Eliana Willis

“When fascism comes back, it will not say ‘I am fascism’; it will say ‘I am antifascism’.” This prophecy, attributed to the Italian writer Ignazio Silone, has been appropriated by the online right and become a tired Twitter meme. Users now replace “antifascism” with basically anything. Some attempts to come to grips with the storming of the US Capitol have adopted a similar syntax: it was an (attempted) coup disguised as something else. Others insisted it wasn’t a coup but a “venting of accumulated resentments” (Edward Luttwak), “a big biker gang dressed as circus performers” (Mike Davis), an “alt-right charivari” (Alex Callinicos), or a “re-enactment” of fantasies originally tested on social media (Wolfgang Ullrich).Some of these interpretations have been accused of trivialising the events. But the semantic helplessness in face of the Washington events suggests a wider uncertainty about the more general phenomenon. The confusion about the event mirrors confusion about the movement as a whole. Is contemporary “rightwing populism” best described as “authoritarianism” or even “fascism”? The answer depends on which level one focuses on: the ideology, the structure of their institutions, the aesthetics, the supporters or the consequences of their actions. If we follow the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás, with his very broad definition of fascism as “a break with the enlightenment tradition of citizenship as a universal entitlement”, the similarities sharpen. A penchant for violence and machismo also points in that direction.But if we stick to strategies, aesthetics or demographics, the differences become more pronounced. When authors like Silone and Erich Fromm analysed interwar-period fascism, they interpreted it as an alliance between what once was called “fractions” of capital (ie business) and the petite bourgeoisie to fend off the challenge posed by workers in the labour movement. Intuitively, we think of fascism as the attempt to impose order, and deprive enemies of organisational power, with authoritarian means. The Nazis force-built a simulacra of civil society: organisations for young women and car owners (the NSDAP’s Kraftfahrkorps was the classic example). The coercive corporatism of German fascism forced employers and unions into the national Labour Front, while the goose steps of masses in brown or black shirts were strictly choreographed.What is different today? Most obviously, trade unions in Europe and the United States are weaker than they have been at any point in the last 150 years (with the exception of fascist periods). No longer threatened by its reality, the enemies of socialism can only invoke its spectre. Suddenly all kind of things are called “socialist”: demands for a speed limit on the German autobahn, stricter gun control, as well as the bond-buying programme of the European Central Bank.More glaringly, unlike in the interwar years, and despite the best efforts of political scientists, it is still not really clear which groups make up the social base of “rightwing populism” today. That certain business elites participate in “rightwing populism” – just think of Rupert Murdoch (media), Charles Koch (fossil fuels), Christoph Blocher (chemicals) and Donald Trump (real estate) – drops out of focus when “populism” is dismissed as a revolt by “hillbillies” or explained by the hardships of “the losers of globalisation”. Academics and pundits highlight the role of industrial workers who lost their jobs. But do unemployed workers still take to the streets or even vote at significant rates? Maybe the petite bourgeoisie, or the small-business-owning middle class, is the more significant second component of the alliance: the craftspeople or small shopkeepers who still have something to lose and who have been bamboozled into fear of anarchism (“Defund the police”) and socialism (higher taxes)?But categories such as petite bourgeoisie or working class are of little use when classes are disintegrating in an economy that pits permanent employees against contract workers, where an engineer at Volkswagen has more to lose than a gig driver for Uber or a woman running a boutique in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Among the crowd storming the Capitol were said to be nuns, soldiers, an Olympic swimmer, a Texas real-estate broker who flew in on a private plane and the son of a New York judge. If political attitudes themselves have always been hard to pin down, this is especially true today.The trouble with concepts such as “coup”, “fascism”, and “authoritarianism” is that they all date back to the period that the late philosopher Zygmunt Bauman called “solid modernity”. By “solid” he meant societies with large groups of people bundled up in intermediary associations (churches, unions, parties) with ideologies that were at least striving for some kind of consistency, and the predictability that comes with it.Tamás spoke of “post-fascism” back in 2000. But all the “post” concepts have the disadvantage of only saying what something is not or no longer. Bauman himself bristled at the term “postmodernity”, but used a positive, content-filled counter-concept: as a lot of solid things had melted into air, he argued, western societies entered a phase of “liquid modernity” in the final quarter of the 20th century at the very latest. Atomised, volatile, swarm-like, with porous borders between gravity and earnestness, sincerity and irony.Bauman, who was born in the Polish town of Poznań in 1925 and experienced the dark sides of solid modernity, applied his concept widely: “liquid love”, “liquid time”, “liquid surveillance”. Single events are by their nature liquid or transient, so while Bauman would probably not have spoken of a “liquid putsch”, it is quite possible that he might have spoken of “liquid authoritarianism”: irony instead of grim determination; social media instead of radio broadcasts; swarms instead of orchestrated formations; merchandise instead of uniforms; followers instead of members; flashmobs instead of regular meetings; erratic policies instead of long-term projects. Trump lards his speeches with references from pop culture. “Sanctions are coming,” he tweets, like a character in Game of Thrones.Attempts to distinguish the phenomenon of Trumpism from its predecessors do not have to trivialise it. What looks liquid or carnivalesque can have terrible consequences. Pipe bombs may still lie in wait for already vulnerable groups or government employees or certain elites.Arnold Schwarzenegger compared the storming of the Capitol to the November pogroms in Nazi Germany in 1938. The Twitterati pounced and proposed the Beer Hall Putsch as the better comparison. The Nazi movement itself was still in a liquid stage in 1923 before it solidified organisationally and institutionally in the 1920s and 1930s. States of matter can change into different compounds: from solid to liquid to gas and the other way round. In this sense one could interpret “Trumpism” or “rightwing populism”, at least when it comes to its diverse base, as an attempt to use liquid-authoritarian means to react to a situation of cultural and economic liquidity. All with the goal of realising the nostalgic utopia of a more solid modernity. More