Rising white supremacist violence in the United States is the culmination of centuries of racist action and rhetoric.However, who has access to that rhetoric and in what context comes back to liberal economic policies.
Earlier this year, Rashad Robinson of Color of Change was interviewed about the shooting in Buffalo, New York, where an avowed fascist drove into a majority Black area and shot thirteen people, killing ten. Robinson reflected on the massacre and how the teenage gunman claimed to have been radicalized into white supremacist ideology online.
“At the end of the day [there is] a whole incentive structure, a whole profit incentive structure, which has. . .incentivized the type of content and disinformation and hate-filled rhetoric that we see online. We have watched social media platforms refuse to deal with this, because self-regulated companies are unregulated companies. . . This is about what they amplify . . . This is about the content that they serve up to users as they sign on. This is about all the ways in which their product is designed in order to create people to have more time on these platforms, more engagement on these platforms, to be engaged in more hate-filled rhetoric. And at the end of the day. . . we are seeing firsthand the impact of it.”
While Fox News and its hosts like Tucker Carlson have been amplifying white supremacist rhetoric among older demographics, young shooters are increasingly inspired online, where racism and fascism have an even stronger hold, reinforced by financial incentive structures. A report by the Mozilla Foundation found that 71% of the “radicalizing” content studied on YouTube came to researchers’ desktops via the algorithm’s automated suggestion mechanism. In her study for the Research Council of Norway, anthropologist Cathrine Thorliefsson analyzed cyberfascism on 4chan and found that users are shown and in turn spread fascist propaganda all across websites like this through a veneer of mere humor and transgression in a way which is “particularly powerful for the amplification of the logic of an endangered ultra-nation that needs urgent violent defense.”
In order to make money, social media companies have to keep users on the platforms for ever-longer amounts of time. Otherwise, advertisers might migrate elsewhere and data from those users, which the platforms would have otherwise collected and sold, becomes scarcer. The calculus is simple: the angrier people are, the easier it is to keep them engaged. To be sure, there are a lot of issues platforms could be getting people angry about – inaccessible housing, low wages, the increasing precarity of our financial futures. However, the catch is that same profit motive Robinson was talking about. Amplifying content which challenges the profit motive could backfire for these companies; amplifying fascist content, however, results in at most a slap on the wrist.
What we’re seeing here today with social media mirrors traditional media’s early treatment of fascism to sell newspapers and magazines. After the failed Beer Hall Putsch, a number of members of the fledgling Nazi Party were tried for their attempted coup. David King writes in The Trial of Adolf Hitler that the group decided, rather than plead their innocence, to use the trial as a platform to denounce the Weimar Republic. International reporters flocked to the courtroom and practically transcribed every point the Nazis made on the stand – after all, people were much more willing to pay for news about a sensational trial full of unorthodox rants than the regular reports of the day. This profit-inspired writing went on to turn Adolf Hitler into a household name and served as a springboard for him to write Mein Kampf in prison. It, too, was published and sold because it made good money.
Robert O. Paxton’s seminal book, Anatomy of Fascism, explains that fascist rhetoric frequently latches on to existing negative feelings and speaks to real issues in the lives of its believers, but takes that basis and blames suffering on an “internal other” rather than structures of power. In doing so, it serves as an escape valve for when liberalism begins to fail. Liberals, from Adam Smith’s classical liberals to FDR’s social liberals, are bound together ideologically by their dedication to individual liberties and their belief that liberal capitalism (perhaps with a few tweaks) is the path towards achieving the greatest outcome for everyone. However, capitalism is notorious for its cyclical economic crashes and potential to create vast inequality. When that structure begins to weaken, alternatives to liberalism gain traction within the population.
Fascism takes these genuine frustrations, pretends to listen, and then pins the blame on a marginalized community within the polity. In the case of the Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory, which inspired the mass shooters in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Christchurch, and El Paso, the issue is not seen as a consistent cycle of economic crashes and record levels of economic inequality caused by capitalism. This conspiracy theory posits that, at some fictionalized historical time, white men were guaranteed good lives and now they aren’t because their position has been intentionally usurped by nonwhite people. Depending on who you ask, this is either at the behest of the Democratic Party or of the Jews. Approximately one in three Americans believes this.
Liberals look at this and are rightfully horrified at fascism. However, there is something they find even more loathsome that comes from the same conditions: socialism. Leftist movements also tend to spring up in these moments of “decaying” capitalism, answering the same concerns of economic precarity and increasing food shortages with a different story. The anticapitalist narrative puts the profit motive at the center of the problem, calls for the overthrow of liberal capitalism, and conceptualizes freedom in a wholly different way than liberals do, explicitly disavowing the individualism which liberal ideas of human rights are based on in favor of the collective.
Leftist rhetoric directly counters fascist rhetoric by accepting the feelings and experiences behind it, then offering an alternative explanation for why things are so bad. There’s a reason the well-known Niemöller poem begins with “first they came for the communists.” Fascists, from Mussolini to Pinochet, make the most fervent anticommunists, to the extent that some scholars argue the rise of National Syndicalism in Italy can be seen in part as a reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution. Thus, in the fight against the existential threat of socialism, liberals have an uneasy ally in fascism. In weighing their philosophical options, liberals must decide between an enemy which challenges both individualism and liberal economics and one which challenges only the individual liberties of the most marginalized. Liberals might not be conscious of why leftists tend to make them more viscerally uneasy, but there is a reason the two capitalist ideologies tend to prefer one another when the time comes. After all, no one supports the profit motive more than a fascist –Pinochet’s Chile was known as the “cradle of neoliberalism” and the word “privatization” was created to describe the policies of the Nazi Party in Germany.
It’s not that liberals are fascists or even that liberals like fascists; it’s that liberal policies create the conditions for fascism and then, when fascism arrives, liberalism’s tools for combatting it come up lackluster. The traditional liberal faith in institutions means nothing when Hitler is elected through those institutions and then uses their procedures to unravel them. Liberal individual acts of consumption, boycott, and peaceful protest do nothing against an ontologically violent enemy that moves in groups based on race or nation rather than as individuals. Fascists also have a long-standing tradition of cynically
using tools like free speech and freedom of assembly, which liberals believe serve as a bulwark against ideologies like fascism, in order to institute the very policies liberals think such freedoms prevent.
During the Trump presidency, we saw this pan out in responses by the Democratic party. If one contends that Trumpism is at least some form of proto-fascism, then Democrats’ reactions to his time in power do not provide much hope for the future. In 2016, Mitch McConnell blocked a Democratic Supreme Court nominee, creating a precedent and a road map for doing so but, throughout Trump’s tenure, he was allowed to pack the courts with Trumpist judges while Democrats refused to replicate the strategy. When called to challenge the rising tide of fascism, they resorted to legalistic approaches, attempting to use the existing structures of power and channels of dissent like impeachments and investigations, and thusly failing to shake Trump’s base or grip on power. Their commitment to failing institutions which serve them materially consistently outweighs their supposed commitment to defeating fascism—even today we see at best a half-hearted willingness to overturn the filibuster, pack the courts, or utilize executive orders to get around Trumpist obstinance because liberals believe (in the face of all evidence) that institutions which fascists ignore are sufficient to stop fascism, if they are only maintained conservatively and judiciously enough.
Meanwhile, as liberalism’s crises deepen, its leaders are forced to choose between an enemy which threatens the profit motive and an enemy that does not. In the case of the 1924 Italian elections, the liberals chose to form a joint slate with Mussolini. In the case of the 1932, the center-left SPD abstained from the leftist coalition against the Nazi Party which could have prevented its rise to power. In the case of 1936, Francisco Franco’s coalition included the monarchist liberals. In the case of 1973, Pinochet was put in power at the direct behest of the liberal hegemon, the United States. Everyday liberal citizens might be dissatisfied and personally angry at rising fascism but the institutions they have to express that anger are neutralized by fascism. All the while, liberal individualism gives frustrated citizens refuge to retreat into the self and feel satisfied with small, incremental changes when all else fails and hope is lost.
The Buffalo shooting could not have happened without the deeply entrenched racism built into US culture, political structure, and economy. That existing premise serves as fertile soil for fascism to grow, blaming liberalism’s crises on nonwhite and Jewish Americans. However, whether and how much exposure young people are getting to that radicalizing, fascist rhetoric is inextricably tied to social media platforms’ profit motive. Liberal economic policies create the political and social crises that fascism responds to. Those same economic incentives amplify its rhetoric. Leftist rhetoric, which can and historically has neutralized fascist rhetoric, is not an option for liberals to ally with, pushing them to tacitly or explicitly side with fascism as it rises. Finally, once liberal advocates realize they must prioritize combatting fascism, they have no effective tools with which to do so. Liberal policies and rhetoric consistently hold open the door for fascism to enter and, if nothing fundamentally changes soon, we will once again be forced to witness liberalism’s inability to combat the creature it created.