William Connolly, Aspirational Fascism

Written in 2017, Connolly’s book tries to make sense of the rise of Trump.  Connolly had previously written about the emergence of the capitalist/evangelical resonance machine in 2005, during the height of Bush era militarism, which was driven by a combination of evangelical belief in a Manichean conception of American exceptionalism and capitalist vision of globalized free market democracy, to be won by means of the defeating terrorism and in the context of Latin America, democratic populism.  Drawing on the work of  Greg Grandin, the evangelical resonance machine is the last gasp of the frontier tradition – the last sustained effort to ameliorate internal tensions by means of outward expansion.  The failure of this project leads to the Trump era, although not inevitably (there was a lot of bad luck involved).  Connolly opens his essay by talking about Nietzche’s conception of genealogy – an enterprise oriented toward pulling apart the apparent solidity of institutions, traditions, and concepts.  When we take a closer look at things, they begin to the disaggregate into “different trajectories, replete with simmering potentialities” (2).  Nietzshean geneaologies point toward a series of bumpy and intersecting becomings moving at different speeds and different levels of complexity” (3). 

What Connolly would like to pursue in this book is a genealogy of aspirational fascism. This means looking at a range of different processes and asking how these might be rearticulated – all consistent with the Nietschean view of interpreting and reinterpreting whatever comes into being. Included in this itinerary of different historically embedded ideas and practices, are bodily practices and bodily modes of the communiation that generate affective contagions. With respect to Trump and also Hitler, there is a similar bodily rhetoric: “Trump’s speeches, similar to Hitler’s…are delivered with grandiose bodily gestures and grimaces, Big Lies, hysterical charges, dramatic repetitions and totalistic assertions” that only he can clean up “the mess.” As to Trump’s audience: they are cause between the neoliberal restructuring, which crushes their livelihoods, and identity politics, which ignores their suffering – a set of circumstances that “opens valves of responsiveness to Trump” (12) who, for his part, is able to articulate a montage of issues associated economic decline, racialized resent, liberal anti-elitism, and the insistence of the purity as a condition of the political community.


These are all focal points of anxiety that Trump’s rhetoric transforms into anger: “an aggressive resonance machange is formed that is more intense than its parts” (13). To go back to Grandin, this is not anger that could be by dissipated through expansionism. Or, rather, previous rounds of expansionism – the U.S. post 9/11 wars in the Middle East – helped to generate many of the resentments upon which Trump would subsequently draw. Here there is a comparison to draw with Hitler and World War One veterans – of whom Hitler was one. “The hyper-aggressive self and the triumphant nation are now called upon to erect sharp boundaries” which reflects the manner in which aspirational facism is an intensification of what Castells terms “communal identities” that have formed in relationship to the network society. It is interesting to think about the ways in which individual and boundary are implicated with one another: the boundaries in question, after all, are boundaries of identity that form around individuals that are concerned with purity via the exclusion of the difference as a condition under which a particular form of identity becomes hegemonic, silences its critics and is capable to programming of the actions of the state. This is what Jan Werner Muller refers to as the internal logic of populism. I think Connolly’s approach to aspirational facism certainly helps to articulate this logic. Connolly also adds some refinements to the anti-elitism and anti-pluralism that lies at the heart of populism. “The crowds who love Trump also rebel against the apparent hegemony established elites give to the written over the oral, the refined over the vernacular, the representational over the performative, and the calm over the agitational” (17).


Another way of thinking about Trump might lie with Kenneth Burke’s discussion of identification between speaker and audience because they have become consubstantial – that is, they share some critical substance. Connolly suggests how the Big Lies serves as a mechanism for identitification. Constantly repeated, such lies become the pegs on which people can hang their grievances. What happens here Big Lies the concentrate the grievances of Trump’s people on vulnerable targets rather than on any policy agenda oriented toward making structural changes of how U.S. capitalism operates. This can be tied to Joseph Stiglitz’s account of how Trump made nationalist sense of the discontents of globalization. For Connolly, though, Big Lies follow one another in rapid succession. They bcome a part of shock politics full of rumor, innuendo, lies that operate on “a visceral level of culture” (21). But at the same time, this who apparatus produces a residual of doubt which resides with the tension between the desires of aggrieved communities to identify with the popular leader and the desire to maintain a degree of self-autonomy tied to the formulation of evidence-based claims (21). Today with the coronavirus pandemic, this tension certainly exists within Trump and his constituency: the desire to wish away the pandemic vs. its obvious reality.


These doubts might be enhanced by the consolidation of a pluralizing left that see beyond the limits of identity politics. “The task is to define that pluralizing left anew as an ally of the white working and lower middle classes as it simultaneously retains strong support for the needs of other constituencies who are often suffering even more” (25). What would constitute such an alliance? Stoller’s Goliath is interesting to consult in this regard. New Democrats have embraced a policy agenda of neoliberal restructuring as a way to exit the economic crisis of Fordism, replete with commitments to non-racist and non-sexist meritocracy in order to foment the emergence new cadres of the high tech workers in finance, information technology, etc. These new professionals – rather than workers or minorities – represent the the privileged sectors of the Democratic party: in particular, its leadership and donor base. The whole project of the New Deal was to hold corporate expansion at bay and create spaces in which ordinary people could compete and survival rather than to compel them to the adapt to the competitive demands of neoliberal globalization. It is not only the competition that emanates from globalism that is problematic, but also the capacity of large finance – what Stoller referred to an “Mellonism” during the 1920s – to extract value from its finanicial control of economic assets, inflating itself as the expense of productive enterprise in the United States. At any rate, this is one way to think about how to articulate Connolly’s democratic pluralism and Stollers’ account of the battle between democracy and monopolies.


Another thinker to throw into the mix of different perspectives that I am considering is William Robinson, who argues that the inequalities of contemporary capitalism have become so vest that they exceed the capacity of democratic politics to mediate them. We are therefore experiencing a turn toward authoritarian capitalism, including populism, which Robinson views as an alliance between transnational capitalists and a declining working class, a relationship that has been historically brokered by Republican leaders intent on asserting the hegemony of American identity. Note that this is not so much Robinson’s formulation so much as it is Walter Hixson’s So add Hixson to the list of perspectives that might be usefully be brought together. Like Connolly, Hixson argues, through a wealth of historical examples, that American identity, like identification with the populist leader, asserts hegemonic conceptions of patriarchy and white privilege. It does so, to back to Connolly for a moment, that “wildly exceeds the necessities of capitalist maintenance” (32). This is a point that Connolly makes with respect to Nazi Germany. Capitalist maintenance did not require the Third Reich. That the Third Reich emerged anyway is a testament to the autonomy of politics – a point that the preceding era of globalization has rendered difficult to comprehend because of the ways in which politics was constantly restructured in order to accommodate emerging economic realities. Of particular note in Connolly’s account of Nazism is the expansion of Nazi party apparatus as the vehicle for mediating state and society and absorbing Germans into the volk community of the nation. This was also a process of assimilating fragements of the working class who organizational structures with coercively destroyed by Nazi rule. In the case of the United States, the organizational structures of the working class have been transformed by the eviscertation of labor unions and the collapse the large scale manufacuturing enterprises into a more small scale service industries. In the cases of both Germany and the U.S. one might argue that the collapse of the mediating institutions of society have made possible a new relationship between the individuals and the nation – one in which, as Hannah Arendt states in Origins of Totalitarianism, the nation triumphs of the recht staat, the constitutional state that operates in terms of the rule of law.


Connolly invokes Freud to develop an understanding of how new forms of identitication emerge between the state and a subset of its citizens, the so called real people. Freud as a generic view of the group psychology that arises from the domination of the father and his murder by a band of brother to whom the father denied sexual access to the females of the family. What emerges with crowds and group psychology, Freud suggests, is a reversion to the instinctual through the reactivation of archaic memory traces that are deposited in our subconscious. What Connolly adds to Freud is a more specific conception of the bodily disciplines through which behavioral dispositions (which Freud would call instinct) are formed. “Those consolidated can thus be activated through affective contagion.” Freud is suggesting an affinity between the authoritarian, narcissistic leader – he is like the father figure from which the subject always sought recognition – and the subject’s own processes of self-formation. Connolly suggests, though, that these are diverse because of the ways in different forms of child rearing, family relations, sexual relations, political participation and military life (among other things) open people up to different forms of affective communication. In a short, Connolly relativizes Freud. “Freud’s theory of instinctive organization rests more upon a set of modern, European normative bodily relations than he has appreciated” (45).


Connolly is interested in examining particular regimes of bodily relations. To do this, he turns to the work of Klaus Theweliet, who has studied the bodily politics of the German fascists. One use summation of all of this is: “The drills, the battles, and the experience of devastating war time defeat came to shape soldierly males as machines of vengeance and ruthlessness” (50). Much of this mind and body set revolves around a relationship to a subordinated feminity on the one hand and hierarchical authority on the other, all in the serve of the racial volk nation. This is how, in very general terms, the fascists became primed for violence against the enemies of the nation. In all of this, instincts become purposive tendencies instilled into people through different regimes of bodily practices. There is also a Hegelian element to all of this – in terms of the formation of state/society relations – through the formation of what Connolly terms concentric circules of attachment reaching from family to region to volk nation, attachments that resonate back and forth in order create a sense of unity, “engraining people with the virtue of obedience to each circle and to the whole” (54). Add to this mix the vicissitudes of history, which we are now experiencing with the Coronavirus pandamic and one gets conjunctures in which affective contagion can surge forward. Connolly speculates about climate change disruption and its contribution to affective contagion, which is certainly a point that Greg Grandin is attempting to make with his discussion of the collapse of the frontier and the rise of the border. could make this same point about other disruptive events (or external shocks): 9/11, the Great Recession. These create the pretext for collective responses that spread by means of affective contagion. Connolly: “The complex conjunctions between leaders, historial disappointments, shocking events, constituency affliliations and selective bodily dispositions may or may not coalesce into a successful fascist movement as a pivotal historical moment.


Connolly shifts focus from the German to the American milieu, starting with a discussion of the Authoritarian Personality and its personality types: the conventional type, the authoritarian personality and the manipulative type, which both reflects the German experience and prefigures the American one. The key point here is upward identification between the authoritarian personality and the manipulative leader. These are affinities that can be actualized in the lives of specific individuals by means of failure in work, social isolation, national decline, failure of a social movement, the general sense of being neglected or downgraded. These are all experiences that John Judis points to in The Revitalization of Nationalism. I think a particularly evocative book title that Connolly cites in this section of the book is White Rage – a term the refers to the sense of entitlement, the dreams and bodily dispositions that foster destructive dispositions (62). Many whites of course are tasked with implementing repressive rule as prison guards, police officers, prosecuting attorneys, but also teachers, social workers and all sorts of other front line bureaucrats whose jobs harden them by means of the training, ethos and harsh practice that they regularly mete out into order to hold the line in a racially divided society. What you get, adds Connolly, is a hardening of previously cultivated innocence: the sense that whites have done nothing wrong in the world and that their prosperity is being challenged by unworthy subaltern groups. At the same time, they are also in the squeeze, as indicated above, between authoritarian bosses that want to extract work from them and social movements which do not recognize their plight. Veterans represent one subset of this group – similar to World War One veterans in Germany: implacable refugees who become more susceptible to the blandishments of narcissistic leaders (65). One of the messages from pluralizing social movements is that white men must accept the loss of their cultural hegemony. Perhaps this is so in terms of the cultural domination of the white males over everyone else – women, non-whites, non-straight, etc. But this becomes a destructive sentiment with regard to the different forms of economic deprivation that white workers without a college education experience. It is an relationship to such pluralizing movements that what Connolly terms the capitalist/evangelical machine is able to draw strength by encouraging white males (and workers in general) to return to the fold of Amerian identity and its principles of hierarchical loyalty to ruling class figures who are able to pass themselves off as “natural aristocrats” (69). A crucial component of he framework of white solidarity is Christianity and the idea of America as a Christian nation What better way to assert the boundaries of the true America?


The way out of the impasse that Connolly describes is to opt for the politics of the pluralistic assemblage over the claims of identity politics, which tend to pit women or blacks or any other oppressed constituency against white male privilege and thus to strengthen the attachment of whites to nativists and the plutocrats that underwite them. So this is different than the course of action Judis recommends: a series of pragmatic compromises on immigration that can restart the great American melting pot. I wonder if the following argument in Connolly does not constitute a crucial distinction with respect to Judis. Connolly underscores the limits of public reason. Public reason is reason that disavows our deeper sources of identity. It insists that these should be sequestered in the private realm. Following William James, Connolly calls for a deep pluralism where “the multiplicity of ethical sources provides one of the operative conditions of being” (79). Why deep pluralism? Because, one sense, anything else would be deracinated: it would be public life cut off from the fundamental sources of our being. To see the value of deep pluralism, consider the anti-pluralism of the volk-nation, discussed on Connolly, or the anti-pluraism of populism, given its insistence on the homogeneous and essential character of the people, which is conceived as an unchanging ethical substance. I like here the discussion of both Neuman and Arendt, both critical analysts of fascism. For Neuman, public reason provided an insubstantial bulkwark against fascism. This is evident in the antipathy between nation and liberalism which figures prominently in fascist writing (von Moeller, Liberalism is the Death of Nations). Arendt situated pluralism with natality: the idea that whoever is born in the world introduces something that is new. This plurality exceeds a plurality of interests.


One of the interesting points about Connolly’s notion of pluralism is how it becomes extended to the natural world within the setting of the Anthrpocene. Nature must be recognized as an active subject: this points to the importance of “recognizing different forms of agency beyond the human estate” (83). And also extending beyond the pluralist politics of the territorial state: methodological nationalism as a preconception of the conventional pluralism. Also pluralism as an adversary of purity, the concentric nation or radical individualism (86). Why the latter, though? Perhaps because it simply aggregates preferences or sees in the market the authoritative device for aggregating preferences into patterns of demand that are consistent with premises of economic liberty. There are also vicersal registers of cultural difference so that anti-racism in the abstract is one thing but the ability to overcome the echoes of visceral racism when one goes into the black community is another. This visceral level is “often occupied by a set of implicit entitlements” (90). Expanding the bandwidth of one’s experience is a way of the breaking down these entitlements.