Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

– CP Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians”

The sight of Trump peacefully leaving office next month should put an end, once and for all, to the debate about whether he is a fascist. The flurry of 11th hour, self-interested litigation does not constitute a coup. Should the proposition that Trump is a fascist somehow continue into 2021, then we will be forced to ask: why did the Germans not choose to vote their fascists out of power? The answer, of course, is that would be impossible with actual fascists in power.

And yet, many people hold onto the idea that Trump is a fascist, or, at any rate, that fascism is just around the corner. George W. Bush was the object of these claims in the 2000s, as were any number of right-wing politicians and forces over the years, from Italy’s Berlusconi to the UK’s Brexit. So pervasive are claims of “fascism” that one has to wonder about the ideological function they play.

On face value, the rhetorical amplification of calling run-of-the-mill liberal authoritarians “fascist” raises the alarm; the aim is to rally the troops. Yes, it is a bit of hyperbole, but so what? Trump got kicked out of office on the back of the highest turnout since 1900—a job well done, surely. Indeed, mobilization not just at the polls but on the streets, we are told, was crucial. Some even think that it was “antifascism” itself that defeated Trump.

Initially, this seems obviously preposterous, fantastical—it was centrist, “normie” middle-class Americans who had had enough of Trumpian misrule and, in opting for a safe pair of hands in Biden, voted Trump out. But if we think of “Antifa” in broader terms as a coalition between “militant,” direct-action oriented leftists and very mainstream liberals, the proposition begins to make more sense. In this vision, “antifascists”—be it white suburban Boomers or their children fighting Proud Boys in the streets—were the key force in Biden’s centrist, neoliberal restoration.

Which implies, it should be noted, that antifascism was also a key force in undermining Bernie 2020. The reasons for Sanders’s disappointing Democratic primary failure—after hopes were so raised from 2016 to 2019—has many competing explanations. One of the more plausible ones holds that, in spite of Sanders’s advantages—a mobilized base of supporters, a huge war fund—the “populist moment” of 2016 had passed. Democratic voters weren’t up for any “radical” experiments. At issue in 2020 was to get someone, anyone, who could defeat Trump. And the Democratic establishment convinced enough people that Biden was the “electable” candidate.

Unfortunately, Bernie played along in indulging the idea of a united front against Trump—Trump out at any cost. If any cost is worth bearing, that includes accepting a centrist neoliberal restoration, in the form of Biden. In preparing the ground for his own defeat, in joining up with the “antifascist” struggle against Trump, Bernie thus allowed himself to be defeated by “Antifa.” It doesn’t matter whether “Antifa” wear masks and wield Molotovs, or whether they wear suits and operate in newsrooms and the corridors of power, as do Obama, Rachel Maddow, Joseph Stiglitz, or any of the rest of them.

The conclusion here is clear: the political purpose of antifascism in the 21st century is to discipline the Left. The united front demands the Left rally around the most powerful “democratic” pole in society—which in this case is the mainstream, well-financed, centrist option—or else.

This is so whether the wielders of “fascism!” realize it or not. Rachel Maddow’s delirium may belie a cynical ploy—or she might really be getting high from her own supply. Little matter, her interests and those she represents are served either way. The Left falls in.

The usual retort to this claim is: 1) it’s unfair to throw the Democratic Party establishment and antifascist street fighters in the same bucket; and 2) the debate over the term “fascist” is scholasticism, taxonomical pedantry. After all, everyone knows what we mean when we call him a fascist: that he’s a dangerous right-wing threat.

As to the first, if the Left on the streets pursues a purely negative stance to right-wing evil, failing to offer an alternative, positive proposal of its own, it has nothing to offer society other than to default to the existing alternative—the Democratic Party. That the two groups bear the same function is true regardless of one’s opinion of the other. Neoliberalism makes strange bedfellows.

Regarding the second retort, the use of the “f-word” should be restrained, not for reasons of academic exactitude, but for very immediate, practical reasons. If a real fascist is in or nearing power, it means we are in a grave situation: traditional elites have abandoned democracy and even non-democratic institutions (such as the courts, the rule of law, etc.) in favor of violent reaction, and a section of the masses have gone over to that side. This means all and any democratic forces must be united to face down this evil, immediately, with all other political questions put to the side.

Though our societies are characterized by anti-democratic drift, this is patently not where we are. A figure that supposedly respectable people have been incessantly calling a dangerous fascist threat is about to leave office peacefully. “Antifa” is the boy who cried wolf—for four years. If an actual wolf shows up in the near future, it’s unclear if anyone will heed the warning.

Indeed, it may even be the wrong warning: our slide away from democracy has already opened the door to growing authoritarianism on the part of the very mainstream institutions we imagine fascism overthrowing. A “centrist,” “non-partisan” break with democracy—known as Caesarism—is a greater and far more realistic concern than hyper-partisan fascism.

Fascism—a form of revolutionary conservation—gains force as a means to smash the workers movement, to crush communism. If today there is no fascism, it’s because there is also no communism. It’s for this basic reason that the analogies with Weimar are wide of the mark.

There are, of course, other authoritarian, conservative politics out there, but conservatism itself is historically weak. As Corey Robin has argued, the U.S. Republicans, for instance, only hold onto power through the Senate, Electoral College, and the courts—precisely those institutions that don’t rely on popular support. Liberalism is still majoritarian, and even as it has become more authoritarian. Populism is merely its ineffectual shadow.

So, why do we fantasize otherwise? The historian and author Barbara Tuchman coined an eponymous law that holds that “the fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold.” As Tuchman elaborates:

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts…. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance…. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.

Perceptually ready to find disaster, we’ve been primed by cinema as much as history-writing and the news to expect emergencies to feel like, well, emergencies. The reality is that very serious and dangerous situations—war, for instance—are often boring for the participants. The much-prophesied global pandemic, now that it has arrived, hasn’t been permanent emergency but rather a lot of tedium and a steady wearing down of society. Nothing feels as real and immediate and urgent as we were told it would be. When does the real stuff start?

At a basic level, then, we should wonder if our favored fascist dystopia is not an attempt to make good on the projections of the culture industry, the reality of the contemporary emergency having failed to live up to its hyperreal expectations. The radical aspects of the Trump presidency were his tweeting and his grating bravado; the rest, continuity—the same deportations, tax cuts, and wars as before. To adapt our political views to Hollywood schemas, we choose to imagine that the mundane degradation of politics is actually fascism, or that the real fascism, the real disaster, the real dystopia, will emerge next time around.

However, it’s not simply that this fantasy is a function of the fact that we are all subjects of the culture industry; it’s also that the fantasy enables a certain kind of left cowardice in the guise of left bravery (antifascists out on the street punching Proud Boys). The leftist denunciation of the powers-that-be as “fascist” is ultimately complicit with the constitution of elite authority. When we rebel, we build up power as a substantial Other, and thereby infinitely postpone seizing authority for ourselves. As philosopher Todd McGowan has written, “rebels never have to see how their resistance manifests itself without what it resists. Rebellion provides the comfort of being on the outside while imagining that there is a substantial enemy on the other side.”

Fantasizing the fascist threat makes it feel like those in power are really wielding authority, rather than being the incompetent, self-contradictory forces they are. The reality of power today is a void of outsourced authority—outsourced to science, both physical and economic; to external enemies; to the objective necessities of globalization. Without our participation in sustaining the fantasy of substantial authority, we would all have to face the void: now what’s going to happen to us without the barbarians? The desired-for fascist dystopia is thus a kind of wish fulfillment: it allows us to imagine that someone might exercise a strong hand, that our world of drift and wearing-down will end, so that we can finally be confronted with our real reality—the naked exercise of power, not this simulacra.

The political right, it should be said, has its own versions of fascist fantasy. In the 2000s, it was “Islamofascism,” an idea as fraudulent as Trumpofascism. Today, the populist right conjures up “Cultural Marxism,” an unholy alliance of the Left and international capital. The “Great Reset”—an uninspired rebranding of “ethical capitalism” by the World Economic Forum, whose purpose is to provide legitimation for a stagnant capitalism—has been recast as a Bolshevik plot. Shit, they imagine, is getting real. The truth, of course, is that it’s all the same shit, just with different aesthetics. This is the secret of our contemporary political polarization: both populist reactionaries and liberal antifascists loudly shout about how everything is changing, when really we’re just getting the same slow decay.

Reaction has always thrived off lurid fantasies—this, for once, is a genuine continuity with fascism. But for the portion of the Left that participates in the fantasy of antifascism, it is self-sabotage. Elites are unfit to rule—we know this, and their response to the pandemic only confirms their incompetent authoritarianism—and yet we persist in imagining them to be domineering masters. In thinking of them as fascist strongmen rather than weak placeholders, the Left avoids its real task of filling the political void with a concrete, alternative program.

Rather than stoke fears about an imminent fascist takeover, we should accept that dystopia has already arrived. It is a low-intensity, mostly banal dystopia, but dystopia nonetheless. Images of emergency, immediacy, sudden action and tanks on the streets—these are fantasies used to cover over the much more mundane situation of diminished popular sovereignty. Worse, in fearing a fascism that doesn’t come, we make ourselves prey to other forces—both those that currently destitute democracy as well as those that may emerge.

When government becomes too intractable, when the continuing absence of popular sovereignty means that elite discipline and coherence ebbs away, the stage is set for a new character to bring order. This may be a sensible and self-composed figure who provides succor to all of those exhausted by an increasingly rancorous culture war. This non-partisan, charismatic figure would be parasitic on worn-down democratic institutions, on the feeling that, “if this is democracy, I don’t want it anymore.” For all of us accustomed to fantasizing about fascism—an act of abnegating our own authority—a 21st century Caesarism may prove seductive.

Alex Hochuli is a freelance writer and research consultant based in São Paulo, Brazil. He is the co-host of the global politics podcast, Aufhebunga Bunga, and co-author of the forthcoming The End of the End of History (Zero Books, 2021).