Reflexive Fascism in the Age of History Memes

Abstract

Contemporary reactions to neofascist movements for the most part focus on national contexts, and frequently pursue a simplistic argument about a dangerous ‘repetition of history’. Warning that historical fascism might rise again like a revenant, commentators miss the fundamentally altered strategies of fascist actors in the era of digital communication and agitation. Introducing the critical term reflexive fascism, this article presents examples from Alt-Right ‘meme’ agitation to argue that ‘reflexive fascism’ presents a historiographic distortion: contemporary neofascist actors remake, revise and warp the very conceptions of post-war history and historical scholarship. Far from constituting a mere relapse into earlier states of history, the ‘fascisms’ currently erupting in many parts of the world and the internet are highly reflexive, self-referential, and include active re-imaginings of historical fascism and the institutional and discursive responses to it. Contemporary fascism is discussed as a reflexive undertaking that remakes post-war histories and democracies as ‘risk productions’ for ethnically understood nation states. It aspires not only to authoritarian desires, but agitates through a ‘bottom-up’ production of feelings of ‘racial endangerment’ for white people. Reflexive fascism is a model that can be used to understand how this updated ‘fascism’ cannot be imagined as the constitutive other of democracy and capitalism, but rather unfolds within and through the affective and communicative channels of these systems.