On fascists' resistance of modernity, Shane Burley writes in the anti-fascist essay collection Why We Fight:
"Modernity is the center of the neo-fascist project, an identity set forward by Julius Evola's rejection of the 'modern world.' Evola's Traditionalism, building on the work of Rene Cuenon, posited a 'divine truth' in all spiritual paths, not just in their gods, but in their hierarchies and tyrannies. Using the Vedic Cycle of Ages, he argued that we have long slipped from the Golden Age and are now in the fourth age, the Kali Yuga, the time of dark passions and decadence. The modern world had rejected the racial purity, hierarchy, and spiritual transcendence that had existed naturally in previous generations. This modern world needed 'men against time,' as Aryan mystic Savitri Devi called them, to resist this modernity as spiritual warriors. Modernity is defined by its state of decline, a false consciousness obscuring the underlying Tradition that puts things in their place through some type of natural law. Fascism is then a distinctly modern concept, something that can only exist in this age of decadence in an effort to return to a fabled place of purity. Jeffrey Herf terms this 'reactionary modernism' the state of technological advancement, and attempts to return to the past of memory."
"By supremacy I mean the spiritual alignment that some people matter, and others do not matter...And by fascism I mean a particular expression of supremacy: a popular political movement organized around an authoritarian cult of personality and privatization of the public good, mediated through an open and explicit reverence for violence as a redeeming force, and energized by a supremacist nationalist myth of purification." — A.R. Moxon, "Bully Tactics" (December 10, 2023)
If we perceive time as focused on past and future, we prioritize a power struggle over what can be made obsolete (e.g., "when faced with ideas we disagree with, we either assign them to the past or worry that they will assign our ideas to the past"), but if we perceive time as focused on what's happening right now, we prioritize coexistence. See: Where Have All the “Isms” Gone? or, Why We Don’t We Have Art Movements In The 21st Century, Mary Rose, Mar 6, 2024
Please also read "Why Fascists Target Gender Transition". It's a 3-minute read on Medium.
Will Bunch reminds us in the Philadelphia Inquirer ("Why we can’t allow Trump to ban that other f-word," October 5, 2025):
“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
The Columbia University history professor and expert on World War II dictatorship Robert O. Paxson wrote that in his book, The Anatomy of Fascism, back in 2004, or 11 years before the president descended from the escalator at Trump Tower. But the hyperlinks are all from America’s dystopian present.
A sense of the future:
"...what gets called executive dysfunction is not always a problem of organisation. Sometimes it is a problem of futurity. More precisely, it is what happens when the future stops feeling emotionally inhabitable—when later remains legible in theory but inaccessible in practice, because the self no longer experiences continuity with the life that “planning” presumes.
I am calling that collapse of futurity. Not as a diagnostic term, and not as a replacement for crisis language where crisis language is needed, but as a way of naming a broader autistic temporal condition that often sits underneath the visible failures of planning, budgeting, routine-building, and long-range life management. It is the loss of forwardness itself—the thinning or disappearance of the felt bridge between now and later. The future is not always rejected. Sometimes it is simply no longer reachable in the same way, no longer emotionally inhabited, no longer felt as a place the self can reliably extend into."
— When the Future Won’t Hold: On the Collapse of Futurity and the Quiet Disappearance of Forward: A shift of frame from “executive dysfunction” to a "collapse of futurity," Jaime Hoerricks, Apr 1, 2026
"When Aimé Césaire first described the “imperial boomerang” the three initial examples he used are a gestapo forming at home, prisons filling up, and the state suddenly having a torture apparatus. In Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire explains how the West was shocked by Nazism, but how to him and others living in European colonies fascism looked simply like the violence Europe has inflicted on others turned inward."
J. P. Hill, The people of the United States yearn for democracy: Venezuela, Trump, and the Imperial Boomerang. New Means, 04 Jan 2026
"The decades from the outbreak of the First World War to the aftermath of the Second, was an Age of Catastrophe for this society. For forty years it stumbled from one calamity to another. There were times when even intelligent conservatives would not take bets on its survival. * * * While the economy tottered, the institutions of liberal democracy virtually disappeared between 1917 and 1942 from all but a fringe of Europe and parts of North America and Australasia, as fascism and its satellite authoritarian movements and regimes advanced."
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (1914–1991), London: Abacus, 1994. "The Century: A Bird's Eye View" [an introduction], pp. 6–7.
"Even more obvious than the uncertainties of world economics and world politics was the social and moral crisis, reflecting the post-1950 upheavals in human life, which also found widespread if confused expression in these Crisis Decades. It was a crisis of the beliefs and assumptions on which modern society had been founded since the Modems won their famous battle against the Ancients in the early eighteenth century - of the rationalist and humanist assumptions, shared by liberal capitalism arid communism, and which made possible their brief but decisive alliance against fascism, which rejected them."
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (1914–1991), London: Abacus, 1994. "The Century: A Bird's Eye View" [an introduction], p. 11.
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