End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor review – the fightback starts here

The more power the radical rightwing nationalists of our age accrue, the greater the risk that their destructive brand of politics becomes normalised. We should not, for instance, regard it as normal that the man in charge of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal casually promises “a whole civilisation will die tonight”. We should not accept that history’s first trillionaire is allowed to spread racist conspiracy theories to a hitherto unimaginable extent. We should be alarmed that, here in the UK, a party tipped to lead a potential future government is trying to cruise to power in the slipstream of this international movement.

In fact, we shouldn’t just be alarmed by such developments: we should stop them and urgently repair the damage already done. But how? And what is the nature of that damage? This bold, clarifying intervention from Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor provides some of the answers. “End times fascism” is their term for a convergence of interests that can broadly be understood as a response to the climate crisis. Faced with a world coming under unprecedented strain from environmental shocks and an unequal, resource-hungry economic system, today’s reactionaries are effectively saying: bring it on.

“The most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating,” Klein and Taylor write, describing a loose alliance of three principal factions rooted in US political and business elites. First are the religious fanatics who see each new disaster as a welcome sign we are entering the end of days, but find common ground with secular demagogues who promise a glorious, prosperous future on the ruins of our present. Think, for instance, of the mirage of a “New Gaza”, a property developers’ fever dream that the Trump administration – heavily influenced by Christian Zionists – claims will arise from the wreckage of Israel’s US-backed genocide.

Next are the new tech barons, who preach that only the AI “arms race”, as Klein and Taylor put it, can save humanity – even as its demand for water and electricity scorches the planet – while they themselves dream of sitting out societal breakdown in remote, fortified enclaves. Last come the political entrepreneurs who transform visions of disaster into votes by promising to turn their nations into bunkered garrison states. Migration draws most of the attention, but you can also see this logic at work in an increasingly aggressive global scramble for natural resources: “supersized prepping at the level of the nation-state”, in Klein and Taylor’s words.

This is nothing less than a revival of fascism, the authors argue – but only if we understand “fascism” as something broader and more persistent than the uniformed mass movements that once brought Europe to the brink of destruction. In their definition, it is a recurring tendency among elites that manifests when capitalism no longer works the way they would like it to, and they feel their positions are threatened. “Fascism,” write the authors, who draw on a range of theorists including Walter Benjamin and WEB Du Bois, “is capitalism with bared teeth.”

There have been endless academic disputes over whether such a broad definition of fascism is useful. Personally, I think we shouldn’t get too hung up on terminology – the important thing is to write in a way that makes people alive to problems around them and leaves them feeling empowered to respond. The authors succeed on both counts: Klein has spent almost three decades outlining the connections between unrestrained capitalism and violent, anti-democratic tendencies, while Taylor, a Canadian-American film-maker, writer and activist, is a veteran of movements for social justice.

They set out how our economic system, “built on limitless growth, and on limitless wealth for the winners”, has collided with the reality that life on this planet is becoming harder to sustain. As a psychological balm, reactionaries offer “bursts of sadistic satisfaction summoned by footage of immigrants in supermax prisons, or soldiers marching through the streets” that only lead to demands for even more extreme measures. At the same time, the right is prone to splits and overreach, making it vulnerable to challenge by progressives whose ultimate goal must be to dismantle the concentration of wealth and power that got us into this mess in the first place.

Klein and Taylor draw particular inspiration from Zohran Mamdani, whose successful run for the New York mayoralty showed it was possible to build a winning coalition by focusing on people’s material concerns – and by celebrating difference rather than trying to deny or apologise for it. They also point to other, creative forms of resistance in the US and elsewhere as the seeds of a new politics “rooted in an expansive, open-armed sense of neighbourliness” that can counter the right’s dystopian visions of the future. The way Venetians challenged Jeff Bezos’s attempt to use their city as a backdrop for his grotesque display of wealth disguised as a wedding, for instance. Or how Minnesotans looked out for one another as their state was bombarded with ICE raids. For the authors, the leftwing, diasporic Jewish idea of doikayt, or “hereness” – fighting for justice and equality wherever you may live – is a guiding principle, but only one of a multiplicity of cultural and political traditions that can be drawn on.

Here, the account falters a little. End Times Fascism has due regard for the global context, but this is largely a book about the US. That’s not a problem in itself: the US is still (just about) the global hegemonic power. But it does raise questions about where the best lessons can be learned. Is the rest of the world expected to take its cue from American progressives? Or is there more we could discover, say, in parts of the world where reactionary, authoritarian politics has prevailed for longer – and where people might have developed longer-term strategies?

It’s not Klein and Taylor’s job to answer these questions comprehensively, though. Their valuable contribution is to map out the frightening new territory in which we find ourselves, and point to an escape.