Nina Farnia

Volume 29.1 (download PDF)

Abstract

In Part I of this series, I argued that the United States has always already been proto-fascist, but that today it is undergoing a transition into formal, de jure fascism. This transition is the result of a change in the class nature of the state itself.

In Part II, I focus on the legal architecture of fascism. I expose rule-of-law liberalism as having paved U.S. fascism’s path. I note the pernicious role of the law in class wars, race wars, gender wars, and global wars, with particular attention on the making of a total state. I then challenge the notion of an imperial boomerang that returns home from exogenous colonies, since the United States is itself a continental empire. Functioning like a feedback loop, U.S. fascism borrows and learns from its imperial exploits and uses those tactics on the homefront, but its etiology is acutely local. I conclude with the perennial question: What Is to Be Done?