As pundits scramble to define fascism for Trump 2.0, a recent book by media scholar Jack Z. Bratich, investigating the theme of “microfascism,” may come in handy. The term, coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, refers to fascism in the small, everyday domain. Bratich’s book On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death (Common Notions Press, 2022), argues that we should take the long view on fascism as not merely starting with Mussolini, but as a much broader and deeper historical way of doing politics and organizing society, founded on patriarchal domination of men by women. Bratich develops a theory of male socialization he calls “autogenetic sovereignty”: a founding myth of the self-made (but also self-destroying) man, who seeks to transcend a material world cast as female. This philosophy animates incel school shooters, fascist militia members, and would-be Mars-colonists alike.
What brought you to this topic?
During the early 2010s I was writing about leftist social movements, such as Occupy Wall Street and Nuit Debout in France, but that kind of stalled when I realized there wasn’t that much happening on the left outside of Black Lives Matter. By 2016, I was witnessing a surge of right-wing movements that were using media and culture. I was seeing, like many, the rise of the alt-right, the rise of the use of internet technologies and digital culture to move activism in a right-wing direction. I was seeing an attention to culture as a kind of strategic realm: the realm of the meta-political. The right understands culture instrumentally, and that real politics happen downstream in the ways that Steve Bannon has said. For me, that was tied to the question of gender, with misogyny specifically considered as a steppingstone, or an entry-level recruitment point for the real fascist politics down the line. People use the word “gateway” for these things, but I think we’re not paying enough attention to the formation of subjectivity and desire in those initial moments. What world opens up if we begin to analyze it on its own terms rather than just as a steppingstone?
Finding this term “microfascism” in Deleuze and Guattari in a scattered form—it’s not a consistently theorized concept, it just appears in short essays and almost offhanded gestural moments—was an important thing for me: to encounter that concept and then try to bring those scattered pieces together, to ask what this concept can allow us to see about fascism that is immersed in culture, subjectivity, and gender.
Today, what does it mean to take the internet as the media cultural expression of contemporary fascism? Or certain digital networks and the production of memes?
In your book you talk about the importance of networked communities on social media, and the participatory nature of using meme culture to actually make a real-world impact.
Primarily, my interest is in an expansive notion of popular culture. The mass-reproduction model is more of a fifties and sixties notion of how culture is produced. Now it’s much more networked and distributed. It’s post-Fordist. It’s niche-oriented. The “popular” part is not just that which is well-known or mainstream or a common set of texts, but it’s also the place where the people, aka the popular, gets formed. Any kind of culture that helps form a cohesion or a composition of the people is worth attending to. How does it bind people? That’s why I think memes are important, less for their content than for their form. Take the Nuremberg-style rallies in the new Star Wars films, which recall those of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935). There’s a strange fetish by which some critics would only see fascism when it would appear in that form: the mass-culture version of fascism, the notion of amassing people into a space, giving them a leader, giving them a series of spectacular signs and pageantry and uniforms.
But we have to look at the ways that media culture itself has changed and how film, which was obviously the media cultural expression of those rallies at that time (especially regarding the notion of the spectator), fueled that version of fascism. Today, what does it mean to take the internet as the media cultural expression of contemporary fascism? Or certain digital networks and the production of memes? One of the things that I’m going to follow-up on in my next book is the making of memes: how these shooters make themselves memes, and do so strategically. It’s a form of connecting with others that says, “I will become your meme, and you can share me, and then you can circulate me.” I think there’s something there that is part of contemporary fascism that isn’t capturable in the Nuremburg rallies and their mass culture equivalents. We’re in a different era and we need to pay attention to the networks model.
One of the key contributions of your book is theorizing the toxic male figure at the center of the new fascism: aggrieved, armed, paramilitarized, and homi-suicidal—a “networked black hole,” as you put it.
I think we see more evidence with Trump 2.0, in a more spectacular and public way, that the far right is obsessed with holding on to patriarchal power and entitlement. When there’s no holding on, this crisis of masculinity then says, “Well, if we’re not going to restore ourselves to some previous glory, then we might as well just take the whole thing down with us as we go.” I call this a “downsurgency” instead of an insurgency; instead of an uprising, a downsinking. I want to go back and see how deep-seated this is, and what is the type of social organization of masculine desire, not necessarily just in the sexual sense, but in the Deleuze and Guattari sense, of attachments to the world and non-attachments to the world that motivate this downsurgency.
The question about what to do about such deep-seated fascist tendencies is a difficult one. It’s a pivotal question for our times because it’s not about just changing these or those subjectivities, but how foundational (while of course contingent) something like patriarchy is in its relationship to life itself. Latin American feminists have been speaking of life, the economies of life, and “re-existence” as a way to think about these entrenched aspects of life and death that are probably not studied enough outside of certain kinds of psychological frameworks (e.g. the death drive). I like this idea that in history you can find ways that masculinity could have been or was actually different. Like how they recognize their fragility yet didn’t succumb to it, or recognize that their framework was already contingent. So we can ask: why do they always have be defensive about their contingent social status, even doubling down through coercion, which then renders their position all the more fragile? This would be a work of cultural genealogy, one that would be a counterpoint to the one that Jordan Peterson and many others are stubbornly attached to: a highly selective narrative of evolutionary biology in order to promise “Here’s how you get your power back and become masculinized again.” This other set of genealogies could involve anthropological knowledge about Indigenous cultures who have figured out ways of doing that. We’re such inheritors of Christianity and moreover of monotheism that has organized gender in this way that it’s hard to think outside of that when we ask questions about other forms of gender relations. It’s why trans movements and culture are so innovative as well as threatening to the fascist restorationist projects.
We’re such inheritors of Christianity and moreover of monotheism that has organized gender in this way that it’s hard to think outside of that when we ask questions about other forms of gender relations. It’s why trans movements and culture are so innovative as well as threatening to the fascist restorationist projects
An oft-mentioned idea is that fascism arises to save capitalism from the threat of socialism. Does this mean that socialism is returning, and should we draw hope from that?
This is where Herbert Marcuse was really helpful in just those couple of lines that people such as Angela Davis and others have taken up. It’s not just that the far right is reactionary, that it reacts to something, but it’s a preventive counter-revolution. It has a different logic than just responding to something that exists. It’s reacting to a potential future, which it recognizes in these emergent movements. So obviously Trumpism and the alt-right is a response to a crisis in capital, which had been going on since (depending on where you trace it from) 2008. But it was also a reaction to things like Occupy Wall Street. It was a reaction to populist left-wing movements that were starting to figure out ways to become more powerful. So, this is a reaction to a competitor, a recognition of revolutionary powers organizing themselves.
One of the characteristic traits of the alt-right is their use of comedy and the carnivalesque, creating an atmosphere of festive cruelty which generates community and solidarity among their members. How does the left reclaim the carnival in the Bakhtinian sense of reversing power?
The right has been doing this at least since the mid-2010s. But what happened during the previous fifteen years was that the left—the counter-globalization movements, Occupy Wall Street, etc.—had that sense of play, of carnival, of fun. Take the rebel clown army, which Gavin Grindon has written about in addition to the creative practice that was happening in those encampments and occupations. It wasn’t about moralizing and having dour doctrines in party platforms but joyful composition in street carnival. I wrote a piece for a collection in honor of James W. Carey called: “Globalization: Counterglobalization and Other Rituals Against Empire” about the counter-globalization movement as ritualistic. Those rituals were not somber ceremonies; they were delirious and joyful. The right learned from things like Occupy Wall Street (another example of the right having little innovation but a deeply cynical mimicry) mostly online. At the same time, the first thing I ever wrote in this vein was on the carnivalesque performance of the alt-right in street protests. That’s when I realized that they were onto something with the kind of cosplay they were doing in the streets that we hadn’t seen, at least in the US.
When the right is taking up things like creative performance and the carnivalesque, the question was: what the hell happened? How did the left’s version of this fizzle out? The right was able to take all that carnivalesque and turn it into its reverse. The classical carnivalesque reverses power relations. So, the right flipped the flip, and thus it becomes a punching-down version of the carnivalesque; the cruelty becomes part of that reversed affect. Where can we find such leftist affects now? Black Joy is definitely important, as is pleasure activism (as analyzed by adrienne maree brown). When Black Twitter was the most active, it was filled with a kind of humorous vernacular. So, there’s no need to reinvent it. We do have to pay attention to how we had it then lost some of it, and also to what kinds of ordinary persistent things continue to take place: like here in Philly, queer and trans open mic and stand-up comedy nights, for instance. I’m sure that’s happening in a lot of places. It is not typically the realm that you would expect that, the stand-up world, which tends to punch down. We see the joy in the streets of transnational feminist organizing, and in car meetups or takeovers, the urban street gatherings around modified cars doing high-speed tricks and other stunts, as sites of informal politics and carnivalesque refusal of police repression. I think it’s still there. It’s been scattered almost like remnants of the of the Grand Republic in Star Wars, but piecing it together I think is important in trying to figure out how to connect.
The classical carnivalesque reverses power relations. So, the right flipped the flip, and thus it becomes a punching-down version of the carnivalesque; the cruelty becomes part of that reversed affect.
Your current work examines a second phase of contemporary fascist masculinity, with boys’ fitness clubs replacing Pepe memes and nihilistic clowning. What phenomena are we seeing today?
When I wrote On Microfascism, I was looking at the period between 2015-19, when the alt-right was prominent, especially as it mobilized trolls, incels, and failsons. The trolls were in it for the lulz, indifferent to others’ feelings as well as infused with the gleeful nihilism that comes with resentment by the aggrieved and entitled. It was what I called a “network of black holes”: a collective connected through their isolation, mobilized through their loserdom despondency. And again a “downsurgency” and a down-sinking—not an upward movement of insurgency, but a rapid downward spiral, taking others with them in a homi-suicidal vortex. The exemplar here is the incel mass killer (or nearly all mass murderers, since one finds gender-based violence and hostility in most of their backgrounds). Recently I asked myself “what happened to the incel?” While of course they still exist, the figure of the incel has faded from the news since late 2024. This became striking when examining the 2024 Trump campaign. His campaign made a different kind of appeal, which promised that the losers would become winners, overcoming their victim status by becoming victorious fighters. In a media-savvy operation, Trump made himself fighter-adjacent. He extended his media wrestling cosplay persona into more tough-guy domains like boxing and Mixed Martial Arts. Hoping for some sympathetic magic, he started palling around with UFC CEO Dana White and influencer-cum-media boxer Logan Paul, and posted an AI-generated photo of himself as a muscly NFL player. His iconic campaign image, found on t-shirts and profile pics galore, was the fist-raising bloodied warrior defiantly overcoming an assassination attempt, with the caption “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
This figure of the fighter is tied to what I discussed in the book as the Mannerbund, the warbands and squads that make up both the manosphere and different eras of fascist masculinity. Now their triumphalism, exemplified by the barrage of gloating gender-based harassment and social media posts about owning women’s bodies, is more direct, gloves-off, and sadistic. In terms of media, memes have taken a backseat to a podcasting ecosystem made up of right-wing comedians, pranksters, sports betting sites, and UFC fandoms. It’s an extension of what Max Read calls “the Zynternet,” named after the tobacco pouch brand, but more precisely refers to an online world of post-college white normie masculinity. It’s not that the nihilism is gone; it’s more that it is now institutionalized rather than being on the (claimed) cultural margins. It’s important to note here that I am primarily referring to young, secular (even atheist) men’s culture. There’s some overlap with the tech bro culture, but they do have separate developments. This is accompanied of course by a more organized Christian Nationalist masculinity found in tradwives, Focus on Family, and the Charlie Kirkian restoration of patriarchal values. To this end, I’m looking to write more about this emergent (though we could say neo-archaic) form of masculine rule: not patriarchy but fratriachy.
Describe your work-in-progress on deathstyles and the morbid symptoms of the “necrocultural imaginary.”
The book I was originally writing was called “Deathstyle Fascism”: it was going to detail the culture of homi-suicidal masculinity and the necropolitics infusing everyday culture. As it turns out, the introduction to the manuscript became the core conceptual framework of On Microfascism. Once Trump 2.0 took hold, others have elaborated the death cult dimension of contemporary US Fascism (see Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor on “End Times Fascism” and Ian Allan Paul on “Fascism and the Spectacle of Death”). We see it in the martyrization of Charlie Kirk and what will inevitably be a grieving frenzy for Trump as fallen messiah. Basically, what I was examining as a cultural form (a lifestyle, but one that centered death) has in 2025 taken hold in several state institutions. It is another way that fully-formed state fascism arrives after organizing and mobilizing the microfascisms, including the homi-suicidal subjectivities formed in culture.
Instead of focusing on fascism’s death cult dimensions, I am now working to analyze more precisely the passage from culture to state fascism, or micro to macro, by understanding the transformation of fascist masculinity and what John Remy calls “androcracy” (a more comprehensive term about masculine rule than the rule of fathers named by patriarchy). Since On Microfascism’s publication, I’ve been writing more about masculinity and fascist metamorphosis in a digital age (e.g. redpilling as neo-archaic rite of initiation). But I want to broaden my analysis to see these cultural developments as indicative of changing political orders. How does the passage from patriarchy to fratriarchy parallel and support/enhance the ways culture wars now take over the state? So, I’m looking to write a short book on contemporary fratriarchy, one that not only understands masculine rule but the recomposition of fascism via leader/follower relationships and distributed group formation. Here again I will focus on the importance of Mannerbund (warbands, squads, masculine grouplets), now in a networked and secular/atheist cultural form. This project might be long enough for a short monograph but might end up being a journal article.
What techniques can we use to fight fascists who are already laughing at themselves, as asked in this article by Emily Nussbaum?
Weaponizing humor has been central to contemporary US fascist culture. In the initial wave, the alt-right was formed through memeing, brigading, and trolling, cloaked in defensive claims that these were “just jokes.” That wave was marked by a 4chan extension of lolz and gleeful sadistic humor. But something important happened in between the Trump eras. Prominent comedians began to identify themselves as victims of cancel culture and political correctness. They claimed that their freedom was being censored by online mobs and #MeToo accountability culture. This version of freedom is directly drawn from online cultures, who want to antagonize without accountability. The MAGA crowd, including Trump, also claimed the position of being victims of woke culture and digital mobs. It’s no wonder that podcast comedians and pranksters took on a more prominent role during Trump’s campaign, with some even attending his inauguration. And now the White House itself posts memes, no longer with the alt-right’s 4Chan-esque cleverness but dull-witted MAGA entertainment like alligators with ICE caps and Ghibli-style carceral aesthetics. This is not a liberating laughter but a handcuffing humor, laughter as a kind of spitting on someone you think you’ve owned or destroyed. Again, it’s tied to a fixation on a type of fighter: “winners” mock and verbally kick the vanquished.
And now the White House itself posts memes, no longer with the alt-right’s 4Chan-esque cleverness but dull-witted MAGA entertainment like alligators with ICE caps and Ghibli-style carceral aesthetics. This is not a liberating laughter but a handcuffing humor, laughter as a kind of spitting on someone you think you’ve owned or destroyed.
At the same time, the Trump 2.0 administration has been acting buffoonish in their efforts at pure domination. I know some scholars who are working on the notion of “clown fascism,” no less lethal in its effects than dramatic fascism. The most spectacular example is Trump’s birthday military parade, with its squeaky tanks, small crowd, anachronistic uniforms, and apparently resistant marching soldiers. But while this might have generated compensatory laughter among his opponents, the machine presses on as the US becomes more of a police state (with the massive increase in ICE funding). As one Trump administration press aide/propagandist put it: “The arrests will continue. The memes will continue.” Resistance needs moments of humor to cope and collectively recognize each other, so it’s still important to see protest signs, sculptural artwork, and social media posts disempower the fascist fantasies. Or take the Portland-based frog costumed protests against ICE and domestic military occupations. This #Amphifa is a reclamation of the alt-right’s Pepe and Kek but now redeployed offline into the streets. Humor gives possibility, even if it doesn’t stop ICE or change hearts and minds. But it will allow people to bond with each other in rebellion, support, and solidarity.
Jack Z. Bratich is professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, researching the intersection of popular culture and political culture, and applying social and political theory to social movements, craft culture, social media, and the cultures of secrecy.
Daniel Lukes is a writer and editor based in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke, working at the intersections of culture, politics, and gender. His most recent book is Black Metal Rainbows (PM Press/Between the Lines, 2023), and he is currently writing a book on incel cultures.
minor literature[s] 