At the Crossroads

A reflection on the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States of America. Harbinger of a resurgent fascism or something different altogether? &nbsp

Keywords: Post-fascism

  The spectre of fascism currently haunts liberal democracy. This ‘keywords’ entry explores the expansion of Right-populism, white nationalism, and the alt-Right, examining the consolidation of a ‘post-fascist constellation’. I outline a five-featured ideal-type of fascism, before turning to explore post-fascism’s utopian dimensions, drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch. Against liberal attempts to mock, pathologise, or re-educate post-fascists, I argue we must attend to both the multitude of fears and the figures of a better world expressed within this formation of thought. &nbsp

Christianity Without Guarantees

This review essay critically examines Hannah Strømmen and Ulrich Schmiedel’s The Claim to Christianity, an activist intervention that seeks to explicate and contest the theologies running through far-right claims to Christianity. While importantly focused on the semantic struggle for Christianity, refusing to interpret the presence of Christianity in far-right ideology as mere instrumentalisation, and espousing a critical Christianity without guarantees, the book suffers from several analytical and evaluative shortcomings. Framing the object of Strømmen and Schmiedel’s work as a component part of the contemporary post-fascist atmosphere, I suggest that drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch and Antonio Gramsci and attending to the utopian, dystopian, stratified, temporally multiple, and synthetic qualities of far-right claims to Christianity better illuminates the ideological operations of post-fascism and suggests the need for powerful alternative theologies

Age of the Void

Review of Marco Revelli, The New Populism. A detailed account of the erosion of the liberal centre and the spread of populism across the United States, United Kingdom, and continental Europe. &nbsp

Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa New Zealand

The contemporary far-right is an extraordinarily complex, diverse ideological and political ecosystem: Christian, atheist, and pagan; violent and parliamentary; nationalist and civilisational; fear- and hate-laden and utopian; individualist and communitarian; traditionalist and accelerationalist; statist and libertarian; progressivist and declinist. Histories of Hate, edited by Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij, and Paul Spoonley demonstrates that such multiplicity is a feature of the history of the far-right in this country

After 15 March: Responses to the White-Supremacist Terrorist Attacks

For many of us who do not encounter forms of racial and religious hatred in daily life, the white-supremacist terrorist attacks of 15 March, which killed 51 people and injured 49 others at the Al-Noor mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, were experienced as a traumatic blow seemingly from nowhere. Explaining and politically responding to the tragedy felt imperative, but collective grief, indignation, and empathy were quite rightly the most immediate feelings and responses in the weeks that followed. Here, writing from a Pākehā, non-Muslim perspective, we want to consider some of the wider explanatory and strategic questions that the Left must face in the wake of these attacks. &nbsp

Beginnings

An introduction to the inaugural issue of Counterfutures. &nbsp

Book review: Capital in the Mirror: Critical Social Theory and the Aesthetic Dimension

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