Chickens Coming Home to Roost
The final definition of fascism is still open, simply because it is still a developing movement. We have already discussed the defects of trying to analyze a movement outside of its process and its sequential relationships. You gain only a discolored glimpse of a dead past. […]
Our failure to clearly isolate and define [fascism] may have something to do with our insistence on a full definition—in other words, looking for exactly identical symptoms from nation to nation. We have been consistently misled by fascism’s nationalistic trappings. We have failed to understand its basically international character. In fact, it has followed international socialism all around the globe. One of the most definite characteristics of fascism is its international quality.
— George Jackson, Blood in My Eye
It is difficult for those of us coming out of the Black radical tradition to embrace the currently popular timeline on fascism. If fascism is back, as the common sense in Europe and the United States seems to insist, when did it go away? In the 50s with Apartheid and Jim Crow? In the 60s and 70s? – not for Latin Americans. In the 80s? – not for Indonesians or the Congolese. In the 90s? – the decade of intensified carceral state violence against Black people in the United States?
— Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, “Plantocracy and Communism”
Masked agents carrying out a raid outside a homeless shelter in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood on October 2, 2025
Fascism does not name a single, coherent ideological program but a genus of contradictory programs that achieve the same end: the stabilization of capitalist hierarchy in and through crisis.
Any ideology that mediates between the capitalist elite, the petit bourgeoisie, and the privileged fractions of the working class—unifying them against the underprivileged and against a racialized global majority—functions as fascist. Its content can vary: racism, ethno-nationalism, pseudo-meritocracy, religious nationalism, or any inconsistent mixture of these and other elements, supplemented by whatever cultural detritus is at hand, so long as it preserves hierarchy while promising unity.
Americanism is one such formation: a distinctly U.S. brand of fascism that binds the capitalist class to the white petit bourgeoisie, the more secure strata of white workers, and the “talented tenths” separated from non-white populations. It cements this alliance by projecting its violence outward—against a racialized global majority imagined as in need of development, discipline, or punishment from the self-declared exceptional state of America for their presumed backwardness or threat to global stability. Yet in moments of crisis, when external domination falters and internal stability teeters, Americanism turns inward, targeting domestic others within its own population: Native peoples, Black communities, Asian laborers, Mexicans, and the poor and unhoused. Current events mark another inward turn in a long imperial process.
I write from Chicago, where National Guard troops—like those sent to Portland—have been ordered in by President Trump, overriding the objections of their mayors and governors. What appears to the liberal press as a dramatic breach of constitutional custom is something more profound. The spectacle of domestic militarization does not mark a new rupture in American political life; it discloses a decades-long, halting regression—the stutter-step, slip, and slide of U.S. fascism from its secure phase of manufactured consent to its insecure phase of coercion.
Trump’s fascist deployment of National Guard troops must be placed within a genealogy linking the nation’s imperial ventures abroad to its racial order at home. George Jackson’s analysis of fascism provides a critical point of entry into that genealogy. In Blood in My Eye, he outlines three phases of fascism: first, when it is out of power, mimicking populist or socialist rhetoric to win support; second, when it is in power but insecure, relying on terror to suppress dissent; and third, when it is in power and secure, exercising domination through routine administration. For Jackson, the United States has lived within this continuum at least since the Civil War: the liberal refrain about “creeping fascism” gets it backward—the nation has never ceased to be a fascist state. The counter-revolution that ended Black Reconstruction, embodied in Jim Crow and the Klan, was fascism’s insecure face in the American South—white rule maintained by lynching, vigilantes, and legal exception. The late-twentieth-century liberal order that followed the Civil Rights Movement represented fascism’s secure phase: a racial-capitalist consensus that stabilized inequality through bureaucratic optimization, mass incarceration, and the rhetoric of equal opportunity.
Trump’s troop call-up signals the terminal decline of the post–Civil Rights liberal order in the early twenty-first century. The racial-capitalist state endures, but the conditions that once naturalized it—economic growth, imperial hegemony, and ideological confidence—are faltering. What resurfaces is not a “new” authoritarianism but the old order revealing its fractures. One faction of the ruling class, still confident in the order’s durability, clings to legality and procedure; another, sensing its control slipping, presses the apparatus of coercion into domestic use. The liberal faction seeks to preserve legitimacy through technocratic management—rule by policy, data, and procedural restraint—believing that security can be maintained through the appearance of consent and due process. Its faith lies in institutions, markets, and the soft power of humanitarian rhetoric. The reactionary faction, by contrast, mistrusts those mediations and turns to spectacle and overt force, insisting that order in crisis requires visible discipline and the public performance of strength. Both rely on the same imperial machinery; they differ only in how naked its operation should be. Now at the helm, the reactionary faction drives fascism toward the overt assertion of power that Jackson called its insecure phase—a regime compensating for dwindling consent through visible force.
In Policing Empires, Julian Go articulates the mechanism at work in Trump’s troop deployments. He calls it the “boomerang effect”—the return of colonial policing methods to the metropole. Techniques perfected in the colonies and imperial peripheries—surveillance, counter-insurgency, militarized crowd control—come home to manage surplus, racialized populations. More often than not, the hinge of this circulation is racialization: the process that converts citizens and “resident aliens” into colonial subjects, marking them as deviant or dangerous. When Trump calls American cities “war zones” and protesters “enemies within,” he is not inventing a new language; he is reactivating the colonial grammar already embedded in U.S. law enforcement. (As Go also notes, this transfer is operationalized by concrete intermediaries—veterans, consultants, manuals, personnel exchanges—so the boomerang is thrown, not fated.)
Our work in the AGAPE collective extends Go’s analysis to the spatial design of empire. We distinguish the Green Zone—composed primarily of the white European imperial powers and their favored client states, where privilege and security concentrate—from the Grey Zone—composed largely of the Darker Nations, where precarity and violence persist. The borders between these zones are not fixed lines but an elastic regime of control. As Harsha Walia observes, the border “can exist anywhere,” stretching and contracting to mobilize and immobilize populations while maintaining the flow of wealth from the Grey Zone to the Green. This elasticity is precisely what Trump’s deployments hinge on. The border’s hinge mechanism functions as designed—expanding inward to authorize the domestic application of imperial tactics. Techniques developed to police colonial peripheries are redeployed to govern cities cast as unruly internal colonies—Chicago, Portland, and other sanctuary cities—treated as if they were foreign insurgent zones through the state’s construction of “criminal” and “alien” populations. In this way, the border’s flexibility enables empire to secure itself by making its interior resemble—and increasingly operate like—its exterior.
For much of the late twentieth century, fascism was secure at home (in the Green Zone) and insecure abroad (in the Grey Zone). For more than a century, the United States and other Green Zone states have sponsored “third-world fascisms” in the Grey Zone to preserve the global order. Now the tools of fascist insecurity refined in those peripheries—counter-insurgency doctrines, surveillance technologies, and “stabilization” programs—circulate back home: the “banana republics” the U.S. engineered abroad become models for intervening in its own “disorderly” internal colonies such as Chicago.
Liberal commentary, preoccupied with breaches of “civil-military norms,” cannot see this structure because it seeks to preserve the illusion of a clear divide between war and peace, foreign and domestic. Yet the mechanisms of empire—occupation, surveillance, counter-insurgency—have always operated within the borders of the United States. The open violence of insecure fascism has repeatedly surfaced in the nation’s internal colonies: in the Black Belt of the American South under Jim Crow, in Black and Brown communities during COINTELPRO and the so-called War on Drugs. Fascism’s insecure phase does not follow automatically from decline; it reappears when crisis is interpreted through racialized panic that reclassifies resident populations as colonial/criminal subjects to be suppressed. The boomerang returns not by inertia but by design—through the discursive and institutional labor that makes repression appear as defense.
Again, if fascism is a mutating process rather than a fixed thing, the Trump era marks a phase shift within that process. Facing crises it can neither explain nor absorb, the fascist state of America relies ever more heavily on tools once reserved for external enemies in its battles against enemies manufactured within its own borders.
To recognize this shift is not to despair but to see clearly.
