Aspirational Fascism, by William E. Connolly — Summary
Synopsis
Connolly argues that Trumpism is best understood not as populism or mere authoritarian drift but as “aspirational fascism”: a political formation that keeps the shell of democratic competition while using rhetoric, affective contagion, bodily discipline, and cross-class coalition-building to hollow democracy out from within. The book’s central claim is that fascism operates simultaneously on the registers of ideology, speech, and embodied habit — and that democratic theory fails when it attends only to the first.
The argument is built as a genealogy in three moves. The first chapter compares the rhetorical strategies of Hitler and Trump, isolating shared operational principles — the Big Lie, enemy-chain construction, rally choreography, and the fusion of speech with intimidation — while insisting these are affinities of political technology, not historical identity. The second chapter traces fascist receptivity to bodily formation: military drill, masculinized obedience, armored selfhood, and the conversion of vulnerability into shame, drawing on Freud, Theweleit, Elias, and The Authoritarian Personality. The third proposes the antidote: a “multifaceted pluralism” that is not merely procedural but materially egalitarian, ecologically enlarged, affectively cultivated, and organized through decentralized militant assemblages rather than centralized command.
The book matters for this vault because it provides a theoretical bridge between democratic erosion as an institutional process and the affective, bodily, and class-structural conditions that make erosion possible. Connolly’s insistence that pluralism cannot survive without class equality, and that democratic politics must contest fascism on the visceral register — not just the discursive one — speaks directly to debates on thymos, cultural cognition, and the failures of liberal proceduralism that run through the vault’s investigations.
Preface: “Apples and Oranges”
The preface opens with a concrete political scene from July 2016, before Donald Trump’s victory but after his candidacy had already begun to alter the emotional climate of American politics. William E. Connolly recalls stopping at a café in northwestern Michigan with family members during a vacation. What matters is not only the setting but the sudden collision between ordinary leisure and a darker political undercurrent. At a nearby table, a working-class group discusses the election, and one domineering man delivers a forceful monologue about the urgent need to defeat Hillary Clinton and elect Trump. Connolly uses the scene to show how fascistic energy may first appear not as formal doctrine but as tone, posture, rhythm, and social intimidation.
What strikes the author in that café is that race is never named directly, yet the conversation is saturated with coded themes: immigration, the wall, lost jobs, resentment of liberal elites, and a sense that a threatened way of life must be defended. The language is punchy, repetitive, and emotionally coercive. One woman at the table offers mild resistance, but she retreats in the face of the alpha male’s certainty and the tacit support of the others. Connolly treats this as an instructive micro-scene of political culture. The important point is not only what was said but how it was said, how dissent was managed, and how vulnerability and aggression could be fused in one male figure.
Leaving the café, Connolly and his companions joke nervously about what they might have said had they confronted the group. Yet the episode leaves him with a serious conclusion: Trump has a real chance of winning. At the time, polls still favored Clinton, and many academics around him dismissed the possibility of a Trump victory. Connolly presents this not as a boast about prediction but as an argument that something crucial was being missed by technocratic readings of the race. Polling, demographics, and conventional expertise were failing to register the force of affective identification between Trump and parts of the white working class.
The author then explains that his own primary research had not centered on fascism at all, but on the Anthropocene and planetary instability. He had been studying climate denial, global inequality in exposure to environmental harm, and the dangerous convergence between capitalist extraction, evangelical politics, and ecological crisis. That broader work on fragility, interdependence, and nonlinear processes prepared him to recognize another form of instability unfolding in U.S. politics. The same attention to precarious systems and resonance effects that helped him think about climate also pushed him toward the political storm gathering around Trump.
From there Connolly turns to a concept he had already proposed in 2011: aspirational fascism. He had used the term to describe a possible American formation that would keep the shell of party competition while using both legal and extralegal means to hollow democracy out from within. In that earlier diagnosis, such a movement would suppress minority voting, pressure the media, mobilize white working-class grievances through false promises, vilify Muslims, encourage vigilante energies, and intensify militarized nationalism. The preface makes clear that Trump did not create this tendency from nothing. He crystallized and accelerated tendencies that had been developing for some time.
Because of that danger, Connolly organized a graduate seminar at Johns Hopkins in spring 2017 titled What Was/Is Fascism? He decided that whether Trump won or lost, the drives unleashed by Trumpism would remain politically significant. The chant “Lock her up!” already indicated that a punitive, anti-democratic sensibility had taken root. The seminar therefore became the basis for the book, which he describes as written quickly and under pressure. He is explicit that the study is preliminary and incomplete. That incompleteness is not a defect to be hidden but a condition of writing amid an unfolding crisis.
Connolly justifies this haste on political grounds. Waiting for events to settle before analyzing them may mean waiting until the moment of intervention has passed. He also insists that he is not claiming Trumpism will reproduce the full historical trajectory of Nazism, especially not the later Hitlerian path into total war and genocide. Still, he argues that it would be irresponsible to refuse comparison merely because the two cases are not identical. The danger lies precisely in recognizing early affinities before a movement fully consolidates itself. The book therefore works in the tense space between historical difference and political urgency.
This is where the title metaphor of the preface enters. Connolly says that comparing Hitler and Trump may seem like comparing apples and oranges. At one level, the phrase names the objection that the cases are too different to be meaningfully compared. But he flips the cliché. Apples and oranges are different, yet comparison across difference can still be illuminating. More than that, comparison should not stop at classification. It should help us notice partial affinities, unexpected crossings, and what he calls heterogeneous connections. The point is not to erase difference, but to ask what kinds of insertion, infection, and transformation become visible when unlike cases are placed in relation.
The preface develops this idea into a broader methodological argument. Connolly contrasts simple comparison with a more dynamic picture of political life shaped by contagion, mutation, and assemblage. He invokes examples from biology and evolution to suggest that history does not move through clean, self-contained categories. Instead, new forms emerge through unexpected crossings, invasions, and symbioses. Nazism, in this language, becomes a toxic infection within democracy. By contrast, multifaceted pluralism and egalitarianism are presented as salutary injections capable of strengthening democracy against fascist capture. The metaphorical field matters because it shifts attention from static labels to active processes.
That shift also explains why Connolly resists describing Trumpism merely as populism. He acknowledges that the movement has populist elements, especially in its appeal against elites and in its claim to speak for a unified people. But the term is too broad and too blunt. Left populists such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Cornel West may mobilize anger against elites, yet they do not rely on the Big Lie, cultivate white triumphalism, undermine pluralism, encourage militarism, suppress minority voting, or build the same alliances with corporate power. To call Trumpism simply populist, in Connolly’s view, obscures its specifically anti-democratic and proto-fascist tendencies.
The preferred framework is therefore genealogy. Connolly says a genealogy of aspirational fascism can recover past elements that clarify present dangers without pretending that history repeats mechanically. Genealogy attends to unrealized tendencies, buried strains, and moments of uncertainty in the past that illuminate contingency in the present. It avoids both determinism and complacency. For Connolly, this method is necessary because highly formal academic styles, obsessed with exact definitions and rigid explanation, often miss the messy and affective dimensions through which fascist energies gather force. A genealogical approach is better suited to a world marked by friction, indeterminacy, and volatile crossings.
A crucial consequence of that method is the centrality of the body. Connolly argues that both democracy and fascism operate not only through ideas and institutions but through bodily disciplines, gesture, tone, posture, and affective contagion. Public rhetoric works because it moves nervous systems as much as it persuades minds. The memory of the “phrase punches” in the café becomes emblematic of this claim. Fascist tendencies gain traction through styles of embodiment and communication that establish dominance, channel grievance, and organize resentment. If democratic thinkers ignore these affective and corporeal dimensions, they will misunderstand both the appeal of fascism and the conditions of democratic resistance.
The preface then outlines the book’s three chapters. The first chapter compares the rhetorical strategies of Hitler and Trump, especially the role of public speech, simplification, emotional infection, and the Big Lie. The second explores bodily practices and authoritarian dispositions, drawing on Freud, Tim Mason, Klaus Theweleit, and The Authoritarian Personality to connect masculinity, grievance, discipline, and susceptibility to fascist appeal. The third turns toward the antidote: a multifaceted pluralism tied to strong egalitarian commitments. Connolly argues that pluralism alone is not enough. Democracy must also address material inequality, job insecurity, humiliation, and the erosion of cultural dignity.
This insistence on egalitarianism leads him to a difficult political diagnosis. Connolly repeatedly stresses that parts of the white working and lower middle classes suffer real grievances, yet those grievances can be articulated through racist, patriarchal, and authoritarian forms. He refuses both romanticization and dismissal. He suggests that neoliberalism and certain failures of the pluralizing Left, despite their deep differences, have together left some constituencies exposed to fascist temptation. The task, then, is not to flatter those temptations but to separate legitimate economic and status injuries from the racist and misogynistic politics through which they are often expressed.
Connolly is candid about tensions in his own position. He distrusts both older collectivist models that could slide toward domination and liberal or neoliberal models whose coldness and cruelty can provoke fascist backlash. His wager is on a democratic pluralism that is not merely procedural, but culturally thick, affectively vibrant, and materially egalitarian. He supports radical reform of capitalism, even while admitting he does not possess a clean blueprint for what should replace it. For now, he imagines an interim politics that stretches capitalism toward greater democracy, equality, and ecological responsibility, while leaving open the possibility of a more plural socialist future.
Another strand of the preface concerns national decline. Connolly argues that one powerful but often disavowed source of Trumpism is anger over America’s diminishing supremacy in the world. Trump’s slogan works because it promises restoration: not only a return to prosperity, but a return to a simpler order of white triumphalism and unquestioned dominance. That promise is impossible to fulfill, but it remains politically potent. Against it, Connolly proposes a more sober democratic politics capable of adjusting to decline, confronting Anthropocene realities, and answering class grievances without capitulating to racism or patriarchy.
The preface closes by widening its frame to Charlottesville in August 2017, an event that occurred after the text had been written but before publication. For Connolly, Charlottesville confirmed the seriousness of the threat. White supremacists, neo-Nazis, and allied militants openly staged a racist demonstration, violence followed, and Trump responded with moral equivalence between fascists and their opponents. This confirmed Connolly’s claim that aspirational fascism operates through encouragement, deniability, and the cultivation of destructive dispositions. Even if Trump’s popularity declines, he warns, the bureaucracy under his command can still produce harm daily, and the broader movement remains dangerous.
In the end, the preface serves several functions at once. It is autobiographical, methodological, diagnostic, and programmatic. It explains why Connolly thinks the comparison with fascism is necessary, why he rejects the safer vocabulary of populism, why he privileges genealogy over rigid explanatory method, and why he believes democratic resistance must become more affectively intelligent and more materially egalitarian. The acknowledgments at the end, directed to students and colleagues who shaped the seminar from which the book emerged, reinforce the sense that this study is not a finished doctrine but an intervention produced collectively, under pressure, in a dangerous political moment.
Chapter 1 — The Rhetorical Strategies of Hitler and Trump
In this chapter, William E. Connolly sets out to build what he calls a genealogy of fascism rather than a simple historical analogy. His point is not that history repeats itself mechanically, but that earlier formations can illuminate dangerous tendencies in the present when institutions that look stable are revealed to be far more fragile and recombinable than they first appear. Drawing on Nietzsche and Whitehead, he argues that political orders are made of heterogeneous elements moving at different speeds, so shocks, resentments, and new alliances can reorganize them into something darker. The chapter therefore begins at a high level of theory: fascism must be studied as a changing assemblage, not as a frozen essence. This lets Connolly ask how a democracy can begin to mutate toward authoritarianism without ceasing to be recognizably democratic at the outset.
Connolly insists that genealogy has a second task beyond historical comparison: it must also identify what in the present is available for democratic resistance. He is not interested in antiquarian comparison for its own sake. He wants to understand how a contemporary American formation composed of a corrupt leader, sections of capital, Republican elites, evangelical energies, and injured parts of the white working and lower middle classes can coalesce into what he calls “aspirational fascism.” That formation, in his telling, is held together not only by policies and interests but by grievances, affects, rhetorical cues, bodily styles, and fantasies of restored national greatness. The point of the chapter is therefore double: to diagnose how Trumpism works and to infer what sort of democratic counterpolitics might still interrupt it before it hardens further.
A crucial early move in the chapter is Connolly’s refusal to reduce politics to discourse in the narrow sense. He argues that any serious genealogy of fascism must attend not only to ideologies and representations but also to affective and subliminal forms of communication that travel beneath explicit argument. He points toward rhythms of speech, styles of bodily comportment, street aggression, rally choreography, surveillance, martial aesthetics, humiliation rituals, and repeated collective gestures as part of the political field. In his view, fascist movements work on the “visceral register” of culture as much as on the level of articulated programs. That is why they can intensify loyalties even when their claims are contradictory or visibly false. For Connolly, democratic thinkers make a serious mistake when they imagine public life can be defended by facts and procedural argument alone.
From there, he turns to rhetoric more directly and frames the chapter as an inquiry into the relation between persuasion and shock politics. Trump’s success, he argues, cannot be understood if critics dismiss him as merely inarticulate, crude, or clownish. Connolly thinks that liberals, radicals, and democrats have often ceded large parts of the white working class to the Trump-evangelical-capitalist machine because they have not spoken intensely enough to real economic injuries while also defending pluralization. He wants a countermovement that opposes race, class, and gender hierarchy; resists authoritarian leadership; and combines pluralism with reductions in inequality. But before that can be done, one has to understand how affective contagion works. The chapter therefore treats rhetoric not as ornament but as a mechanism for organizing resentments, directing anger, and binding followers to an authoritarian leader.
Connolly is careful to place limits on the Hitler comparison. He explicitly says Trump is not a Nazi and that the two figures differ in aims, circumstances, institutional context, and historical scale. He rejects any crude claim that Trump must culminate in death camps or a world war simply because Hitler did. Even so, he argues that comparison remains useful if it is confined to affinities of style, tactics, propaganda, incitement, and organizational logic in the early stages of a movement. Trump, he says, is better understood as an aspirational fascist: a figure who seeks adulation, white triumphalism, law-and-order domination, militarized nationalism, and a politics saturated in fake news, smears, and leader worship. The comparison matters because fascism in a democracy does not first arrive by abolishing popular energies; it twists democratic desires, resentments, and mass communications into support for authoritarian rule.
To make that case, Connolly turns to Mein Kampf and extracts a series of statements from Hitler about propaganda, ruthlessness, beauty, leader-centered mobilization, spoken agitation, repetition, mass suggestion, street violence, and contempt for parliamentary procedure. The point of rehearsing these passages is not to conflate the two men but to isolate operational principles. Hitler presents propaganda as one-sided assertion rather than fair weighing of claims; exalts the unification of diverse enemies under one category; praises repeated slogans; treats mass speech as an art of emotional possession; valorizes violent street action; and mocks committee procedure once personal command has been secured. Connolly treats these as clues to a political technology. Fascism, at least in its emergent form, thrives by simplifying, dramatizing, repeating, scapegoating, and fusing speech to organized intimidation.
Connolly then maps these devices onto Trump’s performances. Trump does not reproduce Hitler’s explicit anti-Semitic vocabulary, but he does assemble his own chain of enemies and humiliations. In Connolly’s reading, Muslims, Mexicans, feminists, ecologists, the media, African Americans, academics, judges, and other targets become linked in the imagination of the crowd as obstacles to national restoration. Trump also stages beauty, normality, injury, and masculinity in ways that echo fascist sorting mechanisms: he glamorizes compliant femininity, demeans disability, and treats wounded or vulnerable bodies as inferior. Connolly notes that both Hitler and Trump share impatience with briefing, impulsiveness, narcissism, and the demand for one-way loyalty. That does not make them equivalent. But it does, in his judgment, reveal a family resemblance in the way domination, vanity, and political performance can fuse inside an authoritarian personality.
One of the chapter’s strongest claims is that Trump’s speeches should not be judged by conventional standards of logical coherence. Connolly argues that critics who mock the apparent disorder of Trump’s speech miss what the performance is actually doing. It is not principally trying to lay out a program; it is assembling a charged montage of grievances, anxieties, resentments, and nostalgic cues. Deindustrialization, race, borders, immigration, trade, gender change, diminished imperial confidence, and planetary instability are folded together and then redirected toward convenient enemies. Trump’s gestures, grimaces, finger-pointing, pacing, and repeated phrase-clusters are part of the message, not decoration around it. All the elements reinforce one another until they form what Connolly calls an aggressive resonance machine. The result is a crowd experience in which anxiety is transmuted into anger and then attached to a leader who promises purification through force.
That is why Connolly takes the rally form so seriously. Trump’s invitations to rough up protesters, his cues to turn toward the media and denounce them, and the behavior of his security apparatus matter because they train followers in a politics of humiliation and licensed hostility. When a constituency is repeatedly cast as vermin, scum, or an enemy of the people, restraints on what may be done to it weaken. Connolly sees in this a dangerous aspiration toward the fusion of rhetoric and coercion. Trump’s shock politics—especially rapid, destabilizing moves, threats, and executive gestures—extend the rally mood into governance. Even when the full aspiration is not achieved, the attempt itself can change public expectations, normalize intimidation, and make law-and-order authoritarianism appear necessary. The chapter is therefore as much about atmospherics and permission structures as about ideology in the narrow sense.
Connolly also argues that Trump’s rhetoric works because it meets a real constituency at a vulnerable historical juncture. He repeatedly returns to the white working and lower middle classes, especially in deindustrialized regions, as people caught between neoliberal intensification and pluralizing social change. In his view, much of the democratic Left failed to recognize this constituency as one of the struggling minorities of the present. That neglect did not create racism or misogyny, but it helped create the conditions under which those energies could be activated more intensely by Trump. “Make America Great Again” functions, in Connolly’s reading, as a visceral condensation of loss, humiliation, and injured entitlement. Trump succeeds because he does not merely name grievances; he channels them through a story in which national, racial, gendered, and civilizational restoration are fused.
An important mechanism in that process is what Connolly describes as the linkage of negative associations. Trump repeatedly strings together assertive women, minorities, foreigners, Muslims, disability, vulnerability, weakness, and national decline until each term begins to vibrate with the threat of the others. This creates a rhetorical shortcut. Once the chain is built, any critic associated with one element can be treated as bearing the contamination of the whole series. “Political correctness,” in this account, becomes a blocking device rather than an argument: a phrase that stops receptive communication by marking opponents as already discredited. Against this negative chain Trump builds a positive one organized around alpha masculinity, hard borders, compliant women, police force, military strength, loyal nationalism, and leader authority. Connolly’s point is that apparent discursiveness or sloppiness is functional; it helps the associations travel.
The chapter then shifts into a fuller account of affective contagion. Connolly argues that the visceral register of culture is never empty. Public life always contains circulating intensities, half-formed perceptions, and embodied susceptibilities that can be coded in one direction or another. Trump’s gestures, lies, shouted refrains, tweets, and dramatized confrontations code this register among select constituencies, especially when mediated by rallies and television. Late-night tweets and extreme executive gestures keep the emotional charge alive between appearances. The targets Trump selects are politically efficient because attacking them does not require any structural change in capitalism, consumption, or climate policy; it only requires anger plus a strongman. Followers thereby become more inflamed by contradiction itself, and blockages against contrary evidence harden alongside attachment to the leader.
Connolly adds that this process also exploits a cultural resentment toward establishments associated with writing, expertise, calmness, and refinement. Trump’s crowds, in his telling, rebel against the prestige of the written over the spoken, the performative over the deliberative, and elite composure over vernacular agitation. That is why satire and exposure matter, but only if they are used intelligently. Merely laughing at Trump can backfire by insulting the people who identify with his style. Connolly nevertheless thinks laughter has a role when it reveals the mechanism of the performance rather than pretending democratic politics can escape affect entirely. Good satire can interrupt enchantment, teach audiences how the trick works, and prepare them to resist when Trump stumbles. The key is not to deny affective communication, but to counter it with democratic forms of affect, solidarity, and rhetorical intelligence.
This leads into one of the chapter’s most important concepts: the “Big Lie Scenario.” Connolly argues that Trump’s lies are not isolated falsehoods but parts of a broader machine. A Big Lie, in his account, is repeated not simply to persuade people literally, but to produce confusion, false equivalence, cynicism about evidence, and emotional coding on the visceral register. Birtherism, “rigged election” claims, attacks on the press as enemies of the people, and charges of fake news all serve to cauterize outrage by making it seem that everyone lies and every institution is corrupt. Under those conditions, evidence loses authority, attention is diverted from structural issues and from Trump’s own corruption, and authoritarian rule becomes easier to justify. Connolly stresses that simple fact-checking is insufficient. One must also explain how the scenario works, why it is repeated, and what deniability or diversion it is protecting.
He further argues that the Big Lie Scenario is linked to what he calls the “Reichstag temptation”: the possibility that a leader who thrives on lies and shocks will seize on a crisis, or help intensify one, in order to expand emergency powers and suppress opposition. Connolly does not claim that such an outcome is inevitable, but he thinks the temptation is built into the style. That is why he urges opponents to prepare in advance by repeatedly showing how these tactics function. The hope, for him, lies in the internal tension among many Trump supporters. Identification with the leader is powerful, but it does not necessarily erase all attachment to autonomy or evidence. Repeated counter-exposure, combined with failures and new events, can eventually crystallize suppressed doubts. Connolly points to delayed public reckonings during Watergate and the Iraq War as examples of how apparent consent can erode after the fact.
The chapter’s last major movement returns to class, charisma, and democratic strategy. Connolly insists that the ugliness expressed by parts of the white working class must be confronted directly, but not used as an excuse to ignore actual grievances produced by deindustrialization, retirement insecurity, wage pressure, and social abandonment. He uses personal and political examples to argue that many in this constituency were effectively written off while their losses were normalized. That abandonment helped make Trump’s appeals potent. Yet he refuses the idea that the white working class should become the privileged revolutionary subject. The Fordist world that once supported such a politics is gone. Instead, he describes the class as a dispersed minority among others, scattered across insecure sectors and often detached from strong unions or durable institutions of collective agency.
Because of that dispersed condition, Connolly thinks a democratic alternative must join pluralism more firmly to class egalitarianism. The goal is not to appease racism, misogyny, or climate denial, but to show that serious responses to working-class precarity are compatible with a more plural, egalitarian society. He imagines intraclass connections across minorities—single mothers, Black workers, same-sex couples, indebted households, precarious laborers of many kinds—so that class grievances no longer default into white nationalism. This would require more than policy proposals. It would require a new rhetorical and organizational style capable of building horizontal attachments across differences. Connolly is explicit that democratic leadership must also be charismatic in its own way. Fascist charisma cannot be answered only with managerial competence or bookish reticence; it must be met by pluralizing, egalitarian forms of inspiration.
That concern shapes his treatment of the media and professoriate. Trump attacks them strategically because he wants to trap them: either they ignore him and let the lies circulate, or they respond narrowly on evidentiary grounds and fail to expose the broader mechanism. Connolly therefore calls for a double response. The democratic Left should criticize the media’s neoliberal softness where warranted, but it must also defend a free press and an independent intellectual culture against authoritarian intimidation. Any attempt to “accelerate contradictions” in hopes that collapse will radicalize politics strikes him as reckless; the more likely beneficiary of chaos is fascism, not democratic renewal. The proper task is harder: expose each lie, explain the design of the lie machine, defend democratic institutions, and simultaneously speak credibly to the neglected grievances that made Trumpism resonant in the first place.
The chapter ends by widening the horizon beyond immediate resistance. Connolly suggests that if a sufficiently strong egalitarian-pluralist assemblage were built, it might eventually transfigure the existing order into a form of democratic socialism centered on ecology, equality, plurality, and openness to newly emerging constituencies. That future remains uncertain, and he does not pretend the path is easy, especially given the depth of racial history in the United States and the lure of exclusionary national restoration. Still, he thinks the alternative is worse: a fraudulent top-down plurality that celebrates diversity rhetorically while concentrating power, or a more overt authoritarian nationalism backed by corporations, finance, police, and militarized affect. The chapter therefore closes not with confidence but with a demand. Democratic politics must learn to understand and contest the visceral, rhetorical, and charismatic dimensions of fascist formation before it is too late.
Finally, Connolly uses the whole discussion to prepare the next chapter’s move from rhetoric to bodily discipline. The implication is that speeches alone do not create authoritarian attachment. They succeed because they resonate with formed habits, postures, susceptibilities, and embodied practices already active in a constituency. To defend “multifaceted democracy,” then, one must do more than rebut arguments. One must understand how rhetoric, affect, class injury, media circulation, gender codes, racial nostalgia, and bodily attunement become organized into a livable style for followers. That is the deeper achievement of this chapter. It treats Trumpism not as an accidental outbreak of bad manners or misinformation, but as a structured political formation working simultaneously through speech, spectacle, grievance, fantasy, and the promise of restored hierarchy. Connolly’s warning is that democrats ignore this multilayered operation at their peril.
Chapter 2 — Bodily Practices and Fascist Modes of Attunement
This chapter argues that fascism cannot be understood only as an ideology, a class project, or a propaganda style. William E. Connolly’s central move is to show that fascist politics also works through the body: through drilled habits, emotional reflexes, rituals of obedience, masculinized postures, and contagious atmospheres that prepare people to receive authoritarian appeals. The chapter therefore begins with class and political economy, but it steadily shifts toward a genealogy of “attunement” — the ways people are bodily tuned to respond to leaders, enemies, symbols, and collective moods. Connolly’s broader aim is strategic as much as analytical. He wants to know why fascism can attract support across classes in moments of crisis, and what kind of democratic culture might be resilient enough to counter that pull.
Connolly opens by revisiting Timothy Mason’s work on the Nazi relationship to the working class. Mason had shown that Nazism rose amid intense class conflict in Germany and that organized workers were initially one of the main obstacles to fascist consolidation. He also refused the crude Marxist view that Nazism was merely capitalism in disguise. For him, industrial elites accommodated fascism to protect their interests, but Nazi violence, racism, expansionism, and institutional fanaticism went well beyond what capital strictly required. Connolly takes this seriously because it allows him to frame fascism as a formation that intersects with capitalism without being reducible to it. It is a regime that reorganizes the state, disciplines institutions, and captures social life in ways that exceed ordinary class rule.
The chapter then focuses on Mason’s later self-critique. In his original account, Mason had emphasized working-class resistance and downplayed the degree to which sections of that class eventually became active supporters of Nazism. Connolly treats Mason’s later revision as crucial. Once labor organizations had been broken and racist rhetoric escalated, Nazism succeeded in seducing parts of the working class by offering not socialist equality but racial belonging. It flattered “worthy” Germans while stigmatizing those marked as alien, impure, or degenerate. That combination mattered because it created a fake image of a classless society: hierarchy remained intact, but membership in the racial community made many feel elevated within it. Connolly’s point is that fascism can cross class lines when it offers dignity, recognition, and emotional compensation through exclusionary identities.
From there he draws a sharper theoretical lesson: political explanations are shaped by the ideals of the theorists who produce them. Mason’s communitarian or collectivist hopes, Connolly suggests, may have made it harder for him to grasp the full multiclass attraction of Nazism. That observation is not a cheap jab. It serves a deeper genealogical purpose. Connolly wants readers to see that concepts such as nation, class, order, and community are not neutral analytic instruments; they carry affective investments. Those investments can distort what one is able to perceive when a new and disturbing phenomenon emerges. Fascism, in this chapter, becomes a test case showing that inherited explanatory frameworks may fail precisely where they most need to succeed.
This is why Connolly begins to ask a different question: what bodily and affective conditions make fascist appeals possible? He notes that it is difficult to measure how much support for Nazism was spontaneous, coerced, or manufactured after Hitler took power. Rather than pretending that this can be settled cleanly, he turns to what Mason underemphasized: the embodied disciplines and relational habits that may predispose some groups to fascist conversion. The shift is decisive. Instead of asking only what people believed, Connolly asks how they had been formed to feel, react, and synchronize. He also introduces the chapter’s normative horizon: perhaps a pluralist and egalitarian democracy would be better able to counter fascist capture than either a purely national ideal or a collectivist one that neglects plural difference.
The next step is Freud and crowd psychology. Connolly revisits Freud’s engagement with Gustave Le Bon in order to examine how collective moods intensify latent impulses. Freud is useful because he takes contagion seriously: crowds do not simply aggregate isolated individuals, they amplify tendencies that may remain muted in ordinary circumstances. Connolly accepts the importance of this insight. Public life is full of scenes in which bodies become synchronized — rallies, religious gatherings, sports arenas, protests, concerts. But he thinks Freud’s account is too universalizing and too tied to a patriarchal model of psychic development. It explains submission to leaders by tracing desire back to the father, the family, and even a speculative “primal horde,” thereby making authoritarian attraction appear nearly built into civilization itself.
Connolly’s criticism is not that unconscious drives are unreal. It is that Freud overgeneralizes their organization and therefore understates historical variation. A theory that makes the authoritarian leader seem almost inevitable leaves too little room for democratic counterformation. Connolly insists that instincts are real, but plastic. They are shaped by childrearing, kinship patterns, education, work routines, military training, gender norms, and everyday rituals of bodily interaction. Once this is admitted, affective contagion still matters, but it no longer floats above history. Different regimes and different social formations cultivate different bodily susceptibilities. That move clears the ground for his turn to Norbert Elias and Klaus Theweleit, who allow him to connect fascism to specific disciplines of the body rather than to an all-purpose account of psychic life.
Elias helps by showing that even basic bodily norms are historically variable. Table manners, rules of modesty, habits of public restraint, distinctions between public and private, and degrees of aversion to bodily display all change over time. Connolly uses Elias to make a simple but powerful point: if bodily organization changes historically, then so do the instincts and sensibilities layered into it. Freud’s supposedly universal account is actually rooted in a specifically modern European organization of the self. Once you see that, you can stop treating fascist receptivity as an abstract problem of human nature and begin investigating the concrete drills, disciplines, and choreographies that cultivate particular kinds of aggression, rigidity, or obedience.
That is where Connolly introduces Theweleit’s work on proto-fascist soldier males in interwar Germany. Theweleit studies diaries, novels, and practices of men shaped by military hierarchy, defeat, humiliation, and obsessive control. Connolly values this work because it ties desire to bodily discipline. He illustrates the general mechanism through examples that range well beyond military life: court ballet, film, posture, gait, and gendered codes of movement. Choreography does not merely represent hierarchy; it installs it in muscles, glances, rhythms, and expectations. Viewers, too, can absorb these patterns through imitation and sensation. Connolly extends this insight to modern mass culture, arguing that even glamorous cultural forms can quietly train people into neoliberal and patriarchal expectations long before those expectations are stated as doctrines.
A telling moment in the chapter is Connolly’s autobiographical aside about changing the way he walked after someone pointed out that his athletic gait carried an unnecessary undertone of hard masculine challenge. The anecdote is not filler. It demonstrates the chapter’s method in miniature. Bodily style is not superficial decoration laid over thought; it is one of the media through which thought, feeling, expectation, and relation are organized. A gait can signal self-defense, intimidation, or openness. It can be inherited through imitation. And it can be worked on. That matters politically because it means bodily dispositions are neither destiny nor irrelevant. They are formed, sedimented, and sometimes modifiable. This claim is essential to Connolly’s broader argument that democratic life needs its own bodily arts and not just its own moral vocabulary.
The most intense section of the chapter examines the making of the “armored male.” Drawing on Theweleit, Connolly describes military academies and paramilitary formations as systems of arbitrary command, exhaustion, punishment, and ritualized hardness. Men are trained to obey orders from above, dominate those below, and convert vulnerability into shame. Softness, care, and dependence are not merely discouraged; they are coded as threats to masculine integrity. Over time, these drills crystallize into bodily traits — rigid posture, set jaw, sharp salute, quick responsiveness to command, aggressive gait, readiness for violence. What matters here is not merely doctrine but incorporation. Fascist masculinity becomes a sensorimotor formation before it becomes a fully articulated worldview.
Connolly is especially interested in how this armored masculinity turns women, softness, and bodily permeability into objects of fear and contempt. Theweleit had argued that these soldierly selves experience femininity as a threat of dissolution, as if fluidity, care, or intimacy might crack open the hardened shell they need in order to function. Connolly adapts that analysis to show how misogyny is not a secondary prejudice attached to fascism from the outside. It is woven into the bodily economy of authoritarian male formation. The fascist leader then activates and organizes these dispositions. Hitler’s speeches, gestures, timing, and staging mattered not only because of what they said but because they resonated with men already trained to respond to command, virility, rhythmic assertion, and collective exaltation.
At this point Connolly makes one of the chapter’s most important conceptual moves. The danger is not simply lawlessness. It is the conversion of a culture devoted to rule-following into one that slides from the rule of law into the law of rule. If people are habituated to obedience across multiple domains, then in moments of crisis those habits can be transferred to authoritarian command. That is one reason Connolly distrusts political ideals centered too heavily on concentric unity — family, locality, nation, civilization — because fascism can seize that structure and harden it into total obedience. Multifaceted democracy, by contrast, is harder to capture because it disperses authority, multiplies institutions, encourages cross-cutting affiliations, and cultivates a more ambivalent stance toward obedience itself.
The chapter therefore links its bodily genealogy to an argument about democratic design. A resilient democracy cannot rely on procedures alone. It needs embodied habits of generosity, receptivity, and engagement across differences. Connolly argues that these habits must be cultivated before fascism consolidates power, because afterward the field narrows drastically. He also insists that bodily discipline never determines action mechanically. Drills create predispositions, not certainties. People subject to the same regimens respond differently; some resist, some break, some redirect what they have absorbed. But if a society contains enough partially militarized, humiliated, and aggrieved constituencies, a charismatic leader can pull those tendencies into a coherent authoritarian movement.
The chapter’s final third shifts to the United States. Connolly revisits The Authoritarian Personality to identify recurring character types that can feed a fascist politics: the conventionally prejudiced, the authoritarian, and the manipulative type. The authoritarian personality is punitive, rigid, and eager to dominate the vulnerable while submitting to higher authority. The manipulative type is colder and more dangerous: it treats everything as material for control and performance. Connolly treats this type as an eerie anticipation of Donald Trump. He also notes that authoritarian traits have been especially visible in segments of the American working class, though never in the whole class and never in a way that should erase variation. His point is not to stigmatize workers but to identify a political danger that democratic movements ignore at their own expense.
That warning becomes sharper when Connolly discusses the American history of conquest and racial domination. Indigenous peoples and African Americans, he argues, have long lived under forms of surveillance, terror, dispossession, and organized brutality that already display fascistic features. White rage in the United States is therefore not an accidental outburst but a recurring political formation tied to threatened entitlement. When economic insecurity, deindustrialization, military experience, harsh workplaces, and racial resentment combine, some white men can become highly vulnerable to authoritarian mobilization. Connolly does not excuse this. He explains it. He argues that neoliberal elites have squeezed these populations economically while some pluralist circles have failed to address their existential grievances, leaving a vacuum that aspirational fascists can exploit.
From there the chapter connects older fascist insights to newer American formations: police cultures, private militias, veterans shaped by war, evangelical masculinity, right-wing media agitation, and the fusion of nationalism with fantasies of injured male entitlement. Connolly describes this as an “evangelical/capitalist resonance machine” that teaches some men to identify upward with powerful male figures while blaming women, racial minorities, immigrants, and sexual minorities for their frustrations. Trump becomes the culminating figure not because he invented these dispositions but because he condensed them: theatrical certainty, contempt for vulnerability, misogynistic display, racial signaling, and the promise that humiliation can be turned into restored greatness. The chapter closes by insisting that removing one leader is not enough. What must be rebuilt is a democratic culture — pluralist, egalitarian, affectively warm, and institutionally diverse — capable of interrupting the bodily and emotional pathways through which fascism becomes politically attractive.
Chapter 3 — Democracy, Plurality, and Class Inequality
Connolly opens the chapter by confronting a problem that shadows every serious interpretation of reactionary politics: does explaining destructive behavior soften judgment against it? He insists that this is a real danger, but not the only one. Explanation can slide into excuse, yet moral condemnation can also harden into a politics of accusation that reduces whole constituencies to objects of disgust. Fascism thrives on precisely that reduction. It converts complex social conflicts into total indictments of enemies who are presented as contaminants, parasites, or traitors. Connolly’s first move, then, is to defend an explanatory practice that neither sanitizes cruelty nor reproduces the fascist habit of turning politics into pure denunciation.
From there he argues that even some contemporary opponents of oppression can fall into a lesser version of this trap when politics becomes almost entirely accusatory. A politics organized only around exposure, punishment, and exclusion may identify real injuries, but it can fail to ask how antagonistic dispositions are formed and how they might be transformed. For Connolly, pluralism is not softness. It must be militant against fascist movements that aim to destroy plurality altogether. But it also cannot survive if every conflict is treated as a final moral verdict. What it needs is a difficult balance: resistance where necessary, receptivity where possible, and a refusal of the comforting simplifications that make cruelty feel righteous.
That balance depends on what he calls an ethic of cultivation. Human beings are not self-created agents who simply choose from nowhere; they are formed through childrearing, institutional discipline, bodily habits, shocks, losses, privileges, humiliations, and inherited cultural scripts. This does not erase responsibility. It means responsibility must be understood as emerging inside histories of formation rather than descending from a transcendent moral law. Connolly therefore wants criticism to address not only individual offenders but also the family structures, schools, churches, work regimes, police practices, military drills, and public cultures that help produce authoritarian and fascistic dispositions in the first place.
This is why he says interpretation is not the same as excuse. To understand how “armored” subjects are made is to widen the field of struggle against them. Connolly criticizes the fantasy that a clean morality of fixed rules and punishments can solve the problem. Authoritarian personalities often experience themselves as the guardians of morality. Their punitive certainty is part of the problem, not the cure. He pushes this point further by arguing that immorality can be lodged not only in selfish desire but in conscience itself. Even great moral philosophers, such as Kant, carried into their supposedly universal ethics assumptions about race, gender, punishment, and civilization that a pluralist must now treat as shameful. Sometimes, he argues, the task is not merely to feel ashamed of immoral conduct but to become ashamed of moral dictates that had been installed in conscience.
Against both transcendent moral command and procedural moral certainty, Connolly proposes a worldly pluralist ethics marked by presumptive care, self-revision, and contestability. The pluralists he admires accept that ethical life is historically formed, that conscience itself may need reworking, and that the sources of ethics remain contested in a world of many faiths and metaphysical orientations. This leads him to reject the ideal of an antiseptic public realm in which deep faith commitments are privatized so that “reason alone” can govern politics. Deep pluralism, as he understands it, allows Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Kantians, Indigenous traditions, and nontheists alike to appear publicly with their own ethical sources, so long as they accept reciprocal plurality rather than supremacy.
The chapter then turns to democracy more directly by contrasting pluralism with traditions of democratic sovereignty that seek unity. Rousseau serves as the key foil. For Rousseau, genuine democracy requires a deep convergence of sentiment and obligation so that citizens can obey laws they have, in effect, authored together. Connolly reads this as a disciplinary dream of communal coherence. It may sound democratic, but it carries exclusions and hierarchies in its structure, often beginning with patriarchal family authority and radiating outward through concentric circles of locality and nation. Fascism represents the most violent transfiguration of that concentric logic: the attempt to erase independent plural sites and fold all institutions into the unity of a racialized nation under a commanding leader.
Connolly draws on both Franz Neumann and Hannah Arendt to show how fascism destroys pluralism, but he also departs from them. Neumann emphasized competing group interests, especially labor and capital. Arendt emphasized natality and the plurality of perspectives disclosed when people act together. Connolly appreciates both, yet he wants a broader model. His pluralism is not only a plurality of interests or viewpoints. It is a multifaceted order that includes intersecting identities, faiths, aspirations, bodily dispositions, institutions, and eventually nonhuman forms of agency. Democracy, on this account, becomes stronger the more effectively it can house and negotiate such multiplicity instead of suppressing it in the name of unity.
He then lays out the positive architecture of multifaceted pluralism. The first element is an active coexistence of many constituencies—religious, racial, sexual, class-based, professional, regional, and others—each pressing claims that may differ in urgency but all belong within the field of democratic contestation. The second is a broad ethos of engagement, one that involves listening as well as asserting, responsiveness as well as demand. Connolly emphasizes that this ethos is not merely intellectual. It also has to inhabit bodily demeanor, affective communication, habits of attention, and the everyday style through which people meet difference. Fascist cultures understand very well that there is no vacuum at the level of gesture, rhythm, drill, and visceral response. A pluralist culture has to work there too.
That insistence on the bodily register is central to the chapter. Connolly argues that pluralism must be cultivated in how people move, perceive, react, and feel, not just in what they explicitly endorse. Police departments, militias, fraternities, fan cultures, and military organizations can all become sites where anti-pluralist affects are rehearsed and intensified. By contrast, a democratic ethos requires bodily practices of dilation: exposure to unfamiliar experiences, changes in habit, forms of meditation or devotion, and active work on one’s own visceral responses. The point is not self-help. It is political formation. Without work at the affective level, formally plural institutions remain vulnerable to panic, resentment, and the sudden appeal of exclusionary movements.
The third major element in his model is what he calls pluralization: the periodic struggle through which new rights, identities, or public ends cross the threshold from invisibility or abjection into legitimacy. Here Connolly breaks with the view that every just new claim was already implicitly contained in an existing constitutional order, waiting merely to be recognized. He argues instead that many advances are genuinely creative. They emerge through conflict, improvisation, suffering, political pressure, and transformed modes of care. Same-sex marriage, public legitimacy for nontheistic reverence, doctor-assisted suicide, and climate reparations are examples of claims that do not simply unfold from a prewritten moral script. They are created in struggle.
This means democratic politics always contains uncertainty. If everything were already implicit, politics would become mere administration. But once genuine creativity enters the picture, so does tragedy. New claims can fail, backlash can harden, and outcomes cannot be guaranteed in advance. Connolly does not see this uncertainty as a defect to be eliminated. He sees it as one of the defining conditions of freedom. A healthy pluralist order can host arguments among those who think legitimacy comes from implicit principles, those who stress creativity, and those who see blurry zones between the two. What matters is that such deep disagreements be lived through in a spirit of agonistic respect rather than converted into a demand for final metaphysical closure.
The bandwidth of democratic culture, he says, determines whether pluralization can succeed. When that bandwidth is wide, people disturbed by a new demand may stretch themselves enough to hear it rather than instantly criminalize it. When the bandwidth is narrow, visceral panic takes over. Connolly’s examples are telling: racial fear persists in bodily reactions even when explicit beliefs have changed, and anxieties around sexuality or gender can be lodged deeply in habit. To become more pluralist, people may need to alter what they watch, where they go, whom they march with, what histories they learn, and what practices they inhabit. Even climate politics, in his view, requires this kind of sensory and affective reeducation if care for distant others is to become politically real.
Connolly does not conclude from this that every claim should be affirmed. Some demands must be rejected. But he denies that defenders of intrinsic morality can prove their absolute authority in the way they often pretend. History is too full of certainties that later revealed themselves as organized prejudice: slavery, patriarchy, property restrictions on voting, civilizational hierarchy, and the condemnation of same-sex intimacy all wore the mask of moral necessity in their time. Pluralism therefore requires a permanent contest between ethical sources. It also requires institutional tension between settled pluralist arrangements and unsettling pluralizing movements. That tension, he argues, is one of the best protections against the fascist transformation of the rule of law into the law of rule.
At this point the chapter widens again. Connolly adds a fourth dimension to pluralism by challenging human exceptionalism. He argues that a democratic culture adequate to the Anthropocene can no longer imagine plurality as exclusively human. Agency, feeling, communication, and judgment, in varying degrees, appear across a wider field of life than older Euro-American traditions admitted. Animals, plants, and planetary processes must enter the pluralist picture, not as decoration but as participants in an entangled world of fragility and interdependence. This move matters politically because ecological crisis, species loss, and climate disruption change the stakes of democracy itself. A pluralism that ignores the more-than-human world is too narrow for the age it inhabits.
The fifth element is the periodic formation of militant pluralist assemblages. Connolly insists that pluralism must sometimes defend itself, but not by imitating the centralized command structures of its enemies. The most effective democratic resistance, in his view, is decentralized, cross-constituency, and issue-specific: a swarming assemblage rather than a single party claiming total leadership. Such formations may act around same-sex marriage, racial justice, climate politics, or antifascist defense. They require coordination across unions, churches, movements, localities, regions, and parties, but they should resist the temptation of one center of command. That temptation reproduces the very siloed authoritarianism pluralism is trying to defeat.
These reflections lead into the chapter’s decisive claim: pluralism cannot be secured without reducing class inequality. Connolly argues that democratic pluralists have too often treated class as secondary while advancing important movements around race, gender, sexuality, and religion. The result has been politically disastrous. Large parts of the working and lower-middle classes, especially white constituencies in the United States, have experienced themselves as squeezed between concentrated wealth above and a pluralist left that seems inattentive to their own precarity. That condition does not justify reaction, but it does help explain why neoliberalism and aspirational fascism can move toward one another. A durable pluralist politics, he says bluntly, must become profoundly egalitarian.
His analysis of capitalism rejects both complacency and rigid determinism. Capitalism is inegalitarian and often ruthless, but it is also never self-sufficient. It is shaped by crises, ecological shocks, social movements, public ethos, geopolitical events, infrastructures of consumption, and changing spiritual dispositions. That is why Keynesian capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, evangelical-neoliberal capitalism, fascist capitalism, and other variants differ in consequential ways. Connolly criticizes theories that make capitalism so closed that every partial reform appears meaningless or complicit. Such views, he argues, underestimate both the real gains won by pluralizing struggles and the danger that periods of capitalist stress can feed fascist movements before any emancipatory rupture arrives.
He then sketches an interim egalitarian program meant to pull democratic pluralism and class justice together. It includes sharp reductions in income inequality, experiments with upper and lower compensation ratios, free public university tuition, a stronger class dimension in affirmative action, single-payer health care, guaranteed retirement security, massive eco-compatible infrastructure investment, revived labor unions, and job programs for regions battered by deindustrialization and automation. He insists that such measures must be defended with the same energy that recent pluralizing movements have shown on other fronts. They also require leaders with charisma, but of a democratic kind: figures able to intensify horizontal solidarities rather than command vertical obedience.
Connolly is equally clear that class reform cannot substitute for struggles against racism and colonial dispossession. Broad class initiatives and targeted work on the specific histories of African Americans and Indigenous peoples must proceed together. Voting rights, urban reconstruction, public education, renewable infrastructure, protection of Indigenous lands, and challenges to state violence all belong inside the same project. These reforms matter not only because they would ease suffering, but because they would reduce the social conditions in which aspirational fascism flourishes. They would also improve the chances of an ecological transition by creating jobs, reducing desperation, and limiting the refugee cascades and nationalist panics that climate disruption is likely to intensify.
The chapter closes by joining egalitarian democracy, ecological transition, and the taming of capitalism into a larger horizon that Connolly sometimes names multifaceted democratic socialism. He imagines worker and housing cooperatives, public ownership of energy grids, mass transit and banking, local repair economies, renewable infrastructure, urban farming, and consumer movements that loosen dependence on profit-driven growth. He is not optimistic in any easy sense. The situation is tragic, dangerous, and open. But he refuses inevitability. Fascist pressures may intensify, yet they are not fate. The practical question is what combinations of pluralism, class equality, ecological action, and democratic experimentation might still interrupt that trajectory. His answer is severe but clear: democratic plurality survives only if it becomes materially egalitarian, affectively cultivated, ecologically enlarged, and militantly ready to defend itself.
See also
- thymos — Connolly’s account of injured dignity and status threat in the white working class is a thymic analysis without using the word: fascism succeeds by offering recognition through exclusionary belonging rather than egalitarian inclusion
- democraticerosion — The book’s core concept of “aspirational fascism” names a specific mechanism of erosion that works through affect, bodily discipline, and cross-class coalition rather than through institutional capture alone
- affectivepolarization — Connolly’s “visceral register” and “aggressive resonance machine” describe the embodied infrastructure beneath affective polarization: how bodily habits and rally choreography harden partisan identities beyond what belief alone can explain
- arendt — Connolly explicitly engages and departs from Arendt’s theory of plurality and natality, arguing that her model needs to be expanded to include bodily dispositions, ecological entanglement, and class inequality
- lakoff_haidt_kahan — Connolly’s argument that political persuasion works through embodied affect and subliminal contagion parallels the moral foundations and cultural cognition literatures, but pushes further by tying cognition to class formation and fascist history
- silverman_gilded_rage_resumo — Silverman’s ethnography of white working-class rage in deindustrialized America provides ground-level evidence for the constituency Connolly theorizes as vulnerable to aspirational fascist capture