Authoritarianism's Annihilation Anxieties

ABSTRACT Using a psychoanalytic lens attuned to preoedipal phenomena, this article argues that neoliberal precarity produces and exacerbates conditions that draw people to fascism. This article shows how neoliberalism produces annihilation anxieties and conditions on which fascism feeds. With mounting anxieties and scant collective means for dealing with them, people easily succumb to fascism's promise of a life raft and safe harbor in precarious times. At bottom, the essence of fascism is its logic for appeasing unconscious demands for ways to ward off debilitating, politically produced anxieties. This logic leads to three overarching fascist delusions: bending reality; a mythic past; and eliminationism. This analysis provides a way to see fascism's deep structure as a palliative that allows a world out of joint continue to be so.