UNLOCK 22.1 Fascism is Also Rational

Antifascist Dad Podcast — Bonus Episode: Fascism Is Also Rational Published March 11, 2026 to Patreon --- Hello, everybody. My name is Matthew Remski. This is the Antifascist Dad Podcast, and this is a bonus episode published March 9th to Patreon. It's called "Fascism Is Also Rational." For housekeeping: you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as Antifascist Dad. In the show notes you'll find a link to pre-order my book, which is coming out April 26th of this year. It's called *Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times.* For this week's March 9th episodes, I've had no guests — what I've produced are two short audio essays. This is the second one. In Part 1, I explored the antifascist mantra of pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. I traced the hints of how I picked it up in my own life prior to my fuller political education — through my mother, through my writing teacher, through Buddhist practice, through Eve Sedgwick's concept of paranoid versus reparative reading. And I talked about how the phrase is commonly attributed to Antonio Gramsci, but that it actually comes from Romain Rolland's 1920 review of Raymond Lefebvre's post-World War I novel, *Le Sacrifice d'Abraham*. I talked about how Gramsci embodied the axiom through his prison years and his ruthless political analysis. And I mapped the tension between intellect and will onto bodily experience, because I think without doing that — and without connecting it to the ongoing need for both theory and mutual aid in antifascist culture — it doesn't really sink in. Today's essay is even shorter, and it's about Michael Parenti. He's not the only one who does this, but he's central to a lot of us, and to my own library, with his insistence that fascism is rational. --- I'm writing this on Sunday morning, March 8th — the day after the US struck oil depots on the northern, western, and southern outskirts of Tehran, which has a population of ten million people. Video shows the oil on fire in massive blazes, but also snaking through the water and sewer systems like a dragon, causing kilometre-long walls of flame on the sides of the avenues. When dawn broke after the nighttime strike, the sky just did not get much lighter. Black and grey smoke is blotting out the sun. Iran's Red Crescent is warning that the smoke has introduced enormous quantities of toxic compounds — such as hydrocarbons and sulphur and nitrogen oxides — into the air and the clouds. The organization added that rainfall in Tehran on Sunday morning could be highly dangerous: "With rain falling this morning in the city, it has highly acidic properties that are extremely dangerous." People there have been advised to either shelter in place or make sure they're equipped with high-quality respirators. Here in Toronto, I'm looking out my window at the dirty retreating snow and a springtime sky, thinking: there but for the grace of God. I can even hear birds singing. I don't think there are birds singing in Tehran at the moment. The contrast between what is coming into my mind through the news and what I'm seeing through the window feels like a mental illness. And I think that's because we are not made to absorb such contrasting realities. Then I have to put gas in my car today, and the price per litre is up around 12%. And I know next week it will spike again, because the Strait of Hormuz has been closed and the effects of that will trickle over into Canada eventually. That gives me a small, immediate connection to those flames shooting out of the sewers in Tehran. But it's minimal, abstract — a pinprick. The most direct causal connections between this blue sky and that sky full of oily smoke are obscured through countless global transactions that fully alienate me. Here I'm holding the gas pump and squeezing the lever, thinking about how in Tehran there must be some dad my age checking the seal on his daughter's respirator, or holding a very rare bottle of water up to his mother's lips. I am blessed and cursed with an imagination that very quickly connects these things. But that connection, in times of stress, is so visceral and immediate that my first instinct is to zoom in on the provocative image — to focus on it, as I just did. The price of that zoom-in focus is that the visceral response can occlude the historical view: everything that led to the moment, everything that made it make sense, all of the logic that the moment itself overpowers. I remember holding our baby boys in my arms for the first time in the hospital, and how their faces burned themselves into my eyes. The transient but enormous impact of those moments erased the lifetimes that brought me to them. There's something unbalanced in my experience of things — and I wonder if this is common, if it's the same for you. The imbalance between the core brain of the moment and the retrospective brain of the storyteller, the person who tells history after it's passed. I've read some good biographies of Marx, and so I have some idea how rich and engaged and irritable and painful his hour-by-hour life was, how it must have produced an endless parade of in-the-moment experience and impressions. And yet he spent a decade in the British Museum researching *Capital*, and in that book there are no zoomed-in sensual or emotional experiences. He was committed to looking at the structure in detail, with rigour. I'm reading Michael Parenti's autobiography as well, and he discloses all kinds of rich, personal, transformative moments — involving family, growing up Catholic in New York, his family's proximity to gangsters. Like any life, he shows it to be a string of rosary beads: glinting, jagged, indigestible, mysterious. Nonetheless, Parenti's entire body of professional work soars above and beyond these visceral, subjective moments. And that's how he's able to stay on message with such determination: the spectacular chaos of fascism — visible now in flames exploding from sewer grates in Tehran — is not random or fleeting. It is not a sickness or a fever, as much as it feels that way. It comes about as the result of a set of rational choices, coldly calculated to protect power. Yes, Trump is demented. The January 6th thugs are now ICE thugs. Pete Hegseth is an end-times evangelical. Nobody at the White House knows what the definition of war is, and nobody seems to care. The White House is putting out AI or Call of Duty war memes. And it all really sums up Sartre's point that the fascist can't be argued with because he doesn't believe in the meaning of words — but he knows that you do, and he finds that funny. Now, Parenti's view that fascism is rational may be hard to hold, depending on your family history of chaos and violence. If you have, say, alcoholism or narcissistic abuse in your family — and to survive it you had to recognize when a perpetrator was about to lose control — then you are watching a latent irrationality come out. There's nothing planned about it. But Parenti consistently reminds me where fascism begins: when socialist and labour movements threaten property relations and wealth inequality, fascism emerges to systematically crush unions, harass and criminalize minorities, protect industrial capital, and restore profitability through repression and militarization. Sound familiar? Fascism, according to Parenti, is a calculated counter-revolution that builds over decades. It takes far too long for liberals to get anxious about it, and when they finally do, we get their story front and centre — because they tend to dominate the media. And the story is built on questions like: *Who are these insane people?* The premise is that fascism is madness, mob psychology, or even evil — a mass delusion that has somehow overtaken all of those red-state losers they always hated anyway. But when that's the framing, people forget about the repetitive, shitty economic crises we're always living through, and why elites seem to always benefit from them. Fascism intentionally redirects working-class anger toward minorities. It uses nationalism to smash class solidarity. It suppresses democracy. It attacks the rights of women. It channels crisis into militarization. And it spews conspiracy theories to make reality illegible. --- So here are some of my favourite quotes from Parenti's *Black Shirts and Reds*: "Fascism historically has been used to secure the interests of capitalists against the demands of popular democracy." "Divested of its ideological and organizational paraphernalia, fascism is nothing more than a final solution to the class struggle, the totalistic submergence and exploitation of democratic forces for the benefit and profit of higher financial circles." "Years ago, I used to say that fascism never succeeded in solving the irrational contradictions of capitalism. Today I am of the opinion that it did accomplish that goal — but only for the capitalists, not for the populace." "Much of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols. Certainly this is true of fascist ideology, whose emotive appeals have served a class-control function." That one hits hard, because symbols are irrational — but their deployment always makes sense. We have rational dominators using irrational tools, and we look at the tools and assume that the people wielding them are as irrational as the tools seem to be. "In Nazi Germany, racism and antisemitism served to misdirect legitimate grievances toward convenient scapegoats. Here again we have a consciously rational use of irrational images." "Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses." That one is interesting to me, because I usually feel that fascists are just in a blind rage. And they are. But they are also being used to discipline and punish. And that's why it's so common to have this feeling of: *Why doesn't Congress stop him?* We know why the GOP half doesn't. But Schumer, Jeffries, Harris during the campaign — they don't want to demilitarize, they don't want to defund ICE. How else can we explain this, except to realize that all capitalists require the same thugs, just calibrated to circumstances? "To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties." "Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of popular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine revolutionary class content. It propagates a 'New Order' while serving the same old moneyed interests." And lastly: "Its leaders are not guilty of confusion, but of deception. That they work hard to mislead the public does not mean they themselves are misled." Pretty direct. So: I'm 54. I'm a parent of two — one kid has high support needs and is still at home with us. I do freelance journalism and commentary. I live in a client state of the US managed by a banker whose priority is to treat wild and Indigenous territories like an ATM, and who was first out of the gate to support this atrocity that's costing a billion dollars a day. In relation to the spectacular hellscape that is scrolling through me, I am helpless. But it is also a vast machine that we can understand and take apart, piece by piece, in our daily lives and in expanding circles. These are the things I try to keep in mind as things are spectacularly bad and scenes of incomprehensible suffering continue to flow into my mind and seem to get closer every day. It is unbearable, it is unwatchable, it is intolerable — but it's also predictable. It is overwhelming — but it's been building for a long time. In Tehran, ten thousand kilometres from where I am now, there are an infinite number of individual cries for help, tears, broken bones, shattered eardrums, plates of rice contaminated by rubble dust, family separations, last goodbyes. But the causes of racist imperial oil violence are not irrational — and they form the backbone of the country I live in. So in the long run, fostering antifascism in my neighbourhood and community seems to be the only real and workable answer to the conditions that produce imperial violence and the fascist boomerang. I said earlier that I don't think we are made to be constantly split in these ways. All I can say is that occasionally I am able to suture those two realities together — and whatever doomscroll is impinging on me is equalled out by the gravity and urgency of what I just have to keep doing. Thanks, everyone. Take care of each other.