Love and Politics: Family and Community in Fascist Times

Love and Politics: Family and Community in Fascist Times

“Against Fascism: Iron Heart” by Shaun Slifer

Against Fascism: Iron Heart” by Shaun Slifer

You and I will become enemies one day.

These words went through my head after a particularly intense conversation with a professor of mine. We had been drinking in the dark and din of an Irish pub. Late into the evening, after our friends had left, he looked at me and said, “Fuck you and your critical theory.”

What followed was a litany of resentments. He ranted about the evils of feminism, the harms of “critical” thinking, and how “easy” it was now for Indigenous women to find tenure-track positions in the academy. This was in the spring of 2017, at the beginning of the Trump presidency, before this kind of discourse would come to inhabit the most intimate parts of my life.

When I left the pub a fog had settled in the street and in my mind.

In the following year, I lost myself in the professor’s world. He had supported me both intellectually and emotionally during my undergrad. And thus, despite his chauvinistic rant, I was bound to him by a sense of love and gratitude. In the last year of my degree, he hired me to work at his fledgling NGO, but our relationship deteriorated quickly when it transitioned from professor-student to employer-employee. Freed from the niceties of the university and enabled by the transactional nature of monetary exchange, he scolded me on how “regressive” my thinking was. Over lunch, he lectured me on the harms of critical race theory, an area which, at that time, I had little knowledge of. He evangelized about the irrelevancy of “postmodernism” and its attendant evils. While the issues he raised were similar to those in the pub, his tone was distinctly more aggressive and patronizing. “I’m not attacking you QC,” he said, “I’m attacking the things you believe in.”

But who are we without our convictions and politics? What possibilities for life sustain us when those we love undo the worlds we live in? Later that night, he sent me the following text:

I have a deep seated dislike of a paradigm that I see as harmful outside of the political economy stuff. But it’s not an existential or resonant issue for me outside of trying to warn you off it because I have seen its impact on a variety of bright people. What I think I see is that you are at a very stressful period in your life—the end of your undergrad. That you are a very bright guy who carries internal and external traumas in a powerful way and that you are subject to too many depressants—mental, physical, and intellectual.

While compassionate at first glance, his text clearly implied that I was unwell, and thus my theories and political analyses of the world were likewise fucked. I believed him for a moment, and part of me wanted to take his world as my own. It would have been easier. If I believed what he believed, then we could have avoided the pain of rupture.

But on the precipice between his world and mine, I was haunted by Eugene Ionesco’s The Lesson. Written in the years following the Second World War, The Lesson is a play about fascism and its indoctrination of German youth. It begins with a passionate intellectual exchange between a teacher and his student and ends with the teacher killing the student. I hadn’t thought about the play in a decade, but in those moments it haunted me like a revenant.

The Lesson is a vignette of fascism’s metastasis. What was once a creeping presence has now consumed entire parts of my life. Earlier this year, it threatened to amputate my relationship with my mother, a first-generation Chinese Canadian who is dating a white Trump supporter. In what follows, I reflect on love’s place, and its limits, in fascist times.

The Spirit of Fascism

The word fascism has an ephemeral quality. Mussolini, coining the term, described it as a “spiritual attitude.” Fascism is both “action” and “thought” through which the individual “by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself” gives birth to his higher calling—the flourishing of the nation and state. Through this assertion Mussolini extricates fascism from the traditions of socialism and liberalism. With the former committed to class struggle and the latter to the individual, Mussolini differentiated fascism through an analytic of scale. Fascism purportedly defines itself by another boundary: the nation-state, which Mussolini claimed is “[n]ot a race, nor a geographically defined region, but a people.”

Mussolini’s definition of fascism is a historical fiction, as fascism is of course all about race and land, or “blood and soil”: it grows through the elimination of racial and ideological others and the consumption of land and territory. However, Mussolini’s Europe still believed in the dream of a Westphalian state system whose core principles included state sovereignty and non-interference. He was also writing to a society entrenched in liberal Enlightenment ideals that proclaimed the equality of men. Thus, Mussolini presented fascism in the image of liberalism, as an ahistorical ideology divorced from the conditions of life, notably from the immanence of race and place.

That said, I’m not primarily interested here in the concept of fascism. I want to explore what the term teaches us about our living present, especially in everyday life, and how we can fight it when it erupts. In this endeavour, Robert E. Paxton’s description of fascism is illuminating:

Fascist movements could never grow without the help of ordinary people, even conventionally good people.… To understand fully how fascist regimes worked, we must dig down to the level of ordinary people and examine the banal choices they made in their daily routines.

In other words, fascism spreads through the actions of ordinary people in our communities, reflecting what Hannah Arendt terms the “banality of evil.” Fascism spreads through those we’re connected to, those we love.

These Fascist Times

My mother began dating again this past summer. After decades of abuse at the hands of my father and a long, drawn-out divorce, she was learning to love again, and I was happy to see her bright-eyed at the prospect of romance. However, our relationship eroded after she revealed that the man she was dating was a white Trump supporter.

Unsurprisingly, the fact of his politics put me on edge, but it was more so his effect on her that pushed our relationship to the limit. She began asking me fanatically racist questions. Were “Muslims” trying to take over our local Catholic schools? Were “Blacks” stealing jobs from white folks in Fort McMurray? While my mother, with her upbringing in an isolationist China, certainly had her own set of prejudices, this form of blatant racism had been tempered over years of vigorous arguments between us, but now it surged again. When I confronted her about her racism, she responded that I had to see “both sides.” When I asked her if he knew I was queer, she told me that “there are some things that he isn’t ready to hear, and that I can’t share.”

Over a matter of weeks, our three-decades long relationship decayed. And I was ready for it to end.

Estrangement is commonplace in my family, and I believe it’s more common generally than people like to admit. I have not spoken to my father in a decade. My mother is estranged from the entirety of her birth family. However, that did not lessen the pain of those moments. A world was ending, but with grief came a blunt clarity: This is how fascism works. Fascism, on the one hand, infiltrates the highest echelons of power. On the other, it sustains and replicates itself through families and communities. Love is fascism’s condition of possibility. In fascist times, effective resistance must recognize the limits of love in the face of politics.

My love for my mother and my professor pushed me to accept their “truths”—until it didn’t. Though my mother’s fanaticism and my professor’s chauvinistic indignation may not readily appear as fascism, fascism cannot spread without attitudes such as theirs. Their beliefs grant consent to political systems that build concentration camps, condone police and military domination, embolden white supremacy, and enact violence against people of colour, women, and queers. These beliefs, held by people I love, are part of the constellation that marks these fascist times. In the words of Nikhil Singh, fascism is “sustained by the fantasy of the Other as a regressive being.” For my mother and her partner, this “Other” took the form of racialized lives in an act of imagined invasion; for my professor it was the stories of lived subjection expressed by these same lives, mine included.

Love and Politics

My relationship with my professor has ended. The one with my mother has not.

After a month of fighting, at a moment when I was ready to cut ties, she and I came to an uneasy understanding. On the precipice, her love for me birthed spaces of listening and heartfelt exchange and our love for each other catalyzed moments of understanding and transformation. Over the past few months she has come to a re-recognition of her racist positioning and has confronted her partner about his. She has told him I am queer. The three of us now inhabit a truce. It is tentative, emergent, and premised on the understanding that prejudice of any kind is unacceptable. If it comes again, I will go.

As for the professor, I have not spoken to him in over a year. I finally realized that maintaining a relationship with him was harmful for me, and that people like him threaten the political projects I fight for.

In these dangerous times, we must live in a way that is accountable to how fascism unfolds through our families and communities. If those we love act in ways which enable its growth, it is our duty to confront them. Love cannot be a reason to accept them unconditionally. At its extreme, these confrontations will necessitate the end of a relationship. When those closest to us place the lives of others bare to violence and liquidation, we must draw a line where our emotional attachments no longer trump our collective survival, where love either brings us to a better world or must end.  


QC Gu is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Alberta where his research is centred on questions of capitalism, colonialism, and violence. He is a queer, first-generation Chinese migrant and considers Treaty 6 his home.

Otherwise Reproductions: Visualizing Black Trans Labour and Kinship in Sean Baker’s Tangerine

Otherwise Reproductions: Visualizing Black Trans Labour and Kinship in Sean Baker’s Tangerine

Sudan Uprising: Poems of Protest

Sudan Uprising: Poems of Protest