Understanding the emotions driving fascism

Loss, shame, humiliation... and compounded grief

weed or flower? beauty or danger?

As I discussed in a recent post, fascism is a movement driven by emotions. Understanding and addressing those emotions (and where they come from) is essential to our ability to respond effectively, and ultimately to prevent fascism from rising again.

French-Israeli scholar Eva Illouz identifies four primary emotions driving populist authoritarian movements: fear, resentment, disgust… and love (of country, a nationalist framing). That resonates with my own understanding and reading of history, and feels explanatory of the emergence of the authoritarian movements currently ascendant around the world (Hungary, Israel, India, Brazil, and beyond).

But fascism is different. In my view it activates and is animated by different emotions. Specifically, I think it comes down to a sense of loss and wounded pride, which left ungrieved metastasizes into shame… which is finally compounded by humiliation.

I want to explore this argument through the lens of the postbellum period following the U.S. Civil War (the last time we had a fascist movement in the United States), in the hope that some distance from our present moment can make things easier to see.

Here’s where I’m coming out (TL;DR): I think fascism’s appeal turns on emotions, and in particular how unprocessed grief can metastasize into shame, and feed a sense of victimhood and grievance in the face of humiliation. Fascism thus becomes a way to avoid shame by directing it onto those deemed “others” as scapegoats for violence.

The implications for our movements are profound:
1. We must acknowledge loss.
2. We must create and support spaces for processing collective grief.
3. We must avoid the use of shaming and “othering” in our communications and tactics.
4. We must actively invest in co-creating new aspirational identities for people to embrace as they shed those which no longer serve.

5. There is radical potential in organizing our movements around Belonging.

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For the purpose of exploring this idea—which is essential to our ability to effectively combat fascism—I am going to center the emotional experience of those people who find themselves seduced by fascism. To be clear: my primary sympathies are with those who do NOT choose fascism, and who are victimized by those choosing fascism. It is admittedly a bitter pill to hold space for and try to understand the emotional experience of the perpetrators.

In a future post I will devote attention to the untended and undischarged emotional experience (primarily grief and rage) of those who are targeted by oppression and fascism. Today I find myself called to try to understand what is motivating the perpetrators; if we do not, I believe we will be unable to effectively respond and prevent fascism’s rise. If you are not in a space today to empathize/humanize with the “other,” that’s okay: I invite you to care for yourself, listen to your body, and return if/when you feel ready. Otherwise, please join me in a journey to try to understand.

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From loss to shame to violence: the emotional arc of fascism

Here’s how I understand the sequencing:

1. A sense of loss… and “wounded pride”

This loss is usually both material (objective) and subjective… it is the felt sense of loss that is far more important than the actual loss. In the case of many southern White people after the Civil War, this is the material loss of the war itself, and the emancipation of formerly enslaved people (for enslavers, the loss of wealth and “property”).

But the deeper loss is psychic: the loss of their position in society, their claim to honor (both wealthy enslavers as well as poor White people who benefited from the “psychic wages” of the system of white supremacy). They experience a sense of what Arlie Hochschild evocatively calls wounded or “stolen pride.”

2. Shame

The healthy response to loss is grief. But that grief is made more difficult by the concurrent emergence of shame, which I see at two levels.

1. The first is the sense of shame most correlated with the emotion of embarrassment: a feeling that “we should not have lost.” This is the sting of defeat… which on its own hurts, but can be overcome.

2. The second source of shame is deeper, and harder to confront: this is the reckoning that perhaps the loss is justified; perhaps the South should have lost. Perhaps the source of pride (dominant position in society over enslaved Black people) was itself actually a source of shame. For southern Whites, both enslavers and those who benefited from a racialized caste system alike, this is confronting the painful possibility of finding themselves on the wrong side of history. It is the sting of a moral failing, and can be experienced by the perpetrator as “moral injury” (especially for the vast majority of Southern people and soldiers who did not actually own enslaved people).

These are deep emotions, and too identity-shattering to confront alone. Shame and grief are both social emotions and experiences: they are too big to hold alone. This is a fraught and potentially dangerous stew of emotions that require careful and collective tending to navigate, to process as grief and move to repair (righting the wrong — reparations) and healing.

I think here of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process—which rightly centered those harmed by apartheid and allowed them to be seen for all they had suffered. But an important and under-appreciated (by outsiders) part of Truth and Reconciliation was that it also offered a way for perpetrators to atone, to take accountability, to repair, and therefore to process their shame as grief before it metastasized into violence. We have never had such a process in the United States.

3. Humiliation

This is the all-important step: the pivot that paves the way to fascism. Humans cannot tolerate the feeling of shame: we experience it (correctly) as a threat to belonging. It feels unbearable. We MUST find a way to get rid of it. Generally there are two paths: grief, repair, and healing (accountability)… or externalizing the shame by blaming it on someone else (impunity).

After the Civil War the victorious North engineered and implemented a process known as Reconstruction: an ambitious and necessary project to remake and rehabilitate the South, and to grant political voice to disenfranchised Black people who had been oppressed under the system of enslavement. To many southern Whites, this had two important psychological/emotional impacts (acknowledging that I am speaking as a non-expert in broad generalizations; the best treatment of Reconstruction I’ve found is David Blight’s Race and Reunion):

1. First, it felt like imposition and coercion: the North exerting its will over the defeated. Many southern Whites experienced this as unjust and unfair.

2. Second, the dominant narrative in the North (during the war and after) adopted a posture of moral superiority: which many southern Whites experienced as hypocritical, shaming, and insulting.

The impact of these two experiences allowed many southern Whites to make an important—and dangerous—shift. It allowed them to experience themselves as victims. They were already resentful (pre-war); feeling unfairly punished gave them a sense of self-righteousness.

[Again, I’m speaking here only to the subjective experience of some southern White people: I happen to believe that the intentions and ambitions of Reconstruction were an equitable and necessary corrective to the degradation of enslavement… and that the South did in fact behavior immorally (not to exempt the North from its also racist and immoral beliefs/behaviors).]

4. Victimhood

Now the locus has shifted: where before they were primarily focused on the sting of their own internal experience (loss, wounded pride, and shame)... the introduction of humiliation shifts the focus to the “other”: the group seen as responsible for causing the humiliation. By blaming the North, southern Whites can avoid the uncomfortable sting of shame. No longer do they have to contemplate how they are perpetrators; instead they can take refuge in victimhood, and the soothing balm of self-righteousness.

Here’s the thing: there is an element of truth to their experience. The North did speak from a place of hypocrisy, by denying their own complicity in the system of enslavement and the (ongoing) oppression of Black people. The North’s effort to avoid its own reckoning (itself motivated in part by shame/denial) left it vulnerable to being named the oppressor. It allowed the South to see and name that hypocrisy, to deflect and avoid confronting their own culpability and feelings of shame.

(This is related to the form of victimhood I discussed here… that analysis helps explain the paradox of perpetrators feeling like victims, especially when they hold objective power).

5. Redemptive violence

This is why fascism is so dangerous, and fundamentally different from other forms of authoritarianism: it demands violence. I previously talked about “aggrieved entitlement,” the predominantly-male phenomenon that paves the way to violence: I think this animated the authoritarianism of Trump’s first term. That grievance comes from a place of not getting something “promised.” The animating force is resentment. The redemptive violence of fascism, by contrast, is motivated by a sense of loss, of something stolen (rather than something denied). The animating force is shame and humiliation. A wrong has been done, and demands satisfaction: the “stop the steal” campaign that led to the violent insurrection of January 6th to me represents this shift from resentment to humiliation, and to me was the threshold from authoritarianism to fascism in America.

In the post-war South, this was the birth of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK): America’s first fascist movement. While we (rightly) see them as domestic terrorists, many Klan members saw themselves as righteous defenders of something sacred (invoking God and defending Christianity, a precursor to today’s Christian Nationalist movements).

As with today’s reactionary movements, these movements were led by elites primarily focused on reclaiming power and imposing racial hierarchy (the self-proclaimed “Redeemers”), and they successfully organized many southern Whites around this sense of victimhood. They justified their violence and terror as a necessary and appropriate response to their feeling of victimhood and humiliation: this was the essence of the “lost cause” mythology that the “Redeemers” so successfully cultivated after the war (leading Reconstruction scholars like Blight to observe that the South “lost the war but won the peace” with this revisionist history).

Implications for movements for justice

I want to be clear that this is not a linear inevitable path: many southern Whites did NOT support the KKK, and found healthier ways to metabolize their loss and confront their shame. Roughly 20% of southern White people opposed slavery and supported Reconstruction governments, and formed the largest percentage of delegates in those governments (derided by “Redeemers” as “scalawags”). Indeed, successful bi-racial governance emerged in several states.

This is also not the full story: many other factors contributed to the rise of the KKK in the post-war period. I’m deliberately focusing today on the emotional dimension, because I think it’s a misunderstood piece of the fascist puzzle.

I’m reminded of Naomi Klein’s great line about conspiracy theorists, which feels equally applicable here to leaders of fascist movements like Trump: they “get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right.” If we hope to respond effectively to fascism, we too need to get the feelings right… if we want anyone to listen to our facts.

Returning to our present moment, I’m sure readers will be drawing parallels. I want to emphasize two things: this is NOT a uniquely American phenomenon (or a Trump phenomenon), and we do ourselves a disservice by ignoring the broader context. And it is NOT inevitable. The benefit of an emotions-focused analysis illuminates the possibility for change. Unlike explanations which turn narrowly on identity, class position, ideology, or racism/xenophobia, recognizing instead that people are responding to universal emotional experiences (and similar conditions) gives us a sense of agency and potential to invite different choices.

For social movements committed to responding to (and ultimately preventing the re-emergence of!) fascism, I draw three key lessons:

1. We must acknowledge the sense of loss. This is the essential first step: to help people feel seen for their suffering. Right now Trump and the far-right have a near-monopoly on speaking to the pain of people with historically privileged identities and helping them make sense of their loss. In a brilliant essay, Amahra Spence explains (talking about the UK context, though I trust U.S. readers will see obvious parallels):

They take the very real grief of poor and working-class white communities—towns gutted by deindustrialisation, families destabilised by precarity, health and futures eroded by austerity—and redirect it into grievance against migrants, Black people, queer people, Muslims, anyone who can be made scapegoat. And because grief carries a deep desire for connection and belonging, these narratives are working. The far right is providing coherence, ritual and story where the Left too often offers distance, ridicule, or silence.

2. We must support the process of collective grieving. Let me be clear: this work is not for everyone (particularly those targeted by oppressive systems)… but it must be for someone. I’m deeply inspired by Malkia Devich Cyril’s work on “radical loss,” which they define as “the ability to move grief in the direction of justice.” Here BIPOC-led movements for justice are (as usual) charting the course, helping marginalized people metabolize their own suffering and rage and transmute it into justice. We need to develop similar containers and movements to support radical loss for White communities and others with historically privileged identities.

3. We must decline the temptation to wield shame or humiliation. bell hooks reminds us that these are the master’s tools; they cannot lead us to liberation. Healing justice practitioner Prentis Hemphill summarizes the literature on this: “shame impedes change.” Particularly for the kinds of people we are talking about here, they are already feeling stuck in shame: if we compound that by introducing humiliation we inadvertently interrupt any potential for grief and transformation, and instead push them toward victimhood (and the dangerous path to redemptive violence).

From revolution to transformation

As I was thinking about this post (and working on a “pitch deck” for Building Belonging, as we prepare for our fundraising drive to continue our work next year), I came up with a little framework that I think might be helpful for the last point I want to make here.

It describes how I understand the dynamic relationship between the status quo and its defenders, the social justice movements arising to challenge the status quo, and the reactionary movements emerging in response. It also mirrors my own lived experience. Let me present the framework, then unpack it:

here’s the pdf I created; feel free to use/remix if you find it helpful

The basic idea is that we are all seeking belonging, in response to conditions of alienation. But because our present systems can’t offer belonging, we try for the next best thing. Here’s how I understand the relationship/flow:

1. The status quo cannot offer belonging: belonging is not possible inside a domination system with a hierarchy that privileges some over others. Instead it offers power to those who are privileged in the hierarchy (as compensation for giving up on belonging), and offers the possibility of fitting in to everyone else (always conditional upon pledging allegiance to the power structure, and only in subservient roles). It masks the violence of the domination system by presenting it as a meritocracy, suggesting that those on top deserve to be there (and vice versa).

2. In response, Revolutionary Movements emerge to challenge the status quo, and to demand inclusion for those who have been marginalized and excluded. They correctly identify the flaws of the status quo, but there is a risk in conflating the problem as those privileged by the system rather than the whole system itself. (I personally think that all Revolutionary Movements contain a transformative impulse that is usually present in the leaders, but it is easily hijacked to serve revolutionary rather than transformative aims, because we are all conditioned into the logic of domination hierarchies. It is incredibly difficult to build liberatory movements that don’t replicate the thing we are fighting against). These movements offer at last the possibility of power to those who were excluded in the status quo, but can only offer fitting in to those who were privileged: belonging is still conditional.

3. The success of Revolutionary Movements in challenging the status quo produces a backlash in the form of Reactionary Movements. These movements are usually led by people who benefited the most from the status quo ante, but the rank and file are those who suffered under the status quo… but now feel threatened by Revolutionary Movements. People who didn’t have power in the status quo find that they also don’t have power in Revolutionary Movements… and stand to lose their role in “fitting in” or in their privileged position along an identity hierarchy: it provokes a fear of loss. Instead these movements retrench in the worst aspects of the status quo, offering the false promise of belonging contingent on “othering.” Instead of dressing up the domination hierarchy as meritocracy, they dispense with the pretense and embrace “othering” and domination as the core logic of the system: I belong because you don’t.

Of course, none of these movements can offer genuine belonging. This is the radical potential and promise of Transformative Movements, which explicitly reject the logic of domination and hierarchy, refuse to “other,” decline to contort ourselves to “fit in,” and instead invite us to practice interdependence, reciprocity, and relationships that honor everyone’s dignity.

This has been my life journey: feeling acutely the status quo’s false promise of belonging; feeling excited at the emergence of revolutionary movements that named injustice, and disappointed to encounter only conditional belonging; and feeling alarm at the reactionary movements that weaponized alienation into exclusion and doubled down on domination. None offered a home where I could bring my full self.

I finally found kin among those building transformative movements. Building Belonging is my effort to create the political home I’ve been longing for: for my kindred spirits committed to embodying belonging beyond hierarchy and domination.

Tread softly with identity: loss can trigger shame

I want to unpack one more complex idea here before I close. This is about the relationship between collective loss, shame, and identity. Here’s how I understand the logic flow:

1. All of the losses I am discussing today are systemic (not individual). There are two categories of loss for the people I am talking about today. The primary causes I consider material: loss of jobs and general economic precarity, as a consequence of the ravages of neoliberalism. These losses are a threat to core identities that give meaning and status based on what people do: provider, worker, middle-class, etc. They threaten one’s sense of self and place in society, and are on their own deeply destabilizing. I think of this as a loss of dignity: this is the failure of the status quo.

   1. If I’m not a provider for my family… who am I? This is the loss that can breed resentment and become aggrieved entitlement: a promise not kept.

   2. But even in this instability there is a path out: we can create new identities, new sources of status and belonging. I can provide in a different way, perhaps I can be a parent and caregiver rather than an economic provider.

2. But there is a secondary set of losses as well that are more cultural. As social movements rightfully challenge dominant systems, there is a risk that these critiques can land as targeting people rather than systems: blaming White people rather than white supremacy, blaming men rather than patriarchy, blaming Americans rather than imperialism. This is a much deeper identity threat: it targets who people are. I think of this as a loss of identity. This is the limitation (experienced as threat) of revolutionary movements.

   1. If the problem is my core identities as a White American man, and those are seen to be immutable… then there is no escape. What was a stable identity and source of pride now becomes a source of shame. This is the dangerous form of loss that is experienced as something stolen… and demanding a response.

3. Thus the people most susceptible to fascism are experiencing what I think of as a form of “double grief” that directly threatens identities that were presumed stable and positive. They experience alienation both from the status quo, AND from the revolutionary movements emerging to challenge the status quo. This combination of material loss of dignity and cultural/psychic loss of identity is profoundly destabilizing: taken together it represents an existential disorientation around their sense of belonging in the social order.

   1. It’s this sentiment: I don’t know who I am or what my role is in society… and I feel powerless in the face of forces beyond my control.

   2. This is a deeply vulnerable and intolerable state for most of us; it is doubly so for men socialized into a form of masculinity that doesn’t admit room for vulnerability, and who do not have strong social networks/sources of support.

This is the fertile recruiting ground for fascism, and the context within which we are working.

Reparation… and creation

As always, I fear I’ve overloaded the tree with ornaments here and it’s going to topple under its own weight. I think these ideas are in relationship with each other:

1. Understanding unmetabolized grief and its internalization as shame as core to the fascist phenomenon.

2. Recognizing the interplay between movements for justice and reactionary movements, and the “double grief” (or compounded shame) that makes people more susceptible to fascism.

I think there is powerful potential for solidarity here. What transformative movements recognize is that ALL of us suffer under our current systems, and that ALL of us have a stake in transforming them. We all yearn for belonging: not the conditional belonging of fitting in, nor the false belonging of othering, but the genuine thing. THAT is what we can offer.

So yes, there must be a component of grief and reparations work that seeks to heal what has been harmed. That is essential. AND: the promise of transformative movements makes the invitation to transformation (and the crushing vulnerability of confronting shame and doing deep grief work) worth it.

The bridge, I think, is deep and tender work around identities:

1. The future-oriented work of co-creating new aspirational identities, which must of necessity be post-racial and post-nationalist (giving people something to transform into)

2. And the past-oriented work of grieving the identities we are shedding… and the harms those identities have caused.

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I’ll leave it here for today; this post has been percolating in me for a long time, and more lies ahead. A deeper exploration of grief that I feel sure will be part of my personal 2026 journey, ongoing work to interrogate where shame lives in me (I see all of this as fractal… between the world and me)… and more.

I would love reactions/thoughts/constructive engagement: is this helpful? What lands, what doesn’t? Is the revolutionary/reactionary/transformative framework useful?

Our last subscriber gathering of the year (with gratitude for your patience!) will be Wednesday, December 17th, @8:30am PT / 11:30am ET / 4:30pm UK / 5:30pm CET/CAT. I’m inclined to open this one to any subscriber who may wish to join; please RSVP here if interested.

In community,

Brian