How (not) to talk to fascists
David Renton
Layla Aitlhadj is one of the directors of Prevent Watch, an initiative which supports people who have been affected by the government’s anti-extremist programme, Prevent. Many of the people she advises are Muslim, but she has also counselled the families of children accused of misogyny, homophobia or far-right extremism. Most of these referrals to Prevent are made by teachers. They might be made aware that one of their students has been sharing videos made by a known extremist, such as the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate. They then contact Prevent, who send a social worker and a Prevent officer to the student’s house.
Often, Aitlhadj says, children are questioned without a parent present. It’s a frightening experience, as the child worries that a ‘wrong’ answer could get them sent prison or taken into care. In theory, the student should be asked questions relating to their own possible radicalisation. But, according to Aitlhadj, the Prevent officer may also ask: ‘Who are you speaking to? What are you doing online? What is your opinion of the Iraq War?’ The child may have no idea what the ‘right’ answer would be; they don’t have an opinion of a war that ended before they were born.
Such methods, Aitlhadj warns, can be counterproductive, antagonising the people subjected to them. ‘When people meet Prevent,’ she says, ‘it feels like the state is bullying them to change their ideas. And there’s a group of people who just won’t be bullied.’ She thinks that many of the teenage boys she meets would grow out of their ideas if society gave them the space to grow up and learn.
‘I think we need to do more joined-up thinking about our problems and how they interact,’ she says. She is often confronted with clichés of generational radicalism; the old imposing reactionary ideas, or the young developing them. She would like to see the generations talking more, not only to ‘address issues of mindset, but other issues too’, including problems of loneliness and isolation.
Joan Braune is a lecturer in philosophy at Gonzaga University in Washington State. She too is sceptical of state efforts to deradicalise fascists, and she extends that scepticism to the liberal press. The story of a fascist leaving the movement, she says, is often told as a ‘compassion narrative’, which doesn’t leave room for other ways of understanding the far right. ‘People are desperate for hope; Christians love redemption narratives.’
In Trump’s first term, Braune says, stories of former fascists ‘became a huge phenomenon’:
The ‘former’ has a story of looking for some purpose in life. Maybe they don’t admit to everything they did wrong, but they do talk about their teenage angst or life traumas leading them to seek out belonging. Then they have an encounter with a lovely person from a minority group. They describe feeling shame and cognitive dissonance.
Braune describes how being a ‘former’ can turn into a job, making the person dependent on retelling their own story in a way that liberals find acceptable. It can also demobilise anti-fascists: ‘When confrontations are suggested by activists – let’s try to block some far-right gathering, let’s try to shut down a neo-Nazi event – people will say we should do outreach to them, we need to meet in the middle.’
The hope that every fascist is a future liberal or leftist just waiting to escape their present life is a form of naive and self-defeating optimism. ‘It’s terrible advice,’ Braune thinks. It can be dangerous for minority communities to show compassion to people who have expressed hateful ideas, or forgive people who haven’t given up the politics of hate. ‘There’s a lot of expectation on Black people to forgive racism, on Muslims to bring non-Muslims into the mosque, on gay people to justify their lifestyles.’
I asked her if anything changes when the people moving to the right are friends or family:
When you try this stuff, it’s you against Elon Musk, Fox News, it’s you against a powerful network. You might lunch with your Trumpist cousin, you might win them, but in the meantime there are thousands of other people being drawn into fascist politics. I think sometimes people feel responsibility for family members. With kids maybe it can work, with cousins. But with the QAnon mum, I tell people there’s probably no point trying to change her. Because she already thinks she knows more than you – she’s your mum.
Alex Roberts is an anti-fascist activist and the author, with Sam Moore, of Post-Internet Far Right. He has observed former fascists online and considered them as potential allies, but always been disappointed. When supporters of the far right make contact with their adversaries, he says, it is rare for them to have made a journey of rejection. They usually still identify with the right. Researchers approach them in the hope of gleaning valuable information but are usually disappointed. ‘The mistake is to think that these people have special insight into far-right movements just because they were involved in them.’
Roberts argues that there are no general lessons to be taken from former fascists, nothing to simplify the task of arguing with people who have been attracted by an idea associated with the far right. But he also insists that leftists need to take care of the people around us:
I persuaded my granddad not to vote UKIP back in the day by talking him through a very particular incident, a protest in Nigel Farage’s home village in which I participated. We were doing an action and it was generous and celebratory – we did calls to prayer and invited people to join in, we staged a gay marriage. Farage said we’d threatened his kids and it was a complete lie. My granddad had been thinking of voting for UKIP, but when I told him what had happened, he agreed not to vote. It was such a big issue for him – he refused to vote for a liar.
Aitlhadj, Braune and Roberts all accept that people will try to argue with their friends and family, and, with some caution, they encourage this. But it’s worth taking the time first to work out how far someone’s gone. A person who has shared a single tweet is in a different place from someone who’s been to a far-right meeting, or is rebuilding their friendship network around people they’ve met on a far-right website. If a member of your family has gone further, to the point where they encourage violence against strangers, then talk to them only with extreme caution. It isn’t good friendship to tell someone they’ve done nothing serious, or to forgive them, if you have any doubt as to what they’ve actually done.
People need to be talked down from right-wing positions, but it’s often a thankless task. If your friend is a determined follower of the latest right-wing fashion, then you won’t be able to persuade them otherwise without committing a great deal of time. Any number of people can reminisce about the time they gave trying to save someone and it was wasted, the effort they made to save an extremist who only lashed out at the people who’d tried to help them. The times we’re living in mean it’s necessary to have the argument, but it requires enormous patience, and an expectation of as many setbacks as successes.
Read more in the LRB
Comments
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9 July 2025
at
2:15pm
David Lobina
says:
The term 'fascist' is just abused and it means everything and nothing at all by now.
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9 July 2025
at
5:00pm
adamppatch
says:
@
David Lobina
I agree with this to a significant degree, but its use in this article is perhaps appropriate because (like "terrorist") its use both names and effects a rupture that makes further discussion between antagonists impossible.
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9 July 2025
at
5:52pm
David Lobina
says:
@
adamppatch
I think far-right extremist is better in this case. There's a lot of talk about Fascism being back, not least in the US (entirely spuriously, to my Italian eyes), and using such words has the unwelcome effect of amplifying such discourse.
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10 July 2025
at
12:16am
Anthony Lorenzo
says:
@
David Lobina
You can call it what you like. It doesn't have to mimic every tenet of Mussolini's political project. There is a clear danger, a rapid growth of the extreme right helped along by armies of online troglodytes who recruit young, mainly male, people to their cause. They are racist, sexist, homophobic and persuasive. They offer a simple to understand narrative that young men believe explains their loss of standing in the world. They feel emasculated by women having more freedom to choose their life paths, they believe homosexuality seeks to recruit and further feminise them, and they believe migrants are 'replacing' them.
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10 July 2025
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7:46am
avogadro2
says:
@
adamppatch
Well yes - the usual patronising approach. What on earth is a QAnon mum, if not a fantasy ‘deplorable’ for use as a punchbag by down-the-well bien pensants? Neither side’s ‘engaged’ proponents seem to have the capacity for rational debate.
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11 July 2025
at
5:53am
haroldsdodge
says:
@
Anthony Lorenzo
This is just great. (Your comment, I mean). A calm, insightful, bullseye of a post. Hats off.
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9 July 2025
at
9:24pm
Richard Ferguson
says:
This silly blog post has reinforced why I was correct to cancel my subscription.
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9 July 2025
at
10:17pm
David Lobina
says:
@
Richard Ferguson
For me it was some of the stuff they have published around gender and being assigned a sex at birth.
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9 July 2025
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11:53pm
Sue Stevenson
says:
I'm afraid I've been unable to read anything vaguely political on here, or any other review of books site, since The Great Mthfckry of 2020-2022 when liberals/leftists ike this one became flagrant endorsers of medical fascism, none of who have owned up since. I didn't think there would be any arrogant people left of this persuasion, but there you go. I'm not interested in hearing condemnation of the pathetic other side until this basic requirement is met.
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10 July 2025
at
11:52am
David Gordon
says:
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Sue Stevenson
Well, nice to know that my medical colleagues and I are in receipt of such gratitude for doing our best to help people and prevent a few deaths during the recent pandemic. Could you please clarify two things:
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10 July 2025
at
8:29am
enfieldian
says:
Where can one begin in pointing out what is wrong with this post? Is it still worth bothering to say that inexact and ill-defined use of the word "fascist" has devalued this word to the level of an all-purpose insult? If you don't like the original meaning - a mass street-fighting movement, financed by big business for the purpose of destroying trade unions and left-wing parties - then by all means make up your own definition, but please tell us exactly what that definition is. Further, by "fascist" do you simply mean people who vote for right-wing parties? Voting, certainly in Britain, probably elsewhere, is a superficial act that few people think seriously about. Even fewer think that their vote will have the slightest effect upon world affairs, or upon the circumstances of their own lives; at the last general election, 40 per cent of the electorate did not vote at all, and an unknown number - almost certainly millions - can't be bothered to put their names on the electoral register. Are fascism and racism the same? Racism has been an important part of British political attitudes throughout my life, and is probably less important now than it was during my childhood (1950's). One thing is certain: to write people off because of their voting behaviour, or because of some of their prejudices (but not others) is an essential trope, or, more than a trope, a basic principle, of the dominant centrist ideology of the British political/media class.
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10 July 2025
at
12:55pm
Graucho
says:
What is more serious and has to be addressed is the funding and support the Kremlin are giving to political parties that will destabilize western democracies and support their imperialistic aims. Name calling will simply not suffice to counter these new fellow travelers.
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14 July 2025
at
2:35pm
enfieldian
says:
@
Graucho
Presumably the Kremlin is subbing Sir Keir Starmer, since his miserable year in office has contributed decisively towards the huge increase support for Nigel Farage's comical party.
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12 July 2025
at
12:38am
Adam G
says:
You'd think that some of the fellow commenters would be able to read, given the forum, but there we go. Knee jerk rejections of a term whose use is pretty well bounded in this piece.
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13 July 2025
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10:03pm
David Lobina
says:
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Adam G
What a pretentious silly comment. You could have at least googled my name so you could have found I have written quite a bit about "fascism", including in the academic press, so I'm pretty sure I've done my research. In other words, I can do away with the smug put-downs.
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16 July 2025
at
11:53am
Adam G
says:
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David Lobina
Let's leave to one side your calling someone pretentious whilst saying they should Google you because you've written in the Academic Press.
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16 July 2025
at
2:01pm
David Lobina
says:
@
Adam G
I can even be more pretentious: go and read what I have written about Fascism, perhaps on 3 Quarks Daily, which is up your level, and then come back, instead of ascribing beliefs and points to me that I have not explicitly defended (quarantine a term? nonsense).
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12 July 2025
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8:42pm
steve kay
says:
Whereas here in the UK we can rely on the forces of law. We can rely on them to arrest at least seventy people, clergy and pensioners, silently holding signs indicating their support for Palestine. And in Northern Ireland we can rely on them to arrest nobody for a large bonfire with an inflatable dinghy on the top with blatant coloured figures, and slogans such as Veterans not Immigrants, and Say no to Small Boats.
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13 July 2025
at
9:32am
Camus
says:
If you read through a definition of Fascism, step by step, ((Schnyder is a good start ) you will find that the Trump regime is well on the way to becoming a fascist dictatorship.
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13 July 2025
at
10:05pm
David Lobina
says:
@
Camus
You mean Tim Snyder? He's actually not an expert in fascism, as Richard Evans and other actual experts have pointed out, ad nauseam. Best to read Emilio Gentile on fascism. Trumpism is Trumpism, and it has little to do with historical fascism.
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14 July 2025
at
6:02am
Graucho
says:
Not well versed in academic studies of fascism, but my understanding is that the term arises from the fasces, a bundle of rods surrounding an axe and a Roman symbol. The point being of course that a single rod is easily broken but a uniform bundle is not. So any political system that insists on absolute uniformity, conformity and doesn't tolerate dissent or deviation can justifiably be described as fascist. The overheard recording of Mr. Trump saying how he wanted his people to be as compliant as those of Kim Jong Un tells us that he can accurately be called an aspirational fascist. Others on the current political stage have sadly already achieved his ignoble ambition.
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14 July 2025
at
11:52am
David Lobina
says:
@
Graucho
No-one in the literature believes such as thing, which would be to reduce a political idea to the etymology of the word you use to refer to it. Not useful at all.
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15 July 2025
at
5:05am
Graucho
says:
@David Lobina (there was no reply link under your text)
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15 July 2025
at
5:11am
Graucho
says:
@enfieldian
Read moreThis seems to reflect some of the arguments in the article and also more or less reflects where we are now as regards public debate.
The problem with the phobias and isms is that they are alluring to discontented people. Rage and anger feel good. Why else would people turn to the racist far-right, rather than to leftist progressivism, which more accurately explains why their lives feel empty, why the ennui is impossible to shake off.
Capitalism has reached the stage now where it is cannibalising itself. A major, revolutionary redistribution of wealth is needed to stem the tide of rage that is growing and speeding up. Reform will take power in this country if Labour doesn't fix the economy in a fairer way. Then what will your issue be? Will your quibbling over terminology be of any use then?
This post’s title was just clickbait.
First, define "medical fascism". It is not a term I recognise, even after 55 years since my medical degree.
Second, can you confirm that "Sue Stevenson" is not a pseudonym of Robert Kennedy Jr?
And, I mean, it's not like we've had racist riots in the UK and consistent physical targeting of migrants by neo-nazis since... You'd think they'd appreciate that language can change and works in family resemblances. You'd think they could do a bit of research. But, you'd be mistaken.
The use of the term 'fascism' is simply manipulative and ill-fitting, current conditions in the UK bear no family resemblance to 1920s fascism in any way.
You're attempting to quarantine a term to its historical use. Just do some basic research into how people use the term fascist in the modern era, look in some dictionaries, and you will see that it has accrued additional meanings. For example, Miriam Webster. You're trying to re-enact Orwell's essay, which is cute, but not relevant here. As I said, the use in this piece to refer to the far right, that is, to people who have fascist and fascist adjacent views on race, authority, gender etc. is perfectly legitimate. If you can't see that, I question your motives in commenting repeatedly on this essay.
I have no problem with differences in usage, actually, and there are certainly different registers for any term. But I do find the usage of the term 'fascism' in pieces such as this post basically manipulative and unhelpful - esp. in YOUR terms, with this talk of fascist and fascist adjacent - such a Butlerian phrase - views on race, authority, gender (gender? how modern of you).
Why does Trump choose such spectacularly bad choices for the biggest jobs? Because there is only one who is allowed to make decisions and everybody swears an oath of loyalty daily to the leader. If you see the daily sessions of members of the cabinet you will watch as his lackeys shower him with praise and thank god for the good work
It was observed that when the unfortunate residents of East Germany found themselves switching from Hitler to Stalin they could scarcely notice the difference. So much for labels. Political movements that set out to crush diversity and individuality are what we are concerned with. Of course they like to dress themselves up in fine sounding intellectual finery, but the acid test is do they think that the people are there to serve them and not as it should be the other way around.
Indeed and the issue of illegal immigration is grist to Reform's mill aided and abetted by the Daily Mail whose record in supporting fascist causes is well known. The Kremlin of course well realises the score.
https://www.lbc.co.uk/politics/uk-politics/putin-illegal-migration-uk-border-defences-security/