Is the American Postmodern Left a Fascist Movement?

For my work in corporate social responsibility, I was recently reading The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi’s critique of capitalism, when something he wrote gave me one of those really uncomfortable “Aha” moments.

Polanyi was discussing the alternatives to capitalism — left socialism and right socialism (which we call “Fascism”). His point was that these two socialisms were created to undo the disruptions of capitalism which had privileged “money power” to degrade human sociality into atomic individualism driven by self-seeking greed.

When I read his observation that the Fascist phase of anti-capitalism brought about “Irrational philosophies, racialist aesthetics, anti-capitalist demagogy, heterodox currency views, criticism of the party system, widespread disparagement of the ‘regime’,” I thought “How odd, that sounds just like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the postmodern Left.”

So, I took a moment to do a quick scan of Polanyi’s criteria of a Fascist movement to see how well they embrace our postmodern Left.

I concluded that our postmodern Left meets each of Polanyi’s criteria