<\/a>During my freshman year in college, my professor for \u201cPolitical Ideologies\u201d class made a pretty bold claim: \u201cIn the next fifty years,\u201d he intoned, \u201cwe will see the rise of a major fascist movement in the United States.\u201d It’s not as outlandish as it sounds.<\/p>\n Usually, I am opposed to the use of the word fascism, because, as George Orwell notes<\/a>, the term has such a nebulous meaning. Fascism is used synonymously with \u201cbig government,\u201d \u201crepression,\u201d etc. I was chagrined to no end when the right compared Obama to Hitler in 2008 and onward. But what fascism means in this context is a virulently racist, pro-corporate, and violent right-wing extremism. And I believe that the recent right-wing violence against perceived national enemies is a prelude to this kind of ideology.<\/p>\n Ideology is a result of crisis, political scientists Terence Ball and Richard Dagger tell us. In Germany<\/a> and Italy, this crisis came in the form of a loss, and tepid victory, respectively, in the First World War. The loss of national fortunes called for a rebirth and revitalization. This regeneration first took the form of lashing out against those the far-right in Germany and Italy considered responsible for republican decadence: socialists, communists, pacifists, Jews, democrats of all stripes. In Germany, during the failed communist revolution of 1918, far-right militias called freikorps \u201croamed the countryside, killing with impunity\u201d.<\/p>\n What is our crisis? Certainly the crisis of 2008 qualifies. And who are our freikorps, our street-fighters? We are seeing their rise as a reaction to social justice movements like Black Lives Matter. In the past several days alone, we’ve seen five people shot<\/a> by white supremacists at a Minneapolis BLM protest, and a black man beaten up at a Donald Trump rally<\/a>, with Trump saying maybe he \u201cshould have been roughed up.\u201d The recent Planned Parenthood shooting also embodies this violent response to \u201cnational enemies.\u201d If this isn’t freikorps-esque street fighting, I don’t know what is.<\/p>\n