The Liquidation of Belief Postfascism and the Post-Truth Condition

A clear-eyed reckoning with our dangerous moment—and a way out.

The Liquidation of Belief comes to grips with today's fascism, or “postfascism”—both what is all too familiar about it and what is frighteningly new—and to understand its relation to the strange suspension of truth's hold on political life. Postfascism is the form fascism has taken in our era of “liquid modernity,” where life is increasingly characterized by nihilism, the emptying-out of belief; hence, we can best understand post-truth in connection with postfascism as “the liquidation of belief.” Cohn argues that these are phenomena of a modernity that has not abandoned its capitalist project but that is liquefying, shedding its former guarantees (unevenly distributed as they were) of civil rights and stable employment. This is a book for those struggling to make sense of our new realities.

Recent shifts in capitalism and the authoritarian state favor the emergence of a postfascist tendency that facilitates the enjoyment of cruelty. However much we are horrified by this predicament, nonetheless, there is no going back to the social and political norms that gave birth to postfascism and post-truth in the first place. We are forced to ask: what was “truth,” and when if ever have we operated within it? Ultimately, without making political prescriptions or prophecies, Cohn suggests strategies to reach a horizon beyond postfascism and post-truth, restoring social trust and thereby truth, in the form of lived solidarity.