I Am Not a Fascist

This is obviously hard to explain, but I don’t want to make any excuses. The love of my life is a fascist—it’s right there in the title. And she’s running for mayor! She doesn’t call herself a fascist, of course, but she admits she’s “far right” when pressed on it, running with the local conservative party she’s taken over and resurrected. But that doesn’t make her not a fascist. Politics is already steeped in self-delusion, mass hysteria and shared fantasies. Politics is the delicate operation of lying in plain sight. Of course she’s a fascist. If all you had to do to not be a fascist is to say so, how would that work? Most people would be fascists if they could just disavow it. A lot of them are, and try to do it all the time. Like Kendra Badger.

A handful of people knew she was a fascist from her very first run for city council. But she dealt with the rat infestation in the North ward and that was a big fucking deal. I was never really plugged in to electoral politics, I’ve always focused on educating and organizing. I was gob smacked when she won. Who falls for this stuff? I don’t know anything about political practice, I deal in theory. Neither am I a romantic, so it feels alien to write about matters of the heart. Stalin said he felt the last of his humanity seep out when his wife died. Maybe that’s where it went wrong.

If I’d fallen in love with a Stalinist, a revisionist, a liberal, even a conservative, I wouldn’t have much to write about. But I fell in love with a fascist. It didn’t happen all of a sudden. I don’t believe in love at first sight. Who could? It’s admitting you’re a product of your environment, selected and animated and driven by it. We’re all products of our environment, of course, and the environment too is a product of us. The goal of humanity, in as much as you can say such a thing, is to mold an environment for a better humanity. This is not a political treatise—I’m in love. I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking through Marxism, and the struggles of the working class, and how Marxism could apply here in America in a way that makes it possible for a truly universal communist society to emerge. America the classless, the stateless, is a slice of Marx before Marx. So it made sense that as I found myself unable to resist falling in love with Kendra Badger, the idea of these ideas penetrating her politics and transforming her also became alluring, irresistible.

She had made quite the impact when she first ran for city council three years ago. She was what you’d call “conventionally attractive,” a dark Marilyn Monroe, Natalie Wood type, though she tried to hide it with make up and accessories to make her seem like an everywoman type. And she said the craziest things, which naturally garnered her a lot of attention in the press, even at the national level, like when she called for the arrest of anyone from the state coming into the city to assess property values for new property taxes. It was dealing with the rats that did it for her though. There had been years of dumping on the boulevard, then the food trucks started congregating up and down the boulevard to catch consumers and strollers and the early drinks crowd, and then the food carts for the late night revelers. It got especially bad after the pandemic guidelines let up. Everyone wanted to eat trash and make it. Being the dividing line between several residential neighborhoods in the north ward, the boulevard was serviced by no fewer than five garbage truck routes. A garbage strike the summer before left the boulevard with more rats than humans, by several orders of magnitude. When the garbage strike ended, the city said it would take weeks to catch up on all the garbage that had piled up. On the first day of school, a pack of rats chased some school children several blocks down the boulevard in a clip that went viral around the world. That afternoon Kendra Badger offered a bounty. A dollar a rat. She would pay out of pocket, setting collection sites all along the boulevard. Her campaign said it collected tens of thousands of rat carcasses, and that a generous anonymous donor had put up the money to pay the bounties. The campaign finance committee ended up investigating Badger’s campaign because the bounties were arguably payments made to voters, but nothing came of it except more attention for Kendra Badger. She knew how to be the center of it.

I couldn’t believe she was for real, just seeing her face on my feed made me angry. The coverage of her reached a fever pitch heading into the election. No one had expected to make it this far, she had been considered a joke candidate, and she was running against an incumbent everyone swore was beloved. Old Stodge Randolph had been in office since the 80s, and always had a few dollars if you ran into him on the street. People are into that. Of course he represented the same class interests as the rest of the city government. But I so was Kendra Badger, and even more brazenly so. But she appealed to people with her populist rhetoric and bulldozer approach. Complex problems require complex solutions, but simple ones are a lot easier to sell. She won the election that fall, and became my council member. You can imagine my surprise when just a few weeks after the election, she came knocking on my door.