On January 10th, 2024, IPK Fellow Maya Vinokour penned an opinion piece for Jacobin titled “Beware Lifestyle Fascism” Read the excerpt below, then click for the full article.

In a world of fraying metanarratives, fragmented sociality, and rule by unaccountable oligarchy, the only remaining choices seem to be consumer ones. In the Bill Clinton era, triangulation and focus grouping accelerated the commodification of politics, transforming candidates into products and voting decisions into lifestyle choices. Since the advent of social media, which has monetized extreme content and siloed users into filter bubbles, politics and lifestyle have drawn even closer together. Not only have political decisions become matters of lifestyle, lifestyle choices accumulate into ideology.

If in Walter Benjamin’s day, fascism was aestheticizing politics, contemporary fascism has lifestylized it. Nowhere is this clearer than in the realm of wellness, where the individualistic drive for self-improvement easily shades into condemnation of the suboptimal, the enfeebled, the inherently unworthy.

Read the full article here.

Photo Credits: Jeff Bottari / Zuffa LLC