Jacobin Radio Dig: Fascist Police State w/ Alberto Toscano and Stuart Schrader
Sep 18, 2025
Alberto Toscano, a scholar focused on fascism and race, joins Stuart Schrader, a professor specializing in the transnational history of policing, for a riveting discussion on the U.S. escalating authoritarianism. They explore the implications of Trump's federal policing and the politicization of ICE. The conversation dives into the historical ties between policing and U.S. fascist tendencies, revealing how liberal complicity has made Washington D.C. a testing ground for repression. Their insights connect the war on drugs and terror, underscoring the risks of state violence in contemporary society.
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Decentralized Policing Enables Federal Capture
- U.S. law enforcement is deeply decentralized for historical and political reasons dating to Reconstruction and Cold War fears of centralization.
- Post–9/11 funding and DHS collapsed those barriers, creating a jerry-rigged federal-to-local flow that now enables centralized federal interventions.
ICE As An Ideological Arm Of The Executive
- Political politicization and ideological branding of ICE and National Guard makes them instruments of executive caprice rather than neutral enforcers.
- That politicization resembles a larval form of fascization where police act as ideological as well as repressive bodies.
Carceral Spaces As Seedbeds Of Authoritarianism
- Black radical thought sees prisons and police as primary sites where fascist tendencies incubate in the U.S.
- These carceral zones are where authoritarian power operates most nakedly and often invisibly to the broader public.
