The People Planning to Survive Without Us
Thursday, September 17, 2026.
End-times fascism begins when a society stops imagining a shared future and starts deciding who deserves protection from the collapse.
There was a time when politics at least pretended to be about building a better future.
The future might be socialist, capitalist, suburban, technological, Christian, multicultural, or suspiciously well supplied with monorails.
But it would be shared.
Even our worst political arguments took place inside a common assumption: there would still be a society when we were finished arguing about it.
That assumption is weakening.
A darker politics has begun to appear—one less interested in preventing catastrophe than in deciding who will be protected from it.
It does not ask how we might preserve a livable world. It asks who gets a place in the bunker.
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call this “end-times fascism.”
Their phrase describes an emerging alliance among religious apocalypticists, technological accelerationists, ethno-nationalists, and extraordinarily wealthy men who appear to have concluded that humanity may not possess a common future—but that they personally might.
The billionaire has a bunker. The fundamentalist has the Rapture. The nationalist has the border. The frightened ordinary soul is offered someone to blame.
Their cosmologies differ. Their emotional proposition is the same:
The future is ruined. There will not be enough. Someone must be abandoned. Make sure it is not you.
This is not merely a political arrangement. It is a relational one.
A society, like a marriage, begins to die when its members stop protecting a shared future and start constructing private escape plans.
Fascism After the Future
The word fascism should not become a synonym for “politics I find revolting.”
It describes something more specific: hierarchy, purification, concentrated power, mythic restoration, and sanctioned cruelty.
It identifies an endangered people, a contaminating outsider, and a leader willing to do what ordinary morality supposedly prevents.
Traditional fascism promised rebirth.
The nation would be purified and made glorious again. It offered its followers a grand future, however fraudulent and murderous that future proved to be.
End-times fascism is more nihilistic. It is not entirely convinced there will be a future.
Its project is therefore less construction than triage: fortify the border, accumulate the resources, secure the compound, automate the labor, identify the disposable people.
Catastrophe becomes a moral permission slip.
If collapse is inevitable, democratic restraint begins to look quaint.
Compassion becomes a liability.
Environmental protection is merely rearranging the deck chairs.
Refugees become invaders rather than human beings fleeing conditions they did not create. Inequality ceases to be a social failure and becomes evidence that the strong have correctly positioned themselves.
Cruelty can then introduce itself as realism.
The Future Has Been Privatized
Couples therapists know this emotional structure.
A marriage does not end only when someone leaves.
It may end much earlier, when one partner stops investing in a shared future and begins quietly building a private one.
The money is separated. Loyalties are reassigned. Evidence is collected. Friends are recruited. Affection is rationed. One person remains inside the relationship while constructing an escape route from its consequences.
The marriage may continue administratively. The future has already been privatized.
End-times politics performs the same maneuver at scale. Its beneficiaries continue extracting wealth, labor, attention, and legitimacy from the common world while preparing themselves not to share that world’s fate.
They are still living in the marriage. They have simply opened a secret bank account on Mars.
The private island, the luxury bunker, the seastead, the fortified border, and the corporate “freedom city” are answers to the same question:
How can I retain the benefits of human society without remaining accountable to the humans who make it possible?
The answer, inconveniently, is that you cannot.
The bunker requires builders, technicians, growers, physicians, security guards, sanitation systems, and somebody who understands the air filter. Even the fantasy of perfect independence rests upon an enormous scaffolding of other people’s competence.
Every bunker eventually rediscovers society.
The Fantasy of Invulnerability
The bunker is more than a structure. It is a relationship strategy.
It promises safety through the elimination of dependence. Nothing enters unless it can be controlled. Other people are sorted into assets, threats, and burdens. Vulnerability is mistaken for stupidity. Mutual obligation becomes a security breach.
The fantasy is simple:
I will need no one, owe no one, and remain untouched by the disorder beyond my walls.
But radical self-sufficiency is usually a dependency fantasy. The person who claims to need nobody often requires an astonishing number of invisible people to maintain that conviction.
Extreme wealth makes this easier. Money can remove ordinary encounters with human limitation. A wealthy person can delegate inconvenience, purchase agreement, and interpret the absence of contradiction as evidence of exceptional wisdom.
Eventually, insulation may begin to feel like superiority.
The danger is not simply that powerful people become selfish. Ordinary selfishness still recognizes other people as real. The greater danger is that they begin to experience the rest of humanity as scenery—or as a logistical problem.
Apocalypse Without Religion
End-times thinking is not confined to religion.
The secular world has developed its own eschatology: climate collapse, artificial superintelligence, civilizational decline, demographic replacement, nuclear war, pandemics, and the end of meaningful human work.
Some of these dangers are real. Several deserve far more serious attention than they receive.
The problem is not anticipating disaster. Preparedness can be prudent, communal, and loving.
Neighbors who store supplies, protect a watershed, establish cooling centers, or develop mutual-aid networks are also preparing for hard times.
The moral dividing line is not between optimists and pessimists. It is between two kinds of preparation.
One asks, How do we make more people safe?
The other asks, How do we make sure the right people survive?
The first produces resilience. The second produces a hierarchy of human worth.
When “Us” Disappears
Healthy relationships depend upon a modest act of faith: the person in front of me will still matter after this argument.
That belief changes behavior. We restrain the most devastating thing we could say. We tolerate frustration. We accept influence. We repair. We do not burn down the house merely because we are furious in one room.
Democracy requires a similar faith. It depends upon citizens believing they will continue living with people they dislike—and that those people must retain rights even when their side loses.
Once the shared future disappears, restraint begins to look foolish.
Why preserve institutions if the country is already lost?
Why compromise with people portrayed as traitors, vermin, invaders, or groomers?
Why protect a planet that technology, divine intervention, or private wealth will allow the chosen to escape?
The abandonment of “us” comes before the abandonment of democracy.
Fascism does not begin with uniforms. It begins when enough people decide there will be no “us” worth saving.
A Useful Idea That Can Become Too Useful
“End-times fascism” is a powerful phrase, which means it should be handled carefully.
Not every conservative is a fascist. Not every Christian awaiting the Second Coming welcomes ecological destruction. Not every technologist wants to replace democracy with a subscription service. Not every anxious conversation about immigration is disguised exterminationism.
A concept that explains everything usually ends by explaining very little.
Nor do fantasies of purification and righteous catastrophe belong exclusively to the political right. Human beings across ideologies enjoy imagining that history will expose their enemies, vindicate their tribe, and spare them the compromises required by pluralistic life.
The term is most useful when it directs us away from speculative mind-reading and toward an observable question:
Are powerful people investing in a future ordinary people can inhabit—or primarily in systems that protect them from the consequences of the future they are creating?
That question is neither hysterical nor partisan.
It is diagnostic.
Strategic FAQ
What is end-times fascism?
End-times fascism is Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s term for an authoritarian politics organized around anticipated catastrophe. Instead of building a livable future for everyone, it concentrates on protecting a chosen group while treating others as expendable.
How is end-times fascism different from traditional fascism?
Traditional fascism promised national rebirth and collective glory. End-times fascism is more nihilistic. It assumes that collapse may be unavoidable and focuses on borders, bunkers, private enclaves, technological escape, and the selection of those considered worthy of protection.
Is preparing for social collapse fascist?
No. Emergency preparation can be responsible, cooperative, and compassionate. The moral distinction is between asking how more people can be kept safe and deciding that only the “right” people deserve to survive.
What does end-times fascism have to do with relationships?
Both societies and intimate relationships deteriorate when people stop protecting a shared future and begin constructing private escape plans. The relationship may continue outwardly even after its future has been privatized.
Who coined the phrase “end-times fascism”?
Writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor developed the phrase in their 2025 essay “The Rise of End-Times Fascism” and expanded it in their 2026 book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.
The Opposite of the Bunker
Klein and Taylor propose a politics of “hereness”: loyalty to this earth, these bodies, these neighbors, and the common world we already inhabit.
It is a refusal of fantasies in which salvation requires escape from other people.
This does not require cheerful faith that everything will work out. Mature hope is not optimism wearing better shoes. It is a commitment made without guarantees.
Couples understand this distinction.
Repair does not begin when two partners become certain the marriage will survive. It begins when they decide the relationship deserves honest labor before its outcome is known.
The political equivalent is not denying danger. It is refusing to let danger choose our morality for us.
Hard years may be coming. We may be tempted to sort humanity into the deserving and the disposable.
Fear will offer to make this sorting feel intelligent.
The answer to end-times fascism is not another fantasy of perfect people building a perfect world.
It is the stubborn maintenance of an imperfect shared one.
The central question may not be whether we can prevent every catastrophe.
It may be whether we can remain human while preparing for what cannot be prevented.
Salvation, if the word is still useful, cannot mean securing a private exit from the human condition.
It must mean refusing to survive without one another.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Klein, N., & Taylor, A. (2025). The rise of end-times fascism. The Guardian.
Klein, N., & Taylor, A. (2026). End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.