The Sacrificial Crisis of Anti-Fascism

A riot in brownstone Brooklyn

Photo: Joseph Banderet

Riots at the theater were once common occurrences. In 1849, a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the Astor Opera House in New York City descended into chaos, leaving a few dozen dead and many more injured. (The altercation stemmed from the rivalry between the American Shakespearean Edwin Forrest and the touring English thespian William Macready.) Nearly 60 years later, the performers in the New York debut of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World were pelted with rotten vegetables and stink bombs by Irish nationalists who took offense at the play. 

But as the unruly masses moved on to other forms of entertainment and the theater became a middle- to highbrow affair, such incidents became less frequent, and eventually unheard of. So when I showed up for a performance of a new Portuguese play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival—which specializes in avant-garde performances, often, as in this case, foreign ones performed with supertitles—I wasn’t expecting to see the audience transformed into an enraged, baying mob. I was wrong. 

The play in question was Tiago Rodrigues’s Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists, written in 2020 and performed several times in Europe before being brought to New York this year. Catarina is a self-consciously Brechtian work (the characters repeatedly quote Brecht) set in the near future at the country home of a left-wing family that has for many decades practiced a peculiar ritual. Each year, they abduct and murder a fascist—or at least, someone they consider to be a fascist—continuing a tradition begun by the deceased matriarch, who initiated it by killing her own husband, the clan’s grandfather. His crime was failing to stop the murder of the grandmother’s friend, Catarina, by a soldier during the rule of the right-wing dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. A passive accomplice of the crimes of fascism, as she explained in a letter that is read aloud during the bloody ritual, is just as guilty as an active killer.

In the lead-up to the annual rite, all the members of the family assume the name Catarina and don the traditional garb of a Portuguese peasant woman. The early scenes present us with a bucolic idyll that is building inexorably towards a violent climax. But things go awry when the younger “Catarina” whose time has come to play the role of executioner refuses to pull the trigger of the pistol she has trained on the politician she helped kidnap. A series of didactic dialogues follow, in which her family members make various attempts to get her to pull the trigger, but she stands firm, Antigone-like. 

Like many of the Greek dramas that stand at the origins of Western theater, Rodrigues’s play depicts what René Girard called a “sacrificial crisis”: a moment when a ritual ceases to serve its social purpose of cathartic discharge and collective renewal; this malfunctioning then precipitates into a broader social crisis. As Girard would predict, the young Catarina’s refusal eventually brings about the total breakdown of the microcosmic social order represented by the family. The play ends with bodies strewn across the stage. Only two survivors remain, one of them the “fascist” abductee. 

In the play’s near-future setting (2028), as we learn, the political party of the appointed victim has gained power and is set to overhaul the constitution. (The party is not named but implied to be Chega, Portugal’s answer to the continent-wide right-populist upsurge that includes Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, and the German AfD.) One of the refusenik Catarina’s arguments is that the family’s strategy for fighting the right-wing menace has demonstrably failed. As if to ratify this point, after killing off all the Catarinas but one, Rodrigues gives the last word to the politician, who makes a 15-minute speech (more on that below).

Catarina is open to various allegorical readings. Mine goes something like this. The late-20th century liberal-democratic order arrived later to Portugal than anywhere else, with the end of the Salazar regime in 1974. But in the subsequent decades, as across the rest of Western Europe, the illiberal right seemed to have been thoroughly vanquished (as did the communist left after 1989). Along with integration into the European common market and attendant economic reforms, a fundamental component of this dispensation was the spontaneous functioning of the marketplace of ideas. Liberal ideas, it was assumed, would inexorably prevail over illiberal ones, and for nearly half a century, that assumption seemed to be borne out. 

But an illiberal supplement to this approach always continued to operate at the margins. For one thing, the censorship of far-right texts and ideas remained part of the legal regime across much of Europe. At the same time, there were some on the radical left who, like the “Catarinas,” kept up the militant traditions of an earlier era, albeit in a circumscribed manner. These were the anti-fascist radicals who argued that the marketplace of ideas was an inadequate prophylactic against the far right, and that far-right ideas must be violently combatted, suppressed, and deplatformed wherever they arose. Even as they voiced contempt for the naïveté of the liberal mainstream, anti-fascist activists also functioned as liberalism’s shock troops, using violence to police the outer boundaries of acceptable opinion. One might understand the secret rites of the “Catarina” family as a stylized version of these covert janitorial services furnished to the liberal state by antifa radicals. 

The sacrificial crisis that brings down the Catarinas in Rodrigues’s play is, quite simply, the crisis of the contemporary liberal order as a whole. In recent years, this order has proven incapable of maintaining the cordon sanitaire that once excluded the illiberal right from the public sphere and electoral politics. The tactics of antifa were adequate to combatting the similarly thuggish remnants of the fascist right in the postwar decades. However, this efficacy depended on its targets’ prior marginalization by the subtler gatekeeping mechanisms protecting the mainstream consensus. Once these began to fail, antifa turned out to be entirely ineffective at halting the elevation of leaders like Giorgia Meloni, or for that matter, Donald Trump. 

When gatherings of right-wing politicians who already hold positions of considerable power are shut down by activists, as occurred with the National Conservatism conference earlier this year, the impotence of the gesture could hardly be more obvious. Even if you manage to stop Viktor Orbán from giving a speech in Brussels, he’s still in charge of Hungary. 

In Catarina, when one of the family members lectures her dissenting niece that mere dialogue will never be enough to keep the far right out of power—that violence is also necessary—she is echoing a standard antifa line. But as the refusenik Catarina points out in response, the family’s rituals of violence have also failed: Killing the man they have kidnapped can’t change the fact that his party is already in power. Do you suggest, she asks, that we murder all the party’s members? Sure, if you want to do that, I’ll happily join in, replies her aunt. At this point, some in the audience cheered. 

A functioning sacrificial order, Girard argues, works by maintaining boundaries: between inside and outside, sacred and profane, pure and impure. The theatrical fourth wall is a secularized version of such a boundary, hinting at the art form’s ritual origins. So it was appropriate, albeit shocking, to see that wall break down just at the moment when the collapse of the familial—and continental—political order was being dramatized. In the play’s final scene, with the Catarinas strewn about him, the previously silent politician took center stage and delivered a speech that, if you listen to what European right-populists say these days, should have sounded familiar. It was an appeal to the silent majority frustrated with ineffectual and arrogant elites, with disorder and lawlessness, with the ceaseless demands of minorities. What about the demands of the majority? What about the freedom of ordinary citizens to live their daily lives in safety? And so on.

The highbrow audience’s response to being obliged to listen to this typical right-populist fare was an all-out revolt. The crowd chanted slogans, booed, and heckled; some stood and turned their backs to the stage; others stormed out; at least one man attempted to charge the stage and was fended off by an usher. “Shoot him!” they shouted repeatedly, addressing the “Catarinas” on stage, who had risen from the dead during their intended victim’s speech and were listening passively to the man they had failed to silence. 

When the speech concluded, the house went dark, and the near-riot gave way to normal-sounding applause. The ritual order of the theater, it seemed, had been restored; the Dionysiac energies the play had unleashed, turning the audience into a frenzied chorus, were absorbed back into it. 

I wrote to BAM’s press office the next day to ask whether there had been plants in the crowd, egging on the reaction. No, I was told: “The response is entirely organic and varies with each performance.” The Times review, published the morning of the performance I attended, mentioned heckling and booing during the final scene, so it is fair to assume some in the audience arrived primed to do so, as if an impromptu ritual had been conjured up to compensate for the failure of the one depicted on stage. I haven’t been able to determine how or when the audience rebellion started. I read some reviews of earlier performances in Europe that made no mention of a similar uproar. A critic who attended a performance Catarina in Tampere, Finland earlier this year described the final scene as being “trapped in the auditorium, forced to listen to a hate speech for what seems like an eternity.” At some point, it would seem, the experience of passive forbearance became intolerable. I can only speculate that the timing of the New York run of Catarina, barely over a week after Trump’s electoral triumph, played a role.

In its outburst, the crowd in effect endorsed the violence of the Catarina clan and repudiated the objections of the play’s heroine. Nonetheless, it was the “fascist” who continued speaking until the house went dark—much as Trump is set once again to mount the presidential bully pulpit, despite the near decade-long efforts of the “resistance.” Whether the performers intended it or not, they had provoked the audience into pantomiming the same impotent gestures of refusal whose waning efficacy the play puts on display.

This week at Compact

In the pages of Compact, we continue to explore the fallout of the election and the evolving ideological reconfigurations it is putting on display. Start with Holly Jean Buck’s “The Rise of Green MAGA,” which takes on a poorly understood migration of certain strands of environmentalism to the right: Not just Robert F. Kennedy Jr. but various green themes and issues are now finding a home in the MAGA coalition.

Meanwhile, Doug Lain considers another defection from the Democratic coalition: that of the working class, the majority of which voted for Donald Trump despite his union-busting record and the Biden administration’s efforts on behalf of organized labor. “Could it be,” asks Lain, “that the interests of the working class don’t align with the interests of what is known as ‘labor’? This isn’t such a novel or contrarian question.”

Of course, to what extent, if at all, Trump delivers for the workers who pulled the lever for him is an open question. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien took to the pages of Compact this week to argue for one concrete way Trump could “show that he stands by the people who are sending him back to the Oval Office”: appoint Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Secretary of Labor.

As for other cabinet picks, Sohrab Ahmari makes the case for Robert Lighthizer at Treasury on similar grounds, Dan McCarthy examines the reformer bona fides of Matt Gaetz (who has since withdrawn from consideration as Trump’s attorney general nominee), and Michael Stumo calls attention to a less-discussed border crisis that Kristi Noem, Trump’s nominee to lead DHS, must take on immediately: “the influx of dangerous and unregulated goods through America’s ports of entry.”

We were also proud to publish the great economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck on how globalism crushed democracy in the neoliberal era, and how democracy is reasserting itself in recent populist revolts; as well as columnist Justin Vassallo’s review of Streck’s latest book, Taking Back Control?

Also: Heather Penatzer’s review of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Lost Souls, about the mostly forgotten refugee crisis that played a major role in starting the Cold War; and Matthew Cavedon on a little-noticed bipartisan success: a rule drafted with input from both the Trump and Biden administrations that protects people with disabilities from involuntary euthanasia.