SMOKERS’ CORNER: The Lure of Fascist Fantasies

In the 1976 Hollywood classic Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro stars as a disturbed military veteran who works gruelling shifts as a cab driver through the decaying, sleazy backdrop of New York City. Plagued by chronic insomnia and living alone in a cramped apartment, he spends his nights ferrying passengers who seem to mirror the city’s moral collapse. He is a man of few words, and the film gradually lays bare his fragile state of mind through his internal monologues.

In these voiceovers, he rails against the social ‘filth’ he encounters on the streets, culminating in a lament: ”All the animals come out at night… whores, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” The lament can be interpreted as a fascist fantasy.

Early in the film, the cabdriver attempts to court a campaign worker for a liberal presidential candidate, only to alienate her completely by taking her on a date to a pornographic cinema. Seemingly unable to comprehend why she is offended, he moves his obsession toward assassinating the candidate. The attempt fails.

His focus then shifts to a young teenage sex worker. When he urges her to leave the trade, she asserts that she is entirely free to make her own choices. Undeterred, he returns later with lethal intent, launching a brutal armed assault that leaves her pimp and his associates dead. By the following morning, the media has reframed his violent spree as an act of ‘heroism’. In the chilling final scene, he is approached once more by the same woman who was once repulsed and offended by him, only this time she greets him with a smile.

From Hollywood’s murderous anti-heroes to extrajudicial killings in Pakistan, ideological convictions and public frustration can make violence seem like an acceptable instrument of justice for both the left and right

So, a disturbed man harbouring ‘fascist’ fantasies, who originally plotted to assassinate a politician, shifted his violent impulses. Eager to project his own idea of morality, he attempted to ‘rescue’ a young sex worker who had explicitly chosen her own path. His solution? Shoot her pimp and associates to death, thereby transforming himself into a ‘saviour’ and a ‘hero’, finally becoming the ‘rain’ he dreamed would wash the ‘scum’ off the streets.

Director Martin Scorsese leaves the final moral judgment to the audience, framing an unsettling question: did the viewers feel a sense of satisfaction or outrage? How could a man evolve from a failed assassin into a murderous vigilante, only to be embraced as a media darling and societal hero? Nevertheless, one can suggest that the film is clearly conscious of the answer.

Most viewers would justify the cabby’s actions. In troubled societies, where law and order is crumbling and whose moral compass seems to be going haywire, paranoia, anxiety and anger breed a dangerous appetite for vigilante action. When institutions fail and public safety feels like an illusion, audiences are dangerously primed to root for a violent reckoning. Therefore, an unstable, murderous anti-hero is perversely embraced because he steps in to do what an impotent system fails to do.

So, what do you think is the actual reaction of most people when they read or hear about the extrajudicial killings of individuals accused of hideous crimes in Pakistan? Beneath the surface, there is often a quiet sense of satisfaction and, perhaps, even covert joy. Of course, ‘liberals’ are outraged, and rightly so, recognising that such actions and reactions are symptoms of a society teetering on the edge of a cliff, on the verge of tumbling straight into the lap of fascism.

But those who have been crushed by the debris of a crumbling order are not the only ones who end up conjuring fascist fantasies or begin hailing actions that gradually nudge polities down fascism’s throat. This is not entirely a right-wing tendency, really.

The embrace of fascism can come from the left and the liberals as well, especially when public frustration with the ‘system’ runs deep. A striking real-world echo of this phenomenon unfolded following the December 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan. When the shooter was arrested, social media, and parts of the public, erupted in an unexpected wave of outright sympathy for him. Even individuals who would typically align with progressive or liberal values found themselves romanticising the murder of an ‘exploiter’.

In January 2011, when the former Governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, was gunned down by his police bodyguard for criticising Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, I was working at a European outlet operating in Karachi. At the office, I was rattled to witness a number of ‘liberals’ (both lifestyle and political), openly hailing the assassination. Some even went to extraordinary lengths to justify the murder, simply because they opposed Taseer’s political party.

Troubled societies frequently create curious left-right trajectories and demonstrations of confused morality. These often converge on the same dangerous destination: a fascist order in the making, nourished by both the left and the right.

In the 1995 film The Last Supper, five liberal graduate students accidentally kill a white racist and hatch a chilling plan: invite prominent right-wing figures to dinner, debate them and poison any guest who refuses to recant. They proceed to execute a rotating cast of bigots and extremists, burying them in their garden. The plot twists when they host a famous right-wing television talking head. Expecting a radical zealot, they are disarmed by his calm and rational demeanour and his admission that he does not actually believe his own rhetoric, but merely performs it for ratings.

Confused, the students retreat to the kitchen to deliberate. They decide to spare him. Unbeknownst to them, though, the guest discovers their plot and switches the bottles of wine, one poisoned, one untainted. Thinking they are drinking untainted wine, the students start to die. The guest then casually lights a cigar.

So who sympathised with whom? I’m sure liberal viewers saw the film as an anti-liberal farce. Yet, one can also posit that the anti-liberal lot weren’t overly enthused either, watching a right-winger confess he didn’t believe what he said on TV. In a way, he was making a fool of his core audience. The temptation of fascism wears many masks. It thrives whenever desperation or ideological zeal convinces us that the ends justify the means.

Whether we cheer for the vigilante cab-driver, the assassin of a corporate executive, a mob that kills a supposed ‘blasphemer’, the unaccountable ‘justice’ provided to nasty people, or liberal students wielding poison in a suburban kitchen, we reveal a shared, perilous truth: when the rule of law breaks down, the applause for extrajudicial violence is the sound of a society eagerly digging its own grave.

Published in Dawn, EOS, November 15th, 2026