Last August, in a piece published on ZNet, I argued that Trump is a fascist, but more specifically, borrowing from the language of Sheldon Wolin, he is an “inverted fascist.” Inverted fascism, like the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, is animated by a totalitarian drive, but puts corporate interests above those of the nation state. The Trump administration’s war on Iran is the most extreme manifestation of inverted fascism that we have seen yet.

Inverted fascism is more than simply a collection of policies that are repressive and in the interest of billionaires. It could be understood as a condition in which popular input, at every level, has been usurped by corporate power. This condition is marked by media concentration in the hands of a tiny group of conglomerates facilitated by FCC-authorized mergers; social media owned by right-wing billionaires; lobbyists, campaign donors, and corporate-backed think tanks determining policy; and underfunded schools, mass deportations, and militarized police.

But inverted fascism is also a global condition. In their report on 2025, the first year of Trump’s second term, Oxfam found that billionaire wealth around the world grew by more than 16%, reaching a record $18.3 trillion. This while right-wing governments around the world have taken up different versions of inverted fascism. Benjamin Netanyahu engages in brazen genocide in Gaza and land grabs in the West Bank and Lebanon while hollowing out Israel’s own social services. Narendra Modi oversees unprecedented inequality while forwarding his own Hindu nationalism.

This order, however, is fundamentally unstable as made evident by the inability of the Trump administration to pry open the Strait of Hormuz, the reverberating economic consequences of the war, Iran’s remarkable success in its assault on US and Israeli targets in the region, and the reluctance of US allies toward participating. This war marks a major step in the decline of US hegemony. As that decline unfolds, the brazenness of the violence of capitalism becomes increasingly evident. The assault began with the bombing of a girls’ school that killed over 150, the vast majority of whom were between the ages of eight and twelve.

Decline has been a reality for US global hegemony since it reached its peak following WWII. In 1949, the Chinese Revolution succeeded despite billions in US aid to the Kuomintang nationalists and tens of thousands of marines working alongside Japanese imperialists endeavoring to defeat the Red Army. One letter from US ambassador to China, John Leighton Stuart, to the secretary of state relayed, “Killing, assaulting of peaceful Chinese civilians and raping of Chinese women and robbing of Chinese shops by American forces in China. One United States Marine in Tientsin had thrown 9 year old Chinese girl into river [sic].”

This was referred to by critics of the Truman administration as the “loss of China.” Over the course of the twentieth century, the US would “lose” Korea north of the 38th parallel despite 350,000 tons of US bombs; Vietnam, despite a war that killed four million people across three countries; and Cuba, responded to with vicious US-sponsored terrorism and a blockade that continues to suffocate the Cuban economy. In fact, Trump said recently, “Cuba’s a mess, it’s a failing country, and they’re going to be next.”

Notably, the US “lost” Iran in 1979, when the deeply repressive Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown. He had been installed following a 1953 coup, organized with millions of dollars by CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Teddy Roosevelt. The coup overthrew the democratically-elected prime minister Mohammad Mosadegh, who in 1951, had nationalized Iranian oil. In 1954, Pahlavi signed the Consortium Agreement, turning over Iran’s oil industry to US, British, and French oil companies. The Shah, with hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment and services from the US military and CIA, ruled brutally. According to one testimony recorded by Amnesty International, summing up the experience of prisoners at the hands of the Shah’s secret police,

First he is beaten by several torturers at once, with sticks and clubs. If he doesn’t confess, he is hanged upside down and beaten; if this doesn’t work, he is (homosexually) raped; if he still shows signs of resistance, he is given electric shock which turns him into a howling dog; if he is still obstinate, his nails and sometimes all his teeth are pulled out.

Early on, the Trump administration signaled that this war would be in line with the legacy of US foreign policy, floating that Pahlavi’s son should be installed to lead an interim government. This expansive policy, flying in the face of his own “America First” rhetoric, is firmly in line with neoconservatism, which long identified Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil.” When Marco Rubio, for example, was running for president in 2016, he took on the campaign slogan “A New American Century,” borrowed from the neoconservative think tank the Project for a New American Century, founded in 1997 by Robert Kagan and William Kristol. As Kagan and Kristol wrote, “American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order. The appropriate goal of American foreign policy, therefore, is to preserve that hegemony as far into the future as possible.”

The December after 9/11, Dick Cheney claimed there were “forty or fifty countries” that potentially needed “military disciplining.” This would ultimately mark the beginning of the end for US hegemony. As journalist Eric Margolis has noted, Osama bin Laden “repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the US from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them.” Costs of War would report that twenty years of the War on Terror wrought a price tag of $8 trillion.

At the same time, the US had already begun to switch from, in the words of historian Charles Maier, an “empire of production” to an “empire of consumption,” visible in the way in which by the end of the twentieth century, the US had “the lowest household savings rates of any advanced economy; it ran a persistent federal budget deficit, except for the late 1990s,” the US deficit making up “nearly 6 percent of GDP and 15 percent of total foreign trade” by 2004. In this time, free trade agreements had gutted US manufacturing, transforming the Steel Belt into the Rust Belt and plummeting union membership. In the process, large tax cuts were passed for the rich while the social safety net was gutted and the externalities of this arrangement were responded to by fierce state repression like the War on Drugs, the militarization of the southern border, and the crack downs on civil liberties.

Inverted fascism has only accelerated this decline, doing so with little regard for democratic norms. The assault on Iran began with hardly any public relations, virtually no coalition building, and without congressional approval as is required by the constitution. While polling done at the times of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan showed majoritarian support, inverted fascism clearly lacks a popular mandate. One Reuters/Ipsos poll found only one in four Americans approved of US strikes on Iran. While Rubio has articulated the war in moral terms, saying, “Imagine an Iran that, instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran,” almost immediately after, Trump revealed the inverted fascist agenda: “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare.”

We are witnessing the pushing of the limits of inverted fascism, operating outside of any sense of international or domestic law or mandate, serving the interests of a collection of oil magnates, multinational corporations, and the military industrial complex. The privations of permanent war are meant as a condition of the Trump administration’s inverted fascist project, unfolding while the US spends over one billion dollars a day on the war machine. Massive state power and resources will be used to benefit billionaires and corporations while a harsh late capitalist reality exists for those in the US whose standard of living has been declining for decades.

This is an order Rubio has long endorsed. During Trump’s first term, over 100,000 people were killed by gun violence, an increasing number of them in mass shootings like the one in 2018 that killed fourteen students and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. After the shooting, CNN held a townhall with several politicians, including Rubio, then a senator from Florida. When asked if he planned on continuing to take money from the NRA, Rubio responded “The influence of these groups comes not from money. The influence comes from the millions of people that agree with the agenda.” Even so, in 2013, 2015, and 2016, Rubio opposed efforts to strengthen background checks. But, according to a poll done by Public Policy Polling, 70% of registered voters in Florida either believed Rubio supported background checks or weren’t sure what his position was. So, who’s really in the drivers’ seat for policy?

Chris Hedges has identified that the fact that the democratic process is in the hands of an economic elite and the public has virtually no influence over its own lives, means that our society is lacking “one of the primary social bonds in a democratic state…the vital shared belief that citizens have the power to govern themselves, that government exists to promote and protect their rights and interests.” Without bonds like these, societies are prone to “anomie,” a word Hedges borrows from sociologist Emile Durkheim, defined as a state of hopelessness and despair.

Resulting from this anomie, is a sort of nihilism that explains rising suicide rates, the opioid epidemic, and mass shootings. This is the sort of deterioration of late-stage capitalism that the Trump administration is accelerating. The fall of US hegemony, the devastation wrought in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza, and the perpetual economic crisis of living in the empire of consumption point toward a harsh reality of deterioration. Inverted fascism will only accelerate this decline. Its going to get a lot worse.Email