21st-Century Fascism and the Antichrist

By Boaventura de Sousa Santos

April 13, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

One of the most influential interpretations of 20th-century fascism is that fascism was a rebellion against the secularism of the modern era, which proposed a transcendent society both on a practical level (progress) and on a theoretical level (the possibility of transcending all limits). This rebellion led to the return of political religion (religion as a form of temporal power) in various guises as a political factor. This interpretation has been the subject of intense debate, and it is not my intention to analyze that debate. I am interested only in addressing the question of the relationship between fascism and religion. Speaking of fascism of the past and fascism of the future may entail the trap of thinking that there is no fascism in the present. It can also lead one to believe that fascism is a monolithic entity and that, therefore, there is only one type of fascism. Usually, definitions of fascism all refer to fascism as a political regime. I, on the contrary, distinguish between political fascism and social fascism; the former occurs in strictly political relations, and the latter, in social relations.

Fascism and Religion in the 20th Century

The relationship between political fascism in the first half of the 20th century and religion is complex. The secularism of modern society (the separation of church and state) was never complete and operated only in the metropolises, not in the colonies. As both religion and the secular state continued to vie for their place in society, the contradictions and disputes between the two coexisted with convergences, complicities, and mutual exploitations. In the case of Italian fascism, we can say that the sacralization of politics (the veneration of the fascist state, fascist rituals and symbols) signified the emergence of a political, secular, laic religion that came to exist in parallel with traditional religion (the privileged recognition of Catholicism). In 1932, Mussolini, unlike Robespierre, asserted that the fascist state did not have its own theology, but it did have its own morality.

Traditional religion was pragmatically used to reinforce the subjugation of the masses to the political designs of fascism. Conflicts existed and were intense between secular religion and Catholicism in the realm of education, since fascism did not want to relinquish its monopoly on the education of new generations. But the goal was always to abolish the boundaries between the political and religious spheres. None of this was entirely new.

Since the 15th century, movements had emerged to create civic religions, ranging from secret societies (Freemasonry, the Illuminati, Opus Dei) to Jacobinism and positivism. Faith in the nation and in nationalism was a way to combat socialism and contain Catholicism. The revolutionary socialism of the early Mussolini was intended to be more of a belief than a science. As he often said: “Humanity needs a belief.” It was about appealing to an experience of faith in the religion of the Nation. The patriotic religion. Giovanni Gentile argued that fascism had a religious character, “insofar as it takes life seriously,” and “as a movement it arose from the very soul of the nation.” It aimed to create an ethical state.

The sacralization of politics has always involved the sacralization of war, purifying violence: the ultimate sacrifice of body and soul for a sublime cause. Death and resurrection appear transfigured in the cult of martyrs and heroes. The connection between war and the awakening of religious sentiment is as evident in D’Annunzio as it is in Marinetti. In Il Fascio from 1921, it was written: “We are the custodians of a generation that, long ago, transcended the limits of its own historical reality and advances unstoppably toward the future… We are the highest of the high… The Holy Communion of war has molded us all with the same spirit of generous sacrifice.” Fascist belief transcended the natural attachment to life on earth.

In 1932, the Fascist youth newspaper asserted that “a good Fascist is religious.” And in 1930, young university students in Milan established a school of Fascist mysticism centered on the Duce as a living myth. A certain syncretism with Catholicism was evident, and potential conflicts of interpretation were resolved through devotion to the party. The leva fascista was a ritual of initiation for young people similar to “confirmation” in the Catholic Church, through which young people were “consecrated as fascists.” The ceremonies were held in public in every city and included, in addition to the consecration ceremonies, oath-taking ceremonies, the veneration of flags, and the cult of the fallen martyrs. The celebration of the founding of Rome, Rome Day, romanità, and the “Latin spirit” were transformed into archetypal models of the greatness of the fatherland and the “civilization of Italy.”

The various religious elements converged in the struggle against “the triumphant beast of Bolshevism.” The blessing of the gagliardetto, the flag of the fascist “esquadras,” was initially used as a ceremony of redemption for a community that had previously been governed by the socialists. If fascism was a religion, dissidents were “traitors to the faith.” The will of God and the will of the State merged. Traitors were excommunicated, banished from public life. Augusto Turati, party secretary from 1926 to 1930, preached to the youth “the need to believe blindly; to believe in fascism, in the Duce, in the Revolution, just as one believes in God… We accept the Revolution with pride, just as we accept these principles – even if we realize they are wrong, and we accept them without question.” In short, the supreme commandment: “believe, obey, and fight.”

Faith had been transformed into the supreme virtue, and the headquarters of the National Fascist Party were regarded as the “altars of the religion of the Fatherland.” The rejection of rationalism and the adoption of mythical thinking are clearly evident in this passage from a fascist book: “The masses cannot distinguish nuances; they need spirituality, piety, religious principles, and rituals.” The political program was far less important than the belief system, rituals, and symbols. Only in this way could massive, intense, and long-lasting support be guaranteed. The sacralization of violence was linked to the aestheticization of politics, as Walter Benjamin rightly noted: politics as a rupture of civilizational constraints. It was this rupture that led Ezra Pound to feel drawn to fascism. Fascist irrationality is aesthetically reconfigured as spontaneity, intensity, and authenticity. Extreme nonconformity toward the world is the flip side of blind obedience to the fascist leader. Hence, too, ultimately, the misery of the aestheticization of violence, especially when bodies began to be thrown into the crematoria.

Fascism seeps drop by drop into the very heart of democracy

In the post-1945 period, analyses and interpretations of the fascist phenomenon proliferated. A significant school of thought considered fascism a rupture in the historical continuity of European culture, and some viewed it as a social pathology or as an imposition by manipulative minorities lacking a coherent doctrine or ideology. In other words, fascism, being the result of political manipulation, had no genuine social base. Selfish interests or intimidation tactics had created the body of fascism’s followers. The opposing school of thought saw fascism as a continuation of the French Belle Époque and considered that fascism had a highly coherent system of thought.

These interpretations shared two characteristics. On the one hand, they conceived of fascism as a phenomenon of the past—a past that had been irreversibly overcome. On the other hand, they constituted an external view of fascism. They did not analyze the internal experience of fascism – the way it was lived by the populations where it functioned as a political system, or how it was passively accepted or enthusiastically celebrated by those populations. Much less were they interested in the facets of personality or psychic drives that made fascist life a “natural” or “normal” way of living for the vast majorities who actively or passively lived under fascism. How was it possible that Nietzsche or Heidegger were proto-Nazis, and that the combination of evolutionary theory, civilizational cycles, and racist biology led to fusions between Charles Darwin and Oswald Spengler?

More recently, the field of analysis has diversified. Internal interpretations of the fascist way of life have emerged, based on the idea that, while fascism sought to be religious and appealed to the irrational or mythical, pragmatic reasons of self-interest or intimidation were insufficient to explain adherence to fascism. On the other hand, renewed emphasis has been placed on psychoanalytic readings previously advanced by the Frankfurt School, which conceive of fascism as a permanent potentiality of communal life; consequently, it makes no sense to speak of fascism as something historically outdated. It is not a matter of theorizing the return of fascism, but rather of theorizing the continued presence of fascism in different forms and potentialities. In a recent book, Vladimir Safatle eloquently defends this theory in a book titled The Internal Threat: Psychoanalysis of the New Global Fascisms (available in Portuguese).

This analytical shift has a very clear sociopolitical rationale: the global rise of far-right political forces that advocate political fascism and, when in power, effectively seek to implement it. Perhaps what best characterizes the present time is the fact that liberal democracy is being used more and more frequently to enable anti-democratic fascists to come to power. These are politicians who are democratically elected but who, once elected, do not exercise power democratically. It is fascism seeping drop by drop into the very heart of democracy. The phenomenon is not new. It happened with Hitler after the 1932 elections. But the intensity with which it is occurring causes the quantity to transform into a new quality. The greater intensity of drip-feed political fascism feeds on the interstitial growth of another type of fascism: social fascism.

Social fascism is the entire system of social relations characterized by extreme power inequality, in which the stronger party holds a veto over the weaker party’s opportunities for life and survival. It consists of situations where people or groups are at the mercy of unilateral powers, without rights or legal defense, even if they formally live in a democracy. It is extreme social exclusion, abysmal exclusion, where human life is devalued by the logic of the market and power. Unlike political fascism, social fascism is pluralistic. I distinguish five forms of social fascism:

1. contractual fascism, in which the weaker party has no choice but to accept the conditions imposed by the stronger party, however unjust they may be, on pain of not surviving;

2. social apartheid fascism, in which excluded populations live in ghettos – urban areas that are not urbanized – and are at the mercy of all kinds of violence;

3. parastatal fascism, in which state violence is subcontracted to paramilitary groups, organized crime, and militias that commit the most extreme violence against populations with impunity;

4. financial fascism, in which powerful sectors of financial capital manipulate the state to, through usurious interest rates, extract a significant portion of the workers’ wages and to engineer permanent crises that justify the theft of the middle classes’ savings or the expropriation of assets pledged as collateral for debts;

5. insecurity fascism, which consists of using situations of extreme insecurity—accidents, extreme weather events, etc. – for which insurance policies do not exist or are inaccessible, and in which the protective intervention of the state is absent.

The intensification of these different forms of social fascism is largely due to neoliberalism as the dominant form of global capitalism. The gradual intensification of fascism aims to create the conditions for a new phase of political fascism. There is no determinism in this. There is only one objective, and it is up to democrats not to allow it to materialize

21st-Century Fascism and the Antichrist

Emerging fascism is more extremist in its religious identity than the fascism of the past. Like the latter, it is based on the sacralization of violence and the sanctification of elites, but it feeds on a dystopian vision of the future that crystallizes in the concept of the Antichrist. It is primarily present in the U.S., but its capacity for dissemination is enormous. Through the idea of the Antichrist, neo-fascism (or neo-Nazism) exacerbates its Christian identity and conceives of present-day society as a life-and-death struggle between Good and Evil where there is no room for negotiations or ceasefires, but only surrender and the extermination of the loser. Society is in a state of perpetual civil war, and its future is the apocalypse unless it is saved by racially and religiously supremacist states equipped with cutting-edge technologies for controlling populations.

On the religious front, there are significant differences between 20th-century fascism and 21st-century fascism. 20th-century fascism created a secular religion but maintained a relationship of cooperation and tension with traditional religion that presupposed the latter’s relative autonomy. 21st-century fascism takes its Christian identitarianism to the extreme and seeks to absorb the traditional religion closest to it: Pentecostal evangelical movements. The fusion between the political and religious spheres is now much more intense, if not total.

Twentieth-century fascism was based on the idea of a better future society, so much so that socialism was originally present in both Mussolini’s and Hitler’s convictions. In contrast, 21st-century fascism is dystopian and apocalyptic, and thus the Antichrist is not only communism and socialism; it is also democracy itself and the kind of coexistence it promotes, leading to the stagnation of technological progress, which is the only path to redemption. The politics of hatred that sustains civil war knows no political adversaries; it knows only enemies to be eliminated.

Given its apocalyptic nature, it is no surprise that 21st-century fascism, unlike 20th-century fascism, is promoted by sectors of the elite – generally the wealthiest, the billionaires, of whom Peter Thiel is a paradigmatic example. While for 20th-century fascism democracy was merely a decadent regime, for 21st-century fascism democracy, like human rights, is the embodiment of Evil. So too is the ecological struggle or any demand that places obstacles in the way of the infinite accumulation of wealth and the technology upon which it depends.

The relationship between 21st-century fascism and Zionism deserves special consideration. 20th-century fascism was anti-Semitic, understood as a radical racist policy against the Jewish people whose extermination it proclaimed and actively sought. Zionism, understood as the aspiration to create a Jewish state, was at that time a minority view among Jews. It found greater acceptance among Russian Jews and those from Eastern Europe (the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland). The Zionist organizations of the time sought and reached agreements with the Nazis, particularly regarding the relocation of Jews to Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel (agreements that, incidentally, met with little success among the Jewish people).

Shortly after World War II, many Jewish intellectuals drew attention to the danger of Zionism and to the similarities between Zionist methods and those of fascism and Nazism. In 1948, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt signed the famous letter to the New York Times, highlighting such similarities in the case of Menachem Begin’s party, today known as Likud.

Extremist Zionists, currently dominant in the Israeli government, share with fundamentalist evangelical Christians the idea of the apocalypse based on the same biblical readings, particularly the Book of Daniel (Dan 7-12) and the Apocalypse of John in the New Testament. Hence the emergence of Christian Zionism, which has greatly strengthened the global fascist movement of this century.

The Antichrist is, as Robert Fuller states, an American obsession. The fight against the Antichrist is today personified in the figure of billionaire Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir, whose artificial intelligence was apparently responsible for the deaths of the Iranian ayatollahs and the 208 children, elementary school students at the Shadjareh Tayyebeh School in the city of Minab, Iran.

Peter Thiel, without any theological training, travels the world denouncing as manifestations of the Antichrist leading to the final apocalypse all those political achievements for which we have fought over the last two hundred years to restore a modicum of dignity to the classes and social groups excluded by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy: a minimally redistributive state, through social policies (public health, housing, and education); democracy as a system of peaceful coexistence and a means of curbing the “excesses” of capitalism; human rights and the struggle for human dignity in societies where the prosperity of a few is achieved at the cost of the dehumanization of many; ecological struggles to build a new relationship with nature that allows for the reconstruction of natural cycles of vital regeneration. All of this is anathema that stands in the way of the salvation that only the intelligent technology of AI can bring. The existential threats are not climate change, the atomic threat, the nuclear threat, or the threat of AI. The existential threats come from resistance to the full development of these “advances.” All of this is a manifestation of an anti-Messiah, the triumphant beast of the end times.

The new promised land is Silicon Valley, theorized with reference to Carl Schmitt and, in a distorted and perverse way, to René Girard (the theory of the scapegoat and imitation as the flip side of rivalry). The new Antichrist is the entire historical accumulation of knowledge, organization, and struggle that has been warning of the existential risks humanity and planet Earth face if nothing is done to curb social, historical, environmental, racial, and sexual injustice; if democracy cannot defend itself against anti-democrats; if imperial will replaces international law; if war, genocide, and the plundering of resources are the only means of “resolving” conflicts. For the fascists of the Antichrist, all this historical accumulation of the last two hundred years is a training ground of stagnation that impedes the only possible redemption, technological redemption.

The fascism of the Antichrist and the extremist identitarianism—both Christian and Zionist—on which it is founded, are nonetheless manifestations of Eurocentric thought, which should come as no surprise since every civilization contains “its own” barbarism. And in true European fashion, the “laboratory” experiments of this fascism begin outside the Eurocentric metropolises, in Western Asia (Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Iran, and Lebanon), but one never knows where they end. After all, wasn’t the genocide of the Herero and Namaqua peoples of Namibia carried out by the Germans between 1904 and 1908 a rehearsal for the Holocaust of the Jews in Europe?Email

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Boaventura de Sousa Santos is the emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. His most recent book is Decolonizing the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice.

 

POLITICS

The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism

Recent debates have centered on whether it’s appropriate to compare Trump to European fascists. But radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.

ALBERTO TOSCANO

In the wake of the 2016 election, public intellectuals latched onto the new administration’s organic and ideological links with the alt- and far right. But a mass civic insurgency against racial terror—and the federal government’s authoritarian response—has pushed hitherto cloistered academic debates about fascism into the mainstream, with Peter E. Gordon, Samuel Moyn, and Sarah Churchwell taking to the pages of the New York Review of Books to hash out whether it is historically apt or politically useful to call Trump a fascist. The F-word has also been making unusual forays into CNN, the New York Times, and mainstream discourse. The increasing prospect that any transfer of power will be fraught—Trump has hinted he will not accept the results if he loses—has further intensified the stakes, with even the dependable neoliberal cheerleader Thomas Friedman conjuring up specters of civil war.

Is it historically apt or politically useful to call Trump a fascist? The long history of Black radical thinking about fascism and anti-fascist resistance provides direction in this debate.

Notwithstanding the changing terrain, talk of fascism has generally stuck to the same groove, namely asking whether present phenomena are analogous to those familiar from interwar European dictatorships. Sceptics of comparison underscore the way in which the analogy of fascism can either treat the present moment as exceptional, papering over the history of distinctly American forms of authoritarianism, or, alternatively, be so broad as to fail to define what is unique about our current predicament. Analogy’s advocates point to the need to detect family resemblances with past despotisms before it’s too late, often making their case by advancing some ideal-typical checklist, whether in terms of the elements of or the steps toward fascism. But what if our talk of fascism were not dominated by the question of analogy?

Attending to the long history of Black radical thinking about fascism and anti-fascist resistance—to what Cedric Robinson called a “Black construction of fascism” alternative to the “historical manufacture of fascism as a negation of Western Geist”—could serve to dislodge the debate about fascism from the deadlock of analogy, providing the resources to confront our volatile interregnum.

Long before Nazi violence came to be conceived of as beyond analogy, Black radical thinkers sought to expand the historical and political imagination of an anti-fascist left. They detailed how what could seem, from a European or white vantage point, to be a radically new form of ideology and violence was, in fact, continuous with the history of colonial dispossession and racial slavery.

Black radical thinkers have long sought to expand the historical and political imagination of an anti-fascist left, revealing fascism as a continuation of colonial dispossession and racial slavery. 

Pan-Africanist George Padmore, breaking with the Communist International over its failure to see the likenesses between “democratic” imperialism and fascism, would write in How Britain Rules Africa (1936) of settler-colonial racism as “the breeding-ground for the type of fascist mentality which is being let loose in Europe today.” He would go on to see in South Africa “the world’s classic Fascist state,” grounded on the “unity of race as against class.” Padmore’s “Colonial Fascism” thus anticipated Aimé Césaire’s memorable description of fascism as the boomerang effect of European imperialist violence.

African American anti-fascists shared the anti-colonial analysis that the Atlantic world’s history of racial violence belied the novelty of intra-European fascism. Speaking in Paris at the Second International Writers Congress in 1937, Langston Hughes declared: “We Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.” It was an insight that certainly would not have surprised any reader of W. E. B. Du Bois’s monumental reckoning with the history of U.S. racial capitalism, Black Reconstruction in America (1935). As Amiri Baraka would suggest much later, building on Du Bois’s passing mentions of fascism, the overthrow of Reconstruction enacted a “racial fascism” that long predated Hitlerism in its use of racial terror, conscription of poor whites, and manipulation of (to quote the famous definition of fascism by Georgi Dimitrov) “the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist sector of finance capital.”

In this view, a U.S. racial fascism could go unremarked because it operated on the other side of the color line, just as colonial fascism took place far from the imperial metropole. As Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials have suggested in their vital The US Antifascism Reader (2020):

For people of color at various historical moments, the experience of racialization within a liberal democracy could have the valence of fascism. That is to say, while a fascist state and a white supremacist democracy have very different mechanisms of power, the experience of racialized rightlessness within a liberal democracy can make the distinction between it and fascism murky at the level of lived experience. For those racially cast aside outside of liberal democracy’s system of rights, the word ‘fascism’ does not always conjure up a distant and alien social order.

Or, as French writer Jean Genet observed on May 1, 1970, at a rally in New Haven for the liberation of Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale: “Another thing worries me: fascism. We often hear the Black Panther Party speak of fascism, and whites have difficulty accepting the word. That’s because whites have to make a great effort of imagination to understand that blacks live under an oppressive fascist regime.”

It was largely thanks to the Panthers that the term “fascism” returned to the forefront of radical discourse and activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The United Front Against Fascism conference held in Oakland in 1969 brought together a wide swathe of the Old and New Lefts, as well as Asian American, Chicano, Puerto Rican (Young Lords), and white Appalachian (Young Patriots Organization) activists who had developed their own perspectives on U.S. fascism—for instance, by foregrounding the experience of Japanese internment during World War II. In a striking indication of the peculiarities and continuities of U.S. anti-fascist traditions, among the chief planks of the conference was the notionally reformist demand for community or decentralized policing—to remove racist white officers from Black neighborhoods and exert local checks on law enforcement.

Political prisoners close to the Panthers theorized specifically about what we could call “late fascism” (by analogy with “late capitalism”) in the United States. At the same time that debates about “new fascisms” were polarizing radical debate across Europe, the writing and correspondence of Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson generated a theory of fascism from the lived experience of the violent nexus between the carceral state and racial capitalism. Davis, the Black Marxist and feminist scholar, needs little introduction, her 1970 imprisonment on trumped-up conspiracy charges having rocketed her to the status of household name in the United States and an icon of solidarity worldwide. Fewer remember that the conspiracy charge against Davis arose from an armed courtroom attack by her seventeen-year-old bodyguard, Jonathan Jackson, with the goal of forcing the release of the Soledad Brothers, three African American prisoners facing the death penalty for the killing of a white prison guard. Among them was Jonathan’s older brother, the incarcerated Black revolutionary George Jackson, with whom Davis corresponded extensively. Jackson was killed by a prison sniper during an escape attempt on August, 21, 1971, a few days before the Soledad Brothers were to be tried.

In one of his prison letters on fascism, posthumously collected in Blood in My Eye (1972), Jackson offered the following reflection:

When I am being interviewed by a member of the old guard and point to the concrete and steel, the tiny electronic listening device concealed in the vent, the phalanx of goons peeping in at us, his barely functional plastic tape-recorder that cost him a week’s labor, and point out that these are all manifestations of fascism, he will invariably attempt to refute me by defining fascism simply as an economic geo-political affair where only one party is allowed to exist aboveground and no opposition political activity is allowed.

Jackson encourages us to consider what happens to our conceptions of fascism if we take our bearings not from analogies with the European interwar scene, but instead from the materiality of the prison-industrial complex, from the “concrete and steel,” from the devices and personnel of surveillance and repression.

In their writing and correspondence, marked by interpretive differences alongside profound comradeship, Davis and Jackson identify the U.S. state as the site for a recombinant or even consummate form of fascism. Much of their writing is threaded through Marxist debates on the nature of monopoly capitalism, imperialism and capitalist crises, as well as, in Jackson’s case, an effort to revisit the classical historiography on fascism. On these grounds, Jackson and Davis stress the disanalogies between present forms of domination and European exemplars, but both assert the privileged vantage point provided by the view from within a prison-judicial system that could accurately be described as a racial state of terror.

Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson saw the U.S. state—the carceral state and racial capitalism—as the site of fascism. This fascism originated from liberal democracy itself. 

This both echoes and departs from the Black radical theories of fascism, such as Padmore’s or Césaire’s, which emerged from the experience of the colonized. The new, U.S. fascism that Jackson and Davis strive to delineate is not an unwanted return from the “other scene” of colonial violence, but originates from liberal democracy itself. Indeed, it was a sense of the disavowed bonds between liberal and fascist forms of the state which, for Davis, was one of the great lessons passed on by Herbert Marcuse, whose grasp of this nexus in 1930s Germany allowed him to discern the fascist tendencies in the United States of his exile.

Both Davis and Jackson also stress the necessity to grasp fascism not as a static form but as a process, inflected by its political and economic contexts and conjunctures. Checklists, analogies, or ideal-types cannot do justice to the concrete history of fascism. Jackson writes of “the defects of trying to analyze a movement outside of its process and its sequential relationships. You gain only a discolored glimpse of a dead past.” He remarks that fascism “developed from nation to nation out of differing levels of traditionalist capitalism’s dilapidation.”

Where Jackson and Davis echo their European counterparts is in the idea that “new” fascisms cannot be understood without seeing them as responses to the insurgencies of the 1960s and early 1970s. For Jackson, fascism is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary form, as evidenced by the violence with which it represses any consequential threat to the state. But fascism does not react immediately against an ascendant revolutionary force; it is a kind of delayed counterrevolution, parasitic on the weakness or defeat of the anti-capitalist left, “the result of a revolutionary thrust that was weak and miscarried—a consciousness that was compromised.” Jackson argues that U.S.-style fascism is a kind of perfected form—all the more insidiously hegemonic because of the marriage of monopoly capital with the (racialized) trappings of liberal democracy. As he declared:

Fascism has established itself in a most disguised and efficient manner in this country. It feels so secure that the leaders allow us the luxury of a faint protest. Take protest too far, however, and they will show their other face. Doors will be kicked down in the night and machine-gun fire and buckshot will become the medium of exchange.

In Davis’s concurrent theorizing, the carceral, liberationist perspective on fascism has a different inflection. For Davis, fascism in the United States takes a preventive and incipient form. The terminology is adapted from Marcuse, who remarked, in an interview from 1970, “In the last ten to twenty years we’ve experienced a preventative counterrevolution to defend us against a feared revolution, which, however, has not taken place and doesn’t stand on the agenda at the moment.” Some of the elements of Marcuse’s analysis still resonate (particularly poignant, in the wake of Breonna Taylor’s murder by police, is his mention of no-knock warrants):

The question is whether fascism is taking over in the United States. If by that we understand the gradual or rapid abolition of the remnants of the constitutional state, the organization of paramilitary troops such as the Minutemen, and granting the police extraordinary legal powers such as the notorious no-knock law which does away with the inviolability of the home; if one looks at the court decisions of recent years; if one knows that special troops—so-called counterinsurgency corps—are being trained in the United States for possible civil war; if one looks at the almost direct censorship of the press, television and radio: then, as far as I’m concerned, one can speak with complete justification of an incipient fascism. . . . American fascism will probably be the first which comes to power by democratic means and with democratic support.

Davis was drawn to Marcuse’s contention that “fascism is the preventive counter-revolution to the socialist transformation of society” because of how it resonated with racialized communities and activists. In the experience of many Black radicals, the aspect of their revolutionary politics that most threatened the state was not the endorsement of armed struggle, but rather the “survival programs,” those enclaves of autonomous social reproduction facilitated by the Panthers and more broadly practiced by Black movements. While nominally mobilized against the threat of armed insurrection, the ultimate target of counterinsurgency were these experiments with social life outside and against the racial state—especially when they edged toward what Huey P. Newton named “revolutionary intercommunalism.”

Race, gender, and class determine how fascist the country might seem to any given individual.

What can be gleaned from Davis’s account is the way that fascism and democracy can be experienced very differently by different segments of the population. In this regard, Davis is attuned to the ways in which race and gender, alongside class, can determine how fascist the country seems to any given individual. As Davis puts it, fascism is “primarily restricted to the use of the law-enforcement-judicial-penal apparatus to arrest the overt and latent revolutionary trends among nationally oppressed people, tomorrow it may attack the working class en masse and eventually even moderate democrats.” But the latter are unlikely to fully perceive this phenomenon because of the manufactured invisibility of the site of the state’s maximally fascist presentation, namely, prisons with their “totalitarian aspirations.”

The kind of fascism diagnosed by Davis is a “protracted social process,” whose “growth and development are cancerous in nature.” We thus have the correlation in Davis’s analysis between, on the one hand, the prison as a racialized enclave or laboratory and, on the other, the fascist strategy of counterrevolution, which flow through society at large but are not experienced equally by everyone everywhere. As Davis has written more recently:

The dangerous and indeed fascistic trend toward progressively greater numbers of hidden, incarcerated human populations is itself rendered invisible. All that matters is the elimination of crime—and you get rid of crime by getting rid of people who, according to the prevailing racial common sense, are the most likely people to whom criminal acts will be attributed.

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We Are Watching the Rise of Democratic Fascism

Bertolt Brecht predicted it in 1942: American fascism would be democratic in the American fashion. He was right. That's precisely what makes it so hard to stop.

By Carolin Amlinger, Oliver Nachtwey , Loren Balhorn 

May 4, 2026

Source: Jacobin

Anti-fascists protesting against Trump in Tucson, Arizona, 15 January 2018 | Image by Johnny Silvercloud

“American fascism would . . . be correspondingly democratic in the American fashion.”

— Bertolt Brecht, Journals

At the end of last year, Donald Trump deployed more than two thousand Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to Minneapolis and St Paul, essentially occupying the Twin Cities and making his previous deployments of the National Guard to Washington, DC, and other Democrat-run cities look like a neighborhood patrol in comparison. Agents hunted down and arrested some three thousand migrants and murdered Reneé Good and Alex Pretti, two US citizens who had joined protests against the operation.

The blitz in Minneapolis made it clear that Trump intended for ICE to function not just as an authoritarian police force with an outsize budget, but as his own political militia. This was evident not least in ICE’s blatant unprofessionalism, with agents often wearing casual clothing and receiving only minimal training, while purposefully and repeatedly undermining local governments and police departments. But it was also meant to be a spectacle: a public display of cruelty toward migrants that simultaneously demonstrated the limits of peaceful protest to his opponents. Even the podcaster Joe Rogan compared ICE to the Gestapo.

Though Rogan’s analogy may have been flawed, it hints at the more fundamental issue of the nature of the Trump administration. During his first term, that question appeared to be settled. Despite his noxious rhetoric, Trump’s track record in office was more or less what could be expected from a Republican president, and with his loss in 2020, it seemed US politics would largely return to normal. That is, until January 6, 2021, when a mob whipped up by Trump’s conspiracy-mongering about a stolen election stormed the Capitol in an attempt to prevent the peaceful transition of power. By then, it should have become clear that Trump was more than just another populist with authoritarian leanings. But was he, then, a fascist?

Historical fascism first came to power some hundred years prior to January 6, in October 1922, when Benito Mussolini led fifty thousand Blackshirts and seized power in the March on Rome (or rather, compelled conservative elites to hand power to him). The storming of the Capitol was obviously not the March on Rome. Trump never explicitly called on anyone to seize anything, and when his supporters finally managed to make it into the building, they mostly milled around and took selfies.

It was a carnivalesque event featuring a wild hodgepodge of protagonists — far-right militiamen, QAnon followers, Tea Party activists, bikers, gamers, manosphere cosplayers — orchestrated through social media but organized only to a limited extent. In that sense, January 6 was symptomatic of a broader trend: today’s far right is not vertically integrated but effectively decentralized, functioning more like a swarm than a combat formation. Moreover, it exhibits a dangerous banality: unlike its twentieth-century predecessors, it plays out in line with the rules of electoral democracy and within our everyday lives. Fascist propaganda is practically ubiquitous on social media platforms like X and increasingly prominent in pop culture. In Spain, a remix of the Falangist hymn “Cara al Sol” topped the Spotify charts, while in Germany, rich kids and skinheads alike delight in chanting xenophobic slogans to the beat of Italian DJ Gigi D’Agostino’s Eurodance hit, “L’amour toujours.” The fascism of today dances to the tune of democracy.

What Is — and What Isn’t — Fascist?

Even during Trump’s first term, debates raged around the extent to which his rule constituted a new form of fascism. While progressives and liberals tended to apply the label quite, well, liberally, critics emphasized that many vital elements of historical fascism were simply not present under Trump. Voices on the left in particular emphasized the roots of Trump’s politics in American democracy and its continuities with the country’s settler-colonial origins.

Fascism is a drastic, historically charged word that is often used merely to provoke a moralistic reaction. In analytical terms, however, it is entirely appropriate to treat fascism as something that is not — or is no longer — exclusively historical. A tsunami of political regression is sweeping across the Western world, and episodes of violence are on the rise, whether shootings of Black Lives Matter activists, the storming of the Capitol, the right-wing riots in the UK, or death threats against politicians in provincial Germany. A slew of parties whose politics go much further than the illiberal authoritarianism of a Viktor Orbán are now within striking distance of power. In eastern Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) — whose far-right current dreams of “system change,” meaning an end to parliamentary democracy — is polling at 40 percent.Fascism is a drastic, historically charged word that is often used merely to provoke a moralistic reaction.

That by no means implies that all right-wingers are fascists. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris repeatedly called Trump a fascist. What she really meant was that he was an autocrat. The same is true of philosopher Jason Stanley, for whom the United States is already fascist — which is obviously not the case. While the Democrats may be an incompetent, feckless opposition, they are neither outlawed nor persecuted. Militias are not dragging Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez off to the camps. Stanley applies the term to all ultranationalist movements in which the nation is represented by a single leader. By doing so, he loses sight of fascism’s specific characteristics. He also regards the American South during slavery as a form of fascism. Surely, any system that denies a group of people equal rights and subjects them to forced labor is profoundly unjust, but American slave-owning democracy guaranteed free elections, the separation of powers, and comprehensive civil rights for the white majority — things that would be inconceivable in a fascist society. Furthermore, Stanley blurs the distinction between social movement and political regime, lumping together all ultranationalisms regardless of how they emerge or whether they exercise power.

In Germany, many now deploy the term from a gradualist perspective, describing a “fascization” synonymous with the radicalization of neoliberalism or even bourgeois society as a whole. But by expanding the concept of fascism into a catchall category applicable to a wide range of historical injustices, we lose the ability to develop a clear, specific analysis of the present. We also risk underestimating the transformative nature of fascist forces by blurring the qualitative difference between democratic authoritarianism and fascism. After all, just as many deportations were carried out under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but only Trump turns them into a public spectacle for his supporters to relish.

Neither Tragedy Nor Farce

If the concept of fascism is to be applied to the present day, it must first be placed in historical context. Despite certain similarities in program and style, what is referred to as fascism today is not the same as Nazism, a mass movement based on a virulently racist ideology combining ethnonationalist propaganda with violent pogroms. Nor is fascism returning as a tool to crush the workers’ movement in an era of acute class struggle.

Historically, fascism refers to a specific form of the extreme right during the interwar period characterized by a cult of the leader, organized street violence, dictatorship, and a drive to eliminate all opponents and enemies of the people whether real or imagined. Against this backdrop, authoritarian governments are not necessarily fascist: Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán may have sought to transform their countries into explicitly illiberal democracies, but they are not dictators.Contemporary far-right currents exhibit more differences from than similarities to historical fascism, while imperialism and colonialism today take on a distinctly different form.

Contemporary far-right currents exhibit more differences from than similarities to historical fascism, while imperialism and colonialism today take on a distinctly different form. For one thing, the European and Atlantic powers are not at war with each other. And while recent wars for geopolitical dominance such as in Afghanistan or the Middle East have certainly produced a lot of veterans, their numbers pale in comparison to the masses of surplus men who found themselves discarded and alienated from mainstream society after World War I.

The sociopolitical and economic conditions are also different. The 2008 financial crisis gave right-wing forces renewed momentum, but today’s economic crises and the associated social fallout are not comparable to the 1930s, when mass unemployment ate away at people’s sense of purpose and clouded their judgment. Today central banks and governments regularly intervene to mitigate crises. The stock market has reached new highs in recent years, and, much unlike the Great Depression, the United States neared full employment during Trump’s first term. By the same token, we have inflation, but no hyperinflation, and instead of a powerful socialist alternative vying for power, our current historical moment is characterized by a profoundly weak left. In this respect, the 2020s are certainly not a repeat of the 1920s and 1930s — neither as tragedy, nor as farce.

Fascism’s Counter-Modernity

The new fascism can thus only be understood within its own historical context. Trump’s authoritarianism reflects an American society that is still shaped by the legacy of slavery, and in which inequality, racism, and violence condition public life far more distinctly than in Europe. Nativism plays a role, as does white supremacy. In Europe, by contrast, far-right parties tend to mobilize a kind of state-oriented nationalism that seeks to combat alleged threats to national unity.

One of the main driving forces behind historical fascism was the fight against social equality, which explains to a large extent its determination to annihilate the social democratic and communist movements. Though the fascists may not have been direct agents of capital enlisted to save capitalism, as Joseph Stalin’s Comintern claimed, fascism would nevertheless have been inconceivable without the support of sections of big capital. Nor was it an irrational movement of sinister seducers and the seduced, as earlier scholarship on fascism claimed. Nevertheless, as Max Horkheimer famously said, “Whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism” — for capitalism and fascism are both systems that naturalize inequality.Contemporary fascism, we argue, is rooted in a specific structure of feeling found in modern societies: the quest for a different kind of modernity.

Contemporary fascism, we argue, is rooted in a specific structure of feeling found in modern societies: the quest for a different kind of modernity. Modern society claims to oppose natural hierarchies and allow reason and rationality to triumph over faith and superstition. It seeks to subjugate nature to humanity, yet simultaneously acknowledges humanity’s natural finitude and limitations. The central promise of modern society, however — that of social integration through upward mobility — no longer holds. The specter of social decline has led to a kind of generalized negativity. Liberal modernity has thus brought forth a destructiveness directed against itself: a new fascism that offers destruction as a means of healing.

Fascism proves attractive in times of rapid social change not least because it fosters a collective narcissistic identification. Every angry and disoriented individual can merge with the community of the nation, which in turn is demarcated from individualistic, multicultural society. The various factions of this community are united by the destructive rebellion against liberal democracy and the desire to restore social hierarchies.

That is why fascism neither was nor is opposed to modernity in the strict sense. In fact, it exhibits many facets of modernity, such as in the way it deals with technology or the economy. Fascism, then, strives not for anti-modernity, but rather an alternative counter-modernity: a mythic order that promises ethos and stability in contrast to the cold rationalities and fluid, crisis-ridden nature of modern bourgeois society. Moreover, it sees itself as an eternal order defined by greatness, in which even the individual can attain such greatness (Peter Thiel or Elon Musk come to mind).

The Oxford historian Roger Griffin developed an influential definition of fascism in the early 1990s. In his view, fascism is a revolutionary movement with a “mythic core,” an imaginary of the nation and its rebirth as a form of “populist ultranationalism.” Fascism always required a national myth about the past in order to turn it toward the future. For fascism was not merely about restoring a bygone utopia, but also about the fantasy of a grand future — a narcissistic identification with the nation to which world-historical greatness was ascribed. Here, one is reminded of the Nazis’ feverish hallucinations of a “thousand-year Reich”.

The Joy of Violence

Fascism scholar Robert Paxton goes beyond Griffin’s ideological dimension on one crucial point, emphasizing the element of practice. According to Paxton, fascism is a “form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity.” Unity, strength, and purity are achieved through exclusion and violence directed against political opponents and minorities. Violence is a defining feature of fascism, but it carries far more significance: it is affective, redemptive, liberating, a means of transgression as well as transcendence through which one becomes one with oneself. Violence also plays a role in the myth of the nation as victim, just as one is oneself a victim of elites, external threats, and foreigners.There was no room for individualism in historical fascist thought: society consisted of regiments and divisions, not individuals.

There was thus no room for individualism in historical fascist thought: society consisted of regiments and divisions, not individuals. Historical fascism understood itself as the total integration of all social life. Economically, fascism was also a means of renewing capitalism — a capitalism purged of class struggle, its place taken by the national community. The fascist movement purges the nation of its opponents for the sake of transcendence. Everything that stands in the way of its rebirth must be destroyed. Fascism therefore always involved the existence of militias, in which the energies of fascist men can be unleashed according to “rhythm, intoxication, compulsion, and woe,” according to “marching, stamping, climbing, chasing, thrusting, and triumphing,” as the German sociologist Klaus Theweleit once put it.

Italian historian Enzo Traverso summed up the conceptual problem at the heart of our debate in his book The New Faces of Fascism: “In short, the concept of fascism seems both inappropriate and indispensable for understanding this new reality.” What we are dealing with, according to Traverso, is neither a return of the old fascism nor something completely different and new, but rather a hybrid, heterogeneous political movement that draws on the politically restorative imagination of the past, but whose future remains unclear. When asked whether Trump is a fascist, the analysis is binary: either he is or he is not, or one checks off a list of characteristics to see whether enough criteria are met. This perspective is far too static, taking too little account of the dynamics and evolution of the radical right.

A Democratic Fascism?

The original fascists wore the fascist label with pride. This began to change after the crimes of the Holocaust came to light, prompting Theodor W. Adorno to comment on the transformation of the far-right parties’ relationship to democracy: “Openly anti-democratic aspects are removed. On the contrary: they constantly invoke true democracy and accuse the others of being anti-democratic.” It is in this sense that we propose the term democratic fascism to describe the far right emerging today.The concept of democratic fascism appears contradictory, since fascism as a political regime was the negation of democracy.

At first glance, the concept of democratic fascism appears contradictory, since fascism as a political regime was the negation of democracy. But in the simplistic, catchphrase-driven use of the term, too little attention is paid to the process through which fascism emerges and comes to power within the democratic order, in order to destroy it later on. In Germany, only a few weeks passed between Adolf Hitler’s lawful election and the Enabling Act. In Italy, it took Mussolini three years to establish a full-fledged dictatorship.

The concept of democratic fascism thus reflects the fact that fascism today manifests itself in a contradictory and ambiguous situation. The Trump administration is not a fascist regime, and Germany does not face a fascist putsch. Far-right extremists can achieve certain goals even within a democracy. Despite all their differences, however, historical and contemporary fascist forces share a very similar self-image: they see themselves as national revolutionaries. This was most clearly articulated by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who told supporters, “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

The contemporary fascist movement sees itself as renewing democracy with the ultimate aim of undermining it. At least for now, dictatorship is not on the agenda. Thus, the core of democratic fascism is its ambivalent relationship to democracy. Unlike historical fascists, who consistently and openly declared their intent to destroy parliamentarism, democratic fascists (even if they occasionally flirt with monarchist fantasies) seek only to strip democracy of its liberal institutions.

So far, Trump’s brand of fascism has been more of a form of what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way call “competitive authoritarianism.” There is real competition for political power and elections take place, even if authoritarian incumbents tip the scales of political competition in their favor. The opposition is legal, but the judicial system and the media no longer act independently and undermine political competition. Nevertheless, democratic fascism is based on a fundamentally different conception of democracy than the one we know. It is often grounded in the writings of the German legal scholar Carl Schmitt, the “chief jurist” of the Third Reich who once described the Nazis’ Nuremberg Race Laws as a “constitution of freedom.” Today, Schmitt is one of the central points of reference for Peter Thiel and J. D. Vance.

For Schmitt, democracy was not to be confused with universal suffrage and parliamentary debate — true democracy was the “identity of rulers and ruled.” Democracy, he argued, existed when the general will of the people was expressed in a national leader. This presupposed “a people whose members are similar to one another and who have the will to political existence.” Schmitt made it unmistakably clear what this meant: “Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second — if the need arises — elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.” In democratic fascism, the homogeneity of the general will manifests itself in majoritarianism — the reshaping of democracy in the interests of the “native” majority, who see their very existence as fundamentally threatened by the expansion of minority rights and whose political and social freedoms must therefore be curtailed. Combined with mass deportations, it is essentially a modernized variant of Schmitt’s thinking.

Trump might be building an authoritarian state to target minorities or the opposition, but he wants to scale back the state’s reach in most other areas, whether education or the environment. Whereas the Nazis sought to control and direct “ordinary people” and the business class, Trump’s state seeks to get out of their way. Businessmen should be able to do what they want — make profits — with state support but without state direction. Historical fascism was an unbridled behemoth, as Franz Neumann called it, a state of lawlessness. Today’s fascism is more like a joint venture in a deregulated state that neither environmental regulations nor antidiscrimination laws can stop. Instead of the total integration promised by historical fascism, democratic fascism is more like a radicalization of neoliberal disintegration.Democratic fascism is not based on a party following, but on a highly politicized public sphere, a hyperpolitics that forms bonds within affective networks.

Democratic fascism is not based on a party following, but on a highly politicized public sphere, a hyperpolitics that forms bonds within affective networks. It constitutes a polymorphous political spectrum unmoored from any rigid set of characteristics. Republicans who have converted to Trump supporters, MAGA enthusiasts, libertarian authoritarians from Silicon Valley, Evangelical Christians, Proud Boys, and angry Tea Party supporters have formed an alliance under Trump’s leadership, but each follows its own logic. If there is such a thing as a common denominator, it is that they are all anti-egalitarian, anti-cosmopolitan, and exclusionary.

In this regard, democratic fascism is obsessively focused on its enemies, while envisioning a modernized form of the nation. Democratic fascists want to roll back the liberalization of personal lifestyles but have no problem with open homosexuality, provided it reproduces social hierarchies. Their attacks on trans people are directed against the non-binary that undermines such hierarchies.

Racism, too, has different layers. Population policy is a key instrument of national governance: the goal is to reduce “low-IQ,” “garbage” migration, as Trump puts it, but not to create a homogeneous national community. When it comes to gender relations, the Right around Trump is strongly femonationalist, attacking abortion rights and promoting traditional family models, but not fundamentally questioning women’s participation in the workforce or political decision-making.

Trump, the Resentment Entrepreneur

Though the new fascism also refers to a mythical national past, it only partially imagines something like a transcendent order. Instead, it is more a kind of restorative origin myth. Donald Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is about restoring something: America is to be great again. The new empire has become profane and secular — we want an empire that rules the world, but one that is great on its own.

A broad spectrum of fantasies of order can be found within MAGA’s intellectual milieu, ranging from monarchical market economies with a CEO as emperor, private cities and private states, to dark utopias of technological singularity and colonizing Mars. Trump’s visions of the future, by contrast, appear quite down-to-earth. Transgressive fantasies are found only in memes or hallucinatory AI-generated clips in which he appears alternately as a Roman emperor, a vengeful and punishing superhero, or a golden statue in an ethnically cleansed Gaza.

Neofascists are also less concerned with molecularly restructuring the entire society into a national body: there is no intention to create a comprehensive totalitarian state that dictates politics, the economy, and daily life, despite bans on gender-neutral language, restrictions on abortion rights, and the persecution of Palestine solidarity. Neofascism is about the restoration of a neo-authoritarian hierarchical society, rather than the creation of a totalitarian state.

Trump is not (yet) a dictator, nor is he a fascist of the classical school who promises transcendence and salvation. He comes across more like a vulgar mafia boss. But his political style, as Christopher Browning described it, is fascist: “The inflammatory rallies; the incessant mongering of fear, grievance, and victimization; the casual endorsement of violence; the pervasive embrace of conspiracy theories; the performative cruelty; the feral instinct for targeting marginalized and vulnerable minorities; and the cult of personality.” The fascist spectrum necessarily includes flirting with what the sociologist Michael Mann once called “moralized violence,” used to justify said violence as necessary, legitimate, and right.

The fascist style can also be observed in the AfD, where provincial party leader Björn Höcke gleefully quotes the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who in 2016 spoke of “well-tempered cruelty” when outlining his vision for European migration policy. From a global perspective, both democratic and historical fascism are in many respects aesthetically and affectively oriented. The pioneering thinker of the German New Right, Armin Mohler, once summed this up succinctly: Fascist rhetoric is not about logical connections, but rather about “setting a certain tone, creating a climate, evoking associations.”

Thus far, liberals have tried to stop Trump and other far-right radicals with lawfare. This strategy was bound to fail. First, under capitalism, the balance of forces is reflected in the legal system, and Trump represents the class of property owners. Secondly — and much more importantly — fascism is an affective atmosphere. Trump was able to gain power by addressing a structure of feeling, a profound alienation from capitalist modernity. He is the perfect resentment entrepreneur, both as a producer and as a representative. The Left has not yet found an effective, durable response to him. Still, people are more resilient than we might fear. The resistance to ICE in Minneapolis was so effective in part because it dispelled the American right’s narrative: multiethnic communities demonstrated more cohesion than the right-wing prophets of apocalyptic social decline could ever have imagined.

Translation by Loren Balhorn.

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Carolin Amlinger is a sociologist of literature and research associate at the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies at the University of Basel. She is coauthor of Offended Freedom: The Rise of Libertarian Authoritarianism.

Oliver Nachtwey is a professor of sociology at the University of Basel. He is coauthor of Offended Freedom: The Rise of Libertarian Authoritarianism.

Loren Balhorn is editor in chief of Jacobin’s German-language edition.

This article was originally published by Jacobin; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Carolin Amlinger

Carolin Amlinger is a sociologist of literature and research associate at the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies at the University of Basel. She is coauthor of Offended Freedom: The Rise of Libertarian Authoritarianism.