Fascism Today

Fascism Today

re:articulate

Trumpism in the US, Brexit in the UK, Meloni’s ‘post-fascist’ Italy, the rise of the AfD in Germany, Orban’s ‘illiberal’ Hungary, Putin’s doctrine of the ‘Russian world’, Erdoganism in Turkey, Hindutva in Modi’s India, Netanyahu’s ultra-Zionist government in Israel, Milei’s far-right ‘libertarian’ government in Argentina: in the face of the increasing influence of far-right parties and movements around the world it is hard to shake the thought that fascism has returned. From the autocratic concentration of state power to the unchecked power of right-wing tech-billionaires like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, the normalization of mass surveillance, detention, and deportation, imperialist wars and genocide, the violent entrenchment of fossil capital, the rise of far-right militias, the demonization and scapegoating of migrants, the unemployed, the homeless, Muslims and Jews, trans people, feminists, antifascists, climate activists, etc., everything seems to be pointing toward the formation of a new globalized fascism.

In “The Great Moving Right Show” (1979), Stuart Hall rejected the notion of fascism as a means of understanding the electoral triumph of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party in the UK and its relation to the far-right National Front. Instead, he insisted on the need for a wider (conjunctural) analysis of the conditions and practices that resulted in the formation of a new “authoritarian populism”. During the first Trump administration, i.e. before the January 6 attack on the Capitol in 2021 and the unconstitutional deployment of marines to Los Angeles on June 9, 2025, the sociologist and historian of fascism Dylan Riley argued in a similar way that Trumpism is better understood as a form of American-style “Bonapartism”, thus echoing Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism as a form of authoritarian populism.¹

Hall emphasized the role of capitalist crisis that had brought about a crisis of the (welfare) state, but he insisted that the response was not simply determined by economic conditions and that it was substantially different from the historical fascism of the interwar period:

What we have to explain is a move toward “authoritarian populism”—an exceptional form of the capitalist state—which, unlike classical fascism, has retained most (though not all) of the formal representative institution in place, and which at the same time has been able to construct around itself an active popular consent. This undoubtedly represents a decisive shift in the balance of hegemony, and the National Front has played a “walk-on” part in this drama. It has entailed a striking weakening of democratic forms and initiatives, but not their suspension. We may miss precisely what is specific to this exceptional form of the crisis of the capitalist state by mere name-calling.²

According to Hall, the efforts to preserve capitalism and the state in the face of a deep crisis produced “a new balance of forces, the emergence of new elements, the attempt to put together a new ‘historical bloc’, new political configurations and ‘philosophies’”.³ Today, however, we can see the very neoliberal capitalist order that the “authoritarian populism” of Thatcher, Reagan and others helped to establish and legitimize collapsing in on itself; once again, “new political configurations and philosophies” are emerging. This time, we think, it is adequate to employ the label of fascism.

We understand fascism as a particular response to capitalist crisis, not an external threat or spontaneous rupture, but a political reaction from within capitalist society. As Antonio Gramsci analyzed in the 1920s, the crisis that fascism responds to is a “crisis of hegemony, or crisis of the state as a whole”⁴ that creates a period of transition marked by an intensification of political contestation and coercive measures: “a time of monsters”.⁵ As such, it can be a gradual process of social formation that re-articulates and intensifies existing capitalist relations and fundamental antagonisms of race, class, and gender. The efforts to preserve capitalism and the state in the face of a deepening crisis increasingly take on new extremes of authoritarianism that might be best understood as contemporary forms of “fascisation”—a process rather than a fixed state—in response to the (poly-)crisis of global capitalism.⁶

On the Concept of Fascism

Unlike the military dictatorships of historical fascism, contemporary fascism, until now, has remained formally democratic, while systematically attacking and undermining liberal democratic principles and institutions. In the Marxist tradition, fascism has generally been understood as a ruling-class strategy to preserve capitalism and the nation state in the face of a deep crisis of capitalism, but also as a reaction to an imminent socialist revolution. The capitalist class, however, is no longer primarily national; and a socialist revolution does not seem to be on the horizon either. Nationalsozialismus, thus, is not the order of the day. Instead, the political sociologist William Robinson describes “twenty-first-century fascism” as “at core […] the triangulation of transnational capital with reactionary political power in the state and neo-fascist forces in civil society”.⁷

Historians of fascism overwhelmingly study the European fascist dictatorships of the inter- and post-war period—Mussolini’s Italy, Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain (sometimes also the Portuguese Salazar, Greek Metaxas and French Vichy regimes)—often sidelining the close ties between colonialism, imperialism and fascist regimes. Recent contributions to the study of fascism have sought to correct this and to update the concept of fascism to the present conjuncture, often taking its cues from Aimé Césaire’s concept of fascism as an “imperial boomerang,” first developed in Discourse on Colonialism (1950).⁸ Today there is a whole array of adjectival fascisms that indicate the need for as well as the difficulties of such a project and the attempts to grasp what exactly is new about the current kinds of fascism: “post-fascism” (Traverso), “late fascism” (Toscano), “techno-fascism” (Mimura/Chayka), “fossil fascism” (Malm & Zetkin Collective), “end times fascism” (Klein/Taylor).

According to the British historian Roger Griffin’s canonical definition, the central myth at the heart of fascism is that of returning the “nation” to an imagined “former greatness” in the face of a perceived existential crisis. Griffin’s term for this is “palingenetic ultranationalism”, combining the Greek word for ‘birth’ genesis with that for ‘again’ palin. “Ultranationalism” is crucial here because the fascist concept of nation differs significantly from the idealized liberal-democratic understanding of national belonging as defined by citizenship, and is essentially racist, or ethno-nationalist völkisch.⁹ Similarly, Michael Feola has analyzed the “melancholic nationalism of whiteness” and the shift from “white melancholy” to “white rage” through the lens of critical race theory and psychoanalysis in The Rage of Replacement (2024).¹⁰ Trump’s MAGA rhetoric and the eponymous movement have become more explicitly “ultranationalist” over time and could therefore now be understood as fascist according to Griffin, while the earlier Reagan and Bush campaigns were careful to use “Make America Great Again” within the bounds of national populism. Today, the reframing of global migration as a coordinated ‘invasion’ of majority white countries by non-white labor migrants and refugees, also known as the ‘Great Replacement’ narrative, has not only gained traction in explicitly fascist circles but moved to the center of official politics.

One problem with Griffin’s definition, however, is that it essentially treats fascism as a set of ideas rather than a formative process. This is the argument of Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism (2004).¹¹ For fascism to exist as a historical and political force, more is required than a set of ideas. Most accounts of fascism suggest that some kind of crisis is required as its condition of possibility. As they deepen, the interlocking economic, political and ecological crises provide the ground for the emergence of fascist hegemony. In the face of climate catastrophe, for example, a newly emerging fossil fascism tries to protect the assets and profits of the fossil economy at all costs.

But as the Zetkin Collective’s White Skin, Black Fuel (2021) emphasizes, “no crisis has ever induced fascism through automatic causation, just as no ingredients bake themselves into a bread. Someone is always running the bakery”.¹² Here, the authors offer a helpful synthesis of Griffin’s and Paxton’s definitions that allows us to make sense of current forms of fascization:

Fascism is a politics of palingenetic ultranationalism that comes to the fore in a conjuncture of deep crisis, and if leading sections of the dominant class throw their weight behind it and hand it power, there ensues an exceptional regime of systematic violence against those identified as enemies of the nation.¹³

From the perspective of Cultural Studies, moreover, Robinson’s triangulation model seems particularly helpful as it raises the question of conjunctural transformations understood as fascist re-articulations of and on the various levels of the social formation. This includes not only the dominant class, but also civil society, or culture in the broadest sense, where some of the most intense struggles over hegemony are waged in the form of ‘culture wars’ and moral panics to garner mass support for contemporary fascism. At the same time, it allows us to better understand how present capitalist constellations differ from those encountered by historical fascism.

Capitalist Crisis

Fascism is a response to capitalist crisis, yes. But capitalism is in crisis all the time. So, what has to happen for a crisis to become so significant that it makes fascist responses attractive to the many? The suggestion here is that today, capitalism’s shift from labor-based to asset-based profit making signals a radical new response to its own crisis that subsequently leads to new forms of fascism. 20th-century post-war Europe harbored a lot of fascists, but fascist political parties had little presence in the parliaments of Western Europe. The social-democratic consensus of the time that kept them out was based on the high profitability of manufacturing (thanks to the destruction caused by WWII, automation, environmental plunder and the exploitation of the Global South), and many workers in Western Europe benefited from this: “This period witnessed an unprecedented decline in inequality, as increases in workers’ real wages outpaced increases in the returns to capital in many countries”.¹⁴ Wages from labor took on a central role in the experience of social participation and agency; cultural institutions from labor and tenant unions to writing and film clubs manifested and bolstered a feeling of collective capacity, and strikes for better pay exercised this capacity. Many workers consequently felt they experienced “privileged access to the gears of the world as an industrial workforce”.¹⁵

This experience of collective social capacity came under attack, however, throughout the long downturn that befell Western economies from the 1970s onward and that culminated in the collapse of 2007/8. The authoritarian-populist policies of Thatcher, Reagan and others aggravated the decline of labor in industrial manufacturing and shifted capitalism’s focus towards individual economic liberty and an ultra-free market. Neoliberal policies subsidized homeownership and share-buying (mainly through tax schemes), which stimulated consumption and boosted profits. However, at least within core capitalist countries, these stimuli only rarely translated into creating new jobs in manufacturing, and the share of profit going to labor continued to fall.

As a consequence, the generation of profits became more and more divorced from the direct exploitation of labor in industrial production.¹⁶ Simultaneously, the share of rent-seeking activities increased: “Since the beginning of the 1980s, there has been a broad-based shift towards economic activities conducted by ‘rentiers’ in the sense that they are structured around the control of, and generation of income (‘rents’) from scarce assets”.¹⁷ Oil and data, land and real estate, licenses and property rights, and above all money itself are now the main sources of profit for those who own and control these assets.

The new ‘authoritarian populists’ of the 21st century like to claim that they can do something about the cost-of-living-crisis through which rentier capitalism articulates itself. They realize that a political system that exempts (often inherited) capital ownership from democratic rule has little to offer when the exploitation of labor is no longer central to profit-making. Desperate measures to ‘Take Back Control’ or ‘Make America Great Again’ promise to re-empower ‘the people’ and reverse growing inequalities. Brexit, for example, can be read as a “vote against the insecurity, inequalities and austerity induced by a system of rentier capitalism”.¹⁸ However, national governments remain unable to stop the continuing trend that the rising cost of living (housing, healthcare, food, education, credit, transport, etc.) outpaces any real wage growth; rent-based profits, based on transnationally owned assets rather than a national work force, were never meant to be shared. While historical fascism was able to bring, at least to a certain degree, distinct material advantages to the völkisch worker within a mostly national economy, “the ‘wages of fascism’ now appear to be entirely psychological”.¹⁹

Contemporary politics consequently turns to overt practices of “coercive domination and violent exclusion”²⁰ to simulate political agency – if you can’t control the transnational tech bros and oligarchs, control someone else: women, immigrants, trans people. Once again, right-wing actors promise benefits to their voters by demonizing ‘welfare scavengers’ and ‘undeserving immigrants’, claiming to prevent money from getting into the ‘wrong’ hands; where they can, right-wing actors slash equal opportunities, environmental protection and other initiatives that apparently distributes tax-payers’ money to the ‘wrong’ causes.²¹ Radical fractions within the new right-wing parties make overtly racist, misogynistic, transphobic, etc. arguments to mobilize ‘the people’ and engender violence towards some imagined ‘enemies of the nation’, displaying the same palingenetic ultranationalism that was emblematic of 20th-century fascism. Others, however, are turning towards a more subtle strategy.²²

What supplements the historical fascist practice of targeting specifically identified sections of the population (Jewish, Slavic and Romani people, persons with disabilities, homosexuals, etc.) is a more generalized attack “in which the ‘Other’ has no name, no identity, no visibility, and thus no entitlement for life, let alone any other human rights”.²³ More precisely, what is supplementing the overtly racist border-regimes of Frontex and ICE, for example, are new modes of letting die. Denying care to people sans papier, to women who need an abortion, to people who are transitioning, to uninsured users of prescription drug opioids, to individuals with severe depression, to people bearing the brunt of environmental destruction: all this is based not on overtly identifying people as specific ‘others’, but on denying their existence as citizen, woman, trans, refugee, sick or simply poor. Other than the violence meted out by a militarized police and fascist mobs, the harm that is caused by neglect is “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”.²⁴ It is, nonetheless, the consequence of concentrating resources in the hands of a few asset holders. The people that suffer most from this new form of violence are once again those that live in the historical shadow of racism, imperialism, misogyny, ableism and poverty. However, oppression by denial is not exactly a practice that rallies the troops. Which brings us to much more active and affective tactics for mobilizing right-wing support.

Moral Panics

Various marginalized groups have become scapegoats for the (poly-)crisis produced by capitalism. Moral panics are crucial to create a consensual front against oppressed groups, casting them as threats to a moral and social order. The CCCS’s influential book Policing the Crisis (1978), for example, analyzes how Black youth were constructed as responsible for broader economic crises through a ‘mugging panic’ in 1970s Britain.²⁵ Similarly, today, racist moral panics shift the blame for the current malaise onto refugees, immigrants, and non-white minorities, obscuring the material and ideological causes for the growing precarity many face under rentier capitalism.

The increasing agitations against trans people are exemplary in this regard. Since the late 2010s, political mobilization against transgender people has been on the rise, driven by organized transphobic actors (e.g., Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk, Joe Rogan) as well as globally operating far-right movements, politically and religiously ultraconservative groups, but also by ‘gender critical’ and ‘women’s rights’ activists (e.g., JK Rowling, Alice Schwarzer). While those groups are the driving forces behind anti-trans rhetoric and politics, similar ‘concerns’ and ‘doubts’ appear widespread throughout society. Transphobic talking points are constantly discussed in mass media, framed as ‘the transgender issue’. In recent years, such political and cultural formations have produced what can rightly be called a ‘moral trans panic’ where authoritarian and fascist agendas meet more socially acceptable liberal anxieties. Together with the anti-migrant push, the moral trans panic illustrates how fascization in the current conjuncture can activate a sense of superiority among a majority group toward a minoritized group. It is here where fascist politics gathers mass traction.

Within the current panic, the policing of sex and gender expresses itself in various ways. One example are the persistently high rates of hate crimes – such as physical assaults and femicides – against trans women and transfeminine people. This violence especially affects racialized and/or migrant trans women (often engaged in sex work), who are disproportionately targets of transphobic attacks.²⁶ Authoritarian and fascist national governments also enact forms of gender policing through legal and structural means, denying trans people reproductive and civil rights. From 2021 to 2026, for example, over 1000 legislative proposals for anti-trans bills were introduced at federal and state levels in the US.²⁷ Such laws – often targeting access to healthcare and education – aim to exclude trans people, especially trans children, from (public) life altogether.²⁸

How can we explain that this ongoing moral trans panic gains so much traction among the populace? Most people gain little material benefits from hating trans people – no new jobs, no state support, no economic security of any kind. The experience of the ongoing trans panic is, rather, a conjunctural phenomenon in which forms of ‘psychological wage’ are crucial. In times of capitalist overaccumulation and economic stagnation, contemporary rentier capitalism and austerity make everyone’s life more precarious. Moral panics define who deserves access to resources, and who can be morally denied such access.

Cisgender people might support transphobia partly because fascism valorizes their lived experiences and their ‘ordinariness’ amid the precarity faced by working- and middle-class heteronormative nuclear families and partnerships. In this context, right-wing actors suggest: ‘If liberals and leftists attack your ways of living, we protect you’ – hiding, of course, the fact that their own economic policies of austerity are precisely what is destroying the basis for such a way of life. This is reinforced by meritocratic narratives – ‘I have worked hard for 20 years to raise my kids: I deserve recognition!’ – that function as a form of symbolic reward, especially for those (mostly feminized) people engaged in unpaid or poorly paid reproductive labor (such as homemakers and caregivers).

Moral panics, as theorized by Cultural Studies scholars like Stuart Hall or Stanley Cohen, serve to legitimize the policing of societies in times of crisis. Accordingly, such moral panics function as “one of the principal forms of ideological consciousness by means of which a ‘silent majority’ is won over to the support of increasingly coercive measures on the part of the state, and lends its legitimacy to a ‘more than usual’ exercise of control.”²⁹ During a moral panic, the “folk devil”³⁰ – outsiders scapegoated for ‘causing social disorder’ – is crucial for legitimizing authoritarian government responses. These responses not only harm the folk devil, however, but ultimately also the (silent) majority by undermining democratic structures. Transgender activists in the US, for example, have stressed that the ongoing institutional attacks on their reproductive rights – such as access to gender-affirming healthcare – serves as a strategic blueprint for restricting broader reproductive freedoms, including access to contraception and safe abortion.

It is important to note that transphobia and the ongoing trans panic do not affect all trans people equally.³¹ Instead, trans misogyny – the specific form of patriarchal violence against transfeminine people – functions as the driving ideology and mechanism of exclusion structuring the current moral panic. Within this discourse, trans women are portrayed as deceptive, hypersexualized or predatory figures prone to harming children and women. But why are trans women and transfeminine people specific targets of misogyny?

Jules Gill-Peterson highlights the selective nature of misogyny. By directing violence toward women living in precarity (trans, racialized, and/or poor women), such targeted aggression simultaneously acts to address all feminized subjects:

Misogyny is not only pure or abstract woman-hating; in practice it fixes itself to women forced to live at the bottom of other social hierarchies, like race and class, that already overexpose them to violence. […] Rather than trying to eliminate all women, misogynist violence can ironically be quite selective as a way of symbolically threatening all women. Misogyny’s discretion is a warning to everyone else: you will be next if you don’t fall in line.³²

In the broader context of patriarchal violence amid rising fascism, trans misogyny is therefore a key strategy not only for targeting trans women, but also for exerting control over and disciplining all women and feminized subjects. Misogyny, as Gill-Peterson writes, is best understood as “the continual policing and punishment of certain women for their perceived failures to stay subordinate to men”.³³

Today, transphobes deploy trans womanhood as a “deviant femininity” with which “authentic” (cis) women cannot be associated with.³⁴ In contrast to such forms of ‘deviant femininity’, fascists promote forms of nationalist womanhood that do not challenge gender roles nor transgress patriarchal sexual difference. In the context of ultranationalism, women “constitute the biological precondition of the nation since they are biologically charged with reproducing the national blood. The body of women belongs to the service of the nation: self-determination, feminism, and any non cis-heteronormative behaviour is inimical to the existence of the nation”.³⁵

And today?

When Stuart Hall wrote about the ‘Great Moving Right Show’ in 1979, the outright fascist National Front was already in decline. Hall, however, did not consider this as a successful case of ‘containment’ by Thatcher’s Conservative Party. Instead, he was more worried about the fact that “so many” of the National Front’s themes had “been so swiftly reworked into a more respectable discourse on race by Conservative politicians”. The “magical connections” that fascists had established “between the themes of race and immigration control and the images of the nation, the British people and the destruction of ‘our culture, our way of life’” were seen as deeply troubling.³⁶

The German chancellor Friedrich Merz followed this pattern of reworking fascist tropes quite precisely when he bemoaned “Probleme mit dem Stadtbild” (problems in the cityscape) in a press conference in October 2025, and linked these “problems” to migration. Pressed by a journalist to explain what he meant by these ominous “problems”, Merz suggested the journalist should ask his “daughters”.³⁷ Rather than spelling out what the apparent problems actually were, and what the threat to the daughters actually was, Merz left it to the imagination of his audience who the bogeymen are.

Hall had emphasized that the “success and effectivity” of right-wing parties “does not lie in its capacity to dupe unsuspecting folk but in the way it addresses real problems, real and lived experiences, real contradictions”.³⁸ And the talk of ‘problems’ within central areas of German cities indeed addresses ‘real and lived experiences’ that most people can relate to. Rentier capitalism does not only lead to a cost-of-living-crisis; due to a decrease in income tax it also diminishes public finances, making it “increasingly difficult for local public administrations to provide social amenities, from affordable accommodation and hospitals to leisure facilities, playgrounds and parks”.³⁹ The cityscape, consequently, becomes a place torn between privatized glamour for those who can afford it and run-down public spaces for those who cannot, a gap in wealth impossible not to notice. It is a clear case of racist scapegoating to de-link such ‘problems’ from economic developments and instead link them to migrants and their alleged criminal behavior.

It becomes a step in the process of fascization when Black and Brown men are portrayed as a threat to Germany’s ‘native’ women, when racial profiling becomes a means to protect the Volkskörper. Merz’s reference to ‘daughters’, finally, can be seen as a symbol for the biological reproduction of a future German nation, which is portrayed as being under threat from a double-pronged attack from various ‘enemies of the nation’: from the inside, by a leftist (trans)gender ideology, and from the outside, by non-white immigration. The fascist way of addressing these perceived threats is stricter laws, more repression, more deportation and more police – all the while protecting a capitalist economy that only benefits a small transnational rentier class and that continues to create social division. The apparent consensus over immigrants, trans people and similar issues, it has to be emphasized, does not solve any crisis, however: industrial production isn’t coming back, the divide within the job market keeps on growing, tax revenues continue to shrink, austerity and militarization persist, war and heat keep killing the most vulnerable.