Reflections on Authoritarian Times

What is fascism? A new wave of authoritarian governments on a global scale has relaunched this debate, but this word that spontaneously arises when we think of Donald Trump, Javier Milei, Giorgia Meloni, or Marine Le Pen is clearly inadequate to describe them. If fascism in the twenty-first century is so different from its forerunners, as many historians explain, maybe we need new concepts to apprehend it. This is true for many other features of our time. The old concept of war is equally problematic and fails to grasp the novelty of conflicts conducted with drones and AI. The revolutions of the past decade abandoned any reference to socialism and did not share much with those of the previous century. Antisemitism means less and less a prejudice against Jews and becomes a label depicting all critics of Israel indiscriminately. And we could continue with many other concepts. So we live in a kind of interregnum, as Gramsci argued the 1930s in his Prison Notebooks: “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This statement fits our present quite well: we don’t face a historical repetition, a regression to the past; we are facing new problems and new threats, but we have only concepts inherited from the past to analyze and interpret them. Of course, this is frustrating: these words’ inadequacy mirrors the uncertainty of our times, which seem to forewarn of a terrible storm.

Maybe we are dealing with a kind of “post-fascism,” a concept that refers to both a historical distance from classical fascism and a significant change in its ideological, social, and political features. This heterogeneous new-far right is a constellation of movements and parties with different origins and ideological references, which in their overwhelming majority pretend to accept the institutional framework of liberal democracy. They wish to destroy democracy from within, not from outside. They are a threat to democracy, but they don’t act like the forces of historical fascism. They put into question the traditional dichotomy between fascism and democracy, at a time in which democracy itself seems used up, discredited, emptied, and deprived of its original virtues. J.D. Vance goes to Munich to identify freedom with Alternative für Deutschland (AfD); Giorgia Meloni defends Italian democracy against a threat embodied by antifascism; all Western governments support Israel as a democratic island surrounded by obscurantist barbarians; far-right movements in Europe and the Americas advance racist and xenophobic measures to defend democracy against Islamic fundamentalism; whereas it deports thousands of immigrants living and working in the US, the Trump administration claims to be defending human rights by giving refugee status to South African partisans of white supremacy. Words have changed their meanings through a kind of Orwellian metamorphosis.   

Paradoxically, the “novelty” of this emerging far right is its conservatism. At the end of World War I, fascism had a powerful utopian dimension. It depicted itself as revolution, spoke of the New Man, the thousand-year Reich, and so on. Fascism said the world was collapsing, and it proposed an alternative for the future. In other words, it had a utopian horizon. Today, “post-fascism” is purely conservative. It speaks of a “great replacement” threatening Western civilization and pretends to defend traditional values: family, sovereignty, national cultures, “Judeo-Christian” civilization, and so on. It puts into question all conquests in terms of minority rights and viciously attacks the most vulnerable, like queer and transgender people. In general, these movements have lost their capacity to make people dream about a different future; they plead for restoring order and security (economic, political, cultural, and psychological security). Even Donald Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” the most exciting for his followers, is not a conquering slogan; it refers to the dream of going back to a lost golden age, when the US was powerful and prosperous. The US lusts after Canada and Greenland to preserve and reinforce its status as a superpower, but it has abandoned its previous hegemonic ambitions. Its Cold War ambition of establishing a US world order is over.

What is new—and reminiscent of the 1930s—is post-fascism’s capacity to create organic links with economic elites, as Trump’s inauguration ceremony spectacularly showed. Perhaps the most probable scenario for the coming years is an authoritarian form of neoliberalism. Until now, post-fascist leaders and movements appeared as outsiders who challenged the establishment and proposed a conservative alternative to neoliberalism; today, they have become reliable interlocutors for the economic elites in the EU, in the US, and in many Latin American countries as well. Of course, it’s difficult to predict how long this new alliance between post-fascism and neoliberalism will last. In the EU, we are still far from the oligarchic power that is now emerging with Trump, but a similar tendency exists. What seems quite clear is that neoliberal elites don’t wish for a “total state” like Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany; their goal is a state of exception that suspends democracy by establishing their own rule, a political power grounded on the principle of the “autonomy of capital,” which is different from the “autonomy of the political.” Carl Schmitt is not completely obsolete—the post-fascist leaders are “decisionists” insofar as they despise parliaments and rule by executive orders, putting into question many constitutional laws—but is revised and corrected by Friedrich von Hayek. When he was elected in 2023, Javier Milei appeared as a kind of Argentinian anomaly, excessive, exotic, and exceptional; today he has become a paradigmatic figure of libertarianism, and his recipes for austerity have been exceeded by Elon Musk’s DOGE. The only historical precedent for such a coexistence between authoritarian political power (Schmitt’s idea of sovereignty) and neoliberal capitalism in which the state completely submits to capital and becomes a tool of a market society (Hayek’s idea of liberalism), is Pinochet’s Chile. And Pinochet’s Chile was not a simple repetition of interwar fascism. This is the historical background of today’s post-fascism.   

This strategic shift was hardly ineluctable. Only recently have economic elites come to trust and support radical-right movements, which previously did not appear as reliable interlocutors. In the past, far-right leaders increased their influence by denouncing neoliberal globalization (as when Marine Le Pen depicted Macron as a representative of the “globalist” elites, or Giorgia Meloni stigmatized the banker Mario Draghi on similar grounds). On occasion, they came to power despite the ruling classes’ preferences, like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in 2016, when they were not the establishment candidates). Today, the alliance between populist far-right movements and global elites prevails everywhere. The grounds for asserting this change are far from being anecdotal. Sketched here is a strange coalition of the poorest with the richest layers of society. This has been probably the most successful achievement of post-fascism: winning both the support of large sections of the laboring classes and the trust of global elites, who are extremely powerful but very few.

The radical right relies on the classic populist paradigm of the “good” people opposed to corrupt elites, but it has reformulated it in a significant way. In the past, the “good” people meant an ethnically homogeneous community (white, nationalist, portrayed as having strong roots in the soil) opposed to the “dangerous classes” of the big cities. After the end of communism, a defeated working class beset by deindustrialization has been reintegrated into the virtuous national community. The “bad” people of the post-fascist imagination—immigrants, Muslims and Black people in the suburbs, veiled women, drug addicts, and other outsiders—merge with the leisure classes (not necessarily wealthy) that adopt liberated conventions and practices: bohemians, feminists, LGBTQ people, antiracists, environmentalists, defenders of immigrants’ rights, and those who protest against the Palestinian genocide. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the “good” people are nationalist, antifeminist, homophobic, and xenophobic, and they are clearly hostile to ecology, contemporary art, academics, and intellectuals. As Michel Feher has pertinently suggested, the continuity between old nationalism, fascism, and post-fascism lies in a persistent imaginary dichotomy between “producers” and “parasites”: the former, virtuous laboring men and women, are shamefully exploited by the latter, a heterogeneous group including both financial elites and immigrants benefiting from social security and welfare services in their host countries. During the first half of the twentieth century, this “parasitic” bourgeoisie took on the traits of Jews in the nationalist and fascist imagination; today, it’s cosmopolitan and globalist.

However, the post-fascist imagination—notably its view of sexuality—is more complex than the stigmatization of “counter-models” and the search for scapegoats might suggest. Despite its neoconservative character, post-fascism should not be interpreted as a simple return to bourgeois “normalcy” and Victorian stereotypes. Emerging within the institutional frameworks of liberal democracy, in market societies forged by possessive individualism, post-fascism has broken with the fascist ideal-type and, in many cases, claims the legacy of the Enlightenment. In the post-totalitarian age of human rights, this gives it respectability. Post-fascism does not justify its war against Islam with the spurious older arguments of imperial expansionism and doctrinal racialism, but rather with its own interpretation of the legacy of Enlightenment. Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Victor Orbán all want to defend Europeans against incoming migrants who cross the Mediterranean, but they also pretend to defend women against “Islamic obscurantism.” Homophobia and homonationalism coexist within this changing radical right. In the Netherlands, feminism and gay rights have been the flags of a violent xenophobic campaign against immigration and Muslims, led first by Pim Fortuyn, who was openly gay, and then by his successor, Gert Wilders, a gay rights defender. Alice Weidel, a national leader of AfD, is a lesbian who avows her attachment to the traditional family and is opposed to same-sex marriage. Today, the legacy of the Enlightenment is often reframed in a new version of Orientalism, based on a dichotomous worldview that pits civilization, rationality, progress, and freedom against barbarism, fanaticism, and obscurantism. Far-right movements participate in this “progressive” neo-Orientalist view without abandoning their traditional racist, misogynist, and homophobic identity. They have abandoned a traditional racialist and colonialist discourse, which is no longer acceptable in the twenty-first century (despite some notable exceptions like Zionist colonialism), but they still argue for an ontological cultural discrepancy between the West and the rest.

The most significant difference between fascism and post-fascism concerns their views of the state. Fascism was born after the Great War, in the age of the advent of the total state, the end of laissez-faire capitalism, and the rise of state intervention into the economy: Keynesianism, the New Deal, fascism, and the Soviet five-year plans belong to the same era of statism. Post-fascism has emerged in a completely different time, an age of free market messianism and neoliberal capitalism. Its authoritarian features coexist with the cult of market society. In this context, the support of economic elites comes at a high price, namely, the abandonment of statism. Today, Trump is no longer viewed as an outsider conquering the GOP, one of the pillars of the US establishment. Similarly, European nationalist and post-fascist movements no longer appear as subversive and dangerous enemies of the EU. Meloni is not a pariah but rather an influential actor in the EU. Before coming to power, neither Mussolini nor Hitler enjoyed such explicit support from their countries’ financial and industrial elites; their situation was in no way comparable to the backing that Trump has received from many US billionaires or that Le Pen received from the media empire controlled by Vincent Bolloré. In many ways, the global elites are reminiscent of the “sleepwalkers” on the brink of 1914, the holders of the “European concert” who fell into catastrophe without understanding what was happening.

During the interwar years, liberal democracies viewed the rise of fascism with a mix of incomprehension and complacency, whose main expressions were the deliberate non-intervention of France and the UK during the Spanish Civil War, and their concessions to Hitler at the Munich Conference in 1938. A similar ambiguity still exists. As Wolfgang Streck pertinently points out, the global elites’ economic and cultural cosmopolitanism has engendered, by reaction, “a form of anti-elitist nationalism from below,” based on Feher’s dichotomy between “producers” and “parasites.” Post-fascism gives political expression to this resentment, while gaining respectability and credibility in the eyes of financial and industrial elites themselves. It’s hard to say how long it will be able to reconcile these contradictory tendencies. Milei, Meloni, Orbán, and Trump are skillful acrobats holding both antinomic poles, but in the long run this exercise can prove perilous: on the one hand, this convergence between the elites and the most disadvantaged social layers can never constitute a true “historical bloc” in the Gramscian sense, only a provisional form of late Bonapartism; on the other hand, the condition for implementing such strategy is the progressive destruction of the institutional framework of the rule of law and liberal democracy.    

Since the 1990s, that is, since the end of the Cold War, both left- and right-wing government forces have embraced neoliberalism as a kind of pensée unique. This is the main premise of the spectacular rise of the far right, which has finally appeared as an alternative. According to Wendy Brown, the radical right is the undemocratic answer to the process of “undoing democracy” carried out by neoliberal reason. In a famous aphorism of 1939, Max Horkheimer wrote that “If you don’t want to talk about capitalism, then you should be silent about fascism.” Today, we could say: “If you don’t want to talk about neoliberalism, you should be silent about post-fascism.” Although neoliberalism and post-fascism are not synonymous, they are now precarious allies.