What is fascism? A new wave of authoritarian governments on a global scale has relaunched this debate, but this word that spontaneously rises 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.
Read MoreTranslated by Liz Mason-Deese
What is new about the authoritarianism that we are currently witnessing? It is useful to situate this authoritarianism within, and to see it as an organic part of, a counterrevolution: that is, the new authoritarianism operates against the backdrop of the transfeminist, Indigenous, migrant, and antiracist struggles that have modified our understanding and collective experience of the connection between patriarchal, racist, and capitalist forms of violence and have simultaneously produced a set of demands and altered desires and sensibilities.
Read MoreOn May 10, 2025, after four terrifying days of shelling and missile and drone attacks along the northern and western border states between India and Pakistan, a ceasefire was ceremonially announced. The US President was among the first to claim credit for it, praising the “common sense and great intelligence” of leaders of both countries — until it became clear that promises of trade deals were what “Trumped” the war. Closer to home, with the polemics of an unabashed bloodthirst losing immediate relevance, the overwrought nerves of a cheerleading troll army had to be directed elsewhere.
Read MoreSerbia is often defined as a hybrid democracy or partocracy, with the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) composed of 700,000 members in a country with a population of over six and a half million. A semi-peripheral, non-EU European country under the uncontested power of its president, Aleksandar Vučić, it is also described as stabilitocracy: a type of government that claims to “secure stability, pretends to espouse EU integration and relies on informal, clientelist structures, control of the media, and the regular production of crises to undermine democracy and the rule of law.”
Read MoreTrump’s win surprised few political realists. What has taken nearly everyone by surprise is the rapid rollout of chaotic authoritarian governing facilitated by a detailed planning and strategy document (Project 2025), plutotechnocratic sycophants like Zuckerberg and Bezos, a docile Republican Party, a hapless Democratic one, a radical right Supreme Court majority, a limp mainstream media, a highly siloed social media, and a dis-educated popular base.
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