This paper is a revision of a somewhat similar essay I started writing about three years ago. The original essay was to be titled “It Can Happen Again,” and in it I would argue that the events of Hitler’s rise to power were not unique to the circumstances of early 1900s Germany– essentially an argument against the idea that Nazism was the culmination of Deutschtum in favor of a more materialist or Marxist perspective– and could, in fact, happen in modern America. I would also argue in it that another genocide the likes of the Holocaust was not only entirely possible, but that the foundations of the rhetoric needed to enact it had already been laid. 

However, my schedule for writing is unfortunately quite tight, and this project was simply not at the top of my priority list. My life outside of writing always takes top priority, and even within my writing life, other projects took up the majority of my focus. This was mostly because of how much research needed to be done to write this essay. I expected it to be well over a hundred pages long, and filled with historical analysis, examination of different ideologies, discussions on the definitions of complex terms, and comparisons of history to the modern era. That kind of work requires a great amount of reading and research. I already have a high standard for factual accuracy, and that was only exacerbated by the absolute breadth of this project.

At the start it went smoothly, and I hammered out about ten pages in only a couple days. The further I went, though, the slower progress got. After a year of writing, I had about twenty pages. The year after, I only wrote eight. After that, one. I had plenty of other projects to work on, and the scale of this essay just kept on growing, so it kept getting left on the back burner, with hardly any actual writing being done on it. The vast majority of the work I did on it was just research. Three years sailed by, and all of a sudden the 2024 election was upon us. Had Kamala Harris won the election, perhaps I could have completed my research and finished the project, but that isn’t what happened. Instead, as I’m sure you well know, Donald Trump was the victor, and in the first two months of his term we have seen the absolute destruction he can wield, and the totality of his power. 

I no longer felt that an argument that fascism could happen again was necessary, especially not one that involved an over fifteen page long summary of Hitler’s rise to power or a five page long discussion on the definition of genocide. If I wanted to get some value out of the work I had put into that thesis, I would have to completely rework it. So, that’s what I did. 

What you are about to read is a revised version of that essay, one that seeks not to prove that fascism can happen again, but rather, to examine the traits of the fascism that is happening. If you disagree with the assertion that fascism is happening at all, however, don’t worry. The majority of the work I salvaged from my original “It Can Happen Again” draft is an exploration on the definition of fascism, so perhaps by reconsidering your understanding of fascism, you may change your mind. If not, then at least you will understand what the basis of my beliefs on this subject is.

As a part of this preface, though, I would like to acknowledge my own shortcomings, that mostly being my inability to keep up with everything that has happened in the two months prior to this essay’s publication. I try to stay up to date on the news as much as I can, but there have been major events happening every day. I have done my best to keep track of them so that I can discuss them all here, but I know there are plenty of topics I have missed– either from not having heard of them or from forgetting them under the tidal wave of hundreds of other news stories. There are also plenty of topics I have either entirely omitted from this essay or have only discussed briefly in order to keep this analysis as concise as I can possibly manage. Recall that this was supposed to be a more focused and concise rewrite of an older project, and despite that it has managed to end up being seventy pages long. 

If I were to discuss every topic I wanted with as much depth as I want, then I would never be able to stop writing. I have to stop myself somewhere. I have to pick and choose the topics I feel are most important. Each and every news story is important, but a filter has to be made. I absolutely hate feeling as if a project is “unfinished,” and one of the greatest hurdles I’ve had to accept with this essay is that it cannot ever be “finished,” at least not in a way that would satisfy me. As a result, even though I am very happy with the analysis in this essay, I am still a bit disappointed in it because I know that no matter how much I write, I will never have covered the full story.

So, in lieu of the ability to write an infinite amount of words in a finite amount of time– which I swear isn’t a fascistic desire– I will resort to the most pretentious alternative possible and act like any and all lacking analysis on my part is actually entirely intentional. You see, it was in fact a deliberate ploy to further the discourse and start a conversation! I want you to think for yourself, and come to your own conclusions, and to debate me, and talk to me about where I may not have taken all factors into consideration! If after reading this paper you feel there’s anything I’ve neglected, shoot me an email. Let’s get a conversation going.

Without further ado, I present the longest and most difficult paper I have ever written.

There’s something unthinkable about the idea of fascism taking hold of the world again. The second rise of fascism is akin to a cartoon villain rising from the grave. This is the move of creatively bankrupt writers, the act of a story clinging onto any attempt at a twist it can manage. “Somehow, Palpatine returned!” 

Fascism is often thought of exclusively in the context of the 20th century. When you ask the average person to name a fascist, they will most likely answer with Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, or Benito Mussolini. By defeating these people and their regimes, we destroyed fascism too, surely. We all saw the evil acts done by these nations. We saw the Holocaust, the Soviet labor camps, and the terror of the Black Shirts, and we put a stop to them. The villain was defeated, and we must be smart enough to not let their actions repeat themselves. We all want history to make sense– like the plot of a good book. There’s a Francis Fukuyama inside each and every one of us, a part of our subconscious that wants to think that history is over. It’s a voice that wants to think there’s something special about our lives, about the time that we are living in.

Despite fascism’s defeats, however, it persists in the modern era, particularly in the wealthiest and most powerful nations on Earth. Where did this new wave of fascism come from? What sets our modern fascism apart from the fascism of the past? In fact, what even is fascism? 

 “Trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.” So said Ian Kershaw in his 2016 book, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914–1949. The term “fascism” has unfortunately become, to many, just another buzzword, and has lost a lot of its meaning. It’s often used as shorthand for “when the government is big and powerful and bad,” interchangeable with “authoritarianism,” but these words do not mean the same thing. 

Authoritarianism is best defined as a genre of governmental systems. Monarchy, oligarchy, theocracy, dictatorship, there are dozens of different kinds of authoritarianism– subgenres, one might say. They each have their own twist on the idea of a central power having complete authority over a people, and these twists can be mixed and matched and combine their features. Monarchism is authoritarianism where the ruler in question is believed to have a divine right to rule that is typically passed by bloodline. Oligarchism is when a small in-group of powerful people have control over a government. If you were to combine the two, then you would get a nation like Imperial Japan, where the Emperor– the monarch– had a divine mandate to rule and had ultimate authority in governance, but most of the decision making was deferred to and done by his cabinet members– the oligarchs. You likely have some intuitive understanding of these definitions already. What defines fascism, then? What is a fascist government? 

Herein lies the problem, which is that fascism is very slippery and enigmatic, which makes it fairly difficult to understand entirely. There have been debates over what exactly fascism means or what it encompasses for almost a hundred years. If we wish to define fascism, then perhaps the best place to start is to hear the perspective of the man credited for the birth of fascism: Benito Mussolini.

Fascism sees in the world not only those superficial, material aspects in which man appears as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law, which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.

In The Doctrine of Fascism, Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile break down the Italian idealization of fascism and lay bare the basest axioms of the ideology. Fascism rejects entirely the values of individualism so highly praised by modernist liberal philosophers. Fascism is about culture, a society of people, a nation, but above all else it is about how the people are subsumed by the State. 

Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual. And if liberty is to he the attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State– a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values– interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people

Fascism deals above all else in absolute essentialization. The individual has no rights, and no essence. Only via the State is an individual granted personhood. Individuals are meaningless, because all that matters is The People– a group who is united together, homogenous in underlying beliefs, goals, and nature. Most people will immediately understand this in relation to the Nazi Ubermensch– the Aryan Race. The fascist creates in their mind a people who are all the same and imagines them as superior to all other peoples. The People is chosen over individual people.

Fascism desires the State to be strong and organic, based on broad foundations of popular support… A State based on millions of individuals who recognize its authority, feel its action, and are ready to serve its ends is not the tyrannical state of a mediaeval lordling. It has nothing in common with the despotic States existing prior to or subsequent to 1789. Far from crushing the individual, the Fascist State multiplies his energies, just as in a regiment a soldier is not diminished but multiplied by the number of his fellow soldiers. The Fascist State organizes the nation, but it leaves the individual adequate elbow room. It has curtailed useless or harmful liberties while preserving those which are essential. In such matters the individual cannot be the judge, but the State only.

The idea of a government speaking for a people while having complete unitary control over them should sound incoherent to you. How can the government represent the people if the people have no say in the governance of their society? A logical question, for sure, but it stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of fascism, because fascism does not represent the people. It isn’t the people making the decisions, it’s The People, and The People are conceived and spoken for by the State, not the people. Individuals do not matter, only The People.

Of course, The People is nothing but fantasy. There is no The People, as each and every person is unique and different in one way or another. The Aryan Race were blonde, white, blue-eyed, proud, strong, German, but if the Nazis had accomplished their goal of racial purity, then they wouldn’t stay that way for long. Soon, more divisions would arise between people with gray blue eyes and green blue eyes, people with platinum blonde hair and people with dirty blonde hair, Aryans with heritage from Germany and Aryans with heritage from Austria or Switzerland. The People would be divided over political issues, and then there would come a redefining of The People. 

However, fascism does not disprove its conception of The People by killing their dissenters. The Nazis did not just kill non-Germans, they killed communists and liberals who disagreed with them, and plenty of those people were true-blooded Germans. Why were they killed even if they belonged to the people the Nazis claimed to want to uplift? Well, just because they were of the people does not mean they are of The People. Remember, The People is spoken for by the State, not the people. Your inclusion in The People is defined not by any objective qualities, but by the whims of the State. The People is a convenient lie, an essentialization of the group you belong to or identify with as perfect, and any other group as foul, evil, sick. If you disagree with the State, then you must by extension disagree with The People, and are therefore an enemy. 

The Fascist conception of life is a religious one, in which man is viewed in his immanent relation to a higher law, endowed with an objective will transcending the individual and raising him to conscious membership of a spiritual society. Those who perceive nothing beyond opportunistic considerations in the religious policy of the Fascist regime fail to realize that Fascism is not only a system of government but also and above all a system of thought.

The idea that fascism is a system of thought more than one of governance is integral to truly understanding fascism. We are not discussing the way a country is ruled, but rather the ideology used to justify why it is ruled the way it is. This distinguishes fascism from the concept of authoritarianism. The former is an ideology, while the latter is a governmental structure. These concepts are not mutually exclusive, and there is in fact a great deal of overlap present, but the distinction is still there to be made. This conception of fascism as ideology rather than governance also allows us to understand fascism not as a binary yes or no, fascist or not fascist, but instead as a sort of spectrum describing fascisticism– how fascistic a person or ideology is. 

Noteworthy too is Musolini’s description of the pseudo-religious nature of his ideology. A fascist does not necessarily need to believe in a god or gods, but they will almost always believe in some kind of higher power that destins them for glory (The Soviet Union was the odd one out here, with Stalin being a militant anti-theist, but we’ll discuss inconsistencies like this later). What that higher power is can vary. It can be a god, the power of fate, the universe itself, karma, mother nature, whatever. The Nazis loved the occult, Francisco Franco in Spain was partial towards Catholicism, the Ustaše in the Balkans were militantly Catholic and had very strong ties to their nation’s church, the Iron Guard of Romania were acolytes of Orthodox mysticism, and Mussolini believed in an odd spiritualism which was “neither skeptical nor agnostic.” The higher power a fascist follows can be anything, as long as it is powerful and intangible; any “superior law.” What rules are set forth by that “superior law” of course is always whatever is most convenient for the people who believe it.

In the simplest of terms, fascism cannot be understood as a mere system of governance. It is a belief system that is often pseudo-religious in nature, and creates a mythological The People who are spoken for by the State and are destined by an arbitrary ‘superior law’ to unite as one ultimate ubermensch and dominate all others. Fascism is more than a system. It is a doctrine.

Fascism is now clearly defined not only as a regime but as a doctrine. This means that Fascism, exercising its critical faculties on itself and on others, has studied from its own special standpoint and judged by its own standards all the problems affecting the material and intellectual interests now causing such grave anxiety to the nations of the world, and is ready to deal with them by its own policies.

We’ve seen how the first fascist thinks of fascism, but in order to truly understand an ideology it can be just as important to listen to its detractors as its proponents. This is doubly so with people as devious and untrustworthy as fascists. If you take the time to read The Doctrine of Fascism you will see how easy it is to pass off even the most insidious beliefs as good and righteous– masking it in flowery language and appeals to populism– so we should put more stock in the understandings provided by its enemies. I mentioned earlier that intellectuals have debated for ages over what fascism is, so let’s see what they think. 

I opened this section with a quote from Ian Kershaw, a British historian who has done a great amount of research and writing on Nazi Germany. He does not give any sort of exhaustive definition for fascism– understandable considering his previously mentioned difficulty in defining the term– but in his book To Hell and Back he notes some very common features among fascist movements. To list just a couple, he mentions hypernationalism, discipline, militarism, and a complete destruction of all political enemies. There are other traits he mentions, including corporatism and anti-capitalism, but he notes these traits are dependent on the nature of specific movements and vary much more. 

Of these traits, I believe the most important one he mentions is hypernationalism. If you absolutely must boil fascism down to one word, then hypernationalism is the best one to go with. While a belief that your nation is great is consistent among all nations, what sets fascist nations apart is not only the belief that they are better than all other nations, but that they must enforce that feeling of betterness as a military and political policy in both foreign and domestic affairs. Any within the nation who are not considered of the nation must be excised or exterminated, and often any neighboring nations must either bend the knee or become a target. Anyone who does not shout at the top of their lungs about the unyielding power of the nation while they beat their chest is a traitor to the state and must be obliterated.

Kershaw has a lot of interesting things to say about fascism, but most of it is on how it came to be rather than on the ideology itself. So we return to the question of identifying fascism– being able to differentiate between what is and is not fascist. As we established earlier, fascism is not a binary on or off, it is a spectrum. The easiest way to recognize fascism is to think of it as a mental illness. I find this to be an incredibly fitting comparison, not only because fascism is an ideological disease, but also because it can be diagnosed like an actual mental illness.

For comparison, think about the process for diagnosing depression. Depression is a very complicated illness with a great many symptoms. Among those are poor appetite, negative feelings, difficulty concentrating, trouble sleeping, fatigue, and suicidal thoughts. How do you diagnose someone with depression? Well, you observe their behavior and ask them questions. If a patient notes difficulty sleeping and trouble concentrating, but no other symptoms, then they might have depression, but it’s just as likely they have some other problem, such as ADHD. It’s also possible that they may not have depression at the moment, but displaying these symptoms could indicate a developing depression. There is a framework for depression present, and it might get worse over time if left untreated. 

If a friend of yours tells you they haven’t really eaten as much as usual lately because they haven’t been super active, but outside of that have had no problems, then it would be weird to tell them they have depression. If a slightly lower than usual appetite is all they have, then it’s probably unrelated to any mental health issue, and is most likely just a passing phase. It’s a bad habit that you should take note of, and would be right to discourage or remedy it, but you also shouldn’t throw the term “depression” around willy-nilly.  Sometimes you just aren’t that hungry, and there’s nothing weird about that. However, if your friend starts isolating themself from you, has only eaten one meal a day for a week, has become very lethargic, tells you they’ve only been getting three hours of sleep a day, and confides in you that they have considered ending their own life, then it’s possible they’re a medical student. If they aren’t a medical student, though, then they probably have depression. 

Where do we draw the line of what is depression, and what isn’t? By extension, when do we draw the line of when a movement is or is not fascist? Well, unfortunately there isn’t exactly a line you cross that suddenly makes a movement fascist. Instead, these movements must be judged on an individual case by case basis. There is a lot of context you need to understand before making a definitive statement. As nice as it would be to say there is a clear line that defines fascism, it unfortunately isn’t that easy. You have to mostly go off of the vibes. Just like with depression, you diagnose it based on an individual judgment considering a combination of the amount of symptoms present and the severity of each symptom. There is a great variance between the axes that must be interpreted somewhat subjectively.

So we reach the most important part of this section and pose the question, what criteria do we even use for a diagnosis like that? The criteria I think is best for determining this is Umberto Eco’s fourteen points of Ur-Fascism, which he laid out in his essay titled simply “Ur-Fascism.” If you’re confused about the term “Ur-Fascism,” don’t worry, it doesn’t mean anything special. Ur-Fascism is just the term that Eco uses to refer to the epitomal, basest fascism rather than any specific kinds. For the sake of simplicity, I will continue to use the term “fascism.”

In the essay, Eco asks why fascism is so widespread, yet so hard to define. He notes that fascism was the term granted to explaining the ideology of seemingly incongruent states, and points out that both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were ruthless, completely totalitarian societies. “There was only a single Nazi architecture and a single Nazi art. If the Nazi architect was Albert Speer, there was no more room for Mies van der Rohe. Similarly, under Stalin’s rule, if Lamarck was right there was no room for Darwin.” Italy, though still brutal, was much less reliant on the idea of one art, one architect. Despite the vast differences between all three of these nations, however, we typically grant them all the moniker of fascist.

How can such different governments fit in the same category? Surely the only way they can fit together is if fascism is a meaningless, broad term; if it is nothing more than a synonym for authoritarianism. However, as Eco points out, these governments are not quite as different as they seem. 

The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations. So we come to my second point. There was only one Nazism. We cannot label Franco’s hyper-Catholic Falangism as Nazism, since Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian. But the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.

 In his own words, the term fascism is a synecdoche for different kinds of authoritarian ideologies. In simple terms, fascism is its own genre of authoritarian ideologies, a flavor that can be tweaked and altered.

Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.

This is how a spiritual belief in a superior law can be a trait of fascism, but the Soviet Union can still be fascist even if they were a staunchly anti-theist government. Add to Italian fascism a radical anti-theism and anti-capitalism, and you have Josef Stalin’s sovietism.

Eco’s essay is a very insightful read, and is one that I can unequivocally recommend you go out of your way to read. I know how citing sources goes, and I know that I could source my waking nightmares as a source for all my claims and you would almost certainly not notice. I ask you not to do that with this essay. It is publicly available on The Anarchist Library, and doesn’t take much time to read. 

Eco lays out fourteen different features that are incredibly common among what he calls “Ur-Fascist” or “Eternal Fascist” movements. He makes sure to note that these features are sometimes contradictory, and can also be present in other kinds of authoritarian movements. This does not, however, make these points weaker. Loss of appetite is a symptom of depression, but excessive hunger is also a symptom of depression. Despite these two being directly opposed to one another, they are both symptoms of the same disease. Similarly, trouble concentrating can be a symptom of ADHD as well as general anxiety, but that does not make it any less a symptom of depression. Some of these traits do not contradict each other, but instead build off of each other. Depression can cause insomnia, which causes a lack of sleep, which causes fatigue. These are all three distinct symptoms, but they are closely tied together.

Summarized here are Umberto Eco’s fourteen points, but Eco himself gives a much better description of the points than I ever could, so once again I recommend you check out the essay yourself. They are as follows:

1. The cult of tradition,

   • “[T]here can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.”

   • Syncretism of different beliefs and practices, even if they are contradictory.

2. The rejection of modernism,

   • The Enlightenment was the origin of the world’s depravity.

   • Advocacy for Enlightenment ideas, including democracy and empiricism, is at best frowned on.

3. The cult of action for action’s sake,

   • “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”

   • Those who think rather than act are weak, effeminate, degenerate intellectuals.

4. Disagreement is treason,

   • Syncretistic faith cannot withstand analytical critique.

   • Modern science praises disagreement, and so it cannot be trusted.

5. Fear of difference,

   • The first appeal of a fascist/prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders.

   • Fascism is inherently racist or otherwise xenophobic.

6. Appeal to a frustrated middle class,

   • Appeal to the majority who are experiencing an economic crisis, feel politically humiliated, and are terrified of lower social groups.

7. Obsession with a plot,

   • The only privilege is to be born in the same nation, and the only people who can provide a nation its identity are the enemy.

   • Therefore there must always be a plot, typically international, but it must also come from the inside. This makes Jews an easy target, as they can be inside and outside at the same time.

   • Usually fueled by xenophobia.

8. The enemy is both feeble and powerful,

   • The enemy is all powerful. They run a shadowy cabal, control the entire world, shape the entire planet’s geopolitical landscape with their own hands…

   • But they are also weak and effete. The common people can defeat them with ease.

9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy,

   • “Life is permanent warfare.”

   • Armageddon complex; enemies have to be defeated, so there needs to be a grand final battle. However, such a victory implies an era of peace, which contradicts the permanent warfare.

   • Therefore, the battle will never end. There will always be a new enemy.

10. Contempt for the weak,

    • Popular elitism, everyone is in the best group, but anyone below you is weak

    • “Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.”

11. Everybody is educated to become a hero,

    • “Heroism is the norm.” There is a cult of heroism inextricably tied into the cult of death.

    • Death is not an unpleasant, but necessary thing. It is, in fact, glory incarnate, and the best reward for heroism.

12. Machismo,

    • Will to power is transferred to sexual matters.

    • There is an almost inherent disdain for women and any deviant sexual habits.

    • It’s hard for fascists to play the game of sex, so they take out their frustrations by playing with weapons.

13. Selective populism,

    • Individuals have no rights, instead there is a monolithic people with a Common Will,

    • But there is no Common Will, so the leader pretends to know it. The People is theater, made up. A convenient lie.

    • “Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.”

14. Newspeak,

    • Yes, that newspeak, the official language of Ingsoc in Orwell’s 1984. 

    • Language that only the in-group understand. An outsider can only guess. It is designed to insulate, to keep the in group away from any who might deradicalize them. You cannot deradicalize that which you cannot understand.

    • In short, dog whistles. Terms, phrases, and sayings that make sense only to those meant to understand them to discourage critical thinking.

Wow, what a definition, huh? Around two pages needed to explain all that, and that’s just a summary! The full definition with detailed explanations and examples is about six and a half pages. It is necessary to be that long though in order to really understand fascism. There are many different definitions for fascism, written by a wide variety of scholars, but I believe none of them reach the necessary level of depth and comprehension Umberto Eco does. Eco perfectly outlines the most common and important features of fascism, one of the biggest being just how incomprehensible it is. So many of those points contradict not only each other, but themselves. This touches on something I believe no other definition drives home better than Eco’s: the fact that Fascism is deliberately incomprehensible. 

With a solid grasp on a means by which we can recognize and define fascism, our next course of action is simple: understand the contemporary right-wing movement and where they came from.

Far-right parties across the globe are gaining power in their respective countries. In Germany, the AfD has been steadily gaining power, having recently won 20% of seats in the Bundestag. The right wing groups of Italy are small, but are slowly becoming more popular, and have had no qualms about placing Mussolini worshippers and descendents in charge. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French far-right National Rally party, has been thoroughly outperforming the liberal party, only being effectively held back by the leftist party. In Canada, over a decade of incompetent liberal leadership has set the stage for the conservative party to lead in polls in every province except Quebec. 

The progenitor of this rise of western right-wing fanaticism is the United States. After the War on Terror began, U.S. intelligence agencies turned the near entirety of their efforts towards countering international terrorist organizations, which came at the cost of giving domestic threats– many of which were far-right organizations– a lot more room to breathe and space to grow. At the same time, use of the internet as a mainstream social forum was rapidly popularizing. New social media and discussion board websites were popping up and making it easier than ever to communicate with people and to share ideas. This combination of a failure to police the domestic threat posed by far-right political groups in the United States and the increasingly interconnected nature of the world via the internet brought about a wholly new threat: mass political radicalization. This was the beginning of the alternative right.

In 2008, white nationalist Richard Spencer wished to set himself and his movement of far-right radicalists apart from mainstream American conservatism– the neo-conservatism of the Bush era– so he coined the term “alternative right.” After years of struggling to maintain consistent employment in conservative organizations because of his extreme beliefs, he eventually took to making his own commentary on politics. Thus, in 2010 he created the website AlternativeRight.com. From that point onward, the far-right spent a few years quietly growing their numbers, mobilizing mostly through the internet on websites like 4-Chan and YouTube. During the early to mid 2010s, YouTube in particular served as a strong pipeline to the “alt-right” with controversies like Gamergate and personalities like Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder serving as catalysts to lock in their stranglehold on internet politics, while progressive voices were either algorithmically obscured or bullied off the site. Through charismatic pundits and the meme-ification of dog whistles, right-wing politics slowly became more and more normalized in young men. This cultural victory through the internet, combined with the lack of populism from the Democratic Party, is inevitably what led to America’s rightward polarization.

The culmination of this rise of the alt-right was the Charlottesville “Unite The Right” rally, which was filled to the brim with neo-nazis. Attendees were waving around swastika flags, wearing shields adorned with the Sonnenrat, and carrying banners of the American National Socialist Movement, all while chanting “jews will not replace us.” Despite all of this, however, Donald Trump did not wholeheartedly condemn the rally’s attendees. That moment marked the beginning of fascism taking root in the United States government. Donald Trump was not– and I argue still is not– ideologically fascist. Donald Trump is driven above all else by ego. Appealing to the fascists who worship him was just his way of stroking that ego. By giving the fascists a pass, however, he sent a message heard around the world: “Fascism is acceptable in the modern day.” 

The years to follow, and the polarization that came with them, are inextricably tied to this moment. Had Donald Trump and the Republican Party condemned the entire rally, spurned the people who participated in it, then that would have most likely nipped the rise of fascism in the bud. Without the approval of their supreme leader or their party, the alt-right would have been severely crippled. They would have been recognized for the lunatics they are and, condemned to be nothing more than a fringe movement, their numbers would eventually dwindle. For many more years to follow, the American right would have continued to be defined by neo-conservatism. However, in giving them the Trump endorsement, the same as he did for Qanon, the Proud Boys and the January 6th rioters, he made a statement as clear as day that he, his administration, and the Republican Party that fell in lockstep behind him, was a safe haven for fascists. This endorsement marked the evolution of the alt-right. Instead of being a mostly online fringe movement, they had become part of the mainstream. There was no more “alt,” it was just “the right.” 

The reason I’ve dredged up this little history lesson and my theory on the moment fascism took root in America is to bring emphasis to Donald Trump’s role in its popularization. Every fascist movement is intrinsically tied to its leader. An ideology can be influenced by thought leaders, even created by them, but they are not often intrinsically tied to them. A communist can be a communist without having ever read a page of Karl Marx, a capitalist can be a capitalist without ever reading a page of Adam Smith, and a liberal can be a liberal without having even a clue who Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill are, but the Nazi cannot be a Nazi without a love for Adolf Hitler. You cannot be an American fascist without a love for Donald Trump. Donald Trump did not create the alt-right, but he defined the trajectory their movement would take. Through the creation of MAGA he embraced the alt-right, freed them of the moniker of “alternative” and made fascism the inevitable end state of the Republican Party. The rise of fascism in America is inherently tied to Donald Trump.

As I mentioned earlier, Donald Trump is a man driven primarily by ego. Donald Trump does not have any loyalty to any ideology, or even to the nation of America. Donald Trump is loyal only to himself, and he craves loyalty from other people. This is why I make the distinction that Donald Trump is not a fascist in ideology, only in practice. Donald Trump’s movement is fascist, but the man himself is not. This is something that makes him fairly unique among other fascist leaders in history. People like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were genuine believers in their ideology. They lied, cheated, and stole to get to the top, but their belief in their proposed ideology was genuine. This is not the case with Trump. Donald Trump has no belief beyond a desire for power.

Donald Trump has changed, though. In the first two months of his second term, it seems that his ego has died, and not in a psychedelic trip kind of way. Trump comes off now almost like a broken man– broken by the forces that be. He has taken almost a sideshow role in his own presidency, with Elon Musk seemingly making the majority of administrative decisions. Musk has been given free rein to do as he pleases with government funding, hiring, and firing. During press conferences, Musk has stood to Trump’s side– standing above him while Trump sits– and answered questions from the press instead of Trump. Perhaps the most damning evidence of Trump’s failing ego, the lack of power he has, is in the first full meeting of Trump’s cabinet, in attendance at which was Elon Musk, in spite of holding no cabinet office. Just like at press conferences, Musk stood to the side above everyone in the room in their chairs, and was given the spotlight instead of Trump, who directly told the cabinet that if they disagreed with Musk, then they would be ousted. 

This faltering ego is yet another trait that sets him apart from fascists of the past. Term one Trump would be a perfect fascist leader. His lack of ideological commitment would be odd, but he would still be perfect. Term two, however, is an entirely different beast. He has less energy, rambles more aimlessly, makes less sense when he speaks, and is simply not all there mentally. You can tell he is starting to suffer the same mental decline as Joe Biden, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering he’s older than Biden was at the start of his term in 2021. As he declines mentally, it seems the people surrounding him are less following him as a leader, and more using him as a puppet on a string to keep his voters happy with them. Now that they have power, he’s little more than an optics machine– a tool to keep the MAGA cult docile. This is unprecedented among fascist leaders. Even at the worst stages of Hitler’s mental decline, he was in charge. The fascist rulers of the past have been rulers. The fascism of modern America, however, is not ruled by its leader. The MAGA leader is a shadow of his former self, and is kept around only because without him, his cult might get rowdy.

Though Trump is unique among historical fascists, the movement he leads is not. The MAGA movement fits the bill for “hypernationalism” perfectly. Their villains are defined by a hatred of the nation– “un-American”– and their heroes by a love for it– “patriots.” Hypernationalist saber rattling is one of the American right-wing’s favorite hobbies. Calls to make Canada the 51st state, to conquer Greenland from the Danes, to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, these are actions taken not for any material gain, but simply for the sake of rabble-rousing, a way of beating their chests and chanting “USA” to show that they are better than everyone else. 

The focus on patriotism is also what creates the American conceptualization of Mussolini’s The People. There is a group of true-blooded American patriots, people who love the nation, and are a part of it. These are the American ubermensch. Opposed to them, there are the un-Americans– the communists, immigrants, criminals, wokists, liberals, et cetera. These are the American untermensch. 

Something important to understand about The People of the MAGA movement is that they are nothing if not religious. Christianity plays a very central role in American fascism, with God serving as their “superior law.” Though the authors of the constitution wished to enshrine a separation between church and state, they were not successful. Slogans such as “in god we trust” and “one nation under god” overshadow the establishment clause of the first amendment. All of the pundits, celebrities, and leaders of the American fascist movement are either Christian, or they pretend to be Christian. Republicans decry America losing Christian values, the most dedicated base for the Republican Party is evangelical Christians, and Donald Trump himself acts like a Christian– an infamous example of this being his photoshoot holding a bible accidentally upside down in response to protests of George Floyd’s murder. Despite not being religious, Trump is constantly making appeals to his religious base, and recently went so far as to say that you cannot be happy without religion and has sought to end “anti-Christian bias,” which is not something that actually exists in America.

So how does the MAGA movement hold up against Umberto Eco’s fourteen points? Well, our first point being the “cult of tradition” we have a relatively easy comparison to draw. The movement is literally built upon the slogan of “make America great again.” There is an implication that our country is not great, but that it once was. Any analysis of this “once” time will reveal it for the bunk it is. They think of a time where women were barefoot and pregnant, but were also hot waitresses in diners serving Coke Floats. They imagine a time where every American was living the American dream with their nuclear family, where every house was two acres with a white picket fence and a dog, but also did not have any bumper to bumper traffic in urban areas. They imagine a time in America where anyone could be exactly what they wanted to be, but where gays, trans people, and other minorities either don’t exist or are swept under the rug.

We see in this take on the cult of tradition a sort of syncretic time. They don’t yearn for any specific point in history, just the general idea of “the good times.” They combine their images of entirely different points in history, while all belonging to the same movement. The MAGA movement is compatible with believers who yearn for the antebellum days of the American south, for the WWII days, the baby boom days, the days of the Reagan administration, the pre-9/11 days, and even the pre-2008 Housing Crisis days. These are all starkly different points in history, yet they fit perfectly together in one tent because common among all of them is a yearning for an idealized point in history that only existed in fantasy. This is the same as the Nazi myth of the Aryan Empire, a supposed time where The People were strong, powerful, and dominant, but have since fallen from grace and must reclaim their tradition. 

If you want to see some real syncretism, though, the right has you covered. The current movement of Trump supporters is littered with worshippers of Christian crusaders, ancient Rome, and ancient Greece. This trait of worshiping Rome is yet another trait they share with the Nazis, who called themselves “the third reich” in reference to the Roman Empire– the first reich– and the Holy Roman Empire– the second reich. This is where the “roman salute” came from, and why the Nazis did it. We see here exactly what Umberto Eco describes in pointing out the commonalities between fascist regimes, and the way that they can be so different, and yet still so similar. The fascists of the modern day idealize Rome the same way Mussolini and Hitler did.

With both the crusades and Rome, we see the continued trend of condensing hundreds, if not thousands of years into nothing more than vibes. Worshippers of these points in history will flip flop between worshipping Rome the Empire and Rome the Republic, without really differentiating between the two. They idolize marble white statues built by people who died millennia ago, and don’t even know the history well enough to know the statues weren’t even white. They fetishize the idea of crusading knights in bucket helms adorned with crosses, charging on horseback to kill the infidels while crying “deus vult”– a saying that Pete Hegseth has tattooed on his chest, if you need evidence of this phenomenon’s mainstreaming–  but have no idea that the crusades were fought almost exclusively by peasants, nor do they know that there were eight major crusades over the course of almost two hundred years, all of which were failures. 

The most interesting bit of syncretism in this movement, however, is the worship of ancient Greece. There is some kind of consistency with the worship of Rome and the crusades as they were all Christian. Well, Rome outlawed Christianity until 313 CE but I doubt these people really care. Ancient Greece however, by virtue of Jesus of Nazareth not even being born yet, could not possibly be Christian. The line that bridges this gap is the fact that the Romans worshipped the Greeks. This Greco-worship was adopted by the modern right wing, while the Roman’s fondness for the nominally non-western empire, Egypt, was disregarded. As the right wing worships Rome, so too did the Romans worship Greece. Just as they do with Rome, though, the modern right-wing does not know ancient Greece. They herald the great philosophers like Socrates, but likely do not even know that Socrates has no surviving works. They worship the legendary Alexander the Great, while the great philosopher Diogenes hated men of great power and wealth, and even insulted Alexander to his face.

There is a rejection of modernism in the MAGA movement, but it is often left implicit. The events of January 6th, 2021, however, made explicit this rejection of democracy. Trump and his followers utterly denied the results of the election, despite having no evidence for their claims for months on end. This election denial came to a head when attendees at a Trump rally attempted a violent insurrection of the government in order to implement their leader's supreme rule. These people do not explicitly describe Enlightenment ideals as depravity, but their actions show their true disdain. In words they praise the ideals of democracy, of freedom, of self-determination, and of truth, but it is nothing but farce. They only like it insofar as it benefits them.

The cult of action for action’s sake is also a noteworthy trait in the MAGA movement. Thinking is for the weak, and there is no trait more descriptive of the MAGA movement than “anti-intellectual.” Vaccine skepticism, 9/11 trutherism, Qanon conspiracism, and general denial of science and medicine and ignoring contrary evidence from “woke” news organizations are all ways in which MAGA believers deny empirical reality and justify their actions. To think is to emasculate yourself, so don’t think. Anyone who thinks is not worth trusting, so don’t trust the scientists and medical experts. The only people worthy of your trust are the strongmen, which is why they like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joe Rogan, men who are seen as “strong” because they look physically fit, and the people with muscles must know all there is to know about everything. They disparage research, empiricism, and expertise in favor of strongmen.

Project 2025 and the Trump cabinet are the perfect encapsulation of the sentiment that “disagreement is treason.” One of the defining traits of Project 2025 is the intent to have liberal government officials replaced by Trump loyalists. We are already seeing this in action, with the Trump administration interrogating civil servants on when they had their “Trump enlightenment,” on whether or not they voted for Trump, and offering to pay these employees to quit their jobs. Liberal bureaucrats are usually competent, and competence engenders the questioning of incompetence. These bureaucrats disagree with Trump– not only on a moral level, but on the practicalities of how the government should be run– but the Trump government does not want criticism. Dissenters will be tossed out, and their jobs will be given to people who will not disagree with any orders handed down to them and will instead blindly follow them to the letter. 

Look no further than Trump’s cabinet picks. Trump’s first term in office had his cabinet acting like a revolving door, with his cabinet members being fired and replaced the moment they expressed disagreement, never having any sort of stability. His current cabinet nominations are even more telling. Pete Hegseth, a fox news anchor, as Secretary of Defense. Tulsi Gabbard, someone with ties to Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin, as Director of National Intelligence. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a conspiracy nutjob, as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Matt Gaetz, a rapist pedophile, was nominated for Attorney General and was only replaced by Pam Bondi because of how unpopular he is in congress. None of these people were nominated to their seats because they earned it, or because they were fit for the job. They were nominated because they have unquestioning faith and loyalty to Trump and the Trump agenda. Competence is not important. In fact, competence is often unsavory. As I mentioned previously, competence begets the questioning of incompetence,  but you cannot question Trump. To do so is treason.

“The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders.” What are Mexican immigrants in the modern day but the fascist’s intruders? The Mexican border wall is built into the very marrow of the MAGA movement. Immigrants are painted as violent thugs, gang members, drug dealers, murderers, human traffickers, and above all else as invaders. Trump tells his followers that these are people who seek to destroy our country, our way of life. This is empirically false, as every crime statistic shows that natural-born citizens are much more likely to commit crimes than undocumented immigrants, but as we already know anti-empiricism is a key trait of fascism. The facts do not matter. All that matters is the fear.

Of course, this fear ties directly into Trump’s appeal to the frustrated middle class. Times are tough. Rent is soaring, prices are rising, and wages are not rising to match them. The job market is abysmal, and so is the housing market. The middle class is furious at the status quo, so the leaders of the MAGA movement are striking on white hot iron. They tell the middle class to fear those beneath them– the immigrants, the blacks, the homeless, the queers. The middle class suffers, and that suffering is harnessed with fear instilled in them by the ruling class.

The reason that fear needs to be harnessed against specific classes of people is because fascism must always have an enemy.  “The only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies.” From this need for an enemy to define yourself against is born the obsession with a plot. That plot can take many forms, and anyone familiar with the history of the alt-right will know some of these plots, like the great replacement theory or cultural marxism/bolshevism. The problem with these two examples, as well as most of the plots the alt-right were obsessed with, is that they are too explicitly fascist. The idea that black people are out-breeding white people rubs the average Joe the wrong way. Similarly, cultural marxism has direct ties to literal Nazis, so that’s a no-go for the current ruling class. The plot they chose to go with instead is the threat of “wokeness,” so they warn about wokeness in Hollywood, in video games, in classrooms.

They would have The People believe that wokeness is taking over, controlling the media, the politicians, and corrupting all that they hold dear. Wokeness, and the people who spread it, are powerful. They control society, and threaten to destroy America. Despite this power, though, they are still weak. Their enemies are just a bunch of woke pansy liberals. Trans people are evil monsters who groom children and invade women’s locker rooms and beat up women in sports while plotting to destroy intelligent society, but they’re also just a bunch of mentally ill suicidal freaks. Their enemies, at least their conception of them, are both strong and weak. They are Saturday morning cartoon villains– a threat that exists to fulfill a plot contrivance, and can be knocked over the moment the story demands it.

But just because the enemy is weak does not mean you can relax while fighting them. “Life is permanent warfare.” This presents a problem, though, which is that to have an enemy you must seek to defeat them. If you defeat your enemy, however, you have run out of conflict, and therefore cannot have permanent warfare. Eco says that no fascist leader has ever solved this predicament, but that does not mean they cannot try to. 

There is only one way to have permanent warfare, and that is to have eternal enemies. Your enemies cannot be allowed to die, not entirely, at least. This is why queer people, most especially trans people, are such prominent targets for the modern fascists; because queer people are not an ethnicity that can be exterminated, but a community of identities that will exist no matter the society. There will always be gay people, trans people, and other various flavors of queer people. The only difference is that they will live in the closet. The need for permanent enemies is also why terms like “wokeness” and “DEI” have become so popular. You cannot destroy a concept, just de-popularize it. If you ever defeat the current wokeness, then you can just redefine wokeness to include something new. By waging war against a concept, you create a nominally eternal enemy. 

It should be no surprise that a movement of people who wage permanent war against enemies who are weak should also have contempt for all that is weak. The focus of their contempt for weakness is mostly expressed through their hatred of queerness, but this contempt can sometimes bleed into how they view their own people. Donald Trump has expressed contempt for veterans of war, calling them “losers” and “suckers.” This is a manifestation of popular elitism. 

Their contempt for weakness and their desire for permanent warfare build off of each other, and breeds in them a sense of machismo, “which implies both disdain for women and intolerance… of nonstandard sexual habits.” It should be obvious that queerness is usually the target of their intolerance for nonstandard habits– transphobia and homophobia are almost prerequisites to being an American right-winger– but this is not the end of their intolerance. Their jokes about the left’s infinite genders fall into this category, too, as does their hatred for BDSM and furry culture. This is why pictures of soldiers wearing pup masks keep getting circulated– in spite of how uncommon example of them actually are– and why right-wingers say our military is dying whenever any video of soldiers doing anything mildly fruity is posted online, even though soldiers being fruity has been common for literal millennia. 

Disdain for women is no uncommon thing in most societies, unfortunately, but our American fascists are quite militant about their misogyny. Ending abortion rights is the most obvious way this misogyny manifests, but it is not the only way. A desire to keep women out of the workforce, and make them live as homemakers is quite common in the American right, even if they would not state it in such simple words. Right-wingers are also displeased with the idea of having women as leaders. During Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president in 2016, it was a relatively common argument that women could not be president since they might declare war because of their periods. While this argument did not rear its ugly head this past election cycle, we have seen the rise of something even uglier. 

The popularity of figures like Andrew Tate and Adin Ross perfectly encapsulate the absolutely militant sexism of the American right-wing. Andrew Tate– who Trump has helped to free from his criminal investigation in Romania and return him to America– is the perfect embodiment of fascist machismo. A hateful, spiteful man, who regards queer people as disgusting degenerates and views women as little more than fleshlights that talk. The problem with this view of women, however, is that it ruins sex. Among modern fascists, sex is an object of desire that they struggle to have. Because women have much more autonomy now than in the 1900s, women have much more freedom to choose who their sexual partners are, and a lot of them are ignoring conservative men. Younger generations are experiencing today a crisis of loneliness, due in part to the polarization between young men and women on the topic of women’s rights. 

These young conservative men are struggling to have sex, and many of them blame it on the freedom of women. The phenomenon of inceldom is a prominent example of this male loneliness epidemic, and it is perfectly indicative of the fact that because “sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons.” If you have ever noticed the trend that the vast majority of mass murders are done by people who identify with right wing politics, this machismo need to play with weapons as a result of sexual frustration is often one of many reasons why.

We’ve talked about The People before, and something important about The People is that they also have a Voice, but as we have already covered, The People is nothing but theater. In any large group of people, there will always be dissent and disagreement. Because there cannot be complete uniformity in a group, there cannot be a singular Voice of the People. This is why selective populism is so important to fascism, and in the wake of Trump’s second term in office we are seeing it utilized. The officials of Trump’s presidential campaign, his minions in the White House staff, his cabinet appointees, and Trump himself have all described his victory in the election as a “mandate,” and every time they have been questioned on why they have passed unpopular policies and made unpopular executive orders, their answer has always been that The People have given Trump a “mandate” by electing him. 

This is selective populism at work. When Donald Trump orders freezes on federal spending, proposes tariffs that would ruin the economy, proposes the dissolution of the Department of Education, and threatens to destroy FEMA, he is doing so against the interests of the people who voted for him. These are not policies that the American people are dying to see passed, and if they were to pass they would disproportionately harm the red states that support him most. The usage of terms like “mandate” is done to imply a staggering, landslide victory in the election. The implication is that The People overwhelmingly demanded that Trump rule, but is that really the case? He may have won the popular vote, but only by a margin of 1.48%– the third smallest popular vote victory margin in all of American history, bested only by JFK in 1960 and Richard Nixon in 1968. In terms of raw numbers, it looks even worse. The US census estimated that the population of voting-age Americans in 2024 numbered about 267 million, and of that, roughly 77.3 million voted for Trump. That means that less than a third of voting age Americans voted for Trump. This isn’t exactly an overwhelming margin, but that doesn’t matter, because Trump isn’t trying to speak for the people, he’s trying to speak for The People. All of these numbers are ignored in favor of the rhetoric that Trump speaks as the Voice of The People, because rhetoric is all that matters.

A very key part of fascist rhetoric is newspeak and dog whistles. Fascism needs to radicalize people, and keep them that way. The best way to keep someone from deradicalizing is to insulate them from the rest of the world and to discourage critical thought. Newspeak is critical to this. How can someone deradicalize you if you cannot engage in the critical thought needed to change your mind? This plays into the anti-intellectualism of modern fascism. Distrust of science, the spreading of conspiracy theories, and the dismissal of all progressive politics as “wokeness” all work together to the end of keeping people stupid so that they don’t ask questions. As I displayed in a previous essay, it is incredibly easy to disprove Republican talking points, but it doesn’t matter. The followers of Trump are kept insulated with their denial of truth. You cannot debate them, or change their minds, because they have been trained to reject critical thought in favor of dogma.

Follow-up question– how can someone deradicalize you if they don’t even understand what you’re talking about? This is what dog whistles are for. We don’t see dog whistles as much today, but in the days of the alt-right they were everywhere. Pepe the Frog, the OK hand symbol, numbers like 14 and 88, surrounding words like “them” with (((echoes))),  these were all very common dog whistles that served not only as a way to communicate with an in-group, but also to insulate that in-group from the out-group. Though they are not so common these days, they were incredibly important in creating the foundations that contemporary fascism was built on.

It would seem that American fascism fits very neatly into Umberto Eco’s points, with the cult of heroism being the only point I could not map onto the MAGA movement. Thirteen out of fourteen definitely illustrates a trend, but what else about it? Umberto Eco may lay out a fantastic outline for identifying fascism, but what makes MAGA fascism special? What traits separate modern American fascism from the fascism of the 1900’s?

There is a lot you can learn about a fascist movement by analyzing the traits that apply to it, but you can learn just as much from the traits that do not apply. I feel it would be a failure of analysis to not consider why the cult of heroism does not apply to MAGA fascism.

All of history is subject to material analysis. Things do not just happen– they are the result of historical circumstances. Similarly, human beings themselves are heavily influenced by our material conditions, as are the ideologies we create. Fascism is no exception, which is one of the many reasons why fascism is so slippery. The tenets of a fascist ideology have to fit the material conditions of the culture it originates from. This is why Nazism was so much more severe than Italian fascism. The material conditions of Germany prior to Hitler’s rise to power birthed a more drastic and bloodthirsty fascism than that of Italy prior to Mussolini’s reign. 

Because of how much the citizens of Germany were suffering prior to Hitler’s rise, Hitler was able to take credit for the revitalization of Germany after the Great Depression, even if he had very little to do with it. On top of that, the suffering Germans faced as a result of post First World War agreements like the Treaty of Versailles, even if they harmed Germany less than they did Germany’s allies, still gave Hitler a lot of ammunition with which to breed a lust for revenge in his people. The unrest that existed in Germany resulted in a movement of people who were not only supportive of Hitler, but also dedicated to his cause. Hitler had a unique ideology that set him apart from his contemporary fascists. That unique ideology combined with the popularity and strength of German nationalism at the time and a feeling that Germany had been stabbed in the back by the rest of the world resulted in a populace that was willing to fight and die for their fascist dictatorship.

This is to be contrasted against fascist Italy under Mussolini. The unrest leading up to Mussolini’s leadership was not as severe and wide reaching as it was in Germany, due in part to his uprising happening prior to the Great Depression. That economic turmoil had to be weathered under Mussolini’s leadership. Just as well, Italy was on the winning side of World War One. Because of that, the only feeling of betrayal Mussolini could harness was the complaint that Italy didn’t gain as much from the war as they deserved, which does not inspire quite the same hateful anger as Hitler’s “the world destroyed our economy, they are our enemies” rhetoric. Mussolini had a cult of personality, but it didn’t have the same fire as Hitler’s, which relied on the cries of “Blut und Boden,” or “Blood and Soil.” In simple terms, Nazi Germany had Italy beaten in ideology. As Eco noted,

Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy… Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric.

Do not be mistaken, the Italian people supported Mussolini, and were permissive of many of the evil acts taken by his government, but they did not have the same love and dedication to the cause– the same frothing-at-the-mouth lust for vengeance against the world– that many Germans did. The reason this is important is because America is in a situation that is not entirely dissimilar to fascist Italy. Eco’s point about Mussolini only having rhetoric in lieu of an actual ideology can apply just as easily, if not moreso, to Donald Trump, a man driven entirely by ego, lacking in even the slightest hint of ideological commitment.

Of course, the leader is not what matters most when discussing the cult of heroism. Rather, it is the followers who matter, and I cannot think of a less heroic, less dedicated band of followers than white, middle class Americans. You’ll have to forgive my crass language, but I’ve lived in America my entire life, and have met a lot of white middle class Americans. What that experience tells me is that these people are generally fat– in spirit if not physically– lazy, greedy, selfish, hyper-individualistic slobs. Americans don’t care about their communities, and don’t care to put in the effort needed to make them better. Americans don’t know their neighbors, and don’t want to. Americans don’t want to sacrifice for their community. In fact, they don’t want to sacrifice anything. The idea of giving something up for the betterment of the community or the nation or the culture is completely foreign to the American mindset. The mindset of the ur-American– the white, middle class, typically but not necessarily suburban American–  is “fuck you, got mine.”

There is truly no better word for Americans than hyper-individualist. When asked to think of an American philosopher, what comes to mind for you may be thinkers the likes of Thomas Paine or W.E.B. DuBois. Foundational and important as their work may be, however, there is no philosopher who encapsulates the psyche of the ur-American than Ralph Waldo Emerson, for there is truly no better epitomization of Americanism than “the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.” The ur-American is diseased, rotten to the core with hyper-individualism, and this morality– if one can even describe it as such– is one of two defining traits of modern Americans. The other? Consumerism. The only greater-good Americans care about is the greater of which goods they want to buy. Morality is for people who give a damn. Americans only care about more-ality, the need to keep buying stuff, to consume more products, and to get more treats.

Despite fascism and hyper-nationalism taking such a bulldog-grip on America, our military is having one of the greatest recruitment crises in our history. Ever since the 1980s enlistment numbers have been continuously declining. Why? Because Americans don’t care about America, at least not enough to sacrifice for it. Americans don’t want to join the military– they don’t even want to pay their taxes. The fascism of modern America has to be coded in such a way that gives it the aesthetic of libertarianism. Our leaders have to talk about lowering taxes, cutting regulations, and ending welfare programs because Americans despise the idea of helping people. The ur-American constantly whines and moans about the nanny state and welfare queens– the “parasite class” as they are often called. Their biggest concern on a daily basis is the fear that bums on SNAP and unemployment benefits are using their tax dollars to buy McDonalds. Americans only care about themselves. What they get and what happens to them is all that matters, and anyone else can starve to death for all they care.

Thus, the term “Treatlerite” was born. The moniker of Treatler– a portmanteau of the words “treat” and “Hitler”– was created in progressive spaces on social media to describe the trend of Americans becoming full-blown reactionaries the moment they are slightly inconvenienced. Juvenile as this term may be, there is, to me, an undeniable value in its use, because you can see this everywhere in America. When Trump voters complain about the state of the country, they talk about the most inane stuff you could imagine– gas prices, wokeness, egg prices, entitled kids. They don’t care about improving education, or better healthcare, or solving homelessness, or anything like that. Why? Because that’s all stuff that helps someone else. “I don’t need healthcare right now, so why should I care about healthcare prices? I could afford college/didn’t go to college, so why should I pay for other people’s college?”

The American people supporting Trump might be the most selfish, anti-social, low-trust population of human beings on planet Earth. Why do Americans vote? The gas was too expensive. Why do Americans vote? Too many blacks in the neighborhood. Why do Americans vote? Too many homeless people panhandling downtown. Why do Americans vote? Bums are using food stamps to buy soda. Why do Americans vote? The damn kids won’t get off their lawn. Americans are hateful, fearful people, but above all else they are lazy, antisocial do-nothings who would sooner chop off their toes than help someone else. Now, though, some Republican voters are turning against Trump. Why? Because they got hurt. Because the President they voted for had the audacity to do exactly what he said he would do.

Over the past month, as DOGE layoffs have started, there have been a few Trump voters caught in the crosshair, and they’ve all been saying the exact same thing: “I didn’t think I would get fired!” One case of this went particularly viral on social media, with a Trump voter who worked at the IRS doing an interview about how he had been laid off. He spends the entire interview talking about how he felt betrayed, and that he thought he was a good, hard-working man, and that it was only the “lazy” employees who would get fired. Unfortunately for him, though, these layoffs don’t care about party lines, and he is now one of the millions of Americans to be awarded the Fell For It Again Award. This case is yet another display of the ur-American selfishness. Americans don’t care if mass layoffs happen, they don’t care if dozens of thousands of people have to find new livelihoods, they only care if it happens to them, because Americans are selfish and hateful. They hate their fellow man, and want nothing but suffering to befall anyone they deem unworthy– the “leeches” of society, anyone who they think is lazy, not hardworking enough, not conservative enough– and will gladly cheer on that suffering until the moment it affects them. Only then will they start to turn.

I’m speaking incredibly generally. Obviously there are plenty of communities in America– most commonly Black and Latin communities– that are very interconnected and care about maintaining their social bonds. However, this is absolutely not the case for the Americans who serve as the largest base of support for the Republican Party– the ur-Americans, the rural and suburbanite middle and upper-middle class white people. The people who voted for Trump are by and large almost exactly as I have described here.

We are an incredibly atomized society, and while that has made it very easy to radicalize people into voting for fascists and supporting fascist policies, it will most likely end up biting those fascists in the ass down the road. This kind of hyper-individualized society does not lend well to a Nazi-style fascist state. Americans don’t want to invade neighboring countries, or pay for private school after public education is abolished, or be a victim of the mass layoffs of civil servants, or deal with any of the economic repercussions of jeopardizing the trade deals we have with our allies. The cult of heroism fails to apply to MAGA fascism because in order to have a cult of heroism, everyone must want to be a hero. They must be willing to suffer for their cause. What’s more, the cult of heroism and the cult of death are two sides of the same coin, and Americans don’t want to die. There are plenty of evangelicals who want the world to end and the rapture to happen, but they don’t want to die. There are plenty of Americans who want Canada to be invaded, but they would never sign up to fight on the front lines. 

There is no broad impatience to die in MAGA fascism, and there is no desire to become martyrs. They don’t want to die for a cause, and they don’t want to die in the first place. They don’t want to suffer or sacrifice, even if it’s for a cause they agree with. This is an especially unique trait of American fascism. In this way, it might end up being the weakest form of fascism in history. Our fascist regime may have the most well funded military, the most powerful unitary government, and the wealthiest oligarchs, but they also have a weak-willed and weak-minded populace. The traits of fascism in a given nation is determined by the nation’s culture, and right now, the culture of America is a culture of selfishness, laziness, fearfulness, and spitefulness. The culture of America is Treatlerism. 

This phenomenon of Treatlerism is not the only unique trait of MAGA fascism, though. As you should well understand by now, fascism is a tricky beast, and the fascism of any nation can be defined through any number of unique traits. Besides, the term Treatlerite only describes a unique trend in the general populace– the people that are led. It does not describe the leaders themselves. If we want to understand the most important trait of modern American fascism, we have to understand the people who ushered in this new wave of fascism in the first place.

A spectre is haunting the West– the spectre of fascism. All the powers of capital have entered into a holy alliance to welcome this spectre: CEO and Shareholder, Republican and Democrat, common Liberals and Proud Boys.

If you have ever heard me talk about politics in real life I’m sure you groaned when you read the word “capital” in that section header– even more so if you got the reference in that opener– but trust me, this is very important. Capital and capitalists being tied to fascism is nothing new. The Nazi party had a very close relationship with the capital class of Germany. The Nazis had a lot of financial support from business owners during their rise to power, and they engaged in a lot of privatization once they had control over the government. Many of the capitalists that supported the Nazi party had some moral qualms with them, but in most cases the material gains they would have received for supporting the Nazis overwhelmed their moral scruples. When the time came for privately owned factories to start producing gas chamber doors, the capitalists were more than willing to have some blood on their hands if it meant higher profit margins. 

I’m here to analyze contemporary fascism’s relationship to capital, however, not the relationship capital had with Nazism. To keep this essay from getting any longer than it already is, I’ll leave that topic there. If you want to learn more about this subject, I would recommend you read “Against the Mainstream: Nazi privatization in 1930s Germany” by Germà Bel and “The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry” by Christoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner. 

What makes our modern fascism different from the fascism of the Nazis in terms of the relationship it has to capital interests is the extent to which capital controls and leads fascism. The Nazis had a strong partnership with business interests, sure, but when you looked at the higher-ups in Hitler’s regime– the leaders and the officials– what you found were card-carrying Nazis. This is not the case in MAGA fascism. When you look at the Trump administration, and the people who support him, what you find is not a coalition of out-and-about ideological fascists, but a capitalist oligarchy unlike any in modern history. 

Many of the wealthiest people in America have raised the MAGA flag in the past years. Some of them have closer ties to Trump than others, but they have all thrown their support behind him in one way or another. Jeff Bezos blocked The Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris, and has said the opinion section of The Washington Post will now be limited only to pieces defending “personal liberties and free markets.” Sundar Pichai attended Trump’s inauguration, announced that he intends to work together with him and JD Vance to “usher in a new era of technology,” and has signaled his support for fascism by having Google remove events like Pride Month and Holocaust Remembrance Day from their calendars without any prior coercion from the White House. Mark Zuckerberg ordered an alteration to the terms of service on his social media sites to be “anti-woke,” has been praising the Trump administration in conferences, and says he will work as a willing partner to the Trump administration. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has supported Trump, and in return has become part of a five hundred billion dollar fund to research AI in competition with China. Though Shou Zi Chew is not American, he is still an icon of billionaires throwing weight behind Trump, with Shou Zi Chew himself thanking Trump for saving TikTok, and a popup notification on TikTok also explicitly credited Trump with TikTok’s continued existence, despite Trump and the Republican Party having written the bill to ban it in the first place.

Trump’s official administration, too, is filled with incredibly wealthy people. CEO of Cerberus Capital Management, Stephen Feinberg, as deputy Secretary of Defense. Linda McMahon, a former executive of WWE, as Secretary of Education. Doug Burgum, a former software entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and real-estate developer, as Secretary of the Interior. Charles Kushner, another real estate developer, as our ambassador to France. Each and every one of these people are worth billions, and they are only a handful of the wealthy people serving in this administration. Rattling off some other names, the administration has also hired the likes of Warren Stephens, Leandro Rizzuto Jr., Steven Witkoff, and Kelly Loefler.

I would be remiss, however, to neglect the most powerful billionaire in this administration. Enter Elon Musk: Richest man alive, owner of Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX, and effective shadow president of the United States. He is a man who has been deeply tied to the Trump campaign for many months, and contributed a huge amount of wealth and resources towards ensuring Trump’s electoral victory. Not only that, but he has been working in the White House since inauguration, tasked with the job of tearing half of the government apart through his proposed– and cringe-ly named, might I add– Department of Government Efficiency. Musk has even met with foreign leaders such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and has attended rallies of the German AfD.

It is entirely clear that the capital class– the owning class– has unified behind the Trump administration and the Republican Party. While some companies, such as Apple and Costco, have been resistant to Trump’s demands for ending “DEI initiatives,” these are only exceptions. It should go without saying that these people are not unifying behind Trump for no reason. They stand to gain a lot from this administration since the class interests of the bourgeoisie predispose them to having a positive attitude towards fascism. Capital owners desire infinite growth. It is not enough to keep making money, they must keep making more money. This desire is one that has some suspicious similarities to the fascist need for permanent warfare– an infinite enemy.

As sophomoric as it may be to point out, it needs not be forgotten that we live in a finite world. There cannot be infinite growth in a finite system, the same way that you cannot have permanent warfare while also defeating your enemy. Just as fascists must invent loopholes to create permanent enemies, so too must capitalists create loopholes for permanent expansion. This is where speculative markets come in– venture capitalism, the stock market, NFTs and cryptocurrencies– ways to constantly generate more and more profit without actually providing a good or service to anyone. This need for infinity within finity puts them in an agreeable position with fascism, but this is not the only habit that is compatible between them.

Fascists and capitalists both have an understanding of the idea that it is easier to conquer a divided people than a unified one. Together we stand, divided we fall. Capitalists have benefited greatly from racial divisions, and in the past have encouraged it in order to discourage unionization. A collective union of all workers is powerful, so capitalists would often sow discord and discourage unions from integrating. While this does not happen as much in the modern day, racial animus is still something capitalists benefit from. The idea that immigrants bring down wages, or that racial minorities get unfair advantages through DEI programs or affirmative action, these are both ideas that benefit the capital class. Instead of striking for higher wages or better working conditions, workers feud with each other. If workers are pitted against each other, they are much less likely to fight against the people actually responsible for their workplace gripes. The fascist must have an eternal enemy in order to bring about permanent conflict, and that permanent conflict is something capitalists can profit off of because it keeps workers divided and weak. 

Weakness is a trait that both the fascist and the capitalist disdain, and it is from this disdain for weakness that they share their senses of popular elitism. To the capital class, workers are a resource– a tool in a box, a cog in a machine– but they cannot be explicitly treated as such. Jeff Bezos can walk into a warehouse and shake hands with one of the employees, and he can wear a grin on his face as he does it, and tell him how much he appreciates his labor, but that does not change the fact that the man he shook hands with is nothing but a resource to him. Those warehouse workers will get messages of appreciation from corporate during peak Prime Day business telling them that they’re all part of a team, and maybe sometimes they’ll get little gift baggies of candy to show just how much they mean to their overlords, but that never changes the fact that the moment their jobs can be automated, they will be. When that happens, all the appreciation and “we’re a team” talk goes out the window, and it’s time for mass layoffs.

Obviously, not all capitalists are built the same way. There are companies like Costco that put noteworthy effort into ensuring good conditions for their employees (though even this is often done not for the good of the workers, but rather to keep them content and less likely to unionize). These companies are not the norm, though, especially not on the global scale. It is important to understand that capital goes beyond the United States. Capital is international. A company like Nike can have fantastic working conditions in America, but that doesn’t matter if they still use underpaid labor in countries like China to cut costs. Nestle has been in plenty of controversies over their use of slave and child labor in the harvesting of cocoa, and that wouldn’t change even if they paid their American employees fifty bucks an hour.

The important thing to understand is that even if an individual capital owner is not doing particularly immoral acts, their class interests can only be best pursued via the exploitation of workers. Their interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of the working class. It is these class interests that put capitalists and fascists in league with one another. Their end goals may be different, but the paths they take towards those goals are ones that overlap in many places. 

All of this is only the overlap in interests of the entire class. Zooming in on some specific industries, you see even more ways in which certain capitalists stand to gain from a fascist regime. The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) above all other fields of industry is incentivized to support fascist regimes. Not only do fascists require permanent war, but their machismo creates a desire to play with weapons. A time of war is when the MIC makes the most amount of money. In a hot war, every bomb dropped, missile launched, bullet fired, tank exploded, and helmet cracked needs to be replaced. In a cold war, you cannot ever stop making new weapons for fear of your enemy having more. It does not matter if there are boots on the ground, all that matters is the ongoing threat of violence.

The MIC wants war. They want conflict. The Cold War against the Soviet Union, the invasion of Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, the Israel/Palestine war, all conflicts in which the MIC made and continues to make countless billions of dollars from the blood of countless millions of people. Their profit motive incentivizes warfare, so it should be no surprise that they will support the most war-like people.

The pharmaceutical and health insurance industries as well have a uniquely vested interest in the Trump administration. Anti-intellectualism being a key trait of fascism, and that anti-intellectualism manifesting commonly today in the form of skepticism of vaccines and modern medicine, you’d think the opposite would be the case, but that isn’t so. Because the capital class has great influence in the Trump administration, they can encourage the government to lift regulations on medication prices, and undo the Affordable Care Act. In its own way, that modern-medicine skepticism could potentially make more money for these industries than it costs them. An increase in the number of medicine skeptics will almost certainly lead to more people getting sick worse and more often, meaning more spreading of diseases, meaning more people will be in need of medical treatment, which makes money for both pharmaceutical and health insurance companies. 

The capital class clearly has a lot to gain from this administration, and Donald Trump is willing to give it to them, as are his Republican colleagues. They do not only gain financially, either. Not only is Trump’s administration willing to hand them a few billion more dollars on silver platters, but they are willing to give capitalists more power too. A very important thing to understand about the class interest of the bourgeoisie is that they don’t just want more money. Money is great, and they want more of it, but it isn’t just about money, it’s about the power that comes with it. 

Large companies have a lot of advantages over small ones. Marxists are quick to point out that a capitalist is still a capitalist, no matter how large the business they own is, and they are right to do so. However, it is undeniable how much disproportionate power large companies have over the entire global economy, which makes them a unique threat compared to the petit bourgeoisie. They have more control over the industrial processes that create the goods they need to operate, can buy those goods in bulk for lower prices than smaller businesses can manage, and have the reliability of brand recognition to make them more appealing to consumers. Something very prescient for today, however, is that large corporations have much greater influence over the government and are much more capable of weathering severe economic downturn. If, for example, Trump’s 25% tariffs greatly increased the cost of goods imported to America, a large corporation has the resources and wealth to eat that price hike and limit how much of it they pass on to the consumer. When a depression happens, a multi-billion dollar corporation has more than enough wealth to keep itself afloat. Your local mom and pop shop may not be so lucky though. 

When recessions and depressions happen, big businesses always get the top priority for federal money bailing them out because of how much leverage they hold. Small businesses don’t often get such a significant cut of that pie. So, when an economic downturn happens, or legislation passes that only benefits large corporations, many small businesses may close down, and who’s always there to swoop in and buy up those failing businesses? The same companies responsible for their failure in the first place. Chain pharmacies are the perfect example of this. For years, small, local pharmacies have been going out of business, unable to compete with the big chains like Walgreens and CVS. These small pharmacies are bleeding money, and the majority of them are having to close down. Almost every time these stores close, though, they get scooped up by their corporate competitors. Walgreens even has a program where failing pharmacies can sign up to be temporarily closed while they are introduced into the conglomerate.

But if you know anything about the current state of corporate pharmacies, then you know that they, too, are bleeding money. Their stores are staffed with only two or three people, employees spread so thin that it isn’t possible for them to do their job effectively or efficiently. Walgreens in particular has been doing so poorly that they agreed to be acquired by private equity. The stores of these chain pharmacies are such a hassle to deal with because of how understaffed they are that they’ve been losing business. Customers just don’t want to bother with it. Customers don’t want to wait ten minutes for the overworked cashier to finally have the time to run over and unlock the cabinet they keep the deodorant in just to wait another ten minutes to buy it. Because of this, these large corporate pharmacies are bleeding money just like small pharmacies are, only in their case their harm is entirely self inflicted. If these businesses are losing so much money, and it’s because of their failing business practices, why then don’t they reverse these decisions? Why do they keep buying up new stores when they can’t even manage the ones that are already open?

Because literal profit isn’t what they care about. They want profit, sure, but their primary goal, as we have already established, is growth. They have to keep making more money. They want infinite growth in a finite system, and big pharmacies are starting to butt heads with that conflict. Walgreens and CVS aren’t able to grow as much as they used to, because they already own the lion's share of the pharmacy business, and there isn’t much more innovation that can be done in their field. They want to grow, but they can’t, so they have to force growth. They’re running out of new stores to open, so they cannibalize the ones they have. “Look at how much money we can save by laying off half our staff! Look at how much money we can save by putting everything in the store behind a lock so people can’t shoplift!” It’s a model that simply is not sustainable. In their pursuit of infinite growth, they are forced to eat themselves alive.

So how do corporations save themselves from this fate? By getting into bed with fascists. The more control the corporations have over the government, the easier it is for them to increase their profit margins by skewing legislation in their favor. The more unitary power the government has, the less influence the working class has over it. Combine the two and you have a corporate oligarchy that only benefits and answers to itself. This is a return to the divide between the aristocracy and the serfs of the pre-industrial era. 

The extent to which the capital class has power over the government should not be understated, because their control is absolutely immense. I’ve focused a lot here on the fact that Republicans and capitalists are working together, but we should not ignore how the Democrats work with them, too. The Democratic Party has helped prop up the exact same bourgeois system that the Republican Party has, the only difference is that they’ve tried to maintain a hint of social progressivism while they do it. To put it simply, the Democrats are just the left wing of the capital party.

Furthermore, the capital class also has near totalitarian rule of the media, with a paltry six companies controlling over 90% of all media, and that’s not just news. They have incomprehensible influence over the shows and movies we watch, the news we hear about, and the way that news is framed. If spreading news about an event will make them look bad, then the capitalists will simply limit the spread of that story. The owners of search engines will deprioritize searches of the topic in their algorithms, and owners of social media sites will do the same with posts on the topic. If the news cannot avoid talking about a subject, then editors ensure that the coverage is framed in the best way possible.

The most powerful capitalists have the vast majority of our politicians in their pockets. Many of these capital owners now have a seat in this administration, and the ones that don’t instead have direct lines of communications to a president, congress, and supreme court that will bend their knees to nigh on any demand made of them. None of this was accidental. They deliberately brought about these circumstances by supporting reactionary politics, and this isn’t a new phenomenon.

Billionaire money has been floating around in the government, especially in conservative spaces, for decades now. Lobbyists for every industry under the sun have used their companies’ wealth to convince congresspeople to propose new bills and amend existing ones in ways that benefit them. The oil industry has spent countless billions of dollars on disinformation campaigns against climate change and lobbying funds to block climate bills from being passed. Even when politicians do propose bills that would hurt capital owners, they have to make sure it isn’t severe. Consider how instead of creating a system of universal healthcare, the Democratic Party has remained staunchly opposed to such a system, and instead the Obama administration proposed and passed the Affordable Care Act. An improvement on our healthcare system to be sure, but that’s a rather low bar to meet.

Once it was clear that the internet was becoming a cultural centerpiece and the new way people were getting information, capital turned its attention to the online front. The alt-right may have started independent, but they didn’t become a widespread cultural movement on its own. The oil and natural gas industries in particular had a great deal of money involved in alt-right content creators who argued to debunk climate change– people like Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro. Perhaps the foremost example of this is PragerU, a YouTube channel founded by Dennis Prager and funded with billionaire fracking and conservative interest group money which existed for the sole purpose of creating short form edutainment style content that would convince people to buy into right-wing ideology by falling for clever rhetoric, flashy graphs, and talented speakers. 

Time and time again we see the ties capital has to the right wing, and that is because their class interest incentivizes them to support authoritarian regimes. This is what got us in the circumstances we find ourselves in today. Capital is international, and has no loyalty or faith to anything but itself. However, it is still subject to the whims of whatever nation it finds itself in, so capital attempts to shape the nation to its desires. That is what is happening in America now, and that is what sets MAGA fascism apart from the fascism of the past. The fascism of the modern era is not one that merely has ties to capital, but one that is specifically curated and funded by it. Any blood spilled by the Trump administration in the years to come, capital and the people who own it will have a share of the blame for every drop.

As of the publication of this essay, Donald Trump has been in office for exactly two months, and in those months we have seen a laundry list of acts flagrantly disregarding the rule of law and separation of power. Congress has made no official vote to create any Department of Government Efficiency, yet Elon Musk has been granted the power to walk freely through government agency offices, firing civil servants left and right. Musk has also been allowed access to the Treasury’s payment systems, giving him the power to cut funding to any programs or agencies he desires, and following congress’s recent prevention of a government shutdown, Musk has essentially been given free rein to do as he pleases with the national budget.

Trump has declared the southern border to be a national emergency. Highly publicized deportations have begun, and with them a scare campaign to keep immigrants fearful and servile. ICE has raided random homes and businesses without warrants. The National Guard has been deployed to the border, and military planes have been used– though wasted might be a more accurate term– to deport thousands of immigrants for photoshoots. Donald Trump and El Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele have reached an agreement that would allow America to send any and all deportees– including Americans– to El Salvador, setting the stage for El Salvador to become a sort of penal colony. The infamous torture camps of Guantanamo Bay are being converted to migrant holding facilities, which will no doubt become concentration camps in time. In light of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest by plainclothes officers in spite of being a legal citizen, it would seem that ICE will be the American secret police. The foundations of the American Black Shirts have been established, and now that Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies act we can only expect things to get worse. 

The Trump administration has begun their attempt to define trans people out of existence. In this pursuit, they have ordered that only two genders be legally recognized, and that all people only be legally identified by their assigned gender at birth. They have made it impossible to change your legal gender on any federal ID, and in some rare cases have supposedly confiscated the passports of trans people who have attempted to change their legal gender. By executive order, trans people are no longer allowed to compete in sports as their identified gender, and trans children are forbidden from receiving gender affirming care until they are nineteen. Trump has also paused any and all hiring practices in federal institutions while they investigate for “wokeness” and “DEI” practices. Perhaps the most worrying development has come from the state of Texas, which has proposed legislation to make being trans a felony, on the basis of “gender identity theft.” Policies like this are how genocide starts.

Though Trump’s presidency began with the implementation of a ceasefire between the Israeli Defense Force and Hamas, it seems that my predictions of this ceasefire falling through will come true. Trump has stated plainly his intent to support any potential invasion of Gaza and displace the over two million people who live there into neighboring nations like Jordan or Egypt. The State Department has said this was merely a posturing threat to urge the Middle East to come up with their own solution, but considering the very friendly relationship Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have shared in the past few weeks– e.g. Netanyahu giving Trump a “golden pager,” Trump pushing in Netanyahu’s dining chair– I would be very surprised if Trump didn’t order some kind of US military action in Palestine, especially now that full IDF activity seems to have resumed in the Gaza strip.

On the front of European war, it seems the Trump administration intends to severely cripple or abandon entirely our alliances in NATO in favor of friendship with the oligarchs of Russia. On top of salvos of threatened tariffs, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will be a particularly pressing thorn in the side of America’s foreign relations with our European allies. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin already have an infamously amicable relationship, and this has been only worsened with the ongoing “peace” talks in regards to Ukraine. All signs seem to show, however, that these talks are more of surrender than of peace. Russian and American diplomats have met in Saudi Arabia to negotiate an end to war, and Ukraine was not invited. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth spoke at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group and clearly established that any peace that America establishes between Russia and Ukraine will come with complete concession of conquered territory to Russia, while Russia is expected to lose nothing. 

Peace talks have only been further spoiled by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance patronizing and shouting at Zelensky during a meeting, and saying that he “isn’t ready for peace.” Since then, all aid to Ukraine has been withdrawn, and our allies in NATO have begun ramping up their military capabilities as it becomes clear that America is at best an unreliable ally, and at worst, a direct enemy. It seems that in one fell swoop, the US will hand territories and power over to one of the world’s greatest enemies while spitting in the face of our allies. If a Third World War were to start– and we can only pray for the sake of humanity’s continued existence that it doesn’t– then it seems that this time, America would be one of the Axis powers.

Perhaps the most damning single act that proves how dark the path this nation walks is in the senate’s passing of cloture on H.R. 1968, which avoided government shutdown by essentially handing a blank check over to the executive branch– and by extension Donald Trump and Elon Musk– on a silver platter. In giving the executive branch more control over the nation’s budget, congress has essentially cut off their own hands. There are no more means by which the legislative branch can effectively limit the president’s power, as they have essentially written Trump a free pass to do whatever he pleases until the end of September. This may be the American equivalent of the 1933 Enabling Act.

The blame for this falls squarely on ten people. This was not a mere unforced error. Ten senators chose to backstab their nation and hand fascists limitless power, freely, and of their own will. Dick Durbin, Brian Schatz, Catherine Cortez Masto, John Fetterman, Gary Peters, Kirsten Gillibrand, Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen, Angus King, and above all others Chuck Schumer. These ten names will be remembered in history as traitors to their nation, as fascist collaborators, and as the people who damned us all. Schumer’s last-minute heel turn to siding with the Republicans, and his spewing of lies throughout it all, will earn him a deserved reputation as a spineless, heartless, soulless, evil, deplorable traitor who sold our democracy and his constituents for cash. If only one person from our time can be remembered as our Paul von Hindenburg then it will be Schumer, and if there is a righteous god, then he will spend an eternity suffering in unending fire for his treachery.

These are dark times, indeed. I expected this administration to be really bad, but even still my expectations are being thoroughly exceeded in these first two months. However dark these times may be though, I consider myself an optimist– even if a cautious one. With every passing week it becomes ever more difficult to be optimistic, but I try to keep my chin up. It’s important to be prepared for and expect the worst, but it’s just as important to remain hopeful through it all. Even more important than that, however, is understanding the good news even in overwhelmingly bad circumstances, and seeing the potential silver linings that are to be found. Any and all fears one has of the future must be tempered with some amount of optimism, lest you fall victim to apathy or nihilism.

It needs be said that this administration has plenty of weaknesses. There is an inherent weakness to fascist regimes, that being their inability to sustain themselves. Because fascism can only survive in eternal conflict, fascism cannot be truly stable because it will inevitably either die in the fight against its enemies, or cannibalize itself in pursuit of new ones. Outside of those inherent weaknesses, though, this wave of fascism has its own unique weaknesses. We’ve already discussed the weakness of The People, what with the Treatlerite phenomenon, but there is also much weakness in the leadership. The deficiency that best applies to the leaders of this movement is quite simply stupidity. Most of the people up top in Trump’s administration are remarkably unintelligent people who make remarkably unintelligent decisions. 

Perhaps the greatest hindrance for the Trump administration in the years to come will be its incompetence, with Elon Musk in particular being a very major structural weakness. Elon Musk has made painfully clear through the decisions he has made in governance that he is not qualified to run anything, let alone a government bureaucracy. He is too stupid to understand soft power, and is treating the US budget like a rat in a computer chewing on random wires. Trump’s ego is notably weaker than it was during his first term, but I imagine it will create some conflict in the administration’s decision making at some point. His steady mental declination as he continues to age will surely be a problem, too. RFK Jr. is a complete lunatic, fully buying into the wildest conspiracy theories imaginable. Pete Hegseth is a raging alcoholic with a noteworthy history of poor workplace behavior. All of these people are only a small handful of buffoons tasked with ruling this country for the next four years, minimum.

Furthermore, though our military is incredibly well funded, the funding of a military does not equate to its effectiveness. The US military’s strength does not come just from how much money is thrown at it, but by the fact that the vast majority of people in the Pentagon, at least to a certain extent, are motivated more by effectiveness than political partisanship. The administrators of our military are mostly liberal bureaucrats, and are by and large as politically neutral as a military administrator can get. As those competent bureaucrats are replaced by loyalists, however– as we have already seen with the dismissal of C.Q. Brown as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff– we will see our military become less interested in effectiveness and more focused on loyalty. This is why Russia, despite having so much more military funding and strength than Ukraine, has not been able to entirely conquer them. Russia’s military administrators are, for the most part, appointed for their loyalty more than their competence. Our military will still be powerful, no doubt, but its potential for power will be hindered severely.

In the actions of the past months– jeopardizing relations with our allies, making ourselves seem less reliable as a trade partner, and making our enemies seem more reliable allies– we see a barrage of absolute idiocy. This is an idiocy that cannot hope to maintain a stable government, especially not the most powerful government in all of human history, and the dominant superpower of the globe. Just as well, the influences of capital may give this regime a unique kind of power through oligarchal support, but capitalism– just like fascism– is a system that cannot sustain itself. There is a reason that a certain unfortunate theorist said capitalism decays into fascism, not that it simply turns into it. Capital turns to fascism when it loses power, when its ability to grow is jeopardized. 

The influences of capital on this regime may end up being a sort of silver lining for us. Since capitalists are motivated by profit margins and growth, it’s possible that the worst aspects of fascist regimes may be mitigated because the execution of them is simply too cost-heavy. Take the idea of mass deportations, for example. It’s clear that many Republican voters and politicians want to expel all undocumented immigrants from the country, but all the capital owners who employ them would be very unhappy if that happened. Undocumented immigrants are some of the hardest working employees, in spite of the fact that they are typically treated the worst. Capital owners don’t want to get rid of migrants, they just want to treat them worse and pay them less. So, instead of deporting all of the undocumented immigrants, you highly publicize the deportation of a small number of them in order to strike fear into the ones who remain. This is already happening. Statistics have shown that Trump has deported less immigrants in the same amount of time than Joseph Biden did in his first few weeks in office. The only explanation for this I can conceive of is that mass deportation is not the actual goal.

The strategy goes like this: If migrants are terrified of being deported, then they’re much less likely to speak up whenever they’re subject to poor working conditions. Furthermore, capitalists can hold the threat of deportation over their heads as an encouragement to work as hard as possible so they don’t get deported. The capitalists do not want their most exploitable workers gone, they want them to be afraid so that they’re even easier to exploit.

I also do not believe Nazi style death camps are at all likely. Even if we ignore the costs associated with maintaining death camps, or the fact that capitalists would only be interested in labor camps at worst, I still do not believe they are that likely. There simply is no political will for death camps. The Holocaust in Nazi Germany was able to spill a lot of blood, due in part mostly to a populace that was mostly ambivalent at best and supportive at worst of the ongoing genocide. Conservatives may have won the legislative war, but they have not won the culture war. Far from it, in fact. 

Same-sex marriage is so normalized at this point that even the average Republican voter doesn’t have much of a problem with it. Gallup polls show that around 69% of the population support gay marriage. Pew Research Center data shows that only slightly less people, around 64%, support legal protections against discrimination for transgender people, despite the fact that 60% of participants believe gender is determined by sex at birth. Conservatives simply do not have control over the culture. The average Republican may be a racist, homophobic, transphobic moron, but they aren’t the kind of bigot that wants minorities killed. They may think the queers are gross sinners, but they don’t have the vitriol needed to report their neighbor to the government for sheltering gays in the attic. Texas can be genocidal by making it flat-out illegal to identify as trans, but even if the Republican voter base supports that entirely, that doesn’t mean they’ll support punishing the “crime” of transgenderism with death. Fascism has to conform to material conditions, and even as our democracy is being eroded in front of us, politicians are still at least somewhat accountable to their constituents, and the average American simply will not ever be in favor of outright genocide.

This is not meant to downplay the threat of this administration, nor is it meant to make out the average Americans to be ardent defenders of progressive ideals. I just feel it is important to understand the differences between the way things are now and the way things were under regimes like fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. This modern advent of fascism is not one built for death camps and mass deportation, because it lacks both the potential for profit and the political will of the people needed for a regime like this to institute them. This fascist regime will be one of mass fear. Fear of deportation, fear of being forced out of the closet, fear of being discriminated against, fear of losing the right to love the person you love, fear of being imprisoned unjustly, fear of getting locked up in a government blacksite for expressing your beliefs, fear of being exploited for labor, fear of becoming a slave, but it will not be one of mass death. Mass death is simply not as profitable as mass fear. Will there be death along the way? Most likely, yes. Palestine in particular will almost certainly be subject to continuation of the genocide that has been ongoing for decades. Hate crimes against queer people will probably become more common, and legislative genocide by imprisoning openly queer people may be a worst case scenario, but I simply do not see industrialized mass slaughter happening in America’s near future.

The greatest bright side of America’s decline to fascism is that it may serve as a warning sign to the rest of the world. Seeing America collapse in on itself as it suffers from internal conflicts over political opposition, administrative confusion, and economic hardship may serve to show the rest of the western world that fascism simply will not give languishing liberal democracies the resurgence they need to be strong, happy, and prosperous. Furthermore, the constant antagonizing from the Trump administration of our allies can serve to radicalize people against fascism purely out of national pride. This already seems to be happening with Canada. I mentioned much earlier that polling data shows the conservative party of Canada is leading far ahead of every other party, but that trend is reversing a lot. Ever since the spat between the US and Canada over tariffs started, Canadians have become very antagonistic towards America, and rightly so. As a result, the conservative party has lost a decent amount of support since voters associate them as being allied with Trump– as just being the Canadian extension of MAGA. Whether this effect will have any significant effects on their elections, I’m not sure, but it is a trend worth noting.

Germany, too, has some amount of promise in their future. The fascist Alternativ für Deutschland party gained a lot of seats in the Bundestag in the most recent election, but so too has Die Linke, currently the most progressive and left-leaning party in the Bundestag. While their votes only numbered to 8.7%, those numbers should be understood with the context that polling data expected they would only receive about 3% of the vote– not even enough to meet the electoral threshold. This spike in popularity came from a social media campaign that started a mere two months before the election. Considering the circumstances, winning 8.7% is quite the achievement. Furthermore, the election saw the complete ousting of the Freie Demokraten Partei from the Bundestag, which will make coalition building against the AfD much easier. As troubling as the AfD may be, there is potential for an effective opposition to them that may keep Germany from going down the same path as the United States.

On the question of “what is to come,” my answer is chaos. I will remind you once again to keep the bright side of things in mind, and to stay optimistic even in the face of adversity, but we must be able to face the facts of this administration as well. Even in only two months, even with four years worth of planning, we see utter chaos happening within the White House as advisors, civil servants, Republican party officials, and oligarchs scramble around unsure of what exactly their plan is, how they’re going to execute it, and the rhetoric they will use to defend it. We will see chaos in the global economy as we continue levying tariffs and starting trade wars with countries who are supposed to be our greatest partners, we will see chaos in NATO as fellow western nations start to become skeptical of our value as an ally, we will see chaos as our ability to manage health crises weakens from RFK Jr.’s anti-intellectualism and our withdrawal from the World Health Organization in the face of bird flu and measles outbreaks, we will see chaos in the populace as minorities try to find out how they’ll continue to live in a country so hellbent against them, and we will see chaos as the true-blooded fascist ideologues start to clash with the profit-motivated capitalists– their paths overlap for now, but their interests will likely diverge eventually. For the foreseeable future, what is to come is chaos. A mess of policies that will do nothing but spread fear, hurt the most vulnerable people in our country, deliberately encourage the start of a second Great Depression, and weaken the soft power and global institutions that America has spent the past century building up.

The actions of this administration so far, combined with their proposed actions for the future, do not paint a picture of a bright future for America. What that future will look like exactly, I’m not sure. There are plenty of ways this could shake out, but I think the best case scenario for this new wave of fascism is that it burns hot, and it burns bright, but it burns fast. With fascism and capitalism both being ideologies that doom themselves to inevitable collapse, perhaps the best way this regime can end is with a courtship death spiral of the two ideologies. They will bring out the absolute worst in each other, exponentially worsening one another, spiraling down and down and down until they finally crash into the ground. The sooner this crash happens, the better, because the sooner it happens, the less people can be killed by this administration.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps America will weather this storm. Perhaps this fascism will fizzle out quietly, and we will somehow manage a return to the liberal order. But I doubt that will happen. The Democratic opposition simply doesn’t have the spine needed to fight against fascism in even a marginally effective manner, and more often than not enables the Republicans more than it hinders them. 

If our country falls entirely to fascism, and we alienate ourselves from our allies, then perhaps America’s time in the spotlight is over. We had a good few years being the supremely dominant superpower, but maybe the time has come for multipolarity– and all the baggage that comes with it– to return. I can only hope that if multipolarity comes back, and new superpowers fill the power vacuum left by America in this scenario, that the niche is filled by progressive governments who care for their people, rather than oligarchies like China or Russia– that the road to our future is paved by leaders the likes of Claudia Sheinbaum and Lula da Silva rather than autocrats like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, or ineffective, bourgeois liberals like Justin Trudea and Joseph Biden. Perhaps that hope is too much to ask for, but I can dream, can’t I?

I won’t try to play the part of the oracle. I can make my predictions, as I just have, and I can share my thoughts on the possible outcomes of this administration, but I cannot say that I know for sure how this will play out. Fascism is very enigmatic, and can start, act, and finish in many different ways. The behavioral traits of fascism have many commonalities, but they manifest and play out in countless ways. This is why it’s so important to understand the traits of fascism. I haven’t salvaged a three year old project and turned it into a seventy page long analysis of fascism just because I felt like it. Fascism does not have a set-in-stone beginning and end. We don’t have the benefit of hindsight when looking at the times we are living in. We can’t open up the present day like a history book and point at the moment our lives were taken over by fascists.

It is imperative that people understand fascism, because unless you understand fascism, you cannot possibly hope to prevent it from rearing its ugly head once again. The people of the early 1900s did not have the advantage we have. The idea of fascism as an ideology had not really been widespread or solidified yet. They could not identify a threat they did not know they needed to recognize. The same cannot be said of us in the modern day, though. We had the benefit of hindsight. We have seen fascism before. We’ve had historians and philosophers and writers talk about fascism and how it came to be. We have much higher quality education now than we did back then. Despite all of this, though, we still failed to recognize fascism when it returned, because we never truly understood fascism.

At this point, there is little to be done about America’s fascist regime. The material conditions are not present for any revolution to happen in America, and given the absolute strength of the military, I doubt they ever will be. The only opposition Republicans face in government are the Democrats, who are entirely ineffectual in their ability to stand against fascism. The oligarchy in charge of the United States right now is the most powerful group of human beings to ever live– the combination of wealth, legislative power, legal immunity, and the breadth of their reach make them such. At this point, it seems like our best hope in America is to survive– to ride this out, protect ourselves and our communities, and hope that a better world can be born from the ashes of the MAGA regime. The rest of the western world still has time to diverge, but I fear America is too far gone, which is a side effect of being the progenitor of this rise of fascism in the first place.

So what is to come? Well, history will continue to be written. Time will do that awful thing it does and keep moving on. This regime will collapse, sooner or later, and a new order will fill the ecological niche. When that order comes around, I can only hope that the people of the future will learn from our failures the way we were unable to with our predecessors. Maybe the third time’s the charm.

These words, “freedom,” “dictatorship,” “liberty,” — I now read them for the first time in my life. I was reborn as a free Western man by virtue of these new words. We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world.

It saddens me to read these words from Eco, because the world was not alert. There were plenty of people who were– leftists who warned about the fascism of the alt-right, who warned of the new age of fascism Trump would usher in– but it was not enough. Fascism can, indeed, come back in the most innocent of disguises. In our era, it came in the disguise of a red baseball cap, adorned with the simple words, “Make America Great Again.” In the decades to come, perhaps those words will be remembered the way we remember “Blut und Boden,” but today it matters not. It seems like our generation did not learn the lessons taught by fascism’s rise in the 1900s. We did not grasp the universality or barbarity of fascism present in so many different countries and cultures. 

We did not heed Umberto Eco’s warning that “freedom and liberation are an unending task.” Let me finish with a poem by Bertolt Brecht.

— “An die Nachgeborenen”, To Those Born After. 

Translated by John Willett, Ralph Manheim and Erich Fried