Since Donald Trump and then Jair Bolsonaro refused to accept electoral defeat, even supporting mobs that occupied the symbolic sites of power, a growing commentary has associated these and similar far-right leaders with fascism.

This is hardly a consensus position. Against such claims, Anton Jäger has argued that the defining sociological transformations of recent decades — rising social atomization and declining associational life — although fundamentally detrimental to democracy and benefitting capital, do not provide the conditions for fascist governments to emerge.

In the examples of the last century, a fascist interclass alliance between capital and part of the people crushed a strong organized left on the verge of power. In today’s atomized “hyperpolitics,” Jäger instead identifies something like the final victory of neoliberalism. In this view, politics have been substantially emptied of their possibility to question who owns and controls what. So, an analysis of today’s political developments should free its historical reference points from the omnipresent trauma of early-twentieth-century Europe.