What Is Fascism?

The question of the persistence — or resurgence — of fascism arises at regular intervals in political life, as has been particularly evident in Italy these last thirty years. Since Donald Trump’s return to power, the issue has become most acute in the United States, as he has expanded his prerogatives and challenged the foundations of the Constitution. Books warning of the (new) fascist threat are filling shelves. The central role of fascism in twentieth-century history — and in its “mental territory” — partly explains its continued prominence.

Equally important is the effort to situate the contemporary far right’s resurgence within a broader historical context. Historians are often called upon, as “experts,” to say whether a particular world leader or movement can be labeled fascist. Yet they quickly encounter difficulties. As historian Emilio Gentile wrote, this is a mysterious object. The term “fascism” remains arguably the vaguest in the political lexicon. All too often, however, this warning becomes an excuse to propose yet another definition.

Since its first emergence after World War I, this new phenomenon — combining mass society and authoritarianism — has inspired a range of interpretations, each emphasizing some supposedly key historical, political, economic, social, or even moral aspect. Most such definitions contain some truth, if relegating to the background elements that do not correspond to a given situation.

If one were to offer a “pocket formula,” fascism can be described as an extreme right-wing political movement that reached its full expression in Italy and Germany during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. It was violently anti-Marxist, racist, antisemitic, imperialist, built on the destruction of democratic rights and freedoms, the rejection of equality, the stigmatization of those targeted as weak or vulnerable, and the subjugation of women.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, fascism could only spread when the labor movement no longer posed an imminent threat. Its rise was inseparable from the political, social, and economic crises that afflicted European societies in the 1920s and 1930s. An autonomous movement — ”a party organized for its own objectives, aiming to seize power for its own ends” — fascism had an inherent subversive thrust: both revolutionary and restorationist, a modern expression of the rejection of democracy and the Enlightenment.

Its triumph depended on the combined action of paramilitary violence and state repression, and the development of a genuine mass movement. It could not capture people’s minds without this unprecedented fusion of seemingly disparate elements of conservatism and modernity, aptly described by Joseph Goebbels as “steel romanticism.” Fascism relied on violence and terror, but also on indoctrination, to impose a new hierarchy among human beings.

There are clear elements of historical continuity with today’s far right, just as historical fascism itself bore obvious links to the reactionary nationalist right of the nineteenth century. Contemporary radical right-wing movements are likewise nationalist, racist, imperialist, homophobic, ultramacho, authoritarian, and anti-Marxist, rejecting class conflict in the name of a national and popular unity. These movements seek to dismantle fundamental rights and freedoms as well as social movements that lie beyond their control. They attack women’s rights and designate scapegoats — Jews, Muslims, and others. Anyone who does not fit their vision of the nation, whether minorities or political opponents, is stigmatized, criminalized, and leveraged for electoral mobilization.

Today this is particularly evident in the targeting of migrants and Muslims, underpinned by fearmongering the “great replacement.” This rejection of the other is accompanied by an exclusionary discourse around identity designed to legitimize authoritarian policies by claiming to defend a “threatened” nation. In this respect, the discursive and electoral strategies of figures such as Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orbán, and Javier Milei do bear striking similarities to those employed by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.

Historical fascism and contemporary far-right movements do in some ways emerge in similar contexts: prolonged economic and social crises; challenges to forms of representation, including the legitimacy of traditional political parties; loss of social bearings; and broader cultural and moral crises, including the questioning of scientific rationality. Yet in important other ways, the context is markedly different and the social and political crises not the same.

Historical fascism arose in the aftermath of World War I and the October Revolution, when the Soviet Union represented a horizon of hope for millions of workers. Nothing comparable exists today. Historical fascism advocated a totalitarian system, which philosopher Hannah Arendt described as an unprecedented fusion of indoctrination and terror.

By contrast, today’s far right is ultra-free-marketeer in its domestic economic orientation, while seeking to massively expand the state’s repressive functions. Figures such as Milei and Elon Musk brandish a chainsaw as a symbol of dismantling “bureaucracy” — in reality, social security and public services, however fragile — by radicalizing the neoliberal policies of previous decades, which portrayed the state as an obstacle to economic development. This echoes Ronald Reagan’s 1981 declaration that “government is not the solution, but the problem.”

Historical fascism relied on mass movements organized around a cohesive ideology and structured by paramilitary groups — such as the SA in Germany or the Blackshirts in Italy — that counted hundreds of thousands of uniformed members. Their primary goal was to dismantle unions, political parties, and workers’ associations with millions of members advocating a socialist agenda. Today this kind of worker organization doesn’t exist on the same scale, and contemporary far-right movements no longer depend on comparable mass mobilizations. While active and sometimes violent far-right groups exist, their numbers are negligible compared to the interwar period, and they are not centralized as the armed wing of a single party — at least for now.

The influence of these movements is largely electoral. True, on January 6, 2021, the assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters raised fears of an attempted coup. The event was even compared to Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Today some warn that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could serve as a kind of organized armed force at Trump’s disposal. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi relies on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary street organization with deep ideological roots. And in Italy, violent attacks by members of the neofascist group Forza Nuova — including the ransacking of the Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL) trade union headquarters in October 2021 — suggest troubling possibilities for future mobilization.

Still, if we speak of fascism today, it is a fascism largely stripped of its mass-movement component but which, as Alberto Toscano notes, retains the vision of national rebirth and the defense of a “productivist” interest aligning workers and business leaders side by side. At the beginning of the twentieth century, references to fascism pointed to a new political phenomenon whose contours, transformative potential, and adaptability to other national contexts were still being defined. But what about now?

Foul Beast

What makes the situation even more troubling is that the core of some of these movements does consist of people who openly identify with historical Nazism and fascism — through their symbols, gestures, clothing, and rhetoric. Recent neofascist demonstrations in Paris and Milan are only the visible tip of the iceberg. A few years ago, such displays might have been dismissed as marginal, a vague form of nostalgic posturing. Today they carry an entirely different weight, whose significance must be fully grasped. Their importance lies less in what they reveal about the organizers themselves than what they say about our societies’ relationship to the past.

Thirty years ago, Umberto Eco remarked: “It would be so comfortable for us if someone appeared on the world stage and said: ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to march again in the squares of Italy.’ Unfortunately, life is not that simple.” Today these demonstrations no longer appear merely as the grotesque face of what political scientist Nadia Urbinati once called “Europe’s fascist mask.” They also — and above all — reflect three decades of erasing history, trivializing horror, and promoting false equivalences: between those who fought for democratic rights, freedoms, equality, and emancipation, often unaware of the realities of Stalinist Russia, and those who stood for the exact opposite of those values.

There are no longer any living witnesses to this past; to borrow Pier Paolo Pasolini’s image, the fireflies have disappeared. The fluidity of historical references has turned history into a kind of reservoir that “contains everything and its opposite.” As a result, those in the West who believe that invoking the specter of fascism remains the best tool for mobilization increasingly find themselves facing indifference — or, worse, a public already conditioned by the vocabulary and modes of thought of the far right. From the “Hello, Dictator” greeting once delivered by Jean-Claude Juncker, then president of the European Commission, to Orbán to the normalization of Giorgia Meloni’s political roots, which she herself does not conceal, the reversal of the values on which Western societies claimed to rest since 1945 could hardly be more obvious.

Today this political camp is working to secure cultural hegemony through historical revisionism, anti-intellectualism, disinformation, and censorship. It does so by leaning on a vast communication network — spanning websites, social media, podcasts, television channels, newspapers, and think tanks — while waging what has been called a “permanent algorithmic campaign,” a new and pervasive form of power that shapes daily life all the more effectively because it speaks to a deeply atomized society.

Italian philosopher and historian Enzo Traverso argues that the concept of fascism is both indispensable and inadequate, emphasizing — following Reinhart Koselleck — the tension between historical facts and their transcription in language. Since the 1930s, fascism has become shorthand for all forms of obscurantist reaction, conservatism, and authoritarianism, even when its “distinctive features” are absent.

Some scholars go further, applying the term beyond historical fascism. In this view, fascism represents “a more general set of cultural habits, instincts, and dark impulses that have manifested themselves — and could manifest again — in the most diverse historical and national contexts, even in the absence of a fascist movement or regime.“ From this perspective, the concept of fascism risks becoming an abstraction, incapable of capturing concrete phenomena rooted in their own time, especially during periods of rapid change. Historian Robert Paxton recently echoed this concern in an interview with the New York Times, noting that the term often “generates more heat than light,” as “the word fascism has been reduced to an epithet, making it an increasingly less useful tool for analyzing the political movements of our time.”

Economic conditions often shift more rapidly than human consciousness, creating the persistence of moral and social forms whose material foundations have long vanished. In this context, debating whether figures such as Trump, Milei, Orban, Meloni, Vladimir Putin, or Marine Le Pen qualify as fascists does little to illuminate the political, economic, and social conditions that have allowed them to thrive.

The twenty-first century is defined by the political impotence of governments and parliaments, unable to influence policies supposedly dictated “by the markets,” but in reality serving the interests of a coterie of superrich elites around the world’s major economies. In the Global South, these policies produce endless conflict, widespread destruction, and endemic poverty. In the Global North, they drive harsh austerity measures, soaring inequality, and the accelerated dismantling of the welfare state — or what remains of it — creating fertile ground for authoritarianism, the erosion of democratic gains, and the normalization of a climate of violence.

The latest report from the Civil Liberties Union for Europe (CLUE) ranks Meloni’s government among those that “systematically and intentionally undermine the rule of law,” targeting the judiciary, democratic freedoms, and basic rights — including press and media freedom, the right to protest, and the right to strike — while also committing what it describes as “serious and systematic human rights violations.” The report further highlights the growing concentration of power in the hands of the executive. In the United States, to take just one other example, the first months of Trump’s second term left little doubt about the continuing strangulation of democracy: mass deportations of migrants, sweeping layoffs in the civil service, attacks on the Voting Rights Act, censorship and cuts to research, militarization of American cities, and cracking down on the Left by designating “Antifa” a terrorist organization.

The current wave of reactionary authoritarianism didn’t come from nowhere. It was fueled by the radicalization of neoliberal policies and discourse in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis: a sharp rise in inequality, the accelerated dismantling of what remained of the welfare state, and the relegation of millions of workers to precarious employment.

The resulting insecurity, fear, frustration, alienation, and inability to plan for the future have generated what Wendy Brown described as “class resentment without class consciousness.” That inequality has only deepened in recent years. According to the latest Takers, Not Makers report, billionaire wealth grew three times faster in 2024 than it had in 2023, while the top 1 percent collectively accumulated more than $33.9 trillion in assets since 2015. At the other end of the spectrum, 3.6 billion people — 44 percent of humanity — now live below the World Bank’s poverty line.

This widening gulf has accelerated what essayist Richard Seymour calls “disaster nationalism,” a politics that thrives on crisis while edging societies closer to social and climate catastrophe. Denial only heightens the danger. “Trump’s furious attacks on all structures designed to protect the public from disease, dangerous food and disasters,” Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor write, creates “a multitude of new opportunities for privatization and profit for the oligarchs who are fueling this rapid destruction of the welfare state and its laws.“

The need to understand these global political and economic upheavals has prompted multiple studies on the ongoing transformations of capitalism and their political, social, and ecological impacts. Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner spoke of a new “political capitalism,” characterized by the penetration of the spheres of power with authoritarian dynamics by large private groups, which now allows them to obtain considerable excess profits in a period of slowed economic growth.

The presence at Trump’s inauguration of the bosses of Meta, Amazon, and Google, whom economist Cédric Durand calls the “techno-feudal lords,” is the tip of the iceberg. If authoritarianism can also represent, in part, a political expropriation of the bourgeoisie, then we need also to analyze the flaws, weaknesses, and divisions within the bourgeoisie, as recently evidenced by hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio’s Financial Times interview.

Faced with the looming disaster, a new and important field of research is opening up on the turning point we are currently experiencing. We must move beyond the obsession with the debate on “fascism” — that opponent whose mere mention seems to guarantee the morality and legitimacy of existing parties and systems — while analyzing historically how we got here. This is the challenge that lies ahead. We have our work cut out.