August 2025

Fascism is here, and the Trump Administration has bulldozed the United States’ checks and balances system in its desire for a liquidation of the federal government and the deportation of undesirables—primarily Latin American immigrants and anyone (especially Muslims) protesting the government’s facilitation of genocide in Gaza. Columbia University alone has functioned as a microcosm of fascist policies over the last few months. On March 9, Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student who was a negotiator in the encampments protesting the Palestinian genocide a year ago, was kidnapped in campus housing by ICE in front of his pregnant wife and held for months in a detention center in Louisiana over 1,300 miles from his home. He was detained without a warrant, and ICE hung up on his lawyer after the arrest. A few days later, Columbia fired Grant Miner, the President of UAW Local 2710, which represents thousands of Columbia student workers, a day before contract negotiations. Like Khalil, Miner was also targeted for his activism against the Palestinian genocide. On March 21st, Columbia capitulated to the Trump Administration’s draconian demands against the university so that they can retain their $400 million in federal funding. Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine and Professor Emeritus at Columbia, wrote,

Columbia barely merits the name of a university, since its teaching and scholarship on the Middle East, and soon much else, will soon be vetted by a “senior vice provost for inclusive pedagogy”, in reality a senior vice provost for Israeli propaganda. Partisans of Israel, infuriated that scholarship on Palestine had found a place at Columbia, once named it “Bir Zeit on the Hudson”. But if it any longer merits the name of a university, it should be called Vichy on the Hudson.

Outside of Columbia, ICE continues to kidnap and detain lawful residents, including Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student at Tufts University in Somerville, Massachusetts, who was kidnapped by ICE outside of her apartment while on the phone with her mother.[2] Öztürk, who was released in May, was arrested for writing an article in a student newspaper a year ago that called for Tufts to cut ties with Israel. ICE is also raiding hispanic communities throughout the country, forcing many into hiding. 

There are two potential objections to the characterization of our moment as fascist: one is that the policies of the Trump administration are in continuity with what came before[3], so they can not really be characterized as novel. In other words, fascism arrived a long time ago. The other is that this is not fascism—authoritarianism, maybe, but not fascism. Steve Fraser, for example, argues that we cannot characterize Trump and the MAGA movement as fascist because a) it is not reacting against an organized left, and b) it is backwards-facing.[4] The fascist movements of the twentieth century were reacting to an organized communist and labor movement, and retained an admiration for advanced technology. I believe Fraser is wrong on both of these points, but I will expand on that later on. Fraser’s view is compatible with a view of fascism as a historical political formation, synonymous with the Nazis and Hitler, evoking imagery of the Fuhrer, the salute, the camps, and swastikas. 

The very conceptualization of fascism is muddied by the volume of theories of fascism in circulation, many of which come from the tradition of European aesthetic theory via Adorno and the Frankfurt School, which narrow the scope of fascism to interwar Europe and later to mass culture itself. Other theories come from the Black Radical Tradition, to use Cedric Robinson’s nomenclature, which broadly locates fascism within the development of capitalism itself in primitive accumulation and settler colonialism. We also have the Marxist-Leninist view that fascism is the unity of big business and the disgruntled middle class, and the liberal theory that groups fascism together with communism under the banner of totalitarianism, reducing both to excessive authoritarianism. Alberto Toscano, in the preface to his recent book Late Fascism, says 

Faced with the worldwide proliferation, consolidation and ascendancy of far-right political movements, regimes and mindsets, many leftists, liberals and even some conservatives have reached for the fascist label. The term is now bandied around with ease verging on abandon, particularly in the United States, but its resurfacing does speak to the urgent challenge of diagnosing the morbid symptoms that populate our present.

It’s necessary to produce a conception of fascism that goes beyond the political formations of the twentieth century in order to understand its proliferation in our conjuncture, and not just in the West, but throughout the entire globe. In other words, fascism was not an aberration that occurred a century ago. If anything, the fascism of today is even more dangerous and destructive than it was in the twentieth century. 

I present two theses on fascism:

Thesis one: Fascism is a tendency of capitalism that emerges when capitalism is in crisis, or in response to insurgency (whether real or imagined). 

Thesis two: Fascism is an ideology that contrasts a pure or good race/group of people against others, usually ethnic or racial minorities, fused together with a fetishization of technology and machinery.[6] Fascism is thus premised on a specific brand of nihilism which embraces technological determinism and is combined with forms of chauvinism and elitism. 

Thesis One: Fascism as Tendency and Political Formation 

Fascism is a tendency of capitalism that emerges when capitalism is in crisis, or in response to insurgency (whether real or imagined). Fascism’s emergence as a response to capitalism in crisis is central to the classical understanding of fascism. In Fascism and Big Business, Daniel Guerin writes of fascism as its own political system, and theorizes it as a necessary development over the course of capitalism.[7] Guerin writes from the perspective of capitalist conspiracy, which posits the bourgeoisie as a unified historical entity that plans out moves in advance, like a hive mind rotating through different agents in a long game of chess. Thus for Guerin, the bourgeoisie adopted laissez-faire capitalism and democracy as its economic and political forms in order to overthrow feudalism and absolutism. Once capitalism developed to a point where there were multiple competing imperialist countries, each led by monopolies in key industries, the free market was thrown out the window and replaced by imperialism. If there are too many imperialists, that cuts into everyone’s profits. As Lenin argues, world war was the logical conclusion of imperialist competition. Fascism was born from its ashes.

While Guerin’s account is conspiratorial and schematic, it’s not necessarily an incorrect presentation of the history of capitalism. Liberal capitalism morphed into imperialism, and then competition between the imperialist super powers led to a world war, paving the conditions for fascism’s emergence. 

Fascism was also a response to the threat of communism, specifically the Bolshevik Revolution, and Hitler developed his political strategy in opposition to Marxism and social-democracy. Wilhelm Reich says that Hitler “formulated nationalistic imperialist goals which he intended to reach by better means than the old ‘bourgeois’ nationalism. What determined the choice of these means was the realization of the power of organized Marxism, and the realization of the significance of the masses for any political movement.”[8] Hitler saw how the communists mobilized the masses to topple bourgeois society in the Bolshevik Revolution and sought to appropriate those tactics. In Mein Kampf, Hitler says, 

Not until the international world view—politically led by organized Marxism—is confronted by a folk world view, organized and led with equal unity, will success, supposing the fighting energy to be equal on both sides, fall to the side of eternal truth. What gave the international world view success was its representation by a political party organized into storm troops; what caused the defeat of the opposite world view was its lack up to now of a unified body to represent it. Not by unlimited freedom to interpret a general view, but only in the limited and hence integrating form of a political organization can a world view fight and conquer.

Fascist movements created stormtrooper paramilitaries, where members would hold political rallies and marches. The most notable incidents in fascism’s rise to power were Mussolini’s March on Rome of 1922 and the Nazis’ Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, and both were intended to seize state power (the former succeeding, the latter failing). Fascists appropriated communist tactics towards completely different ends because they knew traditional bourgeois politics would be toppled by communist movements. Hitler says, “The ‘bourgeois’ parties, as they designate themselves, will never be able to attach the ‘proletarian’ masses to their camp, for here two worlds oppose each other, in part naturally and in part artificially divided, whose mutual relation can only be struggle. The younger will be victorious—and this is Marxism.”[10]

It may seem silly to designate our moment as fascist since there is no organized left that fascism would be reacting to, which is Fraser’s argument. However, this view ignores the power of protest movements over the last decade, and the Summer of 2020 provided a revolutionary opening, even if the opportunity wasn’t seized. As I argued previously, the Summer of 2020 was characterized by a crisis in the ruling class (which has only intensified since then), a global pandemic which dramatically altered everyday life and left millions of people at home and unemployed, and people clashing with cops on the street en masse, even burning down a police station in Minneapolis. The Summer of 2020, alongside the Black Lives Matter movement of the 2010s, rattled conservatives. State repression was heavy-handed in each protest movement and the police were quick to arrest and beat protestors. Furthermore, much of the state’s repression right now, such as the detainment of Khalil and Ozturk, is tied to the Encampments (whether directly or indirectly).[11] Protesting the Palestinian genocide presents dangers to the established powers, which is why they’re trying so hard to squash any resistance. Even though the Summer of 2020 led merely to Biden’s milquetoast liberalism, conservatives saw his presidential victory as the untrammeled ascendance of wokeness, critical race theory, and gender ideology. This is why many of Trump’s policies revolve around gutting the federal government, dictating the content of education (whether in public schools or at universities like Columbia), and eradicating diversity, inclusion, and equality policies (DEI). While communists are aware of the left’s powerlessness, conservatives conflate the left with liberals. It doesn’t matter whether the insurgency is real or imagined, or in this case, exaggerated. Fascists react to it all the same. 

I have so far only focused on the latter half of my thesis, which is that fascism reacts to capitalism in crisis and to insurgency. However, I also insist on theorizing fascism as a tendency of capitalism, something that is always-already present, rather than as its own distinct political formation. The Black Radical Tradition, as characterized by Cedric Robinson[12], locates fascism within capitalism itself through the processes of primitive accumulation, slavery, and colonization. In other words, fascism isn’t a defect that emerges later on in capitalism’s development as a reaction to economic crises—rather, fascism is contained within the development of capitalism itself. As Aime Cesaire famously wrote,

The supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

For Cesaire, the Holocaust was simply Europe getting a taste of its own medicine in the form of an ironic inversion: the violence that Europeans inflicted on the rest of the world was now being inflicted back on themselves from the inside. 

George Jackson theorized fascism in relation to the violence that both establishes a political regime and reproduces it. Jackson had a first-person view of the proliferation of fascism in the post-war United States as a prisoner at San Quentin in California in the sixties and seventies (where he was murdered by prison guards in 1971), and noted how the carceral system was a new front for fascism. He says, 

Historically it [fascism] has proved to have three different faces. One “out of power” that tends almost to be revolutionary and subversive, anticapitalist, and antisocialist. One “in power but not secure” —this is the sensationalist aspect of fascism that we see on screen and read of in pulp novels, when the ruling class, through its instrumental regime, is able to suppress the vanguard party of the people’s and workers’ movement. The third face of fascism exists when it is “in power and securely so”. During this phase some dissent may even be allowed. 

The MAGA movement itself can be analyzed through the prism of Jackson’s analysis. Its rise was fueled by fringe movements outside of mainstream Republicanism, such as the Tea Party movement, the Proud Boys, Breitbart, and other online communities that sprouted through sites like 4Chan. Trump, despite being an elite from New York, became the perfect figurehead for a movement. He’s brash, uncensored, and positioned himself as somehow outside of the establishment, which is hell of an accomplishment for someone so tied to the country’s elite. In the early phase, our contemporary fascist movement presented itself as revolutionary and subversive, and still tries to. Trump was going to take a wrecking ball to the entire political establishment and “drain the swamp”. Yet the first term of his presidency wasn’t much different from Republican predecessors like Bush and Reagan. After he was voted out in 2020 and his supporters attacked the Capitol, it seemed like he was finished. Yet, he somehow came back to win the Presidency again, in large part because of the impotence and incompetence of the Democrats, and now he seems to be fully embracing a scorched earth philosophy. Trump knows he only has four years, unless there’s some kind of brazen attempt to eliminate term limits, and his administration is acting with a real sense of urgency. Now, we’re starting to see the appearance of the second phase that Jackson identified, where fascism is in power but not secure, and brazen repression is running rampant.[15]

Jackson says fascism is a response to instability in the establishment, and this can be tied to Du Bois’s notion of fascism as the counter-revolution of property.[16] Jackson, referencing Guerin’s study, thinks of fascism as a historical phase emerging in between the world wars, but is more willing to expand the traditional analysis. He locates the beginning of fascism in the US in the development of the labor movement from the country’s inception, which excluded black and migrant workers, and in the process of corporate-monopolization that began at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, the US had the ingredients for fascism, but didn’t become fascist until the twentieth century. Fascism was not necessarily present from the beginning, but is nevertheless a logical development within the development of capitalism, and shouldn’t be considered an aberration. 

Fascism is thus contained within capitalism, both in a historical and political sense. Fascism emerged during the development of capitalism when the latter was in crisis, faced with world wars and an ascendant communist movement. Fascism has since emerged in various contexts, whether in the United States at various points over the past fifty years, in Israel’s extermination of Palestinians, and throughout the rest of the world, whether in Europe, South America, or Asia. Fascism is continuous with American settler-colonialism, and for this reason, Toscano says, “[Fascism] might be as American as cherry pie, deeply enmeshed in histories of enslavement and extermination, dispossession and domination that continue to shape the US present, materially and ideologically.”[17]

Thesis Two: Fascism as Ideology

Fascism is an ideology that contrasts a pure or good race/group of people against others, usually ethnic or racial minorities, fused together with a fetishization of technology and machinery. For the Nazis, Aryans were the master race, and they purged Jews (alongside other ethnic minorities and political prisoners) inside their death camps. Mussolini’s Italy wasn’t as fixated on racial ideology as the Nazis, but it was still imperialist and sought to conquer territories formerly belonging to the Roman Empire as part of its nationalist ideology. Fascism in the United States has historically manifested in the form of nativism, where the “true” Americans are those who descend from the early settlers. This is why Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants were oppressed upon their arrival in the US, since even though they were white, they weren’t natives. This is contradictory since all white people in the US descended from settlers, aka immigrants, but alas. In fascist ideology, there are always those who belong, and those who don’t. 

The idea that land necessarily “belongs” to specific people is a key premise for fascism. Manifest Destiny was the driving ideology of American settler-colonialism, and this posited that the land in North America belonged to the country and its settlers. Israel believes that the land in the West Bank and Gaza belongs to its settlers, who were forced out of the area centuries prior. In settler-colonial forms of fascism, it does not matter that there are groups currently occupying the land, and violent expropriation is justified through racism and dehumanization. American settlers were entitled to the land because the indigenous populations were backward and savage. Israelis feel entitled to the West Bank because they believe Palestinians are subhuman animals. The idea of land belonging to people isn’t just abstract, but extends into individual families. Reich argues that the family is a critical pillar of fascism, both for its role in the production process and for the ideologies that are embedded in it. He says, 

The family is—except for the employees and officials—identical with the small economic enterprise. The family members work in the small business; this saves the hiring of expensive help. On the farm, the identity of family and mode of production is even more complete. The close interweaving of family and economy is the reason why the agricultural population is ‘bound to the soil,’ why it is ‘traditional’ and thus so accessible to the influence of political reaction. It is not merely the economic situation which creates these ‘ties to the soil’ and this traditionalism; rather, the mode of production requires a strict familial attachment of all family members to one another, and this attachment presupposes a far-reaching sexual suppression and repression. Only the combination of these two factors creates the typical peasant thinking the center of which is patriarchal sexual morality.

It’s no accident that the middle class is fascism’s historical base. In the twentieth century, the organized communist movement dismissed the peasantry as a class that would be eliminated in the course of capitalism’s development, where rich peasants would merge into the bourgeoisie, while the poorer peasants would disperse into the ranks of the proletariat. History though, never aligns with theory’s pristine sheet music. The middle class was easy to rope into fascism both because of the left’s abandonment and because fascism perfectly appealed to the class’s instincts. Fascism presented itself as subversive and revolutionary, while retaining a respect for tradition and family, and it’s the same for contemporary fascism. As Reich points out, though, it doesn’t matter that fascism in power ends up not fulfilling its promises. 

A key feature of fascism is its nihilistic embrace of technology and machinery. Fascism emerged from the ashes of the first World War, and it’s difficult to understate the war’s impact on Europeans. The war was a true rupture—it was the first modern war in its use of advanced technology, artillery, machine guns, tanks, and chemical weapons. The devastation of the war was massive as well: there were about forty million casualties, and some countries lost 10-15% of their population. Soldiers returned home traumatized and disabled, there was significant malnourishment and starvation, and diseases were rampant, most notably the Spanish flu. 

The War produced an intense nihilism. Felix Guattari says that Hitler embodied “a racist delirium, a mad, paranoiac energy which put him in tune with the collective death instinct released from the charnel houses of the First World War.”[19] The war produced monsters fascinated by the scale of destruction and death, and fascism embraced the aesthetics of war. In his analysis of fascism, Walter Benjamin cites writing by Filippo Marinetti, an Italian futurist who says: 

War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others. . . . Poets and artists of Futurism! . . . remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art... may be illumined by them!

Twentieth century fascism was utopian in the modernist sense, and conceived of an ideal future society. Roger Griffin writes that, 

Fascism is one such attempt at modernist societal renewal, in this case a ‘total’ regeneration claiming to restore magic, joy, a new spiritual ‘home’ and a new phase of civilization inhabited by ‘new human beings’: once the futural, revolutionary, totalizing dynamic of ‘creative destruction’ behind fascism’s onslaught on liberal and socialist Europe is understood, and, in the case of Nazism, on entire categories of people, it emerges as a form of modernist politics which inspired wide-ranging plans and initiatives to create a new (but historically rooted), ‘healthy’ and ultra-modern culture.

It is on these grounds that Fraser dismissed claims of our moments as fascist, since today’s reactionaries are backwards-facing. In the case of MAGA, the goal is to restore America back to its post-war glory days. 

If we were to restrict our gaze to just Trump and sections of the MAGA movement, like Steve Bannon, then maybe this would be true. Yet this would ignore figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others billionaires from the tech world who promote AI, space travel, and cryptocurrency. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, in their recent article on ‘end-times fascism’, summarize the ambition of these billionaires:

Figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.

They acknowledge that this seems to contradict Trump’s American nationalism, yet they are united by “a monstrous, supremacist survivalism”. Fascism is always nihilist, and in our moment, it takes the form of climate doomerism.[22] For billionaires, their rationale is that the planet is rapidly decaying and the situation is hopeless, so they might as well try to benefit from it. 

The more pertinent question is how fascism appeals to those who aren’t a part of this billionaire class, and the answer can also be found in nihilism. Trump voters are fed up with the political establishment and are drawn towards someone vowing to burn everything down. They’re angry about a perceived loss of status for white people in this country, and they rage against “wokeness”.[23] The first point can be connected to Guattari’s insights on the micropolitics of desire in the case of twentieth century fascism. He says: 

What almost everyone refuses to acknowledge is that the fascist machine, in its Italian and German forms, became a threat to capitalism and Stalinism because the masses invested a fantastic collective death instinct in it. By reterritorializing their desire onto a leader, a people, and a race, the masses abolished, by means of a phantasm of catastrophe, a reality which they detested and which the revolutionaries were either unwilling or unable to encroach upon. For the masses, virility, blood, vital space, and death took the place of a socialism that had too much respect for the dominant meanings. And yet, fascism was brought back to these same dominant meanings by a sort of intrinsic bad faith, by a false provocation to the absurd and by a whole theater of collective hysteria and debility. Fascism simply took a much longer detour than, for example, Stalinism. All fascist meanings stem out of a composite representation of love and death, of Eros and Thanatos now made into one. Hitler and the Nazis were fighting for death, right up to and including the death of Germany; the German masses agreed to follow along and meet their own destruction” [italics mine].

The last line especially strikes a chord in our moment. Trump and his cabal of billionaire allies are setting the world on fire—they don’t care about destroying the climate, they don’t seem to care about tanking the economy, and they don’t seem to care about dragging the country into a war (whether literal or a trade war). TJ Clark, in his article on Trump and the spectacle, argues that Trump has achieved a form of politics driven entirely by ressentiment. He says, 

Ressentiment, Nietzsche taught us, is a deep feeling – a determinant fact of our being in the world. We all look around hungrily for someone to blame, someone to wreak vengeance on – for everything we were denied back then, at the beginning. We know we’ll never find the culprit, really; we know we’re making things up; we’re bewildered by our feelings, half ashamed of baying for the scapegoat’s blood – but boy! it feels good. To have made ressentiment the main form of politics, to have made himself the very image of it, to have it written it into every shaking of the jowls and ‘It-wasn’t-me-Sir’ stare – that’s Trump’s achievement.”

Politics as ressentiment entices Trump supporters. If you resign yourself to the reality that the political system is broken and that the world is burning, why not vote for the guy that trolls people you hate? Why not own the libs and drink liberal tears? Clark says that Trump supporters are “as cynical as he is. Or rather, they are serious about spectacle. About the chanting, the hats, the latest insult. They know that’s what politics now is.”[26] Some Trump supporters were motivated mainly by a desire to use slurs, which “wokeness” has taken away from them.[27] Trump supporters believe that if the world is going to burn, they might as well have fun in the process. Fascism’s embrace of nihilism is directly tied to its embrace of bad faith, as Sartre observed almost a century ago. You can’t reason with fascists because they don’t care about making sense. It’s all a game.[28]

Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the entertainment industry produces a society of people who are distracted and seek to be entertained, and this reproduces a fascist subjectivity. For many individuals in contemporary capitalism, the average day looks something like the following: go to work from 9-5, come home, make dinner (or order it on Doordash or UberEats), and spend the night watching television. Rinse and repeat. And if you live in the suburbs where cars are necessary for transportation, this routine can be intensely atomizing as you basically go back and forth from point A (home) to point B (work). Adorno and Horkheimer say entertainment is an escape from the everyday experience of exploitation, designed to produce resignation and submission towards capitalism. Instead of the workplace containing the seeds of class struggle itself, as Marxist theory typically posits, entertainment and the culture industry at large serve to pacify workers. They say: 

To be entertained means to be in agreement. Entertainment makes itself possible only by insulating itself from the totality of the social process, making itself stupid and perversely renouncing from the first the inescapable claim of any work, even the most trivial: in its restrictedness to reflect the whole. Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness. It is indeed escape, but not, as it claims, escape from bad reality but from the last thought of resisting that reality… the shamelessness of the rhetorical question ‘What do people want?’ lies in the fact that it appeals to the very people as thinking subjects whose subjectivity it specifically seeks to annul. [italics mine]

Capitalism produces a society of distracted spectators, and when those subjects become disillusioned, fascism is ready to pounce. If an individual becomes radicalized by the political-economic state of affairs, and if they have no hope that things can get better, why not embrace a politics of trolling and having fun? 

It should be emphasized that fascism only appeals to those whose values are some combination of elitist[30] or chauvinist. If you’re someone who already looks down on immigrants, holds misogynistic views, or makes fun of people for being disabled or overweight, then fascism isn’t a giant leap away. 

Communism, on the other hand, is premised on an egalitarianism which asserts that all individuals are more or less equal, and that all people are fit to govern.[31] Communism asserts that none of this is necessary.[32] Not the subordination of life to capital and technology, not astronomical rents, not a burning planet, not cops killing and detaining people at will, not AI that will facilitate mass illiteracy, not the crisis of education, not the circulation of mass slop via social media, not shitty art, not greater unemployment, and certainly not the genocide in Gaza. None of it is necessary. 

Notes

1. Rashid Khalidi, “Does Columbia still merit the name of a university?” The Guardian, March 25, 2025.
2. Öztürk described her experience in Vanity Fair. 
3. ICE was arresting and deporting immigrants under Biden, during Trump’s first term, and even under Obama. The formation of ICE was part of the larger crackdown on civil and legal rights during the Bush administration. Going further, there was the Red Scare of the 20th century, a century of union busting, the treatment of black political prisoners, and so on. 
4. Steve Fraser, “The End of the Future”, Jacobin, March 2, 2024. 
5. Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism, (London: Verso, 2023), 12.
6. There are variations of fascism that have been ecologically focused a la Heidegger that aspire towards a “return to nature”. However, the dominant form of fascism has usually centered on technology and machinery, and that’s the primary form it takes today. 
7. Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business, (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), 26. 
8. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946), 31.
9. Cited by Reich, Mass Psychology of Fascism, 31-32. 
10. Cited by Reich, 32.
11. Khalil was a prominent member of the Columbia Encampment, and Ozturk wrote an article in support of divestment. 
12. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).  
13. Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36. 
14. George Jackson, Blood in My Eye, (New York: Random House, 1972), 143.
15. One could argue that while Trump’s position may not be fully secure, Republicans on the whole can feel more confident in their position. However, Trump has functioned as a unifier of the various elements in the Republican Party, and without his position as a hegemonic figure, the whole movement risks falling apart.
16. Toscano cites Du Bois, saying we should approach, “fascism in the longue durée, to perceive it as a dynamic that precedes its naming. It means understanding fascism as intimately linked to the prerequisites of capitalist domination – which, albeit mutable and sometimes contradictory, have a certain consistency at their core. W. E. B. Du Bois gave this core a name, still usable today: ‘the counter-revolution of property’. For all their deep differences and dissimilarities, the Ku Klux Klan terrorism against Black Reconstruction, the rise of squadrismo against labour organising in Italy, or the murderous codification of neoliberalism in Chile’s constitution can all be understood under that heading” 13-14. 
17. Toscano, 37.
18. Reich, 40.
19. Felix Guattari, “Everybody Wants to be a Fascist”, in Chaosophy, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 166.
20. Roger Griffin, “Fascism’s Modernist Revolution: A New Paradigm for the Study of Right-wing Dictatorships”, Brill, Fascism 5 (2016), 110.
21. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, “The rise of end times fascism”, The Guardian, April 13, 2025. 
22. While there are versions of nihilism that may not appear nihilist and aspire towards forms of traditional life that may appear life-affirming, fascism is nihilist nonetheless in its objective tendencies.
23. There is a tension in this dynamic where those who feel a loss of status do hope to recover it through the transformations in the economy, political systems, and culture carried forth by the Trump administration.
24. Guattari, “Everybody Wants to be a Fascist”, 168-169. 
25. T.J. Clark, “A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle”, London Review of Books, Volume 47, No. 1 (January 23, 2025).  
26. Ibid.
27. An article in New York Mag was making the rounds following Trump’s election, and the author, Brock Colyar, reported: “This set’s most visible political stance is a reaction to what it sees as the left’s puritanical obsessions with policing language and talking about identity. A joke about Puerto Ricans or eugenics or sleeping with Nick Fuentes could throw a pack of smokers outside Butterworth’s into a gigglefest. Recounting her time at one of the balls, a woman tells me she jumped the velvet rope into a VIP section ‘like a little Mexican.’ Then she lets out a cackle. This is the posture that has attracted newcomers to the cause. ‘Six months into Biden being president, I was like, I can’t fucking do this anymore,’ says a 19-year-old New Yorker who once quite literally had blue hair and attends Marymount Manhattan, which he describes as ‘75 percent women and 23 percent trannies.’ He had supported Biden, but ‘I hate watching the things I say. I took a much farther horseshoe around this time.’ Later, a former Bernie supporter (who looked like the most Bernie-supporting person one could imagine with long, curly hair and a plaid shirt) told me the same: He wanted the freedom to say ‘faggot’ and ‘retarded’.”
28. Sartre famously wrote, “Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, (New York: Schocken Books, 1944), 13.
29. Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), 115-116.
30. Many contemporary fascists frame their politics as a form of anti-elitism, even though in practice they support a different kind of elitism—an elitist anti-elitism that rejects parts of the current order but is equally uninterested in equality. 
31. Asad Haider says that emancipatory politics begins with a decision: “Not some kind of decision about who your friends and enemies are, but a decision about people’s capacity. Are people equal, and are people capable of governing themselves? These are not questions subject to proof. But once we’ve made a decision about emancipatory politics, we have to see that as antagonism in the whole history of political thought. Marx was not the first to say that everyone should rule; he was a careful student of the history of politics, and even if he came more and more to restrict his scientific analysis to the specificity of the capitalist mode of production, he understood that the question of emancipation appears across time and across worlds. If you can't take that position, if you’re unwilling to make a decision on emancipation and instead resort to the laws of historical necessity and their liberal supplement, then you've ended up far away from Marx himself, no matter how fervently you might claim to be a Marxist” [emphasis mine]. Duncan Stuart, “Marxism and Emancipation: An Interview with Dr. Asad Haider”, Cleveland Review of Books, June 17, 2022.
32. Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, (London: Verso, 2010), 35.