a poisonous mix of ultra-nationalism, white supremacy, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. The language of national decline, humiliation, and demonization fuels dangerous proposals and policies aimed at racial purification and social sorting while hyping a masculinization of agency and a militarism reminiscent of past dictatorships. Under current circumstances, the forces that have produced the histories of mass violence, torture, genocide, and fascism have not been left behind. Consequently, it has been more difficult to argue that the legacy of fascism has nothing to teach us regarding how “the question of fascism and power clearly belongs to the present.”127
Fascism has multiple histories, most connected either to failed democracies in Italy and Germany in the 1930s or to the overthrow of democratic governments by the military, as in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s. Moreover, the history between fascism and populism involves a complex mix of relations over time.128 What is distinctive about this millennial fascism is that its history of “a violent totalitarian order that led to radical forms of political violence and genocide” has been softened by attempts to recalibrate its postwar legacy to a liberal democratic register.129 For instance, in Hungary, Turkey, and Poland — and in a number of other emerging fascist states — the term “illiberal democracy” is used as code to allegedly replace a “supposedly outmoded form of liberal democracy.”130 In actuality, the term is used to justify a form of populist authoritarianism whose goal is to attack the very foundations of democracy. These fascist underpinnings are also expanding in the United States. In Trump’s bombastic playbook, the notion of “the people” has become a rhetorical tool to legitimate a right-wing mass movement in support of a return to the good old days of American Apartheid.131 Trump’s right-wing populism is born of and breeds “a culture convulsed of hatred and rancor.”132 It is a worldview organized for repulsion willing to intellectually rationalize the murder of a journalist by Saudi Arabia, the killing of children in Yemen, and the forcible separation of migrant families at the southern border.
Democracy is the scourge of neoliberalism
and its ultimate humiliation
As the ideas, values, and institutions crucial to a democracy have withered under a savage neoliberalism, which has been 50 years in the making, fascistic notions of racial superiority, social cleansing, apocalyptic populism, hyper-militarism, and ultra-nationalism have gained in intensity, moving from the repressed recesses of US history to the centers of state and corporate power.133 Decades of mass inequality, wage slavery, the collapse of the manufacturing sector, tax giveaways to the financial elite, and savage austerity policies that drove a frontal attack on the welfare state have further strengthened fascistic discourses and redirected populist anger against vulnerable populations and undocumented immigrants, Muslims, the racially oppressed, women, LBGTQ+ people, public servants, critical intellectuals, and workers. Not only has neoliberalism undermined the basic elements of democracy by escalating the mutually reinforcing dynamics of economic inequality and political inequality — accentuating the downhill spiral of social and economic mobility — it has also created conditions that make fascist principles more attractive.
Under these accelerated circumstances, neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a comfortable and mutually compatible movement that connects the worse excesses of capitalism with authoritarian “strong man” ideals — the veneration of war; a hatred of reason and truth; a celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity; the suppression of freedom and dissent; a culture which promotes lies, spectacles, scapegoating the other, a discourse of deterioration, and brutal violence, ultimately erupting in state violence in heterogeneous forms. In the Trump administration, neoliberalism is on steroids and represents a realignment — a convergence of the worse dimensions and excesses of gangster capitalism with the fascist ideals of white nationalism and racial supremacy associated with the horrors of the past.134
Neoliberal structural transformation has both undermined and refigured “the principles, practices, cultures, subjects, and institution of democracy understood as rule by the people.”135 Since the early seventies, the neoliberal project has mutated into a revolt against human rights and democracy, and created a powerful narrative that refigures freedom and authority so as to legitimate and produce massive inequities in wealth and power.136 Its practices of offshoring, restructuring everything according to the dictates of profit margins, slashing progressive taxation, eliminating corporate regulations, unchecked privatization, and the ongoing commercializing of all social interactions “inflicts alienating misery” on a polity vulnerable to fascist ideals, rhetoric, and politically extremist movements.137
Furthermore, the merging of neoliberalism and fascism has accelerated as civic culture is eroded, notions of shared citizenship and responsibility disappear, and reason and informed judgment are replaced by the forces of civic illiteracy. State sanctioned attacks on the truth, facts, and scientific reason in Trump’s America are camouflaged as one might expect of the first reality TV president — by a corporate-
controlled culture of vulgarity that merges celebrity culture with a non-stop spectacle of violence. As language and politics are emptied of any substantive meaning, an authoritarian populism is emboldened and fills the airways and the streets with sonic blasts of racism, anti-
Semitism, and violence. The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg rightly observes that Trump makes it difficult to hold onto any sense of what is normal given his relentless attempts to upend the rule of law, justice, ethics, and democracy itself. She writes:
The country has changed in the past year, and many of us have grown numb after unrelenting shocks. What now passes for ordinary would have once been inconceivable. The government is under the control of an erratic racist who engages in nuclear brinkmanship on Twitter … He publicly pressures the Justice Department to investigate his political opponents. He’s called for reporters to be jailed, and his administration demanded that a sportscaster who criticized him be fired. Official government statements promote his hotels. You can’t protest it all; you’d never do anything else. After the election, many liberals pledged not to “normalize” Trump. But one lesson of this year is that we don’t get to decide what normal looks like.138
There is more at work here than the kind of crass entertainment that mimics celebrity culture. As Pankaj Mishra argues we live in a world in which there is a “rout of such basic human emotions as empathy, compassion, and pity.”139 This is a world in which “the puzzle of our age is how this essential foundation of civic life went missing from our public conversation.”140 Part of that puzzle undermining civic culture and its institutions can be found in an unprecedented corporate takeover over of the US government and the reemergence of elements of totalitarianism in new forms. At stake here is the power of an authoritarian ideology that fuels a hyperactive exploitative economic order, apocalyptic nationalism, and feral appeals to racial cleansing that produce what Paul Street has called the nightmare of capitalism.141
Neoliberalism strips democracy of any substance by promoting an irrational belief in the ability of the market to solve all social problems and shape all aspects of society. This shift from a market economy to a market-driven society has been accompanied by a savage attack on equality, the social contract, and social provisions as wages have been gutted, pensions destroyed, health care put out of reach for millions, job security undermined, and access to crucial public goods such as public and higher education considerably lessened for the lower and middle classes.
In the current historical moment, neoliberalism represents more than a form of hyper capitalism, it also denotes the death of democracy if not politics itself. Defining all aspects of society in economic terms, finance and corporate capital defines all behavior through the lens of neoliberal reason. One consequence is that the most fundamental elements of democracy — including the vocabularies that define it, the spaces of deliberation that make it imaginable, and the formative cultures that create the informed citizens that make it possible — are under siege. Anis Shivani’s articulation of the threat neoliberalism poses to democracy is worth quoting at length:
Neoliberalism believes
