by Sven Reichardt
The influential philosopher Jason Stanley, until now a professor at Yale, will—together with renowned European historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore—leave that elite US university for Canada’s Munk School at the University of Toronto.[1] This, says Stanley, protests Trump, who harasses universities with accusations of antisemitism and coerces them with financial threats. When asked whether he would speak of the present-day US in terms of “fascist conditions,” Stanley’s answer was equally succinct and definite: “Yes, of course.” He sees no other, more fitting concept: “Trump is a fascist. His movement is fascist.”
But things are not quite so clear, as the testimony of one of the leading researchers on fascism shows. Robert Paxton, a professor at Columbia University and decades-long luminary of comparative-historical research, stresses that Trump, in contrast to historical fascists, neither wants a strong welfare state nor commands uniformed paramilitaries: “this is not the style of Americans.” Most German historians agree. They are not very visible in comparative fascist studies, since they reference Nazism above all else and often compare the present with Hitler’s dictatorship. Unsurprisingly, this method reveals more differences than similarities. Opposing such a national fixation, David Remnick, editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, put it with inimitable sharpness: “Hitler ruined fascism.”
Many historians consider the term “fascism” to have become vague and worn out by polemical overuse, for example in the GDR or the student movement. Leading intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas see few similarities between the present situation and historical fascism because “no uniformed marching columns” accompany right-wing populism today. The fact that Trump or Meloni do not indulge in the celebration of war or the use of paramilitary violence is, indeed, one of the best arguments against the choice of this term. Nevertheless, even Jürgen Habermas is by no means certain of his judgment, having seen in the new right-wing populism of 2016 the “breeding ground for a new fascism.”
If one surveys comparative fascist studies by US academics, things look different. As clearly as Paxton described differences, he also already recognized by 2016, under Trump’s first administration, countless elements of fascist rhetoric in Trump’s speech and staging: “Well, there’s language and there’s style and manner that has echoes of the fascism of Europe in the 1920s and the ‘30s.” The cult of personality and aggressive character, the glorification of the survival of the fittest, the radical ultranationalism and the racist attacks against migrants, the obsession with fantasies of catastrophe—all of these are elements from classical fascism’s arsenal. The personal orientation of the politics as well as the stubbornness with which Trump pursues his erratic program recall, in their implacability and unconditionality, the fascism of the first half of the twentieth century. His appearances in front of his supporters resemble a political liturgy familiar from fascism. He swears his movement to unconditional allegiance and presents himself to his supporters as their charismatic leader.
Even Trump’s first administration was marked by fascist propaganda. There, as Jason Stanley wrote in his 2018 book, How Fascism Works, one could already detect simplified, nationalistic, and racist rhetoric about others’ incapacity. Today, fascism tends to emerge more insidiously, inventing and idealizing a supposedly glorious past to which society must return. The border between fact and opinion is blurred by manipulative rhetoric that constantly sows distrust of independent media and sciences. Anti-intellectualism disparages academic institutions, instead appealing to supposedly common sense. Lies or conspiracy theories are spread in order to gain control over public perception. Fascist ideologies rest on clear social hierarchies—often those of gender, race, or religion—in which the dominant group always casts itself as the victim. These discourses on security are employed to legitimate authoritarian measures. The state positions itself as a defender from internal threats and consciously stokes fear about the erosion of social order, e.g. traditional gender roles. Big cities are described as sites of moral decay, in contrast to supposedly healthy country life. Furthermore, the working class is idealized and, at the same time, played against supposedly lazy foreigners in order to reframe social tensions in ethnic or cultural terms.
Supporters of France’s National Rally (RN) also regularly blame “the Arabs” or “the Muslims” when they complain about social problems, regardless of whether these concern the lack of spots at daycares, the deterioration of education, the disappearance of long-running downtown businesses, difficulties in accessing public services, or the decline in purchasing power—high taxes, too, are only so high because foreign “idlers” have to be provided for.
At least since Trump’s second administration, Americans’ prognoses of “fascism” have been met with increasing agreement in France. Comparing Trump’s propaganda with Hitler’s, intellectuals such as Olivier Mannoni discover “incoherence as rhetoric; extreme simplification as argumentation; the accumulation of lies as evidence; narrow, distorted, manipulated vocabulary as language.” As the Argentinian historian Federico Finchelstein, who has researched fascism for many years at the New School for Social Research in New York, further explains, the borders between right-wing populism and fascism can be quite fluid. In his 2024 book, he called Trump a “wannabe” fascist, who corresponds to fascists in style and conduct but does not employ the same violence. And the separation of powers has not (yet) been eroded as severely as it was in historical fascism, either. With the spread of disinformation and the manipulation of the truth, Trump uses fascist tactics to influence public opinion and accomplish his political goals. Like classical fascists, Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, and Orban create an “enemy” inside the society and secure their political support through racism and xenophobia. Like Stanley, Finchelstein considers the transition from authoritarian tendencies to outright dictatorship an insidious process. He warns that this development poses a genuine threat to democracy and calls for us to remain vigilant and defend democratic values.
When the world’s leading scholars of fascism gathered for a conference in Rome in January 2025, the Italian historian Enzo Traverso, who teaches at Cornell University, delivered a fascinating address. According to him, fascism studies can no longer presume to study a merely historical phenomenon from the vantage point of stable democracies. He questioned whether the concept of fascism could adequately capture the novelty of the current situation. Finally, he made a case for the concept of “post-fascism.”[2] Contemporary fascism is neither completely new nor straightforwardly equivalent to historical fascism. Undeniable instances of continuity and links to the past exist alongside new ways to destroy democracy. Traverso agreed with several other historians that, today, state-terrorist violence is the exception rather than the rule. After all, Western post-fascism emerged not from World War I, but rather a peace lasting a solid seventy years. The working class is fully integrated into the movements of Le Pen, Salvini, Orban, and Trump. Post-fascism’s new enemies are not primarily the Jews, but rather migrants, Muslims, and black people, as well as liberal groups—from bourgeois bohemians to environmental activists to advocates for LGBTQI rights. Then, as now, the racist, nationalist, antifeminist (post-)fascists inveigh against “parasites” and portray themselves as representatives of the “decent and hard-working” people. Contemporary Islamophobia distinguishes itself via a colonial matrix, and post-fascists’ authoritarianism is accompanied by an idolization of the market. Certainly, when the utopian age drew to a close, fascism likewise lost its orientation towards the future, even if its intellectual ambitions have not totally faded, as evidenced by authors like Michel Houellebecq, Renaud Camus, and Alain Finkielkraut.
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As much as some of these propagandistic elements evoke historical fascism, it is still important to investigate whether the social conditions that facilitated the rise of fascism following World War I exist again today. When one looks, the findings are almost even more unsettling: the social conditions are not only comparable but even open similar windows of opportunity. More than forty years ago, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari published a book about capitalism, in which they examined fascism’s decentralized micropolitics in a “segmented” society (A Thousand Plateaus, 208–231). While the forms of social segmentation in the twenty-first century differ from those of the 1920s, the segmentary mechanisms of closure favor the rise of fascist politics in both cases. Besides the fragmentation of international politics, whose global regulatory mechanisms are increasingly undermined by the rise of nationalism, there are essentially three developments: social fragmentation driven by economic crisis, conflicts over gender relations, and the radical reorganization of the media system.
Let us begin with the economic crisis, which has expanded sequentially into a polycrisis through the banking crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. European welfare states suffer from high public debt as a consequence of massive rearmament, disruptions of global trade flows, and worldwide inflation. Debt burdens, difficulties with deficit financing, banking and currency crises—all of these already led, in the 1920s, to a massive crisis of trust in the state. Today, European social democracy and the successful model of the welfare state find themselves in a deep crisis, too. Euroskepticism is even more pronounced in Eastern Europe, where confidence in the EU’s political skepticism did not have decades to develop.
Just as we see today, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed a decoupling of democracy from liberalism. Furthermore, both eras feature the emergence of authoritarian dynamics, the fragmentation of politics into irreconcilable camps, widespread anxieties about downward mobility, and nationalist fears of globalization. A comparison can also be drawn with the austerity politics of Weimar Chancellor Henrich Brüning, who, starting in the 1930s, raised taxes and cut social spending in an attempt to restore state finances. This parallels the economic fate of Southern Europe, where, in the face of the sovereign debt crisis, the middle class has been at risk of extinction since the 2010s.
Once again, a “panic in the middle class” seems to be breaking out, as the famed legal and political theorist Theodor Geiger impressively described in 1930. While Geiger located the backbone of the Nazi movement in the old middle class of artisans and small traders, a disproportionate number of Trump’s supporters are white men from the Rust Belt and Midwest. In the deindustrialized areas of Europe (with the exception of Wallonia), things seem to be similar. In the 2024 European Parliament election, the French National Rally (RN) was exceedingly successful, winning 53 percent of laborers, 40 percent of salaried employees, and 20 percent of managers. The party’s base lies primarily in poorer social strata with less education, but it can also rely on parts of the middle class. Similar to the pattern seen among Alternative for Germany (AfD) voters in East Germany, support for the French RN increases the further one travels into less populated, more ethnically homogenous regions, where ties to local traditions are more pronounced.
Research on primarily white, impoverished areas of public housing in and around London has shown that underprivileged working-class communities feel that the British welfare state has left them behind. The political orientation of these social strata—their racism and their populist-fascist authoritarianism—is based in real socioeconomic problems. Supporters of Nigel Farage and his UK Independence Party (UKIP) feel, according to studies by ethnologist Insa Koch, abandoned by established political parties and perceive themselves chiefly as victims of globalization. At the same time, they adhere to a declensionist narrative and invoke a rural, unadulterated, or supposedly autochthonous national identity to frame their problems in cultural terms.
Taking in the results of research on post-fascist parties’ supporters in Europe as a whole, one is reminded of Jürgen Falter’s findings about the Nazi Party. After countless electoral analyses, he reached the conclusion that it was a “people’s party with a middle-class belly.” In the 1920s and 1930s, the European fascists of Germany, Italy, Romania, and Hungary scapegoated internal enemies—Jews and communists—for their countries’ decline. In Germany today, skilled workers and the Ruhr Valley’s middle class make their voices heard through the AfD, expressing their fears about migrants by their votes. The loss of trust in established parties corresponds to a feeling of pronounced insecurity with regard to economic development and inflation. But AfD voters are not only low-income people, who feel the impact of current crises more acutely. They include those who, detached from their own financial situation, harbor the same fears and likewise transpose them onto migrants. Contemporary insecurities, defense mechanisms, and fears of loss pertain to not just blue-collar workers but also the middle class as they experience the dismantling of the welfare state. The increasing precarity of the nuclear family, the uproar against globalization, and fears of economic transformation and cultural change all ominously evoke the middle-class revolt of the 1930s (Mullis, Lessenich, Bude).
In the US, the typical Trump voter of both 2016 and 2024 had a marginally above-average income, was middle-class, and was less likely to be unemployed than the average non-Trump voter (Mounk 157–160).[3] In both elections, his core voter base consisted of the self-employed and segments of the middle class. Things are not going so badly for them economically, but they fear a decline, as they live mostly in areas (whether urban or rural) with inadequate medical care. By winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2016, Trump overturned Democrats’ dominance in the formerly industrial Rust Belt. Subsequent research has drawn extensive attention to the problems faced in these milieus, where residents feel abandoned by the Democratic Party and politically repressed. For a substantial number of Americans, the dream of freedom and self-reliance has ended. Inequality has drastically increased: in the last three decades, more and more Americans have been left behind financially and socially. The real income of the bottom forty percent has continuously shrunk over the last thirty years. Many Americans are realizing that their children and grandchildren will not have it better than themselves.
There is another astonishing historical parallel: in the economic crisis of the 1920s and 1930s, too, the US government opted for higher tariffs. On June 17, 1930, it passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, raising tariffs on over 20,000 products to record levels. This protectionist law aimed to shield the US economy from foreign competition. Historians such as Detlef Junker (280), Florian Pressler (75–76), and Charles Kindleberger (131–135, 294) have correctly held it responsible for exacerbating the global economic crisis. Today, Trump’s autocratic zigzag policies on tariffs demonstrate just how susceptible a presidential—in comparison to parliamentary—system is to authoritarian interference and the cult of personal agency. One can observe similar patterns under Erdogan in Turkey or Orban in Hungary, and even Italy is trending in this direction at the moment. In light of the experiences of the Weimar Republic, none of this bodes well.
Austerity conditions and the unjust division of resources explain why today’s industrial workers are turning away from social democrats in Europe and Democrats in the US. A cry of protest against global competition and the corresponding suppression of wages rang out in the American Midwest, the agricultural hinterlands of Eastern Europe, and the centers of heavy industry and mining across Europe. It fell on deaf ears among the established parties. As the social democrats moved ever-closer to the new middle class, their old base flocked to the AfD, Trump, and Orban (Manow 29–35). Overall, since the neoliberal economic boom of the 1990s, the economies of Europe and the US have been under heavy pressure. China’s economic rise over the last twenty years factored in, too. On top of that, the financial and Euro crises led to a major crisis of structural adjustment, which post-fascists have tied to increasing migration from Africa and the Middle East. Post-fascists thereby identify the economic crisis with migration to a certain degree.
Secondly, conflicts over changing gender relations fuel radical right-wing movements. Their nostalgic conception of masculinity is based on a hegemonic model of gender relations that historical fascists also advocated, even as that model faltered after World War I in the face of the “New Woman” and women’s increasing emancipation. Women’s success on the job market especially unnerved those men whose martial ideals of heroism took heavy fire in the mechanized slaughterhouse of World War I. When the war ended, unemployment and women’s competition on the labor market destroyed their self-image as authoritarian fathers. In the 1920s and 1930s, fascists reacted to confident feminists and new, queer modes of life in urban centers with repression and regressive family policies. This brutal “normalization” of bipolar gender relations is reminiscent of the AfD’s gender politics today. The AfD’s top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament election, Maximilien Krah, implored young men on TikTok to become real men again: “One in three young men has never had a girlfriend. Is that you? Don’t watch porn, don’t vote Green, go outside, be true to yourself, be confident, look straight ahead. Real men are right-wing, real men have principles, real men are patriots—then you’ll get a girlfriend.” The video went viral, receiving over 1.4 million views. In the US, the number of involuntarily single young men has been on the rise for a while. It’s similar in the UK, where a study published by the BBC in 2021 found that young men feel particularly lonely. Among many other factors, the study pointed to frustrating experiences with dating apps, pressure from online pornography, and unrealistic ideals on social media. Once again, right-wing radicals are addressing a real problem and redefining it in their own terms.
Trump’s call to “Drill, baby, drill!” in his inaugural address and his desire to return to the fossil-fuel regime by expanding fracking correspond to what political scientist Cara Daggett termed “petro-masculinity.” This ideology—rooted in a backwards-looking, industrial-authoritarian patriarchy—binds coal, steel, and grease together with traditional masculinity, heteronormative gender relations, and the rejection of queer modes of life. The deliberate, ongoing banning of gender studies and queer studies from American universities is joined by a natalist politics that aims to increase the birth rates of white, Christian women and to renew the reputation of traditional masculinity. New abortion laws in the US evidence an anti-feminist attitude that regularly prevails in post-fascist countries like Russia or Hungary. Latin-American post-fascists center gender politics even more prominently. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (20), a leading expert on contemporary right-wing extremism in Latin America, writes: “Immigration is a primary driver of far-right sentiments in Europe, while this is not necessarily the case in Latin America. In Latin America, the main issues revolve around crime, gender and sexual politics.”
Third and finally, one cannot understand the rise of right-wing extremism without discussing the massive change in the media system. Populists like Donald Trump make a point of presenting themselves as crude, uncouth, and unrefined. Populists intend for such comportment to symbolize their down-to-earth simplicity. They cultivate a media-oriented style of politics marked by dramatization, confrontation, emotionalization, and personalization—not only because it aligns with the mechanisms of the media’s attention economy, but above all because it corresponds with the fast, open, and very easily accessible electronic media formats of our time.
A politics of events and symbols—one that practices theatricalization and dramatization—captures great attention on digital media. This model of communication was often successful in the interwar period, too. As early as the turn of the century, but particularly in the aftermath of the First World War, a “transformation in the form of political representation” took place, as the University of Göttingen historian Bernd Weisbrod has analyzed. It took shape through the sensationalist commercial press—with its special issues and splashy reports—and through an illustrated magazine market oriented toward personalization and visualization. Weisbrod (29) incisively characterized this change:
In place of the ideal of a reasoning public, there emerged a mass-media commercialization of politically diversified opinions, stratified into marketable segments. The bourgeois model, in which critical publicity enabled political emancipation, was overlaid by a communications market that gave space to both the partisan press and popular entertainment.
Fascism profited enormously from the mediatization of mass publicity, masterfully playing out the new atrocity propaganda from every angle. Split by social milieu, each segment of the press offered its own truths and facts. As this turning point in media history unfolded, “all political speech” took on “the mode of a promise” (31). Wartime propaganda carried the brutalization and dramatization of political speech much further: “This kind of propaganda required almost no proof; its credibility was founded on the premonition of danger and the panicked sense that it was now necessary to close ranks” (31).
In the US, the rurally based, anti-intellectual People’s Party helped popularize the politics of enemy demonization. In the 1890s, they wielded an autochthonous “heartland” politics of “real Americans” against the Wall Street establishment and the political elites in Washington. The sensationalist new yellow press—then closely tied to influential figures like publisher James Gordon Bennett and magnate William Randolph Hearst—was used just as intensively as a mass medium by the People’s Party in the nineteenth century as radio was by the anti-semitic Father Charles Edward Coughlin or the radical right-wing governor of Louisiana, Huey Long, in the 1920s and 1930s (McMath, Warren, Phillips, Brinkley, Beeby, Kazin). From 1926 on, Detroit’s WJR radio station broadcasted Father Coughlin’s weekly sermons, which propagated a dramatized, simplified, and confrontational antisemitism. Coughlin conjured up an extensive political and moral crisis in the region, where the Ku Klux Klan movement simultaneously gained massive ground. Farmers’ revolts and protests against the railroad companies were to the yellow press what the Tea Party is to Twitter or the German Pegida movement is to Facebook today.
The accelerated development of new communications technologies is freeing politicians from traditional political institutions and established media. Today’s digital media—specifically social media and platforms—provide favorable conditions for the rhizomatic spread of fascism. If fascism is a politics of unbridled hatred, then algorithms provide it a valuable service, insofar as they spread affectively negative messages many times faster than positive or neutral ones. Recent scholarship has intensively investigated this phenomenon. According to Maik Fielitz and Holger Marcks, “digital fascism” takes shape through informal swarms whose flexibility allows them to embed and assert themselves in stable constitutional democracies better than uniformed paramilitaries could. This applies today to Trump’s spectacular use of social media, from Twitter (now X) to Truth Social. For the alt-right movement surrounding the far-right white supremacist Richard B. Spencer, online forums like Reddit play a central role. Laura Loomer—an influencer and troll with her own website, “loomered.com,” and over 1.6 million followers on X—advised Trump on his cuts to the federal workforce. Presenting herself as an enemy of Islam and a champion of white people, she has spread the myth of the “great replacement.” She was the one who, during the 2024 campaign, launched the lie about Haitians in Ohio eating pets. Racist slurs continue to increase her notoriety. Her career is one of numerous examples of the uncoordinated network structure of post-fascist online swarms. The underlying sentiment takes shape in a decentralized, minimally coordinated, fluid, and conflict-laden way; a diffuse network disseminates the ideological justification for the ethnonationalist denigration of anything alleged to be ethnically foreign.
Of course, new media do not inevitably lead to post-fascist politics, but post-fascist politicians can instrumentalize them better than independent broadsheet newspapers or public service broadcasters. The parallel is striking: a segmented sub-public, used to dramatize situations and demonize opponents, offered historical fascism an important window of opportunity—and offers the same to post-fascism today. Then as now, fascism has an affinity for technology; fascist movements were and are some of the most eager users of the popular press, film, radio, and social media. The more radically, apodictically, emotionally, and brutally that mediatized sub-publics stretch the facts, the stronger fascism becomes. Before long, every article or online post will be accompanied by the almost explicit pressure to confess one’s allegiances and an obligatory show of suspicion toward the opposing side (Weisbrod 30).
Considering contemporary changes in the media system—namely, the upheaval of the regulated media landscape brought on by accessible and seemingly direct online media—one can identify an important window of opportunity that populist and post-fascist political forms have opened up in the past decade. New media destabilize existing power structures, provide communication channels to new groupings, and thereby accelerate processes of political change.
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As frightening as the many parallels are, today’s fascism lacks many of its predecessors’ features: the rampant paramilitarism, the cult of violence and death fueled by World War I, the unprecedented repression and despotism at home, as well as the bellicose imperialism abroad. With the exception of Putin, who less skillfully follows the typical populist playbook for domestic mobilization, not one post-fascist regime—from Modi to Orban to Trump—has started a war.
In comparison to the interwar period, today’s paramilitary violence is substantially more diffuse. In the gun-friendly US, the capacity for violence is divided up between numerous radical right-wing organizations, from the Ku Klux Klan to the Proud Boys to the currently spreading Active Clubs. Besides this rhizomatic structure of violence, we can point to another difference: the neoliberalism of the 1990s has undermined the possibility of strong state authority and given rise to a newly aggressive individualism. This would have been almost unthinkable during the comparatively community-oriented 1920s and 1930s. If traditional bureaucracy is now to be exchanged for digital administration, it means unleashing the free market within the state. However, it is important to note that this dismantling of government administration and the welfare state does not extend to the apparatus of policing and repression. In the US, internal security and police forces for the deportation regime are as elaborate as the military apparatus.[4] Migrants and groups denigrated as “anti-American” experience this regime’s force in particular. In this respect, a politics of violence and threats thereof have by no means disappeared in post-fascism. As is well known, anti-communism has also changed. For a long time now, the manufactured panics of “red scares” have ceased to refer to socialist workers’ parties that threaten to expropriate businesses. The fear of a Bolshevik uprising has been replaced by the frightening image of universities and media supposedly overrun by “wokeness,” against which one must protest and defend. Further, the classical fascist “strongmen” have long since been joined by “self-made women” like Marine Le Pen, Girogia Meloni, or Alice Weidel. They present themselves as strong, independent women who have successfully managed careers outside of their families.
Despite all of its coquetry with the symbolic and rhetorical arsenal of classical fascism, post-fascism no longer draws directly on that era as an archetype. Unlike the skinheads or the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) neo-fascists of the postwar decades, post-fascists do not want to fully rehabilitate the Nazi past. Instead they minimize the Nazi era as a speck of “bird shit” in German history. Their aim is to banish the memory of National Socialism and to erase Germany’s “monuments of shame,” as AfD politician Björn Höcke called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial. Differing perhaps from Höcke, the post-fascist Giorgia Meloni wants to renew and change fascism. In January 2025, on the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the former neo-fascist declared before Parliament—to the astonishment of her own party—that although Hitler’s regime indeed carried out the historically unparalleled tragedy of the Holocaust, “the plan… also had the complicity of the fascist regime in Italy, with its disgraceful racial laws and involvement in rounding up and deporting people.”
Already in 1974, the Italian author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (31–34) asserted that “every age has its own fascism.” This is still true today. The conceptual alternatives—populism, far-right politics, or authoritarianism—demand further discussion, but these concepts, too, can no longer be regarded merely as “makeshift solutions” (Fielitz and Marcks 10). They can serve to downplay the danger of these movements, which denigrate migrants, normalize discrimination, and attempt to found a new value system upon the unequal valuing of people. The concept of populism does indeed capture a mechanism of mobilization, but it can adequately grasp neither the ideology and racism nor the steps on the path towards authoritarian governance. On the other hand, the concept of authoritarianism primarily designates a form of rule, but it likewise fails to appropriately analyze the ideological dimension.
Today’s post-fascism is a rhizomatic construct. It commands no organized paramilitaries, builds no welfare state for those of its subjects deemed ethnically desirable, and is more commercial than its forerunners. Present forms of post-fascism unite the most widely varying strains of racism and nationalism with a backwards-looking attitude based on the myth of national resurrection: the nation must lift itself out of the supposedly decadent swamp of diverse, multicultural “wokeness.” It remains unclear whether we are currently witnessing the early stages of a new dictatorship or whether it will take similar steps to those of historical fascism. Neither is impossible.
Sven Reichardt is Professor of Contemporary History at the Department of History and Sociology at the University of Konstanz. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of the Federal Republic of Germany, the history of European fascism, and the history of violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Edited by Jens Bisky and Hannah Schmidt-Ott.
Translated by Zac Endter.
Featured image: Digital montage, Zac Endter, 2025, sampling a photograph of Luigi Russolo and Ugo Piatti in their Milanese intonarumori workshop in Luigi Rossolo, L’Arte dei rumori, 1916.
[1] This article was previously published in German as “Was ist Postfaschismus?” in Soziopolis on May 8, 2025. It first appeared under the title “Die Neuerfindung des Faschismus” in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on April 20, 2025. I thank all those who, subsequent to this article’s original publication, provided me with valuable comments and additions. Unfortunately, I cannot respond in detail to all the comments, but I would like to particularly thank Mitchell Ash, Ulrich Bröckling, Paula Diehl, Heike Drotbohm, Victoria De Grazia, Paul Hanebrink, Isabel Heinemann, Léonie de Jonge, Jürgen Kocka, Pavel Kolář, Jürgen Osterhammel, Shalini Randeria, Petra Terhoeven and the reading group at ifk Vienna.
[2] To the best of my knowledge, the term first entered the scholarly lexicon in 2000, when the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás politically analyzed Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party. Above all, the Marxist-oriented Tamás sees in post-fascism an elitist politics. He underestimates its mobilizing, populist character, which Traverso, on the other hand, grasps explicitly.
[3] Similarly, in the interwar period, the unemployed did not vote for the Nazi Party, but rather the Communist Party, at higher-than-average rates.
[4] As reported by Die Zeit [in translation]: “Donald Trump wants to cut a fifth of the federal budget. The Trump administration demands more money for the military and internal security. Savings are to be made everywhere else, as the draft budget for 2026 indicates.”
