Por Henry Giroux
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| Photograph Source: Daniel Torok – Public Domain |
But how can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth?
—Bertolt Brecht, Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties (1935)
In his magnificent Age of Extremes, the late historian Eric Hobsbawm warned that one of the defining characteristics of the late twentieth century was that men and women increasingly lived in a “sort of permanent present lacking an organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.” Such historical amnesia carries a terrible price. When the past disappears, we lose not only the language necessary to recognize the dangers it has bequeathed to the present but also the capacity to name those dangers when they return in altered forms. Historical amnesia thus becomes a crisis of language: when we lose the words that connect the present to the past, we also lose the political vocabulary necessary to grasp what is unfolding before us. A crisis can awaken historical consciousness, expose the forces that produced it, and become a rallying point for resistance. But when crisis hardens into catastrophe, and the language for naming its causes is emptied of historical meaning, the political imagination begins to collapse. What could once be challenged comes to appear inevitable; what demanded resistance is absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life. Catastrophe then becomes more than an event. It becomes a pedagogy of powerlessness, teaching people to live with the intolerable, surrender their belief that the future can be otherwise, and mistake political defeat for historical fate. At that point, normalization becomes one of authoritarianism’s most powerful weapons: hope is drained of its political force precisely when resistance becomes most necessary.
There are moments when the language used to describe a political crisis becomes part of the crisis itself. We are living through one of them. The recent attempt in Jacobin by Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey to theorize Trumpism under the rubric of “democratic fascism” is symptomatic of a wider intellectual failure: the compulsion to soften the language of fascism precisely when fascism needs to be named. The problem extends well beyond one article. Trumpism has been described as populism, illiberal democracy, authoritarian populism, competitive authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, and now democratic fascism. Such phrases may register elements of the present crisis, but they can also function as euphemisms that domesticate a political formation whose defining features are increasingly difficult to deny. When language is emptied of its most disturbing implications, it underplays the very dangers it claims to name. In the worst case, it turns critique into a discourse of normalization.
Paul Street has rightly attacked this rhetorical evasion. He describes “competitive authoritarianism,” a term increasingly invoked to characterize the United States under Trump, as a bloodless academic formulation that drains Trumpism of its ideological and political content: racism, xenophobia, militant patriarchy, ultranationalism, political eliminationism, cultism, violence, anti-intellectualism, and the destruction of constitutional restraints. His point is crucial. When a government attacks universities and the press, turns immigration enforcement into a massively funded coercive apparatus, treats political opponents as internal enemies, weakens due process, builds a sprawling machinery of detention and disappearance, normalizes state violence, and organizes political life around vengeance and racial purification, the issue can no longer be reduced to whether electoral competition remains fair. The language of procedural erosion becomes an alibi for refusing to name the political project taking shape before us.
When Elections Become an Alibi
The phrase “democratic fascism” reproduces this problem in a different form. Fascism does not become democratic because it gains power through elections. It can exploit elections, constitutional procedures, courts, legislatures, and the machinery of a formally democratic state while directing those institutions against democracy itself. To confuse the route to power with the nature of the power being exercised is to mistake democracy’s institutional shell for its political and ethical substance.
History should have settled this question long ago. Fascist movements have repeatedly used democratic institutions to acquire legitimacy and power before attacking the conditions that make democracy possible. Giorgia Meloni did not seize Rome at the head of an armed column. She became Italy’s prime minister after her Brothers of Italy party emerged victorious from the 2022 elections. Yet Brothers of Italy has historical roots in the postwar neo-fascist Italian Social Movement. Even as Meloni has attempted to present herself as a conventional conservative, scandals within her party have repeatedly exposed fascist salutes, Nazi slogans, antisemitism, and nostalgia for Italy’s fascist past. Her election did not magically transform that history into democratic politics. It demonstrated something far more disturbing: elections can provide authoritarian and fascist political formations with the legitimacy they need to enter the state, normalize their language, weaken democratic institutions, and gradually redefine the boundaries of what is politically acceptable. Modi’s India, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, and, in a different register, Javier Milei’s Argentina reveal variations of the same larger danger: authoritarian politics need not abolish elections in order to hollow out democracy. Electoral legitimacy can become the vehicle through which authoritarian movements enter the state and dismantle democracy from within.
The liberal fetish of elections does more than disguise fascism as democracy; it launders authoritarian power through the ballot box, turning political surrender into democratic virtue and bad faith into the language of liberal fulfillment. This is the discourse of political cleansing and sanitization. Worse, it drains fascism of its blood, terror, and bodies. The violence concealed by antiseptic terms such as competitive authoritarianism becomes visible in masked immigration agents seizing people from workplaces, homes, parks, and streets; five-year-old children detained with their fathers after returning home from school; families living in terror of disappearance; and a machinery of detention and deportation increasingly liberated from legal restraint. The human cost disappears from view when American missiles strike an Iranian primary school, killing more than one hundred children. It disappears in Gaza, where at least 21,700 Palestinian children have been reported killed and tens of thousands more wounded amid the destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, and the conditions necessary for life itself. The human cost also disappears from view when Medicaid cuts are projected to leave 7.5 million additional Americans without health insurance by 2034, converting illness, poverty, and premature death into acceptable entries on a bloodless and morally vapid government balance sheet. It disappears as well in the extraordinary spectacle of American military power being used to destroy suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, with at least 230 people killed in 69 strikes by September 9, 2026, often without the government publicly demonstrating that those condemned to death were trafficking drugs. In the most chilling case, two survivors of an initial strike, clinging to the wreckage, were killed in a second attack.
These are not abstract disputes over the adjective attached to an electoral system. They are bodies seized, children buried beneath rubble, families shattered, the sick and poor abandoned, and human beings killed without trial. A political vocabulary that cannot make this violence visible does more than fail to name fascism. It erases fascism’s human consequences, turning terror into abstraction and cruelty into something ordinary enough to endure. The question is not whether contemporary fascism wears the same uniform as its twentieth-century predecessors, but how its old hatreds, racial hierarchies, and contempt for democracy have found new institutions, new languages, and new forms of violence in the present.
Sarah Churchwell understood the danger precisely. American fascism, she argued, would be “recognizably American, while its fascism would be recognizable as fascism.” The point is crucial. Fascism does not need to reproduce Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany in order to inherit their political logic. The question is what fascism looks like when it speaks an American language, wraps itself in the flag, invokes freedom and Christian nationalism, mobilizes the country’s long history of racial violence, and acquires power through institutions it subsequently turns against democracy itself.
Churchwell’s insight also exposes the danger of treating elections as the dividing line between democracy and fascism. The same mistake haunts discussions of Trump. The relevant question is not whether Americans voted for him. They did. The question is what kind of political and class based formations their votes empowered, what historical forces and cultural conditions made that formation possible, and what happens to democracy once such a movement commands all the major apparatuses of the state. Elections tell us how power was acquired; they do not tell us how that power will be used. A government does not remain democratic simply because it arrived through the ballot box. Democracy must also be judged by what happens afterward: whether dissent is protected or criminalized, whether the rule of law constrains power or becomes its weapon, whether racial and religious minorities retain their rights, whether universities and the press remain independent, whether political opponents are treated as legitimate adversaries or internal enemies, and whether state violence is restrained or celebrated. The ballot box can confer office; it cannot confer democratic innocence.
The Jacobin article itself inadvertently demonstrates the inadequacy of its formulation. It describes Trump’s deployment of more than two thousand ICE agents to Minneapolis and St. Paul, characterizes ICE as an authoritarian police force with an enormous budget, and goes so far as to describe it as Trump’s “political militia.” It also recognizes the spectacular character of its violence: cruelty directed against migrants becomes simultaneously a warning to protesters and a demonstration of state power. What sense does it make to catalogue such practices and then attach the adjective “democratic” to the political formation that produces them? This is more than conceptual confusion; it is the language of apology, a rhetorical laundering of fascism that makes the intolerable appear compatible with democracy.
As Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Umberto Eco, Sarah Churchwell, and Jason Stanley have made clear in different ways, the problem runs deeper than terminology. Fascism has never possessed a single institutional form. It changes its language, technologies, cultural styles, and modes of legitimation according to historical circumstances. Contemporary fascism does not need brown shirts marching through every street or the immediate abolition of elections. It can emerge through neoliberal institutions, billionaire-controlled media, digital platforms, militarized borders, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and a security state whose coercive capacities earlier fascist movements could scarcely have imagined.
Neoliberal Fascism and the Punishing State
This is why neoliberal fascism is a more illuminating framework. Neoliberalism did not simply deregulate markets, privatize public goods, destroy unions, transfer wealth upward, and transform education into a laboratory of market values. It hollowed out the social state while expanding the punishing state, reducing citizenship to consumerism, freedom to market choice, social responsibility to individual failure, and public problems to private troubles. In its wake grew vast zones of abandonment along with the loneliness, precarity, insecurity, anxiety, and powerlessness that inhabit them.
As neoliberalism can no longer disguise its failures behind promises of prosperity and social mobility, its authoritarian core becomes increasingly visible. The market state does not disappear; it merges with the punishing state. Economic violence joins political violence. Surveillance expands. Police power intensifies. Migrants become disposable. Due process becomes an inconvenience. Dissent is increasingly represented as subversion. White supremacy, Christian nationalism, militarism, and billionaire power converge within a political formation increasingly willing to dispense with democratic restraints.
September 11, 2001, marked a crucial turning point in this transformation. The horror of the attacks was seized upon to launch a War on Terror that vastly expanded the national-security state while giving permanent war the legitimacy of permanent emergency. As Tariq Ali argues twenty-five years later, 9/11 became the license for an imperial project extending from Afghanistan and Iraq to Guantánamo, detention without trial, torture, surveillance, and the normalization of executive power freed from democratic restraint. But the War on Terror eventually came home. The violence of empire migrated inward, carrying with it the language of permanent emergency, the suspension of rights, the expansion of surveillance, and the construction of entire populations as threats to be managed rather than human beings to be protected. Muslims became objects of suspicion, dissent was increasingly cast as disloyalty, and the distinction between the battlefield and the homeland steadily eroded. The War on Terror did more than produce catastrophic wars abroad; it helped the legal, institutional, and ideological machinery of a domestic security government, a neoliberal fascist state that could later be redirected against migrants, protesters, dissidents, and other designated internal enemies.
The expansion of ICE gives institutional form to this transformation. The agency has undergone a massive expansion under Trump; a recent whistleblower complaint concerning its hiring surge described an unprecedented lowering of standards as thousands of new officers were recruited. The point is not simply that immigration policy has become harsher. The deeper transformation lies in the normalization of a political culture in which masked agents, raids, detention, deportation, intimidation, and spectacularized state violence become acceptable instruments of governance.
Yet political economy alone cannot explain fascism.
Pedagogical Terrorism and the Education of Desire
Fascism must also be understood as a pedagogical project. It does not simply capture institutions; it produces subjects. People have to learn how to become fascists. They have to learn whom to hate, whom to fear, whose lives matter, whose suffering can be ignored, and why cruelty should be experienced as strength rather than barbarism. They learn, in other words, how to become fascist subjects, white supremacists, and enemies of democracy.
This is where Robert Misik’s recent intervention is indispensable. Drawing upon Leo Löwenthal, Adorno, Freud, and the Frankfurt School tradition, Misik reminds us that fascist agitation effectively turns psychoanalysis on its head. Rather than addressing fear, trauma, loneliness, frustration, and psychic injury, authoritarian politics intensifies them. It feeds anger and bitterness, manufactures paranoia, and offers the authoritarian leader as the savior capable of restoring the world supposedly stolen by immigrants, racial minorities, feminists, intellectuals, dissidents, and other manufactured enemies.
This is the terrain of pedagogical terrorism. Fascist politics educates desire. Through relentless repetition, fabricated threats, conspiracy theories, racial fantasies, enemy stereotypes, public humiliations, and rituals of collective outrage, individuals learn to imagine themselves as members of a besieged community. Private anxieties are given public enemies. Loneliness is transformed into the counterfeit solidarity of the tribe, powerlessness redirected into aggression, and resentment elevated into a moral virtue. As Misik notes, revenge itself becomes a political program. A culture of cruelty feeds on this affective fury, offering those consumed by grievance the intoxicating pleasures of belonging, hostility, and vengeance. Humiliation is repaid through the humiliation of others; fear is converted into hatred; and the desire for recognition is redirected into the exhilaration of domination. Fascism thrives on this emotional economy. It does not merely mobilize anger; it gives anger a target, turns cruelty into a source of gratification, and transforms the lust for revenge and violence into the emotional currency of political belonging. What makes this machinery so powerful is that it feeds on the very loneliness, insecurity, abandonment, and fear that gangster capitalism produces, converting the wounds of a broken social order into the emotional fuel of fascist politics.
Misik calls attention to something conventional accounts of fascism frequently miss: the emergence of an emotional plague in which resentment, humiliation, fear, and the longing for revenge become contagious. They circulate through social media, right-wing television, podcasts, rallies, churches, online communities, and increasingly the institutions of the state. The issue is not merely that people encounter fascist ideas. They inhabit cultural apparatuses that teach them how to feel.
The culture of cruelty is where this emotional plague acquires public form. Cruelty is not an unfortunate excess of contemporary fascism; it is one of its central pedagogical practices. Migrants are humiliated publicly. The vulnerable are mocked. Women are degraded. Protesters are represented as enemies. Violence is celebrated as strength. Politics becomes an extension of war. The leader’s violations of political and moral norms become sources of pleasure precisely because his followers experience every transgression as their own liberation from the obligations of democracy, empathy, and mutual responsibility.
Misik’s most chilling insight is that fascist violence takes root long before the killing starts. It first colonizes the imagination. People learn to laugh at cruelty, then to admire it as authenticity, and eventually to bathe emotionally in its pleasure quotient. The same pleasure attaches itself to Trump’s culture of lying. His followers do not always have to believe the lie in order to enjoy it; they can recognize its falsity and still delight in the transgression, in watching truth itself mocked and those who insist upon it humiliated. The lie becomes a performance of power, a demonstration that their leader can violate the most elementary standards of truth and accountability and revel in getting away with it. There is a thrill in the violation itself, a shared pleasure in crossing the line, breaking the taboo, and forcing others to witness the spectacle. Cruelty and lying begin to feed each other: humiliation becomes entertainment, deception becomes defiance, and transgression becomes proof of authenticity. What is being cultivated is not simply disbelief in truth but pleasure in its destruction. At that point, the distance between imagining violence, enjoying its spectacle, and endorsing it as justice steadily disappears.
This is the terrain that liberal euphemisms cannot comprehend. “Competitive authoritarianism” describes the erosion of electoral institutions; ‘democratic backsliding’ registers the weakening of democratic norms; and ‘democratic fascism’ acknowledges that fascists can win elections. What all three fail to confront adequately is the transformation of culture and subjectivity through which millions learn to experience domination as freedom, racial hatred as patriotism, ignorance as authenticity, and cruelty as justice. The question confronting us, then, is not simply whether elections continue to take place. It is far more disturbing: What kinds of human beings are being produced inside the hollowed-out shell of democracy?
Elections can survive while democratic culture is destroyed; legislatures can remain while their power is emptied out; courts can persist while judges who refuse political obedience are attacked; and freedom can still be proclaimed while universities, journalists, migrants, protesters, and racial minorities are subjected to intimidation and repression. The institutions remain, but their democratic substance is hollowed out as they are increasingly bent to the demands of authoritarian power. Italy under Meloni offers one version of this process; Trumpism offers another. Fascism does not repeat itself mechanically. It learns. It adapts. It changes its costume, appropriates the language of democracy, and inhabits the institutions it seeks to destroy. What remains constant is its hatred of equality, dissent, human interdependence, and democracy itself. This is precisely what makes contemporary fascism so dangerous: it does not always announce its arrival by abolishing democratic institutions; it can capture them, inhabit them, and turn their authority against the very democratic life they were created to protect.
Beyond the Liberal Guardrails
The liberal faith in democratic guardrails mistakes the architecture of democracy for democracy itself. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt concede in How Democracies Die that institutions alone cannot restrain elected autocrats, yet the metaphor of guardrails remains tied to the reassuring belief that courts, elections, constitutions, and legislatures possess an inherent democratic force capable of containing authoritarian power. John Dewey exposed the danger of this assumption almost ninety years ago. Writing in Freedom and Culture as fascism engulfed Europe, he warned against believing that democratic conditions somehow maintain themselves or that democracy can be reduced to constitutional prescriptions. Such faith, he argued, can actually conceal the emergence of forces hostile to democratic freedom.
Dewey’s warning cuts to the heart of the present crisis. As Melvin Rogers has argued in returning to Dewey, checks and balances possess no agency of their own; democratic institutions are only as strong as the habits, dispositions, and forms of collective life that give them substance. Democracy, in this sense, is not merely an institutional arrangement but a culture and practice that must be learned, inhabited, defended, and continually renewed.
Democracy is not a structure that survives simply because its institutional shell remains standing. Its substance depends upon the social conditions that make democratic agency possible: economic security, education, equality, public institutions, political participation, and a culture in which people possess both the capacity and the power to govern their common life. Strip away those conditions and democratic institutions can remain formally intact while being emptied from within. Elections continue, courts remain open, legislatures meet, and constitutions are ceremonially invoked even as concentrated wealth purchases political power, billionaire oligarchs dominate public life, white supremacy and Christian nationalism gain institutional force, and the punishing state expands its machinery of surveillance, detention, and violence. Dewey’s warning must therefore be pushed beyond liberal institutionalism itself. The crisis cannot be resolved by repairing capitalism’s excesses while leaving its fundamental relations of power untouched. A social order organized around the concentration of wealth, the privatization of public life, the commodification of human need, and the conversion of economic power into political power continually erodes the conditions that substantive democracy requires. The question is no longer how to save democracy from the excesses of capitalism, but how to free democracy from capitalism’s grip.
For that reason, any struggle against fascism that refuses to confront capitalism as one of its enabling conditions risks treating the symptoms while preserving the machinery that reproduces the disease. Dewey understood the stakes of this failure nearly a century ago. In 1935, he argued that if radicalism means recognizing the necessity of radical change, then a liberalism that is not also radical is “irrelevant and doomed.” His warning speaks directly to the present: the task is not to restore the political order that produced this catastrophe but to transform the conditions that made it possible. Democracy will not be saved by restoring yesterday’s guardrails or returning to a supposedly more humane version of capitalism. It requires a mass politics capable of breaking the concentrated power of capital, democratizing wealth and economic decision-making, rebuilding the public institutions necessary for a common life, and creating new forms of collective ownership, social equality, and democratic control over the institutions that shape everyday existence. What is required, in other words, is a democratic socialism in which democracy reaches beyond the ballot box and enters the workplaces, schools, media, economy, and other commanding institutions in which power is exercised and the conditions of everyday life are determined.
The failure of liberal institutionalism is inseparable from a failure of political language. The liberal obsession with finding a more comfortable vocabulary for this transformation is itself politically consequential. Euphemism becomes complicity when it makes fascism easier to tolerate. If fascism must first pass some imaginary historical test before we are permitted to call it fascism, we will recognize it only when recognition has become politically useless.
Fascism does not cease to be fascism because people voted for it. Democracy may provide the doorway through which fascism enters. Neoliberalism creates the conditions that nourish it. Pedagogical terrorism supplies the machinery through which people learn to desire it. And the culture of cruelty provides the emotional charge that makes domination feel like liberation and feral tribal belonging masquerade as community. What is needed now is a language forged in resistance, capable of naming real existing fascism, exposing the forces that produce it, and turning outrage into organized struggle. Such a language must recover historical memory, make power visible, connect private suffering to its systemic causes, and create the conditions for people to recognize themselves not in the manufactured hatreds of fascist politics but in organized mass struggles against exploitation, racial violence, disposability, and authoritarian rule. The struggle over language is therefore inseparable from the struggle over power: we must name fascism in order to fight it, expose the machinery that produces it in order to dismantle it, and build the collective power necessary to defeat the world that makes it possible.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.
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