Not a rupture, but the next step: fascism is here

John Duncan argues that in the US and beyond, neoliberalism has created conditions that are ready-made for authoritarian rule.

Is the US a fascist state? How can a free-market state that believes in capitalism be fascist? They elect their leaders, right? Such questions have featured prominently in debates on the US situation that have proven to be long-running, circular and unproductive. As an academic focusing on human rights and neoliberalism, I recently published this article with Kian Aspinall about how the current expansion of far right politics can be understood as the emergence of a contemporary form of fascism and how this moment is not a rupture or revolutionary break from the neoliberal politics of Obama, Bush, Blair, Thatcher, and Reagan, but the intensification of those politics. However, despite the historical evidence, despite the fact that ICE agents are currently murdering people in the streets, abducting migrants and ‘suspected migrants’, and despite the US invading Venezuela and kidnapping its president, I am still seeing ‘thinkers’ on the left deny the obvious truth that the US is now a fascist regime.

While we don’t approach understanding fascism as a static ‘ideal’ type or list of necessary preconditions, it is useful to summarise how we understand what fascism is. For us, fascism is a form of far right, ultranationalist politics characterised by intense racial and gender hierarchies and an authoritarian form of state practice. Frequently it contains what pre-eminant liberal scholar of fascism Roger Griffin calls palingenetic rebirth, which is the myth of nationalist renewal: Mussolini’s Roman Empire rebirth, Nazism’s ‘new man’, Make America Great Again. 

While Griffin, a paradigmatic liberal scholar, emphasises that fascism is a revolution against liberalism, we argue that contemporary fascism contains far more continuities with global neoliberalism than ruptures. 

For example, the rise in extreme anti-immigrant politics which is so characteristic of contemporary fascism (whether it’s ICE in the US, Stop the Boats in the UK, the AfD in Germany, or Giogia Meloni’s femonationalism in Italy) can be traced back to the shift in global politics under neoliberalism whereby Global North states both increased migrant labour (and increasingly feminised that labour) and hardened and securitised border regimes to sort migrant labour into ‘good’ rich migrants and ‘bad’ poor and ‘illegal’ migrants. Poor migrants were increasingly demonised and policed, driving down their wages and keeping them subordinate to local capital and, frankly, local workers. This was common throughout the neoliberal age from Thatcher and Reagan to Obama and ‘progressive neoliberals’. This combined with an increased orientalised threat of the Muslim Other has created a rich terrain of racism and nationalism within which fascism could take root.

Part of the increase of migration was the importing of care labour. This was necessary as neoliberalism sought to undermine women’s liberation movements by nominally freeing women from the patriarchal housewife role while simultaneously maintaining their responsibility for the vast majority of care labour. So women in general (I know there are nuances to this, for example as Angela Davis details in Women, Race and Class, black women in the US were always working outside the home) were suddenly responsible for both waged work and housework and they were naturalised as providers of that housework. To cope, many women exported their care work to frequently racialised migrant women. The gendered regulation of labour was hardened by neoliberalism while the perception of equality soured both the mouths of men and of some women who could not see the benefit of work. Hence we saw the return of rampant anti-feminism, attacks on abortion, and the phenomenon of the trad wife.

Finally, neoliberalism is characterised by a deeply authoritarian form of state practice. From the foundational theories of Hayek who abhorred ‘mass’ control of the economic in favour of decentralised markets (and as he admitted dictatorial power on occasion too), to the practice of increasingly insulating the state, carceral forces, and the market from any sort of democratic management, we have seen the increasing authoritarianism of neoliberalism create an architecture which is ready-made for fascist domination.

So, rather than a rupture from neoliberalism, what we have seen is simply an intensification of its existing features resulting in a novel contemporary form of fascism. And I know that lots of people will still, despite everything, call this sort of thing alarmist and cite differences between the 1930s and today. But fascism is not just a checklist or a static ideal – it’s a dynamic, shifting form of political hegemony. Its characteristic ultranationalism, racism, misogyny, and authoritarian state practice emerge in distinct forms during the neoliberal era. These distinct manifestations mean that direct comparison is insufficient to detect fascism and leads to constant denial of its reemergence which will likely continue until it’s well too late. For decades there was debate about whether Nazism could even be described as fascism because of the ways it differed from Mussolini’s capital ‘F’ Fascism. As the joke goes, it couldn’t be fascism unless it comes from the fascist region of Italy, otherwise it’s just sparkling authoritarianism.

From this argument, it should be clear that fascism could appear with different manifestations, and so we must be able to spot those different manifestations today. Does fascism need a ‘mass movement’? Or, as we argue, can it emerge as neoliberal mass politics, simultaneously break down social divisions and subsume them within a racialised ideal of the nation? As Tony Blair stated in his 1996 conference speech: ‘Forget the past. No more bosses versus workers. We are on the same side, the same team and Britain united will win’ (page 7 of my article). Does it require a non-state street militia or can state-affiliated ICE round up undesirables and murder resistance? Does it need the complete cessation of liberal democratic institutions like elections or can the authoritarian insulation of the state through decades of neoliberalism produce similar results as a singular ‘strong man’ dictator? A question worth asking is whether American fascism could survive the death of Trump. Myself and my co-author seek to answer these questions by locating fascism within the material social relations of contemporary hegemony. The political expression of these relations varies across different contexts but for us it is quite clear that fascism is here. The US is now a fascist state. It’s not in danger of developing fascism – it is fascism. And we in the UK are not far behind.

On 21 February 2026, far right group ‘Britain First’ is organising a so-called ‘March for Remigration’. In response, a coalition of anti-fascist organisations has issued a nationwide call for a counter-protest.

Save the date. Get organised. Travel to Manchester to stand together in opposition to Britain First.