The Allure of Fascism (Vol. II), Part 8
Right-wing politics during Trump’s first presidency often had an obviously pathological core. From the racist vitriol aimed at Chinese, Arab, Muslim, and Mexican people to the misogynistic violence perpetrated by incels, a pathetic sense of grievance motivated a politics aimed at spite and domination. Some right-wing political phenomena had apparently psychotic features, too. From QAnon to Pizzagate to interminable claims about “fake news,” right-wing politics often disavowed reality and sought to replace it with fantasy. Alongside Trump’s spectacular penchant for lying, commentators often proclaimed that we had entered a “post-truth” era of politics—one fuelled by the social media companies like Facebook and Twitter that had become the de facto location for political discussions.
Right-wing politics also became increasingly violent in this period. Beyond the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where a white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a woman and injuring 35 others, right-wing terrorism increased steeply. The rate of right-wing terror attacks accelerated after Obama won the presidency; they then increased precipitously in 2015 and have remained high since. From 2015 to 2020, right-wing extremists, over a quarter of whom were self-identified white supremacists, were involved in 267 plots or attacks that killed 91 people. The far-left, for comparison, were involved in only 66 incidents and 19 deaths.1 The racial motivations of the attackers were often unmistakable: from the Charleston church shooting in 2015, to 2018’s Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, to the El Paso Walmart attack in 2019, these attacks overwhelmingly targeted Black, brown, and Jewish groups. Many of these individuals were motivated by fears relating to the “Great Replacement,” the conspiracy fiction that posits that elites are using migration to replace, politically disempower, and ultimately eliminate the white race. Other individuals were motivated by extreme misogyny, as the wave of incel attacks across the same period shows.
Anti-Trump politics was more grounded in reality and fact. Yet as Olivier Jutel argued in 2016, it often looked like a “liberal nervous breakdown.”2 A fevered, rigid disbelief defined liberal discourse during Trump’s first term—a hysterical blindness that had all too much in common with the right-wing reaction to 9/11. Bush-era Republicans positioned themselves as a pure and good force, defending freedom against an evil threat whose main motive was irrational hatred. Like those Republicans, the critiques made by liberal anti-Trump activists were primarily notable for what their speech excluded: their discourse raging with signs of disavowal, narcissism, splitting, and projection, they largely did not acknowledge that American liberal democracy, which since the millennium’s turn had produced the GFC and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was the ultimate source of their present crisis. In each case, these omissions betray the fundamental fantasy at play in their discourses. A belief that, even despite their respective crises, the political system itself was fine; that they only needed to eliminate some aberrant element (respectively, Islamic terrorists or Trump) to correct the course of history and conserve the status quo.
Once Trump emerged as a serious contender for the presidency, the liberal attempt to eliminate him began almost immediately. Thus began a “titanic struggle” between Trump’s movement and the “legal-rational state,” represented by actors including James Comey and Robert Mueller who supported torture and mass surveillance during Bush’s administration.3 Some of their efforts tried to figure Trump and his success as a product of “outside” influence, as something malevolent and external to American democracy as such. The “Russian influence” claims, which began during his campaign and culminated in 2019’s Mueller report, hoped to reveal that Trump was a foreign agent aligned with Putin. The Mueller Report predictably found evidence of Russian election interference via social media; the investigation otherwise failed to establish beyond reasonable doubt that illegal conspiracy or coordination existed between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government. When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018, critics seized upon the story to position Trump’s electoral success as an illegitimate product of internationalist Big Tech manipulations—forgetting, of course, the fact that Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns made pioneering use of similar techniques and tools provided by one of his largest corporate donors, Google,4 and that Hillary Clinton relied on similar election tools during her 2016 campaign.5 Both events showed the liberal desire to prove that the crisis had come from outside the establishment—and that the establishment, by implication, was fine.
Other attempts to destroy Trump sought to demonstrate his criminality. The first-term scandals that led to legal proceedings against Trump—the Stormy Daniels bribe, the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, and the first impeachment over his call with Zelensky—established his transgressions and criminality on clear, factual grounds. Yet the liberal investment in these attempts to destroy Trump legally only showed more evidence of disavowal. Their appeals to the law revealed their identification with a system of rules and norms that they took to be fundamentally sound; those appeals also once again showed their desire to position Trump as something other and outside that system of laws that sustained their identities, as something antithetical to themselves. This legal work, which ultimately failed to defeat Trump, revealed a tacit acceptance that the establishment did not need to change. It was enough, they believed, merely to enforce the rules as they existed. This fantasy excused liberals from working to defeat Trump politically—a task that would have required self-reflection, change, and an abandonment of their attachments to the status quo.
The “culture wars” of Trump’s first term were a similarly ineffective attempt to destroy Trumpism. The liberal movements of the time, from #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter to gay marriage and trans recognition, were all important efforts to redress historic inequalities and improve the standing of oppressed and marginalised groups in American society. The rejection of racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and other forms of anti-queer and anti-trans sentiment was a necessary element of these movements for rights and liberation, as was the criticism of people who espoused discriminatory views. Co-opted by the liberal establishment, though, these movements were reduced to a means of pursuing the liberals’ basic fantasies of disavowal, purification, and exclusion. They were instrumentalised as part of a political project that was opposed to fundamental change.
Positioned in opposition to Trumpism’s apparent fascism, liberal identity politics fixated on issues related to the representation, visibility, and inclusion of identity categories figured in opposition to those that defined people like Trump—masculinity, whiteness, and heterosexuality, among others. Identity politics largely sought to incorporate the marginalised into the establishment, preserving institutions like private property and corporate power while eliminating historic forms of “privilege” and discrimination based on misogyny, racism, and queerphobia, and expelling or disempowering the individuals that perpetrated them. Debates about identity politics, largely occurring on privately owned platforms like Twitter, thus centred on the roles actors could play in TV shows, the predatory practices of Hollywood executives, the percentage of minorities admitted to Ivy League universities, or the number of women on corporate boards and in C-suite offices. An enormous amount of energy and attention was also invested in destroying specific individuals guilty of transgression. These campaigns, conducted using social media and reputational attacks, replaced criminal law with contract law, public punishment with private penalty. In doing so, they revealed an acceptance of the triumph of corporate power and tech platforms over public institutions.
As these movements tried (and largely failed) to “cancel” people like Brett Kavanaugh, Louis C.K., and of course, Trump himself, concerns that had recently animated protest movements, from Occupy to the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements of the early 2000s, faded from view. The economic issues that have long defined progressive movements, such as class, private property, corporate power, and inequality, were largely ignored. Liberals even failed to address the most obvious problem of the era—the growth of Silicon Valley tech companies, who presented themselves as allies of liberal causes as they erected a vast apparatus of surveillance and manipulation and profited from the culture wars conducted on their platforms. The CEOs of many of these companies would later go on to become supporters of Trump: one of Meta’s top lawyers broke ties with the company in 2025, appalled by Mark Zuckerberg’s “descent into toxic masculinity and neo-Nazi madness.”6
In 1936, Walter Benjamin famously argued that the “logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.” “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves,” he wrote. “Communism responds by politicizing art.” Liberals in Trump’s first term found a third way between communism and fascism—a kind of political aesthetics that fixated on identity and language, largely to the exclusion of “real” and “material” issues. Liberal identity politics in the 2010s was ultimately a conservative movement for this reason, progressive in only the shallowest sense. If we change how everything looks, these movements said, the underlying form can remain the same. Fixating on the aesthetic instead of the material, they betrayed an assumption that you could have a cultural revolution without underlying material change. Insofar as it was a response to Trumpism, identity politics was therefore an immense strategic mistake. Failing to address the discontent that sustained Trump’s popularity, liberal identity politics inadvertently deepened the resentment people felt towards the establishment. It also allowed the political right to legitimately portray liberals as elitist and detached from material political issues. Crucially, the movement’s moralism saw liberals cede libidinal ground to the right, who could position themselves as provocative, transgressive, and free, as opponents of a hypocritical and vicious form of self-restraint.
Establishing “a class solidarity of Washington careerists, policy wonks, the national security state and the media,” liberal identity politics gave the right a fantasy object that helped to secure their own ideology—the image of liberals as elitist, detached, hypocritical, morally masochistic, judgemental and ultimately trivial, an image that animates “the fascist imaginary of the puppet masters undermining the American people’s natural order.” Both that liberal solidarity and the fascistic fantasy, notes Olivier Jutel, “obfuscate actual class antagonism.”7 As of 2026, the rejection of class politics continues to define mainstream Democratic politics. Many Democrats have still not learned from their mistakes.