“What Kinds of Fascism Are There Today?”
Fascisms appear to be proliferating at an unprecedented and alarming rate. With Donald Trump’s recent electoral victory, fascists now are even more emboldened to express their hate in public. Today’s fascists rely on exemplary practices: calling for law and order, scapegoating foreigners, targeting internal enemies, and yearning nostalgically for older times–not only white and Christian times, as in the global North, but also for revivals of nationalist cultures, as in China, India, and Russia. And yet there is something distinct about the fascists of the contemporary era. Suffice it to mention two features. In the West, there is a distinct link between the new fascism and a phenomenon called by some social analysts techno-feudalism: although the new fascism presents itself as populist, it needs the support of the new feudal masters who control the digital space. This link also enables the new fascism to pose as extreme liberalism: less state control and censorship, freedom of the individuals to do what they want in the digital public space. the new fascism’s many faces are thus generated by capitalism’s own profound transformation. Are the kinds of fascism that are threatening the lives of a large swath of the world’s population and accelerating environmental catastrophes a reflection of a weakened Left, still dominated by identity politics, lacking a universalist and emancipatory vision to effectively confront and counter the march of fascists from all the corners of the globe?
BIOS
Slavoj Žižek, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School, is International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London and the author, most recently, of Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There is No Future (Seven Stories Press, 2025), Mad World: War, Movies, Sex (OR Books, 2024), and Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist(Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).
Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a professor of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College and Editor of The Comparatist. His most recent work includes The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (2024), Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality (2023), Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021), Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future (2020), Theory’s Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018), and Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017).