When the naturalist Georges Buffon accepted his honors, he offered a sentence that has outlived almost everything else he ever wrote: the style is the man. He meant that the way a mind arranges the world is more native to it than any single thing it happens to believe. Two centuries later, a dissident sentenced to exile in the Soviet camps refined the thought into something colder and more useful. He said that his quarrel with Soviet power was not political but stylistic — and that this made it deeper and more irreconcilable than any disagreement over programs could ever be. I have come to think those two remarks, taken together, are the sharpest diagnostic instrument we possess for the present moment. They tell us to stop reading the platforms and start reading the style. And when you do that with the two men who currently hold the levers of global politics in their hands, something uncomfortable comes into focus: beneath their genuine frictions, Trump and Putin are stylistic brothers, and that shared style is the living substance of neo-fascism.
The deeper than politics
It is fashionable to catalogue the differences between the two. They are real enough. One of them periodically pressures the other toward a ceasefire, toward some negotiated end to the slaughter in Ukraine; the other receives this pressure with a kind of condescending indifference and goes on deceiving the pressurer while the missiles keep flying. There is friction here, even resentment. But political views are the most changeable thing about a person. They shift with circumstance, with advantage, with the polls. Style does not. Style can change, but only with enormous difficulty, because it is not an opinion a person holds — it is the shape of the person holding the opinions. That is why I trust it as evidence in a way I do not trust any speech or summit communiqué. Watch what two leaders do with their gestures, their lies, their vanities, their displays of piety, and you learn more about their deep kinship than a year of position papers would tell you. On that reading, the political distance between these two men is a surface ripple over a single underlying current.
What is that current? At its core it is a triumphant, swaggering boorishness that experiences itself as greatness. There is a word I reach for: the spirit of the lout who has never doubted himself. It is the exact inverse of the intelligentsia — not in the sense of credentials or reading lists, but in the sense of a posture toward the world. The intelligentsia, at its best, is defined by a critical relationship to itself, by the assumption that the people listening are very likely smarter than the speaker, by curiosity and humility before the complexity of others. The lout’s posture is the mirror image: total self-certainty, contempt for whatever cannot be conquered, and the conviction that being the loudest and the strongest is the same thing as being right. Fascism, wherever it appears, rests on precisely this foundation. And it appears, identically, among the men around the Kremlin and the men around Mar-a-Lago. The accents differ. The grammar is the same.
Victory-ism and the home church
Two symptoms make the kinship unmistakable, because they recur on both sides with almost comic fidelity. The first is what I can only call victory-ism — a pathological compulsion to claim credit for triumphs that belonged, in fact, to others. In the American register, it surfaced when the president announced that the United States had essentially won not only its recent wars but the First and Second World Wars as well, having made, he assured everyone, the greatest contribution to those victories. This is foolish in exactly the way its Russian counterpart is foolish, because it works by erasing the contributions of everyone else — the millions of dead on other fronts, the allied effort, the entire shared inheritance of a struggle. The American version is, for now, less bloody than the Russian one; it does not yet carry the chilling slogan that we can simply do it all over again. But it is the same disease: the past rewritten as a monument to a single ego.
The second symptom is ostentatious piety wrapped around an atrophy of empathy, and here the parallels are almost embarrassing. The man whose principal occupation is the industrial production of death keeps, we are shown, a private chapel in his Kremlin residence — a home church for a man obsessed with the shedding of blood. Across the ocean, his counterpart declares that no one in the history of the world has done more for every religion than he has, posts an image of himself dressed as the Pope, and promises to make his country the most faithful on earth, to bring God back. Place Christ, the Buddha, and Muhammad respectfully in the shadow of one real-estate developer, and you have captured the comedy and the horror at once. What unites the chapel and the papal costume is not belief. It is the use of holiness as decoration over a hollowed-out core. The piety is loud precisely because the empathy is gone. Pathological hypocrisy, pathological lying, and a dead place where fellow-feeling used to be — these are the structural members of the neo-fascist style, and they are load-bearing on both sides.
The contagion that is winning
I want to resist a comforting story we tell ourselves, the story in which this style is grotesque and therefore doomed — a flat, talentless caricature we are merely living inside until the adults return. It is grotesque. We are living inside a caricature so crude that it has effectively killed satire, because you cannot parody a thing that is already its own parody. But grotesque is not the same as failing, and this is the fact I think we are most reluctant to face. The style of boorish triumphalism is, at this moment, successful. Twenty-five years into one man’s rule, he still dictates the global agenda. The other, by every expert account I have heard, presided over a disastrous opening hundred days — and still he sets the world’s tempo, still he takes the entire planet for a ride on his political rollercoaster. Assess their achievements and their failures however you like. The brute fact remains that the controls are in their hands. Not in the hands of the liberals, not the democrats, not Europe, not even China. Theirs. And the style is contagious: its imitators are surging across the continent, in candidates who pledge loyalty to one another and to the two originals, who want to cut off aid to the country being invaded, who would happily detach their nations from the European project and weaken its eastern flank. Court rulings and bans against the far right are taken; sometimes they should be. But Hitler too passed through a prison cell on his way to power, and it did not stop him. Administrative measures do not reverse a shift in the public mood.
There is a particular mechanism that makes this style so corrosive, and it deserves a name. Call it the mirror method. Its inventor once explained his entire approach to fighting the Western world with a childhood taunt — roughly, whoever calls names is the name himself. The move is brutally simple: take your opponent’s most important idea, declare it your own, and brand your opponent as the enemy of that very idea. So anti-fascist Europe is portrayed as the new fascism, and the actual fascists pose as the anti-fascists; an official intelligence service publishes a reworked wartime poster in which the head of a democratic European leader is grafted onto the body of Hitler. The genius of this, if one can use the word, is that it does not bother to argue that the opponent’s idea is wrong. It simply strips the idea of its authorship. Once both sides are shouting the same accusation, the outside observer can no longer tell who said it first, who meant it truly. It is, in a precise sense, the Orwellian elimination of concepts — the destruction not of an argument but of the very possibility of distinguishing the thing from its counterfeit. This is the weapon the neo-fascist style hands to whoever picks it up, and it is being picked up everywhere.
The degradation of the West
What disturbs me most, though, is not the conduct of the obvious villains. It is the speed with which the rest of the world has begun to speak their dialect. I find that my stylistic disagreement now extends not only to the regimes built on this style but to the West that flatters them. Consider the spectacle of a recent summit, transformed into a festival of homage: a secretary general writing to the American president to assure him he will achieve what no leader has managed in decades — as if the architects of victory in the last great war and the end of the Cold War were trifling figures by comparison — and then, asked whether publishing such a private message embarrassed him, replying serenely that it did not, because every word was true. The same man reaching for the word daddy, like the most gifted pupil in a school of sycophants, and dismissing the obvious question about such open bootlicking as a mere matter of taste. The final communiqué scrubbed clean: in a document about a war, the word war does not appear once, where a year earlier the aggressor had been named dozens of times and held solely responsible. All of it softened, smoothed, swallowed — so as not to irritate one man.
This is a moral and stylistic degradation of international relations, and it is its own kind of catastrophe. I understand the calculus that drives it. For the leader of the country under invasion, who put on a suit for the occasion against every habit of his wartime years, each gesture of appeasement is justified, because behind him stand the lives of millions and a single chill in the relationship can be measured in dead civilians. Him I will not reproach. But for the others, the comfortable ones, for whom a cooling means at worst a less favorable tariff — for them I have only the question of how far this goes. If the man at the center demanded tomorrow that everyone arrive in pink fishnet tights, sternly, with that pointing finger, I genuinely do not know who would refuse in exchange for a trade concession. The flattery that the West still considers unseemly, the deep, instinctive bootlicking it associates with other regimes and other latitudes, has migrated into its own chancelleries. That is the contagion doing its work. The style is winning not only its open battles but its silent ones, inside the institutions that were supposed to be immune.
Where does this leave those of us who refuse the style? Without a finished answer, I will admit, but not without a direction. The thing that loses on the political market today is not liberalism’s substance but its stylistic shell — its tone, its self-presentation, its way of carrying itself has grown tired and defensive against a swagger that, however vulgar, projects confidence and command. The core idea remains right; it has simply not been renovated for this century, and neither has its style. There is, in the end, a hard and consoling fact underneath all of this. Trust is not only a moral category but an economic one; societies that destroy it do not prosper for long, and the law of the strong, that romance of raw power which always curdles into fascism, builds nothing that lasts. The lout’s triumph is real and it is now, but it is not founded on anything durable. Naming the style for what it is — refusing to mistake its piety for faith, its victories for greatness, its mirror tricks for arguments — is not yet a victory. But it is the precondition for one. We cannot defeat what we will not see clearly, and the first act of clear sight is to read the style, and to call it by its name.