Fascism

There are years that the textbooks compress into a single date because everything that mattered happened at once. Nineteen forty-five, when the unconditional surrender of Germany was signed in a Berlin suburb and a bipolar order settled over the world for the next four decades. Nineteen ninety-one, when the Soviet Union dissolved and an interim, improvised order took its place. I have come to believe we are living through a third such date right now, in real time, without the comfort of hindsight. The transatlantic order assembled after the Second World War — built largely by the United States, with the United States at its center — is coming apart in front of us. This is not a crisis within the order. It is the dissolution of the order itself, a tectonic shift on the scale of the two that preceded it. And the most important thing to understand about it is that despair is the wrong response. What is ending was always going to end someday; what matters now is what we choose to build in its place. ...

There is a comforting fiction that animates almost every round of diplomacy over this war: the idea that peace is something one assembles at a table, by leaning on both sides until they meet somewhere in the middle. Pressure Kyiv to give a little, pressure Moscow to give a little, and the killing stops. It is a tidy theory. It is also, I am convinced, a delusion — one that has cost a great many lives and will cost more before it is finally abandoned. This war does not have a diplomatic solution that anyone in Kyiv could accept and survive. It has a military solution, and the sooner that truth is spoken plainly, the sooner the war can actually end — on the battlefield, in Ukraine’s favor. ...

There is a question I keep hearing from thoughtful, frightened people, and it always arrives in roughly the same shape. Liberal democracy, the argument goes, is constitutionally too soft. It grants a platform to every voice, including the voices openly committed to its destruction. It plays by rules its enemies cheerfully ignore. We now live in a post-truth world where authoritarian regimes flood the public square with so much falsehood that the truth cannot keep pace. So how can such a permissive, slow-moving system possibly survive the onslaught? Surely, the despairing conclusion runs, the West is writing its own death sentence, and the only honest thing left to say is farewell to it. I want to answer that question directly, because I think the despair behind it, however understandable, rests on a misreading of how history actually moves. ...

When a French court found Marine Le Pen guilty of misusing European Union funds and barred her from running for office for five years, the most revealing thing was not the verdict. It was the reaction. Within hours, a chorus rose across half a dozen countries, all singing the same note. Viktor Orbán posted the old Solidarity slogan, refitted for the occasion: “I am Marine.” Matteo Salvini sneered that those who fear the voters’ verdict reach for the courts instead, and told her to march forward. Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy echoed the sentiment. Geert Wilders chimed in from the Netherlands, Santiago Abascal from Spain, Nigel Farage from Britain, George Simion from Romania. From across the Atlantic came Elon Musk, blaming the radical left for jailing its opponents when it cannot beat them at the ballot box, and Jair Bolsonaro, who diagnosed “leftist judicial activism.” A single court ruling in Paris had set off a continent-wide reflex of mutual defense. That reflex has a name worth using plainly: the Brown International. ...

There is a lazy reflex, common to people who consider themselves sober, to file every new political ugliness under a familiar heading. We say “populism,” we say “the right turn,” we say “the usual demagoguery,” and having named the thing we feel we have understood it. I want to resist that reflex here, because I am convinced that what we are watching in the United States is not a louder version of something old. It is a genuinely new political organism, and like any new organism it deserves to be looked at directly rather than translated back into the vocabulary we already had. My claim is blunt and I will defend it slowly: Trumpism is a form of fascism. Not a metaphor for fascism, not “fascism-adjacent,” but a real, postmodern variant of the disease — one that has discarded the old machinery of violence and replaced it with an engine of lies, and one that, for the first time in history, has seized control of a country that is genuinely free. ...

There is a piece of advice that has become so common it now passes for sophistication. You hear it from supporters and critics alike, from people who agree with me on almost everything and from people who agree with me on nothing: “Don’t listen to what he says. Pay attention to what he does.” It is offered as the worldly counsel of someone who has seen through the noise, who refuses to be fooled by speeches and knows that only actions count. And every time I hear it, I object — not mildly, but flatly. The advice is not wisdom. It is a mistake, and a harmful one, because it asks us to disarm ourselves in precisely the domain where the most powerful people on earth do their most consequential work. We live in a world of words and of information. Ignoring what leaders say is not realism. It is a refusal to look at half of reality, and the more powerful the speaker, the larger that half becomes. ...

There is a story that has become almost an article of faith among people who watch this war closely. It goes by a code name now, a colonel’s pseudonym, and it holds that the President of the United States is a recruited asset of Russian intelligence, that somewhere in a Moscow archive sits a folder with his operational alias, and that this folder explains everything he does. The appeal of the theory is obvious. It is tidy. It converts a maddening, inexplicable man into a known quantity. If he is an agent, then his every move against Ukraine, every gutted alliance, every gift handed to the Kremlin, snaps into a single line of cause and effect. I understand the temptation completely. And I want to argue, carefully, that we should resist it — not because the truth about this man is reassuring, but because the recruitment theory is the weakest available explanation for behavior that a much simpler idea explains in full. ...

Notice what is never on the table. Every Western discussion of how this war ends circles the same small set of options — arm Ukraine a little more, tighten sanctions a little further, wait for the front to shift, or, in the worst version, lean on Kyiv to trade away land for a pause. What is never proposed, never even uttered as a thought experiment in the serious rooms, is the most obvious thing of all: that the war could be ended from inside Russia, by Russians, with Western help. The assumption that arming Russians against their own regime is unthinkable has hardened into a reflex so deep that no one notices it is a choice. It is a choice. And it is the wrong one. ...

The most flattering thing the Russian state now says about itself is that it is a civilization — a “state-civilization,” a separate pole standing between East and West, beholden to neither. It is meant to sound proud. It is in fact a confession, and once you follow it to its logical end, it becomes one of the bleakest self-descriptions a state has ever issued. Because if Russia really is a distinct civilization, set apart from the European order of human rights, the rule of law, and the separation of powers, then the next question is unavoidable: what is the content of this civilization once those things are taken out? Subtract Europe from Russia and look at what remains. The honest name for that residue is not “a third pole.” It is a monster. ...

The comfortable way to talk about the Russian state’s antisemitism is to treat it as a series of accidents. A foreign minister blurts out something monstrous on Italian television; a spokeswoman invents Israeli mercenaries on a battlefield; a ministry moves to expel a Jewish charity. Each episode is filed under embarrassment — a slip, a gaffe, an isolated lapse of a regime otherwise busy with other crimes. I want to argue that this reading is not merely too kind but diagnostically wrong. These are not accidents. They are the surfacing of a single structural attribute, and that attribute is one of the most reliable signs we possess that a fascism has fully crystallized. As Russian power hardens into one of the most obscurantist forms the century has seen, it acquires antisemitism the way the most rabid regimes of the last century acquired it — not as a flaw but as a working part. The once-isolated moves are merging into a coordinated whole. To see it clearly is to stop asking why does this keep happening and start reading it as a symptom that tells you exactly how far the disease has progressed. ...