Liberalism

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. ...

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 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. ...