A billionaire with a mass following

Trump and the question of fascism in the US

By Jan Rehmann

[This article posted in July 2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/ein-milliardaer-mit-massenbasis/.]

Anyone grappling with the question of whether or not the term fascism can be meaningfully applied today faces a problem. On the one hand, it is wrong to use the term fascism inflationarily to label reactionary opponents. This trivializes the fascist danger. This was already true of the Weimar Republic, when communists described the Brüning government (1930–32) as fascist, thereby blurring the distinction between parliamentary and dictatorial forms of bourgeois rule—and worse, when they fought the Social Democrats, with whom they should have formed an anti-fascist alliance, as “social fascists.” The Social Democrats did something similar when they denounced the communists as “Nazis painted red.” On the other hand, it is problematic to limit the term to historical fascism. The argument that Trumpism has nothing to do with fascism because society has not yet been brought into line and elections still take place is to apply an inappropriate “totalitarian” One cannot draw comparisons with the extreme form of German Nazism in power, which pursued the “final solution” to the “Jewish question,” the social question, the question of democracy, and the “colonial question” with particular ruthlessness (cf. Rehmann 2023, 2305, 2324f). Between the “March on Rome” in 1922 and the murder of socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti in June 1924, Italian fascism had not yet abolished the parliamentary system. Only after that did Mussolini proclaim himself Duce of all Italy and ban opposition parties. Ignoring the similarities to historical fascism from the outset would prevent us from recognizing the danger of neo-fascism in the 21st century. This also applies if the current manifestation is no longer characterized by a belated Fordism but by high-tech capitalism. Enzo Traverso suggests using fascism as a “transhistorical concept” that points beyond the era that produced it (2016, 637).

“Ignoring the similarities to historical fascism from the outset would prevent us from recognizing the danger of neo-fascism in the 21st century.”

In the following, I do not use the term “fascism,” but rather “fascism,” which does not attempt to identify a static state, but rather draws attention to processes whose outcome is still open (cf. Becker/Candeias 2024). Some aspects of fascistization are evident in the deportations. The special police force Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has greatly expanded its area of operation, and arrests and deportations are carried out suddenly and without court orders. Their number has increased to such an extent that the courts cannot keep up. The permanent and asymmetrical struggle between the judiciary and the executive branch is leading to a constitutional crisis. A further push toward fascism is emerging in June 2025 with the deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles against the objections of Governor Gavin Newsom: Citing the Insurrection Act of 1807, which was intended to suppress “insurrections against the federal government,” Trump can declare a state of emergency and seize command of the National Guard, which until now has been under state control.

Whether one speaks of fascism or fascistization depends, of course, on which definition of fascism one uses. To gain a yardstick for similarities and differences, I refer to the explanatory approach of the Ideology Theory Project (PIT), in which I myself was able to participate. Hitler’s disparaging and contemptuous comments about the bourgeoisie and bourgeois culture often led to the conclusion that he was “anti-bourgeois.” However, a material analysis of his relevant speeches and statements shows that from the outset he took the position of the bourgeois camp, albeit one that needed to be comprehensively reorganized in order to eliminate Marxism as a whole and, with it, bourgeois-democratic equality in politics and law (PIT 2007, 81). With the help of a new rock-solid belief, a new power bloc of “unified solidarity” was to be created, capable of moving from class defense to class offense (82). The core of the fascist project was to extend the hierarchical principle of leadership, as it prevails in the capitalist economy and the army, to the whole of society (86). This meant dissolving the connection between the bourgeois world and democracy, the legacy of the French Revolution. Some aspects of this are mentioned in Georgi Dimitroff’s well-known definition from 1935, according to which fascism is an “openly terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, […] most imperialist elements of finance capital.” This explanation has also been criticized by Marxists, on the one hand because it neglected the relative autonomy of politics, and on the other because it largely ignored the components of fascist mass movements, their social composition, populist dynamics, and the appeal of their ideologies (30ff).

“The core of the fascist project was to extend the hierarchical principle of leadership, as it prevails in the capitalist economy and in the army, to the whole of society.”

Fascism spoke in the name of ideology par excellence, of subordination to the highest values—e.g., the nation, race, and soldierly honor to the point of heroic death—and in fact succeeded quite early in Germany in winning over the ideological representatives of bourgeois society—earlier than the political parties (50). Think, for example, of the enthusiastic approval of philosophers, lawyers, churches, and doctors in 1933. Against the backdrop of the anti-socialist and populist reorganization of the bourgeois camp, the functionalization of anti-Semitism can also be understood: By articulating the danger of a socialist revolution as a “Jewish world conquest,” an ideological shift from class to race takes place. “Nazism is anti-Bolshevism articulated as the resistance of the people threatened by the Jewish people.” (97) This functional definition does not mean that the Nazis stood outside anti-Semitic ideology in order to consciously manipulate it: the ideologization of ideology produces an ideological circle that also encompasses and permeates anti-Semitic ideologues—the subjects of fascist discourse are themselves discursively constituted (95). Jews become the placeholders for the “counter-people” needed for the ideological construction of the German ‘people’ as a state people, but the place in this counter-people is open to other target groups – socialists, the sick, Sinti and Roma, Eastern European “subhumans,” gays. “Whoever opposes the Nazis falls into this position and ultimately into the sphere of influence of the SS.” (103f)

“The challenge is to understand how fascism succeeds in ‘organizing self-alienation as enthusiastic self-activity.’”

But within this framework of violence, the most diverse elements of action are integrated. Ernst Bloch described this receptivity of fascist ideologies in The Heritage of This Age (1935) as “appropriations from the commune” (EZ 70) – the Nazis stole the “workers,” the “workers’ party,” the unity between workers and intellectuals, the color red, the sea of flags, the maypole (70f); Nazism “does not merely want to smash the Red Front, but also strips the alleged corpse of its jewelry” (74). This ability to absorb the most diverse ideological elements and incorporate them into the fascist project is overlooked by Marxist theories that understand ideology only as an instrument of class rule or as “false consciousness.” At stake is a profound fascistization of the subjects. The challenge is to understand how fascism succeeds in “organizing self-alienation as enthusiastic self-activity” (PIT 2007, 107).

This is a simplified version of the explanatory approach of the Ideology Theory Project. Where are the main similarities and differences between historical fascism and the attempts at fascism in the US?

Fossil fascism against the PRC

Of course, after the collapse of the Soviet model of socialism, the confrontation with Bolshevism is no longer at the forefront. Nor is there any socialist threat within the country. The assumption of Bonapartist theorists that there is a “balance” between the classes does not apply to any capitalist country in the “West,” least of all the US, where the labor union movement has experienced a dramatic decline since the early 1980s. Today, the bourgeois camp is seeking to reorganize itself in order to unite the forces against rival China, whose mixed system of state planning and “managed market economy” (cf. Brie 2025, 7) poses a threat to its hegemony.reformation of the bourgeois camp in order to unite forces against rival China, whose mixed system of state planning and “managed market economy” (cf. Brie 2025, 73ff) is proving more effective in many respects. Ecological modernization has in many respects changed sides and moved over to China (albeit with highly contradictory social and ecological consequences, see Köncke 2025). The Trump administration has apparently decided to no longer wage the systemic conflict in the realm of ecological transformation, but to focus entirely on expanding fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Andreas Malm speaks of “fossil fascism”: since fossil capital would lose profits and investments even with a capitalist-limited ecological modernization, it tends to side with right-wing radical and neo-fascist movements (Malm et al. 2021, 240f, cf. also Candeias 2024). Of course, fossil capital is not the only component.

An oligarchic class project

Following Dimitroff’s definition, one could tentatively argue that Trumpism also strives for an open dictatorship of particularly aggressive factions of big capital. After all, there are 13 billionaires in the government itself. Bernie Sanders warns against the takeover of power by an oligarchy. Of particular significance is the large amount of high-tech capital that, for example, with Elon Musk’s project for a new generation of low-flying satellites, the so-called Low Earth Orbit satellites, is striving for digital domination from space. Starlink and other high-tech companies can only become profitable if they cooperate with the military. The satellite program and other high-tech and AI projects have enormous energy requirements. So here we see, on the one hand, a close link with the military-industrial complex and thus with the new imperial project of Trumpism, and on the other hand, with fossil capital and the nuclear power lobby. Other class factions are involved in subordinate positions (see Foster 2025). With or without Musk, this is a long-term class project to restore US hegemony, and this may well go hand in hand with a Bonapartist breakaway from immediate profit interests.

Shock troops against the “normative state”

In 1940/41, Ernst Fraenkel developed the thesis that the Nazi state consisted of two parallel systems of rule: the normative state and the state of measures (Fraenkel 1974). According to Nicos Poulantzas, fascism organized a “parallelism of power systems,” an institutional “duplication” that leads to rapid shifts in the exercise of power from one apparatus to another and enables an effective war of movement against the masses (1973, 74, 352-54). We can observe such a parallelization in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was launched under the leadership of Elon Musk and, following his falling out with Trump, will likely be continued by Russell Vought, one of the main architects of Project 2025 (cf. Marcetic 2025). Doge is a kind of shock troop, elected by no one, that combs through the state apparatus in order to either dissolve it or bring it into line. The attacks are directed, on the one hand, against the already weak social welfare institutions, such as Social Security and health insurance for the poor (Medicaid); on the other hand, against the so-called DEI programs (i.e., diversity, equity, and inclusion), which are intended to facilitate access to education and employment for women and ethnic and sexual minorities, and, last but not least, against environmental agencies, including the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which was defamed in Project 2025 as one of the main driving forces behind the “climate change alarm industry.” Throughout, the aim is to eliminate the compromises of the state that have allowed subaltern classes and social movements to occupy certain positions. At the same time, the purges target all theories and concepts that address the injustices of US society, starting with critical race theory and feminist gender studies, studies on ecological destruction, and, just around the corner, critical theories in the broadest sense, all of which are considered variants of Marxism.

Last but not least, DOGE collects a vast amount of data from various agencies and consolidates it in a central master database. The evaluation of the data and its preparation for security agencies, intelligence services, deportation authorities, the military, etc. is to be carried out by Peter Thiel’s software company Palantir, which is also linked to Israel’s AI-driven genocide in Gaza (see Beaucar Vlahos 2024).

Fascistization of subjects in new forms

Trumpism also aims to impose hierarchical leadership principles from the capitalist economy, especially from IT companies, throughout society, thereby dismantling the social welfare state and the rule of law. There are indeed elements of a veritable cult of personality surrounding Trump. But the belief system underlying this is no longer the same as in Europe after World War I. I have not yet observed the subordination to ideology per se to the point of ultimate sacrifice of life. Hedonistic consumerism and the culture of the internet, with its shitstorms, disruptions, and distractions, are giving rise to other ideological forms. The Trump administration has not yet succeeded in winning over the “ideological classes”: universities, for example, are wavering between conformity, deflection, and protest, but there is no sign yet of the enthusiastic support seen in Italy in 1922 or Germany in 1933. The same applies to the prestige press, Hollywood, publishing houses, etc. Perhaps such approval is not even necessary if the long-term goal is to replace thinking people with chatboxes.

In contrast to the ideological appeals of Nazism, the focus is now on self-enrichment as a goal in life. Trumpism promises the establishment of so-called Freedom Cities as a kind of “gated community” without state regulation. Naomi Klein observes a post-humanist accelerationism in power that has essentially abandoned the idea of a livable world here on earth, a kind of “apocalyptic fever” that is both evangelical and secular in origin (Klein 2025; Klein/Taylor 2025). The fascistization of subjects runs through other channels. But the social Darwinist struggle of the strong against the weak is once again at the center and is being asserted against all democratic and egalitarian aspirations. What does it mean, for example, that the new Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, who is supposed to dismantle the Department of Education, is the owner of the billion-dollar World Wrestling Entertainment company, whose wrestling matches are also kayfabe, i.e., staged and faked? (cf. Ruoff 2017). According to Judith Butler, Trump supporters are mostly well aware that Trump lies and manipulates, and they admire the power that enables him to do so as he pleases: We must understand the joyful excitement with which this power to lie and hate is experienced as liberation (Butler 2025). This is also a variation on the dynamic observed by the Ideology Theory Project, “organizing self-alienation as enthusiastic self-activity” (PIT 2007, 107).

“Hegemony through gender panic”

The social Darwinist mobilization against the poor and “unsuccessful” is nothing new, but rather part of the deep structure of capitalist socialization, temporarily modified by the postulates of justice of the “social democratic era,” but intensified again in real existing neoliberalism. As Stuart Hall has shown, this took place primarily through the creation of a “moral panic” in relation to street crime, in which the various ideological instances of society participated (2013, 20f). Now, it is primarily the components of machismo and racism that are being radicalized, which were only superficially concealed by liberal diversity discourses. In Trumpism, gender and sexuality function as central topoi for achieving “hegemony through gender panic” (Sauer 2023): The demonization of feminism, queerness, and the “feminization” of culture creates a moral panic that is to be contained by mobilizing “identitarian needs” and the promise of restoring hierarchical gender binary (cf. Sauer 2025, Goetz 2025).

Shifts in racism

Today, anti-Semitism is no longer the primary component of racism; globally, there has been a shift toward Islamism and Muslim immigrants as the enemy. As Mario Candeias observes, “an entire arsenal of monsters is being deployed to generate consent” (2025, 179). In Trump’s case, the “counter-people” are represented in various guises: by pro-Palestinian activists, Islamic terrorists, and illegal immigrants, especially from South America.

“While the fight against alleged “anti-Semitism” is used as a weapon to criminalize the protest movement against the genocide in Gaza, anti-Semitism is simultaneously kept alive.

But even if the Jewish enemy stereotype has receded behind that of Islamic terrorism, it remains nonetheless, mostly latent, but sometimes still visible. “Liberal Jews” are repeatedly the target of fierce attacks. Steve Bannon, for example, believes that Israel’s worst enemies are among us, namely American Jews who oppose Trump and Netanyahu and thus “hate” Israel and their own religion. So while the fight against alleged “anti-Semitism” is used as a weapon to criminalize the protest movement against the genocide in Gaza, anti-Semitism is kept alive at the same time.

Spectacles of cruelty

A hallmark of fascism is the brutalization of racist discourses and practices of dehumanization. During his election campaign, Trump accused immigrants from Haiti of eating the dogs and cats of local residents. He denounced the deported Venezuelans as gang members who had been deliberately smuggled into the country by the Maduro government in Venezuela to poison the American people with drugs. The enemy within, crime, and drugs are now linked to a foreign power against which an economic and sanctions war is being waged. The deportations are based on an old law from 1798, the Alien Enemies Act, which is directed against invading troops from foreign countries with which the US is at war. The deportations to the high-security prison in El Salvador are staged as a spectacle of cruelty. The prisoners are led away by masked men who look like executioners, dragged across the floor, and forced to kneel in a hall in large groups so that their hair can be forcibly shaved off.

Fascism as the radicalization of bourgeois rule

Such abuse and torture have, of course, been commonplace, not only in Guantanamo.

The US empire has always had a fascist underbelly along the racial structure of society, characterized, for example, by systematic violence against African Americans, the bombing of the Black Panthers, and the systematic murder of black activists. In the midst of the constitutional state of the US, a fascist “authoritarian state” existed alongside the liberal “normative state“—here, too, it is important to recognize the complex connection between bourgeois normality and fascistization (Zelik 2025). In the 1970s, Angela Davis spoke of US fascism as a ”protracted social process” that is usually kept hidden (cf. Toscano 2023, 36f).But now the excessive violence and torture are no longer hidden, but proudly displayed. At the same time, we can observe how the Trump administration is working to extend this to white people, for example by proposing to build prisons in El Salvador for US citizens who have committed crimes.

Precarious alliance between the techno-elite and the populist base

An important criterion for using the term “fascism” is, of course, the question of the mass base of Trumpism. Ingar Solty believes that there is no fascistization of society, not even a shift to the right, but only in politics (2025, 22f). It remains unclear on what criteria he bases this distinction. He justifies his thesis, among other things, by pointing out that there are still stable two-thirds majorities in favor of universal health insurance (Medicare for all) and a $15 minimum wage, and that the left-wing candidates of the Squad were re-elected (25f).. According to him, there is still “the potential for economic left-wing populism that is coming to a head in class politics” (23). The latter is certainly true, as demonstrated by the huge crowds at the rallies of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the resounding victory of the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic Party primaries in New York City.

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Is there a need to renew the theory of fascism?

We are experiencing a global resurgence of fascism. What does this have in common with the 1920s and 1930s? And how can we understand the new quality of this development?

By Alex Demirović

[This article posted in May 2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/braucht-es-eine-erneuerung-der-faschismustheorie/.]

Posing the question in this way may seem somewhat tendentious, because it already implies the answer in view of recent socio-political developments: Yes, it is fascism; and a renewal of theory is probably necessary, not only because of historical changes, but also because of internal changes in the capitalist mode of production. In earlier discussions among the left and anti-fascists, there were high expectations of theory. Fascism could only be prevented or stopped if it was understood theoretically. From Clara Zetkin and Ignazio Silone to Leo Trotsky and Bert Brecht to Theodor W. Adorno, there were corresponding efforts to develop a theory of the authoritarian, fascist dynamics of capitalist society. In the 1970s, it was entirely possible to believe that the success of the right was largely due to the shortcomings of left-wing theory, which had been largely economistic in its orientation.

“How are we to interpret the success of an anti-democratic, cold, socially racist politics? It has, if not refuted, then at least undermined all theories.”

But all the theories and extensive studies on social structure and capital factions, the electorate and voting behavior, the social situation of workers or the electorate, sexual morality, the organization of the right and its ideologies have not been able to prevent the rise of authoritarians. How should we interpret the success of anti-democratic, cold, socially racist politics? In fact, they have undermined all theories, if not refuted them; they point to a sense of helplessness within the democratic and socialist spectrum. For if the theories are not wrong, the success of the authoritarian right suggests that it is not a matter of individual theories. Critical materialist theories of fascism and authoritarianism have produced many important insights. But something is still not enough, because they do not prevent those in power (the bourgeoisie, the rulers, the elites) from organizing their rule in this form; and they do not inspire the people (the subalterns, the masses, the proletariat) to become a lasting force of resistance and alternative. Perhaps the expectations attached to these theories are too high or even misguided. Yet the stance taken by critical theories of fascism was often not rationalistic. It was not about simple enlightenment in the sense of humanism, an appeal to reason or bourgeois norms such as freedom, equality, or democracy; nor was it about merely pointing to facts. Anti-fascism could rely on the “power of the gun barrels” of the victorious Allied powers and the resistance movements and express the conviction that the authoritarian revolt of fascism had been crushed militarily. Democracy was not and is not weak. The confrontation with fascism, right-wing extremist and authoritarian tendencies in the efforts to enlighten people consisted of pointing out: Look, these will be the consequences: destruction, poverty, hunger, loss of education, resentment and racism, violence and murder. Fascism today has learned from its historical defeat. It wants to win in the long term, but is also prepared to accept the downfall of humanity. With a metapolitical strategy, it wants to weaken or destroy those forces that are capable of demonstrating the power of democracy and are not prepared to accept nihilism.

In the following, I will argue a) that it makes sense to think about a renewal of fascism theory, b) that even such a renewed theory is not enough, and c) that the current situation should not be understood as fascism.

Transnationally allied nationalists

In at least one relevant respect, the current situation can be compared to the fascist boom of the 1920s and 1930s: anti-democratic forces are gaining strength. Developments in individual states have been contributing to this at different rates for some time. This is not happening in isolation: there are nationalist and authoritarian-populist parties whose representatives meet, right-wing conservative media, intellectual circles that engage in exchange, militant, sometimes armed neo-Nazi groups in many countries that cooperate with each other, and a cultural scene with music, clothing, publishers, and magazines. Right-wing strategies and actors, some of whom are neo-fascist, reinforce each other, network with forces in the churches, authorities, media, and organized crime, where they find sympathy and support; and they blur the boundaries between formal constitutional, institutional, civil society, and underground activities. The authoritarian dynamic cannot be explained solely by the social situation of part of the population, political developments, or the activities of right-wing parties in a nation state. Despite their professed nationalism, there are programmatic similarities between right-wing parties; there are agreements, alliances, cooperation, mutual support, visits, and conferences. A recent example is the criticism of the court ruling against Marine Le Pen, who had misused EU funds for her party while serving as an EU parliamentarian. Immediately after the verdict, Orbán, Meloni, and Trump spoke out and criticized the political ruling. This is a scandal on several levels: the interference of foreign governments in the judiciary of another country; ignorance of French law; and political support for authoritarian policies, since other governments, such as those of Turkey and Russia, are not criticized in the same way. The same thing happened when the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution designated the AfD as a confirmed right-wing extremist party. Representatives of the US government have spoken of tyranny in Germany. It is like Nazi propaganda, because there is a reversal of persecutors and persecuted, perpetrators and victims. Unexpectedly, we are witnessing the spectacle of a section of the ruling class radically disavowing and rejecting the instruments of power: the media, the courts, the police.

“There is a much broader, transnational tendency toward authoritarian rule, which is supported by relevant forces within the bourgeoisie.”

There must be deep-rooted causes for these synchronous processes. These are not to be found in the activities of right-wing nationalist and authoritarian groups, nor in the widespread views of the population as surveyed by opinion polls, nor in the social poverty situation. There is a much broader, transnational tendency toward authoritarian rule, which is supported by relevant forces within the bourgeoisie. Some of these groups probably do not want right-wing governments or are ambivalent (think of Bezos or Musk in the period after 2017, or the distanced relationship between German business associations and the AfD). Presumably, they themselves are caught up in an authoritarian dynamic that tends to become a coercive relationship. They have increasingly talked themselves into a hostile mood: against gender, political correctness, supposed identity politics, the overburdening of the welfare state, bureaucracy. The CDU’s “foreigners out” slogans, the ever-further erosion of asylum rights, and the assertion that Islam does not belong in Germany then turn into demands for decisive deportation and the decisive prevention of immigration. The fact that Wolfgang Schäuble, Christian Wulff, and Horst Seehofer have retracted their racist statements after leaving office is no longer relevant. These are continuously present right-wing forces in the media, in conservative parties, and in interest groups. They pursue this policy or consciously adopt its dynamics, work strategically with it, draw conclusions and turn against the supposed indecisiveness and hypocrisy of the ruling parties. They radicalise widespread positions in the parties of the so-called democratic centre (think of Sarkozy, Kurz, Seehofer, Spahn). Because there is a certain indecisiveness in the bourgeois milieu, in parties, the media, and churches about how far one wants to go and what concessions must be made, i.e., political-strategic debates about limits are taking place, individual persons and groups can become radicalized and split off. This is what happened with the AfD, which was formed by market libertarians and right-wing CDU personnel.

Sometimes actors in right-wing parties describe themselves as fascists and invoke historical role models such as Hitler, the SS, and the SA (“Everything for …” = AfD); they also express explicit anti-Semitism and deny the Holocaust, dig up stumbling stones, riot in memorial sites, or desecrate Jewish cemeteries—only to threaten their opponents a moment later that they would do exactly what they deny (“mitgehangen, mitgefangen”—if you hang with them, you hang with them). Often it is not so clear-cut, but rather allusions are made to a certain sympathy and continuity with historical fascism – but these allusions are then retracted. Arguments are made that revise and relativize history, or it is claimed that these are merely misunderstandings. But there are also clear efforts to distance themselves from their fascist or National Socialist past. For example, members who make anti-Semitic statements or refer positively to Nazism are expelled from authoritarian-populist parties; representatives of these parties visit Israel and seek proximity to right-wing Israeli governments and politicians. The relationship with Jews is ambivalent. Trump fights science in the name of combating anti-Semitism at US universities. But his audacity lies in calling the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, who proclaim that they will not be replaced by Jews, good patriots and pardoning right-wing extremists.

The fascist dynamic in the US

This points to the problem of nomenclature. How should these forces and developments be described? There are numerous and quite contradictory critical attempts to name these phenomena: populism, nationalism, authoritarian populism, right-wing extremism, fascism, authoritarianism, radicalized conservatism, late or post-liberalism, late or post-fascism, micro- or schizo-fascism, right-wing authoritarian nationalism. After the experiences of the first weeks of Trump’s presidency, intellectuals in the US are speaking simply and directly of fascism. The activities of DOGE have led to an administrative and constitutional coup, resulting in the summary dismissal of many civil servants and employees. People have been kidnapped, arrested, and deported by quasi-secret police; legal procedures are not being followed, and supreme court rulings are being ignored by the administration and the government. The media is being marginalized, inundated with lawsuits, and thus intimidated legally and financially. Law firms representing critics of the government are losing clients or facing lawsuits themselves. The academic freedom of universities and research institutions is being systematically violated. Politicians are being threatened. The administrative coup is accompanied by a political and constitutional crisis, as there is no political institution to enforce rights and court decisions, and no possibility for those affected to have state actions reviewed by the courts.

Nevertheless, resorting to the term fascism creates a false historical image. Fascism was a self-designation and served to characterize a certain form of violence, mass mobilization, and conception of the state. The left has often referred to Marx’s Bonapartism thesis to explain it. This tied the left of the 1920s to a historical imaginary (support from a large number of isolated small farmers) and prevented it from adequately recognizing the reality of National Socialism (the destruction of the labor movement, the constant mobilization of large masses, the uniformity of society, the creation of paramilitary combat units and secret police forces). Many believed that Hitler would not remain in power for long and that the masses would understand that the promise of socialism would not be fulfilled. War was expected, but not the rapid military successes, the conquest and plundering of large parts of Europe, and above all the racist policy of extermination—a policy that also accepted the self-destruction of Germany and Austria.

“The use of the term fascism creates a false historical picture. Fascism was a self-designation and served to characterize a certain form of violence, mass mobilization, and conception of the state.”

Because of the Nazi dictatorship, the left has repeatedly been quick to conclude that a return to fascism or neo-fascism is imminent. At demonstrations in the 1970s against the war in Vietnam, the coup in Chile, or US imperialism, it was not uncommon to hear chants of “USA-SA-SS.” The expansion and militarization of the police and the judicial apparatus in the 1970s, the large number of right-wing attacks in Italy, and the anti-communist function of NATO’s secret activities against left-wing groups and non-governmental organizations also suggested that fascism and an authoritarian state were on the rise. Such tendencies existed, but they did not coalesce into a new form of exceptional rule.

It is surprising that in a country like the US, which has had a democratic constitution for over two hundred years, where parliamentary democracy is reasonably stable and regular changes of government take place, a fascist dynamic has emerged that is supported by a broad section of the population. This means that attempts to explain the success of National Socialism in the 1920s by pointing to the weaker roots of democratic institutions in German society, less familiar democratic habits, and limited knowledge and experience of democracy are not very plausible. Even long experience and a vibrant civil society are clearly no protection. The opposite may even be true: the contradictions that politicians have to navigate in democratic institutions are seen as hypocrisy. And the fact that they invoke democratic rules prevents people from imagining that authoritarian practices could emerge from and within democracy.

Fascist developments do not depend primarily on opinions or attitudes among the population. In the 1940s, proponents of critical theory argued, based on personal experience, that anti-Semitism was much more widespread among the US population than it had been in Germany before 1933. For critical theory, this consideration was significant in terms of the sociology of power. Attitudes among the general population do not allow predictions to be made about the political development of a country. What matters is what those in power want. They use economic pressure, threats, violence, propaganda, and lies to create an atmosphere of obedience and conformity, so that many people join and integrate into the authoritarian collective. Opinion polls support this.

So I am thinking in a different direction. We are not dealing with genuinely new phenomena, but neither are we dealing with historical repetitions. Authoritarian political patterns and practices of rule represent a long-term trend; they are a constitutive part of the capitalist mode of production and the formation processes of bourgeois society. In this, I follow a line of thought that Marx formulated in the third volume of Capital. What he attempts to determine is the “ideal average” of the capitalist mode of production. Marx proposes using his theory to examine statistical regularities and understand the constant changes, instabilities, crises, and revolutionary self-transformations of bourgeois social formations. Nothing remains stable or identical—but certain practices return with some regularity in both identical and altered forms. These include not only economic processes and their oscillations, which with a certain probability then lead to surpluses and underproduction, to labor shortages and surpluses, to simultaneous poverty and wealth, to disputes over free trade or mercantilism. In his research, Marx was obviously unsure which phenomena he should include in the ideal average of the capitalist mode of production. But he took into account the novelty of bourgeois society: the capitalist mode of production is the only one that takes the form of statistical distributions, regularities, probabilities, and averages—which has a decisive bearing on the determination of value by abstract labor, which is the result of the market-mediated exchange of concretely useful labor.

“Fascist developments do not depend primarily on opinions or attitudes among the population.”

This consideration also applies to the capitalist state and the various political strategies of bourgeois rule. In his analyses, Marx concludes that the parliamentary republic is, on average, the normal form of the bourgeois-capitalist state. This is an “ideal” average, because in reality bourgeois rule was organized in different and often non-state forms: cities, feudal-aristocratic rule, empires, or it was exercised in authoritarian forms: monarchy, colonial dictatorship, military dictatorship, Bonapartism, fascism. Bourgeois rule took shape from the end of the 15th century, and forms of authoritarian rule played a significant role in the struggles against the peasants who wanted to get rid of feudalism and the Catholic Church: the destruction of peasant emancipation and urban movements, the Counter-Reformation, the suppression of popular movements to appropriate agricultural property, the restoration after the French Revolution with its intellectual representatives such as de Maistre and Bonald or parts of German Romanticism, the suppression of the emerging labor movement, the Catholic counter-revolution after 1848 with representatives such as Donoso Cortez, or the burgeoning anti-Semitism, and after the First World War, fascism and National Socialism. These were efforts and strategies to maintain power and reproduce it on an expanded scale, i.e., not only to combat popular movements once they had already emerged, but to take preventive counterrevolutionary action so that resistance, protest, and social movements would not arise in the first place. In doing so, those in power shifted their focus to the probability that resistance and popular movements would arise. In a special way, bourgeois processes of domination organized themselves with and against a comprehensive, historically completely new social movement, the labor movement, which not only achieved great continuity and spatial expansion, but also developed a secularized knowledge of real social conditions and was able to develop concrete plans for an alternative to the bourgeois world and way of life. This forced the bourgeoisie not only to adopt realism, i.e., to turn to the concrete immanence of social relations and to develop a knowledge of domination and struggles, but also to establish preventive mechanisms designed to guarantee security and order and to monitor social processes and events to see how far they challenged established habits and regularities. Fascism was accordingly a counterrevolutionary practice. It was not primarily a matter of enforcing the interests of a bourgeois faction, as Dimitroff suggested: according to him, fascism was the openly terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most imperialist elements of finance capital. With Gramsci and Poulantzas, on the other hand, it can be plausibly argued that fascism was the result of a comprehensive crisis of the bourgeoisie’s power bloc: an economic crisis, a crisis of hegemony, a political crisis, and finally a crisis of the state, overall a destabilization of previous compromises between social forces. Even if the labor movement had no prospect of revolutionary success, the bourgeoisie was demoralized, felt threatened, and did not know how to overcome and solve the problems of reproduction in capitalist society. It had to prevent the socialist and communist movement from organizing itself in such a way as to undermine national and military policy from within, transform production relations, and socialize social production and reproduction.

Historical fascism in Italy and even more so in Germany took shape as a set of authoritarian practices that bourgeois rule had developed over the centuries. Fascism was a form of unleashing state violence that was unknown until then. It incorporated modern industry, communication, law, science, and technological developments in order to exercise control over huge populations, administer them, persecute them, and destroy them according to racist criteria. Prevention aimed to combat any deviation at the level of biological life in such a way that only a pure racist normality and a homogeneous national community would prevail.

This included the destruction of Marxism and the labor movement, of Jews in Europe, of Slavs, of Sinti and Roma, of gays, of the disabled—in other words, of all those who did not fit into the image of a bred master race.

“Authoritarian political patterns and practices of rule represent a long-term tendency; they are constitutive of the capitalist mode of production and of the processes of formation of bourgeois society.”

Even if it is sometimes problematic to define fascism by means of a kind of checklist, it seems sensible to me to identify a number of characteristics that are typical of the fascist form of authoritarian rule. These include: a willingness to use violence as an everyday and arbitrary practice of rule; elitist contempt for the masses; a national community and rejection of the free individual; nihilism and historical pessimism (cultural decline, degeneration); populism and a leadership that portrays itself as resistant in order to enforce the interests of the ruling class with the help of the mobilized people; nationalism; conservatism; racism and anti-Semitism; sexism, misogyny, and hostility toward sexual minorities; rejection of democracy; rejection of urbanity, intellectuals, and scientific rationality. Fascism was an attempt to seek out and destroy the generic moments of dissent and deviation in bourgeois society using scientific and police methods, combined with the delusional belief that any such practice of otherness and alternative perspectives could be eliminated once and for all. It was supposed to be a final victory, an absolute annihilation of the enemy. The military defeat by the Allied forces led by the US demonstrated, on the other hand, that it is more successful to exercise bourgeois rule through democracy, open statistical regularities, and unstable normalization processes. The delusional belief in the supremacy of the Germans and the Aryan race was refuted. In the form of familial racism, the belief in one’s own chosen status and the superiority of one’s own family, the belief in knowing what is true about gender, the economy, and the welfare of the US, this imaginary construct is returning to the political stage with Trump and Musk. In doing so, they give support to other regimes that are nationalistic and racist but do not have the power to enrich and expand themselves at the expense of others.

Fascism took the form of exceptional rule. It was a condensation of all those authoritarian moments. It ended with the traumatic murder of many people, genocide, destruction, population shifts in Europe, the dissolution of colonial empires and, with it, the ethnocentric certainty of European superiority. When we talk about fascism, we often mean this kind of finality in social dynamics, i.e., totalitarian rule and its destructive consequences. That is why pointing out the fascist or anti-Semitic character of beliefs, public statements, or actions could also establish a kind of political and moral boundary. It was enough to point out the anti-Semitic implications of a politician’s statement to force an apology, resignation, or change in practice. For the majority of the bourgeoisie, the experience of unbridled racist violence and the elimination of democracy meant that they shrank from any attempt to reintroduce authoritarian rule in the form of fascism. The bourgeoisie was and is not opposed to the use of authoritarian practices, but it did not want them to challenge the order of rule itself, leading to unprecedented destruction, defeat, and the destabilization of equilibriums and normalization processes. This has changed in recent years due to the metapolitical strategy of the right. They do not deny the Holocaust, but they can relativize it, operate with ambiguities, retract allusions, or cynically admit: So I am a fascist. Enlightening arguments run their course and lose their effectiveness. Pressure arises to experiment with and operate under authoritarian forms of rule once again.

Getting a grasp of the dynamics

When I argue that historical fascism consists of a series of practices as an exceptional form of rule, I conclude that such finality is not necessary. I imagine it as a kind of prism: all authoritarian elements are present. In social struggles and power relations, specific political-ideological practices can come to the fore: political-economic conservatism, anti-genderism, authoritarian populism, racism, anti-Semitism, statism, fascism (characterized here, as Adorno and Scurati suggest, by violence and propaganda). One of these moments can bathe all the others in a single color and overdetermine them. These moments do not necessarily have to dynamically condense into the form of fascist exceptional rule in such a way that fascism becomes the dominant aspect. They can connect with existing forms of democracy, embed themselves in them, and permeate them. There can still be a parliament, parties, a media public sphere, a constitution, law, and courts. But these formal institutions and their representatives will be divided and merge into an open and crisis-ridden field of forces: judges, prosecutors, and police officers will become part of fascist networks, journalists and writers will gradually and organically align themselves with the right wing and become its spokespersons. But it is also clear that judges, politicians, scientists, journalists, and their family members are being insulted, legally and physically threatened, attacked, or even murdered. This process is ongoing, institutions and individuals are frequently attacked individually, and the attacks are threatening, disruptive, and demoralizing because there is no clear solution in sight. The police and public prosecutors can do little under existing law, or are unwilling to take action. The legal model of action is proving useless in the face of fascist threats and violence (much more so than in the case of organized crime). Even broad mobilization against the right wing can hardly prevent its terror against individuals, threats, and insults.

Instead of talking about fascism, it may be more useful to focus on the dynamic process of fascistization. But what exactly does that mean? It refers to a dangerous dynamic. However, this should not be understood as a purposeful, finalized process that will inevitably lead to fascism. Rather, it refers to constellations of moments such as those mentioned above. Fascist elements are continuously present moments of the bourgeois power apparatus (i.e., racism, neo-Nazi groups, revisionism, the cult of soldiers), but they only come to the fore cyclically and then cast the other authoritarian conditions in a special light. So if fascism is an important moment in the current economic situation, but does not teleologically transition into fascist exceptional rule, the question arises as to how to define the concrete form of rule.

“Instead of talking about fascism, it may be useful to look at the dynamic process of fascism. But what exactly does that mean?”

Elsewhere, I have argued in favor of speaking of authoritarian populism. The basis for this practice of rule was the demoralization of relevant sections of the bourgeoisie after the financial crisis and the emergence of a large wave of protest movements. It was expected that this dynamic would lead to a Green (New) Deal. But the multiple crisis has progressed further. In many respects, tipping points have been exceeded: melting glaciers and Arctic ice sheets, warming oceans and coastal destruction, high CO2 and methane emissions, species extinction, pollution from micro- and nanoplastics, groundwater loss, drought and soil erosion, and mass migration. Raw material and energy shortages are becoming increasingly noticeable in the context of AI use, the security of infrastructure and military readiness are proving to be under threat, and space and the deep sea represent new areas of political and military conflict. A necessary transformation, which would have to be set in motion immediately, would not only yield too little profit in terms of investment, but would also mark the beginning of a process that would lead away from capitalist ownership and production relations. The challenges posed by the contradiction between production relations and productive forces are too great. Serious efforts must be made to abandon the accumulation of capital on an ever-higher ladder, to restructure or even shut down entire branches of production, to develop different patterns of consumption, to overcome dependence on fossil fuels, and to establish a new global economic equilibrium. The transnational bourgeoisie is not ignoring these problems. It is aware of the challenges. The discussions at the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos bear witness to this. But there is an effort to combat the knowledge and emergence of new, appropriate practices. Knowledge should not become relevant to action, and politics should not follow scientific insight. Sealing oneself off from knowledge requires making oneself stupid, blocking perspectives for action, and responding with a defiant “business as usual”: more, bigger, more valuable cars, more and smarter weapons, the restoration of conventional family forms and sexual practices, the destruction of research institutions and universities – as if nothing had happened, as if all the findings of Earth system research, gender studies, or critical racism research did not exist. This includes having control over the disasters that are taking place or are imminent and the resulting practices of solidarity, and rejecting the warnings of the military or insurance companies: it won’t be that bad, they were just one-off events. In other words, the strengthening of fascist tendencies is an attempt to block social and ecological transformation. Bourgeois society wants nothing to do with the monsters it has created and hopes to contain or prevent communication flows and dissident practices by suppressing the sciences (“universities as the enemy”), harassing the media, and controlling social media.

Feudalization of state apparatuses

The economic situation is determined by the form of autocracy. This distinguishes the current constellation from earlier forms of exceptional rule. Those who hold state power are not employees of the bourgeois class who represent different bourgeois forces. Rather, they themselves belong directly to the ruling class. They are entrepreneurs who pursue oligarchic interests. This leads to a feudalization of state apparatuses: overlapping power, superimposition or elimination of hierarchies. This can go as far as a neo-feudal habitus, which can be observed in Trump, Putin, or Erdoğan. Access for representatives of other capital interests can be facilitated or made more difficult, because they now encounter their peers, not people who are bound by legal regulations (equality before the law) and trained accordingly. Media coverage is restructured and partially blocked (rejection of newspapers, attacks on public broadcasting, persecution of journalists), the importance of some civil society organizations is significantly reduced, and the influence of scientific knowledge is diminished. The autocrats are obviously distrustful of the state apparatus, its structure, and state personnel. They are hijacking the state, partially restructuring it, and replacing the leadership with oligarchs, friends, and family members. Democratic institutions and authoritarian leadership intertwine, parliaments, parties, and suffrage remain, but they are reorganized so that the power of one group gains continuity, change in decision-making functions is made considerably more difficult, and quasi-dynastic representations emerge. Developments in the US suggest that state apparatuses can also be drastically dismantled or that an organization such as DOGE, coming from outside, can be used to render individual state apparatuses dysfunctional (social services, foreign affairs, education, research institutions, universities, media) or to destroy them. It could be that this autocracy practices a combination of different forms of bourgeois rule. In addition to representative democracy, this could include the form of the totalitarian state and the form of the libertarian dissolution of the state in the form of seasteads, charter cities, or free trade and special economic zones.

Defending emancipatory achievements

These are new challenges for the left. For in fact, civilization itself, the power structures of the past decades, if not centuries, are up for grabs. This applies first and foremost to all the ecological upheavals that are shaking millennia-old certainties—and thus also to ideas of order that believed they were based on stable natural conditions. Given that the laws of nature are proving to be human and historical in the Anthropocene, a core ideology of the bourgeoisie—the recourse to the naturalness of conditions—is being fundamentally weakened. The nation-state, the legal institutions, the bourgeois democratic processes, the media, and the bourgeois public sphere, which have already been hollowed out by the process of globalization, are under severe pressure. The progressive aspects that have been achieved since the 1960s—sometimes in alliance with so-called progressive neoliberalism—are being massively opposed by the right, even to the point of linguistic policing.

The left must stand up for these emancipatory achievements and not weaken itself by allowing conservative-authoritarian forces to convince it that social and identity-political orientations are contradictory. These achievements were and are a precursor to a new civilization in which it should be possible to be different without fear and to live freely in harmony with nature.

“The left must not weaken itself by allowing conservative-authoritarian forces to convince it that social and identity politics are contradictory.”

New practices of solidarity are needed. For the catastrophic trends will continue: forest fires, floods, drought, supply shortages due to transport disruptions. People, their possessions, and infrastructure are under threat. States are not providing sufficient help, and insurance companies are shirking their obligations. A new common will is needed to drive ecological renewal and organize solidarity in ecological emergencies.

During the coalition government of the SPD, Greens, and FDP, representatives of the SPD and the Greens were frequently criticized and described as the stupidest government Germany had ever had. This was a false polarization, because a number of projects were important, even if only partially correct: the switch to e-mobility, the discontinuation of subsidies for diesel or commuter allowances, the use of pesticides such as glyphosate, the so-called heating law, and the increase in CO2 emission prices. Criticism was levelled at the inadequate implementation, the opportunism, and the fact that society was not mobilized to support appropriate socio-ecological transformations. In the current situation, in which the small grand coalition is threatening to increase military spending, introduce conscription, and cut social security systems, and in view of fascist tendencies that are leading to an autocratic form of government, new, democratic alliances must be considered. A socialist pole is needed. The forces that support this pole need a clear position. But it is also important to develop a perspective for alliances. In view of the strong authoritarian dynamics, it makes sense not to conceive such alliances along organizational affiliations or party lines. A starting point could be (without false updating) considerations of a popular front movement, as developed by Willi Münzenberg in the late 1930s. Such a policy can only succeed if it meets democratic standards in terms of the relationship between the allies and the participation of individuals.

Alex Demirović

Alex Demirović is a philosopher and social scientist. He has taught at universities in Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, among others, is a member of the board of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and a founding member of this journal.

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The chainsaw international

From Trump to Milei, the far right is banking on spectacular acts of retribution to compensate for its harsh economic cuts.

By William Callison and Verónica Gago

[This article posted in May 2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/kettenaegen-internationale/.]

The image of Elon Musk grunting as he swung a chainsaw over his head at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington in February this year went around the world. Less viral, perhaps, was the preceding scene, when the far-right, libertarian Argentine president Javier Milei took to the stage to present Musk with the very same chainsaw – a replica with Milei’s now famous slogan “¡Viva la libertad, carajo!” (Long live freedom, damn it!) engraved on the blade.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is not without reason considered an imitation of Milei’s radical state restructuring. Since taking office in December 2023, Milei has dismantled more than half of Argentina’s ministries (including the Ministry for Women, Gender, and Diversity), created new ministries (such as the Ministry for Deregulation and State Transformation), and laid off around 40,000 public sector employees. Milei openly calls for “sacrifices” for his own version of MAGA, which he says will also make Argentina ‘great’ again: “Make Argentina Great Again.” Musk and Trump are keeping a low profile in this regard, albeit with some notable exceptions. Shortly before the election, Musk admitted that a Trump victory could initially lead to a violent overreaction on the part of the economy. “We need to cut spending to live within our means,” he said. “That will inevitably mean some temporary hardship, but it will secure our prosperity in the long run.”

“Whether or not the sacrifices to be made are named, they have long been on the agenda through drastic cuts and high tariffs.”

Trump expressed similar sentiments on the tariff issue. One day after signing an executive order against Mexico, Canada, and China, he wrote in capital letters: “Will it hurt? Yes, maybe (and maybe not!).” He continued: “But we will make America great again, and it will be well worth the price.” Shortly thereafter, Trump even acknowledged the possibility of a recession, triggering another stock market crash. On April 2, which he promptly declared “Liberation Day,” Trump imposed blanket import tariffs of ten percent on all imports, with significantly higher rates for dozens of countries. In effect, however, this meant a retroactive tax increase for US companies and consumers. At the same press conference, Trump also called on Congress to raise the debt ceiling for the federal budget and to approve permanent tax cuts.

“In this context, the chainsaw is more than a metaphor. It stands for the logic of a new wave of anarcho-authoritarian neoliberalism spreading across Latin America, North America, and Europe.”

Whether or not the sacrifices to be made are named, they have long been on the agenda through drastic cuts and high tariffs. The crucial question is how governments justify and enforce these sacrifices. In this respect, Javier Milei can be seen as a far-right pioneer of authoritarian experiments. From the war on “gender ideology” to cuts in university funding, from the glorification of Israel’s destruction in Gaza to the rejection of an independent judiciary, new authoritarian regimes are showing how fascism can be advanced particularly quickly and purposefully today.

In this context, the chainsaw is more than a metaphor. It stands for the logic of a new wave of anarcho-authoritarian neoliberalism spreading across Latin America, North America, and Europe. As if under the spell of a viral meme, even politicians on the center-left spectrum seem to be following this trend. Just last month, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer brought up the idea of a “chain saw project” modeled on Milei’s far-right attack on the public sector, but, according to Starmer, aimed at achieving “radical goals of the moderate left.” The further the chainsaw logic spreads, the more it strengthens a politics of patriarchal rule, racist exclusion, plunder, and violence, whose actors are increasingly networked internationally.

The New International Right

In 2024, the center of gravity in world politics shifted not only further to the right, but also, with Milei, further to the global South. On the first anniversary of his inauguration and immediately after Trump’s re-election victory, the leadership of the extreme right gathered in Buenos Aires in December 2024 for the first Argentine CPAC. “We could call ourselves the right-wing international,” Milei declared in his opening speech. “With Trump, Bukele, and us here in Argentina, we have a historic opportunity to bring a fresh wind of freedom to the world.” Nayib Bukele, the incumbent president of El Salvador, had shortly before signed an agreement with the Trump administration under which people deported from the US would be housed in the high-security prison CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo; English: Center for the Containment of Terrorism), a notorious facility with a capacity of 40,000 inmates.

As newly appointed members of the so-called “right-wing international,” speakers at CPAC included Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s Vox party; Brazilian congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro from São Paulo (a son of Jair Bolsonaro); Chilean congressman Fernando Sánchez Ossa; Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee; and Arizona politician Kari Lake. The lineup was rounded out by online opinion makers such as Agustín Laje and Ben Shapiro. Steve Bannon and Jair Bolsonaro[1] spoke via video. Their speeches included every inflammatory term in the arsenal of the extreme right: gender ideology, the LGBTQ+ lobby, cultural Marxism, “woke” extremism, migrant invasions, globalist machinations, and civilizational decline. Meanwhile, the crowd in the conference hall danced to Trump’s ironic campaign anthem, “YMCA.”

Even during his time as a hot-headed television commentator with a penchant for tirades, Javier Milei was an ardent admirer of Donald Trump. And now his admiration is reciprocated. Trump’s “favorite president,” as he called Milei, was the first foreign head of state to visit him at Mar-a-Lago after the US elections. “You’ve done a great job in a very short time,” Trump praised him in his first speech after the election. Milei, for his part, boasted: “I am one of the two most important politicians in the world today. One is Trump, the other is me.” This mutual admiration has translated into concrete political measures on several occasions.

Most recently, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio banned former Argentine President and Milei’s declared rival Cristina Fernández de Kirchner from entering the US due to allegations of corruption. Milei won the election during a period of explosive post-pandemic inflation, when many Argentine workers needed multiple jobs to make ends meet.

His agenda included drastic cuts in government spending, the abolition of public subsidies, lower corporate taxes, and market deregulation. Although he has not yet fulfilled his campaign promise to abolish the central bank, he is instead artificially supporting the dollar exchange rate by drawing on its reserves, which are currently at their lowest level since he took office. As a result of his reforms, more and more Argentinians are having to finance all their expenses, from food to rent, through loans. Those affected by this precarious situation are being forced to engage in speculative practices. The rigid austerity measures have led to a massive increase in poverty and private debt. This has been exacerbated by the removal of price caps (e.g., on public transport, telephone, and internet charges) and the liberalization of credit card interest rates (which allows banks to charge higher fees for late payments). Under Milei’s government, the poverty rate rose by 10 percentage points to at least 53 percent of the population. Although the government claims that this figure has since fallen to 38 percent, the fact is that large sections of the population are increasingly running out of money, inflation is particularly noticeable in basic areas such as public services and food, and 93 percent of households are now in some form of debt.

The Argentine government is currently seeking a new loan of US$20 billion from the International Monetary Fund, linking it to another cycle of government debt and growing private debt in the country, all based on the ongoing financialization of social life. The repayment of public debt must be made in US dollars, which in turn are to be generated in highly deregulated sectors such as mining (including lithium production), agribusiness, and energy. In a recent move, Milei’s government allowed young people aged 13 and over to open bank accounts in US dollars: an enticing but largely symbolic offer, given that, according to UNICEF, the majority of children and young people in Argentina live below the poverty line. Similar to the US, the project is particularly popular among boys and young men and contributes to the consolidation of a new toxic form of politicized masculinity. At the individual level, Milei understands his model under the slogan “financial freedom,” which is particularly evident in his openness to cryptocurrencies.

Younger leaders of the Latin American “new right” see their broader project as a “culture war,” referring to the concept of “war of position” developed by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. However, while Gramsci used this term to describe resistance to the cultural hegemony of the capitalist class, this culture war is directed against the perceived hegemony of progressive and left-wing forces—against “progres” and “zurdos,” as Milei prefers to call them—and attacks feminist, queer, indigenous, and human rights movements, as well as the entire public service. Entire government agencies—the Ministry of National Security (under Patricia Bullrich), the Ministry of Human Capital (under Sandra Pettovello), and the Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation (under Federico Sturzenegger) – are now dedicated to fighting the “internal enemies,” criminalizing protests, and cutting funding for science, the public education system, human rights programs, initiatives against gender-based violence, and soup kitchens. Milei’s libertarian “revolution” is hollowing out the state from within, in favor of capital.

By immediately ruling by decree, Milei was not only testing the limits of the executive branch. A veritable flood of decrees immediately after he took office—a foretaste of Trump’s approach, which Steve Bannon described as “flooding the zone”—paved the way for a huge legislative success: the “Ley Bases” basic law, which was passed by Congress about six months later. One element of this package of laws is the new regulations and incentives for large-scale investment (Régimen de Incentivo a las Grandes Inversiones, or RIGI for short), which provide extensive legal guarantees and tax, customs, and exchange rate advantages for large-scale investments in forestry, tourism, infrastructure, mining, the tech sector, and the steel industry. The chainsaw cuts through any regulation that could limit the influence of capital or the exploitation of natural resources.

“The speeches at the first Argentine CPAC attacked all the usual bogeymen: ‘gender ideology,’ ‘migrant invasions,‘ and ‘civilizational decline.’”

In January 2025, Milei carried out his first privatization. It hit IMPSA, a national company operating in the energy and tech sectors as well as metal processing. After the company’s share price plummeted as a result of Milei’s reforms, he sold it at a bargain price of US$27 million to the US-based Industrial Acquisitions Fund – an obvious nod to Donald Trump.

In addition, Milei announced plans to build new nuclear power plants to support AI development and, at the same time, pushed ahead with the development of national uranium reserves for domestic use and export. At the same time, the government is working to turn Argentina’s economy into a platform economy, in close cooperation with Mercado Libre and Mercado Pago, two companies owned by Marcos Galperin, Argentina’s Elon Musk.

The plan is to create a comprehensive platform for income, payments, loans, pensions, and social benefits that will function independently of traditional banks. As luck would have it, this vision is exactly the same as the one Elon Musk is pursuing with his platform X, which recently entered into a partnership with Visa to process financial transactions. At the same time, the very regulatory authority that would be responsible for regulating X’s new financial services has come under fire from Musk’s DOGE authority. But similar to Tesla, the future prospects of X as an “all-in-one app” currently seem increasingly questionable.

Like Milei, Trump has also committed himself to the fight within and against the state. In doing so, he is turning upside down a strategy that theorists such as Nicos Poulantzas once described from a socialist perspective. Although Trump’s “Project 2025” plan had already largely anticipated this instrumentalization of the administrative apparatus—not to destroy it, but to remodel it in the spirit of “arch-conservative rule,” as James Goodwin argued—Milei was both a role model and an ally in this process. Russell Vought, director of the influential Office of Management and Budget in the White House and co-author of Project 2025, openly stated that the aim was to “traumatize” public service employees. White House budget documents indicate government plans to cut the funding of some agencies and departments by up to 60 percent. The US Environmental Protection Agency recently withdrew a plan to lay off 65 percent of its staff; the Department of Education announced plans to cut nearly half of its staff; and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is cutting at least 25 percent of jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services.

“While land, resources, and entire population groups are supposedly ‘sacrificed,’ i.e., surrendered to international capital, the ethos of speculative competition is imposed on individuals as a general principle of life.” Milei is a good example of how far-right politicians gain support by promising national greatness that requires a willingness to make sacrifices. While circumventing democratic processes, they tap into a dissatisfaction with a purely formal democracy that feeds on the everyday experiences of the majority of the population and channel it into anti-democratic radicalism. Milei’s campaign slogan “There is no money” should therefore not be understood merely as an argument for budgetary discipline or fighting inflation, those “achievements” that Western media celebrate at the expense of a suffering population. Rather, this phrase serves primarily to justify sacrifices. Milei is transforming the entire country into a “sacrifice zone”—to borrow a term from extractivism research—by handing over land and resources to large corporations for further plundering and ecological destruction.

In this sense, individual sacrifices and national sacrifice zones are two sides of the same coin. The rhetoric of self-sacrifice demands consent to one’s own dispossession. “You are neither being exploited nor is anything being taken from you,” it says, but rather you are part of a larger project whose success requires sacrifice. Your suffering is necessary and will ultimately benefit you. While land, resources, and entire population groups are supposedly “sacrificed,” i.e., surrendered to international capital, the ethos of speculative competition is imposed on individuals as a general principle of life, deforming subjectivities and undermining the foundations of social reproduction.

Milei’s gift to Musk did not just refer to a specific package of measures. The chainsaw also stood for a strategy to maintain political legitimacy. The staged photo opportunity with Musk came at a tactically opportune moment: just a few days earlier, Milei had promoted the memecoin $Libra on X. The cryptocurrency, modeled on the $Trump memecoin, initially experienced a rapid rise in value, but crashed dramatically a few hours later, causing a national scandal. More than 40,000 people were affected by the crash, with estimated losses of over $4 billion and Argentina’s main stock index falling by 5.6 percent. The Argentine president was soon dubbed “Milei Estafador”: Milei the fraudster.

But whenever his legitimacy at home is shaken, Milei courts the favor of foreign countries – and usually with great success. Not long ago, liberal mainstream media outlets such as The Economist and the Financial Times classified him as right-wing extremist and a threat to democracy; now they praise his policies as a panacea for other crisis-ridden countries, even as a possible remedy for Europe’s economic stagnation. Even heads of state such as Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz have now accepted Milei into the leading circles of a Western order that appears to be in serious trouble. By further normalizing the far-right fringe, they are shifting the boundaries of what can be said within democratic societies, which in turn benefits far-right forces at home in Europe.

The mutual admiration expressed on social media serves similar purposes. Milei, Musk, and Bukele entertain an authoritarian love triangle—a “pan-American Trumpism,” as historian Greg Grandin put it. What began as a virtual acquaintance between Milei and Musk on X shifted into the physical world with a series of meetings resembling bilateral trade negotiations between heads of state. Their joint agenda includes the massive expansion of lithium mining for Tesla’s battery production and the increasing use of Musk’s Starlink satellites for Argentine internet service. Milei has also visited other US tech giants to win them over as strategic partners for Argentina. Contrary to all austerity rhetoric, government spending on personal foreign travel rose to a record high. His focus is clearly on alliances with the US financial, technology, and raw materials sectors. His tour of Silicon Valley included talks with Sundar Pichai (Google), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Tim Cook (Apple), and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), as well as several meetings with Musk. Selfies with thumbs up were a must.

On his way back from a visit to Silicon Valley last year, Milei stopped off in El Salvador to attend the second inauguration of Nayib Bukele, which was only possible because the Supreme Court reinterpreted the constitutional ban on consecutive terms of office. (Donald Trump also recently announced that his thoughts on a third term were “no joke.”) Bukele, who describes himself as “the coolest dictator in the world,” welcomed Milei, Donald Trump Jr., the Spanish king, and Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa to the ceremony. Like Bukele and Milei, Noboa deliberately uses spectacular displays of violence on social media to legitimize his authoritarian rule. Noboa is currently negotiating with Erik Prince, founder of the private military company Blackwater, on a deal to militarize the “war on crime” based on the US model. Shortly before the runoff election on April 13, Noboa visited Trump in Florida to discuss a bilateral trade agreement—apparently in the hope of increasing his chances of re-election. The authoritarian triangle of Trump, Milei, and Bukele is thus preparing to expand into a quadrangle.

“This digital skirmish reveals the new authoritarianism in its purest form: culture war as a shitposting spectacle, constitutional crisis as viral entertainment.”

Trump’s team also has something innovative to offer in terms of authoritarian media strategies. After a deportation agreement with Bukele was announced, the official White House X account published a video billed as “ASMR,” intended to provide viewers with a pleasant sensory experience. It showed men in handcuffs boarding a deportation plane – cruelty staged as a relaxation aid. Shortly afterwards, Bukele released an elaborately produced video, filmed with drones and accompanied by dramatic music. It showed alleged Venezuelan gang members being transferred from the plane to Bukele’s prison complex. (Relatives and lawyers of several of these men vehemently deny the allegations.) The White House then posted a similar clip showing a handcuffed Venezuelan accompanied by the pop song “Closing Time.” However, the video was later deleted. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as the legal basis for these prisoner transfers to El Salvador. Although federal courts banned the deportation flights, the immigration agency ICE continued them anyway. Bukele commented on this on X with “Oopsie… Too late” – and was promptly retweeted by Senator Marco Rubio. A few days later, Bukele claimed that “the US is currently experiencing a judicial coup,” to which Elon Musk replied “1000%.” This digital skirmish reveals the new authoritarianism in its purest form: culture war as a shitposting spectacle, constitutional crisis as viral entertainment.

This is the soundtrack to systematic attacks on the judiciary, the repression of protests, and the imprisonment of citizens and non-citizens alike. In 2021, Bukele’s party dismissed five constitutional judges in El Salvador and replaced them with loyal followers. In February 2025, Milei also appointed two new judges to the Supreme Court by decree while parliament was in recess. And after Trump publicly called for the removal of opposition judges in the US, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson floated the idea of completely abolishing recalcitrant federal courts. At the same time, Bukele and Noboa are pushing through authoritarian law-and-order policies through mass arrests, while Milei is responding to ongoing social protests in Argentina with police violence and Trump is setting the immigration authorities (ICE) on migrants and foreign students.

From the US to Argentina, from El Salvador to Ecuador, the resurgent right is betting that spectacles of retribution—trolling the “Zurdos,” destroying liberals—can obscure or even compensate for real dispossession. As soon as the population begins to question the sacrifices demanded of them, these governments respond with diversionary tactics, further cuts, and calls for anticipatory obedience. How long the rewards of cruelty can outweigh cruel wages remains to be seen. But as long as the calculation pays off, popular resistance that challenges the chainsaw regime will be necessary.

This article first appeared in the Boston Review under the title “The Chainsaw International”. Translated from English by Charlotte Thießen and Maximilian Hauer for Gegensatz Translation Collective

[1] Steve Bannon was released in October 2024 after serving a four-month prison sentence for refusing to testify about the January 2021 attack on the Capitol. Jair Bolsonaro is under investigation for the coup attempt following his defeat in the 2022 election (editor’s note).

William Callison

William Callison is a lecturer in social sciences at Harvard University and co-editor of Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture. His research focuses on the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism, the climate crisis, political subjectivity, and the authoritarian right.

Verónica Gago

Verónica Gago teaches political science at the University of Buenos Aires and is a professor of sociology at the National University of San Martín. She is a feminist activist, member of the Ni Una Menos collective, and recently published the book “For a Feminist International: How We Will Change Everything.”

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Dangerous security

Where democracy is threatening to collapse

By Maximilian Pichl

[This article posted in December 2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/gefaehrliche-sicherheit/.]

Time of monsters

Law and order is booming. The shift to the right could become an avalanche: democratic principles are at risk of being undermined.

For more than 30 years, R+V Insurance has been conducting a long-term study to gauge the “fears of Germans.” For the 2023 study, 2,400 people were surveyed. It shows that the majority of the population is afraid of rising living costs and unaffordable housing. The Global Risk Report 2023 published by the World Economic Forum, for which 1,200 experts were surveyed, provides very similar data on a global scale: while the failure to deal with climate change has been cited as the greatest risk in the ten-year trend, the cost of living ranks first in the two-year trend.

Uncertainty has reached people’s immediate surroundings. In times of inflation, the multiple crises are manifesting themselves as individual fears of social decline, which have now spread to broad sections of the population. An obvious political response would be to raise wages and strengthen social and democratic infrastructures in a sustainable manner. But the opposite is happening: the federal government has presented an unprecedented austerity budget that envisages severe cuts in all social areas. Social welfare organizations such as Caritas and Diakonie are sounding the alarm and warning that there could be no “social safety net” in the future. There is also no movement on wages. The minimal increase in the minimum wage will result in a real loss of purchasing power. While social policy responses to the crisis are hardly being considered, a law-and-order approach is being strengthened and applied to all areas of society—from the criminalization of movements such as Last Generation to blanket bans on demonstrations and the erosion of asylum rights.

Towards an authoritarian tipping point with law and order

It is nothing new that regulatory trends gain momentum in times of crisis. The past decades of neoliberalism have been marked by the selective presence and absence of statehood. While social welfare infrastructures are being dismantled, the state is upgrading its security policies. So, is it business as usual, or are we currently witnessing a new phenomenon?

In an article for the taz, Vanessa Thompson, Daniel Mullis, and I proposed describing the current constellation with the term “authoritarian tipping point.” We borrowed this metaphor from climate research, which uses it to describe a “critical threshold” beyond which a system reorganizes itself and processes accelerate rapidly and irreversibly. Although social processes are never irreversible and politics and law are always contested, we believe that German society has currently reached an authoritarian tipping point that could unleash exponential dynamics. The political developments of recent decades have created a specific constellation that is decisive for the regulation of crises. The difference to previous crises is that, with the AfD, there is a party that is capable of permanently binding right-wing voters and representing them in parliament. The growing local roots of the AfD are particularly dangerous. In many municipalities, places of democratic exchange or alternative youth centers have already been destroyed, either through austerity policies or through previous land gains by right-wing actors. It is not without reason that the AfD is particularly strong in areas where right-wing parties such as the Republicans or the NPD have already achieved electoral success. Right-wing successes can shape places for decades.

Racist debates, both in the media and locally, also reinforce authoritarian socialization processes. When migration is seen only as a threat and the punitive and deportation-oriented state as the only answer—and the media uncritically adopt this framing—it has a lasting impact on people’s perceptions. Human rights violations become increasingly “normalized” and accepted as inevitable. When democratic and alternative spaces for political debate disappear at the same time, there is no social resistance. The coronavirus pandemic has massively reinforced processes of isolation and weakened progressive social movements such as the climate movement, which were able to set the agenda on other issues. In this complex situation, it is not surprising that support for extreme right-wing positions is growing, as the new “Mitte” study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation has found.

The governing parties and the democratic opposition are responding to this situation with a rigorous law-and-order policy. Parts of the Left Party around Sahra Wagenknecht joined the call for tougher measures against refugees, but are now organized in a new association called BSW. Positions against law and order are few and far between in parliament. Instead, there is a competition to outdo each other in demonstrating resolve. The fact that Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants to “deport on a large scale,” as Der Spiegel recently headlined, is a frightening example of this. The traffic light coalition parties and the CDU are united by the conviction—which is in no way justified from a political science perspective—that tougher criminal and migration laws will stop the rise of far-right parties. In 2023, the federal government approved the most serious tightening of asylum law at the European level since the European Asylum System came into force in the early 2000s (see Bünger/Kasparek in this issue). Domestically, too, a hard line is being taken, with the repressive Section 129 of the Criminal Code (formation of a criminal organization) being used against activists of the Last Generation movement and journalists even being wiretapped as part of investigations. The CDU is constantly pushing these debates in opposition and has called for fast-track trials and the harshest possible penalties for activists in the climate justice movement and for young people as a “deterrent.” Any discussion of the political and social background is completely neglected.

Stuart Hall explained why such shifts in security policy are successful, using the example of authoritarian Thatcherism in Great Britain: “The issues of crime and deviant behavior, articulated through the discourses of popular morality, touch on the immediate experience, fears, and insecurities of ordinary people. This led to the incorporation of the ‘call for discipline’ from below into the call for a violent restoration of social order and authority ‘from above’ […] Its main effect is to arouse popular support for a restoration of order by decree: the basis of a populist ‘law and order’ campaign.” (Hall, 2022, 154)

Law and order politics is therefore successful because it explicitly articulates people’s insecurity, but channels their social discontent into regulatory policies and integrates it into its own authoritarian project. Progressive actors failed to find an adequate response to this during the Thatcher era—and continue to do so today.

The rule of law as an imposition

The authoritarian tipping point is characterized by the fact that law-and-order politics does not stop at tougher penalties, more police, and increasingly racist debates. Civilizational achievements and universal standards are openly called into question. In many European countries, right-wing parties have come to power and are turning against instruments of the rule of law or international treaties such as the European Convention on Human Rights. It is no coincidence that human rights in particular are under attack. For right-wing movements, obligations under the rule of law are an imposition that prevent authoritarian rule. What is dangerous is that it is no longer just extreme right-wing parties and movements that are calling for these minimum standards to be dismantled. Representatives of European conservatives, from the conservative Tories to the radical-conservative ÖVP or CDU/CSU, are currently questioning the foundations of human rights with security policy arguments.

There is therefore a danger that right-wing actors in Germany could also succeed in bringing about lasting changes to the state apparatus. The Hamburg police, for example, still pursue a particularly repressive line because former Interior Senator Roland Schill carried out personnel changes during his short term in office in the early 2000s. Once right-wing actors manage to gain a foothold, they are not easily removed.

In the European Union, Poland and Hungary have long been champions of authoritarianism, which aims to bring the authorities, media, and courts into line with party politics. In Poland, at least, the liberal opposition and social movements have managed to halt this trend. The Fidesz party under Viktor Orbán, on the other hand, has managed to push through a comprehensive restructuring of the state that also encroaches on civil society.

The Verfassungsblog has launched a project called “Thüringen-Monitor” to investigate the possibilities for right-wing actors in Germany to bring about such structural changes through participation in government. There are obvious levers available here. For example, if the AfD were to obtain a qualified majority in elections, it could influence the appointment of judges. In the districts and municipalities where it has already achieved electoral success, it can dictate a new approach to public gatherings, influence the implementation of deportations, or even have a say in school policy. Against this backdrop, it is particularly dangerous that the democratic parties are already pushing ahead with a number of tightening measures in the area of security, police and assembly laws, and asylum law. This is because the AfD could use an already repressive law to further its own interests. If it then tests the limits of the rule of law, it can point to the fact that others laid the foundations.

It is worrying that even in parts of the media, a basic understanding of the rule of law is losing ground. Journalist Jochen Buchsteiner recently took stock of what he sees as the “false beliefs of the migration debate” in the FAZ. He turned against voices from politics and academia who oppose law-and-order policies by referring to human rights: “In Germany, which is particularly attached to the legalization of politics because of its past, this sounds like a strong objection. But the law is created by politics, not the other way around. If it can no longer be reconciled with changed circumstances, it can be changed.” (FAZ, October 14, 2023) Buchsteiner suggests here that the current debates are about a confrontation between politics and the law. But this is not about arbitrary laws that can be changed by a simple majority during a legislative period. What is under attack are constitutional and human rights principles that are not just a nice addition to democracy, but are the prerequisite for any democratic process. The basic principle of democracy is that the majority cannot unreservedly trump minorities. Fundamental and human rights exist to ensure this.

Against the security of the security society

Progressive actors find themselves in a powerless defensive position in the face of the authoritarian tipping point. They are fighting for an open society, even though they are aware of the shortcomings of the previous (neo-)liberal hegemony. So far, they have failed in particular to counter the law-and-order agenda with a different political project. What is needed is a difficult balancing act: on the one hand, opposing repressive security logic and, on the other, campaigning for a universal right to social security. The surveys cited at the beginning of this article make it unmistakably clear that the current crises are a real threat to people’s livelihoods – this uncertainty must be taken into account. It would therefore be important to revitalize the concept of social rule of law as we know it from the Weimar Republic and the early days of the Federal Republic of Germany. Constitutional lawyers such as Hermann Heller and Wolfgang Abendroth advocated a concept of the welfare state that regarded social welfare as the very foundation of democracy. For Abendroth, it was therefore clear that economic conditions must also be democratized. He attributed a central mobilizing role to the trade union movement.

Today, broader alliances must take on this task. The alliance between Fridays for Future and ver.di for a socially just mobility transition is a step in this direction. Finally, the campaign to expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co. in Berlin has revived the idea of democratic socialization in the sense of a social rule of law principle. In its final report, the expert commission appointed by the Berlin Senate in response to the successful referendum concluded by a majority that the socialization of housing is possible and proportionate under Article 15 of the Basic Law. Such socialisation does not have to stop at housing; Article 15 explicitly refers to “land” and “means of production”. The Basic Law therefore offers many more possibilities for tackling the social and ecological crisis than is sometimes conveyed in everyday politics.

While social security must be guaranteed through the democratic design and strengthening of social infrastructures, the logic of security must be pushed back in other areas. The late political scientist Wolf-Dieter Narr wrote in his “Fourteen Theses on Internal Security” in 1997: “Democratic-pluralistic societies are characterized by the fact that a wealth of uncertainties [must] always remain. Without uncertainties, there are no opportunities for shaping society, and without these, all plurality and all uniqueness ultimately come to an end. The search for perfect security means that as much deviant behavior as possible must be excluded.” (Narr, 1997) It is worth building on this understanding of productive “uncertainty.” It does not mean ignoring social insecurity, but rather insisting on social security and democratic structures when it comes to “internal security.” Progressive actors can never achieve success in the field of law and order, but can only mark red lines and fight defensive battles.

This also requires alliances with actors who, due to their liberal stance, stand up for fundamental rights but do not represent left-wing positions on other issues, such as economic and social policy. Think of businesses and craft enterprises that oppose the deportation of their employees. In times of skilled labor shortages, such interventions are based on economic as well as humanitarian considerations. Even within state institutions themselves, there are actors who want to prevent an authoritarian tipping point, such as progressive judges. Forging such alliances is not easy and requires a certain pragmatism in short-term strategies. However, this does not mean that progressive actors must lose sight of their long-term goals.

In the long term, the aim is to attack the social foundations of authoritarianism. One point of attack is the logic of security that law-and-order politics produces. This logic must be gradually eliminated from all areas of society so that democratic forms of interaction based on “equal freedom,” as Étienne Balibar called it, can take root. Wolf-Dieter Narr also interpreted uncertainty as a promise of modern society, as a space for political possibilities, alternative lifestyles, and nonconformity. More police and surveillance, more deportations and punishments are not compatible with this.

Literature

Hall, Stuart [1982] 2022: Popular-demokratischer oder autoritärer Populismus, in: Möller, Kolja (ed.), Populismus, Berlin, 144–166

Narr, Wolf-Dieter, 1997: Vierzehn Thesen zur inneren Sicherheit, 21.8.1997, www.cilip.de/1997/08/21/vierzehn-thesen-zur-inneren-sicherheit-vom-eminent-praktischen-sinn-grundsaetzlicher-ueberlegungen

Maximilian Pichl

Maximilian Pichl is a political scientist and legal scholar and currently professor of “Social Law as a Subject of Social Work” at RheinMain University of Applied Sciences.