A growing club of far-right, hardline nationalist, and fascist political leaders is working hard to transform the world. They must be opposed.
Is fascism today essentially internationalist—or is it made up of a series of discrete, nationally bounded projects?
Looking around the world today, it’s hard to escape the sense that fascism has become an internationalist project and one that transcends familiar geopolitical blocs and transnational coalitions: The new Fascist International cuts across NATO and BRICS, the West and the Global South, drawing in actors from all major geopolitical camps to form a multinational coalition of far-right, hardline nationalist, fascist-adjacent and outright fascist political actors.
Congealing around a set of shared ideological commitments, the movement encompasses leaders and governments ranging from Javier Milei’s Argentina, Meloni’s Italy, Israel’s Netanyahu government, Hungary (Orbán), the United States (Trump), India (Modi), and Putin’s Russia, to name its most visible exponents. But in addition, there are (sizeable) parties vying for power, like Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), polling in second place ahead of Germany’s 2025 federal elections, and one-time leaders like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro or the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte.
Xi’s China occupies a more ambiguous position vis-à-vis this new axis, even as it remains undoubtedly authoritarian, with the treatment of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs constituting a serious human rights violation, to take just one example. China’s position as the world’s second-place economic power and its distinctive ideology—a Confucian-inflected “Marxist Nationalism,” to use Kevin Rudd’s descriptor, coupled with an advanced form of neoliberal capitalism—make it something of a case unto itself: It announced a “no-limits friendship” with Putin’s Russia, to be sure, but has since backpedaled to a degree; and it is locked in an antagonistic economic relationship with the Trump II administration, one of the “superspreaders” of global fascism.
Of course, a present-day Fascist International doesn’t involve a literal organization acting in unified, lockstep fashion. Instead, the term draws inspiration from the historical attempt by elements within Mussolini’s regime to form a “fascist international,” in an attempted imitation of the Communist International, exemplified by a 1934 conference in Montreux, Switzerland hosted by the Mussolini-affiliated Action Committee for the Universality of Rome (CAUR). Instead, today’s Fascist International is characterized by what Ludwig Wittgenstein termed a “family resemblance.” In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes that the concept denotes the “various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, color of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. [that] overlap and criss-cross in the same way.”
So, too, with the global family of far-right, hardline nationalist, and fascist leaders: Their commonalities give rise to certain affinities—a generally shared alignment—rather than any perfectly synchronized coordination. Like in all families, there will be differences and even outright conflicts; still, its members feel the bonds of their family resemblance, orienting their ideas and inclinations, both domestically and on the world stage, to a shared ideological purpose. Little wonder, then, that Trump’s first invitee at the outset of his second term was Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, with India’s Modi set to follow close behind.
What are the common denominators of this increasingly self-assertive, global ideological formation? They include (i) an emphasis on strongman leadership and rule by “states of exception,” (ii) the ever-present threat and actual use of both (military) force and economic coercion to realize a nation-centered agenda, (iii) hardline (ethno)nationalism, fueling rampant xenophobia targeting out-groups and designated “common enemies,” (iv) aggressive propaganda campaigns aimed at spreading traditionalist, reactionary notions about gender, race, sexuality, and religion, and relatedly, (v) a deep preoccupation with the body, above all women’s bodies, and the (heterosexual) family, as well as biological and therefore social reproduction.
Fascism is an ideology of selective life and targeted death. It elevates particular social groups that it deems worthy of the gifts of societal support, welfare, life, and joy—while other portions of the population it devalorizes and deems unworthy, stigmatizing, criminalizing, or ejecting those regarded as social refuse from the body politic, at the utmost limit dehumanizing and subjecting such categories to (lethal) violence. As Jason Stanley points out in How Fascism Works,
The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination.
In this sense, Gaza is but the laboratory of fascism (though underwritten and armed by Biden’s Democratic administration for some 16 months), its terrain devastated by an extreme right-wing government; Gaza offers a clear demonstration of fascism’s capacity to inflict death on a captive people even in the twenty-first century. Gaza is a premonition, a potential future, as we face the globalization of extreme nationalisms, a paradoxical agglomeration of movements and leaders that, on the one hand, glorify their own Nation and the People said to belong to its Soil, and, on the other hand, seek out a perverted form of international solidarity—allies with which to bond, commiserate, and bolster their ideological cause.
This does not mean that the Fascist International cannot be resisted or that its victory is in any sense guaranteed: Its endpoint is far from necessary in any ontological-historical sense. But if its paroxysms of violence are to be avoided, the new fascisms of our age, wherever they may appear, must be resisted with every ounce of our strength and using all peaceful means available to people of good will—as activists and intellectuals, labor unions and political parties, religious groups and NGOs. The Fascist International has the potential to produce untold catastrophes; there can be no compromising with this dark and disturbing force that once again threatens to overshadow the world, now technologically augmented and globalized like never before.