The resistible rise of the modern fascist.

Western liberal democracy is under more stress than at any time in eight decades. But today’s wannabe fascists are more mortal than most of us realise.

The master (left) and his apprentice

There are two ways of describing fascism. The first is the way of the strict scholastic historian: that fascism was a system of politics and government that arose in Europe in the 1920s and was defeated by 1945. In its most extreme form, this formulation even denies that the Nazis fitted the description: the only real fascists were Italian and Hitler was something else. As a way of understanding what’s happening now, it‘s not very helpful.

But fascism can also be seen as a process, not as a finished product but as a movement  heading in that unmistakeable direction. Trump, Putin, Farage, Le Pen, Erdoğan, Maduro, Orbán and Bolsonaro do not fit the first definition but sit comfortably within the second. And we should worry much more about where these simultaneous outbreaks of – yes, fascism – are going, rather than where they are now; because the world has seen all this before.

The pathway to fascism has some recognisable, common elements. There must be a single, charismatic leader in control of everything. Outsiders – migrants, Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, political outcasts – are relentlessly targeted and blamed for the county’s ills. And the promises: once the great leader achieves power, the disaffected mass of ordinary people will bask in the warm sunlight of prosperity and fulfilment. The immigrants will be deported, housing stress will disappear, the economy will be supercharged, prices will fall and the trains will run on time.

It is magical thinking. But there’s a market for magic, particularly when those currently in power just aren’t delivering.

Madeleine Albright, the pre-eminent American diplomat, called her final book Fascism: A Warning.

“I believe that fascism and fascist policies pose a more virulent threat to international freedom, prosperity, and peace than at any time since World War II. I am again drawn to my conclusion that a fascist is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have. Throughout my adult life, I have felt that America could be counted on to put obstacles in the way of any such leader, party or movement. I never thought that, age eighty, I would begin to have doubts.”

The primrose path to fascism

Would-be authoritarian leaders have no prospect of power if democratic governments do a decent job of serving the people. Only when democratic leaders fail, and their electorates sink into despair and anger, does the loudmouth populist stand a chance.

In almost every case, fascist and quasi-fascist leaders who gained power did so by winning an election. The challenge then was to stay there. The usual answer – by being a really good, intelligent and responsive government that delivered on its promises, and standing peacefully aside if the voters later change their minds – is not part of the playbook. Populist authoritarians seldom govern well. Their promises are too implausible to be kept; they have little understanding of the complexities of government administration; and they lack the humility to accept the compromises and the limits to power that are inherent in a complex society.

So, to remain in control without being able to deliver the goods, they must subvert or destroy the democratic system that elected them. The most obvious example of such a work-in-progress is the administration of Donald Trump, but closely similar patterns can be found wherever the rule of liberal democracy gives way to its opposite, and the pathway to fascism opens up.

Trump became president because so many Americans believed the two established parties existed not for them but for rich people: the bankers of Wall Street and the 889 billionaires (and political donors) whose personal wealth equals 25% of the nation’s GDP.

It didn’t help that Hillary Clinton, in the lead-up to the crucial election she was to lose, was paid $US675,000 ($A1,012,500) by Goldman Sachs for three speeches. The arrogance and blind insensitivity, common to both the mainstream forces in both the Democrat and Republican parties, played poorly among hundreds of millions of middle-class and working-class voters who felt, with cause, that politics-as-usual had left them behind. Trump won by default.

Since first becoming president in January 2017, he supercharged the process of suborning the courts which Republicans in Congress had already begun. As places became vacant in the judiciary, new and highly politicised right-wingers were appointed instead. It affected all federal courts but, most detrimentally, it turned the Supreme Court – always politicised but seldom as badly as this – into the judicial wing of the Trump White House.

Despite claiming to stand for ordinary people, Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and the richest individuals have greatly increased the corrosive inequality in income and wealth that propelled him into the presidency. Government programs, like Medicaid and food assistance for the poor, have been gutted. Health insurance premiums surged when Trump dismantled healthcare subsidies.

He has pardoned dozens of criminals (though only his criminals); turned the Department of Justice into a weapon of personal revenge; made billions from cryptocurrency and property deals despite the emoluments clause in the constitution; replaced the heads of crucial agencies, including the FBI, with acolytes of his own; attacked the independent Federal Reserve and will soon replace Jay Powell, the widely-respected chair; overseen the boosting of congressional gerrymandering, revoking security for people he doesn’t like, including his former Vice-President Mike Pence and his former National Security Adviser, John Bolton; stopped enforcing the Corporate Transparency Act; closed the FBI’s public corruption squad; used National Guard troops to occupy cities governed by the Democratic Party; fired the head of the national statical agency because he didn’t like the jobs figures; pressured television networks to cancel satirical talk shows he didn’t like.

And so on.

“Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount,” said Winston Churchill. “And the tigers are getting hungry.”

Donald Trump knows that well. So does that quintessential Trump whisperer, Steve Bannon. “Seize the institutions,” he has said repeatedly. “Seize them and purge them.”

Those institutions of government are the essential elements of a free society. The constitution. The rule of law. Checks and balances on power. The armed forces, the courts and the congress, the media, and the public service: seize them all.

“And I will tell you right now, as God is my witness, if we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison – myself included,” Bannon told supporters at a conservative event in Washington.

“And what do we have to counter it with? We have to counter it with more action, more intense action, more urgency. We’re burning daylight. If you look across every aspect of this, we have to codify what President Trump has done by executive order.

“We have to understand that if we don’t take this to the maximum—a maximalist strategy now, with a sense of urgency, and in doing this, seize the institutions—if we don’t do that now, we lose this chance forever,” Bannon said. “Because you’re never gonna have another Trump.”

But if the 22^nd amendment of the US constitution prevails – it forbids anyone serving as president for more than two terms – Trump will be out the door on 20 January 2029, never to return. But he and his acolytes say they are developing a plan to stay. And stay. And stay.

 “I haven’t really thought about it” he said. “But I have the best poll numbers I’ve ever had.” “I would love to do it,”

Bannon is more certain. “Well he’s going to get a third term. So, Trump ’28, Trump is going to be president in ‘28 and people ought to just get accommodated with that,” he told The Economist. “There’s many different alternatives,” Bannon said when asked about the 22nd Amendment. “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is.”

But holding onto power forever is tough, even when you gain almost complete control of those institutions of government and of society. That’s the difficulty being faced right now by two of the most entrenched neofascist leaders: Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Studying how they hold onto power, despite a strong oppositions and majorities of citizens who want them gone, shows us ow fascism works in the modern world.

But can they govern?

Fascists and wannabe fascists are advancing so strongly in so many places that it’s easy to forget how vulnerable they really are. And their greatest vulnerability is their plain ineptitude at governing. When they finally get into power, they are the dog that caught the car.

Some, when first in power, appear to increase general prosperity and take measures – often against immigrants – that win favour. But typically, those early measures, such as providing subsidies and generous, unfunded welfare payments, store up trouble for later. When Hugo Chávez first became president of Venezuela in 1999, he made the judiciary more independent but soon, as rulings went against him, packed the bench with cronies. He purged the bureaucracy, replacing independent and inquisitive public servants with  sycophants. He revoked the operating licences of radio and television stations that broadcast criticism of the government.

“He did all he could to tilt the political process in his favour , but that is not the only reason he won election after election – four in all,” wrote Madelaine Albright. “He had the luck of a divided opposition, and also of high oil prices, which allowed him to make good on many of his promises. During his tenure, his countrymen received better health care than before and ate more, paid less for gasoline and cooking oil, earned higher wages, and could afford never apartments. Just as important, Chávez allowed Venezuelans to feel that they were an integral part of the country.”

But the good times did not last. By spending so freely, Chávez and his lieutenants set themselves up for the bad times which, when they came, they could not handle.

“Chávez wasted enormous sums of money on projects that tripped over themselves because he failed to appreciate the need for expertise in running an oil company, a business, a farm or a justice system. A leader can become popular by compelling supermarkets and appliance salesmen to charge less for their products but the cheering stops when the stores go out of business and food disappears from the shelves.”

“Look at the mess we’re in with all these experts,” said Trump. He, Chávez and Hitler all thought they knew better. They were wrong.

When Chávez died in 2013 his lieutenant, Nicolás Maduro, took over. The new man had all of Chávez’s faults and none of his virtues, but his special skill was staying in power. He’s still there, presiding over a country which once had hope and wealth, but which is now in tatters. Venezuela is a classic banana republic, only with oil instead of fruit. It sits on vast reserves of oil and, when prices were high, the government partied. When prices fell, the long hangover kicked in.

Norway, flush with the riches of North Sea oil, realised that the oil would one day run out, so in 1990 it set up a sovereign wealth fund to bank some of the profits. That fund now holds $US2.1 trillion, an amount equal to 1.5% of the market value of all the world’s listed companies.

Chávez and Maduro didn’t do that. Between 2014 and 2021, the Venezuelan economy shrank by three-quarters. By 2018, inflation soared to over 130,000%. Life savings were wiped out, businesses went bust and the currency became worthless. It still is, even though inflation has since moderated. According to the International Monetary Fund, it’s now at only 270%.

The presidential election in 2024 was clearly won by the opposition but the results were fixed. What followed was a level of repression and cruelty remarkable even for South America.

“Protests following the announcement of the results of the presidential election in July were violently repressed with excessive use of force and possible extrajudicial executions,” reported Amnesty International. “Thousands of arbitrary arrests were carried out against political opponents, human rights defenders and journalists; hundreds of children were among those detained. Detainees including women and children were allegedly tortured. Detention conditions continued to deteriorate. Impunity prevailed for human rights violations.”

There have been many extra-judicial killings: just how many is not known.

This, then, is the archetype of the progress from democratic election to fascism: election, initial success, prolonged failure, repression and mass murder.

Often, fortunately, the cycle is incomplete. Donald Trump went straight to failure without passing success. He is giving repression his best shot but things keep getting in the way, like the law and the constitution. His chances of retaining an obedient congress after the 2026 mid-terms seems increasingly remote, and his chances of a third term are pure fantasy.

Viktor Orbán is knocking on the door of the final stage of perfect fascism but, unlike Maduro, doesn’t have the military or the police onside. In the end, in even the most liberal states, ultimate power grows (as Chairman Mao thoroughly understood) out of the barrel of a gun. If you don’t have the guns, you don’t get the ultimate power.

The tigers are getting hungry

About one important thing, Donald Trump was right. The Deep State is real.

“If you put me back in the White House, their reign is over – and they know it,” he told a conservative conference in 2023. “I will totally obliterate the Deep State. I will fire the unelected bureaucrats and shadow forces who have weaponized our justice system like it has never been weaponized before.”

The Deep State, as Trump calls it, consists of the countervailing forces which protect liberal democracy, the constitution and the rule of law. It is the courts, the professionals in agencies like the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, independent media like The New York Times, public broadcasters, law enforcement agencies like the FBI, and the universities.

But even if he succeeded in obliterating these forces of law and democracy, remaining in power would be more difficult than he seems to think. The democratic impulse is by no means universal, but where it exists it can run very deep. This is the lesson now being learnt by Viktor Orbán in Hungary.

In 2022, Orbán and his Fidesz party won another landslide election, maintaining a supermajority in Hungary’s parliament that allows him to change the constitution as he wishes.

Kim Lane Scheppele, a Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University, has worked on Hungarian constitutional law since the 1990s. In a 2022 article in the Journal of Democracy, she explains how Orbán has remained in power despite a crashing economy and soaring unpopularity:

“In 2022, victory seemed not only possible but probable. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, Fidesz had won parliamentary supermajorities with less than half the vote. Orbán’s victories could be chalked up partly to social-benefits giveaways before each election and partly to campaigns of fear against migrants and cosmopolitans. But much of Orbán’s electoral success results from an election system crafted to ensure that any division in the opposition automatically generates supermajorities for the ruling party. In 2022, with the opposition united across the political spectrum and running neck and neck with Fidesz in the polls for more than a year, it finally seemed that Orbán could actually lose.

“Against all predictions, however, Orbán had his biggest election triumph yet. On the eve of the election, polls had put Fidesz at about 5 percentage points ahead of the opposition, within the margin of error. Yet Orbán came out 20 points ahead on election day, winning 83 percent of the single-member districts and 54% of the party-list vote. Orbán did not just retain his two-thirds majority in parliament – he now has a comfortable cushion with 68% of the seats. With the worst opposition showing since the fall of the Berlin Wall, [opposition] United for Hungary members are trying to figure out what path might lie ahead given that four more years of autocracy are in store.”

But Orbán’s grip on power is loosening. One embarrassing instance came when, early in 2025, he banned the annual Gay Pride March in Budapest. The ban was a fiasco for the government: somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people took part in a very upbeat, joyful celebration. It was also a powerful protest against a tyrannical and out-of-touch government.

Another election is due in 2026, most probably in April. This time, the opposition is less divided, with most support going to the centre-right Tirza party, running for the first time. Under its young and charismatic leader, Péter Magyar, it has surged in the polls to what would – in a more normal situation – be an election-winning lead.

The other opposition parties have slumped, with almost all their support going to Tirza. According to the Politico average at the beginning of November, five parties have between one and six per cent. These range from the far-right Our Homeland party to the Socialists and Greens. Somewhere in the middle is the Two-Tailed Dog party (4%), running on a platform of free beer, eternal life and siestas for all.

For the first time in many years, there is a much better-than-even chance that Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” will be replaced by a more recognisable form of democracy.

Orbán’s trouble is that, unlike Maduro, he does not have the guns – the bulk of the armed  forces and the police – on his side. Hungary’s electoral system is rigged, but it still functions, and it would take an armed coup to keep Fidesz in power if they lost an election.

Hungary’s fascist tendencies also suffer from the country’s membership of the European Union. Already, most payments from the EU have been frozen, costing – in its most recent tranche – € 1.04 billion, bringing the total amount of foregone money to more than €28 billion.

Europe’s wannabe fascists

In three of the world’s most crucial democracies – Britain, France and Germany – far-right authoritarians are in an apparent ascendancy, leading their centrist rivals.

On closer examination, the figures are a little less alarming. In the 2024 parliamentary elections in France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally finished third, behind both the leftist New Popular Front and Emanuel Macron’s Ensemble.

In Britain, the lead by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is fragile and probably evanescent. Its weakness has been on show in Wales, where the party thought it would win a by-election in the former Labour stronghold of Caerphilly. The polls were right about Labour, which did very poorly. But voters in this working-class constituency transferred their allegiance not to Farage’s populists but to the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru, on 47.4%. Reform got 36% and Labour, with 11%, was humiliated.

Labour, having triumphed in the 2024 general election with 412 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, has unambiguously failed the people who had such confidence in it. But Reform lacked the organisational capacity – the ground game – to translate polling results into actual votes.

Since local government elections in May 2024, when they won control 10 local authorities, stories of chaos and occasional corruption have abounded: five in a single council in Cornwall, including the party’s leader in the county.

Labour is in the doldrums. Keir Starmer’s uninspiring, out-of-touch leadership may be in its terminal phase. But a new election is not due until August 2029; and if a week is a long time in politics, four years is even longer.

In Germany support for the insurgent quasi-fascist Alternative für Deutschland is concentrated almost entirely in the former East Germany.

The most recent Bundestag election results show the stark divide between east and west. AfD won a state election – Thuringia, in 2024 – but remains in opposition because the other parties refuse to join it in coalition. There has been a far-right resurgence in Germany, and it is sensible to be concerned about it. But the fear that Germany may once again fall into fascist rule is fanciful.

In its heartlands, democracy lives

Of all the nations we have looked at, only two – Venezuela and Russia – have achieved a state of fascism in its full and final form. In both cases, guns were the key: both Putin and Maduro have control of the armed forces. Other leaders do not.

Unless ultimate force can be deployed to keep an unpopular leadership in power, those leaders will eventually fall. Even distorted electoral systems cannot protect them forever.

Nevertheless, authoritarian leaders can inflict enormous damage during their years in power. Even if they face ultimate political mortality, economies and societies can be wrecked, and recovery may take decades, if recovery occurs at all.

The most significant lesson is that to achieve supremacy, they must first win an election. That will happen only if more democratic parties fail so dismally at their fundamental job of creating a just and decent society that their people succumb to the loud and hollow promises of scoundrels like Trump, Farage, Le Pen and Orbán. Wherever the quasi-fascist far right is ascendant, it is because mainstream politics has failed.

Over almost half a century, the peoples of the western democracies have seen their societies become ever more unequal, with the riches of neoliberal economics and globalisation either going offshore or spiralling upwards to the few who seem to control all the levers. Right now, the indispensable task of democratic leaders is to reverse that trend. The cost of not doing to is too big to countenance.

Western democracy is under more pressure than at any time since the 1930s and 1940s. Back then, getting rid of Hitler and Mussolini cost 40 million lives. It is a lesson humanity cannot afford to ignore.