What Is Post-Fascism?
4th April 2026
The influential philosopher Jason Stanley, until now a professor at Yale, will—together with renowned European historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore—leave that elite US university for Canada’s Munk School at the University of Toronto.[1] This, says Stanley, protests Trump, who harasses universities with accusations of antisemitism and coerces them with financial threats. When asked whether he would speak of the present-day US in terms of “fascist conditions,” Stanley’s answer was equally succinct and definite: “Yes, of course.” He sees no other, more fitting concept: “Trump is a fascist. His movement is fascist.”
But things are not quite so clear, as the testimony of one of the leading researchers on fascism shows. Robert Paxton, a professor at Columbia University and decades-long luminary of comparative-historical research, stresses that Trump, in contrast to historical fascists, neither wants a strong welfare state nor commands uniformed paramilitaries: “this is not the style of Americans.” Most German historians agree. They are not very visible in comparative fascist studies, since they reference Nazism above all else and often compare the present with Hitler’s dictatorship. Unsurprisingly, this method reveals more differences than similarities. Opposing such a national fixation, David Remnick, editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, put it with inimitable sharpness: “Hitler ruined fascism.”
Many historians consider the term “fascism” to have become vague and worn out by polemical overuse, for example in the GDR or the student movement. Leading intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas see few similarities between the present situation and historical fascism because “no uniformed marching columns” accompany right-wing populism today. The fact that Trump or Meloni do not indulge in the celebration of war or the use of paramilitary violence is, indeed, one of the best arguments against the choice of this term. Nevertheless, even Jürgen Habermas is by no means certain of his judgment, having seen in the new right-wing populism of 2016 the “breeding ground for a new fascism.”
The thing is that ‘fascism’, however defined, has more in common with the Left than with the Right—Mussolini began as, and always claimed to be, a socialist, and Hitler’s party had that right in its name. The only substantive difference (and, as we all know, small differences can lead to the worst fights) is between nationalist socialism and internationalist socialism.