Tamás and Post-Fascism

There is a tendency to associate the term ‘fascism’ with excessive political violence, authoritarianism, and ethnic cleansing. Fascism became a foe of organised Western capitalism when Hitler’s imperialist ambitions began to threaten and potentially destabilise the existing powers, seeking occupation and conquest throughout Europe. Once historical fascism had served its purpose, then, it was thrown into the dustbin of history by the powerful who once relied on it.

The objectives of post-fascism, to Tamás, remain still similar to the role of twentieth-century fascism — to prevent a workers’ revolution and the ascension to power of socialist movements, especially in Central and Eastern Europe — but the differences are crucial. Post-fascism does not need to share the lethal characteristics of its predecessor, especially in terms of political clichés like eugenics or empire-building. For today’s post-fascists, the ultra- imperialist rhetoric of classical fascists like Mussolini and Franco may seem ridiculous; and post-fascist figures like Viktor Orbán even articulate anti-war oppositional sentiment (hence Hungary’s ardent support for ending the Ukraine War, albeit on Putin’s terms). Unlike neo-fascist movements, which are defined by a nostalgic sentiment for classical fascism’s ideological bugbears and aesthetic preferences, post-fascism is keenly attuned to twenty-first-century needs, broadly presenting itself as a reactionary attempt to protect national identities and nation-states with strong anti-globalisation rhetoric.

Another key difference between classical fascists and post-fascists is that the latter no longer present themselves as the subversive opposition to hegemonic liberalism. They do not — not even in rhetoric — flirt with ideas about radical breaks with established social norms, wiping out democracy, or employing totalitarian terror; instead, they demand stronger nationalist governments. Post-fascists have shifted their focus to national identity and identity politics with well-articulated attempts to exclude immigrants and other marginalised people — in Tamás’ words, to ‘reverse the Enlightenment tendency to assimilate citizenship to the human condition’ — and with hostility to a general sense of universal citizenship among different peoples.

This is why, for most post-fascist forces, the undocumented, the underclasses, homeless people, immigrants, and refugees have all become the enemy: the aim is to remove from society those who are deemed uncivilised or subhuman. Being ‘expelled from citizenship’, to Tamás, meant ‘quite literally — exclusion from humanity’.

The Flourishing Disease

Today, demonstrations of Tamás’ theory can be found in political movements across the world. Alongside Donald Trump’s Project 2025, post-fascism can be easily identified in the manoeuvres of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Georgia Meloni and the Fratelli d’Italia, and more. All these political forces can be characterised by xenophobia, anti- immgration policies, Islaophobia, and modern-nationalist tendencies like femonationalism and homonationalism.

In a clear break from the past, women are leading fascist movements — an unimaginable phenomenon even three decades ago. With Marine Le Pen and Georgia Meloni rising to power, post-fascist women are helping to remould the boundaries of the political centre in Europe and offering a break from traditional conceptions of fascist masculinity in their daily machinations. Figures like Le Pen and Orbán explicitly integrate femonationalism — the weaponisation of the struggle for women’s liberation against ‘others’ — into their narratives; in his most recent address to the European Parliament in October 2024, Orbán claimed that ‘illegal immigration is the cause of rising antisemitism, violence against women, and homophobia across Europe’.

This narrative is key, in particular, to the dehumanisation of Muslims — and, with increasing focus, Palestinians — across the West; the narrative can also be found in the phenomenon of the failed German politician Karoline Preisler, a Free Democratic Party figure who recently claimed that Israel’s existence as a ‘constitutional state’ exonerates its war crimes (including the mass rape of Palestinian prisoners). There is probably no more obvious an expression of contemporary post-fascist sentiment than this. It reminds one of how the Holocaust was not preceded by legal condemnation, since the German system had essentialised the fascist idea that some people were simply inferior.

As these barbaric sentiments are aired with a growing confidence by Europe’s right-wing political elites, citizenship of a European country is unsurprisingly becoming a more and more disputed privilege. People in search of survival and safe havens are neglected, thrown into detention camps, or left to die in the Mediterranean. The very humanity of these people is undermined by the media and political class alike, who simply refer to them as ‘migrants’.

This notion — of excluding swathes of humanity from communal concerns — was always key to Tamás’ vision of what a realistic fascism today could look like. To him, post-fascism ‘does not need to put non-citizens onto freight trains to take them to death’. Instead, ‘it need only prevent the new non-citizens from boarding any trains that might take them into the happy world of overflowing rubbish bins that could feed them’. In other words, there is a fundamental difference between the concerns of fascisms old and new; as Western states introduce even harsher conditions for citizenship, visas, and residence and work permit applications in order to prevent a mass influx of people from impoverished parts of the world, new political bonds are also forming.

There is no clearer example of this than countries such as Germany, where the German state has threatened immigrants who demonstrate against the genocide in Palestine with imprisonment and deportation. At the time of writing, German politicians are mooting the idea that immigrants should adopt ‘German attitudes towards Israel’ — which merely means unflinching support for the military destruction of an entire people — before they can be considered eligible for visas.

In this sense, liberal democracies are doing the job of the fascists for them. Access to citizenship and participation in a nation’s daily life are being leveraged and used as a weapon of punishment and political subjugation against those who will not adhere to state ideology. As the global climate break- down creates more and more refugees, anti-immigration policies will only become stronger talking points; the fearful atmosphere already created has spawned all sorts of racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories and movements. One look at Project 2025 shows the influence of Orbán, with its proposals for even more militarised border policing operations and mass deportation programmes.

In Britain too, where pogromists recently targeted migrants, refugees, and various institutions which exist to both help and hinder them, Tamás’ ideas of the ‘dual state’ — that of a ‘normative state’ for the populations of capitalist centres and a ‘prerogative state’ for non-citizens arriving or fleeing to a country — are evident. These two states of existence and regulation are becoming increasingly clear to people in advanced capitalist democracies. Racist projects like the European Union’s border regime and Israel’s apartheid system represent a field in which fascism can develop and flourish.

The process of ‘fascistisation’ takes places on different levels: in the nation-state, in global capitals, in political parties, in the absence of organised global left-wing anti- fascist resistance — and, of course, in the lack of working-class solidarity and the suppression of unions. Jameson’s ominous statement that this historical condition may turn out to be ours after all seems increasingly valid.