What is Fascism?

© Richard Bolstad 2025

Knowing how to reverse the rise of fascism depends on understanding what it is. This takes care because the very nature of Fascism is to distract us from its actual sources in the past, and from its agenda in the future. The “common sense” view of Fascism is that it starts with brutal dictators who persecute minority groups and commit their countries to expansionist wars. The traditional Marxist view was that Fascism is merely capitalism in decay (a quote attributed without any sources to Vladimir Lenin), defending itself with organised terror against the results of its own collapse. Here I hope to cut through the Gordian knot of “shock tactics” happening in the USA and so many other countries in 2025, and make two key points about Fascism: Firstly, business oligarchs support Fascism when their survival as a group is threatened by major economic crisis such as the Great Depression or the collapse of the world climate. Secondly, the key tactic used by Fascists is to create fear of those who are “Different”.  

Half of all Americans consider Donald Trump’s regime to be a Fascist regime, a charge levied at him by his opponent Kamala Harris in 2024 (Langer and Sparks, 2024). Anna Hostert and Enzo Cicchino in their book “Trump and Mussolini” argue that Trump and the founder of the Fascist movement Benito Mussloini are essentially identical populist leaders who aim to crush their opponents and institute an extreme right wing fusion of business leadership and political dictatorship (Hostert and Cicchino, 2024). In 1939, Jason Stanley’s grandmother and his father fled Berlin, and his mother, separately fled Poland. His grandmother, Ilse Stanley, had devoted her last few years in Nazi germany to secretly securing the release of 412 fellow Jews from concentration camps. At Yale University, Jason became a Professor specialising in the study of Fascism. His books include “How Propaganda Works”, “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them” and “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future”. In March 2025, he himself fled to Toronto Canada, saying that he believed that the United States of America was descending rapidly into Fascism. His final convincer was when Colombia University surrendered to President Trump’s requirements to expel pro-Palestinian protesters and modify its teaching to suit his ideology, and it’s President resigned in obedience to Trump (Leingang, R. 2025). How did this happen in the “heartland of democracy”?

1. Business Oligarchs Support Fascism When Their Survival as a Group is Threatened  

The Rise of the Billionaires: Oxfam is a global charity organization first founded in 1942 by Oxford academics and Quakers to respond to famine. It recently has focused on the structural failures behind world famine. Its Senior Press Officer Lisa Rutherford explains: “In 2024, the number of billionaires rose to 2,769, up from 2,565 in 2023. Their combined wealth surged from $13 trillion to $15 trillion in just 12 months. This is the second-largest annual increase in billionaire wealth since records began. The wealth of the world’s ten richest men grew on average by almost $100 million a day and even if they lost 99 per cent of their wealth overnight, they would remain billionaires…. The global economic system is broken, wholly unfit for purpose as it enables and perpetuates this explosion of riches, while nearly half of humanity continues to live in poverty.” (Rutherford, 2025)

Who Are The Billionaires? : “The report examines unmerited wealth and colonialism, understood as not only a history of brutal wealth extraction but also a powerful force behind today’s extreme levels of inequality. It shines a light on how, contrary to popular perception, billionaire wealth is largely unearned. Oxfam’s analysis finds that 60 per cent of billionaire wealth globally now comes from inheritance, monopoly power or crony connections – between the richest and governments. In the UK, 37 per cent of billionaire wealth is derived from cronyism, 15 per cent from monopolies – both highest among G7 countries – and seven per cent from inheritance. Many of the super-rich, particularly in Europe, owe part of their wealth to historical colonialism and the exploitation of poorer countries. This dynamic of wealth extraction persists today; vast sums of money still flow from the Global South to countries in the Global North and their richest citizens, in what Oxfam describes as modern-day colonialism.” (Rutherford, 2025)

The American Oligarchy Takes Over: Most people assume that the world is run by governments, rather than by businessmen. However, a decade ago, university researchers showed that American government, in particular, had ceased to represent majority opinion in all cases that mattered. “Ten years ago, political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University took an extraordinary data set and a small army of researchers and set out to determine whether America could still credibly call itself a democracy. As case studies, they used 1,800 policy proposals over 30 years, tracking how they made their way through the political system and whose interests were served by the outcomes. For small-d democrats, the results were devastating. Political outcomes overwhelmingly favored very wealthy people, corporations, and business groups. The influence of ordinary citizens, meanwhile, was at a “non-significant, near-zero level.” America, they concluded, was not a democracy at all, but a functional oligarchy.” (Fung and Lessig, 2025) An oligarchy is rule by a small group of people, and in this case refers to the control of those people who can use their money to influence government decisions and obstruct governments from doing what majorities want them to do. This small group are sometimes called Oligarchs, Billionaires, or the 1% (meaning the 1% with the highest annual incomes). Fast forward to 2025 and “And as if on cue, the new president put tech billionaire supporters including Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg front and center at his inauguration and has given Musk previously unimaginable power to dismantle and reshape the federal government through the Department of Government Efficiency. So what does it mean that American oligarchy is now so brazenly out in the open?” (Fung and Lessig, 2025)

The Oligarchy is The Latest Creation of Capitalism Itself: Economics Professor Richard Wolff explains “I’m going to explain it with a simple example because it gets the idea across. Suppose there was a machine, AI, robot, doesn’t matter, that made workers twice as productive as they used to be. So instead of 10 widgets an hour, they could now make 20 widgets an hour. That typical AIG is supposed to allow one person to work the machine and get the output. OK, here’s what happens in capitalism: The capitalist says, oh, great, he buys the machine, fires half his workers because he doesn’t need them anymore because the other half are twice as productive. What does he do with the money that he saves from the half that he fired? He keeps it; more profit for himself. He’s overjoyed. And that’s how he uses the technical breakthrough…. I have taught in business schools. That’s what businessmen and women think their job is, to maximize profit, but that helps the people who earn profit. It doesn’t help the people who live on wages, but they’re the majority. A democratic workplace would make the decisions that are best for the majority. We don’t live in such a system. Capitalism is the enemy of democracy, and it always was.” (Wolff, quoted in Graham and Janis, 2025) As Wolff points out, the Oligarchs do this not because they believe that having even more money will make them happy, but because they believe (correctly) that they need to maximize their profits or else their companies will simply fail and be replaced by others. Often they have a strong supportive belief that they personally are on a mission to help humanity do well, and that they personally are better entrusted with that destiny than other oligarchs.

How and Why The Oligarchy Funded Fascism: In that ten years from the research on American Oligarchy to the rise of Trump and Musk, it became clear to the oligarchs that demands for an end to rising income inequality and a return to the more equitable 1950s-1960s taxation system would stop their dominance as a social group, as a “class”. A “class” is simply a group of people who share common economic interests because of their common relationship to the economic system (Wright, 1996:1). Oxfam’s report in 2025 continued “The UK Government should be prioritising economic policies that bring down inequality and crucially, start supporting higher taxation on the super-rich. Huge sums of money could be raised, to tackle inequality here in the UK and overseas and provide crucial investment for our public services. For the first time, with the groundbreaking G20 agreement to cooperate on taxing the world’s super-rich, there is genuine momentum to implement fairer taxation globally.” (Rutherford, 2025) It was in the USA that the Billionaire class made its move. “Facing a threat to their wealth, billionaires mobilized to an unprecedented degree. As Bonica outlines, back in 2008, donations over $10 million made up just 4 percent of contributions for Republican campaigns. But in 2024, they made up fully 56 percent—and of a much larger pie. Those mega-donors paid just $58 million in 2008, but last year they paid $2.472 billion, almost two and a half times what they spent in 2020. Elon Musk by himself accounted for more than a tenth of that money (Wright and Leeds-Mathews, 2025), and much more than that if you include his purchase of Twitter as a political act. Without this money, Trump likely would not have won.” (Cooper, 2025)

Hitler’s Billionaires: David de Jong, author of the book “Nazi Billionaires”, explains how a different sequence of events happened in 1933 in Germany. The Nazi party took the initiative and appealed to Germany’s largest businessmen to support its campaign, and they did so. Nazi leaders believed that this was crucial in their success, but the Nazis were not prompted by the wealthy industrialists themselves.  After a secret meeting just weeks before the March 5 elections. “Göring opened the topic with a welcome promise of stability. He assured the giants of industry and finance “that with political pacification, [the] domestic economy would also quiet down.” No economic “experiments’’ would be conducted, he said. But to guarantee a favorable climate for business, Hitler’s new coalition had to emerge victorious in the coming election. The Reichstag president got to the main point: the Nazi Party needed money for the election campaign. Because taxpayers’ money and state funds couldn’t be used for political ends, “other circles not taking part in this political battle should at least make the financial sacrifices so necessary at this time.”…. The day after the meeting, February 21, 1933, thirty-five-year-old Joseph Goebbels, who led the Nazi propaganda machine from Berlin as the capital’s Gauleiter (regional leader), wrote in his diary: “Göring brings the joyful news that 3 million is available for the election. Great thing! I immediately alert the whole propaganda department. And one hour later, the machines rattle. Now we will turn on an election campaign. Today the work is fun. The money is there.” Goebbels had started this very diary entry the day before, describing the depressed mood at his Berlin headquarters because of the lack of funds. What a difference twenty-four hours could make.” (de Jong, 2022) Nazi theorists identified their movement with Mussolini’s pre-existing Fascist movement, using the term Hitlerfaschismus, and they shared with Mussolini the belief in the need for extreme authoritarianism and national unity (Eatwell, 1997).

Mussolini’s Corporate State Blueprint: By advocating a “corporate state”, Mussolini (who first coined the term fascism and equated it with “corporatism”) did not mean that business corporations should rule but that the state should be a unitary “body” – a coalition of business organizations, workers’ groups and political organizations. This, for him, is the definition of “Fascism”. Several wealthy business leaders, across the globe, immediately saw the advantages of such a system in terms of business stability: industrialists would not be dependent on democratically elected governments to respect their “needs”, but would participate directly in the government. These leaders of industry fully supported the rise of the Fascist states in words and with their funds. They included American investment bankers (e.g. J.P. Morgan), Oil company leaders (e.g. Torkild Reiber) and Automobile manufacturers (e.g. Henry Ford). “The relationship between American big business and fascist states preceded Rieber’s dealings with Franco and Hitler in the 1930s [Torkild Reiber was chairman of the Texaco Oil board, and in early World War II he ensured a steady supply of both oil and military intelligence about American government actions, to fascist leaders Franco and Hitler]. As far back as the 1920s, businessmen like J.P. Morgan cultivated economic ties with Italian fascist Benito Mussolini when the latter took control of Italy. The perception among business leaders was that Mussolini’s centralized economy provided economic stability, and thus profits for those who traded with him. Early into his administration, even President Franklin Roosevelt expressed admiration for Mussolini’s economic approach. FDR’s first ambassador to Rome, Breckinridge Long, regularly praised Mussolini and his fascist model in dispatches to the president, eliciting some sympathetic statements from the president. … A decade later, American business tycoons thought the same of Hitler. They believed that Hitler had saved Germany from economic ruin and created a booming economy. Henry Ford, a leading American anti-Semite in his time, epitomized the detestable phrase at the time that “you can do business with Hitler” by establishing profitable trade with the Nazis.” (Capshaw 2018)

2. The Key Tactic Used by Fascists is to Create Fear of Those Who Are “Different”

Oligarchs Claim They Are Defending Common People from Those Who Are “Different”: In order to convince ordinary “working people” that Fascism will benefit them, fascists face a challenge: everyday people can see that the oligarchs, the billionaires, the industrialists are not in fact like them. To convince everyday people that the oligarchs are their defenders, fascism offers a range of “common enemies” who are different, and builds on the psychological fear of those who are different, which is activated by economic hardship, pandemics, environmental disasters and wars. These “different people” can include immigrants and refugees, minority ethnic groups and religious groups, gender/sexual minorities and women, and intellectuals and university educated experts (rebranded as “liberals”, “leftists”, “woke”, “the deep state” etc.). The oligarchs are now the people who will defend common people from these enemies. This worked well in the 1930s and it works well in the 2020s. Fascism usually identifies one great leader who is to be trusted more than any other person as the representative of the common people (Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Donald Trump). A good example of Fascist thinking about all this is given in Elon Musk’s famous 2024 interview with Joe Rogan. “During a three-hour interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan released February 28, Musk talked about his deeply held belief in the conspiracy theory that Democrats are working to import as many undocumented immigrants as possible so that they can take over the US government forever. “If they had another four years, they would legalize enough illegals in the swing states to make the swing states not swing states,” Musk told Rogan. “They would just, they would be blue states. Then they would … win the presidential; they’d win the House, the Senate and the presidency.”… “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.” (Wolf, 2025)

The Issues About Those Who Are “Different” Are a Distraction from the Real Issues: The aim of raising this issue about immigrants is not really to protect some “real Americans” though. The American economy will not suddenly boom merely because a million immigrant laborers get sent back to Mexico. The aim is to create fear. Consequently, the fear cannot be countered by any amount of rational evidence proving that undocumented immigrants do not get to vote and overwhelm democracy. This merely increases people’s fear of an “intellectual elite” who are duping them. As we saw above, it is actually Elon Musk himself, and his fellow billionaires, who have overwhelmed democracy. It is they who have been “calling the shots” for several decades in the USA. From Modi’s India to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, from Putin’s Russia to Trump’s USA, fascism is rising (Mason, 2021: 3-77). As in the 1930s, it does not so much declare itself as aiming for a totalitarian government based on terror, as merely aiming to create a male dominated ethno-state, where people can be “free” of the uncomfortable sensitivities of “modern values” such as gender equality and ethnic diversity. Once again, as in the 1930s, it claims to “tell it like it is”, while simultaneously reassuring us that the truth cannot be found in science, in reasoned arguments, or in researched “traditional news media” (what Vladimir Putin calls the “empire of lies” – Putin, 2022, and what Hitler called  “Lügenpresse” and Trump called “fake news” – Snyder, 2017: 73).

Fascism Asks Us to Trust The Great Leaders: Instead of trusting logic, fascism urges us to a primal trust of certain “pure” individuals who “fight for us” in an eternal battle of light against dark. Controlling the stories available in the mainstream media is an essential Fascist task, as Steve Bannon (Trump’s former fascist ally) said: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” (Illing, 2020). Sean Illing points out “Bannon articulated the zone-flooding philosophy well, but he did not invent it. In our time, it was pioneered by Vladimir Putin in post-Soviet Russia. Putin uses the media to engineer a fog of disinformation, producing just enough distrust to ensure that the public can never mobilize around a coherent narrative. In October, I spoke to Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born reality TV producer turned academic who wrote a book about Putin’s propaganda strategy. The goal, he told me, wasn’t to sell an ideology or a vision of the future; instead, it was to convince people that “the truth is unknowable” and that the only sensible choice is “to follow a strong leader.”” Worldwide, Russian propaganda is coordinated through the “troll farm” of the Internet Research Agency (Агентство интернет-исследований) set up by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a more explicit fascist who also ran the Wagner Group army (named after Hitler’s favorite composer). (Zemlianichenko, 2022; Volchek, 2021).

The Post-Truth World: Historian Timothy Snyder wrote one of the many recent warnings about the 21st century rise of fascism, “On Tyranny”. He examines the flood of pro-fascist memes and videos on social media, and explains the importance of deliberate confusion of facts in the rise of all fascist movements, in the 1930s and now. The aim of fascism is not merely to substitute one set of facts for another, but to get people to give up on ever knowing the truth: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle…. Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share. Post-truth is pre-fascism.” (Snyder, 2017: 65, 71)

Post-Truth Reality in the 1930s Fascist Movements: Snyder was far from the first writer to recognize the centrality of “post-truth” to fascism. In the 1930s, Marxists tried desperately to integrate the new phenomenon into their model of classes as the only base of ideology, claiming that democracies and fascism were identical because they both served the bourgeoisie. The Communist International held that liberal or left wing democratic governments were “Social Fascism” and worse than actual Fascism (Mason, 2021: 136). Fascism, meanwhile, had support that was spread across all classes, and it especially presented itself as a movement of working people. The Nazi party was originally called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, in order to appeal to left-wing proletarians, for example. Those who saw fascism more clearly, realized that it could not be explained easily by reference to classes. It plugged into a far more universal human desire to escape rationality, and to embrace a mythological pre-scientific fantasy world. Fascism promised a world that was mythically simple, with good races and evil races, with two clear gender roles, with one religious faith, one people, one nation and one leader (Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer). The same urge that generated the medieval witch hunts generated 20th century fascism. This appeal depends on a specific type of mythology, which we now call “conspiracy theory”. “‘Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines,’ wrote the philosopher Hannah Arendt, ‘totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself’. Arendt understood that the purpose of conspiracy theories is to make people knowingly complicit in irrationalism: to shut them off from facts, analysis and reason, and to create a closed world in which everything makes sense. In the ‘lying world’ created by Nazi propaganda, she wrote, ‘through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations’.” (Mason, 2021: 41). Discussing the rise of fascism in the 2020s, Mason warns “What the fascists were doing, from Brasilia to New Delhi, is mythmaking. … Here it is important to understand that, for fascists, a myth is not a fantasy or superstition, it is a story you can make come true by believing in it hard enough, and centering your life around it.” (Mason, 2021: 20)

The Fear of Freedom: The last time fascism rose, in the 1930s, psychology was in its infancy, and Freudian psychotherapy offered the most popular way of understanding human non-rational impulses. “In the 1920s, key figures from the Freudian movement gravitated towards Marxism. Wilhelm Reich, one of Freud’s star pupils, joined the KPD in 1930 and convinced the party to launch an association for Proletarian Sexual Politics (abbreviated to Sex-Pol), which at its height had 40,000 members. Erich Fromm, another Freudian psychiatrist, joined the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (commonly known as the Frankfurt School) to head up a research program into working-class attitudes to fascism. Reich and Fromm made real-time attempts both to theorize fascism and to fight it. Both asked questions that begin at the point where Gramsci ends: exactly how does pro-capitalist ideology seep into the minds of individual people?” (Mason, 2021: 179). The Freudians proposed that it was the fear of freedom, especially the fear of sexual freedom, that engaged popular support for fascism. This explains why modern fascists are obsessed with stopping gender diversity and rolling back women’s rights. Announcing his “special military operation” against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin said the West “sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes that they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.” (Putin: 2022) This statement reveals, in its very avoidance of direct language about issues such as women’s right not to be beaten by men, and about legalization of homosexuality, that the Freudian critique was on track. Putin’s speech reveals, in what it cannot say, a fear of even mentioning the freedoms that must be stopped.

Recognizing the Shift of Attention is The First Step to Challenging Fascism: The rise of Fascism is the preceded by the rise of fake issues about gender diversity, immigrant contamination of our “pure” culture, and fear of intellectuals who are hiding the danger under their “woke” calls for “empathy”. As many of your former friends swing to support Fascism, you will hear them buying into blaming the “left” or “liberals” or the “woke” or the “deep state”. You will hear them voicing their fear of reverse discrimination by women, non-whites, indigenous peoples, LGBTQIA+ people, non-Christians and others. The first step is to get absolutely clear about the bottom lines in the rise of Fascism, without which it would not be happening:

  1. Business oligarchs support Fascism when their survival as a group is threatened by major economic crisis such as the Great Depression or the collapse of the world climate systems.
  2. The key tactic used by Fascists to gain mass support is to evoke fear of those who are “Different”.  

Understanding this enables us to stop feeling overwhelmed by the illusory complexity of the situation, the sense that this is a war of all against all, that all we need is to stop arguing and find “middle ground”. I believe that what we need instead is to be clear on where the real argument needs to take place; and to be clear on the collective emotional trauma that allows us to be distracted and which needs to heal so we can see this real issue more easily.

Civilization Collapse and Transformation: As a historian, I can assure you that every civilization creates a level of complexity that reaches limits and then collapses. There are no exceptions (Tainter, 1988). Capitalism with its current Oligarchic dynamic is not an exception, but a classic case. Gaya Herrington analysed predictions from 1972, in the light of statistics up to 2020, and showed that our current global civilization is on track with those 1972 predictions for a scenario of declining food and industrial production, leading to civilization collapse in the 2040s. The coming collapse is not, it should be emphasized, due to a global pandemic, war, or economic downturn per se, although our increasing inability to manage those events is characteristic of the actual causes of collapse. Permanent growth is not intrinsically sustainable, and avoiding collapse would require a dramatic new source of energy and/or living space, and/or a dramatic simplification of lifestyle in this civilization (including limits on population expansion). While those things are possible, there is no evidence in the last 50 years of any changes large enough to preserve civilization (Herrington, 2021). Inequality, in particular is rising, and Kevin MacKay points out that this is a key indicator of impending civilization collapse (MacKay, 2017). Motesharrei et alia argue that the interaction between ruling elites and ruled populations follows the same dynamic as any predator-prey biological system – over time the predators will rise and consume so many of the prey that the prey population collapses, followed by the predator population, and that allows prey numbers to rebuild. It is a gruesome mathematical calculation, that suggests that our civilization is coming to an end. They point out that new technology does not always create a reset, because it may in fact be diverted into increased consumption by the elite itself. This is what we see with the rapid development of space flight and internet technology in our time, feeding an ever smaller group of billionaires. They conclude “Given economic stratification, collapse is very difficult to avoid and requires major policy changes, including major reductions in inequality and population growth rates. Even in the absence of economic stratification, collapse can still occur if depletion per capita is too high. However, collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion.” (Motesharrei, 2014). Ultimately, the collapse of civilization is not the most horrific historical event: it refers mainly to the collapse of the elite that have become predators in that system. The most horrific event is what the rulers of civilization are prepared to do to stop losing their power in a collapse. Fascism is an attempt to stop the inevitable collapse of a system of extreme inequality and world-plundering. History tells us that it will not succeed.

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