The question of fascism’s historical character—whether it represents a distinctly modern phenomenon or a regression from liberal-democratic civilization—remains central to political theory. While some scholars have argued that fascism constitutes an “alternative modernity,” it is, in fact, a modernized re-feudalization of politics: the abandonment of the rule of law and equal citizenship in favor of hierarchy, personal loyalty, and state coercion characteristic of pre-liberal orders. This interpretation finds its clearest articulation in the work of Piero Gobetti, the Italian liberal theorist writing during fascism’s consolidation. For Gobetti, fascism represented “the autobiography of the nation,” not an external imposition but the self-revelation of a society that had failed to achieve a genuine liberal political culture and instead chose “paternal guardianship” over the responsibilities of liberal citizenship.^[1] Where the liberal state had promised free political contest and self-government, fascism substituted what Gobetti termed a “banal revival of patriarchalism,” with “the genius of the race” producing “the legendary figure of the condottiere leading his band, imposing paternal discipline on the restless serfs.”^[2] This evocative imagery—the condottiere, the serf, paternal discipline—deliberately invokes medieval political relations to characterize fascism’s essential regression. The fascists’ “hatred of politics” and preference for “practical economic adaptation,” Gobetti argued, represented “the worst symptom of the decadence of our customs,” a longing for “the repose of the Middle Ages.”^[3] Understanding fascism through this lens illuminates both its novelty and its reaction against the emancipatory trajectory of modern citizenship.

The re-feudalization thesis is not confined to interwar Europe. The second Trump administration exhibits, in compressed and accelerating form, each structural feature this essay identifies in classical fascism: the hollowing of the normative state through presidential immunity doctrine and the purging of career civil servants via Schedule F; the replacement of equal citizenship with hereditary categories of belonging through challenges to birthright citizenship and mass denaturalization; the colonization of public authority by unelected oligarchs operating without constitutional mandate, most visibly in the Department of Government Efficiency; the feudalization of administration into competing personal fiefdoms dependent on the leader's favor rather than institutional procedure; and the mobilization of a downwardly mobile petty bourgeoisie whose populist resentments are channeled, upon consolidation of power, into the service of concentrated capital. The instruments differ (algorithmic manipulation replaces the radio address, executive orders replace enabling acts), but the political grammar is the same: personal rule over impersonal law, the condottiere over the citizen.

This interpretation runs counter to a substantial body of scholarship that situates fascism firmly within modernity rather than against it. Jeffrey Herf's influential concept of “reactionary modernism” identified a tradition among Weimar conservative intellectuals (Jünger, Spengler, Schmitt, Sombart) who reconciled enthusiasm for modern technology with rejection of Enlightenment rationality, producing what Goebbels called a "steel-like romanticism of the twentieth century."^[4] Roger Griffin, whose earlier analysis of fascism's palingenetic nationalism and charismatic instability informs much of the present essay, extended this line of argument in his later work to claim that fascism was itself a species of modernism: a revolutionary bid to forge an "alternative modernity" driven by the same impulse toward transcendence and cultural regeneration that animated the aesthetic avant-garde.^[5]Emilio Gentile traced Italian Fascism's roots to a "modernist nationalism" launched by Futurist artists and intellectuals, emphasizing the regime's embrace of modernist architecture, mass media, welfare-state mechanisms, and urban renewal as evidence of a genuinely forward-looking political project.^[6] These scholars point to real features of fascist regimes—their technological ambition, their mass mobilization, their aesthetic experimentation—that any serious analysis must account for.

The re-feudalization thesis does account for them, but it insists on a distinction that the "fascist modernism" paradigm collapses: the distinction between a regime’s instruments and its political substance. That fascism deployed modern technology, exploited mass media, and mobilized populations through sophisticated propaganda does not make it politically modern any more than a feudal lord equipped with a telegraph becomes a liberal constitutionalist. The political content of fascist governance—personal rule displacing impersonal law, charismatic authority supplanting bureaucratic procedure, corporatist hierarchy replacing equal citizenship, guilt attaching to status rather than action—is structurally pre-modern regardless of the apparatus through which it operates.

As Thomas Rohkrämer has argued, the actual Nazi regime was less systematically technocratic than the Weimar intellectuals who supposedly prefigured it, because Nazi governance was organized around personal loyalty and competing fiefdoms rather than rationalist planning.^[7] Even Griffin’s own earlier work supports this reading: his demonstration that fascism’s dependence on charismatic authority rendered it incapable of institutional routinization or orderly succession points to a regime form that had not advanced beyond pre-modern personalism except for modern means of enforcement.

The Erosion of the Rule of Law and the Rise of Arbitrary Power

The central achievement of liberal-democratic governance—the subordination of political power to impersonal legal norms—was the primary target of fascist transformation. If fascism indeed represents a modernized re-feudalization, then its most characteristic feature must be the displacement of the rule of law by a system of personal rule in which the leader’s will constitutes the sole legitimate authority. Fascist regimes systematically dismantled the normative architecture of liberal constitutionalism, replacing due process with arbitrary power, legal procedure with personal loyalty, and limited government with unlimited coercion—all features of a pre-modern political order.

The most analytically productive framework for understanding this transformation is the German legal scholar Ernst Fraenkel’s concept of the “dual state,” which has proven indispensable to subsequent scholarship. As Robert Paxton explains, Fraenkel identified within the Nazi regime two coexisting yet antagonistic structures: a “normative state,” composed of the legally constituted authorities and the traditional civil service that continued to apply law according to established procedures, and a “prerogative state” formed by the party’s parallel organizations, in which “no rules applied except the whim of the ruler, the gratification of party militants, and the supposed ‘destiny’ of the Volk.”^[8] This coexistence gives a fascist regime its distinctive character, what Paxton terms “its bizarre mixture of legalism and arbitrary violence.”^[9]

The crucial dynamic, however, was not equilibrium but encroachment. Over time, the prerogative state steadily colonized the normative state, contaminating its operations with emergency exceptions until the perception of national crisis allowed the regime to override individual rights and due process at will.^[10] Hitler never formally abolished the Weimar Constitution, yet he refused to be bound by it, declining, for instance, to have a euthanasia law drafted for fear of having his hands tied by rules and bureaucracy.^[11] After the 1933 Reichstag fire, the invocation of “Marxist terror” gave Hitler authority to suspend civil liberties as national security seemed to demand. The legal framework remained formally intact while becoming substantively hollow, a shell of constitutional forms emptied of their protective content.

The theoretical architecture of this transformation is most rigorously analyzed in Nicos Poulantzas’s treatment of the fascist state as an “exceptional” form of state. For Poulantzas, the defining characteristic of the exceptional state is that “law, to put it briefly, no longer regulates: arbitrariness reigns.” What distinguishes the fascist state is “not so much that it violates its rules, as that it does not even lay down rules for functioning.”^[12] The system lacks predictability, the capacity to anticipate its own transformations, because juridical regulation presupposes a stable relation of forces, whereas the fascist state emerges precisely from and perpetuates political crisis. Law no longer delimits the boundary between private and public; virtually everything falls within the scope of state intervention, and the familiar distinction between executive, legislative, and judiciary collapses into undifferentiated prerogative power.

The Nazi Führerprinzip (leader principle) institutionalized this transformation. National Socialism systematically refused to regulate the relationships between state apparatuses juridically as “spheres of competence,” producing what appeared as administrative chaos but functioned as deliberate flexibility for autocratic intervention.^[13] The will of the supreme leader was understood as “universal and total, boundless and exclusive” relative to any regulation.^[14] Members of the various hierarchies were supposed to be directly dependent on the supreme leader and whoever might incarnate his will in given circumstances. This arrangement effectively dissolved the vertical isolation of the bureaucratic hierarchy, enabling the dominant apparatus—the fascist political police—to penetrate the others through parallel power networks.

The fascist political police, embodied in the Nazi SS, became the concrete manifestation of re-feudalized authority. As Poulantzas documents, the police were reconceived not as guardians of law but as creators of a new political order. Their interventions were expressly “political” interventions that, as “acts of the Führer,” were explicitly exempted from legal regulations and judicial control.^[15] The very concept of guilt underwent ideological modification: no longer referring primarily to violations of the law, guilt now attached to the “possible enemy”—anyone whose “objective situation,” as determined by arbitrary criteria, posed a threat to the nation and the state. Jews, communists, socialists, homosexuals, and “anti-social elements” were guilty not for what they had done but for what they were. All individuals became subject to unlimited police intervention, expressed in the lack of distinction between public and private.^[16]

This juridical transformation mirrors pre-modern political structures with uncanny precision. When law ceases to regulate, when the leader’s command constitutes the only rule, when guilt attaches to status rather than action, and when subjects face unlimited intervention into every aspect of existence, we have returned—albeit with modern state institutions and post-industrial technology—to the essential features of feudal lordship. The modern citizen possessed of rights reverts to the serf dependent on the lord’s favor. The transformation that fascism accomplished was not the creation of a new modernity but the reconstitution of an old subjection in modern dress: Gobetti’s condottiere imposing paternal discipline on the restless serfs, now equipped with concentration camps and secret police rather than dungeons and feudal levy.

From Equal Citizenship to Corporate Hierarchy

If the erosion of the rule of law marks fascism’s regression from liberal-democratic procedure, the reconstitution of social relations along corporatist lines reveals its substantive vision of the polity. Fascism does not merely dismantle the legal protections of citizenship; it replaces the very concept of equal citizenship with a hierarchical ordering of society in which individuals possess value only insofar as they serve the nation. Fascist corporatism represents a return to medieval forms of social organization—what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci described as the “economic-corporate” phase of political development, “the worst of all forms of feudal society, the least progressive and the most stagnant.”^[17]

The transformation of citizenship under fascism was, as Paxton emphasizes, among “the most fundamental changes in the nature of citizenship and in the relation of citizens to the state since the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”^[18] The founding gesture was the subordination of the individual to the community: whereas the liberal state rested on a compact among citizens to protect individual rights and freedoms, the fascist state embodied national destiny, in service to which all members found their supposed highest fulfillment. This was not merely a quantitative expansion of state power but a qualitative transformation of the citizen-state relationship. Fascism, Paxton notes, “reconfigured relations between the individual and the collectivity, so that an individual had no rights outside community interest.”^[19] The consequences were stark: “In fascist states, individual rights had no autonomous existence. The State of Law—the Rechtsstaat, the état de droit—vanished, along with the principles of due process by which citizens were guaranteed equitable treatment by courts and state agencies.”^[20] A suspect acquitted in a German court could be immediately rearrested at the courthouse door and consigned to a concentration camp without further legal procedure. The practice of citizenship shifts from the enjoyment of constitutional rights and duties to participation in mass ceremonies of affirmation and conformity. Plebiscites are replaced by elections, and the deliberative citizen gives way to the acclaiming subject.

Gobetti grasped the essentially regressive character of this transformation with particular clarity. For Gobetti, the fascist enthusiasm for corporatism—the organization of society into functional groups of producers rather than the horizontal equality of citizens—represented not a bold step toward a new modernity but a flight from the demands of liberal politics. “To invoke a government of producers,” Gobetti wrote, “when in fact proportional representation alone would be marvelously effective in promoting the political contest and the free formation of parties means taking fright at the prospect of liberty and seeking refuge in the medieval consolations of corporatism.”^[21] The fascists’ “hatred of politics because of a preference for literary idyll and practical economic adaptation” constituted for Gobetti “the worst symptom of the decadence of our customs and the softness of the characters who want a return to the repose of the Middle Ages.”^[22]The supposed radicalism of fascist syndicalism masked the rejection of modern political liberty in favor of pre-political forms of social organization.

Fascist corporatism cemented class domination behind an ideological facade of organic national unity. The corporatist element of fascist ideology, Poulantzas argues, drew simultaneously upon two sources: the “utopia of the guild era” of the Middle Ages to which the traditional petty bourgeoisie looked backward, and the interests of big monopoly capital in subordinating lesser capital and suppressing class conflict.^[23] This dual appeal explains the ideological efficacy of corporatism: it addressed the anxieties of the declining middle classes while serving the concrete interests of concentrated capital. The petty bourgeoisie, as Poulantzas observes, “would like to form the basic force, the pillar and mediator of every social construction, using the State and its own ‘participation’ in State corporations to group all social forces together in an ‘authoritarian’ way.”^[24] Yet this corporatist fantasy in fact serves big capital precisely through “the particular repression of class struggle this implies, and by the subordination of medium capital to big capital which it favours.”^[25]

The ideological elements accompanying corporatism further reveal its feudal character. Poulantzas documents how, during the rise of fascism in Germany, the reaction of the big landowners expressed itself in “a resurgence of reactionary feudal romanticism, with the emphasis on the ‘community of the soil’, on ‘ties of personal loyalty’ among the ‘workers on the land’, in short, on a medieval kind of corporatism, extending from the ‘peasantry’ to the entire ‘national community’.”^[26] This corporatist ideal reappeared in fascist ideology proper, fusing with imperialist ideology to produce a distinctive synthesis. The points of collusion between petty-bourgeois and imperialist ideology—personality cults, nationalism, corporatism, anti-democracy, and authoritarianism—all “mainly turn on the role of the State” and reproduce in modern dress the characteristic features of the pre-liberal political order.^[27]

Gramsci’s concept of the “economic-corporate” phase provides the most rigorous theoretical framework for understanding this regression. In Gramsci’s analysis, the economic-corporate level represents the most elementary stage of collective political consciousness, in which a tradesman feels obliged to stand by another tradesman, a manufacturer by another manufacturer, but without consciousness of solidarity across the wider social group.^[28] This phase precedes the properly political moment in which a class recognizes that its interests “can and must become the interests of other subordinate groups too”—the phase of hegemony in which a class achieves ethical-political leadership of society as a whole.^[29] Fascist corporatism deliberately arrested economic development, preventing the emergence of class consciousness that would enable subordinate groups to challenge the existing order.

Italy’s failure to transcend the economic-corporate phase of the medieval communes ultimately paved the way for fascism. According to Gramsci, the communes “were unable to go beyond the corporative phase, feudal anarchy triumphed in a form appropriate to the new situation.”^[30] Fascism’s corporatist reorganization of society thus represented not a break with Italian historical development but its consummation—a return to the fragmented, hierarchical, and stagnant forms of social organization that Italy’s failed liberal revolution had never overcome. The fascist state, far from inaugurating a new epoch, trapped Italian society in a modernized repetition of its medieval past.

Re-Feudalized Leadership: Charisma and Fiefdoms

The structure of fascist governance represents a regression from the modern bureaucratic state to a neo-feudal pattern of personal rule, rival fiefdoms, and charismatic authority. Far from constituting the efficient totalitarian machine of propaganda and popular imagination, fascist regimes operated through what scholars have termed “polyocracy”—a chaotic system of overlapping jurisdictions, competing power centers, and struggles for the leader’s favor that resembles nothing so much as a medieval court.

The theoretical framework for understanding this transformation comes from Max Weber’s typology of legitimate authority. Weber distinguished three pure types: traditional authority, grounded in immemorial custom and hereditary right; legal-rational authority, resting on impersonal rules and bureaucratic procedure; and charismatic authority, based on the extraordinary personal qualities attributed to an individual leader. As Roger Griffin observes, populist ultra-nationalism of the fascist type “repudiates both ‘traditional’ and ‘legal/rational’ forms of politics in favour of prevalently ‘charismatic’ ones in which the cohesion and dynamics of movements depends almost exclusively on the capacity of their leaders to inspire loyalty and action.”^[31] The “political vacuum created by the erosion of traditional politics” and the weak affective hold of liberal systems “created the conditions for sporadic outbursts of ‘charismatic’ energy in which movements headed by leaders endowed by their followers with quasi-magical properties would temporarily replace them on the basis of spontaneous popular consensus.”^[32]

Fascist rule, Paxton emphasizes, “is more nakedly dependent on charisma than any other kind.”^[33] This dependence helps explain the inability of fascist regimes to manage succession—a problem that plagued both Hitler and Mussolini and that points to the fundamentally pre-modern character of fascist authority. The charismatic leader claims “a unique and mystical status as the incarnation of the people’s will and the bearer of the people’s destiny.”^[34] Unlike Stalin, who shared his role as bearer of historical destiny with the Communist Party, enabling succession even through palace intrigues, fascist leaders concentrated legitimacy in their own persons. The result was that “no fascist regime has so far managed to pass power to a successor”—a structural feature that marks fascism’s regression from the impersonal procedures of legal-rational authority to the inherently unstable personalism of charismatic rule.^[35]

The internal consequences of charismatic authority for state organization proved equally significant. Paxton documents how “Hitler allowed party agencies to compete with more traditional state offices, and he named loyal lieutenants to overlapping jobs that pitted them against each other.”^[36] The ensuing struggles “shocked those Germans proud of their country’s traditional superbly trained and independent civil service.”^[37] A young Prussian official initially attracted to Nazism, Fritz-Dietlof Count von der Schulenburg, lamented in 1937 that “the formerly unified State power has been split into a number of separate authorities; Party and professional organizations work in the same areas and overlap with no clear divisions of responsibility.” He feared “the end of a true Civil Service and the emergence of a subservient bureaucracy.”^[38] Paxton notably characterizes this phenomenon as “‘feudal’ struggles for supremacy within and between party and state.”^[39]

This “polyocracy”—rule by multiple relatively autonomous power centers in unending rivalry and tension—has become a central concept in the scholarly analysis of fascist governance. In polyocracy, Paxton explains, “the famous ‘leadership principle’ cascades down through the social and political pyramid, creating a host of petty Führers and Duces in a state of Hobbesian war of all against all.”^[40] The resulting administrative structure was so chaotic that commentators have described the Third Reich as characterized by “institutional anarchy” and, in a phrase that captures the pre-modern resonance of fascist governance, a “bedlam of rival hierarchies.”^[41] The regime’s political apparatus featured “extensive overlapping and duplication of authority as well as corruption and inefficiency”—structural flaws that propaganda concealed but could not remedy.^[42]

Poulantzas provides a structural analysis of the mechanisms underlying this feudal chaos. National Socialism, he observes, “systematically refused to regulate these relationships juridically as ‘spheres of competence,’” producing “an impression of indescribable administrative confusion, in which frictions and contradictions arose between branches and apparatuses of the state system.”^[43] These relationships revolved instead around the Führerprinzip: “The will of the supreme leader was taken to be ‘universal and total, boundless and exclusive,’ relative to any regulation.”^[44] Members of the various state hierarchies “were supposed to be directly dependent on the supreme leader, and whoever might be supposed to incarnate his will in given circumstances.”^[45] This arrangement deliberately broke down the strict principle of bureaucratic hierarchy, enabling any party member to intervene on behalf of the leader’s will, regardless of formal position.

Even in Italy, where Mussolini accorded more power to the normative state than Hitler did, the fascist system contained “important prerogative elements”: its secret police, controlled press, “economic baronies,” and “African fiefdoms, where party chiefs like Italo Balbo could strut and command the life and death of indigenous peoples.”^[46] Mussolini’s relationship with his own party chieftains—the powerful ras who commanded local squadristi—remained a constant struggle to channel their energies without provoking their rebellion. His critics observed that fascist governance “reduced government to personal fiefdoms unable to discuss policy options and choose among them rationally.”^[47]

This pattern of governance—charismatic leadership, competing fiefdoms, personal loyalty over institutional procedure—represents not an innovative form of modern dictatorship but a recurrence of pre-modern political forms. The “feudal aspects of National Socialism,” as Paxton terms them, mark fascism’s regression from the bureaucratic rationalization that Weber identified as the hallmark of modern political development.^[48] Where the liberal constitutional state subordinated power to impersonal law, fascism restored the personal dependence of vassal on lord. Where modern bureaucracy established clear jurisdictional boundaries and predictable procedures, fascism created overlapping authorities competing for favor. The condottiere with his band of followers, the medieval court with its competing factions: these pre-modern forms found their twentieth-century incarnation in the fascist state, equipped with modern technologies of communication, surveillance, and violence, but organized according to principles that liberalism had supposedly consigned to the past.

Coercion and the Loss of Political Autonomy

In remaking societies, fascism enforced its transformations of society through the destruction of independent political organization, the mobilization of petty-bourgeois resentment as a weapon against the working class, and the creation of a new political subject incapable of autonomous action. The re-feudalization of society required not merely institutional change but the production of a new kind of person—one rendered, in Karl Polanyi’s phrase, “unable to function as the responsible unit of the body politic.”^[49]

Leon Trotsky provided the most penetrating analysis of fascism’s social mechanics. In his 1926 address to the Polish Commission of the Communist International’s Executive Committee, Trotsky characterized the Piłsudski coup in terms that illuminated the general logic of fascist movements: “Taken as a whole, the Piłsudski overthrow is the petty bourgeois, ‘plebeian’ manner of solving the burning problems of bourgeois society in its state of decomposition and decline.”^[50] The parallel with Italian fascism was unmistakable: “These two currents indubitably possess common features: they recruit their shock troops first of all from the petty bourgeoisie; Piłsudski as well as Mussolini worked with extraparliamentary means, with open violence, with the methods of civil war; both were concerned not with the destruction but with the preservation of bourgeois society.”^[51] The crucial point was the trajectory of these movements: “While they raised the petty bourgeoisie on its feet, they openly aligned themselves, after the seizure of power, with the big bourgeoisie.”^[52]

Trotsky’s analysis drew an instructive historical parallel. Just as Jacobinism had been “the plebeian method of settling accounts with the feudal enemies of the bourgeoisie” during its revolutionary ascent, so fascism represented the bourgeoisie’s need, “in the period of the decline of bourgeois society,” for “the ‘plebeian’ method of resolving its no longer progressive but entirely reactionary tasks.”^[53] Fascism was thus “a caricature of Jacobinism”—a sham rebellion that mobilized popular energies not for liberation but for repression.^[54] The outcome of this process was grimly predictable: “Thus the petty bourgeoisie’s idol of yesterday becomes transformed into the gendarme of capital.”^[55]

The mechanisms of this transformation deserve close attention. At the moment when “the ‘normal’ police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium—the turn of the fascist regime arrives.”^[56] Through the fascist movement, Trotsky observed, “capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat—all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.”^[57] These forces served as the instrument for a comprehensive assault on independent political organization: “From fascism the bourgeoisie demands a thorough job; once it has resorted to methods of civil war, it insists on having peace for a period of years. And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job.”^[58]

The result was the total subordination of all organs of social life to concentrated capital. After fascism’s victory, Trotsky observed, “finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive, administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the cooperatives.”^[59] The destruction was comprehensive: “first of all for the most part that the workers organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat.”^[60]

Karl Polanyi approached the same phenomenon from a different analytical tradition but reached convergent conclusions. For Polanyi, fascism emerged as a response to the structural crisis of liberal capitalism—the inability of self-regulating markets to coexist with democratic politics. “The fascist solution of the impasse reached by liberal capitalism,” he wrote, “can be described as a reform of market economy achieved at the price of the extirpation of all democratic institutions, both in the industrial and in the political realm.”^[61] The capitalist economic system, endangered by democratic interference, would be revitalized, but only by destroying the political capacities that had enabled it.

The deeper transformation, however, concerned not institutions but persons. Fascism subjected populations to “a reeducation designed to denaturalize the individual.”^[62] Polanyi’s choice of the term “denaturalize” is significant: fascism did not merely constrain individual action but fundamentally altered the individual’s capacity for autonomous political existence. The product of fascist reeducation was a subject incapable of the independent judgment and responsible citizenship that liberal democracy presupposed.

This reeducation took the form of what Polanyi termed a “political religion”—one that “denied the idea of the brotherhood of man in all its forms.”^[63] The ideological content of fascism—its racism, its militant nationalism, its cult of violence—served to sever the bonds of solidarity that might otherwise unite subordinate classes across national boundaries. The enforcement of this political religion was accomplished “through an act of mass conversion enforced against recalcitrants by scientific methods of torture.”^[64] The juxtaposition is precise: fascism combined the archaic form of religious conversion with the modern techniques of systematic coercion. The result was not mere political submission but the destruction of the human capacities—solidarity, independent judgment, responsible agency—upon which any future politics would have to rest.

Polanyi emphasized that fascism’s emergence could not be attributed to local causes, national peculiarities, or historical accidents. “Fascism had as little to do with the Great War as with the Versailles Treaty, with Junker militarism as with the Italian temperament.”^[65] The movement appeared across an astonishing range of national contexts: “in defeated countries like Bulgaria and in victorious ones like Yugoslavia, in countries of Northern temperament like Finland and Norway and of Southern temperament like Italy and Spain.”^[66] What united these diverse cases was not culture or national character but a common structural situation: the inability of market liberalism to sustain itself through democratic means, and the consequent turn to authoritarianism.

This analysis returns us to the central thesis of this essay. The destruction of political autonomy under fascism: the crushing of independent organizations, the “denaturalization” of responsible individuals, the imposition of a political religion through modern techniques of coercion; all represent the completion of fascism’s re-feudalization project. The liberal citizen, bearer of rights and capable of independent political judgment, is transformed back into the serf: bound to the lord by personal dependence rather than legal compact, incapable of autonomous action, subject to unlimited intervention by powers claiming divine or mystical sanction. The difference is that fascism accomplished this regression not through the gradual accretion of custom or tenacious missionaries, but through the concentrated application of modern state power: propaganda, police, and the “scientific methods of torture” that Polanyi identified. Fascism’s modernity lies in its instruments; its political substance is archaic.

American Re-Feudalization: The Contemporary Case

The theoretical framework developed in this essay, consisting of Fraenkel’s dual state, Gramsci’s economic-corporate phase, Paxton’s polyocracy, Trotsky’s analysis of fascism as the “plebeian manner” of resolving bourgeois crisis, and Polanyi’s concept of “denaturalization”, all provide diagnostic tools that extend beyond historical analysis. Of course, any application of these concepts to contemporary events requires methodological caution: historical analogies can obscure as much as they reveal, and the differences between interwar Europe and the twenty-first-century U.S. are substantial. Nevertheless, the question of whether contemporary political developments exhibit structural homologies with the patterns identified in the preceding sections is analytically legitimate and politically urgent. The question is not whether the United States in 2026 resembles Germany in 1936, but whether the trajectory of political transformation follows patterns identified by the theoretical literature as characteristic of fascism’s emergence.

Applied to the second Trump administration, these concepts reveal disturbing convergences with each stage of fascist re-feudalization. The erosion of the normative state proceeds without formal constitutional abolition, precisely as occurred under historical fascism. The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Trump v. United States, granting broad presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, establishes in law the principle that the leader’s will stands above legal constraint. Poulantzas identifies this doctrine as the exceptional state’s defining characteristic,^[67] where the constitutional framework remains formally intact while substantively hollowed. Simultaneously, the systematic dismantling of the merit-based civil service through mechanisms like Schedule F—reclassifying career officials as at-will employees subject to removal for insufficient loyalty—recalls Schulenburg’s lament about “the end of a true Civil Service and the emergence of a subservient bureaucracy.”^[68] The mass firing of inspectors general, the weaponization of the Justice Department against political opponents, and the pardoning of those who violently assaulted constitutional procedures on January 6, 2021, all collectively constitute the encroachment of prerogative power upon normative institutions that Fraenkel identified as fascism’s characteristic legal dynamic.

The transformation of citizenship follows the pattern Paxton identified. Challenges to birthright citizenship seek to create hereditary categories of belonging, while proposals for mass denaturalization render citizenship conditional and revocable based on political or ethnic criteria. The apparatus of mass deportation—masked agents, military deployment against civilian populations, detention camps, family separation—attaches guilt to status rather than action, precisely as Poulantzas documented in his analysis of the fascist concept of the “possible enemy” whose “objective situation” marks them for unlimited state intervention regardless of individual conduct.^[69] The practice of citizenship increasingly shifts from the exercise of constitutional rights to participation in mass rallies of acclamation—the plebiscitary politics in which the deliberative citizen gives way to the acclaiming subject.

A corporatist reconstruction of governance proceeds under the guise of anti-establishment rebellion. The Department of Government Efficiency, led by unelected tech billionaires wielding public authority without constitutional mandate or Senate confirmation, exemplifies what Gobetti diagnosed as the flight from liberal politics into “the medieval consolations of corporatism.”^[70] The rhetoric of “producers” versus “parasites” (directed against universities, civil servants, and diversity initiatives) replicates the corporatist fantasy that Poulantzas analyzed: the petty bourgeoisie imagining itself as “the pillar and mediator of every social construction,” while actual power concentrates in the hands of monopoly capital.^[71] A cabinet of billionaires implementing policies of tax reduction for the wealthy and deregulation for corporations, while rhetorically championing the forgotten worker, demonstrates the structural function of corporatist ideology: cementing class domination behind the facade of organic national unity.

The administrative structure also exhibits the characteristic features of fascist polyocracy. Elon Musk’s undefined role—not a cabinet officer, yet wielding executive authority, competing with formal appointees, dependent entirely on the leader’s personal favor—instantiates the pattern Paxton documented: loyal lieutenants assigned “overlapping jobs that pitted them against each other” in “‘feudal’ struggles for supremacy.”^[72] Policy announced via social media, contradicted within hours, reversed again without explanation, produces the administrative chaos that Griffin identified as the Third Reich’s “bedlam of rival hierarchies.”^[73] This chaos is not dysfunction but design: the deliberate prevention of bureaucratic consolidation that might constrain executive will. The MAGA movement’s structural dependence on a single charismatic figure, with no institutional mechanism for succession, confirms Griffin’s analysis that fascism’s reliance on charismatic authority renders it incapable of the routinization that durable political orders require.

Class dynamics follow Trotsky’s template with precision. The movement recruits its shock troops from the petty bourgeoisie (small business owners, declining rural communities, the downwardly mobile middle class), mobilizing their resentment against “elites” and “globalists.” Yet the trajectory Trotsky identified unfolds inexorably: movements that “raised the petty bourgeoisie on its feet” but “openly aligned themselves, after the seizure of power, with the big bourgeoisie.”^[74] Tariff policies harm consumers and small businesses while rhetoric claims to champion workers. Populist denunciations of the “swamp” yield to unprecedented integration of oligarchic wealth into the state apparatus. The pattern confirms Trotsky’s bitter formula: “Thus the petty bourgeoisie’s idol of yesterday becomes transformed into the gendarme of capital.”^[75]

Finally, the emergence of what Polanyi termed a “political religion” proceeds apace. Election denialism functions as an article of faith: loyalty measured not by policy agreement but by willingness to affirm demonstrable falsehood. The elaborate mythology surrounding QAnon—depicting political opponents as participants in satanic rituals—replicates the fascist political religion that “denied the idea of the brotherhood of man in all its forms.”^[76] The cultivation of alternative epistemologies, rejecting mainstream media, scientific consensus, and institutional expertise, produces subjects increasingly “unable to function as the responsible unit of the body politic.”^[77] The celebration of political violence—from the January 6th assault on the Capitol to the acquittal and lionization of Kyle Rittenhouse after he killed two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin—confirms Griffin’s observation that fascist movements regard “the recourse to organized violence as both necessary and healthy.”^[78]

The convergence is structural rather than merely rhetorical. Personal rule displaces impersonal law; hierarchical status displaces equal citizenship; feudal loyalty displaces bureaucratic procedure; petty-bourgeois rebellion serves concentrated capital; political religion erodes the capacity for autonomous judgment. Gobetti’s diagnosis of Italian fascism as the revelation of a society that had failed to achieve genuine liberal political culture finds its American application. The instruments are modern: algorithmic manipulation, social media, and mass surveillance, yet the political substance is archaic: the condottiere and his band, the lord and his dependent vassals, the serf incapable of autonomous political existence. What presents itself as revolutionary nationalism reveals itself, upon analysis, as the re-feudalization of the American republic.

Conclusion: The Failure of the Fascist “New Order”

The fascist experiment in re-feudalization, for all its destructive energy, proved structurally incapable of sustaining itself. As Roger Griffin argues, “Fascism is therefore doomed by its nature… to be an impotent and ephemeral political force as the basis of a regime, no matter how destructive it is and irresistible it may seem in the upward sweep of its short parabola through human history.”^[79] The mythic core of palingenetic nationalism—the promise of perpetual revolutionary regeneration—cannot generate the institutional stability that any enduring political order requires. Fascism’s “mythical horizons… do not extend beyond” the revolutionary phase “to envisage clearly any sort of ‘organic’ stage” of consolidation.^[80] A regime dependent on permanent crisis and charismatic energy is “automatically caught between the Charybdis of entropy through normalization and the Scylla of self-destruction through war.”^[81]

This structural weakness confirms rather than contradicts the thesis of fascism as modernized re-feudalization. Medieval political forms—personal rule, competing fiefdoms, arbitrary authority—likewise proved unstable precisely because they lacked the impersonal legal and bureaucratic structures that enable complex societies to reproduce themselves across generations. The transition from feudalism to liberal modernity was driven in part by the functional inadequacy of personalistic rule for coordinating increasingly complex economies and societies. Fascism’s return to these archaic patterns, equipped with modern instruments of coercion and propaganda, could temporarily impose submission but could never create the “New Man” or “reborn nation” its ideology promised. The fascist new order was “doomed not to survive more than a few years, let alone a millennium.”^[82]

The historical record bears out this analysis. Italian Fascism, after two decades in power, had produced not a revitalized nation but “an oppressive counter-revolutionary regime, retarding any authentic integration of the Italians into the state, hampering the emancipation of the peasantry and of women, consolidating conservative institutions and attitudes, stifling initiative, curtailing individualism, abolishing political debate.”^[83] Nazi Germany’s Thousand-Year Reich collapsed after twelve years of escalating radicalization that culminated in total military defeat and the physical destruction of the regime. Neither regime developed mechanisms for succession, institutional consolidation, or the routinization of charisma that would have enabled long-term survival. Their endings—one in ignominious flight and execution, the other in suicide amid the rubble of a destroyed capital—testified to the impossibility of building durable political order on foundations of personal rule and perpetual mobilization.

Yet if fascism’s intrinsic inviability offers a measure of theoretical reassurance, the historical record also demonstrates that fascism’s self-destruction entails catastrophic costs for the societies it governs. The trajectory from seizure of power to collapse consumed millions of lives, devastated economies, and left scars on political culture that persisted for generations. The knowledge that fascism cannot sustain itself provides cold comfort to those who must endure its depredations in the interim. Moreover, the conditions that give rise to fascism—the structural crisis of liberal capitalism, the failure of left alternatives, the mobilization of petty-bourgeois resentment—are not self-correcting. Fascism’s collapse does not automatically produce liberal-democratic restoration; it may simply clear the ground for new forms of authoritarian rule or chaotic disintegration.

The analysis developed in this essay therefore carries implications that extend beyond historical interpretation. If fascism represents modernized re-feudalization, a reconstitution of pre-modern political relations through modern instruments of coercion, then resistance to fascism requires more than the defense of existing liberal institutions, which have already demonstrated their vulnerability to fascist capture. It requires the construction of genuinely democratic forms of political and economic organization capable of addressing the structural contradictions that produce fascist movements in the first place: the subordination of democratic politics to market imperatives, the immiseration and displacement of working and middle classes, the concentration of wealth and power in ever fewer hands. Fascism’s ultimate legacy is not a sustainable alternative to liberal modernity but a demonstration of the catastrophic consequences that follow when societies abandon the hard-won achievements of constitutional government and equal citizenship for the illusory consolations of the condottiere and his band. The task of the present is to ensure that this demonstration need not be repeated.

1. Piero Gobetti, On Liberal Revolution, ed. Nadia Urbinati, trans. William McCuaig (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), xxxi.

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2. Gobetti, On Liberal Revolution, 212.

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3. Gobetti, 218–19.

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4. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1–17

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5. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

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6. Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003)

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7. Thomas Rohkrämer, "Antimodernism, Reactionary Modernism and National Socialism: Technocratic Tendencies in Germany, 1890–1945," Contemporary European History 8, no. 1 (1999): 29–50.

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8. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 120.

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9. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 120.

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10. Ibid., 120–21.

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11. Ibid., 120.

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12. Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism, trans. Judith White (London: Verso, 2018), 315.

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13. Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship, 328.

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14. Poulantzas, 328.

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15. Ibid., 327.

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16. Ibid.

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17. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 132.

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18. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 119.

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19. Ibid., 148.

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20. Ibid., 119.

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21. Gobetti, On Liberal Revolution, 218.

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22. Gobetti, 218–19.

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23. Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship, 248.

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24. Ibid., 248.

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25. Ibid.

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26. Ibid., 83.

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27. Poulantzas, 252.

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28. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 181.

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29. Ibid., 181–82.

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30. Ibid., 132n.

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31. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993), 37.

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32. Griffin, Nature of Fascism, 192.

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33. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 126.

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34. Paxton, 126.

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35. Ibid.

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36. Ibid., 147.

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37. Ibid.

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38. Ibid.

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39. Ibid.

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40. Ibid., 127.

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41. Griffin, Nature of Fascism, 107.

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42. Ibid.

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43. Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship, 328.

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44. Ibid.

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45. Ibid.

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46. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 121.

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47. Paxton, 211.

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48. Ibid., 147.

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49. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 245.

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50. Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), 28.

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51. Trotsky, Struggle Against Fascism, 28.

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52. Ibid.

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53. Ibid., 28-29.

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54. Ibid., 29.

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55. Ibid.

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56. Ibid., 9.

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57. Ibid.

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58. Ibid.

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59. Ibid.

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60. Ibid., 10.

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61. Polanyi, Great Transformation, 245.

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62. Ibid.

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63. Ibid.

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64. Ibid.

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65. Ibid.

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66. Ibid.

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67. Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship, 315.

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68. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 147.

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69. Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship, 327.

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70. Gobetti, On Liberal Revolution, 218.

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71. Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship, 248.

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72. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 147.

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73. Griffin, Nature of Fascism, 107.

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74. Trotsky, Struggle Against Fascism, 28.

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75. Trotsky, 29.

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76. Polanyi, Great Transformation, 245.

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77. Polanyi, 245.

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78. Griffin, Nature of Fascism, 45.

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79. Griffin, 44.

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80. Ibid., 39.

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81. Ibid., 75.

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82. Ibid., 43.

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83. Ibid., 75.

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