It's naive to believe that fascism couldn't start again in the 21st century. Just because it happened in the past century and that we have historical records of how fascism came to power, doesn't mean we won't make the same mistake.
The biggest mistake that I have seen over the past decades is the belief that fascism can be ended through an ideology, by telling people what to think instead of their wrong or even "evil" beliefs. This is pure insanity. You cannot fight top-down ideologies with another top-down ideology. No one consciously does this though, because the contradiction would become too apparent, instead what people do is that they start from relatively good intentions, wanting the world by and large to be more tolerant and less violent, but then this very same set of attitudes becomes the basic to oppress people.
This is how we get the phenomenon, rather strange at first, of woke being a fairly cruel and top-down ideology against a lot of people, such as white men. I say 'at first' because ultimately, the left-wing just like the right-wing is obsessed with power, they are simply too afraid to admit it, and prefer to take roundabout ways to justify it. Whereas a right-winger will explicitly say that they believe in hierarchies and that some people are better and more intelligent than others, a left-winger will present themselves as 'egalitarian' and for 'freedom', but only to the extent that it helps their career. As soon as the freedom and equality of other people could threaten their own power within the system, then they justify top-down forms of power, with the measures during Covid being the perfect and most recent example at a large scale, though of course the long history of atrocities of communism and its mutations is another good one.
Fascism is therefore not merely about white supremacy or anything as narrow as that. Restricting it to a set of right-wing ideologies makes us blind to the structure of dominance and how it justifies itself. More precisely, here are the elements that I believe are the seeds needed for fascism to arise:
Factors 1) and 2) are obvious enough, factor 3) is also rather obvious when it's pointed out, but most people don't consider enough the deep consequences of the death of God and the void that it leaves behind.
Factor 4) is Wilhelm Reich's explanation for fascism, 1 the way in which it is bottom-up and not merely top-down. It's not that the leader is so charismatic that people end up being brainwashed by him, it's rather that people by and large feel so weak, anxious and lost in their life that they would rather submit to an authority which simplifies their world, gives them an identifiable target to attack, and clear battles to "win", than try to figure out their life by themselves. Thus, the charismatic leader can only seize power because there is a large population who is ready to give up their own power to them.
Fascism seen in this way then starts with school, the institution responsible for conditioning curious and free children into repressing their vitality, sit still for eight hours a day, and learn the most important lesson which our system needs them to learn: that the demands of the system and its institutions are more important than their individual needs.
Every institution, every company is founded on this fundamental principle, that individual needs are secondary to what the teacher, or the doctor, or the politician, or the ceo says. Should we be surprised then that the modern world has produced all kinds of responses against authority, all the protests, strikes, revolts, leading to revolutions and civil wars, as well as the individual responses such as theft, robbery, organized crime, or plain old white collar crime like fraud, embezzlement and money laundering? Or what about the deviant forms of sexuality? Most notably for Reich is the preponderance of masochism and sadism.
Fascism arises when people conditioned to be masochistic, because it helps the system function to have impotent doormats who enjoy being dominated, turn to a collective ideology of sadism. As a result, the concern is not as much "what is good for me", but rather "who can we hurt?". This is why the current working class in the USA can rally around Trump, a literal billionaire, not because he represents them, although he tries very hard to make people think that, but because he can channel their frustration towards people that they hate.
Fascism is not interested in building prosperity because destroying things is much easier and satisfying. This is why fascism is an ideology of conquest and warfare, one which necessarily needs an opponent to feed on, because its source of meaning and material prosperity is founded on extraction and fighting.
If we look at those structures for what they are, the way in which fascism provides an outlet for the frustration of impotence, typically leaning towards sadism, and the meaninglessness of a Godless world, we can start to move away from the overly simplistic view that fascism is merely a right-wing thing.
Much of the excess of woke shares many of the core structures for what makes fascism what it is. Criticizing any form of racism whatsoever until their opponents are made ashamed for simply being men and white is a great example of how good intentions can go astray in the ideological quest for fairness (and meaning). Evil does not see itself as evil, and this is most evident with the left-wing, who are so blinded by their self-righteousness that they can cheer together on the death of one of their opponents, and think of themselves as compassionate and egalitarian people.
There hasn't been, from what I can tell, a Trump-like, or Putin-like figure in the left around which they could rally, which is why they can more easily dispel any accusation of their extremes being another form of fascism. One part of it is that broadly speaking, the left being much more agreeable and prone to collective decision-making, means that they are more geared towards becoming part of a mass of nameless people, rather than promoting individuals who rise to be good 2 leaders.
But still, whether evil can be blamed on one corrupt leader or not, the effect of the masses remains, and there is no doubt to me that the excesses of woke have been a considerable factor in promoting the counter-response from the right that we are seeing.
In politics, there is never any void, and every action has its counter-reaction. If your solution amounts to shaming a large group of people into complying, they will eventually be fed up with it and see you as the evil to defeat, and turn what you considered to be vices and see those as virtues. This is what we could call the reversal or inversion of virtues, which brought about the slave morality that Nietzsche wrote so much about, or in our times, the promotion of heartless strength and domination as aspects of masculinity to aspire to.
Another symptom of the creep of sadism can be seen in the abundance of pornography, and the way it has transformed over the past years. Isn't it interesting how we supposedly live in a "feminist" world, and yet the depiction of women in pornography has never been so debased?
It's actually quite simple: love has always been absent in porn, but now that we live in an increasingly atomized world, where people can only understand their own representations of reality, and interact mostly through their screen which accentuates this echo chamber effect to an even higher degree, love is also largely absent from people's lives. Thus they turn to porn as a way to compensate for their non-existent sex life, or a way to relieve their anxiety, or simply out of boredom, but porn has also converged towards being a surrogate form of power, through the depiction of domination.
This is why we see two seemingly opposite categories in porn emerge: the cuckoldry of men, and the domination of women. They are actually one and the same, they provide the fantasy of power to someone who does not have access to it. It is quite obvious with the latter, the sadistic domination of women, where men are essentially using them as their personal sex toys, a horrendous departure from the self-softening communion of making love. In the act of fucking which porn depicts, sex is essentially a form of masturbation with another body, which makes me feel even more isolated from the other person, even more entrenched in my selfish, solipsistic pleasure, whereas in the intimacy of making love, I find that the boundaries which typically rule my life have a way of dissolving, which is why it can feel like you and I become one, or that time likewise dissolves.
But what about cuckoldry? What is the appeal of such a fetish? As strange as it might sound, cuckoldry is a male fetish, similar to how fascism is a bottom-up phenomenon as noted above. In it, there is an acceptance (though it is still repressed more often than not) of one's impotence, but it is resolved by having the woman be fucked by a more confident and masculine guy, similar to how the promise of fascism is to have the problems in your life resolved by one charismatic leader telling you what to do. The fantasy here is not that you can dominate other people, but rather that you can let daddy do all the work for you, and that's a relief for the cuck.
The even stranger thing to realize is that both of those distorted views of sex can exist in the same person. It's not just that some turn to sadism and others turn to cuckoldry, because they have a way of blending with one another. The latter tend to turn to the former in order to enjoy the power trip of having control over a woman, and although I don't think that direction is as common, sadistic and seemingly confident people can often have a surprising core of self-hatred and a sense of impotence, which is reaffirmed to them by the depiction of cuckoldry.
More importantly, both of those are a renunciation from love, a word which is conspicuously absent in most of the political analysis of our time. It doesn't matter who dominates and how they do it, because if that is all that humans do with one another, then we are stuck in a perpetual cycle of waging war on one another, and having the power dynamics reverse once in a while, but never fundamentally resolved. Power without love can only bring atomization and self-perpetuation, it will never solve the root problems that it seeks to address.
It becomes clear to anyone with some amount of introspection and self-honesty that fascism could only be possible because there is some part of us which wants to dominate others and derive meaning from that process. There is a bastard in all of us, especially us men, because aligning our power with a Higher Good is incredibly difficult in our atomized, Godless times.
Fascism is only the visible and ugly symptom of a much deeper process of domination, which starts in the system, even when it works as "intended". It's very easy to blame the Hitler or the Mussolini, but it's much harder to look at the broader dynamics which brought the conditions necessary for their rise in power to happen in the first place.
Today, the word 'fascist' is essentially used for any group of people which someone doesn't like and wants to put down. A habit which ironically enough is the seed for real fascism to emerge, because this inability to see other people who hold diverging views as real human beings is essentially guaranteed to perpetuate the ingroup-outgroup dynamic so central to our conflicts.
As pessimistic as it might sound, I don't think there is any large scale solution to fascism, because our system mainly operates on top-down coercion, and it's impossible to use the same coercion to stop the dynamic of domination to spiral out of control. The thing we could hope for is for those structures in power to destroy one another, amidst the ongoing decline of the modern world due to the diminishing supply of energy, but then again, is 'hope' really such a noble thing to hold onto?
We could take a page out of Julia's book, Winston's lover in 1984, who by and large was uninterested in the agenda of the Party, and prefered to find her fulfillment in the present moment. Not that I think her sexual hedonism is conducive to satisfaction or connection with other people, but because giving away your agency in the act of hoping that large scale collectives will somehow do the thing you want is rather sad.
If the future is grim, then clearly that means that the value of life must be found in the present moment. If the large scale collectives all end up turning corrupt in one way or another, then clearly we must depart from them and learn to build smaller ones which are able to retain the spark of consciousness. If there is no political solution to fascism, then maybe politics is bullshit to begin with, an escape from being in the driver seat of our own life.
1 As expanded upon in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, a book which I haven't read but which is featured on the hermitix podcast here
2 Or in our times, loud and mediatized leaders who are good at getting views and sparking outrage.
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Fascism Masculinity Pendulum Reich Politics Porn Fantasy Cuck Groupthink
2026-02-26