The marchers may want to dismantle the pluralistic liberal order, but they are also its beneficiaries, helping themselves to core liberal values like freedom of speech and assembly.
Racist nastiness burst out into the open soon after Donald Trump’s re-election in November 2024. A group of neo-Nazi protesters marched near downtown Columbus, Ohio, waving swastika flags. They were in a real temper. Racism and anger have long enjoyed a cordial partnership.
Unknowingly, these demonstrators attested to the familiar paradox that lies at the heart of a liberal society. An open society founded on equal freedom tolerates to some degree the expression of intolerance, even by racists who exalt fascism, liberalism’s historical archenemy. The marchers may want to dismantle the pluralistic liberal order, but they are also its beneficiaries, helping themselves to core liberal values like freedom of speech and assembly.
Undercutting the Ohio demonstrators’ show of audacity was their circumspection. These would-be rulers of the earth wore red face masks to conceal their identities. They wanted to be seen and heard but not individually recognized by the public or police. Liberalism’s racist adversaries marched out in the open, but not altogether openly.
Social-justice advocates may take some comfort from the fact that these white supremacists bearing hate symbols wore face masks. Those on the extreme right know that opposing the liberal mainstream requires a little stealth. Their pop-up demonstration relied largely on surprise for its impact.
Their masking confirmed that the Ohio neo-Nazis fell short of absolute fearlessness in their convictions. It also served as an oblique reference to a fascist tenet: individuality must be suppressed for the greater good of the master tribe. Neo-Nazis aren’t bonkers for the idea of a common humanity that transcends race, nation, and class.
Like costumed stragglers who took a wrong turn along the parade route of history, the Ohio fascists inadvertently publicized their marginalization and ineptitude. No throngs of anti-egalitarian disciples buoyed by tribalistic group-spirit applauded them along their route. Fumbling malcontents rather than leaders capable of organizing a mass movement, they will console themselves with the privilege of belonging to an exclusive, dependably clannish group opposed to equity and inclusion.
The far-reaching progress made by Western liberalism since its early days may seem, despite periodic setbacks, like historical inevitability. One hundred years ago, even as the fiercely anti-liberal mass movement of fascism picked up momentum in Europe, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, a genuine partisan of the liberal cause, declared liberalism’s onward march to be “inexorable” — its truth “unassailable.”
In The Revolt of the Masses, published a few years before Hitler established his all-powerful dictatorship as leader of the Nazi party, Ortega called liberalism a “truth of destiny” — as unavoidable, it would seem, as fate. He also wrote that liberalism, though incontrovertible, could still be “either accepted or rejected.” Ortega had in mind as foremost among those disbelievers the fascists of his day who spoke “ill of liberty,” warning of the degeneracy that centres morality on individuals rather than nation or tribe. But their rejection of liberalism, Ortega implied, would ultimately be as pointless as denying the law of gravity. As Europe’s “true destiny,” liberalism wasn’t — for him — “disputable” or open to rational debate like any other run-of-the-mill political theory.
The defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 conferred some short-lived legitimacy on Señor Ortega’s brand of liberal triumphalism. Short-lived because, soon after that historic victory, fascist-inspired parties sprang up anew. As early as 1946, for example, while Italy sought to re-institute liberal democracy, loyalists of dictator Mussolini regrouped to form a neofascist party. That comeback occurred even before Italy had signed the peace treaty under which, as the Third Reich’s ally, it had to pay war reparations. And as early as 1949 in Germany, the Socialist Reich Party attempted a fascism revival.
Partisan philosophers like Ortega may exalt liberalism as an implacable force or iron law of history in response to which only acquiescence is ultimately possible. Still, neo-Nazi groups continually pop up across the US, Canada, and Europe. Eradicating fascist ideology is as likely as stamping out all forms of crime or insanity. Fascism is the century-old nightmare that the liberal West can’t wake up from.
Neo- and quasi-fascists in Ohio and elsewhere ensure that the nightmare never ends. But it is right-wing populism that today poses the greatest threat to liberalism’s standard of equal rights and individual freedom. Small bands of anonymized white supremacists in Ohio don’t win elections; leaders of populist movements hostile to political and cultural liberalism do. In the political lane strewn with the sectarian ideologies of the preliberal past, the rearguard of far-right extremists, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis struggles to catch up with fleet-footed right-wing populists.
In the vanguard of the populist right is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. While twentieth-century fascists in Europe held mostly Jews, communists, and liberals responsible for their countries’ economic challenges, today’s right-wing populists target mostly migrants, minorities, and “woke” liberals who condemn racism and inequality. Under Orbán’s authoritarian leadership, Hungary has implemented anti-LGBTQ laws, far-right policies on immigration, and, for good measure, anti-feminist programs that pay women to stay home and have babies.
The racist scapegoating of migrants is the stock-in-trade of right-wing populists across Europe. During France’s 2022 presidential election, the far-right National Rally (RN), led by its presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, centred its populist platform on making it harder to obtain French citizenship. The RN’s immigration blueprint, Contrôler l’immigration, uses the language of nationalist xenophobia to describe threats to French sovereignty and identity: “out-of-control immigration” and “enormous pressure” from surging migration. That message resonated with France’s white working class.
Driven more by perceptions than realities, populist nationalism requires scapegoats, and the five photos that illustrate the RN’s immigration proposal clearly identify them as Black and Muslim. Three of the pictures show groups of Black men sitting near an encampment of tents or next to a park. Two of them show women wearing headscarves. The supposed threats to France’s distinctive culture are plain to see.
Le Pen’s anti-immigrant, anti-Islamic message appealed to 40 percent of voters in France’s 2022 presidential race, not enough to hand her the presidency. Two years later, Donald Trump’s brand of nativist right-wing populism succeeded where Le Pen’s came up short. He recaptured the White House, receiving more votes than he did in 2020, after reprising the xenophobic scapegoating of immigrants that helped propel him to victory in 2016.
Portraying himself throughout the 2024 presidential campaign as the nation’s protector against external threats, Trump vowed to deport millions of illegal aliens, and accused Haitian immigrants living legally in Springfield, Ohio, of eating pet cats and dogs. The overwhelming majority of voters for Trump in 2024 were white. One poll found that 70 percent of Republicans believe the far-right “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that Democrats want racialized immigrants to replace the white majority.
Trump loyalists aren’t hypnotized by his political sainthood or dazzled by his good will towards the poor and powerless who suffer injustice. Before voting, they didn’t need to come to grips with his racist slurs or his reluctance to condemn racist violence, or even with his countless lies. That’s because he speaks for them. He’s their loudmouthed man of the people, blatantly offensive. “All demagogues,” American political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in 1942, “are fluent masters of the language of the mob.” That’s the language, hysterical and racist, now spoken by the Trump-era Republican party.
An American president’s prerogative for advancing signature policies by executive order isn’t democracy at its finest. Indeed, the signing of these orders at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office echoes the vainglorious style of autocratic rulers whose word instantly becomes law. Unsurprisingly, President Trump luxuriates in the stagy ritual of autographing executive orders.
With a flourish of his black felt-tipped marker, he declares himself the most powerful man on earth, bending the federal government — not to mention the wider impacted world — to his will. After each signing, he holds up his thick scrawl for the benefit of the cameras, the whole world, history. L’état, c’est moi, King Louis XIV of France is presumed to have declared: I am the state.
In the first weeks of his second term, Trump’s illiberal executive orders have triggered the arrest of thousands of migrants in raids on homes, churches, and businesses; suspended refugee resettlement programs; blocked federal support for gender-affirming care for transgender youth; and officially recognized only “two sexes, male and female,” with blatant disregard for those who fall outside that simple binary.
Philosopher Ortega called liberalism “the supreme form of generosity” for it extends to vulnerable minority communities the same rights enjoyed by the majority. He conceded that “so noble an attitude” may be “too difficult” to sustain long term. Trump’s executive orders demonstrate how much easier it is to be a vengeful demagogue — “I am your retribution,” he pledged to his supporters — than an exemplar of the liberalism Ortega called “the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet.”
Trump’s return to the White House is a victory for that durable brand of right-wing populism that taps into reactionary fear of outsiders and minorities. It’s also an indirect victory for the adversaries of liberalism on the extreme right, among them those neo-Nazis who demonstrated in Ohio soon after Trump’s November triumph. To the phantoms of an unregenerate past springing back to life in the American heartland, the forty-seventh president is a protofascist ally in their battle against the liberal values of equal liberty and justice.
Liberalism may be — in the words of that philosophical defender who believed its progress to be inevitable — a “truth of destiny.” However, the struggle to reach that destiny will end only when far-right ideologies disappear from the face of the earth. 