HENRY GIROUX
SEPTEMBER 15, 2026

But how can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth?   — Bertolt Brecht, Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties (1935).

In his magnificent Age of Extremes, the late historian Eric Hobsbawm warned that one of the defining characteristics of the late twentieth century was that men and women increasingly lived in a “sort of permanent present lacking an organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.” Such historical amnesia carries a terrible price. When the past disappears, we lose not only the language necessary to recognize the dangers it has bequeathed to the present but also the capacity to name those dangers when they return in altered forms. Historical amnesia thus becomes a crisis of language: when we lose the words that connect the present to the past, we also lose the political vocabulary necessary to grasp what is unfolding before us. A crisis can awaken historical consciousness, expose the forces that produced it, and become a rallying point for resistance. But when crisis hardens into catastrophe, and the language for naming its causes is emptied of historical meaning, the political imagination begins to collapse. What could once be challenged comes to appear inevitable; what demanded resistance is absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life. Catastrophe then becomes more than an event. It becomes a pedagogy of powerlessness, teaching people to live with the intolerable, surrender their belief that the future can be otherwise, and mistake political defeat for historical fate. At that point, normalization becomes one of authoritarianism’s most powerful weapons: hope is drained of its political force precisely when resistance becomes most necessary.

There are moments when the language used to describe a political crisis becomes part of the crisis itself. We are living through one of them. The recent attempt in Jacobin by Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey to theorize Trumpism under the rubric of “democratic fascism” is symptomatic of a wider intellectual failure: the compulsion to soften the language of fascism precisely when fascism needs to be named. The problem extends well beyond one article. Trumpism has been described as populism, illiberal democracy, authoritarian populism, competitive authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, and now democratic fascism. Such phrases may register elements of the present crisis, but they can also function as euphemisms that domesticate a political formation whose defining features are increasingly difficult to deny. When language is emptied of its most disturbing implications, it underplays the very dangers it claims to name. In the worst case, it turns critique into a discourse of normalization.

Paul Street has rightly attacked this rhetorical evasion. He describes “competitive authoritarianism,” a term increasingly invoked to characterize the United States under Trump, as a bloodless academic formulation that drains Trumpism of its ideological and political content: racism, xenophobia, militant patriarchy, ultranationalism, political eliminationism, cultism, violence, anti-intellectualism, and the destruction of constitutional restraints. His point is crucial. When a government attacks universities and the press, turns immigration enforcement into a massively funded coercive apparatus, treats political opponents as internal enemies, weakens due process, builds a sprawling machinery of detention and disappearance, normalizes state violence, and organizes political life around vengeance and racial purification, the issue can no longer be reduced to whether electoral competition remains fair. The language of procedural erosion becomes an alibi for refusing to name the political project taking shape before us.

When Elections Become an Alibi.

The phrase “democratic fascism” reproduces this problem in a different form. Fascism does not become democratic because it gains power through elections. It can exploit elections, constitutional procedures, courts, legislatures, and the machinery of a formally democratic state while directing those institutions against democracy itself. To confuse the route to power with the nature of the power being exercised is to mistake democracy’s institutional shell for its political and ethical substance.

History should have settled this question long ago. Fascist movements have repeatedly used democratic institutions to acquire legitimacy and power before attacking the conditions that make democracy possible. Giorgia Meloni did not seize Rome at the head of an armed column. She became Italy’s prime minister after her Brothers of Italy party emerged victorious from the 2022 elections. Yet Brothers of Italy has historical roots in the postwar neo-fascist Italian Social Movement. Even as Meloni has attempted to present herself as a conventional conservative, scandals within her party have repeatedly exposed fascist salutes, Nazi slogans, antisemitism, and nostalgia for Italy’s fascist past. Her election did not magically transform that history into democratic politics. It demonstrated something far more disturbing: elections can provide authoritarian and fascist political formations with the legitimacy they need to enter the state, normalize their language, weaken democratic institutions, and gradually redefine the boundaries of what is politically acceptable. Modi’s India, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, and, in a different register, Javier Milei’s Argentina reveal variations of the same larger danger: authoritarian politics need not abolish elections in order to hollow out democracy. Electoral legitimacy can become the vehicle through which authoritarian movements enter the state and dismantle democracy from within.

The liberal fetish of elections does more than disguise fascism as democracy; it launders authoritarian power through the ballot box, turning political surrender into democratic virtue and bad faith into the language of liberal fulfillment. This is the discourse of political cleansing and sanitization. Worse, it drains fascism of its blood, terror, and bodies. The violence concealed by antiseptic terms such as competitive authoritarianism becomes visible in masked immigration agents seizing people from workplaces, homes, parks, and streets; five-year-old children detained with their fathers after returning home from school; families living in terror of disappearance; and a machinery of detention and deportation increasingly liberated from legal restraint. The human cost disappears from view when American missiles strike an Iranian primary school, killing more than one hundred children. It disappears in Gaza, where at least 21,700 Palestinian children have been reported killed and tens of thousands more woundedamid the destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, and the conditions necessary for life itself. The human cost also disappears from view when Medicaid cuts are projected to leave 7.5 million additional Americans without health insurance by 2034, converting illness, poverty, and premature death into acceptable entries on a bloodless and morally vapid government balance sheet. It disappears as well in the extraordinary spectacle of American military power being used to destroy suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, with at least 230 people killed in 69 strikes by September 9, 2026, often without the government publicly demonstrating that those condemned to death were trafficking drugs. In the most chilling case, two survivors of an initial strike, clinging to the wreckage, were killed in a second attack.

These are not abstract disputes over the adjective attached to an electoral system. They are bodies seized, children buried beneath rubble, families shattered, the sick and poor abandoned, and human beings killed without trial.  A political vocabulary that cannot make this violence visible does more than fail to name fascism. It erases fascism’s human consequences, turning terror into abstraction and cruelty into something ordinary enough to endure. The question is not whether contemporary fascism wears the same uniform as its twentieth-century predecessors, but how its old hatreds, racial hierarchies, and contempt for democracy have found new institutions, new languages, and new forms of violence in the present.

Sarah Churchwell understood the danger precisely. American fascism, she argued, would be “recognizably American, while its fascism would be recognizable as fascism.” The point is crucial. Fascism does not need to reproduce Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany in order to inherit their political logic. The question is what fascism looks like when it speaks an American language, wraps itself in the flag, invokes freedom and Christian nationalism, mobilizes the country’s long history of racial violence, and acquires power through institutions it subsequently turns against democracy itself.

Churchwell’s insight also exposes the danger of treating elections as the dividing line between democracy and fascism. The same mistake haunts discussions of Trump. The relevant question is not whether Americans voted for him. They did. The question is what kind of political and class based formations their votes empowered, what historical forces and cultural conditions made that formation possible, and what happens to democracy once such a movement commands all the major apparatuses of the state. Elections tell us how power was acquired; they do not tell us how that power will be used. A government does not remain democratic simply because it arrived through the ballot box. Democracy must also be judged by what happens afterward: whether dissent is protected or criminalized, whether the rule of law constrains power or becomes its weapon, whether racial and religious minorities retain their rights, whether universities and the press remain independent, whether political opponents are treated as legitimate adversaries or internal enemies, and whether state violence is restrained or celebrated. The ballot box can confer office; it cannot confer democratic innocence.

The Jacobin article itself inadvertently demonstrates the inadequacy of its formulation. It describes Trump’s deployment of more than two thousand ICE agents to Minneapolis and St. Paul, characterizes ICE as an authoritarian police force with an enormous budget, and goes so far as to describe it as Trump’s “political militia.” It also recognizes the spectacular character of its violence: cruelty directed against migrants becomes simultaneously a warning to protesters and a demonstration of state power. What sense does it make to catalogue such practices and then attach the adjective “democratic” to the political formation that produces them? This is more than conceptual confusion; it is the language of apology, a rhetorical laundering of fascism that makes the intolerable appear compatible with democracy.

As Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Umberto Eco, Sarah Churchwell, and Jason Stanley have made clear in different ways, the problem runs deeper than terminology. Fascism has never possessed a single institutional form. It changes its language, technologies, cultural styles, and modes of legitimation according to historical circumstances. Contemporary fascism does not need brown shirts marching through every street or the immediate abolition of elections. It can emerge through neoliberal institutions, billionaire-controlled media, digital platforms, militarized borders, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and a security state whose coercive capacities earlier fascist movements could scarcely have imagined.

Neoliberal Fascism and the Punishing State.

This is why neoliberal fascism is a more illuminating framework. Neoliberalism did not simply deregulate markets, privatize public goods, destroy unions, transfer wealth upward, and transform education into a laboratory of market values. It hollowed out the social state while expanding the punishing state, reducing citizenship to consumerism, freedom to market choice, social responsibility to individual failure, and public problems to private troubles. In its wake grew vast zones of abandonment along with the loneliness, precarity, insecurity, anxiety, and powerlessness that inhabit them.

As neoliberalism can no longer disguise its failures behind promises of prosperity and social mobility, its authoritarian core becomes increasingly visible. The market state does not disappear; it merges with the punishing state. Economic violence joins political violence. Surveillance expands. Police power intensifies. Migrants become disposable. Due process becomes an inconvenience. Dissent is increasingly represented as subversion. White supremacy, Christian nationalism, militarism, and billionaire power converge within a political formation increasingly willing to dispense with democratic restraints.

September 11, 2001, marked a crucial turning point in this transformation. The horror of the attacks was seized upon to launch a War on Terror that vastly expanded the national-security state while giving permanent war the legitimacy of permanent emergency. As Tariq Ali argues twenty-five years later, 9/11 became the license for an imperial project extending from Afghanistan and Iraq to Guantánamo, detention without trial, torture, surveillance, and the normalization of executive power freed from democratic restraint. But the War on Terror eventually came home. The violence of empire migrated inward, carrying with it the language of permanent emergency, the suspension of rights, the expansion of surveillance, and the construction of entire populations as threats to be managed rather than human beings to be protected. Muslims became objects of suspicion, dissent was increasingly cast as disloyalty, and the distinction between the battlefield and the homeland steadily eroded. The War on Terror did more than produce catastrophic wars abroad; it helped the legal, institutional, and ideological machinery of a domestic security government, a neoliberal fascist state that could later be redirected against migrants, protesters, dissidents, and other designated internal enemies.

The expansion of ICE gives institutional form to this transformation. The agency has undergone a massive expansion under Trump; a recent whistleblower complaint concerning its hiring surge described an unprecedented lowering of standards as thousands of new officers were recruited. The point is not simply that immigration policy has become harsher. The deeper transformation lies in the normalization of a political culture in which masked agents, raids, detention, deportation, intimidation, and spectacularized state violence become acceptable instruments of governance.

Yet political economy alone cannot explain fascism.

Pedagogical Terrorism and the Education of Desire.

Fascism must also be understood as a pedagogical project. It does not simply capture institutions; it produces subjects. People have to learn how to become fascists. They have to learn whom to hate, whom to fear, whose lives matter, whose suffering can be ignored, and why cruelty should be experienced as strength rather than barbarism. They learn, in other words, how to become fascist subjects, white supremacists, and enemies of democracy.

This is where Robert Misik’s recent intervention is indispensable. Drawing upon Leo Löwenthal, Adorno, Freud, and the Frankfurt School tradition, Misik reminds us that fascist agitation effectively turns psychoanalysis on its head. Rather than addressing fear, trauma, loneliness, frustration, and psychic injury, authoritarian politics intensifies them. It feeds anger and bitterness, manufactures paranoia, and offers the authoritarian leader as the savior capable of restoring the world supposedly stolen by immigrants, racial minorities, feminists, intellectuals, dissidents, and other manufactured enemies.

This is the terrain of pedagogical terrorism. Fascist politics educates desire. Through relentless repetition, fabricated threats, conspiracy theories, racial fantasies, enemy stereotypes, public humiliations, and rituals of collective outrage, individuals learn to imagine themselves as members of a besieged community. Private anxieties are given public enemies. Loneliness is transformed into the counterfeit solidarity of the tribe, powerlessness redirected into aggression, and resentment elevated into a moral virtue. As Misik notes, revenge itself becomes a political program. A culture of cruelty feeds on this affective fury, offering those consumed by grievance the intoxicating pleasures of belonging, hostility, and vengeance. Humiliation is repaid through the humiliation of others; fear is converted into hatred; and the desire for recognition is redirected into the exhilaration of domination. Fascism thrives on this emotional economy. It does not merely mobilize anger; it gives anger a target, turns cruelty into a source of gratification, and transforms the lust for revenge and violence into the emotional currency of political belonging. What makes this machinery so powerful is that it feeds on the very loneliness, insecurity, abandonment, and fear that gangster capitalism produces, converting the wounds of a broken social order into the emotional fuel of fascist politics.

Misik calls attention to something conventional accounts of fascism frequently miss: the emergence of an emotional plague in which resentment, humiliation, fear, and the longing for revenge become contagious. They circulate through social media, right-wing television, podcasts, rallies, churches, online communities, and increasingly the institutions of the state. The issue is not merely that people encounter fascist ideas. They inhabit cultural apparatuses that teach them how to feel.

The culture of cruelty is where this emotional plague acquires public form. Cruelty is not an unfortunate excess of contemporary fascism; it is one of its central pedagogical practices. Migrants are humiliated publicly. The vulnerable are mocked. Women are degraded. Protesters are represented as enemies. Violence is celebrated as strength. Politics becomes an extension of war.  The leader’s violations of political and moral norms become sources of pleasure precisely because his followers experience every transgression as their own liberation from the obligations of democracy, empathy, and mutual responsibility.

Misik’s most chilling insight is that fascist violence takes root long before the killing starts. It first colonizes the imagination. People learn to laugh at cruelty, then to admire it as authenticity, and eventually to bathe emotionally in its pleasure quotient. The same pleasure attaches itself to Trump’s culture of lying. His followers do not always have to believe the lie in order to enjoy it; they can recognize its falsity and still delight in the transgression, in watching truth itself mocked and those who insist upon it humiliated. The lie becomes a performance of power, a demonstration that their leader can violate the most elementary standards of truth and accountability and revel in getting away with it. There is a thrill in the violation itself, a shared pleasure in crossing the line, breaking the taboo, and forcing others to witness the spectacle. Cruelty and lying begin to feed each other: humiliation becomes entertainment, deception becomes defiance, and transgression becomes proof of authenticity. What is being cultivated is not simply disbelief in truth but pleasure in its destruction. At that point, the distance between imagining violence, enjoying its spectacle, and endorsing it as justice steadily disappears.

This is the terrain that liberal euphemisms cannot comprehend. “Competitive authoritarianism” describes the erosion of electoral institutions; ‘democratic backsliding’ registers the weakening of democratic norms; and ‘democratic fascism’ acknowledges that fascists can win elections. What all three fail to confront adequately is the transformation of culture and subjectivity through which millions learn to experience domination as freedom, racial hatred as patriotism, ignorance as authenticity, and cruelty as justice. The question confronting us, then, is not simply whether elections continue to take place. It is far more disturbing: What kinds of human beings are being produced inside the hollowed-out shell of democracy?

Elections can survive while democratic culture is destroyed; legislatures can remain while their power is emptied out; courts can persist while judges who refuse political obedience are attacked; and freedom can still be proclaimed while universities, journalists, migrants, protesters, and racial minorities are subjected to intimidation and repression. The institutions remain, but their democratic substance is hollowed out as they are increasingly bent to the demands of authoritarian power. Italy under Meloni offers one version of this process; Trumpism offers another. Fascism does not repeat itself mechanically. It learns. It adapts. It changes its costume, appropriates the language of democracy, and inhabits the institutions it seeks to destroy. What remains constant is its hatred of equality, dissent, human interdependence, and democracy itself. This is precisely what makes contemporary fascism so dangerous: it does not always announce its arrival by abolishing democratic institutions; it can capture them, inhabit them, and turn their authority against the very democratic life they were created to protect.

Beyond the Liberal Guardrails.

The liberal faith in democratic guardrails mistakes the architecture of democracy for democracy itself. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt concede in How Democracies Die that institutions alone cannot restrain elected autocrats, yet the metaphor of guardrails remains tied to the reassuring belief that courts, elections, constitutions, and legislatures possess an inherent democratic force capable of containing authoritarian power. John Dewey exposed the danger of this assumption almost ninety years ago. Writing in Freedom and Culture as fascism engulfed Europe, he warned against believing that democratic conditions somehow maintain themselves or that democracy can be reduced to constitutional prescriptions. Such faith, he argued, can actually conceal the emergence of forces hostile to democratic freedom.

Dewey’s warning cuts to the heart of the present crisis. As Melvin Rogers has argued in returning to Dewey, checks and balances possess no agency of their own; democratic institutions are only as strong as the habits, dispositions, and forms of collective life that give them substance. Democracy, in this sense, is not merely an institutional arrangement but a culture and practice that must be learned, inhabited, defended, and continually renewed.

Democracy is not a structure that survives simply because its institutional shell remains standing. Its substance depends upon the social conditions that make democratic agency possible: economic security, education, equality, public institutions, political participation, and a culture in which people possess both the capacity and the power to govern their common life. Strip away those conditions and democratic institutions can remain formally intact while being emptied from within. Elections continue, courts remain open, legislatures meet, and constitutions are ceremonially invoked even as concentrated wealth purchases political power, billionaire oligarchs dominate public life, white supremacy and Christian nationalism gain institutional force, and the punishing state expands its machinery of surveillance, detention, and violence. Dewey’s warning must therefore be pushed beyond liberal institutionalism itself. The crisis cannot be resolved by repairing capitalism’s excesses while leaving its fundamental relations of power untouched. A social order organized around the concentration of wealth, the privatization of public life, the commodification of human need, and the conversion of economic power into political power continually erodes the conditions that substantive democracy requires. The question is no longer how to save democracy from the excesses of capitalism, but how to free democracy from capitalism’s grip.

For that reason, any struggle against fascism that refuses to confront capitalism as one of its enabling conditions risks treating the symptoms while preserving the machinery that reproduces the disease. Dewey understood the stakes of this failure nearly a century ago. In 1935, he argued that if radicalism means recognizing the necessity of radical change, then a liberalism that is not also radical is “irrelevant and doomed.” His warning speaks directly to the present: the task is not to restore the political order that produced this catastrophe but to transform the conditions that made it possible. Democracy will not be saved by restoring yesterday’s guardrails or returning to a supposedly more humane version of capitalism. It requires a mass politics capable of breaking the concentrated power of capital, democratizing wealth and economic decision-making, rebuilding the public institutions necessary for a common life, and creating new forms of collective ownership, social equality, and democratic control over the institutions that shape everyday existence. What is required, in other words, is a democratic socialism in which democracy reaches beyond the ballot box and enters the workplaces, schools, media, economy, and other commanding institutions in which power is exercised and the conditions of everyday life are determined.

The failure of liberal institutionalism is inseparable from a failure of political language. The liberal obsession with finding a more comfortable vocabulary for this transformation is itself politically consequential. Euphemism becomes complicity when it makes fascism easier to tolerate. If fascism must first pass some imaginary historical test before we are permitted to call it fascism, we will recognize it only when recognition has become politically useless.

Fascism does not cease to be fascism because people voted for it. Democracy may provide the doorway through which fascism enters. Neoliberalism creates the conditions that nourish it. Pedagogical terrorism supplies the machinery through which people learn to desire it. And the culture of cruelty provides the emotional charge that makes domination feel like liberation and feral tribal belonging masquerade as community. What is needed now is a language forged in resistance, capable of naming real existing fascism, exposing the forces that produce it, and turning outrage into organized struggle. Such a language must recover historical memory, make power visible, connect private suffering to its systemic causes, and create the conditions for people to recognize themselves not in the manufactured hatreds of fascist politics but in organized mass struggles against exploitation, racial violence, disposability, and authoritarian rule. The struggle over language is therefore inseparable from the struggle over power: we must name fascism in order to fight it, expose the machinery that produces it in order to dismantle it, and build the collective power necessary to defeat the world that makes it possible.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

First published on Counterpunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

HENRY GIROUX
JUNE 19, 2026

You can’t have capitalism without racism.

–Malcolm X

Elon Musk is less an aberration than the grotesque byproduct of a capitalist order that converts inequality into virtue, exploitation into spectacle, and mistakes its own deepest failures for its greatest successes. The media frenzy surrounding the prospect of Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire is not a celebration of human progress or individual initiative. It is a symptom of a deeper social and political crisis, one that exposes the power of class privilege, the corrupting forces of gangster capitalism, and a culture increasingly incapable of distinguishing wealth from worth or exploitation from human flourishing.

Musk is symptomatic of the rot of a capitalist system that generates staggering inequalities while concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite whose fortunes depend not simply on markets, but on public subsidies, collective labor, social institutions, and shared resources, all sustained by an authoritarian culture animated by white supremacy, ultranationalism, and the mobilizing passions of fascist politics, especially in the age of Trump.  As Dan Dinello argues, Musk has become an “avatar of chaos, cruelty, and death.” The description is difficult to dismiss. How else are we to understand his role as Trump’s chief enforcer?

 In this case, the world’s richest man played a crucial role in closing and slashing aid for the U.S. humanitarian assistance agency (USAID). To be sure, USAID embodied the contradictions of American power. While it funded vital global health and humanitarian programs, it also functioned as an instrument of U.S. soft power, advancing development agendas and political arrangements often aligned with American geopolitical and economic interests. Its history reminds us that humanitarianism under capitalism has frequently been entangled with empire, shaped as much by the imperatives of power and profit as by the demands of justice and human need. Yet acknowledging these contradictions does not diminish the catastrophic consequences of dismantling the agency. The consequences have been almost unimaginable. Becky Ferreira states that:

“According to monitoring models, the collapse of USAID may have already caused 762,000 preventable deaths, 500,000 of which are children, while the cuts could lead to more than nine million preventable deaths by 2030, according to a study published in February 2026….[In addition], after USAID closed, there was a rapid increase in the likelihood of violence, the severity of conflict, and the lethality of conflict, in nearly a thousand administrative regions across Africa.”

Yet the mythology surrounding Musk erases these social foundations. The self-made billionaire is transformed into a heroic figure, while the workers, public investments, and democratic institutions that made his fortune possible disappear from view. Jenni Krithara is right in stating that:

“Elon Musk has become a symbol of success! In reality, however, he is nothing more than a symbol of inequality and exploitation. No billionaire created the wealth he possesses alone. Behind every corporate empire are workers, public infrastructure, universities, research programs, natural resources and entire societies.”

At the same time, Musk’s ascent reveals the power of a culture and public pedagogy that normalizes and celebrates massive inequities in wealth and power. In a society saturated by myths of entrepreneurial genius and limitless success, extreme concentrations of wealth and power are legitimated as objects of admiration rather than outrage. The scandal is not simply that one person can possess more wealth than entire nations while millions struggle to survive and are relegated to life-threatening poverty and lack of adequate health care.

As Thomas Piketty makes clear in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, people are taught to view the grotesque imbalance and staggering levels of inequality and power as natural, inevitable, and even desirable. At work here is a politics that normalizes economic injustice, while depoliticizing any attempt to analyze it and hold a system and individuals responsible for propagating it. It is hardly surprising that Musk regards empathy as a threat to the authoritarian ethic of white Christian nationalism and treats free speech as a disposable principle, useful only when it serves the interests of power.

Under these conditions, inequality becomes a spectacle sustained by a lethal public pedagogy in which exploitation is rebranded as achievement and democracy itself is endangered as economic power increasingly shapes politics, public discourse, and everyday life. The media’s celebration of Musk’s wealth is not innocent reportage. It teaches people to admire concentrations of wealth that earlier generations would have regarded as obscene. It transforms plutocracy into aspiration and dispossession into a private failing rather than a public injustice. Under such conditions, private issues rooted in a celebrity discourse are severed from the broader systems of power and inequality that produce them. To understand Musk’s appeal, however, requires examining the spectacle through which his power is organized and legitimized.

Spectacle in the age of Musk no longer functions simply as distraction. It has become a mode of governance. Musk understands that power today depends less upon persuading people than upon occupying the circuits of attention through which people experience reality itself. The billionaire is no longer merely an owner of capital. He is an engineer of attention, a curator of affect, and an architect of the public imagination.

What Debord once called the society of the spectacle has entered a new phase. Spectacle is no longer confined to television screens, political rallies, or advertising campaigns. It is now embedded in algorithms that organize desire, shape perception, and reward outrage. In Musk’s universe, visibility itself becomes power. Every provocation, conspiracy theory, racist insinuation, or theatrical gesture feeds an economy of attention in which shock displaces thought and notoriety becomes indistinguishable from authority.

The spectacle no longer hides domination. It glamorizes it. Wealth appears as genius, cruelty as authenticity, and the dismantling of democratic institutions as evidence of courage. Politics becomes performance while the public sphere collapses into a marketplace of emotions organized around fear, resentment, and manufactured grievance.

Yet Musk’s wealth is inseparable from the politics it enables. Economic power at this scale does not merely influence public life; it reshapes the very conditions under which democracy can survive. Musk’s politics intensify these dangers.He has used his immense wealth and control over digital platforms to amplify conspiracy theories, attack democratic institutions, and lend support to far-right and nationalist movements in the United States and abroad. He has embraced the language of racial panic, amplified antisemitic and white nationalist narratives, promoted accounts trafficking in racist conspiracy theories, and used X to normalize forms of hatred once relegated to the political margins. Wealth at this scale is not simply economic. It is political, cultural, and pedagogical. It shapes public consciousness while insulating itself from democratic accountability.

Musk represents something historically new: the fusion of celebrity culture, algorithmic power, and authoritarian politics into a single figure whose influence extends across nations and institutions. He is not simply a capitalist with political opinions. He is a spectacle unto himself, a brand organized around excess, provocation, and the performance of transgression. The appeal of such figures cannot be understood through economics alone. It must also be understood aesthetically.

Susan Sontag once argued that fascist aesthetics transforms politics into an intoxicating drama of style, ritual, and emotional intensity. The attraction lies less in ideas than in sensations: the thrill of power, the seduction of force, the glamour of transgression. Musk updates this tradition for the digital age. He stages himself as the outlaw billionaire, the rebellious genius unconstrained by norms, laws, or democratic accountability. What he offers his followers is not merely a politics but an affective experience: the pleasure of belonging to a movement that mistakes cruelty for courage and domination for freedom.

The spectacle’s greatest deception is that it draws attention to Musk the personality while obscuring Musk the architect of a new political economy. Behind the oscillating images of genius and martyr lies a project aimed not merely at dismantling parts of the public sphere but at reorganizing them around private power—integrating his companies into state and military infrastructures, weakening the institutions charged with regulating them, and converting public resources into engines of oligarchic wealth and influence.

Musk’s rise is not a triumph of individual initiative or entrepreneurial genius. It is the product of a social order in which public resources, state subsidies, collective labor, and technological infrastructures are privatized and redirected toward the enrichment of a tiny oligarchic elite. He despises the social contract because it places obligations on wealth and imposes democratic limits on power. As Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff note in Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, in its place, Musk advances a far-right vision that fuses state power with technological control, elevates algorithmic governance over democratic accountability, and normalizes racialized exclusion as a principle of social order. Musk’s political project promises freedom while producing new forms of dependence, claiming to democratize technology even as it concentrates unprecedented power in private hands.

Will Bunch is right in stating that Musk has transformed X into a global amplifier for racial resentment and white nationalist politics. Under the guise of defending “free speech,” he has repeatedly elevated far-right influencers, reinstated accounts banned for hate speech, and promoted narratives that depict immigrants and racial minorities as existential threats to Western civilization. Just before the Belfast anti-immigrant riots in 2026, Musk amplified calls by the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson for people to “hit the streets,” adding his own exhortation: “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!” The consequences were immediate and terrifying: attacks on immigrant communities, immigrant addresses posted online and  homes set ablaze, and an online culture of racial hatred legitimated and endorsed by the world’s richest man.

Zadie Smith has observed that the propaganda machinery of fascism once relied on posters, radios, and megaphones, crude instruments compared to what Elon Musk now commands. The comparison is instructive. The danger today lies not simply in extremist messages but in the infrastructures that circulate them. Algorithms reward outrage, synchronize emotions, and impose forms of conformity that often operate invisibly. The propaganda machine no longer shouts at citizens from a distance. It lives in their pockets, curates their desires, and quietly organizes their fears.

Musk presides over precisely such a machinery. X functions not simply as a platform for communication but as an apparatus for manufacturing attention, resentment, and ideological belonging. The result is a culture in which people increasingly surrender the burdens of judgment and critical thought to the emotional rhythms of the feed. Spectacle becomes a form of social organization, teaching individuals to react rather than reflect and to experience political life as an endless theater of outrage and enemies.

X is no longer merely a communication network. It has become an infrastructure of authoritarian politics, normalizing racism, rewarding outrage, and converting white grievance into a global spectacle of resentment and cruelty. The richest man on the planet has become one of the chief architects of a politics of white victimhood, one in which white people are perpetually under siege by dangerous invaders who happen to be Black, Brown, and immigrants. How else to explain his barrage of racist posts and conspiratorial rhetoric, along with his support for far-right anti-immigrant movements such as Restore Britain?

X has become one of the most powerful pedagogical apparatuses of the digital age, teaching millions to equate cruelty with courage, racial hierarchy with common sense, and hatred with truth. What is marketed as free speech increasingly operates as a machinery of authoritarian desire that erodes the civic and ethical foundations of democratic life. The symbolism surrounding Musk has become increasingly ominous. After making a gesture at a political rally that was widely condemned as echoing a Nazi salute, Musk responded to the ensuing criticism with mockery rather than reflection. The episode was revealing because it exposed an authoritarian politics in which provocation becomes spectacle, cruelty becomes a public virtue, and historical amnesia becomes a precondition for making fascist ideas appear ordinary, even commonsensical. Fascism rarely begins with concentration camps or military coups. It begins with the normalization of contempt, the trivialization of violence, and the celebration of power unmoored from ethical responsibility.

Musk’s growing influence has become a warning sign of a new form of oligarchic rule in which immense wealth, technological power, and political influence converge to hollow out democratic life from within. The danger lies not only in his embrace of far-right movements and authoritarian figures abroad, but in the extraordinary capacity of a single billionaire to distort public debate, destabilize democratic institutions, and shape political life across national borders. Musk is not the real issue. He is the symptom. The larger question is whether any vestige of democracy can survive when private wealth acquires such immense power over the institutions and cultures that sustain public life.

The spectacle of the world’s richest man accumulating unimaginable wealth while endorsing politics that deepen social divisions and undermine democratic norms exposes the moral bankruptcy of a gangster capitalism that rewards accumulation while abandoning social responsibility. Trillionaire politics is not simply the concentration of wealth. It is the concentration of power, influence, and the capacity to shape the stories societies tell about themselves.

The gravest danger is not Musk himself but the culture that celebrates him. Citizens are increasingly schooled to applaud the very forces that diminish their agency and erode their social protections. They are encouraged to admire those who dominate them, to mistake cruelty for strength, and to equate democracy with the freedom of billionaires to exercise unchecked power. Trillionaire politics is the end point of a society inhabited by what might be called the walking dead: citizens politically numbed and morally anesthetized, taught to applaud their own dispossession, embrace loneliness as freedom, and accept misery as the price of greatness.

The first trillionaire is not a monument to human achievement. He is an indictment of a corrupt social order that mistakes accumulation for greatness, toxic masculinity for leadership, and domination for success.  Is it any wonder that Musk views empathy as a weakness and free speech as a disposable principle? Both stand in the way of the politics of cruelty, white nationalism, and unchecked power he increasingly champions.

Musk is the product of a culture that worships wealth, mistakes spectacle for truth, and increasingly confuses domination with freedom. He represents the emergence of a new authoritarian formation in which capitalism, digital technologies, and fascist sensibilities converge in unprecedented ways. He is the avatar of a techno-fascist order, an updated form of neoliberal gangster capitalism in which state power, digital technologies, and oligarchic wealth converge to erode democratic institutions and remake society in the interests of a predatory elite.

The danger he poses lies not only in the policies he supports or the movements he amplifies. It lies in the world he helps create: a world in which algorithms replace judgment, cruelty becomes entertainment, racism is repackaged as realism, and democracy is hollowed out by spectacles of resentment and manufactured consent.

If Trump embodies the theatrical politics of authoritarianism, Musk represents its technological future. He is the engineer of a new machinery of spectacle, one capable of shaping consciousness on a planetary scale. In this sense, Musk is not simply the world’s richest man. He is among the most powerful public pedagogues of the twenty-first century, educating millions in the pleasures of unfreedom and the aesthetics of authoritarian desire.

Musk is not an exception to our time. He is the most visible symptom of a society in which cruelty is celebrated as strength, democracy is hollowed out by oligarchic power, and freedom is reduced to the prerogatives of the rich. This is more than a failed society. It is capitalism stripped of its myths and revealed in all of its gangster, authoritarian, and fascist impulses.

First Published on CounterPunch.org.

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