Tempting as it is to suggest that that we are re-living the 1930s, it is vitally important to maintain an attitude of skepticism. In a recent editorial of the New Left Review after the US mid-term elections, sociologist Dylan Riley notes the surfeit of invocations of fascism across the political spectrum. Yet, on the basis of four axes – geopolitical dynamics, economic crisis, the relation between class and nation, and the character of political parties and civil societies – he carefully and quite persuasively lays out the case against considering a figure like Donald J. Trump to be a fascist. While compelling, Riley’s brief is, ultimately, unconvincing because he fails to take seriously the undermining of the institutions of liberal democracy, against a backdrop of the chronic (rather than acute) socioeconomic crisis, in the name of collective identities which one witnesses not simply in the United States with the advent of the Trump presidency but globally. And, herein lies the core of contemporary fascism.

Today, the uncanny return of authoritarian populism can be situated between two key events: the Al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, and the financial crisis of 2007–8. The first event, devastatingly tragic though it was, became the justification for a full-blown neoconservative foreign policy of aggressive and direct (as opposed to by proxy) regime change. This had already been envisaged by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) think tank, co-founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1997, that remained active until 2006. Including such neoconservative luminaries as Elliott Abrams, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Francis Fukuyama, Norman Podhoretz, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, the PNAC sought to identify “challenges and opportunities” for the United States in the twenty-first century. It sought increases in military spending, the strengthening of ties with “democratic allies” in confronting its enemies, the promotion of political and economic “freedom” abroad and the assertion of the “unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity and our principles.” In the attacks of September 11, 2001, it found both such challenges and opportunities, as the then National Security Advisor to the Bush Administration, Condoleezza Rice, put it in a much publicized speech at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University:

If the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 bookend a major shift in international politics, then this is a period not just of grave danger, but of enormous opportunity. Before the clay is dry again, America and our friends and our allies must move decisively to take advantage of these new opportunities. This is, then, a period akin to 1945 to 1947, when American leadership expanded the number of free and democratic states – Japan and Germany among the great powers – to create a new balance of power that favored freedom.

Rice and the Bush administration, having hardly waited for the clay to dry, took cunning advantage of such an “opportunity.” By the time of Rice’s speech, the United States had already toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan, weakened Al-Qaeda, and was training its sights on the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq under the false claim that it possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). It would commence the invasion of that country less than a year after Rice’s Johns Hopkins speech.

The policy of regime change tacitly articulated by Rice contributed massively not only to the rise of terrorist organizations such as ISIS in Iraq but also, consequently, a crisis of displaced persons not seen since World War II, if ever. According to the UNHCR, there are some 70 million displaced persons globally. The statelessness produced by these policies constituted, according to Hannah Arendt, “a new type of human being, the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.” This in turn authorized, as Agamben has shown, the exercise of sovereignty in a new form of biopower via the reduction of the human being as “bare life” to the status of homo sacer, the subject that legitimately could be put to death.

If neoconservativism produced a crisis of displaced persons of unimaginable proportions, then 40 years of neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization, accelerated in crucial ways by the “extreme centre” (Bill Clinton and Tony Blair), created a social order in which crisis was no longer managed (as had been the case 1945–75) but has simply become normalized. This ranged from Black Monday, 19 October 1987, through the so-called Asian Flu of 1998 sparked by untrammelled currency speculation in south-east Asian economies, to a near meltdown of the global financial order provoked by the proliferation of subprime mortgages and collateralized debt obligations, by virtue of which high-risk investments were camouflaged amidst apparently low-risk vehicles in 2007–8.

The extreme centre, according to Tariq Ali, “is the political system that has grown up under neoliberalism. It has existed in the States for at least a century and a half, where you have two political parties with different clientele but funded by the same source, and basically carrying out the same policies.” The paradoxical neoconservative tactic of “humanitarian intervention” in the interest of regime change was coupled with the neoliberal remaking of the state via accumulation by dispossession, privatization, deregulation and upward (and outward) redistribution of wealth in Iraq. If the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 form one set of bookends, then 9/11 and the financial meltdown of 2007–8 form another set establishing the unique conjuncture within which the spectre of fascism haunts the present.