Abstract

This article proposes that the Trump administration is “postfascist”. Postfascism combines some aspects of the thought architecture of both neoliberalism and fascism. Along with neoliberalism, it embraces a distinctive human anthropology of atomised individuality conducive to competitive “free” markets. Unlike neoliberalism, and in common with fascism, it exhibits key characteristics of authoritarian populism – “othering” perceived “enemies of the people” (“liberal” elites, intellectuals, feminists, LGBT), undermining established scientific knowledge and expertise, and the embrace of an authoritarian “strongman”. Unlike fascism, it does not formulate its own political anthropology and unique vision of a new society but borrows from neoliberalism and seeks to preserve (rather than challenge) its basic vision of society as an aggregate of competing “individual capital enterprises”. This unique synthesis of ideas is what I call “a dialectic of rationality-irrationality”. Adopting the methodology of Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of fascism, the ideational approach to populist studies, and adapting Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism, I propose that Trumpian postfascism is a form of “irrational-rationality”. It adopts neoliberalism’s rational goals (which uses scientific rationality borrowed from Popper’s critical rationalism to argue for markets as spontaneous orders with their own ordering capacities). But it is also the beneficiary of some of its irrational methods which stem from the idea of market spontaneity (the anti-politics of traducing liberal democratic principles of popular sovereignty and deliberative participation, and undermining human and environmental protections). My argument is that postfascism – with its attacks on liberal democracy, its anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism – dovetails with the “irrational” outworkings of neoliberalism. It is therefore post-fascist in that it adopts some of the thought architecture of fascism, but post-fascist in that it operates with a baseline rationality borrowed from neoliberalism about the atomised nature of human beings and the importance of protecting “free” markets.