All You Fascist Liberals
On Political-Libidinal Doubles
Richard Seymour
In Future of Denial: Ideologies of Climate Change, the psychoanalyst and theologian Tad DeLay asks a simple question: “What does the liberal want?” Liberals claim to care deeply about climate change, for instance. Yet, repeatedly, they reject “any minimal mitigation” of the sort advanced by the social-democratic left if they detect “egalitarianism in the pipeline.” In so doing, they contrive elaborate moral justifications: we could never support a deceitful antisemite like Jeremy Corbyn or a shouty misogynist like Bernie Sanders, and so on.
A grimmer example, adduced by Slavoj Žižek in his essay collection, Liberal Fascisms (Bloomsbury, 2026), is liberal complicity with the genocide in Gaza. The “predominant stance” of European governments, he writes, has been “even worse than that of Israel.” While arming the genocide and ferociously resisting any diplomatic challenge to it, they fret and swoon over Palestinian suffering when required. Such ritual gestures of concern are an expression of liberal disavowal. It is the fetish that allows one to go on: I know very well that Palestinians are being butchered and it’s all very sad, but nonetheless I continue to do what must be done.
Yet it is not enough for them to wring their hands, nor to obfuscate and deflect reasonable demands. Once again, they become morally bombastic: The more complicit they are, the more bombastic they become. Protest becomes terrorism, dissent becomes antisemitism, and soon enough, as in the UK’s absurd politician-safety discourse, parliamentarians fear for their lives. Even referencing the genocide, what Ala Stanford, a Democratic candidate for a Pennsylvania House seat, piously calls “the G-word,” is a threat to community safety, political order, and ultimately all Jews. In the UK, this climaxed with mass arrests of little old ladies under terrorism legislation for supporting the direct-action group Palestine Action. Rather than confronting the structural truth of their situation, they act out what has been disavowed. This acting out is evidence of the disavowal breaking down, of the return of the repressed: We can’t jail the unconscious, but we can lock up grannies.
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What can such authoritarian testerics tell us about the maturing fascisms of the age? The term “liberal fascisms” is something of a paradox, and Žižek offers scant help in explaining it. Yet it is a useful provocation. It is clear that, for over a decade now, there has been a symbiosis between hard-center liberalism and the rising far right. This has been mutually beneficial: The threat of fascism whips the electorate into line behind austerian liberals, while the resulting social misery and anomie provides the emotional mulch for rising fascism. Both prefer it if the left is excluded from the picture. In the context of Gaza, of course, that symbiosis has become a global coalition headed by Washington. Žižek is right to say, riffing on Max Horkheimer, that “whoever is not willing to talk (critically) about liberalism should also keep quiet about fascism.”
Yet this goes deeper and must be historicized. Consider some of the aspects of today’s far right. It is, as historian Richard Saull points out, deeply imbued with the predicates of neoliberalism. Though rejecting its institutional format, from the European Union to NAFTA, today’s far right accepts and radicalizes neoliberalism’s distrust of democracy, its Social Darwinist contempt for welfare, and its tendency to culturalize social questions. In India, Hungary, and France, far-right parties have experimented with and implemented forms of ordoliberalism, the German variant of neoliberalism which espouses a strong state to safeguard competitive markets and insulate them from democratic pressures. In the United States, as Quinn Slobodian demonstrates in Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right, the Trumpian far right is the product of a new fusionism that hybridizes libertarian political economy with IQ racism and race science: an alliance exemplified by DOGE’s hatchet job on the administrative state and the engorgement of ICE into a national paramilitary force enacting ethnic cleansing.
With this comes the jouissance of muscular capitalism: a liberated capitalism not tempered by what Michael Mann calls a politics of “class transcendence,” but instead shorn of enfeebling woke constraints and licensed to drill, pollute, exploit, and oppress. The emblem of today’s far right is not the corporatist state, but Javier Milei wielding his chainsaw as a phallic prosthesis. This is consistent with the trajectory of twentieth-century neoliberalism, which emerged in reaction to mass democracy and its constraints on capitalism. Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian paladin of neoliberalism and author of The Road to Serfdom, argued that welfarism and social democracy, by disrupting the “spontaneous order” of the market with hubristic attempts at planning, would result in a progressive totalitarian hypertrophying of the state. William Scheuerman and Renato Cristi have argued from different perspectives that this critique drew strongly on Carl Schmitt’s critique of the party-political state and thus had a constitutive link with the anti-democratic rightist ideologies of the era. Jessica Whyte’s The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism documents how neoliberal founders embedded this austere, reified market ideology in a professed commitment to Western civilization, Christianity, and the family, at best provisionally supporting democratic arrangements. It was entirely consistent for Hayek to support Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, preferring, he told a Chilean newspaper in 1981, “a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.”
Then, too, contemporary reaction extols a vigorous, macho politics of the “sovereign individual” against the castrating “social justice warrior” and the neutering biopolitical state. As in the gyrations over COVID-19 safety measures, during which the myth of the sovereign individual briefly became countercultural, the new far right is furiously anti-statist when it comes to welfare or health interventions. Indeed, it goes much further: Any claim made on the individual by society is anathema. Masks are muzzles, social distancing is communism, vaccination is totalitarian. Wendy Brown is justified in calling this “sociophobia,” but in what sense? Psychoanalytically, a phobia displaces and conceals the real anxiety. In this case, the anxiety is obviously provoked by the constitutive failure of the sovereign individual, the individual’s total dependency on others and susceptibility to impersonal market or epidemiological forces.
In fact, the individual has never been weaker. As Philip Mirowski points out, neoliberalism doesn’t really believe in the individual: We are all just clusters of various capitals (cognitive, social, erotic, etc.) which can be put into play to return an income stream. Neoliberalism’s fundamental unit of analysis is not the individual but the enterprise. The “maximum of freedom that an individual can enjoy in the framework of the social division of labor,” said Ludwig von Mises, is the slim margin of choice in one’s occupation, under constant disciplinary pressure from price fluctuations that “recompense obedience.” The resulting social order has indeed tended to reduce the individual to a disciplined node in an infinite network of causes.
Sociophobia is not the politic of strong individuals, but of those who want the benefits of society without paying the price and, above all, without having to experience themselves as social beings. This is not wholly novel. Ishay Landa’s groundbreaking work, Fascism and the Masses: The Revolt against the Last Humans, demonstrates a persistent preoccupation among fascist European leaders and intellectuals with defending what Mussolini celebrated as “the individual” and “personality” against the socialized masses, a passion they shared with liberals. “We are anti-Marxists,” the Spanish Falangist José Antonio Prima de Rivera said, “because we are terrified . . . of being an inferior animal in an ant-nest.”
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Significantly, the rallying points for contemporary reaction often begin by clustering around a seeming defense of liberal values against some sort of subaltern threat. Reaction insinuates itself into, and works on, the contradictions of liberalism, mobilizing its exclusionary, hierarchical content against its universalist and egalitarian form. Thus, a reified “Enlightenment” is pitched against Muslims, “science” against trans people, “free speech” against the taxing constraints of civility.
“Reaction insinuates itself into, and works on, the contradictions of liberalism, mobilizing its exclusionary, hierarchical content against its universalist and egalitarian form.”
Take the fabled free speech warrior, oppressed by a censorious woke culture, unable to say what he really thinks, and finally yelping with delighted relief when a rightist agitator says the unsayable. Trump calls Somali immigrants “garbage,” Rodrigo Duterte urges Philippine soldiers to shoot females between the legs, and Jair Bolsonaro claims that wearing masks during a pandemic is “for fairies.” Suddenly, the arduous labor of maintaining a distance between what is ideologically permissible and what is enjoyed at the level of fantasy—violence and humiliation—is canceled. This is rationalized as a strike against the liberal superego and what Žižek calls its “bitter spirit of censoring.” Yet, soon enough, free speech absolutists reveal themselves to be serenely unbothered—or even reaching for the pompoms, as when pro-Palestine activists are arrested or illegally detained for deportation.
Does this mean that the concern was never really about free speech? Up to a point. But the stance can be experienced as consistent precisely because of what Domenico Losurdo has called liberalism’s “macroscopic exclusion clauses,” historically evidenced in Locke’s apologia for slavery and Mill’s defense of colonial tyranny, which precisely serve to distinguish the free from the unfree, masters from servants. Such exclusions have historically defined and delimited what C. B. Macpherson called the “possessive individualism” at the core of liberal ideology. In a social order in which liberty is to be achieved through the market—understood as the only social organization that doesn’t require a police state—the liberal subject is constituted as the owner of his capacities. Since this is predicated on an exchange relation between proprietors, the historical exclusions of women, the colonized, and the propertyless were not accidental but constitutive. In a way, the demand of today’s incipient fascisms has been to restore the exclusions and the compensations of mastery. Free speech was never supposed to be for them.
It must be added that liberalism, in its counterinsurgent phase, is all too ready to supply fascists with the weapons that will later be turned against liberals. It was, after all, liberal intellectuals like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens who normalized the Muslim panic and the associated demographic obsessions that have proved so fecund for the far right; Islam being contrary to liberal values, the comparatively high birth-rate among Muslims was an insidious danger to Europe. This is currently the substance of the Trump administration’s national security strategy as it pertains to Europe. It was liberal feminists like Joan Smith who validated the claim that Islam is a threat to Western women, an argument later taken up with gusto by British fascist Tommy Robinson and French neo-Nazi groups like Collectif Némésis. Similarly, the violent transphobia of contemporary reaction—in which trans women, representing a deviant masculinity, unsettle apparently self-evident chromosome-based sexual difference, making the whole question of a woman’s true place in the world uncertain and politically contested—began as a liberal and radical feminist effort to ground precarious women’s rights in bowdlerized biology. How did that happen?
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If the entry point for contemporary reaction is the exploitation of the antinomies of liberalism, what are the historical conditions under which liberalism itself turns reactionary and furnishes an inchoate political-libidinal architecture for fascism?
Why should it be, for instance, that it was liberal states, well before the rise of authoritarian nationalism in the West, that evinced a paranoid drive to liquidate difference through conversion or conquest in the martial and racial consolidations of the War on Terror? Consider, for example, the recent record of authoritarian French liberalism: Emmanuel Macron’s drive to “reform Islam,” his administration’s deployment of the sinister conspiracist trope of “Islamo-leftism,” and his passage of racist laws under the rubric of the aggressive French form of secularism known as laïcité. This is but a fuller realization and development of the post-2001 aggrandizement of republican aggression toward Muslims, restrictions on their dress, and the drive, as Nicolas Sarkozy, then France’s Minister of the Interior, put it in 2005, to clean the banlieues with a pressure washer.
Or think of British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s dystopian plans for refugees and migrants under the rubric of the so-called Danish model—the Scandinavian country’s migration policies—which included the extravagantly evil plan to expropriate refugees’ assets, including jewelry, and sell them. This, too, builds on the record of the macho assimilationism, surveillance of Muslim communities, refugee detention, and complicity in extraordinary rendition and torture built up under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s New Labour. None of this, in other words, was merely an opportunistic adaptation to far-right growth; rather, it reflects real tendencies within official liberalism. The same can be said, at the risk of stating the boringly obvious, for every rightist lurch on the part of the Democrats: It’s a feature, not a bug.
What is even more striking is that while the liberals have been noisily dropping or qualifying key tenets of liberalism for decades, it was their old enemies on the left who wearily took up their defense. In that era of muscular liberalism that prefigures so much of the present, the defense of liberal values like pluralism and civil rights was left to the radical and revolutionary left.
Liberal intellectuals like Hitchens, André Glucksmann, Paul Berman, and Pascal Bruckner became fomenters of culture war predicated on Western chauvinism, Muslim-baiting, and moral absolutism. It was actually the defenders of revolutionary socialism, supposedly an authoritarian project out to liquidate adversaries in the name of universal liberation, who were most aggressively opposed to this violently exclusionary politics with its odious justifications for military pulverization abroad and police terror at home. Liberals defended Western superiority by belaboring a straw postmodernism and an enfeebling “cultural relativism.” And it was often organized Trotskyists, generally the most obtuse pomophobes themselves, who most militantly spoke up for agonistic respect and reflexive humility, insisted that “the West” had no proprietary hold on any “values,” and demanded that ethnic minorities not be humiliated or forced to genuflect to the idols of liberalism.
This is all rather odd on the face of it. Liberalism turned reactionary not during a deep economic crisis or a social conflagration, but amid a prolonged boom and a period of unusual social peace. Nor was its turn driven by an explosion of mass racism; it was very much driven from above by politicians like Sarkozy, British Home Secretary David Blunkett, and their intellectual auxiliaries. One has to see this, in part, as the panic of a liberalism that thought it had won and that it was the only game in town. The self-understanding of bourgeois liberalism in the post-Cold War conjuncture was not only triumphalist about its supersession of old battles over capitalism and communism, but deeply committed to a morally renewed imperialism: The wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone were the occasions on which so-called Western values were put to the test and found superior.
The liberal intelligentsia largely seem to have accepted this. For all their wised-up cynicism, they were far more assimilated to the Bill Clinton–Tony Blair–Lionel Jospin Third Way than they knew. Their consciousness, especially their self-understanding as ironists and observers aloof from the realm of struggle and as guardians of universal values against particularist barbarisms, was that of what Gramsci would call the “traditional intellectual.” It rested, more than was apparent, on the laziest binaries of Western self-congratulation: civilized and uncivilized, rational and superstitious, modern and premodern. It was a liberalism that thought it had a right to take its parochial precepts for granted.
Then, of course, the barbarians arrived. They proved, without trying to, that the moralization of liberals depended on the demoralization of an enemy and that their self-confidence required someone else to be witch-hunted, bullied, demonized, or pulverized. The ontological shock of an extreme violence arriving from the periphery retroactively recast the old verities of tolerance, inclusion, and respect for difference as weakness, failure to maintain the necessary civilizational vigilance, and indifference. What followed was not one, but a series of moral panics: about Muslims, trans people, migrants, woke extremists, and so on, each of which sought to arouse popular aggression against an enemy whose existence seemed to call liberal self-confidence in its universal and progressive stance into question. Each moral panic reconfigured liberalism by catalyzing authoritarian and identitarian reflexes—eliciting a general right turn as a strategic response to and displacement of antagonisms—and precipitating defections to the right. Each prefigured, to some degree, the contemporary paroxysms about “cultural Marxism” and “white genocide.”
True, the advent of the new far right and the shock of Trump briefly aroused a panicked and moralistic liberal opposition. Its aggression was redirected against incipient fascism, even if its blunt toolkit largely consisted of reheated anticommunism, pious civics lessons, and yet another round of irrelevant pomo-bashing. This momentarily blunted the broad, international, and bipartisan offensive against dangerous minorities—until the alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu fully restored it.
The argument is not and cannot be that since liberalism is organized hypocrisy, which contains the seeds of fascistization, it can be safely junked. Žižek is right to argue, as he does in Liberal Fascisms, that this would be a catastrophic error. Aside from anything else, if there can be “two souls of socialism,” as Hal Draper once put it, there are at least two souls of liberalism. Abolitionism, the American Anti-Imperialist League in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States, anti-apartheid and anti-war campaigns, and today’s struggle to liberate Palestine have relied critically on those liberals for whom the commitment to universality and rights exceeds their admiration for markets, capitalism, and the liberal state. If liberalism contains some of the germs of fascism, it also contains the very revolutionary potential upon which any emancipatory project depends. The point—the problem—is that liberalism is not the eternal Other of fascism. Fascism is, rather, in a sense that Naomi Klein would understand, liberalism’s doppelgänger.