From Hitler to here: the journey of the far right
It’s a great time to be a neo-Nazi. For fans of the Third Reich, 2025 was probably one of the best years since the battle of Stalingrad. Hitlerian podcaster Nick Fuentes could take to Tucker Carlson’s massive online platform to denounce “organised Jewry” and receive the backing of an august conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. Elon Musk unveiled the world’s first automated global fascist propaganda publication, Grokipedia, where modern theorists of antisemitism and white nationalism like Kevin Macdonald, David Irving and Jared Taylor are praised in glowing terms. In Australia, underground Nazi organisations led mass marches against immigration, with the enthusiastic support of right-wing media outlets and mainstream politicians. The sects and gurus of the Nazi fringe can now influence, and sometimes even lead, the mainstream right.
For most of the last 80 years, that has seemed pretty unlikely. Hitler’s empire was blown to smithereens, and Mussolini was lynched by his compatriots. The world seemed to move on comprehensively. By the 1970s, biological racism, medieval sexual politics and antisemitism were viewed by many as historical relics that could never be revived in the Western mainstream.
The programs, methods and doctrines of first-generation fascism seem strictly bound to a particular time and place: a Europe of mass political parties, nascent revolutions and colonial empires challenging one another in open conflict. Fascism’s particular combination of those political elements—building a mass party to repress the revolution and rearm the empire—seemed irrelevant for much of the intervening period.
The ditching of so many distinctive elements of fascism led scholars like Enzo Traverso to use terms like “post-fascism” to describe far-right movements that emerged after the 1950s. Until fairly recently, describing right-wing governments as “fascist” could generate a cringe of embarrassment among liberals (afraid of seeming like overexcited socialists) and among socialists (afraid of seeming like scaremongering liberals). But now even neo-Nazi sects recognise, if not an identity, then a certain common project with the president of the United States. There are no great conceptual gaps in the chain of world views linking Australian neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell to Tommy Robinson, to Musk, to Farage, to Le Pen, and to Trump, the great peacemaker and leader of Western democracy.
The fascist and conservative movements, today merged as a nebulous “far right”, have grown towards each other. Fascist activists have spent decades finding creative, entrepreneurial ways to recast their doctrines and forms of organisation to suit new political periods, and conservative parties have been open to imitating, absorbing and, at times, exceeding those innovations.
Fascism was hardly eradicated after the Second World War. Right-wing dictatorships remained or emerged on the European continent throughout the postwar period, and many ex (or not so ex) Nazis found comfortable positions within the postwar political and business elites. Fascist sects continued to operate underground, sometimes as adjuncts of Western intelligence services. But to rehabilitate it as a mass social phenomenon, or to allow it to influence mainstream right-wing thought openly, would require a series of political manoeuvres and programmatic shifts.
The anti-colonial movement and its aftermath provided an opportunity. Colonialism had been an inspiration for the first generation of fascists: acquiring colonies, preserving colonies and applying the open violence of colonial rule against the domestic left. The rise of anti-colonial movements allowed fascists like France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen to relate to a broad right-wing fury at the impending loss of overseas possessions, and to the humiliation of defeat at the hands of lowly Algerian Muslims. In 1957, his National Front of Combatants organised a nationwide “Caravan for French Algeria”, a propaganda tour rallying support for the crushing of the Algerian independence movement. It was an early step towards the construction of what would be one of Europe’s most successful and influential postwar far-right parties.
But if colonialist pro-war politics allowed the European far right a platform, it did not give it a long-term future. The powers that had retained colonies soon lost them; independence, whether de jure or de facto, became practically universal. There was little to be gained by arguing for the military reconquest of Indochina, Algeria or the Indian subcontinent. By the late 1960s, the far right turned to the issue that would give them a new life and sustain them to this day: immigration.
Opposition to immigration could unite and grow multiple constituencies for fascist-adjacent politics. For extreme reactionaries in Europe, the presence of migrants from former colonial possessions was an insult and a humiliation. For racists, the mere rumour of African, Caribbean, Arab and Asian populations settling in for good was, and remains, an unthinkable horror. But perhaps most importantly, opposing immigration could seem like a simple nationalist solution to almost any economic problem.
Two years after Jean-Marie Le Pen led his pro-colonial caravan, British fascist Oswald Mosley campaigned in a by-election in West London. Mosley had founded the British Union of Fascists and led their infamous march through the Jewish district of Cable Street. But he was also a former Labour politician and knew precisely how to relate to frustration at wealth inequality; now, he openly directed that anger towards working-class immigrants. In his memoirs, he wrote:
“For nearly two generations, the repeated pledge to rebuild the slums and to house our people properly had been broken. Without lifting a finger to fulfil the forty-year-old promise, the government piled a new population on top of people already suffering from an acute housing shortage and widespread slum conditions ... My proposal was simply to repatriate immigrants to their homeland.”
Mosley was disappointed with the 8 percent he garnered in this election, but he had been one of the pioneers of a strategy that would define far-right politics forevermore. Writing in 1968, Mosley hinted that the full potential of the anti-migrant strategy would become apparent in the future: “An electorate never moves decisively except under severe economic pressure, which is nearly always unemployment”.
Sure enough, as the postwar boom exhausted itself and unemployment ratcheted up through the 1970s, anti-migrant far-right movements gained momentum. By 1977, Britain’s National Front had become a genuine mass phenomenon, with 15 percent of young men expressing support for it; from Mosley’s 8 percent support in the North Kensington by-election, the National Front polled 8 percent nationwide.
The anti-migrant stance was helped by the economic stagnation of the 1970s. That same stagnation gave rise to the era of neoliberalism: the centre-left parties would more openly embrace privatisation, deregulation and attacks on working-class living standards. The neoliberal era, in turn, supercharged the potential of anti-migrant politics.
It was not only far-right parties that embraced this scapegoating strategy: the right-wing press, mainstream conservatives and even centre-left parties spent the decades since the 1970s directing frustration and resentment towards migrants, even when the targeted immigrant population was so small as to be completely economically irrelevant, like refugees in Australia.
But for far-right parties, the neoliberal era created a special opportunity to present themselves as the defenders of the redistributive traditions that had been abandoned by the mainstream centre left. The “post-fascists” adopted a stance that became known as “welfare chauvinism”, the 1990 coinage of Danish researchers Jørgen Goul Andersen and Tor Bjørklund. The welfare state should be preserved by banning migrants from accessing its generosity. Immigrants were attacked as the parasitic beneficiaries of a marketised, unequal society.
While railing against the new neoliberal consensus, in the same decades many of the fascist-derived parties sought to “mainstream” and shed the last embarrassing vestiges of their associations with Hitler’s traditions. Antisemitism was deprecated and largely replaced with the fashionable Islamophobia of the War on Terror: the “dédiabolisation” of the French National Front culminated with the expulsion of its founder for his open Holocaust denial; the street-fighting British National Front gave birth to the “respectable” British National Party, which by 2008 was being described as having “one of the most Zionist” stances of any British political party.
Far from Hitler’s revolutionary calls for bloodshed, dictatorship and war, the far right of the 2000s often presented itself as a defender of democracy, liberalism, civilisation and social welfare. Its Muslim-bashing leaders were women like Marine Le Pen, gay men like Pim Fortuyn and self-proclaimed “social democrats” like Jörg Haider.
This was the rehabilitated, sophisticated and relatively popular “post-fascist” right that entered the political maelstrom of the 2010s, when the aftermath of the global financial crisis led to explosive hatred of the established political elites, and the civil war in Syria led to a new focus on immigration. The new politics provided a template by which right-wingers could convert anti-establishment sentiment into reactionary madness.
In some countries, such as the United States, the mainstream conservative party, after an internal crisis, largely adopted a far-right framework. In other cases, new far-right parties surged and displaced the old conservatives, as in France. In some, both processes unfolded one after the other, as in Britain, where Boris Johnson’s Conservatives rode the tiger of Brexit only to be consumed by it and replaced by Nigel Farage’s Reform. But as that process unfolded, something changed. In the decade after the Brexit vote and Trump’s election, the “post-fascist” far right has become a little less “post”. Right-wing activists with mass followings now sound less like Geert Wilders and more like Goebbels.
Having surged, the mass far-right subcultures have also radicalised. Right-wing tech giants have rediscovered the traditional capitalist hostility to democracy and interest in social Darwinism, exemplified by Elon Musk’s musing that the vote should be restricted to “high status males”. Biological racism, extreme misogyny and thuggish 1950s-style homophobia have become normalised. Even Nazi-style antisemitism is increasingly welcome in the global conservative community, the natural and logical conclusion of an ultra-nationalist reactionary world view.
When fascism first emerged, the Communist movement’s leaders were thrown back on their heels. It took some time to understand the seriousness of the threat and the novelty of its methods. A degree of complacency existed. “At first, the prevailing view was that fascism was nothing more than violent bourgeois terror”, Clara Zetkin told the Comintern in 1923—an audience intimately familiar with “violent bourgeois terror” and not inclined to underestimate it. But fascism was “quite different”, with its base “in broad social layers, broad masses, reaching even into the working class”. That required new methods of political combat.
But distinguishing too sharply between fascism and “traditional” reactionary politics can be misleading too. Fascism’s first generation pioneered new tactics—mass parties, revolutionary demagoguery and street violence—that could be adopted as needed by pro-capitalist political forces. The next century was marked by open and hidden collaboration, mutual inspiration and competition between fanatical fascists and mainstream conservatives. The fascist activists who swarmed around Trump, and the post-fascist parties he inspires, have helped to create a broad political movement with few clear barriers separating the underground Nazi sects from the tech CEOs and the think tank chairmen.
