Philip Cunliffe asks whether Trump 2.0 marks not only the decisive end of the post-Cold War era, but also the end of an ideological framework that has dominated global politics since the 1940s.
As European leaders were arriving for the Munich Security Conference 2025, Donald Trump was on the phone to Vladimir Putin talking peace in Eastern Europe. At the same time, his Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth was ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine. When the delegates got to the conference hall, they were told in no uncertain terms by US Vice-President JD Vance that they, and not the Russians were, the most worrying threat to democracy in Europe. The hue and cry in response to the prospect of a deal to end the war in Ukraine was routine and predictable: denunciations of diplomacy as ‘appeasement’, the implication that any compromise to bring peace is equivalent to surrender. The only novel aspect is that the accusations of appeasement are being levelled at the US by its European allies. The fact that a US administration is willing to face down accusations of appeasing fascism from its allies, and successfully seeing off accusations of being fascists from its domestic opponents, marks a historic turning point in world politics.
Accusations of fascism have become routine, part of the electoral choreography with which floundering centrists and progressive liberals try to suppress populist challengers. The bad faith of these accusations is made plain by the fact that accusers do not themselves believe their own propaganda. This was confirmed immediately after the US election when outgoing President Joe Biden welcomed the putative fascist, Donald Trump, to the White House as part of the ordinary rituals of national electoral change and Trump rubbed shoulders with former presidents at Jimmy Carter’s state funeral. Both of these public events made a mockery of all the claims about the supposedly existential stakes of the last presidential election.
Of course, some of the Democrats’ supporters refuse to go along with the formal procedures of US democracy. Clinging to the ideological ramparts, they continue to insist that not only is Trump a fascist but that US voters are also fascists for willingly embracing his Trumpian demagoguery. And of course they claim that Trump’s mooted peace deal with Putin over Ukraine is akin to the betrayal of Czechoslovakia to Hitler at the Munich conference of 1938.
Such claims are difficult to square with the fact that Trump has built a new electoral coalition incorporating large multi-racial swathes of the US working class – a group that has historically not been the natural electoral constituency for fascism. The electoral coalition built by Trump for the GOP undercuts claims that his appeal lies in a racially-stratified ethnonationalism, or that he is the figurehead for the restoration of segregationist white supremacy. Evidently, plenty of black, Latino and white Americans as well as Americans of the female persuasion do not buy the notion that the Land of the Free is on the brink of crumbling into the Fourth Reich.
The voters’ familiarity with Trump also undercuts claims about the embrace of fascism. American voters know full well that Trump managed to get through his first term in office across 2016-20 without establishing a fascist dictatorship. This is despite the fact that he was presented with an obvious pretext to do so, in the form of a once-in-a-century global health emergency during the Covid-19 pandemic – a time when many of the same people currently decrying him as a fascist were also pushing for more drastic curbs to civil liberty and ordinary government than Trump was willing to contemplate. The difference between then and now is that Trump did not win the popular vote in 2016 or 2020, whereas this time more voters than not plumped for the candidate who was not only called a fascist by his opponents, but was also said to be allied with the external fascist leader, Putin.
That so many voters in the world’s most powerful state have refused to accept the strident propagandising that Trump is a fascist or that Putin is the new Hitler marks an important turning point. It may even indicate that the working class is edging its way out of the ruined labyrinth of twentieth-century politics. For those of us interested in the future of internationalism, mass democracy and working-class politics, there is much to be gained from reflecting more deeply on Trump’s success in facing down the left’s relentless anti-fascist propaganda and conspiracy-mongering.
In seeking to cast Trump as a new Hitler or Mussolini, America’s liberals and leftists were not only arguing that Trump was a bad electoral choice, but by virtue of being a would-be fascist demagogue in the world’s most powerful state, Trump was the worst possible choice, not only for the American people but for the world at large. In such circumstances, it was more important to be against Trump than to be for something. This oppositional hostility was underscored by the fact that following Trump’s first election, so much of the left chose the label of ‘Resistance’ for their political identity, defining themselves by what they opposed rather than what they stood for.
At the same time, capital-R ‘Resistance’ was a label that self-consciously harked back to the guerilla bands of mid-twentieth century Europe who had fought the Nazi occupation of their countries. This is despite the fact that the senior managers, professors, post-graduate teaching assistants, lawyers, journalists, civil servants and USAID professionals who comprised the Resistance were very clearly never going to take up arms (and indeed most of them are almost certainly strong supporters of gun control). Nor was there any danger of these latter-day forces of Resistance abandoning any highly-paid jobs working from home to flee for the forests and hills in order to mount guerilla operations against the security forces of the federal government.
In France, the populist left have also styled themselves after the anti-fascist politics of the same era, calling their 2024 coalition the ‘New Popular Front’, harking back to the short-lived Popular Front government of Léon Blum (1936-37), thereby positioning themselves as the opposition to the neo-fascist menace supposedly posed by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Meanwhile, black-clad ‘Antifa’ thugs have replaced the old ‘black bloc’ of roving anarchists that used to lead the anti-globalisation protests of the 1990s. This time, however, they are protesting against the US administration that is actively trying to de-globalise the American economy along the lines that they hitherto supported, as when anti-globo demonstrators, calling for anti-dumping tariffs against cheap steel imports, at the so-called ‘Battle of Seattle’ protested against a meeting of the World Trade Organization in the city in 1999.
The fact that this anti-fascist posture stretches across the democratic world from America to France, and across the spectrum from the European delegates to the Munich security conference through to postmodern anarchist riff-raff, tells us just how much our collective political imagination is still gripped by the politics of the mid-twentieth century – and the politics of anti-fascism. What explains the grip of this late twentieth-century political model, defined by what it is against rather than what it is for?
The origins of anti-fascism
Modern anti-fascism emerged in 1935 at the seventh congress of the Communist International (or Comintern) held in Moscow under the watchful eye of its leader, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The Comintern was a global organisation established in the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1919 to coordinate the policies of new-found communist parties that were breaking away from established socialist parties as part of the rupture of the global left prompted by opposition to the Great War of 1914-18. At the 1935 Comintern congress, a new platform was launched, styled as the ‘Popular Front Against Fascism and War’. This new policy mandated Soviet-led Communist parties to establish electoral coalitions and political alliances with their erstwhile opponents on the left and centre, in order to neutralise and contain the growing strength of fascist regimes and fascist parties.
The fact that the ‘popular front’ was declared two years after Hitler had been appointed Chancellor of Germany is significant in that anti-fascism emerged as a reaction to this earlier catastrophe – the failure of the German Communists, slavishly following Moscow’s orders, to prevent Hitler’s rise to power in the first place. This is despite the fact that Stalin had had ample opportunity to coordinate political collaboration with Germany’s Social Democrats that would have blocked Hitler’s path to power. Stalin nonetheless refused to do so, in the belief that the Nazis’ electoral advances would erode support for liberal capitalism, thereby clearing the way for Communist revolution in the near future – ‘after them, us’, as the Stalinist slogan of the day put it.
After Hitler’s victory, Stalin’s retreat to the defensive line of anti-fascism meant that the Communists put off the goal of socialist revolution in favour of defending the very liberal democracy that Stalin had hitherto derided as irredeemably corrupted. The working-class support mobilised behind the legacy of the October Revolution was dissolved into propping up liberal democracy, supporting Blum’s restrained Socialist government in France and Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism in the US. Stalin calculated that this would enable an alliance between Soviet Russia and the remaining democratic Western states. This alliance would in turn pin Hitler down with the risk of a two-front war in the west and east, thereby allowing Stalin to continue building – and more importantly for him, ruling – socialism in one country, undisturbed.
However not only did anti-fascism arrive late on the scene but failure was heaped on failure. The anti-fascist popular front had few successes, establishing alliances that won elections only in France, Spain and Chile, which led in turn to short-lived, failed governments that either collapsed (as in the cases of France and Chile) or, in the case of Spain, was overwhelmed by a pro-fascist military mutiny. Once again beset by failure, Stalin reversed track again, opting this time for direct alliance with the fascists instead of seeking to contain them through alliances with liberals and socialists. This new policy was consummated with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, with which Nazi Germany and the USSR not only agreed not to fight each other but also carved up Eastern Europe between themselves, wiping Poland off the map in the process. When this policy also failed after Hitler abrogated the pact with his invasion of the USSR in 1941, the politics of the popular front were revived by Moscow once again. Communists in Britain and the US were urged to rally behind their governments to oppose Nazi Germany, while those in occupied Europe joined forces with all those who had taken up arms against Nazi occupiers in order to form a coalition – the Resistance – that would aid the Soviet war effort by tying down and whittling away Nazi forces in the rear.
Surviving the end of fascism
The United Nations’ victory over the Axis by 1945 transformed the politics of the Soviet regime both at home and abroad. At home, the October Revolution gained a new, retrospective apotheosis in the annual military parades of Victory Day on 9 May. The legitimacy of Communist Party rule no longer rested on the prospect of making the free development of all the condition of the free development of each, but rather on Soviet force of arms in having successfully crushed the Nazis’ predatory racial imperialism, thereby vindicating Stalin’s siege socialism. The honour of having crushed the Nazi war machine helped to burnish the Soviets’ reputation in international affairs, extending the promise of protection against German revanchism, with the ‘Peoples’ Democracies’ of Eastern and Central Europe legitimated by the exclusion and suppression of fascists, of whom it turned out there were many more than those who were merely members of fascist parties.
Having been developed in the inter-war period as a rearguard manoeuvre by a floundering dictator seeking to re-legitimise his regime and its policies, paradoxically the ideology of anti-fascism enjoyed a remarkable new lease of life after fascism had been crushed. Anti-fascism allowed the Soviets to claim the mantle of popular patriotism as defenders of democracy, and to point to the threat of resurgent fascism in the event of German rearmament or of surviving fascism at the margins in the case of far-right dictatorships in Portugal, Spain, Greece and Latin America. As in the 1930s, anti-fascism remained at the service of Soviet diplomacy.
At the same time, everything that made anti-fascism work as a political resource for Stalin and his successors also made it an immensely appealing ideological prize for his opponents. Anti-fascism offered the prospect of sharply bifurcated Manichean politics based on the indefinite deferral of one’s ultimate goals, thereby obviating the need to present a case for fundamental change while also avoiding any need to justify the status quo. Instead, both ends were achieved at the same time by a defensive retreat from higher principles on the grounds of fending off the imminent threat of a much greater evil that had to be resisted at all costs – fascism.
This was an ideological manoeuvre that others sought to replicate. In his 1944 argument for restoring classical liberalism, The Road to Serfdom, neoliberal theorist F.A. von Hayek made the anti-fascist case by arguing that war-time controls over the national economy risked recreating fascism in the Allied countries even as the fascists were defeated abroad. In the British general election of 1945, Tory prime minister Winston Churchill sought to fend off Labour’s programme of nationalisation by warning against Labour’s encroaching fascism, arguing that the Labour Party would be forced to create its own Gestapo if it was to manage a nationalised economy. US Democrat president Harry S. Truman denounced his Republican opponent Thomas E. Dewey as a fascist in the US elections of 1948 – despite Truman himself having been a senator from the segregated state of Missouri.
Anti-fascism allowed all sides to lower the expectations of their supporters, defining themselves by what they opposed rather than justifying themselves on what they stood for. On the one hand the Right, frustrated by the Soviets’ championing of patriotic freedom fighters against fascism and empire, tried to turn anti-fascism against the Soviets themselves by substituting it with anti-totalitarianism. They argued that Soviet communism was essentially the same system as fascism, as bad if not worse than Hitlerian fascism. They even went as far as establishing their own heroic freedom-fighting guerrillas in the enemy’s rear, organising psychotic Latin American death squads, pro-apartheid black militias in Angola, and fanatical Islamic terrorists such as Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. The Western Left, on the other hand, adjusted to Stalin’s lowered horizon – the retreat from communism to liberal democracy – to mount a long, staggered retreat of their own. Having retreated to New Deal liberalism and state socialism, they would end retreating from that too with the embrace of neoliberalism and the end of the welfare state overseen by the Democrats in the 1990s, until eventually there was no more territory left to concede – and all that was left was a shrill and fatuous denunciation of Trump as a fascist.
Anti-fascism goes global
The vacuity at the core of anti-fascism meant that it offered no stable long-term basis for successful statehood. It is no coincidence that the three states that had built their political identities around anti-fascism not only collapsed, but disappeared as states – the German Democratic Republic, the USSR and socialist Yugoslavia. Once the Cold War was over, anti-fascism was no longer limited by Kremlin diplomacy – it could go global. Conservative historians such as Francois Furet hoped that with the end of the Cold War, the anti-fascism that had worked so effectively to camouflage the horrors of Soviet communism would disappear along with the Soviet Union itself: The Passing of an Illusion, as the title of Furet’s book on the matter put it. But this only indicated how much he underestimated the flexibility of anti-fascism – and the opportunism of Western politicians. With the Soviet Union gone, the Communists’ monopoly on anti-fascism was broken, and it suddenly became an ideological resource available to all those who had coveted it so enviously since 1945 – conservatives, liberals and social democrats alike.
For social democrats who had surrendered to the market ever since the UK Labour chancellor Denis Healey had accepted austerity as the condition of an IMF loan in 1976, anti-fascism became a way of reclaiming their position on the left. For conservatives, Churchill could be wheeled out to claim an anti-fascism that could now be freely deployed against every upstart leader who happened to stand in the way of US empire at any particular point. Hence the constant fighting of wars against a sequence of tinpot autocrats and strongmen ruling over countries nothing like interwar Germany, each in turn reinvented as the ‘new Hitler’ – Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad and of course, Vladimir Putin. Anti-fascism could even be deployed against the West’s erstwhile allies who had beaten the Communists for them – the Afghan freedom fighters welcomed to the White House by US president Ronald Reagan in the 1980s were deemed ‘Islamo-fascists’ by former Reaganite minister Donald Rumsfeld. For liberals, the polarised stance of anti-fascism was eminently suited to substituting morality and law for politics, where good was defined by fighting against genocidal evil. Anti-fascism came full circle when it returned to Moscow, with Russian president Vladimir Putin justifying his wars against Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014-present) on the grounds of defending vulnerable minorities from genocidal governments, ‘de-Nazifying Ukraine’ and even farcically reviving ‘Peoples’ Republics’ in the territory of eastern Ukraine before annexing them to Russia itself.
It turned out that Stalin’s defensive manoeuvre from the 1930s was an ideology eminently suited to the End of History. With liberal democracy touted as the final form of human government, a system that no longer required either justification or improvement, fighting fascism in the form of recurrent genocidal dictators was now the only cause left. Hence the paradox that the more that actual fascism receded into the past, the more traction anti-fascism gained across the political spectrum. Indeed, the condition of US liberals being able to style themselves as the Resistance in the 2010s is not only the fact that the US was never occupied, but that they could only do so in an era in which the actual resisters and veterans of the war against fascism were dying out. When neo-liberalism entered its crisis with the Great Financial Crash of 2008, anti-fascism was once again revived by liberals and leftists who had nothing left to offer, seeking to ward off the threat to the status quo from populist ballot box rebellions.
Voters however are finding the status quo harder to live with than the left and have turned against both. Trump’s victory at the ballot box represents the culmination of a trend across Western democracies, in which voters have consistently rejected the politics of ‘lesser evilism’ presented by centrist social democratic parties – politics in which they demand votes not on the basis of hope, but on the basis of protecting them from something worse. The voters’ rejection of lesser evilism is evident in the cycle of electoral destruction wreaked a cross Europe’s social democratic parties, beginning with the extinction of Greece’s PASOK in 2015, going through the near-extinction of France’s Socialists, right through to the collapse of support for Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats in Germany today. Trump’s popular victory is not only the culmination of this trend but is also more significant for having been consummated by a figure whose ascent to leadership of the world’s most powerful state could be cast as a menace to the world in a way that Britain’s Boris Johnson, or Greece’s Kyriakos Mitsotakis, or Hungary’s Viktor Orban, could not.
The voters have persistently refused to buy the idea of Trump the fascist. While voters have turned against anti-fascism and lesser evilism, the left, liberals and the neocons have decided they prefer to cling to the moral high ground, each inhabiting their own impregnable fortress of anti-fascist moral virtue and political irrelevance, shooting volleys of over-heated rhetoric at each other as the masses depart the field. European technocrats denounce J.D. Vance as a fascist stooge. Leftists denounce Israel as a genocidal fascist state, Netanyahu as the latest incarnation of Hitler, and rediscover the Resistance in the Islamist reactionaries of Hamas and Hizbollah. Neocons in turn inflate the significance of these rag-tag Islamist militias, denouncing them as genocidal fascists that threaten the Jewish state’s political independence and the physical survival of the Jewish people. It is an ironic and fitting end to the most monstrous political blackmail of the twentieth century, that it ends at Munich, with the inability to decide who is really Hitler – Netanyahu or Sinwar? Putin or Trump?
Anti-fascism ends with a whimper. Trump and Vance are helping the US escape the vortex of anti-fascist politics. The question for the nations of Europe is whether they too can escape the shadow of Uncle Joe, and confront their conditions with sober senses. If the EU doubles down on anti-fascism in response to US strategic withdrawal from Europe, it is likely to crumble in on itself as the anti-fascist states of Eastern Europe did at the end of the Cold War.
The Northern Star 
Leave a comment