America’s Fascist Playbook Is Wreaking Havoc around the World

Just before Thanksgiving in November 2022, I walked up the stone steps of the economics department building at Harvard University. I was there to see a professor: Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate and an intellectual titan who had essentially founded his own field of study called development economics, a discipline that brings economic analysis to bear on the question of mass inequality in developing societies. Sen was born in India at a time when the country was still colonized. And throughout his many books and published articles, through every academic honour available in England and the United States, one conclusion of his stands out.

Sen found that democracies with a free press did not have famines. “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy,” Sen wrote. Democratic governments “have to win elections and face public criticism, and have strong incentive to undertake measures to avert famines and other catastrophes.” Autocracies and empires and fiefdoms tolerated famines; rulers could look the other way because their authority was based only on brute force. Sen had experience close at hand: some 3 million people died in the Bengal Famine when Great Britain ruled India.

Sen was now eighty-nine years old and considered a legend at Harvard and in economics and development departments around the world. After a few minutes, I was called into his office. I pulled up a seat in front of him.

Sen sat on the couch, watching me. “So what are you working on?” he asked finally.

“Fascism,” I said.

Sen leaned back, knowingly. “Fascism,” he repeated. After a pause, he said, “Around the world?”

“Mostly in North America,” I said.

Sen scrunched his face, and he sat forward slightly. “Fascism is spreading elsewhere too. You must address the rest of the world.”

Sen was seeing what many had thus far been ignoring in America and the Western world—that fascism was now a global phenomenon, rising in democracies in all corners of the world. Right-wing nationalist and extremist parties were playing by the same rule book, which was to delegitimize their democratic systems, attack minorities, and convert democracy into a dictatorship. The playbook appeared to be working.

“Like fascism in India?” I asked.

For several years, India’s nationalists had targeted Sen and other intellectuals for their views on India and democracy. They had roughed up progressives, had targeted and killed minorities, and were trying to rewrite India’s national consensus into one of Hindu supremacy. “It’s terrible what they are doing. Terrible,” Sen said. “They are violent, violent. They obey no laws. Dangerous people. They intimidate students, even here; several of my students here have been terrified to speak up. You must address India and the fascism we are witnessing worldwide.”

Sen was speaking of the Indian nationalist right, which had come to power through Narendra Modi. The Indian prime minister was also a member of—and close to—the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a far-right Hindu cult that worshipped Adolf Hitler. The RSS organized young men into warriors, had a salute like the Nazi salute, and wanted to cleanse India of Muslims and other minorities. The RSS was explicitly religiously nationalist and extremist. India was for Hindus only, they claimed, and it had to be made great again.

India was perhaps the first major example of the left falling globally. The country had marched irreversibly in a far-right, nationalistic direction, comfortable now to plot out assassinations of dissidents on North American soil, carrying out targeted killings in Canada and attempting killings, according to the US justice department, in the United States. India wanted to transform itself from a multireligious society into a monolithic, Hindu-supremacist nation. Its propagandists wanted to turn their country, once the most pluralistic society on Earth, where diverse peoples have intermingled for centuries, into a place to be ruled by race and religion.

Even if Modi lost now, he had indelibly transformed the country. Gone was the syncretic, democratic, multi-ethnic nation that had once given the world the traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and pluralistic Islam. Now India was channelling its own inner fury, claiming to avenge past imperial wrongs and to make good on threats against the West. India was no longer the exception to the antidemocratic tide. It was quickly becoming the norm.

Fascism is indeed spreading around the world. Russia, Hungary, Poland, and France all have empowered or growing fascist movements. Pakistan can be said to be an authoritarian state, though not yet a fascistic one, since it has no charismatic or cult of leadership but is ruled by a military elite. Vladimir Putin’s Russia aspires to be a fascist state, although it lacks a radicalized mass party and is closer to an oligarchy and a kleptocracy, desirous of plundering the country’s wealth and redistributing it among a select group of the president’s friends.

China is a communist country that, in some moments, resembles not so much fascism but Stalinism, with Xi Jinping ruling with an iron fist and its eyes on the smaller nations in its periphery. Recall that fascism shares elements in common with the Stalinist and communist regimes, especially the cult of personality and the glorification of the masses, but with private property and the nation treated as separate and inviolable.

Two of the most overtly fascistic and murderous regimes of recent years were the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Bashar al-Assad regime of Syria—the ideology of both, called Ba’athism, was a direct mimicry of classical European fascism. A country does not need to go completely fascist to slide into authoritarianism; it can move along the fascist spectrum, taking on more qualities as its institutions crumble gradually.

In Germany, the country that rebuilt itself from the smouldering ashes of Nazism, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now the second-most powerful party in the country and is polling in first place. The AfD does especially well in areas that were under Soviet control and in regions less developed than wealthy Germany. In Berlin, you can clearly see the areas where AfD is succeeding. The AfD began as a party skeptical of the Eurozone currency and immigration and has morphed into a hard-line nationalist group that wants to deport not just legal immigrants but also German citizens of diverse backgrounds.

The fact that Germany could again entertain the likes of fascism is an indication of the power of the fascist idea. Uprooting fascism is difficult. It lurks always under the surface and is now reappearing. A country that has, for several generations, based its national identity on remembering has, apparently, forgotten.

Fascists in the modern era can shape-shift and, when necessary, put on the face of respectability. In Italy, with Giorgia Meloni, a friendlier version of the political right is in power. As a teenager, Meloni was part of a neofascist organization, the Movimento Sociale Italiano, founded by former prime minister Benito Mussolini’s supporters. Meloni’s own political party today has its spiritual roots in this organization and in Mussolini’s Fascist Party. Fascist rallies have taken place across Italy in recent years, with hordes of people caught on camera giving the fascist salute, most recently on the eightieth anniversary of Mussolini’s execution, in April 2025.

Next door in France, the far-right nationalists are also making gains and stoking resentment, and they are now the second-largest party in the country. France’s right-wing nationalists will be a force to contend with in coming years, especially as they learn from and build on each defeat.

Fascism is rising everywhere because the same breakdown in society and cartelization of the economy have rotted the old bonds between citizens, corroded democratic norms, and taken over democratic and legal institutions. Politicians of the left and the centre, when in those offices, did not do enough to help regular people and lost the messaging and purpose of their work. Fascists are dominating because fascists are speaking to people’s hearts and minds—and wallets—and giving them an easy solution.

Fascism both unleashes terror within its society and makes militant threats abroad to other countries. The end result is often war—aggression served at home that builds up to war. Fascists also engage in diplomacy and construct alliances that can, in the near term, maintain some semblance of peace. The countries leaning fascist today are seeking out alliances with each other. In fact, the US, at the risk of stating the obvious, is now an ally to the major right-wing populist nations. Elon Musk has publicly supported some eighteen right-wing nationalist parties around the world, and J. D. Vance has vocally supported the AfD.

In other words, the fascists find each other. When people are economically frustrated, when democracy no longer delivers for ordinary people, economic and political systems could come apart. Sen saw democracy as a “universal value,” meaning anyone, born anywhere, would have independent reasons to support democracy. The fascists seek to dismantle this consensus by overthrowing democracy with a dictatorship that they say will be more effective. They share values of a certain kind and share the same perceived enemy. That may be “the enemy within,” as they say, referring to minorities and elites, or the “global enemy,” which refers to international bureaucrats and progressive activists. The fascists see their society in an existential struggle against these enemies—who, often paired with an ancestral ethnic enemy, will destroy society by ruining the family and poisoning the nation’s blood.

These fascist parties’ rise to power has consequences: deportation agents in masks snatching students off the sidewalks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement doing drive-bys of immigrant churches, books being removed from shelves, innocent people being sent to a prison in El Salvador, tourists on legitimate visas being shipped off to secret detention centres. The horrors of fascism multiply, and its scenes often unfold while remaining unseen by the outside world. The consequences include the creation of lower classes of citizens, the attacks on sexual and racial minorities, the elimination of the free press, the weaponization of the law, and the dismantling of any organization critical to the regime. They include the temporary madness induced in its supporters and the general climate of fear and terror in everyone else.

The result of fascism is the eradication of constitutional rights and the destruction of democracy from within.

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In early 2023, it was clear that the fascist mobilization around the world was part of a cyclical pattern. Countries that had once been fascist were going fascist again. Countries where fascism took root but where liberal democracy had earlier routed any chance for a domestic fascist regime—such as in the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom—were seeing the fascist resurgence. And unfortunately, there seemed to be little broad-based, coordinated left-wing opposition.

I wanted to speak to one of the great intellectuals still alive then who had been warning about fascism for years. Noam Chomsky was now ninety-one years old. The main question I wanted to put to him was whether fascism was ascendant in the US and what we could do about it.

Chomsky was not convinced the US had turned completely fascist yet—but he did think it was heading there. For Chomsky, the saving grace of the moment was that Trump was a cartoonish figure. “I’ve said for a long time that the United States is very lucky that we haven’t had a charismatic figure who is honest, dedicated, committed to establishing fascist rule. What we’ve had are clowns: Joe McCarthy, Jim Bakker, Donald Trump, who’s just a narcissistic megalomaniac. We haven’t had a real Hitler type. Well, we could get one.”

After the assassination attempts against Trump, he has indeed taken on a kind of hallowed status of his own and is now viewed as a saviour by many of his followers. Private institutions, like universities and law firms, have prostrated themselves before the iron fist of the Trumpian state. Trump’s second coming has given him a glow of invincibility.

Indeed, there will be many miniature Trumps who observe his success and want to replicate it. Others will attempt to be the next Trump, perhaps with more fidelity to the law or a more refined way of speaking—but it will happen. They may lack his charisma and unique reality television personality, but the playbook for right-wing populism has been written and shown to be successful. As structural forces shift ever more strongly toward fascism, perhaps it does not even matter the particular kind of individual who comes to power.

While fascists rise globally, what remains universally true is that fascism always leads to war. The US has rediscovered its nineteenth-century foreign policy and the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, bringing back a century of American expansionism. The politics of redemption-through-revenge extends around the world, ceding power to far-right leaders and inflaming the anger of the ordinary person on the street. It is a powerful mix of fear and euphoria and myth making, and its appeal is both political and spiritual.

In our conversation, Chomsky was adamant, however, about one thing: that young people had the greatest task and challenge ahead of them. He had specific tips for the young: “First of all, educate yourself about it, so you understand it. Second, get together with others, organize to overcome it. Third, recognize that the younger generation today is facing a challenge that has never arisen in human history. Never. We now face multiple crises. If you open the newspaper, you’ll see the latest updating of the doomsday clock.”

Chomsky was referring to a clock created by the nonprofit group Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which estimates how close humanity is, at any given time, to global catastrophe and total destruction. At the time of this writing, it was set at merely eighty-nine seconds to midnight.

“Midnight,” Chomsky said, “means termination of the species. A challenge like that has never existed in human history. We’re very close to the precipice on the threat of nuclear war, climate destruction, the breakdown of democratic functioning. That challenge is real.”

Chomsky paused. “We—meaning older generations—have betrayed young people. They face the question: Are we going to save the human species from suicide? Along with the innumerable other species we are destroying in our folly: Are we going to save them, or are we going to fall over the precipice with them? It’s a challenge, but it’s also a prospect. Could be the most magnificent achievement in human history—to save the species from destruction. There’s no way to avoid this. You have to face it one way or another. No way to go home and say, ‘I don’t want to bother with it.’ That’s like saying, ‘Let’s march over the precipice.’ That’s what younger people face today.”

Should American democracy fall, other democracies will fall with it. Constitutional systems and charters of rights and hard-won battles for freedom that took centuries will crumble. This cannot be our fate. Nor can the eventual lurch into doomsday be our future. The great challenge before us now is to defeat fascism and save the planet. It will fall on people alive today to build a new consensus and win this struggle for democracy and freedom.

Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from Shadows of the Republic: The Rebirth of Fascism in America and How to Defeat It for Good by Omer Aziz, published by Broadleaf Books, 2026.

Photo: Barbara Burgess, Unsplash / Prime Minister’s Office, Government of India (GODL-India), via Wikimedia Commons / Giorgia Meloni 2022, Wikimedia Commons / Photo by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, via Flickr (CC BY 2.0) / Image adapted from “Trump-Musk-Putin.jpg” by Buaidh, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)