Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently – Rosa Luxemburg

Every democracy worthy of the name recognizes a simple but indispensable truth: dissent is not its enemy but its lifeblood. The freedom to criticize those in power, expose injustice, challenge entrenched authority, organize collectively, and imagine a more just future is the foundation upon which a meaningful democratic society rests. Without the right to dissent, citizenship becomes obedience, violence is normalized, politics collapses into spectacle, corrupt power is legitimated, reason disappears into an abyss of lies, and freedom is reduced to little more than an empty slogan. In such a society, state violence no longer needs to hide in the shadows; it is transformed into theater, a public spectacle of fear, humiliation, and degradation.

Authoritarianism begins by reversing democracy’s foundational principle. It does not merely silence critics; it first rewrites the language through which people understand politics itself. Protest becomes disorder. Journalism becomes subversion. Critical education becomes indoctrination. Independent thought becomes disloyalty. Memory becomes dangerous. Manufactured ignorance is elevated over literacy precisely because literacy offers the possibility of agency. Citizens who refuse to submit are defined as extremists, traitors, or terrorists. Fascism emerges as a regime of regulated memory imposing pedagogical structures that dictate what can be known, what must be remembered or forgotten, and what is permitted to be mourned or celebrated. Before authoritarian regimes imprison bodies, they colonize consciousness, imposing a cultural and pedagogical regime organized around racism, bigotry, greed, isolation, and apocalyptic visions. They teach people to fear dissent more than concentrated power, to mistake obedience for patriotism, and ultimately to embrace repression as the price of security.

This assault on democratic consciousness never relies on police power alone. Every authoritarian movement understands that force can suppress opposition temporarily, but only culture’s pedagogical power can make domination appear natural. As a result, authoritarian politics wages war not only through courts, prisons, and executive decrees but also through schools, universities, libraries, museums, the arts, the media, religious institutions, digital platforms, and every cultural apparatus capable of shaping public memory, civic identity, and moral responsibility. Democracy is won or lost not only through elections and laws but also through education, culture, language, and the stories a society tells about itself. As John Dewey argued in Freedom and Culture, a vibrant democracy depends upon a civic culture—a pedagogical matrix of habits, dispositions, and sensibilities—that ensures its survival. When that culture embraces anti-democratic values and visions while destroying the social fabric that binds people together, the formative conditions that cultivate critical agency and democratic citizenship begin to disappear. The consequences are not merely cultural; they become visible in the institutions, policies, and practices through which authoritarian power is organized and dissent is repressed.

The criminalization of dissent and the violent repression of protesters have long accompanied moments of democratic crisis in the United States. The Trump regime distinguishes itself by the scale, brazenness, and ideological coherence with which it has revived this tradition. Even more revealing, we are witnessing one of the most aggressive campaigns in generations to criminalize dissent while transforming the institutions of culture into the pedagogical machinery of authoritarianism.

The ambitions of this project extend far beyond partisan politics. It seeks to normalize state violence, legitimize the concentration of executive power, erase historical memory, and redefine democratic opposition as a form of domestic terrorism. Its goal is not simply to govern citizens but to reshape how they think, what they remember, whom they fear, and what they are willing to accept as normal. As the Lemkin Institute has warned, Trump’s attack on democratic institutions and those who defend them is part of a broader process of normalization sustained by “a language and symbolism rooted in genocidal ideology, dulling collective awareness of its harms and desensitizing society to its violence.”

That project came into sharp focus when Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened an international summit devoted to what the Trump administration described as the global threat of “far-left terrorism”. Joined by White House adviser Stephen Miller, one of the administration’s most fanatical white nationalist ideologues, Rubio warned of an international menace supposedly posed by left-wing movements while portraying political opponents as enemies of civilization whose claims to constitutional protections deserved little consideration. Embracing the dehumanizing language of the McCarthy era, Rubio dismissed the left as animated by “a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality, justice, and liberation” [describing its adherents as people driven by] “an overwhelming need to tear down, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right.” He concluded with a familiar nationalist refrain: “They despise the West because the West is great.”

Such language does more than vilify political opponents. Resurrecting the language of the Confederacy and the blood-and-soil rhetoric of racial-purification movements, this discourse casts immigrants as a civilizational threat; that is a contaminating presence allegedly poisoning the nation’s blood, undermining its racial purity, and threatening the imagined supremacy of a white Christian America. The purpose is not merely to exclude immigrants but to redefine democratic citizenship through a racist logic that treats difference as contamination and resistance as political subversion. Those marked as foreign are cast outside the protection of the nation, while those who defend them are branded enemies from within. Rubio’s disingenuousness takes one’s breath away, embodied in a death-dealing rhetoric that feeds on its own moral rot, strips language of conscience, and embraces cruelty without hesitation, remorse, or shame.

Stephen Miller’s hysterical remarks revealed the deeper ideological architecture of this project. He claimed that the left is driven by envy and hatred of “a perfect family with a perfect life and a perfect job and a perfect kid and goes [sic] to church every Sunday.” Beneath this sentimental Disneyified image lies a project of racial cleansing parading as a political ideal: a white Christian nationalist vision of America in which immigrants, people of color, journalists, critical educators, student protesters, and anyone who challenges state power become enemies of the nation itself. Miller’s racialized nostalgia for the patriarchal family echoes Jack Luzkow’s observation that Trump’s vision of America “comes in the name of the Flag, the cross, and nostalgia. It comes because of the fear of the future, the fear that white Christians are being displaced by Muslims and Mexicans, the fear of irreversible decline, the fear of China, the fear of technology and the robots that are coming for American jobs.” It is an authoritarian vision that Zeteo senior politics editor Andrew Perez has aptly described as “characteristically apocalyptic and authoritarian”, one that enables Miller to live out what Perez calls his “violent fantasy.” Within this morally decrepit universe, the separation of migrant families, the expansion of privately operated ICE detention centers, the abduction of students, and U.S. complicity in the mass killing of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon become either necessary acts of national defense or objects of indifference, while those who condemn such policies are branded extremists.

What is at work here is more than the delusional fiction of fanatical certainty and moral self-righteousness; it is an abject political illiteracy joined to a profound thoughtlessness, evident in the overt and self-conscious destruction of every vestige of humanity. Nowhere is this fascist logic of ethical corruption more apparent than in Miller’s portrayal of ICE agents as the real victims in Trump’s white Christian nationalist warfare state. In reality, as Andrew Perez points out, these are “violent, masked thugs who kidnap people, terrorize communities, and kill immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.” This is moral nihilism in its most dangerous form: a cultivated political thoughtlessness that refuses the claims of conscience and makes the destruction of human beings easier to ignore, justify, or celebrate. Miller thus defends a growing paramilitary force steeped in white supremacist ideology, one whose agents have exchanged the white robes of racial terror for the uniforms and machinery of authoritarian power. In this political order, cruelty becomes policy, suffering becomes spectacle, and the destruction of empathy is elevated into a civic virtue. It is a politics that wages war on the very meaning of our shared humanity.

ICE, now the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the Trump administration, is not merely an agency of immigration control. It is the institutional spearhead of what Eddie Glaude Jr. identifies as a restorative project, one designed to reclaim America as a white republic. The policing of migrants cannot be separated from this larger politics of racial restoration. Within this project, exclusion, disposability, and state violence become the instruments for reconstructing a nation defined by white Christian nationalism. In such a political order, cruelty becomes policy, suffering becomes spectacle, and the destruction of empathy is elevated into a civic virtue. It is a politics that wages war on the very meaning of our shared humanity.

Border czar Tom Homan, appearing on Fox News, extended this logic even further, repeatedly suggesting that Democratic politicians who resist the administration’s immigration policies are aiding terrorists or behaving like terrorists themselves. Even worse, he stated that “It all go backs [sic] to the Dems … there’s still gonna be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws that they enacted.” Here fascist politics reveals its final truth: the victims of state violence disappear, those who protest their suffering are blamed for the violence inflicted upon them, and the perpetrators proclaim themselves innocent. What disappears most completely in Homan’s account is the humanity of those whose lives have been shattered or destroyed. They vanish into the bloodless abstractions of “enforcement,” leaving behind only a political narrative designed to absolve the state and criminalize its critics.

Rubio, Miller, and Homan are dangerous not only because they are white supremacists and ideological fanatics, but because they wield the machinery of the state, its powers of education, repression, surveillance, and disposability. Their rhetoric exemplifies what Pankaj Mishra identifies as the “cult of redemptive violence,” a politics in which brutality is not merely tolerated but endowed with the moral force of purification and renewal. The cumulative effect of this rhetoric is unmistakable. Political disagreement is now viewed as evidence of criminality and national betrayal, and therefore as justification for state violence.

Taken together, this rhetoric constitutes a politics of fear, degradation, and violence. Its purpose is not merely to silence opposition but to reshape citizens into compliant subjects, teaching them to mistake intimidation for security, humiliation for justice, and cruelty for civic virtue. State violence is redefined as virtue, dissent is transformed into terrorism. History teaches that such dehumanizing narratives are never merely rhetorical. They prepare the cultural and moral conditions in which persecution, repression, and eventually mass violence become thinkable and, all too often, publicly acceptable. What follows is a descent into a moral abyss in which cruelty loses its power to shock and the unthinkable is normalized.

This politics of moral annihilation is reinforced by the administration’s revival of Cold War hysteria. The hysterical anti-communism driving the Trump administration is on full display in the remarks of Rubio, Miller, and others. As Robert Koehler observes, with Democratic socialists on the rise, Trump and his minions resort to “fear-mongering [as] a cover for his administration’s fear-creating. It’s not godless communists who are walking around, arresting and sometimes killing Americans, it’s the Trump Gestapo, also known as ICE.”

These statements reveal far more than rhetorical excess. They expose an emerging governing philosophy. The significance of Rubio’s, Miller’s, and Homan’s remarks lies not simply in their rhetorical excesses but in what they reveal about the administration’s broader political strategy. Democratic dissent is being recast as a national security threat, while the language of counterterrorism is increasingly deployed against critics of the state rather than against those who undermine democracy through violence. Homan’s response to the ICE killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine made this strategy brutally clear: state officials defend the agents responsible, blame Democrats and protesters for the bloodshed, and then invoke the violence they have helped produce as grounds for silencing further criticism.

The omissions were as revealing as the accusations. Neither Rubio nor Miller devoted serious attention to the January 6 assault on the United States Capitol, the most direct attack on the peaceful transfer of presidential power in modern American history. They did not object to Trump’s pardoning of the rioters, including those who brutally assaulted Capitol police officers, nor did they confront the extensive record of violence committed by white supremacist and other far-right extremist movements, long identified by researchers as among the most persistent sources of domestic political violence in the United States. Such selective outrage is more than hypocrisy. It reflects an authoritarian logic in which state violence and right-wing extremism are erased from public view, while democratic resistance becomes the principal source of political danger.

The consequences of this distortion reach far beyond political rhetoric, for its logic is increasingly embedded in public policy. The expansion of militarized immigration enforcement, the deployment of federal forces into American cities, the escalating use of surveillance powers, the broad claims advanced under National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, the increasingly severe prosecution of protesters all point toward a common objective: narrowing the space in which democratic opposition can exist while expanding the reach of the national security state. The shocking sentences imposed on protesters in Texas reveal the increasingly punitive machinery being deployed against dissent, demonstrating how the power of the state can be mobilized not simply to control protest but to intimidate those who dare to challenge its authority.

Alongside these legal and political developments, the administration has intensified its assault on the institutions that sustain democratic culture. Universities face political intimidation and threats to their funding; public schools are pressured to censor history and silence teachers; libraries confront organized campaigns to remove books; museums are pushed to sanitize the nation’s past; and journalists and independent media are vilified as enemies. Taken together, these attacks seek to capture the institutions through which societies produce knowledge, preserve memory, and cultivate informed judgment, making authoritarianism appear not exceptional but inevitable.

The danger before us is therefore larger than any single administration or policy. What has emerged is a political culture in which democracy itself is redefined as a threat whenever citizens dare to hold power accountable. Once governments succeed in persuading people that dissent is terrorism, solidarity is conspiracy, journalism is sedition, education is indoctrination, and justice is disorder, the foundations of democratic life begin to erode from within. History reminds us that democracies rarely disappear overnight. They are dismantled gradually as fear replaces hope, cruelty replaces compassion, propaganda replaces truth, and obedience replaces civic courage.

The defense of dissent is therefore about far more than protecting the rights of protesters or journalists. More fundamentally, it is about preserving the civic imagination upon which a meaningful democracy depends. Every generation must decide whether it will surrender the language of freedom to those who govern through fear or reclaim the democratic conviction that questioning power, defending truth, and standing in solidarity with others are not crimes but the highest responsibilities of free people. What is ultimately at stake is far more than policies or elections. It is whether democracy can survive as a lived culture rather than be hollowed out into the political facade of gangster capitalism, where concentrated wealth governs through fear, disposability, corruption, and organized cruelty while democratic institutions remain only as empty shells. Democracy cannot survive when it becomes synonymous with the rule of oligarchs, the commodification of every public value, and the substitution of market power for civic responsibility. It survives only as a culture capable of nurturing informed judgment, collective responsibility, and the courage to imagine a future beyond authoritarian rule. To grasp how such a politics takes hold, however, we must first examine the machinery of dehumanization through which authoritarian power acquires its legitimacy, emotional force, and capacity to make the unthinkable appear ordinary.

The Politics of Moral Collapse

The criminalization of dissent depends upon a deeper moral reversal. Authoritarian politics does not deny violence; it relocates it. Violence exercised by the state is recast as law, order, patriotism, or national security, while those who expose injustice or challenge abuses of power are portrayed as dangerous extremists. Under this logic, heavily armed federal agents carrying out militarized immigration raids are defenders of public safety, while students marching against injustice, journalists investigating government misconduct, teachers defending historical truth, and citizens protesting unconstitutional policies become the true enemies of the nation. Violence is no longer judged by what it does but by who exercises it.

This authoritarian logic now shapes the expanding machinery of state power in the United States. The administration has repeatedly justified the deployment of federal troops and tactical forces into American cities while presenting such extraordinary measures as necessary acts of public protection. It has vastly expanded the powers of immigration enforcement, unleashing ICE as an increasingly militarized arm of state terror while defending its raids, abductions, detentions, and deadly violence through the fascist language of invasion, contamination, and permanent emergency. Within this authoritarian imaginary, often spectacularized, immigrants are .transformed into enemy populations whose persecution becomes public spectacle, masked agents operate with expanding impunity, and constitutional safeguards are redefined as intolerable obstacles to the exercise of unchecked state power.

The fatal shooting of Johan Sebastian Guerrero during an ICE operation cannot be dismissed as an isolated tragedy or bureaucratically sanitized as the unfortunate consequence of “enforcement.” It also exposes precisely what Homan’s rhetoric erases: the humanity of those destroyed by state violence. As Jeffrey St. Clair’s moving portrait makes clear, Guerrero was not an abstraction or a statistic but a young man remembered for his generosity, dignity, and deep devotion to his family and community. His life stands as a rebuke to the official language that reduces human beings to targets, suspects, or collateral damage. This is how authoritarianism works: it destroys people physically only after it has rendered them politically invisible and morally disposable. The killing of Guerrero belongs to a widening landscape of state violence in which human beings are rendered disposable, terror is normalized as public policy, and the machinery of repression is concealed behind the bloodless vocabulary of law, order, and “enforcement.” Nor can the human cost of this system be dismissed: since Trump began his second term, at least 51 people have died in ICE custody, a figure experts warn may significantly undercount the actual toll. Lives are lost, families are devastated, communities are terrorized, yet accountability is too often replaced by bureaucratic rationalizations and political indifference.

At the same time, the administration has intensified its effort to criminalize democratic resistance. NSPM-7 marks an alarming expansion of the national security state under the banner of combating domestic extremism, criminalizing dissent through a sweeping executive directive issued without congressional approval. Civil liberties advocates have warned that its broad language risks collapsing the distinction between violent acts and constitutionally protected political activity, granting federal authorities unprecedented latitude to monitor, investigate, and prosecute individuals and organizations whose principal offense is opposition to government policy. History teaches that when governments acquire expansive powers in the name of security, those powers rarely remain confined to genuine threats. They almost inevitably migrate toward those who challenge existing relations of power.

That danger is no longer hypothetical. Across the country, protesters are facing increasingly aggressive prosecutions under conspiracy statutes and terrorism-related theories once largely reserved for organized criminal enterprises. The extraordinary sentences imposed on anti-ICE protesters in Texas shocked legal observers precisely because they signaled something far more ominous than the punishment of individual wrongdoing: the emergence of a system of repression willing to collapse political association into criminal conspiracy and recast democratic protest as organized extremism. Nor is Texas an isolated case. In Minnesota, federal prosecutors have brought conspiracy charges against activists accused of organizing resistance to the administration’s immigration crackdown. Federal authorities have also pursued scores of cases against protesters in Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., often accompanying these prosecutions with rhetoric that portrays political opposition as extremism. Here the legal architecture of the authoritarian state comes fully into view: the line between dissent and criminality is deliberately erased and opposition to state power is increasingly redefined as conspiracy, subversion, and even terrorism. This is how repression acquires the force of law: the dissenter becomes the criminal, the protester becomes the enemy, and the exercise of democratic freedom itself becomes grounds for surveillance, prosecution, and punishment.

The administration’s attack on democratic opposition extends beyond the courtroom. Journalists investigating abuses of power have encountered escalating intimidation, exclusion, legal threats, and public denunciation. Independent reporting, once understood as indispensable to holding power accountable, is increasingly depicted as an obstacle to national unity or as an enemy of the people. Trump recently offered a revealing display of authoritarian power fused with wounded vanity when, after ABC and NBC refused to broadcast his speech on alleged voter fraud, he suggested that their broadcast licenses should be revoked. The episode would be laughable if it were not so dangerous: a president, enraged that television networks declined to provide the national audience he believed he was owed, invoked the regulatory power of government as an instrument of political revenge. Here the petulance of the autocrat merges with the logic of authoritarian rule, the childish demand to be seen and obeyed, backed by the menacing power to punish those who refuse. The objective is not merely to silence particular reporters or intimidate individual networks but to undermine the independence of every institution capable of exposing governmental deception, corruption, and abuse. When citizens no longer trust independent sources of information, they become increasingly dependent upon official narratives, political spectacle, and propaganda.

Yet these developments cannot be understood simply as attacks on individual institutions. They reveal a broader authoritarian strategy aimed at reorganizing public consciousness itself. Authoritarian rule requires far more than obedient laws; it requires citizens whose moral imaginations have been reshaped to accept repression as common sense. For that reason, its primary target is not any single institution but the democratic capacities those institutions cultivate: historical memory, critical judgment, civic literacy, ethical responsibility, and the ability to distinguish truth from propaganda. Once those capacities are weakened, citizens become increasingly vulnerable to fear, manufactured ignorance, and political manipulation. The objective is not merely to silence dissent but to transform the cultural conditions under which dissent can even be imagined.

These attacks are often discussed separately, as disputes over education, immigration, journalism, policing, or public safety. As I have argued elsewhere, such fragmentation obscures the comprehensive project taking shape. Each assault reinforces the others, narrowing the spaces in which democratic consciousness can develop and weakening the critical thought, historical memory, compassion, and collective responsibility that make democracy possible. Citizens deprived of the language needed to recognize injustice become far easier to govern through fear.

Accordingly, the current assault on dissent cannot be reduced to debates over law enforcement or public order. At stake is the struggle over political imagination itself. Every authoritarian regime seeks not only to discipline bodies but also to colonize the political imagination and narrow the boundaries of what people believe is possible. It strives to convince ordinary people that repression is freedom, ignorance is common sense, and obedience is the highest form of patriotism. Democracy begins to die not only when citizens lose their rights but when they lose the capacity to imagine that another future remains possible. This assault on democratic consciousness is not confined to the United States; it belongs to a global authoritarian formation whose movements increasingly share the same language, strategies, and political ambitions.

The Global Grammar of Twenty-First-Century Fascism

The current trajectory of the United States is neither exceptional nor accidental. It is part of a broader authoritarian insurgency that has spread across the globe, adapting itself to different national histories while relying on a remarkably consistent political vocabulary. Whether in Hungary, India, Argentina, Italy, El Salvador, Russia, or elsewhere, contemporary authoritarian movements share a common grammar of power. They attack the legitimacy of independent journalism, weaken universities, censor teachers and public schools, rewrite national history, demonize immigrants and racialized communities, vilify intellectuals and artists, concentrate executive authority, militarize public life, and portray democratic critics as enemies of the nation. They cultivate fear, elevate cruelty into a political virtue, and transform insecurity into an instrument of governance.

These regimes differ in important respects, but they are united by a common ambition: to replace the language of democracy with the language of fear. Across national boundaries, democratic institutions are hollowed out while retaining their outward appearance, historical memory is subordinated to nationalist mythology, and citizens are encouraged to distrust evidence and critical thought in favor of manufactured outrage and charismatic authority. Democracy is emptied of its substance even as its symbols are cynically appropriated.

What binds these developments together is not merely a shared politics but a shared pedagogy. Twenty-first-century fascism governs less by commanding obedience than by producing forms of common sense that render domination natural, cruelty virtuous, and democratic values suspect. It wages a relentless struggle over memory, language, desire, and everyday life, flooding digital culture with disinformation, transforming spectacle into a substitute for reasoned public debate, and teaching citizens to distrust one another, forget their histories, and equate compassion with weakness. Its deepest achievement lies not simply in silencing opposition but in reshaping the moral and political imagination before repression ever becomes fully visible, producing subjects who no longer recognize authoritarianism when it arrives clothed in the language of patriotism, security, and freedom.

This explains why schools, universities, libraries, museums, journalism, and the arts have become central battlegrounds. These institutions cultivate informed judgment, the capacity to distinguish truth from propaganda, a culture of questioning, the ability to distinguish memory from myth, justice from vengeance, and shared responsibility from organized selfishness. They remind citizens that democracy is not inherited but learned, defended, renewed, and expanded by every generation. For authoritarian movements, they represent a profound danger precisely because they nurture the critical consciousness and collective agency that make domination more difficult.

The assault on these institutions is inseparable from the assault on dissent because both are aimed at transforming the conditions under which people think, judge, and act politically. Authoritarianism triumphs not when criticism is merely silenced, but when citizens lose the capacity to recognize domination itself. By the time democratic freedoms survive only as constitutional forms emptied of civic substance, the work of authoritarian education is already well underway.

This global convergence reveals not only the spread of authoritarian politics but the emergence of a new institutional architecture of fascist power. Unlike the classic fascist regimes of the twentieth century, the new authoritarianism rarely arrives through military coups or the immediate abolition of elections. It advances incrementally through legislatures, executive orders, courts, media conglomerates, digital platforms, billionaire patronage, and the gradual capture of educational and cultural institutions. Rather than destroying democratic institutions outright, it empties them of their democratic substance while preserving their outward forms, allowing authoritarian rule to cloak itself in the language of constitutional order, national security, and popular sovereignty. Its greatest institutional achievement is to normalize this process, making the slow dismantling of democracy appear as its very defense.

Beneath these institutional changes lies a deeper historical truth. Fascism today is not simply the negation of democracy. It is the political form that gangster capitalism assumes when even limited democratic demands begin to threaten the concentration of wealth and power. As Prabhat Patnaik notes, when neoliberalism (gangster capitalism) defaults on its promises of social mobility and a better life, it turns to neofascism. When democratic institutions become obstacles to oligarchic rule, they are hollowed out, privatized, militarized, and increasingly governed through the language of permanent emergency. Under such conditions, authoritarianism is no longer an aberration. It becomes the preferred political instrument through which concentrated economic power protects itself from democratic accountability.

Against this authoritarian convergence, the defense of democracy must be fought across every institution in which people learn, remember, deliberate, and act collectively. It cannot be confined to elections, court decisions, or legislative battles alone. It must also be fought across the institutions of education and culture, within labor and community organizations, and in every public space where people learn to think critically, care for one another, and imagine a future beyond fear. A socialist democracy can only emerge and survive when it is sustained by a vibrant civic culture capable of resisting the politics of disposability, organized forgetting, and manufactured ignorance. The struggle before us is therefore not only political; it is educational, cultural, moral, and profoundly international. Yet the global advance of authoritarianism cannot be explained by captured institutions and concentrated power alone. Its durability depends on its capacity to enter everyday life, reshape ordinary relationships, and educate people into accepting domination as common sense.

Teaching Fascism: The Socialization of Everyday Life

One of the most dangerous misconceptions about fascism is the belief that it begins with concentration camps, secret police, or the formal abolition of democratic institutions. By the time those horrors become visible, fascism has already achieved one of its most important victories. It has transformed everyday life into a vast educational force that teaches people how to think, whom to fear, what to forget, and whose suffering no longer matters.

Contemporary fascism is best understood not simply as a political movement or a set of governmental policies. Before anything else, it is an educational project. Long before it governs through laws, prisons, and military force, it governs through culture. It wages a relentless struggle over language, memory, desire, identity, and common sense. It seeks to reshape the moral imagination by normalizing cruelty, celebrating ignorance, rewarding conformity, and teaching citizens that democratic values, critical thought, compassion, solidarity, equality, and dissent are signs of weakness rather than sources of civic strength. It also reproduces through culture anti-democratic habits that sustain capitalism and undermine the social fabric.

This pedagogical machinery operates across the institutions that organize everyday life. Schools replace honest history with nationalist mythology; universities are disciplined through political intimidation and financial coercion; libraries and museums become targets of censorship and historical erasure; journalism is denounced as an enemy; and billionaire-owned media and digital platforms transform politics into a permanent spectacle of resentment, conspiracy, and distraction. Churches sanctify exclusion rather than compassion, while entertainment industries glorify violence, hypermasculinity, and the survival-of-the-fittest ethic of gangster capitalism. Across these cultural sites, citizens are taught the same lesson: democracy is dangerous because it encourages people to question authority, while authoritarianism offers the comforting illusion of certainty, order, and belonging.

Its pedagogical reach extends deeply into everyday life, reshaping the most basic human relationships. Fear replaces trust. Competition replaces solidarity. Public problems become private failures. Compassion is ridiculed as weakness. Cruelty becomes a spectacle to be consumed rather than resisted. People begin to experience the humiliation of immigrants, the suffering of the poor, the censorship of teachers, the harassment of journalists, and the imprisonment of political opponents not as democratic emergencies but as ordinary features of public life. The extraordinary becomes routine. The unthinkable becomes thinkable. Eventually, it becomes acceptable.

Rubio’s summit, Miller’s rhetoric, the militarization of immigration enforcement, the prosecution of protesters, and the attacks on education and journalism are not disconnected responses to isolated crises. They form a single pedagogical project, a regime of cultural violence, designed to make authoritarian rule appear natural, necessary, and inevitable. Together, they produce a form of civic illiteracy in which the public loses the capacity to distinguish democracy from domination, freedom from fear, and justice from revenge. If fascism educates people into resignation, fear, and cruelty, resistance must do more than oppose its policies. It must cultivate the solidarities, capacities, and political imagination necessary to build a radically different future.

Beyond Resistance: Reclaiming the Radical Democratic Imagination

Every authoritarian movement seeks to convince people that there is no alternative to fear, cruelty, permanent insecurity, and concentrated power. The greatest victory of fascist politics is not simply that it suppresses dissent but that it destroys the capacity to imagine a different future. It teaches resignation instead of hope, cynicism instead of solidarity, and private survival instead of collective struggle.

The answer cannot be a nostalgic return to the neoliberal order whose inequalities, exclusions, and betrayals helped produce the conditions in which contemporary fascism could flourish. Neoliberalism did not simply weaken democratic institutions; it hollowed out the public sphere, reduced citizenship to consumerism, celebrated privatization as freedom, normalized staggering inequalities of wealth and power, and abandoned the very language of the common good. It created a society in which democracy became increasingly subordinate to the imperatives of capital long before authoritarian movements openly sought to dismantle what remained.

The struggle before us is no longer simply a choice between authoritarian capitalism and the increasingly hollow institutions of liberal democracy. More fundamentally, it is a struggle between authoritarian capitalism and a radical democratic politics committed to democratizing every major institution that shapes everyday life, the economy no less than education, the workplace no less than government, culture no less than elections. Democracy cannot survive where economic power remains beyond democratic control, because concentrated wealth inevitably seeks concentrated political power. Political democracy without economic democracy remains permanently vulnerable to authoritarian capture. The struggle against fascism is therefore inseparable from the struggle against neoliberal capitalism at home and abroad. In its gangster capitalist form, capitalism no longer merely corrodes democracy from within; it increasingly generates the authoritarian forces that seek to replace it altogether.

The alternative must be a fundamentally different democratic horizon informed by the principles of radical democracy and democratic socialism. Such a democracy places human needs above the imperatives of capital, expands rather than contracts the public sphere, deepens democratic participation throughout society, and recognizes education as the foundation of democratic freedom rather than an instrument of conformity. It measures freedom not by the wealth accumulated by a privileged few but by the degree to which all people possess the political, economic, educational, cultural, and social capacities necessary to exercise meaningful agency over the conditions of their lives. Such a democracy does more than protect civil liberties. It creates the material conditions that make freedom possible, insisting that freedom without equality becomes privilege, equality without freedom becomes domination, and both lose their emancipatory promise when detached from solidarity, historical memory, and shared responsibility. The struggle before us, then, is not simply to resist fascism but to build the democratic socialist future that fascism fears most: a society in which power is shared, wealth is democratized, education cultivates critical agency rather than civic conformity, and every person is recognized as capable of shaping the conditions of collective life. Against the authoritarian pedagogy that saturates everyday life—teaching fear instead of hope, disposability instead of solidarity, obedience instead of critical judgment—we must cultivate a radical democratic pedagogy of everyday life, one that nurtures the civic imagination, deepens historical consciousness, and expands the capacities necessary for self-government. Such a pedagogy teaches people not only how to recognize domination but also how to imagine, create, and sustain the democratic socialist society capable of transforming freedom, equality, and solidarity from abstract ideals into the lived conditions of a just and flourishing democracy.