THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM & THE RISE OF MAGA FASCISM

Dedicated to the seven million people who marched in the “No Kings March” of October 18, 2025. “Events [without historically-grounded, theoretically-informed understanding] are dust” – Fernand Braudel

Liberalism has the historical distinction of having been the most polished ideology of what became known as bourgeois democracy in the history of the modern capitalist world-system: a centrist ideology, it was committed to social change by advancing reforms and achieving social progress (in contrast with right conservatism), but in gradual, moderate steps (in contrast to left radicalism), while steadfastly defending, advancing, and sustaining private property and the endless accumulation of capital as the true, overriding logic of the global social system – both against monarchical/theological and radical communitarian logics.

Philosophically, the roots of liberalism go back to the secular humanist Enlightenment, the Reformation, and the momentous societal changes ushered in by the scientific revolution; but it only became triumphant as the "geoculture" of the modern world-system – politically and ideologically dominant – during the eras of British (1815-1914) and U.S. (1945-1989) global hegemonies. 

Liberalism first defeated the reactionary, church-state fused, monarchical "ancien régime" in the wake of the French & American Revolutions, as it extended propertied elite democracy at home and simultaneously championed aggressive "Free Trade Imperialism" in the peripheries of the world-system. 

It was sold as "the march of progress," the "expansion of civilization," and the "White Man's Burden." The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, which the very British dominated and expanded along with the French and others the centuries before, was unilaterally abolished in favor of machine production in Europe and the direct colonial exploitation of native labor forces and appropriation of their natural resources in Africa, India, and East & Southeast Asia. 

The first wave of decolonization and expansion of liberalism in the pan-European world, in a fierce battle against traditional royal/church conservatism, happened in the U.S. & Latin America, while European colonialism greatly expanded in Africa and Asia - both simultaneous developments championed by the same British liberals who were by then in effective command of the capitalist world-system. 

As new areas of industrial capitalism arose in Europe, inter-imperialist rivalries soon overtook the logic of Free Trade Imperialism, despite the best British efforts to regulate it in the 19^th century (e.g., the negotiated partition of Africa soon led to the "scramble for Africa"). In its place, European imperialism went to war between its major powers in the second decade of the 20^th century (Russia and Japan did as well earlier in East Asia). The geopolitical zero-sum logic of territorial conquest overtook the economic logic of capitalist trade & production - or rather, inverted their primacy in their imbricated relationship in the global capitalist social system.

After the huge disaster of WWI and the earlier defeat of Russia in its war with Japan - both of which sparked the socialist Russian Revolution -, and the calamity that followed with the Great Depression, liberalism - now led by the U.S. under Woodrow Wilson and later FDR - regrouped and led the charge against the revanchist fascist threat that emerged in Italy, Germany, and an emboldened Imperial Japan. The resulting combat - WWII - was won in alliance with British conservatism (Churchill) and Soviet socialism (Stalin). 

The U.S. led the interstate coalition against fascism with its reinvigorated economic and military might but enhanced by the promise of its New Deal social contract to the world, which offered major social, economic, and political concessions to the working classes. It was liberalism finest hour.

The second wave of world decolonization that followed WWII was championed both by the U.S. and the USSR, the two remaining military superpowers, but in bitter ideological and geopolitical rivalry during the early period of the Cold War. The British gave up India and most of its African colonies (the white settler states in Rhodesia & South Africa would resist until 1979 & 1994, respectively); the Portuguese and the French imperialists fought brutally but eventually lost all their African and Asian colonies. The Korean and Vietnam wars were “partitioned” decolonization processes the U.S. tried to prevent – with split results in the former and defeat in the latter. The two remaining unresolved legacies of that second wave of Cold War decolonization are the two Koreas (technically still at war) and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Furthermore, the U.S.-led decolonization processes were based on “free enterprise imperialism” which encouraged capitalist development via the new international lending institutions (WB & IMF) and U.S. corporate foreign investment and allowing “national development” of Third World economies via import substitution strategies. These were neocolonial formulas, sponsored and regulated by the U.S. state in the “Free World” and, whenever deemed necessary, subject to covert and military interventionist action to impose “discipline” and stamp out radical left reforms in the Third World.

The Soviet Camp – the so-called Second World – was geopolitically "contained" and economically frozen out for half a century, though it too grew and expanded to East (China) and Southeast Asia (North Korea & Vietnam) under the ideology of "Marxism-Leninism". In Eastern Europe, under the neoimperialist direct dominance of the USSR, autonomous democratic national development was ruthlessly stamped out (except in Yugoslavia). 

In the Americas, Cuba stood as the only Latin American, more or less autonomous, version of socialism but caught in the crossfire of the Cold War -- even after it ended, up to today. 

In Asia, India's Gandhian "Third Way" was in effect neutralized, its geopolitical tensions notwithstanding with Pakistan and China; and we all know how war-torn Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan have fared over the past 4 decades. Finally, the revolutionary national liberation movements and socialisms of postcolonial Africa were derailed by U.S. covert operations, chronic civil wars, and rampant corruption. 

So, decolonization in the "Third World" (except in China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba) ended up proceeding along strictly capitalist developmental paths, governed by pro-Western authoritarian states aligned with or severely hampered by the global circuits of capitalist accumulation. At the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, the Second (Soviet camp) World disappeared altogether and was re-integrated into the circuits of capitalist accumulation under the new “Washington Consensus” that benefited mostly the Global North, and within it mostly the commanding heights of capital. It was based on the so-called neoliberal ideology – a combination of classic British free trade liberalism with U.S. free enterprise imperialism, but without the New Deal social contract.

It is in this scenario that we witness the 21st-century resurgence of fascism in the core countries - U.S. and Europe. It is a dual story involving the massive, popular revolts against neoliberalism in the impoverished Global South combined with the repudiation of the legitimacy of liberalism in the Global North. 

In the U.S., it’s a story that goes back to the Vietnam War catastrophe, the nuclear arms race, the mid-century revolt of the racialized and gender others, and the glaring limitations of the liberal welfare state policies in a perennial war economy, all of which help spark the "1968 world revolution" against both Wilsonian liberalism and Soviet Marxism-Leninism. A hundred Maoisms and feminisms blossomed, the antiwar movement exploded, only to be outflanked by the maneuvers of the archconservative Nixonians, who went to China and signed strategic arms treaties with the Russians, who institutionalized affirmative action policies that greatly benefited white women, that re-invigorated conservative politics with his racist “Southern strategy.” 

The Carter brief liberal interregnum met its fate in the sands of a defiant Islamic revolutionary Iran and the impact of the world economic contraction caused by OPEC and its oil embargoes. The Reagan Revolution (and later the Clinton corollary) inaugurated the new neoliberal project of globalization, restoring market fundamentalist ideology over social democracy, formalizing and enforcing draconian pro-Global North trade rules via the World Trade Organization, and reasserting militarism, all to their 19^th-century “Free Trade imperialism” heights.

By 2000, the glaring failure of the neoliberal globalization project to deliver results to the U.S. working classes domestically by either party of the duopoly, combined with the previous, peculiar way the Cold War had ended, created a huge ideological vacuum. The Bush/Cheney neoconservative right moved to fill it up, unshackled from all previous liberal restrains, and launched its Empire Project, seeking, in the words of Giovani Arrighi, “U.S. global dominion without hegemony.” 

But the asymptotic limits of neoconservatism, too, would soon become apparent: the costly and disastrous U.S. Bush neoconservative wars in Central Asia after 9/11/2021, which help spark the 2008 U.S. financial meltdown, in combination with the prior neoliberal deregulation of Wall Street; the spectacular rise of China to economic superpower under strict state controls (something Russia, following neoliberal “shock therapy” privatization formulas,  failed to do); the appearance of a mighty Pink Tide of progressive/left populist governments in Latin America; and finally in 2008, the election of Barack Obama, which sought to “administer the hegemonic decline” more prudently (which turned out ineffective as well). 

These dual failures of both the neoliberals and the neoconservatives is what gave rise to a virulent fascist ideology, combining populist anti-tax revolts fed by the anger at the fast-declining standard of living with anti-immigrant xenophobia and rising anti-Black racism, all visible among the frustrated white working classes. First appearing under the well-funded “Astroturf” Tea Party Movement, it soon became the Trumpian Maga Movement, a neofascist challenge to both liberals and traditional conservatives. The emerging left alternative, led by Bernie Sanders, was sabotaged by the liberals in favor of their discredited candidate, Hillary Clinton, paving the way for Trump’s victory in 2016. 

The first Trump regime, predicably, induced relentless chaos in the hyperpartisan duopoly and heightened tensions in an already polarized society. The Covid pandemic was badly mismanaged. This gave way in 2020 to the return of the Biden moderate liberals. The first overt, violent Maga insurrection failed on Jan. 6, 2021, but the Maga movement was left intact. After the Biden Democrats proved utterly ineffectual at confronting and defeating the unbowed fascists now in control of the Republican Party, the latter roared back to power in 2024, this time dominating every branch of the federal government and all the 30+ Red states, and with a scorched-Earth plan – Project 2025 – to consolidate power and decimate American democracy as we know it. We are in its first year and already the carnage has been substantial in every area of the society.

Similar authoritarian governments aligned with Maga Trumpism have arisen in Hungary, Brazil, Argentina, Türkiye, the Philippines, Italy, El Salvador, Ecuador, and others, as well as parties and movements in Great Britain (which led to Brexit in 2016), France (NR), Spain (VOX), and many others. There is now a well-organized network, akin to a "Fascist International", aligned with Maga Trumpism in the U.S. and variously sympathetic to Putin’s Russia. Global fascism has made significant inroads in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East as well. It has dramatically influenced the course of events in both the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. And it keeps growing in breadth and depth worldwide.

An era of great geopolitical tensions and proxy wars has ensued. Liberals like Joe Biden/Kamala Harris and Keir Starmer/Tony Blair have performed no different than Donald Trump in mismanaging global affairs, if only more ineffectively. Venezuela seems to be next in the plate of a reasserted, aggressive U.S. imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, with hardly any pushback from U.S. liberals. The Democrats’ present aims, it seems, continue to be to accommodate the Maga fascist project as much as possible to salvage the elite duopoly; secondarily, to prevent the rise of a radical left alternative in American politics; and internationally, unite with the Trumpists in stopping China – deemed the common strategic enemy - with trade wars and, if required, open military confrontation. 

That's what explains why Trump won again - because he offers to the American ruling classes a reassertion of U.S. imperial power and a more forceful domestic alignment with their plutocratic interests, filling the immense vacuum left by the failures of liberalism and even traditional conservatism.

The weak and disorganized radical left forces in the United States have been on the strategic defensive for decades, with all the major progressive movements held hostage by straightjacket duopoly politics and the power of mega-donor cooptation: the labor movement foremost, but also the immigrant rights movement, the environmental movement, the women’s & LGBTQ movement, the ethnic movements - even the Black Lives Matter movement.

It's overdue time to regroup and make a robust comeback in the face of advancing, virulent, and already-empowered Maga fascism. The left must break out of its marginalization and impotency. It must redefine its radical vision for social and planetary change in this new era, its historic mission of expanding the sphere of human liberation and now planetary survival, device a bold plan of action and updated strategy for our digital era or succumb. The liberals - with their perennial loyalties to rescuing late capitalism from itself, and their ultimate complicities with the right – even the fascist right – , already have. 

The hour is very late, and much terrain has already been lost or ceded, but a left radical resistance movement can - and must – still arise from the ashes of our past victories now in serious tatters, giving birth to a new vision of a post-capitalist global social system. 

No borders this next time around in the approaching world’s revolution; no incarcerating gulags for criminalized, excluded others; no endless accumulation of capital allowed; and no unlimited concentration of status, wealth and power anywhere, anymore.

This may be utterly difficult for Americans and Europeans in the Global North to fathom, let alone champion! It may very well be that it will necessarily fall on others not dragged down by the heavy chains of the compromised historical experiences of living in the core area of the capitalist world-system to imagine the world anew, and to lead us all to its rebirth, away from the alluring but poisonous jingoisms of modern, updated, global fascism. 

The peoples’ movements and bold new visions arising from China, India, Africa, Latin America, might be the key for executing an urgently needed post-capitalist transformation. Perhaps the new visionaries will mostly come from there. Perhaps they are already alive and, through AI translation services, may be reading this and other urgent stress signals emanating from us, the few incorrigibly radical - but marginalized – activist-thinkers still challenging the status quo from the belly of the monster - folks like Naomi Klein and Greta Thunberg, Angela Davis and Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, and various others.

Hopefully we will soon assemble and meet each other, as the alter-globalist movement set out to do every year at the beginning of the 21st century (Porto Alegre); only then will we resume acting in unison, but this time via amazing new digital communication platforms at the palm of our hands.

We'll see again, after a two-decade hiatus, the rise of this mighty new actor in the world stage - self-organized, combative, global civil society, organized horizontally from the Global South with support and participation from the Global North. 

And this time around, the world's displaced, migrant & refugee people - 4% of the total and rising - will play a central role in imagining a new transborder social system, and thus help establish a just, free, inclusive, and equitable world social contract and a new system of global participatory democracy.

States - such as Brazil already did once – will increasingly accompany and sustain this "movement of movements," in the same manner that the Non-Aligned Movement once supported the revolutionary movements of the Third World. Only then will the current interstate system be transformed, and only that way will the capitalist inter-enterprise system be replaced by a new non-capitalist mode of production and trade. 

Is that possible?

Certainly! But perhaps not. In the end, it'll be the accumulated weight of the myriad actions and conscious decisions of every person, every social movement, and every social force in this living planet that will tip the balance forward - or backward. The coin is in the air.

One of my teachers, the great late Immanuel Wallerstein, on his very last text (2019) gave us a 50-50 chance. Another one, the great antisystemic thinker Giovanni Arrighi, said in 2009 (shortly before he passed) that he remained an "agnostic" as to the odds that the Chinese - the sole agency he came to identify as capable of leading the world effort to end  historical capitalism and usher in a new, global post-capitalist civilization. 

Though both scholars witnessed the implosion of the U.S.-led world order and the ensuing systemic chaos that ensued, their tentative prognoses were made before the Maga insurrection of Jan. 6 2021 or the advent of Trump 2.0; before the catastrophic wars in Ukraine and Gaza; all events occurring in the absence of any sign of organized, mobilized, radical left alternatives. In Russia, Putin and his crony-capitalist, neoimperialist regime has tightened his autocratic grip on power. In China, a similar consolidation of the Xi Jinping regime along an authoritarian state-capitalist path has taken place. 

Today we see the U.S. Maga fascist project extended into every area of institutional life, consolidated and unchecked by a supine Congress and a complicit Supreme Court, seeking full-spectrum dominance of the U.S. media and academy, enjoying the support of the American plutocracy, and recklessly barreling towards a rigged election in 2025. Internationally, the Trump regime seems eager to launch new disastrous military adventures in Latin America, orchestrated by unrepentant imperialists like Marco Rubio. New and devastating inter-imperialist wars now loom in the horizon worldwide.

In this menacing panorama, the odds have gotten worse - much, much worse, I’d say - that humanity will manage to transit through this dangerous period of the end of historical capitalism, and arrive, relatively unscathed, at a higher plane of human history. Rather, the odds have increased that we shall descend into a prolonged era of violent chaos, one that may even lead to the collapse and extinction of life on this planet.

This calls for redoubling the effort, not giving up! But to do this we must first take stock of the reality we face, the precipice in front of us, the road drenched in blood and paved in gold that brought us to this point, as well as the social forces and the ideologies that brought us to the brink! 

For not only conservatives are responsible for enabling fascism, but pro-capitalist liberals as well – and, to be honest, even socialists in the Global North who, even without attaining power, allowed their ideas to become fatally compromised by the corrosive effects of nationalism, imperialism, and racism/xenophobia. We must all atone and move forward.

¡La lucha continúa!

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REFERENCE VIDEO INTERVIEW: Interview with Jason Hickel, Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science & Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and author of two books: The Divide and Less is More.

The succinct section of the terminal crisis of liberalism is here.