Bad Ideas That Just Won't Die: The Resurgence of Fascism, Nazism, and Ultranationalism

Resurfaced, Repackaged, Regrettable

Fascism, Nazism and ultranationalism; names that belong, by all rights, to history books and bad dreams. Yet, somehow, they keep stepping back into the spotlight, cloaked in new language, new platforms and disturbingly familiar sentiments. What ought to be long-settled questions of morality and governance are, once again, finding traction in parliamentary speeches, viral soundbites and ballot boxes.

This isn’t simply about fringe movements or internet provocateurs. It's about a disquieting trend: ideologies that were once toppled are now finding fresh applause. Something is being stirred in the social fabric; something old, something dangerous, and something we were meant to have outgrown.

This article takes a closer look at why such ideas continue to find a foothold. We won’t just dwell on historical echoes; we’ll trace the quieter mechanics of influence, legitimacy and desire that make these ideologies so hard to put to rest. And by the end, we might ask the only question that really matters: is it finally time we stopped giving them an encore?

The Bad Ideas That Keep Getting the Spotlight

The Basics: Ultranationalism, Authoritarianism, Racial Purity (and Then Some)

One might think certain ideas, like ultranationalism and authoritarian control, would have been permanently shelved in the historical archives marked “Do Not Reopen.” Yet here they are, popping up like weeds in a cracked pavement. Ultranationalism, with its obsessive fixation on homogeneity and national supremacy, tends to follow a recognisable formula: romanticise a mythical past, demonise the present, and promise an eternal glory that just happens to require absolute obedience.

Authoritarianism often joins the ride as the designated driver, steering society toward control in the name of “order” or “tradition.” It's a conveniently self-fulfilling ideology: freedoms are curtailed not because of tyranny, we are told, but to save the nation from chaos. Meanwhile, racial and ethnic purity, thought long discredited, continue to masquerade under softer terms like “cultural preservation” or “demographic integrity.” It’s the same old poison in rebranded bottles.

But the targeting doesn’t stop with race or nationality. The net has widened. LGBTQIA+ communities are now in the crosshairs of many so-called “traditionalist” movements, portrayed as threats to national virtue or social stability. Meanwhile, academic frameworks like Critical Race Theory, once an obscure branch of legal scholarship, have been vilified as corrupting young minds, sowing division, or somehow destroying civilisation one curriculum at a time.

To clarify: Critical Race Theory, or CRT, explores how racism is embedded in legal systems and institutional structures, rather than merely existing as individual prejudice. It’s not a mandatory bedtime story for children, but that hasn’t stopped some political actors from turning it into a monster under the bed.

This ideological cocktail isn’t only seductive; it’s deceptively practical for those seeking power. These aren’t ideas that failed because they didn’t work; they failed because of the horrifying consequences they produced. Yet they’re back, again, likely because they remain useful to a very particular kind of political ambition.

The Liberty Discount: Order at the Cost of Freedom

“Order” is the favourite currency of authoritarians, and they’re always offering a discount: just trade in your liberty. On paper, it sounds like a stable exchange; in practice, it's like trading a parachute for a faster descent. Societies beset by uncertainty; economic instability, migration, social change, become ripe for political actors to sell security as salvation.

What often goes unmentioned is that these guarantees come bundled with the erosion of civil rights. Surveillance becomes omnipresent, dissent is reframed as sedition and democratic institutions are stripped down in the name of efficiency. The judiciary, the press, academia, none are spared if they dare ask uncomfortable questions.

The liberty of LGBTQIA+ individuals, educators, and ethnic minorities is often first on the chopping block. Restrictive laws are passed under the guise of ‘protecting children’ or ‘preserving national identity.’ The cost is not merely symbolic; it’s tangible and escalating. A community silenced here, a book banned there, a protest outlawed somewhere else.

What’s worse: this is often supported by significant portions of the population. It’s not just a top-down affair; many actively hand over freedoms, believing it's a necessary sacrifice. As Hannah Arendt warned, totalitarianism doesn’t merely rely on oppression; it thrives on voluntary submission. The liberty discount may be marketed as temporary, but historically, such offers rarely come with a return policy.

Us vs. Them: Divide, Distract, Conquer

Every authoritarian script includes a classic plot device: a villainous “Them.” Whether it’s immigrants, minorities, intellectuals, or drag queens reading to toddlers, creating an enemy is essential. It offers a scapegoat for internal problems and consolidates identity through exclusion.

This isn't just garden-variety xenophobia. It’s a precise political tool. If people are busy fearing each other, they’re not questioning the erosion of democratic norms. If they’re worried about “outsiders,” they’re not noticing the wealth gap widening or institutions crumbling.

Division becomes a governing strategy. With every policy or speech that pits one group against another, solidarity fractures. Fear, resentment, and anger are carefully curated, fed, and weaponised. And because it masquerades as patriotism or loyalty, it’s often applauded rather than condemned. It’s not just “us versus them”; it becomes “us, or else.”

Genocide as a Feature: Sanitising the Unthinkable

At the dark heart of ultranationalism, authoritarianism, and the more “traditional” ideologies lies an uncomfortable truth: mass violence is not merely a regrettable side effect of their policies; it is often a strategic tool in the pursuit of social “reorganisation.” The atrocities of the 20th century have, unfortunately, failed to be the deterrent one might have hoped for. Instead, they’ve quietly lingered in the shadows, evolving like a virus; and not the kind that can be stopped with a simple dose of penicillin, mind you. No, this one adapts and thrives in a sanitised environment.

What is truly insidious in today's world is not just the re-emergence of genocide, but the way it has been repackaged. The blunt, horrific language of extermination; so familiar to the horrors of the Holocaust or Cambodia’s Killing Fields, has been replaced by more palatable terms. The genocidal rhetoric of the past was overt; now it’s “refined,” even sterilised. Instead of public proclamations of destruction, we hear about “ethnic cleansing,” “population relocation,” or “national renewal.” Words, it seems, are the first line of defence, a sleight of hand to obscure the reality of what’s actually going on. If you can dress it up in enough euphemisms, the public will buy it; or at least, be too polite to object.

Take the language of “processing centres”; euphemistic for concentration camps, but wielded so easily in public discourse that its chilling effect is softened. It’s as though the world has grown accustomed to talking about things like mass imprisonment as though it were just another industry standard. Governments, both past and present, have become rather good at reshaping crises, rebranding them as routine necessities for “order” or “security.” The international community, with all its bluster and outrage, nods along, careful not to disturb the facade of propriety. Meanwhile, internally, the population is primed to accept the “necessary evil” as a form of national hygiene. It’s as though the machinery of genocide has been reduced to a series of polite formalities. Very British, if you will. Just a little cup of tea before they ship you off.

And then, of course, there’s the steady trickle of legislation, stoking the fires of hate under the guise of protecting “cultural purity” or “family values.” In this context, the attacks on LGBTQIA+ communities are not isolated incidents but part of a larger, carefully constructed narrative. These groups are first vilified in the media, then marginalised politically, and finally, their very existence is questioned. It’s a slow, methodical creep; think of it as a societal termite infestation. At first, it’s a few books removed from libraries, a couple of pride marches cancelled for “security reasons.” Before you know it, the atmosphere is so toxic that violence starts to feel like the natural next step. In the grand tradition of “nothing to see here, folks.”

The real danger lies in the gradual normalisation of such ideas. What once seemed impossible; the notion that people might be deported or even eliminated for their identity, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, becomes less of an outlier and more of an expectation. At first, the violence is indirect: exclusion, surveillance, repression. But with time, as the rhetoric builds, the unthinkable shifts into the realm of the thinkable. Suddenly, the idea of concentration camps doesn’t feel like a relic of the past; it feels like something that could easily be justified for the “greater good.” It’s all just a matter of perspective.

At first, it’s just rhetoric. Then policies. Then silence. Then, the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and the thinkable becomes law. Genocide, in this framework, isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. And when enough people believe it’s for the greater good, the machinery whirrs to life with terrifying efficiency. It's the kind of thing you’d expect to read about in a dystopian novel, except, well, here we are.

The language used to justify these actions becomes incredibly important. Terms like “cleansing,” “purification,” and “restoration” are woven into the national narrative. They normalise the violence, transforming it from an exceptional event to an inevitable one. It’s no longer about the eradication of a specific group; it’s about “protecting the nation,” as if the nation were an abstract entity that required purging for its survival. The ethical dilemmas are framed as “hard choices,” and any dissenting voice is depicted as an enemy of progress or, even worse, a traitor to the national cause. It’s as though the very act of questioning becomes a crime against decency.

What’s terrifying is the speed with which these ideas gain traction. Consider how, over just a few years, laws that once seemed extreme become not only accepted but celebrated. The state’s role in regulating identity, culture, and social norms is framed not as authoritarian overreach, but as a patriotic duty. The rhetoric of security and stability is wielded with precision, offering an illusion of peace while quietly dismantling the very foundation of a pluralistic society. It’s like watching a well-rehearsed magic trick unfold, except the trick is the disappearance of human rights.

And as Arendt rightly warned, it isn’t just the iron fist of the dictator that consolidates power; it’s the willing submission of the populace. Genocide, as a feature of the state’s strategy, doesn’t require widespread complicity at the start. It merely needs the tacit approval of a significant portion of society, even if that approval is unspoken. Once enough people believe that the violence is justified, even necessary, the wheels of history start to turn with a terrifying momentum. One moment, you're shaking your head at the madness; the next, you're signing petitions for a “stronger” nation.

What is often forgotten in these chilling analyses is that the process is not inevitable. Societies are not doomed to repeat these cycles of violence and oppression. There are always choices, and always room for resistance. But as history has shown, the longer the people remain passive, the more entrenched these ideas become. Genocide is not a feature of society because it is “human nature,” but because it is allowed to be. And that is perhaps the most terrifying aspect: that the machinery of hate can, through careful rhetoric and calculated inaction, be set into motion without most of us even noticing. It’s like the proverbial frog in boiling water; except this time, the water’s already boiling, and we’re still not jumping out.

In this environment, genocide is no longer an external threat. It is a domestic feature of a society that has been steered toward a terrifying end with quiet efficiency. And here we are, wondering how we got here. At least we know how the tea’s been made.

Power’s Playbook: The Making of the Authoritarian Leader

Authoritarianism today is less about jackboots and more about strings: invisible levers that pull public opinion, shape collective belief and normalise the once unthinkable. To see how fascist and ultranationalist leaders navigate these currents, we must examine a constellation of theories, from Foucault’s regimes of truth to Agamben’s state of exception, all showing how power is constructed, embodied and consented to.

Manufacturing Reality
Michel Foucault taught that power does not simply repress; it produces the very truths we live by. Modern authoritarians harness this by saturating media, education and public ritual with a single narrative: national identity under siege, existential threats lurking everywhere and the leader as sole protector. The resulting “regime of truth” is less about objective fact and more about consensus: repeated slogans become common sense, while dissent is recast as madness or treachery.

Adding another layer, Pierre Bourdieu described how “symbolic violence” cements domination. Schools, churches and cultural institutions distribute the ruling class’s values as “cultural capital” so subtly that alternative world-views feel deficient rather than repressed. In ultranationalist regimes, this explains why patriotic fervour seeps into everyday life, history lessons praise past glories, national hymns play at sporting events and even children’s cartoons echo the official line.

Fear and Loyalty
Niccolò Machiavelli’s blunt counsel, that it is safer to be feared than loved, remains uncannily relevant. Authoritarian figures stoke anxiety about outsiders, economic collapse or moral decay; they pass security laws with patriotic names and stage high-profile crackdowns to display their resolve. Yet fear must be balanced with a veneer of care. Humanitarian photo-ops and selective charity carve out a paternal image, making repression appear as protection. Loyalty thus becomes transactional: rewarded with favour, punished with exclusion; citizens learn that compliance is preferable to suspicion.

Steven Lukes expands this by arguing that power operates in three dimensions: visible decision-making, hidden agenda-setting and the deepest level of shaping desires and beliefs. Fascist movements excel at this third dimension. When citizens cannot imagine alternatives to the national myth, the ideology has already won, resistance seems not only risky but inconceivable.

Order at Any Cost

Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, painted a portrait of human nature so grim it makes a traffic jam seem like a utopia. Left to our own devices, he claimed, we would descend into a brutish free-for-all where the only certainty is mutual destruction. His proposed solution: surrender liberty to a sovereign power capable of enforcing peace; a Leviathan, grand and unyielding, whose very presence suppresses the chaos within us.

Modern authoritarian leaders have taken to this idea like ducks to water, though they rarely quote Hobbes outright. Instead, they adopt his logic in press briefings and late-night decrees: liberty must be paused, perhaps indefinitely, to save us from ourselves. After all, who among the public truly understands geopolitical threats, viral contagions or the moral hazards of independent thought?

What Hobbes envisioned as a philosophical fix to an anarchic state of nature has become, in the hands of the modern strongman, a rhetorical Swiss Army knife. Faced with dissent? Cite instability. Faced with protest? Invoke the spectre of civil collapse. Faced with opposition victories? Announce that the Leviathan is now available in electoral override mode.

Yet Hobbes, for all his fondness for absolute sovereignty, was no fool. His Leviathan wasn’t a playground bully; it was a necessary evil to uphold a social contract. The ruler's legitimacy derived from the people’s consent, not from divine revelation, historical grievance or an unusually popular YouTube channel. The irony is that many authoritarian regimes operate on Hobbesian premises; minus the contract and minus the consent, but with plenty of Leviathan.

This sleight of hand pairs neatly with Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception” and Plato’s philosopher-king: all imply that rational rule in crisis justifies unaccountable power. But where Plato’s ideal ruler was wise and just, and Hobbes’s sovereign contractual, today’s Leviathans are more often reality show contestants in military cosplay, offering salvation in exchange for obedience and a few constitutional edits.

Charisma and Tradition
Max Weber’s notion of charismatic authority shows how leaders bypass legal or traditional legitimacy by embodying the people’s will. Figures such as Narendra Modi, Giorgia Meloni or Viktor Orbán cultivate an image of authenticity: gravelly tones in rousing speeches, anecdotes of humble origins and social-media feeds curated like performance art. This charisma makes opposition feel like betrayal, as criticising the leader becomes synonymous with criticising the nation itself.

At the same time, Weber’s traditional authority is invoked through mythic pasts. References to founding fathers, religious heritage or heroic battles frame the leader as heir to a noble lineage. Democracy becomes messy in contrast; authoritarian rule is cast as the natural order.

Guardians or Tyrants?
Plato’s philosopher-king, ruling by wisdom and virtue, is the progenitor of the “guardian” narrative. Modern authoritarians adopt this mantle, presenting themselves as the only ones qualified to safeguard civilisation against chaos. This paternalistic trope infantilises citizens: they are told they lack the expertise to choose policies, so they must defer to enlightened rulers. Yet the philosopher-king easily becomes a tyrant, cloaking a power grab in the language of moral clarity and expert stewardship.

Bureaucratic Efficiency
Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” highlights how totalitarian regimes operate through mundane procedures rather than dramatic violence. Laws banning dissent, regulations rewriting curricula or directives censoring art pass through committees as though adjusting office memos. This corporate-style governance; centralised, hierarchical and protocol-driven, ensures repression is methodical, impersonal and therefore harder to challenge.

Cultural Consent
Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony shows that power is most enduring when it secures consent rather than merely forcing compliance. By shaping culture; controlling textbooks, influencing entertainment and guiding religious discourse, authoritarian movements make their ideology feel like common sense. Opposition then appears not just dangerous but absurd, as if advocating a reality that no longer exists.

Louis Althusser deepens this by distinguishing Repressive State Apparatuses (police, military) from Ideological State Apparatuses (schools, families, media). It is through the latter, via “interpellation,” that individuals are hailed as subjects: taught, often from childhood, to see themselves as part of the national project. When a child learns that “traditional values” are sacred or that “the nation” is under siege, they have been interpellated into the movement’s fold, long before they ever cast a vote.

Crisis and Exception
Carl Schmitt claimed that the true mark of sovereignty is the power to decide on the exception: to suspend normal rules in a crisis. Giorgio Agamben extends this, warning that emergency measures; whether for terrorism or pandemics, tend to outlast the emergency, normalising extraordinary powers as the new baseline. Once the state can detain, surveil or censor “for the public good,” those powers rarely recede, leaving citizens perpetually within a state of exception.

Jürgen Habermas complements this by highlighting the “legitimation crisis” in modern democracies: when the public sphere is colonised by markets and bureaucracy, citizens feel unheard, opening the door to populist saviours who promise to bypass the broken system and speak for “the real people.” This erosion of deliberative democracy creates fertile ground for authoritarianism.

In the orchestration of authoritarian power, each theorist provides a crucial note, from the manipulation of truth to the cultivation of loyalty, fear, and consent. These thinkers collectively demonstrate that authoritarianism is not simply the work of one man or one ideology, it’s a system of interwoven techniques and strategies, subtly ingrained in society’s fabric. The leader, then, is less a singular figure and more a puppet master, pulling invisible strings to keep the machinery of oppression running smoothly. But how do these abstract mechanisms translate into real-world politics? In the next section, we’ll examine four modern examples, from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy to Germany’s AfD, to see how truth-manufacturing, fear tactics and cultural hegemony play out on today’s political stage.

The 21st-Century Remix: Fascism but with a Fresh Coat of Paint

Authoritarian and ultranationalist movements have become masterful at reinvention: they retain the core message of “us versus them”, of purity, strength and unity, yet they present it in contemporary garb that feels less like a throwback to the 1930s and more like an almost plausible solution to modern anxieties. Below, four emblematic case studies reveal how these movements adapt old dogma to twenty-first-century conditions, exploiting digital media, electoral systems and societal fractures to gain legitimacy.

Fratelli d’Italia under Giorgia Meloni: Neo-fascism in Designer Packaging

Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) is the direct descendant of the post-war Italian Social Movement, yet today it projects the image of a mainstream conservative party. Under Giorgia Meloni’s leadership, it has leveraged savvy communications and coalitions to transform from a fringe grouping into the dominant force in Italian politics with approximately 26 percent of the vote in the 2022 general election.

Political Roots and Evolution
Fratelli d’Italia traces its lineage to the Movimento Sociale Italiano, a neo-fascist party formed in 1946. Over decades, it distanced itself from overt fascist symbols while preserving nationalist rhetoric. When Meloni took over in 2014, she instituted a two-pronged strategy: modernise the party’s image and broaden its appeal beyond hard-line traditionalists. She emphasised themes such as national sovereignty and the defence of Christian heritage; she promised to protect families with pro-natality incentives; and she criticised the European Union for overreach. By softening the overtly extremist edges and embracing centre-right allies, Fratelli d’Italia achieved respectability without abandoning its core ultranationalist convictions.

Electoral Strategy and Coalition Building
Meloni’s electoral success hinges on strategic alliances with other conservative forces such as Matteo Salvini’s Lega and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Though these parties differ on economic policy or EU alignment, they share a desire to counter left-wing and centrist blocs. Fratelli d’Italia skilfully positions itself as the most principled defender of Italian identity, allowing it to anchor coalitions while still claiming ideological purity. The result is a disciplined parliamentary bloc that advances a legislative agenda on immigration restrictions, constitutional reform and cultural conservatism.

Media and Messaging
Fratelli d’Italia’s communications team excels at producing viral content: short videos that juxtapose images of Mediterranean migrants with evangelical music; tweets highlighting threats to “Italian values”; and speeches delivered in emotive, colloquial language. Meloni herself cultivates a “no-nonsense” persona, either photographed at construction sites, wearing workman’s gear, or greeting families at local festivals. This blend of authenticity and theatre creates the illusion of a grassroots movement, even as think-tanks and policy advisers, some with links to former fascist scholars, draft the party’s platform.

Cultural Infrastructure
Beyond elections, Fratelli d’Italia sponsors youth camps in locations laden with Roman imperial symbolism; it funds publications that present an alternative history of fascism as a misunderstood nationalist awakening; and it holds “family festivals” where traditional gender roles are celebrated. These cultural initiatives serve a Gramscian function: they embed the party’s worldview into everyday life, making national unity and homogeneity appear as common-sense aspirations. Through such efforts, symbolic violence (in Bourdieu’s sense) operates subtly, those who question the narrative are seen as unpatriotic or naive, rather than critically engaged.

Implications for Democracy
Meloni has pledged to defend democracy, yet her legislative proposals include stripping automatic citizenship from second-generation immigrants and imposing stricter oversight on the judiciary. This reflects a Machiavellian calculus: by appearing to protect democratic institutions from chaos, Fratelli d’Italia secures the public’s consent to circumscribe civil liberties. When combined with control over public broadcasters and the potential for emergency rule in times of crisis, the party’s strategy reveals the ease with which democratic safeguards can be hollowed out from within.

Alternative for Germany (AfD): Populist Remix of Far-Right Nostalgia

Alternative for Germany (AfD) began in 2013 as a Eurosceptic party opposing the eurozone bailouts. By 2015, it had pivoted sharply toward nationalist and anti-immigrant positions, exploiting the refugee influx from Syria and beyond to galvanise support. Today, AfD’s electoral strength, hovering around 15 to 20 percent in various state elections, marks the first sustained far-right presence in the Bundestag since 1945.

Evolution and Electoral Gains

Initially, AfD attracted disgruntled conservatives upset by Chancellor Merkel’s policies. It capitalised on economic anxieties, urban–rural divides and a sense that traditional parties had abandoned working-class voters. The 2015 refugee crisis provided the catalyst: AfD leaders framed mass migration as an existential threat to German culture and security. Its success in eastern states, where unemployment and demographic decline are acute, underscores how economic instability and social alienation drive support for exclusionary solutions.

Internal Dynamics
AfD’s federal structure allows radical factions, such as those aligned with the identitarian movement, to co-exist alongside more moderate regional branches. While national chairpersons occasionally distance themselves from extremist remarks, local chapters have hosted paramilitary training exercises, celebrated SS anniversaries and published anti-Semitic tracts. This decentralisation creates perpetual tension but also provides cover: when a scandal erupts, leaders condemn extremists and promise reform, only for new radicals to emerge under different guises.

Media Warfare
AfD’s media arm weaponises outrage. Party activists flood comment sections with incendiary claims; they organise flash mobs at migrant-shelter sites; and they coordinate hashtag campaigns that dominate trending topics. Traditional media outlets amplify the controversy, prompting debates about freedom of speech. Meanwhile, AfD’s social-media channels frame any critique as yet another example of “mainstream media bias”, reinforcing the idea that AfD is the sole protector of “ordinary Germans”.

Legal Scrutiny and Surveillance
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency categorises parts of AfD as “right-wing extremist”, allowing for surveillance of members’ phone calls and social-media activity. Yet this scrutiny has, paradoxically, increased the party’s appeal among voters who view it as persecuted. Here Lukes’s three dimensions of power become clear: AfD’s agenda-setting (second dimension) and deep belief-shaping (third dimension) are bolstered by the narrative that the party is the victim of an establishment conspiracy.

Policy Proposals and Cultural Impact
AfD’s legislative programme includes repatriation incentives for refugees, restoration of traditional gender roles in family law and mandatory “German heritage” classes in schools. These proposals may never pass nationwide, but they shift the Overton window, making once-unthinkable ideas part of mainstream discourse. The echoes of Jobbik and Golden Dawn are audible when AfD branches sponsor “German culture days” that exclude minority performers and highlight folk traditions, subtly naturalising exclusionary nationalism.

Golden Dawn and Jobbik: Extremist Networks Adapting to Suppression

Golden Dawn in Greece and Jobbik in Hungary illustrate how far-right movements can survive legal bans and electoral setbacks by morphing their structures and messaging.

Golden Dawn: From Street Violence to Political Rebranding
At the peak of Greece’s economic crisis, Golden Dawn won 7 percent of the vote in 2012 by boasting a paramilitary wing that patrolled Athens’s downtown streets, attacking migrants and left-wing activists. Its leaders celebrated Nazi imagery, though they publicly denied any ideological debt to Hitler. When a Greek court in 2020 convicted top Golden Dawn figures of running a criminal syndicate, the party’s official banner was forced to vanish. Yet former members regrouped in breakaway formations such as “Greek Dawn” and “National Liberty”, preserving networks of supporters, financial backers and online propaganda channels.

These successor groups host charity drives, food distribution at community centres, mirroring CasaPound’s strategy in Italy; they portray themselves as patriots filling state-service gaps, while quietly organising training camps. Through Althusser’s lens, they operate as Ideological State Apparatuses: interpellating individuals to see themselves as defenders of Greek heritage, long before any vote is cast.

Jobbik: Softening the Image Without Changing the Core
Jobbik surged to 20 percent support in 2014 by railing against Roma communities and promising a “Greater Hungary” reclaiming territories lost after World War I. Under pressure from the European Union and moderate coalition partners, Jobbik’s leadership undertook a notorious “moderation” campaign around 2016, rebranding as a people’s party and downplaying overt anti-Roma rhetoric. Yet the movement’s grassroots remain radicalised: Jobbik youth wings continue to distribute revisionist history materials and organise summer camps featuring uniforms reminiscent of the interwar Arrow Cross.

This duality exemplifies Gramsci’s war of position: by controlling civil-society spaces; cultural festivals, sports clubs, student groups, Jobbik secures consent, even as its public face adopts centrist language. The result is a hidden network of ultranationalist sentiment that can be mobilised when political opportunity arises.

The Alt-Right and Global Extremism: Digital First, Borderless Second

The Alt-Right, CasaPound, Proud Boys and their international affiliates demonstrate how extremist movements have gone global, learning from one another’s successes and failures.

Digital Mobilisation and Meme Warfare
The Alt-Right pioneered a strategy of meme creation: simple images, satirical videos and ironic slogans that can be shared across platforms. This digital playbook has been adopted by groups from Brazil’s Integralism revival to India’s Hindutva trolls. Memes serve as low-barrier recruitment tools; they obscure hateful content beneath layers of humour, making them harder to moderate. Platforms such as 4chan, Telegram and Gab function as echo chambers where collective identity is forged through in-group language and shared trolling rituals.

Paramilitary Aesthetics and Community Services
The Proud Boys in the United States and CasaPound in Italy combine street-level violence with social outreach. Proud Boys organise “self-defence” workshops; CasaPound runs homeless shelters. These dual tactics strengthen local bonds and muddy the waters between civic service and extremist indoctrination. Through Lukes’s third dimension of power, such groups shape desires and beliefs: volunteering becomes political allegiance, and community care becomes loyalty to the cause.

Transnational Networks
International conferences and social-media exchanges have created what scholars call the “Far Right International”. Speakers travel from Sydney to Stockholm to share tactics on influencer marketing, campaign financing and legal resilience strategies. Financial flows, often through informal channels or shell companies, fund small-scale activism across continents. The result is a shadow network that can rapidly adapt to local contexts: a slogan invented in one country becomes a protest chant in another within weeks.

Targeting Academia and Critical Race Theory

In the United States and beyond, extremist movements have targeted Critical Race Theory (CRT) as evidence of an alarming ideological agenda. Though CRT remains confined to academic discourse on systemic racism, it is portrayed as a conspiracy to indoctrinate children. School-board protests, legislative bans on “divisive concepts” and viral campaigns against educators have spread globally, echoing Althusser’s concept of ideological state apparatuses. By undermining trust in educational institutions, these movements aim to dismantle spaces where critical thinking might challenge their narratives.

Across these four case studies, a clear pattern emerges: the core message of national rebirth, unity through exclusion, and charismatic salvation remains intact, even as the packaging shifts to suit modern tastes. Yet recognising these continuities only brings us to the next, deeper question: what makes societies embrace such dangerous, volatile, and unethical ideologies again and again? This brings us to the psychological fears, social anxieties, and structural pressures that make authoritarian promises so alluring, despite all the evidence of their destructive legacy.

Why People Keep Returning for an Encore

The allure of authoritarianism, fascism, and ultranationalism is not simply a tale of malevolent leaders and ideological bombast. It is also a story about the people; those who cheer at rallies, share conspiracies over breakfast, and look at complexity with a longing for simpler answers. If history teaches us anything, it is that these ideologies are less like passing political fads and more like unwanted houseguests: they always seem to return just when you thought the locks were secure.

Why, then, do these ideologies keep making comebacks worthy of a reunion tour? To answer that, we need to go beyond the headlines and into the social and psychological wiring that allows them to flourish. This is not just about angry men with flags. It is about the context that makes those flags flutter so enticingly.

We begin, as any good mystery does, with the social conditions that make people susceptible to extreme political solutions.

The Social Pull: Tribalism, Belonging and the Need to Belong Somewhere

Humans, bless us, are social animals. We are pack creatures in suits and smartwatches. Evolution wired us to survive not by claw or fang, but through cohesion. From this need to belong arises tribalism: the mechanism by which individuals sort themselves into us and them, safety and danger, kin and threat.

Scholars such as Henri Tajfel and John Turner, through their Social Identity Theory (1979), have shown how easily people divide themselves into groups, even when the distinctions are arbitrary. Give people two colours of T-shirt and a meaningless point-scoring game, and you will have in-group loyalty and out-group hostility before the second round. Imagine, then, what happens when the dividing lines are ethnicity, language, or ideology.

Tribalism creates belonging, but it also creates exclusion. Authoritarian ideologies thrive in this soil by offering not just a group, but a chosen group. Ultranationalism is the promise that you are part of something ancient, noble and under threat, and that your loyalty is both righteous and required. The leader becomes the patriarch of the tribe, and dissent becomes treachery.

In today’s neo-Nazi movements, you’ll find the same mechanics. They offer a tribe built on white supremacism, a nostalgic myth of national greatness and the solemn promise to defend it against outsiders; migrants, Jews, LGBTQIA+ people or political dissidents. This manufactured “us” provides belonging for those who feel rootless in a globalised world. And because mainstream liberal democracies struggle to fulfil that need for clear identity, these groups step in and say: “We know who you are, and we’ll protect you.”

When societies fracture; economically, culturally, or demographically, people seek the comfort of coherence. They want an “us” that feels safe. And nothing says safety like someone pointing confidently at a “them.”

Scapegoats and Shortcuts: Why Blame Is More Fun Than Complexity

It is far easier to say the country is going to ruin because of immigrants than it is to admit that thirty years of deregulated markets, crumbling public services and stagnant wages might have something to do with it. Complexity is difficult. Blame is deliciously simple.

This is not a new insight. Gustave Le Bon, in his 1895 work The Crowd, noted how individuals in a crowd lose their critical faculties and become more susceptible to simplistic narratives and emotional appeals. And nothing rallies a crowd like a scapegoat. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), explored how totalitarian regimes manufacture enemies in order to unify a population through fear and manufactured moral purpose.

Socially, scapegoating is a way of turning economic and political failure into moral battle. It makes injustice personal and curable, which is exactly what people want when their world feels adrift. The result is a society that substitutes catharsis for justice and rage for reform.

The Psychological Side: Fear, Uncertainty and the Longing for Order

If the social realm provides the script, psychology provides the stage direction. Fear, after all, is not just a feeling; it is a driver of decisions, a sculptor of politics.

Erich Fromm, in Escape from Freedom (1941), argued that the rise of authoritarianism is driven by a deep existential anxiety. In modern societies, where traditional structures of meaning have eroded, people are left with too much freedom and not enough guidance. The result is what Fromm called the “authoritarian character,” someone who longs to surrender their autonomy in exchange for certainty and belonging.

This view is supported by Bob Altemeyer’s research on Right-Wing Authoritarianism (1981), which identifies a cluster of psychological traits; submission to authority, aggression towards out-groups, and conventionalism, that make individuals more prone to following strong, punitive leaders. These traits are not exclusive to the right, but authoritarian systems rely on them to cultivate obedience.

Neurological studies have even suggested that people with higher sensitivity to threat stimuli, real or perceived, are more likely to adopt authoritarian views (Oxley et al., 2008, Science). In short, when the world feels threatening, the strongman looks like a saviour.

Echo Chambers and Digital Dogwhistles: How Technology Helps It All Along

The rise of the internet was supposed to democratise knowledge. Instead, it gave us infinite corridors of mirrors, where one's beliefs are endlessly reflected back and rarely challenged.

Cass Sunstein, in #Republic (2017), details how digital spaces allow like-minded individuals to coalesce into what he terms “echo chambers,” reinforcing biases and increasing polarisation. What used to require a political rally and a megaphone now needs only an algorithm and a Wi-Fi password.

The danger is not just that people become misinformed. It is that they become convinced. Convinced that their neighbours are enemies, that their country is under siege, and that the only solution is decisive, exclusionary leadership.

Authoritarian ideologies have always relied on storytelling. Social media simply tells those stories faster, louder and without editorial oversight.

Nature or Nurture: Is Obedience to Authoritarianism in Our DNA or Just in Our Neighbourhood?

Now for the question philosophers and Facebook commenters alike have debated for years: are we hardwired for authoritarianism, or is it simply a product of bad company and worse circumstances?

Psychologists have long debated whether humans have an innate tendency towards hierarchy. Evolutionary psychology suggests that, in early human societies, groups that followed strong leaders may have had a survival advantage. In that sense, deference to authority could be a built-in feature. But if that is the case, it is not the only one. Humans also display remarkable capacities for empathy, cooperation and fairness.

Social constructionists, on the other hand, argue that context shapes behaviour far more than instinct. As Stanley Milgram’s infamous obedience experiments (1963) and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) demonstrated, people can adopt authoritarian roles disturbingly quickly when placed in environments that reward obedience and punish dissent.

Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect (2007) takes this one step further. His work explored how situational factors, such as role-playing and peer pressure, can swiftly transform ordinary people into perpetrators of cruelty. The Stanford Prison Experiment, designed to mimic the conditions of a prison, revealed how quickly individuals could internalise positions of power and abuse it. The lesson, however, isn’t that people are inherently evil. It’s that under certain conditions; when fear, power dynamics and group pressures come into play, the line between good and bad can blur almost immediately.

A more recent, real-world example of this phenomenon can be found in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, where U.S. military personnel subjected prisoners to physical and psychological abuse. The conditions of power, isolation, and authority present at Abu Ghraib echoed the same dynamics explored in Zimbardo’s experiment. When the perpetrators were placed in a dehumanising environment where brutality was normalised, the resulting acts of cruelty unfolded. In a similar way to the Stanford Prison Experiment, those involved in the abuse argued that they were merely following orders or conforming to the expectations of their peers, acting as part of a larger system rather than as individuals with agency.

The terrifying part of both Zimbardo’s and Abu Ghraib’s outcomes is not that people in these environments were necessarily predisposed to cruelty, but rather that they were conditioned by their situations to become cruel. This underscores the central point: humans may have latent tendencies towards authoritarian thinking, but it is the social, economic, and political contexts, often ones built on fear and hierarchy, that bring these tendencies to the forefront.

The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in the uncomfortable middle. Humans may have a latent capacity for authoritarian thinking, but it takes particular social, economic, and political conditions to activate it. And once activated, it is very hard to switch off. The tug between our psychological predispositions and the world around us, be it the pressure of our neighbourhood, the social climate, or our historical moment, shapes whether these tendencies are allowed to flourish or remain dormant.

So, What Do We Do With All This?

Understanding why people return to authoritarianism is not just an academic exercise. It is a civic imperative. The forces that give rise to these ideologies are still very much with us: economic precarity, cultural anxiety, institutional decay and digital manipulation.

But if the roots of authoritarianism are both social and psychological, then so too must be the remedy. Strengthening democratic institutions is necessary, yes, but so is strengthening communities. People must feel that they belong somewhere, that their voices matter, and that the future is not something being decided for them behind closed doors.

Education that teaches critical thinking, media literacy and historical context can inoculate against the lure of easy answers. And perhaps most importantly, political systems must stop treating the public as data points and start treating them as citizens.

After all, the best way to stop people from returning for an encore is to make sure the first performance wasn’t a disaster.

Reclaiming Our Humanity

To sum it all up, the recurrent appeal of authoritarian ideologies is not merely a matter of political fashion; it’s a manifestation of deep-rooted psychological and social mechanisms that are both universal and disturbingly timeless. Whether we trace the roots of these ideologies to human nature or social constructs, or, as it is more often the case, the uncomfortable intersection of both, what becomes clear is that the return of fascism, ultranationalism, and authoritarianism is not an anomaly, but a predictable pattern in human behaviour. These ideologies thrive in times of uncertainty, offering a false sense of clarity, belonging, and control, comforting illusions when we are confronted by the chaos and complexity of the modern world.

From a social perspective, authoritarianism offers a seductive, albeit dangerous, solution to the fragmentation of society. In an age marked by disillusionment with traditional political structures, the appeal of a strongman or a populist movement is a tempting shortcut to perceived stability and unity. The psychological allure lies in the promise of an easy answer to difficult questions, a simplified worldview where the ‘other’ is demonised and ‘we’ are self-justified. The dark beauty of such ideologies is that they don’t require complex thought or introspection, but rather an easy acceptance of the narratives spun by those in power.

The appeal is, of course, not universal. The rise of authoritarianism has always been, and will continue to be, met with resistance from those who dare to challenge the simplicity of these ideas. But as history has shown, the resilience of these ideologies often depends on their ability to adapt and evolve. What was once a flagrant embrace of violence, militarism, and oppression can now be clothed in more palatable forms, made palatable by slick media campaigns, social media manipulation, and the subtlety of modern propaganda. In the 21st century, fascism doesn’t necessarily march in jackboots; it marches in tailored suits, perfectly coiffed hair, and a message designed to appeal to our most primal fears.

What is truly at stake, then, is the question of whether we are willing to confront these ideologies with the same vigour with which they confront us. The challenge lies not in simply rejecting these ideas on a superficial level, but in interrogating the conditions that allow them to persist. Are we willing to examine the very foundations of our societies; our politics, our economics, our sense of identity, and ask the difficult questions that we’ve long avoided? Are we willing to engage in the messy, uncomfortable work of creating societies based on inclusivity, empathy, and critical thought?

The conclusion, for now, remains ambiguous. As long as human beings crave certainty, seek out simple solutions to complex problems, and fall prey to the temptation of scapegoating others, authoritarian ideologies will continue to resurface. But it is also true that as long as we possess the capacity for reflection, dialogue, and compassion, the fight against these ideologies is far from lost. This is where the work of civil society, intellectual engagement, and political action becomes paramount. Whether or not we choose to return for the next act of this tragic encore is ultimately up to us.