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After watching Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, the politically astute and the ignorant alike sat up in their seats – it was a final, overwhelming announcement that fascism is back in.
The EIU’s 2024 Democracy Index resoundingly supported this proposed democratic backsliding, reporting a historical low with 130 of 167 states registering stagnation or decline in their score. The ‘year of elections’ saw far-right and even fascist parties creating governments in seven EU states, and accelerating influence rapidly in countless others. Argentina’s Havier Milei, El Salvador’s Nayyib Bukele, India’s Narendra Modi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and America’s Donald Trump are just a handful of fascist or fascist-like governments recently elected across the globe.
The Role of Influencers
We’re all aware, to a certain extent, of the integral role that social media has had in this: more engaging, addictive, and radicalising algorithms, alongside inadequate or downright biased fact-checking (we’re looking at you, Zuckerberg) and algorithms controlled by America’s tech oligarchs.
All around us, political messaging is becoming increasingly difficult to identify. And arguably, it is most effectively disguising fascist ideologies, a far cry from Mussolini’s sensationalist oration or Hitler’s Swastika-covered posters.
Social media is seeing the online ‘bro-culture’ influencers syphoning viewers toward the spanning and increasingly extremist web of the ‘alt-right pipeline,’ comprised of ‘red-pill’ content, the ‘manosphere,’ conspiracy theory podcasts, ‘incel’ communities and even Neo-Nazis. Netflix’s recent viral sensation Adolescence outlines the nuanced ways in which these pathways ensnare young men.
The extreme ‘Andrew Tate’ caricatures and Tenet Media Scandals of this deceptively large movement often see it ridiculed and its threat diminished. Yet enormously popular, seemingly laid-back and fiercely likeable influencers are increasingly proving a gateway to this extremist pathway; when three of the top influencers (amongst young men) Joe Rogan, Nelk Boys and Adin Ross alone have a combined YouTube view count of over nine billion, the global reach of their platforms becomes frighteningly real.
After garnering millions of devoted ‘followers’ for their laddish, comedic and apolitical content, all three channels hosted Donald Trump for on-brand relaxed conversations with the then- then-presidential candidate. Bizarrely, in his speech at Trump’s Florida victory celebration, UFC CEO Dana White praised “the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan” and others for their role in winning the vote for Trump. Considering Trump’s share of the young male vote increased from forty-one per cent in the 2020 election to forty-nine per cent in 2024, it is highly unlikely that these endorsements had no effect.
Besider directly promoting right-wing political candidates, these ‘gateway’ influencers have platformed extremists under the guise of casual conversations through the ‘Alternative-Influence Network,’ which sees fan favourites like Adin Ross or Joe Rogan introducing increasingly fascist ideals by interviewing Neo-Nazis, Holocaust Deniers and alleged rapists.
Never before have fault lines between politics and entertainment been so blurred. This is all the more concerning when considering the parasocial relationships these influencers foster with their viewers through the form of content put out; intimate details of their lives, close-up videos filmed on their phone’s ‘selfie’ camera, and long interactive live-streams with fans.
Thus, our geopolitical landscape faces a new political actor, disguised as your average Joe (pun very much intended). They are relatable, entertaining and irreverent, borderless and translatable into over one hundred languages. Indeed, ‘the fascist game can be played in many forms.’
Umberto Eco’s ‘Ur-Fascism’
Umberto Eco identifies the ‘eternal fascism’ (or ‘Ur-Fascism’) as a collective of fourteen characteristics which, like Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘language-games,’ can be combined in infinitely different ways so that fascism has no one distinct ‘appearance.’ Eco stresses that fascism is not a single ideology but a ‘collage’ of contradictions, illustrating a need to remain vigilant in identifying these characteristics, wherever they present.
Parallels between the alt-right pipeline’s messaging and Eco’s fourteen characteristics are painfully easy to draw. What proves more insidious, however, is how easily the early stages of the pipeline feed into fascist ideology.
‘Gym bro’ culture, ridicule of less traditionally masculine men, and ‘hustle culture’ create inroads for ‘machismo.’ And, this machismo’s concomitant ‘disdain for women’ is created by a perpetual reinforcement of the Whore-Madonna complex. Influencers glorify ‘womaniser’ status through bawdy retellings of sexual encounters and party montages at strip clubs, whilst simultaneously criticising female sexual liberation and deliberating on ‘acceptable body counts’ for women.
This ‘Cult of Tradition’ and ‘Rejection of Modernity’ also manifests in ‘anti-PC’ humour as racist, homophobic and misogynistic sentiments are trivialised and posited as a protest against ‘woke censorship.’
Idealisation of a diffuse and unspecific notion of absolute freedom and free speech creates an ‘Obsession with an Enemy,’ of a massive umbrella encompassing ‘the left,’ ‘wokeness,’ and ‘DEI.’
This villainization finds easy traction with young men through an ‘Appeal to [their] Social Frustration,’ blaming various common struggles on the scourge of ‘wokeness.’ This entire cultural paradigm of traditionalism, separation, prejudice and intolerance which influencers actively promote is leading to radicalisation, extremism and fascist ideology across a range of demographics. While this article focuses on young men and the ‘bro-culture’ influencers, there are seemingly apolitical pipelines toward fascism from all angles (like trad-wife content and the alt-right pipeline for women).
Implications of this New Political Actor
State sovereignty is perpetually facing new challenges and modifications. The United Nations’ creation saw conceptions of states’ territorial and cultural integrity evolve, and globalisation saw trans-national corporations evade, and even openly defy, states’ ability to exercise control (evading tax, manipulating media coverage, and flouting laws).
However, the ability of online influencers to bypass state sovereignty through the invisible and fundamentally intractable internet enables them to stoke not just national but global anti-democratic trends, all while appearing apolitical.
As Eco warns, “Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances – every day, in every part of the world.”
