Is This Fascism, Far-right Populism, or ‘Red Pill’ Politics?

In June 2015, Donald Trump took the stage in the basement of his Trump Tower in Manhattan and announced his bid for president. During that announcement, he insisted that the United States was “dying,” accused Mexico of sending people “bringing crime” and “rapists” into the country, and vowed to build “a great, great wall” on the southern border. Across the last 11 years, Trump has had two presidencies, directed wave after wave of assaults on immigrant communities, and saw his supporters attempt to overthrow an election he lost as part of a bid to keep him in power. Since he returned to the White House last January, his administration has launched a coordinated crackdown on political dissidents, deployed federal troops in American communities on both coasts and in between, and discussed using the military to police Democrat-run cities. 

Yet it wasn’t Trump’s proposal to close borders to people solely based on their religious affiliation, his musings on murder, or even his initial refusal to reject an endorsement from the former leader of the Knights of Ku Klux Klan that gave Ost the idea. Rather, it was an interview he watched on television while in Warsaw. A critic was pressing a supporter of Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) on the party’s similarities to fascism. “The problem is,” the interviewee finally said, “that Hitler gave fascism a bad name.”

As shocking as Ost found that statement, he soon understood that it might be partly correct. The word fascism itself had become inescapably linked to the unimaginable violence of the Holocaust. As Ost argues in Red Pill Politics, there was “no global consensus against the fascism of the Nazis” until after Hitler’s regime was ultimately defeated during World War II.

The fascism question can become tedious and exhausting, but with Ost’s meticulous and deeply researched sojourn into the debate, there is an important point at work: Fascism cannot be treated simply as “murderously evil” because fascists are “more than capable of winning over plenty of people who are not murderously evil.” If anti-fascists ever stand a chance of beating back the far right, the way he sees it, they will need to understand the distinct manifestations of far-right ideology, why many people come to support these exclusionary movements, and how to spot the dangers even when jackboots are not inflicting gruesome violence on the masses.

The far right has enjoyed shocking success in recent decades. In Poland, PiS enjoyed its first major national success during the 2005 elections, when the party secured 155 parliamentary seats and eventually formed a coalition government; it later oversaw a majority government from 2015 until 2023. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s ultra-right Fidesz party turned the country into what critics call an “electoral autocracy” throughout his 16 years in power. Throughout the decade following his 2016 election victory, Trump has dragged the American GOP to the hard right fringe. In many cases, the far-right politicians and movements taking a hatchet to the existing world order today are, according to Ost, “red pill parties.” Ost makes a compelling argument that these “red pill parties” have been successful because they speak to working-class voters directly and on their own terms. None of this is entirely out of step with the historical fascism of Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Nazi regime. Ost argues that for “most people, who did not aspire to be hardened killers, fascism promised a better life, not endless bloodshed.”

Ost’s Red Pill Politics is a skillful contribution to an undeniably important conversation and offers a revealing dissection of the different varieties of the present day’s hard-right ideologies, as well as the unique dangers they pose. The preoccupation with the astounding level of repression and violence under historical fascist regimes, in Ost’s telling, can lead one to “miss its most alluring feature: its populism.” As he argues, “The terrible consequence of the association of fascism only with violence and terror, rather than with the other aspects of Red Pill politics, is that it enables the rehabilitation and even normalization of fascism today.”

There is something to this argument, though it isn’t always clear that associating fascism with violence and terror is truly the primary reason today’s far-right resurgence has been normalized. Ost is correct that the astounding level of bloodshed 20^th century fascism inflicted has yet to be reproduced under the current crop of far-right rulers. 

In both Italy and Germany, fascism made concrete promises to the working class. Mussolini, in fact, had once considered himself a revolutionary syndicalist, while Hitler “piled on the populist rhetoric,” Ost recounts, despite “bloodily” dispensing with the economic left-wing of the Nazi Party. Hitler went as far as to kill the influential anti-capitalist Nazi Gregor Strasser (along with up to 1,000 others) during a lethal purge known as the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Hitler and Mussolini both implemented social welfare programs that benefited the working and middle classes. In the case of 1930s Germany, prewar corporate tax hikes occurred alongside plummeting unemployment rates. The main harm to “Aryan” workers, Ost explains, materialized as the disappearance of their rights and freedoms. After all, Hitler harbored a deep fear of the workers. “In the end,” Ost writes, “Nazi populism was more effective than repression in keeping the regime in power.” (In all instances, of course, the rewards of this brand of populism were reserved only for those who were considered “real” or “legitimate” citizens of the nation.)

The present-day far right necessarily looks different but still has its obvious parallels. Trump has long appealed directly to American workers, promising economic prosperity and jobs. In reality, though, his economic policies have resulted in immense personal enrichment for himself and those around him, tax breaks for the billionaire class, and ever fewer protections for working Americans. 

Within the Trump coalition, Ost views Tucker Carlson’s politics as an especially illustrative example of melding pro-worker rhetoric with exclusionary racial politics. Carlson has likely done more than anyone else to popularize the anti-immigrant Great Replacement conspiracy theory. In one breath, the former Fox News star has expressed sympathy for white workers; in the other, he has opposed minimum wage hikes, lamented the supposed breakdown of hierarchy, and lashed out against eviction freezes. Meanwhile, he has also promoted Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” as a blueprint the US should follow. According to Ost, Carlson “makes clear he sympathizes with white workers only,” meanwhile using culture as a stand-in for race. Traditional fascists “essentialized race, whereas today’s right-wing populists essentialize culture, but the result is the same,” Ost writes. “You belong to our cherished group, usually called the nation, only if you meet the criteria we set.” 

In part, this is what allows for nonwhite support for far-right movements in the United States and Europe. But this isn’t a new phenomenon, either. Ost looks at the cases of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the far-right Zionist Revisionist who viewed Mussolini as inspiration, and Marcus Garvey, the early 20th century Black nationalist who colluded with the Ku Klux Klan and once claimed that the Italian dictator had stolen his ideas in the creation of fascism. 

After the 2024 election, a slate of newspaper articles sought to answer the question of how and why voters of color could cast a ballot for Trump. Ost rightly points out that American conceptions of race often differ sharply from elsewhere in the world — a person of Latin American heritage may very well consider themselves white. These articles also relied on the assumption that the voters in question viewed their race or ethnicity — rather than, say, class status — as their primary identity. “The most obvious answer is that they [vote for right-wing parties] because they like the message and program these parties are offering, or at least prefer them to what other parties are offering,” he argues. “All people have multiple identities.” 

Trump, of course, has always spoken out of both sides of his mouth. He will direct a racist dog whistle (“murderers,” “rapists,” “criminals,” and “terrorists”) at immigrants, then turn around and announce, “I love Hispanics.” The president’s “diehards don’t consider this treachery because they understand the world they live in,” Ost explains. At the same time, people who have never known a life without discrimination may make the calculation that “embracing the devil is safer than resisting.” 

In 1944, the English writer George Orwell wrote an essay lamenting the everyday misuses of the word fascism, concluding that the word had become “almost entirely meaningless” and was used as a stand-in for any objectionable form of politics. It would stand to reason that Orwell, if anyone, ought to have known: He had volunteered to fight fascism during the Spanish Civil War, even taking a bullet to the throat in the process. 

Then as now, there is little doubt that the accusation of fascism has been carelessly lobbed around. But it was a peculiar moment for Orwell to make the argument: The British public was already largely aware of the deportations, death camps, and mass murder taking place under Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany. (More unnerving still, Orwell’s own words have endured similar abuse across the last eight decades. Conservative politicians, far-right conspiracy theorists, and even Holocaust deniers have cited his writings to defend their own politics against left-wing criticism, usually unaware that the man was a lifelong democratic socialist.)

In the face of these “red pill politics,” Ost puts forward a three-pronged strategy for beating back the far right: the courts, civil society, and elections. The breakneck pace of the far-right assault in 2026, though, leaves reader wondering if these forms of pushback will be enough. After all, the Trump administration now flagrantly defies court orders, threatens to weaponize the government against nonprofit groups and left-wing activists, and supposedly jokes about cancelling November’s midterm elections. 

Orwell, for his part, may have offered a largely baffling objection to the public discourse on fascism in 1944, but when he first returned from the battlefields of Spain, he had made another argument altogether. In a letter he wrote in September 1937, not long after he returned from the frontlines, he explained that he no longer believed a return to the status quo could protect against the ever-present threat of a resurgent far right. “After what I have seen in Spain, I have come to the conclusion that it is futile to be ‘anti-fascist’ while attempting to preserve capitalism,” he wrote. “Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest democracy, so-called, is liable to turn into fascism when the pinch comes.”

David Ost’s Red Pill Politics will be released by The New Press on May 19 and is now available for preorder.