Hyperfascism

My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

Last week, the political scientist Seva Gunitsky, whose Substack I highly recommend, posted an interesting summary of recent research on the features that contribute to autocratic regime stability. As Gunitsky sums it up, “The central technology of autocratic rule is not repression but administration.” The dictators with the most staying power tend to be the ones who are most concerned with the boring day-to-day work of keeping the regime humming along smoothly. The more dramatic spectacles that people tend to associate with tyranny—purges, violent suppression of protests, and so on—are often symptoms of regime weakness, not strength.

Longtime readers know that I am a big believer in the power of bureaucratic administration to make or break governments, so the findings Gunitsky highlighted were not hugely surprising to me. But it was nonetheless clarifying to explore the details and nuances of some of these findings. And they once again got me wondering how to classify whatever it is that the Trump regime is up to.

On the one hand, we have a pretty straightforward answer to this question: fascism. The years-long “fascism debate” about Trumpism has been settled. No less an authority than Robert O. Paxton, the foremost English-language scholar of fascism, said after January 6 that calling Trump a fascist “now seems not just acceptable but necessary.” Trump’s own former chief of staff agrees. Even some dead-enders have been forced to concede that, at minimum, Trump has moved in the direction of fascism during his second term.

On the other hand, “fascist” is a broad and, at times, sort of fuzzy category. Trumpism is not Nazism or Francoism; it is its own thing, and it emerged out of a very different set of circumstances. That difference in material conditions forms the basis of Adam Tooze’s argument against the fascism thesis; in 2022, he wrote:

I don’t find this especially persuasive; successful ideologies always outlast the material conditions that gave rise to them in the first place. You might as well say that the 21st century is so different from Enlightenment Europe that it makes no sense to speak of modern American liberalism.

But we should grant Tooze half a point. The modern United States is a very different place from 1920s Italy or 1930s Germany, and those differences are critical to an accurate understanding of Trump’s fascism. So we should ask ourselves: what kind of fascism is MAGA fascism?

I would like to suggest that Trumpism is best understood as a species of what I’m going to call hyperfascism. By “hyperfascism,” I don’t mean “superfascism” or anything like that. Instead, I’m using the hyper- prefix in a way similar to how Baudrillard deploys it in his definition of hyperreality as a sort of representation that is more “real” than whatever it was originally meant to represent. (He uses Disneyland as an example of the paradigmatic hyperreal space.) I’m also influenced by Anton Jäger’s suggestion that “hyperpolitics”—or constant and frenetic political activity in the absence of any structures that might convert this activity into real institutional change—is the dominant political register in 21st-century Western democracies.

So what is hyperfascism? It is hyperreal, hyperpolitical fascism. It’s a dramatic reenactment of totalitarian domination in a time and place where the infrastructure for real totalitarianism is nowhere to be found. It’s the signs and symbols of fascism detached from the machinery of the Nazi war economy or the large-scale, organized street violence of the Italian blackshirts.

Make no mistake: hyperfascism is still fascism. But it is a shallow sort of fascism, obsessed with outward appearances and completely uninterested in everything else. It is as if the architects of the Trump regime had cribbed their entire governing agenda from cheap cyberpunk thrillers about fascist dystopias. They certainly haven’t given much thought to how authoritarian regimes consolidate popular consent; in fact, they’re acting like the 2024 election represented the end of politics, and therefore the end of any need on their part to modulate their behavior in order to ensure regime stability.

This helps to explain the key difference between the Trump regime and the more successful, long-running authoritarian regimes that appear in Gunitsky’s literature review. As Gunitsky notes, “the most resilient autocracies are those that look the most ‘normal’, with somewhat functioning bureaucracies, legislatures where people sometimes argue, and cabinets with ministers rotating in a way that, if I take my glasses off, kind of resembles the churn of democratic governance.” Trump’s regime has a dysfunctional bureaucracy, tolerates no dissent, and is prone to erratic firings and staff purges. And it kicked off Trump’s second term by voluntarily plunging into the sort of fiascoes that typically signal profound regime weakness: violent confrontations with protestors, open and unpredictable campaigns of terror, and needless provocations against other countries. Why? Well, one possible explanation is that violent purges and jackbooted pogroms are the sort of thing that fascist bad guys do in movies and TV.

That is why I say Trump is practicing a form of hyperreal fascism; its models are less prior fascist regimes than lurid media representations of those regimes. If you think I’m being a little glib when I say that Trump’s acolytes are self-consciously imitating pop culture supervillains, don’t take my word for it. Government departments now regularly post winking references to cinematic monsters like American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, to say nothing of outright Nazi iconography. Everything else—the threats to invade Greenland, the concentration camps for undocumented immigrants, the invasion of Minneapolis—exists on the same continuum. It’s all part of the show.

The fact that all of this is being done for the sake of spectacle sometimes leads liberal elected officials and talking heads to mistake it for a “distraction” from real issues like the Epstein files or the price of gas. But that’s a mistake, and not only because the spectacle of ICE raids ruins real human lives. Spectacle is not a distraction from Trump’s real agenda; it is Trump’s real agenda. That does not make it any less dangerous. In some ways it is more dangerous, because the logic of spectacle is the logic of constant escalation.

We live in a hyperpolitical age, and so hyperfascism is not today’s only major hyperpolitical movement. The streamer Hasan Piker, for example, is probably better described as a “hyperleftist” than a bona fide socialist; his work bears little resemblance to what used to be understood as the meat and potatoes of socialist movement-building, with its emphasis on building up trade unions and other tightly organized institutions. Like the vast majority of political influencers, he is not a leader or organizer but an entrepreneur offering parasocial identification with a charismatic celebrity in place of anything resembling organized political action.

This is the form so many self-identified radical movements take at the end of history. They may advertise themselves as concrete alternatives to liberalism, but there’s nothing inside the tin. The good news is that this means hyperfascism can’t survive long as a governing ideology, because it has no program for long-term institution-building. The bad news is that there may be no limits to the damage it can cause if left unchecked. Hyperfascism’s sole imperative is to produce one horrible, transfixing image after another; the images themselves may be hyperreal, but the cost of creating them is all too real.