Introduction: Fascism at the End of Industrial Civilization

This essay argues that the United States is drifting toward a distinctly twenty‑first‑century form of fascism driven not by mass parties in brownshirts, but by an oligarchic techno‑feudal elite. Neoliberal capitalism has hollowed out democratic institutions and concentrated power in a transnational “authoritarian international” of billionaires, security chiefs, and political fixers who monetize state power while shielding one another from accountability. At the same time, Big Tech platforms have become neo‑feudal estates that extract rent from our data and behavior, weaponize disinformation, and provide the surveillance backbone of an emerging global police state.

Drawing on the work of Robert Reich, William I. Robinson, Yanis Varoufakis, and others, alongside historian Heather Cox Richardson’s detailed account of Trump‑era patronage, whistleblower suppression, and DHS/ICE mega‑detention plans, the essay contends that America is rapidly constructing a system of concentration‑camp infrastructure and paramilitary policing designed to manage “surplus” populations and political dissent. Elite impunity, entrenched through national‑security exceptionalism, legal immunities, and revolving‑door careers, means that those directing lawless violence face virtually no consequences. Elections still happen, courts still sit, newspapers still publish, but substantive power is increasingly exercised by unelected oligarchs, tech lords, and security bureaucracies.

This authoritarian drift cannot be separated from the broader crisis of industrial civilization. Ecological overshoot, climate chaos, resource constraints, and structural economic stagnation have undermined the promise of endless growth on which liberal democracy once rested. Rather than using the remnants of industrial wealth to democratize a just transition, ruling elites are hardening borders, expanding carceral infrastructure, and building a security regime to contain “surplus” humanity in a world of shrinking energy and material throughput. America’s oligarchic techno‑feudal fascism is thus not an anomaly, but one plausible endgame of industrial civilization: a stratified order of gated enclaves above and camps and precarity below, designed to preserve elite power as the old industrial world comes apart.

I. From liberal promise to oligarchic capture

The American republic was founded on a promise that power would be divided, constrained, and answerable: a written constitution, separated branches, periodic elections, and a Bill of Rights that set bright lines even the sovereign could not cross. That promise was always compromised by slavery, settler colonialism, and gendered exclusion, but it retained real, if uneven, force as a normative horizon. What has shifted over the past half‑century is not simply the familiar gap between creed and practice, but the underlying structure of the system itself: the center of gravity has moved from public institutions toward a private oligarchy whose wealth and leverage allow it to function as a parallel sovereign.

The neoliberal turn of the 1970s and 1980s marked the decisive inflection point. Deregulation, financial liberalization, the crushing of organized labor, and the privatization of public goods redistributed power and income upward on a historic scale. Trade liberalization and capital mobility allowed corporations and investors to pit governments and workers against one another, extracting subsidies and tax concessions under the permanent threat of capital flight. At the same time, Supreme Court decisions eroded limits on political spending, redefining “speech” as something that could be purchased in unlimited quantities by those with the means.

The result, as Robert Reich notes, has been the consolidation of an American oligarchy that “paved the road to fascism” by ensuring that public policy reflects donor preferences far more consistently than popular majorities. In issue after issue, such as taxation, labor law, healthcare, and environmental regulation, there is a clear skew: the wealthy get what they want more often than not, while broadly popular but redistributive policies routinely die in committee or are gutted beyond recognition. This is not a conspiracy in the melodramatic sense; it is how the wiring of the system now works.

William Robinson’s analysis of “twenty‑first‑century fascism” sharpens the point. Global capitalism in its current form generates chronic crises: overproduction, under‑consumption, ecological breakdown, and a growing population that capital cannot profitably employ. Under such conditions, democratic politics becomes dangerous for elites, because electorates might choose structural reforms such as wealth taxes, public ownership, strong unions, and Green New Deal‑style transitions that would curb profits. Faced with this prospect, segments of transnational capital begin to see authoritarian solutions as rational: better to hollow out democracy, harden borders, and construct a global police state than to accept serious redistribution.

American politics in the early twenty‑first century fits this pattern with unsettling precision. A decaying infrastructure, stagnant wages, ballooning personal debt, militarized policing, and permanent war have produced widespread disillusionment. As faith in institutions erodes, public life is flooded with resentment and nihilism that can be redirected against scapegoats (immigrants, racial minorities, feminists, and queer and trans people) rather than against the oligarchic‑power‑complex that profits from the decay. It is in this vacuum that a figure like Donald Trump thrives: a billionaire demagogue able to channel anger away from the class that actually governs and toward those even more marginalized.

The decisive shift from plutocratic dysfunction to fascist danger occurs when oligarchs cease to see constitutional democracy as even instrumentally useful and instead invest in movements openly committed to minority rule. Koch‑style networks, Mercer‑funded operations, and Silicon Valley donors willing to underwrite hard‑right projects are not supporting democracy‑enhancing reforms; they are building the infrastructure for authoritarianism, from voter suppression to ideological media to data‑driven propaganda. The system that emerges is hybrid: elections still occur, courts still sit, newspapers still publish, but substantive power is increasingly concentrated in unelected hands.

II. The “authoritarian international” and the shadow world of deals

Historian Heather Cox Richardson’s recent analysis captures a formation that much mainstream commentary still struggles to name: a transnational “authoritarian international” in which oligarchs, political operatives, royal families, security chiefs, and organized criminals cooperate to monetize state power while protecting one another from scrutiny. This is not a formal alliance; it is an overlapping ecology of relationships, exclusive vacations, investment vehicles, shell companies, foundations, and intelligence ties, through which information, favors, and money flow.​

The key is that this network is structurally post‑ideological. As Robert Mueller warned in his 2011 description of an emerging “iron triangle” of politicians, businesspeople, and criminals, these actors are not primarily concerned with religion, nationality, or traditional ideology. They will work across confessional and national lines so long as the deals are lucrative and risk is manageably socialized onto others. Saudi royals invest alongside Western hedge funds; Russian oligarchs launder money through London property and American private equity; Israeli and Emirati firms collaborate with U.S. tech companies on surveillance products that are then sold worldwide.​

Within this milieu, the formal distinction between public office and private interest blurs. Richardson’s analysis of Donald Trump’s abrupt reversal on the Gordie Howe International Bridge after a complaint by a billionaire competitor with ties to Jeffrey Epstein—reads less like the exercise of public policy judgment and more like feudal patronage: the sovereign intervenes to protect a favored lord’s toll road. Tiny shifts in regulatory posture or federal support can move billions of dollars; for those accustomed to having the president’s ear, such interventions are simply part of doing business.​​

The same logic governs foreign policy. The Trump‑Kushner axis exemplifies this fusion of public and private. When a whistleblower alleges that the Director of National Intelligence suppressed an intercept involving foreign officials discussing Jared Kushner and sensitive topics like Iran, and when the complaint is then choked off with aggressive redaction and executive privilege, we see the machinery of secrecy misused not to protect the national interest but to shield a member of the family‑cum‑business empire at the center of power. It is as if the state has become a family office with nuclear weapons.​​

Josh Marshall’s phrase “authoritarian international” is apt because it names both the class composition and the political function of this network. The same names recur across far‑right projects: donors and strategists who back nationalist parties in Europe, ultras in Latin America, Modi’s BJP in India, and the MAGA movement in the United States. Their interests are not identical, but they overlap around a shared agenda: weakening labor and environmental protections, undermining independent media and courts, militarizing borders, and securing immunity for themselves and their peers.​

This world is lubricated by blackmail and mutually assured destruction. As Richardson notes, players often seem to hold compromising material on one another, whether in the form of documented sexual abuse, financial crime, or war crimes. This shared vulnerability paradoxically stabilizes the network: as long as everyone has something on everyone else, defection is dangerous, and a predatory equilibrium holds. From the standpoint of democratic publics, however, this stability is catastrophic, because it means that scandal—once a mechanism for enforcing norms—loses much of its power. When “everyone is dirty,” no one can be clean enough to prosecute the others without risking exposure.​​

III. Techno‑feudal aristocracy and the colonization of everyday life

Layered atop this transnational oligarchy is the digital order that Varoufakis and others describe as techno‑feudalism: a regime in which a handful of platforms function like neo‑feudal estates, extracting rent from their “serfs” (users, gig workers, content creators) rather than competing in open markets. This shift is more than metaphor. In classical capitalism, firms profited primarily by producing goods or services and selling them on markets where competitors could, in principle, undercut them. In the platform order, gatekeepers profit by controlling access to the marketplace itself, imposing opaque terms on those who must use their infrastructure to communicate, work, or even find housing.

This can be seen across sectors:

• Social media platforms own the digital public square. They monetize attention by selling advertisers access to finely sliced demographic and psychographic segments, while their recommendation algorithms optimize for engagement, often by privileging outrage and fear.

• Ride‑hailing and delivery apps control the interface between customers and labor, setting prices unilaterally and disciplining workers through ratings, algorithmic management, and the ever‑present threat of “deactivation.”​

• Cloud providers and app stores gatekeep access to the basic infrastructure upon which countless smaller firms depend, taking a cut of transactions and reserving the right to change terms or remove competitors from the ecosystem entirely.

In each case, the platform is less a company among companies and more a landlord among tenants, collecting tolls for the right to exist within its domain. Users produce the very capital stock, data, content, behavioral profiles, that platforms own and monetize, yet they have little say over how this material is used or how the digital environment is structured. The asymmetry of power is profound: the lords can alter the code of the world; the serfs can, at best, adjust their behavior to avoid algorithmic invisibility or sanction.

For authoritarian politics, this structure is a gift. First, platforms have become the primary vectors of disinformation and propaganda. Cambridge Analytica’s work for Trump in 2016, funded by billionaires like the Mercers, was an early prototype: harvest data, micro‑target individuals with tailored messaging, and flood their feeds with narratives designed to activate fear and resentment. Since then, the techniques have grown more sophisticated, and far‑right movements worldwide have learned to weaponize meme culture, conspiracy theories, and “shitposting” as recruitment tools.​

Second, the same infrastructures that enable targeted advertising enable granular surveillance. Location data, social graphs, search histories, and facial‑recognition databases provide an unprecedented toolkit for monitoring and disciplining populations. In the hands of a regime sliding toward fascism, these tools can be turned against dissidents with terrifying efficiency: geofencing protests to identify attendees, scraping social media to build dossiers, using AI to flag “pre‑criminal” behavior. The emerging “global police state” that Robinson describes depends heavily on such techno‑feudal capacities.

Third, the digital order corrodes the very preconditions for democratic deliberation. Information overload, filter bubbles, and algorithmic amplification of sensational content produce a public sphere saturated with noise. Under these conditions, truth becomes just another aesthetic, and the distinction between fact and fiction collapses into vibes. This is the post‑modern nihilism you name: a sense that nothing is stable enough to believe in, that everything is spin. Fascist movements do not seek to resolve this condition; they weaponize it, insisting that only the Leader and his trusted media tell the real truth, while everything else is a hostile lie.

Finally, the techno‑feudal aristocracy’s material interests align with authoritarianism. Privacy regulations, antitrust enforcement, data localization rules, and strong labor rights all threaten platform profits. Democratic movements that demand such reforms are therefore adversaries. Conversely, strongman leaders who promise deregulation, tax breaks, and law‑and‑order crackdowns, even if they occasionally threaten specific firms, are often acceptable partners. The result is a convergence: oligarchs of data and oligarchs of oil, real estate, and finance finding common cause in an order that disciplines the many and exempts the few.

IV. Elite impunity and the machinery of lawlessness

Authoritarianism is not only about who holds power; it is about who is answerable for wrongdoing. A system where elites can violate laws with impunity while ordinary people are punished harshly for minor infractions is already halfway to fascism, whatever labels it wears. The United States has, over recent decades, constructed precisely such a system.

The Arab Center’s “Machinery of Impunity” report details how, in areas ranging from mass surveillance to foreign wars to domestic policing, senior officials who authorize illegal acts almost never face criminal consequences. Edward Snowden’s revelations exposed systemic violations of privacy and civil liberties, yet it was the whistleblower who faced prosecution and exile, not the architects of the programs. Torture during the “war on terror” was acknowledged, even documented in official reports, but those who designed and approved the torture regime kept their law licenses, academic posts, and media gigs. Lethal strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, justified by secret intelligence and shielded by classified legal opinions, have killed dozens with no public evidence that the targets posed imminent threats.

This pattern is not an aberration but a feature. As a Penn State law review article notes, the U.S. legal system builds in multiple layers of protection for high officials: sovereign immunity, state secrets privilege, narrow standing rules, and prosecutorial discretion all combine to make it extraordinarily difficult to hold the powerful to account. Violations of the Hatch Act, campaign‑finance laws, or ethics rules are often treated as technicalities, and when reports do document unlawful behavior, as in the case of Mike Pompeo’s partisan abuse of his diplomatic office, there are “no consequences” beyond mild censure. Jamelle Bouie’s recent video essay for the New York Times drives the point home: America is “bad at accountability” because institutions have been designed and interpreted to favor elite impunity.

Richardson shows how this culture functions inside the national‑security state. A whistleblower complaint alleging that the Director of National Intelligence suppressed an intelligence intercept involving Jared Kushner and foreign officials was not allowed to run its course. Instead, it was bottled up, then transmitted to congressional overseers in a highly redacted form, with executive privilege invoked to shield the president’s involvement. The same mechanisms that insulate covert operations abroad from democratic oversight are deployed to protect domestic political allies from scrutiny.​

Immigration enforcement offers another window. The Arab Center notes that ICE raids, family separation, and other abuses “escalated under the current Trump administration into highly visible kidnappings, abuse, and deportations” with little accountability for senior officials. The National Immigrant Justice Center documents a detention system where 90 percent of detainees are held in for‑profit facilities, where medical neglect, punitive solitary confinement, and preventable deaths are common, yet contracts are renewed and expanded. A culture of impunity allows agents and managers to treat rights violations not as career‑ending scandals but as acceptable collateral damage.

Latin American scholars of impunity warn that such selective enforcement produces a “quiet crisis of accountability” in which the rule of law is hollowed out from within. Laws remain on the books, but their application is skewed: harsh on the poor and marginalized, permissive toward the powerful. Over time, this normalizes the idea that some people are above the law, while others exist primarily as objects of control. When a polity internalizes this hierarchy, fascism no longer needs to arrive in jackboots; it is already present in the daily operations of the justice system.​

The danger, as the Arab Center emphasizes, is that the costs of impunity “come home to roost.” Powers originally justified as necessary to fight terrorism or foreign enemies migrate back into domestic politics. Surveillance tools built for foreign intelligence monitoring are turned on activists and journalists; militarized police tactics perfected in occupied territories are imported into American streets. A population taught to accept lawless violence against outsiders (migrants, foreigners, enemy populations) is gradually conditioned to accept similar violence against internal opponents.

V. Concentration camps, paramilitary policing, and ritualized predatory violence

In this context of oligarchic capture, techno‑feudal control, and elite impunity, the rapid expansion of detention infrastructure and the deployment of paramilitary “federal agents” across the interior United States are not aberrations; they are central pillars of an emergent fascist order.​

Richardson’s insistence on calling these facilities concentration camps is analytically exact. A concentration camp, in the historical sense, is not necessarily a death camp; it is a place where a state concentrates populations it considers threats or burdens, subjecting them to confinement, disease, abuse, and often death through neglect rather than industrialized extermination. By that definition, the sprawling network of ICE and Border Patrol detention centers, where people are warehoused for months to years, often in horrific conditions, qualifies.​

New reporting details how this system is poised to scale up dramatically. An internal ICE memo, recently surfaced, outlines a $38 billion plan for a “new detention center model” that would, in one year, create capacity for roughly 92,600 people by purchasing eight “mega centers,” 16 processing centers, and 10 additional facilities. The largest of these warehouses would hold between 7,000 and 10,000 people each for average stays of about 60 days, more than double the size of the largest current federal prison. Separate reporting has mapped at least 23 industrial warehouses being surveyed for conversion into mass detention camps, with leases already secured at several sites.​

Investigations by Amnesty International and others into prototype facilities have found detainees shackled in overcrowded cages, underfed, forced to use open‑air toilets that flood, and routinely denied medical care. Sexual assault and extortion by guards, negligent deaths, and at least one homicide have been documented. These are not accidents; they are predictable outcomes of a profit‑driven system where private contractors are paid per bed and oversight is weak, and of a political culture that dehumanizes migrants as “invaders” or “animals.”

Richardson highlights another crucial dimension: the way DHS has been retooled to project this violence into the interior as a form of political terror. Agents from ICE and Border Patrol, subdivisions of a relatively new department lacking the institutional restraints of the military, have been deployed in cities far from any border, often in unmarked vehicles, wearing masks and lacking visible identification. Secret legal memos under Trump gutted the traditional requirement of a judicial warrant for entering homes, replacing it with internal sign‑off by another DHS official, a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.​

This matters both instrumentally and symbolically. Instrumentally, it enables efficient mass raids and “snatch and grab” operations that bypass local law‑enforcement norms and judicial oversight. Symbolically, it communicates that the state reserves the right to operate as a lawless force, unconstrained by the very constitution it claims to defend. When masked, unidentified agents can seize people off the streets, shove them into unmarked vans, and deposit them in processing centers without due process, the aesthetic of fascism…thugs in the night…becomes reality.​

Richardson rightly connects this to the post‑Reconstruction South, where paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan, often tolerated or quietly aided by local officials, used terror to destroy a biracial democracy that had briefly flourished. Today’s difference is that communications technology allows rapid mobilization of witnesses and counter‑protesters: people can rush to the scene when agents arrive, document abuses on smartphones, and coordinate legal support. Yet even this can be folded into the logic of spectacle. The images of militarized agents confronting crowds under the glow of streetlights and police floodlamps serve as warnings: this is what happens when you resist.​​

The planned network of processing centers and mega‑warehouses adds another layer of menace. As Richardson points out, if the stated goal is deportation, there is no clear need for facilities capable of imprisoning tens of thousands for months. Part of the answer is coercive leverage: detained people are easier to pressure into abandoning asylum claims and accepting removal, especially when they are told, day after day, that they could walk free if they “just sign.” But the architecture also anticipates a future in which new categories of internal enemies, protesters, “Antifa,” “domestic extremists,” can be funneled into the same carceral estate once migrant flows diminish or political needs change.​

Economically, the camps generate their own constituency. ICE and DHS tout job creation numbers to local officials, promising hundreds of stable, often union‑free positions in communities hollowed out by deindustrialization. Private prison firms and construction companies see lucrative contracts; investors see secure returns backed by federal guarantees. A web of stakeholders thus becomes materially invested in the continuation and expansion of mass detention. This is techno‑feudalism in concrete and razor wire: a carceral estate in which bodies are the rent‑producing asset.

Once such an estate exists, its logic tends to spread. Border‑style tactics migrate into ordinary policing; surveillance tools trialed on migrants are turned on domestic movements; legal doctrines crafted to justify raids and warrantless searches in the name of immigration control seep into other domains. The fascist gradient steepens: more people find themselves at risk of sudden disappearance into a system where rights are theoretical and violence is routine.

References:

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