Alienation defines modern politics. The gap between power and the people has never felt wider; work is precarious and meaningless; and community has eroded. In this vacuum, neo-fascism thrives, not by resolving alienation but by weaponising it. Trumpism, Reform UK, and their European counterparts do not challenge the economic structures that produce disaffection; they feed off it, repackaging frustration as grievance and grievance as political identity.
If Trumpism is anything, it is the politics of alienation. It does not alleviate alienation but harnesses it, commodifies it, and sells it back to its victims as resentment. This alienation is not new, but it has become both the fuel and the product of the system itself. Trump did not create these conditions, nor will he change them, but he understands how to profit from them. His re-election confirms not just his endurance but the consolidation of alienation as the dominant political condition of our time.
This is not an American anomaly. Across the West, economic precarity, political inertia, and the erosion of social bonds have driven neo-fascist movements that redirect capitalism’s crises rather than dismantle them. Farage’s Brexit campaign thrived on the same disaffection, the same belief in elite betrayal. With Reform UK, he has repackaged that resentment again, offering not solutions but perpetual grievance. Like Trumpism, Reform’s appeal is not in its policies—few could name them—but in its posture: belligerent, anti-establishment, promising vengeance rather than reform. In France, Marine Le Pen has rebranded the old far right as a working-class revolt while preserving the interests of capital. None of these movements offer transformation; they offer enemies. Their programme is not policy but emotion, such as anger and belonging, a shared grievance in which alienation is always someone else’s fault.
Neo-fascism is not just economic or political; it is cultural. The rapid pace of change, technological, social, demographic, has created a world where the familiar feels under siege. These movements exploit this, positioning themselves as defenders of a vanishing order. Trumpism, Reform UK, and Le Pen’s movement trade on the idea that an older, more “authentic” way of life has been deliberately destroyed by elites. Their nostalgia is not for a lost economy but for a lost hierarchy, one where national identities were unchallenged, social roles were fixed, and power was stable.
Yet the past they promise to restore never truly existed, at least not in the way they claim. The “golden age” they invoke was always exclusionary, built on inequalities they seek to reinstate rather than rectify. Rather than engaging with the real sources of cultural alienation—precarity, displacement, the erosion of communal life—neo-fascism turns it into an endless culture war. Meaning is not reclaimed but weaponised.
For the left, the challenge is clear: it cannot dismiss these anxieties or retreat into managerialism. It must articulate an alternative form of belonging, one rooted in solidarity rather than exclusion. Without this, alienation will remain the defining feature of our time, and neo-fascism will continue to offer the only compelling, if entirely false, answer to it.
There is precedent for this. The crises of the twentieth century, economic depressions, mass unemployment, political collapse—have repeatedly produced movements that channel disaffection into reaction. The interwar period saw economic crisis reframed as national humiliation, its solution found not in class struggle but in racialised conspiracy. The neoliberal revolutions of Thatcher and Reagan dismantled the last remnants of collective power, replacing security with precarity, solidarity with competition. What remains is an experience of capitalism that no longer feels like class struggle in any traditional sense but something more diffuse: a sense of drift, disorientation, of power being exercised elsewhere, beyond the reach of ordinary political action.
Earlier fascist movements were built in the streets, through political leaflets, newspapers, and mass meetings. Today, they are assembled online. Trumpism, like Faragism, is as much a digital phenomenon as a political one. It is in the digital sphere that it reproduces itself most effectively, not just as a set of ideas but as a way of experiencing the world. Musk’s X has become its primary incubator, not simply a platform but an alternate reality, where political life is no longer mediated by institutions but by a relentless circulation of outrage. Social media does not merely distribute information; it structures political experience. Where unions once built class consciousness through shared struggle, the algorithm offers only fragmented digital tribes, bound not by solidarity but by perpetual grievance.
In an era of economic and political instability, identity has become a primary terrain of struggle. The loss of stable work, the decline of class-based solidarity, and the rise of digital fragmentation have left many searching for belonging. Neo-fascism has seized upon this, not by offering real community, but by constructing an identity under siege, one that sees itself as constantly threatened by immigrants, minorities, and an amorphous liberal elite.
This is why Trumpism and movements like Reform UK thrive, not as coherent political forces, but as identity machines. They offer their supporters not just policies, but a worldview in which they are the last defenders of a besieged civilisation. Watch Fox News or GB News on any given night: their politics is not about building anything, but about preserving a sense of self against an imagined enemy. This is why their grievances never resolve, why the anger never fades, because without it, the identity they offer collapses.
The left has struggled to counter this, in part because it has failed to reckon with how political life has been reshaped by the digital economy. The structure of political communication has changed. The old forms of organisation—the workplace, unions, parties, mass movements—have been hollowed out. While the right has mastered the digital terrain, the left’s presence remains fragmented and reactive, more a loose network of tendencies than a coherent force.
Meanwhile, the right has understood something essential: people do not simply want material security; they want meaning. The decline of organised religion, the collapse of working-class institutions, and the disintegration of stable employment have left people not only materially vulnerable but existentially unmoored. Neo-fascism offers a substitute: nationalism in place of community, conspiracy in place of history, grievance in place of political agency. The Corbyn and Sanders movements briefly gestured towards an alternative, combining economic justice with collective belonging, but both were swiftly neutralised, by party machines, by the media, by a system that no longer tolerates even mild social-democratic reform.
Yet if their movements failed, it was not because their ideas were unsound but because they were too reliant on singular figures. Corbynism cannot live or die with Corbyn, just as Sandersism cannot be reduced to Sanders himself. The challenge now is to build a Corbynism without Corbyn, Bernie Bros without Bernie, to detach the programme from the personalities and root it in a lasting organisational and ideological framework.
The right has outlasted individual leaders because its appeal is not tied to policy but to deep wells of cultural and economic grievance. Trump may have been re-elected, but Trumpism would have survived even if he had lost. Farage has cycled through multiple political vehicles, but the resentments he stirs remain constant. By contrast, left movements often struggle to sustain themselves beyond their figureheads. If the left is to counter neo-fascism, it must build something that survives political setbacks and evolves beyond electoral cycles.
This means not just advocating socialist policies but embedding them in a culture that lasts. It means shifting the left’s focus away from saviour figures and towards durable structures—unions, grassroots networks, mass participation. If left politics remains tied to individual personalities, it will always be vulnerable to the same forces that dismantled Corbynism and neutered Sandersism. The ideas must stand, not as the vision of one person, but as the foundation of a movement that endures.
There is no easy way out. The structures that once mediated between capital and the individual—trade unions, the welfare state, even traditional media—have been systematically dismantled. The expectation of political representation has been replaced by a politics of pure resentment. Trumpism is not an aberration but a logical product of the system itself: a politics that does not seek to resolve alienation but to make use of it. If there is an alternative, it will not come from nostalgia for a more rational capitalism, nor from the promise of competent governance. It will require something deeper: the reconstruction of solidarity, a politics that offers not just opposition but purpose. Otherwise, alienation will remain the defining feature of our age, and neo-fascism will remain its most successful product.
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