There was a time when the factory floor could order a life. A man clocked in, did his eight or ten hours, took home a wage that could feed a family, voted Labour or Democrat, and felt (however briefly) that he belonged to something. It was a grim belonging, often racialised, always gendered, built on compromise with capital and the state. But it came with form. Fordism was not just a system of production; it was a political settlement, a cultural project, a way of being. The postwar consensus, for all its limitations, made promises: that work would mean stability, that the nation could be managed, that politics had a direction.
That order is gone. It didn’t collapse into revolution or rupture. It eroded, hollowed out by neoliberalism, automated by platform capital, buried beneath spreadsheets and surveillance. For decades, we were told that technocracy had replaced ideology. That there were no more grand narratives. That history had ended.
Now history is back. But it’s not marching forward. It’s circling, reanimating ghosts. Trump, Farage, Meloni. Their politics is not new, and not strictly neoliberal. It is affective, mythic, death-haunted. It does not offer solutions. It offers memory: of steelworks and shipyards, of proud nations and strong men, of a world where the father ruled the dinner table and the worker knew his place. This isn’t nostalgia for the past. It’s nostalgia for power.
What died with Fordism wasn’t just an economic model. It was a structure of identity (masculine, racialised, national) and its demise has created a vacuum into which fascist fantasy rushes. Neoliberalism cannot fill it. Social democracy will not speak of it. But fascism will. That is the danger.
What follows is not an attempt to mourn Fordism. It is an attempt to name the necro-nostalgia that now stalks its ruins, and to ask, with urgency, what it is that today’s fascism wants to return to.
What Was Fordism and What Did It Buy Us?
It’s easy to forget that Fordism was a fantasy, too. A real one, backed by wages, contracts, and the industrial state, but a fantasy nonetheless. Named after Henry Ford’s assembly lines and perfected in the ruins of postwar Europe and Roosevelt’s America, it promised a kind of equilibrium: capital would invest, labour would work, governments would mediate. Workers wouldn’t seize the means of production; they would just buy the products. Labour movements would be recognised, pensions institutionalised, and domesticity subsidised in bricks, wages, and white goods. In return, the subject. Almost always white, male, and able-bodied. Was expected to be orderly, obedient, and productive. The deal was this: conformity for stability.
It’s worth remembering that the man who gave his name to this system was also an antisemite who published The International Jew—a text so notorious it earned him praise from Hitler. This isn’t to suggest a direct line from Fordism to fascism, but rather to note that even the most “rational” systems of production can carry dark ideological shadows. The myth of order has always had a racialised underside.
For a time, it worked. In Britain, this was the Butskellite middle ground: council housing, nationalised industries, education expansion, the NHS. The postwar settlement was never revolutionary. After all, it was designed to prevent revolution. But it gave a generation material certainty, and with it, a powerful myth: that capitalism could be civilised. That you could have growth and fairness, consumption and community, empire and progress. Of course it never delivered equally. Black workers, women, colonised peoples, none were fully admitted to the Fordist bargain. But the image stuck: the factory, the home, the nation.
Fordism also gave us something else: a model of masculinity forged in labour. The man as producer, provider, citizen. His worth measured in output, his dignity in work. His identity inseparable from what he did, what he made. As feminist thinkers like Wendy Brown and Silvia Federici have long argued, this was a deeply gendered economy of recognition. Women were cast as supporters, reproducers, secretaries of the private sphere. The man worked the machine; the woman maintained the man. This too was a kind of order, and its death is as political as its life.
You can still see traces of it. In the iconography of the miners’ strike. In the mourning for “red wall” industries. In the haunted nostalgia of TV reruns and union ballads. But the structure is gone. The production lines automated or offshored. The jobs casualised or atomised. The postwar compromise no longer exists. What remains is the memory of order and the rage at its loss.
The Machines Went Quiet and So Did the Future
The common story goes like this: Fordism collapsed, neoliberalism replaced it. Thatcher broke the unions, Reagan broke the state, and capital was finally free. The productive economy became a speculative one. The citizen became the customer. The job for life became the hustle. But this tidy substitution (old model out, new model in) misunderstands the violence and incompleteness of the shift. Neoliberalism didn’t replace Fordism. It ripped it up and flogged the parts.
Where Fordism offered structure, neoliberalism offered flexibility. The wage was no longer tied to productivity but to volatility. The worker became the entrepreneur of their own survival, forever marketing themselves, forever failing to scale. The factory disappeared; in its place: the call centre, the zero-hours contract, the Deliveroo algorithm. And through it all, politicians preached meritocracy, choice, personal responsibility. We had liberty in the form of permanent insecurity.
Yet neoliberalism never built a new social myth. It had numbers, not meaning. Its promise was efficiency, not identity. You could not be proud of deregulation. You could not sing hymns to private equity. Even as people became more precarious, more surveilled, more exhausted, they were told it was working. The economy was “growing”. The market was “free”. The graph pointed up. The system didn’t fool people, it just kept repeating that everything was fine while tearing up what held life together.
This is where the cultural and psychic damage took root. With Fordism, however coercive, came a script. Neoliberalism tore it up. The result wasn’t just economic dislocation, but existential drift. Entire communities were devalued overnight. The working class was reframed as a pathology. Council estates became moral failings. Masculinity became confused, ridiculed, feared. Where Fordism had located identity in production, neoliberalism left people alone with consumption and shame.
The left faltered too. Social democrats embraced the market, clung to growth targets, and outsourced hope to PR campaigns. The radical left, still reeling from defeat, often spoke only in critique, not imagination. Into this void, of narrative, structure, belonging, stepped something darker. Not a coherent ideology, but a mood. A sensibility. A yearning for order. Not the old world exactly, but the myth of it.
Fredric Jameson once said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But for millions, capitalism ended a long time ago, they just haven’t been told. What they see is not a system but a betrayal. What Mark Fisher called the feeling of having been “cheated of our birthright,” abandoned not just economically but symbolically.1 What they feel is not progress but grief. Where grief festers, fascism waits.
Fascism’s New Face: Trump, Farage, Meloni, and the Necro-Industrial Fantasy
If neoliberalism couldn’t build a new social myth, fascism was more than happy to exhume an old one. Not the actual past (fascism is never that honest) but a spectral version of it: men in factories, women in aprons, flags in the wind, enemies clearly marked and easily punished. It offers not solutions but catharsis, not reform but ritual. The politics of necro-nostalgia doesn’t try to rebuild Fordism. It dresses its corpse, lights the torches, and marches it through the town square.
Trump’s entire political theatre is built around the ruins of American industry. “Make America Great Again” was never a policy, it was a conjuring. He promised thriving steel mills and new coal mines, but delivered tax cuts and tariffs that helped his donors. The 2025 “Liberation Day” tariffs (pitched as economic justice for the American worker) did more to rattle supply chains than revive industry. They made headlines, not jobs. But that was never the point. The fantasy was the point. You were not meant to read the fine print. You were meant to feel the clang of industry, the return of control, the illusion that someone in power was finally on your side.
Farage plays a similar tune in a different register: village green fascism. He doesn’t promise rebirth through industry, but through authenticity. Real ale, proper borders, no more foreigners telling us what to do. For Farage, the Fordist ideal is not the worker but the yeoman. The fisherman, the smoker, the pub landlord who pours pride as much as pints. Brexit was his myth-machine, churning identity out of resentment. He didn’t need to build a new economy. Just stage a last stand for the nation.
Meloni offers a more disciplined version. Where Trump blusters and Farage banters, she sermonises. Her vision is maternal, militarised, Catholic. Her Italy is not the future but the family, the motherland. She invokes God and Mussolini without blinking. The past she offers is purified. This is a place of no migrants, no queers, no disruption. Her myth is one of rebirth through sacrifice. A womb for the nation. A border at the breast.
What unites them is death. Not in the morbid sense. But as a kind of structure. These are not visions of life as it is, or could be. They are visions of what must be lost to regain control. The brown child at the border. The trans woman in the changing room. The protester in the street. The worker who no longer obeys. Sacrifice is always at the edge of this politics: someone must pay for the fall. Someone must be cast out so the centre can hold.
These leaders don’t want to revive Fordism. They want to weaponise the memory of it. Salvaging the parts that flatter: That of the strong man, the steady wage, the obedient wife, and discarding the rest. Not a return, exactly, but a cleansing.
When the Factory Dies, the Strongman Returns
It’s no coincidence that fascism speaks in the voice of the man. Not just any man, but the one imagined to have been dethroned: the breadwinner, the father, the foreman, the war hero, the one who once held court at the dinner table and whose authority (moral, economic, sexual) was presumed natural. When the Fordist order collapsed, so too did the structure that had upheld him. His wages no longer sustained a household. His job no longer defined him. His wife no longer needed him. His country, he was told, was “changing”. Now becoming diverse, gender-fluid, cosmopolitan. What was sold as progress registered, for him, as humiliation.
Fascism doesn’t invent this crisis. It just organises it.
Trump didn’t rally a class in revolt. He rallied a gender in retreat, and turned class anger into cultural war. His body, his vulgarity, his refusal to apologise, these were not political positions but performances of unbroken male authority. He strutted through accusations of assault, bankruptcies, lies, and indictments, not despite them but because of them. To the base, he was proof that the strong man could still get away with it. That the patriarch had not been castrated by HR departments and campus feminists. That the world might still be run on fists, not feelings.
Meloni, for her part, restores patriarchy through the maternal. Her Italy is the nation as household, the leader as protective mother. It’s a softer form, but no less rigid: women may be honoured, but only as vessels of reproduction. Deviate from that function (be queer, childless, migrant, feminist) and you are cast outside the family, and thus the state.
And Farage? He sells the everyman version: not the patriarch but the pub man. He who smokes, drinks, ogles, and tells it like it is. His persona isn’t polished but pointed. He represents the male voice that feels silenced—by migrants, by women, by political correctness, by the softness of modern life. He doesn’t need to build power; he just needs to vent for those who’ve lost it.
Underneath it all is the same structure: the restoration of gendered hierarchy as the answer to economic and cultural collapse. The man must be returned to the centre. Nnot because he’s missing, but because without Fordism, he no longer knows who he is. Fascism offers him a script. Not a job, but a role. Not dignity, but domination.
As Jessa Crispin notes, the real crisis of masculinity isn’t that men have lost power. It’s that they’ve lost certainty.2 In a world without clear roles, without wage-based recognition, without promised futures, the strongman becomes a surrogate father, the state a disciplinary household, and violence (rhetorical or real) a form of clarity.
Fascism, then, is not the return of the man. It’s his reconstruction. Out of ruins, resentments, and ritual.
What Does Fascism Want to Return To? (What Might the Left Offer Instead?)
The question is not rhetorical. Fascism does not simply want “the past”. It wants a version of it, stripped of contradiction and filled with meaning. It wants the factory without the strike, the wife without the women’s movement, the flag without the empire’s blood. It wants work, but only as discipline. Family, but only as order. Nation, but only as homogeneity. It wants to return to a moment before shame, before loss, before ambiguity. When the world was ruled by the right kind of man and everyone else knew their place.
But this past never existed. The stability of the Fordist era was not universal; it was exclusionary, racialised, imperial. The male wage was subsidised by women’s unpaid labour. The working-class suburb was built on colonial extraction. Even at its height, the Fordist dream was rationed. What fascism mourns, then, is not justice. But dominance. What it promises is not recovery. But revenge.
The danger is that this myth feels truer than the present. In an age of precarity, loneliness, and algorithmic chaos, the past at least offers a story. Technocracy doesn’t. Starmerism doesn’t. Neoliberal centrism, in both its Clintonian and Blairite forms, speaks only in metrics and mandates, not myths. It doesn’t even pretend to inspire. Just to manage.
If the left is to offer anything meaningful now, it cannot be a nostalgic socialism or Blue Labour. It cannot be a promise to return to the postwar consensus. After all we will not fight fascism by offering people the same old deal, just with solar panels and a mindfulness app. Remember you can’t beat necro-nostalgia with carbon credits and corporate wellness. That world is gone, and it was never enough. The challenge is to name the loss without idealising it. To mourn what gave people identity and purpose, but also to show how that structure relied on exclusions we cannot reproduce.
We must learn to speak of work without sacralising it, of masculinity without restoring it, of the nation without fetishising it. This means building new myths (collective ones, egalitarian ones) but also confronting the emotional terrain that fascism currently occupies: grief, confusion, rage. It’s the same terrain colonised by Andrew Tate’s swaggering cruelty and Jordan Peterson’s patriarchal balm-for-the-broken. These aren’t fringe figures. They speak to a generation that feels lied to and abandoned. These are political states. They cannot be managed out of existence. They must be politicised.
Walter Benjamin warned that every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution. That failure is not just structural. It is a narrative. Where there is no story of liberation, a story of domination will do. And so the task, always, is to make history again feel possible.
Not as return. But as rupture.
Footnotes
- Mark Fisher, Exiting the Vampire Castle (Open Democracy, 2013). ↩︎
- Jessa Crispin, What Is Wrong with Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything (New York: Pantheon/Knopf Doubleday, June 3, 2025). ↩︎
