Performative Fascism

The current US administration is, unlike the populist authoritarian regimes in Central Europe of recent years, not adequately characterized as following a legalist authoritarian or competitive constitutionalist path. Instead it has dictatorial features, that make it plausible to describe it as a performative fascist regime. Performative fascism is the postmodern form of fascism: It is focused on performing fascist attitudes, commitments and actions in a series of ad hoc measures, without having either the ambition or ability to penetrate and organize the whole of society and build institutional capacity to effectively follow through systematically on ambitious policies. Besides describing and analyzing the phenomenon, the talk will also provide some hypothesis about why fascism has taken a performative turn, what its possible trajectories are and what should be done about it.

WZB Talk by Mattias Kumm

The event is part of the WZB Talks series.