Neofascism and the Erosion of Normativity Subjectivation and Political Identity in the 21st Century

The resurgence of neofascist movements in the early 21st century has been widely analysed in terms of economic dislocation, political realignment, and cultural polarisation. This article argues that the contemporary viability of neofascism cannot be understood solely as a reaction to economic or institutional crises, nor as the revival of a closed ideological repertoire. Rather, it proposes that neofascism has gained traction within a broader reconfiguration of subjective and normative frameworks that structure political life. These transformations affect how individuals relate to authority and autonomy, how norms are produced and contested, how identities are stabilised or essentialised, and how equality and suffering are interpreted in the political field and how they affect current collective identity formation.

While much of the recent literature has focused on populist leadership, institutional decline, or the strategic dynamics of contemporary authoritarianism, comparatively less attention has been devoted to the sociological processes through which subjects become receptive to more radical forms of anti-universalist identification. In particular, the re-emergence of neofascist political imaginaries in the 21st century suggests the need to examine not only political institutions or ideological discourses, but also the transformations in the normative foundations that historically structured modern democratic coexistence. In this sense, recent reflections on the crisis of neoliberal rationality and the weakening of democratic normativity also point to broader transformations in the relationship between subjectivity, norms, and political authority (Brown, 2019; Traverso, 2019).

This article does not engage systematically with the historiographical literature on fascism studies – from the pioneering contributions of authors such as Wilhelm Reich, Franz Neumann, Hannah Arendt and Ernst Nolte in the classical tradition (Arendt, 1951; Neumann, 1942; Nolte, 1965; Reich, 1970), to the influential comparative frameworks of scholars such as Robert Paxton, Roger Griffin, and Emilio Gentile in the contemporary field (Gentile, 2005; Griffin, 1991; Paxton, 2004). Rather than offering an account of fascism's ideological content or historical trajectory, the argument developed here focuses on the sociological processes that render subjects receptive to neofascist forms of identification in the present conjuncture – a level of analysis that, we contend, cannot be fully derived from ideological or historical approaches alone.

This proposal addresses that problem through a sociological reconstruction of the processes of erosion of normative universality and how it enables the formation of neofascist political subjectivities. The argument developed here does not seek to delegitimise struggles against historically structured forms of oppression, nor to deny the persistence of unequal relations of power along lines of class, gender, race, or colonial history. Rather, it aims to examine how certain contemporary modes of identity and norm construction – when reified and detached from their historical and structural conditions – may converge with the rise of neofascism.

The analysis reconstructs a constellation of interrelated processes that have altered the conditions under which political mobilisation takes place. First, autonomy has increasingly been redefined in ways that detach it from collective processes of norm construction and reciprocity, privileging forms of individual self-assertion resistant to mediation. Second, shared normativity has been weakened, as institutional and symbolic frameworks that historically regulated social conflict have lost legitimacy or authority. Third, identity has come to be articulated through essentialist categories – such as gender, ethnicity, or culture – that fix subjects in static positions rather than situating them within dynamic and historically contingent relations.

These developments are further reinforced by the transformation of victimhood into a central mode of political identification, in which suffering is no longer primarily analysed as the outcome of specific relations of domination but is converted into a morally privileged and enduring identity, even vicarious. At the same time, the erosion of normativity has contributed to the emergence of forms of false egalitarianism that flatten distinctions between situated knowledge, institutional authority, and arbitrary opinion, thereby undermining shared criteria of judgement. Finally, these processes converge with relativistic frameworks that reject the possibility of common standards of truth or justice, limiting the capacity for critique and collective deliberation.

Taken together, these transformations do not mechanically generate neofascism, nor do they determine its ideological content. Instead, they shape a sociopolitical environment in which neofascist discourses can resonate and mobilise by offering simplified and essentialised identities, restored hierarchies, and affective certainties in contexts marked by normative fragmentation and social distrust. By analysing these interrelated processes, the article seeks to contribute to debates in political sociology on authoritarianism, identity, and normativity, and to clarify how contemporary forms of neofascism are embedded in broader transformations of subjectivity.

The Debate on Normative Production

As a logical consequence of critical perspectives on the fascist and authoritarian experiences of the first half of the 20th century, there has been an increasing tendency to conceive the production and existence of norms solely in terms of their repressive character – that is, as expressions of an authoritarian power that tends to violate citizens’ rights, coming particularly through the strong influence of Michel Foucault and the critics of the normative structure of Modern States (Agamben, 1998; Foucault, 1977, 1978; Wacquant, 2009).

From these perspectives, the state is conceived as the primary violator of rights, and the norm as one of the tools through which such violations are enacted. As a result, the articulation between processes of normative production and changing correlations of forces linked to diverse modes of exercising domination becomes increasingly blurred. Within this ‘denunciatory’ outlook, anyone who transgresses a norm is conceived as a victim of the state apparatus and, in more radical versions, even as a potential counter-hegemonic subject, with little analysis of the type of action involved, the nature of the violated norm, or the consequences of these elements for the communal social bond.

It is certainly true that the state, through its various agencies, configures and crystallises a normative apparatus that defines what constitutes a crime. There is a selectivity of the law that produces an initial differentiation between practices that are considered criminal and those that are not. However, this first level of analysis is insufficient to grasp the social impact that such practices may entail. Establishing that the state legitimises, through the normative apparatus and the judicial system, what counts as a crime does not automatically mean that there is no social harm involved in each of the practices defined as criminal, nor that there are no disputes and shifting correlations of forces in determining what constitutes a crime, nor – still less – that all norms historically constructed favour dominant sectors.

These perspectives identify only one part of the phenomenon: the productive character of power as a capacity for normalisation. What is overlooked is that, in normative construction – both traditional and institutionalised – the possibility is also at stake of penalising the conduct of hegemonic powers (such as genocide or crimes against humanity) or of imposing limits on the unrestrained use of force. Numerous popular conquests have been transformed into legal norms. Victories that have involved struggles and deaths in order to achieve them, ranging from the right to strike to the eight-hour working day, paid holidays, progressive taxation on high incomes, or various modalities of land-rent distribution. The state is a space of dispute and, therefore, normative production is also a field of struggle.

The state can define a crime as criminal theft, armed robbery, homicide, social protest, strikes, road blockades, discrimination, or genocide. It is correct to understand that an action is not necessarily harmful to the community merely because it has been constituted as a crime by state normativity. However, just as an action is not socially harmful simply because it has been criminalised by the state, it is neither useful nor legitimate to fall into the inverse, believing that an action, by virtue of being subject to state persecution, is in itself positive. Theft, armed robbery, bodily harm, homicide, or even discrimination or genocide constitute distinct ways of negatively affecting the communal social bond and the possibilities of cooperation among peers. Rejecting exacerbated punitivism in response to some of these practices, or proposing more reparative forms of justice, cannot entail denying the modes of social harm they generate, nor – still less – disregarding collective demands in relation to these harms or the need to establish modalities of responsibility and reparation.

The Functions of Authority

By now classical works such as those of Jean Piaget (1932/2013) and Lev Vygotsky (1962) in psychology, or Norbert Elias (1939/2000) from a more socio-historical perspective, have distinguished the complexity and richness involved in the process through which norms emerge within any community, as well as their dual character as both articulators of possible processes of solidarity and expressions of systems of domination.

Piaget (1932/2013) distinguishes between heteronomous and autonomous modes of normative construction – that is, between norms that arise from external imposition and those constructed through consensus among peers – and analyses the complex and gradual process through which human development unfolds from birth and early childhood, necessarily situated in contexts of heteronomy, towards the progressive conquest of autonomy. This autonomy emerges from relations of reciprocity among peers, among subjects and groups who conceive of themselves as part of a community, as members of a shared space that requires the establishment and ongoing transformation of the norms necessary for social life. Vygotsky (1962), for his part, insisted on the usefulness of the external creation of norms by authority in specific contexts – such as childhood and adolescence in relation to the role of parents, or within the school system in relation to the role of the teacher – as ways of establishing behavioural patterns, even if only so that they may later be challenged.

In this sense, although the family nucleus – as the primary space of socialisation – and subsequent institutional forms such as religious denominations, the school, or even the justice system constitute the foundation of hierarchical orders, it is impossible to ignore the fact that any later confrontation with these orders requires their prior existence as objective and subjective conditions for the configuration of a community of peers. This configuration depends on the internalisation of representations of the world and of sets of rules that guide action in order to guarantee forms of cooperation.

Norbert Elias, in The Civilizing Process (1939/2000), develops an account of how these patterns have traversed the history of the species, generating modes of containment of violence and organising schemes of social relations capable of constructing increasingly complex mediations in systems of manners, conflict modulation, and symbolisation. While these developments have been articulated with hegemonic systems of power, they have also enabled more advanced forms of cooperation among large human groups.

This analysis does not entail a normative defence of hierarchical authority or traditional social forms. Rather, it approaches authority and normativity from a more functional perspective, examining their role in the constitution of social cooperation and the formation of subjects capable of agency.

Modern internationalism proposed that the French, English, German, but also Argentine, Mexican, or South African worker shared common interests beyond skin colour, language, religion, or culture. This universalism was grounded in the possibility of guaranteeing the population as a whole certain minimal ‘securities’, such as housing, health, education, or food – foundations of the welfare state's structures of containment and of the assumption of all inhabitants of a given territory as ‘citizens’ equal in their rights. Political confrontation was based on a dynamic and non-essential positioning with respect to the productive forces and on an objective location within a set of relations of oppression. This does not imply that circumstances have not changed in the 21st century, or that disputes around gender construction, sexual identities, ecological issues, among many others, should not play a role in the reformulation of modes of identity construction and in struggles for hegemony.

However, the re-emergence of various forms of racism at the beginning of the 21st century can be read in this light, with the delegitimation of the concepts that dominated 20th-century understandings of the world (social class, revolution) and their replacement by new formulas of identity construction based on essentialist elements such as the ‘traditional characteristics’ of peoples.

Luigi Zoja (2001) has traced some of these consequences in the mutations of forms of social organisation, focusing in his case on the profound changes in the structure of the family nucleus resulting from transformations in the conception of the paternal figure since the Industrial Revolution. Zoja analyses the ways in which the emergence of this paternal role is central to understanding the limitations imposed on modes of intra-species violence.

Zoja draws attention to the abandonment and de-hierarchisation of the paternal function, which had emerged as a form of commitment to the care of offspring and of the couple and which represented a novelty in evolutionary terms. This function required the containment of classical male violence and gave rise to the creation of the ‘family nucleus’, the sedentarisation of men, and monogamy. The de-hierarchisation of the paternal function has tended to reactivate forms of individual or gang-based male violence that dispense with normative constructions forged over millennia.

The criminological analyses cited by Zoja regarding transformations in family structures among populations integrated into criminal networks, or serving as labour for drug trafficking organisations, gangs, or maras, constitute elements that must be taken into account in any serious analysis of these social transformations. The male fraternities that have transformed modes of violence against women and other men in recent decades – analysed, among others, in the work of Rita Segato (2003, 2016) – did not emerge within the classical nuclear families of colonialist or Victorian modernity (i.e. within the classical patriarchal model). Rather, according to recent ethnographic research on the origins and family histories of members of such groups, they emerged as a consequence of the destruction of these classical family nuclei.

These transformations have tended to generalise family structures characterised by the absence of paternal figures – whether due to the father's murder or, much more commonly, abandonment of the household and the tremendous difficulty faced by mothers in assuming both roles under conditions of economic and cultural deprivation. This absence of the father is articulated with the simultaneous destruction of community norms and/or extended families that might otherwise have replaced the paternal figure, as well as with the absence or erosion of state normativity and the de-hierarchisation of secondary socialisation institutions such as the school in territories permeated by networks of new forms of criminality. These networks – closely linked to drug trafficking but also present in other illegal economies – seek out, train, and recruit these new masculine figures (‘males’ in the most primitive sense of the term).

This new ‘male’ figure (no longer a father) is constituted precisely through the repudiation of any possible paternal role, the rupture of responsibility toward the family nucleus, and the refusal to assume obligations toward descendants, who are abandoned. These subjects conceive of themselves as members of fraternities that reclaim the exercise of direct violence based on ‘endurance’, physical superiority, and the naturalisation of a relationship with death – both their own and that of others – thus breaking with millennia of the construction of an increasingly affective paternal masculinity.

All of these issues are particularly unsettling for a politically correct mode of thought that tends to assume a set of ‘truths’ without reflection – such as the intrinsic evil of any modern Western construction, the intrinsically counter-hegemonic character of any form of organisation among historically oppressed groups, or the stigmatisation of classical family nuclei or paternal functions and their association with the construction of authority. These assumptions are imposed not through critical analysis but through a presumed prior ‘moral superiority’, deriving from apriorism rather than from an examination of their objective validity, the critical history of their psychic functions, or their consequences for social relations.

The uncritical replacement of modern conceptions of identity (liberal, social democratic, or Marxist) by postmodern modalities that do not subject their aprioristic and essentialist assumptions about identity to scrutiny has constituted a setback for any genuinely radical transformation. Moreover, it has played a fundamental role in converging diagnostically with neoconservative or neofascist modes of identity construction. This convergence can be observed in the political participation of significant contingents of young white men in these new movements, who find in neofascism a response to an identity crisis for which no constructive models are available. Cornered and stigmatised, attacked for bearing characteristics they neither can nor wish to renounce (being heterosexual men, white, Western), fascism appears in many cases as the only viable political option that does not demand self-renunciation and that allows for the assumption of an identity model.

The Role of Essentialism

This set of transformations has generated essentialist modes of identity construction and a positioning articulated around victimhood. The 19th-century universalism of humanism had opened the door to a dynamic and fraternal perception of human beings. Indeed, the concept of fraternity constituted one of the central axes of the French Revolution (liberty, equality, and fraternity), even though it would later become the most neglected of the three. This notion of fraternity was subsequently recovered and enriched by Marxism and other counter-hegemonic currents, through a dynamic perception of identity that located fraternity in relation to a ‘unity of class situation’.

This ‘unity of class’ made it possible to move beyond rigid ethnic or national determinations that had structured social conflict for centuries, and in some cases even enabled struggles for gender equality by incorporating women into political movements from which they had historically been excluded, with early examples such as Rosa Luxemburg. The slogan ‘workers of the world, unite’ was grounded in the conception that it was a dynamic situation – the subordinate position within the productive structure that defines the proletarian – that generated a shared interest among subjects with different histories and identities. From this perspective emerged the internationalist pacifism of the First World War, which identified that the interests of exploited populations worldwide were not those of the dominant classes, who appealed to nationalism to justify the defence of their corporate economic interests at the cost of the lives of workers from different nations who bore no intrinsic hostility toward one another.

This humanism entered into a profound crisis with the resurgence of anti-colonial nationalisms, the rise of new cultural left movements, the transformation of feminism at the beginning of the 21st century and the influence of Heideggerian thought, certain post-Foucauldian developments, and deconstructionism. It should be noted that what is referred to here as ‘postmodern’ or ‘post-structuralist’ encompasses a highly heterogeneous field of intellectual production, including authors whose critical intentions and analytical contributions differ significantly from one another. The argument does not impugn the theoretical value of these traditions as a whole, but rather identifies a specific displacement – the rejection of universalism and the adoption of essentialist identity frameworks – that has characterised certain readings and political appropriations of these currents, particularly as they entered into dialogue with subaltern, postcolonial, and identitarian politics. This trend can be identified even in fields like genocide studies (Feierstein, 2016).

These processes enabled a critique of the modern order from the standpoint of oppression that was no longer conceived primarily in terms of class, but rather reactivated older ethnic, national, or gendered elements. Beyond the validity of many of these critiques regarding the colonising role of Western modernity, the central epistemological problem in the hegemony of such approaches lay in the neglect – or more precisely, the rejection – of the universalist and internationalist character of the revolutionary projects of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and in the re-adoption of an essentialist perspective on identity, in which good and evil once again acquired a character tied to skin colour, place of birth, or gender. One of the most provocative critics of this trend has been Vivek Chibber (2013).

Unlike the dynamic and reversible character of the appropriation of the means of production in the universalist Marxist opposition between proletarians and bourgeois – where the bourgeois would cease to be such by relinquishing the appropriation of the means of production – man cannot cease to ‘be a man’, nor can a white person cease to ‘be white’. What is demanded is not merely the renunciation of power or of a class position, but the renunciation of one's own identity in a static sense, where being male or being white becomes an essential pole of evil.

The bourgeois who renounces the appropriation of surplus value is not required to renounce his self-representation, since bourgeois identity refers to a position within the structure of production and disappears when that position is abolished. A metaphor drawn from the final scene of the classic Italian film Novecento captures this distinction poignantly. A rural Italian ‘people’, at the moment of victory over fascism, debate the meaning of the need to ‘kill the landlord’. One proposal resolves the ethical conflict by suggesting that this does not mean taking his life, but rather killing his condition as a landlord – that is, stripping him of control over the means of production. In other words, the bourgeois is required to renounce, in the present, the exercise of appropriation of another's labour.

By contrast, gender, skin colour, and even culture do not possess this intrinsic dynamism. They are constructions of far greater antiquity and, in many cases, articulated with biological dimensions. Renouncing the exercise of gender violence by men is not equivalent to renouncing male identity itself.

All bourgeois subjects extract and appropriate surplus value, since appropriation constitutes the condition of possibility of their existence as a class. While it is true that men, white people, and Westerners have tended historically to be oppressors, it is not their being male, white, or Western that explains oppression, but rather the historically situated ways in which these social relations have been structured – relations that must be analysed historically and whose transformations must be assessed. A bourgeois who ceases to extract surplus value ceases to exist as a bourgeois because profit disappears. A man, a white person, or a Westerner who does not participate in processes of gender or colonial oppression may nevertheless continue to be male, white, or Western.

Like all essentialisms, postcolonial or subaltern perspectives fail to account for the dynamic and reversible character of identities. Ladino peasants across Latin America who do not identify as indigenous have often suffered exploitation as severe as that experienced by their indigenous counterparts (and in many cases share those origins but do not identify with them, sometimes out of ignorance and sometimes out of conviction). Jewish or Roma populations persecuted for centuries throughout Europe and central to the Nazi genocide shared the same light skin colour as their executioners. Super-exploited workers in the North American industrial belt – often characterised as white trash when rendered unemployed and homeless – not only possess light skin but have always conceived of themselves as Western, Anglo-Saxon, and white.

Unlike the slogan ‘workers of the world, unite’, postcolonial, subaltern, or identity-based calls for rebellion stigmatise and exclude large majorities of the population. They constitute their social force through fragmented minorities whose claims do not necessarily derive from present suffering (even when such suffering continues to exist), but from the need to repair past suffering. It is here that essentialism connects with the victimist configuration that will be analysed in the following section.

In the struggle against essentialisms, the central political challenge of the present lies in how to reconstitute a universalist notion capable of encompassing identities that are currently assumed only in fragmented form. Marxism, populism, and anarchism sought to resolve this challenge through the figure of the proletarian. The question that remains open is what contemporary figure might prove most effective in recomposing a universalist perception of people who suffer in the present. Some of these problems were part of the interesting debate between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth (Fraser & Honneth, 2003).

The Construction of Victimhood

Essentialism tends to be articulated with a particular configuration of victimhood. This configuration does not merely involve the recognition of suffering or historical injustice – an indispensable task for any critical theory – but rather the transformation of victimhood into the central axis of identity construction and political legitimacy.

Within this framework, the condition of the victim becomes not a historically situated position that demands redress and transformation, but an essential attribute that defines the subject once and for all. Victimhood ceases to be a contingent experience produced by specific relations of domination and is instead naturalised as an immutable identity. In this sense, the victim is no longer conceived as a subject capable of agency, transformation, or political articulation beyond the experience of having been harmed, but as a subject whose legitimacy derives precisely from the permanence of that harm.

A significant body of sociological work has examined the emergence of the victim as a central social and political figure in contemporary societies. From the perspective of the sociology of action, Michel Wieviorka and Alain Touraine have analysed the transformation of collective actors and the decline of the social movement as a vehicle for political representation, arguing that the fragmentation of collective agency has opened space for new forms of subjectivity organised around suffering and recognition (Touraine, 1997; Wieviorka, 2012). In the Latin American context, researchers such as Diego Zenobi and María Pita have examined how victim identities are constituted and mobilised through specific institutional and political processes, highlighting their ambivalent relationship with state power and collective agency (Pita, 2010; Zenobi, 2014). Gabriel Gatti and his collaborators have offered a broader and brilliant conceptualisation of the ‘victim’ as a contemporary social category – analysing its emergence, stabilisation, and uses across different political and cultural contexts, including its capacity to be appropriated by very different kinds of actors (Gatti, 2017). The argument developed in this article builds on and extends this literature by emphasising a specific consequence that has remained undertheorised: the convergence between victimist configurations and neofascist political mobilisation.

This configuration produces a profound displacement in the understanding of political conflict. Rather than analysing relations of power, exploitation, or domination in their structural and historical dimensions, political struggle becomes organised around the recognition of suffering and the attribution of moral authority to those who embody it. The central political question shifts from ‘what social relations must be transformed?’ to ‘who has suffered more?’, generating a competitive logic of victimhood that fragments collective action.

In this context, suffering is detached from its social causes and converted into a form of symbolic capital. The political field is reorganised around the distribution and recognition of this capital, with subjects and groups competing for the status of legitimate victims. This dynamic tends to displace struggles oriented toward the transformation of material conditions in favour of demands centred on recognition, symbolic repair, or moral condemnation.

Moreover, this form of victimhood often implies a temporal fixation on past injuries. While memory and historical responsibility are essential dimensions of political justice, the absolutisation of past suffering can obscure present relations of domination and inhibit the construction of collective projects oriented toward the future. The subject is anchored to a past wound that defines its identity and circumscribes its horizon of action.

Recognising this dynamic does not imply minimising historical suffering or questioning the necessity of memory, justice, and reparative practices. On the contrary, it seeks to preserve their critical and political force by preventing their transformation into fixed identities that foreclose agency, debate, and collective projects oriented toward the future.

The transformation of victimhood into identity also has normative consequences. If the victim is constituted as morally superior by virtue of having suffered, criticism of the positions or practices of victims – or of those who speak in their name – tends to be disqualified in advance as illegitimate, violent, or oppressive. This produces a closure of debate and a weakening of critical rationality, as disagreement is reinterpreted as a new form of aggression.

Paradoxically, this configuration of victimhood can converge with authoritarian or neofascist logics. When suffering is essentialised and detached from structural analysis, it becomes available for appropriation by reactionary movements that present themselves as the true victims of contemporary transformations. Groups that historically occupied dominant positions can re-signify themselves as victims – of globalisation, feminism, multiculturalism, or political correctness – and mobilise this self-victimisation as a source of political legitimacy.

In this sense, victimhood functions as a flexible and politically ambivalent category. Detached from an analysis of power relations, it can be mobilised both to denounce oppression and to justify exclusionary, punitive, or violent responses. The figure of the victim thus becomes a key element in the subjective and normative conditions of possibility for the emergence of neofascist discourses.

The challenge, therefore, is not to deny or minimise suffering, but to reinsert it within a framework that restores its historical and structural intelligibility. Only by reconnecting experiences of harm with the social relations that produce them can victimhood be articulated with projects of emancipation rather than with dynamics of fragmentation and authoritarian regression.

False Egalitarianism

These difficulties in different modes of socialisation, linked to the inability or lack of agreement to assume any form of authority, have been accompanied by what may be described as ‘false egalitarianisms’. That is, instead of observing and combating conditions of inequality (whether class-based, ethnic, gender-related, or others), inequality itself is directly denied through the creation of euphemistic concepts.

Inequality would no longer be conceivable as inequality, but merely as ‘another way of being equal’, whose supposedly unequal character would be nothing more than an effect of the power of nomination and could therefore be reversed simply by naming facts differently. The seriousness of this way of perceiving reality lies in the fact that, far from resolving inequality, it merely postulates its resolution as if it were a purely discursive problem, compelling us to perceive an alternative but distorted and deceptive reality that does not correspond to the concrete consequences observable in everyday life. What is sought is to reverse inequality at the level of language alone, but not in its materiality. This gives rise to profoundly hypocritical forms of dealing with inequality.

The inability to register difference or hierarchy (whether produced by talent, sacrifice, commitment, or even sheer luck) immerses those who undergo this type of socialisation in a fiction that ultimately proves dysfunctional in a world where difference is in fact the most common feature, regardless of how just or unjust its emergence or construction may be. Intolerance of frustration thus becomes a consequence generated by the very process of socialisation, contributing to the erosion of the meaning and relevance of institutions of socialisation. Those who do not experience either victory or defeat in their learning processes find themselves defenceless in the face of the everyday frustrations of the real world, which facilitates their subjectivation as victims, insofar as they come to experience the world as behaving towards them in a permanently unjust manner.

All of this connects with the repeated attacks on what is stigmatised as ‘meritocratic’. The degradation of the notion of merit dilutes what had been one of the most classical and effective democratic forms of contestation of authoritarianism, hereditary succession, or the reproduction of class privileges. The idea that merit, talent, effort, or sacrifice should constitute the conditions for access to certain goods or positions represented, in modernity, a form of struggle against oppression and an egalitarian tool, forged in the context of the bourgeois revolutions, humanism, and the Enlightenment.

Pierre Bourdieu famously showed that merit is never socially neutral, insofar as it is historically and structurally intertwined with unequal distributions of cultural capital, educational trajectories, and inherited dispositions (Bourdieu, 1984). More recently, Michael Sandel has argued that meritocratic narratives, even under formally equal conditions of opportunity, tend to produce moral hierarchies that generate hubris among ‘winners’ and humiliation among ‘losers’, thereby corroding social solidarity and the sense of a common good (Sandel, 2020). These critiques are analytically powerful insofar as they expose the limits and distortions of merit under conditions of structural inequality. However, when such critiques are displaced into a wholesale denunciation of merit as such, they risk converging with forms of false egalitarianism that dissolve one of the historically most effective democratic mechanisms for contesting inherited privilege and arbitrary domination. Rather than abolishing merit as a criterion, the problem lies in ignoring the material conditions that shape its unequal accessibility, thereby transforming a critique of inequality into a discursive levelling that paradoxically contributes to its reproduction.

False egalitarianism disbelieves in merit by automatically attributing it to the very axes of distinction it originally opposed (class, inheritance, or estate). Beyond the fact that there is indeed a historical relationship between merit and cultural capital, making merit a condition of access to goods or positions is precisely what enables a subject from disadvantaged sectors to gain access to what was not destined to them by birth – particularly in societies where education is public and free. This does not imply that such subjects start from the same position as those from privileged sectors, nor that they do not require far greater effort. Of course, they do. Yet every form of conquest, including political ones, requires effort. To assume that upward mobility can be achieved by hypocritically ignoring real conditions of inequality through purely discursive or euphemistic strategies paradoxically serves to perpetuate inequality.

Stigmatising merit as ‘meritocratic’, as in the other cases discussed, produces a false flattening, an indistinction, and an inability to generate difference (just as there can be no winners or losers, talented or untalented, industrious or idle individuals, and so forth). The fact that the discourse of dominant sectors has often relied on a fictitious postulation of their own merits (which in reality corresponded far more to their starting conditions, inheritance, skin colour, or gender) does not automatically turn merit itself into a lie. On the contrary, the denial of merit abolishes one of the most democratic ways that has existed historically for establishing differences – differences that will always exist in a reality that cannot be homogenously flattened, however insistently such flattening may be postulated in the unrealism of false egalitarian representations.

This sense of ‘deception’ experienced by oppressed groups in the face of false egalitarianisms – the postulation of an equality that is merely discursive and is not expressed either in equal access to goods, equal enjoyment, or in the provision of effective tools for social mobility – has been another factor in the advance of neofascism among popular sectors. Faced with this sense of deception, such groups become receptive to discourses that, in the most conservative manner possible, seek to re-establish notions of authority or to make differences explicit. Even while assuming a subordinate position, many members of popular sectors experience these discourses as more attuned to their lived realities than the falsely egalitarian world of political correctness.

Relativism

The construction of contemporary subjectivity is also connected, fundamentally, with the relativist drift. The questioning of any notion of truth enables an equivalence between epistemological scepticism and moral scepticism that undermines the foundations of responsible judgement and action. That was very clear in many of the Western reactions to the COVID-19 crisis (Feierstein, 2022).

If it is no longer possible to know what is true and what is false, nor what is right and what is wrong – if everything is relative and dependent on perspective – then the investment in one's own solipsistic outlook and hedonistic desire finds both scientific and ethical justification.

Humanism, both in its liberal and Marxist currents, assumed an excessively rigid version of the discourse of truth (under the influence of positivist currents) as well as of justice. Yet this rigidity nonetheless enabled a distinction between truth and falsehood, justice and injustice. Hannah Arendt expressed this with particular clarity in The Life of the Mind, ‘The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this, at the rare moments when the stakes are on the table, may indeed prevent catastrophes, at least for the self’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 193). For Arendt, it is precisely Nazism and fascism that succeed in dissolving the capacity for moral judgement through a logic of indistinction.

The rise of relativism occurred when hopes for transforming the world through a vision of greater justice were frustrated. This disappointment was projected onto the very understanding of the world, both in epistemological terms (theories of reality and modes of existence) and in ethical-moral terms (evaluations of action and their relation to good and evil, justice and injustice).

Thus, in the face of a harsh defeat that was also a profound disappointment – the inability of the experiences of ‘actually existing socialism’ to construct a more just, more egalitarian world capable of enabling greater collective happiness and enjoyment – the acceptance of actually existing capitalism did not take the form of explicit conviction in its virtues, but rather of cynicism. In this sense, Susan Neiman has compellingly argued that cynicism should not be understood as a form of critical lucidity, but rather as a moral abdication that renounces the distinction between justice and power, truth and mere opinion, thereby undermining the very conditions of responsible judgement (Neiman, 2008).

A related line of critique has been developed by a number of contemporary political theorists who, from different perspectives, have warned against the consequences of abandoning shared criteria of truth, justification, and judgement. Raymond Geuss has argued that political critique loses its force when it renounces any evaluative standpoint beyond the mere description of power relations, thereby collapsing into a form of sceptical quietism that ultimately reinforces the status quo (Geuss, 2008). Steven Lukes, in turn, has shown that relativism undermines the very possibility of criticising domination, insofar as power becomes indistinguishable from legitimacy once no common normative standards are acknowledged (Lukes, 2005). Bernard Williams similarly warned that the rejection of truth as a regulative ideal does not emancipate political judgement but instead opens the door to cynicism and manipulation, since without a commitment to truthfulness, political discourse becomes vulnerable to systematic distortion and bad faith (Williams, 2002). Taken together, these perspectives help clarify how the relativist turn does not radicalise critique but rather neutralises it, dissolving the conditions for responsible judgement and enabling precisely the forms of political cynicism and authoritarian exploitation that have proven so fertile for the resurgence of neofascist practices.

Despair articulated itself as the installation of an extreme doubt which, having initially emerged as a healthy challenge to the rigid positivism that hegemonised the 19th and 20th centuries, extended to the point of undoing the very foundations of humanism, establishing indistinction as the defining feature of a new era.

This indistinction increasingly radiated throughout the final decade of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century, accompanied by a cynical, ironic, and nihilistic view of political reality. Doubt had constituted a fundamental tool of critical judgement and a historical necessity both for the advancement of knowledge and for the advancement of responsibility. In particular, it was an indispensable necessity in confronting the positivism that dominated both the scientific field and ethical-moral evaluations from the Enlightenment through to the end of the Second World War.

Yet this need to make room for doubt and critical judgement was very different – indeed, almost the opposite – of its relativist turn. Doubt, even in its most radical form, does not eliminate the possibility of constructing a common world, nor the distinction between true and false or just and unjust. Doubt does not entail an incapacity to distinguish; rather, it obliges the revision of foundations and consistency, introduces alternative possible views not as given realities but as possibilities that must themselves be subjected to critique and evaluation under common, collectively constructed parameters based on demonstration, reasoning, and the capacity to persuade and to prove.

It is scepticism regarding the possibility of finding common parameters (whether in terms of truth or justice) that enables the transition from critical thought to relativism. Critical thought questions every claim on the basis that common criteria of evaluation can be found. Relativism presupposes the impossibility of dialogue and the generalised legitimation of any point of view, sustained solely by its own existence. In this sense, relativism entails the end of critical thought, insofar as critique becomes unnecessary once positions are legitimised merely by existing, without the need for justification.

It is the new right-wing movements of the 21st century that have been able to capitalise on the consequences of the relativist turn, to the surprise and difficulty of response of the whole democratic system. The world of ‘fake news’, flat-earth theories, climate change denial, genocide denial, anti-vaccine and anti-scientific movements more generally are all legitimate offspring of relativism. If there is no acceptable way to settle disputes over truth or justice, then any position becomes legitimate. From indistinction emerges an incapacity for dialogue, and actions can then only be settled through violence.

If each individual can construct reality according to their own preferences and evaluate it by their own parameters, why should the (false, distorted, biased, or even delusional) perceptions and evaluations of the new right be considered any less legitimate than the biases, exaggerations, or distortions of relativist left positions, or indeed than any well-founded and consistent view, whether it originates on the right or the left?

In these objective and subjective transformations lie many of the deepest foundations of the re-emergence of fascist social practices in contemporary international, regional, and national contexts, beyond their varying degrees of intensity or the specific forms they may take. The willingness to ask politically incorrect questions, to rigorously test a priori assumptions through in-depth studies (economic, sociological, ethnographic), and, above all, to recover the experiences of antifascist struggle constitutes today a fundamental necessity for any counter-hegemonic political project. This constitutes the central axis of the conclusions of the present work.

Conclusion

The analyses developed in this article have sought to identify a set of transformations in modes of subjectivation and normativity that have rendered the contemporary resurgence of neofascism more politically viable. Rather than attributing this phenomenon to a single cause, the argument has emphasised the articulation of multiple processes that, taken together, reshape the conditions under which political identities and forms of authority are constituted.

The erosion of shared normativity, the essentialisation of identity, the moralisation of victimhood, the spread of false egalitarianism, and the consolidation of relativistic frameworks have not emerged independently. Their convergence has contributed to the fragmentation of collective frameworks capable of mediating conflict and to the weakening of universalist reference points through which domination might be critically assessed. In this context, neofascist movements are able to present themselves as responses to disorder and uncertainty, mobilising essentialised identities and affective bonds while rejecting the very normative constraints that might subject them to critique.

Understanding these transformations does not imply nostalgia for past forms of authority or uncritical defence of modern institutions or positivism. It does, however, underscore the political risks involved in abandoning normativity and universalism without providing alternative frameworks capable of sustaining equality, responsibility, and collective agency. The challenge that emerges is not merely to oppose neofascism at the level of ideology or electoral competition, but to confront the deeper subjective and normative conditions that enable its appeal and durability.