What is becoming visible across different countries today does not return in the shape of classical fascism. It does not necessarily march in uniforms, does not always repeat the old slogans, and does not require an openly totalitarian state to be effective. It appears more quietly. It comes as a tone of voice, as exhaustion, as hardening, as a taste for humiliation, as a cold readiness to sacrifice the dignity of others to one’s own emotional impulse. That is precisely why the concept of “existential fascism” is so precise: it designates not merely an ideology, but a psychic and cultural form in which the self absolutizes itself and the common world disintegrates (Morán, 2025).

One of the great political mistakes is to wait for fascism to arrive in full costume. By then, it is already too late. The more important question comes earlier: What psychic disposition prepares the ground? The answer is uncomfortably simple. It is the idolization of the self in an age of lost trust. When institutions are hollowed out, when language empties, when social bonds weaken, and when the future no longer appears as a shared promise but only as a private threat — then the desire for hardness grows. Not because hardness heals reality, but because it gives the destabilized self the feeling of still existing. Politics stops asking what is true and starts offering something easier: relief. A place to dump fear, rage, humiliation. (Arendt, 1951; Fromm, 1941; Adorno et al., 1950).

In the United States, this shift has become particularly visible. On February 23, 2026, Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic — not the crude claim that all Republicans are Nazis. His argument was more precise, and therefore sharper: the Republican Party has become a space in which slogans, codes, and rhetorical figures associated with fascism, or even with the Third Reich, are no longer decisively rejected. His point is not: identity = Nazism. It is: the normalization of a political vocabulary that once would have been treated as an uncrossable line. That is where the structural shift lies. It is not only the fringe that radicalizes — the center loses its capacity for rejection (Nichols, 2026).

The same pattern appears in Europe not as a copy, but as a family resemblance. Radical right parties are in many countries no longer mere fringe phenomena but actors with growing influence over political agendas, public language, and the formation of governments. They differ in history, style, and national context. But they share common instincts: politics of enmity, distrust of liberal mediating institutions, the heroization of national assertion, and the willingness to portray democratic norms as weakness. A 2025 ECFR report noted that radical right parties led in polls in the four most populous democracies in Europe and were already sharing governmental responsibility in several EU states. By early 2026, the same think tank described a Europe in a condition of deep political and psychological uncertainty and fragmentation. That is not identical to fascism. But it is precisely the climate in which authoritarian temptations begin to appear reasonable, sober, or necessary (Mudde, 2019; ECFR, 2025; ECFR, 2026).

Germany offers a particularly illuminating example. The debates around the AfD have shown how far a democracy can habituate itself to the presence of a force that openly flirts with — or integrates — far-right intellectual frameworks. Spain shows a different variant with Vox: not the same history, but the same underlying impulse — a condensation of nationalism, culture-war politics, and an anti-pluralist tone of mobilization. In the Netherlands, one sees how quickly a society considered liberal can slide into a mode of hardening in which the destruction of the common is sold as realism. What matters is not the perfect equivalence of cases, but the recurrence of the same inner logic (Mudde, 2019; Rooduijn et al., 2023).

Italy under Giorgia Meloni reveals how this process can become institutional without yet warranting the classical label of dictatorship. That, precisely, is the point. Democratic regression rarely begins with an open rupture — it begins with displacements: pressure on media, attacks on judicial independence, reshaping the political field in favor of the executive. In 2025, Italy was described in a widely noted report as one of Europe’s “dismantlers” of the rule of law. By 2026, a further analysis warned of the continued erosion of rule-of-law standards in several EU states, Italy among them. Existential fascism does not require the total state immediately. It already lives beforehand in a society that learns to admire the weakening of checks and balances as an expression of strength (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018; Urbinati, 2019).

Outside Europe, Javier Milei in Argentina exhibits yet another distinctive variant of the same field. This matters because it destroys the misunderstanding that fascization must always appear in collectivist form. The new type can also appear under the banner of radical freedom. It does not say: “The state is everything” — it says: “Only the aggressive, uninhibited self counts.” The result is paradoxically similar: contempt for anything that mediates, devaluation of social bonds, and the transformation of the public sphere into an arena of dominance. Freedom collapses into cruelty the moment it is no longer shaped by reciprocity and limit (Brown, 2019; Traverso, 2019).

Israel occupies a particularly delicate place in this discussion — and for exactly that reason cannot be omitted. Not because everything there reduces to the same denominator, but because the situation demonstrates in concentrated form how war, trauma, a state of exception, and institutional erosion can together produce an authoritarian climate. This point must not remain abstract. It can be named concretely. First, the crisis around the judicial reform has not simply ended; constitutional analyses from 2025 explicitly emphasize that the security shock following October 7 did not close the dynamic of the “judicial overhaul” — it deepened the threat to liberal-democratic structures (Roznai, 2025). Second, the Israel Democracy Institute documented in early 2026 a series of concrete steps weakening democratic institutions, including attacks on the authority of the Supreme Court, pressure on independent oversight, and further encroachments on equality and institutional balance (IDI, 2026). Third, the Knesset passed legislation in late March 2026 providing for the death penalty specifically for Palestinians in terrorism cases — legislation criticized internationally as discriminatory and incompatible with the rule of law. It is precisely here that the concept becomes analytically sharp: existential fascism does not arise only where a society becomes brutal — it arises where a society learns to morally absolve its own brutality as necessary hardness for survival. At that point, fear is no longer processed — it is politically gilded (Agamben, 2005; Butler, 2004; Mbembe, 2003).

The point of the concept is not insult. It is diagnosis. Its value lies in what it exposes at the anthropological core. Existential fascism begins where the self no longer understands itself as a vulnerable being among others, but as the final authority that orders everything according to fear, injury, and utility. From there, the path is short: truth becomes a tool, law becomes a weapon, politics becomes revenge, and the common world appears only as a burden. The human being no longer calls for justice — only for permission to be hard. That is the real catastrophe: not merely institutional decay, but a distortion of the soul. The term “the fascism of the self” names this shift with particular clarity: it is not first the system that absolutizes itself — it is the isolated self that makes itself the measure of all things (Morán, 2025).

The decisive question, then, is not whether these movements share the same programs everywhere. They do not. The real question is whether they all partake of the same inner disease. And the answer is: in many respects, yes. They live off exhaustion, they feed on resentment, they organize fear and sell hardness as truthfulness. That is precisely why “existential fascism” is not rhetorical excess — it is a usable concept. It names the fact that what is new lies not primarily in ideology but in the constitution of the human being who has learned to hate the common and to mistake the mirror of his own affect for truth. If one does not see this, one recognizes the danger always too late. If one does see it, critique begins earlier — where politics is still language, habit, tone, and moral permission (Arendt, 1951; Fromm, 1941; Traverso, 2019).

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