“It is impossible to understand Trumpism if we detach it from the past, as some are tempted to do when they contrast the good-old multilateral neoliberalism, which supposedly respected the international order, with a bad new nationalist and imperialist capitalism that does not.
“Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney may well make the finest of speeches in Davos, but he cannot make us forget that the cause he has defended and continues to defend is not as pure as he would have us believe.
“Neofascism serves as its bridgehead and model. The aim is clear and unapologetic: to destroy democratic institutions, even in the most minimal sense of the word ‘democracy’, in all countries, starting with the national sphere.
“The Trump administration is an administration at war. It makes no secret of the fact that it is waging a total war against both internal and external enemies. This is its very justification. Today, as in the past, the enemy is primarily foreigners, who are equated with criminals. But foreigners are above all ‘invaders’, who are, thus, the enemies in a war of territorial defence.
“Total war is also ‘cultural’. It authorises all manner of purges, all censorship, and all attacks on research, science, universities, the press and books.
“The Choice of Civil War seeks to understand how neoliberalism already contains the germs of neo-fascism.
“Neo-fascism does not always seek to counter or constrain the threat of electoral expression; it may also opt to divert this expression to its own advantage, precisely by mobilising a war against the “enemies of the people”. This is where the subtlety of this strategy becomes apparent. The old neoliberals sought to constitutionally restrict governments’ room for manoeuvre to avoid any challenge to private property. The neo-fascist version, however, seeks to bypass the constitutional order to violently impose a capitalist order free of all constraints, in the name of defending the People against all its internal and external enemies.
“While neoliberal measures have enabled the capitalist class and its associated oligarchies to increase their wealth and power, they have only been able to do so by reactivating long-standing divisions linked to cultural and religious traditions, ethnic and racial differences, gender, and specific national histories. Neofascism is the unprecedented synthesis of the great victors of neoliberalism and the embittered, resentful vanquished.”
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