I had an in-depth conversation with some lovely friends the other night about conservatism as it pertains to our experiences in our respective home countries and here in Germany where we have all found each other. When I say conservatism I don’t necessarily mean the conservative parties per se, even though they are part of the below, but more how fascist elements, tendencies tend to build the majority of their entire appeal on “conserving” and/or returning to a past, which, frankly and historically never existed. Now, I hate fascists, always have, and its been passed down the generations ever since my Granddad decided to come to the European mainland to fight the fuckers, it’s their bullying of the weak and needy that kicked off my initial disdain for them all those decades ago and really it could just be left at that, I don’t really think it is necessary to have a nuanced need to hate the bastards but let’s have it.
Black Lodges || The most pathetic feature of contemporary fascism is also one of its most effective: its dependence upon nostalgia for a past that never existed. Every major reactionary movement across the contemporary West, from the supporters of Donald Trump’s MAGA project in the United States, to the voters of Reform UK, to the adherents of the AfD in Germany, to the proliferating constellation of nationalist and far-right parties scattered across Europe, derives a substantial portion of its emotional energy not from a concrete political programme directed towards the future but from a fantasy directed backwards, towards an imaginary golden age that exists nowhere except in myth, selective memory, propaganda, and deliberate historical amnesia. The promise is always restoration rather than creation, recovery rather than transformation, a return rather than an advance. Yet what is to be restored never actually existed, and what is imagined as having been lost was, in most cases, inaccessible even to those now mourning its disappearance.
This is not merely an incidental characteristic of fascistic politics but one of its defining features. Fascism emerges not from confidence but from anxiety, not from historical understanding but from historical confusion, and not from genuine attachment to tradition but from an inability to confront reality as it exists. Faced with economic instability, declining living standards, collapsing public institutions, precarious employment, ecological crisis, social fragmentation, and the increasingly obvious failure of neoliberal capitalism to provide either prosperity or meaning, reactionary movements find themselves incapable, and unwilling of identifying the actual causes of collective suffering. They cannot direct their anger towards capital because their ideological commitments forbid it and they cannot challenge the structures of ownership and power that govern contemporary society because those structures constitute the very foundation of the social order they seek to defend. Consequently, they require an alternative explanation for decline, and that explanation is supplied through mythology.
The mechanism is depressingly simple. A fictional past is constructed in which social harmony prevailed, communities were cohesive, families were stable, prosperity was widespread, national identity was uncontested, and ordinary people supposedly possessed dignity, security, and purpose. The complexity, violence, inequality, exploitation, and contradiction that actually characterised those periods are systematically erased and historical reality becomes subordinate to emotional utility. The past ceases to function as history and becomes instead a repository of political fantasies, a projection screen onto which contemporary frustrations can be cast.
The absurdity of this process would be laughable were its consequences not so destructive. Consider the American case. The slogan “Make America Great Again” contains within its four words an entire reactionary worldview. The obvious question, which its supporters are remarkably reluctant to answer directly, concerns precisely when this greatness supposedly existed. Was it during the nineteenth century, when slavery remained the foundation of much of the national economy and vast sections of the population possessed no political rights? Was it during the Gilded Age, when industrial monopolists accumulated fortunes while workers endured conditions that would now be considered intolerable? Was it during the 1950s, the period most frequently invoked by conservative nostalgia, when racial segregation remained institutionalised, women were systematically excluded from numerous forms of economic and political participation, homosexuality was criminalised, and the prosperity now romanticised was itself dependent upon unique historical circumstances produced by war, state intervention, organised labour, and post-war economic dominance that can never be replicated?
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The answer is ultimately irrelevant because historical accuracy is not the point. The imagined past functions as an emotional symbol rather than an empirical claim. It is deliberately vague because vagueness permits projection and every supporter can insert their own fantasies into the empty space. For some it represents racial hierarchy, for others it represents patriarchal authority. For others still it signifies economic security and for many it simply represents a period during which they imagine social complexity had not yet emerged and the world seemed easier to understand. The content matters less than the structure. The promise is always that decline can be reversed through restoration rather than transformation.
The same pattern repeats itself throughout Europe with extraordinary consistency, thanks in large to the same, or similar financiers behind these movements. Reform UK mobilises a vision of Britain that bears little resemblance to any Britain that ever existed. The country being mourned is a strange hybrid construction assembled from fragments of imperial mythology, post-war nostalgia, media stereotypes, and collective forgetting. It is a Britain supposedly characterised by unity, stability, prosperity, common sense, and national confidence. Yet the actual history of Britain consists not of harmonious continuity but of class conflict, industrial exploitation, colonial violence, political upheaval, regional inequality, and persistent social antagonism. The nostalgia being marketed is not nostalgia for history but nostalgia for fiction.
This is particularly evident whenever the British Empire enters the discussion. One of the most remarkable achievements of contemporary reaction has been the successful transformation of one of history’s largest imperial projects into a sentimental object. What renders this nostalgia possible is not historical remembrance but historical erasure, since the violence that sustained imperial rule, the famines that accompanied colonial governance, the immense extraction of wealth that underwrote Britain’s industrial and financial development, the military coercion that silenced resistance, and the rigid racial hierarchies upon which imperial administration depended must all first be stripped from collective memory before empire can be repackaged as a comforting symbol of national greatness rather than recognised as the profoundly exploitative political and economic project that it was.
What remains is a sanitised image of order, prestige, and national greatness. The empire becomes not a historical reality but a therapeutic fantasy designed to compensate for contemporary decline. Faced with a shrinking economy, deteriorating public services, stagnant wages, and diminishing geopolitical influence, sections of British society retreat into imperial nostalgia because confronting the actual causes of decline would require confronting capitalism itself.
Germany presents an equally revealing case. The AfD operates within a society whose twentieth-century history should, one might imagine, render nationalist mythology politically hazardous. Yet even here the appeal of imagined restoration persists. The specific content differs, constrained by historical circumstances, but the underlying structure remains recognisable. What sustains this worldview is the conviction that the nation has somehow deviated from an authentic and previously stable form, that cultural cohesion has been fractured, communal bonds weakened, and inherited values displaced by supposedly alien influences, yet the explanatory force of this narrative rests entirely upon the elevation of a fictionalised past into a normative ideal, since the period against which the present is judged exists largely as a product of political mythology, selective historical memory, and ideological reconstruction rather than as a faithful representation of any society that actually existed.
This phenomenon reveals something deeply revealing about reactionary consciousness. Fascism does not merely falsify history; it depends upon an inability to think historically at all. Genuine historical understanding requires recognising change, contradiction, contingency, and conflict. It requires understanding that societies are not static entities but dynamic processes shaped by material conditions and collective struggles. Fascism rejects such a conception of history not simply because it reaches different conclusions but because its ideological structure is fundamentally incapable of accommodating complexity, ambiguity, and contradiction, requiring instead a world rendered legible through absolute moral certainties in which every political conflict is reduced to a struggle between heroes and villains, every period of decline is paired with the promise of national restoration, every social transformation is interpreted as contamination rather than development, and every challenge to inherited hierarchies is understood as evidence of civilisational decay, with the result that historical reality itself becomes intolerable precisely because it resists the simplicity upon which the fascist imagination depends.
Consequently, the reactionary imagination transforms history into mythology. The consequence is a profound inversion of political analysis in which economic transformations are recast as evidence of moral decline, structural contradictions are reinterpreted as symptoms of cultural corruption, class antagonisms are displaced into imagined conflicts between insiders and outsiders, and crises generated by the internal dynamics of capitalism itself are attributed instead to immigration, multiculturalism, feminism, secularisation, or whichever minority or marginalised group happens to provide the most politically expedient scapegoat at a given historical moment, thereby ensuring that the actual sources of social dislocation remain both obscured and untouched. Every genuine explanation is displaced by a fictional one because genuine explanations point towards conclusions that reactionary politics cannot permit.
The extraordinary tragedy is that much of the anger animating these movements originates in legitimate grievances. People are poorer. Housing is increasingly inaccessible. Employment is more precarious. Communities have been hollowed out. Public infrastructure has deteriorated. Social isolation has intensified. Democratic institutions increasingly appear incapable of influencing economic power. These experiences are real. The suffering is real. The insecurity is real. The rage is real.
Yet instead of directing that rage towards the structures responsible, fascist movements function as vast systems of ideological diversion. Instead of directing popular anger towards the structures of ownership from which inequality and insecurity originate, these movements redirect it towards questions of identity, displacing frustration with capital into resentment of culture and transforming opposition to entrenched concentrations of power into hostility towards carefully selected scapegoats. In doing so, the billionaire becomes politically invisible while the migrant is rendered omnipresent, the corporation disappears from public scrutiny while the refugee is recast as the source of every social problem, and the landlord escapes accountability even as cultural and ethnic minorities become the obsessive focus of public anxiety. This is not political analysis but political misdirection, a deliberate inversion of cause and effect designed to ensure that those responsible for social decline remain insulated from the anger their actions have produced.
What makes this process so infuriating is the sheer humiliation embedded within it. Millions of people are being robbed, exploited, surveilled, precarised, and systematically stripped of economic security by structures that grow increasingly concentrated and powerful, yet are persuaded to direct their fury not upwards but sideways. They are taught to blame neighbours rather than owners, migrants rather than employers, diversity rather than privatisation, cultural change rather than economic domination. The result is a politics of permanent confusion in which genuine causes become invisible while imaginary causes dominate public discourse.
There is something almost unbearably degrading about watching populations suffering under decades of neoliberal restructuring become convinced that their principal enemy is not the financial system that impoverishes them but the existence of people speaking different languages or practising different religions. It is difficult to imagine a more complete ideological victory for ruling classes than persuading those they exploit to wage political war against one another while the mechanisms of exploitation continue functioning uninterrupted.
This is why nostalgia occupies such a central position within contemporary fascism. Nostalgia is politically useful precisely because it prevents analysis. The moment decline is understood historically and materially, questions emerge concerning ownership, power, labour, wealth distribution, and class. Nostalgia suppresses such questions by transforming political problems into emotional ones. Society is not understood, within this framework, as failing through the operation of structural contradictions embedded in its economic organisation but is instead narrated as having lost its way, as though its crises were primarily symptoms of a collective amnesia or moral disorientation rather than the predictable outcomes of material relations of production. Economic decline is consequently reinterpreted as moral decline, material deprivation is transmuted into questions of cultural degeneration, and the analytical language of political economy is progressively displaced by the psychologising idioms of identity, behaviour, and sentiment, with the effect that systemic causation is dissolved into narratives of individual or cultural failure.
The pathetic nature of this manoeuvre should not obscure its effectiveness. Indeed, one of the greatest mistakes made by opponents of reaction is assuming that ridicule alone can defeat it. The fantasies are absurd, but their emotional appeal is powerful because they offer something many people desperately need: an explanation. A false explanation remains psychologically attractive when no convincing alternative exists. An imaginary community remains appealing when real communities have been destroyed. A mythical past remains seductive when the future appears hopeless.
For this reason the struggle against contemporary fascism cannot be reduced to fact-checking historical inaccuracies or mocking reactionary delusions, however tempting such responses may be. The deeper challenge lies in confronting the material conditions that make nostalgia politically attractive in the first place. People retreat into fantasies of restoration because existing institutions offer no credible vision of transformation. They become vulnerable to myths because reality has become increasingly intolerable.
Yet recognising this should not diminish the anger these movements deserve. There is something profoundly contemptible about political projects that exploit genuine suffering while ensuring that its causes remain untouched. There is something morally grotesque about movements that transform economic despair into ethnic resentment, social anxiety into chauvinism, and legitimate frustration into organised cruelty. There is something infuriating about watching reactionaries drape themselves in the language of rebellion while defending hierarchies that have dominated society for generations.
The central fraud of contemporary fascism is therefore not simply that it lies about the future. It lies about the past and everything in between. It offers restoration where restoration is impossible because the object to be restored never existed. It promises a return to a world that survives only in propaganda, memory distortion, and political mythology. It sells historical fiction as political reality. It weaponises nostalgia against understanding. It transforms collective frustration into collective hallucination.
That this strategy continues to succeed should alarm anyone concerned with democracy, equality, or historical truth, but it should also enrage them, because beneath every invocation of national rebirth, every promise to make a country great again, every appeal to recover a supposedly lost civilisation, there lurks the same fundamental deception: the insistence that salvation lies behind us rather than ahead of us, that our problems can be solved not by building something new but by resurrecting something old, and that history’s answer to contemporary crisis is not transformation but regression. It is a pathetic fantasy, a cowardly fantasy, and a transparently fraudulent fantasy, yet because it offers certainty in an age of confusion and myth in an age of despair, it remains one of the most dangerous political forces of the twenty-first century.
