Theme Panel: Liberalism’s Fascist Horizon

August 14, 2025 APSA Annual Meeting, Theme Panels Comments Off on Theme Panel: Liberalism’s Fascist Horizon

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

  • (Chair) Jeanne Morefield, University of Oxford
  • (Presenter) Joseph E. Lowndes, Hunter College – CUNY
  • (Presenter) Alberto Toscano, Simon Fraser University
  • (Presenter) Kevin M. Bruyneel, Babson College
  • (Presenter) Naomi Murakawa, Princeton University
  • (Presenter) Jakeet Singh, York University

Session Description:
Over the last decade, increasing numbers of liberals have described the rise of far–right populist movements in the United States and around the world as a resurgence of political and rhetorical fascism. Debates within liberal circles tend to focus on both the similarities (or lack thereof) between our contemporary moment and those of the interwar period, and on identifying the various failures of liberal democracy that have led / are leading to fascist drift. This roundtable, by contrast, starts neither with definitions nor with failure but, instead, with the long-term entanglements of liberalism and fascism that treats fascism as a constituent feature of the relationship between “liberal democracy” and imperial capitalism. Fascism, from this perspective, is the containing impulse associated with the “counter–revolution of property” (in Du Bois’ framing) that asserts itself along the racial peripheries of the liberal world order: in the prison, at the border, in the colonies. Participants on this roundtable will explore these connections through the liberal-fascist intimacies that coalesce around: the defence of so-called western civilization: the aesthetic similarities between liberal and fascist fantasies about “human trafficking” and global conspiracy; the shared fixation with the lost values of merit, fairness and safety that reinforce property relations; the gender norms and forms of racial domination that emerge in the fascist-liberal alliance to attack and demonize immigrants, transgender athletes, “blood thirsty criminals,” and the “radical left.” In all, participants challenge the common sense that fascism is liberalism’s opposite (the product of its failures) and that liberalism is always the antidote to fascism. Rather, from the perspective of this roundtable, fascism is liberalism’s doppelganger.