After the Italian elections, I wrote for Public Seminar highlighting Giorgia Meloni’s place within a contemporary far right that has turned away from anti-Americanism and uses ties to respectable conservative parties as a resource for destigmatizing its reputation.
In the spring of 2022, Kimberly Tower and I wrote two articles for Foreign Policy. Both articles analyzed diffusion from the US to France during the French presidential election cycle. The first focused on wokisme.
The second article focused on French exhortations to “stop the steal” and other election conspiracy theories, including one about Dominion election machines, a company that does not operate in France.
Fascism was characterized by a formal union of institutional party politics with paramilitary mobilization. Reflecting on the January 6 insurrection, the plan to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmer, and other growing evidence of right-wing paramilitary mobilization, Simon Pratt and I argue (in Foreign Policy) that informal ties between the GOP and paramilitary actors represents a contemporary form of fascism.