Liberalism arises historically with the bourgeoisie, promising universal rights, free markets, and political representation.

Its core contradiction: it proclaims universal freedom but maintains private property, class hierarchies, and colonial domination.

Its “progressive” content (rights etc) is always mediated by its “reactionary” content (capital accumulation, imperialism).

In the late 20th century, liberal politics shifted focus from material redistribution to recognition and representation of identities (race, gender, sexuality).

This has real emancipatory elements (civil rights, anti-discrimination), but within a liberal framework it tends to:

Fragment the working class into competing identity groups.

Leave capitalist property relations untouched.

Turn politics into a symbolic arena of inclusion/exclusion rather than redistribution.

This becomes what some call “neoliberal multiculturalism”.

The Alienation of the Proletariat:

Workers whose economic position deteriorates under neoliberal globalization see elites championing diversity while offshoring jobs and cutting welfare.

They perceive “liberal elites” as hypocritical or hostile — not because they oppose equality per se, but because the equality on offer seems to bypass their economic suffering.

This creates fertile ground for reactionary movements that reframe their economic grievances as cultural ones.

The Dialectic: Liberalism to Fascism

If we think dialectically:

Thesis (Liberalism): Universal rights, formal equality, market freedom.

Antithesis (Proletarian Alienation): Mass discontent over the gap between formal equality and real inequality.

Synthesis (Fascism): A counter-movement that rejects universalism but mobilizes identity (national, racial, religious) to restore a sense of collective belonging and purpose.

Fascism thus does not arise ex nihilo; it is the reaction to liberal contradictions:

Liberalism’s fragmentation of solidarity enables fascism’s call for a unified, “authentic” national identity.

Liberal elites’ cosmopolitanism enables fascism’s anti-globalist populism.

Liberal tolerance of corporate power enables fascism’s authoritarian alliance with capital.

Fascism is hence the “Degenerate Offspring” of Liberalism

You can theorize fascism here as:

Not simply a negation but a mutation of liberal politics: it retains mass politics, identity focus, and even some welfare-state promises — but only for the “in-group.”

A perverse form of “recognition politics” where instead of expanding recognition, it contracts it violently.

The endpoint of liberalism’s failure to resolve class contradiction: when equality cannot be achieved materially, it is abandoned and replaced with exclusionary hierarchy.

This would mirror Marx’s notion that each stage of history contains the seeds of its own negation.

This theory does not mean liberal politics intends fascism. Just that its contradictions enable fascism.

Overcoming fascism requires not just defending liberal norms, since the radical aspects of it which have been valuable are being attacked, but transcending liberalism’s economic foundations — i.e., re-centering class and material redistribution.

Now I’m no Hegelian, my understanding of Hegel and Marx is fairly limited. But this is the best I could do put forth the reasoning for fascism and where to move forward.

This is also not US centric, I am not american and am seeing fascism and surveillance states rise around the world. While fascism used to be a fear of ‘the other’ as an outsider, we’re seeing a world where fascism uses citizens as ‘the other’ now.

I would love to go more in depth here. I would like to incorporate naom Chomsky’s idea of manufacturing consent to show how the alienation is created.

In a genuinely Hegelian sense, capitalism contains the seeds of its own transcendence. But contrary to Marx, this transcendence is not socialist.

Through ideological domination the working class is stripped of its revolutionary potential. The only remaining agent capable of resolving capitalism’s crises is the capitalist class itself.

This class resolves contradictions not by abolishing capital but by restructuring the state around authoritarian and nationalist principles.

Thus the dialectic moves from capitalism to fascism, not because of proletarian liberation, but because of capital’s own drive for self-preservation.