Fascism, it is assumed, has had a peculiar talent for survival. It lingers like a spore, dormant in the corners of societies that imagine themselves inoculated against it, waiting for just the right mixture of grievance, nostalgia, and fear to bloom again. When it does, it often presents itself not as the menace familiar from history books, but as something strangely fragile—a wounded creature rather than an armoured juggernaut. Unlike the triumphant narratives, it is a spectacle of vulnerability that masks deeper, more dangerous impulses. This paradox—the seeming weakness that becomes a source of strength—helps explain why fascism, as both ideology and affect, is able to insinuate itself into the very systems meant to resist it. It thrives not in its moments of triumph but in its posture of persecution.
By contrast, the mythology of the communist man has often depended on an entirely different aesthetic of the body. There is a possibly apocryphal story of Stalin enduring a flogging gauntlet so stoically that a blade of grass held between his teeth did not so much as tremble. Whether or not the story is true is beside the point; it expresses an ideal that would later be attached to many revolutionary leaders—a body forged of steel, a will impervious to pain. Psychoanalytic theory might describe this invulnerable communist figure as the embodiment of Lacan’s objet petit a, a remainder that cannot be absorbed or appropriated, the kernel of defiance that gives a movement its symbolic coherence. In Hegelian fashion, this leftover becomes totalised into the physical presence of the leader himself, who stands in for the indestructible idea.
The fascist body, however, is cast from very different material. It is porous, reactive, and theatrical. Its leaders, real or imagined, are figures who seem perpetually exposed to fate’s “slings and arrows,” to borrow from Shakespeare, and often undone by them. Nietzsche’s collapse has been retrofitted into a parable about sensitivity and excess, though he himself was neither fascist nor proto-fascist in any straightforward sense; yet the image lingers, made use of by those who later enlisted him into a politics he would not have recognised. In the contemporary world, the figure of the public intellectual or political influencer—Jordan Peterson comes to mind—often performs a similar dance between strength and frailty, casting himself as a man standing precariously between order and chaos, equilibrium and breakdown.
This ambivalent aesthetic has given rise to a durable myth: that fascism is somehow invincible, immovable, a political regime as stable as the Franco dictatorship once seemed. Yet the roots of fascism’s emergence in Europe tell a different story. Some historians argue that fascism originated partly in the embarrassment and anxiety of certain intellectuals who recoiled from the unrefined violence of the French Revolution. In response, they sought to aestheticise politics, to transform governance into a kind of stylised performance. The revolutionary left, meanwhile, attempted the inverse manoeuvre—politicising the aesthetic, making art and culture instruments of ideological purpose. The anxieties of the liberal bourgeois, caught between these competing currents, contributed to the conditions in which fascism found its foothold. And today, its cultural power often manifests not through grandeur or terror but through something far more modest: cringe.
Cringe, in this sense, is not the internet age version of secondhand embarrassment but something more structural: the unease that arises when the human refuses to become fully machinelike, when our attempts at precision and authority falter visibly. Fascist art, literature, and film—whether from the early twentieth century or the present—frequently inhabit this zone of overwrought sincerity, melodrama, and bathetic spectacle. Yet this aesthetic awkwardness becomes an asset rather than a liability. Fascism, unlike liberalism, experiences no shame in its failed performances. Its poetry may be clumsy, its imagery histrionic, but it is delivered with such unblinking conviction that it acquires the aura of authenticity. Even artists as different as A. Ayyappan or Peter Handke have found themselves caught in debates over the political valences of sincerity, kitsch, and complicity. Fascism absorbs the shame of its critics and recycles it as a form of boldness.
This dynamic explains why figures on the far right can appear, paradoxically, more frank or honest than their opponents. The liberal or left-leaning intellectual, wary of causing offense or misreading nuance, hesitates; the fascist ideologue does not. Donald Trump’s rise, for instance, cannot be understood solely through policy or partisanship; it also reflects the cultural appeal of his unfiltered speech, the perception—among supporters and some critics alike—that he says what others are too timid to say. This “faux-parrhesia,” or counterfeit truth-telling, is a performance of candour that exploits the liberal instinct toward politeness and carefulness. The more outlandish the statement, the more it is taken as proof of boldness rather than irresponsibility.
Even satirical projects that aim to expose cringe culture—like “mockumentaries” in the tradition of Cunk on Earth—sometimes miss the mark when confronting the far right. Where satire assumes that shame is a universal currency, fascist aesthetic traditions, from the propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl onward, rely on the opposite premise: shamelessness. Because nothing embarrasses them, they are immune to ridicule. This stands in stark contrast to the early Christian cultivation of humility, defeat, and self-effacement—qualities Nietzsche famously criticised. Modern fascist movements invert those values entirely, feasting on cringe rather than fleeing it. They manipulate the basic decency that causes one person to hesitate before labelling another’s behaviour idiotic. As the philosopher Slavoj Žižek has remarked, if someone behaves like a fool, perhaps he simply is one—but contemporary liberalism often finds ways to avoid such blunt judgments. That hesitation becomes capital for the fascist provocateur.
Vulnerability, whether performed or genuine, becomes one of fascism’s most effective tools. Third-wave feminist critique has analysed a similar phenomenon in the realm of race and gender, dubbed “white woman tears”—the use of ostentatious emotional distress to deflect accountability and invite sympathy. Something analogous appears in political contexts when individuals or groups exercising disproportionate power cast themselves as persecuted or endangered. The spectacle of vulnerability disarms critics, blurring the boundary between victim and aggressor. In academia, in cultural institutions, and in political debate, it is not uncommon to find figures who deploy melodrama as a shield, eliciting protective instincts even while engaging in harmful behaviour. This fragile-strong act allows microfascism—small, covert, adaptive forms of authoritarian behaviour—to survive in environments that should be inhospitable to them.
Fascism adapts precisely because it mimics organic vulnerability. The communist icon, in propaganda at least, may appear as a figure carved from steel, unwavering even in failure. The fascist, by contrast, is always on the verge of collapse, forever wounded, forever misunderstood. This protoplasmic quality—its softness, its readiness to absorb the blows of criticism—gives it a mobility and resilience that the rigid, idealised communist body lacks. It appeals to empathy while undermining the structures that make empathy possible. It thrives in embarrassment, it weaponises awkwardness, and it turns the ordinary discomforts of human interaction into strategic advantages.
In the end, fascism’s power lies not in its theatrical displays of strength but in the disquieting way it invites us to feel sorry for it. It coaxes indignation into pity, converts critique into caution, and transforms its own aesthetic shortcomings into proof of sincerity. The vulnerability it projects is neither wholly false nor wholly true; it is a political technology, calibrated for different eras but remarkably consistent in effect. If liberal societies repeatedly underestimate fascism, it is because they continue to imagine it as a monolith of violence rather than as the fragile-seeming, cringe-hungry organism it often is. The threat lies not only in the moments when fascism is loud and triumphant, but also—and perhaps especially—when it trembles.
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