Here’s how to understand the politics of the US Capitol breach | Heinrich Geiselberger

We witnessed what I call liquid authoritarianism: far-right politics for an age of instability and flux

When fascism comes back, it will not say I am fascism'; it will say I am antifascism'." This prophecy, attributed to the Italian writer Ignazio Silone, has been appropriated by the online right and become a tired Twitter meme. Users now replace antifascism" with basically anything. Some attempts to come to grips with the storming of the US Capitol have adopted a similar syntax: it was an (attempted) coup disguised as something else. Others insisted it wasn't a coup but a venting of accumulated resentments" (Edward Luttwak), a big biker gang dressed as circus performers" (Mike Davis), an alt-right charivari" (Alex Callinicos), or a re-enactment" of fantasies originally tested on social media (Wolfgang Ullrich).

Some of these interpretations have been accused of trivialising the events. But the semantic helplessness in face of the Washington events suggests a wider uncertainty about the more general phenomenon. The confusion about the event mirrors confusion about the movement as a whole. Is contemporary rightwing populism" best described as authoritarianism" or even fascism"? The answer depends on which level one focuses on: the ideology, the structure of their institutions, the aesthetics, the supporters or the consequences of their actions. If we follow the Hungarian philosopher Gaspar Miklos Tamas, with his very broad definition of fascism as a break with the enlightenment tradition of citizenship as a universal entitlement", the similarities sharpen. A penchant for violence and machismo also points in that direction.