It is 2026, yet public debate seems trapped in a time bubble. The term “fascism” is wielded with the same frequency and imprecision as a century ago, reduced to an emotional synonym for any form of authoritarianism or unwelcome dissent. This lexical and historical fixation is not a sign of civic maturity, but a symptom of extraordinary political myopia. Fighting dictatorial regimes is a universal moral duty, but it means fighting the regimes of one’s own time. Believing that the history of dictatorships ended in 1945 is not just naive: it is a dangerous, piloted self-deception.

State-promoted anti-fascist rhetoric, propagated through monuments, media, and civil calendars, has taught us to consider ourselves children of a democratic, progressive, and inherently good era because it is opposed to that absolute Evil. It is a reassuring narrative that hides a harsher reality: power has not disappeared, it has only changed its skin, adapting its mechanisms to a globalized and financialized world. Its features are less theatrical, more bureaucratic, but just as recognizable in their ultimate intention: the control and self-preservation of an oligarchy.

When the only ideology left standing, after the collapse of the great 20th-century narratives, is an economicist liberalism emptied of its ideals of individual freedom and reduced to the cult of “markets” and their deus ex machina (IMF, ECB, large investment funds), continuing to fight among ourselves over issues from eighty years ago is not just anachronistic. It is a luxury we cannot afford, while social, environmental, and economic degradation advance inexorably. The current system has a vital need to demonize the regimes of the past: they serve as a perpetual negative benchmark, a bogeyman to demonstrate, by contrast, its own presumed goodness and inevitability.

But do we truly live in a complete democracy? Or rather in a façade democratic system, where, in the final analysis, a pool of central bankers, financiers, and technocrats – none of whom are elected by any people – decides a country’s solvency, conditions the formation of its governments, dictates the agenda of its economic laws, and steers its productive choices? Mainstream media, often concentrated in few hands and tied to that financial system, follow surprisingly coherent and unidirectional editorial lines, turning “freedom of the press” into the freedom to repeat the dominant doctrine. Real censorship today is not the gag, but the algorithmic selection of news and the structural marginalization of voices outside the chorus.

There is no political project, from the right or the left, that once in government can avoid serving these transnational elites. It is they, through the blackmail of debt, capital flight, or credit ratings, who indirectly appoint national governments. Parliaments are progressively stripped of power, transformed into chambers for ratifying decisions made elsewhere. Power has been relocated: from squares and parliamentary halls, it has moved to the boardrooms of investment banks and the lounges of hotels where large speculative funds meet.

As long as we fail to become aware that we live in a presumed democracy, populated by figures serving oligarchic interests, where unelected men and women govern our lives through economic variables, we will always be on the wrong path. We will continue to watch the circus of political spectacle on TV and the puppet show of talk show brawls, while real decision-making power flows elsewhere, through opaque and uncontrolled channels.

The grotesque paradox of 2026 is this: while pointing the finger at the figures of yesterday’s dictators (or at their presumed folkloric epigones), we ignore the diffuse and impersonal dictatorships of today. The dictatorship of the algorithm that profiles and manipulates us. The dictatorship of the market that decides who has a right to health and who does not. The dictatorship of debt that strangles the future of new generations. It is a mass distraction puppet show, and the new generations, deprived of a civic education that goes beyond ritual, still fall for it, convinced that the enemy is a caricature of the past and not the sophisticated structure of their present.

Acknowledging this does not mean downplaying the horrors of historical fascism. It means, rather, truly honoring its victims by committing to fight the new, subtle, and pervasive forms of human subservience. The most authentic anti-fascism today is the struggle for the real sovereignty of peoples, for the transparency of financial powers, for information free from monopolies. It is about stopping looking in the rearview mirror of history and having the courage to focus on the monster with a human face that is leading us to the precipice.

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