Neoliberalism to Trumpism: The Re-Normalization of White Supremacy as State Ideology
The crisis of late-stage capitalism has stripped away the liberal disguise and revealed white supremacy as the official ideology of the U.S. state.
To understand the current historical moment, it is not enough to catalog the reactionary policies of the Trump administration. One must understand the deeper ideological logic that makes those policies appear both rational and necessary to the ruling class. In the United States, the resurgence of open appeals to “Western civilization,” the demonization of immigrants, the criminalization of anti-colonial resistance, the assault on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), and the expansion of the national security state are not isolated political developments. On the contrary, they represent a conscious reassertion of a normalized racialized colonial worldview that historically has always rationalized Western colonial/capitalist conquest and dominance.
The current capitalist crisis and turn to global fascism – the ultimate capitalist reform – has simply stripped away the liberal vocabulary that once obscured that reality.
For decades, the mythology of liberal democracy permitted Western ruling classes to portray themselves as defenders of universal human rights while simultaneously waging wars of conquest, imposing economic sanctions that devastated entire societies, supporting colonial occupation, and maintaining systems of racial domination both domestically and internationally.
Today, that contradiction has become increasingly difficult to sustain. As the irreversible crisis of late-stage monopoly capital intensifies, the material foundations of Western capitalist hegemony weaken and along with its legitimacy and the global balance of power shifts away from the West. As a counter, the ideological language of universalism has given way to a more explicit politics of white, Western civilizational hierarchy as the rationale for the emergence of U.S. led fascism on a global scale.
The clearest expression of this worldview emerged in U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s address to the Munich Security Conference in February 2026. Rubio called upon Europe and the United States to defend a common “Western civilization,” describing Europe and the U.S. as bound together by a shared Christian heritage and warning that mass migration and other contemporary developments threatened the survival of that civilization. He rejected what he characterized as “managed decline” and urged Europe to reclaim its cultural identity!
While Rubio’s remarks were presented as a defense of transatlantic unity, the underlying framework was unmistakably civilizational, an appeal to “white” unity. The Western political community was implicitly defined through European historical experience and Christian cultural identity. The millions of people across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and West Asia who have experienced European colonialism appeared only as sources of instability, migration, or geopolitical challenge, rather than as peoples whose histories and aspirations are equal components of a common humanity.
Rubio returned to these themes in July 2026 when he convened representatives from more than sixty countries in Washington, D.C. for a ministerial meeting devoted exclusively to what the administration described as “political terrorism.” Dismissing the documented and historically consistent threat posed by far-right political violence, the conference portrayed left-wing movements, anti-fascist organizing, and anti-capitalist politics as a principal global security challenge. Rubio warned that such movements threatened “Western civilization” and announced new initiatives for international intelligence cooperation directed against what the administration termed “far-left terrorism.”
The significance of these interventions extends well beyond counterterrorism policy. They represent an effort to redefine political opposition itself as a civilizational threat. By equating anti-fascist organizing, anti-colonial politics, and radical critiques of capitalism with terrorism, the administration collapses distinctions between political dissent and political violence while simultaneously constructing “Western civilization” as the object requiring state protection!
And while this civilizational discourse is not a new feature of liberal Western thought, its emergence and re-legitimation as an ideological weapon wielded by the most right-wing, violent, nuclear-armed nation on the planet poses an existential threat to global humanity, especially non-European humanity
The refusal to recognize Palestinian self-determination, unwavering support for Israel’s colonial occupation, the war of aggression against Iran, the continuing economic siege of Cuba, militarized immigration enforcement, a massive national penal system that targets non-European peoples and represents twenty-five percent of all incarceration rates on the planet – all emerge from the same ideological framework. Within that framework, non-European peoples appear not as equal members of collective humanity but as populations to be managed, disciplined, contained, sanctioned, or, when necessary, destroyed.
The common thread connecting these policies is not merely nationalism but the persistence of a colonial conception of humanity in which European civilization constitutes the normative standard against which all others are judged. Peoples who have the audacity to resist imperial domination are cast as irrational, uncivilized, extremist, or terrorist, while U.S. and white Western violence is represented as order, security, or a humanitarian necessity.
This ideological structure underpins the parasitic relationship between the white West and the Global South. The extraction of labor, resources, and wealth from formerly colonized societies has always depended upon denying those societies equal moral and political standing. Contemporary appeals to defend “Western civilization” reproduce that hierarchy in modern form. They provide ideological legitimacy for military intervention, economic coercion, border militarization, and the denial of collective human rights, while obscuring the exploitative relationship through which Western prosperity emerged and was maintained for the last five hundred years.
Therefore – and this is the monumental error so many on the Eurocentric left make – white supremacy should not be understood simply as prejudice, individual bias, or as a product of the superstructure manipulated by capital to divide the proletariat, but as a way of organizing power that establishes a hierarchy of human value. Throughout the history of Western expansion, that hierarchy has distinguished between those understood as the legitimate subjects of history and those who exist merely as objects to be governed, disciplined, exploited, or eliminated. The vocabulary changes across historical periods. “Civilizing mission” gives way to “development.” “Manifest destiny” becomes “democracy promotion.” “The defense of Christendom” becomes “the defense of Western civilization.” Yet the underlying political logic remains remarkably consistent.
Political theorist Cedric J. Robinson challenged the conventional assumption that capitalism was originally a universal and progressive economic system that later became distorted by racism. Capitalism did not simply exploit labor; it developed by assigning different peoples different values, rights, and political status. Colonial conquest, the transatlantic slave trade, Indigenous dispossession, and imperial expansion were therefore not unfortunate by-products of capitalist development. They were among the central mechanisms through which capitalism accumulated wealth and established global power.
From this perspective, race is not an accidental feature of capitalism but one of its primary organizing principles. The distinction between those whose lives are fully recognized and those whose lives are rendered expendable has always been fundamental to the reproduction of capitalist power.
Frantz Fanon had already advanced this understanding by demonstrating that colonialism constructs not merely political domination but an entirely different conception of humanity. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argued that colonial society is divided into two mutually exclusive zones. One is the zone of the colonizer, associated with civilization, law, reason, and full humanity. The other is the zone of the colonized, associated with disorder, violence, irrationality, and diminished human value. Colonial violence depends upon this division because conquest requires that the colonized cease to be understood as fully human subjects possessing equal moral and political standing.
This distinction helps explain why massive violence against Palestinians can be defended as self-defense, why comprehensive economic sanctions imposed on Cuba or Iran are normalized despite their humanitarian consequences, and why migrants fleeing conditions shaped by imperial intervention are represented as security threats rather than as human beings with the human right to dignity and protection.
W. E. B. Du Bois identified what he described as the central problem of the modern world: “the problem of the color line.” Du Bois understood that racial hierarchy did not merely organize domestic social relations within the United States. It structured the global political economy itself. European colonialism and American expansion depended upon an international racial order that divided the world between those entitled to rule and those expected to serve, labor, or submit.
The language of “Western civilization” weaponized by fascists in the U.S. and embraced by fascists globally from Argentina and Israel to Ukraine reproduces this global color line in updated form. Resistance to colonial domination becomes terrorism, calling out white supremacy becomes attacks on national identity and anti-fascism becomes extremism. In each instance, political conflict is translated into civilizational conflict, allowing coercive state power to appear not as domination but as legitimate self-defense. Understanding this historical continuity is essential.
For authentic left forces, the historical imperative must be clear. The struggle against U.S. led global fascism cannot be separated from the struggle against all of its forms – colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy and racial capitalism because each represents a different expression of the same interconnected system of domination.
The unapologetic (re)merging of the U.S. state with white supremacy and all that it implies is a gift. Freed from the obfuscations of liberal pretentions, it allows the global public to identify more clearly the enemy of collective humanity. We accept that gift as we prepare our own gift for the slayers of peoples and nations.
Ajamu Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is the Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights and serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC).
Endnotes
- Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference; U.S. Department of State: state.gov/releases/office-of-t…
- Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, Department of State: state.gov/cuba-the-capital-of-…
- Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). Robinson develops the concept of racial capitalism, arguing that capitalism emerged within preexisting European racial hierarchies rather than becoming racialized only after its development.
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004 [1961]), especially Chapter One, “On Violence,” and Chapter Four, “On National Culture.” Fanon’s discussion of the colonial world divided into separate “zones” of humanity underpins the analysis of the colonial hierarchy of human value.
- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008 [1952]). Fanon’s analysis of colonial psychology and the production of racialized subjectivity provides an important complement to The Wretched of the Earth.
- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), Chapter II. Du Bois famously declared that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,” a formulation later expanded into a global analysis.
- W. E. B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945). Du Bois extends the concept of the color line to colonialism, imperialism, and the international political economy.
- W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa (New York: Viking Press, 1947). Du Bois demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the making of the modern world economy and critiques European colonial historiography.
- Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018). Horne traces the co-development of settler colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and white supremacy.
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014). Dunbar-Ortiz situates the United States within the history of settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession.
- 11. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337
source: Black Agenda Report
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