Momina Areej is currently pursuing an MPhil in Clinical Pharmacy Practice. With a passion for writing, she covers diverse topics including world issues, literature reviews, and poetry, bringing insightful perspectives to each subject. Her writing blends critical analysis with creative expression, reflecting her broad interests and academic background.
Democracy is the form of governance that has evolved to be the favored political form, and in the current era of global liberalism, it is argued as the only legitimate model of governance, especially as it pertains to ideas of popular sovereignty, the rule of law, and individual rights guaranteed by foolish constitutions that are often ignored. But under the layers of electoral legitimacy and constitutional performance lies something far worse: growing systemic violence, exclusion, and oppression sanctioned by a majoritarian process.
I will use the term “soft fascism,” but it can be closely conceptualized with either authoritarianism or insidious forms of tyrannical governance, and certainly war crimes sanctioned behind the thin shield of democratic forms (elections, legislatures, and courts) that produce effects indistinguishable from the authoritarian violence of intimidation. While immediate thoughts might go to the abominations of the 20th century that ended in the totalitarian monstrosities that we bear witness to today, the mechanism is different.
Soft fascism takes those gestures and works them into customary institutional frameworks, and often significant reliance on some kind of democracy, thus allowing some kind of legal consent to fuel the violence. In this article, I discuss how the insights of majoritarian politics can also serve as a site of soft fascism and will draw from case studies as divergent as Hindutva in India, the Zionist “settler” project in Israel, ethno-national majoritarianism in Hungary, and populist exclusion in the Philippines.
From Rule of Law to Rule by Law
Soft fascism, at its foundation, exploits a transition away from the “rule of law”, where laws are neutral and designed to protect minorities, towards “rule by law,” where the law itself becomes a tool for majoritarianism to prevail. The authentic rule of law is complemented by judicial review, separation of powers, and rights-based constitutionalism, so that acts of tyranny are mitigated. However, a governing coalition possessing a supermajority may usurp constitutions, pack courts, and redefine rights. The legal changes insulate against violence: by legislative fiat, the systematic expulsion of minorities, confiscation of land, challenge to freedom of expression, and state-executed extrajudicial killings can be brought to bear.
India’s Hindutva-infused majoritarian moment, through the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is supported by many forms of legal change that undermine constitutional secularism. These include changes to citizenship laws, redefinitions of property laws, and redefining historiography, all aimed at marginalizing Muslim communities, legitimizing pogroms against those communities as witnessed in cities like Delhi, and facilitating land transfers from minority trusts to predominantly Hindu organizations. In these cases, while violence is perpetuated through vigilante mobs, it is evident that the state condones, and at times directly facilitates, this violence as an extension of majoritarian policy rather than violence occurring at random.
Similarly, Zionist majoritarianism in Israel often disguises state violence behind legality. Embeds Jewish supremacy in the constitutional framework and demonstrates how a democratic majority can constitutionally embed exclusion. Using administrative detention, military orders, house demolitions, and land confiscation in the occupied territories, the state uses construction efforts to carry out forced displacement and systemic violence under the guise of security concerns. Soft fascism works through a legal rationale here, too, making violence appear as necessary and justifiable as it is drawn from democratic discourse.
The Manufacturing of Consent
Beyond legislative maneuvering, soft fascism relies on the continual manufacture of consent. Majoritarianism uses a populist discourse and media manipulation to create a collective culture and make those who dissent feel treasonous. The “people” become a singular whole, Hindus in India, the Jews in Israel, and ethnic Hungarians in Budapest, and minorities are rebranded from second-class citizens to existential threats. The ethnic or religious homogenization suppresses pluralism and prepares the masses to accept imposing repressive measures in the name of self-defense.
In Hungary, the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Fidesz party have perfected this model. Orbán’s government has maintained two-thirds majorities in parliament by steadily campaigning against Brussels bureaucrats, illegal migrants, and liberal elites in the past decade. From that position, the Fidesz government began a process of amending the constitution that restricted press freedoms, subjugated the courts, and criminalized civil society organizations that sheltered refugees. In other democracies, political parties have sought to gain or hold power. In Hungary, Fidesz leveraged the ballot box to amass power and justify implementing a range of draconian measures by claiming that each represents the will of the Hungarian people.
The Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte, whose crackdown on drugs began in 2016, is one of the clearest examples of how electoral mandates can support extra-judicial violence. Duterte’s campaign ads presented drug users as vermin threatening national security. Duterte’s administration authorized police and paramilitary death squads to murder suspects without due process, and estimates have the death toll in the tens of thousands. While courts have failed to intervene, the president’s continued popularity shows how soft fascism can nurture public indifference, or even public support, to state violence.
Bureaucratic Violence and the Banality of Exclusion
In her foundational text on totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt described the “banality of evil” as the normal bureaucratic processes that result in genocide. Soft fascism similarly utilizes banal bureaucratic processes, revoking licenses, land zoning laws, and denying benefits, to harm targeted groups. These policy changes rarely make headlines, but together produce displacement, impoverishment, and erasure.
Take the case of Kashmir. Following an amendment to India’s constitution in August 2019, Article 370 was revoked, nullifying Kashmir’s autonomy. In conjunction with the revocation of autonomy was a complete communications blackout and mass detentions of political leaders to ramp up the machinery for disenfranchisement. Few barricades were physically created on the ground, but the suspension of rights along with the creation of a security lockdown demonstrates bureaucratic violence, carried out ostensibly through legitimate orders.
A second example is the regime of permits that Israel has developed to regulate the day-to-day life of residents in the West Bank. Checkpoints, restricted travel, and the arbitrary approval of building permits eliminate the economic viability of Palestinian life and limit their potential gain in numbers/demographics. What is produced as a result is a slow-motion displacement that would be condemned worldwide if it were happening overtly. However, because this is ostensibly justified on security, people view this as the normal approach to the management of an occupying force.
Comparative Perspectives: Beyond the Obvious
The United States has a history of soft fascist behavior as a result of the legacy of Jim Crow or contemporary voter suppression that maintains racial subjection even in democratic institutions. That is, political majorities (often bolstered by the Supreme Court) have closed polling stations in neighborhoods with a minority majority, rigged districts against minority populations through gerrymandering, and made it more difficult to vote through strict ID laws. The 2013 Shelby County decision, which struck down provisions of the Voting Rights Act, was a soft fascist judicial decision that permitted discrimination, all the while insisting upon a technically legal ruling.
Similarly, the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil is replete with soft fascist language. Bolsonaro’s focused strategy of polarization was signaled by his relentless attacks on the media, direct reference to military intervention, and positive messaging towards highway blockades from far-right militias. While the rejection of environmental protections has made violence towards Indigenous peoples and activists in the Amazon possible, the legislative majorities in Bolsonaro’s government have offered him the safety of having a sympathetic Supreme Federal Court, which thus far insulates these law changes from any substantive challenge.
Even in Western Europe, held often as a model of liberal democracy, soft fascism is lurking. In Poland, the Law and Justice (PiS) party has made use of its parliamentary supermajority to diminish the independence of the judiciary, remove constitutional judges, and politicize the prosecutor general’s office. While PiS is still electorally legitimate, its systematic violations of the checks and balances of law through the subversion of the basic tenets on which the rule of law stands allow for fascist ideologies to rise to state power through a nationalist exclusion operating with a de facto dictatorship without any necessary recourse to overt dictatorship.
Conclusion
The strength of democracy exists in its ability to reflect the will of the people; the weakness exists when that will seeks exclusion or domination. Soft fascism exists within the cracks in that weakness; democratic form can serve to legitimate systemic violence. Majoritarian politics can shove people into oppression while abrogating human rights through the trappings of laws or ballots, as is evident through Hindutva and Zionism, through populism in Hungary or the Philippines, through voter suppression in the United States, and through environmental repression in Brazil. Witnessing soft fascism is the first step in resisting it: by reclaiming pluralism, reinstating institutional checks, and upholding majoritarian rights everywhere, we can, as the democratic practice, ensure democracy protects all from becoming a misnomer for tyranny.
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