Hitler Never Really Left

We like to believe history ends.

It doesn’t.

We defeat a dictator, bury a generation, sign treaties, build institutions, raise monuments, and teach our children that the nightmare is over. Then we congratulate ourselves for having learned the lesson.

But history does not care about our lessons.

Taking your medicine last year never stopped anyone from catching a cold the next.

The Myth of “Never Again”

Since 1945, the world has been at war again and again. Revolutions. Military coups. Civil wars. Dictatorships. Invasions. Ethnic cleansing.

We simply learned how to look away.

For decades, Western Europe enjoyed the luxury of watching much of this from behind a political and geographical glass wall. The wars were somewhere else: Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East. They were “regional conflicts.” They belonged to other people.

Then Yugoslavia exploded.

War returned to the European continent. Nationalism became a weapon. Cities were besieged. Populations were displaced. Ethnic cleansing became a reality not in some distant history book, but in Europe itself.

The glass wall cracked.

And suddenly, the comforting idea that certain horrors belonged to another age became much harder to defend.

History had not disappeared.

We had simply moved it out of the frame.

Hitler Never Really Left

No, Hitler did not survive 1945 as a man.

But the political conditions he exploited did not disappear from human nature.

Fear did not disappear. Economic insecurity did not disappear. National humiliation did not disappear. The desire for simple answers to complicated problems did not disappear. Neither did the temptation to blame someone else.

That is what “Hitler never really left” means.

Not that history repeats itself word for word. It doesn’t.

History changes its clothes.

The uniforms change. The slogans change. The technology changes. The enemies change.

But the machinery of fear can still be rebuilt.

The Democratic Shell

There is another uncomfortable reality: a democracy can survive institutionally while becoming increasingly hollow socially.

You can still have elections, parliaments, courts, constitutions, and political parties. You can preserve the machinery while losing the trust that makes the machinery legitimate.

And when people begin to believe that the system no longer represents them, protects them, or gives their children a credible future, something happens.

They start looking elsewhere.

Sometimes they look toward nationalism. Sometimes toward populism. Sometimes toward authoritarian leaders promising to cut through the institutional noise and restore order.

The response is often to condemn the symptom.

The harder question is to understand the conditions that made the symptom politically possible.

When the Market Becomes a Religion

For decades, Western societies were told that the market knew best.

Deregulation. Privatization. Flexibility. Competitiveness. Efficiency. Less government. More market.

These were not merely economic policies. They became a worldview.

The individual was increasingly expected to absorb risks once shared by society. The worker became “flexible.” The welfare state became “expensive.” Public services became “inefficient.” Inequality could be explained away as the unavoidable price of modernization.

For those who prospered, the system could look like freedom.

For those who lost security, bargaining power, community, or a sense of control over their future, it could look very different.

And here lies one of the great political contradictions of our time.

The same societies that embraced decades of neoliberal economics can now find themselves frightened by the political backlash produced by the social consequences of that economic order.

Enter Atlas

This is where Atlas comes in.

In the ancient myth, Atlas carries the heavens on his shoulders. He does not get to put the burden down. He simply carries it.

Forever.

That image has become strangely relevant to the modern West.

For decades, ordinary people were asked to carry the weight of globalization, technological disruption, labor-market transformation, fiscal restraint, international competition, and shrinking economic security.

They were told that this was the price of progress.

Keep carrying.

Keep adapting.

Keep competing.

Keep consuming.

Keep believing.

And now something has changed.

Atlas is tired.

Worse, Atlas has started asking a dangerous question:

Why am I still carrying the sky?

When Atlas Moves

That question is politically explosive.

Because if the people carrying the system stop believing in the system, the system itself begins to shake.

The backlash can take many forms: nationalism, protectionism, anti-establishment politics, isolationism, immigration restrictions, distrust of elites, nostalgia for a stronger state, and anger at international institutions.

Some of these responses may be contradictory. Some may be destructive. Some may be based on false assumptions.

But dismissing them as irrational does not make them disappear.

People do not become politically discontented in a vacuum. They respond to the world they believe they are living in.

And when enough people conclude that the existing order is no longer working for them, someone will eventually promise to tear that order apart.

The Dangerous Mistake

The dangerous mistake is to believe that defending democracy means defending every economic arrangement that currently exists within it.

It doesn’t.

Democracy is not a stock market index. It is not a balance sheet. It is not a permanent guarantee that tomorrow will resemble yesterday.

Democracy survives when people believe they have a meaningful stake in the society they inhabit.

Take that belief away for long enough, and formal institutions may remain standing while something much more important begins to collapse underneath them.

Trust.

Belonging.

Hope.

History Does Not Repeat. It Rhymes.

The twenty-first century will not reproduce the twentieth century.

There will be no perfect replay of 1933.

There doesn’t need to be.

History rarely repeats itself exactly.

It rhymes.

The danger is not that another Hitler will suddenly appear wearing Hitler’s clothes. The danger is that a society can once again create the conditions in which someone offering fear, certainty, enemies, and absolute solutions becomes politically attractive.

That is why “never again” cannot simply mean remembering the past.

It has to mean recognizing the mechanisms that made the past possible.

Otherwise, remembrance becomes ritual.

And ritual without understanding is little more than decoration.

The Sky Is Already Moving

Perhaps the most important question is not whether authoritarianism is returning.

Perhaps it is this:

What happens when the people holding up the existing order decide they no longer want to hold it?

That is the question behind the revolt of Atlas.

For decades, he carried the sky because he was told there was no alternative.

Now he is looking upward.

He sees the weight. He sees who benefits from the structure above him. And he is beginning to wonder whether the sky really has to remain where it is.

We can condemn Atlas for moving. We can fear what might happen if he lets go. We can insist that the old order is the only protection against chaos.

But there is one question we cannot avoid forever:

Why did Atlas become willing to drop the sky in the first place?

Because taking the medicine yesterday never made anyone immune to tomorrow’s fever.

From Moscow Gold to Market Gold

The Left Did Not Just Lose Its Soul

Perhaps the Western Left did not merely lose its soul. It also lost something far more tangible: a source of material power.

For decades, the Soviet Union represented the great political and ideological reference point — and, through channels documented by numerous investigations and historical accounts, also a financial one — for the international communist movement. The story of so-called “Moscow gold,” explored in a body of investigative literature under the same name, belongs to that controversial history in which politics, ideology, and financial resources became deeply intertwined.

Then that world collapsed.

With the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, the Western Left found itself without that reference point and immersed in a profoundly transformed economic system. Globalization was advancing, finance was gaining enormous power, capital was becoming increasingly mobile across borders, and the market was gradually being presented not as something to regulate and restrain, but as the natural environment within which politics had to operate.

This is where we can begin to understand an important part of the Left's transformation.

Not necessarily because someone issued orders from above, nor because every left-wing leader suddenly became an advocate for the interests of major financial lobbies. That would be an oversimplification.

The deeper point is this: when the material conditions in which a political force operates change, so can its sense of what is possible, desirable, and even realistic.

When the Funding Changes, So Does Political Independence

In Italy, during roughly the same period, direct public funding for political parties was also phased out.

Politics, of course, did not stop requiring money. It simply had to find resources through other means and from other sources.

This does not mean that investment funds, multinational corporations, banks, or major companies automatically “buy” political parties. One thing is documented political financing, another is lobbying, and yet another is the convergence of interests. Confusing these categories would turn a serious political question into a conspiracy theory.

But one question remains legitimate: how genuinely antagonistic can a political force be toward an economic system on which, at least to some extent, its own ability to raise money, communicate, and compete depends?

At the same time, the Left was gradually losing its traditional roots among the working class and lower-income communities, while the economic world it had historically viewed with suspicion was becoming increasingly powerful.

A historical paradox was therefore taking shape: a political movement born to limit the power of capital was gradually coming to accept the economic system created by financial globalization as inevitable.

No longer the Left seeking to transform capitalism.

Increasingly, the Left seeking to manage capitalism.

From the Social Question to the Politics of Identity

The transformation was not merely economic. It also changed the political causes through which the Left sought to redefine its identity.

Many of the civil-rights causes that now occupy a significant place on the Left's agenda had, for decades, been the distinctive territory of Italy's Radical Party under Marco Pannella and Emma Bonino: secularism, individual rights, personal autonomy, civil liberties, and opposition to prohibition.

There is nothing inherently illegitimate about a political movement adopting those causes. The problem begins when identity politics comes to occupy the space left vacant by the social question.

Because while the Left was increasingly focused on identity, recognition, and individual rights, the world of work was changing beneath its feet. Precarious employment was becoming structural, wages were losing purchasing power, stable employment was becoming increasingly inaccessible to younger generations, and trade unions were losing part of their ability to represent workers.

The Left was becoming increasingly attentive to differences of identity at precisely the moment when it was becoming less capable of representing economic differences.

The old questions — Who owns? Who works? Who gets paid? Who loses? Who controls wealth? — were gradually giving way to another question: Who am I, and what recognition am I entitled to?

Both sets of questions are legitimate. But they are not the same question.

And one cannot become a way of avoiding the other.

The Forgotten Worker and the Abandoned Peripheries

The paradox became particularly visible in the working-class neighborhoods and urban peripheries.

For decades, the Left had built a substantial part of its identity there: public housing, public schools, factories, unions, social services, community organizations, cooperatives, and local party branches. Its presence was physical before it was electoral.

Then that presence gradually disappeared.

Party offices closed. Factories declined or moved abroad. Work became more fragmented, and precarious employment replaced stable jobs in many cases. At the same time, the Left's political language became increasingly sophisticated when it came to rights and increasingly distant, in the eyes of some working-class voters, from their everyday concerns.

Not because those people had suddenly become hostile to rights.

But because they also had much more immediate problems: insufficient income, insecure employment, housing they could barely afford, and an uncertain future.

The paradox is hard to miss: the Left became more attentive to differences of identity just as it became less capable of representing differences in economic circumstances.

The fundamental questions once were: How much do you earn? How much do you work? What rights do you have on the job? How secure is your contract? How much bargaining power do you have against your employer?

An increasing share of political debate has instead shifted toward recognition, identity, and cultural discrimination.

The issue is not choosing between rights and work.

The issue is that working people need both.

And when someone in a precarious economic situation feels that no one is seriously addressing their material circumstances anymore, they may begin to wonder whether that political force still represents their world.

When the Left and Right Stop Being Alternatives

This is where Diego Fusaro's provocative argument becomes interesting.

According to this interpretation, the distance between today's right and left has become, at least on certain fundamental issues, much narrower than their electoral rivalry suggests. Atlanticism, support for Israel, and acceptance of the neoliberal economic order would, in Fusaro's view, be among the areas where the traditional conflict between left and right has progressively diminished.

One may agree or disagree with that interpretation. But the question it raises deserves to be taken seriously:

How genuinely alternative can a Left be if it no longer challenges the fundamental economic premises of the order that governs the world?

If the differences remain primarily cultural and identity-based while the underlying economic and geopolitical framework is largely shared, voters may eventually come to see political competition as a choice between different ways of administering the same system.

And that may be one of the roots of the crisis.

When You Lose Your People

Perhaps this is where we should look for part of the explanation behind the Left's current crisis.

Not simply in the abandonment of a particular economic ideology. Not simply in the collapse of communism. Not simply in globalization.

But in the growing separation between part of the Left's new political class and the social world it once represented.

The Left has conquered new cultural territory while losing some of its social territory.

It has learned to speak the language of individual rights while partly abandoning the language of redistribution.

It has defended the recognition of differences while struggling to explain how economic inequality can actually be reduced.

And so something seemingly paradoxical has happened: part of the working and lower-middle classes have stopped recognizing themselves in the Left even as the Left continues to regard itself as their natural political representative.

Perhaps the crisis is therefore not that the Left has lost its soul.

Perhaps, more simply, it has changed its constituency.

What If the Final Push Comes From Outside?

There is one final element that makes this transformation even more unsettling: the changing international order.

For decades, the West took for granted that its economic and geopolitical model would remain at the center of the world. Today, that certainty appears considerably less secure.

The rise of the BRICS and, more broadly, the consolidation of economic and political relationships outside the traditional Western axis represent a phenomenon that cannot simply be dismissed as a new Cold War. The countries involved have very different interests, political systems, economies, and strategic objectives.

That is precisely what makes the phenomenon so interesting.

The fundamental question is not whether a new bloc is emerging that will simply replace the West.

It is whether the international economic order built after the Cold War is gradually losing its central position.

And this is where the Western Left may find itself facing a historical paradox.

After abandoning the old world, it may have integrated itself so deeply into the new one that it has become part of the very order now at risk of entering a period of crisis.

This would no longer be merely an electoral crisis.

It would be the crisis of a political force that, after losing its old point of reference, became too deeply identified with the new one.

And so the final question would no longer be which new slogan the Left should invent in order to win again.

It would be much more radical:

Who does it really want to represent?

Because a Left that loses the world of work, the peripheries, and the social question may continue to win cultural battles.

But sooner or later, it may discover that it has stopped representing the very people for whom it was originally created.

The Right Isn’t the Cause. It’s the Symptom of a Deeper Crisis

Why are we so afraid of the political right when the real crisis came first?

Across Europe, right-wing parties are gaining ground. Governments are changing, political alliances are shifting, and commentators warn about nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism.

But I am not particularly afraid of the rise of the right.

Not because it is harmless. Not because elections don't matter.

Because the right is not the cause. It is the consequence.

Its rise reflects deeper economic, social, and geopolitical failures that were already underway. Confusing the effect with the cause is like looking at a fever and blaming the thermometer.

A Narrative in Crisis

For decades, Europe lived inside a reassuring story.

Globalization would bring prosperity. Free markets would create efficiency. European integration would guarantee stability. Economic interdependence would make major wars increasingly unthinkable. Western alliances would keep us safe.

Then reality intervened.

Ukraine. The Middle East. Energy prices. Inflation. Rearmament. Stagnation.

The war in Ukraine exposed Europe's dependence on a fragile energy system. After abandoning Russian gas, Europe faced dramatically higher energy costs.

Whatever one's position on the war, the lesson is unavoidable:

Geopolitical decisions have economic consequences, and ordinary people eventually pay the bill.

Then came the Middle East.

The war following October 7, 2023, brought another conflict to the center of global politics. The widening confrontation in the Persian Gulf has added another layer of uncertainty to an already unstable system.

This is no longer just about war.

It is about energy, economics, social stability—and whether Western societies can absorb another major shock.

Europe Is Getting More Fragile

There is a contradiction at the heart of today's Europe.

Governments struggle to preserve living standards while committing more resources to defense. They talk about fiscal discipline and spending restraint while preparing for years of higher military budgets.

The argument for rearmament is straightforward: Europe must be able to defend itself.

Fair enough.

But there is another question.

What happens when societies spend years filling arsenals with weapons?

Military power can deter war. It can also magnify the consequences of miscalculation, escalation, or political failure.

The issue is not simply who has the weapons.

It is the kind of world we are building by accumulating them.

We Have Become Fragile

There is another vulnerability that receives far less attention.

The Italian psychiatrist Vittorino Andreoli wrote extensively about what he called the "fragile man." I would broaden the idea.

It isn't only men.

Human beings have become fragile.

Western societies have spent decades becoming accustomed to comfort, security, instant availability, and predictability.

We are not accustomed to deprivation. To waiting. To doing without.

Earlier generations knew scarcity in ways we can barely imagine.

For them, the problem might have been finding enough food.

For us, it can be losing a cellphone signal.

That sounds trivial.

It isn't.

Prosperity gives us comfort, but it also creates dependence on comfort. The more a society takes normality for granted, the harder it is to absorb its sudden disappearance.

We Are Not Ready for a Long War

Modern conflicts have exposed another weakness.

For years, we convinced ourselves that war could be quick, technological, precise, and decisive. Superior weapons would produce superior outcomes.

Afghanistan should have cured us of that illusion.

Twenty years of Western intervention ended with the departure from Kabul and the return of the Taliban.

The lesson was not simply military. It was psychological.

A society accustomed to prosperity and security struggles to sustain a conflict when victory is neither quick nor certain.

And that vulnerability becomes far greater when the enemy can strike back.

We are accustomed to thinking of war as something that happens somewhere else.

What happens when it doesn't?

What Happens When the Lights Go Out?

Imagine a genuine global war—not a distant conflict, but a confrontation between major powers capable of striking each other's territory.

What would they target?

Military bases. Command centers. Communications. Transportation.

And energy infrastructure.

Because destroying electricity means attacking the nervous system of modern civilization.

No power means crippled telecommunications, failed payment systems, disrupted computer networks, impaired water systems, stalled fuel distribution, broken supply chains, and hospitals forced onto backup generators.

The smartphone in your hand could become little more than a piece of glass and metal.

Italy experienced a warning in 2003, when a massive blackout left almost the entire country without electricity.

That was 2003.

There were no smartphones in everyone's pocket. Digital payments were nowhere near as pervasive. Our dependence on permanent connectivity was nothing like it is today.

Now it is 2026.

Imagine that blackout lasting days instead of hours.

And imagine that it wasn't an accident.

Imagine it was deliberate.

That is when we would rediscover something we have forgotten:

technology does not free us from physical reality. It makes us more dependent on it.

So Why Is the Right Winning?

This is why I see the rise of the right as a secondary phenomenon.

When people become poorer, more frightened, and less secure, they look for someone who promises to restore control.

The right understands this instinctively.

Immigration.

Borders.

Sovereignty.

Order.

Identity.

Enemies.

Simple answers are powerful when people are afraid.

But they do not necessarily address the forces producing that fear.

They can capture anger. Turn anxiety into votes. Give people someone to blame.

They cannot, by themselves, repair the economic and geopolitical structures underneath the crisis.

And the political center and left have their own problem: they often warn about the right without convincingly explaining why millions of people have become receptive to it.

That is the real political vacuum.

The right may offer simplistic answers, but at least it offers answers.

Its opponents too often offer explanations without a compelling alternative.

The Problem Is the Model

This brings us to the uncomfortable question.

For decades, much of the West embraced the idea that markets should regulate an ever-larger share of economic and social life.

Government intervention was reduced. Economic planning became suspect. Redistribution was treated as a distortion. Efficiency became the supreme virtue.

But a country is not a corporation.

And a society is not a marketplace.

When crisis arrives, we remember what the market cannot guarantee on its own.

Energy.

Water.

Healthcare.

Transportation.

Industrial capacity.

Strategic reserves.

Infrastructure.

Food security.

These are not merely economic assets. They are the foundations of national resilience.

This is where Keynes inevitably returns to the conversation.

Not as a relic of the twentieth century, but as a question:

Can a modern society really entrust its survival entirely to the invisible hand of the market?

The answer should not be ideological.

The real question is practical:

Where does the market work—and where must society retain the capacity to plan, protect, and prepare?

The Crisis Beneath the Elections

That is why the rise of the right does not frighten me nearly as much as the conditions producing it.

If Europe becomes poorer, energy remains structurally expensive, rearmament becomes permanent, wars spread, and economic insecurity deepens, the right will continue to find fertile ground.

Changing governments won't be enough.

Changing parties won't be enough.

Changing leaders won't be enough.

A structural crisis cannot be solved by changing the occupants of the palace.

The conditions themselves have to change.

And perhaps we are asking the wrong question.

We obsess over elections, polls, parties, leaders, and social media.

But what if the more important question is much simpler?

How resilient would our society be if tomorrow we lost the things we now take for granted?

Electricity.

The internet.

Electronic payments.

Fuel.

Logistics.

Heating.

Instant access to goods.

Security.

Peace.

A civilization is not truly strong because it possesses extraordinary technology.

It is strong when it can survive without it.

We have built an extraordinarily sophisticated civilization.

But sophistication is not the same thing as resilience.

And if the arsenals we are filling today ever have to be emptied, the question may not simply be:

Who won the war?

It may be:

How long can we survive when the lights don't come back on?