Post-Fascism for Adolescents

"Money doesn’t come out of nowhere; if you have money, it’s because you took it from someone else," says a famous Argentinian YouTuber who’s still in high school. He drops the phrase and continues the video explaining how to become a millionaire by investing from home, even though he couldn’t explain what the stock market is or how much his parents pay for electricity so he can stream from his bedroom.

Trying to avoid the Western tradition’s clichés of blaming new generations for the degradation of culture and values, I reread that phrase and wonder how adolescents understood so clearly the workings of capitalism and its primitive accumulation.

Perhaps neither this influencer nor his thousands of followers have ever heard the term surplus value, but they’ve figured out that wealth isn’t built on wages. Since they were born—or at least since they have memories—their families have become poorer every day, despite spending more hours trying to make ends meet. And, although governments have changed colours several times, none have reversed this trend of children growing to be significantly poorer than their parents in adulthood.

No political party has called on young people to take political protagonism either, because in Western societies, youth is the future—that is, not the present—granting them second-class citizenship, which they are even expected to be grateful for, having been born into a system with rights and video games. Regardless of each age group’s specific realities, the truth is that in this age of capitalist realism, as Fisher describes in his eponymous book, no one can feel much like a protagonist because the only narrative available is that of the end of history repeating and amplifying itself until the end of the world—an end no one truly expects to survive.

What place do adolescents have on a planet that’s ending every day? What does the future generation dream about when no one expects the future? The sense of defeat is overwhelming, cyberpunk was right, evil has won, the crisis is daily—economic and climatic—and there’s nothing to be done against law-breaking corporations, illegitimate IMF debt, data-stealing apps, war, or the authoritarian judicial system.

Why It Appeals

Of course, there are many adolescents who don’t fit in this apocalyptic affective atmosphere and who take to the streets, organize, and become protagonists of their time. From Latin America, we have much to say about this, and from feminisms too, but we haven’t fully questioned the adult-centric structures and the paternalistic gestures we reproduce in our revolutionary pursuits. Also, throughout the region, progressive political parties have been collecting failures while the rest of us accumulate fatigue and the sadness of seeing our rallying cries turned into memes and trendy slogans on water bottles.

In this particular context, radical right-wing movements have emerged as new interlocutors for many adolescents unwilling to embrace the passivity offered by the narrative of the end of history and the world. On the contrary, these political groups promise quick exits from poverty and suffering, specifically to young men.

On the one hand, they offer escape from political depression: because if dictatorships didn’t kill civilians, if climate change doesn’t exist, and neither does patriarchy, then there’s nothing to apologize for or worry about. As Hochschild analyses in her book Stolen Pride, radical right-wing movements appeal to various groups publicly shamed by the liberal-progressive discourse, which in Latin America includes the ultra-Catholics, the military sympathizers, the pro-U.S.A. neoliberals, and all kinds of conservatives. Viewed through an age-based lens, this restoration of pride—via denial of history and the return of protagonism—lets adolescents avoid responsibility for a world they didn’t break and a political system that still deems them unfit to participate.

On the other hand, these right-wing movements promise individual economic escape routes that promote competition and challenge the meritocracy upon which liberal democracies are founded. These promises rely less on effort and more on luck—letting each teen dream they’ll be the one to strike it rich and escape mediocrity. Mediated by digital technologies, these magical formulas specially attract young people who, with only internet knowledge, fantasise that they can lift their families from poverty or buy the so desired Lamborghini, thus becoming the only thing society truly values: someone with a lot of money.

These adolescents understood the message we never explicitly told them—because we’re ashamed—but that we enact every day. They read in our actions what we hide in our words: that you need a lot of money to have a good life in this world.

So, they want money, and since they won’t make it through work, they test strategies to take it from others. For these boys, if the dream used to be becoming a famous football player, now it’s getting rich by winning a sports bet that others must lose for money to circulate. Or selling LOL profiles in dollars or making a masterful Bitcoin purchase—where one wins because others lose. Or opening an online casino or selling Ponzi scheme courses. But they haven’t quite understood this part and end up spending what they don’t own, borrowing money they can’t repay, and becoming the losers of each game, increasingly obsessed with money and more frustrated by lacking it.

What It’s Made Of

This machinery aims to produce a generation of poor, indebted, and angry youth. Even among the upper class, the political proposal is to break them—if not economically, then by breaking everything around them. But for it to work, it needs several identifiable elements, and with some creativity, we might disarticulate them.

The strongest age-related proposal of post-fascism is the re-privatization of childhood and adolescence—reinforcing the idea of children as private property, a cornerstone of a deeply conservative capitalism. Revealing their anti-democratic convictions, these right-wing leaders tell parents they can do whatever they want with their children: make them work, turn them into products on social media (sharenting), misgender them, or deny them contraceptives.

Social media is flooded with content insisting that the best thing for a child is to spend more time with their parents, supporting parenting models that are not only hetero-classist but hyper-endogamic. Global trends show parents are spending more time with their kids every decade—yet still feel it’s insufficient—while teens have fewer adult role models and are increasingly encouraged to distrust any adult who looks them in the eyes instead of through a screen. The pandemic and its management reinforced this trend.

Attacks on education align with this too: authoritarian right-wing movements need weak institutions that can’t offer intergenerational refuge or respond to reports of violence. In South America, we’d already faced the "Don’t Mess with My Kids" movement [1] , but newer versions directly challenge compulsory education and promote homeschooling. These efforts aim to ensure adolescents only know their family’s worldview and never learn where all that disappearing (virtual) wallet money goes when they bet or make a bad investment.

This is accompanied by an anti-friendship rhetoric online, reinforcing the idea that money is all that matters—making time spent playing or talking with peers a waste. Public spaces like sidewalks or streets become dangerous, and screens are presented as perfect alternatives offering endless entertainment without leaving the bedroom. We didn’t see teen gambling addiction coming when privatizations were made in our countries, but the link is now clear: less public space plus more phone ads equals big profits—not for teens, but at their expense.

Another key element of these projects is their hatred of women. The supposed antifeminist critique hides the single argument that women should go back to working for men for free. Because, in the end, it’s all about money—just like the infamous influencer Andrew Tate repeats ad nauseam. He got rich making women work on webcams and now faces charges for trafficking. Personal development coaches particularly advise young men not to date or get distracted by sexuality or pleasure—anything that diverts them from the sacred goal of financial freedom.

Thus, figures like INCELs, redpillers, and the manosphere grow: a web of images, forums, and pages promoting violent, hateful masculinity that must harm others to prove itself. Meanwhile, girls are flooded with images of “tradwives” — housebound wives devoted to their husbands — while 12-year-olds follow skincare routines to stay beautiful. Phrases like “monogamy or bullet” become memes while governments abandon reproductive health policies, stop promoting birth control patches, and leave girls dependent once again on their male partners.

Mental health policies are also defunded just as suffering increases: teenage suicides, eating disorders, panic attacks, and social anxiety are on the rise. We all have developed addictive subjectivities under this consumerist age, but young people are a targeted experimental group—where many crises converge. And again, the political right offers individualistic, quick solutions that deepen the very distress they exploit.

On one hand, they spread messages denying these struggles exist, as Fernández-Savater discusses in Libidinal Capitalism, and as every self-help teen guru confirms. “Depression doesn’t exist,” says one of them in a viral TikTok while selling a course on emotional control, as governments launch emotional education programs.

On the other hand, they respond to youth suffering with over-medication and easy pill prescriptions—benefiting pharmaceutical companies, while teens must pay (what they don’t have) for health care, now also privatized. Addicted, over-medicated, and in perpetual abstinence, teens become the perfect subject for both late capitalism and fascist right-wing ideologies.

How We Get Out

For now, there’s no plan. What we know is that this is a political project—a possible narrative for a generational experience—not a description of how adolescents are today. While some may indeed relate to these practices and affects, many other things are happening that open alternate paths.

The clearest Achilles heel of neo-fascism is its failure to make young people rich or solve any of their economic problems. Beyond grandiose slogans like Make America Great Again or Javier Milie’s Argentine version— “we’ll be like Germany in thirty years” (or Germany in the 1930s?)—post-fascism lacks real improvement proposals or any future project inviting young people in.

Still, our best chance is not to rely on their failures but to craft a plan of our own. In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein says much of the right’s rise mirrors the left’s decline as a radical force—especially true for youth. While regional progressive parties emphasize protection and preservation of past achievements, the right forces invite children and teens to transform; while progressive parties promise mild redistributions within unjust legal frameworks, the right forces call on youth to break everything and get rich in a year.

If we want a different outcome, we need a political fantasy of the future that matches how we want to live. Thinking of adolescents, I offer three ideas and leave the rest to you. On the first place, we must enrich our collective imagination with alternative models of masculinity that show it is possible to be a man without resorting to violence or domination over women and other genders. Secondly, we need to nurture visions of life that move away from the logics of scarcity and debt, and instead value what grows when shared—fostering cooperation instead of competition. Finally, we need to reinvent a sense of the common, one that emerges from dialogue between generations rather than placing blame between them, because that intergenerational rupture is also a social fracture that post-fascism exploits to thrive.

This article was originally published in Spanish in Jacobin Latin America: https://jacobinlat.com/2024/11/posfascismo-para-adolescentes/.