Neoliberalism To Trumpism: The Re-Normalization Of White Supremacy As State Ideology

Neoliberalism To Trumpism: The Re-Normalization Of White Supremacy As State Ideology Ajamu Baraka, Black Agenda Report (blackagendareport.com). 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 (state.gov) 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 initiative