Marco Rubio's appeals to Western civilization, Christian heritage, and the defense of Western dominance are fundamental to the consolidating global fascist project, functioning to transform a crisis of political economy into a crisis of what he and others refer to as civilization.
White Supremacy is the combined ideological and structural expression of “white power.”
In its ideological expression, it posits that the descendants of the peoples from the territories now referred to as Europe represent the highest examples of human development. That their culture, social institutions, religion, and way of life are inherently and naturally superior.
This position is combined with what the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) calls the global structures and institutions of white supremacy – the structural expression. The material means to maintain and advance global white power: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Trade Organization, Global Banking system, NATO and dollar hegemony, and the international capitalist cultural and ideological apparatus – media, entertainment industry, Big-Tech etc.
For BAP, white supremacy, therefore, cannot be reduced to individualized attitudes and values just among people identified as white. Instead, it should be seen as a structure of domination that is also ideologically embedded into every aspect of U.S. and European society to the extent that it has become normalized and, consequently, invisibilized as general common sense. White supremacy is fundamental to the Pan-European Colonial/Capitalist Patriarchy that emerged with the invasion of what became the “Americans”in 1492. (BAP definition of White Supremacy)
My central argument is that the appeals to “white supremacy” and the defense of Western dominance being advanced by the United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio, are not incidental features of the consolidating global fascist project let by the United States of America, but fundamental for galvanizing Western states to mobilize internal political support and the projection of external, imperialist power to maintain Western white capitalist power. Ideologically, white supremacy provides the historical narrative, definition of the political enemies – left and communist forces aligned with non-Europeans – and the justification for coercive state power, wars and repression.
At the February 2026 Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio presented the U.S.-European relationship as a defense of a shared Western civilization. His appeal to common Christian and European cultural origins was not simply an invocation of historical heritage. It was part of a political argument that the West must recover its confidence, sovereignty, and capacity to exercise power against perceived civilizational threats.¹
Rubio's October 7, 2026, address in Athens made the underlying proposition more explicit. Invoking ancient Greece, Rome, Christianity, European exploration, and the founding of the United States, he constructed a continuous civilizational genealogy culminating in contemporary U.S. power. He included Christopher Columbus and Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés among the figures embodying the frontier spirit of Western civilization, despite their association with conquest and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. He then declared that the West must maintain its position “at the head of the world,” rather than accept “atrophy, servitude and decline.”²
Rubio’s Athens comments, along with his comments at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, when read alongside the State Department’s campaign against what it calls “far-left political terrorism,” should be seen as a declaration of war. It is a declaration that has conjured up the most dangerous element for those of us who are non-European – the spectrum of white supremacy as a normalized justification for horrific state violence and war.
Rubio's strategy and that of the U.S. imperial state is to transform a crisis of political economy into a crisis of civilization. Rather than confront the relations of production, ownership, and international extraction that generate super-exploitation, immiseration and insecurity, his narrative directs attention toward cultural inheritance, civilizational loyalty, and the supposed need to restore white Western greatness.
His position also illuminates how white civilizational nationalism abroad and the criminalization of opposition in the U.S. to the march back to claims of white greatness reinforce one another.
The ideological function of this narrative is to reaffirm the defense of the Western created colonial/capitalist global order into a defense of a collective identity, a white identity. The white working class experiencing the consequences of the inability of right-wing neoliberalism to address their real material needs, are encouraged instead to identify with the power of the Western state and idea of “Westernism” and “whiteness” rather than with other working people and oppressed peoples whose exploitation created and sustain that power.
Fascism as a Capitalist Reform Strategy
As the BAP definition reminds us, we must ensure that analysis must also center the material contradictions driving this return back to the mother of all capitalist reforms – fascism, with white supremacist ideology as its civilizational logic. It is the weaponization and consequent acceptance of this logic that serves as the basis for the politics of racial convergence. That is, the fascist movement toward a cross-class white supremacist alignment of class power under the state rule of the petit-bourgeoise on behalf of monopoly white capital.
The U.S. State is a State of War (George Jackson)
The “re-emergence” of fascism – fascism never went away and was never completely defeated in Europe and certainly not in the colonies and settler colonies of the West and internal colonies within the U.S. and the “Americas” - must be understood first as a response to the deepening structural crisis of neoliberal capitalism and the declining capacity of the United States and its Western European allies to preserve their 500-year history of global dominance.
The contemporary reemergence of 21st century fascism had as its foundation the counterrevolutionary and counterinsurgency policies of the state in reaction to the political challenges posed by social upheavals resulting from the war in Vietnam and movement for so-called civil rights, but primarily from the revolutionary politics of the Black Liberation Movement and crisis of capital in the 1970s.
Beginning in the 1970s as part of the fight-back by capital to discipline labor, the developing radical left inspired by Black Liberation Movement and its socialist and communist offshoots, and Keynesian welfare statism, the emergence of what became labeled as neoliberalism promised that deregulated markets, the intensification of value extraction from the global South, financialization, and privatization, would generate prosperity that would eventually benefit workers and the new petit-bourgeoisie. Instead, the working classes of the United States and other Western countries have experienced growing economic insecurity, deteriorating public services, deepening inequality, and the exponential concentration and centralization of wealth and political power by an unregulated and increasingly reckless capitalist class.
Internationally, the mechanisms through which Western states extracted wealth from the Global South over the last forty years — sanctions, military coercion, unequal economic relations, and control over international institutions—faced increasingly organized resistance. The result? The current crisis of material legitimacy and imperial power.
This is the material context in which we must understand the turn toward the language of Western civilization, Christian heritage, national restoration, and the defense of a supposedly threatened Western identity. As the promise of neoliberal prosperity loses credibility and the ability of Western powers to impose their will encounters growing resistance, the ideological justification for the existing order becomes increasingly important.
White civilizational nationalism offers a political substitute for declining material legitimacy. It attempts to unite the European working class in Europe and the U.S. with the very capitalist oligarchy responsible for their insecurity by persuading them that their common interests lie in defending a threatened “white” Western civilization. This point is fundamental. White supremacy is integral to the fascist project. The historical construction of Western civilization depended on the creation of a racial hierarchy that had the white colonial/capitalist at the apex but also reflected a relative material benefit to white workers, settlers and the expanding petit bourgeois.
Opposition to fascism while ignoring the role of white supremacist ideology by Western left forces ensures that fascism will not be defeated, at least in the West.
From Western dominance abroad to the internal enemy in the U.S.
The relationship between civilizational nationalism and domestic repression becomes clearer when Rubio's speeches are read alongside the State Department's campaign against what the administration calls “far-left political terrorism.”
In 2026, the State Department promoted international cooperation against alleged far-left political violence, describing it as a transnational threat that had been neglected by existing counterterrorism frameworks. The administration announced designations of four European radical-left organizations as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists, alongside financial measures intended to disrupt their alleged support networks.³
The objective is clear. As neoliberalism loses its ability to secure consent and as Western geopolitical dominance encounters greater resistance, capitalist states led by the U.S. are compelled to jettison the forms of bourgeois democracy practiced in the imperialist core. The designation of radical political opposition as a national-security threat transforms the crisis of legitimacy into a rationale for state coercion.
Consolidating fascism demands that radical opposition to capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy and the state become synonymous with terrorism. In fact all opposition to fascism is criminalized by the provisions and interpretations reflected in National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) of September 25, 2025, which directs federal agencies to counter domestic terrorism and organized political violence. The memorandum expands attention to alleged networks, organizational relationships, funding, and radicalization.
If Fascism is to be Defeated, the left must confront the Mother of Identity Policies: White Supremacy
Much of the radical and left analysis of the present crisis emphasizes neoliberalism, monopoly capital, economic inequality, militarism, and the concentration of executive power. These are indispensable categories. But when race is treated as secondary, or white supremacy is reduced to the prejudice of individual political actors, the analysis misses the historical structure through which these forces have operated and shaped class structures and dynamics.
The Rubio argumentation in defense of Western dominance is a political stance that is committed to preserving a historically constructed racial hierarchy in which Western white power claims the authority to organize the world while resisting the emancipatory claims of peoples subjected to colonialism, racial domination, and imperial exploitation.
The appeal to Western powers employing the language of Western civilizational decline, national restoration, anti-globalism, and the defense of Western identity has proven to be a powerful force. is reinforced by the power of the state to identify as enemies all forces, peoples and nations that challenge the existing distribution of global power.
This is why a serious analysis of U.S. fascism must connect the racial history of the state to the contemporary political economy. White supremacy is not an ornamental addition to an otherwise complete explanation of capitalism. It is one of the historical principles through which capitalist power, colonial domination, and state violence are organized.
The failure of the Western left to acknowledge its historic relevance, to deploy conceptual frames such as settler-colonial and imperialism and name the nature of the challenge concedes the terrain of ideological struggle to right-wing forces offering symbolic membership in a supposedly superior historical community united by the idea of “whiteness” while the underlying relations of ownership, accumulation, and exploitation remain intact.
It is incomprehensible that left forces in the West are unable to understand that the continuation of the genocide in Gaza, the united European wide support for the war of aggression against Iran, and the siege of Cuba, can only be explained by the Western consensus that non-European life has less value than European life.
Rubio, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, and the capitalist media understand the role of race and white supremacy as frames that naturalizes unequal power and presents Western colonial/capitalist power as inevitable, legitimate and irreversible.
Opposition to this “natural” global order automatically designates one as an irrational terrorist. White supremacy solves the crisis of “whiteness,” according to Rubio. The West must embrace its superiority and in fact be ready to defend its right to rule.
For Rubio and the bipartisan fascists in the state and among the ruling class, the objective of U.S. and indeed Western policy is more than merely attempting to restore confidence in the United States or repair the legitimacy of Western institutions. They are building a new fascist legitimacy. What they are concerned with is capital’s ability to preserve the relations of power and extraction through which the West led by U.S. capital have historically accumulated wealth, exercised geopolitical authority, and structured exploitative relationships with the Global South.
From a People(s)-Centered Human Rights perspective, the central issue is therefore not simply whether liberal-democratic procedures survive. It is whether peoples in formation and nations possess the material capacity to exercise collective self-determination, control the conditions of their social reproduction, and resist the political and economic forces that subordinate their lives to accumulation and domination.
The struggle against U.S. fascism means confronting white supremacy and its material basis.
The defense of Western civilization has become a vehicle for naturalizing fascism and defending Western power under conditions of Western decline. The task of emancipatory politics is to prevent the crisis of that order from being resolved through the reorganization of domination under fascism and to turn it instead toward the collective liberation of humanity.
Endnotes
- The White House, “In Munich, Secretary Rubio Calls on Allies to Embrace Shared Heritage, Meet Challenges of New Era,” February 14, 2026, https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/02/in-munich-secretary-rubio-calls-on-allies-to-embrace-shared-heritage-meet-challenges-of-new-era/. See also Mathias Risse, “Reclaiming the West from Civilizational Panic: A Human-Rights-Based Reply to Marco Rubio’s Speech at the Munich Security Conference,” Harvard Kennedy School, February 18, 2026, https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/our-work/carr-ryan-commentary/reclaiming-west-civilizational-panic-human-rights.
- Marco Rubio, “Remarks,” The Pnyx, Athens, Greece, October 7, 2026, U.S. Department of State, https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesman/2026/10/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-remarks. See also The Guardian, “Rubio in Greece Digs into Past to Tout Trump’s ‘America First’ Approach,” October 7, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/07/rubio-greece-trump-america-first-speech.
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).
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