The big question is whether this nationalist political right represents a turn away from transnational capital accumulation. These forces sometimes express themselves as protectors of domestic manufacturing jobs. But I don’t think that’s their main thrust. Their main thrust is to define the nation again in xenophobic terms, which also combines with protection of old cultural values that would restore hierarchies of race, gender, and sexual orientation.

[...] it’s worth remembering that fascist regimes were capitalist. There is a tenden­cy among analysts to think of capitalist regimes as tending to be free-market, but the type of state-led capitalism that Hitler introduced was very much capitalist. [...] we might see authoritarian state-led, but blatantly capitalist, infrastructure programs and policies.

Yet both of them played the nationalist card, and it shows the extent to which the nation-state has remained integral to the global accumulation projects of so many capitalists. These guys understand that for accumulation to continue on a global scale, you need to legitimate it by attaching it to a xenophobic nationalism of some kind. They’re trying to ride this tiger of nationalistic ideology that allows global accumulation to continue. That may be at the expense of the Ukrainian or the
Estonian nationalists, and for sure at the expense of Mexican immigrants, let alone refugees of every sort.