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Published online: 13 April 2026
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2026
Published with Eidolon Ink (a not-for-profit publisher) in December 2024, Alasdair Cannon’s breathlessly articulate and characteristically readable new book, Infinite Discontent: Writings on the Allure of Fascism, presents a timely intervention. A series of essays initially written between November 2020 and May 2021 – and then intensively rewritten between September 2022 and March 2023 – Cannon (p. 1) acknowledges the challenges of producing a text about fascism that would remain relevant to the shifting vicissitudes of contemporary psycho-politics. The book begins with the giddy catalogue of escalating horrors that accompanied its inception, from the US Capitol riots and the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza. Slouching rather menacingly on the temporal horizon of this deteriorating political landscape is Donald Trump’s second presidency. “Throughout the world today”, as Cannon writes, “a terrible force threatens liberal democracies from within”. “That force”, he continues, “is fascism” (p. 7). If the history of the 1920s and 1930s demonstrated the susceptibility of liberal societies to the fascist “fever dream”, Cannon insists that “this flirtation has returned”, and that the “fascinating magic of fascism now seduces states” which had once fought Mussolini and Hitler (p. 8). Fascism is back. Both a “terrible force” and a “fascinating magic” – combining these terms, we might call it a magical legitimation of terror – its seductive power has been reborn in some of the world’s most liberal nations. “Fascism”, Cannon asserts, “is a War on Terror” (p. 10), an attempt to master the restive destructiveness of liberal capitalism by redirecting that destructiveness against internal and external enemies. The opening reference to George W. Bush engages the extent to which the universal moral pretensions of US