The Surprisingly Banal, Moderate Fascism of ‘Zero Day’
Image; Netflix
Zero Day (2025) is not a particularly good show. A middling action drama that starts with a lot of energy only to dissipate under the weight of the very question it tries to answer — i.e., what happens when a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ terrorist attack causes America to sacrifice the very liberties it claims to cherish (9/11 joins the chat).
Robert De Niro stars as George Mullen, a former president and reluctant authoritarian, who must uncover a conspiracy theory while simultaneously being tapped to lead a new commission in the wake of a dangerous cyberattack known as “Zero Day.” The commission grants George Mullen what, in the year 2024, the moderate writers of this show thought were constitutionally dangerous powers beyond the pale of normal US politics.
Created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, and Michael Schmidt (the latter a DC-based correspondent for The New York Times), Zero Day opens the viewer up to a dying type of DC groupthink, where a political moderates save the day simply by keeping to the ‘truth.’
Won’t anyone think of the moderates?
DC before 2024 was a crazy place (it’s still crazy but in completely different ways). There was this entire ecosystem of self-proclaimed centrists who were trying to uplift the idea that all you needed was a calm, ‘rational’ (i.e., economically neoliberal) status quo politician, and you would capture the heart of America. If you peruse The Washington Post or The New York Times op-eds, you might still come across these people who think all we need to do is refind the center.
Zero Day is an escapist fantasy for the people who read those op-eds and opine for this supposed lost vision. People who think that yet another ‘we are all in this together’ project (see the Lincoln Project, Third Way, Forward Party, etc.) is all we really need to save America.
The show accomplishes this perspective by making one of these political relics our main point of view character. De Niro’s George Mullen is a politician who existed in the beforetimes when both sides of the aisle allegedly collaborated on legislation. As his daughter, politician Alexandra Mullen (Lizzy Caplan) remarks:
“He thinks that the world is the same as when he left office…Dreyer, okay? That side of the aisle? Those are not the same people that he served with. This is not the same country. If he goes back now, they will bury him.”
George Mullen, we are meant to believe, is one of the good ones: perhaps too good for the political world he now finds himself in. We are not told his beliefs or policy preferences, but we do see his even-keeled tone and know how he hates alleged extremists from both the left and the right. People he believes, are not able to come together for the common good of America. “Everyone says they want the truth,” George tells his wife of the current political situation. “But the reality is it’s better for both sides if the blame can’t be pinned on anyone.”
Mullen’s desire for ‘truth’ is the perspective we are meant to root for and think is missing from contemporary American politics.
The country has lost its moderate way, and Zero Day is a conversation amongst moderates debating how to fix it. Nowhere is this debate more clear than with the reveal of the series’s antagonists. It’s learned that the true initiator of the Zero Day attack is not Iran or domestic terrorists, but all factions at the center of the political divide, in their paradoxically extremist war on extremism.
I mean it: the in-universe Republican Speaker of the House Richard Dreyer (Matthew Modine), the ‘progressive’ firebrand Alexandra (a not-so-subtle reference to AOC), and the corporate oligarch Monica Kidder (Gaby Hoffmann) all teamed up to remind Americans of their vulnerability. They did this so that the supposed adults in the room (i.e., them) would have enough political capital to actually address America’s real problems. In the words of Alexandra, speaking to her coconspirator Dreyer:
“One minute of system shock, that’s what you said. A few months with the right power in the right hands and the country’s back on track by Christmas.”
These, let’s call them radical moderates, tried to use the horror of an attack to stomp out the political fringes (a danger that is supposed to be so obvious it’s self-evident), and it’s a narrative that is entirely disconnected from our political reality.
Doesn’t everyone think the way I do?
The idea that somehow all the leaders on the left and right were able to coherently plan anything together is a hard pill to swallow, especially when we are supposed to believe that those in power are secret centrists held hostage by the extremists in their own parties.
Yet this perspective makes sense if you have a hollow political view that erases all the nuances of the various extremes these moderates appear to be opining. And Zero Day, for all its bluster, does not understand America’s political fringes (not even a little bit), and it is not interested in understanding them.
The best example of this on the show is the character Evan Green (Dan Stevens), a radio talk show host whose anti-government stance is so vague that I genuinely cannot tell what political ideology he is even meant to represent. The only thing we know is that he’s extreme. In the words of Devan Suber in IGN:
“In dialogue and performance, Evan appears to be a riff on conspiracy-spouting fearmongers like Alex Jones. But he appears to be broadcasting a largely left-wing populist show on some sort of cable channel whose name positions it as an equivalent to the conservative outlet Newsmax — a conflict of worldviews that has not and will not ever exist anywhere in any reality. Without spoilers, both Evan’s storyline and that of Elon Musk stand-in Monica Kidder (Gaby Hoffmann) point to real-world issues, but that’s all they do: Get you to say “Oh, I see what you did there” without ever feeling satisfying narratively or making some actual statement in the ideological soup.”
And that’s interesting because it’s a perspective that divorces ideology and completely focuses on aesthetic: one where it doesn’t matter what the left and right are saying, just that they are angry and passionate against America. “You know what the cancer is,” Dreyer confesses to Mullen. “The white nationalists ranting about being replaced. The anarchists shouting ‘abolish the police.’ The delusional that think an election is open to interpretation…”
To both the heroes and villains of Zero Day, it’s the extremists who are the problem. What they disagree on is not so much a hatred of the political extremes as the tactics being used. The radical moderates are willing to do something illegal to preserve the institutions they care about, while Mullen cares about doing things legally and the right way, even if those things allow him to trample on the civil liberties of his fellow Americans in the name of justice.
George Mullen is, by all accounts, still an authoritarian. His decision to lead the Zero Day Commission — an overreaching government organization that absolutely would lead America right into a dictatorship— belies a fascist impulse. His brief tenure as the head of this commission has him suspend rights enshrined by the constitution, torture suspects, and take advantage of a level of surveillance that is quite unsettling, even for modern America.
While we ultimately may let George off the hook for some of these actions because of potential interference from a secret mind control experiment (a subplot I’m not interested in diving into because it’s never confirmed), he seems unrepentant of his actions, caring more about having lied to the American people than the many civil liberties he’s trampled on.
A zeroed-out conclusion
All in all, this text just felt lazy. It failed to dive into the political nuances between the fringes and the center, focusing more on hand-wringing over America’s politics being unstable (no shit) than providing any solid analysis.
Even its final monologue ends on a very hackneyed moral of sticking to the truth, as if Americans who deny elections and rant about the Great Replacement don’t think they are telling the truth. News flash: most people think their political ideologies are correct. That’s how ideologies work.
This refusal to delve into the very subject matter it’s focused on extends to the centrism it seems to present as the solution to America’s woes. It was weird watching Zero Day because, despite being a text decrying fascism, it’s absolutely authoritarian. It’s just one that celebrates a middle-of-the-road authoritarianism rather than one coming from the radical, ultranationalist right.
The film ends with America having unseen enemies within its own government that must now be rooted out, which is one of the hallmark signs of fascism, according to some scholars (see “the enemy is both strong and weak”). And for a text that claims that a commission like the one in Zero Day shouldn’t exist, the narrative certainly affirms the idea that an authoritarian like Mullen could get a lot done. Mullen single-handedly uncovers a conspiracy that everyone else in the government wanted to push aside. He’s a hero figure, and a certain amount of reverence is shown to him toward the end of the series (note: hero worship is also a hallmark sign of fascism).
This is a vapid text, and it worries me that the moderates who crafted it care more about the tone of an authoritarian government than about what it actually does, which does not bode well for the months and years ahead.