The resurgence of fascism?

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Are we seeing the resurgence of fascism today? Some people argue that we are, that we’re back in the 1930s, seeing intimations of fascist governments, even Nazi-type governments. There is no question that the world, as people conceived it in 1945 when they wanted to build a new, better and more stable world based on international cooperation, is gradually crumbling. We’re seeing more nationalism, less desire to cooperate, less interest and support for international institutions.

One can’t generalise too much. The European Union is still there. The United Nations hasn’t come to an end in the way that the League of Nations did after WWI. Not all is lost, but there are signs that are deeply worrying. One of those signs is that right-wing populist demagogues are using rhetoric that reminds us of the worst of the 1930s: it’s xenophobic, anti-immigrant, it blames foreigners, it makes them scapegoats, it voices great doubt about democratic institutions, it is illiberal, it denounces the press as being traitors to the people, and deliberately attacks the independence of the judiciary. All these signs are indeed there.

Different meanings of fascism

Firstly, one should always be very careful with these historical parallels because they’re never exact, and history never repeats itself in the same way – we all know that’s a truism. Secondly, people use a word like fascism so loosely that it has come to mean “anybody whose views I hate is a fascist” – if you are speaking from the left – which has rendered it almost meaningless as a word. Fascism, historically, has meant different things: fascism in Italy was not quite the same as it was in Portugal or in Argentina. It’s always been a rather vague concept that people have never been able to completely pin down. The distinction between fascism and national socialism is another thing that escapes most people: Hitler was not a fascist in the same way that Mussolini was a fascist. National socialism has many aspects of fascism, the corporate state for example, but its racial theories – the idea of a racially superior people that has the right to expel and exterminate inferior people – was not part of the original idea of fascism, which was all about national order, militarising societies and collectivising the economy. So, to compare what happened in the 1930s exactly to what’s going on now is misleading, even though a lot of the rhetoric is indeed alarmingly similar.

Something else to be considered is that just as in the 1930s, fascism or forms of Nazism were different from country to country. Depending on the histories of these various nations, it took a different form. One of the mistakes that was made after WWII when they had war crime tribunals, first in Nuremberg in Germany and then in Tokyo in Japan, was to assume that Japanese militarism – imperialism – was the same thing as Hitler’s Third Reich. There were enormous differences. There was no Hitler, in the first place. There was no systematic ideology of extermination of an inferior people. There are many other differences. Comparison is always good, but one should not go too far, and just as you had these different flavours of fascism, militarism, imperialism and national socialism in the 1930s, you have different flavours of right-wing nationalism today.

Populist demagogues

Donald Trump is a typical product. He’s not a typical president. In fact, he’s in many ways an atypical president, perhaps even a unique president, far more so than many people on the left assume, who simply see him as the vulgar, sneering face of a rotten, decadent capitalist system – and that is not in any way rarely distinct from presidents who came before, it’s just cruder. I don’t believe that. I believe he is something new. He’s breaking too many norms to make him a normal president – even a normal right-wing conservative president. He’s not conservative at all. Like all populist demagogues, he seeks to break down order, not to conserve. That’s why he’s popular with people who feel left behind, disappointed and dismissed. They want the man who in 2016 promised to go to Washington and “break things down, wreck them, drain the swamp”, as he put it.

He is culturally very much a product of the history of the United States. When you look at his style, it’s not just that he comes from television and showbiz. He’s a carnival huckster; he’s a loudmouth of a kind that is very recognisable in the United States; a salesman. You see it with the leaders of television, of megachurches and evangelists on TV: they’re selling something, and they sell it with a mixture of showbiz and fraud. He comes from that world. He’s not an ideologue. He’s never read or written a book. He certainly hasn’t written a book like Hitler, that had a programme. He doesn’t have a programme. He’s a salesman and a salesman for his own shtick to enrich himself, his family and his friends. He’ll take anything that he can sell to stay in power. This is a very American phenomenon.

Vladimir Putin is also a product of the background of his country; his own background in the KGB, of course, but the background of his country is the history of tsarism. Quite consciously, many of the ways in which he promotes his cause and his monopoly on power in Russia is by appealing to the same sentiments that tsarism did. He’s Father Russia, the strongman that people can worship and feel safe with, and who makes Russia great. He appeals to all those emotions. It’s no coincidence that Trump appears to feel much more comfortable with Putin – he’s even subservient to Putin – than he is with democratically elected leaders in Western Europe.

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European versus American extreme right

One of the differences between the European – let’s not call them neo-fascist – resurgent populist extreme right and the American variety is that in the last 10 years, we’ve seen a generational shift in the European populists. When I grew up, in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, people who were on the extreme right in Europe tended to be older men in dirty raincoats who went to porno cinemas. In Germany, those who still had sympathies for the Third Reich were disreputable types. The new right-wing populists in Europe tend to be young, often handsome, men who wear beautiful tailor-made suits and appeal to frat boys who yearn for a new aristocracy of smart, slick young men who loathe the mediocre egalitarianism and the vulgarity of liberal democracy, and who worship power and strong men. The Action Française before the war was similar. There is a European tradition of this crazed aristocratic rightwingery. In Nazism, you had this element in the SS which saw itself as an aristocratic elite corps, with its own uniforms and rituals.

In Trumpism, there is not the same yearning for an authoritarian, aristocratic order. There is a yearning for something else, which again is a distinction between the United States and other places. Most right-wing demagogues everywhere are hostile to immigrants, foreigners, Muslims and other elements that they would argue are alien to the native people; whereas class in Europe – hence the aristocratic nostalgia – still plays a very big role. It plays the role in the United States, too, but class and race overlap in the United States in ways that are far greater than in Europe. You hear a lot more in America about the system of white supremacy; cultural institutions that have to apologise for being part of a system of white supremacy and in a way that Europe doesn’t yet, and perhaps won’t to the same extent, because race simply doesn’t have the same history. So, are we seeing the new fascism? Possibly, it could all get a lot worse. Even the United States could end up as an authoritarian state. No country is immune to it. It will depend on many things I can’t predict. But whatever it will be, it’s not going to be brownshirts, torch parades, Leni Riefenstahl and men with funny moustaches ranting and raving through the radio. It will be something different. It could be just as unpleasant – it could be something even worse considering the weapons we now have to destroy others and ourselves.

The role of memory

The role of memory in politics is a complicated one. I’m not a great believer in the glib maxim that those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it in the future. I do not believe that by simply remembering generation after generation in a ritual fashion, what happened in the past, is going to stop unpleasant things from happening in the future. This is not an argument to forget the past: it’s very important to remember the past, if only because it allows us to understand our own times and how we fit into them. Without understanding the past, it’s not so much that we are condemned to repeat things, it’s that we don’t understand ourselves and our societies and so we are more likely to make huge mistakes. But remembering the past can in itself become a reason for us to make big mistakes.

For example, take the Balkan wars. Many of the atrocities carried out by the Serbs against the Bosnian Muslims were in the name of a medieval battle that the Serbs fought with the Ottoman Empire. The hatred that is kept alive by remembering the past can lead, in the hands of a demagogue, to a sense of self-righteous vengeance. Therefore, it’s not always good to remember everything from the past. The past can be distorted.

Memory as a warning

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It can also have other effects. I don’t think that people have quite forgotten the horrors of WWII, which is why even the more extreme right-wing populists in Europe will not come out and say ‘I am a Nazi’. They flirt with it by what a lot of their followers will find titillating and attractive, but nobody yet dares come out and say it, which means that the memory is still potent enough. On the other hand, it’s not potent enough to make people actively allergic to a lot of these flirtations.

In the case of support for the European Union, it began as a widely shared fear that without European unification, the Europeans might start WWIII. Because of memories of the war, people were genuinely fearful. People under 40 or 50 no longer have that fear, because those who experienced WWII are dying. In fact, there are not all that many people left who consciously remember it, so memory is a double-edged sword. It can lead to further violence and hostile propaganda, but it can also act as a restraint and a warning. I don’t think, however, we should put too much confidence in the latter. I believe the best argument for remembering the past is that it leads to greater understanding.

The strength of democracy

One thing about democracy is that its history is not all that old. You can say that it started in ancient Greece and that elements of it were there in Renaissance Italy and during the Dutch Republic in the 17th century, but the system we know today – liberal democracy – does not have a very long history and has always been confined to certain parts of the world, which should make us very sanguine about its potential future.

As long as liberal democracy has been there, however, people have always been worried about how weak it was, how it was about to collapse, and that it was decadent and corrupt. One of the reasons why dictatorial countries often recklessly thought it would be acceptable to start to declare war on democracies was because they thought democracies were weak and couldn’t defend themselves, and so far they’ve been wrong. It’s what the Japanese thought on the eve of Pearl Harbor. It’s what Hitler thought when he attacked Poland. He thought that the British certainly wouldn’t be up to defending Poland and would give in immediately. History has shown that when democracy is under dire threat, it’s much tougher than people expected.

Mob opinion

On the other hand, there are, of course, vulnerabilities, which were already pointed out by de Tocqueville in his famous book Democracy in America. He was afraid that democracy could lead to the tyranny of the majority, to uneducated mobs imposing their views on minorities, and he saw organised religion as the great protector of freedom and democracy in the United States because it would keep people morally on the right path. This worry that somehow democracy could lead to mob rule has always been there.

We must distinguish between liberal democracy and democracy. Even North Korea calls itself a democracy. Liberal democracy, which is representative democracy, is vulnerable in times when people start to be actively hostile against those they see as their elites. Without an elite, representative democracy is very difficult to maintain because, after all, those who represent us are almost by definition an elite. They are people who have certain expertise, who are chosen, who are the opposite of mob opinion. Some now argue that we no longer need parliamentary democracy because they’re incompetent, corrupt, decadent and elitist and what we need is the direct voice of the people through referendums. That’s a very illiberal view of democracy, which has its history, too, but it’s a very different idea of democracy.

Liberal democracy is vulnerable in that hostility to elites can lead to the temptation of going towards – what people like Mussolini called – direct democracy, the will of the people exemplified by their great leader. Liberal democracies perhaps are also vulnerable because they’re messy.

Decisionism

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One argument people often have is that, for example, China today under the Communist Party is superior to liberal democracies because decisions are taken. They can be carried out without too much opposition. It’s more efficient. You don’t have people fighting for different interests and different political parties, which is seen as selfishness. The people who lead the state can decide what to do and carry it out with maximum efficiency. Now, there is some truth to that. Mussolini called it “decisionism”: the great leader who represents the will of the people can decide and then do whatever is necessary.

However, in a liberal democracy, it takes more time. Different interests have to be considered. This can lead people into the temptation of authoritarianism as somehow a more efficient way of doing things. But there is an argument to be made why even inefficient liberal democracy is not only superior but has more staying power. The reason is that in an authoritarian system, as long as people feel that the government is helping them, as long as, for example, the urban-educated class in China feels that it’s getting wealthier, that the economy is growing, that they’re doing well out of this authoritarian system, the system can survive quite nicely. But as soon as there’s a serious economic crisis, as soon as people feel that they’re no longer doing so well – that in fact they’re going to do worse, that the state can no longer guarantee their stability, their security, and their prosperity in an authoritarian system – all there is to it is a revolution or a violent rebellion, which the Authoritarian State will then try and put down with maximum force.

Consensus is eroding

In a democracy, at least people have the option to vote the rascals out, which gives it more flexibility. That’s the great strength of a liberal democracy. It has more legitimacy, too, precisely because different interests have to be taken into account. In the end, you have a certain consensus, and the system is worth defending even if a party is in power that you don’t like. The danger today, of course, is that countries are becoming so polarised that consensus is eroding. People hate the other side so much that they don’t see the election of the party they didn’t vote for as legitimate. The fact that the president of the United States himself is fanning the flames by saying that he will not leave the White House if he feels the election was rigged is a direct attack not only on Democrats and those who vote for the Democrats, but on the American system of liberal democracy. And that, again, makes him very different from previous presidents. No president before has attacked the system itself in that manner. That, I believe, is a cause for serious worry.

Discover more about

the extreme right and populism today

Buruma, I. (2018, July 13). American fascism: Reading the signs of the times. Asia Times.

Buruma, I. (2018, January 22). Why is Japan populist-free? The Japan Times.

Buruma, I. (2018, April 15). Tracing the rise of political machismo. Asia Times.

Post-war ideals and the political aftermath of World War II