MoveOn posted on Instagram this X/Twitter message of July 21 from Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey:
Markey was linking to this story:
Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs”, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.
The incident at the downtown federal detention center is one of a succession of alleged abuses at jails operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice) in the state since January, chronicled by the advocacy groups Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South from interviews with detainees.
Dozens of men had been packed into a holding cell for hours, the report said, and denied lunch until about 7pm. They remained shackled with the food on chairs in front of them.
“We had to eat like animals,” one detainee named Pedro said.
Degrading treatment by guards is commonplace in all three jails, the groups say. [my emphasis] (1)
I recalled this when reading the following analysis from the late Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer:
[A]lthough the Nazis did not invent the concentration camp, they developed it in new ways. Especially novel was the intricate procedure by which they deprived inmates of their "normal" human attributes by systematic humiliation, which reached its peak in their use of what may be called excretionary control - total humiliation by controlling human excretions. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this development is that, to date, no Nazi document has been found that points to a discussion of how to humiliate victims. The conclusion is inevitable: humiliation was not the result of planning but of a consensus that did not require orders or bureaucratic arrangements. In other words, probably the most extreme form of humiliation known to us was the natural result of the Nazi system. [my emphasis] (2)
I don’t mean by quoting that to imply in any way that senior officials at ICE should not be held accountable for their crimes and abuses. Trump may be using that agency as a chief way of eroding the rule of law more generally. But it’s the responsibility of ICE officials up to its Director Todd Lyons and his boss Kristi Noem who thinks shooting puppies is fun to take precautions to make sure their agency isn’t committing criminal acts. And when they do, to make sure the criminals are fired from the agency and prosecuted.
I know at one level it’s laughable to say such a thing about the depraved characters running that agency. But it is their responsibility. And they should be held accountable for their lack of actions against this kind of cheap sadism. No matter how much the MAGA chuds get off hearing about it.
The Guardian report also talks about how the ICE sadists use the “excretionary control” Bauer mentions: “At the Krome North service processing center in west Miami, female detainees were made to use toilets in full view of men being held there, and were denied access to gender-appropriate care, showers or adequate food.”
And Republicans present themselves as the party of Jesus Christ. Listen and watch to see how many of the good Christian white folks in the Republican caucuses in Congress condemn this conduct. Hint: you’ll have to be very patient before you hear any of them doing that. If you’re placing bets on how many will, it would be wise not to pick a number with double digits.
But it’s not hard to say. They can simply use Sen. Markley’s phrase: “This is a violation of basic human dignity.”
But all the Republicans in Congress know that already. The question is how many of them will straightforwardly condemn this.
“I’m not a Nazi,” declared Donald Trump on Monday. (1) Thus entering at the top of the list of famous Presidential denials along with Richard Nixon’s, “I’m not a crook.”
Such nominal denials are actually more like confessions. Even proud confessions.
“I’m the opposite of a Nazi,” Trump said immediately following. Whether Trump can define what a Nazi or a fascist is, would be another question. Much less what their opposite would be. Some of his advisers like Stephen Miller would be happy to explain it to him, I’m sure. Steve Bannon just got out of prison, so he’d probably be glad to fill Donald in on what those things mean.
Kamala Harris has said she agrees with the Trump-as-fascist characterization. And since he just staged a big rally in Madison Square Garden that echoed the vibes of the infamous 1939 German America Bund (Nazi) rally there, Trump’s campaign was certainly encouraging the Nazi comparison, as well:
But, to be fair, the Trumpistas haven’t adopted standard uniforms like the Bundists of those days. Unless you count the red MAGA baseball caps.
In case you’re wondering, the George Washington image was meant to stand for the “true Americanism” of the Bundists. They didn’t actually spend much time studying up on the Founders and what they stood for, though. All that late-17th-century “liberal democracy” stuff was way too Commie for them to bother with.
Defining the thing – the easy definition
Even for political scientists and historians, coming up with a clean definition of fascism has been a challenge. Political movements based on thuggish displays of enthusiasm for a Master Race and a Holy Nation don’t lend themselves to being easily reduced to precise academic models. As one example of why it’s tricky, the famous German Weimar Constitution was never abolished during the Hitler regime. It was officially in force until the day in 1945 when Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. Hitler’s government just ruled without paying any attention to it. But if we looked only at the constitution, Germany was just as democratic in 1944 as it had been in 1932.
If Trump wins next week, we’ll probably hear Bannonites making a similar argument to excuse any un-Constitutional thing Trump does. They will claim to be defending the True Constitution, just as Trump claims to be defending true democracy when he declares, "We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country." (2) (Hey, he didn’t say there that he was tearing up the Constitution and the rule of law, now did he?)
Benito Mussolini’s movement that came to power in 1922, followed by Mussolini’s coup in 1925, called itself the Fascist Party. It would be hard to argue that Mussolini’s Fascist Party was not really fascist. His political themes were anti-socialism, anti-democracy, and a pompous hyper-nationalism of the ethnonationalist brand. Mussolini and his supporters engaged in “populist” rhetoric in which the Fascists posed as the representative of The People (the true people, ethnic Italians) against an oppressive Elite, which they defined to include liberals, socialists, pro-democracy media, and labor unions. Big capital as such was not taken to be such an urgent threat to the True People.
Militarism, including paramilitary displays by the Party itself, was central, as was colonialism. The nationalist ideology also indulged in an aggressive foreign policy, including the seemingly (for ultranationalists) contradictory effort to promote fascism in other countries, notably Austria, France, and Germany. It also included actual expansionist and colonial wars against Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia) and Albania. Mussolini’s Fascism included promoting Catholicism and getting along with the Vatican, which demanded only a limited version of Christian behavior by the Fascist government for their support. Italian Fascist ideology did not have the anti-Semitic emphasis of the German Nazis. But as Mussolini became more and more dependent on German support, the Italian Fascists cooperated more actively in the Holocaust.
The Austrian dictatorship that began in 1933 and lasted until the Germany takeover in 1938 was and is known as “Austrofascism” and was closely modeled on Mussolini’s politics. Mussolini directly supported the Austrofascist government of Engelbert Dollfuss and then Kurt Schuschnigg. When Hitler Germany attempted a coup against Dollfuss in 1934, Mussolini backed Austria against Germany and threatened to intervene directly on its behalf should Germany invade Austria militarily. But Mussolini would soon become more dependent on Germany, so that by 1938 there was no Italian threat of intervention to prevent Germany from annexing Austria.
Hitler explicitly modeled his National Socialist movement on Mussolini’s fascism. The hatred of democracy and socialism and (especially) Communism, the militarism and violence in politics and foreign policy, the imperial expansionism, the use of paramilitary partisan formations, the hyper-nationalism, the bombastic ethnonationalist rhetoric and legislation, and cooptation of the Catholic Church, were all elements German Nazism shared with Mussolini’s fascism. The centrality of murderous anti-Semitism was a particular feature of Germany Nazi/fascist ideology.
We could add other features of historical fascism, like the banning of independent media outlets once in power. But politics and history are not hard sciences like chemistry or physics, where there are objective physical measures to determine what a particular substance or process is. But historical and social-science definitions are not completely arbitrary either.
The more complicated approach
The Soviet-era Communist Parties gave often Jesuitical definitions of fascism when it came to dealing with particular regimes. When Communist Yugoslavia established an independent foreign policy from that of the USSR, the Soviets denounced Yugoslavia’s government as “fascist.” When they improved relations later, Yugoslavia didn’t officially look so “fascist” anymore.
The definitions of regime type used today by institutions like Freedom House and V-Dem tend to use a spectrum running from liberal democracy to autocracy to describe the nature of contemporary regimes. The Mussolini-Dollfuss-Hitler type of regimes arose in capitalist countries, and historical left definitions of fascism usually included capitalism as part the definition of fascism. But even countries that have established economic systems based on massive state ownership and control have also been known to have what we politely refer to as “democratic deficits.”
As long as we’re talking geeky political theory here, I’ll throw in a mention of the question of whether Communist and Fascist regimes are somehow mirror images of each other. Liberals have sometimes used “red fascism” to describe Communism and Communist regimes. But however much “objective conditions” may determine the forms of political regimes, ideologies also do matter. Because however cynical their applications may be, they can and do influence how decision-makers understand the world and the actions of other countries and political players.
Aurel Kolnai was a Hungarian Jew who converted to Catholicism, moved to Austria, and became a philosopher. He was also a convinced democrat and a perceptive critic of fascism. He wrote a book called The War Against the West that was first published in 1938 in English, though he wrote it in Austria before the German annexation (Anschluss). It is a book of continuing interest, because he makes an extensive analysis of the Nazi ideology based on Nazi publications and propaganda. And his suggestions about how the Nazi policies might develop internally and externally held up remarkably well to what happened in future years. He was writing after the passage of the Nuremburg Race Laws, the attempted German putsch in Austria in 1934, and during the early part of the Spanish Civil War but before Munich Agreement.
He correctly identified the roots of Nazi ideology in the reactionary, anti-democracy, anti-French Revolution tradition of 18th and 19th century thinkers who had rejected the entire concepts of political liberalism and democracy.
The following three theses gives a good idea of Kolnai’s perspective:
1. The outstanding [i.e., most prominent] form of Fascism known as National Socialism, and the Germany known as the Third Reich, controlled by, and imbued with National Socialist thought in its more or less official varieties, constitute a reality, spiritual and historical, of supreme individuality and importance.
2. Absolute and conscious antagonism to Western Liberal civilization is the central impulse of that intellectual and political reality.
3. The National Socialist and affiliated doctrines are fundamentally opposed to Liberal democracy, as well as to its Christian foundations and to its Socialistic trends and implications. [my emphasis] (3)
The Nazis’ hostility attitude to Communism regarded it as yet another toxic form of democracy. Kolnai writes in relation to the philosophy of Ernst Jünger, who after the Second World War managed to rebrand himself as a responsible conservative:
Some readers will probably be reminded of Communism, and Jünger, who is one of the so-called National Bolshevists, is likely to accept this kinship. But, in fact, the simile is completely misleading. For Communism the object of socio-economic equality is essential above a ll; its hard and inhuman methods of procedure, its militaristic organization, its use of proletarian class-privileges are throughout imbued with the dialectics of revolutionary transformation ; it destroys the former master classes instead of adapting them into fit managers of a more formidable mastery. Whether or not the sufferings and humiliations entailed by its methods are justified by its aims and achievements, Communism is bent on creating a rational society of free workers ; whereas Junger’s “ Worker-Type ”, the bearer of new Herrschaft, is in fact a new edition of the old masters, a compound of Prussian officers’ caste and officialdom, factory owners and higher engineers, placed above the workers as a personified Daemon of Work. (pp. 879-880)
(To be fair to Jünger, he was dismissed from the German Army in 1944 because of his association with officer implicated in the famous 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.)
Historically speaking, both liberal democracy and Communism were products of democratic thought and practice. Or, to complicate it a bit more, the early “communism” that manifested itself in late-medieval and early-modern Christian heresies and peasant revolts actually was an important phase in the development of liberal democracy in Europe.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote their legendary pamphlet The Communist Manifesto in what became known as the “pre-March” days of 1848, i.e., just before the breakout of massive pro-democracy revolts in Europe, a critical moment in the development of liberal democracy, including its social-democratic variants. It was written as the programmatic statement of a tiny group called the Communist League.
Neither the group nor the pamphlet had any detectable effect on the outbreak of the 1848 revolutions. But it wound up being influential for quite a while. Ideology does matter.
When it comes to Trump, he seems to have no actual ideology other than seeking more money and power for Donald Trump. And he thinks tariffs are somehow magically wonderful. But he understands that the far-right and xenophobic ideology he is promoting can bring him votes if he convinces enough people to put their hatreds and fears above their responsibility as citizens. He has his armed partisan militia that went into action on January 6, 2021 at the US Capitol. And, to repeat his declaration of last November in New Hampshire, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and he radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country."
I’m sorry, but anyone who doesn’t recognize that as Hitler talk needs to read a history book or two.
Reading, of course, does require more effort than listening to one of Trump disjointed rants.
Thomas Zimmer is a good analyst and is very focused on the stakes for liberal democracy in the US Presidential election and in elections in Europe and other places.
Thomas Zimmer is a good analyst and is very focused on the stakes for liberal democracy in the US Presidential election and in elections in Europe and other places.
But in a recent post (1), he winds up grumping about how the hippies over at Jacobin are worrying about the definition of fascism. Of course, “fascism” is a notoriously difficult concept for political scientists, historians, and pretty much everyone else to define clearly.
On the other hand, pretty much everyone can agree on a variation of Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography, which would be: I can’t define fascism, but I know it when I see it!
“It” in the case of fascism was pretty clearly there in 1922 when Mussolini became Prime Minister of Italy. Because his party was called the Fascist Party, taking its name and symbol from the ancient Roman fasces which we see here in the form of a symbol used by the Italian air force during the Mussolini period (from Wikipedia):
Mussolini staged the famous March on Rome as a show of force before he became Prime Minister. But he had already gotten the Italian king to appoint him to the office. The March on Rome was a PR stunt. (And, no, he didn’t actually make the trains run on time either!)
This short 2017 documentary gives a good glimpse and the antidemocratic tendencies of the Trump movement, then in its first year of his Presidency: (2)
Here is a current one from the Financial Times focused on Europe: (3)
Now, when it comes to the know-when-I-see it test, Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comment (included in the 2017 video starting at 1:02:45) about the crassly antisemitic neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville that included the murder of a counter-protest, Heather Heyer, was more than enough to convince me that Trump was a straight-up fascist.
Those annoying lefties ...
Zimmer defines his gripe with the hippies this way:
... the stubborn refusal by a specific camp of leftwing intellectual Skeptics to engage seriously with the fascism argument and the radicalizing tendencies on the Right. Their overriding concern is not to get the diagnosis right. They are engaged in a political struggle against what they believe is the real enemy: The (neo-) liberal elites, which they define in very broad and unspecific terms to include basically the entire mainstream of American politics from Center-Left to Center-Right, and particularly the Democratic establishment.
He focuses in particular on arguments made by Daniel Bessner, Ben Burgis, and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins. (4) The Bessner-Burgis article is from several days after the January 6 coup attempt. Basically, they are saying that people need to be thoughtful about what constitutes fascism and not use the term loosely, which is good advice. Still, I don’t share the reservations that they express about using the f-word to describe Trump himself.
From today’s perspective when there is much more in the public record about Trump’s coup attempt, I would argue that they understate the seriousness of that event. But I wouldn’t say they were being frivolous about it, either. They even make a point that one might think Zimmer would find sympathetic, “While there is a long and noble tradition of left -wing anti-fascism, it was liberal anti-fascism that has had the most consequential impact on US history.”
But as Zimmer makes clear, what gripes him the most is a point they make in the immediately following sentence: “liberal anti-fascism, from its beginnings, has been defined by a skepticism of mass politics, a skepticism that directly led to the creation of a post–World War II American state defined far more by technocratic than representative governance.” Zimmer also seems to be irritated by their criticism of the far too many illiberal actions of centrists like Bush and Obama, both of which had bad records on civil liberties issues. Bessner and Burgis were clearly warning about slipping into the trap of not criticizing real failures by the Biden Administration – the uncritical support of Israel’s current Gaza war being the most dramatic one to date – because that only helps Republican fascists.
The Bessner/Steinmetz-Jenkins article from last month is much more current. They argue that the fascism-vs.-democracy framing of this years elections is superficial and overblown. My own worry about that framing is not that it’s wrong as such, but that the Democrats have to be focused on connecting their defense of democracy to specific issues: abortion rights, labor rights, voting rights, access to college without debt servitude, combating climate change. Focusing on maintaining a peaceful world and promoting nuclear arms control ought to be in the list, but Biden’s fiasco with Netanyahu’s Gaza war will make it very tricky to campaign heavily on any foreign policy issue. And to the extent that fighting for liberal democracy almost means supporting international law, neither the Gaza war nor his at-least-not-as-bad-as-Trump immigration policy are at all encouraging on the liberal-democracy front.
But in election campaigns, democracy also has to be democracy-for-what. Bessner and Steinmetz-Jenkins in that sense are correct in arguing that the centrist “language of acute crisis has not been an effective means to address US democracy’s pervasive problems.”
On the other hand, their conclusion makes it look like they are caught in the same blind spot that neoliberal centrists have, “If we really want to improve our democracy, we must lay the fascism debate to rest and turn to face our uncertain future.”
Uh, no. Laying the “fascism debate to rest” is the opposite of what is needed to confront that uncertain future. On that point, I would side more with Zimmer’s perspective.
The liberals’ dilemma over describing fascism
Centrists (both conservatives and liberals) have a chronic dilemma in describing the threat of fascism to liberal democracy. Max Horkheimer famously formulated the problem this way: “Whoever does not want to talk about capitalism should also stay quiet about fascism.” (5) Centrists prefer to think that liberal democracy is something like the natural form of government for a capitalist society. There certainly is a historical connection there.
But admitting an inherent tension between democracy and capitalism is a hard pill for them to swallow. “But,” as Horkheimer put it, “the totalitarian order [fascism] is nothing other than its predecessor that has lost its constraints.” He regarded fascism as a chronic tendency in capitalist societies, whether they were pristine liberal democracies or not.
In other words, fascism is always a reserve option to preserve a capitalist system when it becomes endangered. But it’s not an inevitability. But if we look at the world outside the countries who claim to be operating a classical Marxist socialist system (e.g., China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba), it would be hard to claim that there is an overpowering element of determinism driving to provide liberal democracy as the ruling system in capitalist countries.
Even in the European Union, which currently operates on thoroughly neoliberal principles, the widely-used rankings of the V-Dem Institute for 2023 show a bare majority of 14 of the EU’s 27 members nations qualifying as full “liberal democracies.” Hungary ranks as an “electoral autocracy, and the 12 others as “electoral democracies.” (6) So if there is some historical determination pushing capitalist countries to be pristine liberal democracies, its effect is less than universal.
The excellent Austrian political scientist Anton Pelinka in a 2022 book looks at the notion of inherent capitalist tendencies toward fascism. (7) He notes than in the Second World War, all the major nations adopted a much higher degree of central planning as in peacetime. (The same was true in the First World War.) In the cases of Germany and Italy, the notion of fascism as the backup option for capitalist countries in crisis was actually put into practice. But he observes, “Above all, one thing is certain. If German, Italian, and Japanese [industrial capital had been focused on the maximization of profits, they chose the wrong option.” In other words, however tempting the fascist model may look to oligarchs as a way to maintain their profits and power, in practice it hasn’t always had that effect:
The USA, number one in capitalist ranking, remained devoted to liberal democracy despite the economic crises and mass unemployment [of the Great Depression]. That goes for the United Kingdom, as well, and – at least until 1940 – for France. One can conclude from that there is no causal connection can be derived between capitalism and fascism.
In other words, we can observe historically that fascism could become, and in some countries did become an option, that the ruling elites adopted, there is no inevitability involved. In his reading, liberal democracy always remains an option for capitalist countries though fascism is always a temptation for those who see their power and wealth as endangered. We might saw that in this view, fascism is always a dark shadow cast by capitalism, or even a perpetually serious risk, but not an inevitable development.
How the dark shadow shows up in the US
On the other hand, the tendency toward authoritarianism is not just a matter of a few bad apples of the Donald Trump and Steve Bannon variety.
The German historian Annika Brockschmidt in her current book (8) recalls the good ole days of that nice moderate Republican George H.W. Bush, the patrician Episcopalian whose campaign in 1988 notoriously used the image of the black rapist Willie Horton to generate racial fears among white voters and pander to the non-inconsiderable number of Republican base voters who were looking for such racially-charged symbols. Michael Nelson noted in 2018, “In some ways, the Willie Horton ad is the 1.0 version of Trump’s relentless tweets and comments about African-Americans.” (9) It was generally held to be a decisive factor in Bush’s win over the Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis.
Bush’s victory in 1988 was a lesson for the Democrats that would have far-reaching consequences for American domestic politics. The Democrats drew the conclusion from the Dukakis disaster that they were vulnerable on the crime issue. But instead of denouncing the Republicans’ tactics and presenting a counter-proposal to the authoritarian Law and Order politics, under Bill Clinton [elected President 1992] they would then attempt to outdo the political opponent in this field. Joe Biden, then still grey- and not white-haired, was one of the co-authors of the 1997 Crime Bill, the most comprehensive criminal law in US history.
It prompted high investments in prisons, preventive programs, and an increase in staff, but also had fatal consequences, which are still denounced today by racial justice advocates. The sentencing was increased drastically in some cases, with the death penalty alone being introduced for sixty other crimes. According to civil rights organizations, the law is partly responsible for [the US having] the highest percentage of incarcerated people in the world, including a disproportionate number of Black Americans. [my emphasis]
The Republicans were primarily responsible for the increasing authoritarian in US politics, but the Democrats made their own contributions. We see that also in the restrictive immigration politics in the Obama Administration and even more restrictive ones in the Biden Administration.
The Democrats in 2024 clearly represents the liberal-democratic alternative to Trump’s authoritarianism with fascist goals. But the Democrats also need to present much better alternative to Biden current rightwing immigration policy, his ridiculous policy on police responsibility (“Fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them.” [10]), and his Administration’s support of Israel’s hideous war on civilians in Gaza.
Conclusion
Addressing the substantive problems of US democracy, including the unrepresentative Electoral College system and the role of oligarchs in funding political campaigns through (legalized) bribery, means being realistic about them. Saying we should never criticize Democrats because the Republicans are so much worse is not going to achieve that, ever.
It also means, though, that we cannot “lay the fascism debate to rest and turn to face our uncertain future.” Because that dark shadow still is a part of “our uncertain future.” Or, once again: “Whoever does not want to talk about capitalism should also stay quiet about fascism.”
(5) Horkheimer, Max (1939-40): Die Juden und Europa. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung/Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 8:1939-1940, 115-137. My translation from German.
(7) Pelinka, Anton (2022): Faschismus.Zur Beliebigkeit eines politischen Begriffs, 29-33. Wien & Köln: Böhlau Verlag. My translation from German.
(8) Brockschmidt, Annika (2024): Die Brandstifter.Wie Extremisten die Republikanische Partei übernahmen, 12131. Hamburg: Rowohlt. My translations from German.
Jason Stanley uses the f-word (fascism) in analyzing a film that was part of the Trump rally on January 6 that directly insight the storming of the US Capitol building. (Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist PropagandaJust Security 01/04/2021).
The article gives a blow-by-blow analysis of a film that strikes authoritarian themes common on the radical right and also in the Republican Party, although it may be redundant at this point to talk about the Republican Party as something distinct from the radical right. (The film is embedded in the article, though I'm not embedding it here.)
He explains that we can safely assume that the message of the video was one that the pro-coup-attempt Trump White House produced, whatever Trump's actual direct role may have been in making it:
Each of us can decide what moral responsibility Trump personally has for a video to rouse his supporters at the rally. How much of a role the White House or Trump himself may have played in deciding to show the video and sequencing it immediately after Giuliani’s speech, we don’t know. But it is worth noting that the New York Times recently reported that by early January, “the rally would now effectively become a White House production” and, with his eye ever on media production, Trump micromanaged the details. “The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations. For Mr. Trump, the rally was to be the percussion line in the symphony of subversion he was composing from the Oval Office,” the Times reported. [my emphasis]
It's important to remember that the Big Lie of the "stolen election" of 2020 is currently a shared framework within the Republican Party generally, including the two main groups that Timothy Snyder recently labeled the Gamers and the Breakers. (Think of the Gamers as the Liz Cheney faction, the Breakers as the Josh Hawley/Marjorie Taylor Greene/"Gym" Jordan faction.)
Stanley takes a shot at the vexed question of defining fascism:
Fascism is a patriarchal cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by a treacherous and power-hungry global elite, who have encouraged minorities to destabilize the social order as part of their plan to dominate the “true nation,” and fold them into a global world government. The fascist leader is the father of his nation, in a very real sense like the father in a traditional patriarchal family. He mobilizes the masses by reminding them of what they supposedly have lost, and who it is that is responsible for that loss – the figures who control democracy itself, the elite; Nazi ideology is a species of fascism in which this global elite are Jews.
But he specifies what he means by it in the American context this way:
Fascism is not an ideology consigned to Europe. Black American intellectuals from W.E.B. Du Bois to Toni Morrison have spoken of American fascism. America has a long history of anti-Semitism similar to Nazi anti-Semitism, central to the ideology not just of the Ku Klux Klan, but to Henry Ford’s “The International Jew.” In its American version, communist Jews supposedly use Black liberation movements, control of Hollywood, and labor unions to destroy the nation in the service of a global elite. We should not be surprised at all by the rise of a fascist movement in the United States. And if it does arise, it would be no surprise if it did so in the party that keeps alive the “lost cause” myths of the American South. [my emphasis]
His concluding paragraph is a caution to avoid simplistic historical analogies while recognizing real processes that appear in different places and times:
Worldwide, there have been many fascist movements. Not all fascist movements focus on a global Jewish conspiracy as the enemy, and not all of them were genocidal. Early on, Italian fascism was not anti-Semitic in its core, though it later turned that way. British fascism was not genocidal (though it also was never given the opportunity to be). The most influential fascist movement that takes a shadowy Jewish conspiracy as its central target is German fascism, Nazism. Nazism did not start out in genocide. It began with militias and violent troops disrupting democracy. In its early years in power, in the 1930s, it was socialists and communists who were targeted for the Concentration Camps, torture, and murder. But it must never be forgotten where Nazism culminated. [my emphasis]
I'm sure that Stanley is not suggesting that not being overtly genocidal is a sufficient bar to clear for a movement to be democratic or even non-fascist! On the contrary.
"Trump is unusual, but the Republican Party has been preparing the way by becoming the voter-suppression party. They’ve become a party which is about a minority bullying a majority." - Timothy Snyder
Snyder analyzes Trumpism as "sadopopulism," which he describes here in this way:
Sadopopulism is a type of populism where people actually don’t get anything other than pain. In populism, the assumption is, ‘I, the leader, and you the people are against some elite’, and the policy is, ‘I’m going to transfer some of the wealth of that elite to you, the people’. The critique of populism is then usually, ‘the elite is mythical’ or ‘the elite is an ethnic minority and they’re being oppressed’. But Mr. Trump is not a populist in that sense. He isn’t transferring wealth from any kind of elite to the people. On the contrary, he’s transferring wealth from the people to the already existing elite. He’s not giving people greater chances to pursue happiness. He’s actually doing the opposite: he’s creating more pain in the system. And he’s very good at persuading people that it’s good, it’s ok for them to be hurt as long as others are hurting more. [my emphasis]
In in the following comments, I think he may give Trump a bit too much credit for not using militarism in a way that is typical of classic fascists like Mussolini. But it's an important analysis of Trump and fascism:
Trump clearly draws from a fascist toolbox, consciously, half consciously, unconsciously. One can debate how much it matters that his father was in the Ku Klux Klan and whether he knew or not that ‘America first’ could be used as a fascist slogan when he chose it for his presidential campaign slogan. Who knows? But he certainly uses fascist rhetorical tricks the ‘us’ and ‘them’ the quick slogans, the rallies.
So, let me try to put this carefully. I think it’s impossible to talk sensibly about Mr. Trump without invoking the history of fascism. That said, when pressed, I’ve tried to use phrases like, ‘not even a fascist’, meaning I think he does some but not all of the things a fascist would do. I think they are enough to bring down a republic, but do not include redistribution and war.
Mussolini fought wars in Ethiopia. He joined in Hitler’s wars in Europe: although little known, tens of thousands of Italian soldiers died around Stalingrad. Trump does not like war. He’s afraid of physical violence and is less of a militarist than previous American presidents have been. He does not want to control the world and does not have the tools of redistribution and military expansion. [my emphasis]
Snyder in this interview is addressing primarily Trump's political style, and he has some important insights. He doesn't talk in this interview about the sociology of Trumpism. So, no magic answers here to the "economic anxiety"-vs.-"liberal identity politics" argument that will be going on for quite a while.
The quotes here are from the article's edited transcript.
Because Donald Trump is such a clear and present danger to formal democracy and the rule of law, his time in office has produced even more scholarly and journalistic accounts of authoritarianism. Not that the theme was being ignored before that. A new German book on the contemporary far right and its narrative themes is titled Das Faschistische Jahrhundert: Neurechte Diskurse zu Abendland, Identität, Europa und Neoliberalismus (The Fascist Century: New Right Discourses on the West, Identity, Europe and Neoliberalism). The title is a reference to a statement of Mussolini, "We have every reason to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right', a fascist century." declaring the dawn of a "fascist century". He had founded his Fascist Movement in 1919.
The lead essay in that book is by Roger Griffin, author of A Fascist Century (2008). In that book, he argued that fascism "as a party-political force of any consequence, it effectively died in Hitler’s bunker, unable to operate as a ‘cultic’ or ‘ritual’ form of politics with a charismatic leader." But he also argued even in 2008 that there were discernable continuities between fascist nationalism and some prominent ideas in the European far right:
[There is a] strong element of continuity between interwar and post-war schemes of national regeneration, which sometimes nurtured a pan-European vision of rebirth. It also highlights the way an extreme right-wing form of ‘Europeanisation’ has become far more prominent since 1945 as a response to the Cold War, globalisation, and to the rise of a liberal-capitalist European Union fostering multi-culturalism.
Contemporary Eurofascism offers a motley group of ultra-nationalists, neo-Nazis, Third Positionists, New Rightists, and white-supremacists a way of dissociating themselves from the narrowly chauvinistic nationalisms of interwar Europe that were largely based on the nation-state – and hence from Nazi crimes against humanity – while smuggling nationalism into their policies in other guises, such as ‘ethno-regionalism’, or the war on ‘Americanisation’. [my emphasis]
As we know, far right politics can evolve fairly quickly. QAnon went within three years or so from being a demented fringe phenomenon on obscure online message boards to now being rapidly accepted by the Republican Party base in the US and even spreading to Europe. Just like the original fascism, even nationalistic ideologies can become an international trend. Yanis Varoufakis talks about the Nationalist International of far-right parties and movements in present-day Europe.
As always, defining fascism is a tricky business. Even people very familiar with the history wind up relying to some degree on a variation of Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography: I don't know how to define fascism, but I know it when I see it!
Historically speaking, since Mussolini called his movement and party Fascist, it would be difficult to argue that his politics were anything but fascist. And since Hitler saw himself as following Mussolini's model in his drive to take power in Germany, it's fairly obvious to see German National Socialism as a form of fascism. (Although among academics that has been seriously disputed!) The Dollfuss-Schuschnigg dictatorship of 1933-38 in Austria was even more explicitly modeled on Mussolini's regime.
Other far-right regimes of that period like those in Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Rumania, and Croatia were anti-democratic and authoritarian. But the definitional task is complicated by the fact that while explicitly ideological fascist parties may have supported or participated in those governments, the dominant leadership was not quite so explicitly aligned with a fascist ideology as were Mussolini, Hitler, and Dollfuss. Griffin notes that "Mussolini and Hitler recognised an affinity between their movements that they did not see, for example, in Salazar’s Portugal."
That's worth keeping in mind when looking at today's political situation. I'm inclined to an I-know-when-I-see-it approach when looking at Trump, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, or Narendra Modi in India. But as concepts like "red fascism" or "Islamofascism" remind us, a promiscuous use of the term may wind up obscuring more than it clarifies.
I've previously suggested that Hungary is a good example of how Trumpism could develop - with or without the Orange Clown in the White House. (Hungary as a model for American authoritarians 04/11/2020) The main far-right authoritarian party in Hungary had been Jobbik. The current Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had been a liberal leader during the post-1989 transition, and his current party is Fidesz, which has been affiliated with the conservative European People's Party, though it is currently suspended (though not expelled). But since Orbán became Prime Minister in 2010, he has pushed Hungary in the direction of authoritarian "illiberal democracy." As Zoltan Simon reports (Orban Says He Seeks to End Liberal Democracy in HungaryBloomberg 06/28/2014):
“I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations,” Orban said, according to the video of his speech on the government’s website. He listed Russia, Turkey and China as examples of “successful” nations, “none of which is liberal and some of which aren’t even democracies.”
Orban, who was re-elected in April for a second consecutive four-year term, has clashed with the EU as he amassed more power than any of his predecessors since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, replacing the heads of independent institutions including the courts with allies, tightening control over media and changing election rules to help him retain a constitutional majority in Parliament.
Authoritarianism takes various forms. Despite his affinity for Putin's style of rule in Russia, Orbán is currently maintaining the outward forms of democratic institutions. We can and should expect authoritarian governments to become more so. But Orbán at this point is not arresting journalists or poisoning opposition leaders. He has established broad control over the press through oligarchs allied with him buying up media outlets, without resorting to formal censorship. Politicians and political parties can organize and campaign in regular elections, but through an extreme form of gerrymandering he has made it virtually impossible for opposition parties to gain a majority in Parliament to be able to form a new government.
All this is a way of saying what the famous apocryphal saying attributed to Mark Twain, that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And the historical background and contemporary similarities can help us understand the very specific events and developments in the US or any other given country.
Radical Right in Real Time
There is a lot of coverage currently that looks at current developments among radical rights sects and the Republican Party in light of the current danger to democracy.
The historian Heather Cox Richardson has spent a lot of time this year on YouTube videos discussing her scholarly work and contemporary politics, and also posting political commentary on her Facebook page and at Bill Moyer's website. She has given particular history to American political parties in her professional work, including To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (2014). She takes what I would call a realistic view of US political history that engages directly with how the longterm development and expansion of democracy has simultaneously been intimately connected with inequality and brutality. One of her recent essays is Democracy Under Attack 09/07/2020:
Democracy depends on the rule of law. Today, we learned that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who rose to become a Cabinet official thanks to his prolific fundraising for the Republican Party, apparently managed to raise as much money as he did because he pressured employees at his business, New Breed Logistics, to make campaign contributions that he later reimbursed through bonuses. Such a scheme is illegal. ...
Democracy depends on equality before the law. But Black and brown people seem to receive summary justice at the hands of certain law enforcement officers, rather than being accorded the right to a trial before a jury of their peers. In a democracy, voters elect representatives who make laws that express the will of the community. “Law enforcement officers” stop people who are breaking those laws, and deliver them to our court system, where they can tell their side of the story and either be convicted of breaking the law, or acquitted. When police can kill people without that process, justice becomes arbitrary, depending on who holds power.
Democracy depends on reality-based policy. Increasingly it is clear that the Trump administration is more concerned about creating a narrative to hold power than it is in facts. [my emphasis]
Sarah Churchwell takes a look at the real existing American fascism during the days when Mussolini and Hitler were practicing their versions of it in American Fascism: It Has Happened HereNYB Blog 06/22/2020.
Fundamentalist Christianity and its institutions are still critical links in the US between the Republican Party and the most fanatical far-right attitudes and conspiracy theories. Here are a few recent pieces focusing on that aspect:
It now appears clear that part of that strategy is to send Federal agents dressed like Iraq War troops to Democratic-run cities, on the pretext of protecting Federal property, and then for them to attack and provoke Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police protesters, causing violence to escalate and using it … to scare the suburbs. The exercise also has the advantage for Trump of entrenching a new form of secret police and of turning Federal agents into instruments of his authoritarianism. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has confirmed the plan to send the Feds into those cities.
Provoking social conflict so as to polarize society was part of the Russian hacker playbook in 2016. It is the preferred tactic of terrorist groups such as ISIL and the Neo-Nazis, since a polarized society is much easier to scare into submission.
Yes, they are acting like South American paramilitaries in military dictatorships like those in Chile and Argentina last century. It will either escalate and get more brutal unless public pressure and elected officials who actually believe in the rule of law will force them to back off. Cole writes:
The youth have in recent days mostly clashed with Federal agents sent by Trump on the pretext of protecting the Federal courthouse, and who have used provocative teargas and physical attacks on the protesters. Video posted on YouTube suggests that the Feds, with anonymized name tags and unmarked vehicles, attacked people simply for being in the street and made arrests without warrants or any probable cause. This behavior is unprecedented for Federal agents, who seldom make arrests and have in the past proceeded only with a court warrant. In other words, they are behaving like the Egyptian secret police.
Despite my serious doubts about the motives of the Lincoln Project backers, I'm glad they are running these hard-htiing spots. But I also think it's time for the Democratic Party to be seriously embarrassed that they are letting Republicans do the aggressive campaigning for them. One of numerous things out of joint in 2020.
This qualifies as an actual "antifa" spot, because it is calling out the "fa": How It Starts 07/20/2020:
Something else strikes me about the Lincoln Project pitches. They may be a gaggle of neocons who really hate Trump because they think he's not competent enough at starting wars. (I'll be happy for them to prove me wrong after the election.)
But I don't remember any of their ads making a pitch to those legendary creatures known as "moderate Republicans" reassuring them that, hey, it's okay to vote for Status Quo Joe because he really loves plutocracy and is completely committed to the notion that the wealthiest people should never ever have to pay taxes to support their country. These are turnout ads to motivate voters who already dislike or hate Trump to vote in November. This one even suggests that It's critical for the sans-coulottes to be protesting in the streets. These are definitely not ads aimed at converting some slice of the 35-40% who are devoted to Bunker Boy.
Paul Taylor has a cautioously optimistic take on the possible weakening of rightwing populism in Europe, Has Europe reached peak populism?Politico EU 09/05/2019:
... a series of events and votes in Italy, Britain, France, Spain, Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic suggest the tide could be turning against the anti-establishment nationalist movements that have upended politics across the Continent, leaving the barbarians howling in frustration at the gates.
That doesn’t mean that the social and economic distress that turned many working-class, rural and poorer voters against the traditional political parties, the parliamentary system and the European Union has gone away. But the populists seem unable to secure a majority for their radical, anti-European course almost anywhere.
In thinking about authoritarian movements, it's important to be realistic in seeing both their strengths and their real limitations. But the difference between complacency and realitic optimism can sometimes be difficult to perceive. So can the difference between complacency and excessive pessimism. But in dealing with authoritarian movements will real strength, complacency is probably the worst attitude that pro-democracy voters and activists can take.
Rachel Donadio takes a look at The New Populist PlaybookThe Atlantic 09/05/2019. She describes his very recent setback when he tried to force new elections but was surprisingly thwarted by the left-populst Five Star Movmement and the center-left social-democrats:
The seemingly unstoppable momentum emboldened Salvini to put his popularity to the test. He withdrew his party’s support for the government, forcing a crisis in a bid for new elections that he hoped would make him prime minister of the first far-right government of a major European power. He didn’t get his wish this time. Instead, the Five Star Movement and the center-left Democratic Party - one representing the populist anti-establishment, the other the establishment - put aside their long-standing mutual animosity to form the strangest new government in recent Italian history, one with a sole purpose: to block Salvini.
But her analysis strikes me as exaggerated in describing the innovative appeal of Salvini. "He is not simply a Donald Trump facsimile in Europe, nor merely the archetype of an angry anti-immigrant nationalist in the Viktor Orbán mold. Salvini has been writing an entirely new playbook for 21st-century populism."
Donadio's article didn't convince me that Salvini has a strongly innovative approach to far-right demagoguery. But it's an in-depth look at Salvini and his movement that provides a much more detailed account than we usually see in the American press when it comes to continental European politics. She provides this illustration of how Salvini and his Lega party exploit a very legitimate issue, the EU rules banning procyclical Keynesian policies during recessions, and give it a rightwing, anti-Semitic spin:
Salvini and other senior League officials have said they want the EU to change its rules, including the one requiring countries using the euro to keep their budget deficits under 3 percent of GDP.
This would require changing European treaties, which is a long shot. It’s also too technical for most voters to comprehend. Instead, Salvini rails against what he calls a Europe run by “bankers, do-gooders, and bureaucrats.” And he often singles out the billionaire financier George Soros in conspiratorial tones. In Salvini’s speech in Milan before European Parliament elections in May, he accused some “elites” - Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Soros - of betraying Europe, and said Soros was paying NGOs to bring immigrants to Europe. Is his targeting of Soros not a classic anti-Semitic trope? I pressed [Lega spokesperson Claudio] Borghi on this. “Salvini talks about Soros because he’s a speculator, not because he’s Jewish,” he said. The Hungarian-born financier was indeed a currency speculator in the ’90s, but Salvini mentions him only in the context of immigration. Here Italy seems to be following Orbán’s Hungary: a country with few Jews but dog-whistle anti-Semitism. [my emphasis]
Salvini's Lega (the League) is also a Putinist party:
... it’s the only party in the country to have signed a cooperation agreement with Putin’s United Russia party, which it did on Salvini’s watch, in 2017. Sebastian Kurz’s People’s Party (ÖVP) in Austria and Le Pen’s National Rally signed similar accords with United Russia. (Kurz'
There's a flat-out mistake here. It was Austria's far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), not Sebastian Kurz' Christian Democratic People's Party (ÖVP), who signed the agreement with the United Russia party. The ÖVP and FPÖ were partners in a coalition government from 2017 to 2019. [Update 09/09/2019: The error has been corrected and acknowledged at The Atlantic website.]
After Le Pen’s party signed the agreement, it secured a loan from a Russian bank. The League has said that no money changed hands in its agreement.
Yet the relationship with Russia could damage the League’s credibility. In recent months, the Italian magazine L’Espresso and BuzzFeed News have published damning scoops about a meeting in Moscow last fall in which close associates of Salvini discussed an energy deal that allegedly would have diverted funds to the League ahead of European Parliament elections in May, in violation of Italian campaign-finance law. In July, BuzzFeed published audio recordings of the meeting - one of the clearest signs to emerge yet of how Russia is trying to influence and destabilize European politics. There’s no evidence that the energy deal happened, and Salvini and his associates have denied wrongdoing, but magistrates in Milan have opened an investigation. [my emphasis]
That's a reminder of an important one of many ways that far-right parties in Europe share themes and techniques and actively cooperate to some degree. Even though the notion of a Nationalist International is inherently strange, and problematic in practice.
And so the bigger point raised by Wednesday’s American hatefest is the question of what are we going to do about American fascism? The signs right now are not good. The leaders of the Democrats in Congress — the ones with the most leverage to actually do something — are not only running out the clock on impeaching this unfit president but putting a lot of their eggs, at least this week, in one basket: Wednesday’s long-delayed testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller.
But the Mueller gambit could backfire, and in fact it probably will. ...
America’s weak body politic is absorbing Trump-Russia and other presidential wrongdoing that same way that it once absorbed the Access Hollywood tape, when Trump’s own words about sexual assault didn’t derail his election. The ability of Team Trump to steamroll congressional subpoenas and basic requests for information are making the Democrats look weak, because arguably they are. It hardly helps that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems stuck in the 1990s, seemingly unable to grasp the severe threat to American democracy on inglorious display in North Carolina last week. [my emphasis]
n other words, normalization of Trump continues even as his white nationalist focus intensifies.
Defining political systems can be tricky. But not impossible.
Historian Christopher Browning wrote a piece that is helpful in understanding the current rise of authoritarianism in the world, The Suffocation of DemocracyNYBooks 10/25/2018.
Browning makes some well-grounded points about the process in Germany that led to Hitler taking power and sees some broad parallels for US isolationism in the interwar period to the situation that could develop from Trump's program of thoughtlessly trashing the existing international order.
But Browning also argues "that current trends reflect a significant divergence from the dictatorships of the 1930s." He writes:
The fascist movements of that time [the interwar period] prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and selfenrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies. [my emphasis]
If we put these into a PowerPoint type list, it would be something like this:
Have elections with functioning opposition parties but rig the system so that the ruling party retains decisive control even when a solid majority votes for other parties
Establish effective control of the press without overtly bringing them under government control and censorship, including intimidation or acts of violence against journalists
Use extensive corruption to favor allied oligarchs and to insure that the ruling party's policies are established even when they are unpopular
Neutralize, exile, or kill prominent critics
Use Carl Schmitt-ian polarization and demagoguery to generate support for the ruling party
Explicitly encourage authoritarian attitudes through fear of crime and other themes
I'll stipulate here that none of Browning's points or my bullet-point elaboration of them are not immune to nit-picking criticism from sophomore political-science students or FOX News commentators.
But we're not talking mathematical rules of logic or religious dogmas here. These issues are about forms of government in the real world. Browning refers in particular to the current governments of Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and the Phillipines.
For Americans, making these distinctions has special twists. If we start from a viewpoint like that of, say, Hillary Clinton in 2016, that America is "the greatest country that has ever been created on the face of the earth for all of history," it would be natural to measure how democratic another country is by how much its government looks like that of the United States. (Quote from Hillary Clinton addresses military veterans at the Democratic National ConventionTelegraph 07/25/2016, just after 1:10 in the video)
But there are also other measures, including centuries of history, political theory, and legal reasoning. One of the best known set of standards are provided by the European Union. Most of whose governments are some form of parliamentary system, by the way, which looks significantly different than the American government. To qualify for admission to the EU, a country has to demonstrate its compliance with a range of democratic standards: representative government with democratic elections and universal suffrage; separation of powers (executive, legislative, judicial); competitive and independent political parties; a free press; an established legal system with effective rule of law; control on corruption; minimal standards on human rights - including having no death penalty - and compliance with international law.
The sophomore poli-sci student, or a graduate student in philosophy, might stress that ultimately all this implies some minimum level of agreement on what all those things mean. The graduate student might bring some particular Wittgensteinian or Habermasian insights to the argument. And it's true. That's why the EU has elaborate procedures and established decision-making processes to reach effective determinations on this. (The Bannonites would say, "Hey, man, George Soros and the globalists just call whatever they want "democracy," everybody knows dat.")
A couple of thoughts, here. One is that the United States obviously doesn't meet the EU's minimum standards just by having the death penalty alone. And whether our Citizen's United system of campaign financing would pass the EU's corruption standards, I don't know.
Currently, the EU has formal reviews under way for Hungary and Poland for not maintaining the minimum democratic standards. Just three months ago there was an important court decision on judicial independence in Poland: Jon Stone, European Court of Justice orders Poland to stop purging its supreme court judgesIndependent 10/19/2018.
The general public assumption right now is that Hungary has gone the farthest of all the EU countries in the direction of "illiberal democracy," a term that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán uses with approval. Poland is considered the next most concerning example. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic are known as the Visegrad countries, and the latter two have also have some troubling developments in the same direction as Hungary and Poland. Far-right parties are part of the governing coalitions in Italy (the Lega) and Austria (Freedom Party, FPÖ). The same is also true for EU members Bulgaria, Denmark, Greece, and Latvia, and for non-EU countries Switzerland and Norway. (Caelainn Barr et al, Vom Flackern zum FeuerDer Freitag 01/2019, 04.01.2019)
Latin America's largest and most populous country Brazil recently elected a rightwing authoritarian President, Jair Bolsonaro, after years of the Brazilian oligarchs pursuing their version of Browning's point, "Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another." One of the main tools was a highly politicized anti-corruption investigation called Operation Car Wash, with which former center-left President Lula da Silva was imprisoned on dubious charges. And his successor, Dilma Rousseff, was removed from office in 2016 by a "soft coup" under charges that were transparently frivolous.
Among historians and other students of far right political movements, defining "fascism" in a rigorous way is a notoriously aggravating problem. Sometimes it can make you feel like adapting a version of Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964): "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."
That would mean: I don't know how to define fascism, but I know it when I see it!
One approach to the historical question that I find helpful is to look at the actual international connections between governments and movements. For instance, since Mussolini headed the Fascist Party, there's not really any dispute about calling them fascist. Austrian Prime Minister Engelbert Dollfuss established authoritarian rule in 1933 and formalized it into a dictatorship in 1934, one modeled explicitly on Italy's at the encouragement of Mussolini's government and the Catholic hierarchy. Its own self-description was Standestaat, or corporate state. ("Corporate state" in the sense of "estates" or social classes, not business corporations). But it was and is referred to as the Austro-fascist or clerical-fascist regime.
Similar associations and similarities can be applied to contemporary cases of "illiberal democracy."
A final comment on defining fascism. As Frederico Finchelstein notes in the article linked above:
In Brazil and elsewhere, right-wing populists are increasingly acting as the Nazis did and, at the same time, disavowing this Nazi legacy or even blaming the left for it. For post-fascist members of the alt-right, acting like a Nazi and accusing your opponent of being so is not a contradiction at all. Indeed, the idea of a leftist Nazism is a political myth that draws directly on the methods of Nazi propaganda.
According to Brazilian right-wingers and Holocaust deniers, it is the left that threatens to revive Nazism. This is, of course, a falsehood that comes straight out of the Nazi playbook. Fascists always deny what they are and ascribe their own features and their own totalitarian politics to their enemies. ...
... Fascists have always replaced reality with ideological fantasies. This is why Bolsonaro presents the left’s leaders as latter-day emulators of Hitler when in fact he is the only candidate close to the Führer in style and substance. [my emphasis]
For American rightwingers and Republicans making a similar charge against the Democrats (not just against people who could legitimately be considered far left), Jonah Goldberg's tendentious propaganda tract, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change (2008) provides a template for this nonsense. Dave Neiwert organized a set of reality-based responses to that book, or slogan in the form of a book, for History News Network (2010).
Comparing countries is not something most Americans think about a lot. After all, when you're part of the Greatest Country in the World, you don't need to do a lot of comparing, amirite?
Or, as Hillary Clinton put it in 2016 speaking to a group from the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), America is "the greatest country that has ever been created on the face of the earth for all of history." (Hillary Clinton addresses military veterans at the Democratic National ConventionTelegraph 07/25/2016, just after 1:10 in the video)
But if we want to look seriously at the relative health of democracies, we have to look at something beyond campaign hyperbole.
I recently took the time to read a book by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Entfernte Verwandtschaft: Faschismus, Nationalsozialismus, New Deal 1933-1939 (2005). It isn't a very good book. But I had seen it referenced as comparing the policies of the US, Italy, and Germany during the Great Depression. And there are comparisons to be made.
And that makes the level of comparison important. We could say that Sweden is a country, and Libya is a country, so they're both the same. And that's true, as far as it goes. But if we get a bit more specific, we would have to say that Sweden has a functioning national government, while Libya is generally considered to be a failed state. And that's a radical differnce.
So the level of comparison and the scope of it is important. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Age of Uncertainty (1977):
The Nazis were not given to [economics] books. Their reaction was to circumstance, and this served them better than the sound economists served Britain and the United States. From 1933, Hitler borrowed money and spent - and he did it liberally as [John Maynard] Keynes would have advised. It seemed the obvious thing to do, given the unemployment. At first, the spending was mostly for civilian works -railroads, canals, public buildings, the Autobahnen. Exchange control then kept frightened Germans from sending their money abroad and those with rising incomes from spending too much of it on imports.
The results were all a Keynesian could have wished. By late 1935, unemployment was at an end in Germany. By 1936, high income was pulling up prices or making it possible to raise them. Likewise wages were beginning to rise. So a ceiling was put over both prices and wages, and this too worked. Germany, by the late thirties, had full employment at stable prices. It was, in the industrial world, an absolutely unique achievement.
That is a straightforward assessment by a leading Keynesian economist. And it looks at particular mechanisms of economic policy: debt, deficit spending, and infrastructure projects. He draws a contrast to the previous policies of the German Chancellorship of Heinrich Brüning government in Germany (1930-32) and the American Presidency of Herbert Hoover (1929-1933). Both governments had pursued austerity polities, which was the widespread orthodoxy in most of the world. Franklin Roosevelt campaigned in 1932 on balanced budgets. Even leading European Marxist Social Democrats like Rudolf Hilferding and Otto Bauer thought that budget-balancing was the appropriate response to the crisis. The same orthodoxy plagued the social-democratic Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald in Britain.
So it is possible to make meaningful comparisons between countries on how they handled the Depression. But it requires making sensible comparisons while noting differences. But Schivelbusch draws dubious parallels at a high level of generalization that make an unconvincing argument for the point his making about parallels among the New Deal, Italian fascism, and Nazi Germany. He writes:
Nimmt man dazu die heute unbestrittene Tatsache, daß die USA erst durch den 2.Weltkrieg die Wirtschaftskrise überwanden, so ergibt sich ein weiterer wundersamer Parallelismus zwischen Faschismus, Nationalsozialismus und New Deal. Alle drei bedurften zur Überwindung ihrer Wirtschaftskrise einer Rüstungskonjunktur und letztlich des Krieges.
[If one also takes into account the reality, undisputed today, that the USA first overcame the economic crisis by the Second World War, then a additional wondrous parallel among fascism, National Socialism, and the New Deal. All three required an armaments increase and finally the war to overcome the economic crisis.]
That odd statement raised my curiosity about the book's perspective. Because the economy in general was on an upward swing during the 1930s, beginning in 1933 and interrupted by a 13-month recession in 1936-37. A recession whose occurrence had a lot to do with the fact that, despite his militant rhetoric against the "economic royalists" in the 1936 election, FDR switched after the election to budget-balancing, i.e., toward austerity policies, which he had the sense to soon abandon.
But it's a common anti-New Deal and anti-Keynesian argument to say that, see, the New Deal didn't work! It took the war to end the Depression! In American politics, this goes comfortably together with a seemingly endless bipartisan faith in the virtue of military spending. (In the real world, government spending on war mobilization and armaments stimulates the economy in the same way building new posts offices did, by the borrowing money and spending it.)
Unfortunately, his analysis reflects that shaky assumptions and high level of generalization reflected in that statement. He cites a lot of comtemporary sources making comparisons of the New Deal to fascism and National Socialism. He also cites various Americans expressing admiration for Mussolini's policies, leaving a false impression that it was entirely mainstream and respectable in the US to do so. That was not the case.
The contemporary sources he cites include people distinctly on the left politically, including civil rights activist Oswald Garrison Villard; Alfred Bingham, editor of a left-leaning journal called Common Sense; V. F. Calverton, a pseudonym of George Goetz, a left radical who edited a journal called Modern Quarterly; and pro-New Deal writers Gilbert Montague and Ruth E. Shallcross.
But he also cites some very dubious figures as well. The rightwing crackpot isolationist John T. Flynn and the American activist for what he himself called "national socialism," Lawrence Dennis, were among "the sharpest analysts and critics of the New Deal," in Schivelbusch's view. If by that he means polemical, frivolous rightwingers, then I suppose we could agree with him. He or his editors chose to put that assessment in an epilogue. Which was good judgment on their part, because I would have probably stopped reading if they had put it in an introduction. The epilogue at least points out that Flynn was an isolationist and that Dennis is regarded as a fascist. The far right Mises Institute profile of Flynn praises him as a "master polemicist of the Old Right". Gary Younge provides additional biographical information in The fascist who 'passed' for whiteGuardian 04/04/2007
Schivelbusch includes an alibi comment showing that he's aware that calling Roosevelt and the New Deal "fascist" was a cheap polemical practice of his enemies:
Den Faschismusvergleich, den die Gegner Roosevelts in der tagespolitischen Rhetorik benutzten, können wir wegen seiner durchschaubaren propagandistischen Natur und Willkür unberücksichtigt lassen.
[The fascism comparison that Roosevelt's opponents used in daily political rhetoric, we can ignore because of his transparently propagandistic nature and and arbitrariness.]
But then he praises Flynn and Dennis as sound and insightful sources? Please.
Another of his comparison quotes comes from J.B. Matthews, who served as executive director to Joe McCarthy's Red hunting Senate Investigating Committee. A militant leftist in his younger years, who joined the Socialist Party and also co-authored a book on fascism with Ruth Shallcross publishe by the leftist League for Industrial Democracy in 1934. But by 1938 at the latest, he became a zealous rightwinger. In a biographical article that is balanced and even sympathetic, Nelson Dawson nevertheless leaves the impression that Matthews was an erratic character, at least when it came to political ideology. "It is sometimes difficult to determine precisely what Matthews believed and, indeed, when he believed it," he writes. His career as a Red-hunter pretty much ended after he published an article in the far right American Mercury charging, "The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States today is composed of Protestant clergymen." That, Dawson observes drily, was "admittedly an assertion of considerable audacity." (From Fellow Traveler to Anticommunist: The Odyssey of J. B. MatthewsRegister of the Kentucky Historical Society 84:3; Summer 1986)
That some on the left and the right made (usually) disapproving comparisons of the New Deal with Italian fascism reflects the fact that fascism had the general reputation of being undemocratic and dictatorial. Even Herbert Hoover rolled out the accusation, which Schivelbusch quotes in English, "We must fight again for a government founded on individual liberty and opportunity that was the American vision. If we lose we will continue down this New Deal road to some sort of personal government based upon collectivist theories. Under these ideas ours can become some sort of Fascist government."
But "fascism" was also a useful epithet because, not entirely unlike today, most Americans had only a vague idea of what it meant. Writing in 1960, James Shenton explains (Fascism and Father CoughlinWisconsin Magazine of History 44:1; Autumn 1960):
Americans have notoriously refused to ft define political terms exactly. Often a single term has been used to cover such a multitude of sins and virtues that the historian or political scientist is left with the impression that he has entered into a wonderland of nonsense. An excellent example of this propensity is the scope with which the word "fascism" was used in depression America. A person unfamiliar with the New Deal era might, after reading the popular magazines and journals of the day, be justified in assuming that fascism was the dominant political mood of America during the 1930's. ...
... fascism [has] been used to describe the Daughters of the American Revolution, Boss Frank Hague, the New Deal - and particularly its NIRA experiment - Huey Long, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, local chambers of commerce, the American Legion, Tammany, and the Reverend Charles E. Coughlin, among others.
But why would people who were sympathetic to fascism, either overtly or very obviously implicitly, criticize the New Deal as fascist? Because they indulged in sectarian double-talk, for one thing. Part of Lawrence Dennis' schtick was to argue that the Roosevelt Administration and the New Deal were fascist, but a bad fascism. What he wanted to see was a good fascism. Rightwingers today still use this kind of quirky, double-reverse arguments.
Yes, comparisons between countries can be a challenge. One that Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Entfernte Verwandtschaft doesn't rise to meet.
The historian Timothy Snyder has an informative article from last March about Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), a philosopher that Vladimir Putin has been promoting since 2005 or so and who Putin occasionally quotes: Timothy Snyder, Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian FascismNYBooks 03/16/2018. Much of the material also appears in Snyder's book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018).
Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), Russian fascist philosopher
Ilyin's ideas seem to be especially suited for using to justify Russian hostility toward Ukraine. And Snyder seems to think that a lot of "Western observers" were distracted by that, though he doesn't really expand on the point. He writes:
Ilyin’s arguments were everywhere as Russian troops entered Ukraine multiple times in 2014. As soldiers received their mobilization orders for the invasion of the Ukraine’s Crimean province in January 2014, all of Russia’s high-ranking bureaucrats and regional governors were sent a copy of Ilyin’s [book] Our Tasks. After Russian troops occupied Crimea and the Russian parliament voted for annexation, Putin cited Ilyin
again as justification. The Russian commander sent to oversee the second major movement of Russian troops into Ukraine, to the southeastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in summer 2014, described the war’s final goal in terms that Ilyin would have understood: “If the world were saved from demonic constructions such as the United States, it would be easier for everyone to live. And one of these days it will happen.”
Ilyin's philosophy was a strange combination of Russian Oxthodox mysticism, extreme Russian nationalism, and fascist politics as it was known in the 1920s and 1930s, with some neo-Hegelianism and a bit of phenomenology thrown in to make things even more confusing. Snyder doesn't think Putin is modeling his approach to government on Ilyin's ideas. "Russia today is a media-heavy authoritarian kleptocracy, not the religious totalitarian entity that Ilyin imagined," Snyder writes.
But he also believes Ilyin's somewhat jumbled ideas provide an important insight into how Putin views governing and at least some of the ways he justifies Russian nationalism in official ideology. Snyder also talks in this article about how Putin sees weakening or destroying the European Union as a functioning entity to be an important foreign policy goal for Russia. Even though Ilyin was bitterly opposed to the Communist government of the Soviet Union, the Putinist version of his approach manages to portray the USSR as an example of Russia's mystical national mission to purify the world. Or something along those lines. And yet at the same time, the official observances in 2017 of the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution pictured Ilyin "as its heroic opponent." The Putinist version is jumbled in its own way.
One surprising element in Snyder's account is Ilyin's interest in psychoanalysis:
In 1913, Ilyin worried that perversion was a national Russian syndrome, and proposed Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) as Russia’s savior. In Ilyin’s reading of Freud, civilization arose from a collective agreement to suppress basic drives. The individual paid a psychological price for sacrifice of his nature to culture. Only through long consultations on the couch of the psychoanalyst could unconscious experience surface into awareness. Psychoanalysis therefore offered a very different portrait of thought than did the Hegelian philosophy that Ilyin was then studying. Even as Ilyin was preparing his dissertation on Hegel, he offered himself as the pioneer of Russia’s national psychotherapy, travelling with Natalia to Vienna in May 1914 for sessions with Freud. [my emphasis]
I would be very curious to know how those sessions went!
