And yet, in 2016, we have woken up to the reality of resurgent fascism. Not since the 1930s has it been so triumphant, capturing the imagination of people in rich industrial democracies and winning at the ballot box.
What is fascism? Fascist regimes and movements over the past century shared all or most of the basic ideological principles:
Collective identity based on race, nationality, religion or class, often presented as a return to some harmonious age of the past; disdain for democracy and other forms of consensus and compromise between divergent interests of society.
Division into “us” vs. “them”, with “them” seen as the cause of “our” problems; as a consequence, denial of rights of minorities and rejection of accommodation with those who “don’t belong”.
Fondness for the irrational and disdain for professional opinion.
Rejection of complexities of the modern world and preference for quick, simple solutions.
Cult of a strong leader who expresses “our” collective will and provides quick, simple solutions by cutting through all the liberal-democratic bull.
That Russia should succumb to the lure of fascism comes as no surprise. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the “lawless 1990s” so closely paralleled the end of World War I and the Weimar Republic in Germany that it was almost fated to follow in the German footsteps to the end – which it is now doing with the annexation of Crimea and attempted Anschluss with Eastern Ukraine under the same banner of uniting a divided nation.
More astounding is the fact that the leading Anglo-Saxon powers, the two great champions of democracy in the 20th century and a bulwark against fascism, have fallen into the same trap.
Indeed, the Brexit vote in Britain in some respects conforms to the ideological tenets of good old fascism. There is nostalgia for the great sovereign empire as well as cozy “little England” and hatred of immigrants who are changing the character of the country. Michael Gove, a leading pro-Brexit voice, called on voters ignore experts – and in fact the voting was generally irrational, with regions whose economies depend on the EU most voting overwhelmingly to leave.
The rise of Donald Trump exhibits the same characteristics as the Brexit vote – except, happening as it does in America, it is much more extreme, violent, bizarre and alienated both from mainstream and reality. Toxic fascist ingredients are present in the Trumpist movement in spades: nativism, racism and xenophobia expressed in the #AmericaFirst hashtag Trump sometimes uses, nostalgia for the good old days of US dominance encapsulated in the “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan, etc..
Foreigners are predictably blamed for “destroying America” with the connivance of unpatriotic liberals. Also predictably, the Trumpist brew contains a measure of anti-Semitism and extreme misogyny. In fact, strong, independent women are especially abhorrent to fascism, with its sniveling nostalgia for traditional family values and the good old days. A career woman can never be anything but a bitch or a “Crooked Hillary”. It is especially ironic that Trump is stirring America’s homegrown fascism while running against the first female nominee of a major US political party.
Like Hitler and Mussolini before him, Trump loathes democracy, its institutions and due process that limit the flight of his fancy. He talks of a rigged system but what he actually means is that the system lacks a strong leader who could step in and ensure a “genuinely American” outcome. What else but a “rigged system” can explain the election of Barack Obama, for whom Trump and his followers have nothing but condescending disdain reserved for lower races? What else can explain the lack of indictment of Hillary Clinton?
Small wonder Trump has expressed admiration for people like Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein and the North Korean Kims.
Trump doesn’t have an election platform in a conventional sense, but most of what he has pledged to do if he becomes president contravenes the Constitution. His recent encounter with Republican leaders in Congress revealed that he isn’t even familiar with the document. The question arises, first, how he intends to take the oath of office whose most important function is to uphold the Constitution and, second, how can the Republican Party nominate a candidate who effectively proposes to tear down the fundamental law of the land?
Finally but significantly, Trump rejects professional advice. He has severed all connection between his pronouncements and basic facts. His followers, too, have abandoned reality in favor of the irrational. Whatever you think of the kind of America they want to live in, to believe that Donald Trump can bring it about is extremely naive.
The Trump phenomenon was engendered by the same social forces that have fueled the Brexit vote in Britain. The two countries are in the vanguard of modernity with its breakneck technological change and social dislocations, they are the main beneficiaries of the ascendency of the financial sector on the wave of cheap money pumped into the economy by world central banks. The egalitarian postwar economic system has broken down, creating relatively few winners and an enormous mass of losers. Entire social classes and nations are struggling desperately to stay relevant and solvent in this new world.
While Brexit seems to have come out of nowhere, stirrings of discontent in the United States were evident already in the 2012 Republican primaries. Back then, the party’s rank and file were already restive, swinging in quick succession from one marginally sane candidate to another in search of a leader who would give voice to their fears, resentments and hatreds.
Of course no one in their wildest dreams expected the homegrown American Fuehrer to turn out to be a fraud and a buffoon – an evil narcissistic nonentity. Now that all of Trump’s business shenanigans are starting to come out, we may soon see a class action suit against the Trump brand, which seems nothing but a cover for fleecing consumers.
However, it makes perfect sense, for the fascist leaders of the past – Hitler, Mussolini and Uncle Joe Stalin – were also, in essence, evil narcissistic nonentities.
In 1933, the Germans opted for Hitler who promised to make sense of the post-World War I confusion and rebuild the nation. People who voted for him wasted their protest vote. They voted for a maniac and for his irrational simplification of an increasingly complex modern world. Those who survived his bold experimentations lived to regret it.
After the war, the Europeans fell out of love with irrational solutions. They opted for the boring, painstaking process of building democratic institutions and creating a cadres of professionals able to run them. They built a complex world based on a system of checks and balances, accommodation and inclusiveness. Washington sponsored and initially funded this project, but during the ensuing decades the United States also underwent considerable change – first liberalizing as a result of the Vietnam war, student protests and the Civil Rights movement and then, starting in the mid-1970s, accepting a wave of new immigrants on whose labor and energy the current American prosperity has been based.
Liberal democracy has not been a uniformly successful project and it is certainly riven with flaws. In its current form, it no longer responds to the challenges of the modern world. However, the only way to achieve success is to reform existing institutions rather than fall for the facile lure of fascism proffered by Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Vladimir Putin, Marie Le Pen, Norbert Hofer, Viktor Orban and others of their ilk who are coming out of the woodwork around the globe.
