{"id":382,"date":"2020-07-26T17:25:17","date_gmt":"2020-07-26T21:25:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/?page_id=382"},"modified":"2020-07-26T17:25:17","modified_gmt":"2020-07-26T21:25:17","slug":"the-dark-european-stain-how-the-far-right-rose-again-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/the-dark-european-stain-how-the-far-right-rose-again-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The dark European stain: how the far right rose again"},"content":{"rendered":"
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New Statesman<\/em>, 12 SEPTEMBER 2018<\/span><\/h1>\n<\/header>\n
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Faced with Trump and populist nationalism, liberals are quick to proclaim the return of fascism. But other disturbing historical echoes are going unnoticed.<\/em><\/p>\n

BY THOMAS MEANEY<\/p>\n

When the last zoning war is won, and the Donald J Trump Presidential Library finally opens for business in Manhattan, it is not hard to imagine future historians idling inside the gift shop, regretting that their subject had not done them all a favour and gone full fascist. How much easier the history would be to write if one could date the beginning of the end of the democratic era to the day Trump took office? How much more convenient if the echoes of the 1930s had been of perfect pitch: if Trump had locked up Hillary Clinton, if the trade wars had turned hot; if, instead of withdrawing security clearances from his enemies, Trump simply had them shot.<\/p>\n

The intellectual reflex of today\u2019s Western liberals is to invoke the spectre of fascism. It is the most solemn way of registering their revulsion at the course politics has taken. Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state and herself a child of fascist Europe, writes that fascism \u201cpose[s] a more serious threat now than at any time since the end of the Second World War\u201d. Fintan O\u2019Toole, Ireland\u2019s leading liberal intellectual, declares fascism is under way. \u201cWhat we are living with is pre-fascism,\u201d he writes. Michelle Goldberg of the\u00a0New York Time<\/em>s agrees: fascism \u201cis already here\u201d.<\/p>\n

Liberal historians have certified the mantra. \u201cThe attempt to undo the Enlightenment as a way to undo institutions,\u201d the Yale historian Timothy Snyder says, citing Trump\u2019s first two years as president, \u201cthat is fascism.\u201d Nor is the fascist wave confined to the United States. Upstanding liberals are supposed to take it as given that France only narrowly escaped a second round of Vichy under Marine Le Pen, that Italy has undergone a new \u201cMarch on Rome\u201d, and that even Scandinavia now has a right-wing \u201cmodel\u201d in the Sweden Democrats. During the recent bout of political deadlock late last year in Berlin, when Angela Merkel\u2019s Christian Democratic Union could neither form a coalition, nor stomach running a minority government, the Harvard historian Charles Maier published a pie chart comparing the voting patterns of the Weimar Republic with current German ones, coyly noting that they were not\u00a0exactly<\/em>\u00a0the same.<\/p>\n

The definition of fascism is notoriously hard to pin down. The recent coinages \u2013 twee-fascism, gonzo-fascism, schizo-fascism \u2013 no less so. With understandable caution, some historians insist the term only applies to the social conditions in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s, when the term was first used by Mussolini and his\u00a0squadristi<\/em>to describe their vision of society and the state. But most agree that fascism at least applies to the broader phenomenon of right-wing regimes in the interwar years, when parties and groups such as the Nazis, Romania\u2019s Iron Guard, the French Popular Party, the Spanish Falange, and others, came to the fore. These parties forged a new political form by blending together different features, which were sometimes at odds with each other: the idolisation of the beauty and efficacy of violence, the need to construct a mythical past for the people that could only be fulfilled by the instincts of a charismatic leader, and the belief that socialism could only be achieved through a corporatist economy that met the needs of a racially defined group and co-ordinated the interests between workers and capitalists.<\/p>\n

Many fascist movements took aim at the idea of not only liberal democracy \u2013 but \u201cdemocracy\u201d\u00a0tout court<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 which they took to be a political form that, in its vagueness and elasticity, threatened to dilute the special life force of the chosen people. The problem with invoking fascism today is less that it doesn\u2019t work as a historical parallel or that it doesn\u2019t summon the correct response in populations already numb to every form of invective. Rather, the comparison mistakes the symptoms of decaying liberal democracies \u2013 anti-refugee sentiments, the return of anti-Semitism, the attraction to right-populists \u2013 for the cause. Worse, it serves as an exculpatory manoeuvre for political elites who, however inadvertently, helped soften the ground for the current upsurge of the right.<\/p>\n

In the broadest sense, fascism is not a useful word. Almost none of the right-wing populist movements of our time pit themselves against the principles or rhetoric of democracy. Instead they view liberalism as an alien spore that has infected real democracy. The bluntest besieger of liberal democracy in Europe today is the Hungarian president, Viktor Orb\u00e1n. In a Transylvanian spa town this summer, Orb\u00e1n made the case for the fundamental incompatibility between democracy \u2013 specifically, Christian democracy \u2013 and \u201cliberalism\u201d. Untraditional families, immigration and cultural pluralism \u2013 Orb\u00e1n wants to weed them all out of Hungary. But more notable is that he plans to do it through the EU. \u201cLet us steel ourselves for the European Parliament elections,\u201d Orb\u00e1n told his audience, \u201cwe are on the threshold of a great moment.\u201d He may not be wrong. Orb\u00e1n\u2019s political party, Fidesz, is a member of the European People\u2019s Party, alongside Merkel\u2019s Christian Democrats, whose right flank is far from repelled by Orb\u00e1n\u2019s calls for a more exclusionary politics.<\/p>\n

The reliance of right-wing populists on traditional institutions and precedent is even clearer in the US. Trump has appointed and nominated reactionary Supreme Court justices in a perfectly legal manner (with members of the American liberal professoriate complimenting him on his choices). His child separation policy on the Mexican border provided some of the most repugnant scenes in recent American history. But such separations were already being conducted under Obama and George W Bush (though Trump turned an ad hoc policy into a formal one), and may likely fall within America\u2019s constitutional provisions. One of the ongoing ironies of the Trump years in America is watching liberals put their faith in the very institutions they despised only a few years before \u2013 the CIA, the FBI, the NSA \u2013 to protect them from the domestic menace. In the Deep State we trust.<\/p>\n

Is thinking about the conditions of the 1930s and our own time in any way useful? One aspect of fascism\u2019s rise to power seems particularly relevant. It is sometimes forgotten how fragile and uncertain the fascist ascent in Europe was in the interwar period. Mussolini\u2019s \u201cMarch on Rome\u201d, in which he seized power in Italy at the head of thousands of blackshirts, is a bit of very successful fascist mythology. In fact Mussolini arrived from Milan in a comfortable railway sleeping car, and warily called on King Victor Emmanuel III, who \u2013 instead of using the forces available to him to crush Mussolini\u2019s followers and deny his claim on power \u2013 acquiesced and gave him the reins of the state. More dramatically, Hitler was invited into the German government by an old guard of conservatives who thought that they could control him as their political puppet.<\/p>\n

The way in which fascists were only able to rise in Europe with the connivance of conservatives was something that fascists themselves wanted to forget by the time they reached their heights in the 1940s. (And they weren\u2019t the only ones: the Allies, too, had every interest in presenting Italian and German fascists as upstarts without any deep support.) But today, once again, conservatives have serenely presided over Trump\u2019s tinkering and savoured the blessings he has brought to the Republican Party. In this scenario \u2013 crude, but more accurate than others \u2013 Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is America\u2019s Paul von Hindenburg, the Weimar president who thought he could manage the F\u00fchrer.<\/p>\n

Only this time, the conservatives have got their way: Trump delivered the tax cut Republicans have been salivating over for more than a generation; and he is able to voice views they no longer find it profitable to air, but which they profit from nonetheless. Nazism itself was no foe to private enterprise, but early on it was more divided about its relation to capitalists. Trump, too, makes noises in this direction \u2013 on certain days he seems to want to imitate China\u2019s state capitalism model \u2013 but Republicans have no reason to be threatened by the rhetoric, considering Trump\u2019s record and his unblinking eye on the US stock market.<\/p>\n

In Germany, too, a species of conservatism still has the upper hand, despite the inroads of some genuinely fascist elements in Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland (AfD), whose advertisements should one day compete for space in museum display cases with Nazi propaganda (a recent campaign poster reads: \u201cGerman core culture! Islam-free schools!\u201d below a picture of frolicking, pale teenagers). This summer Horst Seehofer, the leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU) and an Orb\u00e1n admirer, was not only invited into Merkel\u2019s cabinet, but was allowed to call the shots on migration policies.<\/p>\n

In my interviews with AfD politicians, it was often difficult to tell the difference between their line and that of more standard German conservatives. Alexander Gauland, the co-head of the AfD, whom I met in his rooms in the City Palace at Potsdam, shifted effortlessly between the bombast of a Trumpian provocateur and the pro-market, pro-Nato, pro-US platitudes of a dyed-in-the-Cold-War German liberal.<\/p>\n

If one is worried about fascism, the real lesson of the 1930s is to look at the conditions that gave rise to Trumpism and new political forces such as the AfD.<\/strong>America\u2019s decades of fruitless, costly wars \u2013 in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya \u2013 have undermined faith in the \u201cliberal international order\u201d much more than Trump\u2019s lack of reverence for it. In the US, the Republican Party has long wanted to reward its upper economic stratum, but has only now cottoned on to the fact that it can be more effectively done in a fully hypocritical populist guise than one that sincerely clings to the virtues of the free market. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has been content to sabotage the organisation of its working-class constituents, who may well still be keeping a vigil for the emergence of a new New Deal.<\/p>\n

In Europe the story looks different. The blanket policies of economic austerity, so apparently enlightened that European elites stopped bothering to justify them, are often understood as having provided populists of every stripe with tinder to burn. But the effects of austerity on the surge of nativism on the continent are very difficult to measure. In Germany, the political scientists Philip Manow and Hanna Schwander have challenged the widespread assumption that it was Germany\u2019s \u201closers of globalisation\u201d who voted in droves for the AfD. Germany, after all, was still experiencing its post-2008 boom as the far-right surged across the country, mostly piloted by \u201cwinners of globalisation\u201d (early on, the AfD was personally funded by the respectable former president of the Federal Association of German Industry, Hans-Olaf Henkel, though he has since distanced himself from the party).<\/p>\n

Manow and Schwander argue that populations that suffer from globalisation via the free flow of goods and capital (ie who live in low-productivity economies, and whose states can\u2019t counteract this with the manipulation of currency) will vote for left-wing populists. By contrast, countries that suffer from globalisation via increased influx into their welfare systems will turn to the right. The voters for the AfD are against migrants not because migrants are competition in the labour market, but because migrants may become competition for social benefits. In particular, AfD voters are horrified about refugees receiving monthly allowances that they themselves may have received \u2013 or were eligible to receive \u2013 a decade previously, and may one day need again.<\/p>\n

The leading historians of European fascism have balked at being asked to validate the supposed \u201cfascist creep\u201d. Dylan Riley, a scholar of interwar Romania and Italy, makes the uncomfortable argument in his work that fascism, contrary to what liberals tend to think, is not premised on the destruction of civil society. Instead it is something that can grow out of civil society. For Riley the most notable aspect of Trump is not his fascistic tendencies but his \u201cneo-Bonapartism\u201d, which Riley defines as \u201ca form of state-dependent capitalism, in the sense that profits will owe more to political connections and interventions than to productivity\u201d. The result is the opposite of the fascist empowerment of the political party: in the scenario of state-dependent capitalism, Riley argues, parties wither away, leaving only enterprising salesmen to collect the political remains.<\/p>\n

For Robert Paxton, the revered historian of Vichy France, Trump appears too ignorant of what a state actually is to be a good fascist \u2013 he is more of a plutocrat interested in growing his own wealth and that of his family and fellow \u201canti-elite\u201d elites. Beyond his passion for military parades, Trump does not see violence or new large-scale military adventures as a way of transcending the failures of the American brand of neoliberalism \u2013 at least not yet. Unlike today\u2019s right-wing populists, interwar fascists, Paxton reminds us, were generally averse to replicating themselves: Hitler was pleased to see the Romanian fascist party brought to heel, and found Franco intolerable. For Geoff Eley, one of the shrewdest historians of Nazism, what\u2019s most notable are the keenly felt global pressures that Trump is proposing a solution for. Where the Nazis worked hard to gin up an internal enemy, Trump can coast on the anti-Muslim propaganda of the American media, and point to enemies at the border, who are desperate to link up with domestic subversives.<\/p>\n

These migrants and refugees represent the area where Trump has perhaps been most innovative. He recognised much earlier than the neoconservatives or traditionalist \u201cpaleocons\u201d that upgrading Islam to the status of public enemy number one was not going to be sufficient. With the infinitely inflatable threat of communism gone with the end of the Cold War, something equally flexible was required for the fear-monger. China would seem to fit the bill, and Trump occasionally uses it, but it is still too abstract: it is still a word on product labels, rather than a physically embodied presence. Instead, the figure of the migrant has become the best way to recharge the friend-enemy distinction.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s brilliance on the campaign trail was to build up the sense of the enemy as the non-American who is pursuing Americanness among natives: the enemy who wants to dilute or possibly poison the beloved brand. There is fake news but there are also fake Americans \u2013 and only Trump and his administration, the message goes, are ruthless enough to weed them out.<\/p>\n

This gambit has worked remarkably well. While liberal commentators expected Latino Americans and their supporters to band together in a beautiful, solidarity-igniting protest, something else appears to be happening. In the immediate wake of the implementation of the child separation policy, the approval of Trump among Hispanic voters appears to have increased. They seem to be doing what \u201cpassing\u201d populations have traditionally done to survive: to assimilate into the white majority \u2013 to compress their identity to \u201cwhite\u201d as opposed to \u201cHispanic white\u201d \u2013 and present themselves as part of the host population.<\/p>\n

The Weimar Complex that certain liberals today exhibit has an unfortunate \u2013 and perhaps not entirely coincidental \u2013 way of shutting out the possibility of learning from other historical periods, not to mention other regions. Two candidates for comparison for our decade would be the 1960s (a decade of comparable polarisation) or the 1990s (a decade when smaller upsurges of right-wing populism were roundly defeated in several countries). The 1990s saw the rise of Third Way politics and the muscle-flexing of the \u201cliberal international order\u201d and bears more resemblances to our time than many liberals seem prepared to admit. But there is one critical difference: what lost back then is advancing now.<\/p>\n

In Germany in the 1990s, small right-wing \u201cflash parties\u201d such as the Republikaners and the Schill Party appeared, but never made the inroads of the AfD. The young Viktor Orb\u00e1n already had a stint as prime minister of Hungary in the late Nineties, though he recognised quite clearly that the timing for a nationalist resurgence was not yet ripe.<\/p>\n

Only Silvio Berlusconi, having taken the reins of a country suddenly no longer of geopolitical consequence, was able in the 1990s to serve up a preview of coming attractions: the special brew of populist, nativist politics combined with a neoliberal agenda that is the signature political form of our time. With a combination of cultural canniness and charisma, Berlusconi first got a nation of Catholics to watch soft pornography in the evenings, and then embarked on an orgy of privatisation and state sell-offs more spectacular than his Viagra-fuelled soir\u00e9es.<\/p>\n

What kept the forces of right-wing populism back in the 1990s, which is no longer able to hold them back now? There appear to be three elements. The first was that the Cold War had kept polarisation within Western democratic electorates relatively at bay. In the face of Soviet propaganda \u2013 and the Soviet example \u2013 the liberal regimes of the West were compelled to provide their lower-middle classes with tolerable living conditions, and a common vision of the future. Neither imperative remained in place after 1989, as had been registered earlier in the years of the Cold War D\u00e9tente. The second, greater condition for liberalism\u2019s relative power was that the Third Way \u2013 the new \u201ccompassionate\u201d form of neoliberalism \u2013 had not yet failed, at least in the public\u2019s mind. And so it was granted a trial period of sorts that ended in the financial crisis and Middle Eastern paroxysm. Finally, the pressure of China in the global economy had still not yet been adequately felt in the 1990s. The Chinese state was, for instance, still a net exporter of oil until 1993, not having yet adjusted to its own appetite for resources.<\/p>\n

What was new in the 1990s \u2013 the decline of Cold War solidarity, the Third Way, the rise of China \u2013 is now old hat. But the right-wing populism of that decade has still never been properly tested. To the horror of those liberals who came to prominence in the 1990s, Tony Blair above all, it seems that a significant portion of their populations are willing to \u201cgive fascism a chance\u201d. But to the horror of the more authentically fascist-minded figures of today\u2019s right \u2013 from Steve Bannon to the AfD\u2019s Bj\u00f6rn H\u00f6cke, from Olcay Kilavuz, leader of the Turkish Grey Wolves, to Tommy Robinson, formerly of the English Defence League \u2013 illiberal nationalism is being thwarted by an adaptable breed of populist neoliberals. The rising political form of our time appears to be a mongrel: the expansion of the market into every domain, combined with shrewdly targeted redistribution and social programmes, all wrapped in an appeal to racial solidarity and the demonisation of outsiders.<\/p>\n

To counter this combination, liberals need to do more than just roll back privatisation, tweak social provisions and crush right-populists at the voting booth. The longer-range necessity is to undermine the view that we live in an economic and political order without alternatives. At the minimum, this will mean allowing socialist contraband \u2013 under whatever label necessary \u2013 back on to the dock of liberalism<\/p>\n

Thomas Meaney is a visiting fellow at the Institut f\u00fcr die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) in Vienna<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New Statesman, 12 SEPTEMBER 2018 Faced with Trump and populist nationalism, liberals are quick to proclaim the return of fascism. But other disturbing historical echoes are going unnoticed. BY THOMAS MEANEY When the last zoning war is won, and the Donald J Trump Presidential Library finally opens for business in Manhattan, it is not hard … Continue reading “The dark European stain: how the far right rose again”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":114,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-382","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/114"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":383,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/382\/revisions\/383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}