The call of the fascist

What's the appeal of facisim ? We would do well to remember a quote from this video :

Communism, totalitarianism, dictatorships, fascism, they all come with positives. If they didn’t, they’d never make it to power. The question is what’s traded in return. If we really want to learn from their mistakes, we absolutely need to look at how they got there. It’s disingenuous to only discuss failed societies from a post-collapse perspective.

Above all, we need to get past the simplistic notion that people only do anything because of their innate character. They don't. They are, unfortunately, far more complicated than that. I like the analysis presented in this Aeon piece very much, which compares and contrasts modern-day tendencies towards strongmen with those of the 1930s.

Yes, we must attend to new threats, but old ones can reoccur too. Mass unemployment isn’t what threatens us today... Powerlessness [as well as unemployment] can lead to detachment. But it can also lead to exuberant support for whomever seems to be on your wavelength. 

I would interject here that this is another consequence of inequality that is independent of absolute standards. Whereas certain "progressives" feel that it's absolute, personal standards of living that matter to people's overall satisfaction, others might argue that the statistics do not properly capture a sense of unfairness - perhaps one not always consciously realised. If you have a decent house and a reliable wage, you may still legitimately look at a billionaire with a personal harem of the entire cast of Love Island and sixteen Jaguars and think, "that ain't right". You can feel dissatisfied with society even when your own circumstances are, judged against some absolute standard, pretty good. You can justly feel, "I'm happy with my own life, but that person's wealth gives him undue influence and I don't want them having so much say in what I do" .

The concern for workers’ rights is surely the forgotten element in far-Right ideology. In the first instance, far-Right ideas can bloom in those who consider themselves wronged or ignored by their political leaders. Early fascists latched on to low-paid workers, war veterans and others who felt betrayed by a system that gave them nothing in return for their sacrifices.  

Yet, surely, national inequality is an obsession of the Left rather than the Right? In the end, what is the difference between fascist and Left-wing ideas?  According to Oswald Mosley – the leader of the British Union of Fascists from 1932 to 1940 – the British Labour Party was pursuing policies of ‘international socialism’, while fascism’s aim was ‘national socialism’.

Early Italian fascism broke from socialism only on the grounds of nationalism. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini proposed giving women the vote, lowering the voting age to 18, introducing an eight-hour workday, worker participation in industrial management, heavy progressive capital tax and the partial confiscation of war profits. Of course, he also advocated extreme nationalism and Italian expansionism, but the pro-worker aspects of his programme are striking.

I would here repeat my own personal definition of patriotism versus nationalism, which I think the author broadly agrees with : a patriot loves their own country, whereas a nationalist also hates all others. A fascist can be (it doesn't follow that this is always true) genuinely concerned for their own citizens, or perhaps some narrower demographic, and is quite prepared to step on anyone else in order to help them. Someone who is merely patriotic, however, regardless of political affiliation, wants to help their own country but is not necessarily prepared to weaken others in order to do so. And then of course there are people who just hate everybody, but that's another story.

What keeps this type of more sophisticated nationalism, or patriotism, liberal or progressive is that it is intended to be nonexclusive. You take pride in your country’s achievements while recognising that other countries can take pride in theirs. And you don’t exclude or demonise outsiders. But how easy is it to maintain this position? At the very least, it takes work to prevent it from sliding into the dangerous blind loyalty that breeds racism and xenophobia. The crowd can form too quickly.

Why ? It's easy to love your family without thinking that all other families must be shite. In fact you'd have to work really hard to convince practically anyone that only their own family was important. So why does nationalism become destructively competitive, even among tiny nations who have never done anything to anyone ?

We cannot wish nationalist sentiment away. Much of ordinary political and cultural life depends on it. Pride in national traditions of food, wine, sport, art, music and literature. Attachment to a particular, bounded, territory. Solidarity with those with a shared history.

Perhaps it's simply that such values are frequently taken out of context and deliberately exclude others. Unless your family lives under a rock, you can't be unaware that there are other families - you'll have to interact with them directly quite often. But with something more abstract like a country, it's easy to put together, say, the Museum of Welsh Life that deliberately excludes (or at least neglects) vital contributions to sheep shearing and rugby from other countries. If you only ever give people local examples of things they should appreciate, it's easy to look on contributions from further afield as somehow lesser, rather than celebrating them as part of a common heritage.

Take Medieval 2 : Total War. I always found there were some countries I was more inclined to play as than others. The Byzantines ? Sure, the last vestiges of the Roman Empire, what European wouldn't see them as worthy of leading back to glory ? Whereas, the French... no, no, as a Brit, the French are for fighting, not playing. Hah, the very idea of it !

Mussolini and Mosley are a reminder that espousing a concern for workers’ rights is not, in itself, a protection against authoritarianism. In the United Kingdom today, there is a growing belief that it was the Labour Party’s failure to embrace nationalist policies – thought to be favoured by its traditional voters – that led to its humiliating electoral defeat in 2019.

On the first point I agree, and would add that the certain kinds of populism aren't even really concerned with worker's rights at all - they're just used as a flimsy attempt to appear moral and entrance supporters. As in that famous Charlie Chaplin speech, "dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people."
On the second point, here I do have to raise a serious quibble with the author (and with Aeon's apparent policy against linking to sources, which might have clarified things). I've never heard anyone claiming this explanation for the electoral defeat, nor is it necessary. Brexit+Corbyn = more than sufficient explanation. Also, are Labour's traditional supporters nationalists ? No ! When I was growing up, Labour was unashamedly pro-immigration and no-one questioned their patriotism. Somewhere along the line, long before Brexit was an issue, the British left got into an absolutely catastrophically confused situation of these disastrously mixed messages as to whether it welcomed immigrants or not. They lost the ability to explain why immigration does not infringe the rights and prospects of British workers. With eastern Europeans currently being flown in to provide essential jobs, perhaps both sides will be forced to learn something from this horrible situation.

Fascism has the knack of turning democracy against itself. Democracy has been used as a stepping stone to power, only to be dismantled and replaced by authoritarian rule... The first stage concerns the basic question, What is democracy? Naturally, we identify democracy with majority rule...  But Mill points out that democracy exposes us to a new sort of tyranny: the tyranny of the majority. 

At the heart of democracy is a tension between the rule of the majority and the protection of the rights of the minority. Protecting minority rights means that, in practice, liberal democracy limits the rule of the majority. Many countries have a written constitution, covering issues that are simply too important to be left to ordinary day-to-day politics. 

Liberal democracies have evolved a vast web of institutions that can interfere with an overreaching leader’s plans in different ways, and that collectively protect minority rights. The most visible are the formal mechanisms that limit power or authority. These include the rule of law and law courts. The upper house in parliament keeps watch over executive overreach. Local government provides an alternative source of concentrated authority.

Perhaps we should expand the power of the upper house rather than perpetually wailing about the "unelected lords". Who gives a monkey's if your doctor or electrician was elected ? Rather than making the Lords a mere "revising chamber", perhaps it should be its explicit job to check for constitutionality of a proposed law. It could have a power of veto if it found a law violated fundamental principles, rather than leaving this to the courts.

Healthy politics includes a ‘loyal opposition’, supporting the system but opposing the government of the day. The test for whether leaders understand this concept is if they dismiss expressed opposition as ‘treason’... Fascism disagrees. Mosley wrote: ‘The will of the people is greater than the right of the minority.’ The leader is there to carry out the will of the people, irrespective of the consequences for particular individuals. No one has the right to stand in its way.

An elected tyrant is still a tyrant. But at the same time :

If the first stage of the fascist dismantling of democracy is to prioritise the will of the majority over minority rights, the second is to contest how the will of the majority is made manifest. Is it by majority vote? No, said Hitler, in a speech to Dusseldorf industrialists in 1932. In an argument reminiscent of Plato’s Republic, Hitler argued that democratic voting: "is not rule of the people, but in reality the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy … Thus democracy will in practice lead to the destruction of a people’s true values."

So as a general point, even elections can be democratic or anti-democratic, depending on context. Therein lies the difficulty. It's easy to rally support for or against votes/elections in principle. And it's easy to say,"we want free and fair elections"... but it gets tricky when you start to refine this further. Is it enough that everyone is entitled to vote, even if they actually can't in principle ? Should they, at the other extreme, be forced to vote, and if so should there be an option to abstain ? What if they genuinely object to the whole principle of voting ? Under what conditions can a campaign be considered fair ? It's not that these questions can't be answered - they can. It's that the complexity makes the process perilously easy to undermine and compromise. and of course, uncompromising men are easy to admire.

The concern for workers’ rights, the creation of a pure state and the opposition to social democracy – the three aims of the Nazis, as identified by Lorimer – came together in the development of a majority-pleasing nationalism, in which the will of the people steamrollers anything in its way. We hope never again to see the extreme form developed by the fascists. But defeating fascism didn’t destroy its seeds, and some observers think that they can see its shoots once more.

Authoritarian leaders, who believe that they have been elected with a mandate of radical national renewal, can become easily frustrated with the spider’s web of institutions that prevent them from exercising power as they wish. The press is biased; the news is fake; the judges are the enemies of the people; the universities crush free speech and promote subversive ideologies; the trade unions stand in the way of progress; local government is a viper’s nest; and the upper chamber is full of deluded, self-interested fools.

I see two particular dangers. The first is the most obvious: the increase in Right-wing authoritarianism. But I’m also worried about a growing tendency on the Left: the idea that, in order to regain majority support, it’s necessary to adopt nationalist polices. Some, with roots in the traditional Labour movement, seem to think that, as long as they support trade unions and pro-poor policies, they are on the side of the righteous – whatever else they believe – and that this grants them moral immunity from criticism. But we have seen this combination of views before.

Somehow the British right managed to convince enough people that being pro-immigration was being unpatriotic. This argument needs to be overturned. The point here that being pro-(any demographic) does not equate with morality is, however, well made.

An acceptable nationalism would have to be tempered by liberalism. It would also need to be held in check by democracy that strongly supports the rights of the minority. We should never accept the argument that the intermediate institutions of government and civil society are standing in the way of the will of the people. On the contrary, they must be supported and strengthened. This is our best chance of keeping the unthinkable unthinkable.

If we can end the Great British Bake Off and all those bloody landscape programmes and quash nationalist sentiment, then I for one am all for it.

What 1930s political ideologies can teach us about the 2020s - Jonathan Wolff | Aeon Essays

Ours is the age of the rule by 'strong men': leaders who believe that they have been elected to deliver the will of the people. Woe betide anything that stands in the way, be it the political opposition, the courts, the media or brave individuals.