In my life, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a society’s intellectuals, pundits, and leaders get anything as wrong as America’s got the rise of fascism. First, the media, wholesale, spent election year dismissing the possibility as outlandish hyperbole, pooh-poohing it as impossible fantasy. Then its star pundits, like Nate Silver and Ezra Klein, misjudged the election to an almost comically absurd degree. And now, after all that, the New York Times runs weekly puff pieces about Nazis who bake cupcakes, just like you and me.
There’s something very wrong with this picture. That something is that American intellectuals have failed utterly, consistently, and totally to grapple with fascism: why it rises, how it works, or what it is. At every possible juncture, and in every possible way. They’re seeing the world backwards, perpetually astonished by their own wrongness, but I’ll get to that.
Professors who flunk basic math have no business trying to teach the rest of us that two plus two equals three. So here are three myths, and three realities, about fascism, that you should know.
Myth: fascism has nothing to do with the economy. Reality: Fascism has everything to do with the economy. American intellectuals have done their society a great disservice — one of the greatest in modern history — by saying “economic anxiety” doesn’t “cause fascism”. That’s what, in statistics, we might call a poorly defined variable, a spurious correlation, and a false negative: what is “economic anxiety”, anyways? It’s a cop-out, that’s what. Anxiety is something I feel over my Netflix choices, and so while “economic anxiety”, whatever that might be, might not cause fascism, what about…economics?
The answer to that question’s so simple I only need a sentence. Can you think of a single example ever, in all of human history, the whole millennial panorama of it, of a fascist movement arising during good economic times, booms, seasons of plenty? Go ahead. I’ll wait. Just one. Mull it over. Done? Good. You can’t think of one because there isn’t one. Fascism is a product of stagnant or declining economies. That is precisely the great lesson World War II taught us. It is what the entire post-war world, from it’s currencies to its constitutions to its democracies, was built upon. What a pity it is to live in a time where I must remind you of that.
So I want you to really understand it. How did German fascism arise? Well, after World War I, Germany was saddled with debts to those that won the war — Britain, mostly — which drove it into penury, causing its economy to flatline, and the average German, indebted, his life savings blown up, to feel a burning sense of injustice. The result was rage, Nazism, and Hitler. Now, if we substitute America into that story, the only real difference is that the debts the average American owes aren’t to another country, but to an invisible, shady class of ultra-wealthy of their own. Yet the dynamics are all precisely the same: a burning sense of injustice, the debts can never be repaid, and the American’s savings, future, and possibility have all been blown to hell. It’s not a coincidence. Fascism is always and everywhere a product of stagnation. Why?
(Now: that’s not to say stagnation hasn’t reopened and worsened old racial wounds in America — it’s to say American intellectuals don’t appear to understand anything beyond monocausality, to grasp the idea of sparks and fires, that ultimate causes (racism) and proximate causes (stagnation) can indeed amplify one another.)
Myth: Fascism is “populism”/”ethno-nationalism”/insert buzzword. Reality: Fascism is a way to ration a stagnant economy to in-groups. If you understand just one sentence about fascism, let it be that one — because it’s the key. Like everything in life, our love, our fear, our desire, so too, our hate serves a purpose. Fascism exists for a reason: to ration the dwindling fruits of a stagnant economy. Think about it this way: if the harvest suddenly fails, then the crop must be rationed somehow — a way must be found to take from some, and give to others, because markets and prices and so on will begin to leave people hungry. What is that way? Who will get it, and how much?
Well, that way is usually this: blaming a scapegoat for the stagnant economy, for the failed harvest, whether it’s Jews in the 1930s, Muslims and Jews and immgrants today, or virgins and witches in the dark ages. And then therefore excluding those scapegoats from the economy altogether, just as laws were passed to first expropriate, take the possessions of, Jews, and then to push them into ghettoes, then into labour camps, and then, finally, terribly, into atrocity. The less undesirables, the fewer subhumans there are, the more there is of the failed crop for the chosen few, who are usually those of some kind of mythical pure blood. Of course, the problem then is that even those chosen few must either dwindle, along with the failed crop, in a vicious circle — or the fascist must declare war, and find someone else’s crop to seize, which is what Germany did. Either way, the point remains.
Fascism rations stagnation. It’s so vital I’ll say it again. We have never, ever once seen fascism arising during good times in all of human history because fascism is a way to take from some and give to others — a bad, inhuman, and foolish way to solve a problem: the problem of stagnation, when the harvest begins to fail. But it is a way to solve a problem nonetheless, and until we understand that, we have understood precisely nothing about it at all. Now, the some that take are of course always more powerful, and those that are forced to give are usually, therefore, perfectly logically, the least powerful and most vulnerable of all. The fascist’s hate in this way serves a purpose: it is a social mechanism of rationing in order to solve the problem of stagnation.
Myth: our existing institutions will save us from fascism. Reality: fascism can only arises when those institutions have already failed (and so they’re not going to save us from much). Remember the media telling everyone to dismiss the possibility of fascism, over and over again, during election year? See the media running puff pieces on fascists now, instead of owning up to their first failure, examining it, asking why they were dead wrong? That’s two counts of one kind of institutional failure: media failure. Let’s count some others.
The rest of the world, after World War II, wrote not just hate speech laws, but made it illegal to join Nazi parties, express support for them, write about them, and so on. America didn’t. That’s legal failure. Then there’s democratic failure: American democracy doesn’t really represent the will of the people anymore, seventy percent of whom want healthcare and education and so on — but only an extreme fringe, for whom more inequality is better. And that brings us to another kind of failure, inequality itself, which is the failure of economic institutions to create and allocate real value, unless you really think that the teacher who educates your kids only creates a tenth of the human possibility that the hedge fund trader who’s busy raiding their non-existent education funds does.
Failure after failure — of economic, political, and social institutions. Fascism can’t rise all the way to power if strong, functioning, institutions work. Let’s review Germany again. Hitler never won a majority — power was given to him. Really: just handed over. The central bank gave up on managing the currency. Really: just gave up. Then there was Chamberlain, and so on. The media across the world was spellbound, and failed to warn properly of the horrors to come. If none of these things had come to pass, neither, maybe, would have World War II. But they did: institutional failures sow the seeds of fascism — and those institutions can’t then save societies from the very fascism they’ve helped create. What did Germany have to do after World War II? It had to build new institutions, write a new constitution, restructure the government, have war crimes tribunals, and so on. Scared? You should be! Intellectuals today aren’t taking any of this seriously, and this is what why they get it wrong, over and over again.
It takes a vacuum. If strong institutions work, fascism is suffocated. Only when there is an absence, a void, of institutions, and the order, prosperity, and growth that they create, can it arise. So the rise of fascism tells us in the strongest terms possible that institutions don’t work anymore—fascism rising is their ultimate failure. That is what we see in America today: an institutional vacuum. Nothing works anymore, does it? Not the law, the media, politics, capitalism, democracy. That is precisely what gave fascism the room, space, fuel, freedom to arise.
Placing our faith in precisely the broken institutions that let fascism rise to then stop it is the truest kind of folly. Hoping for those weakened, corroded institutions to stop fascism is like hoping that a broken dam will hold back the flood that has already hit the village. It says that we don’t really understand our plight or predicament at all. That we are out of step with time itself, out of history, seeing everything backwards.
And all that is exactly where America’s intellectuals are: glibly dismissing or warmly cooing over a thing they can’t understand. Only in this case, unfortunately for Americans, that thing happens to be the greatest lesson of the century. Even at this late stage, American intellectuals are unable to comprehend the first thing about fascism — what it is, why it happens, or how it works. They think history couldn’t possibly apply to them, and that is why they are stuck seeing backwards, perpetually surprised by how wrong they always are.
It’s often said that those who can’t remember history, and thus learn from it, are doomed to repeat it. Here you see a perfect example. And that is why you are watching history repeat itself before your very unbelieving eyes.