[There is no guarantee that fascism will not triumph, but it will
certainly win unless we put ourselves, body and soul, fully and
smartly, on the line to stop it]
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FASCISM 101: WHY WE NEED TO SPELL IT OUT  
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Walden Bello
December 7, 2023
Foreign Policy in Focus
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_ There is no guarantee that fascism will not triumph, but it will
certainly win unless we put ourselves, body and soul, fully and
smartly, on the line to stop it _

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni,

 

Donald Trump’s electoral defeat in 2020 and Jair Bolsonaro’s loss
to Lula in Brazil in 2022, along with Rodrigo Duterte’s leaving the
presidency of the Philippines last year, gave some quarters hope that
the far-right or fascist wave had crested globally.

Two political earthquakes, taking place just in the last two weeks,
have shattered this illusion. In Argentina, Javier Milei, a
Trump-like, self-described anarcho-capitalist who brazenly denies that
human rights abuses took place in that country during the so-called
dirty war waged by the army in the late 1970s was overwhelmingly
elected president. Two days later, in the elections in traditionally
liberal Netherlands, the Freedom Party led by Geert Wilders emerged as
the country’s biggest party. A Trumpist long before Trump showed up,
Wilders wants to ban the Koran, describes Islam as the “ideology of
a retarded culture,” and calls Moroccans “scum.”

When far-right personalities and movements started popping up during
the last two decades, there was, in some quarters, strong hesitation
to use the “f” word to describe them.  Indeed, as late as less
than three years ago, I had to defend the use of the word fascist in
the Cambridge Union debate against academics who were squeamish about
employing it to describe far-right movements in Europe, the United
States, and other parts of the world. What Donald Trump and the Jan 6,
2021, insurrection have shown, however, is that the distinction
between “far right” and “fascist” is academic. Or one can say
that a “far-rightist” is a fascist who has not yet seized power,
for it is only once they are in power that fascists fully reveal their
political propensities.

A movement or person must be regarded as fascist when they fuse all or
most of the following five features: 1) they show a disdain or hatred
for democratic principles and procedures; 2) they tolerate or promote
violence; 3) they have a heated mass base that supports their
anti-democratic thinking and behavior; 4) they scapegoat and support
the persecution of certain social groups; and 5) they are led by a
charismatic individual who exhibits and normalizes all of the above.

I would like to focus on some people, aside from Trump, who fit the
“f” word.  In the Philippines, after warning before the 2016
elections that Rodrigo Duterte would be “another Marcos,” I wrote
two months into Duterte’s presidency that he was a “fascist
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was criticized by many opinion-makers, academics, and even
progressives for using the “f” word.  Over seven years and 27,000
extra-judicial executions of alleged drug users later, the “f”
word is one of the milder terms used for Rodrigo Duterte, with many
preferring “mass murderer” or “serial killer.”

Narendra Modi has made the secular and diverse India of Gandhi and
Nehru a thing of the past with his Hindu nationalist project, which
relegates the country’s large Muslim minority to second class
citizens.  Currently, he is carrying out the most sustained attack on
the freedom of the press by putting progressive journalists in jail
and bringing charges against noted writers like Arundhati Roy.

In Hungary, Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party have almost completed
their neutering of democracy.

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro lost the 2022 presidential elections to Lula
da Silva by a slight margin, but his followers refused to accept the
verdict, and thousands of people from the right invaded the capital
Brasilia in an attempt to overthrow the new government, in a
remarkable replication of the January 6, 2021 insurrection in
Washington.

Europe is the region where fascist or radical right parties have made
the most inroads. From having no radical right-wing regime in the
2000s, except occasionally and briefly as junior partners in unstable
governing coalitions as in Austria, the region now has three in
power—one in Hungary, the government of Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and
the Law and Justice Party in Poland, which is trying to hold on to
power despite having lost the October 2023 parliamentary
elections. The far right is part of ruling coalitions in Sweden and
Finland. The region has four more countries where a party of the far
right is the main opposition party. And it has seven where the far
right has become a major presence both in parliament and in the
streets.

SOCIAL CONDITIONS THAT BREED FASCISM

Leaders are critical in fascist movements, but social conditions
create the opportunities for the ascent of those leaders. Here one
cannot overemphasize the role that neoliberalism and globalization
have played in spawning movements of the radical right. The worsening
living standards and great inequalities spawned by neoliberal policies
created disillusionment among people who felt the liberal democracy
had been captured by the rich and distrust in center-right and
center-left parties that promoted those policies. These resentful,
discontented masses are the base of fascist parties. It is this heated
base motivated by a mix of economic insecurity, resentment, or hatred
that accounts for the fact that although Duterte, Bolsonaro, and Trump
are no longer in power, they can stage a comeback or be replaced by a
new leader of the same type.

Take the United States. The 2020 election of Joe Biden drew a sigh of
relief from quarters concerned with the health of democracy in the
United States. But 11 million more Americans voted for Trump in 2020
than in 2016, while 70 percent of the Republican Party believed
against all evidence that he won the election. Today, Trump faces 91
felony counts across two state courts and two different federal
districts, any of which could potentially produce a prison sentence.
Yet he’s left all his Republican rivals in the dust in the drive to
challenge Joe Biden for the presidency in 2024, and he’s leading
Biden in the polls in the swing states that will determine who will
win next year’s elections. Indeed, his competitors for the
Republican presidential nomination are trying to project an image of
being more Trumpist than Trump.

Economic conditions, however, cannot fully account for the emergence
of fascist movements.  Racism, ethnocentrism, and anti-immigrant
sentiment also fuel them. In fact, these behavioral or ideological
drives are central to the fascist project, which is to create a
cross-class solidarity based on skin color, religion, language, or
culture by defining as the Enemy or the Big Other those who are
perceived to be different. It is not accidental that Hitler’s
project was called national socialism—that is, it was “equality”
but only for those of the same race and not for the Other. This Big
Other is said to be the source of the crisis or the problems of
one’s imagined community. In the United States today, white
nationalism or white supremacy is the ideological expression of the
fascist project, and in both Europe and the United States, strong
feelings against non-white migrants are a key feature of fascist
consciousness.

Fascism cannot be reduced to a conspiracy by Big Capital to
repressively stabilize society and promote its interests, as
traditional Marxists saw it. Fascists are not mere instruments of the
elite. In fact, their rhetoric is not only anti-democratic or
anti-liberal but also often anti-capitalist or anti-Big Business.
Witness how Trump and his followers claim that they are anti-Big Tech
or against the “plutocrats.” Fascists, however, do not seek to
overthrow Big Business; they merely want an accommodation with Capital
to serve their movement’s own interests, but with them in the
driver’s seat.

During “normal times,” fascists and Big Capital can sometimes have
different stands on some issues, as, for instance, in the case of
“woke capitalism,” where corporations piously assert that
corporate policies should be “pro-environment” or politically
correct in hiring practices when it comes to race and gender. However,
these differences are transient and minor, and when Capital is
threatened by movements that cut into their profits or threaten their
economic hegemony, it welcomes efforts by fascists to stabilize or
“sanitize” the social order.

Fascists can come to power through elections, as Hitler, Trump, and
Bolsonaro did. In fact, the closer they come to power, the more they
try to project a constitutionalist or moderate image, as Giorgia
Meloni did in Italy in the run-up to the 2022 parliamentary elections
and Geert Wilders did more recently in the Netherlands. But once in
power, they often seek to remain there through the use of force or
violence. Violence is the main instrument by which fascists want to
carry out their revolution or counterrevolution to “purify”
society to assert or reassert the supremacy of the traditionally
dominant majority defined by skin color, ethnic identity, or culture.
Thus, in India, while they are reshaping the institutions of the
country via their parliamentary majority, the Hindu nationalists see
their power as based in the final analysis on their capacity for
violence, which they periodically unleash to remind subordinate
communities like the Muslims, as they did in the Gujarat massacre of
2002.

HOW TO COUNTER FASCISM

Let me end by proposing several moves we can take to deal with the
fascist threat.

First, we need to stop resorting to easy explanations about the rise
of far right, like the claim that trolls are responsible for it, and
acknowledge that far-right personalities and movements have a critical
mass of popular support.

Next, we need to find ways of stopping the extreme right from coming
to power in the first place, like building broad united electoral
fronts, even with non-fascist groups we may have differences with.
It’s much harder to remove the far right once they’re in power.

Third, we need to make sure we have at the leading edge of our
resistance those movements which have a great deal of resonance among
broad sectors of the population including the middle classes, such as
the movements to stop climate change, promote gender equality, and
advance racial justice.

Fourth, we must fiercely defend human rights and democratic values,
even where–or especially where–they have become unpopular. This
will involve aggressively championing people and groups that are
currently persecuted, with majority opinion being whipped up against
them, like Muslims in India and non-white immigrants in both the
United States and Europe. International solidarity with the persecuted
is an essential element of the anti-fascist project.

Also, let’s not fear to see what we can learn from the extreme
right, especially when it comes to the politics of passion or the
politics of charisma, and see how our values can be advanced or
promoted in passionate and charismatic ways. We must unite reason to
passion and not see them as being in contradiction, though, of course,
we must not violate our commitments to truth, justice, and fair play
in the process.

Sixth, if history, especially of the United States, is any indication,
one must not preclude the possibility of violent civil war, and should
that become a real threat, to take the appropriate steps to counter
it.

But, probably most important, we need to have a transformative vision
that can compete with that of the far right, one based on genuine
equality and genuine democratic empowerment that goes beyond the now
discredited liberal democracy. Some call this vision socialism. Others
would prefer another term, but the important thing is its message of
radical, real equality beyond class, gender, and race.

There is no guarantee that fascism will not triumph, but it will
certainly win unless we put ourselves, body and soul, fully and
smartly, on the line to stop it.

* Fascism
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* Anti-Fascism
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* Rodrigo Duterte
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* Narendra Modi
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* Donald Trump
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* Jair Bolsonaro
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* Victor Orban
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