Springtime for Fascism?

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Project Syndicate:

NEW YORK – Are we seeing a new dawn of fascism? Many people are beginning to think so. Donald Trump has been compared to a fascist, as has Vladimir Putin and a variety of demagogues and right-wing loudmouths in Europe. The recent tide of authoritarian bluster has reached as far as the Philippines, whose president-elect, Rodrigo (“The Punisher”) Duterte, has vowed to toss suspected criminals into Manila Bay.

The problem with terms like “fascism” or “Nazi” is that so many ignorant people have used them so often, in so many situations, that they have long ago lost any real significance. Few still know firsthand what fascism actually meant. It has become a catch-all phrase for people or ideas we don't like.

Loose rhetoric has coarsened not only political debate, but historical memory, too. When a Republican politician compares US property taxes with the Holocaust, as one Senate candidate did in 2014, the mass murder of Jews is trivialized to the extent of becoming meaningless. The same is roughly true when Trump is compared to Hitler or Mussolini.

 

As a result, we are too easily distracted from the real dangers of modern demagoguery. After all, it is not hard for Trump – or the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, or Putin, or Duterte – to refute accusations of being fascists or Nazis. They may be repulsive, but they are not organizing uniformed storm troopers, building concentration camps, or calling for the corporate state. Putin comes closest, but even he is not Hitler.

 

Of course, forgetfulness or ignorance about the past goes both ways. When a young Dutch writer, sympathetic to the new populist wave, expressed antipathy to his country’s “cultural elite,” for promoting “atonal music” and other arrogant forms of ugliness, instead of the wholesome beauty embraced by the common man, I wondered whether he knew about the Nazis’ attack on “degenerate art”? Atonal music, hardly the cutting edge today, was precisely the kind of thing that Hitler’s minions loathed – and ultimately banned.

 

There are other echoes of our darkest history in contemporary political bombast, which a few decades ago would still have cast any politician who used it to the margins. Stoking hatred of minorities, fulminating against the press, stirring up the mob against intellectuals, financiers, or anyone who speaks more than one language, were not part of mainstream politics, because enough people still understood the dangers of such talk.

 

It is clear that today's demagogues don’t much care about what they derisively call “political correctness.” It is less clear whether they have enough historical sense to know that they are poking a monster that post-World War II generations hoped was dead but that we now know only lay dormant, until obliviousness to the past could enable it to be reawakened.

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Today's fascists, like those before them, originated in the Left. We should be thankful that there's no Stalin or Hitler to lead them-yet.