Why Fascism’s Returning to the World
Image Credit: OECD
And What America’s Teaching the World About Breaking the Laws of History
by umair haque
We live in strange and perilous times. As if climate change and mass extinction weren’t enough, they’re accompanied by…the return of fascism to the global stage. Wave after wave of it pulses across the world, like civilization itself having a heart attack. What’s behind it?
Take a hard look at the chart above. What does it say? Real incomes are falling around the globe. Sharply, hard and fast. And yet this isn’t new. It’s the culmination of what’s became a world-defining mega-trend — only no one much noticed. Way back in 2016, McKinsey noted what they then called a “Great Stagnation” — incomes had flatlined across much of the world. Here’s how they put it then.
Dire stuff.
What does that have to do with the resurgence of fascism? Well, everything. Stagnation and decline are the central reason that fascism’s reappearing around the globe. Take a hard look at it. In Britain, no political party has the faintest shred of a plan or vision to revive the economy after the xenophobic shock of Brexit — instead, they only offer more and harder strains of xenophobia, even the left. In Italy and Sweden, “formerly fascist” parties are now kingmakers. Europe as a whole is struggling with the return of the hard right, gaining power by the day. Russia, of course, is on a bloody neo-fascist crusade to regain an empire.
We’re making little to no real progress on fighting climate change. Or mass extinction. Or inequality. Instead, what truly defines our age — sadly, shockingly, is the resurgence of fascism. It’s proceeding much, much faster than we’re solving any of our Existential Threats.
Even in America, a bright spot — and I’ll return to it — while the majority resoundingly rejected Trumpism, tens upon tens of millions are still ardent believers in it, and it grows more openly supremacist and violent by the day, even if horrors like massacres of the LGBTQ community are forgotten as quickly as they happen, which itself is pretty….you know….fashy.
So. What does all this have to do with flatlining — and now declining — incomes? Everything. Unless you think it’s some kind of cosmic coincidence, one of the biggest in history, that fascism swept the globe again right as income began to stagnate and plummet — there’s a clear, distinct, causal relationship at work here.
To really understand it, let’s quickly review a bit of social theory. Way back at the dawn of this thing called social theory, two guys predicted that capitalism would eventually fail. It would “contradict” itself, meaning that capital would keep so much money that workers would be left in the lurch, penniless, all of that would cause a huge depression, and as it gathered pace, the workers of the world would unite, and institute a thing called “socialism.” Now, leave your own politics aside for a moment — we’re just trying to review social theory. I’m not trying to persuade you of any political perspective in any way whatsoever.
The problem is that it didn’t turn out that way. Part of the story happened just like the two guys said it would: there was indeed a Great Depression, which was in fact caused by a tiny number of hands hoarding too much wealth, leaving too little for the vast, vast majority. That depression swept much of the world. In the 1920s, of course. And what happened next?
Fascism did. The rosy prediction that the workers of the world would unite and overthrow their capitalist chains (I’m being half ironic) was dead wrong. Instead, they reacted in just the opposite way. They didn’t go out there and seize wealth and power from the ultra rich. They attacked the most powerless and vulnerable in society, at the command of demagogues, who told them that they, the downtrodden, were the master race, oppressed by “immigrants” and “foreigners” and “aliens,” corrupted by gay people and liberated women, facing a genocide. And therefore, it was perfectly justified — moral, even — to strike back. And hurt all these people, in what turned out to be shocking, historically repugnant ways.
Do you see the link? History didn’t turn out the way our two friends — Marx and Engels — said it would. They were wrong. Stagnation and depression didn’t give way to socialist utopia. Instead, it caused a wave of hate and violence aimed in precisely the opposite direction — downwards, at groups like Jews and gay people and immigrants and the disabled. The Nazis took it the furthest, but don’t forget how far fascism really had spread. From Italy to Japan, it was ascendant. In France, the Vichy regime appeased it. Even in America, it was a serious movement, legitimized in places like the New York Times, until Pearl Harbor happened.
After the war, the “new left,” as it came to be called, was therefore faced with a problem. This was a group of intellectuals, many of them European, many of them Jewish, whose families had fled fascism. And they understood that there was a serious issue now in social theory. Why had fascism happened — and not socialism? After all, what sense did it make, really, for some poor average Joe whose life was falling apart…to scapegoat a Jew or some even poorer migrant worker or a gay person or someone in a wheelchair for their woes? What had happened here?
Something had gone badly wrong in the way that social theorists had understood everything — from human nature to politics to society itself. People shouldn’t have been this self-destructive, hateful, foolish, irrational. So much so to cause a World War and a Holocaust. But they had been.
It was the great John Maynard Keynes who pieced it together best. Fascism, he discovered, was the result of sudden, sharp plunges into poverty, especially unexpected ones, ones where people’s expectations of upward mobility collided with the grim reality of downward mobility. I say “discovered” for a reason. It wasn’t a theory — he backed it up with voluminous evidence. It was one of the great discoveries of the 20th century — the socioeconomists’ equivalent, perhaps, of the polio vaccine. There was a clear relationship at work here, Keynes had found.
And there is again today.
The new left, such as it was, didn’t really solve the problem. They realized that their intellectual grandfather — Marx — had been wrong. But figures like Herbert Marcuse — called the “father of the new left” — offered vague and oft impenetrable explanations for why fascism had occurred in the ashes of depression. Their criticisms of society and capitalism were powerful, to be sure — Marcuse pioneered the idea of being “intolerant of intolerance.” But for the problem of fascism, it was left to Keynes to really provide the answer.
Now. Why the review? So that we really understand the problem sweeping the globe, and I mean really understand it. Just like the new left were then, many of us are puzzled, baffled, and bewildered by the resurgence of fascism. Take a place like, I don’t know, Sweden. How is it that a society which was until very recently held up as a shining example of being one of the most advanced in the world…is now basically at the whim of neo-fascists…who go out and do things like dissolve the Environment Ministry…LOL…while climate change bites? How do you get from the Sweden the world admired and respected to here? Or take Britain. How do you get from a society that, at the turn of the century, was the envy of the world, skyrocketing living standards, peaceful, tolerant, wise…to the seething cauldron of xenophobia and spite it is now…in which both sides scapegoat the powerless and vulnerable for the shattered future of the “true Brit”?
What happened to the world?