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Every age has its own Fascism. —PRIMO LEVI
IF WE THINK OF FASCISM as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab.
In 2016, “Fascism” was searched on the Merriam-Webster dictionary website more often than any other word in English except “surreal,” which experienced a sudden spike after the November presidential election.
Unlike a monarchy or a military dictatorship imposed on society from above, Fascism draws energy from men and women who are upset because of a lost war, a lost job, a memory of humiliation, or a sense that their country is in steep decline. The more painful the grounds for resentment, the easier it is for a Fascist leader to gain followers by dangling the prospect of renewal or by vowing to take back what has been stolen.
This is the first rule of deception: repeated often enough, almost any statement, story, or smear can start to sound plausible.
Fascism, most of the students agreed, is an extreme form of authoritarian rule. Citizens are required to do exactly what leaders say they must do, nothing more, nothing less. The doctrine is linked to rabid nationalism. It also turns the traditional social contract upside down. Instead of citizens giving power to the state in exchange for the protection of their rights, power begins with the leader, and the people have no rights. Under Fascism, the mission of citizens is to serve; the government’s job is to rule.
To my mind, a Fascist is someone who identifies strongly with and claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are necessary—including violence—to achieve his or her goals.
A Fascist, however, expects the crowd to have his back. Where kings try to settle people down, Fascists stir them up so that when the fighting begins, their foot soldiers have the will and the firepower to strike first.
To dramatize their unity, they chose for their emblem the fasces, a bundle of elm rods coupled with an ax that in ancient times had represented the power wielded by a Roman consul.
In speech after speech, Mussolini offered an alternative. He urged his countrymen to reject the capitalists who wanted to exploit them, the Socialists who were bent on disrupting their lives, and the crooked and spineless politicians who talked and talked while their beloved homeland sank further into the abyss.
This was how twentieth-century Fascism began: with a magnetic leader exploiting widespread dissatisfaction by promising all things.
He initiated a campaign to drenare la palude (“drain the swamp”) by firing more than 35,000 civil servants.
Mussolini. Apparently fascists have been vowing to “drain the swamp” for a long time.
Good guys don’t always win, especially when they are divided and less determined than their adversaries. The desire for liberty may be ingrained in every human breast, but so is the potential for complacency, confusion, and cowardice.
It is easier to remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps than to kill the ideas that gave them birth.”
In a true democracy, leaders respect the will of the majority but also the rights of the minority—one without the other is not enough.
Respect for the rights of others is a lofty principle; but envy is a primal urge.
advances in technology have provided both the blessing of a more informed public and the curse of a misinformed one—men
When we awaken each morning, we see around the globe what appear to be Fascism’s early stirrings: the discrediting of mainstream politicians, the emergence of leaders who seek to divide rather than to unite, the pursuit of political victory at all costs, and the invocation of national greatness by people who seem to possess only a warped concept of what greatness means.
Like Mussolini, he conceived of politics as a spectacle, a rollicking exhibition of good guy vs. bad guy entertainment.
A former planning minister estimated that, under Chávez, a third of Venezuela’s oil money was stolen or lost.
Chávez was pro-labor, but when strikes compromised his other priorities, he had the leaders thrown into jail.
In a true police state, street crime goes down—and
Thus was born Vladimir Putin’s redemptive purpose. Two years later, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, he was working for the mayor of St. Petersburg. Colleagues dutifully hung in their offices a photograph of the new president, Boris Yeltsin; Putin did the same with a portrait of Peter the Great.
Putin is small and pale, so cold as to be almost reptilian.
Russia’s pioneering use of social media as a weapon reflects not any unusual cultural aptitude for hacking, but rather Putin’s experiences in the KGB, where spreading disinformation was both a way of life and an art.
Putin’s decision to capitalize on the turbulence in Ukraine flowed in part from his conviction, shared by most Russians, that Crimea rightly belongs to Russia.
An illiberal democracy is centered on the supposed needs of the community rather than the inalienable rights of the individual. It is democratic because it respects the will of the majority; illiberal because it disregards the concerns of minorities. Orbán has made clear that the aspirations of the majority correspond precisely to the program of his own movement: Fidesz.
Virtually every state in Europe is the product of a nationalist movement that flowered in the nineteenth century or earlier. Wilson’s doctrine of self-determination gave a boost to the idea that wherever there dwelled a people, there should be a state—however impractical that concept would be to implement in a region where the movement of people and the wondrous spontaneity of romance have conspired to link some very different family trees.
In 2015, immigration became the paramount political issue in Europe, due to a huge spike in arrivals from Syria and North Africa at precisely the moment terrorist incidents seized center stage,
The impact of the crisis was felt in the United Kingdom, where wariness toward migrants almost certainly spelled the difference between success and failure for the 2016 Brexit referendum, an exercise in economic masochism that Britons will long regret.
In Germany, which opened its borders to more than a million asylum seekers in 2015 alone, immigration worries helped the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) secure an eighth of the vote in the September 2017 election and thus enter parliament and occupy influential posts as the third-largest party.
“In the programs and statements of these parties,” observes Columbia University’s Robert Paxton, “one hears echoes of classical fascist themes: fears of decadence and decline; assertion of national and cultural identity; a threat by unassimilable foreigners to national identity and good social order; and the need for greater authority to deal with these problems.” Beyond the formal political parties, there is a vast and growing collection of hyper-nationalist entities that make their presence known in marches and rallies, hoisting banners that advertise such sentiments as “White Europe” and
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The complexity of immigration as an issue begins with a basic human trait: we are reluctant to share.
Over two days, I spent about twelve hours with the Great Leader’s dear son, Kim Jong-il. Shaking hands and posing for cameras, I found that we were about the same height, in part because we wore the same size heels.
To illustrate what this new era of good feeling might be like, he conceded that his government had not been educating its young correctly. “Our children are taught to call people from your country ‘American bastards,’” he said. Then he turned to his interpreter. “Is there a translation for ‘American bastards’?” Yes, came the reply: “Yankees.”*
TELL MY STUDENTS THAT THE FUNDAMENTAL PURPOSE OF FOREIGN policy is elementary: to convince other countries to do what we would like them to do. To that end, there are various tools at our disposal, which range from making polite requests to sending in the Marines.
When they met in the Oval Office soon after the 2016 election, President Obama told his successor that the DPRK would be the gravest national security challenge he would face. Trump has responded erratically.
The DPRK is a secular ISIS; its existence provides further evidence of the tragedy that can result when power is concentrated in the hands of too few for too long.
Hitler fantasized that the United States so fully shared his racist views that it would ultimately side with the Third Reich.
Decades ago, George Orwell suggested that the best one-word description of a Fascist was “bully,” and on the day of the Normandy invasion, Franklin Roosevelt prayed to the Almighty for a “peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men.”
The ability of a free and independent press to hold political leaders accountable is what makes open government possible—it is the heartbeat of democracy. Trump is intent on stilling, or slowing down, that heartbeat. This is a gift to dictators, and coming from a chief executive of the United States, cause for shame.
As to America’s standing to argue on behalf of human rights, my reply is that “standing” is beside the point. The real question is: who has the responsibility to uphold human rights? The answer to that is: everyone.
To the whole world on Twitter, I’m “a very stable genius.”
In the wake of one Trump visit, an exasperated Angela Merkel said, “The times in which we can fully count on others are somewhat over.”
What makes a movement Fascist is not ideology but the willingness to do whatever is necessary—including the use of force and trampling on the rights of others—to achieve victory and command obedience.
Fascism feeds on social and economic grievances, including the belief that the people over there are receiving better treatment than they deserve while I’m not getting what I’m owed.
I am drawn again to my conclusion that a Fascist is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.
Trump is the first anti-democratic president in modern U.S. history. On too many days, beginning in the early hours, he flaunts his disdain for democratic institutions, the ideals of equality and social justice, civil discourse, civic virtues, and America itself.
If this circle of despots hadn’t come into being, Trump’s dispiriting influence would likely be temporary and manageable, a minor malady from which a healthy body could rapidly recover; but when the law-based international order is already fighting off a variety of illnesses, the immune system is weakened. That is the peril we confront.
ONE OF MY PASTIMES IN RECENT YEARS HAS BEEN TO PARTICIPATE in think tank projects that assess, for example, the outlook for democracy in the Middle East and threats to political and social pluralism in the United States and abroad.
