This is an excellent, illuminating, well articulated, and vitally important article. ― Molly
How History Ends Up
Repeating Itself
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 immigrants
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 ghettos, then into labor 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 becausefascism 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 risingis 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.
