JUAN CARLOSJUAN HIDALGO/EPA-EFE/REX Saluting tyranny: demonstrators protest in July against plans to exhume Spanish dictator Francisco Franco from the El Valle de los Caidos mausoleum

22 | NEW STATESMAN | 14-20 SEPTEMBER 2018 COVER STORY The dark European stain Faced with Trump and the populist nationalism sweeping the Continent, liberals are quick to proclaim the return of fascism. But other disturbing historical echoes are going unnoticed By Thomas Meaney

hen the last zoning war intellectual, declares fascism is under way. – twee-fascism, gonzo-fascism, schizo- is won, and the Donald J “What we are living with is pre-fascism,” fascism – no less so. With understandable Trump Presidential Library he writes. Michelle Goldberg of the New caution, some historians insist the term finally opens for business York Times agrees: fascism “is already here”. only applies to the social conditions in Italy in Manhattan, it is not hard Liberal historians have certified the man- in the 1920s and 1930s, when the term was Wto imagine future historians idling inside tra. “The attempt to undo the Enlighten- first used by Mussolini and his squadristi to the gift shop, regretting that their subject ment as a way to undo institutions,” the describe their vision of society and the state. had not done them all a favour and gone full Yale historian Timothy Snyder says, citing But most agree that fascism at least applies fascist. How much easier the history would Trump’s first two years as president, “that to the broader phenomenon of right-wing be to write if one could date the begin- is fascism.” Nor is the fascist wave confined regimes in the interwar years, when parties ning of the end of the democratic era to the to the United States. Upstanding liberals and groups such as the Nazis, Romania’s day Trump took office? How much more are supposed to take it as given that France Iron Guard, the French Popular Party, the convenient if the echoes of the 1930s had only narrowly escaped a second round of Spanish Falange, and others, came to the been of perfect pitch: if Trump had locked Vichy under Marine Le Pen, that Italy has fore. These parties forged a new political up Hillary Clinton, if the trade wars had undergone a new “March on Rome”, and form by blending together different fea- turned hot; if, instead of withdrawing se- that even Scandinavia now has a right-wing tures, which were sometimes at odds with curity clearances from his enemies, Trump “model” in the Sweden Democrats. During each other: the idolisation of the beauty and simply had them shot. the recent bout of political deadlock late last efficacy of violence, the need to construct a The intellectual reflex of today’s Western year in Berlin, when Angela Merkel’s Chris- mythical past for the people that could only liberals is to invoke the spectre of fascism. tian Democratic Union could neither form be fulfilled by the instincts of a charismatic It is the most solemn way of registering a coalition, nor stomach running a minority leader, and the belief that socialism could their revulsion at the course politics has government, the Harvard historian Charles only be achieved through a corporatist taken. Madeleine Albright, the former US Maier published a pie chart comparing the economy that met the needs of a racially de- secretary of state and herself a child of fas- voting patterns of the Weimar Republic fined group and co-ordinated the interests cist Europe, writes that fascism “pose[s] a with current German ones, coyly noting between workers and capitalists. more serious threat now than at any time that they were not exactly the same. Many fascist movements took aim at the since the end of the Second World War”. The definition of fascism is notoriously idea of not only liberal democracy – but “de-

Fintan O’Toole, Ireland’s leading liberal hard to pin down. The recent coinages mocracy” tout court – which they took to t

14-20 SEPTEMBER 2018 | NEW STATESMAN | 23 t be a political form that, in its vagueness fall within America’s constitutional pro- too, had every interest in presenting Italian and elasticity, threatened to dilute the spe- visions. One of the ongoing ironies of the and German fascists as upstarts without cial life force of the chosen people. The prob- Trump years in America is watching liberals any deep support.) But today, once again, lem with invoking fascism today is less that put their faith in the very institutions they conservatives have serenely presided over it doesn’t work as a historical parallel or that despised only a few years before – the CIA, Trump’s tinkering and savoured the bless- it doesn’t summon the correct response in the FBI, the NSA – to protect them from ings he has brought to the Republican Party. populations already numb to every form of the domestic menace. In the Deep State In this scenario – crude, but more accurate invective. Rather, the comparison mistakes we trust. than others – Republican Senate majority the symptoms of decaying liberal democra- leader Mitch McConnell is America’s Paul cies – anti-refugee sentiments, the return s thinking about the conditions of von Hindenburg, the Weimar president of anti-Semitism, the attraction to right- the 1930s and our own time in any who thought he could manage the Führer. populists – for the cause. Worse, it serves way useful? One aspect of fascism’s Only this time, the conservatives have as an exculpatory manoeuvre for political rise to power seems particularly rel- got their way: Trump delivered the tax cut elites who, however inadvertently, helped evant. It is sometimes forgotten how Republicans have been salivating over for soften the ground for the current upsurge of Ifragile and uncertain the fascist ascent in more than a generation; and he is able to the right. Europe was in the interwar period. Musso- voice views they no longer find it profitable to air, but which they profit from nonethe- less. Nazism itself was no foe to private en- The comparison with fascism mistakes terprise, but early on it was more divided about its relation to capitalists. Trump, too, the symptoms of decaying liberal makes noises in this direction – on certain days he seems to want to imitate China’s democracies for the cause state capitalism model – but Republicans have no reason to be threatened by the rhet- oric, considering Trump’s record and his In the broadest sense, fascism is not a use- lini’s “March on Rome”, in which he seized unblinking eye on the US stock market. ful word. Almost none of the right-wing power in Italy at the head of thousands of In Germany, too, a species of conserva- populist movements of our time pit them- blackshirts, is a bit of very successful fascist tism still has the upper hand, despite the in- selves against the principles or rhetoric of mythology. In fact Mussolini arrived from roads of some genuinely fascist elements in democracy. Instead they view liberalism as Milan in a comfortable railway sleeping car, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), whose an alien spore that has infected real democ- and warily called on King Victor Emmanuel advertisements should one day compete for racy. The bluntest besieger of liberal democ- III, who – instead of using the forces avail- space in museum display cases with Nazi racy in Europe today is the Hungarian presi- able to him to crush Mussolini’s followers propaganda (a recent campaign poster reads: dent, Viktor Orbán. In a Transylvanian spa and deny his claim on power – acquiesced “German core culture! Islam-free schools!” town this summer, Orbán made the case for and gave him the reins of the state. More below a picture of frolicking, pale teenag- the fundamental incompatibility between dramatically, Hitler was invited into the ers). This summer Horst Seehofer, the lead- democracy – specifically, Christian democ- German government by an old guard of er of the Christian Social Union (CSU) and racy – and “liberalism”. Untraditional fami- conservatives who thought that they could an Orbán admirer, was not only invited into lies, immigration and cultural pluralism control him as their political puppet. Merkel’s cabinet, but was allowed to call the – Orbán wants to weed them all out of Hun- The way in which fascists were only able shots on migration policies. gary. But more notable is that he plans to do to rise in Europe with the connivance of In my interviews with AfD politicians, it it through the EU. “Let us steel ourselves for conservatives was something that fascists was often difficult to tell the difference be- the European Parliament elections,” Orbán themselves wanted to forget by the time tween their line and that of more standard told his audience, “we are on the threshold they reached their heights in the 1940s. German conservatives. Alexander Gauland, of a great moment.” He may not be wrong. (And they weren’t the only ones: the Allies, the co-head of the AfD, whom I met in his Orbán’s political party, Fidesz, is a member rooms in the City Palace at Potsdam, shift- of the European People’s Party, alongside ed effortlessly between the bombast of a Merkel’s Christian Democrats, whose right Trumpian provocateur and the pro-market, flank is far from repelled by Orbán’s calls for pro-Nato, pro-US platitudes of a dyed-in- a more exclusionary politics. the-Cold-War German liberal. The reliance of right-wing populists If one is worried about fascism, the real on traditional institutions and precedent lesson of the 1930s is to look at the condi- is even clearer in the US. Trump has ap- tions that gave rise to Trumpism and new pointed and nominated reactionary Su- political forces such as the AfD. America’s preme Court justices in a perfectly legal decades of fruitless, costly wars – in Afghan- manner (with members of the American istan, Iraq and Libya – have undermined liberal professoriate complimenting him on faith in the “liberal international order” his choices). His child separation policy on much more than Trump’s lack of reverence the Mexican border provided some of the for it. In the US, the Republican Party has most repugnant scenes in recent American long wanted to reward its upper economic history. But such separations were already stratum, but has only now cottoned on to being conducted under Obama and George the fact that it can be more effectively done W Bush (though Trump turned an ad hoc “Apparently scientists can tell how in a fully hypocritical populist guise than

policy into a formal one), and may likely much you drink from your hair” one that sincerely clings to the virtues of LEIGH GEORGE

24 | NEW STATESMAN | 14-20 SEPTEMBER 2018 Riley the most notable aspect of Trump is not his fascistic tendencies but his “neo- Bonapartism”, which Riley defines as “a form of state-dependent capitalism, in the sense that profits will owe more to political connections and interventions than to pro- ductivity”. The result is the opposite of the fascist empowerment of the political party: in the scenario of state-dependent capital- ism, Riley argues, parties wither away, leav- ing only enterprising salesmen to collect the political remains. For Robert Paxton, the revered historian of Vichy France, Trump appears too igno- rant of what a state actually is to be a good fascist – he is more of a plutocrat interested in growing his own wealth and that of his family and fellow “anti-elite” elites. Beyond his passion for military parades, Trump does not see violence or new large-scale military adventures as a way of transcend- ing the failures of the American brand of ne- oliberalism – at least not yet. Unlike today’s Tall story: Mussolini’s “March to Rome” was a fascist myth that disguised the role of conservatives right-wing populists, interwar fascists, Paxton reminds us, were generally averse to the free market. Meanwhile, the Democratic particular, AfD voters are horrified about replicating themselves: Hitler was pleased Party has been content to sabotage the or- refugees receiving monthly allowances that to see the Romanian fascist party brought ganisation of its working-class constituents, they themselves may have received – or to heel, and found Franco intolerable. For who may well still be keeping a vigil for the were eligible to receive – a decade previous- Geoff Eley, one of the shrewdest histori- emergence of a new New Deal. ly, and may one day need again. ans of Nazism, what’s most notable are the In Europe the story looks different. The The leading historians of European fas- keenly felt global pressures that Trump is blanket policies of economic austerity, so cism have balked at being asked to validate proposing a solution for. Where the Nazis apparently enlightened that European elites the supposed “fascist creep”. Dylan Riley, worked hard to gin up an internal enemy, stopped bothering to justify them, are often a scholar of interwar Romania and Italy, Trump can coast on the anti-Muslim propa- understood as having provided populists of makes the uncomfortable argument in his ganda of the American media, and point to every stripe with tinder to burn. But the ef- work that fascism, contrary to what liber- enemies at the border, who are desperate to fects of austerity on the surge of nativism on als tend to think, is not premised on the de- link up with domestic subversives. the continent are very difficult to measure. struction of civil society. Instead it is some- These migrants and refugees represent

In Germany, the political scientists Philip thing that can grow out of civil society. For the area where Trump has perhaps been t Manow and Hanna Schwander have chal- lenged the widespread assumption that it was Germany’s “losers of globalisation” who voted in droves for the AfD. Germany, after all, was still experiencing its post-2008 boom as the far-right surged across the country, mostly piloted by “winners of glo- balisation” (early on, the AfD was person- ally funded by the respectable former presi- dent of the Federal Association of German Industry, Hans-Olaf Henkel, though he has since distanced himself from the party). Manow and Schwander argue that popu- lations that suffer from globalisation via the free flow of goods and capital (ie who live in low-productivity economies, and whose states can’t counteract this with the manip- ulation of currency) will vote for left-wing populists. By contrast, countries that suffer from globalisation via increased influx into their welfare systems will turn to the right. The voters for the AfD are against migrants not because migrants are competition in the labour market, but because migrants may

KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-KEYSTONE VIA GETTY IMAGES become competition for social benefits. In

14-20 SEPTEMBER 2018 | NEW STATESMAN | 25 state sell-offs more spectacular than his Viagra-fuelled soirées. What kept the forces of right-wing pop- ulism back in the 1990s, which is no longer able to hold them back now? There appear to be three elements. The first was that the Cold War had kept polarisation within Western democratic electorates relatively at bay. In the face of Soviet propaganda – and the Soviet example – the liberal regimes of the West were compelled to provide their lower-middle classes with tolerable living conditions, and a common vision of the fu- ture. Neither imperative remained in place after 1989, as had been registered earlier in the years of the Cold War Détente. The second, greater condition for liberalism’s relative power was that the Third Way – the new “compassionate” form of neoliberalism – had not yet failed, at least in the public’s mind. And so it was granted a trial period of sorts that ended in the financial crisis and Middle Eastern paroxysm. Finally, the pres- Extremist fashion: a couple at a far-right music festival in Ostritz, Saxony marking Hitler’s birthday sure of China in the global economy had still not yet been adequately felt in the 1990s.

t most innovative. He recognised much he Weimar Complex that certain The Chinese state was, for instance, still a earlier than the neoconservatives or tradi- liberals today exhibit has an un- net exporter of oil until 1993, not having yet tionalist “paleocons” that upgrading Islam fortunate – and perhaps not en- adjusted to its own appetite for resources. to the status of public enemy number one tirely coincidental – way of shut- What was new in the 1990s – the decline was not going to be sufficient. With the ting out the possibility of learning of Cold War solidarity, the Third Way, the infinitely inflatable threat of communism Tfrom other historical periods, not to men- rise of China – is now old hat. But the right- gone with the end of the Cold War, some- tion other regions. Two candidates for com- wing populism of that decade has still never thing equally flexible was required for the parison for our decade would be the 1960s been properly tested. To the horror of those fear-monger. China would seem to fit the (a decade of comparable polarisation) or the liberals who came to prominence in the bill, and Trump occasionally uses it, but it is 1990s (a decade when smaller upsurges of 1990s, Tony Blair above all, it seems that a still too abstract: it is still a word on product right-wing populism were roundly defeat- significant portion of their populations are labels, rather than a physically embodied ed in several countries). The 1990s saw the willing to “give fascism a chance”. But to presence. Instead, the figure of the migrant rise of Third Way politics and the muscle- the horror of the more authentically fascist- has become the best way to recharge the flexing of the “liberal international order” minded figures of today’s right – from Steve friend-enemy distinction. and bears more resemblances to our time Bannon to the AfD’s Björn Höcke, from Trump’s brilliance on the campaign trail than many liberals seem prepared to admit. Olcay Kilavuz, leader of the Turkish Grey was to build up the sense of the enemy as But there is one critical difference: what lost Wolves, to Tommy Robinson, formerly of the non-American who is pursuing Ameri- back then is advancing now. the English Defence League – illiberal na- canness among natives: the enemy who In Germany in the 1990s, small right- tionalism is being thwarted by an adaptable wants to dilute or possibly poison the be- wing “flash parties” such as the Repub- breed of populist neoliberals. The rising po- loved brand. There is fake news but there likaners and the Schill Party appeared, but litical form of our time appears to be a mon- are also fake Americans – and only Trump never made the inroads of the AfD. The grel: the expansion of the market into every and his administration, the message goes, young Viktor Orbán already had a stint domain, combined with shrewdly targeted are ruthless enough to weed them out. as prime minister of Hungary in the late redistribution and social programmes, all This gambit has worked remarkably well. Nineties, though he recognised quite clear- wrapped in an appeal to racial solidarity and While liberal commentators expected Lati- ly that the timing for a nationalist resur- the demonisation of outsiders. no Americans and their supporters to band gence was not yet ripe. To counter this combination, liberals together in a beautiful, solidarity-igniting Only Silvio Berlusconi, having taken need to do more than just roll back priva- protest, something else appears to be hap- the reins of a country suddenly no long- tisation, tweak social provisions and crush pening. In the immediate wake of the im- er of geopolitical consequence, was able right-populists at the voting booth. The plementation of the child separation policy, in the 1990s to serve up a preview of longer-range necessity is to undermine the the approval of Trump among Hispanic vot- coming attractions: the special brew of pop- view that we live in an economic and politi- ers appears to have increased. They seem to ulist, nativist politics combined with a neo- cal order without alternatives. At the mini- be doing what “passing” populations have liberal agenda that is the signature political mum, this will mean allowing socialist con- traditionally done to survive: to assimilate form of our time. With a combination of traband – under whatever label necessary into the white majority – to compress their cultural canniness and charisma, Berlusco- – back on to the dock of liberalism. l identity to “white” as opposed to “Hispanic ni first got a nation of Catholics to watch Thomas Meaney is a visiting fellow at the white” – and present themselves as part of soft pornography in the evenings, and then Institut für die Wissenschaften vom

ATTILA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET HUSEJNOW/SOPA VIA GETTY IMAGES the host population. embarked on an orgy of privatisation and Menschen (IWM) in Vienna

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