a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

When Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, capitalism was marching across the world imperialistically. His rallying call was that European workers and colonials everywhere should unite as Communists, sharing the same cause: freedom, through a slave revolt. Those enslaved in factories and on farms were in the shackles of “ownership of the means of production,” so it seemed they had to abolish these shackles to win their freedom. They had nothing to lose but their chains.

Capitalism is on the march again, in the new form that goes under the name globalization. This is a vague name for an exceedingly complex cluster of factors: transnational corporations and banking systems linked by new technologies and using new technologies to create production processes and financial instruments that less and less resemble 19th century manufacturing and banking. The speed and complexity of these processes produces dislocations of every sort, a kind of universal dizziness. Governments and international development agencies are more and more owned by these corporations, legislating in their favor, promoting their speedy growth and taking their growth as the measure of well-being for all people—even while world poverty increases.  In this context, fascism, not Communism, is the spectre haunting Europe and the world.  It–ominously—offers a delusionary certainty ideal with appeal for all classes, oppressing and oppressed, capitalists and workers; it is negativistic toward all establishments, right, left and center; it spews anger everywhere.

Fascism offers a way not to revolt or throw off shackles, but to deny the realities of the world and succumb to a nostalgia for a group cohesion that never existed, a world of certainties and freedom from fear.  The ideal, however, means different things to the “class enemies” who rush toward it from their different positions.  The ideal is uniting, but fascists of the world will never unite, there will be no Fascist International, because fascism’s delusionary ideal calls for groups that are tightly boundaried, exclusionary  –they cannot unite with each other. Fascists are the opposite of cosmopolitans looking forward to some kind of unity of humankind. But if a majority or even a large minority of the world’s nations or national sub-groups became fascistic, that would be quite enough to destroy the great post-war political innovation called social democracy.

Just as there is a new capitalism, there is a new fascism, quite different than the fascism of the post-World War I period and the Depression. The old fascism, taking its name from “fasces,” the Latin word for a bundle of straight stalks wrapped together for strength, was a type of anti-representational, anti-democratic government that featured extreme nationalism politically and extreme “national character” conformism socially.

The bundle of all alike stalks or arrows excluded everyone not of the “nation” –a group of the same blood, the same birth, kindred– and everyone not conforming to an imagined “national character” which the fascist leaders exemplified charismatically. Fascism, thus, had many variants, each reflecting a particular nation’s history and culture.  So scholars debated for decades about how to define fascism. But Benito Mussolini knew instantly that it should be a one-party dictatorship that could combine all kinds of political positions, all kinds of people, as long as it thundered out rejection of all other parties, all other economic systems, and of the status quo.

All the European national variants of fascism in the 1920s were initially dedicated to exploitation of unwanted “non-national” people and all evolved toward exclusion of unwanted people. Nazi Germany evolved so far that it entered into totalitarianism and “strong state” worship, while most of the fascist countries had governments made up of people suspicious of governments and more tribalistic or Mafiosi in their arrangements for authoritarian ruling. The non-totalitarian fascists were interested in making their nations into fortresses and throwing their unwanted peoples over their parapets. The Nazis advanced past this stage to become expansionary, imaging the whole world as their fortress and dedicated to eliminiating all unwanted peoples inside their expanding reach. For this, they needed much more complex and secretive bureaucracies than any merely fascist country ever created.  The Nazis wanted to erase political action amongst their citizens, that is, they were anti-political, but they were, at the same time all for a government that crept into every corner of life and held people in an iron grip of surveillance and terror. The fascists stayed with “limited government” very authoritarianly constructed.

As it develops, fascism, a kind of modern tribalism, does not lose its roots in hysterical exploitation of unwanted people, and that mode of prejudice retains its appeal, particularly to young male fascists. When we were in Europe last week, a philosophy student from Berlin, now 28 years old, described to me her first encounter with a young Neo-Nazi and the basic lesson she got in how hysterical fascism works.  She was 18 then, enrolling at the Free University after growing up on a farm in northernmost Germany, near Denmark. To her, the Neo-Nazis boys she saw hanging out in their Berlin bars, flaunting the swastikas on their black leather jackets, were bewildering. Weren’t Germans supposed to reject the Nazi past and atone with multiculturalism?  One day, she had the opportunity to ask a Neo-Nazi kid what had drawn him to his gang, and was a shocked by his matter-of-fact reply. He hated Jews, he explained, because they had bought up Hollywood and were producing films there that starred muscled, sexy Black men. Then they distributed their films in Europe and made all the young white women crazy for the Blacks. Guys like him seemed weak, small, unexciting, to their own corrupted women. He and his friends would like to be an Aryan army, able to destroy the Jews and keep out the Blacks –and get the girls.

This does not seem to be the main ambition of most middle-aged and middle class contemporary fascists, who seek not sexual enhancement by military means but control by means of resentful, self-righteous contempt and exclusion.  More obsessionally and narcissistically, they seek purification of their society and control over its reproduction. They want to keep out immigrants who represent impurity and the capacity (by reproducing and by intermarrying) to overwhelm and out-populate the true nation and the national character.  These excluders are completely opposed to any social democratic government that wants to promote integration or multiculturalism or helping immigrants with social services. Social services seem to them like a zero sum game in which they lose if immigrants gain. But the immigrants they are talking about and fantasizing about are quite different than the ones that stirred fascist passions before the Second World War.

As in the 19th century, capitalism’s present march is producing a vast movement of populations. But then it was primarily a movement of populations out of Europe, to the European colonies and to America, where waves of Irish, Italian, Germans channeled through Ellis Island and on out into the vast American heartland.  (Huge numbers of Chinese came to the West Coast, and were greeted with anti-immigration legislation, despite how crucial they were to the building of railroads and the unification of the country by its rail lines. But they did not represent the same kind of threat as the Europeans who could “pass” for Americans, for whites, and manipulate the local governmental systems to favor their own.)  Because America was so underpopulated, it could absorb the European immigrants, and it became known after the Second World War –with some truth—as a “melting pot.”  Integration was an ideal –never carried out very well, but nonetheless an ideal, even for “Negroes,” the former slaves who became internal emigrants after the Civil War.

The immigrations that are now being set off by globalization are quite different. There
are still immigrants from Europe, but most of the world’s immigrants now are from all the regions of the earth that have been disrupted by European and American-based transnational capitalism and by the old Soviet empire’s colonization practices. Traditional economies –mostly agricultural—have broken down everywhere, and deracinated, desperate people (as well as some international business people) are headed for Europe and for North America.

Because immigration in this period of transnational capitalism is transnational –that is, immigrants to Europe and North America are coming from all over the world—the difficulties of assimilating the immigrant populations are vastly more complex than they were when the primary immigrant populations were European. Muslims, particularly, are felt as threatening in predominantly Christian nations, especially because they carry the stigma of terrorism and “clash of civilizations” with them and they do not speak “world” languages or have cultural and religious traditions felt by Christians to be kindred. The European (and Canadian) social democratic effort to integrate the new immigrants and provide channels to citizenship are now under tremendous strain.  The “melting pot” ideal in America seems antiquarian as American fascists invent new ways to block new immigrants, expel illegal immigrants, and set up citizenship requirements few can meet. Members of the working class feel the new immigrants as threats to their jobs as well as their ways of life, their national belongingness; capitalists feel them as burdens who will get welfare or workfare and strengthen the local and federal governments that provide these, moving the country in the direction of “socialism,” which will also entail crippling regulations slapped on businesses. The crazy “birther” charge that Barack Hussein Obama is a foreigner, an illegal immigrant to the Presidency, and a socialist makes sense in the fascist world-view, so capaciously negative. Many American fascists are, as I have said before on this blog, secessionist:  they want to split off into a smaller, purer, more
distinctly Christian nation –however, no one has solved the problem of how to do so when the true Americans are spread throughout the country. The best they can do is seize control governmentally and toss out or keep in semi-slavery any foreigner.

The fascist ideal of purified national unity (embraced with patriotic fervor) and conformity to an alleged national character has to contend in America with the old “melting pot” ideal and the fact that we Americans are all immigrants –even the traditional status (not wealth) aristocracy of people like my mother’s and father’s families, who came to America with the original settlers in Massachusetts and in Virginia, respectively.  Our American “national character” is always a work in progress, although it consistently involves individualism and entrepreneurship, innovativeness, and self-assertiveness (often religiously sanctioned) and self-sufficiency. It has been difficult for fascists to demand conformity to a national character ideal defined as individualistic, but when this kind of “herding cats” is not working well, there is always theology and religious conformity (to some form of Christianity in the “Christian Nation”) to fall back on.

Around the world, religious fundamentalisms have been, in the last three decades, the chief sources of integrative national character ideals –they have provided the wraps to keep the straight stalks strongly together and exclusive. Religious fundamentalism has become the quintessence of fascism everywhere. It even uses the word fascism to condemn other religions: thus we have the fighting word “Islamofascism.”  Islamic fundamentalists do not seem to have words for “Christofascism” or “Judeofascism,” but they certainly do have broadswath critiques of Western values, including Western “Islamophobia.” In the West, it is often assumed that only madrasahs are instilling jihad-thinking and anti-modernity, while institutions like the Vatican are free to become models of militant Catholic nostalgia for purity, purging the insufficiently doctrinally correct from Catholic ranks, consolidating a male priestly hierarchy, and casting off blame for any of its in-house prejudicial practices –like child abuse.

I was amazed during our European trip to observe how widespread is a facet of fascist thinking that I had thought was concentrated in America, because of our country’s anti-intellectual traditions.  This facet goes under the general name “anti-science,” sometimes “science denial.”  Climate change is being denied in America much more than in Europe, which is way ahead, too, in environmental protection and alternative energy programs.
It is inspiring to look down on the English Channel from an airplane (not a fuel intensive jet) and see the wind farms hard at work. But it was discouraging to read each and every morning while we were in London of some attack on British science, scientists, or science education –including a lot of Social Darwinist nonsense about group “survival of the fittest.” Herbert Spencer, the renowned Social Darwinist of the 1860s, could return to write for the British tabloids if only he brushed up on the Human Genome Project. (Did you know that Caucasian DNA has now been definitively proven to be the fittest?)  During the War (in 1944), the American historian Richard Hofstadter did a thorough critique of this “survival of the fittest” underpinning of fascism in his book Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1914, and he returned to the critique in 1964 with Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. But we need more of this kind of analysis for now, and for the anti-intellectualism in world intellectual life, where the spectre of fascism is haunting very well indeed thank you very much.

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