Fascism from two directions

WEF corporatism and despair against conservatives.

Historian Sir Niall Ferguson on Triggernometry responded to the, now infamous, Tucker Carlson-Darryl Cooper interview characterising Winston Churchill as the villain of World War II. James Lindsay, in a recent New Discourses podcast, discusses corporatist fascism as, in effect, post-Socialist Communism. They manage to outline our “fascism from two directions” historical moment.

Yes, yes, the smear of “Fascist!” is way, way overused. But Fascism is an actual historical thing. A Fascist State is one where there is a large commercial sector ruled over, and subordinated to, a Party-State whose over-arching political project is not confined to existing national boundaries. While there were very significant differences between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, they were both structured in that way.

It is an increasingly appropriate description of Putin’s Russia, with its ramped up militarised authoritarianism and violent irredentism pushing the imperial project of Russia as a providential country, just as Italian Fascism pushed Italian national glory and Nazism Aryan volkisch racial imperialism. That said, Putin’s regime looks much more like Fascist Italy than Nazi Germany.

Coat of arms of Russian Federation, Wikimedia Commons.

The imperial crowns and imperial double-headed eagles all over the heraldry of the Russian Federation very much invokes its imperial heritage. It is a feature of empires that they have no definitive boundaries: the territory they control at any point is an expression of power, not some definitive settlement.

Hegemonies—such as the American hegemony—are relations between states. The American hegemony creates and sustains a maritime order, one that includes the metropoles of all the C20th maritime empires.

Empires destroy states: they impose their statehood, their imperium. Hitler sought to create a great land empire to give Germans lebensraum. The Holocaust overwhelmingly happened in the zone of destroyed states that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union created.¹

The Russian Federation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have nothing ideologically in common. What they have in common is they are all land empires confronting a maritime order.

James Lindsay is clearly correct: the C20th state whose institutional structure and capacity the post-1978 People’s Republic of China most resembles is Nazi Germany. Both Nazi Germany and the contemporary PRC are militarily capable Party-States with large commercial sectors that were nevertheless clearly subordinated to the demands of the regime. As he says, the PRC is a Communism that can produce.

Communist propaganda has as its central emotion anger: Marx’s own writings are full of anger. Fascist propaganda has as its central emotion love: love of country, love of people, of volk.

Communism mobilises envy in the name of égalité. Fascism mobilises fear, with fraternité (solidarity) as the antidote to threat.² This mainland Chinese music video is classic Fascist propaganda.³ Going on and on about the Century of Humiliation is a much more naturally a Fascist theme than a Communist one. Both Communism and Fascism reject and suppress liberté.

It is also clear that the China model is quite attractive to the sort of folk who the World Economic Forum (WEF) assemble at Davos, the WEF-ivski. The China model is the sort of model that Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) has a natural affinity for. Public-private partnerships enforced by activist networks generate a managerialist⁴ Gleichschaltung around “inclusion” and “sustainability”. It really is quite Fascistic, Gleichschaltung being the model for imposing totalitarian politics on a liberal-democratic state (without foreign occupation).

Is the “disinformation” censorship push a sign of elite power or, as analyst Martin Gurri suggests, elite panic? Either way, it is a elite trying to suppress unruly voters who, as former US Secretary of State John Kerry complains at (of course) a WEF forum, are proving annoyingly hard to manage.

The ESG push has attached to it—via Diversity Equity Inclusion (DEI)—a whole set of racial and other hierarchies—albeit based on intersectionality and oppressor-oppressed categories—to make it more like the Nazi model, without the murderousness: it being the Gleichshaltung of performative-victimhood whining cry-bullies rather than of a goose-stepping master-race.

DEI is a mechanism for making bureaucrats arrogant and organisations stupid. Giving bureaucrats a moral mission turns them into moral guardians, moral masters—plus it gives them a moral purpose to hide behind. Meanwhile, elevating identity (“diversity”) and ideology (“inclusion” “safe spaces”) over competence is a classic mechanism for organisational failure: looking at you Ubisoft, morally grandiose marketers, and every HR department with self-righteous shrews.

The Nazis thought the Jews were both parasites and oppressors. This is exactly the bourgeoisie’s role in Marxism—hence “Der Antisemitismus ist der Sozialismus der dummen Kerle”: Antisemitism is the socialism of fools.

The current left-progressivist cheering for Hamas (and Hezbollah) as “decolonisers”—and the targeting of Jews as Zionist and so settler-colonialists—does not exactly reduce the congruence. This is especially so when the largest anti-Jewish pogrom of the postwar era becomes an act of “resistance”.

As Sir Niall Ferguson notes elsewhere, there has been a massive unlearning of C20th lessons. This is because the same disastrous ideas lived on and metastasised in our universities.

The racialising of identity is, indeed, the racialising of identity. If one adds in—as Critical Social Justice and intersectionality do—a moral hierarchy based on racial identity, then that is racism, quite precisely. Indeed, it is a favour-divide-and-dominate racism.

The shrieking about “Fascist!, Fascist!” turns out to be another case of the Iron Law of Woke Projection. (This is a pattern that well predates “wokery”.)

The attack on Churchill—extending, as Sir Niall Ferguson points out, to the recycling of Nazi arguments and claims—and Putin apologism are both manifestations of the sort of alienation from conventional centre-right politics that was basic, during the interwar period, to the success of authoritarian traditionalism (Horthy in Hungary, Franco in Spain) and to the success of Italian Fascism and German Nazism.

National populism is the dominant contemporary manifestation of alienation from conventional centre-right politics. It lacks crucial features of Fascism: paramilitary wings; fetishising violence or military forms; supporting aggressive militarism or foreign adventurism by their polities; explicit rejection of democracy.

Suppose, however, one’s despair at contemporary trends in Western societies is sufficiently intense that such national populist electoral politics seems inadequate. Then, one will likely get what happened in interwar Europe: a shift to more extreme politics. Which is to say, Fascism—or an analogue adapted to contemporary circumstances.

Just because someone is paranoid, does not mean they do not have enemies. Just because the shrieking about “Fascist!” is so overdone, does not mean that there are not Fascists, or Fascist politics. Indeed, one of the many, many problems with such shrieking is that it becomes harder to discuss—or even accurately identify—the real thing.

Which brings us to demonising Churchill. For what does Churchill represent? Unyielding conservative rejection of Nazism. Churchill visited Germany not long after Hitler came to power. Unlike many folk on the conservative side of politics, he got Hitler’s number very early. Hence his constant public campaigning against Hitler: campaigning that alienated a lot of folk on his side of politics. He was, of course, vindicated in the end.

Wikimedia commons.

It is that vindication which is attempted to be stripped away in the Carlson-Cooper interview. There are people in the West whose alienation from what is being done by left-progressivism to the institutions and heritage of our societies is so intense that it drives their reaction to everything. Hence folk who, for instance, see Ukraine-Russia through that lens rather than through the dynamics of Russian autocracy.

This includes folk who may reasonably be described, as Konstantin Kisin does, as the “woke right”, since they replicate much of the argumentation style of progressive “wokery”. The more threatening left-progressivism appears to be, the more tempting it is to turn their methods against them. This was very much a pattern within interwar politics. Both Mussolini and Hitler adopted and adapted the Jacobin model of politics—politics unlimited in scope and means—whose efficacy Lenin had demonstrated, to their own political projects: the collectivism of nation and race respectively.

In a podcast on the controversy, discussant “Hannah” (not her real name) covers key points (lightly edited for clarity):

There's this civic religion, this moral myth, that underlies sort of post-war liberalism, that undergirds civil rights morality, the lachrymose-like slavery-Hitler version of history that we are taught in school, of progression from white people sewing smallpox blankets in the New World, to the triangular slave trade—and no other slave trade—to Hitler and the Jews. Everywhere you go, there's one enemy archetype, one acceptable villain, and it's Voldemort—or some other white person—trying to single out and exterminate an Other, and everything has to be viewed through this lens.

Tucker sort of blames this morality for the collapse of the British Empire—a kind of the abdication of the things that Rudyard Kipling and others stood for—and this sort of collapse into this paused pozzed degraded—when I say paused pozzed I don't mean paused, like pausing a movie, I mean like paused pozzed the way Bug Chasers which use that term—just corrupted and infected and poisoned. They think that if we attack the moral myth of World War II that Hitler was this notably evil, exceptionally evil figure, and that stopping him was worth it, that we poke holes in that myth, and therefore wokeness and all of its precursors, Also, that we undermine the case for other Western interventions abroad.

That's another thing that these guys do, and they're drawing substantially on Pat Buchanan who had similar views: they note that when there's an internal, there's a domestic policy debate—domestic meaning internal to America—about whether we should intervene against Saddam Hussein or Putin or whoever, invariably some neocon will tweet some kind of reference to Hitler.

So, if there's a dumb foreign policy discourse that might compare Putin to Hitler or Saddam to Hitler—and if the Allied intervention in World War II is treated as a template for all other Western military interventions—then I think there's this mental reflex that goes: well if the other if the other post-war interventions have been bad, if the other modern military interventions have been bad, then Hitler must not have been worth stopping either. If Putin is Hitler—and we know that going to war with Putin is wrong—then going to war with Hitler was wrong. But there's another possibility, which is just that Putin is not Hitler. [5:20]

As she also notes, it is the implication that Hitler was not worth stopping that provokes the strong counter-responses to the interview.

As fellow discussant “Steve” notes during the same podcast, there is a “being oh so transgressive” giddiness in operation, plus an implication that Hitler should have got his win, and that the Holocaust either didn’t happen or wouldn’t have happened if Hitler got his win. Moreover, Churchill being “the villain” of the Second World War makes him worse than Hitler or Stalin. It is this that provokes such intense counter-responses, not just critiquing Churchill or merely being revisionist about the history and myths of the Second World War.

I have previously listened to some of Darryl Cooper’s Martyrmade podcasts. A previous post of mine made reference to an earlier media appearance of his. This viral thread of his captures the views of many Trump supporters quite well.

In early episodes of his Martyrmade podcast, Darryl Cooper has some thoughtful things to say from deep dives into history. Once he adopted a conspiracist view of the Maidan demonstrations, I stopped listening to him. I recognised the pattern. He has since clearly gone way, way down that rabbit hole.

This is part of a wave of alienated conspiracism in the West. A regime of censorship and discourse suppression—such as that the West increasingly suffers from—generates conspiracist thinking. The more deranged the official public discourse becomes, the more deranged the responses are likely to be. Much damage has been done to the notion of expertise by so many expert missteps: such as the politicising of “The Science”, and outright lying, that was so evident in the response to Covid. This is bearing ugly fruit.

The alienated shift towards Fascist-flavoured politics is driven by the same reactions to the social imperialism of left-progressivism as the original Fascism and Nazism were. The patterns are repeating, as so many patterns currently are.

But Fascism and Nazism were never the correct response. The problem of illiberal left-progressivism is not solved by illiberal right-progressivism. Churchill was correct then and his rejection of such politics is correct now.

There is a lot more at stake in this critique of Churchill than historical accuracy—though that is also at stake. The solution to the politics of lies and falsehoods is not another form of the politics of lies and falsehoods.

The hidden guilty figures here are those practitioners of conventional centre-right politics who have proved completely inadequate to the challenges of our time. They are either utterly unable to accurately diagnose the institutional dynamics being inflicted on us or are too craven to speak up against such. The illiberals get their opportunities when conventional politics and politicians fail.

Sir Niall’s fatalism in the Triggernometry interview about mass migration being inevitable is not correct. Both the US from 1921 to 1965 and interwar Australia managed sustained pauses in large-scale migration. Nor, given the global falls in fertility, is migration a permanent solution to the problems of aging populations: what, in March 2000, the UN was pleased to call replacement migration—replacing the children who were not born. Indeed, bringing in migrants who are net costs to the public fisc, and/or whose low skills discourage investment in productivity, makes such problems worse. Moreover, Sir Niall’s belittling of the problems of cultural distance—which are real—is not helpful. Indeed, such belittling—endemic among so many commentators—is part of the problem.

No, the success of societies is not just a matter of ideas and institutions, culture matters as well. Culture affects which migrants are, or are not, fiscally positive for recipient countries. (Also, his argument that migration keeps down inflation is nonsense: increased demand from population growth can put upward pressure on prices, increased labour supply can put downward pressure on prices, but inflation remains ultimately a monetary phenomenon.⁵)

A mischievous equation

The two most remarkable Nazi intellectuals were Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, who both noticed things about the world. Schmitt wrote about them with remarkable clarity. Left-progressives have rehabilitated them both. Schmitt’s ideas have also received positive consideration in China.

Meanwhile, the intellectual output that gave us the horrors of Communism is either directly, or in adapted form, still promulgated in Western universities: indeed, taught as if it is true. When updated versions of those toxic ideas are working their way through our institutions—along with updates of their social control mechanisms—reaction is inevitable. If conventional politics fails to respond effectively, unconventional politics will step into the vacuum. This is a central lesson of interwar politics.

Left-progressives have never forgiven Churchill for his Iron Curtain speech. Those of traditionalist and conservative bent who have become alienated from the consequences for conservative and traditionalist politics of the Second World War alliance between liberal-democracy and Soviet Communism against Nazism, Fascism and Japanese militarism, have found their own set of reasons not to forgive Churchill.

Churchill represents the postwar political settlement. Attacking him is natural to all those who reject—or have come to reject—that settlement. As this perceptive discussion of the Churchill myth points out, his myth is running out of believers.

But Churchill was right about the Iron Curtain, just as he was right in his absolute rejection of Nazism. Churchill was not some saint, there are plenty of things to criticise him for. But lying about him is entirely another matter.

Churchill was human, so flawed. He was also a historical giant, an example of what democratic politics can produce in times of stress.

Historian A.J.P. Taylor—who very much did not share Churchill’s politics but lived through that time—had a simple label for Churchill: “saviour of his country”. Moral and intellectual pygmies attacking his memory out of frustration and despair are no sort of guide. They are, however, a warning.

References

Alberto Alesina and Paola Giuliano, ‘Culture and Institutions,’ Journal of Economic Literature, 2015, 53(4), 898–944.

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Pelican, 2018.

David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, Oxford University Press, 1996. (But see also https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2828.)

Garett Jones, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, Stanford University Press, 2023.

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, The Bodley Head, 2010.

1. It is a striking difference between the Nazi mass murders and the Marxist mass murders that the Nazis mass-murdered outside their core territory in a time of war. Marxists mass-murdered inside their own countries in times of peace. This fits in with Nazi propaganda being about love of homeland and creating a worthy order for the volk, while Communist propaganda is about anger towards internal class enemies.

2. Solidarity is not inherently fascist or fascistic. Where the US emphasizes liberté and France égalité, Australia—a country with strong majoritarian democracy mores and patterns—forefronts fraternité (solidarity) because of the struggles against a harsh landscape full of risks of fire, flood and drought and because Australia began as a low-population European outpost on the edge of Asia.

3. This is not a shot at the singer, who is one of my favourite Chinese actor-singers. Any entertainment celebrity—particularly of his prominence—in the PRC has to remain in good political odour with the regime.

4. Or what sociologist Musa al-Gharbi would call symbolic capitalists. They mobilise dominion capital, as I discuss here.

5. David Hackett Fisher, who analyses persistent inflation as coming from population growth, in his discussion of the Price Revolution of 1470-1650, underestimates the scale of the increase from the later C15th in Central European silver production from technological advances, silver being the main monetary metal. His analysis also runs together immiseration effects, from population increasing faster than resources—thus driving up wheat and other food prices—with the consequences of silver production increasing faster than output of goods and services.