Once again the lazy use of Trump, a man who spent four years trying to withdraw the troops from Afghanistan and the ME, who oversaw the destruction of Isis (although they will be back). who engineered various peace agreements, and who did more to at least stand up to China (a state with genuinely fascist overtones) than any western politician since China embraced capitalism.
There are few things on this planet more pathetic than today’s media and commentariat.
Moreover, I think it was Reagan who said ‘When fascism comes to America it will come dressed as liberalism’ and based on what we are witnessing, he was right.
Trump was a bull in a political china shop, and didn’t behave in the way expected of a President… and yet there is a sprinkling of ‘Trump was right’ articles being produced. It seems to me that the Democrats are far more likely to indulge ‘fascist’ behaviour by their supporters.
Also having to define something by the personality of one person means it isn’t fascism or communism.The regimes in Russia & China were big government , ruled by central control & secular -they are defined as communist but totalitarian might be better description. As soon as the author began to take Paul Mason’s definition seriously ( a man so far left he probably feels the system in North Korea is too benign & easy going) you know where it was going to lead. Trump was voted in & served as President for 4 years-during that time he did nothing illegal. The administration which was supposed to carry out Republican party policies , however , did behave illegally but as they are now in power , noone is going to deal with them. Some democrats may have buyer’s regrets as they watch the wrecking party that they put in power try to destroy America-that is their problem. Regimes respond to situations & times-the 1930’s was between two world wars-most of us have never lived through a single large scale war.
Ed West’s marathon article going nowhere above is the perfect example of ‘James Thurber’s’ theory that a writer should be paid for a story, BUT, money Deducted for each word, resulting in quick, pithy, stories of tight, logical, thinking.
WWG1WGA, TDS, and MAGA “But instead of cancer, we have fascism, a disease the commentariat can diagnose everywhere.” is true, Marxist/Liberal/Lefty loons see N*z is hiding in every bush and under every bed, but it is their craziness which is the problem, not the Right. N*z is are as rare as unicorns, but Marxists thugs head up every entertainment, education, MSM, Social Media, Political, Legal, organization. But this is what you get when ex-Guardian types are the writers.
I thought the article was on point. It touches on all the core issues around this topic, in particular, the way leftists usually define any kind of non-leftism/conservatism as “fascism”, even though the ur-Fascists were all on the hard left. The comparison to hypochondria is well made, the comments about not being able to talk about a real Resistance well observed, and in general I feel a need to give some support to Ed here BTL because it seems to me the article is pretty decent.
There are fringe voices in the Democratic party that excuse Antifa, etc. Polling shows that large segments of Republican voters believe that because they could not have fairly lost the 2020 Presidential election, violence to enforce a political outcome is legitimate. Both are deplorable, but the Republican Party is drifting rapidly into a new model of an authoritarian right wing party, while the Democrats are largely comparable to a european social democratic party with wokeist baggage.
It was BLM, openly supported and funded by the Democrats, who used endless violence last year, to discredit the Trump administration and get him out of office.
Give one example of that American conservatives are becoming authoritarian. American conservatives believe in the constitution. That why we support originalist justices. The left want activist judges who change the meaning of the constitution to suit their needs. Judicial activism is authoritarian not judicial restraint. Conservatives want lower taxes, cut spending, smaller government, reduced regulations. That’s in-line with anti-authoritarian. The left wants more taxes, bigger government, more regulations. That’s all authoritarian.
Any political dispensation without ‘authoritarianism’ is impossible. What matters is the source and justification of the authority. On the ‘left’ it’s ‘power’, on the ‘right’ it’s the will of all those subject to the authority to accept it as legitimate. These are two radically incompatible approaches, with differing ways of life that follow on as a consequence.
“on the ‘right’ it’s the will of all those subject to the authority to accept it as legitimate.” Where does that happen in a Democratic state? You’re using the langue more commonly seen last in the USSR.
Large segments of Democrat voters, including most of the mainstream US media, clearly believed that they could not have fairly lost the 2016 Presidential election. They never ceased whining about it for the next three years.
Whatever Trump achieved, he is clever rather than intelligent which makes me think he achieved by luck rather than judgement. I agree with Ed’s description of him as unpredictable.
He was lucky to surround himself with people who were intelligent!
You mention his property empire; you do not have to be pleasant to build a property empire. As for his TV programme, that says much about American taste!
Actually, all the evidence suggests that as President he surrounded himself with very bad and/or disloyal advisors. This makes it all the more remarkable that he managed to deliver so much.
I agree. I don’t think Trump knew how thick the muck was, and remains, in DC, or the Forbidden City as I call it after 29 years in federal service, and he made some very bad choices in staffing.
I guess that says a great deal about the BBC and the taste of their audience. Woke Morality plays, Fake News, and bad comedy padded out with game and reality shows.
Why do you think he is unpleasant? According to Andrew Neil Trump was well known as a very good employer & there has been no ex-Trump staff ‘spilling the beans’ .Those doing that were the usual suspects like Stormy Daniels ( she was big friend enemy Larry Flynt who said he would give one million to anyone giving him compromising info on Trump-don’t think she received her million & she is the last person he would sleep with because Flynt connection) He is friends with all his children & not a single problem among them-more than can be said for Biden-both his children have addiction problems.The TV show is American version of the British programme-it was about getting people started in business.Practically every actor wears fake tan-so don’t know why he was singled out as ‘orange man’-a bit fruitist . He has a very good speaking voice & can give a long speech well without notes. He’s probably a bit of a nightmare to be married to-but thats Melania’s problem isn’t it?
“…you do not have to be pleasant to build a property empire.” Nor do you have to be “pleasant” to be a good President. Certainly, at any rate, not “pleasant” to people who are trying to discredit and destroy you from day one. And how exactly do you think an unintelligent person manages to “surround himself” with intelligent people? His good looks and charm? You don’t have to like Trump to concede that he obviously – and unlike the current unfortunate occupying the White House – has a well-functioning brain.
Well said Fraser. This whole “Trump is a dumbass” looks ridiculous in the face of his actual accomplishments. Ed West, who I actually quite like and find to be a very insightful writer/commentator, has this strange contempt for Donald.
Sorry Ed West, the Left will never like you or give you a seat at the table, don’t bother trying to be one of the “nice” conservatives by bitching about one of the few actually successful conservative politicians since Reagan.
And if you are listing Trump’s personal achievements it’s churlish to ignore:
Gained more votes for reelection than any sitting President in history, more than any other candidate except the propaganda-driven one supposedly achieved by his senile rival, and did so in the teeth of literally unprecedented mass media and big tech manipulation of opinion against him and to protect and promote his rival.
The man has plenty of personal flaws (but the same can be said of most top politicians), but his achievements are significant
Since teh US population is always growing, gaining more votes than previously is just what nearly all president-elects get.
This isn’t evidence for anything–just a meaningless talking point.
No it’s based on empirical evidence. This is not a talking point. Even the Dems are quoted over and over again about the ability to hack the machines, site studies of massive fraud with mail-in voting.
“Since teh US population is always growing, gaining more votes than previously is just what nearly all president-elects get.” “Nearly all” is not “all”. Just looking at recent presidents, Obama went down in 2012, and Reagan in 1984 got more than Bush in 2000, the other Bush in 1988, and Clinton in 1996. Numbers don’t always even go up at all with rising populations, though they usually do to some extent for sitting presidents, and Trump increased his vote by a spectacular 12m in just 4 years, in the teeth of the massive hostile bias in the broadcast media and unprecedented big tech manipulation against his campaign. Your denial just comes across as dishonest Trump-hatred.
Being born the son of a property millionaire certainly is luck.
And TV stardom simply shows that his only real skill, salesmanship, also translates into popular TV.
Not sure what promises he kept. No border wall. No give by Iran, N. Korea, China, Russia or any other US adversary throughout his term. Moreover, since the US economy has been growing for about 250 years, even his economic growth is unexceptional.
Trump is a spent force. He’s now an albatross around the GOP’s neck.
The GOP will never get back the White House while he is still alive.
I disagree. I think the Democrat party is scaring everybody with its support of Critical Race Theory. The tide is rapidly turning against the New Racism which is being taught in America’s schools and colleges.
And in burned BLM cities like San Francisco,New York, Portland Oregon, Seattle etc..Democrats with money &families Moving to Republican Governed states like Florida ..
Watch Trump being interviewed by Charlie Rose in 1992. You do not tell the whole story. The interview will get you closer. Consistency is strength. Our political leaders, political class have no consistency- they are the true car salesman. No political leader would ever take what Trump took, a lesser man would’ve yielded, gone along to get along. billionaire Bloomberg said in his own words he spent $150million of his own money to flip the house (and tried in the Senate) why? for America? No. For his own personal financial gain to secure his financial empire through growth with China. So much evidence to the contrary of what you comment.
Trump was very smart. He was crude and obnoxious but very smart. He didn’t speak political speak, so people accused him of lying all the time, but if you track everything he said that was initially accused of being lies, he was right and truthful the overwhelming majority of the time. Obama lies more than any president ive ever seen, but since he says it in political-ease, he gets a pass
I doubt I’m the only one who thinks that the “new fascists “ are actually far more likely to be found amongst the “progressive left”, and centre left, the very people claiming to be fighting and guarding against a resurgence of fascism. That seems to be the main problem with Americans, unlike the Brit’s, they, for the most part, don’t seem to get irony. Ironically !
The author is a Brit, and the people claiming to see the incipient arrival of fascism for the last four years or so (or longer) haven’t been more American than you would expect given that the bete noir was an American president. Is what you are saying ironical in some sense that I don’t get?
The dig at Americans was tongue in cheek, I apologise if my sense of humour failed to travel further than the words on the page. The bit about anti-fascists displaying fascist tendencies however, I think, still stands. Again, I think I am far from alone in thinking that the further someone goes to the far left, the closer they probably get to the extreme right. The details might differ, but the end results appear to be much he same.
Can you tell me how you could have a ‘state’ at all without ‘authority’, imposed from ‘above’?
The US is a hybrid country, with a political system largely derived from French Revolutionism and other continental forms harking back to ancient Rome (President, Senate, Congress’ etc. etc.) but a unusually strong attachment to English common law in parts. But for the latter, Fascism would be the normal state of the type of Goverment (because the authority would stop at the top in a human being, like a Roman Emperor, some of whom were led to confuse themselves with a God). In the UK the ultimate authority, constitutionally, is ‘God’. Everyone beneath that invisible, assumed foundational being is dependent on its granted authority. Even the Queen cannot personally instruct men to arrest you. In practice ‘God’ stands for an impersonal ideal, which nonetheless possesses and encapsulates the essence of legitimate ‘rule’ which most people feel ‘bound’, morally, to obey, and their resulting obedient behaviour is entirely weightless in daily life.
‘Democracy’ is the form of political system most likely to lead to Fascism (as it represents the will of capricious random majorities).
You attached “Authority” to right wing government exclusively in you’re previous post. Now you’re saying it’s common to all states.You say nothing about communism,in which way does that feel different to fascism?
As an atheist your comments about god are meaningless and prove nothing. The Queen is titular and secular head of state,not god. All that was dealt with in the civil war.
Your statement about fascism and democracy also applies to communism, where else could it occur? That is why democracy is so great! and problematic. Once democracy is surrender and lost the other two options are difficult to change or escape from.Both are oppressive and murderous, no one in their right minds would wish to live in such a state.
Of course, the left in this country (as it is in the US) is fascist. The three tenets of fascism are authoritarianism, suppression and regimentation. Now ask yourself who came up with no platforming, cancellation and taking the knee.
it Was National Socialism, and the big thing of the WWII Fas***s was Public/Private industrialization. If anything it is very like the Left, only the Left do not want the public to be involved – leave the Governing to the experts they believe, the public need to do as they are told.
Indeed: George Orwell made this observation in, I think, The Road to Wigan Pier where he compared the extreme left and right to the hands of a clock at five minutes to one.
As an American, let me tell you, buster, if I want irony I’ll eat a steak or take vitamin supplements. And I need CliffsNotes to understand Monty Python.
Regressives….Authoritarian from UK Conservative government supporting taking the knee at football matches.is beyong the pale….Dont trust lib-lab-Cons-Greens-Snp
There could be no more fascist group than ‘antifa’. Read about their year of riots, arson, murders, and intimidation in Portland and elsewhere, and you cannot help but think of the brown shirts of the 30’s. They are a paramilitary organization brutalizing citizens, police, and bystanders, and are limiting the press coverage of their crimes by assaulting anyone who attempts to take video or photos of their antics.
One need not speculate about future fascists, they are here.
antifa crashed the shores of Normandy and freed the hell hole of Europe.from fascism,the usa got lucky drumpf is too dumb and lazy to have won 4 more years,his mini experience ,,with the taste of fascism and authoritarian rule was enough to wake up 80+ million voters and oust the wannabe
Hahaaa, sure. Antifa was a Marxist political party in Germany 1930s. They were as thuggish and brutal in street terror and violence as they fought the Na* is to see which monstrous form of oppression would take the nation. Antifa lost, but just hid away, and like cockroaches these ultra violent, thuggish, Marxists keep popping up to push for their Nu-Stal*nism.
The reason they picked the name Antifa is because they were competing with the Fa* c*sts, and thus anti that group – ideologically they were very bit as brutal and oppressive! Same as now. Street violence and terror have been the antifa way since they began in that horrible time and place of the Weimar Republic. (where the ‘Frankfurt School’ also aroze, and gave us the Marxist leadership in our Education systems, and MSM, and Politics – google them, and the 11 points)
so today and tomorrow is all I have left here, and awaiting for approval is all I get… Unherd is turning the corner, they are being assimilated by the MSM Borg.
(I wish I could write it in the original Klingon, but just c/p instead) “Borg Star TrekThe Borg are a fictional alien group that appear as recurring antagonists in the Star Trek franchise. The Borg are a vast collection of “drones”, or cybernetic organisms, linked in a hive mind called “the Collective” or “the Hive”
Yes, it’s a great pity. This section was often the most interesting part of Unherd, for me. I hope at least to be able to continue reading those who can/will pay to air their views and debate.
where is your evidence? Proof, the electronic voting machines are hackable. Proof; there are studies available dating back decades on mail in voting fraught with the massive fraud. Proof; Democrats have spoke on camera to this in Congress and at the state level. physical proof; massive outdoor rallies for Trump, some in freezing temperatures during a pandemic. car & boat rallies, miles long that were by word of mouth. Proof; empirical evidence of voter machine hacking by several foreign countries.
Meanwhile you have the Dem presidential candidate that can’t form a sentence, exhibiting extreme dementia. Placing immigration policies 70% of the people polled don’t want. A VP candidate that didn’t only not get support from her own State, CA but pulled out before the first primary. Do you really think Americans want to pay higher gas $’s?, higher food costs?, higher taxes?, higher drug costs?, higher living costs?, mutilating children’s genders? The poor are getting poorer. America has been experiencing endless wars, opioid drugs and homeless doubling and tripling in numbers. No society can stay on this trajectory, undoing social norms and control.
Antifa, BLM manifesto states the opposite of their labeling. When the people tell you who they are, listen.
One of the cleverest things the left accomplished was to define fascism as extreme right rather than extreme left, simply on the basis that it stood against communism.
They are both left wing ideologies that stand for state control and against individual freedom. They fought against each other with bitter hatred in much the same way as shiites and sunnis or catholics and protestants.
It was always thus.
Fascism was a left project, the Nazis weren’t naming themselves socialists for nothing.
Goebbels, today’s role model for so many in politics and media, was a particularly staunch socialist.
Stalin invented the smearing of the fascists as being on the right, merely to distinguish himself from them and we fell and still fall for it. https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/05/lk-samuels/the-fascist-left-myth-or-reality/
And conversely, the new “resistance” is comprised of those who have the courage to be openly conservative–or even classically liberal. I laugh at the people who claim to be brave fighters against the establishment–as they spout off the same platitudes everyone else is spouting.
We do get it! The left here bandy “Fascist” like confetti to all who oppose their dogma. They overlook the “socialist” in the N*Z* tag. Totalitarian/Authoritarian feel much the same to the oppressed I would guess. This stuff today is Neo Marxist riding on the back of identity/inter-sectional rubbish from Postmodernism. It is undemocratic, It must be resisted.
Johannes Kreisler
2 years ago
Undoubtedly a well-intentioned article, but (going with the hypochondria line) it reads like obsessing about a pimple on one’s nose (Trump) while being completely oblivious to / in denial of the great big lump of advanced brain tumour disfiguring one’s head (the American left and all the institutions / positions they encroached). If there’s still anyone in the 21st century who believes that “nationalism” is the problem or that “fascism” is a rightwing concept, that person needs their brains examined by a reputable medical professional.
Gandydancer x
2 years ago
“…the clown act turned deadly in the end, but it was still a clown act that never seriously threatened a 250-year-old constitution.” Well, you’re certainly right that Trump didn’t threaten our Constitution, but what remains of it is in fact under threat any time the Supreme Court is in session. And the only deadly thing that happened on Jan 6th was the murder with impunity of Ashli Babbit by an as-yet unidentified minion of the new regime.
The failure to prosecute the killer of Ms Ashli Babbitt is an absolute disgrace and just confirms many people’s suspicion, that at the end of the day, the USA is just ‘A Cowboy Republic’.
Incidentally video evidence quite clearly shows that Babbitt’s killer was black, and it is rumoured that he is/was a Lieutenant in the Capitol Police.
Nick Clegg wants to extend Trump’s Facebook ban even longer ( presumably to stop any re-election bid) because Trump ‘crossed a red line’ by inciting violence during the Capitol riot. So there you have it , it seems Trump must have shot this woman. Somehow , even though he was half an hour’s walk a way he caused the violence. Does this mean then that the Democrat party is responsible for all the deaths and destruction from BLM etc,? If Trump can cause events by telekinesis , surely they can as well?
The Dems are in complete control of Washington DC. We’ve been told over the years that Congress and Senate when voted into DC are quickly told, on both sides of the isle, they better play by the company rules or not receive support in their next election through funding and/or support on the campaign trail. Those who don’t play are eventually cast to the side. And then the head of the beast grows bigger.
Snow White; Queen says…” mirror mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all?” An old story that will be repeated until an unlikely Snow White comes along and exposes the fraud. It will look like the Queen is going to win killing her competition but alas, …Bright light, information, is the only disinfectant.
Sidney Falco
2 years ago
Anyone who can’t see that Trump, notwithstanding his occasional oafishness, was trying to save Americn democracy is simply an idiot.
An example being the Judge Kavanagh farce. The woman accuser ,Blasey Ford comes from a CIA family , her friend Liz , from school, works for FBI. A team of legal people ( who would cost the average person $ hundreds thousands ) worked pro bono in order for her to make preposterous & in some cases obviously untrue allegations .Yet is two-doors Christine in jail for telling fibs? No shes a multi-millionaire enjoying her life. The police weren’t interested in any of the other accusers either. Papers such as The Guardian still refer to these allegations as valid & true. So the media , the police and the security services were the ones who ultimately were in charge of the justice system & they can decide who they like or dislike.We are seeing this again in the Chauvin case. Probably be easier & cheaper just to return to summary justice of the wild west.
There have been numerous trials where some figure from the past is accused of doing something sexual to someone who was then young ( basically the Blasey-Ford claim). In some of the cases the person is found not guilty ( in one case because someone had made a private home-movie at that time which clearly contradicted the claim) The winning accused still have to pay all their legal costs , the crown pays for the ( unsuccessful) accuser & except in the case of ‘ Nick’ -noone seems to have been prosecuted. It seems the CPS ( and whatever they have in America ) is totally staffed by people with their own agenda.
G Harris
2 years ago
Whatever anyone’s opinion of someone like Trump it behoves us all, not least the author of this curate’s egg of a piece, to remember that a record 74m Americans democratically voted for this Republican that he calls an egotistical, deluded clown and had it not been for Covid, despite the huge, unified forces of American big tech and mass media consistently ranged against him, that he would likely have won in 2020.
I’m not inclined to think the election itself was to be honest, but there was definitely a brazen political, media and scientific establishment conspiracy against Trump in the US, as evidenced by the recent dramatic Biden volte face on Trump’s apparently outrageous ‘racist’ earlier claims regarding the lab origins of the virus.
This was made all the obvious given that Australia, not gripped by the same polarised political tensions within the US, had called for an inquiry into the virus’s origins and instantly invited the threat of severe economic retaliations from China. Not a coincidence I feel.
This was way back in May 2020, had the backing of 122 countries and managed to avoid inviting similar derision and summary dismissals quite clearly because, although in essence the substance was similar, the language was more nuanced and the person saying it of course wasn’t Donald Trump.
When you couple this with the timing of the ‘totally unexpected’ announcement of the first covid vaccine just days after (not before) the US election then, to me, something definitely smells rotten in the state of Denmark as the Old Bard once wrote.
In terms of the 2020 election being ‘stolen’ with a dodgy count I’m not inclined to think it was to be honest, but there was definitely a brazen political, media and scientific establishment ‘co-ordinated manouevre’ against Trump in the US, as evidenced by the recent dramatic Biden led mass volte face on Trump’s apparently outrageous ‘racially motivated’ earlier claims regarding the Chinese lab origins of the virus.
This was made all the obvious given that Australia, not gripped by the same polarised political tensions within the US, had called for a far more robust WHO led inquiry into the virus’s origins and instantly invited the threat of severe economic retaliations from China for daring to do so. Not a coincidence there I feel.
This was way back in May 2020, had the backing of 122 countries and managed to avoid inviting similar derision and summary dismissals quite clearly because, although in essence the implication was similar (certainly to the Chinese), the language was more nuanced and the person saying it of course wasn’t dear ol’ Donald Trump.
Amidst this backdrop, when you couple this with the timing of the ‘totally unexpected’ announcement of the first covid vaccine just days after (not before) the US election then, to me, something definitely smells more than a little fishy in the state of Denmark, as the Great Bard once sort of wrote.
Why does it take nineteen hours to be approved? Are they hoping that no one will be reading the article or more importantly, the comments by then.
censorship by delay.
Hoping my following up to this comment passes moderation.
Been in and out ‘awaiting for approval’ purgatory for some time now…..
William Gladstone
2 years ago
its projection isn’t it, Biden his big tech and corporate buddies and the fawning media constantly warning about the made up bogey man of white supremacy look far more fascistic than trump ever was/did.
The trouble is that the right as well as the left have aided this agenda. Now we have got to the point it is spoken as fact. Anyone who disagrees loses their job.
hardtruths
2 years ago
Quite amusing. West is obviously correct that the left’s constant clowning, for more than half a century now. about anyone with views even slightly conservative or traditionalist being “fascist” was and is nonsense, but it’s noticeable that he joins with the left establishment (and yes that includes most of the “Conservative” Party hierarchy) in making ritual denouncements of Trump for the crime of representing the people the Democrats (like the British Labour Party) abandoned with contempt.
But he seems not to have noticed that we currently live in a state that arrogates to itself unprecedentedly detailed control over every aspect of our lives. That this has been enabled and massively increased under spurious “emergency” legislation that empowers the regime to do almost literally anything. That this is protected by massive media propaganda and open suppression of dissent. That dissenters are demonised and scapegoated as supposedly “delaying” or “threatening reopening”, encouraging violence against them and blaming them for the very totalitarianism they are opposing.
We aren’t all that far from fascism, and it didn’t come from Trump’s side of politics.
Not really worth quibbling too much. There are no clear definitions. This totalitarianism comes from the left rather than the right and that suggests communism rather than fascism, but it’s much closer to fascism in many aspects.
Quite right. How many boxes do we need to tick here, before people are willing to admit this? Authoritarian suppression of freedom and free speech? Tick. The prioritisation of corporatist interests and the corrupt arrangements that entrench them? Tick. The justification of all this using an overtly moralising set of arguments designed to defend the State’s role in protecting society? Tick. The enthusiastic support of the State’s actions and methods by a subset of society who then act, unpaid and unbidden, as enforcers of State ideology, through lies, defamation and intimidation? Tick.
So far, none of this has happened under an overtly nationalist agenda in most nations, except in Scotland of course, where Wee Krankie is doing everything Mussolini did except making the trains run on time. But it is telling that the international consensus on lockdown was driven by a very obvious dose of competition between national governments on their comparative performance, and that this resulted in a bias towards draconian measures for the sake of their value in establishing the credentials of each government in question on the world stage, so we might arguably even include the nationalist component here as well.
Last edited 2 years ago by John Riordan
John Riordan
2 years ago
This article, though it expertly lampoons the typically delusional attitudes of the Left, misses the same point that the Left itself misses on the question of Fascism, namely that it is a left-wing ideology, and that it still exists on the political Left.
And frankly it amazes me that with anti-Semitism emerging once again in the UK and USA’s left-wing parties, and the Covid19 global fiasco having ripped away the veil that usually covers left-wing authoritarianism, that anyone can reject the proposition that Fascism is returning, based solely upon the delusions and self-exculpatory circular logic that permits those on the Left to escape scrutiny of their own values and actions. Just because modern Fascism is not obviously rooted in nationalist attitudes does not mean it’s not Fascism: identity politics, now an internationalist movement, contains all the conditions for the re-establishment of Fascist authoritarianism.
The article above even points this out: the establishment of victimhood and grievance as a means of binding voters together under a single political banner: you can’t say that this isn’t Fascist just because it ticks every box except the one about nativism, and I’m surprised that the author doesn’t agree here, especially the later part where he rightly separates conservatism from Fascism and identifies the persistent left-wing delusion that confuses the two things.
Fascism is indeed back, but back where it always belonged: on the Left. And it’s just as ugly as it ever was.
John, the philosophical world is not arrayed between the left and right of liberalism. No nationalism appears on the liberal axes, strange as this may seem to your inner right-liberal.
Child, you are a prisoner of the ideas you have received from others. Every last nationalist knows this. Every one of them has escaped from the trap and found the human truth. You can too, but you must first accept that you are not free today.
I’m not so sure. With European people set to become minorities in their own countries and antiwhite sentiment seemingly rising inexorably, I feel something big brewing in the next two or three decades.
Fascism grew out of an intellectual reaction to the anomie and nihilism of late 19th century modernity, and the terrible war it visited on the European world. Today we have a completely novel existential, not moral, challenge; and the reaction to that will not be fascistic but ethnic nationalist.
It is important not to play by the word-rules of the revolutionary left. Nationalism is not fascism, but fascism is an extreme moral and imperialistic form of nationalism. No nationalism is on the right or left of the liberal philosophical system, which does not describe all human political persuasion, just that flowing from Enlightenment thinking. Nationalism is the politics of the natural interests of peoples, not of liberalism’s guiding concept of the unfettering will. It is, therefore, a separate system of political thought (about which those given wholly to the liberal system perceive next to nothing).
A particularly appalling incident of
‘disappearing’ occurred a couple of days ago when the pithy comments of J Bryant Esq on the ‘Wuhan Lab Leak Theory’ were expunged!
Up until that moment they had been the most popular of the day, then presumably the somewhat slovenly CIA, prompted by Fu Manchu & Co passed the sentence of excommunication, and the deed was done.Bravo!
Thanks for a thoughtful response; I think we’re fundamentally on the same page. Agree that ethno-nationalism doesn’t necessarily equal fascism, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see far right views on social issues making a comeback too: fundamentally, the majority values order.
Perhaps I’m ‘play[ing] by the word-rules of the revolutionary left’ to some extent, but I guess I’m pushing back on Ed West’s apparent contention that it’s going to be simple conservatism (or perhaps Trumpian populism) that’s in the offing.
Hi Jon, thanks for the reply. I have to say I don’t like Walker Connor’s label ethno-nationalism, and I regret that since Nick Griffin alighted on it at the turn of the millenium in a doomed bid to throw anti-fascists off the scent, it has broadly stuck among British nationalists. Ethnic nationalism is a unity. There shouldn’t be some offcut with a different name for peoples of European descent.
Likewise the label “far right” is problematic. Whole peoples possess commonalities – identity, relationality, gene interests, history, etc – which are central to their existence. It isn’t “far anything” to advocate for these. We lost the war of language before we even knew it was being fought. But we are not losing the war of discourse.
There does seem to have been over the years teams of human rights lawyers and sympathetic civil servants who have completely altered the rules in this country. Certain people now know they can do whatever they want & won’t be punished-but if anyone complains they certainly will. Far-right & N word as used routinely by politicians & media for attitudes that were once quite normal. Are we saying the war generation were evil people-they didn’t know what they were fighting for? That present day people , so long as they present as minority in some way , sexual or religious are the best people in this country-because if so we need help.
1:The scrapping of the Double Jeopardy principle. Now, if at first you don’t succeed try, try & try again.
2: Lord Justice Widgery got it completely wrong over ‘ Bl**dy Sunday. So, let’s have a retrial and GET the right answer. To hell with the additional cost upwards of £400million.
3: Lord Justice Hoffman* sitting on the Pinochet Appeal when he knew he shouldn’t have.
4: Last, but not least, the pièce de résistance,
Blair & the Iraq War.
Blair created the supreme court & its President Lady Hale said Johnson couldn’t suspend parliament-this was withiut precedent.If Starmer were PM I wonder what her ruling would have been? Lots of rulings & judgements which are clearly that person’s personal subjective feelings or even a vindictive wish to cause harm
As i said in Sundry General Elections & Local leaflets, The Police (Police &crime commissioners) BBC , (media) Universities ( Cancel Kultur) Judiciary (Supreme court in UK) Society has been politicised .I am on Standby to Save Europe from Wokeist mobs at my Laptop…,
At the moment people don’t mind that the system is stitched up-it doesn’t affect them. They are not going to go cold or hungry though & if personally threatened we will see some angry people. Just need a charismatic leader & who knows? The political class is much too complacent-they think we are all idiots & they can get away with anything
It’s what you say plus the country with the most virulent form of Fascism – Germany – having lost the “terrible war”.
Paul Marks
2 years ago
Mussolini stood for a Corporate State – where independent business enterprises are crushed and the economy is dominated by the state and pet corporations. And, sadly, that is what the international establishment (whether it be Mr Biden or Mr Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum) want.
Mussolini also stood for political repression – and the is what the “Justice” Department, the FBI (and all the rest of it) now stands for. The “justice” system operates a double standard – conservatives are punished for things that supporters of the left are not punished for. The security services are blatantly political – and the “mainstream media” act as cheerleaders for the biased and corrupt system.
Ironically it was not Donald John Trump who was bringing Fascism – he was trying to stop its development. But, tragically, it was too strong.
neil.mack
2 years ago
The threat of fascism comes not from Trump, but from the Democrats and their corporatist allies. In Britain, crackpot fantasists like Mason, and his reptilian allies in the public sector represent a more potent threat to my liberties than do anyone else.
West’s ideas represent the petulant rejection of populism by the dying and irrelevant Tory past.
David Yetter
2 years ago
Perhaps the author is simply looking in the wrong place. Over on my side of the pond, we have a political party that eagerly and explicitly divides people by race, painting one race as the source of the world’s ills for centuries, if not millennia; has corporations enforcing adherence to its social views, both by censorship and in personnel policies; and has black-shirted goons who engage in street violence on its behalf. And, they currently control all the elected branches of the Federal Government.
Ivan Hybs
2 years ago
Fascism (in old brown/black shirts sense) is not coming. But some sort of collectivism perhaps is coming. And that is not encouraging.
Try not to be a pathetically self-estranged libbo. The liberal individual does not exist. Human beings are relational, and the most powerful relation is of that of kin and kind. Ethnic nationalism offers the only political truth of Man.
Fascism may have originated as a description of hyper-nationalism, enforced by a totalitarian regime, brooking no argument, but in France fascism is used in a generic sense to describe any political movement which is authoritarian and hates dissent from its “approved” doctrine. This can now be used to describe many of the political movements so loved by progressives and the woke. Try to say you don’t believe CO2 is a danger to the planet; that Trump was a very democratic President, increasingly popular with American minorities; that globalism and mass immigration is the fastest way to reduce the power of the average citizen while devaluing the pound in his pocket; that a human born with a p***s is a man no matter what surgery he undergoes. See how readily people accept your beliefs and tell me fascism isn’t alive and well in the West. Left and right are no longer relevant.
Brendan O'Leary
2 years ago
The big postwar revival of self-aggrandising “Fascists everywhere” hysteria of the left was surely with the elections of Thatcher and Reagan.
Does anyone remember “A Very British Coup” in which a heroic unassuming but noble “man of the people” leftwing leader is brought down by right wing establishment forces?
When the leftwing reality of the time was gasbag Neil Kinnock and militant tendency fop Derek Hatton.
Then the title was resurrected by the BBC after the shock, their shock anyway, of Brexit.
barbara neil
2 years ago
This only shows, outrageously, that communism still has a patina of respectability in the west. Fascism, Nazism, the devil itself – but communism, well you know, the intentions were good…. Let’s stop looking in the direction of the pointing finger and look instead at the finger itself! ((an old thieves trick). P. S. Trump is no excuse, in real terms or as the giant caricature the media presented to us.
There was an article on unherd about history. Yet how many people know the 20th century history of Russia or China? Probably nothing, yet for over a century some members of the government , some members of the secret service & practically all the academic & media think these are great regimes.They just don’t want to tell us why, they keep it a bit of a secret. The full focus has been on the European conflict-its on the main school history syllabus -little moustache man is still an instantly recognizable figure. They have been training up student followers of marxism & maoism for decades.Obviously they won’t like populist figures who don’t share their vision.
Albireo Double
2 years ago
Such laziness; so many assumptive stereotypes. Is this idle soft left-wingery all that journalism now is?
This author would probably be genuinely shocked at the suggestion that the danger of fascism now comes exclusively from the so-called liberal left.
But it is is the truth.
Brian OFlynn
2 years ago
Yes, all very open and liberal and inclusive in its own self obsessed way. But to dismiss Trump so glibly speaks of poorly developed critical faculties. It ignores the term “fake news’ which Trump coined with good reason. Vide: Fauci and the Wuhan Virus and the rowing back of the media kicking and screaming as the truth emerges. It ignores the malevolence and the mendacity of the CCP, which he tackled head on. It blithely ignores Pax Trumpana which gave the world four years of peace and prosperity. It ignores the fact that he received 12 million votes more in 2020 than in 2016, easily more that his opponents, a befuddled half hidden candidate as well as an unpopular running mate. It does not surprise me that the writer suffers from hypochondria and its irrational fantasies….it is the type of poorly researched and written article that gives me pause for thought before I sign up for Unherd…
School report : Ed could do better if he were to apply himself more diligently!!
Last edited 2 years ago by Brian OFlynn
rj5555366
2 years ago
“…that majority ethnic groups have become the ‘victims’ of migration and multiculturalism; (we have & all on our buck, so to speak… mass immigration costing us millions… but shhh you can’t say that, we have to pretend the obvious lie that somehow all those arriving are net contributors and that overall were quids in!) that the gains of feminism should be reversed (err, it’s not us enabling men to play women’s sport, or cancelling the use of ‘mum’, or trying to cancel JK Rowling)that democracy is dispensable (how many years trying to reverse Brexit Paul?); that science, universities and the media cannot be trusted (I know Mason is a spanner extraordinaire but surely even he knows we’ve clearly seen the light regarding the bias and nudge nudge mentality, not to mention cancel culture that pervades); that nations have lost their way and need to become ‘great’ again (you’re right Paul. I want to live in a ‘rubbish’ country as close to 3rd world status as possible please, preferably with people starving on the street) ; and that there will soon be a cataclysmic event which sets things right…(we can only hope, as with an 80 seat majority and a British Hindu as Home Sec, it’s now or never to put the Paul Masons of these isles back in their bright red poorly labelled and sumptuously furnished on the inside box)…
Bryan Dale
2 years ago
You’re looking the wrong way. Fascism is a leftist ideology and it has arrived. Cancel culture, rigged elections, etc. Joe Biden is Der Fuhrer.
Biden his time..he is like A Senile ”Peter Finch” Character in network,without the intelligence..senile Joe P*** off out of uK, yankee go home..
neil.mack
2 years ago
It’s hard not to see in the mentally confused and doltish Biden a latter day Hindenburg – a gatekeeper for the fascists of his own side.
hayden eastwood
2 years ago
The most extraordinary thing of all is that all the properties of actual Fascism are being carried out by those who claim to be terrified of the return of Fascism.
Take your points about Fascism. Here is how they apply to the current woke left:
“Identification of enemies/scape-goats as a unifying cause” – tick (white people, men)
“Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism” – ok so they don’t form outgroups based on nation state, but on Critical Race Theory conceptions of ethnicity, not a huge difference.
“Disdain for the importance of human rights” – tick (they want to dispense with the presumption of innocence when it suits them – eg Harvey Weinstein, Derek Chauvin, et al who the mob condemns before the trial. One need only look at how Weinstein’s lawyer was driven out of Harvard for performing his duty to defend the accused.
“Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts” – tick. Intellectuals with wrong-think are purged from arts faculties, or are unable to enter – no surprise that 90% of the arts are self-professed leftwingers. Art is not even considered art unless it is subversive to traditional values.
“Obsession with crime and punishment” – tick. They are obsessed with extra-judicial punishment of outgroup members and of subverting the existing criminal justice system in order to protect militant members of their group, who they believe should be above the law.
The current crop of wokenistas are fascists by their own definition. But worse than that, they are so blinded by their own sense of moral grandiosity that they simply can’t see it which, in my view, is arguably the most fascistic trait of all.
It is interesting to recall an interview I once watched of Hendrik Verwoed (the architect of Apartheid in South Africa) with an interviewer who asked, “Do you ever have any doubts about this idea of yours?” To which Verwoed responded that he was lucky enough to be utterly convinced that Apartheid was the right course of action, and had never doubted himself or his ideas for a moment.
I would suggest Mr Verwoed has much in common with modern day SJWs.
Democrats used the Capitol Riot just like the Reichstag Fire, as an excuse to curtail their opponents’ civil liberties. Twitter deplatformed 70,000 conservative accounts, including the president’s. At least 200 Capitol Rioters, perhaps guilty of trespassing, have been held without bond, some in solitary confinement, for 100 days.
Chris Milburn
2 years ago
This article would have been 100% great, without the perfunctory Trump-swipe at the end.
It is very hard to separate Trump-the-Man (whose personality, at least as it comes across through the media, doesn’t appeal to me), and Trump-the-President, (whose policies mostly made perfect sense once stripped of the partisan presentation they received through corporate media).
Even the trade spat he had with Canada made sense to me (I’m Canadian) when I look at our (very socialist) government’s hidden subsidy system behind many industries that put US competitors at an obvious disadvantage.
God forbid we judge someone by their actions and policies – much more fun, and clickbait-y, to skewer them on their personal traits.
Ferrusian Gambit
2 years ago
Honestly the people hyperventilating over Trump’s creating a fascist dictator in waiting seemed to be severely overemphasising or flattering his effectiveness. Being an totalitarian dictator sounds like a lot of work for a man who seemed much happier wasting hours on Twitter, watching TV and playing golf. I mean Hitler came across as lacksidasical to some but he spent his idle hours engaging in what I suppose we would now call ‘brainstorming’ and the big ideas about the future of civilization that he passed down to his subordinates in a Darwinian struggle for his approval.
As for actual real hypercondria, well even before the mobile your average medical book, even one designed for home usage for non-specialists, was a fertile source of that problem. And lets not forget that Moliere wrote a whole play about it in the 17th century. For once it is a problem that as far as I can tell was not noticeably aggravated by the internet. I say this as a veteran hypocondriac of the pre-internet age.
Last edited 2 years ago by Ferrusian Gambit
G Harris
2 years ago
Authoritarianism is authoritarianism period, no matter what side of the political spectrum it appears to come from and, rest assured, it will always find its natural supporters on both ‘sides’.
Be it from the supposed left or the right, the net result is the same. Only the self-serving politically blinkered pedantic corpse counters attempt to draw a distinction.
Regular democratic accountability and scrutiny, agnostic free speech and the right to protest, and truly independent checks and balances are the crucial pillars to preventing its rise.
Take but one of these three away and it’s starting to push at an open door.
Maybe you are assuming that authoritarianism has a causal permanence in and of itself. In the East Asian and Eurasian sociobiological contexts it might. But the European sociobiology is grounded not on conformism and the giving of assent to authority but individualism and the lending of that assent. It is a key distinction which renders authority a tool of European political organisation, not a natural element of it.
We are living in a soft authoritarian form of political organisation right now, from which the will of Europeans has been almost completely excluded and which functions on the basis of according no human worth or meaning to the life of European peoples. We are not intended to survive it. If we are to survive then authority there must be for a time on the European continent, because the population of our lands has to be changed. That would be good authority, therefore, and an authority which seeks, like Cincinatus, to retire itself when the job is done.
I’m suggesting that an inevitable tendency toward authoritarianism exists at both ends of the political spectrum, that democracy itself is helluva lot more fragile than most people like to imagine and that, rather than treat it as a political football, those who genuinely care about it should be be more politically agnostic about who’s fighting to preserve it.
Indeed there is grave authoritarianism in left-liberalism and there is grave authoritarianism at the imperialist pole of nationalism. Where we differ is that I do not do violence to the nationalisms, of which there are many forms, by crowbarring them in with the many forms of liberalism; these being two fundamentally distinct worlds of thought about Man.
It is uncomplicated. Liberalism, left or right, is a systemic philosophy of the unfettering will. Nationalism, which is equally systemic and which is completely indisposed to the notional “goods” of liberal individualism and egalitarianism, is a philosophy, I would say, of the interests, relation, and identity of peoples. Interests can be defensive or expansive, hence the distinction between ethnic nationalism and the fascisms. When someone caught in systemically liberal thought speaks of the “far right” or of national socialism being socialist in the equalitarian sense then violence is done to the distinction between the systems.
We who have some capacity for thought should be more considering than the masses, and seek a higher resolution of meaning.
Authoritarianism is logically and practically impossible in any system based upon small government. It is therefore not possible on the political Right. The problem with this debate in general is that the most successful political lie ever told is the one where Fascism is a right-wing political ideology. It never was, and never can be, and right-wingers don’t have to explain it or apologise for it.
You are an example of someone entirely ignorant of nationalist thinking and wholly given to lie that every political persuasion maps on the liberal axes. Read what I have written and make room for historiographical difference, there’s a good chap.
‘Authoritarianism is logically and practically impossible in any system based upon small government.’
With the greatest of respect that’s a little naïve, simplistic and idealistic.
It’s not by accident that history has shown us that the apogee of fascism was Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, and both were strongly built around a sense of nationalism, racial purity and militarism.
Factors, which whether you like it or not, tend to be more immediately more attractive to those on the right of the political spectrum.
Both achieved their ultimately dictatorial positions initially through the ballot box with more than a little help from big, private money.
‘The definition of fascism is the marriage of corporation and state’ as Il Duce helpfully put it, where ‘not even a cigarette paper separates them’.
Both US Presidents FDR and Eisenhower saw fit to warn against the dangers of the influence of ‘private’ power and the possibility that its excessive influence could lead to de facto fascism in a democracy.
A political system in which it is probably more likely to occur I might suggest. Certainly more likely than Communism.
Even today, the propagated right wing myth of ‘small government’ might sound good on paper and play well in some circles, but all too often the corporate puppet masters are still pulling the strings and calling the shots somewhere along the line for said ‘small government’.
Last edited 2 years ago by G Harris
Don Gaughan
2 years ago
The liberal left progressives and their malicious censor cancel dissent persecution horde slander any and all who do not comply as facists.The woke hate cancel mob is verifiabely guilty of everything they falsely accuse, especially tyranical, racist scapegoating , intolerant facism.They need to be brought to justice , and when found guilty , they sould face the same consequences they demand for their targets.
opop anax
2 years ago
Stopped reading this article when it started to equate the Trump presidency with Fascism and the danger thereof. What?
America now has de facto totalitarian rule, enforced by thuggish, partisan troops, authoritarian in thought, and word,and deed, figure-headed by an obvious dotard controlled from beneath.
People are incarcerated without trial for their political opinions (qv the Jan 6th folks who blundered (aided by guards) into the Capitol building, one of whom was shot dead by an above mentioned state sponsored thug. No protest, no mainstream media coverage. Poor woman.).
None so blind as those that cannot see.
objectivityistheobjective
2 years ago
Trump may have been unpredictable and egocentric, but up until the virus hit, the United States was running at very high efficiency thanks to Trump. One of the best economies in 30 years, record low unemployment, winning the trade wars, had China on their heels, controlling illegal immigration, kicking terrorist butts. United States is a sh!t show right now. China is walking all over us, hundreds of thousands of illegals (mainly males between the ages of 16-25) pouring into our country, economy is in a shambles, $30 trillion national debt. We are being run by children.
Er..No Globalists elites rather like ”Robocop 2022”?…& multinationals…
John Shea
2 years ago
It’s not Trump I’m worried about. It is Antifa and Black Lives Matter who are the true Fascists and Marxists. These are these people who should concern you, cancellation is just another name for Fascism. Wake up!
Jeff Chambers
2 years ago
The interesting thing about fascism and communism is how extraordinarily similar they are as political processes. This is not a coincidence – it is because they both derive from the 19th century leftwing idea of the superiority of community over society.
Here’s a list of the political artifacts which proves that fascism and communism are fundamentally identical:
(1) Destruction of independent political parties and associations to produce a one-party state, i.e. a state where a single political party has a monopoly both of power and public discourse.
(2) The transformation of the revolutionary party’s members from a sect into a ruling class: the state bourgeoisie.
(3) Language policing: the detailed control of language, and not merely in the public sphere. This involves the abolition of free speech, and its replacement by government-approved speech, accompanied by the introduction of state-defined thought crimes, along with criminal and social sanctions for ‘wrong-think’, ‘wrong-talk’, and ‘heresy’.
(4) State-party monopoly of publishing and the media, maintained by abolishing the free media, and replacing it with a state-party-controlled media based on organised and systematic lying. This in turn permits the state-party apparatus to control public discourse of political and social issues, and establish Orwellian controls on the output of the academic world.
(5) Abolition of freedom of association, and its replacement by group identity.
(6) A centrally planned and directed economy controlled by the state bourgeoisie via the Party. This involves the abolition of free enterprise based on true private control of the means of production, and its replacement by state-directed economic planning in an economy whose ends and means are strictly and comprehensively defined and controlled by the Party.
(7) Abolition of independent trade unions, and their replacement by government-controlled ‘worker organisations’.
(8) The transformation of the working class into a stratum of indentured workers working under the control of, and at the direction of, The Party.
(9) The transformation of the criminal courts into institutions for determining punishment rather than guilt or innocence. This requires the abolition of the evidence-based justice system built on natural justice, due process, and the presumption of innocence, and its replacement by one built on group identity and/or political orientation where evidence of an individual’s innocence of crime no longer counts as relevant evidence if the accused belongs to a politically incorrect social group.
(10) Introduction of a Zhdanovite system of detailed state-party control and direction of culture and the arts – literature, the plastic arts, music, science, philosophy, etc. – as well as rigid and oppressive controls on the creators of those works.
(11) State-party monopoly of education, including the introduction of compulsory youth movements, whose function is to allow the state-bourgeoisie to usurp, undermine and counter the moral influence of parents and religious organisations on the young.
(12) The idea of ‘modernity’ as a central component of ideology. Thus the totalitarian state is presented as ‘modern’, ‘efficient’, ‘forward-looking’, ‘advanced’, ‘progressive’, ‘on the right side of history’. This is accompanied by the representation of the past, except insofar as it foreshadows the present, as reactionary, corrupt, and incompetent.
(13) The attempt to bring religion under state-party control, the long-term aim being the abolition of traditional religion, and its replacement with state-directed paganism and/or atheism.
(14) Government by a non-democratic ‘association of the elect’ – the state bourgeoisie – operating via a non-elected private organisation, ‘The Party’, which is above society and outside the law, and which exercises despotic political, economic, and social control. Such Parties are backed and reinforced by especially privileged and militarised political police forces which are also above society and outside the law.
(15) At the top of the system of social control is a charismatic leader with unlimited power: il Duce in Italy, der Führer in Germany, Vozhd (Вождь) in Russia.
(16) The merging of the administrative apparatus of the Party into that of the state in order to blur the lines of demarcation and competence in the administration of the state.
(17) The establishment of a parallel civil administration separate from the conventional civil service, and based on and around the Party apparatus. This permits those ‘extra-judicial’ actions by the Party which require the expertise of experienced and skilled administrators and which also require an unusual degree of secrecy in their execution.
(18) The destruction of democratic law-making, and its replacement by a top-down and centralised command system based on decree and administrative fiat. This permits the abolition of constitutional – i.e. limited – government.
(19) The re-introduction of judicial torture.
(20) The re-introduction of slavery.
(21) The re-introduction of serfdom.
(22) The use of mass-murder as a means of social transformation and social control.
Why are you so familiar with the political system of modern China?
mark taha
2 years ago
What exactly did Trump do that further restricted the freedom of the average American? The threat to freedom is from the OC Lefyt-Ollie Robinson is just the latest example.
Douglas Proudfoot
2 years ago
The real problem is that government is no longer by the consent of the governed.
In Western Democracies, unelected regulators, judges and bureaucrats make almost all of the most important decisions. This causes unrest because elections appear not to have the consequences voters expect.
Governments faced with popular protest movements, like the Tea Party or Yellow Vests, suppress them like peasant uprisings. Unpopular policies, like transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, are justified by unexplained “expert opinion.” Even dissenting experts are suppressed.
For example, open discussion of global warming, whether it exists and, if it does, the most economical ways to deal with it, is suppressed. The common man may not have an MS in Statistics, like me, but they notice gasoline prices are going up in service of a theory which allows no dissent. This causes unrest.
The prevailing governing philosophy is that government knows better than the people themselves what’s best for them. Vox populi, vox dei, is a totally obsolete concept for modern bureaucrats. However, the people think they should be able to choose for themselves. This conflict will only be resolved by a return to less intrusive government, or an advance to a more openly oppressive state. So far, the state is getting more repressive, but allowing mob violence to intimidate political enemies into submission.
Chauncey Gardiner
2 years ago
Missing from all this Left-Right crap is appreciation for good, old school, classical liberalism — you know, that business about constitutional governance. Most anyone on the street would have no idea what the phrase “constitutional governance” means. (I’d put money down on that. A lot of money.) And that is a big problem. The biggest most important innovation that the West could offer the world — the concept of constitutional governance — is not so much being ignored or rubbished. It is being rubbished by not even being recognized as the central concept at work. “Governance” means what? It’s the stuff we need to sort out any time more than one person collaborates (lives with; lives next to; trades with; says hello to) with at least one other person. So, some folks came to appreciate that we need to commit to rules of engagement… Oh, and the King is not above the rules. The king was not too keen on that, but 50 years of on-and-off English Civil Wars put the question to rest. Except the Scots (my people) didn’t get the memo. They fought on the side of the divine right of kings during “The ’45”. Once one puts aside all of the romance of “Scotland the Brave against England the Strong,” one can see that my peeps were on the wrong side of history on that one. So, what to do? Make young people appreciate that there is no better alternative to constitutional governance. (The alternative, obviously, is un-constitional governance.) Government-by-manufactured-consensus is a tyranny. It leads to unconstitutional governance. It’s Soviet. Folks are never going to agree entirely about anything. So, we need rules for sorting out our politics in ways that transcend the tradition ways of resolving disputes. The traditional ways involve killing each other; silencing each other; packing people off to camps in … Western China. The delusion of government-by-consensus — which is the fiction of Rousseau’s “general will” in my mind — has been winning the battle of the sound bites. Folks need to say that maybe those folks in the 17th and 18th centuries were on to something radical and cool: Equality before the law; Constitutionalism. Because the alternative is what?: Inequality before the law — that is, arbitrary government.
Robin Lambert
2 years ago
Really Biden &his Globalist allies like wHO,UN,EU George Soros, Facebook,twitter censorship .Kneeling politicians &Police are more Fascistic than trump could ever be….lazy journalism again…Look at boko Harim in Bukino faso Killed 100+ Children Last week hardly covered in Lying media..
Kathy Prendergast
2 years ago
“…the clown act turned deadly in the end…” Only to Ashley Babbit, unarmed nonviolent protester shot by an unnamed Capitol police officer. To date, she is the only person confirmed to have died violently at the Jan. 6 protests.
Considering there were already hundreds of trespassers in the building by that time, it’s likely she was deliberately targeted by the cop, possibly because he recognized her as a military veteran.
It was a supposed “insurrection” in which the only shot fired was by the government.
John Standing
2 years ago
Anyone here know why the nationalism of peoples’ life interests is not the nationalism of heroic conquest? Anyone know which of these a European-descended people needs in an age of existential, not moral, crisis?
So long, folks! From Wednesday, the struggle against evil (fascists / communists / nationalists / democrats / republicans / tories / centrists / leftists / wokes / immigrants / people who disagree with me / people who cant use apostrophe’s)* will have to continue without us non-members. It’s been…. something.
* insert your own preferred form of evil
(* apologies, I just wondered if that would evade the Censor.)
Rag Marrss
2 years ago
as a German Biologist Ph D – this labelling and expression typing does not help anything. It is OUR easy prey fast reward conditioning – that never challenges any reasoning at all. We get ever dumber and just let it happen. Göring answered in Nürnberg for the start of Concentration Camps. “because of resistance”. Right. How much resistance? Almost zero! it was far too late to resist anything. So we are here today. It is far too late to resist anything. We are dumb sheeple following anything. The madder the better. An infantile distorted deluded sense of “freedom” and entitlement – in ALL areas. That is the DOOM. Not what you label it.
And this goes on and further – Things to Come – H G Wells…. many more to come…
Michelle Haley
2 years ago
Why is the lead story this Author, who’s story doesn’t speak to the title of his piece? The piece lacks any substance. I find myself scrolling down to the comment section of “unherd” more often, to read the more thought provoking section of “unherd” the subscribers. Disappointing
Richard E
2 years ago
Those that see themselves as Anti Facists do a lot of straw man making. They tell you what the right stand for, and intentionally misrepresent it to try and make them the Nazi’s – which then allows the Left to attack them more easily. Gives them an excuse to de-platform, censor, exclude and harass.
The Right – Trump included – simply stand for free speech, the democratic nation state that retains the key powers to control its borders and internal policies, and the freedom to pursue foreign policies that puts their own country first.
The real FACISTS, are of course the Left and Globalists who are the exact opposite. They want to reduce the power of the electorate and are eager to hand powers away to the international bodies and organisations that they control. They try and create Nazi like enemies of everyone who oppose them, whip up hysteria about racism in the ethnic minorities in an attempt to get their votes, blatantly import voters, manipulate elections and clamp down on free speech through their control of social media, the media and through ‘hate speech’ laws.
mike otter
2 years ago
Its time for journo’s to stop misusing the word fascist and say “closed society” or “closed ideology” instead. Fascism has about 30 years history in Italy in its pure form. Precursors like DAnnunzio’s Fiume Regency and successors like Spain’s JONS and Portugal’s Estado Novo had many similarities. Fascism is collectivist and corporatises the state and society. It has a mystical, macho, supreme leader culture. The “fasci” – a bundle of sticks, are easy to break individually but very strong together. It failed for the same reasons Greenism and Leftism fail today: Because the “pure fascist” is a myth its adherants will enter a purity spiral that splits the movement and hopefully produces a circular firing squad. Whilst its true that many current political and economic movements favour a closed society non can really be labelled Fascist. Greenies, Lefties, CPC, Big Tech, Putin, WHO and US Democrats all favour dictatorship, distain elections, call voters “stupid” and are happy to misuse the courts or police to hurt their enemies (who are, naturally, everywhere). They are as opposed to our values of Universalism, Pluralism and Secularism as were the Fascists and IMO are much more dangerous. It therefore makes sense to replace inane student slogans with rigourous definitions. Not all these bad actors will get away with it. Its the duty of all but especially the press to record who and what they are, so if any are brought to account they may judged objectively and history will view them more clearly. Though they are different to Fascist movement’s i expect history’s perspective will be similar: A few mad zealots leading a bunch of gangsters and opportunists with an ultimately disasterous outcome.
Last edited 2 years ago by mike otter
Martin Logan
2 years ago
No fascism isn’t coming. But, at least in the US, a far more likely possibility is civil strife, if not civil war.
In the run-up to the US Civil War, both sides saw the other as dictatorial and untrustworthy. Both sides saw civic morality in terms of black and white.
Moreover, because the two sides are often in very discrete locations, it’s a lot easier to rule over particular swaths of the country.
Fascism would thus only be possible after some very significant civil conflict.
Christin
2 years ago
This author has joined the “commentariat” he lampoons. More unhinged TDS from Unheard. Meanwhile, the UK is censoring speech, arresting people for social media posts, and has cameras on every single street. Nice work!
A lot of broadly right wing/conservative UK commentators use anti-Trump rhetoric, or just general disrespect of Trump, as a respectability signal to try to placate the leftist establishment here. Often, imo, they seek to reassure themselves with it.
Bit like the way insecure lockdown opponents use “anti-vaxxers”, and similarly self-defeating.
I agree, obviously, but many commentators who are of the conservative right feel somewhat out of step with the establishment and perhaps as a result feel a strong need to reassure themselves and/or the said establishment (often their employers, and almost always their fellow dinner party etc attendees and hosts) that they are not really “too bad”. Not as bad as those really naughty “racists”/antivaxxers/antisemites/ homophobes/conspiracy theorists/whatever.
Disrespecting Trump (whom they doubtless genuinely dislike) seems like a no-cost route to achieving that, certainly in British society.
They will argue that doing so stops their modestly right-wing views from being discredited by association with the aforementioned bad-think and social pariahs. My suspicion is that all it does is leave them as the “fringe” teetering on the edge of the Overton Window.
Alex Lekas
2 years ago
Well, of course; you can tell fascism is not coming by how dissidents are being silenced in an alliance between Big Tech and Big Govt, how race is front and center at every turn, and how things Trump was supposed to be planning are being done by those who hate him.
Cathy Carron
2 years ago
Trump’s term was not a ‘clown act’. He was the ‘middle-finger-extended’ that was and is still badly needed to confront the country’s elite.
Last edited 2 years ago by Cathy Carron
Andrew Baldwin
2 years ago
Ed is a little lazy in his search for supporters of Hitler in Europe. As Canadian journo Scott Taylor has noted: “On April 28 about 250 people marched through the streets of Kiev, Ukraine, to commemorate the 78th anniversary of the Second World War’s Waffen SS Galicia Division.” You don’t get much more solid in your allegiance to Nazism or fascism than supporting the SS, do you? This is part of a trend to resuscitate the reputations of Ukrainian nationalists who fought with the Nazis during the Second World War that started with the interim government of Ukraine in 2014 and has continued under President Zelensky. Ukraine is the most important country where this has happened, but there have been disturbing signs of the same thing in the Baltic states and in Croatia’s unpleasant evocation of the murderous Ustaša regime that was installed by the Nazis.
Ed’s non-stop column-after-column driveby slandering of Trump is a real pain. Re “the clown act turned deadly in the end”, presumably a reference to the Capitol city riots, there was only one person shot dead in those riots, Ashli E. Babbitt. She was an unarmed Trump supporter and a military veteran, shot by a policeman who has not even been identified, let alone charged. This is what justice looks like in America post-Trump, under the Biden-Harris regime.
Harry Potter
2 years ago
Every country considers nationalism a good idea to promote and instill into their children’s heads, except those one in the West. Yet it seems no justice fighters in the West is willing to pay attention to (let alone critique) this common sense prevailing outside their echo chamber.
Niobe Hunter
2 years ago
’we live in a free society’. Do we? A society where people can lose their jobs and be visited by several police for the thought crime of thinking that someone who still has a functioning derek isn’t a woman, even though insert preferred pronoun says it is?
where you can be prevented from playing for your country for something you said ten years ago, even though that statement was perfectly legal then ( and I believe still is).
where government departments, universities and private sector employers demand that you pass some ludicrous right-think course before you can have a job or an education?
where the established church tells its ( ever dwindling) membership that they are damned for voting incorrectly in the past, and probably damned anyway for the crime of being born in the majority ethnic group of the country?
that maybe your definition of a free country. It isn’t mine
awaiting moderation, no doubt
Last edited 2 years ago by Niobe Hunter
Geoffrey Simon Hicking
2 years ago
“The truth, that we’re living in a free society and that the path to heroism has been cut off; that we have nothing greater than the worries and regrets of our everyday life, is too much to bear.”
We need some new road to heroism, or for the media to encourage some kind of “new” heroism. Not everyone can be a soldier, but there are many that can and should be given a chance to achieve something heroic. Simply shrugging our shoulders and saying “no more heroes” is not conducive to a vibrant and thrusting society.
‘We are living in a free society’. He’s living somewhere other than me , then. Cover your face, keep your distance, be careful what you say or you will lose your job, even if you said it ten years ago.
That isn’t my definition of a free society.
Tom Krehbiel
2 years ago
The cries of “Fascism!” against US Republican politicians began long before the Second Bush Administration. Barry Goldwater, who ran as the GOP’s presidential standard bearer in 1964, was described as the “Fascist Gun in the West” in some leading US magazine before the election. (I was a boy of 10 or 11 then, and regret the fact that I no longer recall which publication this was.) It always struck me as ironic that those who were for reducing the size of government – as Goldwater was – are most likely to be called Fascist. This is despite the fact that Mussolini and Hitler both expanded the power of the state enormously, and were called totalitarians for a reason.
rolf_herman
2 years ago
Fascism is always coming (and going). The extent and form of it, however, remains elusive.
Kremlington Swan
2 years ago
Fascism, though, is terribly old-fashioned. There are other ways for the despotic to command the political stage. All they need is an understanding of behavioural conditioning, a willingness to use it to manipulate an electorate, and a sufficiently developed gift for communication.
That is a far safer route to extended power than outright violence.
Fight your war in the heart and the mind and if you are the only one who knows a war is being fought you can win it without firing a shot.
The only danger comes from being rumbled, but even then if you can keep most people in the dark you are safe, because the arithmetic of democracy will keep you in power.
If you are a leader who knocks over seats then your own party will turn a blind eye. The odd elected representative who isn’t entirely self-serving may raise his voice in protest, but he or she is soon made irrelevant.
He who understands the politics of confusion is the new enemy not just of liberty, but of humanity itself.
Last edited 2 years ago by Kremlington Swan
James Jenkin
2 years ago
Great article, and yes the term ‘fascist’ gets thrown around. So maybe it’d be useful to define it as precisely as we can. What were Mussolini’s and Hitler’s regimes like? You can argue ethno-nationalist, authoritarian, and corporatist. If you can accept that definition, we now have common ground to ask: Was Trump fascist? Is Russia? China? Brazil?
Digitis Impudicus
2 years ago
Its just that Fascism is a left wing phenomena. They were called National SOCIALISTS for a reason.
Every country considers nationalism a good idea to promote and instill into their children’s heads, except those in the West. Yet it seems nobody in the West is willing to critique this common sense prevailing outside their echo chamber.
Shelly Andon
2 years ago
I agree with the general conclusion of the article that catastrophising narratives are more interesting than “didn’t we do well” ones. There is more opportunity to be a hero in the comic sense. We can see the same phenomenon with the climate change narrative. The problem this catastrophist narrative creates is the shutting down of rational debate and reasonable and proportionate action to try and solve the problems or to take a proportionate view of their relative importance and impact.
Patrick Chevallereau
2 years ago
I am not convinced at all by this article which dangerously downplays the risks of the populism and hides that there is an obvius path to facism. But maybe the most ridiculous phrase is that one: “populism tends to be defensive and democratic, even egalitarian”… Well, the denial of the 2020 elections results by Trump and his Republican accolytes is the best sign of a democratic appraoch isnt’it?…
“Populism” is the demonisation term used by elites against resistance to their corruption. That’s why populism was usually of the left a hundred years ago and it’s usually of the right now, as dominance of the elites has shifted from right to left.
The 2020 election results were clearly manipulated. We know beyond honest dispute that there was massive and systematic media and big tech manipulation to protect the Biden campaign and damage the Trump campaign.
Whether there was more traditional vote-rigging we don’t know and probably will never know for sure. By definition, once our sources of information on a topic cannot be trusted, we can no longer know anything for certain.
The anti-democratic forces were those professionally (along with numerous obsessive amateurs) manipulating the campaign, covering up information, suppressing dissent, harassing opinionators, putting out propaganda, almost all systematically in the direction of damaging Trump and promoting Biden.
There is simply no way that a senile and relatively unpopular candidate like Biden would ever have won a free and fair election against a hugely successful candidate like Trump (74 million votes, in the teeth of the aforementioned manipulation).
So examine the beam in your own side’s eye, before you start complaining about the other side’s defensive responses.
Actually your comments are the perfect illustration of what facism looks like. So thank you for that. You cannot imagine the magnitude of disguss with which the rest of the World is considering the conspirationist theories you are promoting. The Trumpers are not the America we used to love and admire. They are the exact opposite. A shame for the Founding Fathers. At war, a key principle is to know the enemy. Well, what a better way to know the enemy than to read and listen to you in this war for dignity?
The OP is rational and courteous. Your response is nothing more than name calling.
a good illustration of what many others have defined as the new……..
Jonathan Weil
2 years ago
The clown show *did* damage the 250-year-old constitution — first, by being a clown show in the White House, the corrosive effects of which have yet to reveal themselves fully; second, by ramping up the polarisation and hysteria in American politics by an order of magnitude (and doing so deliberately, for political advantage). All those saying the real problem is the American Left (a diagnosis it would be foolish to dismiss) need to reckon with the way the Trump presidency turbo-charged all the worst features of the American Left. These people need Trumpism just as much as Trumpism needs them. A plague on both their houses.
This is what lefties call “blaming the victim”, when it’s directed at their favoured special interest groups.
Every US regime in history has had its share of “clowning”, the Trump regime was worse in some areas, better in others, but the increased hysteria and polarisation came entirely from the elite reaction to Trump’s win.
To the extent that Trump himself was “polarising”, it came entirely from his refusal to kowtow to some of the “respectability” limits imposed by the left and its collaborators in the mainstream Republican “right”.
If you want to get a better grasp of the issue here, the best brief summary was given by Victor Davis Hanson in February, after the “victory” the Democrats achieved through shameless and unprecedented media and big tech bias and manipulation, discussing the real political issues underlying Trump and the response to him:
“It’s tragic that this country is at this place right now, because it didn’t have to be this way. They could have said Donald Trump represented a lost constituency that … globalised culture had ignored in a very amoral fashion and that was an understandable pushback, but the way to beat Donald Trump is to appeal to his voters in the way that the Democratic Party used to do, and win them back. They didn’t do that. They didn’t do that because they wanted open borders, and they’re tribalists that believe in identity politics, and they don’t care about people of the working class any more, and they feel that their money and their power and their titles and their degrees have allowed them to be an unquestioned elite. Sort of Platonic Guardians that we … don’t dare question.”
Sure, I agree with a lot of that. But I also think that the “leftie” tactic of citing “victim-blaming” to preempt any questioning of special interest groups’ narratives is, well, unhelpful. I think you’d agree with that, so I’m not sure why you’d try the same move yourself. The idea that Trump wasn’t provocative, outrageous, in a way that needlessly inflamed passions on both sides of the divide — that he and his followers were simply the “victims” of elite reactions— is, to me, frankly preposterous. None of which is to support every aspect of those reactions, nor to claim Trump’s constituency have nothing to be alarmed or angry about.
Re “victim-blaming”, the trope obviously has a kernel of truth – there are occasions when people are blamed for defending themselves or responding to injustice (which is the case for most of the hysteria aimed at Trump and Trump supporters). But the trope can also be cynically abused to excuse criminality for political reasons (which is how the left usually uses it).
Most of the things Trump did in power that were claimed to be “outrageous” were perfectly reasonable responses to the dominant left elite’s manipulations, both before he came to office and while he was there. They weren’t in fact “outrageous” at all, unless you first internalise the establishment left’s assumptions and dogmas. And the media response was intentionally inflammatory to a hysterical and profoundly dishonest degree.
He wasn’t a great person in many old fashioned decency terms, but that’s true of many, perhaps most, presidents. But he was probably the most personally American president in living memory (perhaps Reagan could compete). And in policy terms, perhaps the best (or maybe least bad is better) in the same period, despite constant disingenuous legal and institutional sabotage by the hysterical left establishment.
That’s part of the reason (pop growth obviously the major part) why Trump received more American votes than any previous sitting president, in the teeth of massive pop media and social media bias, and more than any presidential candidate in history, except for Biden’s total that was grossly inflated by unprecedented media and big tech propaganda and manipulation (even if we disregard for the purposes of this discussion the probability of more direct vote-rigging).
And now we have a clearly senile old man, in charge of the world’s most powerful state, in office solely due to massive media and corporate manipulation. What could possibly go wrong?
I agree tonally, but disagree with the final point. The attempted coup was rubbish sure, but there were people with zip-tie handcuffs chanting about kidnapping the VP. I’m not saying they were competent, but it got very close to kidnap and perhaps murder of senators. That’s not to be understated.
This is the problem with modern media. You’ve been left with an impression that simply isn’t true. According to prosecutors (see the court filing), the ziptie man found them inside the capitol – like a prop left in place – he didn’t bring them with him. He was there with his mother. Not exactly the image of a murderous assassin. And none of the incursers had weapons (in contrast to the Capitol police). You’ve been sold the story that it was terrible attempt at a coup, and very little looks like more than opportunistic protest – not so unlike the one in the Capitol carried out by Democrats at the Kavanaugh hearings.
Last edited 2 years ago by Saul D
Kieran Garland
2 years ago
A retired general (Flynn), former top aide to a defeated President, who incited a violent assault on the Capitol, was only just recently calling, at a conference, for a military coup in support of a movement designated a domestic terrorist threat by the FBI. That seems concerning to me.
Concerning indeed, but instead of blaming the victims your concern should really be directed at those who have made democratic resistance all but impossible, by mass media and big tech social media opinion manipulation.
The US has perhaps one more chance at electing someone to represent the disenfranchised (many of the 74 million Americans who voted to reelect Trump despite the massive propaganda campaign against him), who saw Trump as their only chink of light through the globalist left political establishment duopoly, before those people finally give up on democracy, and the US is genuinely in a world of hurt.
hijiki7777
2 years ago
I think we should put the F word to one side. There is something very worrying going on in the USA. The reason Trump was thwarted from his attempted coup was that there were still good Republicans who believed in democracy. Since then they have been vilified by Trump and largely replaced or will be replaced by his true believer support base. The Republican party is now fully engaged in gerrymandering and voter suppression and the clear aim is to win elections on a minority of the vote, and dispute close elections but only if they are losing. When asked about QAnon many Republicans claim not to know much about them, which of course is ludicrous. If you believe that Democrat politicians are paedophiles then that is a small step away from believing they should all be executed. The checks and balances have so far withstood the attempts of insurrection but the Republican party is busy sweeping them away.
You are a deluded Berk..Go &See Hunter &Biden’s bank accounts totally corrupt uS president A woke joke on the world..
mac mahmood
2 years ago
It is not Trump you need to worry about, you need to worry about his supporters. Populism and fascism have one thing in common – they are exclusive and Trump supporters are highly exclusive, highly armed and easily formed into a pitchfork and torch brigade as seen in the storming of the Capitol. Trump has a Manson like following in them. I do not think fascism in the US is unlikely at all though its arrival and lingering may be cloaked in a lot of constitutional wizardry engineered by the GOP.
I think you’ll find Manson attracted all the artistic types who are usually left-wing & this tends to be true of most cults -alaister crowley Gurdjieff etc rather than occasional religious ones-who just attract converts ( with big bank accounts)
Manson incited Killings for loyalty, (5 including Sharon Tate, Jay sebring) including Liberal Dennis Wilson & Terry melcher,escaped after rejecting two manson songs, he was More left than Conservative!….He also helped kill Hippie Dream of Living off the land.. (Easy rider climax ending was a result of loons like manson?..
Once again the lazy use of Trump, a man who spent four years trying to withdraw the troops from Afghanistan and the ME, who oversaw the destruction of Isis (although they will be back). who engineered various peace agreements, and who did more to at least stand up to China (a state with genuinely fascist overtones) than any western politician since China embraced capitalism.
There are few things on this planet more pathetic than today’s media and commentariat.
Moreover, I think it was Reagan who said ‘When fascism comes to America it will come dressed as liberalism’ and based on what we are witnessing, he was right.
Trump was a bull in a political china shop, and didn’t behave in the way expected of a President… and yet there is a sprinkling of ‘Trump was right’ articles being produced. It seems to me that the Democrats are far more likely to indulge ‘fascist’ behaviour by their supporters.
Also having to define something by the personality of one person means it isn’t fascism or communism.The regimes in Russia & China were big government , ruled by central control & secular -they are defined as communist but totalitarian might be better description. As soon as the author began to take Paul Mason’s definition seriously ( a man so far left he probably feels the system in North Korea is too benign & easy going) you know where it was going to lead. Trump was voted in & served as President for 4 years-during that time he did nothing illegal. The administration which was supposed to carry out Republican party policies , however , did behave illegally but as they are now in power , noone is going to deal with them. Some democrats may have buyer’s regrets as they watch the wrecking party that they put in power try to destroy America-that is their problem. Regimes respond to situations & times-the 1930’s was between two world wars-most of us have never lived through a single large scale war.
Ed West’s marathon article going nowhere above is the perfect example of ‘James Thurber’s’ theory that a writer should be paid for a story, BUT, money Deducted for each word, resulting in quick, pithy, stories of tight, logical, thinking.
WWG1WGA, TDS, and MAGA
“But instead of cancer, we have fascism, a disease the commentariat can diagnose everywhere.” is true, Marxist/Liberal/Lefty loons see N*z is hiding in every bush and under every bed, but it is their craziness which is the problem, not the Right. N*z is are as rare as unicorns, but Marxists thugs head up every entertainment, education, MSM, Social Media, Political, Legal, organization. But this is what you get when ex-Guardian types are the writers.
It is their favourite word at the moment-thousands of Titania McGraphs screaming it at everyone they don’t like or agree with
I thought the article was on point. It touches on all the core issues around this topic, in particular, the way leftists usually define any kind of non-leftism/conservatism as “fascism”, even though the ur-Fascists were all on the hard left. The comparison to hypochondria is well made, the comments about not being able to talk about a real Resistance well observed, and in general I feel a need to give some support to Ed here BTL because it seems to me the article is pretty decent.
There are fringe voices in the Democratic party that excuse Antifa, etc. Polling shows that large segments of Republican voters believe that because they could not have fairly lost the 2020 Presidential election, violence to enforce a political outcome is legitimate. Both are deplorable, but the Republican Party is drifting rapidly into a new model of an authoritarian right wing party, while the Democrats are largely comparable to a european social democratic party with wokeist baggage.
It was BLM, openly supported and funded by the Democrats, who used endless violence last year, to discredit the Trump administration and get him out of office.
Give one example of that American conservatives are becoming authoritarian. American conservatives believe in the constitution. That why we support originalist justices. The left want activist judges who change the meaning of the constitution to suit their needs. Judicial activism is authoritarian not judicial restraint. Conservatives want lower taxes, cut spending, smaller government, reduced regulations. That’s in-line with anti-authoritarian. The left wants more taxes, bigger government, more regulations. That’s all authoritarian.
Any political dispensation without ‘authoritarianism’ is impossible. What matters is the source and justification of the authority. On the ‘left’ it’s ‘power’, on the ‘right’ it’s the will of all those subject to the authority to accept it as legitimate. These are two radically incompatible approaches, with differing ways of life that follow on as a consequence.
“on the ‘right’ it’s the will of all those subject to the authority to accept it as legitimate.”
Where does that happen in a Democratic state? You’re using the langue more commonly seen last in the USSR.
SDP you plank are Anything but wokeist,Patriotic]Concerned with Too many China Imports, illegal immigration ,Concreting the Countryside..etc…
Large segments of Democrat voters, including most of the mainstream US media, clearly believed that they could not have fairly lost the 2016 Presidential election. They never ceased whining about it for the next three years.
Whatever Trump achieved, he is clever rather than intelligent which makes me think he achieved by luck rather than judgement. I agree with Ed’s description of him as unpredictable.
Whatever you might think of him – and I always thought of him as a vulgarian real estate mogul who probably should have gone bankrupt – Trump has:
That is not luck.
He was lucky to surround himself with people who were intelligent!
You mention his property empire; you do not have to be pleasant to build a property empire. As for his TV programme, that says much about American taste!
He was intelligent enough to surround himself with good advisors and confident enough to listen to them.
the pandemic advice kills that theory
Actually, all the evidence suggests that as President he surrounded himself with very bad and/or disloyal advisors. This makes it all the more remarkable that he managed to deliver so much.
Yes Comey , Mueller , Barr the list goes on. I assume that until he got to Washington he assumed top officials were ‘straight’
I agree. I don’t think Trump knew how thick the muck was, and remains, in DC, or the Forbidden City as I call it after 29 years in federal service, and he made some very bad choices in staffing.
He also Fired incompetents in Defence department, Refused to appoint two faced politicians,like Republicans Mitchell Romney, Mitchell mcConville
I guess that says a great deal about the BBC and the taste of their audience. Woke Morality plays, Fake News, and bad comedy padded out with game and reality shows.
Vaudeville never died.
Why do you think he is unpleasant? According to Andrew Neil Trump was well known as a very good employer & there has been no ex-Trump staff ‘spilling the beans’ .Those doing that were the usual suspects like Stormy Daniels ( she was big friend enemy Larry Flynt who said he would give one million to anyone giving him compromising info on Trump-don’t think she received her million & she is the last person he would sleep with because Flynt connection) He is friends with all his children & not a single problem among them-more than can be said for Biden-both his children have addiction problems.The TV show is American version of the British programme-it was about getting people started in business.Practically every actor wears fake tan-so don’t know why he was singled out as ‘orange man’-a bit fruitist . He has a very good speaking voice & can give a long speech well without notes. He’s probably a bit of a nightmare to be married to-but thats Melania’s problem isn’t it?
“…you do not have to be pleasant to build a property empire.”
Nor do you have to be “pleasant” to be a good President. Certainly, at any rate, not “pleasant” to people who are trying to discredit and destroy you from day one.
And how exactly do you think an unintelligent person manages to “surround himself” with intelligent people? His good looks and charm?
You don’t have to like Trump to concede that he obviously – and unlike the current unfortunate occupying the White House – has a well-functioning brain.
Well said Fraser. This whole “Trump is a dumbass” looks ridiculous in the face of his actual accomplishments. Ed West, who I actually quite like and find to be a very insightful writer/commentator, has this strange contempt for Donald.
Sorry Ed West, the Left will never like you or give you a seat at the table, don’t bother trying to be one of the “nice” conservatives by bitching about one of the few actually successful conservative politicians since Reagan.
Nor was he unpredictable: he always told us what he thought – until FATGA excommunicated him – and he always did what he said.
And if you are listing Trump’s personal achievements it’s churlish to ignore:
Gained more votes for reelection than any sitting President in history, more than any other candidate except the propaganda-driven one supposedly achieved by his senile rival, and did so in the teeth of literally unprecedented mass media and big tech manipulation of opinion against him and to protect and promote his rival.
The man has plenty of personal flaws (but the same can be said of most top politicians), but his achievements are significant
the only potus to lose the white house senate and house in 80+ yrs isnt a achievement;its an embarrassment
Who said he lost?
But did he? You have to live under a rock to not know our elections have been rigged since 2004 -real empirical evidence
Since teh US population is always growing, gaining more votes than previously is just what nearly all president-elects get.
This isn’t evidence for anything–just a meaningless talking point.
No it’s based on empirical evidence. This is not a talking point. Even the Dems are quoted over and over again about the ability to hack the machines, site studies of massive fraud with mail-in voting.
“Since teh US population is always growing, gaining more votes than previously is just what nearly all president-elects get.”
“Nearly all” is not “all”. Just looking at recent presidents, Obama went down in 2012, and Reagan in 1984 got more than Bush in 2000, the other Bush in 1988, and Clinton in 1996.
Numbers don’t always even go up at all with rising populations, though they usually do to some extent for sitting presidents, and Trump increased his vote by a spectacular 12m in just 4 years, in the teeth of the massive hostile bias in the broadcast media and unprecedented big tech manipulation against his campaign.
Your denial just comes across as dishonest Trump-hatred.
He didn’t need bankster money to bankroll him unlike numerous other presidential contenders
.
But surely Fraser, you must see that that was what made him so unpopular with the MSM and the swamp.
he ran twice.facts do matter
He won twice facts do matter. Do your research
Being born the son of a property millionaire certainly is luck.
And TV stardom simply shows that his only real skill, salesmanship, also translates into popular TV.
Not sure what promises he kept. No border wall. No give by Iran, N. Korea, China, Russia or any other US adversary throughout his term. Moreover, since the US economy has been growing for about 250 years, even his economic growth is unexceptional.
Trump is a spent force. He’s now an albatross around the GOP’s neck.
The GOP will never get back the White House while he is still alive.
I disagree. I think the Democrat party is scaring everybody with its support of Critical Race Theory. The tide is rapidly turning against the New Racism which is being taught in America’s schools and colleges.
And in burned BLM cities like San Francisco,New York, Portland Oregon, Seattle etc..Democrats with money &families Moving to Republican Governed states like Florida ..
Watch Trump being interviewed by Charlie Rose in 1992. You do not tell the whole story. The interview will get you closer. Consistency is strength. Our political leaders, political class have no consistency- they are the true car salesman. No political leader would ever take what Trump took, a lesser man would’ve yielded, gone along to get along. billionaire Bloomberg said in his own words he spent $150million of his own money to flip the house (and tried in the Senate) why? for America? No. For his own personal financial gain to secure his financial empire through growth with China. So much evidence to the contrary of what you comment.
that’s just silly
Unpredictability was Trump’s strong suit.
Trump was very smart. He was crude and obnoxious but very smart. He didn’t speak political speak, so people accused him of lying all the time, but if you track everything he said that was initially accused of being lies, he was right and truthful the overwhelming majority of the time. Obama lies more than any president ive ever seen, but since he says it in political-ease, he gets a pass
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/05/lk-samuels/the-fascist-left-myth-or-reality/
Spot on.
I doubt I’m the only one who thinks that the “new fascists “ are actually far more likely to be found amongst the “progressive left”, and centre left, the very people claiming to be fighting and guarding against a resurgence of fascism. That seems to be the main problem with Americans, unlike the Brit’s, they, for the most part, don’t seem to get irony. Ironically !
The author is a Brit, and the people claiming to see the incipient arrival of fascism for the last four years or so (or longer) haven’t been more American than you would expect given that the bete noir was an American president. Is what you are saying ironical in some sense that I don’t get?
The dig at Americans was tongue in cheek, I apologise if my sense of humour failed to travel further than the words on the page. The bit about anti-fascists displaying fascist tendencies however, I think, still stands. Again, I think I am far from alone in thinking that the further someone goes to the far left, the closer they probably get to the extreme right. The details might differ, but the end results appear to be much he same.
I agree about the far left but surely any extreme view easily becomes authoritarian as does any view of an absolute nature.
Can you tell me how you could have a ‘state’ at all without ‘authority’, imposed from ‘above’?
The US is a hybrid country, with a political system largely derived from French Revolutionism and other continental forms harking back to ancient Rome (President, Senate, Congress’ etc. etc.) but a unusually strong attachment to English common law in parts. But for the latter, Fascism would be the normal state of the type of Goverment (because the authority would stop at the top in a human being, like a Roman Emperor, some of whom were led to confuse themselves with a God). In the UK the ultimate authority, constitutionally, is ‘God’. Everyone beneath that invisible, assumed foundational being is dependent on its granted authority. Even the Queen cannot personally instruct men to arrest you. In practice ‘God’ stands for an impersonal ideal, which nonetheless possesses and encapsulates the essence of legitimate ‘rule’ which most people feel ‘bound’, morally, to obey, and their resulting obedient behaviour is entirely weightless in daily life.
‘Democracy’ is the form of political system most likely to lead to Fascism (as it represents the will of capricious random majorities).
You attached “Authority” to right wing government exclusively in you’re previous post. Now you’re saying it’s common to all states.You say nothing about communism,in which way does that feel different to fascism?
As an atheist your comments about god are meaningless and prove nothing. The Queen is titular and secular head of state,not god. All that was dealt with in the civil war.
Your statement about fascism and democracy also applies to communism, where else could it occur? That is why democracy is so great! and problematic. Once democracy is surrender and lost the other two options are difficult to change or escape from.Both are oppressive and murderous, no one in their right minds would wish to live in such a state.
Of course, the left in this country (as it is in the US) is fascist. The three tenets of fascism are authoritarianism, suppression and regimentation. Now ask yourself who came up with no platforming, cancellation and taking the knee.
it Was National Socialism, and the big thing of the WWII Fas***s was Public/Private industrialization. If anything it is very like the Left, only the Left do not want the public to be involved – leave the Governing to the experts they believe, the public need to do as they are told.
Indeed: George Orwell made this observation in, I think, The Road to Wigan Pier where he compared the extreme left and right to the hands of a clock at five minutes to one.
As an American, let me tell you, buster, if I want irony I’ll eat a steak or take vitamin supplements. And I need CliffsNotes to understand Monty Python.
When you look back at who were the “progressives” of the early 20th century, you do start to winder why certain people choose that label.
Regressives….Authoritarian from UK Conservative government supporting taking the knee at football matches.is beyong the pale….Dont trust lib-lab-Cons-Greens-Snp
There could be no more fascist group than ‘antifa’. Read about their year of riots, arson, murders, and intimidation in Portland and elsewhere, and you cannot help but think of the brown shirts of the 30’s. They are a paramilitary organization brutalizing citizens, police, and bystanders, and are limiting the press coverage of their crimes by assaulting anyone who attempts to take video or photos of their antics.
One need not speculate about future fascists, they are here.
antifa crashed the shores of Normandy and freed the hell hole of Europe.from fascism,the usa got lucky drumpf is too dumb and lazy to have won 4 more years,his mini experience ,,with the taste of fascism and authoritarian rule was enough to wake up 80+ million voters and oust the wannabe
Hahaaa, sure. Antifa was a Marxist political party in Germany 1930s. They were as thuggish and brutal in street terror and violence as they fought the Na* is to see which monstrous form of oppression would take the nation. Antifa lost, but just hid away, and like cockroaches these ultra violent, thuggish, Marxists keep popping up to push for their Nu-Stal*nism.
The reason they picked the name Antifa is because they were competing with the Fa* c*sts, and thus anti that group – ideologically they were very bit as brutal and oppressive! Same as now. Street violence and terror have been the antifa way since they began in that horrible time and place of the Weimar Republic. (where the ‘Frankfurt School’ also aroze, and gave us the Marxist leadership in our Education systems, and MSM, and Politics – google them, and the 11 points)
so today and tomorrow is all I have left here, and awaiting for approval is all I get… Unherd is turning the corner, they are being assimilated by the MSM Borg.
(I wish I could write it in the original Klingon, but just c/p instead)
“Borg
Star TrekThe Borg are a fictional alien group that appear as recurring antagonists in the Star Trek franchise. The Borg are a vast collection of “drones”, or cybernetic organisms, linked in a hive mind called “the Collective” or “the Hive”
Yes, it’s a great pity. This section was often the most interesting part of Unherd, for me. I hope at least to be able to continue reading those who can/will pay to air their views and debate.
where is your evidence? Proof, the electronic voting machines are hackable. Proof; there are studies available dating back decades on mail in voting fraught with the massive fraud. Proof; Democrats have spoke on camera to this in Congress and at the state level. physical proof; massive outdoor rallies for Trump, some in freezing temperatures during a pandemic. car & boat rallies, miles long that were by word of mouth. Proof; empirical evidence of voter machine hacking by several foreign countries.
Meanwhile you have the Dem presidential candidate that can’t form a sentence, exhibiting extreme dementia. Placing immigration policies 70% of the people polled don’t want. A VP candidate that didn’t only not get support from her own State, CA but pulled out before the first primary. Do you really think Americans want to pay higher gas $’s?, higher food costs?, higher taxes?, higher drug costs?, higher living costs?, mutilating children’s genders? The poor are getting poorer. America has been experiencing endless wars, opioid drugs and homeless doubling and tripling in numbers. No society can stay on this trajectory, undoing social norms and control.
Antifa, BLM manifesto states the opposite of their labeling. When the people tell you who they are, listen.
Dont talk like An A****** Allies thought against Taking the Knee,Free speech…
Coherence much?
Antifa was nowhere near Normandy.
One of the cleverest things the left accomplished was to define fascism as extreme right rather than extreme left, simply on the basis that it stood against communism.
They are both left wing ideologies that stand for state control and against individual freedom. They fought against each other with bitter hatred in much the same way as shiites and sunnis or catholics and protestants.
“catholics and protestants.”
My town has Catholic, Methodist, Baptist churches, they never fight. Your reference is bad.
Check out the film ’71 for the happy Protestant vs Catholic hi-jinks everyone over 40 in the UK remembers.
He is referring to ‘Norn Irn’.
Yep. https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/05/lk-samuels/the-fascist-left-myth-or-reality/
It was always thus.
Fascism was a left project, the Nazis weren’t naming themselves socialists for nothing.
Goebbels, today’s role model for so many in politics and media, was a particularly staunch socialist.
Stalin invented the smearing of the fascists as being on the right, merely to distinguish himself from them and we fell and still fall for it.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/05/lk-samuels/the-fascist-left-myth-or-reality/
Is “socialist” the same as social democrat?
And conversely, the new “resistance” is comprised of those who have the courage to be openly conservative–or even classically liberal. I laugh at the people who claim to be brave fighters against the establishment–as they spout off the same platitudes everyone else is spouting.
We do get it! The left here bandy “Fascist” like confetti to all who oppose their dogma. They overlook the “socialist” in the N*Z* tag. Totalitarian/Authoritarian feel much the same to the oppressed I would guess. This stuff today is Neo Marxist riding on the back of identity/inter-sectional rubbish from Postmodernism. It is undemocratic, It must be resisted.
Undoubtedly a well-intentioned article, but (going with the hypochondria line) it reads like obsessing about a pimple on one’s nose (Trump) while being completely oblivious to / in denial of the great big lump of advanced brain tumour disfiguring one’s head (the American left and all the institutions / positions they encroached). If there’s still anyone in the 21st century who believes that “nationalism” is the problem or that “fascism” is a rightwing concept, that person needs their brains examined by a reputable medical professional.
“…the clown act turned deadly in the end, but it was still a clown act that never seriously threatened a 250-year-old constitution.”
Well, you’re certainly right that Trump didn’t threaten our Constitution, but what remains of it is in fact under threat any time the Supreme Court is in session. And the only deadly thing that happened on Jan 6th was the murder with impunity of Ashli Babbit by an as-yet unidentified minion of the new regime.
I couldn’t agree more.
The failure to prosecute the killer of Ms Ashli Babbitt is an absolute disgrace and just confirms many people’s suspicion, that at the end of the day, the USA is just ‘A Cowboy Republic’.
Incidentally video evidence quite clearly shows that Babbitt’s killer was black, and it is rumoured that he is/was a Lieutenant in the Capitol Police.
Nick Clegg wants to extend Trump’s Facebook ban even longer ( presumably to stop any re-election bid) because Trump ‘crossed a red line’ by inciting violence during the Capitol riot. So there you have it , it seems Trump must have shot this woman. Somehow , even though he was half an hour’s walk a way he caused the violence. Does this mean then that the Democrat party is responsible for all the deaths and destruction from BLM etc,? If Trump can cause events by telekinesis , surely they can as well?
There is loads of video footage pulled by the FBI -why?
Isn’t it obvious?
But the new regime hadn’t taken power when that incident happened.
Is that a thinly veiled approval of murder?
No
Good.
The Dems are in complete control of Washington DC. We’ve been told over the years that Congress and Senate when voted into DC are quickly told, on both sides of the isle, they better play by the company rules or not receive support in their next election through funding and/or support on the campaign trail. Those who don’t play are eventually cast to the side. And then the head of the beast grows bigger.
Snow White; Queen says…” mirror mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all?” An old story that will be repeated until an unlikely Snow White comes along and exposes the fraud. It will look like the Queen is going to win killing her competition but alas, …Bright light, information, is the only disinfectant.
Anyone who can’t see that Trump, notwithstanding his occasional oafishness, was trying to save Americn democracy is simply an idiot.
Yes, he was trying rather than succeeding.
Not so easy to succeed when you have the entire federal apparatus and all the media apparatchiks ranged against you.
An example being the Judge Kavanagh farce. The woman accuser ,Blasey Ford comes from a CIA family , her friend Liz , from school, works for FBI. A team of legal people ( who would cost the average person $ hundreds thousands ) worked pro bono in order for her to make preposterous & in some cases obviously untrue allegations .Yet is two-doors Christine in jail for telling fibs? No shes a multi-millionaire enjoying her life. The police weren’t interested in any of the other accusers either. Papers such as The Guardian still refer to these allegations as valid & true. So the media , the police and the security services were the ones who ultimately were in charge of the justice system & they can decide who they like or dislike.We are seeing this again in the Chauvin case. Probably be easier & cheaper just to return to summary justice of the wild west.
Doesn’t the US ‘do’Perjury anymore?
Is it following the example of wee little Scotland and the Salmon affair?
There have been numerous trials where some figure from the past is accused of doing something sexual to someone who was then young ( basically the Blasey-Ford claim). In some of the cases the person is found not guilty ( in one case because someone had made a private home-movie at that time which clearly contradicted the claim) The winning accused still have to pay all their legal costs , the crown pays for the ( unsuccessful) accuser & except in the case of ‘ Nick’ -noone seems to have been prosecuted. It seems the CPS ( and whatever they have in America ) is totally staffed by people with their own agenda.
Whatever anyone’s opinion of someone like Trump it behoves us all, not least the author of this curate’s egg of a piece, to remember that a record 74m Americans democratically voted for this Republican that he calls an egotistical, deluded clown and had it not been for Covid, despite the huge, unified forces of American big tech and mass media consistently ranged against him, that he would likely have won in 2020.
I’m not inclined to think the election itself was to be honest, but there was definitely a brazen political, media and scientific establishment conspiracy against Trump in the US, as evidenced by the recent dramatic Biden volte face on Trump’s apparently outrageous ‘racist’ earlier claims regarding the lab origins of the virus.
This was made all the obvious given that Australia, not gripped by the same polarised political tensions within the US, had called for an inquiry into the virus’s origins and instantly invited the threat of severe economic retaliations from China. Not a coincidence I feel.
This was way back in May 2020, had the backing of 122 countries and managed to avoid inviting similar derision and summary dismissals quite clearly because, although in essence the substance was similar, the language was more nuanced and the person saying it of course wasn’t Donald Trump.
When you couple this with the timing of the ‘totally unexpected’ announcement of the first covid vaccine just days after (not before) the US election then, to me, something definitely smells rotten in the state of Denmark as the Old Bard once wrote.
In terms of the 2020 election being ‘stolen’ with a dodgy count I’m not inclined to think it was to be honest, but there was definitely a brazen political, media and scientific establishment ‘co-ordinated manouevre’ against Trump in the US, as evidenced by the recent dramatic Biden led mass volte face on Trump’s apparently outrageous ‘racially motivated’ earlier claims regarding the Chinese lab origins of the virus.
This was made all the obvious given that Australia, not gripped by the same polarised political tensions within the US, had called for a far more robust WHO led inquiry into the virus’s origins and instantly invited the threat of severe economic retaliations from China for daring to do so. Not a coincidence there I feel.
This was way back in May 2020, had the backing of 122 countries and managed to avoid inviting similar derision and summary dismissals quite clearly because, although in essence the implication was similar (certainly to the Chinese), the language was more nuanced and the person saying it of course wasn’t dear ol’ Donald Trump.
Amidst this backdrop, when you couple this with the timing of the ‘totally unexpected’ announcement of the first covid vaccine just days after (not before) the US election then, to me, something definitely smells more than a little fishy in the state of Denmark, as the Great Bard once sort of wrote.
Why does it take nineteen hours to be approved? Are they hoping that no one will be reading the article or more importantly, the comments by then.
censorship by delay.
One has to wonder sometimes, doesn’t one?
Hoping my following up to this comment passes moderation.
Been in and out ‘awaiting for approval’ purgatory for some time now…..
its projection isn’t it, Biden his big tech and corporate buddies and the fawning media constantly warning about the made up bogey man of white supremacy look far more fascistic than trump ever was/did.
Communistic, not fascistic.
Same difference. Disagree with a Communist and end up jobless, in a gulag for re-education or shot.
Did you see the Biden speech at a school graduation? He said Racism and White Supremacy are the biggest issue the nation faces!
The trouble is that the right as well as the left have aided this agenda. Now we have got to the point it is spoken as fact. Anyone who disagrees loses their job.
Quite amusing. West is obviously correct that the left’s constant clowning, for more than half a century now. about anyone with views even slightly conservative or traditionalist being “fascist” was and is nonsense, but it’s noticeable that he joins with the left establishment (and yes that includes most of the “Conservative” Party hierarchy) in making ritual denouncements of Trump for the crime of representing the people the Democrats (like the British Labour Party) abandoned with contempt.
But he seems not to have noticed that we currently live in a state that arrogates to itself unprecedentedly detailed control over every aspect of our lives. That this has been enabled and massively increased under spurious “emergency” legislation that empowers the regime to do almost literally anything. That this is protected by massive media propaganda and open suppression of dissent. That dissenters are demonised and scapegoated as supposedly “delaying” or “threatening reopening”, encouraging violence against them and blaming them for the very totalitarianism they are opposing.
We aren’t all that far from fascism, and it didn’t come from Trump’s side of politics.
We have a totalitarian system. It is not Fascist though.
Not really worth quibbling too much. There are no clear definitions. This totalitarianism comes from the left rather than the right and that suggests communism rather than fascism, but it’s much closer to fascism in many aspects.
Quite right. How many boxes do we need to tick here, before people are willing to admit this? Authoritarian suppression of freedom and free speech? Tick. The prioritisation of corporatist interests and the corrupt arrangements that entrench them? Tick. The justification of all this using an overtly moralising set of arguments designed to defend the State’s role in protecting society? Tick. The enthusiastic support of the State’s actions and methods by a subset of society who then act, unpaid and unbidden, as enforcers of State ideology, through lies, defamation and intimidation? Tick.
So far, none of this has happened under an overtly nationalist agenda in most nations, except in Scotland of course, where Wee Krankie is doing everything Mussolini did except making the trains run on time. But it is telling that the international consensus on lockdown was driven by a very obvious dose of competition between national governments on their comparative performance, and that this resulted in a bias towards draconian measures for the sake of their value in establishing the credentials of each government in question on the world stage, so we might arguably even include the nationalist component here as well.
This article, though it expertly lampoons the typically delusional attitudes of the Left, misses the same point that the Left itself misses on the question of Fascism, namely that it is a left-wing ideology, and that it still exists on the political Left.
And frankly it amazes me that with anti-Semitism emerging once again in the UK and USA’s left-wing parties, and the Covid19 global fiasco having ripped away the veil that usually covers left-wing authoritarianism, that anyone can reject the proposition that Fascism is returning, based solely upon the delusions and self-exculpatory circular logic that permits those on the Left to escape scrutiny of their own values and actions. Just because modern Fascism is not obviously rooted in nationalist attitudes does not mean it’s not Fascism: identity politics, now an internationalist movement, contains all the conditions for the re-establishment of Fascist authoritarianism.
The article above even points this out: the establishment of victimhood and grievance as a means of binding voters together under a single political banner: you can’t say that this isn’t Fascist just because it ticks every box except the one about nativism, and I’m surprised that the author doesn’t agree here, especially the later part where he rightly separates conservatism from Fascism and identifies the persistent left-wing delusion that confuses the two things.
Fascism is indeed back, but back where it always belonged: on the Left. And it’s just as ugly as it ever was.
John, the philosophical world is not arrayed between the left and right of liberalism. No nationalism appears on the liberal axes, strange as this may seem to your inner right-liberal.
I do not understand your comment, but strongly suspect that you have not understood mine.
It takes time to formulate the first questions of oneself and one’s enworldment.
Blather and nonsense, as I suspected.
Child, you are a prisoner of the ideas you have received from others. Every last nationalist knows this. Every one of them has escaped from the trap and found the human truth. You can too, but you must first accept that you are not free today.
Don’t be such a patronising arse.
I’m not so sure. With European people set to become minorities in their own countries and antiwhite sentiment seemingly rising inexorably, I feel something big brewing in the next two or three decades.
‘History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.’
Fascism grew out of an intellectual reaction to the anomie and nihilism of late 19th century modernity, and the terrible war it visited on the European world. Today we have a completely novel existential, not moral, challenge; and the reaction to that will not be fascistic but ethnic nationalist.
It is important not to play by the word-rules of the revolutionary left. Nationalism is not fascism, but fascism is an extreme moral and imperialistic form of nationalism. No nationalism is on the right or left of the liberal philosophical system, which does not describe all human political persuasion, just that flowing from Enlightenment thinking. Nationalism is the politics of the natural interests of peoples, not of liberalism’s guiding concept of the unfettering will. It is, therefore, a separate system of political thought (about which those given wholly to the liberal system perceive next to nothing).
A very good post. Unherd should commission a more fully formed version from you.
It is more likely that Unherd will ban me, I would have thought.
This isn’t The Guardian where the slightest criticism ends with a ban.
It would be nice if you are right.
No but your comments may disappear.
Yes its interesting seeing the comments re-arranged to get the one wrong-speak out of the way.
A particularly appalling incident of
‘disappearing’ occurred a couple of days ago when the pithy comments of J Bryant Esq on the ‘Wuhan Lab Leak Theory’ were expunged!
Up until that moment they had been the most popular of the day, then presumably the somewhat slovenly CIA, prompted by Fu Manchu & Co passed the sentence of excommunication, and the deed was done.Bravo!
Unherd hires from the ex-Guardian pool of writers, check them out, it seems most have written there.
Thanks for a thoughtful response; I think we’re fundamentally on the same page. Agree that ethno-nationalism doesn’t necessarily equal fascism, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see far right views on social issues making a comeback too: fundamentally, the majority values order.
Perhaps I’m ‘play[ing] by the word-rules of the revolutionary left’ to some extent, but I guess I’m pushing back on Ed West’s apparent contention that it’s going to be simple conservatism (or perhaps Trumpian populism) that’s in the offing.
Hi Jon, thanks for the reply. I have to say I don’t like Walker Connor’s label ethno-nationalism, and I regret that since Nick Griffin alighted on it at the turn of the millenium in a doomed bid to throw anti-fascists off the scent, it has broadly stuck among British nationalists. Ethnic nationalism is a unity. There shouldn’t be some offcut with a different name for peoples of European descent.
Likewise the label “far right” is problematic. Whole peoples possess commonalities – identity, relationality, gene interests, history, etc – which are central to their existence. It isn’t “far anything” to advocate for these. We lost the war of language before we even knew it was being fought. But we are not losing the war of discourse.
There does seem to have been over the years teams of human rights lawyers and sympathetic civil servants who have completely altered the rules in this country. Certain people now know they can do whatever they want & won’t be punished-but if anyone complains they certainly will. Far-right & N word as used routinely by politicians & media for attitudes that were once quite normal. Are we saying the war generation were evil people-they didn’t know what they were fighting for? That present day people , so long as they present as minority in some way , sexual or religious are the best people in this country-because if so we need help.
Some recent appalling examples were:
1:The scrapping of the Double Jeopardy principle. Now, if at first you don’t succeed try, try & try again.
2: Lord Justice Widgery got it completely wrong over ‘ Bl**dy Sunday. So, let’s have a retrial and GET the right answer. To hell with the additional cost upwards of £400million.
3: Lord Justice Hoffman* sitting on the Pinochet Appeal when he knew he shouldn’t have.
4: Last, but not least, the pièce de résistance,
Blair & the Iraq War.
(* Leg-over Lennie to his friends.)
Blair created the supreme court & its President Lady Hale said Johnson couldn’t suspend parliament-this was withiut precedent.If Starmer were PM I wonder what her ruling would have been? Lots of rulings & judgements which are clearly that person’s personal subjective feelings or even a vindictive wish to cause harm
As i said in Sundry General Elections & Local leaflets, The Police (Police &crime commissioners) BBC , (media) Universities ( Cancel Kultur) Judiciary (Supreme court in UK) Society has been politicised .I am on Standby to Save Europe from Wokeist mobs at my Laptop…,
At the moment people don’t mind that the system is stitched up-it doesn’t affect them. They are not going to go cold or hungry though & if personally threatened we will see some angry people. Just need a charismatic leader & who knows? The political class is much too complacent-they think we are all idiots & they can get away with anything
An excellent, pithy comment, thank you.
It’s what you say plus the country with the most virulent form of Fascism – Germany – having lost the “terrible war”.
Mussolini stood for a Corporate State – where independent business enterprises are crushed and the economy is dominated by the state and pet corporations. And, sadly, that is what the international establishment (whether it be Mr Biden or Mr Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum) want.
Mussolini also stood for political repression – and the is what the “Justice” Department, the FBI (and all the rest of it) now stands for. The “justice” system operates a double standard – conservatives are punished for things that supporters of the left are not punished for. The security services are blatantly political – and the “mainstream media” act as cheerleaders for the biased and corrupt system.
Ironically it was not Donald John Trump who was bringing Fascism – he was trying to stop its development. But, tragically, it was too strong.
The threat of fascism comes not from Trump, but from the Democrats and their corporatist allies. In Britain, crackpot fantasists like Mason, and his reptilian allies in the public sector represent a more potent threat to my liberties than do anyone else.
West’s ideas represent the petulant rejection of populism by the dying and irrelevant Tory past.
Perhaps the author is simply looking in the wrong place. Over on my side of the pond, we have a political party that eagerly and explicitly divides people by race, painting one race as the source of the world’s ills for centuries, if not millennia; has corporations enforcing adherence to its social views, both by censorship and in personnel policies; and has black-shirted goons who engage in street violence on its behalf. And, they currently control all the elected branches of the Federal Government.
Fascism (in old brown/black shirts sense) is not coming. But some sort of collectivism perhaps is coming. And that is not encouraging.
Try not to be a pathetically self-estranged libbo. The liberal individual does not exist. Human beings are relational, and the most powerful relation is of that of kin and kind. Ethnic nationalism offers the only political truth of Man.
I like your satire.
Fascism may have originated as a description of hyper-nationalism, enforced by a totalitarian regime, brooking no argument, but in France fascism is used in a generic sense to describe any political movement which is authoritarian and hates dissent from its “approved” doctrine. This can now be used to describe many of the political movements so loved by progressives and the woke. Try to say you don’t believe CO2 is a danger to the planet; that Trump was a very democratic President, increasingly popular with American minorities; that globalism and mass immigration is the fastest way to reduce the power of the average citizen while devaluing the pound in his pocket; that a human born with a p***s is a man no matter what surgery he undergoes. See how readily people accept your beliefs and tell me fascism isn’t alive and well in the West. Left and right are no longer relevant.
The big postwar revival of self-aggrandising “Fascists everywhere” hysteria of the left was surely with the elections of Thatcher and Reagan.
Does anyone remember “A Very British Coup” in which a heroic unassuming but noble “man of the people” leftwing leader is brought down by right wing establishment forces?
When the leftwing reality of the time was gasbag Neil Kinnock and militant tendency fop Derek Hatton.
Then the title was resurrected by the BBC after the shock, their shock anyway, of Brexit.
This only shows, outrageously, that communism still has a patina of respectability in the west. Fascism, Nazism, the devil itself – but communism, well you know, the intentions were good…. Let’s stop looking in the direction of the pointing finger and look instead at the finger itself! ((an old thieves trick). P. S. Trump is no excuse, in real terms or as the giant caricature the media presented to us.
There was an article on unherd about history. Yet how many people know the 20th century history of Russia or China? Probably nothing, yet for over a century some members of the government , some members of the secret service & practically all the academic & media think these are great regimes.They just don’t want to tell us why, they keep it a bit of a secret. The full focus has been on the European conflict-its on the main school history syllabus -little moustache man is still an instantly recognizable figure. They have been training up student followers of marxism & maoism for decades.Obviously they won’t like populist figures who don’t share their vision.
Such laziness; so many assumptive stereotypes. Is this idle soft left-wingery all that journalism now is?
This author would probably be genuinely shocked at the suggestion that the danger of fascism now comes exclusively from the so-called liberal left.
But it is is the truth.
Yes, all very open and liberal and inclusive in its own self obsessed way. But to dismiss Trump so glibly speaks of poorly developed critical faculties. It ignores the term “fake news’ which Trump coined with good reason. Vide: Fauci and the Wuhan Virus and the rowing back of the media kicking and screaming as the truth emerges. It ignores the malevolence and the mendacity of the CCP, which he tackled head on. It blithely ignores Pax Trumpana which gave the world four years of peace and prosperity. It ignores the fact that he received 12 million votes more in 2020 than in 2016, easily more that his opponents, a befuddled half hidden candidate as well as an unpopular running mate. It does not surprise me that the writer suffers from hypochondria and its irrational fantasies….it is the type of poorly researched and written article that gives me pause for thought before I sign up for Unherd…
School report : Ed could do better if he were to apply himself more diligently!!
“…that majority ethnic groups have become the ‘victims’ of migration and multiculturalism; (we have & all on our buck, so to speak… mass immigration costing us millions… but shhh you can’t say that, we have to pretend the obvious lie that somehow all those arriving are net contributors and that overall were quids in!) that the gains of feminism should be reversed (err, it’s not us enabling men to play women’s sport, or cancelling the use of ‘mum’, or trying to cancel JK Rowling)that democracy is dispensable (how many years trying to reverse Brexit Paul?); that science, universities and the media cannot be trusted (I know Mason is a spanner extraordinaire but surely even he knows we’ve clearly seen the light regarding the bias and nudge nudge mentality, not to mention cancel culture that pervades); that nations have lost their way and need to become ‘great’ again (you’re right Paul. I want to live in a ‘rubbish’ country as close to 3rd world status as possible please, preferably with people starving on the street) ; and that there will soon be a cataclysmic event which sets things right…(we can only hope, as with an 80 seat majority and a British Hindu as Home Sec, it’s now or never to put the Paul Masons of these isles back in their bright red poorly labelled and sumptuously furnished on the inside box)…
You’re looking the wrong way. Fascism is a leftist ideology and it has arrived. Cancel culture, rigged elections, etc. Joe Biden is Der Fuhrer.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/05/lk-samuels/the-fascist-left-myth-or-reality/
Plus ca change…
Biden his time..he is like A Senile ”Peter Finch” Character in network,without the intelligence..senile Joe P*** off out of uK, yankee go home..
It’s hard not to see in the mentally confused and doltish Biden a latter day Hindenburg – a gatekeeper for the fascists of his own side.
The most extraordinary thing of all is that all the properties of actual Fascism are being carried out by those who claim to be terrified of the return of Fascism.
Take your points about Fascism. Here is how they apply to the current woke left:
“Identification of enemies/scape-goats as a unifying cause” – tick (white people, men)
“Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism” – ok so they don’t form outgroups based on nation state, but on Critical Race Theory conceptions of ethnicity, not a huge difference.
“Disdain for the importance of human rights” – tick (they want to dispense with the presumption of innocence when it suits them – eg Harvey Weinstein, Derek Chauvin, et al who the mob condemns before the trial. One need only look at how Weinstein’s lawyer was driven out of Harvard for performing his duty to defend the accused.
“Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts” – tick. Intellectuals with wrong-think are purged from arts faculties, or are unable to enter – no surprise that 90% of the arts are self-professed leftwingers. Art is not even considered art unless it is subversive to traditional values.
“Obsession with crime and punishment” – tick. They are obsessed with extra-judicial punishment of outgroup members and of subverting the existing criminal justice system in order to protect militant members of their group, who they believe should be above the law.
The current crop of wokenistas are fascists by their own definition. But worse than that, they are so blinded by their own sense of moral grandiosity that they simply can’t see it which, in my view, is arguably the most fascistic trait of all.
It is interesting to recall an interview I once watched of Hendrik Verwoed (the architect of Apartheid in South Africa) with an interviewer who asked, “Do you ever have any doubts about this idea of yours?” To which Verwoed responded that he was lucky enough to be utterly convinced that Apartheid was the right course of action, and had never doubted himself or his ideas for a moment.
I would suggest Mr Verwoed has much in common with modern day SJWs.
Democrats used the Capitol Riot just like the Reichstag Fire, as an excuse to curtail their opponents’ civil liberties. Twitter deplatformed 70,000 conservative accounts, including the president’s. At least 200 Capitol Rioters, perhaps guilty of trespassing, have been held without bond, some in solitary confinement, for 100 days.
This article would have been 100% great, without the perfunctory Trump-swipe at the end.
It is very hard to separate Trump-the-Man (whose personality, at least as it comes across through the media, doesn’t appeal to me), and Trump-the-President, (whose policies mostly made perfect sense once stripped of the partisan presentation they received through corporate media).
Even the trade spat he had with Canada made sense to me (I’m Canadian) when I look at our (very socialist) government’s hidden subsidy system behind many industries that put US competitors at an obvious disadvantage.
God forbid we judge someone by their actions and policies – much more fun, and clickbait-y, to skewer them on their personal traits.
Honestly the people hyperventilating over Trump’s creating a fascist dictator in waiting seemed to be severely overemphasising or flattering his effectiveness. Being an totalitarian dictator sounds like a lot of work for a man who seemed much happier wasting hours on Twitter, watching TV and playing golf. I mean Hitler came across as lacksidasical to some but he spent his idle hours engaging in what I suppose we would now call ‘brainstorming’ and the big ideas about the future of civilization that he passed down to his subordinates in a Darwinian struggle for his approval.
As for actual real hypercondria, well even before the mobile your average medical book, even one designed for home usage for non-specialists, was a fertile source of that problem. And lets not forget that Moliere wrote a whole play about it in the 17th century. For once it is a problem that as far as I can tell was not noticeably aggravated by the internet. I say this as a veteran hypocondriac of the pre-internet age.
Authoritarianism is authoritarianism period, no matter what side of the political spectrum it appears to come from and, rest assured, it will always find its natural supporters on both ‘sides’.
Be it from the supposed left or the right, the net result is the same. Only the self-serving politically blinkered pedantic corpse counters attempt to draw a distinction.
Regular democratic accountability and scrutiny, agnostic free speech and the right to protest, and truly independent checks and balances are the crucial pillars to preventing its rise.
Take but one of these three away and it’s starting to push at an open door.
Maybe you are assuming that authoritarianism has a causal permanence in and of itself. In the East Asian and Eurasian sociobiological contexts it might. But the European sociobiology is grounded not on conformism and the giving of assent to authority but individualism and the lending of that assent. It is a key distinction which renders authority a tool of European political organisation, not a natural element of it.
We are living in a soft authoritarian form of political organisation right now, from which the will of Europeans has been almost completely excluded and which functions on the basis of according no human worth or meaning to the life of European peoples. We are not intended to survive it. If we are to survive then authority there must be for a time on the European continent, because the population of our lands has to be changed. That would be good authority, therefore, and an authority which seeks, like Cincinatus, to retire itself when the job is done.
I’m suggesting that an inevitable tendency toward authoritarianism exists at both ends of the political spectrum, that democracy itself is helluva lot more fragile than most people like to imagine and that, rather than treat it as a political football, those who genuinely care about it should be be more politically agnostic about who’s fighting to preserve it.
Indeed there is grave authoritarianism in left-liberalism and there is grave authoritarianism at the imperialist pole of nationalism. Where we differ is that I do not do violence to the nationalisms, of which there are many forms, by crowbarring them in with the many forms of liberalism; these being two fundamentally distinct worlds of thought about Man.
‘I do not do violence to the nationalisms….’
Going to need some clarification on that.
It is uncomplicated. Liberalism, left or right, is a systemic philosophy of the unfettering will. Nationalism, which is equally systemic and which is completely indisposed to the notional “goods” of liberal individualism and egalitarianism, is a philosophy, I would say, of the interests, relation, and identity of peoples. Interests can be defensive or expansive, hence the distinction between ethnic nationalism and the fascisms. When someone caught in systemically liberal thought speaks of the “far right” or of national socialism being socialist in the equalitarian sense then violence is done to the distinction between the systems.
We who have some capacity for thought should be more considering than the masses, and seek a higher resolution of meaning.
You would have made an excellent ‘Tribune of the Plebs’ had we still had such an august office.
You may recall Diocletian, like Cincinnatus, retired, but sadly in his case before his task was done.
Honoured. sir.
Authoritarianism is logically and practically impossible in any system based upon small government. It is therefore not possible on the political Right. The problem with this debate in general is that the most successful political lie ever told is the one where Fascism is a right-wing political ideology. It never was, and never can be, and right-wingers don’t have to explain it or apologise for it.
You are an example of someone entirely ignorant of nationalist thinking and wholly given to lie that every political persuasion maps on the liberal axes. Read what I have written and make room for historiographical difference, there’s a good chap.
‘Authoritarianism is logically and practically impossible in any system based upon small government.’
With the greatest of respect that’s a little naïve, simplistic and idealistic.
It’s not by accident that history has shown us that the apogee of fascism was Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, and both were strongly built around a sense of nationalism, racial purity and militarism.
Factors, which whether you like it or not, tend to be more immediately more attractive to those on the right of the political spectrum.
Both achieved their ultimately dictatorial positions initially through the ballot box with more than a little help from big, private money.
‘The definition of fascism is the marriage of corporation and state’ as Il Duce helpfully put it, where ‘not even a cigarette paper separates them’.
Both US Presidents FDR and Eisenhower saw fit to warn against the dangers of the influence of ‘private’ power and the possibility that its excessive influence could lead to de facto fascism in a democracy.
A political system in which it is probably more likely to occur I might suggest. Certainly more likely than Communism.
Even today, the propagated right wing myth of ‘small government’ might sound good on paper and play well in some circles, but all too often the corporate puppet masters are still pulling the strings and calling the shots somewhere along the line for said ‘small government’.
The liberal left progressives and their malicious censor cancel dissent persecution horde slander any and all who do not comply as facists.The woke hate cancel mob is verifiabely guilty of everything they falsely accuse, especially tyranical, racist scapegoating , intolerant facism.They need to be brought to justice , and when found guilty , they sould face the same consequences they demand for their targets.
Stopped reading this article when it started to equate the Trump presidency with Fascism and the danger thereof. What?
America now has de facto totalitarian rule, enforced by thuggish, partisan troops, authoritarian in thought, and word,and deed, figure-headed by an obvious dotard controlled from beneath.
People are incarcerated without trial for their political opinions (qv the Jan 6th folks who blundered (aided by guards) into the Capitol building, one of whom was shot dead by an above mentioned state sponsored thug. No protest, no mainstream media coverage. Poor woman.).
None so blind as those that cannot see.
Trump may have been unpredictable and egocentric, but up until the virus hit, the United States was running at very high efficiency thanks to Trump. One of the best economies in 30 years, record low unemployment, winning the trade wars, had China on their heels, controlling illegal immigration, kicking terrorist butts. United States is a sh!t show right now. China is walking all over us, hundreds of thousands of illegals (mainly males between the ages of 16-25) pouring into our country, economy is in a shambles, $30 trillion national debt. We are being run by children.
Er..No Globalists elites rather like ”Robocop 2022”?…& multinationals…
It’s not Trump I’m worried about. It is Antifa and Black Lives Matter who are the true Fascists and Marxists. These are these people who should concern you, cancellation is just another name for Fascism. Wake up!
The interesting thing about fascism and communism is how extraordinarily similar they are as political processes. This is not a coincidence – it is because they both derive from the 19th century leftwing idea of the superiority of community over society.
Here’s a list of the political artifacts which proves that fascism and communism are fundamentally identical:
(1) Destruction of independent political parties and associations to produce a one-party state, i.e. a state where a single political party has a monopoly both of power and public discourse.
(2) The transformation of the revolutionary party’s members from a sect into a ruling class: the state bourgeoisie.
(3) Language policing: the detailed control of language, and not merely in the public sphere. This involves the abolition of free speech, and its replacement by government-approved speech, accompanied by the introduction of state-defined thought crimes, along with criminal and social sanctions for ‘wrong-think’, ‘wrong-talk’, and ‘heresy’.
(4) State-party monopoly of publishing and the media, maintained by abolishing the free media, and replacing it with a state-party-controlled media based on organised and systematic lying. This in turn permits the state-party apparatus to control public discourse of political and social issues, and establish Orwellian controls on the output of the academic world.
(5) Abolition of freedom of association, and its replacement by group identity.
(6) A centrally planned and directed economy controlled by the state bourgeoisie via the Party. This involves the abolition of free enterprise based on true private control of the means of production, and its replacement by state-directed economic planning in an economy whose ends and means are strictly and comprehensively defined and controlled by the Party.
(7) Abolition of independent trade unions, and their replacement by government-controlled ‘worker organisations’.
(8) The transformation of the working class into a stratum of indentured workers working under the control of, and at the direction of, The Party.
(9) The transformation of the criminal courts into institutions for determining punishment rather than guilt or innocence. This requires the abolition of the evidence-based justice system built on natural justice, due process, and the presumption of innocence, and its replacement by one built on group identity and/or political orientation where evidence of an individual’s innocence of crime no longer counts as relevant evidence if the accused belongs to a politically incorrect social group.
(10) Introduction of a Zhdanovite system of detailed state-party control and direction of culture and the arts – literature, the plastic arts, music, science, philosophy, etc. – as well as rigid and oppressive controls on the creators of those works.
(11) State-party monopoly of education, including the introduction of compulsory youth movements, whose function is to allow the state-bourgeoisie to usurp, undermine and counter the moral influence of parents and religious organisations on the young.
(12) The idea of ‘modernity’ as a central component of ideology. Thus the totalitarian state is presented as ‘modern’, ‘efficient’, ‘forward-looking’, ‘advanced’, ‘progressive’, ‘on the right side of history’. This is accompanied by the representation of the past, except insofar as it foreshadows the present, as reactionary, corrupt, and incompetent.
(13) The attempt to bring religion under state-party control, the long-term aim being the abolition of traditional religion, and its replacement with state-directed paganism and/or atheism.
(14) Government by a non-democratic ‘association of the elect’ – the state bourgeoisie – operating via a non-elected private organisation, ‘The Party’, which is above society and outside the law, and which exercises despotic political, economic, and social control. Such Parties are backed and reinforced by especially privileged and militarised political police forces which are also above society and outside the law.
(15) At the top of the system of social control is a charismatic leader with unlimited power: il Duce in Italy, der Führer in Germany, Vozhd (Вождь) in Russia.
(16) The merging of the administrative apparatus of the Party into that of the state in order to blur the lines of demarcation and competence in the administration of the state.
(17) The establishment of a parallel civil administration separate from the conventional civil service, and based on and around the Party apparatus. This permits those ‘extra-judicial’ actions by the Party which require the expertise of experienced and skilled administrators and which also require an unusual degree of secrecy in their execution.
(18) The destruction of democratic law-making, and its replacement by a top-down and centralised command system based on decree and administrative fiat. This permits the abolition of constitutional – i.e. limited – government.
(19) The re-introduction of judicial torture.
(20) The re-introduction of slavery.
(21) The re-introduction of serfdom.
(22) The use of mass-murder as a means of social transformation and social control.
Why are you so familiar with the political system of modern China?
What exactly did Trump do that further restricted the freedom of the average American? The threat to freedom is from the OC Lefyt-Ollie Robinson is just the latest example.
The real problem is that government is no longer by the consent of the governed.
In Western Democracies, unelected regulators, judges and bureaucrats make almost all of the most important decisions. This causes unrest because elections appear not to have the consequences voters expect.
Governments faced with popular protest movements, like the Tea Party or Yellow Vests, suppress them like peasant uprisings. Unpopular policies, like transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, are justified by unexplained “expert opinion.” Even dissenting experts are suppressed.
For example, open discussion of global warming, whether it exists and, if it does, the most economical ways to deal with it, is suppressed. The common man may not have an MS in Statistics, like me, but they notice gasoline prices are going up in service of a theory which allows no dissent. This causes unrest.
The prevailing governing philosophy is that government knows better than the people themselves what’s best for them. Vox populi, vox dei, is a totally obsolete concept for modern bureaucrats. However, the people think they should be able to choose for themselves. This conflict will only be resolved by a return to less intrusive government, or an advance to a more openly oppressive state. So far, the state is getting more repressive, but allowing mob violence to intimidate political enemies into submission.
Missing from all this Left-Right crap is appreciation for good, old school, classical liberalism — you know, that business about constitutional governance.
Most anyone on the street would have no idea what the phrase “constitutional governance” means. (I’d put money down on that. A lot of money.) And that is a big problem. The biggest most important innovation that the West could offer the world — the concept of constitutional governance — is not so much being ignored or rubbished. It is being rubbished by not even being recognized as the central concept at work.
“Governance” means what? It’s the stuff we need to sort out any time more than one person collaborates (lives with; lives next to; trades with; says hello to) with at least one other person. So, some folks came to appreciate that we need to commit to rules of engagement… Oh, and the King is not above the rules. The king was not too keen on that, but 50 years of on-and-off English Civil Wars put the question to rest. Except the Scots (my people) didn’t get the memo. They fought on the side of the divine right of kings during “The ’45”. Once one puts aside all of the romance of “Scotland the Brave against England the Strong,” one can see that my peeps were on the wrong side of history on that one.
So, what to do? Make young people appreciate that there is no better alternative to constitutional governance. (The alternative, obviously, is un-constitional governance.) Government-by-manufactured-consensus is a tyranny. It leads to unconstitutional governance. It’s Soviet. Folks are never going to agree entirely about anything. So, we need rules for sorting out our politics in ways that transcend the tradition ways of resolving disputes.
The traditional ways involve killing each other; silencing each other; packing people off to camps in … Western China. The delusion of government-by-consensus — which is the fiction of Rousseau’s “general will” in my mind — has been winning the battle of the sound bites. Folks need to say that maybe those folks in the 17th and 18th centuries were on to something radical and cool: Equality before the law; Constitutionalism. Because the alternative is what?: Inequality before the law — that is, arbitrary government.
Really Biden &his Globalist allies like wHO,UN,EU George Soros, Facebook,twitter censorship .Kneeling politicians &Police are more Fascistic than trump could ever be….lazy journalism again…Look at boko Harim in Bukino faso Killed 100+ Children Last week hardly covered in Lying media..
“…the clown act turned deadly in the end…”
Only to Ashley Babbit, unarmed nonviolent protester shot by an unnamed Capitol police officer.
To date, she is the only person confirmed to have died violently at the Jan. 6 protests.
Considering there were already hundreds of trespassers in the building by that time, it’s likely she was deliberately targeted by the cop, possibly because he recognized her as a military veteran.
It was a supposed “insurrection” in which the only shot fired was by the government.
Anyone here know why the nationalism of peoples’ life interests is not the nationalism of heroic conquest? Anyone know which of these a European-descended people needs in an age of existential, not moral, crisis?
The English.
By heaven, yes.
So long, folks! From Wednesday, the struggle against evil (fascists / communists / nationalists / democrats / republicans / tories / centrists / leftists / wokes / immigrants / people who disagree with me / people who cant use apostrophe’s)* will have to continue without us non-members. It’s been…. something.
* insert your own preferred form of evil
Where’s left to go?
Up its own fundament.*
(* apologies, I just wondered if that would evade the Censor.)
as a German Biologist Ph D – this labelling and expression typing does not help anything. It is OUR easy prey fast reward conditioning – that never challenges any reasoning at all. We get ever dumber and just let it happen. Göring answered in Nürnberg for the start of Concentration Camps. “because of resistance”. Right. How much resistance? Almost zero! it was far too late to resist anything. So we are here today. It is far too late to resist anything. We are dumb sheeple following anything. The madder the better. An infantile distorted deluded sense of “freedom” and entitlement – in ALL areas. That is the DOOM. Not what you label it.
And this goes on and further – Things to Come – H G Wells…. many more to come…
Why is the lead story this Author, who’s story doesn’t speak to the title of his piece? The piece lacks any substance. I find myself scrolling down to the comment section of “unherd” more often, to read the more thought provoking section of “unherd” the subscribers. Disappointing
Those that see themselves as Anti Facists do a lot of straw man making. They tell you what the right stand for, and intentionally misrepresent it to try and make them the Nazi’s – which then allows the Left to attack them more easily. Gives them an excuse to de-platform, censor, exclude and harass.
The Right – Trump included – simply stand for free speech, the democratic nation state that retains the key powers to control its borders and internal policies, and the freedom to pursue foreign policies that puts their own country first.
The real FACISTS, are of course the Left and Globalists who are the exact opposite. They want to reduce the power of the electorate and are eager to hand powers away to the international bodies and organisations that they control. They try and create Nazi like enemies of everyone who oppose them, whip up hysteria about racism in the ethnic minorities in an attempt to get their votes, blatantly import voters, manipulate elections and clamp down on free speech through their control of social media, the media and through ‘hate speech’ laws.
Its time for journo’s to stop misusing the word fascist and say “closed society” or “closed ideology” instead. Fascism has about 30 years history in Italy in its pure form. Precursors like DAnnunzio’s Fiume Regency and successors like Spain’s JONS and Portugal’s Estado Novo had many similarities. Fascism is collectivist and corporatises the state and society. It has a mystical, macho, supreme leader culture. The “fasci” – a bundle of sticks, are easy to break individually but very strong together. It failed for the same reasons Greenism and Leftism fail today: Because the “pure fascist” is a myth its adherants will enter a purity spiral that splits the movement and hopefully produces a circular firing squad. Whilst its true that many current political and economic movements favour a closed society non can really be labelled Fascist. Greenies, Lefties, CPC, Big Tech, Putin, WHO and US Democrats all favour dictatorship, distain elections, call voters “stupid” and are happy to misuse the courts or police to hurt their enemies (who are, naturally, everywhere). They are as opposed to our values of Universalism, Pluralism and Secularism as were the Fascists and IMO are much more dangerous. It therefore makes sense to replace inane student slogans with rigourous definitions. Not all these bad actors will get away with it. Its the duty of all but especially the press to record who and what they are, so if any are brought to account they may judged objectively and history will view them more clearly. Though they are different to Fascist movement’s i expect history’s perspective will be similar: A few mad zealots leading a bunch of gangsters and opportunists with an ultimately disasterous outcome.
No fascism isn’t coming. But, at least in the US, a far more likely possibility is civil strife, if not civil war.
In the run-up to the US Civil War, both sides saw the other as dictatorial and untrustworthy. Both sides saw civic morality in terms of black and white.
Moreover, because the two sides are often in very discrete locations, it’s a lot easier to rule over particular swaths of the country.
Fascism would thus only be possible after some very significant civil conflict.
This author has joined the “commentariat” he lampoons. More unhinged TDS from Unheard. Meanwhile, the UK is censoring speech, arresting people for social media posts, and has cameras on every single street. Nice work!
A lot of broadly right wing/conservative UK commentators use anti-Trump rhetoric, or just general disrespect of Trump, as a respectability signal to try to placate the leftist establishment here. Often, imo, they seek to reassure themselves with it.
Bit like the way insecure lockdown opponents use “anti-vaxxers”, and similarly self-defeating.
Perhaps it is time to stop placating people whom you dislike and distrust
I agree, obviously, but many commentators who are of the conservative right feel somewhat out of step with the establishment and perhaps as a result feel a strong need to reassure themselves and/or the said establishment (often their employers, and almost always their fellow dinner party etc attendees and hosts) that they are not really “too bad”. Not as bad as those really naughty “racists”/antivaxxers/antisemites/ homophobes/conspiracy theorists/whatever.
Disrespecting Trump (whom they doubtless genuinely dislike) seems like a no-cost route to achieving that, certainly in British society.
They will argue that doing so stops their modestly right-wing views from being discredited by association with the aforementioned bad-think and social pariahs. My suspicion is that all it does is leave them as the “fringe” teetering on the edge of the Overton Window.
Well, of course; you can tell fascism is not coming by how dissidents are being silenced in an alliance between Big Tech and Big Govt, how race is front and center at every turn, and how things Trump was supposed to be planning are being done by those who hate him.
Trump’s term was not a ‘clown act’. He was the ‘middle-finger-extended’ that was and is still badly needed to confront the country’s elite.
Ed is a little lazy in his search for supporters of Hitler in Europe. As Canadian journo Scott Taylor has noted: “On April 28 about 250 people marched through the streets of Kiev, Ukraine, to commemorate the 78th anniversary of the Second World War’s Waffen SS Galicia Division.” You don’t get much more solid in your allegiance to Nazism or fascism than supporting the SS, do you? This is part of a trend to resuscitate the reputations of Ukrainian nationalists who fought with the Nazis during the Second World War that started with the interim government of Ukraine in 2014 and has continued under President Zelensky. Ukraine is the most important country where this has happened, but there have been disturbing signs of the same thing in the Baltic states and in Croatia’s unpleasant evocation of the murderous Ustaša regime that was installed by the Nazis.
Ed’s non-stop column-after-column driveby slandering of Trump is a real pain. Re “the clown act turned deadly in the end”, presumably a reference to the Capitol city riots, there was only one person shot dead in those riots, Ashli E. Babbitt. She was an unarmed Trump supporter and a military veteran, shot by a policeman who has not even been identified, let alone charged. This is what justice looks like in America post-Trump, under the Biden-Harris regime.
Every country considers nationalism a good idea to promote and instill into their children’s heads, except those one in the West. Yet it seems no justice fighters in the West is willing to pay attention to (let alone critique) this common sense prevailing outside their echo chamber.
’we live in a free society’. Do we? A society where people can lose their jobs and be visited by several police for the thought crime of thinking that someone who still has a functioning derek isn’t a woman, even though insert preferred pronoun says it is?
where you can be prevented from playing for your country for something you said ten years ago, even though that statement was perfectly legal then ( and I believe still is).
where government departments, universities and private sector employers demand that you pass some ludicrous right-think course before you can have a job or an education?
where the established church tells its ( ever dwindling) membership that they are damned for voting incorrectly in the past, and probably damned anyway for the crime of being born in the majority ethnic group of the country?
that maybe your definition of a free country. It isn’t mine
awaiting moderation, no doubt
“The truth, that we’re living in a free society and that the path to heroism has been cut off; that we have nothing greater than the worries and regrets of our everyday life, is too much to bear.”
We need some new road to heroism, or for the media to encourage some kind of “new” heroism. Not everyone can be a soldier, but there are many that can and should be given a chance to achieve something heroic. Simply shrugging our shoulders and saying “no more heroes” is not conducive to a vibrant and thrusting society.
‘We are living in a free society’. He’s living somewhere other than me , then. Cover your face, keep your distance, be careful what you say or you will lose your job, even if you said it ten years ago.
That isn’t my definition of a free society.
The cries of “Fascism!” against US Republican politicians began long before the Second Bush Administration. Barry Goldwater, who ran as the GOP’s presidential standard bearer in 1964, was described as the “Fascist Gun in the West” in some leading US magazine before the election. (I was a boy of 10 or 11 then, and regret the fact that I no longer recall which publication this was.) It always struck me as ironic that those who were for reducing the size of government – as Goldwater was – are most likely to be called Fascist. This is despite the fact that Mussolini and Hitler both expanded the power of the state enormously, and were called totalitarians for a reason.
Fascism is always coming (and going). The extent and form of it, however, remains elusive.
Fascism, though, is terribly old-fashioned. There are other ways for the despotic to command the political stage. All they need is an understanding of behavioural conditioning, a willingness to use it to manipulate an electorate, and a sufficiently developed gift for communication.
That is a far safer route to extended power than outright violence.
Fight your war in the heart and the mind and if you are the only one who knows a war is being fought you can win it without firing a shot.
The only danger comes from being rumbled, but even then if you can keep most people in the dark you are safe, because the arithmetic of democracy will keep you in power.
If you are a leader who knocks over seats then your own party will turn a blind eye. The odd elected representative who isn’t entirely self-serving may raise his voice in protest, but he or she is soon made irrelevant.
He who understands the politics of confusion is the new enemy not just of liberty, but of humanity itself.
Great article, and yes the term ‘fascist’ gets thrown around. So maybe it’d be useful to define it as precisely as we can. What were Mussolini’s and Hitler’s regimes like? You can argue ethno-nationalist, authoritarian, and corporatist. If you can accept that definition, we now have common ground to ask: Was Trump fascist? Is Russia? China? Brazil?
Its just that Fascism is a left wing phenomena. They were called National SOCIALISTS for a reason.
it’s just that you are very shallow and don’t actually know what any form of nationalism is.
Nationalism occurs when a citizenry feels it is under attack from nefarious entities both from within and without.
Within a liberal system, yes. But liberalism is not the only system for life.
Every country considers nationalism a good idea to promote and instill into their children’s heads, except those in the West. Yet it seems nobody in the West is willing to critique this common sense prevailing outside their echo chamber.
I agree with the general conclusion of the article that catastrophising narratives are more interesting than “didn’t we do well” ones. There is more opportunity to be a hero in the comic sense. We can see the same phenomenon with the climate change narrative. The problem this catastrophist narrative creates is the shutting down of rational debate and reasonable and proportionate action to try and solve the problems or to take a proportionate view of their relative importance and impact.
I am not convinced at all by this article which dangerously downplays the risks of the populism and hides that there is an obvius path to facism. But maybe the most ridiculous phrase is that one: “populism tends to be defensive and democratic, even egalitarian”… Well, the denial of the 2020 elections results by Trump and his Republican accolytes is the best sign of a democratic appraoch isnt’it?…
“Populism” is the demonisation term used by elites against resistance to their corruption. That’s why populism was usually of the left a hundred years ago and it’s usually of the right now, as dominance of the elites has shifted from right to left.
The 2020 election results were clearly manipulated. We know beyond honest dispute that there was massive and systematic media and big tech manipulation to protect the Biden campaign and damage the Trump campaign.
Whether there was more traditional vote-rigging we don’t know and probably will never know for sure. By definition, once our sources of information on a topic cannot be trusted, we can no longer know anything for certain.
The anti-democratic forces were those professionally (along with numerous obsessive amateurs) manipulating the campaign, covering up information, suppressing dissent, harassing opinionators, putting out propaganda, almost all systematically in the direction of damaging Trump and promoting Biden.
There is simply no way that a senile and relatively unpopular candidate like Biden would ever have won a free and fair election against a hugely successful candidate like Trump (74 million votes, in the teeth of the aforementioned manipulation).
So examine the beam in your own side’s eye, before you start complaining about the other side’s defensive responses.
Actually your comments are the perfect illustration of what facism looks like. So thank you for that. You cannot imagine the magnitude of disguss with which the rest of the World is considering the conspirationist theories you are promoting. The Trumpers are not the America we used to love and admire. They are the exact opposite. A shame for the Founding Fathers. At war, a key principle is to know the enemy. Well, what a better way to know the enemy than to read and listen to you in this war for dignity?
The OP is rational and courteous. Your response is nothing more than name calling.
a good illustration of what many others have defined as the new……..
The clown show *did* damage the 250-year-old constitution — first, by being a clown show in the White House, the corrosive effects of which have yet to reveal themselves fully; second, by ramping up the polarisation and hysteria in American politics by an order of magnitude (and doing so deliberately, for political advantage). All those saying the real problem is the American Left (a diagnosis it would be foolish to dismiss) need to reckon with the way the Trump presidency turbo-charged all the worst features of the American Left. These people need Trumpism just as much as Trumpism needs them. A plague on both their houses.
This is what lefties call “blaming the victim”, when it’s directed at their favoured special interest groups.
Every US regime in history has had its share of “clowning”, the Trump regime was worse in some areas, better in others, but the increased hysteria and polarisation came entirely from the elite reaction to Trump’s win.
To the extent that Trump himself was “polarising”, it came entirely from his refusal to kowtow to some of the “respectability” limits imposed by the left and its collaborators in the mainstream Republican “right”.
If you want to get a better grasp of the issue here, the best brief summary was given by Victor Davis Hanson in February, after the “victory” the Democrats achieved through shameless and unprecedented media and big tech bias and manipulation, discussing the real political issues underlying Trump and the response to him:
“It’s tragic that this country is at this place right now, because it didn’t have to be this way. They could have said Donald Trump represented a lost constituency that … globalised culture had ignored in a very amoral fashion and that was an understandable pushback, but the way to beat Donald Trump is to appeal to his voters in the way that the Democratic Party used to do, and win them back. They didn’t do that. They didn’t do that because they wanted open borders, and they’re tribalists that believe in identity politics, and they don’t care about people of the working class any more, and they feel that their money and their power and their titles and their degrees have allowed them to be an unquestioned elite. Sort of Platonic Guardians that we … don’t dare question.”
Sure, I agree with a lot of that. But I also think that the “leftie” tactic of citing “victim-blaming” to preempt any questioning of special interest groups’ narratives is, well, unhelpful. I think you’d agree with that, so I’m not sure why you’d try the same move yourself. The idea that Trump wasn’t provocative, outrageous, in a way that needlessly inflamed passions on both sides of the divide — that he and his followers were simply the “victims” of elite reactions— is, to me, frankly preposterous. None of which is to support every aspect of those reactions, nor to claim Trump’s constituency have nothing to be alarmed or angry about.
Re “victim-blaming”, the trope obviously has a kernel of truth – there are occasions when people are blamed for defending themselves or responding to injustice (which is the case for most of the hysteria aimed at Trump and Trump supporters). But the trope can also be cynically abused to excuse criminality for political reasons (which is how the left usually uses it).
Most of the things Trump did in power that were claimed to be “outrageous” were perfectly reasonable responses to the dominant left elite’s manipulations, both before he came to office and while he was there. They weren’t in fact “outrageous” at all, unless you first internalise the establishment left’s assumptions and dogmas. And the media response was intentionally inflammatory to a hysterical and profoundly dishonest degree.
He wasn’t a great person in many old fashioned decency terms, but that’s true of many, perhaps most, presidents. But he was probably the most personally American president in living memory (perhaps Reagan could compete). And in policy terms, perhaps the best (or maybe least bad is better) in the same period, despite constant disingenuous legal and institutional sabotage by the hysterical left establishment.
That’s part of the reason (pop growth obviously the major part) why Trump received more American votes than any previous sitting president, in the teeth of massive pop media and social media bias, and more than any presidential candidate in history, except for Biden’s total that was grossly inflated by unprecedented media and big tech propaganda and manipulation (even if we disregard for the purposes of this discussion the probability of more direct vote-rigging).
And now we have a clearly senile old man, in charge of the world’s most powerful state, in office solely due to massive media and corporate manipulation. What could possibly go wrong?
Don’t forget the VP, who has not held a press conference for 74 days.
Yes, the ticket as a whole could never have come anywhere near winning, if it hadn’t been “carried over the line” by corporate media and big tech.
Perfectly said!
I agree tonally, but disagree with the final point. The attempted coup was rubbish sure, but there were people with zip-tie handcuffs chanting about kidnapping the VP. I’m not saying they were competent, but it got very close to kidnap and perhaps murder of senators. That’s not to be understated.
This is the problem with modern media. You’ve been left with an impression that simply isn’t true. According to prosecutors (see the court filing), the ziptie man found them inside the capitol – like a prop left in place – he didn’t bring them with him. He was there with his mother. Not exactly the image of a murderous assassin. And none of the incursers had weapons (in contrast to the Capitol police). You’ve been sold the story that it was terrible attempt at a coup, and very little looks like more than opportunistic protest – not so unlike the one in the Capitol carried out by Democrats at the Kavanaugh hearings.
A retired general (Flynn), former top aide to a defeated President, who incited a violent assault on the Capitol, was only just recently calling, at a conference, for a military coup in support of a movement designated a domestic terrorist threat by the FBI. That seems concerning to me.
Concerning indeed, but instead of blaming the victims your concern should really be directed at those who have made democratic resistance all but impossible, by mass media and big tech social media opinion manipulation.
The US has perhaps one more chance at electing someone to represent the disenfranchised (many of the 74 million Americans who voted to reelect Trump despite the massive propaganda campaign against him), who saw Trump as their only chink of light through the globalist left political establishment duopoly, before those people finally give up on democracy, and the US is genuinely in a world of hurt.
I think we should put the F word to one side. There is something very worrying going on in the USA. The reason Trump was thwarted from his attempted coup was that there were still good Republicans who believed in democracy. Since then they have been vilified by Trump and largely replaced or will be replaced by his true believer support base. The Republican party is now fully engaged in gerrymandering and voter suppression and the clear aim is to win elections on a minority of the vote, and dispute close elections but only if they are losing. When asked about QAnon many Republicans claim not to know much about them, which of course is ludicrous. If you believe that Democrat politicians are paedophiles then that is a small step away from believing they should all be executed. The checks and balances have so far withstood the attempts of insurrection but the Republican party is busy sweeping them away.
Honestly, why don’t you shut up or stick to trashy american sites.
“Attempted coup” … “insurrection” … this guy is a really sad case. Where does one even begin to help him see?
By suggesting I “shut up” looks like you do not believe in freedom of speech. Can you debate or do you prefer abuse?
With wingnuts like you abuse (or preferably a slap) is the only means.
Bit of a long winded post for a Wumao.
You are a deluded Berk..Go &See Hunter &Biden’s bank accounts totally corrupt uS president A woke joke on the world..
It is not Trump you need to worry about, you need to worry about his supporters. Populism and fascism have one thing in common – they are exclusive and Trump supporters are highly exclusive, highly armed and easily formed into a pitchfork and torch brigade as seen in the storming of the Capitol. Trump has a Manson like following in them. I do not think fascism in the US is unlikely at all though its arrival and lingering may be cloaked in a lot of constitutional wizardry engineered by the GOP.
I think you’ll find Manson attracted all the artistic types who are usually left-wing & this tends to be true of most cults -alaister crowley Gurdjieff etc rather than occasional religious ones-who just attract converts ( with big bank accounts)
Manson incited Killings for loyalty, (5 including Sharon Tate, Jay sebring) including Liberal Dennis Wilson & Terry melcher,escaped after rejecting two manson songs, he was More left than Conservative!….He also helped kill Hippie Dream of Living off the land.. (Easy rider climax ending was a result of loons like manson?..