Post-Fascism

Could it happen here? The prospect of fascism hangs over the nation like a bad smell as in the sometimes-heard “the hallmark of an authoritarian regime is the road to tyranny.” Corresponding sentiments include ultranationalism, anti-intellectualism, right-wing populism, dictatorship, cult of personality and totalitarianism, all of which might be conflated into that all-purpose shorthand epithet . . . . you know, Hitler-esque.

Let us thus go to ground zero in order to parse what the term even means with our focus article by a German history professor, who presumably knows something about the subject (click: Post-Fascism). He suggests the term has become “vague and worn out by polemical overuse” and maintains that while the ideologies espoused by the likes of Donald Trump and Girogia Meloni carry some overtones of historical fascism, they lack certain key elements, such as strong welfare state or an emphasis on uniformed paramilitaries. He puts forth a new term, Post-Fascism, to distinguish today from that parade-of-horribles of the Nazi era – that “speck of bird shit in German history.”

Do you buy it? We had taken took a hard look at this question seven years ago as we discussed what was probably the most dramatic transformation of the twentieth century – Germany’s rise from a functioning (though weak) democracy into an authoritarian state – from the perspective of the people who had experienced it at the time (MM 7/16/18 Could It Happen Here?). Yet, sometimes the biggest sweeps of history are largely invisible to those experiencing them at the time. We will discuss whether or not we find comfort in the assertion that this path is not “the style of Americans.”

Really? Which America are we talking about, as we’ve identified and discussed at least four distinct Americas (MM 7/12/21 Four Americas), each reflecting and responding to different realities. Not every “America,” for example, would react in the same way to a military parade marking the Army’s 250th anniversary which happens to coincide with our dear leader’s birthday.

This new label of Post-Fascism wouldn’t change that.

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