The Nation, Feb. 19, 2021
How Can We Revive Herd Immunity to Fascism?
There is a clear correlation between the neoliberal onslaught that
started in the 1980s and the rise of neofascism and religious
fundamentalism.
By Gilbert Achcar
Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
The concept of “herd immunity,” that is, the immunization of a whole
population as a result of a high percentage acquiring resistance to a
disease, has gained a lot of currency since the onset of the Covid-19
pandemic. It has long been a tradition of social sciences to borrow
terms and concepts from the medical sciences, and the current global
situation induces more of that. Thus, there are reasonable grounds to
describe metaphorically as a pandemic the worldwide spread of far-right
movements in recent years, including governments run or co-run by
political forces that reproduce some of the key ideological tenets of
fascism in countries as varied as Brazil, Hungary, India, Italy, the
Philippines, Russia, and the United States.
The onset of this far-right pandemic goes back to the 1980s and was
powerfully boosted in the following decade, as the editors of a
collective book, Fascism and Neofascism, acknowledged in 2004: “While a
revival of extremist activity in Western Europe began during the 1980s,
the collapse of Communism resulted in a surge of the extreme right all
across the continent. During the 1990s, fascism, or something like it,
was suddenly and unexpectedly resurgent.” Like the classical fascism of
the three decades that followed the First World War, this
“neofascism”—arguably the best designation, as it refers to both
historical affinities and the renewal of forms in tune with our
times—takes different shapes according to the countries in which it
develops.
Karl Polanyi dedicated several pages of his 1944 classic, The Great
Transformation, to underlining the great variety of fascisms and fascist
ideologies. “In fact,” he commented, “there was no type of background—of
religious, cultural, or national tradition—that made a country immune to
fascism, once the conditions for its emergence were given.” He even
affirmed that “the existence of a fascist movement proper” was not
necessarily part of the symptoms of what he called a “fascist
situation.” At least as important were signs such as the spread of
irrational ideas, racist views, and hatred of the democratic setup.
Read in the light of the ongoing events in the United States, Polanyi’s
following comment sounds chilling: “Though usually aiming at a mass
following, fascism’s potential strength was reckoned not by the numbers
of its adherents but by the influence of the persons in high position
whose good will the fascist leaders possessed, and whose influence in
the community could be counted upon to shelter them from the
consequences of an abortive revolt.” For the Hungarian-American thinker,
fascism was above all a “solution of the impasse reached by liberal
capitalism” aiming at “a reform of market economy achieved at the price
of the extirpation of all democratic institutions.” In this light, the
herd immunity to fascism achieved in most Western countries after 1945
was not only the result of the defeat of the Axis powers, but also and
above all a result of an alternative solution to the impasse of liberal
capitalism: the Keynesian democratic solution that discarded the idea of
“the self-regulating market,” which Polanyi called “a stark utopia.”
In another and much older classic of the social sciences, the founder of
sociology, Émile Durkheim, was already lamenting, in his 1897 book
Suicide, the fact that “for a whole century, economic progress has
mainly consisted in freeing industrial relations from all regulation.…
Government, instead of regulating economic life, has become its tool and
servant.” For the French sociologist, this economic deregulation was the
main source of what he called “anomie,” i.e., “a state of exasperation
and irritated weariness” resulting from the loss of economic security
and the disruption of social patterns. Anomie leads individuals to seek
refuge in some type of identity group and—unless it is inward-oriented
(suicide)—deploy their exasperation against other identities held
responsible for the increasing precarity of their social condition,
primarily by way of racist and/or xenophobic logic. Thus, the rise of
fascist-like ideologies and movements starting from the 1980s went along
with the rise of other types of exclusive identity groups, of which
religious fundamentalism is the most obvious.
This fully coincides with the observation made by Eric Weitz and
Angelica Fenner, the editors of the abovementioned book about the
resurgence of fascism: “The right-wing revivals were very much a
response to the political and social dislocations of the 1990s,
including substantial unemployment, the erosion of the security net that
the welfare states of both Eastern and Western Europe had provided, and
the deterioration of urban neighborhoods. They were also a response to
the wide-scale population migrations that have taken place across the
North/South and East/West axes of Europe since 1945.”
There is indeed a clear and undeniable correlation between the
neoliberal onslaught that started in the 1980s, led by Margaret Thatcher
and Ronald Reagan—an onslaught that made “deregulation” one of its main
goals, along with privatization, reduction of social spending, and tax
cuts for the rich—and the rise of phenomena such as neofascism and
religious fundamentalism after decades of marginalization. Likewise, the
Great Recession, triggered in 2007, gave a major boost to neofascist
forces, as did the major wave of mostly Syrian refugees pouring into
Europe in 2015. The facts resulting from both crises are still very much
affecting our world, and the huge economic crisis that is presently
gestating as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic can only severely
aggravate the anomic conditions globally (the far-right exploitation of
anti-lockdown movements is an indication), unless it is countered by
economic policies similar to those adopted after 1945.
Add to this the fact that, however significant Donald Trump’s defeat in
the latest US presidential election was, it was certainly not of a scope
comparable to the defeat of fascist powers in the Second World War. His
loss occurred not because of the disaffection of his supporters but
despite a huge increase in their numbers (11 million more voters) at a
time when, unlike 2016, there was no possible illusion about what Trump
represents and, therefore, hardly any ambiguity in the sense of voting
for him. At the global level likewise, there are presently no signs of
neofascism waning: The continuing popularity of figures such as Jair
Bolsonaro (until very recently, at least), Narendra Modi, or Viktor
Orbán does not portend any withering away of the far-right pandemic in
the foreseeable future.
Achieving a new state of herd immunity to fascism, like that of the
postwar years, requires not only a political defeat of the most
prominent neofascist movements and an uncompromising fight against their
ideologies. It also requires, most crucially, a global shift away from
the neoliberal paradigm that has been dominant over the past four decades.
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