While reading the features of fascism in the article below, I am tempted to list some of the internal signs that modern “liberal democracies” exhibit, and how it breeds fascism/lays the fertile ground for fascistic tendencies, especially when the economy enters into a crisis:
- the increase in the number of voters supporting Donald Trump in the last American election.
- the European Court of Justice rule in favour of banning the slaughtering of animals according to the Muslim and Jewish way in two regions of Belgium.
- conformism: everybody must follow the liberal form in how they dress, for example in France.
- redefining ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘secularism’ in order to repress and marginalise minorities, and ultimately to disable resistance. Example: France.
- stifling dissent and alternative views and encouraging conformism: the Department for Education guidance said schools in England “should not use any resources from organisations that had expressed a desire to end capitalism or other ‘extreme political stances’ regardless of the content of the particular material.”
- weakening of trade unions and demonising them in the media openly or with some subtlety. Unlike under fascism, which smashes such workers organisations, liberalism in its neoliberal form, undermines their effects and fragments them.
- encouraging comfort zones so criticism is minimised and self-censorship is pursued. Debates are framed in advance, discussions are contained, and the success of businesses and shareholders’ pots are prioritised. Questioning is impaired.
- commodification of every aspect of human life thus the standardisation of human relations.
- the threat of the foreigner – the migrant, the immigrant, the refugee, etc. And resurgence of neofascism in Germany where AfD secured 94 seats in the Bundestag in 2017, becoming the third largest party in the country.
- the strengthening of the nation(al) state. The “taking-our-country-back” in rhetoric and in action. Examples: Brexit as well as what has been happening in Hungary and Poland.
- inventing a ‘communist/marxist’ threat without communism in reality. Example: U.S. and Brazil.
- resurge of national chauvinism. Example: India.
- atomisation and individualism: inventing individual needs and manufacturing our interests, looking after our well-being becomes an obsession (the healthy diet industry, ‘you are what you eat’, etc.), the ‘return’ of self-help books, career advancement/entrepreneurial spirit is glorified.
- social movements are co-opted: the liberal feminist movement is idealised in order to prevail over radical movements.
- a whole social system that creates fragile and insecure individual, vulnerable and unshielded against authoritarian ideologies.
- general depoliticisation: people are sunk into the mundane and social thought is fragmented so phenomenon are treated as isolated or nonpolitical–in the wider sense of the word. Example: Trump/Trumpism is treated as an exception/anathema rather than an outcome of previous political and economic choices by Obama, Biden and others, which laid the ground to his/its emergence.
‘The masses’ tend to refrain from discussing political-economic issues in public.
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Here are some key arguments from the article:
For those not blind to the resurgence of authoritarian movements across the globe, the earlier spasm of neofascist enthusiasm in mid-’60s West Germany may serve as a sobering confirmation of Adorno’s claim that fascist movements are not exceptional to liberal democracy but rather are internal and structural signs of its failure.
Adorno and his fellow researchers marshaled quantitative and qualitative data to develop a comprehensive understanding of the potential for fascism in a democratic citizenry, delving deep into the psyche but never failing to note that authoritarianism is not reducible to individual psychology but ultimately reflects the objective conditions of modern society.
Fascism, the studies argued, is not a sublime evil or a pathology for which there is a simple remedy. It is something far more unsettling: a latent but pervasive feature of bourgeois modernity.
Adorno made this point explicit: “The past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.”
But fascism was also, in his words, born from “the general situation of society.” Liberal democracy contained in itself a drive toward standardization, powered by the commodity form, that reduced objects as well as human subjects to items for exchange.
In a 1959 lecture, Adorno declared, “I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.”
Prompted by Freud’s essay “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” he came to believe that human groups display an instinctive resistance to change and a longing for authority.
The 1967 lecture on the new right-wing extremism is only one modest and rather brief specimen of this work, but it deftly encapsulates his general view that fascism was never really defeated but resides in the everyday facets of both social structure and personal conduct and must always be combated anew.
The element of unreality may be the most distinctive feature of fascism: It evacuates politics of its content and reduces it to the mere circulation of propaganda. The old fascism and the new are alike in their ingenious use of propaganda without a higher purpose, as if the only aim were the perfection of mass psychology for its own sake. “There was never a truly, fully developed theory in fascism,” Adorno said; instead, it stripped politics of any higher sense, reducing it to sheer power and “unconditional domination.”
But a mass movement is not made of them alone: It consists of ordinary men and women who are no more irrational than the world they inhabit. If their politics are irrational, this is only because they make explicit the systemic irrationality of the social whole.
The extravagant notion that the past is utterly past—that its alterity inhibits us from drawing any analogies across differences of time and space—will hold us in its grip only if we see history as broken into islands, each one obeying laws entirely its own.
In the words of the historian Ernst Nolte, Nazism was “the past that will not pass away.”
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