One of the promises I make in my podcast, Fifteen Minutes of Fascism, is that I’ll stare into the abyss all week so you don’t have to. Instead, you can listen in once a week, for fifteen minutes, and get a good look at what’s going on in the world of the right-wing. That’s worked pretty well so far - I research the show throughout the week, people listen, and they learn what’s going on in the world of fascism. I try to include stories that are big, and others that are small.
But there are all kinds of questions about fascism and how it works that motivate me as a researcher, as a communicator, as a political person that don’t fit into that format. Questions like:
What is the relationship between fascism and the left wing? Why is there a history, both from a hundred years ago and from the recent past of people moving from the left to the right? As a leftist myself I balk when conservatives try to tell me that fascism is a left-wing phenomenon (it’s not), but there is something about the fact that the fascists do have a fair number of lapsed socialists in their ranks. This includes the man who invented the word, Benito Mussolini!
What is different about fascism today versus one hundred years ago? Do those differences mean that we can’t look to the past for our examples? Some of these differences are about who the fascists target for their violence and hatred, but some of them are related instead to more fundamental political questions like what it means for fascism now that the era of mass politics is long gone. Even more so than Marxism, fascism was an outgrowth of the kind of mass political organizations that dominated the early 20th century. If fascism, like other ideologies, is no longer beholden to that model, what would it look like if it took power?
And perhaps most importantly: What can be done to fight fascism? This after all is the reason I’m here in the first place. I don’t know about you, but if fascism were just a curious old political movement I wouldn’t have dedicated my life to understanding it, I’d be doing something much more fun. Instead, though, fascism is a major danger that faces us constantly and requires a response.
But what kind of response? The last time fascism threatened the entire world it was opposed by several of the largest and most powerful countries around - the US, the USSR, the UK, etc. These countries knitted together a coalition of very strange bedfellows (liberal capitalists, Marxist-Leninists, conservative monarchists) to defeat their common enemy.
Today, there is no such coalition anywhere. Fascist or otherwise far right-wing movements are on the rise in essentially every major power on Earth, with the exception of China. What does the fight against fascism look like without this global coalition? Or, instead, does it mean looking at different forms and kinds of coalitions, ones that cross and intersect borders? Coalitions of community groups in several countries, coalitions that express a politics beyond national borders?
My goal with this newsletter is to showcase some of that longer-term thinking, and to have a space where my thoughts about it can be processed, used, and criticized by others - an old-fashioned internet as public square venue to think and strategize about these problems. Each week, starting next week, I’ll post something around a thousand words on these or related questions, with some contemporary and historical examples. If you think this kind of thing is useful or important, check out my patreon to help me justify how much time I spend doing it rather than something else that will allow me to survive: https://www.patreon.com/FifteenMinutesofFascism