Back in the early 20th century, parties used to mean something. Being a member of a party was sometimes a difficult accomplishment - it meant getting in good with powerful people. Other times it meant really throwing your hat in the ring with in ideology. It meant what events you attended, what you read, and how people thought about you. There were rallies, offices, celebrations, heroes, villains, publications, broadcasts, talking points, all of them tailored by the party leadership for the masses to consume and use. In turn, those masses got to participate in something bigger than themselves and possibly win big on issues that were important to them.
This was the era of mass politics. It’s exemplified by lots of different organizations, many of which are entirely different from each other except int hat they are all mass political parties or movements. The Democratic Party under FDR counts for this, as does the Nazi Party in Germany, as does the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Mexico. All of these parties had wildly different leaders and ideologies, but they were all major ecosystems in which people thought, acted, voted, and lived.
The general consensus is that the era of mass politics is now over. Instead of mass politics, we have disaffected and diffuse groups of people who sometimes gather together over particular issues or who can be “wedged” apart by other ones. Parties are no longer organizational ecosystems but umbrellas you stand under for shelter from what’s going on outside. In the past, parties could get you jobs - either in the party itself or through its allies. Now they are emptied neoliberal shells moving money around.
This, at least, is the consensus. MAGA and the Trump movement have challenged this a bit, as Trump continues to build his supporters into large masses and rallies (even if their attendance declines). Wearing MAGA gear, watching FOX, going to certain rallies or wearing certain brands of clothing still signifies a lot about a person’s politics. In other countries, like India, mass rallies are still a staple of governance and movement growth.
But it remains the case that parties and politics do feel or seem different than they did a hundred years ago. Whatever MAGA is, it is a pale reflection of the kind of mass organization that used to be brought to bear n the US and elsewhere.
This means two big things for fighting fascism. One, it means that fascism itself has changed enormously. And two, it means that the organizations that used to fight fascism have changed as well.
Fascism used to be a mass political movement. It was a party, with a newspaper and publishers and a paramilitary and a radio station and a staff both national and regional. It was a whole universe, a parallel state within the national government. Today, all these entities exist, and they are connected, but they aren’t controlled within a single body anymore. This renders them harder to notice to outside observers, but that also can limit their reach within their own movements. It also results in a lot of duplicate work - think about how many right-wing would-be influencers there are out there!
All of this might mean that fascism is simply weaker this time around than it was last time. This time there is no central party from which to disseminate orders to take over the state, or to fight the left, or whatever dirty work the right needs doing.
But the lack of mass organization also makes it harder to fight fascism. I talked a bit about this last time - how the lack of centralized resistance to fascism means that we have our work cut out for us. There isn’t as simple of a media/activist/masses ecosystem as there used to be.
And on a more complicated level, more complex than a newsletter of this nature merits, questions remain about what politics even is now that mass politics is over. Are we now trapped in the atomized world of affinity groups? Is it possible to rebuild a mass organization, ala the DSA in the US? Sadly, I am no Cassandra.