Tempting as it is to suggest that that we are re-living the 1930s, it is vitally important to maintain an attitude of skepticism. In a recent editorial of the New Left Review after the US mid-term elections, sociologist Dylan Riley notes the surfeit of invocations of fascism across the political spectrum. Yet, on the basis of four axes – geopolitical dynamics, economic crisis, the relation between class and nation, and the character of political parties and civil societies – he carefully and quite persuasively lays out the case against considering a figure like Donald J. Trump to be a fascist. While compelling, Riley’s brief is, ultimately, unconvincing because he fails to take seriously the undermining of the institutions of liberal democracy, against a backdrop of the chronic (rather than acute) socioeconomic crisis, in the name of collective identities which one witnesses not simply in the United States with the advent of the Trump presidency but globally. And, herein lies the core of contemporary fascism.
Today, the uncanny return of authoritarian populism can be situated between two key events: the Al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, and the financial crisis of 2007–8. The first event, devastatingly tragic though it was, became the justification for a full-blown neoconservative foreign policy of aggressive and direct (as opposed to by proxy) regime change. This had already been envisaged by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) think tank, co-founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1997, that remained active until 2006. Including such neoconservative luminaries as Elliott Abrams, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Francis Fukuyama, Norman Podhoretz, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, the PNAC sought to identify “challenges and opportunities” for the United States in the twenty-first century. It sought increases in military spending, the strengthening of ties with “democratic allies” in confronting its enemies, the promotion of political and economic “freedom” abroad and the assertion of the “unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity and our principles.” In the attacks of September 11, 2001, it found both such challenges and opportunities, as the then National Security Advisor to the Bush Administration, Condoleezza Rice, put it in a much publicized speech at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University:
If the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 bookend a major shift in international politics, then this is a period not just of grave danger, but of enormous opportunity. Before the clay is dry again, America and our friends and our allies must move decisively to take advantage of these new opportunities. This is, then, a period akin to 1945 to 1947, when American leadership expanded the number of free and democratic states – Japan and Germany among the great powers – to create a new balance of power that favored freedom.
