The Truth About Our Civilization’s Fascism Problem Is Even Worse Than You Think

When Even Its Happiest Country Goes Fascist, Something’s Going Very Wrong With a Civilization

Image Credit: CNN

Here’s a funny, dark, absurd juxtaposition that sums up just how much trouble our world is in. Quick, what’s the world’s happiest country? Finland. That research just came out a few days ago. Guess who just went…pretty…fascist? LOL, Finland. I exaggerate, but only a little. Finland just had an election where the second place party turned out to be the new, far right, “True Finns,” and you don’t have to think too hard to guess what the “true” is code for.

So how can…LOL…what is this even, an episode of Black Mirror…the world’s happiest country…now be on the leading edge of a fascist wave? What kind of bizarre non-sense does that make? If we’re happy…why would we go fascist?

Today’s an historic day. The first indictment of an American President in history. It matters more — far more — than many of us suspect. Want to think. Because it comes in a certain context: the rapid decline of democracy globally.

Take the events of just the last few days leading up to Trump’s indictment. In once gentle Finland — of all places — the Social Democrats placed a distant third, behind the “True Finns,” a far right party of extremists, with resonance to, of course, Trumpism. In France, protests are still raging nationwide, after Emanuel Macron forced through a needless rise to the pension age. Just the last few days — and that comes after a year when cracks emerged in the European Project, the far right ascendant from Italy to Sweden.

By now, we take for granted the sudden rise of the far right. But we shouldn’t. Because this is a force fundamentally hostile to democracy. It is authoritarian, if not overtly fascist. It is only interested in democracy insofar as it can use its mechanisms to undo it — like, of course, in Florida, where the governor, Ron DeSantis, is busy banning books, criminalizing doctors and teachers and families, purging universities, and more’s sure to come.

Political scientists put this great trend of the Age of Extinction in an anodyne way, which understates, even obscures the truth. “Democratic backsliding.” Or should we better call it the rise of authoritarianism and fascism? History’s pretty clear on that score. Orwell and Arendt would hardly mince words.

This juncture is far more critical than most of us think. If I’d told you even just ten years ago that the far right would be ascendant in Europe — of all places — you would have laughed at me. If I’d told you that an American President would have led a bloody coup on the steps of Congress, you would have rolled your eyes at me and called me an “alarmist.” And yet here we all are — taking this threat for granted, more or less.

The most sophisticated form of democracy on the planet isn’t America. It’s Europe. And when the European project cracks and teeters, as its beginning to, we should all pay attention. And we should pay attention to America, too — because it’s beginning to lead the fight back against the far right, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes in large ones.

What do I mean by that? Consider the founding of modern Europe. Its entire idea was to prevent the far right ever rising again. Modern Europe, rebuilt in the ashes of the war, did something remarkable, that led to what later obeservers like me would call the European Miracle. It took the relatively small amount of investment that America gave it — which was all it had — and used that in a way that was fundamentally new in human history. Instead of spending it on arms, or giving it to elites, it used it rewrite constitutions which guaranteed everything from healthcare to education to transport as basic, fundamental, universal rights.

This was the point of Keynes’ magisterial insight into why the War had happened. Germans, declining into sudden poverty, destabilized by debt, had undergone a political implosion. Economic ruin had had political consequences. The consequences of “the peace” as Keynes said — the peace of World War I, which had been designed to keep Germany impoverished. Fascism erupted as a result. And so after the Second World War, Europe did something bold, unprecedented, and remarkable in all of human history — it offered its citizens these cutting edge social contracts, rich in rights for all, built institutions to enact them, from pension systems to high speed trains, and then formed a political union on top of that, to make sure that peace, this time, remained.

And here we are. All of that is fraying. Let me say that again, because I think people often fail to fully grasp this point. That is a century of modern history. Which contains some of the most vital lessons that we have about peace, violence, democracy, and how they all cohere, hang together, exist in a fragile equilibrium. All of that is now what’s fraying. Think about that for a moment. The lessons of World War I. Of World War II. Of the European Miracle, in which living standards rose, in one human lifetime, improbably, to history’s highest, anywhere, ever. All of that is what’s being lost.

The European far right is ascendant, of course, because America began the trend. It was in America that the modern far right rose. And way back when — a decade now — figures like myself and Sarah Kendzior predicted it. We saw figures and facts and realities which alarmed us. I remember the day that research came out saying the American middle class was now a minority. I saw Weimar Germany flashing before my eyes. I wrote about it — and back then, nobody much wanted to believe it. Fast forward just a few short years, and Trump was in office, and that was after plenty of denial that he could ever be President, too.

It’s not about point scoring. It’s about understanding. What we are really dealing with here, which is an historic threat.