Walden Bello — Fascism is at the gates. How should we counter it?
First published at Foreign Policy in Focus.
Two recent events have shattered complacency about the specter of a fascist takeover globally that a number of us have been warning about for some time now. In Europe, far-right parties scored impressive gains in the elections to the European Parliament in June. \In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and other like-minded parties got 15.9 percent of the vote, forcing the long-time second-placer Socialist Party to third place. In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance gathered just 14.6% of the vote while Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National) took in 31.3% of the vote. The results prompted Macron to an ill-advised decision to immediately dissolve the French Parliament and call a snap election, which resulted in a devastating first round victory for Le Pen’s party.
In the United States, President Joe Biden made a second Trump presidency come immeasurably closer with a horrible performance in a debate with Trump on June 27 that simply confirmed what most voters have discerned for some time now: that Biden is simply too old to function effectively in what is arguably the most powerful job in the world.
This has made many progressives and liberals fear that the enemy is at the gates. They are right. Gramsci depicted his times, the early decades of the 20th century as a time when “the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” That line might well describe where our world is at today.
How I got interested in fascism
My interest in fascism started when I went to Chile in 1972 to do field research during the presidency of Salvador Allende, which was cut short by a military coup on Sept 11, 1973. I arrived in the capital, Santiago, in the midst of the Chilean winter, greeted by tear gas and skirmishes of opposing political groups in the aftermath of a demonstration. Hauling two suitcases, I made it with great difficulty from the bus depot to the historic Hotel Claridge.
I had gone to Chile to study how the left was organizing people in the shantytowns or callampas for the socialist revolution that the Popular Unity government had initiated. A few weeks in Santiago disabused me of the impression of a revolutionary momentum that I had gathered reading about events in Chile in left-wing publications in the United States. People on the left were constantly being mobilized for marches and rallies in the center of Santiago, and increasingly, the reason for this was to counter the demonstrations mounted by the right. My friends brought me to these events, where there were an increasing number of skirmishes with right-wing thugs.
I noticed a certain defensiveness among participants in these mobilizations and a reluctance to be caught alone when leaving them, for fear of being harassed or worse by roaming bands of rightists. The revolution, it dawned on me, was on the defensive, and the right was beginning to take command of the streets. Twice I was nearly beaten up because I made the stupid mistake of observing right-wing demonstrations with El Siglo, the Communist Party newspaper, tucked prominently under my arm. Stopped by some Christian Democratic youth partisans, I said I was a Princeton University graduate student doing research on Chilean politics. They sneered and told me I was one of Allende’s “thugs” imported from Cuba. I could understand if they thought I was being provocative, with El Siglo tucked under my arm. Thankfully, the sudden arrival of a Mexican friend saved me from a beating. On the other occasion, my fleet feet did the job.
When I looked at the faces of the predominantly white right-wing crowds, many of them blond-haired, I imagined the same enraged faces at the fascist and Nazi demonstrations that took control of the streets in Italy and Germany. These were people who looked with disdain at what they called the rotos, or “broken ones,” that filled the left-wing demonstrations, people who were darker, many of them clearly of indigenous extraction.
My experience in Chile did two things to me. One, it gave me an abiding academic fascination with counterrevolutionary movements. Two, it turned me into a life-long activist with a deep loathing for the far right and instilled a commitment to fight authoritarianism and the far right. In many ways, these contradictory drives have determined my personal, political, and academic trajectories.
Is it fascism?
Fast forward to the present. When far-right personalities and movements started popping up during the last two decades, there was, in some quarters, strong hesitation to use the “f” word to describe them. With my experience in Chile, the Philippines, and other countries behind me, I had no such qualms. This apparently was the reason I was invited by the famous Cambridge Union for a debate on the topic “This House Believes That We Are Witnessing a Global Fascist Resurgence” on April 29, 2021, where I would speak for the affirmative. Of course, a great incentive for agreeing to participate was that one of my intellectual heroes, John Maynard Keynes, had been involved in a famous Cambridge Union debate. Joining me in the debate by Zoom that evening were New York University Professor Ruth Ben Ghiat, Russian journalist Masha Gessen, staff writer for the New Yorker, the prominent historian of the Second World War Sir Richard Evans, and Isabel Hernandez and Sam Rubinstein, two Cambridge University students.
In that debate, I said that a movement or person must be regarded as fascist when they fuse the following five features: 1) they show a disdain or hatred for democratic and progressive principles and procedures; 2) they tolerate or promote violence; 3) they have a heated mass base that supports their anti-democratic thinking and behavior; 4) they scapegoat and support the persecution of certain social groups; and 5) they are led by a charismatic individual who exhibits and normalizes all of the above. It is how they fuse these five features together that accounts for the uniqueness of particular fascist leaders and movements.
Not surprisingly, Donald Trump figured prominently in that debate. And one of my main arguments was that Donald Trump and the Jan 6, 2021, insurrection showed that the distinction between “far right” and “fascist” is academic. Or one can say that a “far-rightist” is a fascist who has not yet seized power, for it is only once they are in power that fascists fully reveal their political propensities, that is, they display all of the five features mentioned above. By the way, the Cambridge audience agreed with me. The Cambridge Independent carried the news the next day that “the motion was carried with 38 votes in favour, 28 against, and 2 abstentions.” Thank god, I didn’t let Keynes down.
Fascists and counterrevolutionaries
In my work on the right, I have used the word “counterrevolutionary” interchangeably with the word “fascist.” Here I have been greatly indebted to the great historian of counterrevolution, Arno Mayer, who distinguished between the three actors in what he called the “counterrevolutionary coalition:” reactionaries, conservatives, and counterrevolutionaries. “Reactionaries,” said Mayer, “are daunted by change and long for a return to a world of a mythical and romanticized past.” Conservatives do not make a fetish of the past, and whatever the makeup of civil and political society, their “core value is the preservation of the established order.”
Counterrevolutionaries are more interesting theoretically and more dangerous politically. They may have, like the reactionaries, illusions about a past golden age, and they share the reactionaries’ and conservatives’ “appreciation, not to say celebration, of order, tradition, hierarchy, authority, discipline, and loyalty.” But in a world of rapid flux, where the old order has become unhinged by the emergence of new political actors, “counterrevolutionaries embrace mass politics to promote their objectives, appealing to the lower orders of city and country, inflaming and manipulating their resentment of those above them, their fear of those below them, and their estrangement from the real world about them.” Counterrevolutionaries or fascists, to borrow from another great historian, Barrington Moore, seek to “make reaction popular.”
Fascism as a global phenomenon
The rise of fascism is a global phenomenon, one that cuts through the North-South divide.
Narendra Modi has made the secular and diverse India of Gandhi and Nehru a thing of the past with his Hindu nationalist project, which relegates the country’s large Muslim minority to second-class citizens. The parliamentary elections earlier this year returned his BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) to power, though it lost its absolute majority in the lower house. Nevertheless, there is no indication that Modi will relent in his fascist project. Currently, he is carrying out the most sustained attack on the freedom of the press since the Emergency in 1976 by putting progressive journalists in jail and bringing charges against noted writers like Arundhati Roy.
In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro lost the 2022 presidential elections to Lula da Silva by a slight margin, but his followers refused to accept the verdict, and thousands of people from the right invaded the capital Brasilia on January 8, 2023, in an attempt to overthrow the new government, in a remarkable replication of the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington.
In Hungary, Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party have almost completed their neutering of democracy. Indeed, Europe is the region where fascist or radical right parties have made the most inroads. From having no radical right-wing regime in the 2000s, except occasionally and briefly as junior partners in unstable governing coalitions as in Austria, the region now has two in power—one in Hungary and the government of Giorgia Meloni in Italy. The far right is part of ruling coalitions in Sweden and Finland. The region has four more countries where a party of the far right is the main opposition party. And it has seven where the far right has become a major presence both in parliament and in the streets.
In the Philippines, I wrote two months into Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency in 2016 that he was a “ fascist original.” I was criticized by many opinion-makers, academics, and even progressives for using the “f” word. Over seven years and 27,000 extra-judicial executions of alleged drug users later, the “f” word is one of the milder terms used for Rodrigo Duterte, with many preferring “mass murderer” or “serial killer.”
Duterte nevertheless ended his presidency in 2022 with a 75 percent approval rating, and he is now leading the opposition to the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., apparently confident he can topple it.
Fascist charisma and discourse(s)
Let me spend some time on Duterte since he is the fascist figure I am most familiar with. Like Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Orban, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and now Javier Milei in Argentina, Duterte is a charismatic figure. Charisma, that quality in a leader that creates a special bond with his or her followers, is not just of one variety. Modi’s charisma is different from that of Duterte. Although Modi’s charisma is more of the familiar inspirational type, Duterte has what I called “gangster charm.” In the way he connects with the masses, in his discourse, Duterte has similarities to Donald Trump, with his penchant for saying the outrageous and delivering it in an unorthodox fashion—precisely what drives their supporters wild.
On Duterte’s discourse while he was president, I would like to share three observations. First, from a progressive and liberal point of view, his discourse was politically incorrect, but that was its very strength. It came across as liberating to its middle-class and lower-class audience. Duterte was seen as telling it as it was, as deliberately mocking the dominant discourse of human rights, democratic rights, and social justice that had been ritually invoked but was increasingly regarded as a cynical coverup for the failure of the post-Marcos liberal democratic regime to deliver on its promise bringing about genuine democratic political and economic reform.
Second, Duterte’s discourse involved a unique application of what Bourdieu calls the strategy of condescension. His coarse discourse, delivered conversationally and with frequent shifts from Tagalog, a Filipino language, to another, Bisaya, to English, made people identify with him, eliciting laughter with his portrayal of himself as someone who bumbled along like the rest of the crowd or had the same illicit desires, at the same time that it also reminded the audience that he was someone different from and above them, as someone with power. This was especially evident when he paused and uttered his signature, “Papatayin kita,” or “I will kill you,” as in “If you destroy the youth of my country by giving them drugs, I will kill you.”
Third, Duterte’s speechmaking did not follow a conceptual or rhetorical logic, and this was another reason he could connect with the masses. The formal conceptual message written by speechwriters was deliberately overridden by a series of long digressions where he told tales in which he was invariably at the center of things that he knew would hold the audience’s attention, even when they had heard it several times. Let me confess here that when I listened to Duterte’s digressions, peppered as they were with outrageous comments, like telling an audience he would pardon policemen convicted of extra-judicial executions so they could go after the people who brought them to court, my mind had to restrain my body from joining the chorus of laughter at the sheer comic effrontery of his words. With Duterte, the digression was the message.
Duterte, of course, is not unique among far-right leaders In his ability to connect to his base by trampling on accepted conversational conventions and admitting to illicit desires. One of the sources of Donald Trump’s appeal is that he, like Duterte, connects, without subterfuge or euphemism, with his white male base’s’ “deeply missed privilege of being able to publicly and unabashedly act on whatever savagery or even mundane racism they wished to,” as Patricia Ventura and Edward Chan put it. To many aggrieved white American males he came across as refreshingly candid in publicly calling Mexicans rapists, Muslims terrorists, colored immigrants as coming from “shithole countries” instead of pristine, white Norway, and boasting that, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Economics and fascism
Leaders are critical in fascist movements, but social conditions create the opportunities for the ascent of those leaders. Here one cannot overemphasize the role that neoliberalism and globalization have played in spawning movements of the radical right. The worsening living standards and great inequalities spawned by neoliberal policies created disillusionment among people who felt that liberal democracy had been captured by the rich and distrust in center-right and center-left parties that promoted those policies.
Perhaps, there is no better testimony to the role of neoliberal policies than that of former President Barack Obama, who represents the dominant, neoliberal, “Third Way” wing of the Democratic Party, along with the Clintons. In a speech in Johannesburg in July 2017, Obama remarked that the “politics of fear and resentment” stemmed from a process of globalization that “upended the agricultural and manufacturing sectors in many countries…greatly reduced the demand for certain workers…helped weaken unions and labor’s bargaining power…[and] made is easier for capital to avoid tax laws and the regulations of nation states.” He further noted that “challenges to globalization first came from the left but then came more forcefully from the right, as you started seeing populist movements …[that] tapped the unease that was felt by many people that lived outside the urban cores; fears that economic security was slipping away, that their social status and privileges were eroding; that their cultural identities were being threatened by outsiders, somebody that didn’t look like them or sound like them or pray as they did.” These resentful, discontented masses are the base of fascist parties.
Disenchanted with the Democratic Party’s embrace of job-killing neoliberal policies, the white working class vote put Republican Trump over the top in the traditionally Democratic swing states in the Midwest during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. But it is not only neoliberal policies that white workers are protesting by walking out of the Democratic Party and walking into the Trump tent; they also feel that professional and intellectual elites have captured their old party, along with Blacks and other minorities.
It is not only the white working class that now forms the base of the Republican Party. Large parts of rural America have long been marked by economic depression, creating ideal ground for the politics of resentment and the incubation of far right militias, who made their intimidating presence felt in the cities where protests against police brutality spread after the killing of George Floyd.
In France, the Socialist Party collapsed, with a significant part of its former working class adherents going to Marine Le Pen and her National Front (now National Rally). Their sentiments were probably best expressed by a Socialist senator who said, “Left-wing voters are crossing the red line because they think that salvation from their plight us embodied by Madame Le Pen…They say ‘no’ to a world that seems hard, globalized, implacable. These are working-class people, pensioners, office workers who say: ‘We don’t want this capitalism and competition in a world where Europe is losing its leadership.’”
It is not only economic insecurity that helps create a mass base for fascism but also fear or the sense of physical insecurity. Practically alone among Filipino politicians in his quest for the presidency in 2016, Rodrigo Duterte appealed to “rampant criminality” as his main, indeed, only road to power. A blistering five-fold increase in reported crime and a marked decline in effective law enforcement were recorded in the years prior to the elections and a generalized sense of lawlessness took hold in the public consciousness, especially among the “aspirational middle class, who benefited from concentrated growth in the retail, real estate, and business outsourcing sectors, but now worried about their basic safety,” noted analyst Richard Heydarian.
This conjoining of economic insecurity and physical insecurity was deadly, and, with his instinct for the jugular, Duterte seized on it, his most memorable campaign statement being his promise to cut up common criminals and drug dealers into small pieces and feed them to the fish in Manila Bay. Duterte’s success in stoking crime as the path to power is a grim reminder of Hobbes’ counterthesis to Locke’s on the state: that at its origins it is a primordial contract between a people who are willing to hand over their rights and a sovereign who promises to protect their life and limb.
The social psychology of fascism
Economic conditions and fear, however, cannot fully account for the emergence of fascist movements. There are other factors, social psychological in nature, that fuel them. One is the sense felt by many white males of being adrift in a world where the traditional gender hierarchies are being shaken, the binary gender classification is being abandoned, women are gaining control over their bodies, and the traditional norm of the heteropatriarchal family is being put into question by new familial arrangements. One of the drivers of far-right politics, especially in the white nationalist movement is what Patricia Ventura and Edward Chan characterize as “besieged and aggrieved white manhood.”
Counterrevolutionary patriarchal attitudes usually come together with the most salient drives of far-right mobilization: racism, ethnocentrism, and anti-immigrant sentiment. These behavioral or ideological drives are the burning core of the fascist project, which is to create a cross-class solidarity based on skin color, religion, language, or culture by defining as the Enemy or the Big Other, those who are perceived to be different. It is not accidental that Hitler’s project was called national socialism—that is, it was “equality” but only for those of the same race and not for the Other.
In Europe today, the Big Other is no longer the Big Brother of the Cold War era but non-white migrants that, in dark conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement Theory, treasonous liberal elites are allying with and using to destroy one’s imagined community. One of the signature expressions of this theory is provided by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, with the EU and its immigrant quota system that the far right despises, in the role played by Washington’s liberal elite in the United States:
The situation…is that there are those who want to take our country from us. Not with the stroke of a pen, as happened one hundred years ago at Trianon; now they want us to voluntarily hand our country over to others, over a period of a few decades. They want us to hand it over to foreigners from other continents, who do not speak our language, and who do not respect our culture, our laws or our way of life: people who want to replace what is ours with what is theirs.
But just to show how ethnocentrism and racism have made inroads in the European consciousness, it was no less than the foreign policy chief of the European Union itself, Josep Borrell, who bared the subliminal fears driving the continent when in a speech in 2022 he pontificated that “Europe is a garden” but “most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.”
In the United States, white nationalism or white supremacy is the main ideological expression of the fascist project. Racism has always been ideologically reproduced by a social structure in which racial domination has been as central as class domination. Since the late 1960s, the Republican Party, with its color-coded or “dogwhistle” politics and programs, has been the preferred vehicle of the white majority, with white non-Republicans being increasingly the outliers. White nationalism has been exacerbated in recent decades, by perceived gains made by minorities, in particular, the black community, in the last few decades, notably the election in 2008 of Barack Obama as president of the United States.
To the fear of blacks gaining at the expense of whites was added the popular conspiracy theory that immigration is a plot by liberal elites in Washington to make the white majority the minority by 2042. This set the stage for the man that CIA analyst Barbara Walter called “the biggest ethnic entrepreneur of all,” Donald Trump. According to her, “No Republican president in the past fifty years had ever pursued a more racist platform, or championed white, evangelical Americans at the expense of every one else.”
In the mind of Trump, America is an exclusively white creation. This was in full display in Trump’s acceptance speech as presidential candidate at the 2020 Republican National Convention, where he said that what was unique to America was the spirit of the conquest of the land and the West by white “ranchers and miners, cowboys and sheriffs, farmers and settlers,” a white world made possible by the likes of “Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill.” Those names of television characters that Trump apparently loved as a child reflected nostalgia for the lost white America of the 1950s and a subliminal unwillingness to reconcile with the post-Civil Rights America that succeeded it.
But the fear of the Other of Trump and his enrages, goes beyond nostalgia for a lost Jurassic world. According to Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, white nationalism, “rather than being fueled by a fear that new immigrants will fail to assimilate into American culture, is fueled by a fear that they will assimilate all too successfully.” Drawing on the work of Marcel Detienne, they write that,
[T]he implication of successful assimilation is that the cultural identity of natives is not a genetic inheritance but, instead, something disturbingly superficial and relatively easy for newcomers to adopt. If those with an entirely different genetic inheritance can internalize the cultural legacy of multi-generational inhabitants of their host country, then national identity does not really reflect a blood bond tying the current generation to its dead forefathers. If true, Detienne’s thesis helps explain the roiling emotionalism of anti-immigration politics. It stems, on this account, from an unspoken fear of identity theft. Subconsciously, we can speculate, white nationalists fear that recent arrivals, with biologically unrelated ancestry, will expose the embarrassingly shallow roots of their cherished but fictional national identity.
In India, a veritable witches’ brew of resentments, from a sense of Hindus being despised for being a non-martial race to insecurities related to a demographic decline relative to Muslims, one that is said to be actively abetted by “love jihad,” has been skillfully exploited by the BJP, RSS, and Sangh Parivar, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to pursue a strategy of electoral polarization cum violence that has proved eminently successful in the drive to turn India from a secular democracy into an “ethnic democracy,” to use the term coined by Christophe Jaffrelot.
Whether in India, Europe, or the United States, It is this heated base motivated by a mix of economic insecurity, physical fear, ressentiment, or pure hatred, disseminated by conspiracy theories on the Internet that accounts for the fact that fascism, not liberal democracy, and certainly not socialism, has momentum globally today. Opportunistic fascist leaders are certainly a good part of the explanation, but if Trump, Orban, Modi, Duterte, Bolsonaro did not exist, they would have to be created. Indeed, this is the reason why although they are no longer in power, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Poland’s Law and Justice Party, and, of course, Donald Trump won’t fade away and can be returned to power.
Take the United States. The 2020 election of Joe Biden drew a sigh of relief from quarters concerned with the health of democracy in the United States. But 11 million more Americans voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016, while 70 percent of the Republican Party believed against all evidence that he won the election. Today, Trump faces 91 felony counts across two state courts and two different federal districts, any of which could potentially produce a prison sentence. Yet he’s left all his Republican rivals in the dust in the drive to challenge Joe Biden for the presidency in 2024, and he’s leading Biden in the polls in the swing states that will determine who will win this year’s elections. Imitation is the greatest compliment, and Trump’s competitors for the Republican presidential nomination tried to project an image of being more Trumpist to trump Trump. The Republican base, however, overwhelmingly prefers the original, and they are determined to bring him back to power this year, whatever the electoral results of the November 2024 elections will be.
Fascism and big capital
Fascism cannot be reduced to a conspiracy by Big Capital to repressively stabilize society and promote its interests, as traditional Marxists saw it. Fascists are not mere instruments of the capitalist class. In fact, their rhetoric is not only anti-democratic or anti-liberal but also often anti-capitalist or anti-Big Business. Witness how Trump and his followers claim that they are anti-Big Tech or against the “hypercapitalists,” as Steve Bannon calls them. Fascists, however, do not seek to overthrow Big Business; they merely want an accommodation with Capital to serve their movement’s own interests, but with them in the driver’s seat. Fascism in power, in fact, often has detrimental consequences for Capital. To cite a classic case, in return for protection from a militant labor movement, German Capital allowed itself to be hijacked by Hitler, and this led to its near destruction serving as a tool of his expansionist war.
During “normal times,” the far right and Big Capital can sometimes have different stands on some issues, as, for instance, in the case of today of “ woke capitalism,” where corporations piously assert that corporate policies should be “pro-environment” or “politically correct” in hiring practices when it comes to race and gender. However, these differences are transient and minor, and when Capital is threatened by movements that cut into their profits or threaten their economic hegemony, it welcomes efforts by fascists to stabilize or “sanitize” the social order.
Fascism and violence
Fascists can come to power through elections, as Hitler, Trump, and Bolsonaro did. In fact, the closer they come to power, the more they try to project a constitutionalist or moderate image, as Giorgia Meloni did in Italy in the run-up to the 2022 parliamentary elections and Geert Wilders did more recently in the Netherlands.
But once in power, they often seek to remain there through the use of force or violence. Violence is the main instrument by which fascists want to carry out their revolution or counterrevolution to “purify” society to assert or reassert the supremacy of the traditionally dominant majority defined by skin color, ethnic identity, or culture. Thus, in India, while they are reshaping the institutions of the country via their parliamentary majority, the Hindu nationalists see their power as based in the final analysis on their capacity for violence, which they periodically unleash to remind subordinate communities like the Muslims of their “inferior status,” as they did in the Gujarat massacre of 2002.
As for the United States, Moira Donegan of the Guardian reminds us,
America is no stranger to political violence. But usually, it comes from the right. Mass shootings are routinely carried out in public in America by men with far-right political agendas, who massacre church worshippers, grocery shoppers or high school students in the service of a cause; the death toll from these explicitly political atrocities has been assimilated into our social fabric, hardly registered as assaults made on behalf of a movement. Meanwhile, far-right militias, from the polo-wearing Proud Boys to the masked and khakied Patriot Front, hold parades meant to intimidate their political enemies and the populations they consider undesirable. Sometimes, they threaten or beat people; sometimes, they surround state capitols with guns on display. Once, they stormed the Capitol. Rightwing political violence is likely to shape the 2024 election, and barring the emergence of a dramatically different political settlement, it will be a feature of American life for the foreseeable future.
Blatant espousal of violence is now common, even among elected members of the Republican Party. For instance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a leading member of the far right in Congress, has told the Republican base that “the only way you get your freedoms back is [if] it’s earned with the price of blood.”
How to counter fascism
Let me end by switching from the analytical to the normative, from being the academic to being the activist.
First, we need to stop resorting to easy explanations about the rise of far right, like the claim that trolls are responsible for it, and acknowledge that far-right personalities and movements have a critical mass of popular support.
Second, we must acknowledge that in being able to mobilize people using the most up-to-date methods available on the internet, the fascists are far ahead of us. To cite just one example, in 2020, Modi, who was among the top five most followed world leaders on social media, had 45.9 million followers compared to opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s 3.5 million on Facebook.
Next, we need to find ways of stopping the extreme right from coming to power in the first place, like building broad united electoral fronts, even with non-fascist groups we may have differences with. It’s much harder to remove the far right once they’re in power. Even if they lose elections after they’re in power, their work in reshaping democratic institutions may be very difficult to undo. As New York Times commentator Michelle Goldberg, notes, with respect to the transition in Poland from the Law and Justice regime that lost the October 2023 elections to the new liberal government led by Donald Tusk, “The new coalition government has a mandate to rehabilitate [government] institutions, but the former rulers aren’t ceding control willingly, and often there’s no consensus about who has the authority to settle conflicts related to the transition. For Poland’s new leadership, roadblocks to reform are everywhere.”
Fourth, we need to make sure we have at the leading edge of our resistance those movements that have a great deal of resonance among broad sectors of the population including the middle classes, such as the movements to stop climate change, promote gender equality and reproductive rights, and advance racial justice. Again, the example of Poland provides encouragement. As Goldberg points out, playing the key role in the electoral outcome of the October 2023 elections was “public revulsion toward a far-reaching abortion ban.” Likewise, the result of the U.S. presidential elections later this year may well hinge on the resistance of women to the threat posed by the far right to their control over their bodies.
Fifth, we must fiercely defend human rights and democratic values, even where–or especially where–they have become unpopular. This will involve aggressively championing people and groups that are currently persecuted, with majority opinion being whipped up against them, like Muslims in India and non-white immigrants in both the United States and Europe. International solidarity with the persecuted is an essential element of the anti-fascist project. Compromise here will only encourage the fascists. Moreover, equality, human rights, democratic rights, and due process are the cornerstones of the democratic world view. When it comes to freedom of movement, of course, every country has the right to manage migration in an orderly manner. But this is very different from virtually sealing off its borders for racist, chauvinist, or religious reasons that are disguised as “protecting our values” or “preventing disorder” or “saving jobs.”
Sixth, let’s not fear to see what we can learn from the extreme right, especially when it comes to the politics of passion or the politics of charisma, and see how our values can be advanced or promoted in passionate and charismatic ways. We must unite reason to passion and not see them as being in contradiction, though, of course, we must not violate our commitments to truth, justice, and fair play in the process
Seventh, if history, especially of the United States, is any indication, one must not preclude the possibility of violent civil war, and should that become a real threat, to take the appropriate steps to counter it. CIA analyst Barbara Walter is not crying wolf when she writes:
Where is the United States today? We are a factionalized anocracy [a degenerating democracy] that is quickly approaching the open insurgency stage, which means we are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe. January 6 was a major announcement by at least some groups—such as the Oath Keepers–that they are moving toward outright violence…In fact, the attack on the Capitol could very well be the first series of organized attacks in an open insurgency stage. It targeted infrastructure. There were plans to assassinate certain politicians and attempts to coordinate activity.
Given her background, it is not surprising that Walter suggests that part of the response might involve “engaging in targeted retaliation…where governments should arrest, prosecute, and seize the assets of insurgents” and pursuing “a strategy of called ‘leadership decapitation,’ which involves imprisoning the leaders of a terrorist group to hasten its collapse.” But this raises the question of how far partisans of democracy should cooperate with the institutions of the state and still preserve their commitment to protecting basic freedoms and due process. Anti-fascists must protect democratic freedoms but ensure that actions to protect those freedoms do not turn into state-directed repression.
But, probably most important, we need to have a transformative vision that can compete with that of the far right, one based on genuine equality and genuine democratic empowerment that goes beyond the now discredited liberal democracy. Some call this vision socialism. Others would prefer another term, but the important thing is its message of radical, real equality beyond class, gender, and race. Our gamble is that that side of human beings that values cooperation and, yes, love, will triumph over that side that seeks a regression to Nietzsche’s blonde beasts.
Rosa Luxemburg, the martyred German Marxist, wrote that the future belonged either to socialism or barbarism. In the twentieth century, barbarism was stopped in its tracks. Will that also be the case in the twenty-first century? Let me end by saying that there is no guarantee that fascism will not triumph, but it will certainly win unless we put ourselves, body and soul, fully and smartly, on the line to stop it.
Walden Bello is Honorary Research Fellow and formerly International Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton; recipient of Right Livelihood Award (aka Alternative Nobel Prize) 2003; named Outstanding Public Scholar by the International Studies Association in 2008; conferred the title “Most Distinguished Defender of Human Rights” in 2023 by Amnesty International, Philippines; author or co-author of 25 books, including Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right (Halifax: Fernwood, 2019). This article is based on the author’s keynote address at the annual conference of the Global Research Program on Inequality of the University of Bergen, April 24, 2024.