Central to fascism was the totalizing identity: state=people=nation=race. However monstrous, it was a coherent “narrative” sensu @mgurri. The very possibility of such a narrative having vanished, fascism cannot, and indeed does not, exist today. 1/n
Democracy has indeed decayed everywhere; at home in the West and elsewhere; almost without exception. (
https://v-dem.net/media/publications/dr_2022.pdf
But there are almost certainly common factors that give our age its character — above all, the breakdown of elite-mass relations; of the weaponization of working class discontent; of the reversal of the class-partisan coalitions documented by @PikettyLeMonde et al. 3/
Italy, Sweden and Russia have been charged with the rise of “fascism”. This is an information-free charge that gets all its “value” from the moral condemnation integral to it, but offers little insight into the behavior of these actors, or what is happening in these countries.4/
If Italy is now in the grip of fascism, then the European project would be over. Of course, that’s no more than a remote possibility. So, something is wrong with the charge. It is simply not useful to think with this category. 5/
The same can be said of Russia. Putin reestablished the authority of the Kremlin over Russian lands (Chechnya is what forged the new state formation), over Russian politics, and, above all, over the oligarchs. 6/
With this re-centering of power and authority, Russia arguably returned to the long-standing patterns of “Muscovite political folkways” (Keenan 1986,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/130423
For a more “tactically-sensitive” reference frame, I find Winters’s notion of a “Sultanistic oligarchy” (
https://policytensor.com/2013/11/09/the-defence-of-property/
During the Cold War, much heat and light was wasted on the concept of “Totalitarianism”, by which was meant the cannibalization of civil society by the state. But it was merely a discourse of Western self-congratulation, offering little by way of analytical purchase. 9/
We can say the same thing about the charges of “fascism” flying around today. It is one of the routines of the liberal-democratic discourse through which the Western alliance talks to itself; a recycling of the High Racialist Wilsonian discourse of “White civilization” etc. 10/
These reference frames are not only poor lenses through which to view the world, they’re actively harmful to careful, reasoned, evidence-based thinking and argumentation. 11/
When you hear such claims (eg