Madeleine Albright - Fascism - A Warning

SET IN THE VEGETABLE MARKETS OF CHICAGO, THE RESISTIBLE Rise of Arturo Ui is a parable of how Fascists can ascend to the top in any community. In Bertolt Brecht’s play, an ambitious gangster, egged on by unscrupulous aides, blackmails a politician into appointing him to a position of power. From there, a few acts of betrayal, some finely targeted violence, a little instruction in public speaking, and a couple of threats are enough to crush all rivals. By the final curtain, the gangster has seduced the public, silenced the press, cowed the courts, and eliminated all opposition, even while admitting to “not being loved.”

Written in 1941, the script parodies Hitler’s rise and shows Fascism to be a vicious predator, quick to exploit—among other human frailties—timidity and greed. Brecht stresses a further point: that for Fascism to extend its reach from the streets to the high offices of state, it must secure backing from multiple sectors of society. This insight has value today because of the growing tendency in the media to portray Fascism as a logical outgrowth of populism and to attribute both allegiances to an unhappy lower middle class, as if anti-democratic sentiments were the exclusive property of one economic tier. They’re not, and there is nothing inherently biased or intolerant about being a populist, which Merriam-Webster defines as “a believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people.” Were I to be given the choice of sitting inside or outside that large circle of believers, my response would be, “Include me in.”

In the United States, populism was first associated with the American People’s Party, founded in 1890. The movement attracted workers from coast to coast, including farmers angry at railroads for charging too much to transport crops. Its presidential candidate, James B. Weaver, promised to raise taxes on the wealthy, nationalize telephone and telegraph lines, and resist the “haughty millionaires who are gathering up the riches of the new world.” In the 1892 election, Weaver carried five states.

Four decades on, in the 1930s, Louisiana senator Huey Long needled Franklin Roosevelt from the left. Flying the banner “Every Man a King,” Long claimed to speak for families denied their fair share of the American Dream. His rousing call for income guarantees, property limits, and old-age pensions inspired the formation of more than 27,000 “Share Our Wealth” clubs. With the Great Depression as a backdrop, Long could have made a formidable candidate for the White House had he not, in 1935, been assassinated by one of his many political enemies. [9] Long is thought to be the model for Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, the Fascist elected president in Sinclair Lewis’s cautionary novel It Can’t Happen Here (1935).

In the late 1960s, Alabama’s George Wallace weighed in from the anti-Washington right, hurling calculated gibes at the rich, welfare queens, hippies, civil rights advocates, and “pointy-headed college professors who can’t even park a bicycle straight.” Like Long, he was often called a Fascist, to which Wallace, an Army Air Corps sergeant in the latter stages of World War II, replied, “I was killing Fascists when you punks were in diapers.” In 1972, he was shot while campaigning in Maryland and spent the remainder of his life in a wheelchair, apologizing for his racist past, and getting reelected as governor.

Twenty years later, Texas oil billionaire Ross Perot attacked the entire political establishment from the vantage point of a folksy, fed-up, libertarian, penny-pinching nationalist. Matched against Bill Clinton and the senior George Bush, he captured 19 percent of the 1992 presidential vote by campaigning against corruption, budget deficits, and the “giant sucking sound” of U.S. companies and jobs moving to Mexico. Perot blamed both parties for a big-government “propaganda machine in Washington that… Goebbels would have just envied.”

These examples barely scratch the surface.

From the Republic’s earliest days, candidates for office in the United States have affirmed a deeply rooted belief “in the rights, wisdom, and virtues” of the common people. Why? Because common people are the majority, and having the majority on one’s side is a pretty good strategy for winning elections. No wonder, then, that American presidential campaigns have been enlivened by an array of folksy nicknames, from “Old Hickory” Andrew Jackson, “Young Hickory” James Polk, and “Old Rough and Ready” Zachary Taylor to “the Rail-Splitter” Abraham Lincoln, “Unconditional Surrender” Grant, “Boatman Jim” Garfield, “the Great Commoner” William Jennings Bryan, “Fighting Bob” La Follette, “Give ’Em Hell” Harry Truman, and “the Gipper” Ronald Reagan. In addition, Ivy Leaguers such as Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and both Roosevelts struck populist chords whenever they could, and even Richard Nixon claimed to champion a neglected constituency: the “silent majority.”

Historically, populism has wielded a broad brush, but a lot of people now seem determined to paint it into a corner. The 2017 annual report of Human Rights Watch bears the title The Dangerous Rise of Populism , as if populism were inherently a threat to civil liberties. Headline writers often refer to Vladimir Putin as a standard-bearer for global populism, even though his inner circle is dominated by former KGB agents and nothing irritates him more than a demonstrator with a bullhorn. Donald Trump is routinely described as a populist despite his country-club lifestyle, a cabinet stocked with billionaires, and a penchant for hiring foreigners to make the beds in his hotels and to stitch together clothes stamped with his brand. In Europe, right-wing political movements have been called populist because of their “illiberal” tendencies, but by that measure, military dictatorships would be among the most populist states on earth.

Consider that, though street protests are rightly taken as signs of populism, fighting corruption is the most frequent theme of such demonstrations, and as we have witnessed in—among other countries—South Korea, Brazil, Romania, Peru, and Guatemala, there is nothing illiberal about exposing crooks. Opposition to immigration is often assumed to be a populist trait, and yet in the United States it is the “Dreamer” movement that displays the traditional earmarks of populism: a community-level effort to empower voices not previously heeded. Similarly, racial bias is regularly associated with populists, and fairly so in some cases; but it was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who got more Americans into the streets with linked arms and signs demanding change than any other. In Europe today, right-wing protesters are often confronted by left-wing protesters—who speaks for the common people then?

This doesn’t make sense. If populists are, as some suggest, the bad guys in an epic debate about the future of democracy, who exactly are the good guys? Elitists? I don’t think so. In fact, elitists pose a more lethal threat to freedom than populists, but neither term is precise, and both have been so thoroughly abused as to be almost meaningless. We need to do a better job of describing the reality we confront.

There are two kinds of Fascists: those who give orders and those who take them. A popular base gives Fascism the legs it needs to march, the lungs it uses to proclaim, and the muscle it relies on to menace—but that’s Fascism from the neck down. To create tyranny out of the fears and hopes of average people, money is required, and so, too, ambition and twisted ideas. It is the combination that kills. In the absence of wealthy backers, we likely would never have heard of Corporal Mussolini or Corporal Hitler. In the absence of their compulsion to dominate at all costs, neither would have caused the harm he did.