Fascism Redux: A New Axis Takes Shape
Western democracy faces a crucial test in the coming months that Tom Scott fears it is all too likely to fail
At the opening of Men at Arms, the first book of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, the novel’s hero, Guy Crouchback, experiences an epiphany on hearing news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Nazi regime and Stalin’s Soviet Union. “Now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.”
What looks to be the imminent election of Donald Trump for a second term as US President, and the clear intention of Trump and his Vice-Presidential running mate, JD Vance, to abandon Ukraine to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin, might perhaps prompt a similar epiphany in anyone who has hitherto been only vaguely aware of the monstrous threat the democracies of the world now face.
What we are witnessing is the formation of a transnational axis of autocratic tyrannies that share many characteristics with their 20th century forebears.
Fascism did not disappear from the world with the defeat of Nazi Germany. It was discredited for generations, but as those with personal memories of the horrors it had inflicted in its first incarnation have almost completely passed away, it has been mutating into new and virulently toxic forms.
Even in the 20th century, fascism was never an ideologically monolithic entity. Mussolini’s Italian variety was not nearly as obsessively driven by antisemitism as Nazism. In Spain, Franco’s Falangism was much more oriented to preserving fossilised social hierarchies and the pervasive role of the Catholic Church. Hungary’s Arrow Cross, while viciously antisemitic, was also anti-feudal and favoured land reform.
As James McDougall, Professor of Modern History at Oxford, has written: “Discussion of fascism suffers from an excess of definition. That often, ironically, allows far-right groups and their apologists to disavow the label because of some tick-box characteristic which they can be said to lack.”
But 20th century fascist regimes all shared some key characteristics, and these are replicated in the contemporary varieties of far-right populism that have taken hold in Russia, the US, several European countries, and Israel, all of which are clearly recognisable as specimens of the same ideological genotype.
The Cult of the Leader
First of these is the cult of the leader, seen as a saviour figure with a sacred mission to restore national greatness. Putin has fostered such a personality cult around himself for years, built on his vaunted hyper-virility as a huntsman, bare-chested horseman and martial artist. And since his first speech to the Russian Duma, as a presidential candidate in 1999, he has made it clear that he sees his mission as being to restore the former power of the Soviet – and indeed the Tsarist – empire. His invasion of Ukraine has been framed for Russian audiences in these terms.
In the US, the cult-like veneration that Donald Trump inspires in his MAGA followers reached fever pitch following the botched assassination attempt on 13 July. This incident confirmed many of Trump’s devotees in the belief that their idol enjoys providential protection from God. When Benito Mussolini was similarly grazed by an assassin’s bullet in 1926, this too was hailed as evidence that the Duce was a “man of providence” sent to save Italy. Adolf Hitler often harped on his own narrow escape from a bullet during the Beerhall Putsch of 1923 (the Nazi next to him was killed) and that incident became a celebrated part of the Führer mythology.
Other far-right figures in today’s Europe have also cultivated personality cults. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has used his ruling party’s complete control over state media to promote an image of himself as a national hero, and his “laws for national survival” have been painted onto the walls of new schools (“A homeland only exists as long as there is someone who loves it. Every Hungarian child is a new sentinel. Truth means little without strength. Only that which we can defend is truly ours...”).
In Britain, Reform UK is essentially a vehicle for the promotion of Nigel Farage, and, as recent events have shown, he exercises total personal dominance over the party, with no pretence of any internal party democracy. Farage’s beer-and-fags image is strikingly different from the burnished machismo of Putin (the leader he has said he most admires) but his carefully cultivated persona as a “common man”, saying “what we’re all thinking” in bar-room language, is reminiscent of the rhetorical strategies of both Trump and Putin.
Trump’s rambling and usually unscripted speeches may seem bizarre, but the vulgarity of his language has echoes of both Mussolini and Hitler and is very deliberate. So too is the way that Putin and his vodka-sodden apprentice Dmitry Medvedev pepper their utterances with crude and often violent street slang, as when Putin, shortly after coming to power, described how he would deal with unruly Chechens: "We'll waste them in the shithouse.”
In Italy, Farage’s friend and ally Matteo Salvini – another fan of Putin, who has described the Russian leader as “the best politician and statesman in the world" – is also famous for the aggressive vulgarity of his language, often directed at immigrants. As with Trump and Farage, the purpose of this is to position Salvini – now Deputy Prime Minister in Giorgia Meloni’s government – as a tough-guy “man of the people” in opposition to “elites” supposedly scheming against the people’s best interests. Salvini’s party, Lega Nord, has been shaped, like Reform UK and the Republican Party under Trump, into a personal vehicle for its leader, and the party’s emblem that now appears on ballot papers now carries Savini’s name.
Personality cults are not, of course, unique to politicians of the far right. Several left-wing thinkers of the 20th century, including the Austrian Marxist and early scholar of totalitarianism Franz Borkenau, noted that Stalin’s regime shared this and other characteristics with the Nazis to whom it was (except during the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the carving up of Poland) a mortal enemy. Borkenau saw Stalinism as an example of “red fascism”, and both China under Mao and North Korea’s nominally communist regime would also fit this description, which helps explain why Trump sees Kim Jong Un as “an OK guy”.
Scapegoats and Conspiracy Theories
Scapegoating of minorities is just as much a feature of contemporary fascism as it was in the last century, and while today’s far-right leaders tend to avoid outright racist abuse, at least in public, their lieutenants and followers are much less cautious and are in no doubt as to who Trump, Farage, Salvini, Le Pen et al are referring to when they attack “immigrants”, as anyone who has spent much time on X/Twitter will readily attest.
Likewise, conspiracy theories used to generate fear of shadowy groups plotting against the interests of “the people” (conceived of in terms of ethnic and racial identity) are a pervasive feature of contemporary fascism, as they were in the 1920s and 30s. Typically, these malevolent forces are described as “globalists” and it is no accident that the individual most often used to personify them is the Jewish philanthropist, George Soros. In Hungary, Orbán has weaponized images of Soros, depicted as an evil puppet master scheming to undermine Hungary’s ethnic purity, in ways that evoke the most virulent forms of antisemitic 20th century fascism.
Extraordinarily, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly backed the attacks on Soros by Orbán’s party. But perhaps this is not so extraordinary when one considers that Netanyahu’s Government includes several outright fascists, has pursued ethno-nationalist policies with extreme violence, and has made determined attempts to destroy the rule of law in Israel.
Contempt for the Law and Democratic Process
Contempt for the rule of law and the democratic process is another common element of both 20th and 21st century fascists. Trump has a well-established personal record of serial criminality and almost succeeded in overturning the result of the 2020 presidential election by violence and intimidation. His hopes of being free to act beyond the rule of law in his second term were greatly boosted earlier this month when a ruling by a US Supreme Court stuffed with his own appointees granted him (and future presidents) broad immunity from criminal prosecution.
Meanwhile, Trump’s backers at the Heritage Foundation have drawn up a plan to eviscerate the US civil service and replace civil servants with political appointees under direct presidential control, “Project 2025”. Framed as a fight-back against the “Deep State” (which plays a big part in far-right conspiracy theories), this politicisation of the state itself is a strategy that matches that of every dictator who has successfully destroyed a democracy in the last hundred years. Here too, Trump’s appointees on the Supreme Court have given him virtual carte blanche by removing federal agencies’ powers to adjudicate in matters currently within their purview, including environmental protection, food and drug regulation, and abortion care.
Talking about Project 2025 to Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, struck another distinctly fascist note: the threat of violence. "We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be," Roberts said. What would happen if “the left” should object and resist this project was left unsaid.
Bannon himself was unable to host the show, having just begun a four-month jail sentence for defying a congressional subpoena to testify on his role in the 6 January insurrection. But Trump’s former chief strategist has a long record of inciting extreme violence against those he perceives as political enemies. In November 2020 he called for Dr Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray to be beheaded: “I'd put the heads on pikes. Right. I'd put them at the two corners of the White House. As a warning to federal bureaucrats: Either get with the programme or you're gone."
Violence
Violence and the threat of it are very much a feature of contemporary fascism, just as they were in the last century. There is strong evidence that Putin won his first term as president by using the FSB to mount a series of terrorist bombings in and around Moscow. These were blamed on Chechens and used as a pretext for Russia’s second brutal attack on Chechnya, in 1999 – the war that cemented Putin’s grip on power. Since then, Putin has systematically murdered any opposition figures who have emerged as potential threats to his control.
So far – and with the notable exception of the storming of the Capitol incited by Trump and Bannon, which left five people dead – violence against the political opponents of would-be autocrats in Western countries has mainly been confined to incidents instigated by individuals or small groups of fanatics. But there is clearly now an appetite among very large numbers of Trump’s supporters for “revenge” against those who figure in the conspiracy theories that dominate their thinking. The spectacle of massed ranks of Trump Republicans raising their arms and chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” when their idol appeared on stage at the Republican National Convention this week was one that struck a chill into many observers and evoked comparisons with Nazi rallies of the 1930s.
Parallels and Differences
The parallels between fascism today and its earlier iterations go way beyond the scope of an article of this length, and several historians of 20th century fascism have been making increasingly urgent efforts to point them out and raise the alarm, not least Timothy D. Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat. But there are also significant differences between the situation now and that of the 1930s.
One is the extent to which social media have made the spreading of disinformation and conspiracy theories much quicker and easier. Putin’s regime has played a big part in this, as part of its strategy of creating polarisation and chaos in Western countries. But there is, of course, no shortage of home-grown conspiracy theorists, and platforms such as Elon Musk’s X have been actively enabling and promoting these. By way of example: in the wake of the shooting at the Trump rally last week, X posts falsely claiming a Jewish involvement in the assignation attempt received almost 9 million views according to the Centre for Countering Digital Hate.
The unprecedented scale of this industrialised lying is creating very large numbers of what Hannah Arendt – the most percipient observer of 20th century totalitarianism – described as the ideal subjects of totalitarian rule: “not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
A related difference is the very much more internationally networked nature of contemporary fascism. This is not entirely new; in the 20th century, fascist regimes had friendly relations with each other and collaborated for purposes of war and plunder. Before the outbreak of World War Two, the governments of both Mussolini and Hitler gave financial support to fascists in other countries, including Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in the UK, just as Putin’s regime has given succour to far-right parties throughout Europe and actively supported Trump.
But despite the best efforts of the Blackshirts and “America First” fascists, the 1930s did not see belief in far-right conspiracy theories gain anything like the international reach that these now have. The radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin, a poisonously antisemitic Catholic priest and admirer of Hitler, reached an impressive 30 million listeners in the US – but that was still only around a quarter of the population of the time. Very few users of social media now have not been exposed to fascist propaganda to some degree, and Elon Musk now shares far-right content onto the timelines of all X’s 368 million users, whether they follow him or not.
Another significant difference is the extent to which fascism has become a cloak for kleptocracy. While there has always been a mismatch between fascists’ claims to be fighting corruption and their venal behaviour once they attain power, the wholesale looting of state assets for private profit is now very much the operating principle for regimes such as Putin’s, and it is remarkable how many of the far-right populist leaders who admire him have proven records of financial misconduct and/or long-standing associations with major fraudsters.
In this sense, ideology may be less of a motivating factor for many of the leading proponents of contemporary fascism than it was for their forebears, and more of a means to purely selfish criminal ends. The same is true of their cheerleaders, who have been very effectively monetizing far-right conspiracy theories. Among these is Russell Brand, who turned up to bask in the adulation of his fans at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week.
But the turbo-charged capacity of these people to exploit the credulity of their followers, and their clearly visible intention to trash democratic safeguards and the rule of law, now present a grave and imminent threat to the survival of American democracy. And if that falls, both the world’s biggest nuclear-armed states will be under the control of leaders with virtually no checks on their ability to violently dominate and destroy anyone who gets in their way, whether these are Ukrainians resisting invasion or Americans attempting to defend basic standards of human decency.
For the poet W H Auden, the Spanish Civil War was a crucial test of the Western democracies’ determination to resist fascism. The invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s fascist kleptocracy has been a similar test; and if Trump wins in November, the outlook for Ukraine and Russia’s other neighbours is very dark. As Auden wrote in 1937:
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.