Jason Stanley's fatal fascination with Fascism

This week, Netanyahu won, Bolsonaro lost, and Jason Stanley wrote another silly essay about Fascism in Project Syndicate. 

For fascist parties and politicians to win elections, they usually must attract support from people who, if asked, would loudly reject the fascist label.

Only if asked by anti Fascists who look like they might knife them or deny them tenure or nookie or something of that sort.  However, Fascist parties stop holding elections after coming to power. It is then dangerous to say one is anti-Fascist. 

But this need not be so difficult: voters merely have to be persuaded that democracy is no longer serving their interests.

Why not persuade voters to work hard and stop doing stupid shit? If people can be brain-washed so easily, why not use this magic power to get them to focus on Scientific Research and living healthy?  

NEW YORK – When Fascist Blackshirts marched through the streets of Rome at the end of October 1922,

there was a genuine danger of a Communist revolution of the type which had turned Russia to shit.  However, it should be noted that a large section of the Italian Communist party, under Bordiga, had rejected the 'United Front' strategy, save on the industrial front. It would ally with workers taking over factories but not with the Socialists or Social Democrats. By contrast, Giolitti- the successor to Cavour as Italy's master-statesman- was prepared to make alliances and zig and zag between Left and Right. Mussolini had once been the most prominent Marxist ideologue in Italy. He was still considered anti-clerical. Giolitti underestimated Mussolini but ultimately it was the King's fault for installing him The Liberal Premier, Facta, had wanted the Army to crush the marchers- which would have been easily done. However, Facta had already resigned. It is said that  Mussolini was preparing to bolt across the border if the Army intervened against his people. Like D'Annunzio, he'd concentrate on Literature after a brief foray into a flashy type of politics.

Why did the King elevate Mussolini? The answer is that Fascism appeared to be merely a reaction to Communism. The Communist party had made it clear that it would not do coalition politics. It wanted to come to power by wading through a sea of blood killing even the Socialists in the process. As Gramsci said ' “The same process will take place in Italy as in other capitalist countries. Against the advance of the working class, a coalition of all the reactionary elements will form, from the fascists to the Popular Party and the socialists: actually, the socialists will become the vanguard of the anti-proletarian reaction because they know best the weaknesses of the working class.'

This is the same thinking as that of the German Communists who considered the Social Democrats to be their true enemy. Antifa was originally aimed at 'Social Fascists'- i.e. the Center-Left. Thanks to the Soviets, the German Commies got their way in East Germany. Merkel's dad, a Christian pastor, was welcome to emigrate and settle in the Democratic Republic. Had he been an atheist, but one squeamish about shedding bourgeois blood, he'd have been rigorously fucked. 

their leader, Benito Mussolini, had just been installed as prime minister. While Mussolini’s followers had already organized into militias and begun to terrorize the country,

it terrorized the Communists who had frightened the shit out of everybody else.  Bordiga, later seen as a Trotskyite, (Gramsci was considered right wing compared to him) welcomed a Fascist takeover. He did not understand that only Liberal Democracy gave workers the political space to organize themselves. It did not occur to Bordiga that Mussolini could do what Lenin was doing- i.e. physically eliminating when not exiling or incarcerating his enemies.

Bordiga said ' Fascism incorporates the counter-revolutionary struggle of all the allied bourgeois forces, and, for this reason, it is by no means necessarily compelled to destroy the democratic institutions. 

This is the problem with calling anybody you don't like a Fascist. You start to believe that actual Fascists are pussies. They won't kill you. Bordiga soon discovered his error. On release from jail he remained as quiet as a mouse and thus survived into old age.

The fact is 'democratic institutions' don't exist purely for the benefit of those who want to cut democracy's throat. In a well run democracy, the Police beat, shoot and incarcerate Marxist and other nutters. The party which presides over such slaughter gets reelected with a bigger majority. 

Bordiga illustrates the infantile imbecility of the Left. 

From our Marxist point of view, this situation is by no means paradoxical, because we know that the democratic system is only a collection of deceptive guarantees, behind which the ruling class conducts its battle against the working class.

Italy had only recently moved to universal manhood suffrage. It had had to use very tough measures on workers and peasants during the War- which Giolitti had wanted to stay out of. Thus the 'two Red years' were seen as a sort of release of steam which was understandable. The workers would return to their senses and accept that the Government was well-intentioned towards them. They would turn on the extreme Communists who lived in a fantasy land where 'Democratic institutions' prevent the police or the Army shooting Revolutionaries and crushing an insurrection. The Italian Army, unlike the Russian Army, had won its war. It would not stand idly by while Bolsheviks ran amok. 

Bordiga believed that the establishment of a fascist dictatorship would actually be an advance for the workers’ movement because it would destroy illusions in capitalist democracy. 

There is little point in getting the posthumous last laugh or saying 'I predicted this would happen' while being tortured by the secret police. 

Bordiga wrote in July 1922  

“So the fascists want to burn down the parliamentary circus? We’d love to see the day!.. The main danger is, and remains, that everyone agrees that the apple cart isn’t overturned, and that a legal and parliamentary solution is found.” 

The fool didn't get that Mussolini wasn't Kerensky, he was Lenin. 

it was during the 1922 march, historian Robert O. Paxton writes, that they “escalated from sacking and burning local socialist headquarters, newspaper offices, labor exchanges, and socialist leaders’ homes to the violent occupation of entire cities, all without hindrance from the government.”

Killing Commies is how you prevent Commies killing you. The Italians had a King. He didn't want to end up like the Tzar. The point about Fascists is that you only need them if the Police and the Army are uncomfortable beating and killing Commies in the streets. This scruple was soon dropped. After all, Mussolini had solid Socialist credentials.  

By this point, Mussolini and his Fascist Party had been normalized,

 Mussolini stopped being abnormal once he recognized that peeps don't want class war though they don't mind getting together to fuck up foreigners and grabbing real estate from them. The British and French paid him to support Italian participation in the Great War.  However, it was Gramsci & Co's stupid notion of worker control of factories in 1920 which prevented the gains made by workers and peasants at the expense of the propertied classes from leading to a political consolidation of the Left. Instead, the Reds shat the bed. The wider problem was that Italy had embraced proportional representation- a recipe for instability. Thus Giolitti- the old fox who had steered Italy to left of center democracy- supported the Acerbo law which gave the biggest party, provided it had received 25 percent of the votes, a two thirds majority. After 1924, there were no more free elections and so things improved somewhat. 

because they had been brought into the center-right government the previous year as an antidote to the left.

Mussolini had started off on the far Left. Giolitti thought he would cleave to the center because, truth be told, his followers were a ragtag bunch. But, it was precisely Mussolini's weakness which made him bold.  

The other point is that the Socialists had become defeatist- at least partly because they too were on the Communists' hit list. Matteoti urged passivity. 'Stay home! Do not respond to provocations. Even silence, even cowardice, are sometimes heroic.' To his credit, Matteoti had the courage to charge the Fascists with electoral fraud. Mussolini had him killed. He didn't bother killing Bordiga who objected to Communist party members making common cause with working class opposition to the March on Rome. He wrote- 'We can only deplore the fact that Communists have been in contact with the people in Rome who initiated the Arditi del Popolo, offering to work with them and follow their instructions. If such actions are repeated, the most severe measures will be taken.' The cunt wasn't even in power and he was already threatening to Gulag everyone. 

The government was in disarray, its institutions delegitimized, and leftist parties were squabbling among themselves. And Fascist violence had fueled disorder that Mussolini, like a racketeer, promised to resolve.

The fact remains that the Fascist march could have been easily crushed. The premier, Luigi Facta, knew this but the King wouldn't back him up in his desire to crush the Fascists. Mussolini would have bolted. History would remember him as merely a journalistic D'Annunzio who, however, had a thorough grounding in Marxist theory- i.e was as stupid as shit.

But while Mussolini presided over Fascism’s first real taste of political power, his movement was not the first of its kind. For that, one must look instead to the United States. As Paxton explains, “It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is

first the Finnish White Guard and then the German Freikorps- ex-soldiers- used to put down Red insurrections in Germany. There were similar counter-revolutionary movements in Hungary and Spain and so forth.

American: The Ku Klux Klan … the first version of the Klan was

against the occupying Union Army and 'Reconstruction'. It was not Fascist because Commies weren't the enemy.

arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe.”

this is only arguable if you are as stupid as shit. Anyway, the second Klan was already around at this time. It was anti-Catholic (wops drink wine! That too in Church!) and pro-Prohibition

As important as these functional parallels between movements and organizations were, it is at the level of ideology that one finds the common denominator shared by American and European (especially German) variants of fascism.

But one finds a racial ideology equally prevalent in Bertrand Russell and Mahatma Gandhi and John Maynard Keynes.  

In 1916, the American eugenicist Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race, which decried the supposed replacement of whites in America by Black people and immigrants, including “Polish Jews.” According to Grant, these groups posed an existential threat to the “Nordic race” – America’s “native class.”

But Grant wasn't very different from the Zionist Max Nordau who, at least, married a Great Dane.  

While Grant did not object to the presence of Black people in America, he insisted that they must be kept subordinate.

Whereas Woodrow Wilson was promoting them in the Federal Government, right? Wrong. Wilson was sacking them.  

His book was an exercise in scientific racism, arguing that “Nordic whites” are superior to all other races intellectually, culturally, and morally, and thus should command a dominant position in society.

Sadly a lot of the Scandinavian immigrants were pretty left wing. The aviator, Charles Lindbergh's father, a Congressman, was a case in point. They guy wanted Government ownership of stuff like grain elevators!  

At the core of his worldview was a racialized version of American nationalism: Nordic whites were the only “real” Americans, but they were at risk of being “replaced” by other races.

Then Americans remembered that Swedes were often Pinkos. Better stick with the WASP label; the term 'Teutonic' having had had to be abandoned for obvious reasons.  

Grant tapped into a powerful political current of his time. In the years that followed, the “America First” movement would emerge to oppose “internationalism” and immigration.

This did meant that High School enrolment rose while real wages in inner cities faced less downward pressure. Jason doesn't get that America really did become the richest and most powerful nation on earth because of 'America First'. It could also use McCarthyite tactics to get rid of its own Red Menace.  

As Sarah Churchwell of the University of London notes in her brilliant 2018 book, Behold, America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “the American Dream,” in February 1921 US Vice President Calvin Coolidge “wrote an essay for Good Housekeeping called ‘Whose Country is This?’” Coolidge’s answer, as Churchwell recounts, was unambiguous: “‘Our country must cease to be regarded as a dumping ground’ and should only accept ‘the right kind of immigration.’” By that, he explicitly meant “Nordics.”

Who, it must be admitted, were hard working and eager to advance through education.  

It was also in 1921, Churchwell notes, that the Second Ku Klux Klan adopted “America First” as part of its official credo.

How strange! Why not 'America Last' or 'Fuck America in the ass'?  

With its fevered commitment to white supremacy and traditional gender roles, the Second Klan

was similar to the Democratic and Republican parties. 

focused its efforts on spreading paranoia about Jewish Marxists and their attempts to use labor unions to promote racial equality.

But it was Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe who were the biggest losers from 'Jewish Marxists'. The smart ones, like Ayn Rand, got the fuck out of any place where 'Jewish Marxists' were digging a collective grave for their own people.  

Meanwhile, the American industrialist Henry Ford had been financing the publication and distribution of The International Jew, a compilation of articles that placed Jews at the center of a global conspiracy. Jews, Ford claimed, controlled American media and cultural institutions, and were bent on destroying the American nation.

Ford may already have had this paranoid theory but newspaper reports of his widely derided 1915 'Peace Ship' misadventure blamed Rosika Schwimmer, a Jewish journalist, who accompanied him, for his crazy views. This made it difficult for Schwimmer to get US citizenship after she had fled Hungary where she had briefly served in Bela Kun's cabinet. Schwimmer, a feminist, finally got citizenship though, as a Pacifist, she refused to bear arms in defence of the country, because the Supreme Court ruled that women were incapable of bearing arms! 

One finds the same kind of racialized nationalism running through

Mahatma Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, Max Nordau's Degeneration and a host of other books. Everybody was a racist back then- unless they were genuine Theists or realized that they formed a vulnerable minority. 

Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s 1924 prison manifesto. Hitler was incensed by the presence of foreigners, and especially Jews, in Vienna, but he made clear that his hatred was not for the Jewish religion.

This was because Hitler was Luddendorf's deputy. The latter hated Catholics as much as he hated Jews. Hitler needed to make clear that he wasn't a typical Catholic anti-semite. He was a Nationalist anti-Semite with vaguely left wing views. 

Before arriving in Vienna, he writes, Hitler had rejected anti-Semitism, because he saw it as a form of discrimination against Germans on the basis of religion.

Bismark's kulturkamp against Catholics was still a vivid memory. The Catholic Rhinelanders felt they had acquitted themselves with distinction in the Great War. But so had German Jews. Indeed, Hindenberg was astonished to find that the majority of Jewish Civil Servants had served on the front. Indeed, the author of the 'Hymn of Hate' was Jewish. The plain fact is that Jews are great patriots no matter which country they belong to and enlist in the Army in greater numbers if the country is in danger.  

But Hitler came to see Jews as the ultimate enemy,

because some were rich. Robbing them would be profitable.  

portraying them as members of a foreign race who had become assimilated in Germany in order to take it over. This, he claimed, would be achieved by loosening immigration laws to “open the borders,”

Jews, whether or not they believe in God, want to help refugees fleeing persecution. So do Christians because they identify with the people Moses led out of captivity to the Promised Land.  

encouraging intermarriage to destroy the Aryan race,

instead of marrying your niece the way Uncle-Daddy did.  

and using control of the media and culture industries to destroy traditional German values.

which involve starting disastrous Wars and then getting well and truly stomped. 

According to Nazi propaganda, Jews were the force behind international communism and the source of the mythical “stab in the back” that had supposedly caused Germany to lose World War I.

The Army paid Hitler to go into politics to spread this theory. The sad thing is that the Germans continued to believe that they would starve unless they gained land to the East and could force France to hand over gold as reparations.  

Hitler drew inspiration from the US, which, following the rise of the America First movement, had adopted immigration policies that strictly favored Northern Europeans.

Actually, Germany had introduced strict immigration controls precisely because so many refugees fleeing Tzarist pogroms passed through Germany on their way to America. Those who were refused admission at Ellis Island- the old, the sick- would be sent back to Germany where they would stay on. This is also the worry of Orban's Hungary. Getting immigrants who want to live in your country is one thing. Having to keep people who want to get the fuck out of your country is another thing entirely.  

Looking to the early American settlers’ genocide of the continent’s native peoples in the name of “Manifest Destiny,” he found a model for his own later actions in pursuit of Lebensraum (territorial expansion).

Mussolini had the same idea. Indeed, all Europeans did. Britain and France and Portugal thought they could reduce poverty by exporting the poor to the colonies. This was short-sighted and counter-productive. On the other hand, Keynes agreed with this policy. He was stupid enough to think that America had become a net food importer. Thus Germany had to conquer Ukraine to avoid starvation. In other words, the economists agreed with the German Army's maximal program. The Weimar Republic was a Ponzi scheme based on borrowing money and promising to pay reparations. 

And as historian Timothy Snyder shows in his 2015 book, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Hitler hoped to recreate the American Antebellum South’s slavery regime in Ukraine.

Stalin created the holodomor there instead.  

The fact that American racialized nativism

Like everybody else. Britain introduced strict immigration controls- aimed at Russian Jews- at the beginning of the Century. This was enthusiastically supported by the only 'colored' MP- 'Bow and Agree' Bhownagree. Priti Patel and Suella Braverman are carrying on a great Indian tradition of telling furriners they can't become British and should fuck off to Rwanda. This is like the 'Uganda scheme' briefly entertained by the Zionists. The 'Madagascar scheme' however found no takers. 

and German fascism embodied shared practices, not just shared beliefs, merits closer attention.

Jason is reviving the Gramsci/Bordiga thesis that everybody you don't like is totes Fascist. 'Closer attention' to paranoid ideas makes you more and more paranoid.  

As the American legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw

who helped destroy Feminism as a political force 

has shown, legal practices historically have enforced and perpetuated unjust hierarchies of value in ways that often go unnoticed.

Also, legal practices are causing cats to marry dogs. Why? It is so as to distract you while Mossad installs cameras in your toilet. The Government is watching you poop. Wake up sheeple!  

Hence, the point of anti-discrimination laws is not to offer special protections for any specific group – say, Black women; rather, it is to ensure that the law does not reproduce discriminatory social, political, and historical hierarchies of value.

In which case the country turns to shit. What paranoid nutters don't get is that if the Government isn't busy installing cameras in your toilet to watch you poop, then it will do something yet more repugnant. Alternatively, there will be no government. The rich will hire gangsters to enslave the rest of us.  

This is one of the central insights of critical race theory (CRT), which evolved from the work of Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, and other scholars who have explored how legal practices perpetuate discrimination – sometimes as a side effect of motivated reasoning by those in power, and sometimes as a policy’s explicit intent.

CRT is the gift which keeps giving- to Trump.  The truth is CRT is only about colored people getting all the jobs in the anti-discrimination industry. Sadly, this means Bengalis will replace actual African Americans. On the other hand, Bengalis can wax very eloquent about how the zamindars they are descended from where actually plucking cotton in the shadow of Southern Trees which bear strange fruit. 

And, because CRT has become one of the most important theoretical tools in anti-fascist practice,

as opposed to just dropping acid and running around naked with a radish up your arse. 

it is also the new bugbear of the white nationalist right.

and black peeps- like Obama or Clarence Thomas.  

CRT urges us to recognize law as the core manifestation of a political ideology.

But the law is merely a service industry like accountancy or hair dressing. It has no magical power. First you pay money to get a judgment in your favor and then you have to pay a lot more money to get it enforced. But if the obligation holder has no incentive to provide the  remedy, there will be no remedy. The bond of law is useless. 

Ideology is magical thinking. It is paranoid. Only if the Government really has the resources to watch everybody poop while getting cats and dogs to marry each other would ideology matter. But, in that case, the only useful ideology to have would consist of saying 'stop doing stupid shit. Instead of watching people poop, the Government should fix Climate Change and invent Time Travel and other such cool stuff.' 

In the case of fascism, citizenship is based on racial identity, which in turn rests on a founding myth of hierarchy and superiority.

No. Citizenship remained what it was till amended by law such that some folk were degraded from 'citizen' to 'national'. But this happens under all sorts of regimes. A democratic country can strip citizenship under specific circumstances. The UK, Australia and Canada have recently beefed up such measures. 

While a race-based conception of national identity was not central to Italian Fascism, it was the driving force behind Nazism. With the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, German citizenship came to be based on Aryan superiority. Only those of “German blood” could be German citizens with political rights. Jews, by dint of being non-Aryans, were excluded from citizenship and therefore stripped of political rights.

Germany, unlike England or America, had enshrined a racial conception of citizenship in 1913, though this did not affect many because traditionally States had been reluctant to give citizenship to non-Germans. Weimar appeared more liberal but in practice very few of the 150,000 East European refugees in Germany were granted citizenship. The Nazi innovation was to reverse the more liberal policy of Fredrick the Great and Napoleon. But the Federal Republic kept the 1913 act. However, Germany was forced to take ethnic Germans from former Hapsburg territory. 

Not by coincidence, Black Americans had long suffered similar treatment in the post-Civil War American South.

Very true. Jews had been brought to Germany as slaves to build Pyramids- right?  

As James Q. Whitman of Yale Law School documents in Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, Nazi ideology borrowed straightforwardly from the Jim Crow regime’s use of legal practice to structure the nature of citizenship.

Nonsense! Jim Crow welcomed immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa- if they were foolish enough to arrive voluntarily. Indians and Chinese and non-Caucasian Asiatics were not wanted.  By contrast, the Germans wanted to physically remove Slavs from rich agricultural land in the East so that every German General could live like a Juncker lord. 

While the Allied victory eventually ended German racial fascism in 1945, America’s Jim Crow regime would survive for another generation.

Till the Federal Government realized that African-Americans were vital to winning the Cold War and boosting the economy. Also they were way cooler than White folk.  

The defeat of Nazi Germany had required America to overcome the power of the isolationist America First movement at home.

No. The moment Hitler declared war on America, there was no fucking isolationism anywhere.  

But the draconian immigration policies that the movement had inspired in the 1920s were still in place in the 1930s, when America infamously turned away many Jewish refugees attempting to flee Europe ahead of the Holocaust.

FDR- what a bastard!- right? 

In a 1939 Reader’s Digest essay titled “Aviation, Geography, and Race,” the leading spokesman of America First, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, wrote: “It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again. This alliance with foreign races means nothing but death to us. It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol and Persian

Persians were classed as Caucasian and were admitted to Citizenship. But 'negroes' from Africa or the Caribbean (unlike equally dark Indians from East or South Africa or Trinidad) were not subject to restriction till later on because their capacity for hard work was admired.

and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea.” Lindbergh advocated neutrality in the war between Britain and Germany, regarding both as allies against open immigration into Europe and the US by non-white peoples.

The US would chuck out plenty of Mexicans under 'Operation Wetback' in the Fifties and Sixties.  

In Germany, fascists had entered government as a result of their rapidly rising popularity in electoral politics, starting in 1928.

When the Ponzi scheme with financed Weimar collapsed. But the Communist insistence on treating the SDs as the real enemy played a part in this. However, the SDs were bound to split over issues like having to build a battleship rather than provide free school meals. Ultimately the SDs had to hand power to Hindenberg to rule by decree.  

The German economy had experienced a series of terrible shocks, from hyperinflation to soaring unemployment. Hitler’s Nazis, naturally, blamed these problems on Jews, communism, and international capitalism. Like Mussolini’s Blackshirts, they violently attacked leftists and provoked open street fighting – and then presented themselves as the only force that could restore order.

Which, because General Blomberg didn't like General Schleicher- whom Hitler killed- was true enough. Only the party backed by the Army- Blomberg got the troops to take a vow of obedience to Hitler- could 'restore order'. But, the bigger problem is that Germans thought they would starve unless the conquered territory in the East, while their industrial development depended on extorting French gold. 

Nazi ideology appealed to multiple constituencies.

No. It appealed to those who wanted to see Commies being kicked to death. Some such may also have wanted to see Jews being robbed but the first order of business was killing Commies.  

With its promise to strengthen the nation by supporting traditional gender roles and the creation of large Aryan families, it appealed to religious conservatives.

Whereas Stanley Baldwin and FDR was constantly demanding that everybody turn Gay and copulate in their streets.  

And with its hostility toward communism and socialism, it promised to protect big business from organized workers.

By killing Communists. 

The Nazis opposed capitalism only as a universal doctrine – that is, as one that granted Jews the right to property – and portrayed themselves as the protectors of Aryan private property against “Judeo-Bolshevism.”

A term first coined during the Soviet-Polish war- Żydokomuna (Judeo-Communism"). The odd thing was that when Stalin gained control, Jewish Communists were overrepresented in the regime. They were purged in the late Sixties.

On the cultural front, it bears emphasizing that fascist parties have always been violent defenders of a strictly binary conception of gender.

Whereas Stanley Baldwin was always dressing up in a skirt while FDR was notorious for dancing the can can. 

In the 1920s, Berlin was a cultural boomtown and a center of emerging European gay life, which Nazi ideology associated with Jews.

A view which Otto Weininger, author of 'Sex and Character' had popularized. Hitler was told of this 'one good Jew' who killed himself in Beethoven's house at the age of 23. 

The city was also the site of Magnus Hirschfeld’s

who was hated because he had testified in court that von Moltke was gay (though he changed his testimony in the second trial where he put all the blame on a woman driven to hysteria by lack of porking). Still, the damage was done.  Eulenburg- a moderating influence on the Kaiser- was forced out of politics. Incidentally,  Hirschfeld was first beaten in 1920 before there was a Nazi party.  When public order collapses, Gays are attacked- unless they are heavily muscled or are good with a knife. 

Institut für Sexuallewissenschaft, a vast library and archive housing a wide variety of gender expression. That made him one of the Nazi Party’s main enemies. When the Nazis started burning books, Hirschfeld’s library was among the first targets.

In England, there would have been no such institute. Hirschfeld would have done two years hard labour and then been deported. England was probably the worst place to the Gay till the Sixties. 

It is no surprise that fascists have always found common cause with religious conservatives.

It is no surprise to Jason because he is paranoid. He probably thinks the Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Germany was a pen pal of Hitler's.  

While fascism and Christianity forged an alliance of convenience in Italy

Mussolini, who was genuinely anti-Clerical was forced to do a deal with the Church. Hitler was quicker off the mark in establishing the Reichskonkordat which is still in place to this day. The tax-man takes money from German Catholics to give to the Church unless they explicitly stipulate otherwise. Money matters. Religion like the Law is a service industry. You have to pay to get its imprimatur. 

and Germany, they all but fused into a single ideology elsewhere. In Romania, for example, the Legion of the Archangel Michael was both the most Christian and the most violently anti-Semitic of the European fascist parties.

Franco appointed the Virgin Mary the Captain General of his Army. But he wasn't particularly anti-Semitic. The same was true of Salazar.  

In Brazil, a Catholic integralist form of fascism was imported directly from Italy by Plínio Salgado.

Salgado's green-shirts were like the Irish blue-shirts. Vargas exiled him when he wagged his tail in 1937. The fact is Vargas had kept power in 1937 by claiming there was a Jewish-Communist plot- 'the Cohen plan'- which he had to put down. Vargas's 'Estado Novo' was similar to Salazar's for an obvious reason. 

The role of Christianity is also obvious in the structure of the Russian fascism that is ascendant today.

Only to the same extent that Zelensky is a Nazi by reason of being Jewish. The problem with paranoia is that anybody can talk evil nonsense.  

Russians and Russia are depicted as the last defenders of Christianity against the heathen forces of decadent Western liberalism and gender fluidity.

But Putin's 'passionarity' is supposed to appeal to Muslims too.  

And, of course, Christianity has always animated American fascism, with its ideological core of white Christian nationalism.

Christianity is totes evil- right?  Did you know that Trump was born into a Christian family? What kind of Democracy would let an out and out Christian run for the highest office in the land?! 

By the end of the 1920s, the Nazis had managed to appeal to multiple groups that did not regard themselves as Nazis.

Because the Nazis were actually fighting with Commies and kicking in their heads whenever they themselves didn't get their heads kicked in first.  

And owing to the widespread distrust of more mainstream political parties and institutions,

which weren't boasting about how many Commies they killed and weren't making martyrs of their own Horst Wessels.  

they became the second-largest parliamentary party after the 1930 election, and then the leading party following the election in 1932.

The problem was that the Communists had gained seats at the expense of the Social Democrats. This meant that there could be no left of center coalition.  

Though German conservatives looked askance at the Nazis, they regarded Hitler as preferable to any option on the left.

Which is strange coz Conservatives normally vote Communist- right?  

Thus, with the support of the conservative establishment, Hitler was appointed chancellor by Germany’s president in 1933. While Hitler had made his virulent opposition to democracy abundantly clear in his statements and writings, German conservatives handed him power anyway, demonstrating – at best – unforgivable naivete.

Nonsense! They knew they were handing power to the German Army. What few realized was that the General Staff would be mesmerized by a bohemian Corporal. The fact is, Germans believed they must either conquer territory and extort reparations or else they would starve sooner or later.  

In fact, every canonical example of European fascists’ success in the twentieth century involved

the Army either killing Commies of enabling the country to get rich off colonies. Extorting money from Jews, too, looked like a smart- as opposed to suicidal- thing to do. 

political parties coming to power through the normal electoral process, after having broadcast their anti-democratic sentiments and sometimes even their express intentions. Conservative leaders and voters chose fascism over democracy, believing that they would win out in the end.

against Communism- sure. The alternative was to wait around to have your throat slit.  

If we think of fascism as a set of practices, it is immediately evident that fascism is still with us.

Only if we are as stupid as shit. Fascism is not a 'set of practices'. It is a bunch of guys who say 'We're Fascists'. If these Fascists do smart things, people are cool with them. If they start unwinnable wars, people turn against them.  

As Toni Morrison

who alleged that Israel had 'liquidated' the Palestinian nation 

pointed out in a 1995 speech, the US has often preferred fascist solutions to its national problems.

Fuck that! Fascists are losers. Uncle Sam kicks ass. It does 'liquidation' better than anybody else. Ask the First Nations.  

Consider, for example, the Prison Policy Initiative’s findings on global incarceration rates in 2021: “Not only does the US have the highest incarceration rate in the world;

but some demographic groups have higher longevity in jail than out of it. 

every single US state incarcerates more people per capita than virtually any independent democracy on earth.”

Because America is rich. Also some prison labor may yield more revenue than the cost of incarceration. 

This is a burden that falls disproportionately on the formerly enslaved population of the country.

who kill each other disproportionately, which is why African Americans tended to vote for 'three strike' policies in the Nineties.  

And unlike in many other democracies, prisoners in 48 US states cannot legally vote.

Nor can chickens. Why does nobody mention the chickens?  

In Florida, strict disenfranchisement laws strip one million people – enough to shift the state’s partisan leaning toward Republicans – with past felony records of their voting rights.

Which is why Florida isn't an utter shithole. That could change.  

And under the state’s current Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, an election police force has been created to address a nonexistent epidemic of voter fraud. In the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, there have been highly publicized arrests of Black people with felony records who thought they could vote (and who, in some cases, had received confusing messages about the matter from the state).

America has 'dual sovereignty' which is why it can't have an Indian style Election Commission. 

We should recognize this for what it is: the return of Jim Crow tactics designed to intimidate Black voters.

Because African Americans are being forced to sit in the back of the bus- right? Why not recognize Jason's paranoid nonsense for what it is?- viz. the mirror image of Lavrov's proof that Zelensky is a Nazi on the basis that he has Jewish heritage.  

Unlike the Third Reich, the Jim Crow regime never suffered defeat and elimination in war.

Nor did Apartheid. So what? Some countries get conquered. Others don't.  

Instead, its practices have quietly persisted in varying forms, often serving as a model for laws like those in Florida.

Jim Crow was about segregation. Enfranchisement was a separate matter. It was and remains a matter of State law whereas Jim Crow came under the auspices of the Supreme Court.  

In most cases, racist laws are made to appear racially neutral.

No. Racist laws explicitly mention race. Allegedly racist laws do not do so. But this is also true of all laws which, it is my contention, are really about compelling the Government to install cameras in toilets so that depraved Japanese billionaires can watch me poop. I mean that's like totes Fascist dude.  

Literacy tests for voting, for example, are ostensibly neutral but discriminatory in fact.

In which case, the matter is justiciable. But this entails a pattern and practice investigation of a painstaking sort. Just saying 'this is Fascist' won't cut it.  

Nor is this tactic confined to the US. In India, the Hindu nationalist ruling party has created a national registry to codify citizenship and expel “illegal immigrants,”

Nope. The Bench created a Nationality register in Assam. It also opened detention centers. But that was under the previous regime. The Indian government had promised to expel illegal immigrants back in 1983 after the Assamese massacred Muslims from Bangladesh. It was the Bench which took suo moto action to enforce that promise. But the Bench overstepped the mark. Nothing has actually changed on the ground though a few people did relocate to the 'detention camp' because of superior amenities to be found there. 

The plain fact is that the Government is neither interested in, nor able to afford, systematic ethnic cleansing. If the majority wants to do it- as it did in Kashmir Valley- let them do it themselves using agricultural implements. Don't expect the tax-payer to finance it. The Law, after all, is merely a service industry. Serve yourself if you don't have the cash to get others to serve you.  

cynically exploiting the fact that a significant number of Indian Muslims lack official documentation.

Only if they aren't Indian. Prima facie, a Hindi or Tamil or Gujarati speaking Muslim is Indian. Anyway the poor do have documentation because that's how they access the public distribution system.  

Hindu nationalists can now target Indian Muslims and threaten them with deportation to Bangladesh.

It was the Bench which did this because of Indira Gandhi's promise given back in 1983.  

At the same time, the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act gives non-Muslim migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan a fast track to citizenship.

Which they already had. The only difference is that the 2019 Act gives 2014 as the cut-off date. In practice, only Muslims accused of blasphemy- e.g. Dr. Taslima Nasrin- can't settle in India for fear of having their heads chopped off. This does not mean that the majority can't do ethnic cleansing. It just won't get money from the tax-payer to do so.  

The manipulation of citizenship laws to privilege one group as the true representatives of the nation is a feature of all fascist movements.

But citizenship laws don't mean shit if they are too costly to enforce. Currently, British and American law privileges legal residents. But there are plenty of 'illegal' residents who are doing well. Why spend money removing hard working people with useful skills?  

As Tobias Hübinette of Karlstad University has pointed out, Sweden’s far-right party, the Sweden Democrats, has “a direct organizational lineage tracing back to World War II-era Nazism.”

But so does Germany which is the successor state of the Third Reich.  

Its platform asserts a racially homogenous Swedish national identity, and its candidates have “campaigned openly for the installation of a repatriation program with the explicit purpose of making non-Western immigrants move back to their countries of origin.” In the September 2022 election, the Sweden Democrats became the second-largest party in parliament– echoing the Nazi Party’s achievement in 1930.

But Swedish tax-payers won't pay for this. Either these guys do the ethnic cleansing themselves- which might involve getting shot by swarthy gangsters- or else they have to stop pretending to be macho.  

Far-right leaders elsewhere in Europe have also been openly campaigning against multiracial democracy, though Muslim minorities have been substituted for the massacred Jewish population as the Fifth Column in their “Great Replacement” theory. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has used the courts and the law to silence opposition media and peddle a Christian nationalist nostalgia for a lost greater Hungary. By stoking fears of sexual and religious minorities, he has shown how a leader can win elections time and again while openly campaigning against the press, universities, and democracy itself.

Orban may have gone too far by sticking up for Putin. Still, Jason is undoubtedly correct when he says that the typical Hungarian male used to spend half his time having sex with Gay Rabbis while devoting the rest of his working week to helping Muslim refugees to get into the Shengen zone. 

In the century since Mussolini’s March on Rome, leaders and parties who openly run against democracy all too easily prevail in elections. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has called for removing democratic institutions and repeatedly praised the country’s former military dictatorship.

But Bolsonaro has accepted the electoral verdict.  

And despite his disastrous first term, he stands a decent chance of winning in the second-round vote on October 30. And in the US, the Republican Party has become a cult of personality beholden to a white nationalist leader

unlike Biden who is Chinese and a long-term devotee of Dr. Fu Manchu.  

who led an effort – most of which he plotted in the open – to overthrow American democracy.

Also he installed cameras in toilets so that Japanese billionaires can watch you poop.  

Fascists can win when social conservatives decide that fascism is the lesser evil.

than Communism- which is true enough.  

They can win when enough citizens decide that ending democracy is a reasonable price to pay for achieving some cherished goal – like the criminalization of abortion.

This is foolish. Abortion was decriminalized by the Bench. But what 'due process' gives, 'due process' can take away. On the other hand, Jason probably is crazy enough to want Stalinism if that means fetuses get to be killed on an industrial scale. The trouble is that Stalins tend to ban abortion and homosexuality and so forth.  

They can win when a dominant cohort chooses to end democracy in order to preserve its cultural, financial, and political primacy.

Democracy can be modified easily enough. It can only be ended if there is a cheaper way to rule the country. 

They can win when

their rival does stupider shit. That's all that matters. The plain fact is that the one weapon the Left had was a General Strike. But they didn't use it- probably because it would fail as the British General Strike failed in 1926. It turns out that the proletariat needs capitalism more than capitalists need the workers. They can take their skills and emigrate. 

they attract votes from those who merely want to thumb their noses at the system or lash out in resentment.

Mussolini dispensed with vote catching once he saw that there was no danger of a General Strike. By 1925 he was openly a Dictator of a Leninist type. 

And they can win when business elites decide that democracy is just a substitutable input.

Business leaders either run away or stay if it is profitable to do so. Mussolini and Hitler were less shite than Lenin or Stalin or Franco's Falangists in that industrialists did okay under them. Sadly, this meant they thought they could win wars. That was their big mistake. Otherwise Fascism was better than Communism though what was even better was a Democracy with sensible Labor leaders.  

Fascist parties feed a longing for

killing Commies not 

national innocence, which is why they run on narratives of national glory that erase past crimes.

Nobody cares about past crimes which enriched them unless those crimes involved sucking off homeless dudes.  

Hence, some parents will support fascist parties – while vehemently disclaiming the label of fascism for themselves – to prevent their children from learning about the racist legacies that underpin the persistence of racist outcomes.

Mummy and Daddy are totes Fascist. Prof. Stanley told me so. Please give me a gold star for my essay on how horrible my parents are.  Also, kindly get them to increase my allowance. 

Today, as in the past, fascist movements often have a powerful symbolic dimension

Zelensky is symbolically defying Putin. That shows he is totes Nazi.  

that makes them contagious internationally. In the figure of Giorgia Meloni, Italy has its first far-right leader since Mussolini.

She is the first female PM. Jason thinks she will institute a one-party state.  

Having long promoted admiration of Mussolini’s legacy and hatred of immigrants and sexual minorities in her pursuit of party and government positions, Meloni’s ascension to the Italian premiership is a potent symbol for global fascism.

But Meloni wants to get reelected. She does not want to invade Greece.  She isn't really a Fascist at all. 

Finally, the world has its most openly fascist leader since Hitler in the figure of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has demonstrated why we must never become complacent about this ideology and its implications.

But Putin thinks Zelensky is a Nazi. Neither are. They are both interested in holding power and wielding it in their nation's interest. Putin seems to have miscalculated. Zelensky, it turns it out, is no clown. 

Putin’s genocidal war against Ukraine shows that he is not a pragmatic actor, but rather a fanatic seeking to recreate a lost Russian empire.

No. Putin miscalculated. But then most independent analysts thought he would prevail. What followed was a revelation.  

In mustering such effective resistance, the Ukrainians have confirmed the ancient truth suggested in Pericles’s famous funeral oration: democracies fight better than tyrannies, because democratic citizens fight by their own choice.

But Alexander showed it wasn't true at all. The Macedonians prevailed under a King.  

When institutions have been delegitimized for presiding over enormous economic disparities, cronyism, and generational crises, massive social change becomes possible.

Or not, if those institutions kill or anyone who tries to fuck with them. Otherwise massive social change occurs anyway because institutions don't matter unless they are very good at killing people.  

Sometimes, that change is positive, as when the labor movement helped establish the weekend, improve workplace safety, and abolish child labor.

Not in England it didn't. Lord Shaftesbury wasn't exactly a horny handed prole. Child labor ended despite not because of the working class. But parents were allowed to exploit their own kids on their farms on in their shops. 

But such moments are inherently perilous.

No they aren't. Communism sucks ass big time but Fascism isn't too bad provided you can run away from it. That's what really matters- running away from shitty places.  

Fascism is the dark side of liberation,

nope. It's what one prays for if the Commies appear on the point of seizing power. Currently, we are cheering for the Azov battalions.  

and history shows that it is often what democratic polities will prefer.

only if the Commies or crazy terrorists or other such nutters are running amok. But better than blackshirts or brownshirts or greenshirts or blueshirts are mobs which slaughter Commies or other nutters on their own time and using such agricultural implements as are ready to hand. Politics, like the Law or Religion, is merely a Service industry. Disintermediate it if it is cheaper to do the killing yourself.  

It may be true that the Fascists had cooler uniforms but they didn't have magical powers. Jason Stanley's fatal fascination with Fascism arises from magical thinking. But he only succumbed to magical thinking because he studied an utterly shite type of psilosophy and then proceeded to teach it to kids more stupid yet.