These have often illustrated the truth of the comment (wrongly attributed to Henry Kissinger) that “[t]he politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low”.
Today, the stakes could not be higher, as the fate of liberal democracy may be in the balance in countries like Germany and Italy, where neofascist parties are either in government or soon could be.
A popular literature has arisen, penned by liberal politicos and intellectuals such as former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and historian Timothy Snyder, warning of the dangers of fascism’s return.
To what extent does it make sense to trust such sources? Do they really understand fascism, or is it just a dog whistle for liberal interventionism?
Albright, for example, remains heavily criticised for bombing Serbia during the Kosovo conflict, and Snyder for being a Ukraine war hawk, like the liberals who supported invading Afghanistan and Iraq.
No one should be censored from speaking about politics, least of all professors and retired politicians. The problem is treating them as experts rather than moralists or influencers with agendas.
Ever since Donald Trump won the 2016 US election, his anti-democratic politics have graduated an entire class of experts on fascism, some qualified, many not.
For example, most would be hard-pressed to distinguish between populism and fascism and nationalism and the far right. That matters, given the European origins of fascism and how it played out.
Fascism is a term that can be meaningfully applied, beginning with the far-right movement that ran Italy from 1922 to 1943 and those that took power in other European states in the 1920s and 1930s.
The academic discipline of fascist studies has built its trade on this. It may not have always produced the best work, but familiarity with it helps us negotiate the deficits of pundit discourse about the crisis.
Leading figures in the discipline, including Roger Griffin, Stanley Payne, Roger Eatwell, and others, often speak of a consensus that has arisen since the 1980s.
This refers to an account of fascism that identifies it as a cross-class movement characterised by what Griffin terms “palingenetic” (aiming at rebirth) ultranationalism.
Along with the other significant figures in fascism studies, Roger Griffin argues that fascism is a transhistorical concept that can be applied analytically to various times and places.
Israeli historian Ishay Landa’s The Apprentice’s Sorcerer (2009) is one of the more recent attempts to question the consensus.
The book raises several problems regarding the discussion of fascism, most importantly, whether it can be used as a general analytical concept.
At the centre of The Apprentice’s Sorcerer is fascism’s ties to liberalism. To suggest there might be a connection is unthinkable amongst the rank and file. Among Nazis there is no greater bête noire.
According to Landa, one of his primary goals is to refute what he takes to be Zeev Sternhell’s partisan association of fascism with socialism in Ni droite ni gauche and elsewhere.
The historian sees Sternhell’s position in line with the liberal consensus, which continues to be echoed today by politicians like Ursula von der Leyen, who often inveigh against “left and right extremes”.
But Landa seems unaware of Roger Griffin’s meticulous critique of Sternhell.
According to Griffin, Sternhell identified two separate fascist ideological cultures in France that were distinct in time and membership.
Those whose origins were in the socialist and syndicalist movements were distinctly less influential in the growth of French fascism in the 1930s and 1940s.
Ishay Landa operates in the tradition of the late Italian historian Domenico Losurdo, whose landmark work, Liberalism: A Counter-History, finds illiberalism in most historical versions of liberalism.
It may sound counterintuitive, but liberalism is not the synonym for freedom and democracy that it is supposed to be. Quite often, it is cover for its opposite or, at the very least, nurtures it.
This is the contradiction that fascism and fascist-adjacent politics refuse to countenance.
Landa distinguishes between political and economic liberalism. The former centres on the liberal project’s individual rights and justice elements, and the latter on economic freedom.
According to the historian, political challenges from below prompt economic liberals to move right, evincing a willingness to interact with fascist movements. If it sounds familiar, it is.
To return to Ursula von der Leyen, consider her former alliance with Italian far-right premier Georgia Meloni before the EU election and her courting of her European Conservatives and Reformists group.
The European Commission chief was neither the first centre-right politician to flirt with the extremes nor will she be the last. A little history is in order.
From Hobbes and Locke to the Austrian school, liberalism’s history has consistently witnessed the curtailing of rights when workers unionised and demanded equality measures like progressive taxation.
Anything that limited profits and violated libertarian principles was justification for diminishing democracy.
This insight is not new. Leftist theorists such as August Thalheimer and Friedrich Pollock had taken the same view in accounting for the rise of National Socialism.
Ishay Landa’s argument rearticulates the issue for a new historical context in which nationalist forces are reemerging in parallel circumstances.
The need for such analyses is doubly significant because of its absence in fascist studies.
Roger Griffin, for example, is dismissive of such efforts because, in his view, fascism is an expression of the need for the bourgeoisie to reconfigure society to cure liberal capitalism’s ills.
Griffin’s targets are historians such as Mark Neocleous, Dave Renton, and Donny Gluckstein, whose analyses follow the class-based accounts of Georgi Dimitrov and Das Argument in the 1960s.
The British academic unfairly dismisses this approach. However, it might be closer to the mark to say that their problem is not being wrong but, at times, too reductive.
Roger Griffin’s disagreements are predictably ideological. His approach to fascism is about culture rather than (or to a much greater degree than) economics, so politics aside, it’s not hard to understand his angst.
Griffin sees fascism as an elite project transferred to a mass base to reject liberal democracy and replace it with a wholesome, ethnically integrated society.
There is no reason that the two accounts could not find some middle ground. One could employ them both to progressive ends, albeit with some adjustments.
However, the economics of fascism are a behemoth on their own and easy to focus on to the exclusion of all else. And the record of fascist movements and Nazism on the economy is wildly inconsistent.
Some fascist regimes have been more economically interventionist. The Nazis, whose dictatorship has the distinction of having most fully put its program into practice, are a prime example.
Hitler was clear that the party’s inclusion of the term “socialist” in its name was done to encourage working-class participation rather than to express its intention to redistribute Germany’s wealth.
As Adam Tooze shows in Wages of Destruction, the most extensive analysis of the Nazi economy, although Hitler’s government did direct production, only one business (Junkers aircraft) was nationalised.
This, of course, excludes the massive expropriation of Jewish-owned businesses.
Suffice it to say, the differences between what we’ve read about fascism in the press the last eight years is decidedly different from how it’s discussed in academic circles.
Though there are noticeable ideological differences in both academic disagreements and within and between scholars and the press, the persistence of the discourse is healthy, if not always correct.
After all, politics comes first, and analysis, second. The ideal situation would be to make public discourse about fascism as informed and nuanced as possible.
Watching recent news footage of Donald Trump telling an Evangelical audience they won’t have to vote anymore after he gets elected couldn’t make that any clearer.
People don’t just need to be told that fascism is bad. They need to understand why and where it comes from.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
