Over the past decade, the world has witnessed a flurry of far-right movements. With them, the ghosts of the 1930s seemed to reappear and the shadow of a neo-fascist or post-fascist wave spread across several continents. The high point was between 2016 and 2018, with the electoral victories of Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and, meanwhile, the clash between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron in France. Many far-right parties came to government in European Union countries, and some “exceptions” ended, with the appearance of Alternative for Germany [Alternative für Deutschland] and Vox on the German and Spanish political scene, respectively, plus the expansion of the Italian Northern League [Lega Nord] under the leadership of Matteo Salvini. Authoritarian, nationalist and xenophobic governments were installed everywhere, from Vladimir Putin's Russia to Narendra Modi's India and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey. The world was taking a bleak turn: neo-fascism, post-fascism, far-right populism? The debate on what to call it remained open, but everyone understood that at that time fascism was more than an area of ​​historical studies; it was once again a matter of the contemporary agenda. Most observers – myself included – believed that a new economic crisis would drastically accelerate this general trend and that we should prepare for a horrible new scenario. The crisis occurred: since the beginning of 2020, the covid-19 pandemic has plunged the planet into a global recession. But at the same time – luckily – our dire diagnosis has not been fulfilled. Of course, we are still in the midst of a global crisis, far-right movements have not disappeared, and there are still several possible outcomes. However, it is now clear that there has been a significant setback in the seemingly inexorable dynamic of fascism.

How to call them? Neo-Facism, Post-Facism, Far-Right Populism?

The most obvious indicator of this change was the defeat of Trump in November 2020. If we look at this heterogeneous and contradictory panorama from a general perspective, without limiting ourselves to a single country, the pandemic appears as the matrix of two global trends : a biopolitical turn and a potentially authoritarian turn. While it may be inappropriate to speak of a matrix – of course, such trends existed beforehand – there is no doubt that the pandemic has increased and accelerated them with vigor. Without exception, the biopolitical turn is quite noticeable: governments have extraordinarily developed their control over populations, dealing with our lives—our physical bodies, literally—as biological objects to be managed and protected. The future of the global economy depends on the effectiveness of these health policies; First of all, a rapid, extensive and effective vaccination campaign. We support or criticize our governments based on their ability to implement these health policies. But the problem has a second dimension, which no longer affects us as biopolitical objects, but as legal and political subjects, as citizens. This second dimension is a potentially authoritarian twist that lies in the transformation of our governments into "states of exception", into political powers that radically limit our public and individual liberties. Of course, we accept the confinements and restrictions imposed in the name of collective security, but little by little we realize that these policies are altering our lifestyles, our ways of working, our ways of socializing and interacting, and that in our societies increasing sharply class differences. It is not true that we are all equal in the face of the virus, since we are exposed to it selectively based on our social and economic status, and also based on the country to which we belong. There is no doubt that the pandemic has a greater impact in the global South. This implies increasing inequalities at all levels and, in turn, more inequalities imply more authoritarian powers. In China, the pandemic was neutralized with despotic measures worthy of an Orwellian government. In several countries in Europe, lockdowns and restrictions were implemented through the enforcement of anti-terrorism laws and coincided with a significant increase in police violence. In a context like this, the far-right movements may seem like good candidates to lead the authoritarian turn towards the state of emergency. But there is a crucial fact: they do not have serious credentials to control the biopolitical turn. Like “good shepherds”, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini have no credibility. In the terms of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, we could say that nobody sees them as the personification of an effective “pastoral power”. This is a significant difference between current far-right movements and classical fascism, and it goes well beyond various other demarcations related to our different historical contexts. In the 1930s, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco promised a future and proved to be an effective response to the economic depression, against the exhausted liberal democracies that, in the eyes of many people, embodied the vestiges of a political order in ruins. Of course, this was a dangerous illusion – the effort to end unemployment through rearmament and war led to catastrophe – but until World War II his propaganda worked quite well. The same does not happen with his heirs. The responses of Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Le Pen and Salvini to the pandemic consisted simply of denial, misunderstanding, incompetence and inefficiency. The first year of the pandemic made us increasingly aware that we are facing a global emergency that requires global responses. The traditional recipes of the extreme right – nationalism, a return to conservative values ​​and national sovereignty, plus the search for scapegoats – did not work at all. In Italy, Salvini, the charismatic leader of the nationalist and xenophobic League, had gotten used to organizing massive demonstrations in which he denounced the terrible diseases that plagued his country: immigrants, refugees and, of course, Islam. Hate preaching had proven to be a very popular exercise, and Salvini was leading in the polls. However, after a few months of the pandemic, when the country was the epicenter of the European outbreak and hospitals were overwhelmed, people began to shower praise on Albanian doctors and nurses,Tunisians and Chinese who came to the aid of their Italian colleagues. This is the sign of a setback, not a defeat or irreversible decline. We are in the midst of a transition process whose results are still unknown and open: either a New Deal for the 21st century, capable of tackling climate change and reversing the transformations produced by forty years of neoliberalism, or a turn to the extreme right. that will throw our planet into the announced catastrophe. In the current context, both outcomes are perfectly possible. In the 20th century, fascism was a project of "regeneration" of the nation, seen as a homogeneous ethnic and racial community. If this is the core of fascism, it would not be wrong to define today's far-right movements, despite so many obvious differences, as the heirs of classical fascism. The fascist lexicon has changed, of course, and its "imagined community" exhibits new characteristics, or rather, new myths. It designates a supposedly original purity that must be defended or restored against its enemies: immigration (“the great replacement”), anti-white racial invasions, the corruption of traditional values ​​by feminism and Lgbtqi activism groups, Islamism and its agents (terrorism and "Islamoizquierdismo"), etc. The precursors of the emergence of this neo-fascist wave nest in the crisis of hegemony of the global elites, whose government tools, inherited from the old nation-states, seem obsolete and increasingly ineffective. As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci explained in his critical review of Nicholas Machiavelli, domination is a combination of repressive apparatuses and a cultural hegemony that allows a political regime to appear legitimate and beneficent, instead of tyrannical and oppressive. After several decades of neoliberal policies, the ruling classes have greatly increased their wealth and power, but have also suffered a significant loss of legitimacy and cultural hegemony. These are the premises for the rise of neo- or post-fascism: on the one hand, the increasing “fall into savagery” of the ruling classes and, on the other, the widespread authoritarian tendencies that their domination engenders. The definition of fascism as a project of "regeneration" of the nation captures a fundamental element of historical continuity, but it is probably insufficient. Seen from a historical perspective, fascism was more than a form of radical nationalism and a racist idea of ​​nationhood. It was also a practice of political violence, a militant anti-communism and a complete destruction of democracy. Violence, especially directed against the left and communism, was the privileged form of his political action, and in all the places where he came to power –whether through legal means, as in Italy and Germany, or through a military coup. As in Spain, fascism destroyed democracy. From this point of view, the new movements of the radical right have a different relationship with both violence and democracy. While they want to defend the “people” against the elites and restore order, they do not want to create a new political order. In Europe, they are more interested in enforcing authoritarian and nationalist tendencies within the European Union than in destroying its institutions.

Their responses to the pandemic were misunderstanding, incompetence, and denial

That is the position of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Mateusz Morawiecki in Poland, as well as Marine Le Pen in France and Matteo Salvini in Italy, two leaders who ultimately accepted the euro. The Italian League recently participated in a coalition government headed by Mario Draghi, a former head of the European Central Bank and a prominent figure in neoliberalism and financial elites. In India, Brazil and the United States, far-right leaders came to power and displayed authoritarian and xenophobic tendencies without questioning the institutional framework of their states. Bolsonaro and Trump were not only unable to dissolve parliamentary power; they finished (or are about to finish) their term facing various impeachment proceedings. The case of Trump, the most discussed in recent months, is particularly instructive. His fascist trajectory was clearly revealed when at the end of his presidency he refused to admit defeat and sought to invalidate the electoral result. However, the folkloric “uprising” of his supporters who invaded the Capitol was not a failed fascist coup; instead, it involved a desperate attempt to overturn an election by a leader who had clearly broken the most basic rules of democracy – making it possible to describe him as fascist – but was unable to point to a political alternative. . There is no doubt that Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet would have considered this "uprising" of January 6 as an initiative of pathetic amateurs. The events on Capitol Hill indisputably revealed the existence of a mass fascist movement in the United States, and in a broader sense, a fascist movement organized through a network of armed militias. Even so, this movement is still a long way from seizing power, and its immediate consequence was to plunge the Republican Party into a deep crisis. Trump had won the 2016 election as the candidate of that party: a coalition of economic elites, upper-middle classes interested in tax cuts, advocates of conservative values, Christian fundamentalists, and impoverished white lower classes who were attracted by a protest vote. . By the way, this coalition can be recreated. However, as the fascist leader of a movement of white supremacists and reactionary nationalists, Trump does not have much of a chance of being re-elected. In addition, the fascist movement that supports it should be understood in its context. In contrast to the Italian fascist militia (the Blackshirts) between 1920 and 1925 or the Nazi SA [Sturmabteilung] between 1930 and 1933, which expressed the fall of the state monopoly on violence in postwar Italy and Germany, respectively, the Trump's militias are a poisoned legacy of American history, the history of a country where individual gun ownership is considered a hallmark of political freedom. As chilling as it is, this is not the harbinger of a collapsing state. In the 1930s, European industrial, financial, and military elites supported fascism as a solution to endemic political crises and institutional paralysis; also, and above all, as a defense against Bolshevism. Today, they support neoliberalism. In the United States, the establishment may support the Republican Party as a typical alternative to the Democratic Party; but the Pentagon would never go along with a white supremacist coup to prevent the election of Joe Biden as head of the executive branch. In the so-called Old World, the establishment is represented by the European Union and is firmly opposed to populist, nationalist and post-fascist movements that demand a return to "national sovereignties".

This right has a different relationship than fascism with violence and democracy

Classical fascism was born in a continent devastated by total war and developed in an atmosphere of civil wars, within deeply unstable states and with institutional mechanisms paralyzed by acute political conflicts. His radicalism arose from a confrontation with Bolshevism, which gave it the "revolutionary" character. Fascism consisted of a utopian ideology and imaginary, which created the myth of the "new man" and national greatness. The new far-right movements lack all these pillars: they are the product of a crisis of hegemony that cannot be compared to the European collapse of the 1930s; its radicalism does not include even a trace of “revolutionary”, and its conservatism – a defense of traditional values ​​and cultures, threatened “national identities” and a bourgeois respectability opposed to sexual “deviations” – is devoid of the idea of futurity that so profoundly shaped fascist ideologies and utopias. For this reason, it seems more appropriate to describe them as post-fascists, not as neo-fascists. Does this mean that there is no fascist danger? No way. To tell the truth, if we look at the present through a historical prism, we cannot rule out that possibility. The impressive rise of far-right movements, parties and governments clearly shows that fascism can become an alternative. But while the possibility of a new post-fascist era certainly persists, it is important to note that the economic crisis unleashed by the pandemic did not strengthen it. Thus, the far-right claim to embody an "anti-establishment" alternative probably seems less convincing today than it did five years ago. Ultimately, however, the future of far-right movements will not depend exclusively on their internal evolution, their ideological orientation and their strategic decisions, nor on the support they can obtain from global elites. In the end, it will depend on how capable the left is of outlining an alternative.

I have decided to document my journey with rediscovering piano . I figured it give me motivation to move forward.… https://t.co/JESQsyv6FL

— 🎶Suno🎶 Wed May 12 12:10:06 +0000 2021

☛ Title: The new faces of the right

☛ Author:Enzo Traverso

☛ Publisher: Siglo XXI Publishers

Author's information

He is one of the most outstanding historians of the ideas of the 20th century.

Graduated from the University of Genoa, he received his doctorate from the EHESS in Paris and for two decades he taught at universities in France while he was a visiting professor at different centers in Europe and America.

*Among his books, “The past, instructions for use” and “History as a battlefield” stand out.