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      in World Politics

      How Do You Tell an Authoritarian From a Fascist These Days?

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      Recent developments in global politics, such as Donald Trump’s reelection campaign or the rise of illiberal democracies across Central and Eastern Europe, have arguably led to a misinterpretation of what many refer to as a “return of fascism.” Although authoritarian populism shares numerous similarities with fascism, these two ideologies differ markedly, both in terms of their ideological nature and of their danger, as well as the very real challenges that they pose to liberal democracies in the 21st century.

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      The term “fascism” is a complex ideological label that has found historical prominence in both 20th century Italy and in Nazi Germany between the two world wars. The concept is currently applied broadly in academic literature to identify radical-right political parties, right-wing authoritarian (or military) regimes or even movements sympathetic to fascism. However, the term is more properly used when referring to the ideology that was promoted and implemented by Benito Mussolini in Italy in the interwar period.

      Fascism Versus Authoritarianism

      Historically, fascism derives its roots from nationalism, totalitarianism and the myth of violence. Firstly, through the advent of nationalism, fascism does not only try to achieve ethnic homogeneity of the members of the community but also introduces the concept of national superiority over other peoples and nations.

      Secondly, to comprehend totalitarianism, it is necessary to keep in mind the impact of the Great War and the depersonalization of the individual. For fascism, an individual is a “tool” used to pursue the interests of the state, which coincide directly with the interests of the fascist party. However, fascism is not limited solely to obedience, as has been shown, among others, by Hannah Arendt. It claims legitimacy by obtaining the consent of the masses and, to accomplish this, fascism as an ideology is mobilized and tends to encompass all sectors of society. As the self-styled Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile remarked, “for fascism everything is in the state and nothing is outside the state, in this sense the state is totalitarian.”

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      Finally, the myth of violence is one of the most important tenets of fascism. Enemies are everywhere, and fascism must assert itself through violence (extreme, if necessary). This pattern inevitably undermines any forms of pluralism. For this reason, for fascist ideologues, this eventual clash is inevitable, and, eventually, all the principles of both liberal democracy and representative institutions fall.

      In defining authoritarian populism, we can refer to the “fourth wave” in the radical-right literature as outlined by Cas Mudde. Mudde argues that there are three core patterns that make up this ideology, comprising nativism, authoritarianism and populism. Firstly, nativism refers to the “membership” of the nation, which is determined by ethnic terms. This notion is also related to the exclusionary pattern of radical-right parties that tend to argue that multiculturalism should be considered as a threat to the national heritage and cultural traditions. Consequently, the state should impede access to those immigrants who differ from the majoritarian ethnic group; or, alternatively, immigrants should entirely adopt the national culture and fully assimilate.

      Secondly, authoritarianism refers to what extent a society should be strictly controlled by the state in order to maintain security and order within the borders of the country. This pattern is linked to the strong emphasis on law and order which “is directed not only against external threats (immigrants and asylum seekers) and criminal elements, but also against its critics and political opponents.” Finally, the notion of populism refers to the well-known definition of conflict within current societies, between the people (represented by the radical right) and the elite (mainstream politicians and the political establishment).  

      The Cult of the Leader

      It is clear from the above analysis that fascism and authoritarian populism are different, ideologically speaking. Nonetheless, there are two elements that are significantly comparable in both ideologies. The first is the cult of the leader, or fanatism. The fascist leader isn’t just someone to obey or support, but also serves as an image in which the electorate can feel represented. This image is one that is omnipotent and omniscient. For example, Mussolini was portrayed as a hero in all fields — “a hard worker, an athlete, an airplane pilot” and so on — in order to create a cult of personality.

      A similar cult of personality was also portrayed in Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, via the Führerprinzip — the leader principle. In this regard, US Present Donald Trump also (indirectly) reminds us of this type of leader. Trump often boasts of his “unlimited” knowledge and unprecedented achievement in various fields, from science and defense to economics and race relations.  

      Trump also speaks through his body. For example, after the first presidential debate against former Vice-President Joe Biden, President Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19. Once recovered, he staged a dramatic return to the White House to demonstrate strength in having defeated the virus and being immune from it. A not too dissimilar scene also played out in Brazil, with President Jair Bolsonaro also contracting COVID-19 but dismissing it as nothing more than an ordinary bout of flu.

      In both fascism and authoritarian populist ideologies, the leader is presented as an invincible figure that most of the times is described (most often by the state propaganda machine) as the savior of the homeland from ruin. So, Mussolini should have restored the ancient splendor of the Roman Empire, while Trump was supposed to “Make America Great Again.”

      Creation of the Enemy

      The second analogy is the creation of an enemy. Recalling how fascism was founded on the myth of violence, conflict does not take place only on ethnic or religious, but also on political grounds. Thus, anybody who represents a danger to the stability of the fascist authority in the country should be eliminated (for the good of the nation itself).

      As the Soviet author Vassily Grossman explains in his famous 1970 novel “Everything Flows,” the “scalpel is the great theorist, the philosophical leader of the twentieth century.” With this image, Grossman exemplifies how totalitarianism (including fascism) envisaged a certain political project — founded on purely abstract ideological principles applied in the real world — and everything that is not included in this project must be eliminated and overthrown.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Fascism does not foresee discussions or compromises with the other side. In this same regard, even authoritarian populism does not offer dialogue to the opposition, since its raison d’être is to interpret society as a Manichean conflict between “the pure people versus the corrupt elite,” which does not include dialogue between these “two homogeneous and antagonistic groups.”

      For example, during his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump declared several times that he would have Hillary Clinton jailed and later accusing former President Barack Obama of “some terrible things” that “should never be allowed to happen in our country again.” This is an example of how Trump, an authoritarian populist leader, identifies the political counterpart as an enemy, thereby leaving no space for discussion or disagreements. Scholars such as Matthew Feldman, the director of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, have even recently remarked about the fascist ideological nature of President Trump. Recent events in the United States, such as yesterday’s storming of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, by pro-Trump rioters hoping to overturn the election result, give rise to fears about a neo-fascist wave.

      Ideological Differences

      Although fascism and authoritarian populism share two important ideological features, it might be easy to forget that fascism was, on the one hand, a conservative militia with the goal of subduing communist mass strikes of workers and peasants. On the other hand, it was born as a revolutionary movement. Indeed, the main historical goal of fascism was to overthrow the modern state “with its connotations of industrialism, individualism and bourgeois values.”

      Put simply, the project of fascism was to reject liberal democracy, political pluralism and the market economy. Authoritarian populism’s aim is not to overthrow the democratic regime — instead, it is a part of the democratic system. Even though authoritarian populist leaders can achieve political power in government, they are not immune from the overall democratic process, especially when they lose power. President Trump’s loss in the 2020 US election, despite his claims of voter fraud, demonstrates this fact.

      The year 2020 will surely be remembered for the significant impact that COVID-19 has had on globalized societies. During the first wave of the pandemic, national governments called for nationwide solidarity, and many succeeded in achieving it. At the same time, the past year may have ushered in authoritarian populism as the new zeitgeist of the next decade: The long-term impact of COVID-19 may benefit radical-right parties as the second wave of the pandemic wave has caused an even longer period of economic and social deprivations.

      Authoritarian populism may play a legitimatizing role in democratic regimes, and it is important to note that this ideology has become increasingly mainstreamed and normalized. While authoritarian populists should not be defined as fascists if they do not abolish democratic institutions, this normalization process represents the main threat to liberal societies across the globe in the 21st century.

      In contrast to neo-fascist movements, which are significantly opposed to democracy, the leaders of authoritarian populist movements are allowed to participate in the democratic game, to fuel protests politics among citizens and to capitalize on these in order to achieve power. Donald Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen from him to spur his supporters to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory has left four dead. As the world watched an “insurrection incited by the president” at the heart of the world’s oldest democracy, it is clear that the line between fascism and authoritarian populism is becoming increasingly blurred.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Congress certifies Biden and Harris win hours after deadly attack on Capitol – video

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      With all electoral college votes counted, the US Congress has certified Joe Biden’s win in the election. Biden and Kamala Harris will take over as president and vice-president on 20 January. The confirmation of the vote was delayed when pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol building in the afternoon of 6 January
      Congress certifies Joe Biden as next US president hours after pro-Trump mob storms Capitol – live
      America shaken after pro-Trump mob storms US Capitol building More

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      in US Politics

      'Morale has been gutted': can Biden restore the DoJ's battered reputation?

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      When Bill Barr was invited to speak at the conservative-leaning Hillsdale College, Michigan, in September, he leapt at the chance to respond to criticism that he had politicized the justice department that he led in order to benefit his political master, Donald Trump.The then US attorney general, who stepped down from the post last month , began his speech by arguing that there had to be political input at the top of the Department of Justice (DoJ) in order for it to be publicly accountable. Then he turned to his own staff and, in response to recent complaints that he had improperly overruled the decisions of career prosecutors, gave them a good tongue-lashing.“Name one successful organization where the lowest-level employees’ decisions are deemed sacrosanct,” he said. “Letting the most junior members set the agenda might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it’s no way to run a federal agency.”Comparing hard-working, highly trained public servants to kindergartners might pass as motivational leadership in the Bill Barr school of management. But to many DoJ attorneys, it summed up life in the Trump era.For four years, they have watched the president trash the historic norm of the agency’s independence from White House interference. Trump has referred to the DoJ as “the Trump justice department”, and made repeated vicious attacks on top officials, including the attorney generals whom he himself appointed.Senior officials have resigned in unprecedented numbers after Trump attempted on multiple occasions to use the justice department as his own personal weapon in battles with his political enemies.The morale and the reputation of the department has been gutted because of undue political influenceBarr, who was Trump’s longest-serving attorney general, behaved in similar fashion, leaving the impression with many observers that the department under his leadership was in the pocket of the president. He sought a more lenient sentence for Trump’s buddy Roger Stone, and moved to drop the criminal case against the former national security adviser Michael Flynn.“The morale and the reputation of the department has been gutted because of undue political influence on the decisions of career staff,” Vanita Gupta, a former head of the DoJ’s civil rights division, told the Guardian. “Barr literally compared career prosecutors to toddlers.”Barr’s derisive comment is symbolic of the challenge now facing President-elect Joe Biden as he seeks to restore confidence in this battered and bruised pillar of American democracy.“The department needs to be rebuilt by new leadership committed at every turn to decisions made on the law and on the facts, and not on what the president wants,” said Gupta, who now heads the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights.The first priority for Biden as he seeks to put the DoJ back on the rails will be to show to the American people, in both word and deed, that he intends to respect the independence of the agency with respect to specific criminal cases. Where Trump stated that he had the “absolute right to do what I want with the justice department”, Biden has pledged to take a different path.In a joint CNN interview with the vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, Biden guaranteed that he would avoid telling the justice department how to do its job. “Any decision should be based on the law, should not be influenced by politics,” was how Harris put it.Biden may well find his best intentions sorely tested early on in his presidency. The Trump administration has been busy planting legal landmines in his path.Last month, the US attorney in Delaware – a Trump appointee – opened an investigation into the tax affairs of the president-elect’s son, Hunter Biden. What happens to that inquiry once the new administration takes office may define just how much independence the 46th president is willing to grant his attorney general.In any case, merely abiding by the traditional norm of DoJ prosecutorial independence may be insufficient to repair the damage of the Trump era. Gupta said: “We came dangerously close to our democratic norms being undermined, so it won’t be enough to go back to the old ways – it’s going to be incumbent on the new administration to learn the lessons and act on them.”Bob Bauer, who was White House counsel from 2010 to 2011, also believes that special measures are now needed to shore up the independence of the agency. “You cannot expect everything to return to normal just because Donald Trump has left the scene,” he said.Bauer took a leave of absence as a law professor at New York University to advise Biden during his presidential campaign. Speaking to the Guardian in a personal capacity, he said that he was fearful that norms that just about survived the Trump onslaught could be shattered if a more efficient demagogue entered the White House in future.You cannot expect everything to return to normal just because Donald Trump has left the scene“Somebody could come along and execute on the threat to use the department to pursue political enemies more effectively than Trump did. Rather than wait for a more shrewd, deft, competent Trump to appear, it makes sense to deal with this as an institutional crisis that needs addressing.”In his new book, After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, Bauer and his co-author Jack Goldsmith set out reforms they would like to see put in place to protect the DoJ from any future authoritarian president. They include introducing a new executive rule that would overtly instruct all 115,000 employees of the justice department to “answer in all their actions not to partisan politics but to principles of fairness and justice”.The authors also propose that Congress put in writing that any prospective attorney general must satisfy the Senate confirmation process that they are a “person of integrity”. Changes would be made to the special counsel system to clarify in what circumstances presidents can be investigated, and to shield the investigators from White House efforts to remove them.Any move by the Biden administration to introduce new rules on DoJ independence is likely to face opposition. Michael Mukasey, a former federal judge who served as US attorney general under George W Bush, told the Guardian that in his view any such measures would be unnecessary and unfounded.Mukasey said that criticism that the DoJ had been politicised in its decision making within the Trump administration was inaccurate. “There have been many actions by the justice department that were directly contrary to the president’s wishes.”He pointed to the decision of Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian collusion – an action which mightily displeased the president. He also cited Barr’s lament to ABC News in February that Trump’s tweets were making it “impossible for me to do my job”. “That was hardly consistent with the White House view,” Mukasey said.In Mukasey’s analysis, attempts by the incoming administration to try to change the department either through internal procedures or legislation would be misplaced. “I think we in this country sometimes have a fascination with mechanical solutions to problems – if we tinker with this or that, we can fix things.”Instead, the focus should be on finding the right caliber of personnel to fill top jobs. “The principal lesson of the past four years is that we need good, sound people in all positions from the White House on down. If you have them you are fine, if you don’t have them, then you can have all the mechanical bells and whistles you like” but they won’t make a difference.The Biden administration will also be under pressure to restore the central role played by the DoJ in combatting police brutality and discrimination in the wake of the George Floyd protests. Under Trump, the department’s engagement in policing reform has withered on the vine.On his final day in office as attorney general, Sessions issued a memo that scrapped consent decrees – court-backed agreements that allowed the DoJ to drive through essential reforms within police forces found to be engaging in racial profiling, excessive use of force, or unjustified killing of unarmed black men.Under Barack Obama, 14 consent decrees were imposed on wayward police agencies; under Trump, there have been none.Gupta said that the Biden administration needed to withdraw the Sessions memo on day one. “The gutting of civil rights enforcement across the board has been such a setback for communities around the country, and restoring it has to be a priority,” she said.Similarly, Gupta urged the incoming Biden team to move swiftly to rebuild the civil rights division as a key defender of the right to vote. In the Trump era, that feature of the justice department’s work faded too, with Barr accommodating the president’s baseless claims of massive voter fraud in the election by allowing federal prosecutors to investigate the matter – prompting another high-profile resignation. Barr waited until well after the 3 November election to announce publicly that there was no evidence of widespread voter irregularities.“It’s high time in this country that we stopped politicizing voting rights and treat it like it is – a core value,” Gupta said. More

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      in Elections

      Biden calls on Trump to 'demand an end to this siege' – video

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      President-elect Joe Biden denounces the violence at the Capitol, after a mob of Trump supporters storm the building. ‘This is not dissent, it’s disorder, it’s chaos, it borders on sedition, and it must end now,’ Biden said. He then called on outgoing US president Trump to publicly ‘demand an end to this siege’
       Trump tells mob that stormed Congress ‘we love you’ as Biden condemns ‘siege’ – follow live
      ‘Trump blows up US democracy’: the world watches on in horror More

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      in Elections

      America shaken as violent pro-Trump mob storms Capitol building

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      [embedded content]
      America was shaken on Wednesday as a mob of Donald Trump supporters staged an insurrection at the US Capitol building in Washington, storming the debating chambers and fighting police in clashes that left one person dead.
      The siege was among the worst security breaches in American history and came after Trump had earlier urged a crowd of protesters to march on the Capitol and undo his November election defeat.
      The violence halted the tallying of electoral college votes to affirm Joe Biden’s victory. Mike Pence, the vice-president, and members of Congress were evacuated to undisclosed locations for their own safety.
      Local police said one person had been shot inside the Capitol building. Later, Dustin Sternbeck, a spokesman for the DC police, told the Washington Post that the woman had died. More

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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden to nominate Merrick Garland for next US attorney general

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      Joe Biden will nominate the federal appeals judge Merrick Garland to be the next US attorney general, a transition official for the president-elect said on Wednesday, a choice most Americans know as the supreme court nominee of Barack Obama who was memorably blocked by Republicans.Garland, 68, serves as a judge on the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit. Obama, a Democrat, nominated him to the supreme court in 2016 while Biden was vice-president, but the Republican-controlled US Senate refused to hold hearings on the nomination.Biden, who takes office in two weeks, also intends to nominate justice department veterans Lisa Monaco as deputy attorney general and Kristen Clarke as the assistant attorney general to the civil rights division, the official said.During his election campaign, Biden pledged to take steps to end racial disparities in sentencing by eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, ending the use of the federal death penalty and restoring the justice department’s role of investigating and holding police departments accountable for “systemic misconduct”.While many of these initiatives would require approval from Congress, Garland as attorney general will still have significant power to address these topics through changes in policy, such as by instructing prosecutors not to seek the death penalty or to make charging decisions that will not trigger mandatory minimums.The news came as Democrats looked set to win two US Senate seats up for grabs in Georgia runoff elections held on Tuesday, which would give the party control of both houses of Congress and give Biden more leeway to enact his agenda.Garland, who has served on the federal appeals bench since 1997, is no stranger to the justice department.Before becoming a judge, he worked as a federal prosecutor where he helped secure a conviction against Timothy McVeigh for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. He was also on the team that helped secure a conviction of former District of Columbia mayor Marion Barry for cocaine possession.Garland held other key posts at the justice department, including serving as principal deputy associate attorney general to the deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, starting in 1994.Obama nominated Garland in March 2016 to replace the long-serving conservative justice Antonin Scalia, who died on 13 February 2016. But the then Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, a Republican, refused to consider the nomination on the grounds it should not occur in a presidential election year.That stance, assailed by Democrats at the time, came under further criticism two months before the 2020 presidential election, when McConnell rushed to confirm Donald Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, to fill the vacancy of the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.While serving as attorney general under Trump until last month, William Barr faced criticism for his willingness to intervene in criminal cases in ways that benefited Trump’s political allies, such as Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. More