Populism and democracy incorporated: Natural authoritarianism, banal fascism
Has fascism ever been dead? Or is it the un-dead of the century? The French Communist Party lost its popular support after 1978. This was due to a large extent to technological developments – deindustrialization, and came hand in hand with the ascent of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s racist party.
Before 1985 the hitherto unimaginable question was posed: can there be fascism in France? At about the same time the perennial thesis that the impermeability of France to fascism was a fait accompli was put under scrutiny.
Le Pen’s rise caused a debate among historians because the theses advocated outright were similar to fascism’s claims put forward half a century ago. The new right went beyond everyday fascism and banal nationalism.
The French neo-fascism took over from where José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle had left –the first two executed because of treason, the other committed suicide before being arrested after the downfall of the Nazi regime.
In a document published in 1970 Rivera and Brasillach were sanctified as heroes who had opposed the decadence of bourgeois liberalism and democracy. The 1970 work was no simple text; it was penned by talented people and used Sorel’s arguments concerning myths. Drieu La Rochelle’s criticism of Marxism ha also found its way into the 1970 manifesto. The manifest of 1970 was addressed to European elites, and characterized itself as a non-political and independent salvation course for entire Europe. There is nothing erratic or random in the new right, right-wing populism, neo-fascism etc. that we witness today. It is a self-conscious effort to recreate a re-engineered olden day ideological current. There is nothing erratic in Islamo-Fascism ether.
At best what we now face is some kind of Democracy Inc. as Sheldon Wolin baptised two decades ago. This can also be renamed populism remade. Populism is a right-wing phenomenon today. Fascism also exists albeit in different forms. Fascism is now a religion-cum-nationalistic myth worshipping phenomenon and crony capitalisms finance it. Nobody cares and nobody can do anything about it.