Modern Fascism, the Collapse of Truth, and Why Americans Need “Small Courage” with Sharon McMahon

Well, I was there doing my... I'm a historian of the place and I write about the place, and if you're going to be a historian of a place, you've got to go there, and if you want to write about it, you should go there too. I was running some conferences and I was seeing friends and I was visiting the front. And I guess there's much to talk about, but the main thing that I would say is that I was reminded, as always, that there are people taking bigger risks than you so that you can be back home taking your smaller risks. And for almost everybody, that's always true all of the time, and it helps to acknowledge that because I think it helps us to take the smaller risks we need to take when we realize that there are other people taking bigger risks.

Well, I mean, if we look at the whole world, one thing that I would just kind of stress before I get to us is that if the Ukrainians hadn't resisted, you and I would be having a very different conversation right now, and the things that we are going to be talking about about our country would be much worse than they are. And so, if you can continue to be grateful to other people, I think then it's easier to recognize the difference that you can make yourself. But as far as the United States, well, you know, the people who are more courageous than citizens would be the non-citizens who are taking risks. And the people who'd be more courageous than the white people would be the black people who are taking risks. And in general, though, anybody who is stepping out and willing to say, 'Hmm, we're in a very historically unusual situation where, however you want to look at it, our democracy, our republic, our country are at risk of ceasing to exist.' All of those people are taking some kind of risk, and all of those people are clearing the way for the rest of us.

Yeah, that's a great way of putting the question because I think it's fair for everyone to make up their own mind whether people are fascists or whether a movement is fascist or whether that's the direction we're heading. So, for me, the first point would be: a fascist is someone who believes in will or emotion over reason. So, a fascist will be somebody who doesn't see what's wrong in telling big lies because life is all about how we feel, it's all about our instincts, it's all about our emotions, rather than about our values, our interests, or what we care about for the future. A fascist, second of all, is somebody who explains the world in terms of conspiracies, invisible things, half-invisible things, rather than in terms of what we can understand with the evidence, and what we can understand with our common sense or our sight or our journalism. A fascist will be somebody who doesn't talk much about the state or the republic or the government, but will talk instead about civilization and nation and race. A fascist will tend to be very concerned about things like birth rates and purity and so on, and will tend to be extremely concerned in a negative way about immigration and the mixing of peoples and things like that. So, those are, I mean, I think pretty generally acceptable criteria. Oh, one more would be: the fascist tends to romanticize a past that never really happened. So, with those criteria, one can kind of make one's own judgments.

I tend to think that, you know, the Trump people are trying hard to be fascist, but they don't quite have what it takes. That's sort of my judgment. Like, the fascists actually believed in struggle. Like, their whole view of the world was that everything was about struggle. And this is a terrible worldview. I'm not trying to praise it. But the Trump people kind of want everybody else to do the struggling for them, right? So, like, they'll fight wars, but they're not going to go to the front themselves, right? They'll talk about everyone's an enemy, but then they want us to fight among ourselves, right? They want to delegate all the difficult work of the racial struggle to other people. They lack attention span. And the main thing which is different between them and the fascists of 100 years ago, though, was the money. So, whatever you want to say about Mussolini or Antonescu or Hitler or any of the historical fascists, they were not in general in it for the money. Whereas, it's pretty obvious that Trump and the people around him are in it for the money, and that the fascism is a tool, you know, to divide, to divert, to direct people towards a false us and them. Whereas, the real us and them is that they have their hands in our wallets. Like, that's the real us and them.

I mean, I will admit that I'm still thinking about it, right? Like, I'm still thinking about it. I think the intermediate, though, between us and the 1930s is Putin's Russia, where you do have someone with a huge amount of money, that is Putin himself, who does govern by way of what are pretty clearly fascist ideas, including the fascist idea of a total war, which they're now waging against Ukraine. And I think without that intermediary from, let's say, circa 2010, you don't get from the 1930s to the 2020s. I think it's not an accident that Trump admires Putin so much, that he follows Putin's lead on pretty much everything. I think Putin is a kind of example for Trump. Not an example he can actually attain, but I think he's an example for Trump. And I think the Russians were pioneering in bringing together huge amounts of money concentrated in the hands of one person with fascist ideas. And the other thing which is different between now and the 1930s, which again the Russians pioneered, is the existence of social media. So, fascists back then did very well with a radio and with newspapers. They were very excited about television. But they couldn't have dreamed of the kind of technology that we now have, right? The kind of attention-diverting or attention-attracting technology of social media and AI, which today's fascists are very good at using. And so that's another difference. I mean, I would tend to say it's something like fascism is evolving, you know, and that we ourselves have to adapt as we try to understand what it is.

See, what this is an example of is a question that's so much better than the answer is going to be, but I'm going to try. So, yes, it is an example because a post-truth society ultimately is not about the technology that surrounds us. It's about the conviction or lack of conviction within us. And so, insofar as we don't believe in truth, then we're a post-truth society. So, insofar as we take that view, exactly the one that you cite, that it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, it makes me feel good, it affirms the way that I want to see the world, if we do that, then we're in a post-truth society. And of course, this is an area where the left has to bear some responsibility because the notion that everything is just about how we feel, or that the personal is just... well, the political is just the personal, those kinds of ideas have pushed us in the direction of accepting that there's no difference between subjectivity and objectivity, right? It's just how we feel. But the problem is that if politics is just about how we feel, then we all become vulnerable to those who can make us feel certain ways. And the people who can make us feel certain ways are the people who own social media platforms, who own AI companies, or who happen to be president of the United States. So, by trying to privilege the individual, you end up creating a situation in which you can have pretty much the worst form of mass politics. So, a post-truth society is one in which we don't acknowledge that truth is real. If you don't acknowledge that truth is real, and of course, what truth is, it's not an easy question, but what is extremely easy is just to say, 'Oh, there's no such thing.' Right? And once you make that move, then you won't put any resources, either personal or institutional, into figuring out what is, in fact, true. Which means you no longer care about journalism, you no longer care about science, you no longer care about educating your children, and then all those institutions start to float away, and then you have a second-order phenomenon, right? Which isn't just we're throwing up our hands and saying, 'What is truth?' We create the next generation of people who have no idea that there ever was such a notion. And then this does go back to fascism, right? And to your very good question about what fascism could look like today. Fascists are people who thought that we should be completely free of the notion of what's objectively true, and we should just follow our own emotions. They thought that would lead us into racial conflict, which they wanted us to have. They wanted us to have racial conflict forever. This kind of fascist is similar to that in that, by way of technology and by way of disparaging the notion of truth, they turn us into a kind of blank slate where it's just all about the way we feel. And then, not surprisingly, they do try to lead us into those familiar conflicts. Like, it's all about immigration, it's all about demography, it's all about people whose skin color is different than yours, and so on.

Okay. I'm going to take a step back a little bit and try to get some distance on that question. I wrote a big book called Blood which was largely about the encounter of fascism and communism, and as you know very well, there are places where they overlap and then there are places where they're very different. So, fascism and communism were historically similar in that the fascists recognized that a Leninist-style party-state was a way towards power. And so their notion was, yes, a one-party system from the far right rather than the far left. And the fascists also took from Lenin, or let's say it was consistent with Lenin, the idea of voluntarism, that politics is all about an effort of will at the right historical conjuncture. You just push everything aside, you do the thing that you think is absolutely necessary. Now, they were opposed to each other in the sense that fascists said everything was about a racial struggle and the communists said everything was about a class struggle. And at times they were opposed to each other on the battlefield too, like after 1941. But it's also important to remember that between 1939 and 1941, Nazis and communists, that is to say Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, began the Second World War as allies. So, it's a historical relationship in which it's hard to imagine the one without the other, and there are some commonalities even as there are also some differences.

In the US today, I would start from a slightly different place because I think there's a pretty banal place where your question may actually begin, and that's with polling. The Republicans' polling is telling them that socialism is popular, and so therefore you might have noticed that until a couple of months ago it was all 'socialism and communism are bad.' And now they've been pushed into this corner of saying communism is bad, right? And they've dropped socialism because their own polling is telling them... I mean, this is a fact and I'm drawing a causal inference, right? Which I can't be entirely sure about, but I'm pretty sure it's right. They no longer go after socialism because basically they realized that Mom's policies and like Bernie Sanders' policies are popular among their own electorate, right? So, to be safe, they pivoted all the way to communism.

Now, there's a problem with this, which is that what is bad about communism? What's bad about communism is that it's anti-democratic, okay? Trump's that. What's bad about communism is that it's about having power in the hands of a small clique of people who think they understand the economy and technology. Oh, well, that's Musk and that's Peter Thiel and that's that group of people. What's bad about communism is that it's people who are sure about the way the future is going to go and they're going to drag the rest of us in that direction. Hmm, well, that also sounds like the technocrats, the David Sacks, the people who are around Trump right now telling us that artificial intelligence is going to save the day and it's all going to be terrific. So, like all the things... Oh, and what's bad about communism? Well, it interferes in the free market. Okay, well, we now have a president who's imposed historical-level tariffs and also thinks that all the big companies should be partly owned by the US government, right? So, if you go down the list of the things that are bad about communism, these tend to be policies that Trump has actually supported. And but even more dramatically, like where is communism in the actual real world? Well, the Communist Party of China, right? Which is a horrible institution, but which is greeted with fanfare in the White House of the United States with the president essentially humiliating himself and fawning all over the head of the most important Communist Party. And who else does Trump like? Oh, he likes the North Korean dictatorship, which is the second most important Communist institution in the world. So, we have a foreign policy which is hardly anti-communist and we have a foreign policy which is basically pro-communist. And then they're asking us to accept that it's the Democrats who somehow are going to lead us towards communism. So, that's where I would go. I don't really think any of this has to do with like the grand historical conflict of fascism and communism. I think that they're just desperate for a word to create an us and them and they think communism is that word. But the reason why it shouldn't work is that the head of their party, Mr. Trump, is basically in his domestic and foreign policy bizarrely pro-communist.