Andrew Wollard
Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read

You’ve made salient points here. Economic realities. Economic inequalities. People awakening to the fact that they aren’t going to be captains of industry, but they will be cleaning the toilets and floors of these captains, should they be lucky and pass the HR check.

That said, you missed a vital component. Namely, as in Spain and Italy, and to a lesser extent other European countries in the 1930s, when the left eats itself in foolish sectarian battles and enervates its strength, ability to adapt, and to provide targeted legislative responses to real problems. Perhaps that is Fukuyama’s unintended contribution here: instead of the identity politics he asserts causes a right-wing backlash, the so-called “identity politics” causes strife, tension, anxieties, and conflict within the left broadly, and thus weakens its ability to effectively respond to emerging fascism. So, Fukuyama is both wrong and right.

That doesn’t mean that the left, or liberals, or identity politics, if you decide to use such nomenclature, should shoulder any responsibility for fascism. Fascists, and white supremacists, are responsible for the social construction of hatred and racism, and they are to blame for engendering distrust for postwar political policies and institutions.

Instead of taking a page out of the populists book from the 1890s ( populism had in its platform, then, a desire for regulation of railroad rates, direct election of senators, primaries, inflationary measures and expanded access to cash/credit, the initiative, the recall, the referendum, graduated income tax, a move away from fee-based government and services, suspicion of centralized power and yet insistence of having some access to that power, repudiation of reptilian worship of the gold standard…), today’s fascists and their alt-right cousins have kept the suspicion of some power and some regulatory agencies ( paradoxically, agencies like the EPA or the Consumer Credit Protection Bureau, which could be of most help to those who are not captains of industry…), while desiring Congress to “regulate” Google and Facebook. They worship, in a bizarre contradiction, both small business and corporations while railing against organized labor ( ignoring even orthodox economic theories like marginal productivity of value, as if somehow getting society to subsidize “bad” economic actors who do not pay what workers actually contribute to the business makes up for the short-change…at the same time also railing against that self-same subsidization, namely food stamps or Earned Income Tax credits. Make sense? Not to me…).

In fact, today, because of the elastic nature of American populism, it is often conflated with authoritarian and right-wing politics. The Economist, surely knowing better, recently published an article linking populism broadly with strains of anti-vaccination sentiment. However, it is worth noting, according to historians like Lawrence Goodwyn and Charles Postel, that populism, at least in the United States historically, was about some of the above mentioned goals and about resistance to ossified power and political corruption. “ Isolated incidents” of experts making iterations and reiterations did not elicite opposition from populists. Resistance is different from either seizing power or acquiescing to power. Fascism, even if we do not hew too close to John Locke’s definitions of liberty, is about neither liberty nor resistance, but it is about the structures of power.

Sadly, America doesn’t even need to invoke the bloody fables of fascism and world war in the 1930s and 1940s to see a blood-stained and guilty face staring back at itself from the mirror of History. Think of slavery and our original sins. Think of the extermination of many tribes and King Phillip’s War ( 1676 ), and the wars fought in Florida, Georgia, and the plains. Think of the atrocities soldiers committed during the so-called Mexican American War ( 1846–1848…the spoils of war, to paraphrase Emerson, poisoned America…) because they were promised riches and land and experienced chauvinism, death, and autocratic officers, so paid themselves, according to historian Paul Foos, in the wages of atrocities committed against Mexicans. Think of the laborers in New York or Pittsburgh or on the railroads during strikes in the 1880s and 1890s who were beaten and arrested, even shot and killed, for clamoring for fair pay and stable work hours.Suddenly, if we are honest, the postwar policies and liberal institutions they promulgated and protected don’t seem so stable or deep with historical continuities, even in our own relatively new country.

    Andrew Wollard

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    Former PhD student ( History, without degree ) and MFA graduate. Disciple of historians and writers everywhere.