Ideas - Is Fascism Coming Back?

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

An ideology that emerged with catastrophic consequences 100 years ago, has become a rising political force globally. With the possible re-election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, some observers believe that if he were to win again, a fascist would be inhabiting the most powerful political post in the world. IDEAS examines the ideology of fascism — and why it poses such a danger now. 

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. To save America, get your friends, get your family, get everyone you know and vote. I don't care how, but you have to get out and vote. And again, Christians, get out and vote.

Just this time. I'm Nala Ayed. Welcome to Ideas and to a series we're calling The New World Disorder, Part 2. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? In four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote. Donald Trump speaking in July 2024

at a conservative summit in Florida. This is him again in December while stumping for the Republican nomination. They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done. They're coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. I've said that Trump and the Republicans are fascists and that media should start using the term fascism because Trump and the Republicans represent the kind of qualities of fascism we saw in the 1930s. It is only common sense that when I'm re-elected, we will begin, and we have no choice, the largest deportation operation in American history.

We have a breach of the Capitol! Breach of the Capitol! We have a breach of the Capitol! Breach of the Capitol! In January 2021, Donald Trump urged supporters to pressure officials to reject the results of the election, which he still claims was stolen from him. Trump was the first candidate in pretty much the post-war period that got a lot of enthusiasm from members of the extreme right in the United States, neo-Nazis, self-proclaimed fascists, Ku Klux Klan members. And it's not only in the U.S. where the threat of fascism has re-emerged. January 2023. A mob supporting defeated far-right president Bolsonaro

attacked Brazil's Congress and called for a military coup to rescind the election results. Look at this, cousin! Look how beautiful it is, cousin! Around the world, extremist and authoritarian forces are on the rise, or already in power. Look at Russia under Vladimir Putin. And on the fourth day of anti-war protests, Putin appears to be pulling Russia into a full-blown dictatorship. Or look at Germany, Austria, Hungary, France and Italy, where the current prime minister, Giorgia Maloney,

comes from a neo-fascist background. I am Georgia! I am a woman! I am a mother! I am Italian! I am Christian! You will not take me away! So, is fascism, which appeared dead in 1945, back again? Contributor Bruce Lifsey joins me now to help answer that very question. So Bruce, is fascism like real fascism? Is it really back? Well, that's a very good question. After all, we correctly associate fascism with brutal police states, swastikas, torchlit parades of brown

shirts and black shirts, street violence, concentration camps, bigotry and anti-Semitism, and messianic leaders like Hitler and Mussolini raging away to fervent crowds. And while some of that is happening today, mostly it's not. But as I learned in researching this documentary, even the very people who study fascism can't agree on very much about it. Why is that? Well, for one thing, there's no commonly accepted definition of fascism, or even whether what we're seeing today is fascism, or just merely far-right authoritarianism. But everyone does agree on one thing, where fascism came from, and that's where we'll start.

Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in 1940, speaking responsible for creating fascism as an ideology. The irony there is that it was started by a bunch of heretical Marxists. I'm Professor Matthew Feldman, a specialist on the far right, and in particular far right terrorism. Mussolini himself was very senior in the Italian Socialist Party, had wanted it to take a maximal, that is, revolutionary line. Fascism was very much a response to the social, economic, and political trauma of World War I. In four years of fighting, the First World War had claimed a life every 25 seconds. And when the mincing machine stopped on November 11, 1918... By the end of the war, the far-left Bolsheviks were in power in Russia,

empires had collapsed, and much of Europe lay in ruins with millions of disillusioned, unemployed, and angry soldiers returning home from the trenches. The war had a devastating impact on Italy, millions of disillusioned, unemployed, and angry soldiers returning home from the trenches. The war had a devastating impact on Italy, with over 600,000 dead, leaving the country almost bankrupt with serious food shortages and staggering inflation. So Mussolini comes to power in 1922. What sort of state does he create? What is his ideology fundamentally? What sort of state does he create? What is his ideology fundamentally?

For 20 years, there had been talk of a fusion between nationalism and socialism. The power of nationalism had become very clearly demonstrated force than the kind of abstractions of international brotherhood or trans class solidarity. And it really made a lot of these guys kind of swing around to an ultra-nationalism. And Mousseline was very clear in saying, I sit on the extreme right when he gave his first parliamentary speech in 1929. But what was different about this extreme right is that it wasn't a sort of version of uber-conservatism. It wasn't a reactionary view. It actually took some elements from the left, and Mussolini's first program in 1919 really was talking about a lot of things that labor unions over the 20th century advocated for, a sort of 40-hour working week and days off and an end to the monarchy and so forth. So what we found with

fascism was a mix of nationalism with socialism, literally a socialism within the nation, shorn of its international ideas that was bent on creating in its own lights a new civilization, a new man, on creating in its own lights a new civilization, a new man, a new society even. And with these kind of grandiose ideas, fascism from the start saw itself as a revolution against a sort of materialistic order that was either liberal democracy or the Soviet Union and communism, both of which were seen as materialistic as opposed to fascism's more spiritual approach to politics. Mussolini saw democracy as outdated. His new ideology would create a cult around an omnipotent leader whose mission was to restore national greatness

in the face of quote-unquote threats from within and without. It was also virulently anti-communist and pro-militarist. But it wasn't yet anti-Jewish. I think it's important to say that fascism wasn't anti-Semitic, but it had anti-Semites in it. But fascism as an ideology wasn't more racist than the other ideologies and countries around it until about the mid-1930s. But in, again, the early 20s we're talking, the focus of who the fascists were going after were not the Jewish community. Who was it? That's true.

That was going on to some degree in Germany. It was still a small movement. But the fascists in Italy, like they were everywhere, targeted the left first and foremost. As the Fuhrer's grand tour draws to its end, he stands with the Duce and Italy's king and queen to watch the march past of the fascist army. It's the greatest military parade that Rome has ever seen. And the pomp and circumstance of German and Italian fascism, the swastikas and marches, the uniforms, parades, the black shirts and brown shirts. How important are the aesthetics to fascism? The aesthetics weren't just to mark them out as separate from other parties, but was actually kind of part of the ideology as well. It was

meant to show the ideology in action, this manly, this virile, this regimented group of young men, and it was overwhelmingly men who were on the front lines of these fascist movements. And so fascism in its Italian form was intensely violent, and use of torture, bombings, terroristic type of methods were instrumental in Mussolini's seizing power in 1922. So violence, street violence, is fundamental to these guys. It's fundamental, and it's part of the aesthetic itself. Just as Mussolini was shaping his fascist ideology in Italy, a wannabe Austrian artist and corporal, Adolf Hitler, had been dispatched by the German army to spy on a tiny new party in Munich called the German Workers' Party. The party was made up of mostly former soldiers who were incensed with the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler quickly joined their ranks and eventually became its leader.

I mean, how does the Nazi party, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, how does it differ from the Italian fascists? Two of the things that really, I think, were different in Germany was the strength of anti-Semitism as opposed to in Italy. Similarly, Germany really, along with America and a couple of other countries, led the world in terms of eugenics. And that was something that it, right through World War I, prided itself on as being a kind of a world leader. And I think it's not surprising that two of these elements come to kind of mark

out the differences between German fascism and Italian fascism. And that is a sort of eugenic approach to racism and anti-Semitism that really powered the fanatical view of a national community that was meant to be pure and it was meant to be homogenous. Fascism emerges when capitalism is malfunctioning and traditional political parties can't fix the problems. But while socialism seeks to replace capitalism, fascism does not, which explains, at least partly, why it often garners strong support among the wealthy, business, and conservative classes. That's a very important point, and there is an overlap between conservative anti-communism and ultra-nationalist fascism. But as Germany's economy recovered throughout

the 1920s, the Nazis remained on the fringes. But then, everything changed. The stock market buckled and crashed, and the nation's economy plummeted into the Depression. During the Great Depression, voter support for the Nazi party surged, reaching as high as 37% in 1932. It was the forerunner of depression and crisis. Germany had up to 6 million people unemployed, a third of the country. But this was now twice in seven years that the economy had completely tanked. And so people were looking to those who were not affiliated with the democratic system, feeling that it had failed.

Now, there were two... So they're looking at either the far right or the far left. Exactly right. And both of them increased their vote significantly after 1929. The question is, why was there a fascist revolution in 1933 and not a communist revolution? One answer

is simple. The fascists won the battle of the streets. In German medieval Nuremberg, the marching, seething squash of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Congress comes to an end. The Soviet soldiers will be brought here and we will win again in our own way! Yes! For the business class and conservative elites,

Hitler and the Nazis were the preferred option to communists and social democrats, despite the Nazis' rabid anti-Semitism. Their decision to back the Nazi Party would prove to be the most disastrous in history. So Britain prepares to fight, and never in our history have we been so united in the knowledge that our cause is just. We shall be fighting for something which is vital to our life and to the life of all civilized people. By the time the Second World War ended in 1945, Hitler had killed himself in a Berlin bunker,

while Mussolini had already been executed, strung up upside down in a public square in Milan. The war saw the industrialized slaughter of up to six million Jews through concentration camps and death squads. It was the bloodiest conflict of all time, claiming the lives of at least 60 million civilians and soldiers, with another 25 million wounded. Outside Hitler's air raid shelter at the Chancellery is the spot where the bodies of Hitler and his alleged wife, Eva Braun, were said to have been burned. Is this the end of the Hitler legend? Maybe his ghost will turn up someday and give a repeat performance of those balcony. At the end of World War Two, fascism as a political ideology appears finished and discredited.

Obviously, you know, the catastrophe of the war. What happens to this ideology after the war? So I think especially in 2024, the question sometimes gets asked, is it possible to kill an ideology? Is it possible to kill an idea? Well, 1945 really tested that thesis to death. And it turns out it is impossible to kill an ideology fully and completely. In Europe, the birthplace of fascism, governments took measures after World War II to ensure the material conditions that fostered fascism would not replicate themselves. But starting in the 1980s, globalization and cuts to social programs began to make many people vulnerable, laying the groundwork for far-right movements to reappear. Italians in January this

year marking the murder of three fascist activists in Rome in 1978. This report from the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle is from the spring of 2024. Almost 80 years after the defeat of the Third Reich, there can be few single gestures that send and are designed to send such a chilling warning. Today, most far-right and fascist groups in Europe can't be as overtly anti-Semitic or embrace the pageantry of fascism, or openly call for killing off democracy as they did in the 1920s and 30s. But that hasn't stopped them. I'll just list some of them here.

There's like the Alternative for Germany Party, Jobbik and Fidesz in Hungary, the Forum for Democracy in Holland, the Freedom Party of Austria, Golden Dawn in Greece, the Vlaams Belang Party in Belgium. So my question to you is this, why are these parties doing so well? I think that if we take a sort of step back and look at all of Europe, it's quite clear that across Europe there have been some severe crises over, say, the past 15, 20 years. I'm Catherine Fieske, and I'm a political scientist at the Robert Schuman Center at the European University Institute in Florence. at the European University Institute in Florence. You know, I'm thinking of the euro crisis, the so-called migration crisis in 2015 and 16.

I'm thinking also of some of the major terror attacks. There's been COVID and then now on the edge of Europe, there is war between Russia and Ukraine. I think that for our societies, these have felt like really rather profound dislocations. And I would argue that for most people, they feel that their societies have gone through enormous change, you know, through enormous change, you know, against the backdrop of growing inequality, you know, a sense of less personal and family security. All of this, I think, plays into that sense of national decline that so many of these parties exploit. The far right has also been fanned by deindustrialization and integration of Europe's economies, while wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, poverty and climate catastrophes in Africa have led to waves of refugees and migrants, all of which have strained state resources across

Europe. But there's more to it than that. I've always argued that what we have is really a politics of class, right? So in most European countries, there is real social protection. There is real redistribution, the increases in minimum wage, the redistribution through tax policies really haven't done very much to quell the sense of exclusion that most voters for the far right experience. So my sense is that economics makes matters worse, but economic fixes don't make the resentment go away because it's also a resentment about feeling as though you're a second class citizen, not because of income, but because your aspirations, for example, aren't global. There was an interesting example in the UK in the run up to Brexit. There was a real disparaging of working class culture in the UK through books, TV shows, a relegation of a whole part of the population, not on the basis that they weren't rich enough, but on the basis that they were uncouth. And it's that kind of disdain. It's a sense of inequality of aspirations that I think also very much feeds the far right. France is due to vote in snap elections at the end of the month, and polls show the opposition far right national rally could come out on top.

In the summer of 2024, France held two elections. The national rally, a far right party, won the first election but lost the second. It's led by Marine Le Pen, whose father Jean-Marie founded the party in 1972, back when it was called the National Front, and led it up until 2011. You have observed, like me, that my competitors have put at the center of their campaign the themes of immigration, patriotism, and national identity. I think fascism is an ideology, but it's also is willing to be extremely ruthless with foreign minorities and to stop migration if that's what it takes. But I don't think I see it as wanting to instore an authoritarian regime. I think it wants to instore a xenophobic nationalist regime.

While Hitler and Mussolini's enemies were leftist and Jewish communities, for Le Pen and his daughter, the enemy is primarily immigrants, Arabs and Muslims. For them, you know, the toning down of the anti-Semitism is part of this Islamophobic discourse. And where does the extreme right get most of its support and why is it growing in popularity? This goes back to this idea of, you know, the broadening of the base and the mainstreaming. Initially, the Rassemblement National very much went for sort of middle-class, lower middle-class support, quite bourgeois, liberal professions, mostly people in the south of France where waves of migration had been more pronounced. And they realized relatively quickly that this would never be enough to be politically significant, let alone gain a majority.

majority. So this is when they were very systematic about going for people who were in more socio-economic difficulties. People in northern France, which is a particularly deprived part of France, you know, they targeted voters there, they targeted voters in France's rust belts. In Italy, fascism has been gaining, or maybe regaining, significant ground. Are you a fascist? If you ask me like that, I probably would say yes, but I have to complete the term and say I'm a revolutionary. Competing narratives in the country that created fascism. Was fascism ever truly expunged from Italy the way it was in Germany after the

war? No, I think that Italy had a very different exit from the Second World War. In 1946, Italy called a referendum on a new constitution, a new republic, and everyone was included in this new republic, including the heirs to fascism. So people who had been in power during the fascist years found themselves sitting in the Italian parliament as of 1946. There was almost no hiatus there. We live in a time in which everything we stand for is under attack. Our individual freedom is under attack. That's Giorgia Maloney speaking at a conservative conference in 2022. It's the same all over the world. So-called progressives use the power and the arrogance of their mainstream media

to force their political opponents to change. In September of that year, she became Italy's prime minister after her party, called the Brothers of Italy, won the national election. We on the right know exactly who we are and what we stand for. The Brothers of Italy are the heirs to the National Alliance, which was the post-fascist party. And the National Alliance was the reincarnation of the Italian social movement, which was itself the reincarnation of the fascist party. So Brothers of Italy are sort of version number four of the fascist party. So Brothers of Italy are sort of version number four of the fascist party. And Meloni herself, you describe how in terms of her politics?

Meloni, I would describe as a far-right nationalist, ultra-conservative. You could call her a neo-fascist in the strictest sense of the word because her party is an heir to the fascist party. Today, the black shirt salutes fill various yearly tributes. They say it's historical commemoration. Critics call it glorification of past crimes. So if the boogeyman for the fascists in the 20s was communism, the Bolsheviks, and in the case of Germany, the Jews, today what, it's mostly the immigrant Muslim Arab population. Is that often what's happening? I think that, you know, this became really one of their defining features was the rejection of immigration and specifically Muslim immigration. The other thing they share with fascist parties is the declinism, right? A sort of rampant nostalgia,

the belief that things were better before, right? They believe that there was a golden age. You're listening to Ideas. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, on World Radio Paris, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad.

My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus, and being I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. While fascist movements are emerging across Europe, they're not the only alarming development about the far right. Fascism seems to be taking root in two of the world's nuclear superpowers. But that semblance leads us back to a central question. How do you define fascism? Contributor Bruce Lifsey brings us his documentary called,

define fascism? Contributor Bruce Lifsey brings us his documentary called, Is Fascism Coming Back? He joins me again here in studio. So let me ask you, Bruce, directly, how do you define fascism? Well, the best way to answer that question is to explain that among scholars, they don't really agree on what is fascism. So there's one group of scholars who say agree on what is fascism. So there's one group of scholars who say that unless a nation resembles what Italy and Germany were during the 1920s and 30s, that is not fascism. While other scholars are saying, well, that's a bit too set in concrete. And they have a basically more loosely defined definition. So why does any one definition matter more than any other? Well, I think it matters when determining whether Russia is fascist right now or whether the United States is potentially heading towards fascism.

One of the experts I spoke with is Matthew Feldman, associated with York University in the United Kingdom. He does not believe either country is fascist. Okay, what do we mean by fascism? And does, for example, Donald Trump come into that category? He's on the right. He's a kind of charismatic leader type figure. First of all, these aren't mathematical questions. They don't have a right and a wrong answer. It depends on the evidence that you adduce. I think this is a debate that people need to have. And that debate is happening. To my mind, and many scholars believe Putin's regime is a part of fascism or a version of

fascism. My name is Vladislav Inozemtsev. I'm a Russian scientist, an economist by education, and a political analyst. To my mind, the most important element of fascism was the glory of the glorification of the past, the militarism, which is the dominant ideology, the idea of the dominance of state above the people, which is omnipresent in Russia, the corporate state, which is really in place, the lack of democracy and persecution of political opponents, and, of course, the aggressive state, which is really in place, the lack of democracy and persecution of political opponents, and, of course, the aggressive wars,

like Italy waged in Abyssinia, as the German Reich waged in Europe starting in 1939. So, to my mind, there are more similarities than differences. Vladislav Inozmitsev supports the definitions of fascism posited by the Italian philosopher and writer Umberto Eco, who wrote Eternal Fascism, 14 Ways of Looking at a Black Shirt, and Columbia University historian Robert Paxton, author of The Anatomy of Fascism. Robert Paxton argues that fascism can emerge in situations of political deadlock and polarization, where a charismatic leader takes control of the state through official institutions,

such as the police, and traditional elites, such as the clergy or business magnates. Umberto echoes that fascism features the cult of tradition, the rejection of modernism, labeling disagreement as treason. It also features an appeal to social frustration, contempt for the weak, selective populism, and unapologetic militarism. Inozmetsev argues that the regime of Putin embodies most of the traits outlined by Paxton and Eco. For me, from the very beginning, it was a guy who was absolutely hostile to the democratic change in Russia, which was underway in the 90s. exterminated and now we have a perfect one party rule, maybe not so much similar to Nazi Germany as a German democratic republic. So Putin's idea is fascism, but not Nazism. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Putin was devastated. Its economy collapsed,

mafia, gangsterism and corruption flourished, and state companies were plundered by oligarchs. Then, in the year 2000, Putin was elected. I mean, he sort of stabilizes the oligarchic system. And Russia, up until what, about 10 years ago, was still a pretty free and open society. But you argue there's been a drift towards fascism under Putin. What changed for him? Like, why does he sort of move in a more severe direction? I think that this was his plan from the very beginning, because one of the elements of fascism was the glory of the past, which was present in Putin from the very beginning. He restored the Soviet anthem in his first year in power.

The second point is that Putin started to bring big industries under state control immediately after he took power. So I would say that Putin, from the very beginning, started this corporatization of the state, one-party rule, and persecution of his political opponents. Now, when we talk about fascism, this is an idea that really originates with the Italians, with Mussolini. But it was very clear by the time both Mussolini and Hitler come to power that there are elements to it that scholars can point to. So, you know, there's the obvious militarism, there's the destruction of democracy,

you know, the targeting of enemies within, you know, bigotry, the deployment of secret police, the use of terror, and even wanting to revolutionize society from top to bottom. When we look at Russia under Putin today, has he done all of those things? I would say he did everything except the mass mobilization of society. But yes, we have one party rule. We have no democracy. We have persecution of political opponents. We have a complete merger between the state and business. The KGB now is around 700,000 people strong. There's been international outrage and condemnation at the news that the most prominent opposition leader in Russia, Alexei Navalny,

has died suddenly in prison. The 47-year-old was president... Numerous opposition figures have been imprisoned and even murdered, the most famous being Alexei Navalny. President Biden said tonight that President Putin was responsible for Mr. Navalny's death, and it was yet more proof of his brutality. Alexei Navalny's wife Yulia said... According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 43 journalists and media workers have been killed in Russia since Putin came to power, at least 25 of them in, quote, retaliation for their reporting.

Many of these murders remain unsolved. Since the 2022 election of Ukraine, independent media outlets in Russia have been closed down, while most of what remains have become pro-Putin, pro-war propaganda outlets. Do you believe that Russians think they're living in a fascist state themselves? No. Actually, this is one of the biggest successes of Putin, that his propaganda is really much more sophisticated than that of Dr. Goebbels was, because he really succeeds in picturing, for example, the Ukrainian society as a fascist one,

which it never was. The Ukrainian society is not fascist at all. It started before dawn. Ukraine woke to explosions around the capital, Kiev. It was the same across the country. Above the clouds, a fighter jet soared over our heads. In his worldview, the most important thing is not so much conquest, but subjugation. So for him, it's not about building a former empire on the place where the Soviet Union once was.

It's more about commanding the neighboring states. It's enough for him. After invading Ukraine, Russia's military has adopted scorched earth tactics similar to those of the Nazi army when it invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, destroying homes and infrastructure, committing atrocities against civilians, as well as kidnapping and deporting more than 20,000 Ukrainian children into Russia. So the invasion was, I think, a continuation of his obsessive idea of a kind of bigger Russia. It's not about, you know, a kind of global domination like the idea of Hitler. He doesn't want... Or the Third Reich.

Yeah, the Third Reich. He doesn't want to conquer, you know, Africa or Asia. He just wanted to get back the state which he believes is Russia. How would you envision the future of Putin and his form of fascism? and his form of fascism? I would say that no fascist regime except, actually no fascist regime was able to survive its founder. The same applies to Mussolini, the same applies to Hitler,

even to Franco. So to my mind, Putin's system cannot survive his death. So as long as he lives, his regime will remain as it is today? Yes. Why do I care what's going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? And I'm serious. And why shouldn't I root for Russia? Putin's move towards a form of fascism has made him a hero among far-right parties and authoritarian regimes around the world, including supporters of the Republican

Party, like former top-rated Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Wait a second, why is it disloyal to side with Russia, but loyal to side with Ukraine? Tucker Carlson became something of a media sensation in Russia after two things, his fawning interview with Vladimir Putin and oddly, his trip to a Moscow grocery store. If you take people's standard of living and you tank it, and that's what our leaders have done to us, and coming to a Russian grocery store, the heart of evil, and seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders. That's how I feel anyway, radicalized. The fact that a fascist leader in Russia would appeal deeply to the American hard right is no surprise to those who've been watching the transformation of the Republican Party over the

past decades. Our right-wing populist movement is in some ways the most radical. I mean, we've seen an attempt to overthrow an election with, you know, mobs in the streets, which is precisely the kind of thing you would associate with historical fascism. I'm John Ganz. I'm a writer. I'm the author of the recently released book, When the Clock Broke, Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. And I write a newsletter called Unpopular Front. And what event or incident sparked your interest in whether fascism is taking root in America? I think that what made me initially concerned was the type of rhetoric that Trump started to employ in 2015, 2016, and particularly who was excited by it.

and particularly who was excited by it. Trump was the first candidate in pretty much the post-war period that got a lot of enthusiasm from members of the extreme right in the United States, neo-Nazis, self-proclaimed fascists, Ku Klux Klan members. David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Klan, won a seat in the Louisiana legislature. In his book, When the Clock Broke, John Gans examines why far-right ideas began to take root in the Republican Party. He traces the change back to at least the late 1980s. David Duke has been trying to shed his image as a cross-burning Klansman for almost 10 years now. He's still having difficulty doing that

with a lot of people. David Duke was a former wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and a neo-Nazi, and he runs for governor in Louisiana. He loses, but he gives the Republican establishment fits. He wins his primaries. They can't stop him. They throw everything they have at him. They're unable to get rid of him. I can guarantee you that the Republican vote will not be split. I'll receive 85% of the Republican vote in this election, plus a great percentage of the Democratic vote. He goes on to lose his campaign for government.

He loses quite a big landslide. But he wins 55% of the white vote. And then there is a number of people who are observing this with great interest. And one of these people is Pat Buchanan. Buchanan is a racist! Buchanan is a racist! Calm down, everyone. Nothing. Nothing's going to stop us from going forward to a new era of greatness in a new century about to begin. And we can go to that era

of greatness if we go forward together. Happy Canaan, you know, is a longtime Republican, a longtime member of the conservative movement. He works in two White Houses. He works in the Nixon White House. He works in the Reagan White House. But they aren't right-wing enough for him. He says in the late 80s that the biggest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan, and he seeks to occupy it. And when David Duke's race kind of outperforms the expectation of what you might think a neo-Nazi would do, he thinks, all right, maybe it's time for me to give this a shot. I mean, look, the interesting thing about that race was that they spent an enormous amount of time, Bush spent an enormous amount of time trying to smear, it wasn't really smear, to label Buchanan as an anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer. And these are serious charges, the worst politics of the 20th century. And then when it's convention time and time for the party to reunite, they invite him to give a speech. So what does that say in essence? This is part of our coalition.

to give a speech. So what does that say, in essence? This is part of our coalition. This is an indispensable figure for us. And we can't really afford to tell them to get lost. So it's gone from the fringes of the Republican Party now to the core of the Republican Party. Precisely. John Gantz also identifies another figure who had an outsized impact on the Republican Party, someone you've likely never heard of, Murray Rothbard. Murray Rothbard is a great American eccentric. He was a libertarian economist, an inveterate writer of political pamphlets, someone who kind of labored on the fringes of American politics for a long time. He was one of the founding members of the Cato Institute with the Kochs.

He gets money from Charles Koch, the Kansas-based oil tycoon. Yeah, that's right. And Rothbard, he studied the rise of fascism of the Nazis, and what did he learn from them? He writes a memo about how to take power as a mass movement and basically he talks about a lot i mean he talks about mussolini and he talks about hitler and he says the spectacles the use of myth of mussolini um are worth looking into and hitler's adoption of a clear friend enemy distinction um of having a clear villain at all times

and banging on that is an important political tactic. So he looked at those movements with a lot of interest. Although Murray Rothbard would die in obscurity in 1995, one of his essays would live on. Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us! Its title was Right-Wing Populism. Blood and soil! Blood and soil! Blood and soil!

It was around the time of Charlottesville, and there was lots of interviews in newspapers and magazines with neo-Nazis and alt-right figures. And just about to a man, they all said what started them down their road to the far right was reading Murray Rothbard. And what connects Rothbard, who died in, was it 1995, with Donald Trump many years later? Basically, if you read Murray Rothbard's essay, Right-Wing Populism, the figure that he describes as a kind of loudmouth demagogue who's able to reach directly to the masses, as he puts it, reach directly to the masses, as he puts it, and short circuit the media elites, who is entertaining, who rips the mask of hypocrisy off of the ruling system, and is able to use television to great effect.

You know, what he's conjuring up in this essay, essentially, is this before image of Trump. I've just received a call from Secretary Clinton. The 2016 election of Donald Trump may have shocked many at the time. She congratulated us, it's about us, on our victory. But in fact, all of the elements that helped foster far-right authoritarianism and fascism were already implanted within the American body politic. I think people's expectations are being dashed in the United States of what they expected they would have and where they would be,

given how hard they're working. And inequality is at record levels. And inequality is at record levels. I'm Robert Reich, and I was Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration. I'm now Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Corruption, which follows inequality in the wake of inequality, because when you have wealthy people, they tend to use their wealth to undermine democratic institutions and democracy. That also contributes to the sense among many people in the working class that the game is rigged against them. Immigration and the tidal wave of immigration that people perceive, that also feeds people's sense of fear, their fear of the unknown, their fear that

their country is no longer theirs, all of it contributing to the potential for fascism. And just as in the 1920s and 30s, centrist political parties today seem unable to fix the problems people need fixed. But the economic insecurity, you know, happened because of policies that most mainstream political parties around the world embraced, which was globalization, free trade, you know, neoliberalism. And this led to deindustrialization, good jobs being sent offshore, the decline of unions and labor movements. So is a lot of what we're seeing today really the fault of the political elites? A lot of what we're seeing today is indeed the fault of the political elites who embraced

neoliberalism. I mean, even the Democratic Party, and I worked for a Democratic president. I'm very proud of the work we did. I'm very proud of what we achieved in the Clinton administration. Nevertheless, we were in the shadow of Ronald Reagan's and Margaret Thatcher's neoliberal revolution, which meant globalization. Tide of goods coming in from China and from elsewhere in Latin America because of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Act, and also Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization. And then you also had even democratic administrations in the United States turn their backs on organized labor. The strength of unions is very, very low. In the 1950s, for example, 35% of American workers in the private sector were unionized. Today, it's down to 6%. So American workers have very, very little power. At what point would you say that the lurch towards right-wing extremism started to accelerate in the United States? The lurch toward right-wing extremism began to

accelerate in the United States after the financial crisis of 2008, when the banks were bailed out and no major banker went to jail, even though the financial crisis was brought on by Wall Street. But millions of Americans lost their homes, their jobs, their savings, and concluded that the system was rigged against them. But we have horrible deals. Our jobs are being taken out by NAFTA, one of the worst deals ever. Our jobs are being sucked out of our economy. You go to Pennsylvania, you go to Ohio, you go to Florida, you go to any of them. You go upstate New York. Our jobs have fled to Mexico and other places.

We're bringing our jobs back. In 2016, Donald Trump did the same thing that fascists of the past did. He took a left-wing critique of capitalism, that it was making the lives of working people untenable, and tapped into widespread anger and despair of those who'd been left behind by free trade and de-industrialization. It was a seismic shift for the Republican Party, which had up until then been in favor of globalized trade. I am going to renegotiate NAFTA. And if I can't make a great deal,

then we're going to terminate NAFTA and we're going to create new deals. We're going to have trade. We're going to make a great trade deal. So the transformation of the Republican Party from that of Dwight Eisenhower to what we see today didn't happen overnight. What happened? The Republican Party was taken over. It was taken over because there was a void in American politics, the suspicion, fear of elites who are conspiring with those outside the country to, at least according to the mythology, entrench their power. Now, the Democrats are not blameless. In fact, the Democrats created this void. The Democrats had been, under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democrats are not blameless. In fact, the Democrats created this void. The Democrats had been, under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the party of the working class. But the Democrats had been drinking the same financial trough as the Republicans when it came to funding their

campaigns. And the Democrats, instead of becoming the party or staying the party of the working class, started to focus on the suburban swing voters. The net result of all of this is that the Democrats essentially gave up the working class. This created a populist void. I'm not putting anybody on a moral plane. What I'm saying is this. You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and it was horrible

and it was a horrible thing to watch. The use of street violence was central to Hitler's ascendancy in Germany. And when Donald Trump was president, he refused to distance himself from the violence committed by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. Kill the person. Heather Heyer, don't. Excuse me. We had some very bad people in that group.

But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group. Excuse me. Excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. I've said that Trump and the Republicans are fascists. And the media should start using the term fascism because Trump and the Republicans represent the kind of qualities of fascism we saw in the 1930s. cultural elites, a nationalism based on superior race and historic bloodlines, extolling brute strength and heroic warriors, and a disdain of women and of LGBTQ plus people. These are all of the features of fascism we began to see in the early 1930s coming to tragic fruition in the middle 1930s in Germany

and elsewhere. And we're beginning to see the same thing in the United States. Adolf Hitler curried favor with big business and took their cash. When Trump came to power, he gave the wealthiest class a large tax break, deregulated industry, and cut beneficial programs for workers, while he didn't scrap or materially change existing trade deals. And he garnered support from a long list of billionaires, like Woody Johnson of the Johnson & Johnson fortune, the Koch brothers, and their political network.

So, who do you want representing America? And of course, Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world. Absolutely. I think this election, I think it's the most important election of our lifetime. Many of the other billionaires who are now investing, and they call it investing, they use the term investing in Trump. They want Trump because they want an extension of the Trump tax cuts that he gave them. He's promised big oil. Trump has promised big oil that if they will contribute a billion dollars to his campaign, he will decimate environmental regulations that have kept big oil contained and made fossil fuels less profitable than fossil fuels otherwise would

be. These very rich, extraordinarily wealthy members of American society are willing, they seem to be willing, that is, to sacrifice democracy, the rule of law, and human rights for the sake of making a lot of money. Well, again, you can look to the 1930s and see some very, very striking and disturbing parallels between what the industrialists in Germany did and what's happening here. Do you think we're facing a fascist future? No, neither is fascism inevitable, nor is any country particularly immune from fascism because of its essence or national character. Professor Matthew Feldman. I think that right now we're in the period between the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler. It's

by no means certain that these things can be headed off. There were a number of things the German state could have done between 1929 and 1933 that could have still kept Hitler out of power. And as a historian of fascism, are you kept awake at night about what's happening now? No, I still believe the barbarians are not at the gate. I still believe in the strength of liberal democracy and of people of goodwill to stand up for it. I absolutely believe that if we give in to despair, we've already lost. So no, I still believe that fighting for liberal democracy matters, that people standing up and being counted matters, and that people understanding the history of fascism so as not to fall into the same traps as we saw 100 years ago, also matters.

You were listening to Ideas and to a documentary by contributor Bruce Lifsey, Is Fascism Coming Back? It's part of our series, The New World Disorder, Part 2. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval, with help from Marco Luciano. Nikola Lukšić is the senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.