Orwell: “Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.”
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world”
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
A spectre is haunting the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) of the western world, together with their captive media, and their political expression, The Party. There have been similar spectres in the past—notably of Revolution, Communism and War—and all sorts of agents proposed as manufacturers or enablers of these spectres, ranging from the Jesuits to the Illuminati, the Freemasons to the Jews, the KGB to the CIA. At the time of writing, amongst widespread political violence in Europe and with more of it anticipated, the usual pundits are out in force, blaming the usual suspects.
Yet the spectre I have in mind here goes back a century, and ways of visualising it, and fearing it, have hardly progressed in all that time. Fascism—since that is what we are talking about here—has squatted like an ugly spider in the the middle of the political web since that time. The word, as George Orwell put it “has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” It is one of a series of concepts with names but no content, a signifier with no signified. In this, as Orwell observed, it partly resembles words such as “democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice,” which “have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.” All that was possible then—and it’s worse now—is an empty choice between empty words, to which we attach meanings that we find episodically comforting.
Orwell was right, though, to stress that whereas “Fascism”, even when he was writing, was a semantic void, an empty chamber pot waiting to be filled by anyone with the power to do so, it was an extreme case. By contrast, “democracy,” “freedom,”etc, though themselves largely empty of agreed meaning, attract defenders, commentators and analysts, seeking to impose their own meanings on the word. So you will have heard of ”bourgeois democracy,””parliamentary democracy,” “direct democracy,” “guided democracy,” “peoples’ democracy” and many more. People argue violently about what “democracy” means, but the very ferocity of the struggle to control the meaning tells us that something at issue here is important, and worth the effort. In turn, this is because it is very hard for anyone to be against democracy in its literal sense of “rule by the people” or at least “rule by the citizens,” so it is correspondingly important to be able to dictate what an allowable definition is, and so and exclude the others. By contrast, Fascism is different, if not unique, in that genuine, as opposed to polemical, debates about the nature of Fascism are usually left to specialists: all you need to know is the Fascism is a Really Bad Thing, even if you are not quite sure why. Thus, “saving democracy from Fascism” is a deeply encoded slogan.
The very emptiness of the term has meant that from the beginning, “Fascism” has been weaponised, to justify one’s own politics, to condemn those of another person, but most of all to purge and discipline those on our own side who otherwise may escape control. Since the term has effectively no meaning outside an immediate polemical context, an accusation of being a “Fascist” is effectively impossible to refute. Orwell himself was famously accused of being a “Fascist” for criticising the mass killings and purges of Stalin. Indeed, and partly for internal Moscow political reasons, non-Communist political parties, even those of Marxist inspiration, were routinely smeared as “Fascist.” The great Socialist parties of Europe were dismissed as “Social Fascists,” objective allies of the capitalist system, and later of the Nazis. This policy was put into screaming reverse after 1933, but by then it was a bit late. Even today, some historians are still influenced by this line of thinking which was, indeed, obligatory under pain of excommunication during Stalin’s time, and even afterwards. Much ink was wasted arguing that the identification of the Socialists rather than the Nazis as the main enemy in the early 1930s was not the disastrous strategic error some claimed. And conversely, the idea of some kind of natural affinity between the capitalist system and “fascist forces”—another Stalinist cliché that Gramsci warned his fellow Marxists against—is still more influential than it has any right to be, unsupported as it is by evidence of the time.
So it’s easy to see why “Fascist” is such a popular term of abuse, and for that matter the go-to insult for a political party or a politician you don’t like. It is effectively meaningless and inherently bad. No-one will defend it, everyone will argue that they are not a Fascist but perhaps you are and, most of all, no-one will ever ask the question ”what do you mean by that?” (I can’t remember how many articles called something like “Is Trump a Fascist” I’ve glanced at that and it showed zero knowledge or even interest in what the word might mean A few parallels with unpleasant individuals of the past and the game is over.) Likewise, all the shock-horror articles asking “are we moving towards a fascist state?” are similarly uninterested in what fascist states were actually like, but only in condemning individuals and movements of today by tendentious association.
This is important, because I am increasingly convinced that the Right, as I will define it, will come to power in a number of western states, not necessarily through the ballot-box alone, and not the pro-Brussels neoliberal Right either. This process will almost certainly include violence—a continuation of what we have already seen, but I don’t think the Right will face an organised challenge from the Left, which will limit itself to the name-calling and symbolic handwaving which will make its practitioners feel heroic. But it will not be, and for reasons I will explain cannot be, anything resembling historical “Fascism,” and the sooner people shut up with this stupid discourse the better for all.
As it happens, while I was putting off starting to write this paragraph I was watching live TV coverage of the beginning of the demonstrations in Paris and Marseille, and also in Orléans on 24 October, where the Rassemblement national was holding its annual conference. Most of the placards were home-made, some highly specific ‘“the RN should not be allowed to hold conferences” some referred to the demands of the students, many complained about economic issues, and still others railed vaguely against a Fascism either already here or soon to appear.
Yet like many such demonstrations I’ve watched over the years, it had the comfortable, auto-congratulatory, monolithic and superficial character of a demonstration against Sin organised by the Catholic Church. The participants who were interviewed had generally sensible things to say, and their grievances were often well expressed. But there was little sense of how those grievances could be addressed, let alone combined, even less resolved: perhaps, as I suggested last week, we’ve got past that stage, and all that remains is anger.
It’s become a cliché over the last few weeks that the violence and disorder in the streets will strengthen the political Right in France, and this is very probably true. Marine Le Pen is continuing the good political tactic of never interrupting your enemies when they are making a mistake, and continuing to sound states-person-like, while keeping her more excitable lieutenants under control. Whether this, will bring her to the Elysée in 2027—and by what mechanism— is impossible to say, and much depends on who her opponent is in the second round, if there is one. But of course there are other right-wing parties, and elections are not the only way in which “the Right” (or theoretically the”Left”) can come to power. To understand what other possibilities (and dangers) there are, and what options are probably excluded, we need to do something few people bother with, which is to touch on the modern heritage of the French Right, and some of the forms it has taken. Fortunately, a few brave explorers have been that way already.
The basic distinction between Left and Right a century ago was that the antediluvian Right, which dominated at the time, looked back nostalgically to rule by the Monarchy, and influence for the Church. Its main goal was to overthrow the secular Republic of 1870, after which a strong and disciplined conservative state could be built. Even if the literal return of a King was improbable (there were two contenders anyway) the longing for a strong hand on the tiller brought the Army, the Church and much of the ruling class behind Pétain, and against De Gaulle in 1940. That archaic Right largely disappeared after 1945, and the (very small) extreme nationalist Right with it, but the tendency lives on in the old-money families of Versailles that have supplied Generals, bankers, diplomats and Prefects to the Republic for generations. They are not numerous but they could be influential at a certain point.
On the other side, one of the most fundamental and least understood distinctions in politics is between parties of the Left, and Socialist parties. Those who seized control of the French Revolution after the first few years were of the Left (since they supported the Republic and favoured significant political change) but they were not Socialists. They were, for want of a better word Liberals, in the sense that their organisation (and their electorate) came very much from the new commercial and professional middle classes whose power had been released by the Revolution. Their descendants formed the Radical Party, not the Socialist Party. They were lawyers and dentists, as the Traditional Right might be bankers, and the Socialists were frequently teachers. No doubt this is at the origin of the famous remark made by President Chirac to Mr Blair: “I am a man of the Left, you see, whereas you are a man of the Right.” But if this tendency thought of itself as of the Left, that didn’t stop it collaborating with the traditional Right on occasions to stop Socialist initiatives: most famously in the violent and bloody destruction of the Paris Commune in 1871.
Now so far I have said little about Fascism, which wasn’t influential in France, but is nonetheless the elected subject for this week. So, then. The oddest thing about Fascism is that there is so much apparent disagreement about it. Its origins, as I’ll relate, are simple and time-specific, and its ideology, in as much as it had one, wasn’t much more subtle than a punch in the face. In fact that’s just about all it was to it. Fascists themselves never hid this: indeed they gloried in action at the expense of tedious thought. The point, though, is that if Fascism can be defined retrospectively to be something it wasn’t, or much more than it was, then all sorts of interesting options open for calling contemporary enemies of yours “Fascists.” Otherwise you have to think of other terms of abuse which are not so memorable. So by ignoring what the Fascists actually said, by deliberately blurring the lines between initial ideology and subsequent behaviour in power, you can create a Fascism à la carte, and apply it to anyone or any organisation you like. (My parents thought that post-war Britain was getting “a bit like Hitler’s Germany” because of food rationing and the increased role of the state.)
Well then, Fascism came out of a very precise place and time, and it was as much an aesthetic as a political movement. As a political movement it was only moderately successful in Italy, being largely tamed by existing power structures within a decade, but a different version enjoyed more success in Germany. It worshipped modernity, technology, populism, disruption and violence, and believed that the world of the early twentieth century was changing fundamentally. Strikingly, its Fascist Manifesto, published in 1919, was coauthored by no less than Filippo Marinetti, whose Futurist Manifesto had set the European art world abuzz in the period immediately before the Great War. The Futurists admired speed and technology , and saw the Future incarnated first in the motor car, and then in the aeroplane. Art, in their view, could be nothing but “violence, cruelty and injustice,” and Marinetti went on to advocate a strongly revolutionary programme, deliberately destroying the art of the past and glorifying war as a kind of hygiene. This was a surprisingly influential view in many countries, at the time and after. Nor was it confined to art: the visceral rejection of the long nineteenth century extended through fashion and morals to political action. In all the major powers, and especially in those who had been defeated or, like Italy were in crisis, the demands for a radical rejection of the past, for new political systems based on violence, modernism and technology, were everywhere.
But for Fascism to triumph as a political movement, it required the right circumstances, which were those of Italy after the First World War. This is a confused and complex story, which has been surprisingly little covered in English, in comparison to the avalanche of books on Hitler and the Nazis. The very fluidity and imprecision of Fascism, as well as its relative lack of ultimate success, have discouraged more than a handful of decent accounts. Out of curiosity; I looked through the first few pages of the Amazon site, whose list of books quickly degenerated into ‘Fascism from Mussolini to Trump,” thus rather vindicating the thesis of this essay: that Fascism is essentially an empty goal into which anyone can kick to make a political point. There are serious historians of Fascism and Mussolini’s Italy, like Richard Bosworth, but they are lost in a sea of polemicists, and authors who would really prefer to be writing about Hitler.
What one can reasonably say is that the Italy of 1919-22 was in political chaos after an unpopular war in which the country had changed sides, and then suffered a catastrophic defeat at Caporetto, in 1917, which the victory at Vittorio Veneto the following year did little to rectify. The country was in economic crisis, exacerbated by millions of unemployed military veterans. The Italian Socialist Party, which won a third of the vote in the 1919 elections, adhered to Lenin’s Third International, and its programme called for the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” through violent revolution. Other non-revolutionary but pro-reform parties also did well, while the traditional political groupings suffered badly, and the country was wracked by continuing violence. The King and the Army hesitated to intervene, unwilling to risk a civil war, and it was at this point that Mussolini offered his help and the fighting power of the Squadristi, generally disgruntled ex-combatants. He was assisted by the first of many occasions when different parts of the Left failed to ally against him. Faced with the choice between a populist left-wing revolution they could not control, and a populist right-wing revolution they felt they could, the Italian power structure chose Mussolini, without really appreciating what they were getting. What they got, of course, was steadily increasing political support for the new Fascist Party, at a time when the conventional party system was breaking down, and finally the “March on Rome” of October 1922 (in which Mussolini did not participate) which sealed the increasing control of the Fascists over the Italian political system. Far from the “instrument of reaction,” they hoped for, though, the bourgeoisie, as Gramsci noted at the time, called up something “worse than the devil.”
Now I would like to stay just a moment longer with the history of this period, because there are so many dangerous myths about it. The first and most iniquitous is that Mussolini (like Hitler after him) was “swept into power” by an ignorant and propagandised population. As we have seen, this was quite untrue: Mussolini, like Hitler subsequently, was brought to power by organised paramilitary violence which the State could only have confronted with massive loss of life. Thus, the current argument that “extremist” politicians and parties should be banned, that the communications media should be censored in case people hear the wrong things and that, in the last instance people like you and me are too stupid to be trusted with the vote, is entirely devoid of any historic support. While we’re at it, it’s worth adding that the “Hitler was elected” myth also seems destined for eternity in spite of being a complete caricature. When Hitler was “levered into power” in Ian Kershaw’s phrase, it was as an unsatisfactory stop-gap solution to get enough votes in the Reichstag to allow Chancellor Brüning to stop ruling by decree. That worked out pretty well, too.
It is not possible to see Fascism without its Bolshevik antithesis, and outside the crisis of modernity that affected much of Europe at the time. This was an age of growing popular power, but no agreement on how it was to be expressed. Electorates and educated classes were steadily expanding, in a process that was evidently unstoppable, and even in authoritarian states a new generation of urban workers could read, and a new generation of newspapers was produced for them. For the first time in 1914, states actually had to take public feeling and parliamentary opinion into account to some extent in a crisis. But on what basis could a popular state be organised politically?As the ever-ambiguous and ever-observant Curzio Malaparte noted at the time, the immediate future was to be a clash of two revolutions, “Italy’s dominated by individualism and Russia’s dominated by collectivism.’ Fascism against communism, in other words, race against class, with no room for any other ideology or system of organising the people politically. In time, and especially towards the end of the 1930s, this became an extremely influential view among western intellectuals, many of whom had by that stage despaired of parliamentary democracy as a viable alternative.
Mussolini never entirely abandoned his revolutionary aspirations, and his claim to represent the interests of the “little guy.” But as time passed, he found it convenient to de-emphasise this part of his movement, and try to make himself acceptable to the existing Right-wing forces and power structures. Indeed, he had little choice, because if by 1925 he had effective and unaccountable control over the political system, he never managed to challenge the real pillars of the Italian State: the Army, the Church and the Industrialists, and was forced to work with them. And the last of his Socialist aspirations disappeared with the stupid wars into which he led his country, and which led ultimately to his overthrow and death.
It’s interesting to see how little success Fascist parties enjoyed elsewhere. In Spain, for example, after the “Three Bolshevik Years” of 1918-20, continuing labour unrest and widespread violence were finally stopped by a good old-fashioned reactionary military coup in 1923. At no point then did a serious Fascist movement emerge, although the later Falange movement did borrow some inspiration from Mussolini. In Germany, the confrontation of the revolutionary forces was with the existing power structure: the Munich Soviet was brought down by regular troops from Berlin and a militia made up of recently-demobilised soldiers. The principal attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic came from the military-conservative-political fringe: the so-called Kapp Putsch of 1920 failed because the trades unions organised a general strike, and the deeply conservative bureaucracy refused to submit to a military coup. And so on.
That is not to say that Fascist movements were unknown in Europe. In France, the Parti populaire français led by Jaques Doriot, some 120,000 strong at its zenith, is the best known. But Doriot was in fact a former high office of the Communist Party, who broke with the Party in 1936. The PPF was never a thorough-going Fascist party, though it collaborated eagerly with the Germans, and Doriot and others went to fight in Russia in German uniforms. But Doriot was a long way from the centres of power, and had no influence either over the dramatic events of 1940, nor the collaborationist policies of the Vichy government, which he thought were insufficiently radical. And at the other end of Europe the Arrow Cross movement led by Ferenc Szálasi was the most prominent of a series of Nazi-inspired nationalist movements, which incorporated Fascist characteristics to some degree, and which enjoyed limited popular support in the late 1930s. It was however banned under the nationalist-military dictatorship of Admiral Horthy, and it was not until 1944, when the Germans invaded and overthrew the regime that the Arrow Cross enjoyed a few months of murderous power.
I’ll stop there, because I just want to insist again that popular myths of “fascist leaders” being “swept to power” by ignorant mobs is a self-serving delusion of those who loathe and distrust the common people. Such leaders, where they had actual power, were generally installed by others, by chance or just by pure stupidity; and none more so, of course, than Adolph Hitler, who owed his progression from leader of a fringe mystical nationalist cult to leader of Germany, to unbelievable luck, and unbelievable incompetence on the part of his opponents. Even then, Hitler, like Mussolini, didn’t have it all his own way. The industrialists on whom the all-important future war effort would depend were extremely wary of him and his populist rhetoric: the more acceptable Goebbels and Goering were sent to sooth them with reassurances that they would retain their industries and their profits. But Hitler never dominated the industrialists; nor for that matter the Church, nor the Army, which tried to kill him several times.
The real model of effective right-wing power and repression in the twentieth century was actually a familiar one: the seizure of power, under names like the “National Revolution” by traditional forces seeking to overthrow democracy or, as they saw it, avert chaos. The best-known examples are Franco’s Spain, Pétain’s France and Salazar’s Portugal. Far from the violent populism and revolutionary fervour of Fascism, these were elite authoritarian regimes, based firmly on the traditional governing forces of Aristocracy, Army and Church (It’s probably not a coincidence that all these regimes were Catholic.) Which is not to say that any of them simply tried to revert to a black-and-white photograph of the world a generation before. Most had ideologies of some kind, based often on vague concepts of national solidarity and renewal, sometimes influenced by the Catholic Social Doctrine of the interwar years, and many of them distrusted the new forces of the Liberal Right, as found in Britain and the United States.
Finally, from the beginning of agitation for nation-states, there were extreme nationalist groups who were realistic enough to appreciate that boundaries in most cases would be settled by force, and minority populations expelled, if not worse. It was therefore up to them to have the weapons and the necessary ruthlessness, if their ”people” were to survive. There are too many such groups over the generations even to list, let alone discuss, but there are two general points that can be made. First, such groups fission and re-fission, and every time there is a settlement of any kind, a more extreme group will arise to disavow it and fight on. This is something that has to be lived with. It is ultimately one of the many and various prices we pay for having the nation state: someone is always going to be unhappy. Second, such groups can be murderous, but their effect is rarely fundamental in the absence of one of two criteria. The first is sponsorship in war by a major power. But such groups are, in the end, dependent on this support for their viability, as was seen with the extreme nationalist groups supported by the Nazis in World War 2, none of which lasted long. They may also be assimilated into existing power structures, as in contemporary Ukraine, but there, it is unclear who is in charge. They can occasionally also stumble accidentally into the middle of a crisis and exacerbate it through bombings or assassinations. The obvious example is the young Serb nationalists who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914.
These are essentially right-wing nationalist groups, fuelled by hatred and fear of other groups, and, very frequently, seeking revenge for ills allegedly done to their ancestors. In the 1960s and 1970s, some (like the Irish Republican Army) adopted the currently fashionable discourses of national liberation and alt-Marxism, as much as anything else to try to get money and weapons from places such as Libya. But almost by definition these groups are small (the IRA probably never had more than a few hundred active members at a given time) and for most countries today they are a law-and-order problem, rather than a political one. They do not have a serious chance of taking power anywhere.
I’m not going to throw around value-judgements like “extreme” here, but I’ll finish by talking about where some organised right-wing parties come from today, bearing in mind that it’s not where they used to come from, nor where they came from in the post-1945 era. And here we approach the central, and generally unappreciated, paradox of modern politics. I began by talking, in the context of the French Revolution, about the traditional distinction between Left and Right: the former wanting change, sometimes quickly, the latter wanting continuity, or at least the smallest change possible. “Change” in those days could plausibly be argued to be in the interests of ordinary people, whilst opposition to change could be legitimately seen as reactionary. Whilst the Republican Left clashed, often violently, with the burgeoning Socialist movement, the two agreed that the world was moving, more-or-less, in the right direction. They famously cooperated in the Popular Front government in France in 1936-37. Now, I am tempted to say that the sides have been reversed. The current Republican Left (the PMC) eternally wedded as it is to mindless change and innovation, uncritically accepts everything new and different, from economic deregulation to transsexualism to “AI.” Outside the PMC, of course, pretty much everybody recognises that the world is getting worse for ordinary people, and very large numbers of them are unhappy about it, some violently. Nonetheless, the ingrained habits of two centuries mean that the same tired old slogans are wheeled out endlessly: obscurantist, backward looking, reactionary, can’t keep up, and of course “Fascist.” It’s deeply insulting than to tell the son of a skilled metal-worker, whose factory was outsourced years ago that it’s somehow his fault if all he can find is a job stacking boxes. But this is what the PMC does, and it explains a good part of where the anger comes from.
Thus, Left and Right have effectively changed places, not as organised political entities, but as sets of concepts. The Left drives furiously ever-forward, without any real concern for the human consequences of its actions, and has swallowed whole and without even burping what were once the economic nostrums of the Liberal Right. The traditional Right, especially in its post-1945 Christian Democrat guise, has largely disappeared, but, where it still exists, it effectively makes common cause with the remaining Socialists in an attempt to save what can be saved. So as hallucinatory as it may seem to dismiss those trying to re-shore industry, defend public services or improve reading standards as coming from the “extreme Right,” it makes a kind of twisted sense in today’s political mirror-world, which equates change of any kind with virtue, and resistance of any kind with vice, and which then labels such resistance as “Fascism.”
This is only possible because much of the political architecture of the past has disappeared. The elite, educated, individualist Left has taken over and largely destroyed the Socialist parties, whose populism and care for the community they had reluctantly tolerated in the past. Competitive individual rights, the grievances of minorities real or ascriptive, the enforcement of abstract normative standards, and the export of these standards, by political and even military pressure, took the place of traditional Socialist concerns for the common welfare and the lives of ordinary people. The traditional Right, based around custom and practice, small towns and local communities, the Church and traditional middle-class professions, has been taken over by the neoliberal Right of financiers, property speculators and rent-seekers of all kinds. Both tendencies make an ignorant fetish of change for its own sake: the”AI” madness is simply the latest stage of the descent of the western ruling class into psychological breakdown.
It’s this that makes contemporary political analysis seem so distant from reality, and the terms “Left” and “Right” essentially meaningless. Indeed, the two modern tendencies have joined into a kind of Permanent Revolutionary Party, with its own factions and its own bitter internal disputes. Now for the last time, I’m going to talk briefly about the French Revolution, and for two reasons. One is because it is still heavily caricatured, and used as an argument against popular power of all kinds. “Oh, there was the storming of the Bastille followed by the Terror,” although these events were separated by years of complex and cataclysmic political change. The cautious attempts at Reform in the early years gave way to radicalism only when the King tried to flee abroad and encouraged other nations to invade his own country. But secondly, and more important here, the ultras among the Jacobins, who gained power steadily as the crisis deepened, were the first political flowering of the managerialist revolution that is now almost complete in the West: they were the PMC of the day.
Whereas the early radical years of the Revolution had introduced a whole series of reforms that we now taken for granted—the abolition of slavery, basic human rights, male-female equality divorce by mutual consent and many others—there was also a tendency towards arid normativeness, enforced by legalistic repression. Thus, the short-lived attempts to enforce decimal weeks and months, or the compulsory closure of churches and worship of the Supreme Being instead, were the first indications of the managerial, rational, legalistic Liberal spirit getting out of control. It’s ultimately why your organisation has a meaningless Mission Statement, and why it’s just introduced, with great fanfare, a new expenses system that requires a fifteen-minute training video, takes twice as long to use as the previous one and keeps making mistakes. And of course it was contracted out. But Avanti!: we must go forward. These tendencies, previously kept under a degree of control for the most part, have now swept all before them.
Ordinary people don’t like this very much. Their wants are modest, and they are not much interested in fantasy futures. They want jobs with living wages, decent places to live, enough to eat, a good education for the children, safety in the streets …. It is through the provision, or the facilitation, of these things that states acquire legitimacy, and through their absence that they lose it. (If you’ve ever been in a country where the state has lost its legitimacy, you’ll be in no hurry to return.) To the question, Why should I obey the state? the only sensible answer is, with Spinoza, Because it’s in my interest to do so. Not even the most repressive state in the world can actually stop people jumping red lights, trying to cheat their income tax or shoplifting from supermarkets. Society only functions at all because we agree to keep written and unwritten rules, in return for which the state offers its protection.
But it’s become horribly obvious in the last few weeks that the state cannot actually offer this protection when informal rules and norms are starting to break down. This was always sort-of realised, but could be ignored so long as it was confined to the poor suburbs. Now, it has invited itself into the centre of large cities, including several in France. The French Forces of Order have never been weaker, not just in numbers, but in capacity, especially after a series of misguided reforms. And whilst even large demonstrations are manageable (so far they have all passed off peacefully), it’s clear that quite small numbers of casseurs can paralyse a city, working in small groups and smashing and looting as they go. This afternoon I saw shopkeepers in my local town centre boarding up their windows in advance of next Saturday’s anticipated riots. They no longer trust the state to protect them, and they are right.
Curzio Malaparte, who I mentioned earlier, is the author of the notorious Technique du Coup d’état, published first in France because it was impossible to do so in Italy. Forget mass movements and storming the barricades, he said, revolutions are a technical process carried out by small groups of skilled professionals. His book is a How to Do It manual, but for our purposes it is his main conclusion which is most devastating: “Parliamentary democracies make the mistake of placing too much faith in the triumphs of liberty; while in reality nothing is more fragile than the modern European State.” And states in 1931 were stronger than they are now, and informal social controls and norms were infinitely stronger as well.
So we shall probably see self-defence groups forming, vigilante patrols with dogs, and WhatsApp groups of retired military and police. There are a fair number of guns in France. And of course some businesses will close down or move to safer areas. The rich won’t be exempt either: minimum-wage private security guards aren’t going to die to protect blocks of (mostly-empty) luxury flats, or antique shops or department stores. (One major department store in Paris has already been ransacked.) We are approaching the point where money, as such, won’t provide protection any more: the best it might do is to help you run faster. The Tech Lords are going to lose most of their wealth in the coming “AI” crash, and with it most of their political influence. They will not be our new rulers either.
Actual power may start moving quite quickly away from gesticulating politicians. Yet they will continue to gesticulate, mouth the same platitudes and act as if they matter, as the waters rise around them. This seems so counter-intuitive that you can almost understand why conspiracy theories of control (the Bilderberg Group, aliens from Zeta Reticuli) are popular in some quarters. But alas, there’s nothing new about this: the conventional, sound, mainstream politicians of the 1930s did exactly the same: mulishly cutting government spending in a recession, even as unemployment exploded. Power will probably move at a local level towards groups and ad hoc movements that are coded as Right, less because of their own strength than because of the hallowed tradition of the Left being unable to organise a piss-up in a brewery. Malaparte was correct about the fragility of modern states, as anyone who has worked inside one will know, although in his day organised crime was less powerful and there were no radical Islamist groups.
But communities organising for their protection, mounting patrols and demanding identity documents because they no longer trust the State, will be greeted with inevitable cries of “Fascism!” as though they themselves were the problem. Between now and 2027, the elections (if they happen at all) will be agreed to be “threatened by Fascism,” which is to say threatened by populism, which is to say threatened by democracy. But the real threat is psychological: the implicit security bargain with the state, never formally acknowledged, has begun to break down, and no-one can say where that will take us.
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