As an analysis of rightwing populism, Daniel Trilling’s argument works well enough (The impossible promise: are we witnessing the return of fascism?, 18 April). We cannot assume that fascism will always take the same form, rather than adapt to, and try to provide answers to, events as they unfold.
Fascism might best be seen as history’s punishment for the failed universalism of the Enlightenment project – the failure to deliver on the promise of universal equality. The resurgence of the far right is a reactionary response to the broken promises of social democracy. Working-class supporters of the far right, having seen the fight for equality for all replaced with a neoliberal war of all against all, simply adopt the logic of the day.
At grassroots level, the strategy of the far right seems to work – if you say immigrants are draining resources from your community and protest against asylum seekers in hotels, and see them bussed out as a result, that can feel like a win. It is this aspect that Trilling misses.
There is a Strasserite component to today’s far right, organised around the likes of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Strasserism was the political ideology formed around Nazism’s working-class base. This can be antagonistic to the populism of the likes of Nigel Farage, because it believes Farage will sell out his working-class supporters. Can a resurgent class politics split this base? Denying reality is not the best place to start.
When, for example, local workers say that eastern European workers are driving down wages by working at lower than the average local rate, there is no point in saying how much immigrants contribute to the economy. Capitalism only uses the free movement of workers to its own advantage. Better, however hard, to try to establish trade union control over wages and enforcement of the minimum wage, and an end to casualisation, so that native and immigrant workers are raised up.
Nick Moss
London
Daniel Trilling’s long read on fascism may have missed one broader longer-term element. We are, perhaps, also witnessing the continuing debate between two opposing trends in the western European Enlightenment: Hobbesian strongman-led and Lockeian property-based democracy on one side, and Voltaire’s freedoms with Rousseau’s people’s rights on the other. Dictatorships and gross inequalities of wealth and power, now significantly enabled by cloud capitalism, are again challenging liberal social democracy after just 75 years of a partial lessening of wealth, power, gender and racial division.
Steve Jefferys
Emeritus professor of European employment relations, London Metropolitan University
Nesrine Malik’s profound commentary on the nature of our current evil (Trump’s presidency is what evil looks like: absurd, frightening, cruel, 20 April) explores the bizarre mixture of horror, emptiness and performance that saturates our sociopolitical world, recalling what Hannah Arendt termed “the banality of evil”. Malik’s piece reminded me of a 1951 essay by Theodor Adorno in which, drawing on Sigmund Freud’s book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, he describes the characteristics of fascist leaders.
Such leaders, he explains, have to draw to themselves the identification of the masses; to do so they have to convey their possession of superhuman powers (having a special access to a peculiar omnipotence which exempts them from any moral law/ordinary humanity), and at the same time must, so to speak, be just one of the boys.
Adorno writes: “One of the most conspicuous features of the agitators’ speeches [is] the absence of a positive program and of anything they might ‘give’, as well as the paradoxical prevalence of threat and denial … the leader can be loved only if he himself does not love. Yet Freud is aware of another aspect of the leader image which apparently contradicts the first one. While appearing as a superman, the leader must at the same time work the miracle of appearing as an average person, just as Hitler posed as a composite of King Kong and the suburban barber.”
Dr David Bell
London
