Pat Kane: Why we have to be proactive and vigilant to stop fascism spreading

Some choobs – known as Patriotic Alternative – unfurled their “White Lives Matter” banner across the top of Ben Nevis this week. They were followed by two blue transit vans from the far-right Britain First, chuntering round the Parliament, Bute House and parts of Falkirk, repeating Unionist slogans (“Save the Union, Stay United”).

Phalanxes of weapons-bearing, uniformed xenophobes, goose-stepping scarily down your high street, this most certainly ain’t. (Britain First’s co-founder Jayda Fransen, who harassed Nicola Sturgeon as she street-campaigned in Glasgow Southside during the last UK General Election, eventually amassed the mighty sum of 46 votes.)

This is a year where we’ve all experienced a sense of post-Trump relief. No daily horrors, prejudices and othering from the most powerful politician in the world, capped by his failed cos-play coup at the Capitol. So it’s tempting to delete all those “is fascism imminent?” bookmarks from one’s browser. We’ve had more to concern us. The coronas of Covid are quite indifferent to fantasies of racial superiority. Anybody’s warm, wet lungs will do.

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But stop dragging those links to trash. The new book from journalist, theorist and rabble-rouser Paul Mason, titled How To Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance, is here to urge us not just to be vigilant, but proactive. It drove me to return this week to American commentary, after a good half-year away from it. I found article after article – including a forthcoming book from his cousin Mary Trump – readily slapping the “fascist” label on the ex-President.

On Fox News in July, Trump escalated his claims of electoral fraud, and praised the Capitol insurrectionaries as “great people”. As conservative commentator David Frum noted in the Atlantic, this draws from the classic fascist playbook.

Deny the rule of law that undergirds the existing political system. Exonerate or celebrate street violence in the name of a greater cause. Mussolini or Hitler would have nodded.

Mason’s How To Stop Fascism is massively useful, in that it condenses the various playbooks on what fascism is, and how to know it when you see it. Paul also re-examines the historical periods when fascisms first succeeded – Italy and Germany from the 20s to the 40s. And also the moments (the Popular Front governments of France and Spain in the 30s) when they were confronted and halted.

But it’s his one-line definition of the phenomenon that really seized my brain. “Fascism is the fear of freedom, triggered by a glimpse of freedom.” What might that mean?

“The turn to fascism”, explains Mason, “is triggered when a group that is supposed to be subservient suddenly gains power and agency, and begins to revolt in ways that actually embody freedom, and show what it might look like”.

For the early twentieth century, that would be a militant proletariat. For the early 21st century, that might be the protests of women, of people of colour at home and in the world, of LBGTQ+ folks.

Who is most scared of this, and thus most susceptible to fascism? “Those with no clear, future-oriented identity; those who believe their status is reliant on stopping other people achieving freedom, for example white racists and violent misogynists”, continues Paul.

They might also include “religious fundamentalists whose beliefs are entirely moulded around hierarchy; and people for whom violence and repression are already a way of life (eg the classic ex-serviceperson or military fantasist).”

This has the virtues of a checklist. Mason is very clear he is writing for activists and the citizen who wants to act, not academic departments.

These are also people, in the very general sense, who are “socially disintegrating”, as they face a crisis of the systems they usually lean on. Cheerily, Paul identifies “five kinds of trouble” we’re currently facing. He suggest that if they ever interlink, they could be even more discombobulating than the meltdowns that drove the fascisms of the 20th century.

FIRSTLY, the neoliberal period in capitalism is falling apart. This sends immiserated (but atomised) communities off looking for a multitude of scapegoats. Then the “wall of technological power” represented by the internet. This gave a hint, during the various Springs of 2011-13, that the world could be a very different place.

This compelled far-right forces to strategically tilt the Net’s playing field. They were aided by the terrible collusion of tech companies themselves, who derived much cash from all the chaos this info-war produced.

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In addition, democracy is decaying, the planet is burning, and Covid is putting all this in a pressure-cooker. Paul allows himself some futurology, identifying a list of imminent country-crises that could open up an appetite for fascism. A victory for the far-right in France’s 2022 elections; a breakthrough for the Italian far right by 2023; a Trump-esque Republican candidate, victorious in 2024; a coup by the generals to prevent Lula’s left taking back power in Brazil. Finally Modi’s BJP in India turning even more harshly against the country’s Muslims. There’s some sobering entries for your calendar.

So how exactly do we stop fascism, then? As the last Marxist gunslinger in town, Mason goes back into history and has a real beef with his Italian and German comrades.

Their theory of fascism, he finds, was fatally flawed. They believed it was a haven for isolated, disintegrated loners. These could be easily neutralised, with the communities around them returning to the party fold.

Wrong. Paul cites new historical work which shows that Nazi adherents were actually “joiners”, not loners. They embedded themselves in the messy civil life of amateur football clubs and yearly festivals, building out a coherent lifeworld for their ideas. These are realms which class-struggle leftists at the time (and maybe now) would dismiss as “bourgeois”.

That dismissal of bourgeois life also numbed the 30s left to the possibility of broad, anti-fascist alliances with liberal political forces. Briefly hopeful, Mason points to the French and Spanish Popular Fronts, especially their ability to strengthen collective will by means of the creativity of artists and intellectuals.

The solidarity they built against the fascist street gangs was made out of plurality, conviviality and sensuality. This was a world that attracted and supported you (containing figures like Wilhelm Reich, distributing mass pamphlets on sex education). And as such, it was a real counter to the fear and anger exploited by fascist ideology.

We got a hint of what that positive, attractive and alternative worlding might be, in the performances of the young black English players in the recent Euro finals. I would also say that the Yes culture of 2012-2014 was a Popular Front of the kind that Mason seeks. Perhaps it’s a model for a resilient anti-fascist response (it certainly shaped the civil character of Scottish nationalism).

There’s only one element that seems off to me. So much everyday violence here! Mason hazards another one-line fascist definition: “for them, violence makes facts”.

Yet isn’t the number of demobbed and traumatised ex-military in a society a crucial factor here? This is a problem undoubtedly for the USA, dealing with the backwash from its various 21st century adventurings. But isn’t that much less of an issue over here?

We may reject this sub-authoritarian Westminster regime. But they are not encouraging (or letting happen) inter-communal violence, or street intimidations, or random murders. That’s the kind of nerve-shredding instability that creates openings for strongmen (still much more likely than strongwomen). No, at the moment, and at least in Scotland, it’s shilpit banners erected for five minutes, before hillwakers boo them off the hills. Or men in blue vans, their insignias cheesy and their messages second-hand. But How To Stop Fascism is a good toolbox to ensure we keep it that way.

How To Stop Fascism, by Paul Mason, is out at the end of August