I share this open letter from the New Fascism Syllabus. As they say of themselves:
The
#NewFascismSyllabus is a crowd-sourced collection of writings on the history of fascist, authoritarian, and populist movements and governments during the 20th and 21st centuries. It is intended to serve as a popular entryway into the scholarly literature for those seeking deeper insights into how past societies gravitated towards and experienced varieties of right-wing authoritarianism.
This is the letter that 80 scholars within the project have published. The full list of names is on the original letter:
Regardless of the outcome of the United States' election, democracy as we know it is already imperiled. However, it is not too late to turn the tide.
Whether Donald J. Trump is a fascist, a post-fascist populist, an autocrat, or just a bumbling opportunist, the danger to democracy did not arrive with his presidency and goes well beyond November 3rd, 2020.
While democracy appeared to be flourishing everywhere in the years following the end of the Cold War, today it seems to be withering or in full-scale collapse globally. As scholars of twentieth century authoritarian populism, fascism, and political extremism, we believe that unless we take immediate action, democracy as we know it will continue in its frightening regression, irrespective of who wins the American presidency in early November.
In contrast to the hollow proclamations of economic and political liberalism's “inevitable” triumph over authoritarianism in all its iterations, studying the past demonstrates that democracy is extremely fragile and potentially temporary, requiring vigilance and protection. Scholars of race, colonialism, and imperialism have further deepened our perspectives by reminding us of how the myths of national “greatness” were and continue to be written on the backs of largely silenced, marginalized and oftentimes enslaved or unfree, “others.”
We study the conditions that have historically accompanied the rise of authoritarian and fascistic regimes. In nearly every case, we have observed how profound social, political, and economic disruptions, including the ravages of military conflicts, depressions, and the enormous pressures caused by globalization, deeply shook people's confidence in democracy's ability to adequately respond to their plights, or even provide basic forms of long-term security.
We have seen all of these patterns in our study of the past, and we recognize the signs of a crisis of democracy in today's world as well. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed profound inequalities of class and race across the globe. As the last four years have demonstrated, the temptation to take refuge in a figure of arrogant strength is now greater than ever.
To meet the challenge at hand, there are several things we must do.
We must boldly and unapologetically safeguard critical thinking based on evidence. This includes demonstrating the virtues of entertaining a wide array of positions and perspectives, and support, both in word and deed, for investigative journalism, science and the humanities, and freedom of the press. We need swift and tangible commitments from corporate media organizations and governments to tackle the dangers of misinformation and media concentration. We must encourage coalitions organized across differences of race, class, gender, religion and caste, while respecting the perspectives and experiences of others. We need to reveal and denounce any and all connections between those in power and those vigilante and militia forces using political violence to destabilize our democracies. Much like the active democratic movements across the globe from Nigeria to India, Belarusto Hong Kong, we must be prepared to defend pluralism and democracy against the growing dangers of communal violence and authoritarianism at the ballot box but, if necessary, also through non-violent protest in the streets. We must defend the integrity of the electoral process and ensure the widest possible voter turnouts, not just in this election but in every election large and small in all of our hometowns. And we must re-commit to a global conversation on support for democratic institutions, laws, and practices both within and between our respective countries. This includes directly confronting the unfettered greed that drives global inequality, which has unleashed geopolitical rivalries over access to resources, international migrations, and collapsed state sovereignties all over the world.
We need to turn away from the rule by entrenched elites and return to the rule of law. We must replace the politics of “internal enemies” with a politics of adversaries in a healthy, democratic marketplace of ideas. And above else, we need to work together to find ways to keep the light of democracy shining in our countries and all over the world. Because if we don't, we will indeed face dark days ahead.
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I take the point about a near presidential Government. But democracy is alive and kicking in the UK. We have General Elections and we have local elections. We also have referendums when needed. The electoral system is up for debate. That said as Sir Kier rids the Labour Party of it’s deep rooted racism and simultaneously eradicates momentum and the hard left (as this is where the Party’s institutional racism originated) then I feel confident that a new look Labour Party will form the next Government. At that stage the FPTP system won’t seem so bad.
What a peculiar post.
Perhaps the writer is unfamiliar with Trumps efforts to limit voter participation – or perhaps in the view of Jason – he’s just having a “bit of a larf”?
In the case of the Labour party and the left wing having deep rooted racism, perhaps Jason could educate us all on what this assertion is based?
Seriously, I’d love to know, always good to hear a different erm… “perspective”.
Well mike look no further….https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/our-work/news/investigation-antisemitism-labour-party-finds-unlawful-acts-discrimination-and
And yes this stems from the hard left.. I hope momentum form a breakaway party to satisfy the needs of its supporters because the Labour Party won’t… and once Labour is seen as more balanced and centrist then it will get elected.
This is not a platform for Labour debates to be honest
Can they be done elsewhere?
Labour was guilty of failing but the ‘hard left’ trope is just that. I criticised Corbyn and McDonnell from the left, for example, because much of their economic policy was pro-austerity and reinforced banker control of the economy, which was absurd. But I am not hard left. In fact, I am still inclined to call myself a social democrat, if anything.
democracy is alive and limping.
Johnson purged the party of 20 MPs, including ex-ministers and long standing members, to get his bill though the House.
He tried to prorogue Parliament for a long period to prevent scrutiny of the bill and had to be forced to re-open Parliament by the Supreme Court, whose powers he will diminish according to his election manifesto.
The Tory funding is mainly from a handful of very rich people, many not of British birth.
We are about to have a Brexit which is not the one we were promised, it will inflict great harm on the nation and the majority are against it. Even the general election result showed that over 50% of the population voted for parties who were opposed or who would offer a referendum to confirm.
A Chancellor was told his appointment was conditional on his advisors being replaced by ones chosen, it seems, by an unelected official.
80% + of newspapers are supporters of the Conservatives, leaving out stories which reveal their mistakes and conducting character assassination on opposition politicians, whether Labour or SNP.
The BBC is increasingly led by people with links to the Conservative party.
Ministers will not appear on ITV Good Morning Britain nor on Channel 4. The latter is to be sold off.
Voter ID is being trialled using the Republican play book on voter suppression. Not using automatic registration like most democracies means fewer young people are registered to vote.
The House of Lords is also scheduled to have its powers reduced.
PR would encourage people to vote for other parties -less need to vote to keep a party out-and a party winning 40% of the vote would not be able to rule alone.
PR would mean the Conservatives would never again be able to rule by themselves.
There is no deep rooted racism in Labour. One antisemite is too many but if you are looking at this in Labour only then you aren’t interested in antisemitism. Also, please define hard left. Also, could you tell me why Sir K said BLM was only a moment? I would suggest you are looking at the wrong end of the spectrum. Also, if you think democracy is alive and kicking in the UK you are suffering from cognitive dissonance.
I had a go at defining hard left in another post when you asked the same question.
I’m still waiting for your response.
So as not to encourage a debate about Labour and to ATFQ I will say this:
The Left, the Greens – in fact ANY movement calling itself ‘progressive’ must ditch the faulty narratives that govern politics at the moment as Richard M repeatedly points out.
I’m tired of going to meetings hearing well meaning but technocratically deficient people tell me that they care, they have sleepless nights and cry over the poor or the environment but have no new ideas whatsoever to deal with it.
The only way the lights of democracy are going to be kept on is with the dynamo of new ideas like MMT, PR GND. And Labour – Right or Left or so-called centre are not it.
Real progressives need to get out of the Left’s resuscitation room and find our own space.
When most of what is called mainstream politics believe in the same faulty thinking, any dreams of an effective opposition just melts away.
All Labour promise is to do the ‘wrong thing righter’. That is not even Left. It is just stupidity.
Last night CH4 news interviewed Stewart Rose – ex M&S boss. He wanted to get the economy working so that taxes could be generated to pay for the NHS and so the next generation was not saddled with debt. And Kathy whatsername never even questioned any of that.
Ignorance runs deep.
Do any of these idiots read? We are living it seems in a new dark age.
They’ll be telling us that the sky will be falling on our heads next.
Rose was appalling
It appears to me that FPTP facilitates the savage divisive positions currently being taken (attacks on migrant, “activist lawyers” etc) plus it breeds resentment in the “losing” side, furthering those divisions
I agree with the criticism of the other responses to this risible post. FPTP OK!! I well remember the slavering howls from right wing politicians and press when the SNP won 56 seats in 2015 GE – One Party State, outrageously unrepresentative etc – when the SNP were the only major party (by number of seats) in favour of PR. The irony that they won big-time thanks to a system imposed by ConLab (to ensure their alternating hegemony) was lost on their critics.
While I also agree with the diagnosis presented in the letter, I am not so sure about the treatment. “Return to the rule of law” When was that? The law too has been to some extent captured, available mostly to the rich, and administered and interpreted too often by the same sort of elite (public school, top university) as the politicians who create the law. Not so long ago a judge just couldn’t conceive of a police force that could lie or beat up suspects.
Subscribe to and adhere to the rule of law and when found acting, or proposing to act, against the rule of law then resign or be dismissed sine die.
PR, citizens’ assemblies, devolution, a code of conduct with teeth, state funding of political parties and an end to donations, a cull of lobbyists and unaccountable special advisors would be a start.
Democracy isn’t alive and well in the UK, it’s quite sick.
As you point out a little later in your post, the electoral system needs attention…well, more than attention I’d say, a total overhaul, and if that isn’t right, then how can democracy be alive and well?
First Past The Post is a sham of democracy.
Besides, local and regional powers can be weakened at will (almost) by the Central government, as we have seen these last few years.
Starved of funds, made impotent, and then scapegoated for what goes wrong at local level.
As for referendums…You can make what you like of them, and like in Switzerland, make them useful because very well structured and understood by voters, or ridiculously simple and faulty, like in the UK.
You can even have the Central government dictate regional ones whether they can or cannot organise them.
The UK government system is extremely centralised, has become increasingly autocratic. This isn’t democracy.
Voters do not vote in significant numbers at any level of the process, showing they don’t believe it matters whether they do or not. Self-defeating maybe, but when they do, the FPTP system will silence their voice anyway, they know that. Not a healthy democracy at all.
Elections don’t equal democracy. Even Sadaam Hussein held elections. The UK has the most centralised government in the developed world. We have local councils, and even mayors, but they are virtually powerless.
We’ve seen through this pandemic the inability of local governments to respond to the crisis because they have no powers left. For any emergency they are forced to run, cap in hand to central government, who, with their FPTP granted parliamentary majority, effectively rule by decree. I have lived in a number of countries with a variety of democratic arrangements and never have I seen such a concentration of power in a single office as in the UK.
Constitutional and electoral reform is desperately needed in the UK, to pretend otherwise is to bury ones head in the sand. The current Westminster-centric arrangement disenfranchises too many people and this sense of abandonment and of being unheard is behind much of the anger and unease which is fueling the upswing in radical left and right wing engagement in the UK.
We need a government that brings real decision making power closer to the polis, where people can feel that their opinions and local needs are heard and where they have real representatives, empowered to respond to those needs. Sadly, the current status quo, with Tories being be party of power and a vitiated Labour playing the role of occasional substitute teacher, suits those parties too much for them to take the steps necessary to even begin to discuss changing the system. Perhaps a constitutional crisis along the lines of Scotland or NI leaving the UK would wake them up, though judging by their management of the Brexit mess and the pandemic, even then I doubt it.
I agree with what you say to an extent but we cannot ignore the fact that even the pretense of a democracy that has existed in this country is now being shoved aside for what can only be described as a 1000 Year Tory Reich.
Whats going on here,first i,ve seen of it,mro
https://www.we-the-people.co.uk/
Total nonsense
Yet again, it’s the same old, long winded, flowery language discussion… we must .., we should …. we need to … all scholarly bull …. the right have dominated, press, tv, think tanks etc for 70 plus years … the demise in the “socialist” movement, whatever you call it, has been due to the control of propaganda by the right. They own it, they control it and they deal it out. If you stop watching, listening and reading the right bullshit, you’d get that world has been shifted right by propaganda. There is only one solution… Revolution. To change a thing you have to change a thing…, change who rules, take back the narrative and stop using the rights propaganda narrative. The strong are beating the crap out of the weak poor because we have Leaders with their own leadership words and no arguments. Its been ripped out of our heads by the elite. One day you’ll realise we have to fight the right.
I don’t do Revolution
I am not convinced those in need win from it
Revolution can mean a lot of different things.
An armed revolution, a la Russia 1917 or the communications revolution post internet.
You are correct that the vulnerable very rarely benefit in the aftermath of an armed coup. Cuba perhaps?
Our elites are now expert at manipulating social media; lies and misinformation are the order of the day. So the poor and vulnerable lose out again. Mind you, it’s the poor and vulnerable who’ve suffered during times of crisis all through history.
For a TED talk, Observer journalist, Carole Cadwalladr, presented evidence of ‘Facebook’s role in Brexit – and the threat to democracy’. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSMr-3GGvQ]
I’ve posted some of this. Here is some more:
In Britain we limit the amount of money you can spend in an election. [The Brexit] referendum took place almost entirely online. And you can spend any amount of money on Facebook or on Google or on YouTube ads and nobody will know … But we do know that in the last days before the Brexit vote, the official “Vote Leave” campaign laundered nearly three quarters of a million pounds through another campaign entity that our electoral commission has ruled was illegal, and it has referred it to the police. And with this illegal cash, “Vote Leave” unleashed a firehose of disinformation. Ads like ‘Turkey’s 76m people are joining the EU. GOOD NEWS??? YES/NO). This is a lie. Turkey is not joining the European Union. …
Most of us never saw these ads because we were not the target of them. “Vote Leave” identified a tiny sliver of people who it identified as persuadable. [These people] saw them. The only reason we are seeing these now is because parliament forced Facebook to hand them over. …
This was the biggest electoral fraud in Britain for 100 years. In a once-in-a-generation vote that hinged up just one percent of the electorate. And it was just one of the crimes that took place in the referendum. There was another group that was headed by Nigel Farage. His group, “Leave.EU” also broke British electoral laws and British data laws …
Similar methods were used in the USA: According to the special counsel investigation’s Mueller Report “Advertisements bought by Russian operatives for the Facebook social media site are estimated to have reached 10 million users.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections#Social_media_and_Internet_trolls
Could it be that the same is planned for Africa? An Aljazeera programme screened yesterday (1 Nov 2020) alleged that Facebook appears to be generous in supporting African nations in having access to the internet — but with conditions attached, such as, if I remember accurately, that Facebook has ownership of the data arising from the platform provided.
I reckon this is the most important of the changes you proposed, Richard. Without this, the electorate has to struggle to get informed. Sometimes it’s almost impossible to get at the truth.
“We need swift and tangible commitments from corporate media organizations and governments to tackle the dangers of misinformation and media concentration.”
I don’t disagree with the threat analysis but I’m not convinced that the proposed solution will work.
The UK, the USA and many other countries are political duopolies. “Hobson’s Choice” is a sham of a democracy. It’s way past time that people wake up to this and vote these duopolies out of existence. Except they don’t and won’t.
The elites that control both sides of these duopolies as well as our mainstream media know this and exploit it. They continue to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. Meantime, turkeys keep voting for Christmas. They say that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Voters in countries where these political duopolies exist are demonstrably insane.
One possible way to peacefully establish true democracy is for people to realise the insanity of voting for one side or the other of these political duopolies and to vote instead for those that promise electoral and political reform. How many more elections will there be before this happens? Too many chances have already been missed and too many voters have tribal loyalties, having been brainwashed by relentless propaganda. Hobson’s Choice will therefore persist, political duopolies will persist and the path to authoritarianism will continue.
Scottish independence provides a possible escape route but what hope is there for the UK, USA and other political duopolies?