In its panic over a supposedly new fascism, the political left resorts to excessive and undemocratic means to preserve its power, from cancel culture to deplatforming. The result is a spiral of escalation that drives both camps ever further apart. At the end of that process, in the worst case, stand two hostile ideological blocs within society, each denying the other’s legitimacy, and whose social visions are so far apart that coexistence within a single polity appears almost impossible.

A Charge with a Long Pedigree

Against this background, it is worth examining the accusation of fascism as it is so insistently leveled by the liberal-left milieu against populists and the conservatives and right-leaning liberals close to them. The first point to note is that the charge is not new.

In the wake of the October Revolution in Russia in late 1917, the Third International, generally known as the Comintern, was founded in 1919 on Lenin’s initiative. Its aim was to spread the communist revolution to the West and, as a precondition, to reshape communist parties along Soviet Bolshevik lines.

The success of Mussolini’s March on Rome in October 1922 posed both a practical and a theoretical challenge to the international communist movement: first, because Benito Mussolini came from its own ranks, the Partito Socialista Italiano; and second, because the phenomenon of fascism could not be reconciled with the standard instruments of Marxist thought at the time. An explanation therefore had to be found.

The theory eventually developed ran roughly as follows: fascism represented the late stage of capitalism, designed to secure the property and power of a handful of monopoly capitalists against socialist movements. Conversely, this meant that capitalism was essentially nothing other than a preliminary form of fascism, and therefore fascist itself. Social democrats, who sought a reformist accommodation with capitalism, were accordingly allies of fascism and therefore social fascists, as Grigory Zinoviev put it as early as 1924.

This analysis was, of course, arrant nonsense and overlooked the obvious: fascism was merely a national socialism that opposed the international socialism of the Comintern, while otherwise displaying a number of similarities with international socialism itself.

In the student movement of the late 1960s, this nonsensical formula of fascist capitalism, used above all as a rhetorical weapon, enjoyed a revival. This time, however, the concept of fascism was stretched even further. From the perspective of the left-wing student rebels in Western Europe and the US, everything that was not left-wing was fascist: the market economy, liberalism, the bourgeoisie, bourgeois values. Even good manners, politeness, adherence to traditional dress codes and the idea of monogamous relationships were branded fascist. The empty, boundless inflation of the concept of fascism was thus complete, as expressed in the famous chant “USA – SA – SS”.

The Dignity Detour

This vacuous concept of fascism received its academic consecration from the thinkers of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School. In his Studies on the Authoritarian Personality, Theodor W. Adorno described fascism as a petty-bourgeois state of mind marked by emotional impulses, attachment to the inherited order, a desire to punish violations of traditional values, general hostility, contempt for dissenters and belief in the existence of evil in the world.

The current equation of populism with fascism is therefore a continuation of Stalinist and neo-Marxist patterns of thought from the 20th century. Any attempt to preserve petty-bourgeois culture and protect it against internationalism, migration and the dissolution of traditional role models is deemed fascist.

Since such concerns are not fascist in themselves, the argument takes a detour via human dignity.

Human dignity is supposed to serve as the tertium comparationis between populism and fascism. The idea behind it is this: since fascism is contemptuous of human beings, all political movements that call human dignity into question are fascist. Populists, in turn, are allegedly guilty of precisely such a violation of human dignity through their restrictive migration policies or their adherence to a binary order of the sexes. Ergo: populists are fascist.

When Freedom Becomes the Enemy

This “proof” is, of course, meaningless. It rests on the trick of treating every challenge to an individual’s autosuggestion, and every rejected wish to immigrate into prosperous societies, as a violation of human dignity. The German philosopher Eva von Redecker goes even further, viewing the liberal desire for freedom itself as “fascist”, because it supposedly defends a possession, individual freedom, with the same ruthlessness with which historical fascism defended the nation or the fatherland.

With that, the debate on fascism has reached its endpoint and turned the concept into its opposite. For if anything is not fascist, it is individualism and liberalism. What is clearly fascist, by contrast, is the leader principle, imperialism, militarism and collectivism. The populist parties of the present, however, are none of those things. They are explicitly democratic in structure and are not organized around the leader principle. Most are more isolationist than expansionist, more pacifist than militarist and, in practice, products of the individualistic everyday culture of Western societies.

The accusation of fascism directed at the populist movements of our age is therefore plain historical falsification, with the easily discernible aim of politically discrediting even the desire for more democracy and individual freedom. This dishonest approach is galling.

One consolation remains, however: it is the expression of a rearguard action by an increasingly desperate left.