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A Great Link on Fascism

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Clarissa

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Sorry for the long quotes but I love this because I didn’t think of it myself and there’s an answer here to a question that’s been bugging me for two years:

This is most pronounced among the political class. It is their sensation of being under assault, of the ebbing away of their technocratic, judicial, evidence-based authority over society following the decidedly political jolts of Brexit and Trump, that has led them to resuscitate the fascism frenzy. The omnipresence of that word tells us little about a return of fascist terror, but a great deal about the political class’s own feeling of terror at recent political events.

And more:

Having retired political life, having relinquished political language, having retreated from the sphere of ideology into the comfort zone of expertise and technocracy, they now lack the political resources to deal with change, or even to understand it. And so they see terror and horror  –  and fascism  –  where in fact there is only political confrontation, a revolt; where there is simply the business of politics.

This is a brilliant author. He’s like a Marxist, British Kevin Williamson.

2 responses to “A Great Link on Fascism”

  1. el Avatar
    el

    And the other side of this:

    // Ten years ago, social anthropologist Maryon McDonald conducted interviews with EU officials in Brussels, and noted that there were serious limits to the kind of criticisms that could be raised with them. Any substantial critique of the EU risked being condemned as, by definition, an extreme right-wing position. She wrote:

    ‘Since the 1970s especially, it has become increasingly difficult in Europe to criticise the EU without appearing to be some lunatic right-wing fascist, racist or nationalist, the one often eliding with the other, or simply the parochial idiot of Little Britain. The serious side of this is that the EU has, quite literally, encouraged neo-nationalist racism in Europe. That has often seemed the only space available in which criticism of the EU has been possible. A new space of serious criticism is therefore badly needed.’ (1)

    A project with no name

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I can’t believe we didn’t know this great website existed until now. I’m like, let’s stop reading my blog and go read these guys instead because they are better.

      It was really funny at the German conference because the hosts seemed to think that only a fascist would be against the EU, and all of a sudden they see a bunch of clearly very liberal people – on of them a high commissioner of the socialist government, and they are not all “rah-rah, EU is the best.”

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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