“The playbook has become familiar,” observes Ben Rhodes in the Review’s August 15 issue.

A right-wing populist harnesses the backlash to globalization’s failures to win an election on a grievance-filled us-versus-them platform. Cronies, enriched via corruption, finance the leader’s political agenda. Courts are packed with judges who allow further power grabs. Parliamentary districts are redrawn to entrench the ruling party. Voting laws are altered to favor certain parts of the population. The media is turned into an extension of the ruling party’s interests, while independent journalists are threatened, deplatformed, or imprisoned. Social media is used to monitor, intimidate, and demoralize political opponents. Civil society is demonized, harassed, or restricted.

Over the past twenty years nationalist autocrats have swept into power everywhere from Russia to Hungary, India, Israel, El Salvador, Argentina, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, and for everyone else, “almost half the world’s population lives in countries that will be voting this year.” “How,” asks Rhodes, “should we understand the political trend they represent?” And for would-be strongman candidates like Donald Trump, “When does a populist become a fascist?”

Below, alongside Rhodes’s essay, we have compiled a selection of writing from the archives about fascism.

Ben Rhodes
American Descent

Donald Trump and right-wing strongmen like him around the world are using grievance-based nationalism to gain power. When does this sort of populism tip into fascism?

Sarah Churchwell
American Fascism: It Has Happened Here

“In America Negroes do not have to be told what fascism is,” the poet and activist Langston Hughes told an audience in the 1930s. “We know.”

—June 22, 2020

Isaiah Berlin
Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism

The stock portrait of the Counter-Enlightenment writer Joseph de Maistre is of a fanatical monarchist and papist, proud, bigoted, and inflexible, with an uncommon power of rigorous deduction from dogmatic premises to extreme and unpalatable conclusions; an exasperated reactionary, a ferocious opponent who aimed to kill, vainly seeking by the sole power of his prose to arrest the progress of history; an unbending, fanatical diehard, pouring curses upon the marvelous new age which he is too self-blinded to see, and too willful to feel.

—September 27, 1990

Susan Sontag
Fascinating Fascism

“Fascist aesthetics flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, and extravagant effort; they exalt two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication of things and grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, ‘virile’ posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death.”

—February 6, 1975

István Deák
What Was Fascism?

“In such Eastern European countries as Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland, the established authoritarian regimes effectively preempted the platform of the genuine fascists and, for the most part, also won favor with Italy or Nazi Germany or both. Because the Eastern European fascists were rebellious, radical, and anarchic, Hitler favored the authoritarian right-wing governments and allowed the latter to crush local fascist movements.”

—March 3, 1983

Leonard Schapiro
What Is Fascism?

“The friction, the inertia, the multiplications of conflicting authorities which became apparent after Hitler came to power, were not the teething troubles of the new system: they were the system itself. Above the confusion stood the Führer alone, the supreme, omnipotent arbiter who gained in strength from the rivalries between individual underlings, or from the conflict between party and state, and SA and the army, or the industrialists and the bureaucracy. This is what a personal tyranny means.”

—February 12, 1970

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