[Peace-discuss] Eschew fascism

[C G Estabrook]

“Fascism” isn’t much of analytic category these days - it doesn’t indicate an agreed-on list of policies or practices. No one (with minor exceptions) says, “I’m a fascist."

It’s used as a term of abuse against one's opponents. (Who’s the bigger fascist, Clinton or Trump?) I think it should be avoided altogether today.

People do say, “I’m on the Left,” or “I’m on the Right,” and it’s important to ask them what they mean.

And I think ‘populism' is worth recovering as an analytic category (and not a term of abuse), not easily translated as 'left' or 'right.’

In "Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European Democracy" (2008), Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell define populism as an ideology that "pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity, and voice.”

Recent examples include the Iranian demonstrators, the Trump campaign, the Sanders campaign, Brexit, the Le Pen and Mélenchon campaigns, the Five Star and Lega campaigns (in Italy), and the AfD (in Germany)…

Only by establishment convention are these movements 'right-wing,' which normally means support for the wealthy. But populism supports the opponents of wealth.

The US political establishment (the major party organizations, the ‘intelligence community,’ the leading media [NYT, WaPo et al.] and their pundits) understands this, as their sneers at ‘populism’ shows…

I think we should talk about populism, and perhaps avoid the term ‘fascism’ - and they certainly shouldn’t be used as synonyms.  —CGE