Democracy, the Prelude to Fascism

The Authoritarian Tendencies of Freedom

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“I know what you’re thinking, but it is NOT my mother!” This unprompted reflection by a patient led Freud to the perplexing insight not only that ‘mother’ occupied some unusually problematic position in the patient’s subjective register, but also that an idea can frequently express itself by its apparent opposite. The ideological translation of this self-effacing negation is taking on an uncanny life of its own today: the separation between democracy and fascism/authoritarianism, a separation that founded the liberal politics of the 19^th century, is becoming obscured. By a Freudian reversal of an idea into its opposite, authoritarianism is more and more frameable not as the fundamental opposite, but as a specific form, of democracy.

The increasingly aggressive, undiplomatic, and unpredictable tone of Trump – his sinister insistences on taking over Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal either by ‘economic or by military force’, his willingness to reject any terms of Palestinian freedom by illegally acquiring Gaza, or his desire to expand his oligarch international empire to include Putin – may not be immediately assimilable to the often exclusively ethnic or racial reasoning behind fascist regimes. Unlike isolated fascistic cases, Trump appears to be the consequence of a more general process of wealth and power concentration in the global market. Trump is the symptom, and culmination, of the uprooting of cultural and social forms induced by a decentred, techno-capitalism, a problem which the left has failed to counter with any serious solutions.

We may therefore be able to ascribe a logical series of events to which the Trump and the New Republicans are the inevitable response. But it is becoming difficult to ignore a mutation of Trump’s policies, which initially appealed to a libertarian, democratic freedom that he claimed to be obscured by the neoliberal bureaucracy of the Democrats, into an unsettling imperialistic, authoritarian, and proto-fascistic push towards global domination. It is on this point that we should not forget that fascism itself is a response. Fascism does not arise unexpectedly in a vacuum. This was the great shock to early 20^th century socialism, which seemed to patiently await a socialist conclusion to the growing demands for European democracy: instead, this democratic tendency culminated in a continental spread of fascism.

Fascism is not simply a deviation from an otherwise stable order. It is not the mere product of certain unpleasant and exploitative individuals that distinguish themselves from the rest of the population by their immoral and despicable politics. The question, as recent historians of the Soviet Union are coming to realise, is not about the wicked, authoritarian personality or the narcissistic traits of authoritarian leaders, but of the political system itself which allows certain (narcissistic) people to deploy and profit from their exploitative and wicked personality. The question of fascism should therefore not be of the type of person who may become a fascist, but rather of the system itself which is capable of producing fascist leaders.

We are therefore forced to ask an unpleasant question, the same question which the dawn of Nazism drove the Frankfurt School to ask: what is it about the demand for democracy that lends itself towards a fascist or authoritarian expression? There is an inherently Hegelian dimension to this paradox of democracy. In his Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel suggests that the properly democratic constitution must always comprise an un-democratic instance, an exception to the general logic of democracy. In the end, it becomes the un-elected, purely performative role of the monarch which embodies this principle: the monarch acts as a singular universal subjectivity, the moment of our political substance’s “reflection upon itself” which democracy needs in order to recognise itself as such. What is reproduced in this argument is the first fundamental insight of Hegel’s ontology, that the ground of existence is possible only insofar as it embraces the very moment that cannot be reconciled to it: nothingness.

Even the mystic theologian Meister Eckhart recognised this functional necessity of an idea to be divorced from itself in order to truly take on an ideological quality. Christianity, he argued, spread not by the immanent and sublime conviction of its followers, but by a symbolic distance introduced between the idea and its follower: not by ‘knowing’, but by ‘knowing that they know’. In order to the idea to become ideology, in other words, it must be kept at an epistemological distance, or even to have its directness rejected. What is fundamentally relevant today, however, is that we wrongly frame the problem if we insist on opposing fascism/authoritarianism to the familiar idea of liberal, capitalist democracies. The Trumpian insistence on a ‘pure democracy’, on putting an end to bureaucracy and bolstering the rights of the individual American worker, is producing anything but the desired effects. Trump’s America, like the accepted notion of democracy, wants to be open – it does not want to conceal its structure in an ideological veil. And ‘open’ is indeed what Trump is: he no longer pretends to have a determinate ideological stance, but rather acknowledges and plays with his contradictions, disavowals, and inconsistencies. And yet this open embrace of contradiction does not hinder his politics, but only makes them more effective.

As Mladen Dolar puts it, ideology today is no longer a case of asking whether the emperor is naked beneath his clothes (whether his humanistic façade conceals a sadistic set of private interests). Instead, the emperor proudly displays his nudity – Trump no longer acts under the guise of any remnants of the Truman Doctrine, that the cruelty of post-war US foreign policy operates in the positive name of spreading liberal democracy around the globe. On the contrary, Trump is not afraid to openly enact his policies in the name of private financial interests: the mediating role of Israel as an outpost for US economic hegemony was dropped where Trump intends to bypass Israel and establishing a direct US presence in Gaza; the ‘human face’ of American foreign involvements is shed where Trump intends to abandon Europe because it is a bad investment, and establish friendly ties with whoever serves his financial agenda. The Trumpian democracy is therefore a democracy which seems to openly admit to its own authoritarian, imperialist core.

At the same time, we should remember Adorno’s argument, in Minima Moralia, that fascism itself is characterised by this doctrinal openness. Unlike liberalism, which grounds its exploits by claiming to be acting according to principles of humanism and empathy, fascism is less ideological: it does not pretend, it does not force you to second-guess its intentions, but instead openly states the subjugation that it has planned for other nations, races, or groups. This despotic tendency of democracy can only be framed in modern terms, according to the global and stateless capitalism which produces the new forms of authoritarianism, such as Trump, that would be unthinkable according to early industrial State capitalism. The forms of liberal democracy that the West prides itself on, and in the name of which Trump is condemned, is a democracy not opposed to Trump, but in which new forms of authoritarianism have a privileged place. The more-or-less open market of contemporary democracy, which nevertheless occasionally relies on some form or other of State interventionism, is less restricted than ever by national borders. Wealth accumulation is de-centred, and capital can be concentrated to previously unthinkable levels. Whereas pre-20^th century authoritarianism had at least an element of tactical restriction in the physical limitations in market structures, qualitatively new forms of asymmetry in power accumulation are today possible.

It would be delusional to maintain that this globalisation of wealth concentrations by modern democracies does not simultaneously furnish forms of mass exploitation that we are only beginning to find the coordinates to express. The opposition between capitalist democracies and fascist/authoritarian tendencies is an opposition that is internal to these democracies themselves. Trump does not obey a fundamentally different set of rules from the rules that ground modern democracy. He is not an external perforation of this modern democracy that makes claim to a different rationale. He is rather the inherent tendency of this democracy – an anti-democratic, fascist tendency that is constitutively attuned to the democratic structure.

We frequently hear claims, even by critical thinkers such as Fredric Jameson – a crucial figure in understanding the postmodern market – that imperialism is a thing of the past, rendered obsolete by the virtual forms of hegemony introduced by contemporary, international capitalism. There are even hints today to a general scepticism about the possibility of fascism or authoritarianism, which we seem to have exclusively assigned to the 20^th century. But if Trump teaches us anything, it is that imperialism is alive and well, albeit in a new form – in a form which paradoxically maintains the notion of democratic rights by relying on the tools of authoritarianism and fascism that seem inherent to this liberal democracy.

Ultimately, the uncomfortable fact is that the economic and political institutions that democracy depends on inevitably tend towards unjust concentrations of power which in turn oppose this same democracy. If we continue to misunderstand fascism, to refuse to see it as an internal possibility of democracy itself, then the troubling rise of figures like Trump and his oligarch international will never be countered, and the paradoxically authoritarian logic of a democratic appeal to universal individual rights will never be confronted.

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