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Men on Horseback is now available at the online bookstore of your choice. Here are some thoughts on how it might contribute to current political discussions. Starting with, yes, “fascism.” https://www.amazon.com/Men-Horseback-Power-Charisma-Revolution-ebook/dp/B07Y73RNMQ /1
We have been seeing long, heated arguments about whether fascism is on the rise again. Peter Gordon, for instance, has made an impassioned case for the relevance of analogies between the present day and the interwar period. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/07/why-historical-analogy-matters/ /2
Many others have warning about fascism in a less nuanced way for a long time now. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074YM8W91/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1. /3
On the other side, @samuelmoyn, @CoreyRobin and others have insisted that these concerns are misplaced. When writing about Donald Trump, they emphasize his relative political weakness, and they way that, in practice, he has governed as a typical Republican. /4
Calling Trump a fascist threat, they suggest, distracts from more fundamental structural issues. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/05/19/the-trouble-with-comparisons/ /5
It’s a fascinating argument, but both sides are missing an important point about modern representative democracies that a look back at the Age of Revolution can help to illuminate – namely about how vulnerable they have _always_ been to charismatic authoritarianism. /6
Characterizing present threats as “fascism” exoticizes them, makes them seem like some sort of foreign bacilli threatening our otherwise healthy body politic. This is precisely why so many historians (myself included) see this particular analogy as unconvincing. /7
Fascism was based on regimented mass movements of a sort that have never had much success in the US. “Fascist” may be an effective political insult, but there are many, many kinds of anti-democratic movements, and many, many forms of political evil that have not been fascist. /8
But just because we are in no imminent danger of “fascism” does not mean that we are not vulnerable to other forms of authoritarianism. Men on Horseback argues that, from the start, modern democracies have depended on charismatic leaders to bind fractious polities together. /9
Their charisma in turn depends on the creation of a direct emotional bond between leaders and followers. Some leaders have a greater ability than others to inspire such emotions, but in many cases followers project hopes and fantasies onto surprisingly unlikely figures. /10
The bond takes shape through, and is shaped by, media: print in the 18th and 19th centuries, radio, film and television in the 20th century, the internet and social media today. /11
But all along, if powerful enough, the bond has the ability to “trump” (sorry) constitutional restraints. In what is often misleadingly called the “age of democratic revolution,” _most_ of the revolutions in question ended up sliding into dictatorship. /12
Men on Horseback traces how this happened in the case of France, Saint-Domingue/Haiti, and Bolivar’s South America. It was not just a matter of the fragility of the new constitutional systems, but of the positive attraction of charismatic authoritarianism. /13
If the United States did not follow this pattern, it was in large measure thanks to good luck. Among other things, our own charismatic founding figure, George Washington, for all his many grievous flaws as a slave-owner, resisted exploiting the immense popularity he enjoyed… /14
at the start of his presidency to override constitutional restraints during the intense partisan strife that followed. This is an important reason why, despite his flaws, we need to resist the temptation to cancel him. /15
But we shouldn’t overestimate the inherent stability of our own democratic system. Particularly given the rise of a right-wing media machine that has proven chillingly effective at creating an intense emotional bond between Trump and much of his “base.” /16
(If you don’t listen to Limbaugh, Hannity and Fox News regularly, you may have no idea of just how deeply they shape the worldview of that large segment of the electorate). https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/trump-year-one-tragedy-farce-right-wing-media /17
Trump would certainly prefer not to use his appeal to this base to move in an authoritarian direction. But if sufficiently isolated, and in a sufficiently confused and volatile moment—an election amidst a plague surge?—we can’t assume the old restraints will function. /18
It wouldn’t be “fascism.” But we should not underestimate the danger of deep, even violent political instability, for which the current unrest in Portland and elsewhere is only a small-scale rehearsal, following from such a moment. /end
