In the 1920s and 30s, we saw so many of the things we see today: financialization and deindustrialization in core economies, a fragile world peace fraying among rival empires, massive wealth disparity and concentration, economic growth sustained by rising consumer debt and increasingly irresponsible stock market speculation, people problematizing their gender and getting tattoos and the rise of populist authoritarians.
When very similar political, material and economic conditions obtained, we saw the same kinds of political and social phenomena that we do today. Populist authoritarians, anti-democratic strongmen nevertheless returned to office through elections were one of the key phenomena associated with that period. Ioannis Metaxas, António de Oliveira Salazar, Francisco Franco, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Plutarco Calles were not unlike Donald Trump, Recep Erdogan, Victor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro and Rodrigo Duterte in their time. And much has been written about the lessons we can learn from the successes and failures of the 1920s and 30s and how we might apply them to fighting populist authoritarianism in the present.
But we must also ask what makes today’s authoritarians new, and examine how they are different from their forbears a century ago. I want to suggest that one of the most notable differences has to do with questions of diversity and cosmopolitanism.
1920s Europe was a continent of new countries and old countries with new borders, following the treaties ending the First World War and the ethno-national partition processes established in their wake. The border of Italy had gelled just two years before Benito Mussolini took power in 1922, following an eighty-year process of partition, expulsion and amalgamation that pulled Italian-speakers into the boot-shaped polygon etched on the map and pushed Slovenes, Croats, Germans and others out. This Italy possessed an ethnolinguistic homogeneity all previous incarnations had lacked.
The Greece in which Ioannis Metaxas took power was just twelve years old, following a century-long process of partition and expulsion, with Greeks pouring in from Asia minor and Turks, Slavs and Albanians being pushed out east and north. The Weimar Republic that Hitler overthrew was similarly only fourteen years in age, with thousands upon thousands of Czechs, Poles, Germans and others being forced to relocate in a byzantine partition process that lasted years.
For fascists, the ethno-linguistic purity of their nations was insufficient. Roma, Jews, Catalans, Basques and others were early and easy targets for political movements whose paranoid style required the existence of internal enemies. And the fact that these groups were so thoroughly assimilated only helped to feed narratives of internal subversion and conspiracy.
For all the superficial similarity of their rhetoric, with the exception of Hungary’s Victor Orban, today’s authoritarian success stories are coming from states that are best-known not for ethnolinguistic homogeneity but diversity and cosmopolitanism. Not only are Brazil, the Philippines and the United States some of the most diverse countries in the world, they are only growing more so with time. The US is increasingly a bilingual country; Filipino Muslims and Fukien Chinese are more geographically distributed than every before; even as Brazil continues to boast German, Japanese and other non-Portuguese news media from settlers a century ago, English- and Spanish-speakers constitute larger chunks of the population.
Donald Trump did not just continue but amplified his rhetoric when it came to praising white supremacists, denigrating Muslims and abusing Latinx peoples. Narendra Modi’s rhetoric of Hindu supremacy and exclusivity has, similarly, not been tempered by high office. And Jair Bolsonaro’s race-baiting of Afro-Brazilians combined with continued calls for Indigenous genocide have similarly continued or been amplified in office.
Yet, when it came time to examine who the five million new Trump voters were this November, it turned out that this group of voters were disproportionately non-white, with Asian Americans and Latinx voters becoming more likely to positively reappraise Trump than white voters. Similarly, Modi’s successes at home in bringing Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs into his coalition, to make the BJP a more religiously diverse party are even being experienced in the Indian diaspora. Even former Khalistan activists and their children, who fled India in fear of their lives, with the dream of a Sikh homeland in Punjab are increasingly joining pro-Modi diasporic coalitions with Hindus.
When one delivers this news to Woke folk/progressives, there is the usual response: this should not be what is happening; the people who are doing it are stupid and because it is dumb and should not be happening, we should behave as though it is not.
But what if this behaviour is rational and based on people’s lived experiences? How can we explain what is taking place? Because if we cannot explain what is happening or why it is, we have no hope of stemming the tide.
First, we must ask this: what is supporting a new authoritarian movement an alternative to? For racialized people, ethnic and religious minorities, it is, among other things, an alternative to the way liberal societies and neoliberal economies manage questions of diversity, pluralism and cosmopolitanism.
Most visibly, our societies manage this through tokenism, a kind of neo-Ottoman social organization where people with minority identities are prominently featured in high-level government and corporate positions. Like a Greek Orthodox vizier in the Ottoman court or an Armenian Christian vizier serving an Abasside Caliph, the material interests of the vizier are a continuation of the dominant order. When medieval fellahin in the Nile Delta saw a Copt as the Caliph’s first minister, there was no celebration of impending Christian-Muslim equality, no talk of breaking glass ceilings. They understood clearly that, to keep his job, the vizier would work tirelessly for the supremacy of the Muslim Caliph who appointed him. Sadly, contemporary progressives lack the political sophistication of the average medieval peasant and are still wowed by the pageantry of false equality.
When Mexicans or Arabs move their support to Donald Trump, they are looking past the symbolism of exhibiting children in cages and American bombs landing on Yemeni cities and recognizing that the Trump regime is only a little more racist and Islamophobic in its policies than the Obama regime that preceded it. That, when one strips away the theatre of cruelty, the same Christian and white supremacist structures are continuous, maintained by Republicans and Democrats alike.
This might explain why the Trump regime might be seen as no worse, but why might it be seen as better? First of all, transparency and honesty; while Trump is honest and unapologetic about the way that the hierarchy of American cosmopolitanism is ordered, liberals and progressives constantly lie about an imagined equality, an imagined amity. Trumpism, on the other hand, recalls the rough and tumble pluralism of the First Gilded Age, of the Roman Republic, where competition among ethnicities was acknowledged, where neighbours traded racist jokes across back fences and rioted against one another.
Of course, some especially foolish folk might say that our goal is for a pluralism that is non-hierarchical, that is culturally neutral. Even leaving aside Karl Popper’s arguments about how pluralism must be governed by a value system that values and supports pluralism, it is also obvious that different dominant cultures organize pluralism different ways.
“Personality of law,” for instance, is a historically common pluralism that has been rejected by modern liberal Christian “secular” societies. In this model of pluralism, every person has the right to be governed based on the laws and traditions of their religion or ethnicity. Sharia law applies to Muslim citizens and canon law to Christian citizens. Only in the EU is personality of law incorporated into the Christian pluralist order—and it only applies to wage legislation i.e. most workers carry their country’s minimum wage with them. In modern Ethiopia, as in the United States before the 1860s, freedom of religion is exercised by towns, not individuals.
Modern liberal pluralism is not the only, or even most logical theory for organizing a religiously and ethnically diverse cosmopolitan society. And, I would argue that one of the most powerful forces animating modern populist authoritarian movements is not a desire to eliminate pluralism but to offer new models of pluralism that are more satisfying for their followers.
The Trump movement, like its Democratic Party opponents, recognizes the United States as a complex hierarchy of races and religions that enjoy varying degrees of wealth, safety and opportunity; these are not just groups of individuals but a complex system of institutions, secular and religious, that deserve varying degrees of state patronage and recognition, depending on the race and religion in question.
People are usually embarrassed to speak about their sexual desires and are not likely to miss a dose. cialis uk The cialis canada cheap best way to find out the reasons behind this stress. Of the loss of the performance, dying regarding a liked a particular one, nor different disenchantment, stimulates lots of the signs having to do with depression. robertrobb.com cheap viagra No question about it! cialis viagra cheap has made a difference for millions of men and their partners.But whereas the traditional party system cloaks this in a discourse of secularism and cultural relativism, the Trump movement is transparent in how it hierarchizes these groups and the institutions that purport to represent them. This transparency has proved attractive to white Christians, who receive the most state recognition and patronage but has proven increasingly popular with groups that are below the top of the hierarchy but still seek and obtain recognition and patronage.
For instance, it has not just been Christian charter schools that have benefited from the policies of Education Secretary Betsy de Vos. Madrassahs have benefited too, albeit to a lesser extent, as have Jewish and Hindu religious schools. And the movement’s popularity has grown in these communities as their leaders have come to hear Trump’s anti-Semitic and Islamophobic proclamations as indicative not of a Nazi-style genocidal policy but rather the rhetoric one associates with the rough and tumble hierarchical pluralism of pre-WWII America, the Ottoman and Roman Empires.
In India, we see a similar set of developments. Whereas Muslims are subject to increasing brutal violence and genocidal actions by Narendra Modi’s BJP and affiliated militias, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains have enjoyed increasing state protection and patronage. For the Modi movement, there exists a binary: non-indigenous religions i.e. evangelical Christianity and Islam are facing increasing persecution and attempts at eradication. But those religions considered to be part of a larger Hindu-based family of religions descended from the one true faith are now inside the Hindu tent and organized into a hierarchy. In this way, there are substantial material and political payoffs that autocthnonous enjoy when their members join Modi’s coalition in greater numbers.
A similar phenomenon obtains when it comes to lower caste Indians. While most Dalits (ie. Untouchables) and “backward” castes have faced increasing violence from the Hindu fundamentalism being hawked by the Modiites, there is a paradox. Modi himself brags of being of “the most backward caste” and proudly shows the evidence of this coursing through his blood and written upon his skin. His personal rhetoric is not merely exemplary; it is instructive: by adopting the dress, politics and affiliations of his movement, other darker, lower caste Indians can whiten themselves.
Prior to Modi, there were processes of passing and whitening known as “Sanskritizing” that the old secular Congress Party worked actively against. Their goal was to the eradication of caste, not unlike the dreams of Latin and Anglo American liberals at the foundation of their countries. Individuals and jatis (large lineage groups) have always had a way of moving up the caste hierarchy. Under Hindu, Mughal and British rule, this process was negotiated by the brahmins, the priest class, permitting mobility for individuals and groups at the cost of reinforcing the overall caste structure. (Similar to the limpieza de sangre system I explain here.)
Under the rule of the Congress Party, following independence, Sanskritizing i.e. leaving one’s village, moving to a large city and falsifying one’s genealogy was the preferred process, not unlike “passing” in the United States during the same period.
But the Modi movement offers an alternative preferable to more and more low-caste individuals: joining the movement and using a rank in the party or one of its militias as a whitening influence on one’s lived caste position. Just as Rudyard Kipling’s fictive British Raj promoted private Gunga Din to the rank of corporal posthumously, despite him coming from a low caste ineligible for officer ranks in the army (unlike the martial lineages like Sikhs), because he better embodied the traits desired in a British officer than a man of the correct race and lineage, BJP and its militias are mass producing Gunga Dins.
In America, the Trump movement offers two models of personal whitening, both arguably imported from the more venerable and better theorized and strategized Modi movement.
If there was one event more uncanny in the 2016 US election than any other, it was the Donald Trump campaign’s Hindu diaspora campaign event. Building on the ways in which the colour line in the core of Dixie had already come to work, the campaign was explicit in its invitation to high-caste Hindus who, like Nikki Haley, are already situated above the black-white colour line in states like Louisiana and South Carolina. High caste i.e. white Hindus were explicitly recognized as part of a global Aryan nationalist white supremacist project in ways that had not been since the 1930s. While Trump, himself, was personally clueless, helpfully stating “I support Hindu,” during the bewildering event in which he was festooned in gold and received endorsements from temple priests, his advisors were clear-eyed.
And high-caste Hindus were just one part of a larger project. Many Latin American states have a long white supremacist history but none more than the two great “white settler states” of the Southern Cone, Brazil and Argentina. White Brazilians and Argentines from metropolises like Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo come from a civic discourse that is more explicitly white supremacist than that of Anglo America. And many have suffered indignity and confusion coming to Canada and the US, having led lives of benefiting from and praising white supremacy, only to find themselves situated below the colour line. These groups the Trump campaign targeted successfully.
And this is a paradoxical feature one finds particularly in the Bolsonaro, Modi and Trump movements: if one is located within the movement, the colour line becomes more flexible and moves lower to accommodate more folks.
In this way, the Trump movement’s use of regalia is especially powerful. Donning a red MAGA hat makes any person wearing it if not white than significantly whiter in the eyes of other MAGA hat-wearers. And this is not a wholly new phenomenon, especially in the US. Poles, Czechs, Irish, Turks, Greeks, Italians, etc. all became whiter by joining not the anti-racist Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln but the white supremacist Democrats of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the newly white and the nearly white joining a populist racist movement might make the country as a whole more racist, the lived experience of individuals is the opposite. A MAGA hat is more powerful than Kevlar when it comes to stopping police bullets.
What begins to come into focus with these comparisons is that unlike the fascists of the 1920s and 30s, or retro fascists like Victor Orban and the fourth and fifth parties of Western Europe’s parliaments and legislatures, the new authoritarians are not simple opponents of cosmopolitanism. Rather, they seek to refashion their countries’ pluralisms into systems that are more visible, more hierarchical, more dynamic and at peace with many long-term civic inequalities.
We see this too in Recep Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman term. Erdogan’s movement is pronouncing on a century of secular liberalism at gunpoint in Turkey and offering, in its place, a return to a pluralistic, theocratic, ordered hierarchical Ottoman past, offering permanent inferiority to religious and ethnic minorities as an alternative to assimilation at gunpoint that the Kemalist state offered in the twentieth century.
But most importantly, for traditionalists within any culture, there is a universal appeal in the figure of the authoritarian patriarch.
Bill Maher pointed out in 2012 that, as people grow increasingly cynical about the ability of their votes to arrest or even mitigate the destruction of neoliberalism, they begin thinking about political campaigns like a wealth seminar: Mitt Romney and Donald Trump are not going to govern to benefit individuals of their class. Rather, by joining their movement and following their advice, you might become like them—they will tell you “the secret” to becoming rich, powerful patriarchs like themselves.
In this way, there is an implicit, unstated promise, especially from a man dominating a large, attractive and accomplished family like the Trumps. Every conservative patriarch sees the election of a man like Trump as authorization to intensify his domination of his women, his children. Men that head families staging gender reveal parties, sending their kids to religious schools, engaging in surgery tourism to perform gendercide or FGM see a natural ally, even if he might say a few mean things about their church, their temple, their language.
As John Sayles wrote in the film Lone Star, “it’s comforting when you see one prejudice triumphing over another deep prejudice.”
