Reactions to the Reactionary – The New Scholarship on Fascism, 2
All this aside, the themes Snyder identifies make the book a ready complement to his own pamphlet On Tyranny, his colleague Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, and other recent books on authoritarianism and nationalism. Together, Snyder and Stanley’s triptych might be said to form, loosely, a “Yale Theory of Fascism” that could prove significant.
Like other analyses, it presents fascism as a set of right-ward authoritarian symptoms, themes, or trends, broader than the particular political party from which it takes its name, while tackling how their expression has evolved in the internet age and distinguishing them from mechanically similar but ideologically distinct authoritarianisms of the left.
That Snyder’s thoughts in On Tyranny correspond to events explored in Road to Unfreedom is unsurprising, but the thrill of the book is in finding such copious examples. The most memorable, for me, was reading Road to Unfreedom’s description of the Night Wolves biker gang holding a nationalistic pageant for Putin, which so easily conjured On Tyranny’s injunction to be wary of paramilitary groups and militias which court the favor of nationalist politicians.
This possible connection came to mind again in March of last year, and not just to me. That groups like the border militias and Bikers for Trump, existing outside legal institutions, desire to act as auxiliary law enforcement and adopt its methods – to internalize the might and jurisdiction thereof into their lives as private citizens – should be recognized as one of the unnerving aspects of contemporary American life.
By “government of the people, by the people” was not meant this populist redistribution of coercive authority, but institutions so staffed and administered as to represent by the work of a mandated few the interests of the whole public. That this is not the perspective of many nominal patriots and rebels against government overreach is something Snyder’s books make uncomfortably difficult to ignore.
Not so easy to anticipate, but as rewarding, is the book’s interplay with Stanley’s work.
As discussed in my review of Stanley’s book, one feature of this interplay is Road to Unfreedom’s reiteration of the importance of sexual stigma to authoritarian politics (a specific preoccupation in the defining of enemies on which Stanley and Snyder’s Yale theory of fascism seems to put greater emphasis than earlier analyses). When Snyder says that Vladimir Putin has labelled political opponents “sexually deformed” in order to shift conversation away from political debate and onto cultural reaction to people’s sexual and gender identities, one sees clearly the action of fascist politics described in Stanley’s chapter on sexual anxiety.
But, in addition to this, the two works complement one another in their exploration of the fascist view of history: Both acknowledge that fascists trade in a debased version of history that claims the homeland was once an ethnically and culturally pure utopia, spotless in its innocence and righteousness, while the present is a sordid failure that has abandoned and thereby dishonored the virtuous past. Stanley cites as example, a leader of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland party who said, “No other people have been so clearly presented with a false past as the Germans,” and spoke of taking pride in “the accomplishment of our soldiers in both world wars.”). However, Stanley’s text suggests this is an attempt to justify a social structure analogous to family roles evoked by the mythic past, and fascist politicians’ policies create future conditions which corroborate their rhetoric about the bankruptcy and squalor of the present, while Snyder’s book shifts our notion of how fascists obscure the past.
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