Quote:
Originally Posted by goofyballer
You're good at tying stuff to history - does this resemble the rise of Hitler/Mussolini/Franco in the 1930s, or (removing the specific focus on right-wing politics) waves of revolutions in 19th century Europe?
No. I still don't think you can write a coherent story about the fascism in the 1930s without the dual effects of 1) WWI and 2) the Depression and the traumas those enacted on the European and global psyche. The parallels to the present time are of course extent but not that apt.
I think we're closer to the 1870s-1900s in recent historical memory.
You can find a lot in the era of American history that sounds familiar to us. Continued fallout from a huge social upheaval -- the forces of Reconstruction and Jim Crow. A divided, often corrupted, largely inept government resulting from the failure of elites, both in the grip of ideological malaise and regulatory capture. Rapid expansion of huge corporations controlling more resources and the means of production, monopolization and monopsonization of industries. Mechanization/technology of farm equipment especially ending long-standing social and labor positions of people, who migrated to urban areas. Along with a big global migration. Growing strife leading to outright violent clashes between labor and capital, and an increasingly restive white racial majority re-applying authoritarian policies and tactics to racial minorities, Indians. You see a lot of counter-responses and feedback loops with aggrieved populations and social justice movements; consider temperance movements, anti-saloon leagues, women suffrage movements, etc. all flourished in the period. It was a multi-faceted social upheaval and I think *most* of the causative factors can be laid at the feet of industrialization, the introduction of finance capitalism, the concentration of wealth, increasing geographical/spatial stratification and segregation, etc.
Globally, a lot of the same phenomenon were happening; in France, Napoleon III and Bismarck operated as effectively mini-dictators during the early industrialization of Europe in the 1860s-1890s. Later in the 1890s and early 1900s, the British Empire is starting to fail and the global order is starting to be up-ended; the Malthusian/Darwinian paradigms -- which im you cannot divorce from capitalism, industrialization, labor movements -- are influencing social thought and producing strong hierarchical theories about the righteousness of the world (e.g., there are people who should have ****, or natural talents, or wealthy, and they should brutally eliminate and de-humanize lesser orders of humans because it's an incredibly zero-sum world and our survival as a species depends on acting on this mentality, lest inferior humans consume too much and jeopardize our collective well being, etc. etc.).
Think of seemingly random totemic events like the Dreyfus Affair producing social revolutions in France, much like how seemingly minor events cause global fascination, conspiratorial thinking, fit into these growing ideological binary frames. The struggle between nativists and tribalists against the forces of global integration and social justice.
In the UK, the US, really all of Europe, we saw the dawning of the Progressive Era in the US, the Liberal Party ascendancy in the UK in 1905 not hugely different from the re-discovery of a more vibrant left in the US and Europe now (e.g., politicians like Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn having national prominence would have been hard to imagine 10-15 years ago). I realize this is unsatisfying to the extent that I'm using some strong language (fascism, authoritarianism) and yet I'm walking back a comparison to the fascist movements of the 1930s most readily available to our common historical knowledge. But it's worth reiterating we *did* see the aggrandizement of those tendencies during the late 19th century period I'm describing: that US was entirely brutal against blacks, against Indians during this time, and that many blacks, Indians, women, immigrants had in fact seen better and been treated better before, a lot of that poor treatment was either cuased by, aided and abetted or at least ignored by an inept or complicit governments. And that Europeans were exporting a lot of their aggression and bloodthirst and fascist impulses out to their colonial enterprises and their own working class populations.
Last edited by DVaut1; 10-08-2018 at 03:33 PM.