This ended up long.
There are many reasons why I think fascism is inevitable. I can only throw a few ideas at this post. It is a bit scatter-gun, hopefully it paints something of a picture of the various conditions we are facing. I don't like pretty much any of the reality of our global situation, but I am looking at dealing with reality rather than the world I would like to be in.
tl/dr: the currently rich and powerful prefer fascism over an egalitarian society in which their and their children's advantage is taken away. The conditions for totalitarian fascism have been created and are in use. Exploitation of fossil fuels (and the green revolution) has resulted in several billion too many of us as we approach a resource constrained future and huge biospheric degradation. World War 3 is hotting up, meaning some degree of fascism might be necessary for simple self-defence. Impoverished former working class people are given no other credible alternative. Climate change is a crisis multiplier whose impact is going to intensify dramatically over the coming years and decades.
A definition of 'fascism' I arrived at (that might be commonly held I don't know) is: 'the extremism of the centre ground'. I know that this doesn't encompass all aspects of fascism. It helps inform my conclusion regarding its inevitability here in the UK and more broadly.
At one point, amongst a lot of other reading, I listened to fifteen or twenty hours of podcasts that Roger Hallam (one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil) recorded about creating a social movement to try and tackle climate change.
Hallam spent a couple of years studying for a PhD, researching how to achieve social change through civil disobedience and radical movements. I get the impression he decided to act rather than be an academic. I don't agree with him in terms of the timeline for climate change, but he has studied protest and social movements, and has put his money where his mouth is. He might be in prison now, he was sentenced last year to five years.
Anyway, I got the impression that he wants to have a social movement in place for when, if, we get to an inflection point where mass civil disobedience (and thousands of prison sentences) could lead to the change that is necessary to try and avoid the worst-case scenarios for climate change that we are currently accelerating towards. There is a societal equivalent to this, in terms of the rise of the far right, that is relevant to this post.
The British government has responded to civil disobedience over the failure to address climate change with increased authoritarianism. We live in a data-totalitarian, almost permanent surveillance society: from mobile phones, obviously, to the decline of paper currency, cctv and npr, to 'smart' electricity meters (whose surveillance capability doesn't seem to be widely discussed but is absolutely a factor in its roleout) and on and on. It is far more intrusive than even Soviet era East Germany. It is an ideal state precursor to fascism: the state apparatus has been built and is being 'improved'. You can't have the opposite with that apparatus in place. How would any social movement disband all of it?
I can't remember whether I first heard from Roger Hallam that the common conditions necessary for 'revolution' throughout the 20th century are also the conditions in which fascism thrives: very briefly, former working class (an outdated term as the social contract those people previously enjoyed has been ripped up by neoliberalism), now working poor or precariat go hungry and have so little to lose that they are prepared to be locked or beaten up in protest. I get the impression he is hoping for a climate change analogue of the above conditions.
We are at the back end of 45 years of neoliberal economic/political ideology that has impoverished former working class people, following 250 years of fossil-fuel-powered capitalism whose decimation of the biosphere's ability to support human life hasn't even begun to really be felt. In the UK every benefit cut, every act of unnecessary austerity creates many thousand reform UK voters. The same scenario has played out in the US with poor former working class people being betrayed by the Democrats' shift right. The coming climate change refugees (who have been created by the last several decades' inaction) will be orders of magnitude greater than the UK's currently nearly-a-London-a-decade. How will Europe deal with this? One of capitalism's many 'big lies' is that is manages scarcity, when in fact it has come to exist in the period of greatest abundance (see primary energy consumption for incontrovertible evidence of this). Some combination of a genuine low energy society, and biospheric devastation is on the horizon. We are moving towards genuine scarcity and a collapse of the energy source that powered capitalism. What will follow fascism, in my opinion? Some form of feudalism.
Media owners, the rich and powerful, prefer fascism over an egalitarian society in which they lose their advantage. They want the vast majority toiling in a trickle-up economic system from which they profit. We see this playing out now as it has before. We saw during covid that actually most jobs are not 'essential'. They exist because people are there to do them. Hyper-capitalist libertarian 'tech bros' are coming for those (many 'middle class') jobs with AI. If they get that together, the conditions for fascism are immediately in place.
World War 3 (previously playing out as proxy wars, and in the information, cyber, economic and no doubt other spheres) is in danger of hotting up. The 50 year petrodollar arrangement ended a few years ago, hastening the end of the dollar's reserve currency era. The question was 'could the US with the biggest army in the world, accept a much reduced global role (and portion of unearned global wealth) without using its military might?' The US chose a leader who is clearly prepared to go to war. We don't know how the next decade or so is going to play out, but the risk of a hot world war makes cooperation much less possible. Autocratic leaders whose concern is self-preservation in a global war scenario is a light form of fascism.
A bit bleak and depressing? Only if you haven't come to terms with ideas such as progress being a fossil-fuel-powered capitalist myth. Every society creates them, of the past and the future. I suppose I hope I am wrong, and some sort of revolution to prevent the rise of the far right, of world war three, of biospheric collapse don't play out. But I also think it is a mistake to fight battles that are already lost.
