We live in strange and perilous times. As if climate change and mass extinction weren’t enough, they’re accompanied by…the return of fascism to the global stage. Wave after wave of it pulses across the world, like civilization itself having a heart attack. What’s behind it?

Take a hard look at the chart above. What does it say? Real incomes are falling around the globe. Sharply, hard and fast. And yet this isn’t new. It’s the culmination of what’s became a world-defining mega-trend — only no one much noticed. Way back in 2016, McKinsey noted what they then called a “Great Stagnation” — incomes had flatlined across much of the world. Here’s how they put it then.

During the last decade, income growth came to an abrupt halt for most households in the developed countries, with those headed by single women or comprising young, less educated workers among the hardest hit. Real income from wages and capital for households in the same part of the income distribution was lower in 2014 than in 2005 for about two-thirds of households in 25 advanced economies — more than 500 million people. From 1993 to 2005, by contrast, less than 2% of households in these economies had flat or falling incomes.

Dire stuff.

What does that have to do with the resurgence of fascism? Well, everything. Stagnation and decline are the central reason that fascism’s reappearing around the globe. Take a hard look at it. In Britain, no political party has the faintest shred of a plan or vision to revive the economy after the xenophobic shock of Brexit — instead, they only offer more and harder strains of xenophobia, even the left. In Italy and Sweden, “formerly fascist” parties are now kingmakers. Europe as a whole is struggling with the return of the hard right, gaining power by the day. Russia, of course, is on a bloody neo-fascist crusade to regain an empire.

We’re making little to no real progress on fighting climate change. Or mass extinction. Or inequality. Instead, what truly defines our age — sadly, shockingly, is the resurgence of fascism. It’s proceeding much, much faster than we’re solving any of our Existential Threats.

Even in America, a bright spot — and I’ll return to it — while the majority resoundingly rejected Trumpism, tens upon tens of millions are still ardent believers in it, and it grows more openly supremacist and violent by the day, even if horrors like massacres of the LGBTQ community are forgotten as quickly as they happen, which itself is pretty….you know….fashy.

So. What does all this have to do with flatlining — and now declining — incomes? Everything. Unless you think it’s some kind of cosmic coincidence, one of the biggest in history, that fascism swept the globe again right as income began to stagnate and plummet — there’s a clear, distinct, causal relationship at work here.

To really understand it, let’s quickly review a bit of social theory. Way back at the dawn of this thing called social theory, two guys predicted that capitalism would eventually fail. It would “contradict” itself, meaning that capital would keep so much money that workers would be left in the lurch, penniless, all of that would cause a huge depression, and as it gathered pace, the workers of the world would unite, and institute a thing called “socialism.” Now, leave your own politics aside for a moment — we’re just trying to review social theory. I’m not trying to persuade you of any political perspective in any way whatsoever.

The problem is that it didn’t turn out that way. Part of the story happened just like the two guys said it would: there was indeed a Great Depression, which was in fact caused by a tiny number of hands hoarding too much wealth, leaving too little for the vast, vast majority. That depression swept much of the world. In the 1920s, of course. And what happened next?

Fascism did. The rosy prediction that the workers of the world would unite and overthrow their capitalist chains (I’m being half ironic) was dead wrong. Instead, they reacted in just the opposite way. They didn’t go out there and seize wealth and power from the ultra rich. They attacked the most powerless and vulnerable in society, at the command of demagogues, who told them that they, the downtrodden, were the master race, oppressed by “immigrants” and “foreigners” and “aliens,” corrupted by gay people and liberated women, facing a genocide. And therefore, it was perfectly justified — moral, even — to strike back. And hurt all these people, in what turned out to be shocking, historically repugnant ways.

Do you see the link? History didn’t turn out the way our two friends — Marx and Engels — said it would. They were wrong. Stagnation and depression didn’t give way to socialist utopia. Instead, it caused a wave of hate and violence aimed in precisely the opposite direction — downwards, at groups like Jews and gay people and immigrants and the disabled. The Nazis took it the furthest, but don’t forget how far fascism really had spread. From Italy to Japan, it was ascendant. In France, the Vichy regime appeased it. Even in America, it was a serious movement, legitimized in places like the New York Times, until Pearl Harbor happened.

After the war, the “new left,” as it came to be called, was therefore faced with a problem. This was a group of intellectuals, many of them European, many of them Jewish, whose families had fled fascism. And they understood that there was a serious issue now in social theory. Why had fascism happened — and not socialism? After all, what sense did it make, really, for some poor average Joe whose life was falling apart…to scapegoat a Jew or some even poorer migrant worker or a gay person or someone in a wheelchair for their woes? What had happened here?

Something had gone badly wrong in the way that social theorists had understood everything — from human nature to politics to society itself. People shouldn’t have been this self-destructive, hateful, foolish, irrational. So much so to cause a World War and a Holocaust. But they had been.

It was the great John Maynard Keynes who pieced it together best. Fascism, he discovered, was the result of sudden, sharp plunges into poverty, especially unexpected ones, ones where people’s expectations of upward mobility collided with the grim reality of downward mobility. I say “discovered” for a reason. It wasn’t a theory — he backed it up with voluminous evidence. It was one of the great discoveries of the 20th century — the socioeconomists’ equivalent, perhaps, of the polio vaccine. There was a clear relationship at work here, Keynes had found.

And there is again today.

The new left, such as it was, didn’t really solve the problem. They realized that their intellectual grandfather — Marx — had been wrong. But figures like Herbert Marcuse — called the “father of the new left” — offered vague and oft impenetrable explanations for why fascism had occurred in the ashes of depression. Their criticisms of society and capitalism were powerful, to be sure — Marcuse pioneered the idea of being “intolerant of intolerance.” But for the problem of fascism, it was left to Keynes to really provide the answer.

Now. Why the review? So that we really understand the problem sweeping the globe, and I mean really understand it. Just like the new left were then, many of us are puzzled, baffled, and bewildered by the resurgence of fascism. Take a place like, I don’t know, Sweden. How is it that a society which was until very recently held up as a shining example of being one of the most advanced in the world…is now basically at the whim of neo-fascists…who go out and do things like dissolve the Environment Ministry…LOL…while climate change bites? How do you get from the Sweden the world admired and respected to here? Or take Britain. How do you get from a society that, at the turn of the century, was the envy of the world, skyrocketing living standards, peaceful, tolerant, wise…to the seething cauldron of xenophobia and spite it is now…in which both sides scapegoat the powerless and vulnerable for the shattered future of the “true Brit”?

What happened to the world?

What happened to the world in a sense is very simple. Incomes stagnated — and now, they’re actively plummeting. The timeframes, too, matter. In America, incomes stagnated in earnest through the 1990s. In Europe, as McKinsey points out, from the 2000s. The rich world, in particular, has faced decades by now of stagnating incomes. And the problem isn’t getting better — it’s getting worse, fast. That is what declining real incomes mean.

Falling incomes are an Existential Threat to civilization itself. Why? Because they result in fascism — at precisely the time when the world and societies need to pull together to fight the other Existential Threats of climate change and mass extinction. The world, and every country in it, needs to take collective action, or else these threats simply overwhelm us. But in fascism, only one form of collective action is possible, and it’s not say saving the planet, life on it, renewing natural resources, replanting forests, cleaning up oceans — it’s just annihilating and cleansing away the “impure,” so that the persecuted master race is “supreme” again.

Now. It’s not so hard to understand just why stagnant and falling incomes cause fascism. What happens to people when their incomes stagnate and fall? They begin to grow discontented. They’re living right at the edge. They pile up massive debts, just to maintain failing living standards — the discovery at the heart of Keynes’ analysis. Life seems to hang by a thread. Anxiety turns to rage, a burning sense of injustice, a feeling of being abandoned and betrayed by institutions, which are corrupt, and only serve the rich and powerful.

And along comes a demagogue who blames all that on a scapegoat.

That might sound abstract to you, but let’s look around the world today. Do you want to know a funny thing about it, if you really look? Everyone’s pointing the finger at everyone else as a scapegoat. There’s Britain, scapegoating Europeans. There’s Europe, scapegoating immigrants and refugees — and while it’s true that many display a certain inability or unwillingness to integrate into European life and cultural mores, still, that’s not the reason incomes are falling. There are the Trumpists, scapegoating Jews and Latinos and women and gay people. Do you see how ridiculous this all is? If any of these scapegoats were genuinely the cause of all these societies’ real problems — if the Big Lies were really true — then surely, one of them would have fixed their problems by now. But none have.

The world is playing a game of musical chairs of scapegoats — one country’s true and pure is another’s hated impure and faithless one. Except, perhaps, in the case of the universal enemies of fascism — women, gay people, disabled people, and so on. But how can it be the case that this kind of group is “supreme” here, but hated there? Surely even a child can see how absurd this form of illogic is.

Now. What happened in the 1920s? The search for scapegoats didn’t work. Let’s go from Marx to the Nazis. What did the Nazis propose as their only social vision and agenda? Eliminate the impure — and conquer much of Europe for “lebensraum,” living room, for the “true” German. The problem was that scapegoating — well, what did it achieve? First, the Jews were demonized. Then, Jim Crow style laws — laws explicitly modeled on American ones — were passed to expropriate them and create a segregated society. Then they were put into ghettoes. None of this did anything whatsoever to make the average German better off. Finally, the Jews were annihilated, in the Holocaust. And apart from being a moral horror of historic proporitons, what did that achieve? Nothing. Not a thing. Germans’ lives didn’t improve. The story can be expanded, too, and perhaps should, to include the persecution of disabled people and gay people and so forth.

What happens in historical cycles like this, then, is this. Incomes fall and stagnate. Instead of some kind of upwards-focused revolution, there’s a downwards focused one. Average people fall under the sway of demagogues, who scapegoat already marginalized groups for their very real problems. But then something even more sinister happens. Scapegoating doesn’t work. And yet precisely because it doesn’t work, it hardens. It goes from hate to persecution. Then from persecution to street violence. And then from street violence to genocide. Nobody much stops to ask: hey, is this even working? Or is this…ignorance and folly? How is this going to solve anything? The answer is already there, and it’s always: you’re not trying to destroy the impure hard enough, and that’s why your incomes are still falling, and your living standards are still plummeting.

You hate them? You told them that? Not good enough. Go out there and scream death threats at them. You did that? Still not working? Hey, maybe go out and massacre a few of them at a nightclub. Still not working? Well, maybe you need to elect us, so that we can make it against the law for those people to exist. They shouldn’t, you know — they’re parasites, liabilities, they could infect your wife and your kids with their gayness or their faithlessness or their impiety. Just give us the power to make them go away, and then things’ll be better.

Oh, that still didn’t work? It’s because you didn’t give us enough power. This thing called democracy? It’s just an impediment in the way of the project of cleansing a society. Your society. You’re the persecuted one. Just give us the power to end democracy, absolute power — and then we can finish the job. With a Final Solution.

Chilling words. That’s how it goes down. That is how history works. We are now repeating history. Only we don’t seem to know it. Way back in the Trump years, there was some awareness of this fact. But the trend — fascism sweeping the globe — hasn’t gone away. It’s only gotten worse. In that sense, history’s still repeating itself.

Now. America’s a bright spot, because it’s bucking the laws of history right about now. That’s a remarkable thing for a nation to do, genuinely. It speaks to a people’s courage and moral fiber. That Americans can go out there and reject Trumpism resoundingly, even while incomes are falling, after stagnating — well, that’s something that shouldn’t be happening, according to history, but it is, and in that context, America is a world leader right now.

Because it tells us that no law of sociohistory is made of iron. Yes, Keynes discovered that stagnant and falling incomes ignited fascism, as people were crushed by debt, lost hope and truth in institutions and each other, and society’s matrix of bonds and beliefs was rewired by demagogues to run on the voltage of hatred and violence. Yes, Marx and Engels were wrong, and depression didn’t lead to some kind of glorious socialist revolution, but just the opposite, World War by way of fascist flames.

But none of that has to always be true. Sociohistorical laws are just generalities. This isn’t physics. We are human beings, with moral centers and free will, and we can go right out there, and break the laws of sociohistory, too, when we so choose. That’s what America’s doing right now, and that’s why this moment feels so powerful for Americans. Because it is. It’s genuinely remarkable to see a nation choose to break the laws of sociohistory, and say, we’re going to do the right thing, and set a new path, prove to the world that it doesn’t have to end up the old way, like it did before. We can break the chains of history.

But is the world learning that lesson? That, my friends, is the question. You see, America’s accomplishment, breaking history’s chains, shouldn’t be underestimated. It should be witnessed by a world in which the sway of fascism increases by the day. And Americans themselves should be, even while they applaud themselves, ever more determined, learning from their very own lesson, that it is possible to break these chains, to regain the moral center of a society, to go sane again, to rebuild a society of decency and community and norms and bonds of peace and justice and truth. Make no mistake, America’s taken just the first step — but in this context, the first step is the crucial one, the shattering of history’s bonds. Let us hope it continues walking towards the light, and leading the world that way, too.

We are in a dark place, my friends. All of us have a responsibility to really understand the above. How history’s laws say fascism happens. And then to defy those very laws, and show the future that history isn’t made of chains. It’s made of freedom. That part, though, is up to us.

Umair
November 2022