LARB has a conversation on Facism with Rob Riemen:
Like Umberto Eco, I think it’s worthwhile to address fascism as — borrowing from Wittgenstein — a “family resemblance” concept. As such, we can name constellations, groups, and regimes as “fascist” when they share, in Wittgenstein’s words, “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing,” but they don’t have to all share every single feature of what we might call a fascist trait — nationalism, racism, traditionalism, chauvinism, militarism, etc. — to deserve the name. I also think that, as a speech act, when we call something fascist, we aren’t just describing something, we’re also surely calling for an antifascist response. What should that look like, in your view?
In 1938, Thomas Mann arrived in New York. Originally, he was only scheduled to go to the United States on a tour for his lecture series, The Coming Victory of Democracy, but it became impossible for him to go back to Europe, since he was in exile. He spoke at these old-style American town halls from the East Coast to the West Coast, around 15 places in all, most of the time with an audience of two, three, four thousand people.
I’m still amazed. We are talking about a man in his late sixties, a European with a heavy German accent, and you have two, three, four thousand Americans listening to his lectures. The essence of what he had to say was, “Look, who am I to tell you Americans about democracy? You’re the country of Lincoln, of Walt Whitman, you’re the country of President Roosevelt. But I have a certain experience which I would like to share with you, and which is very important for you to understand. I come from the city of Munich. I was there for more than 30 years. Mr. Hitler was there all the time. I saw the whole thing happening and growing. This fascist movement is growing all over Europe. And what I realized is that the essence of a democracy is its spirit.”
He understood that the spirit of democracy involved people’s enlightenment. That’s why his conclusion was that the essence of democracy is education. The democratic experience is an appeal to “our better angels,” and for that you need education. It’s not just an American phenomenon that we live in a society of “organized stupidity.” Goebbels would be in awe of Tucker Carlson and people like him. The propaganda machine, the conspiracy theories, and the total lack of education — that is how you create a society in which these things can happen. And, again, this is not only about America; we see it here in Europe all the time.
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