Project Syndicate: Increasing Fascist Public Disclosure

January 27, 2019 Bob Weir Market Insights, Project Syndicate

Though “fascism” generally evokes images of jack-booted thugs and mass rallies, fascist movements first politicize language. Judging by the arguments and vocabulary now regularly used by mainstream politicians and thinkers in the USA and Europe, their strategy is bearing fruit.

“Populism” is an innocuous-sounding description for the xenophobic nationalism that is now sweeping much of the world. But is there something even more sinister at work?

In The Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish scholar who miraculously survived World War II in Germany, describes how Nazism “permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms, and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.” As a result of this inculcation, Klemperer observed, “language does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it.”

A similar phenomenon exists today in countries where a far-right politics has achieved success, be it Britain in the age of Brexit, Poland under Jarosław Kaczyński, or the United States under President Donald Trump. In recent weeks, politicians with such ideologies in these countries have increasingly found themselves painted into a corner, and have resorted to ever more outlandish lies.

While the Brexiteers remain insistent that crashing out of the European Union would not be devastating for the U.K. economy, Kaczyński has been busy trying to blame the murder of Gdansk mayor, Paweł Adamowicz, on the opposition, instead of his own party’s rhetoric. Trump, for his part, has continued to manufacture a crisis on the Mexican border to justify his demands for a wall.

Yet, for all of the focus on these leaders’ lies and violent rhetoric, not nearly enough attention has been devoted to the subtler applications of far-right rhetoric in recent years. History shows that illiberal movements can advance their agendas not just through elections, but also by infiltrating the common parlance of political debate. As we will see, the evidence today suggests that far-right “populists,” authoritarians and, indeed, fascists have been self-consciously waging a battle of words in order to win the war of ideas.

I am deeply worried that our changing linguistic use is paving the road to anti-democratic outcomes, including modern-day versions of fascism, which will not mirror precisely the forms we have known in the past. Given this danger, it is vitally important not to shy away from labeling the danger for what it is.

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About Bob Weir 3242 Articles
Bob Weir has over 50 years of investment research and analytical experience in both the equity and fixed-income sectors, and in the commercial real estate industry. He joined eResearch in 2004 and was its President, CEO, and Managing Director, Research Services until December 2018. Prior to joining eResearch, Bob was at Dominion Bond Rating Service (DBRS).

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