Back to the Future The Alternative Twenties

hello

thank you so of course as for tonight’s

team

i want to start with the big question

that everyone is going to ask

are we indeed all going back to the

1920s

now if we read through our newspapers if

you read through our news feeds

if we see our smartphone updates it

often does feel as if the future namely

the 2020s

is just like the past when we look at

the way we use the word populism it

seems to indicate that we’re now

returning not actually to the 2020s or a

time of the future but we’re returning

to the 20th century

the so-called midnight of the century as

people have called it

when series of wars immigration crises

and refugee crisis

but also xenophobic mass movements

mainly from the right

took control of states and governments

and unleashed mayhem

afterwards now this has been going on

mainly for four years but i think it’s

good to put certain things in

perspective here

so mainly since the brexit and trump

votes of 2016

commentators and pundits both in europe

and in america

have lamented the so-called rise of

populism or even fascism

as a return to those dark days of the

mid 20th century

and they often treat the 2020s and the

1920s

almost as perfect paragons there so

trump salvini

orban and even le pen here seem to be

the reincarnations of people like hitler

mussolini or the leftwing case even stan

now what i want to argue in this talk

and this is an argument that quite runs

counter

to this literature or to this discourse

we’ve seen mainly in the last five years

is that the comparison with the 1920s

and the 1930s

actually reveals as much as it hides

now although there definitely are some

similarities between the two

ver various eras there are also some

important

and very stark differences and i want to

go over them

the absence of mass parties the absence

of mass war mobilization

and the absence of a really strong and

organized socialist or communist left

now if you really want to understand the

common politics of the 2020s

then the 1920s i claim might actually be

more useful as a

contrast rather than as an example in

this sense i think we are forced to see

our era precisely as that

namely ours they’re our 2020s

now even though someone like bayern has

won the election

or is hoping to win the election after

the last recounts for trump are over

when we look at for example europe and

jerry bodes

right by the film for democracy is

collapsing and you can see declining

numbers even for the honest you know

in france few people are really

confident

that any of these trends are going to

continue into the 2020s or into the next

decade

many people don’t believe that the 2020s

will be more liberal

and more open than what came before

certainly if we look at the 1990s or the

2000s

which were the heyday of globalization

which were the heyday of a kind of

liberalism

that now mainly seems on the retreat if

we look at what gets published and what

gets

advertised in our bookshops we

definitely should feel vindicated when

we see these apocalyptic visions

now we have reams and reeves of

publishing which have been dedicated to

the idea

that we have entered a new 1930s or a

new

fascist era there are many examples here

i’m just going to mention some

we have the former state secretary

madeleine albright who in 2017 published

a book called

fascism a warning and you have the yale

philosopher jason stanley

who also put out a book on fascism as a

hand guide

while a very prominent historian such as

timothy schleider

who mainly works in century europe has

also jumped on this fascism train

and has said that figures such as putin

trump

le pen and france are all to be seen

essentially as

examples of the types of fascist threats

we saw in the 20th century

now if we look closer to home in the

netherlands for example

you have philosophers such as johor

berman who’s quite a prominent cultural

critic

who already have talked for a fascism

2.0

since the last six years originally

referring to

figures such as wilders and jerry borden

now if you look at jimmy budder who’s

now often been in the news because of

the troubles his party finds himself

and was the embattled leader of the

existing forum for democracy in the

netherlands

there is a sense in which it is true

that there is a fascist site to put

there

he has regularly boasted of his

knowledge of certain fascist writers

he references them in some of his books

and also in his speeches there are

moments when he does a type of dog

whistling that does seem to signal his

adherence to a certain fascist

philosophy some might say that it’s just

transgression

as they call it or they just do it for

shock value but at the same time you can

see he’s at least

curious about parts of his fascist

legacy

as i said a lot of this what i’m talking

about certainly reminds us

of the scary times we saw in the 1920s

and in the 1930s

the xenophobia on the hatred for

outsiders

the uneasy and sometimes frankly hostile

relationship

to certain liberal institutions or the

idea of separation of powers

but also the negation of the idea of a

legitimate opposition

or the idea that your political

opponents are

not just participants in a game in which

you agreed on the rules

but are particularly lovesome or

dangerous individuals that need to be

eliminated sometimes or certainly don’t

even deserve

to be considered as a legitimate

opponent so all of that

has a dangerous 20th century ring to it

now of course this feeling is reinforced

by the circumstances that produce

all these far right and these new

extremist movements

we have rising inequality we have

a financial class that doesn’t seem

accountable for any of its actions since

the 2008

crisis certainly the coronal crisis is

massively

splitting society into a wealthy group

of individuals who are able to gain all

their wealth

another group of individuals who have

less and less access

to decent wages or decent public

services and all of that

as in the 1930s with the economic crisis

that in germany for example

does remind us of previous dark times

in the 20th century now nonetheless i do

want to insist that looking at the 1920s

and the 1930s

might actually be a mistake if you want

to find out what happens in the presence

and confuses or muddles about what is

happening today

and the first thing i want to talk about

when we use the word fascism is that

historically what fascism referred to

was a very distinct specific movement

that was tied to that context of the

1920s and 1930s

this meant that fascism had very strong

and large institution at its disposal

in which it used to crush them with its

very powerful opponents

now the most powerful of those opponents

were of course the well-organized

working-class socialist and communist

parties

which were found all across europe which

the main example of it was germany

in which the nazis basically set

themselves up as the caretaker

for a german ruling class to finally get

rid of the socialist and communist

insurgents

who were making it difficult for that

ruling class to rule

now we have to realize that mainly in

the 2020s and since the last 30 years

we really have none of those

institutions left

if we read around in political science

but also if you

look at the newspaper you will see that

mainstream parties and also socialist

parties

have actually lost massive amounts of

members since the early 1990s at the

earliest

our party landscaping is becoming more

and more fragmented there are more and

more parties

more smaller parties with a lot of

smaller challenges on the right which

are growing although there are some

challenges on the left as well

and these are pushing against the

dominance of a certain traditional

mainstream

but it’s important also to remember that

those parties hardly do that

push with larger constituencies or

voting and member bases

than those mainstream parties um if you

look for example

at flames belang or you look at vote for

democracy in the netherlands when you

look at the

way which is actually not a real party

they might have members and they might

have people who knock on doors for them

but they don’t do that with numerical

amounts of members

which are in any way reminiscent of the

1930s

or resemble the numbers that can be

given by traditional parties who are in

a very very deep crisis already

now of course one possible counter

argument here is that well some of these

parties

might not have a lot of members but they

do have a very online following

there was no internet in the 1920s and

1930s there was the press

there was all kinds of book circulations

but they didn’t have that digital tool

that today proves so powerful when

you’re trying to create support for your

political movement

certainly when we look at places such as

4chan look at reddit

with a very very rich extreme right

youtube conspiracy scene

the number of followers and subscribers

people have on twitter

the fact that the leader of lange in

belgium now has

its own tick tock account the fact that

his van langer nervous

instagram account is an immense

popularity

does give the sense that the politics of

large numbers of the politics of large

fascist movements

is still with us or returning but

specifically on the internet

and remember perhaps in belgium the

scandal surrounding the so-called

panel report on these fun language in

which the vertex or the public

broadcaster found out

his membership of this chat group which

is full of racist

and extremist content and it does seem

to indicate that the new

illiberal of far-right politics mainly

flourishes online

and we’ve seen this already in the

vocabulary that is so typical of the

internet with

more such normies or libcox or the

theory of a kind of great replacement

in which the west white societies are

being replaced by immigrants

the web certainly is a very hospital hub

or very hospital environment for a new

type of extreme white politics

now we also have to remember that

appearances do deceive

in contrast to the fascist organization

of the 1920s and 1930s i talked about so

mass parties paramilitary groups

the so-called exit costs or the price

you pay

once you leave these online

organizations is very minor and

practically insignificant compared to

these previous ones

that means that the kind of organization

the kind of

groups that flourish in the internet are

extremely

voluntary and so as anyone who’s been in

a facebook group or has been on twitter

it certainly has fairly real life

complete consequences on people’s

careers

but leaving them is not nearly as costly

or not nearly as hard as some of those

other associations were

so the new right flourishes in common

sections information on digital streams

and in facebook groups

but it simply doesn’t have the same

capacity for mobilization except when it

comes to clicks and ratings

now if you look at the us and we look

away from europe of course we do see

that there is some paramilitary side to

some of these movements

just like we saw insane street violence

in the 1920s and 30s when you had police

communists and fascists all fighting in

the streets and shooting each other

and in the u.s for example the recent

black lives matter protests over the

summer

have called for the formation of

so-called right-wing militias and the

proud boys and the boogaloos

which remind us of the fascist death

squads that roamed around europe

in the post-war period but this also

brings us to another key difference with

the 1920s namely and that is the absence

of a war

fascism was really born in the wake of a

massive mobilization in the context of a

world war

now today we live in a world language

war has

mainly disappeared mainly from europe

and the united states it has been

professionalized or it’s been outsourced

to paid mercenaries

or in the u.s the army mainly serves as

a kind of buffer for a lot of

very poor citizens who can’t afford to

buy themselves an education if they

don’t get into the army

we also of course know that america for

example is awash with guns

it’s got an enormous amount of people

who own firearms at home

but that does not necessarily mean that

as in the 1920s and 1930s a lot of

people

have experience with hand-to-hand combat

now people might play all kinds of games

on their consoles

including the in-cells as they’re called

or the involuntary celibates

who have joined the alt-right but they

hardly know anything about the street

violence we saw in the 1920s

and we think we can also see that the

far right itself realizes this is

because there’s a deeply performative or

visual side to the way they do politics

in which they mean they have to film and

stream and record all their meetings on

social media

to actually inflate and give a sense of

importance to the fact that they are

gathering

not the largest audience possible and i

think this is something which is not

specific to far

right moments in that sense but it’s

also a problem that occurs for

massive protest movements that have

rocked other parts of the political

spectrum

such as the recent extinction rebellion

actions or

the massive black lives matter protests

that shook the planet

over the summer and what you have there

again is a notion of a very

voluntary form of group in which

people’s

certain specific groups but rather for

vague slogans which

they don’t really know what kind of

policy they entail

so for example after the george floyd

protests we saw that loads of people put

black squares on their instagram pages

which of course um spoke to a real moral

concern

about the horrific police treaty that a

lot of black americans mainly suffer

and how that treatment mirrors the

police treatment of other minorities

across europe and across the world

yet we also know that instagramming or

just changing your profile picture on

instagram

is very cheap and easy and it takes

about 30 seconds to put a black square

on your profile picture

and we can easily let go of that

commitment later on

so it is this increasingly uncommittable

or liquid

society if i want to say which all our

commitments and beliefs seem temporary

and easily suspendable

on which this current new fashion

actually thrives

so again the 1920s yes perhaps but also

mainly no

we do live in very very different times

so we should not just compare ourselves

with the 1930s and 1920s

which are often pinpointed as previous

episodes of populist or

fashion success europe today faces a

massively

demobilized situation which has little

experience of combat

it doesn’t take part in large-scale

electoral or

elections and it has no memory wheel of

state driven finance

now fascism in contrast was a response

to a socialist threat

and the recent opening up of democratic

means of expression

and had a very large pale military

presence

fascism we know today or the populism we

know today actually arises in a

completely different set of contexts

people don’t go to elections as much as

they do there is falling votes of

participation

and the types of economic policy that

accompanies are also completely

different

now that doesn’t mean of course that

today might not be dangerous

or that there are not things we need to

take into account and that there are no

dangerous forces on the horizon

for which we should look out but they

are dangerous in a different way

than what we saw in the 20th century and

this is the most important thing i think

you can take from studying political

science

not all bad things are the same and

although the 2020s might mean we go back

to the 1920s

they also remain our decade so we have

to assume that mainly

it’s our future thank you very much