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
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