A new age of religious wars
How the age of fossil struggle could be more like a Reformation than a Revolution
There’s a lot of discussion about whether Putin or Trump are fascists. The discussion usually hinges on what kinds of ideologies they have – whether they are nationalists, whether they glorify the military, whether they search for scapegoats and so on.
A big problem with this approach is it doesn’t really help us understand what motivates Putin or Trump or help us know what they will do next. Because it ignores an important part of what comprised fascism: mass mobilisation. Fascist movements were always mass movements, or tried to be. Part of the scholarly debate around whether Franco was ‘really’ a fascist hinges on the fact that the Falangist movement was only ever a fraction of his support, and he was as much a military-religious leader as anything else.
The reason a mass movement, or its absence, is essential for discussions about analysing Trump and Putin in terms of fascism is that for a fascist leader a mass movement is both a weapon they can use in the struggle for power, and it is also a constituency that they must be in some ways accountable to, and responsible to. So for example after Hitler came to power by bullying his opponents with mass rallies and street fighting he had thousands of NSDAP members who he needed to find jobs for, and who he also had to control and purge as possible sources of opposition to him.
Neither Trump nor Putin have the power nor the limits that fascist mass movements place on a leader. The Trump ‘movement’ is a semi-detached population of fans who act in ways they think he might like, while often being abandoned in practice (see the January 6th rioters). Putin is also a figurehead for a body of fans, but he has not depended on them for his power in any real way, and only started to mobilise an astroturf semblance of a popular movement after being scared by the 2008 colour revolution in Ukraine.
My argument is therefore that neither Trump nor Putin can currently usefully be seen as fascists, regardless of their ideological poses, because they lack the concrete infrastructure that has shaped how successful fascist politicians have acted. They are not subject to the dynamics that mass organising demands. Rather my point is that they are populist bureaucrats, trying to sprinkle a little fascism-dust over the regular machinery of achieving and holding state power in order to give them a boost within the terms of the normal system. Two very different normal systems, of course, but I think the parallel holds.
But now we see a change and a divergence in these two phenomena. Under pressure of sanctions and his failed invasion Putin seems to be trying to mobilise some kind of genuine fascist movement, to seal his control over state power, and to enable him to mobilise the country for war. His bureaucratic-technocratic attempt to seize Ukraine quckly and cheapy without anyone knowing about it, as he did with Crimea, has failed. He is now attempting to get his hands dirty in the messy business of fascist organising and mobilising. Probably by starting with the same kind of astroturf paid demonstrators and subsidised ‘movements’ as before, but also trying to reach out beyond this.
Whether Putin survives or falls now depends on how successful he is at managing this transformation. Although, the fact that he is bringing in thousands of mercenaries to fight in Syria indicates to me that he is not really confident in his ability to mobilise Russian nationalism for war; and any such mobilisation would also open him up to criticism from real far-right nationalists who he has tried to sideline. So Putin is in the middle of shedding one skin and growing another; I hope he fails and his system withers and dies during this moment of exposure.
Meanwhile the Trump ‘movement’ is becoming increasingly like a real mass movement, but in contradiction to the development in Russia, this development into mass-organising is happening despite the desires of the figurehead, not because of them. The Trump-inspired Qanon movement and all the other overlapping movements are now gathering their own dynamics and have autonomous centres of organising based on independent activities such as the anti-vaccination convoys.
But I think this ‘movement’ is also unlikely to develop into what we can call fascism. My concluding points are all about how what we seem to be seeing is more like the birth of religious movements based on interpretations of holy texts.
My theory is therefore that what we are seeing are the growth of story-based movements, where people who are networked over social media and other communication forms based on texts and text-like story structures relate to each other and to institutions based on their common values. The mass movements of the 20th century were generally based in shared material experiences. Farmers, urban workers, disenfranchised women and colonised people developed ideas that could articulate their material demands so they could live. In the current situation we are seeing the opposite development; people are gathering based on the logic of the stories they find compelling. Of course, there is a material-ideological interaction here: a lot of the Qanon-style movements can be traced to fear by white men and older generations that they are experiencing a loss of status relative to what they are accustomed to. There is a material space for organising that these stories are able to form in; a particular ecological niche. But it is a very large niche, especially in the USA and parts of Europe.
Hence my conclusion is that the politics of conflict in the 21st century will be shaped to a great deal by the clashing of stories rather than by the clashing of mass movements. During the last two weeks the European Union has acted boldly and changed a lot of concrete factors related to things like its money transfers, energy supply and trade; based on security threats to be sure, but also based on the dominant European stories of a need for a green transition and to protect the post-WW2 human rights. Likewise the dominant voices supporting Putin in the USA and in Russia itself and the rest of the world relate to Russia’s dictatorship as part of adapting their existing stories that they need to make sense.
This is why I think what we need to do now is work on establishing sustainable and wholesome stories of our own that can see us through this time of conflict. Because unlike in the 20th century we do not have the presence of either the benign or the malevolent mass movements that we cna expect to drive the direction of politics.
Loukas, have you ever stumbled across the concept of the memespace egregore? It ties in with what you are saying about story-based movements.
This link is to a general overview - the author then has various articles applying the concept to particular situations, including Ukraine
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/memespace-egregores-and-google-maps?r=9p04p&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web