For the last year and a half, many American liberals and progressives have been fretting the rise of fascism in America. Left-of-center commentators from Michael Kinsley to Paul Krugman have openly called Donald Trump a fascist, the gifted and accomplished Harvard historian Timothy Snyder has written not one but two books on the reemergence of fascism in the United States and Europe, and of course Sinclair Lewis’s satirical It Can’t Happen Here has had an enormous boost in sales.
Now it’s Madeleine Albright’s turn. This month she published a new book, Fascism: A Warning, in which the former secretary of state surveys various global political crises and suggests some reasons for the rise of authoritarianism. We leave to one side the merits of her claim that Trump’s ascendency is a kind of fascist renaissance. What we heartily object to, however, is Albright’s tendency—and the tendency of her left-liberal allies—to denounce “fascism” and “authoritarianism” without noting its constant companion: socialism.
Consider her recent remarks about Venezuela in an NPR interview:
We would of course agree with Albright that Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro has exhibited strident authoritarian characteristics. He is, in a loose sense, a fascist. But he is also, in a very literal sense, a socialist. Venezuela is a socialist nation. The consolidation of political power we’ve witnessed in Venezuela over the last two decades would not have been possible if Venezuela had remained a market economy.
To put it plainly: Socialism is fascism’s sine qua non. You don’t get to fascism unless the government already owns the means of production and dictates the nation’s economic decision-making. Socialist economies breed the sort of authoritarian takeovers that liberals and progressives rightly worry about: In China, in Eastern Europe, in Russia, in Venezuela, national governments have arrogated authority to manage the private-sector economy. That in turn has allowed strongmen like Venezuela’s Maduro, Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to assume dictatorial powers.
And yet left-wingers in America, while claiming to lament the rise of fascism in America, sing the praises of socialism and social democratic candidates like Bernie Sanders. Granted, as Christine Rosen pointed out in our pages in the fall of last year, many of today’s young Bernie-supporting “socialists” may not realize that socialism means state control of the economy. We grant, too, that neither Sanders himself nor almost any of his ideological compatriots would willingly promote anything resembling a European fascist dictatorship.
Even so, American liberals and progressives appear to be engaged in a self-contradictory delusion: On the one hand, they loathe fascism. On the other hand, they’re falling back in love with fascism’s necessary precondition. We await a book by Madeleine Albright or Paul Krugman warning Americans of the dangers of socialism.
