Here’s a funny, dark, absurd juxtaposition that sums up just how much trouble our world is in. Quick, what’s the world’s happiest country? Finland. That research just came out a few days ago. Guess who just went…pretty…fascist? LOL, Finland. I exaggerate, but only a little. Finland just had an election where the second place party turned out to be the new, far right, “True Finns,” and you don’t have to think too hard to guess what the “true” is code for.
So how can…LOL…what is this even, an episode of Black Mirror…the world’s happiest country…now be on the leading edge of a fascist wave? What kind of bizarre non-sense does that make? If we’re happy…why would we go fascist?
Today’s an historic day. The first indictment of an American President in history. It matters more — far more — than many of us suspect. Want to think. Because it comes in a certain context: the rapid decline of democracy globally.
Take the events of just the last few days leading up to Trump’s indictment. In once gentle Finland — of all places — the Social Democrats placed a distant third, behind the “True Finns,” a far right party of extremists, with resonance to, of course, Trumpism. In France, protests are still raging nationwide, after Emanuel Macron forced through a needless rise to the pension age. Just the last few days — and that comes after a year when cracks emerged in the European Project, the far right ascendant from Italy to Sweden.
By now, we take for granted the sudden rise of the far right. But we shouldn’t. Because this is a force fundamentally hostile to democracy. It is authoritarian, if not overtly fascist. It is only interested in democracy insofar as it can use its mechanisms to undo it — like, of course, in Florida, where the governor, Ron DeSantis, is busy banning books, criminalizing doctors and teachers and families, purging universities, and more’s sure to come.
Political scientists put this great trend of the Age of Extinction in an anodyne way, which understates, even obscures the truth. “Democratic backsliding.” Or should we better call it the rise of authoritarianism and fascism? History’s pretty clear on that score. Orwell and Arendt would hardly mince words.
This juncture is far more critical than most of us think. If I’d told you even just ten years ago that the far right would be ascendant in Europe — of all places — you would have laughed at me. If I’d told you that an American President would have led a bloody coup on the steps of Congress, you would have rolled your eyes at me and called me an “alarmist.” And yet here we all are — taking this threat for granted, more or less.
The most sophisticated form of democracy on the planet isn’t America. It’s Europe. And when the European project cracks and teeters, as its beginning to, we should all pay attention. And we should pay attention to America, too — because it’s beginning to lead the fight back against the far right, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes in large ones.
What do I mean by that? Consider the founding of modern Europe. Its entire idea was to prevent the far right ever rising again. Modern Europe, rebuilt in the ashes of the war, did something remarkable, that led to what later obeservers like me would call the European Miracle. It took the relatively small amount of investment that America gave it — which was all it had — and used that in a way that was fundamentally new in human history. Instead of spending it on arms, or giving it to elites, it used it rewrite constitutions which guaranteed everything from healthcare to education to transport as basic, fundamental, universal rights.
This was the point of Keynes’ magisterial insight into why the War had happened. Germans, declining into sudden poverty, destabilized by debt, had undergone a political implosion. Economic ruin had had political consequences. The consequences of “the peace” as Keynes said — the peace of World War I, which had been designed to keep Germany impoverished. Fascism erupted as a result. And so after the Second World War, Europe did something bold, unprecedented, and remarkable in all of human history — it offered its citizens these cutting edge social contracts, rich in rights for all, built institutions to enact them, from pension systems to high speed trains, and then formed a political union on top of that, to make sure that peace, this time, remained.
And here we are. All of that is fraying. Let me say that again, because I think people often fail to fully grasp this point. That is a century of modern history. Which contains some of the most vital lessons that we have about peace, violence, democracy, and how they all cohere, hang together, exist in a fragile equilibrium. All of that is now what’s fraying. Think about that for a moment. The lessons of World War I. Of World War II. Of the European Miracle, in which living standards rose, in one human lifetime, improbably, to history’s highest, anywhere, ever. All of that is what’s being lost.
The European far right is ascendant, of course, because America began the trend. It was in America that the modern far right rose. And way back when — a decade now — figures like myself and Sarah Kendzior predicted it. We saw figures and facts and realities which alarmed us. I remember the day that research came out saying the American middle class was now a minority. I saw Weimar Germany flashing before my eyes. I wrote about it — and back then, nobody much wanted to believe it. Fast forward just a few short years, and Trump was in office, and that was after plenty of denial that he could ever be President, too.
It’s not about point scoring. It’s about understanding. What we are really dealing with here, which is an historic threat.
Our modern world was designed — all of it — to prevent all this from ever happening again. Now, we can debate, as leftists will, whether that design was cynical, in a sense, or not — to prevent the far left ever rising, too. But that’s almost besides the point. From Europe to America, decades of gains are being reversed now.
That link isn’t being made often enough, because those decades of gains are different. America’s behind Europe, a long way. So in America, decades of gains being reversed look like women losing their basic freedoms of privacy and expression and association. Books being banned. A fanatic in Congress appearing on 60 Minutes and — amazingly — getting away with smearing everyone from liberals to the LGBTQ as “pedophiles.” In Europe, those reversals are different. The loss of the feeling of modernity that Europe had, and still does, to an extent — the sense of harmony, peace, trust, and community. Replaced by a new kind of hostility, rage, resentment, fear, alongside the ancient demon of scapegoating. And yet while these reversals look different, the theme is very much the same.
And so is the goal. You see, the European far right is of course watching and learning from the American far right. How have Europe’s fanatics been so successful — in what was once the wold’s stronghold of social democracy? Well, they’ve observed their American counterparts closely. They’ve learned to run for local office. To target working class constituencies, who feel left behind, with convenient scapegoats. Culture wars. To blame, in short, the woes of the pure and true — the “real Finn” — on the nearest powerless social group, women, gays, refugees, immigrants, journalists, intellectuals, Jews. Make no mistake that the European far right has learned, and learned well, from the American one. And that its goals, too, are the same.
So we see a strange kind of carnival mirror when we look at democracy today. Europe is ahead of America — but America teaches us the future of Europe, too, should the far right go on ascending. Book bans. Sudden erasures of basic rights. The desire to cleave society into a permanently riven place, where demonic figures are out to get your wife, kids, jobs, home, land. Pedophiles, groomers, enemies of the people. Their books must be banned. They must be criminalized and shunned. They must be taught a lesson. Europeans don’t see the danger — and yet they don’t quite grasp, either, that in America, all this has happened in the last few years, astonishingly fast, too.
Meanwhile, Europe teaches America what is really lost when it turns to the far right. What do Europeans enjoy, still, even though it’s teetering now, that Americans don’t? All those rich, sophisticated social contracts, one supposes, which guarantee them everything from high speed transport to cutting edge healthcare.
But there’s more than that. All that creates — or did for a very long time — a feeling that doesn’t exist in America. A sense of community. A kind of peace, which you can readily see in the absence of gun massacres in Europe, even though, yes, there are guns, if not quite so many. Stronger social bonds and ties — Europeans still have friends, and in America, friendship itself has become a luxury. All that matters.
And yet all this is breaking down, incredibly fast, in shockingly dire ways, which Europeans are severely, severely underestimating. They look at America and think: that could never happen to us! But what else does the European far right want? It’s a mistake of the highest order to think it’s anything else.
Let’s go back to the juxtaposition I raised at the beginning. The world’s happiest country…is now on the leading edge of a fascist wave. What does that tell us?
Here’s what it tells me. Remember the story I told you about seeing a single statistic — the American middle class becoming a minority for the first time in history, way back a decade ago — and being shocked by it, because it was that significant? This is like that. It’s another statistic that takes my breath away, because it portends ill, that ill, for the future.
What this means is that the fascist wave of the 21st century is now so powerful, so ascendant, that even the highest forms of defense we have against it are no longer fully successful. It is a strain against which the old vaccines are no longer as potent. The highest defense we had against fascism? If you’ve understood this story I’ve told you so far — and it’s been long because I want you to really understand it — then the short version goes like this. The best defense we have against fascism is happiness. Human happiness comes from just what Keynes said it would: universal rights, investment, a strong social contract, robust institutions. In the absence of all that, humanity regresses. All the old demons — war, conflict, violence, by way of hate, spite, resentment, scapegoating, Big Lies — pour out of history’s broken bottle.
You can think of many, many defenses against fascism — which is just shorthand, it doesn’t just mean “political” fascism, it means hate, spite, rage, violence, writ large. From simple ones, like laws against hate speech, to more complex ones, like indictments of a President who led a coup. But of all these? The most advanced, sophisticated and powerful one we know of is…human happiness itself. Fascism is born of rage, fear, despair, which drives people into the arms of demagogues, who blame all those woes on hated subhumans, “others” — and so the truest antidote we know of to all that is human happiness itself.
But what does it say when happiness is no longer an effective antidote to the far right? To fascism? To the hate it preaches and the violence it threatens?
Then we are in serious trouble. Historic trouble. Just like the day I read that the American middle class had finally become a minority, and I exhaled sharply, seeing history’s omen rising — that’s the feeling, the knowledge, I have, seeing this juxtaposition.
If happiness — the highest amount of it we know how to produce — isn’t enough to defend against fascism, which is really just violence, hate, spite, rage, by way of authoritarianism…then, my friends, we are in real trouble.
Because now we are in uncharted water. Think again of what I’ve discussed above. And no, I’m not presenting any of this to you as academic research — we’re just talking. Connecting dots. Trying, as ever, to trace the elusive outline of history. When the highest heights of happiness our civilization knows how to produce no longer vaccinate us against fascism, then we are in a new place.
Because for the last century or so, since the last war ended, that has held true. We knew how to produce happiness — all those cutting edge social contracts, institutions, the expansion of universal rights, which, yes, really did make Europe history’s happiest set of societies. And you could feel it. Step off a train or plane into London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Rome, and you could sense — in seconds — how much happiness there was. Not in the trivial sense — the American fake smile. The real one. People existing, coexisting, laughing, loving, embracing, arguing, shouting, living. Europe became famous for this joie de vivre, and it was the expression, the enactment, of the statistical fact that happiness prevailed.
But now it doesn’t. Statistically, sure, Europe is happy. But that finding is also now increasingly meaningless, because, well, what can “I’m so happy I’ve decided to embrace the hate and spite of the fascists” really mean? We may have “happiness” as a statistical notion, but quite clearly, what is symbolized by it is eroding. People may say they’re “happy,” but that no longer means they feel secure, stable, safe, and so they are turning, in the classical, textbook sequence, right into the arms of demagogues, whether Donald Trump, whose hold over his base remains unbroken, or the, LOL, “True Finns.” Think about it for a moment. Finland doesn’t just have one of the world’s most advanced social contracts — it’s one of history’s most advanced societies, period. It is a pinnacle of what our civilization can achieve. It is the happiest kind of society we know how to produce. But if even that level of happiness is now so eroded and corroded, it means nothing when it comes to defending against fascism, violence, conflict, hate, spite….then that is an incredibly dark omen for the rest of us. For our civilization.
That’s a complex and subtle set of thoughts. Does it make sense, a little bit? Let me try to sum it up, using an overly simplistic metaphor, which shouldn’t be taken literally, but might be instructive. Imagine a civilization in which some level of happiness, let’s call it an 8, has protected against regress — violence, hate, spite, demagogues, coalescing in the form of fascism. Societies that have hit that mark, through a lot of hard work — advancing their constitutions, social contracts, institutions — were thought to be more or less impregnable. They’d ascended to a new and stable equilibrium. Hit this level of development — and you can’t go back to the lower one.
But now, suddenly, that civilization finds that it’s not true anymore. Things seem to have gone haywire. Even societies with that happiness level of 8 are plunging into conflict, rage, hate, all of which are being tapped by organized fascists. As a result, democracy itself is under threat, civilizationally. So much so that even the society with the highest happiness level of all is now succumbing to the fascist wave.
What does that civilization do? Where does it go? Its intellectuals, those who are left, feel as if their hearts have stopped — because all the teachings and learnings they spent a lifetime mastering no longer hold true. At the most fundamental level. Whatever happiness this civilization knows how to produce — it’s no longer enough for it to stay civilized. Why did that happen? How is it happening? What’s behind it? Nobody much can really say, except that the plight of the average person is insecure, troubled, that everything does seem unstable and precarious, from the economy to life to the future.
That civilization is us, my friends. We are in greater trouble than we know. When I see a civilization, a world’s, happiest society…turning fascist? Something is very wrong. Something on the scale of “America’s middle class just imploded.” It is a dire, dark omen, which says to me that our civilization is unable to produce enough of what’s necessary — stability, security, optimism, confidence, cohesion, self-efficacy, trust, truth all of which add up to happiness — to prevent that too often has been inevitable. Collapse.
It’s in that sense, too, that the indictment of Trump matters. Is it enough? Of course not — for fraud relating to hush money for a porn star, not…storming Congress in a bloody coup. But at least it’s something. Perhaps it will help wake the world to its plight. Or perhaps we will go on sleepwalking into this no-future. Fascism, on a dying planet, which is coming a little truer every single dark day now.
