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How Fascists Have Used Panics to Consolidate Power
Roland Clark
Sometimes it is okay to panic. Or at least, some situations demand radical solutions. But when you are up to your eyeballs in judgement against your neighbour for hoarding toilet paper or the government for jeopardising your children’s future to sell another barrel of oil, keep in mind that, in interwar Europe at least, fascist politics emerged out of a climate of panic and constant talk of crises. Benito Mussolini rode to power on the claim that anarchist and communist violence was out of the government’s control. The massacres of the White Terror in Hungary relied on fears that communists and Jews posed a genuine threat to law and order. Adolf Hitler staged the famous Beer Hall Putsch in the midst of a state of emergency in Bavaria, then used the Reichstag fire of 1933 to end civil liberties and suppress his enemies. Oswald Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists with one speech after another about the dire circumstances British workers found themselves in at the end of the Great Depression. Engelbert Dollfuss shut down Austria’s government in 1933 by over-exaggerating a political stalemate that gave him an excuse to attack the Social Democratic Party and launch the Austrian Civil War. Cries about judicial corruption in the case of the embezzler Alexandre Stavisky brought the right-wing Leagues out onto the streets of Paris in February 1934, bringing down Édouard Daladier’s government and almost resulting in a coup d’état.
In his influential 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, the sociologist Stanley Cohen analysed what he called “moral panics”.1 These happen, he said, when the media irresponsibly exaggerates a social problem, demanding radical solutions that are often not even relevant to the problem at hand, and then exacerbates the problem by causing people to over-react to it. His book studied fights on the beaches of Brighton one summer that broke out between two youth subcultures: the Mods and the Rockers. But moral panics are far from being something only for the history books. Panics about refugees and asylum seekers, teenage pregnancy, youth gangs, terrorism, sexual deviants, and stock prices generally work in the same way. The so-called “yellow journalism” of the tabloid press was in full swing by the interwar period, and talk about crises was not just something done by the radical right. But whereas the mainstream liberal press spoke about threats to the proper functioning of the social order, the radical right used the language of warfare and religion to portray corruption scandals or economic disasters as existential threats to the nation. Reporting only those facts which would generate the greatest possible emotional responses, right-wing newspapers and speakers whipped up an atmosphere of fear that helped people feel justified in taking radical steps to protect their communities. In normal times, perhaps it would be abhorrent to ban Jews from public swimming pools, but if Jews were known carriers of disease and parasites then that would be a different matter. Just think of the children!
Especially in its early years, it was not always clear what set fascists apart from the other political options on offer. There was certainly something left-wing about parts of their ideology, but at the same time they managed to gain the support of prominent members of the aristocracy. They talked about nationalism, but so did almost every other political party of the day. They called themselves a party of the future, but few were eager to recreate the societies that had produced the Great War. One thing that fascists did do exceedingly well though, was to make people panic. On street corners, in lecture halls, and in their newspapers, fascists worked hard to transform people’s fears—some of which were legitimate, others not—into full-blown moral panics. Moreover, fascists never pointed out problems that they believed could be fixed with a couple of band-aids and a nice cup of tea. Every problem mentioned by the radical right had to be a life-or-death issue that could only be resolved by an almost apocalyptic transformation; restoring order through revolution and democracy through authoritarianism. The fact that fascism emerged from moral panics should never be a reason not to take responsible, decisive action in the face of serious social problems, but as insipid as it seems today when printed on coffee mugs and internet memes, perhaps one of the most profoundly anti-fascist things anyone ever said was: ‘Keep calm and carry on!’.
Dr Roland Clark is a Senior Fellow at CARR and senior lecturer in history at the University of Liverpool.
1 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London: Routledge, [1972] 2011).
Can the Radical Right’s Reductionist Narrative Withstand Real-World Complexity?
Alan Waring
There is a general recognition that major problems and issues of our world, including understanding them and their causes, and proposing remedies and coping strategies, are rarely simple in nature. Complexity theory and the long history of systems science, as exemplified by the work of such authorities as von Bertalanffy,1 Parsons, Ackoff, Checkland2 and others, have demonstrated this truism conclusively. Nevertheless, systems science has always recognized that reductionism also has an important role in conceptualization, theory development, methodology, analysis, problem/issue elicitation, and design of practical interventions.3 However, that role is meant to be a controlled and targeted one, to be used judiciously only when appropriate to a particular topic or juncture within a larger and more holistic strategy, and not to be used as the exclusive quick-fix approach to all “problem solving”. Regrettably, there is abundant evidence that radical right leaders, ideologues, politicians, administrations, opinion-formers and others have an overwhelming tendency to promulgate, often dogmatically and even ruthlessly, simple analyses and solutions to complex real-world issues. Unsurprisingly, these rarely work and often make things far worse.
Characteristics and fallacies of radical right reductionism
The radical right exhibits reductionist thinking and narratives in two main ways: 1) trivializing or minimizing the nature and impact of particular risks (and sometimes maximizing them), contrary to known science or factual evidence, and 2) over-simplifying specific problems or issues, or inventing false and unscientific cause-effect explanations for them. The apparent motives for why the radical right engages in such egregious manipulation and fakery centre on four processes, which they believe will bring their cause political and populist benefits:
1) Authoritarian revisionism
The radical right indulges in the erasure from their narrative of inconvenient or unwelcome facts from the accepted knowledge base of history and science. For example, protagonists pretend that the vast body of knowledge on the complexity of problems and issues relating to society, science, economics, health, social reforms, human rights, foreign relations, and governance in general, as developed over the past half century, is irrelevant, or is fake science, or never even existed. The radical right policies, narratives and actions of the Trump administration provide stark in extremis examples of such revisionism on many fronts and in various forms.
The radical right seeks to regress to the “simple truths and values” of an imaginary past world of the 1960s and earlier, when relatively simple mechanistic, biological or economic “explanations” provided a comforting illusion of order, certainty, neatly stacked “problems-and-solutions”, and simplistic salvation models and “programs” for correcting deviations from their dogma and their assertions of what constitutes the correct normative order. Critiques,4 of the “fallacy of predetermination” and other reductionist fallacies, and critiques5 of the poor predictability of non-holistic programmatic change, have no currency in the radical right world, since these expose their inherent flaws.
Examples of radical right salvation “cure-alls” range from Trump’s Mexican wall and Orbán’s anti-Muslim border controls, to the palingenetic ultranationalist ethno-religious and political cleansing demanded by the extreme right, to radical right advocacy of, or sympathy with, discredited eugenics theories of inferiority of certain races. As allegedly inferior races will be an unacceptable drain on society and the economy, eugenics advocates argue that they should be “dealt with” (echoing the Nazi Rassenhygiene laws and Eugen Fischer’s infamous Aktion T4 extermination program in Hitler’s Germany). For example, Prime Minister Boris Johnson refused to apologize for, or dismiss, a policy adviser who suggested publicly that discriminatory policies based on eugenics were warranted.6
Complexity theory regards real-world problems and issues as “messes”, i.e. systems of problems that defy resolution simply by picking off component problems one-by-one or even in groups, because in doing so the “mess” simply adapts itself and survives in a modified and unresolved form. Messes require the systemic whole to be tackled holistically. Despite the overwhelming trend over the past fourty-five years among governments, policy research groups, and academia towards adopting holistic approaches, the radical right have persisted with their reductionist and revisionist worldview. For example, as I’ve noted,7 some of the radical right (e.g. Reisman) seriously argue for reintroduction of minimalist social, employment and environmental policies similar to those of Victorian times, and the wholesale removal of protective legislation for work people. Nevertheless, because radical right propaganda overall offers a seductive “salvation” model, as the 21st century has progressed, radical right salvation ideas have gained widespread populist support among weary and fearful societies demanding “solutions”. Moreover, there has also been a resurgence of reductionist theories and arguments in some areas of academia, e.g., recent scientific papers that airbrush out the body of knowledge on complexity and advocate rehashed reductionist theories on scientific management and salvationist programmatic change models from the 1960s.
2) Manipulation of risk perceptions
US President Trump’s persistent official policy was to deny that climate change exists or, if it does, then it is neither human-created nor a major threat to the world.8 That policy implies a belief that there is no systemic cause-effect relationship between human activity, global warming/climate change, and extreme weather events. Therefore, no special preventative measures or contingency planning are required, and existing emergency response provisions are adequate since extreme weather events will remain rare, unpredictable, and non-catastrophic. In radical right terms, the “problem” and its risks are thereby reduced to zero, as they do not exist. The motive behind Trump’s extraordinary “wishful thinking” position is open to conjecture.
As another example, in radical right terms, MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) is reduced to a set of allegedly relatively minor health threats whereas [quoting discredited quack science from a struck-off physician] MMR vaccine is falsely cited as a major cause of autism in children. The underlying justification appears to emanate from the radical right’s fear of removal of the freedom of parental choice coupled with a belief that scientists who support vaccination (i.e., the vast majority, authorities such as the CDC, WHO, etc.) are part of a left-wing conspiracy to undermine conservative governance and the economy. Radical right supporters are heavily represented among anti-vax supporters, who include Trump. In February 2020, he also contradicted the CDC and WHO on the seriousness of the coronavirus threat, dismissing the scale of the threat as a “hoax” and claiming that his media enemies were using false coronavirus stories as a weapon to undermine him politically. Subsequently, he has persistently sought to “talk down” the COVID-19 threat to public health and has strongly advocated removal of the lockdown restrictions while the pandemic was still raging and before safe to do so, apparently on economic grounds, a belief that health experts were exaggerating the risks, and to avoid damage to his re-election chances.
While the radical right artificially deflates some risks, it also inflates others. For example, Trump has persistently inflated the incidence and risk of violent criminality among immigrants (whether legal or illegal) from Mexico, contrary to the known facts. He has also similarly falsely inflated the risk of terrorism from Muslim immigrants and visitors to the US.
3) Confirmation Bias in Propaganda
The radical right exhibits a strong preference for any evidence, opinion, or assertion which they believe strengthens their case. While not unique in seeking to present their best case, the radical right stand out in the relentless and aggressive way they disseminate their propaganda by all forms of media, especially online and social media. Radical right leaders, politicians, ideologues, opinion formers, commentators, and supportive journalists selectively include in their narratives only those items and assertions that tend to confirm and support radical right objectives and, conversely, exclude any material that contradicts or challenges radical right ideology or that casts the radical right in a poor light.
Thus, for example, the recent sudden increases in MMR cases (including deaths) officially attributed to anti-vax campaigns supported by the radical right will be ignored, while stories of populist support for the anti-vax position will receive favourable publicity. Stories of heroism of firefighters and emergency services workers in the conflagrations in California and Australia will dominate the narratives of radical right administrations and their supporters, while climate change (if mentioned at all) will be vehemently denied as a primary causal factor in the fires. Viktor Orbán will boast of a huge success in his “Hungary for Hungarians only” policy in the way his massive border fencing and strict controls have stopped the alleged Muslim takeover of the country, while ignoring the fact that historically Hungary has only ever had a miniscule Muslim population—a classic false proposition to evoke fear in the native population followed by their relief when the (non-existent) threat is neutralized. If the non-existent Muslim hordes have not entered the country, then populists believe that clearly Orbán’s policy was correct and effective!
4) Mendacity and amoral calculation
Radical right leaders and supporters persistently lie in order to advance their political ideology, persuade the public of their righteousness, and to cover up their own bad conduct. For example, according to the Washington Post,9 by October 2019 President Trump had made 13,435 false or misleading statements since taking office. By 10 December 2019, that number had risen to 15,413.10 While it may be anticipated that all politicians “stretch the truth” to their advantage, and some brazenly lie from time to time, the scale of Trump’s mendacity is exceptional and unprecedented. Trump, his administration and the radical right establishment have turned amoral calculation, lying, and dissemination of false facts and fake news into a central plank of official policy rather than just used as an ad hoc convenience.
Radical right reductionism has played well to a populist audience looking for some kind of salvation from perceived problems and threats. The radical right has been skilful in weaving into its narrative an artful rhetoric and imagery concerning problems and threats that are in some cases real but mixed up with far more that are exaggerated or invented. Playing on populist fears, the radical right then proposes itself and its policies as their only salvation. This populist support, based on psychological dependence, may work for a time if the promise of salvation seems plausible and realistic. However, ultimately support is likely to wane as enacted radical right policies fail in the face of real-world complexity.
Dr Alan Waring is a Policy and Practitioner Fellow at CARR and adjunct professor at the Centre for Risk and Decision Sciences (CERIDES) at the European University Cyprus.
1 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, “The History and Status of General Systems Theory,” Academy of Management Journal 15 no. 4 (1972): 407-26.
2 Peter Checkland, Systems Thinking, Systems Practice: Includes a 30-year Retrospective (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 1999).
3 Alan Waring, Practical Systems Thinking (Aldershot, UK: Thomson/Cengage, 1996), 62-4.
4 Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: Reconceiving Roles for Planning, Plans, Planners (New York: Free Press, 1994); Henry Mintzberg, “Rethinking Strategic Planning, Part 1: Pitfalls and Fallacies,” Long Range Planning 27 no. 3 (1994): 12-21.
5 Michael Beer, Russell Eisenstat, and Bert Spector, “Why Change Programs Don’t Produce Change,” Harvard Business Review 68 no. 6 (1990): 158-166.
6 “Andrew Sabisky, No 10 Adviser Resigns Over Alleged Race Comments,” BBC News, February 18, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51538493.
7 Alan Waring, “The Five Pillars of Occupational Safety and Health in a Climate of Authoritarian Socio-political Climates,” Safety Science 117 (2019): 152-63.
8 Alan Waring, “The Alt-Right, Environmental Issues, and Global Warming,” in The New Authoritarianism Vol 1: A Risk Analysis of the US Alt-Right Phenomenon, ed. A. Waring (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2018), 273-301.
9 Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly, “President Trump Has Made False or Misleading Statements Over Days,” The Washington Post, October 14, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/14/president-trump-has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days/.
10 Nancy LeTourneau, “The Magnitude of Trump’s Lies,” The Washington Monthly, December 12, 2019, https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/12/17/the-magnitude-of-trumps-lies/.
Alternative Epistemologies of the Radical Right: How Grand Narratives and the Quest for Truth Offer Recognition and a Sense of Belonging
Mario Peucker
In early 2019, during ethnographic fieldwork on radical right movements in Australia, I attended a far-right rally against allegedly “African gang crimes” in Melbourne. I spoke to a young man in his twenties about his reasons for taking part in the protest. In response he alluded that the problem was much bigger than the criminal behaviour of some African kids, but he was reluctant to explain his ominous insinuations: ‘I can’t tell you. You have to find out yourself. You just have to read the right things’. He appeared very proud of having found the “right” sources and discovered the truth independently and on his own accord. The truth needed to be earned, he seemed to believe, it can’t simply be passed on. There was a sense of superiority in his words as he had travelled this arduous path towards his “red pill” enlightenment, and he was now sending me on my own journey to discover this truth.
This experience stayed with me, but I was unable to make deeper sense of it until, almost one year later, I interviewed a group of people who had participated in anti-Islam protests and other far-right rallies for several years. During our conversation they also spoke at length about their long way of “educating themselves” and “doing their own research” gradually leading them to what they considered the truth. They were convinced that a secretive globalist cabal directly controls local council and governments to “break” society and implement the New World Order (NWO). Such NWO claims are among the most popular conspiratorial myths within radical right milieus in Australia and globally. In general, and also within this specific group, they serve as a grand narrative that ties a range of beliefs around mostly unrelated issue—from immigration, Islam and anti-Semitism (absent in my interviews) to socialism, climate change, gender identity, vaccination, and government actions—into a seemingly coherent system.
Leaving aside the sometimes obscure and contradictory nature of the arguments put forward by the people in this group, what became clear is that their personal quest for the truth was a process with complex psychological and social implications. Again, there was this strong sense of pride in their claimed capacity to look behind “fake news” in mainstream media and deliberate indoctrination attempts by the government and its education system. Although they all shared the same convictions around NWO, none of the interviewed individuals wanted to appear as if they had simply adopted the views of others (not even of those in their own group). Instead, they all insisted on having done their own independent “research”, and they simply arrived at the same truth from different angles, which was further proof that their convictions were true. They felt empowered and a sense of recognition and self-worth as a result of their personal quest, but these processes have also strengthened their collective identity and belonging to a community (in-group) with supposedly superior knowledge.
The vast literature on (radical) political and social movements1 and violent extremism2 has highlighted that such psychological and social factor are often pivot in explaining the appeal of far-right ideologies and groups. The analysis of these interviews underscores this and demonstrates the interplay between these factors and the specific ideological narratives. The people in this group have found recognition, respect, and social connectedness through their radical right activism and their pursuit of the truth.
There were also other social dynamics at play. Whilst emphasizing their individual autodidactic efforts, the interviewed individuals also stated that, once they have done their own research, they would come together and share with each other. This was described by one person as ‘ripple effect’, and another one stated:
As we learned more, we developed…and we all come back together, it’s about networking too. We all share. [Person X] may find out more information to do with Islam and Christians, [person Z] may find out something about Communism…we all learn from each other.
Through these processes of information sharing and mutual exchange of personal experiences, they “often find common ground”. This is how initially unrelated fears and concerns around issues such as Islam, vaccination, and marriage equality are continuously solidified, expanded, and successively bundled together under a coherent grand narrative—in this case, the conspiracy myth of the NWO. The accounts of several members of this group highlighted these processes: ‘When we first came together it was just about Islam, but it is about so much more now’.
This process of “doing my own research” and sharing it within a group of likeminded others, as well as the outcome of these processes, i.e., the belief in an ideological meta-narrative that identifies a secrete global elite and their “puppets” in government as being responsible for all social ills, form an alternative system of knowledge. Similar to dogmatic interpretation of religious belief systems, it offers morally charged, simplistic answers to highly complex questions. This quasi-religious epistemology, whilst rooted in a combination of ultra-nationalistic and aggressively anti-egalitarian tropes, draws heavily on conspiratorial thinking. It is positioned in explicit opposition to the established “mainstream” epistemology, based on reason, science and provable facts, and controlled by the very same elites allegedly responsible for the demise of society. As such, this conspiracy theory-driven knowledge system reinforces boundaries between in-group and out-group, whereby strengthening internal solidarity and belonging and discrediting the others who are considered to be part of the establishment: local councils, governments, universities, and mainstream media. Any attempt by these “elite” agencies to challenge the in-group’s convictions, for instance through rational arguments or counternarratives, may backfire as it can be regarded as a deliberate manipulation attempt by the out-group and hence ‘perpetuate the original conspiracy theories’, as Holbrook recently argued.3
The alternative epistemologies within the radical right are powerful and difficult to refute from outside, also because they often serve a deeper psychological purpose for the individual. They offer something that people who feel disenfranchised may seek and feel they deserve but society has denied them: a sense of recognition, control and power in a social environment, both locally and globally, that is complexly interconnected, constantly changing and characterised by uncertainty and ambiguity.
Dr Mario Peucker is a Senior Fellow at CARR and senior research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Industries and Liveable Cities at Victoria University, Melbourne.
1 James M. Jasper, “Emotions and Social Movements: Twenty Years of Theory and Research,” Annual Review of Sociology 37, no. 1 (2011): 285-303.
2 Hedieh Mirahmadi, “Building Resilience against Violent Extremism: A Community-Based Approach,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 668, no. 1 (2016): 129-44; Matteo Vergani, Muhammad Iqbal, Ekin Ilbahar and Greg Barton, “The Three Ps of Radicalization: Push, Pull and Personal. A Systematic Scoping Review of the Scientific Evidence about Radicalization Into Violent Extremism,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 43, no. 10 (2020): 854-85.
3 Donald Holbrook, “The Challenge of Conspiracy Theories for Strategic Communications,” The RUSI Journal 165, no. 1 (2020): 26-36.
