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To borrow Gramsci's line, "Now is the time of monsters."
Two recent events have shattered complacency about the specter of a fascist takeover globally that a number of us have been warning about for some time now. In Europe, far-right parties scored impressive gains in the elections to the European Parliament in June. \In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and other like-minded parties got 15.9 percent of the vote, forcing the long-time second-placer Socialist Party to third place. In France, President Emmanuel Macron's centrist alliance gathered just 14.6% of the vote while Marine Le Pen's National Rally (Rassemblement National) took in 31.3% of the vote. The results prompted Macron to an ill-advised decision to immediately dissolve the French Parliament and call a snap election, which resulted in a devastating first round victory for Le Pen's party.
In the United States, President Joe Biden made a second Trump presidency come immeasurably closer with a horrible performance in a debate with Trump on June 27 that simply confirmed what most voters have discerned for some time now: that Biden is simply too old to function effectively in what is arguably the most powerful job in the world.
This has made many progressives and liberals fear that the enemy is at the gates. They are right. Gramsci depicted his times, the early decades of the 20th century as a time when "the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters." That line might well describe where our world is at today.
How I Got Interested in Fascism
My interest in fascism started when I went to Chile in 1972 to do field research during the presidency of Salvador Allende, which was cut short by a military coup on Sept 11, 1973. I arrived in the capital, Santiago, in the midst of the Chilean winter, greeted by tear gas and skirmishes of opposing political groups in the aftermath of a demonstration. Hauling two suitcases, I made it with great difficulty from the bus depot to the historic Hotel Claridge.
I had gone to Chile to study how the left was organizing people in the shantytowns or callampas for the socialist revolution that the Popular Unity government had...