Timothy Snyder found the intellectual roots of fascism, at least Russian fascism, or Putin’s fascism, in a little-known philosopher Ivan Ilyin who lived in the first half of the 20th century. Putin and his cronies revived him in the 1990s and 2000s.
According to Timothy Snyder who has spent his academic life studying fascism, the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s to which Ilyin was attracted, had three core features:
- It celebrated will and violence over reason and law;
- It proposed a leader with a mystical connection to his people;
- It characterized globalization as a conspiracy rather than a set of problems to be solved
In the 21st century fascism has been revived by populist leaders around the world. According to Snyder the driving force of that process is inequality. I agree. I said earlier inequality promotes resentment and contempt, particularly self-contempt. And that leads directly to fascism. According to Snyder,
“Fascism serves oligarchs as a catalyst for transitions away from public discussion and towards political fiction; away from meaningful voting and towards fake democracy; away from the rule of law and toward personalist regimes.”
In other words, the politics of eternity are what Putin has achieved and Trump did his best to achieve. I call that fascism. Trump was just a wanna be fascist. Of course in the last election in the US he had more than 73 million supporters many of whom now believe he was cheated out of his rightful second term as president of the United States. That is his fantasy and it has been taken up by his supporters. That makes Trump a force to be reckoned with. He could return in 2024 or earlier if there is successful insurrection, which cannot be ruled out. Even if Trump does not return, Trumpism is alive and well in the United States with millions supporters. In only 1 America election were more than 73 million votes needed to be elected President , and that was of course in 2020. The yearning for the politics of eternity, as Snyder calls it, is far from dead. It could come back to haunt the country and in fact the world at any time.
According to Snyder, Ilyin is “a guide on the darkening road to unfreedom, which leads from inevitability to eternity.”
Snyder also makes clear that eternity, like inevitability, as he calls it, “is another idea that says there are no ideas.”
Snyder explained this idea this way:
“The politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those in its thrall deny that ideas matter, proving only that they are in the grip of a powerful one. The cliché of the politics of inevitability is that “there are no alternatives.” To accept this is to deny individual responsibility for seeing history and making change. Life becomes a sleepwalk to premarked grave in a prepurchased plot.
Eternity arises from inevitability like a ghost from a corpse. The capitalist version of the politics of inevitability, the market as a substitute for policy, generates economic inequality, that undermines belief in progress. As social mobility halts, inevitability gives way to eternity and democracy gives way to oligarchy. An oligarch spinning a tale of an innocent past, perhaps with the help of fascist ideas, offers fake protection to people with real pain. Faith in technology serves freedom opens the way to his spectacle. As distraction replaces concentration, the future dissolves in the frustration of the present, and eternity becomes daily life. The oligarch crosses into real politics from a world of fiction, and governs by invoking myth and manufacturing crisis. In the 2010s, one such person, Vladimir Putin, escorted another, Donald Trump, from fiction to power. ”
Those are the ideas that Snyder uses to describe fascists from Hitler to Stalin, to Putin to Trump. And their essence is fantasies.