Fascism, Rivers of Blood, and today’s political and media elite

Whether we call the Trump regime fascist or not is in one sense just semantics. Trump clearly has similarities to the archetypical fascist regimes of the 1930s, but there are also clear differences. In this post I defined, following Finchelstein, a fascist as a right wing populist that promoted violence for political ends and tried to subvert free elections. Trump qualifies as a fascist with his 2020 election result denial and the subsequent storming of the Capitol. The actions of the new Trump administration bring yet more parallels with 1930s fascism.

Of course others may have different definitions. Kay and Matlack say that an essential part of fascism is a strong state. The quote Mussolini: “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato” (“Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”). Trump and the Republican party, in contrast, are in many ways diminishing the state. Adam Tooze, for related reasons, calls the “Trump=fascism equation” absurd.

There is of course a great deal to debate here. Is ICE, soon to be the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government, going to become a new arm of state terror or just a means of deporting non-white people? (It could, of course, become both.) Are tariffs just Trump’s idiosyncratic plaything or a new means for the state to control corporate America? But that debate is not the purpose of this post.

Instead I want to ask whether the validity of the Trump=fascism equation matters beyond academic discussion of appropriate definitions. I want to suggest one very political reason why it might matter.

As the years go by, the memory of what fascism in Germany in particular involved, as well as what it cost to ensure it did not come to dominate Europe, tends to fade. In particular, it tends to fade in the minds of the political and media elite. As an illustration of this, I want to recall the reaction of the political elite to the Rivers of Blood speech made by the then shadow cabinet member Enoch Powell in 1968.

In the speech Powell quotes a constituent as saying: "In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man". Powell goes on to say: “Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that the country will not be worth living in for his children….We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” He advocated not just a halt to immigration but voluntary re-emigration to avoid the calamity he foresaw.

Powell’s speech was extremely popular among many, in part because they saw it as someone from the political elite at last recognising their own concerns. However key members of the then Shadow Cabinet threatened to resign if Powell remained in the Shadow Cabinet. Edward Heath dismissed Powell a day after the speech. The Times declared it "an evil speech", saying "This is the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way in our postwar history." The political elite of 1968 did not talk about the legitimate concerns of their constituents or readers, but condemned racism and the dehumanisation of immigrants in the clearest possible terms.

Compare and contrast with today. The Times, of course under different ownership from 1968, was happy to recently splash on the front page that “1 in 8 of all prisoners were born overseas”, neglecting to follow that up by noting a higher proportion of the total population was born overseas (1 in 6), meaning that those born overseas were less likely to be in prison than those born in the UK. This scare headline is part of what seems like an avalanche of attempts by the right wing press and right wing politicians to suggest that immigrants are much more likely to commit crimes (see also here, or here). It of course echoes Trump, who justifies the arbitrary deportation and sometimes brutal imprisonment of people of a certain ethnicity by describing those deported as hardened criminals.

The effect of all this is to stir up hatred against immigrants in general and particular groups of immigrants in particular. Demonstrations have been held outside hotels housing asylum seekers, with calls to ‘protect our kids’ and ‘get these scum off our streets’. These asylum seekers may well have been the victims of significant trauma in their countries of origin, as well as enduring a hazardous journey to the UK. They stay in hotels at taxpayer expense while their claims are assessed because the UK forbids them to work. Adding to that trauma by staging demonstrations of this kind is not an expression of legitimate concerns, but instead indicates that the UK is becoming a sick society.

A far right MP mistakes some rowers for a small boat carrying asylum seekers and helps organise a group of vigilantes on shore to await them. All this is encouraged by the language constantly and increasingly used in the right wing press and by mainstream politicians: talk of invasion, calling asylum seekers illegal and so on. Are those writing about the UK being at‘boiling point’ that different from Powell talking about rivers of blood? There are of course real issues around the level of overall immigration to the UK, but the demonisation of asylum seekers and small boats cannot be justified this way. Unfortunately spreading or encouraging disinformation about minority groups is as old as civilisation itself.

As the example of Powell shows, there have always been politicians and newspapers that have been able and willing to stir up racial or religious hatred. What has changed in the UK over the last fifty years is that the mainstream political and media elite seem unable to call out this behaviour for what it is. It was a Conservative party leader who did so in 1968, yet today even a Labour Prime Minister seems unable to resist joining in the dehumanisation of asylum seekers, treating them as a problem rather than deserving of our sympathy.

What has changed over the last fifty years to make dehumanisation and racism more acceptable among the political and media elite? It is not the case that the population as a whole have become more racist and intolerant, with a host of evidence suggesting the opposite has occurred. We are a less racist and more tolerant society today than we were in 1968.

The reasons why today’s elite seem unable to stand up to racism and dehumanisation in the way their predecessors did fifty years ago are no doubt complex [1], but one factor could be the distance in time from a war fought against a regime that turned racism into mass murder. Edward Heath and many in his cabinet will have served during WWII. They would have understood the common roots between racism against black people in 1968 and antisemitism in 1930s Germany. They may well have been aware of how many Jewish refugees from Germany were turned away by the UK government before WWII, and that many of those that were allowed in were then confined to internment camps when war broke out.

When I was younger I and others used to make fun of how obsessed people in the UK seemed to be about WWII. Now I think our political elite needs reminding of the characteristics of the regimes that war was fought against. This is why I think calling Trump a fascist isn’t just about semantics. Our elites need reminding about the values that their equivalents, like Edward Heath, helped create after WWII, and about the similarities between the regime currently running the United States and the regimes that war was fought against. Right now our political and media elites appear trapped in the headlights of growing racism and intolerance in the UK, fearful of a press and certain politicians that are doing their best to spread that racism and intolerance.

[1] The proximate causes are familiar. Farage is our own Donald Trump, whose popularity owes much to the desire of the right wing press to achieve Brexit and encourage right wing populism. The Conservative party has collectively decided that the threat of Farage is best met by copying him, so the idea that Badenoch could act towards Jenrick the way Heath did to Powell seems impossible. More extraordinary is that the Labour government is also under the misapprehension that the best way to combat Farage is to sound like him, a mistake that will seem incomprehensible in a few years time.