By TARSUS GENUS*

Fascism, German and Italian analogy: a reflection

The polarization between left and right, both integrated into the democratic process within the rules of the game, is the best of politics in liberal democracy. It is a confrontation of meanings for human life, within an economic system hostile to a peaceful and supportive human life, a meaning always pursued by the great utopian, reformist and revolutionary minds of the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment.

We cannot confuse this regulated polarization, however, with the historical polarization between right-wing extremism – fascist or simply criminal – and liberal democracy, as a constitutional regime supported by periodic elections. In all the organic centers of power of financial capitalism, where democracy is under siege – according to its enemies – because the Rule of Law today does not have ways to solve the problems of the world-system, as if at some time someone or something had solved them.

Problems such as poverty, insecurity, “illegal” immigration and organised crime, in all those centres where extremist political forces are committed to destroying the liberal-representative rule of law, have only improved in the 40 years since the Second World War. The colonial-imperial surplus, obtained through methods analogous to slavery, financed those glorious years in the new and old colonial and neo-colonial metropolises of the entire world.

In the polarization between constitutional democracy and fascist or simply criminal extremism, the subjects in combat are not fixed in one place, as in a “war of position”. They move to different “fronts” of “movement wars”, both because polarization occurs in an environment of informational and material flows of crisis, but also because this type of struggle has no rules: it runs outside and inside institutions and networks, as a dispute between the life and death of democracy, and, probably, between the life and death of its contenders.

Unlike fascism and right-wing extremism, which preceded the Second World War, when internal unity for the formation of political majorities – both for oppression and for resistance – could be formed taking into account a visible external enemy, from another State and another nation – today – the internal and the external make up the same political space and are confused. And they do so through immaterial and material ties, which generate internal political fronts in countries in crisis, no longer motivated by “strangers from outside”, because these are both inside and outside, and not all “strangers” can be easily identified as enemies, nor can “equals” easily be identified as friends.

Antonio Gramsci always saw in Benito Mussolini the defeat of the Italian Enlightenment, and Benedetto Croce, at first admired him and even defended him as the leader of a new Italian national renaissance. However, he turned against him and abandoned him when he saw him as the executioner of political democracy, the enemy of liberal democracy itself and of the national destiny of modern Italy.

Democracy, in the end, succumbed on the homicidal altar of fascism, and the two great Italian philosophers and – in a broader sense – the two great organizers of modern Italian political intelligence – Croce and Gramsci – were unable to communicate with each other to block Benito Mussolini, but suffered the same fate: prison and humiliation. Antonio Gramsci, in 1926, when fascism was on the rise, and Benedetto Croce, in 1943, when it was collapsing.

The liberal governments of Giolitti, Bonomi and Luigi Facta – between 1921 and 1922 – vacillating and incapable of establishing a new democratic hegemony under their leadership – as well as the humiliation suffered by Italy after the Second World War, handed the country over to the totalitarianism of the extreme right, already configured as a fascist project.

Analogy is not an equality of situations, it is similarity; it is not mimesis as occurs in naturalness; they are contexts, however, whose typicality “teaches” political theory, instead of receiving lessons from it and therefore help to unveil certain realities.

I think we are living in a situation analogous, partly to the Italian one and partly to the German one, in which a de facto parliamentarism, armed not by the political ingenuity of a directionless opposition, but by the distortions allocated in our own legal framework – partisan and electoral – as well as the Lula government's own moderation in thinking of non-traditional solutions within the order, can lead us to a dead end.

These great historical crossroads that normally affect the course of a country, in any political regime, are often met by its leaders who resort to “analogies” to interpret their present. These situations are not unfamiliar to the methods used by great novelists to seek meaning for a double complexity of the “modern”, established both in solitude and in human sociability.

Italo Calvino, in his memorable Why read the classics tells us about the creative process of Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) when he composes his spectacular Robinson Crusoe (“the diary of mercantile virtues – “authentic bible of mercantile and industrial virtues, in the age of individual initiative”, (…) showing the “direct and natural way in which a custom and an idea of ​​life, a man’s relationship with things and the possibilities within his reach are expressed in images”. Daniel Defoe makes an analogy – to create the character with a solitary and imagined life from “a man who had lived alone for four years”, on an Island called Juan Fernandez, who was a certain Alexander Selkirk, who also came to exist by analogy, in the words and gestures of Robinson Crusoe, as a universal being of an era in transition.

My first analogy is that Jair Bolsonaro attempted an impossible coup because it was conceived – by analogy of his instinctive imbecility – with the memory of Hitler's attempt in November 1923, in the Munich Beer Hall. His cursed seed, however, continued to thrive and was later reborn in its unbridled brutality, with the victory of the Nazi Party in the 1932 elections.

My second analogy is that we must prepare for 2026, under the leadership of our main democratic leaders against Jair Bolsonaro and his ilk, to impose a crushing defeat on fascism and its ilk in the next elections, which will not happen if we do not, as a government, quickly address – with a sense of immediate effectiveness – the issue of public safety and the most urgent challenges of the climate transition. The character who must speak about these two issues and give direction to democratic civil society and its parties is called the government. Unfortunately, there is no other Daniel Defoe character who is capable of doing so.

This historical “dead end” in which we find ourselves can be overcome in 2026, with answers to three concrete and current political enigmas: is a perverted parliamentary regime the same as a tired presidential regime? Are secret amendments legitimate instruments for generating alliances and building captive electoral bases? Should a Defense Minister, defending amnesty for coup plotters, be the creator of embarrassing political facts for a president who still has two years left in a term that has been relatively successful so far, but with serious problems ahead?

By analogy, I remember Bertold Brecht, referring to the development of Nazism when he asked, in a poem that can be read either as an inquiry into how they, the Nazis, got to this point, or even as genuine historical curiosity, which not even he himself knew how to answer, about the rise of Hitler: “On the day the Great Wall of China was finished/ where did the masons go? (…)/ Great Rome is full of triumphal arches/ who built them/ who paid the expenses\ so many stories\ so many questions” – asked Bertold Brecht, in his 1935 poem “A Worker Who Reads” –, but already in the midst of the Nazi regime.

*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (arts & crafts). [https://amzn.to/3DfPdhF

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