A few days ago, taking advantage of the twenty seconds we shared in an elevator, a reader thanked me for recommending a novel. Since getting it right is the pleasure of a columnist, I'll try it again today with a short and clear book. It's not fiction, unfortunately, because it performs the brilliant yet troubling exercise of taking Mussolini's fascism and placing today's populist far-right on top of it. The result is a carbon copy, a word-for-word transposition of the simplicity, fear, hatred, and violence of a type of people who ask us for our vote.
Fascism and populism (Editorial Asuntos & Rayo Verde) transcribes in just 57 pages a lecture by the Italian professor Antonio Scurati where the relationship between the world of a century ago and today is exactly like that of a repeating canon: empires and certainties have disappeared, the most incredible events happen, the economic situation is past its parents' time and someone finds the recipe to take advantage of all this great malaise: "All political life is reduced to having an enemy to fear and hate." Proclaiming oneself the people, turning every phrase into a slogan, a lot of tactics, little strategy, never appealing to hopes but always to fear, and thus going from fear to hate, and from hate, to power.
The malaise of the present has real foundations, it's true. Caught in the web of complex everyday life, it's comforting to allow ourselves to be overcome by the easy solutions of those who point to an enemy as responsible for our ills. The economy and technology have overwhelmed liberal democracy. Find out what solution the author proposes. It will take a little longer to take effect, but it is still in our hands.
