America’s Fascist Playbook Is Wreaking Havoc around the World |
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America’s Fascist Playbook Is Wreaking Havoc around the World
I spoke to the brightest minds of our age to understand where we go from here
Just before Thanksgiving in November 2022, I walked up the stone steps of the economics department building at Harvard University. I was there to see a professor: Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate and an intellectual titan who had essentially founded his own field of study called development economics, a discipline that brings economic analysis to bear on the question of mass inequality in developing societies. Sen was born in India at a time when the country was still colonized. And throughout his many books and published articles, through every academic honour available in England and the United States, one conclusion of his stands out.
Sen found that democracies with a free press did not have famines. “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy,” Sen wrote. Democratic governments “have to win elections and face public criticism, and have strong incentive to undertake measures to avert famines and other catastrophes.” Autocracies and empires and fiefdoms tolerated famines; rulers could look the other way because their authority was based only on brute force. Sen had experience close at hand: some 3 million people died in the Bengal Famine when Great Britain ruled India.
Sen was now eighty-nine years old and considered a legend at Harvard and in economics and development departments around the world. After a few minutes, I was called into his office. I pulled up a seat in front of him.
Sen sat on the couch, watching me. “So what are you working on?” he asked finally.
Sen leaned back, knowingly. “Fascism,” he repeated. After a pause, he said, “Around the world?”
“Mostly in North America,” I said.
Sen scrunched his face, and he sat forward slightly. “Fascism is spreading elsewhere too. You must address the rest of the world.”
Sen was seeing what many had thus far been ignoring in America and the Western world—that fascism was now a global phenomenon, rising in democracies in all corners of the world. Right-wing nationalist and extremist parties were playing by the same rule book, which was to delegitimize their democratic systems, attack minorities, and convert democracy into a dictatorship. The playbook appeared to be working.
“Like fascism in India?” I asked.
For several years, India’s nationalists had targeted Sen and other intellectuals for their views on India and democracy. They had roughed up progressives, had targeted and killed minorities, and were trying to rewrite India’s national consensus into one of Hindu supremacy. “It’s terrible what they are doing. Terrible,” Sen said. “They are violent, violent. They obey no laws. Dangerous people. They intimidate students, even here; several of my students here have been terrified to speak up. You must address India and the fascism we are witnessing worldwide.”
Sen was speaking of the Indian nationalist right, which had come to power through Narendra Modi. The Indian prime minister was also a member of—and close to—the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a far-right Hindu cult that worshipped Adolf Hitler. The RSS organized young men into warriors, had a salute like the Nazi salute, and wanted to cleanse India of Muslims and other minorities. The RSS was explicitly religiously nationalist and extremist. India was for Hindus only, they claimed, and it had to be made great again.
India was perhaps the first major example of the left falling globally. The country had marched irreversibly in a far-right, nationalistic direction, comfortable now to plot out assassinations of dissidents on North American soil, carrying out targeted killings in Canada and attempting killings, according to the US justice department, in the United States. India wanted to transform itself from a multireligious society into a monolithic, Hindu-supremacist nation. Its propagandists wanted to turn their country, once the most pluralistic society on Earth, where diverse peoples have intermingled for centuries, into a place to be ruled by race and religion.
Even if Modi lost now, he had indelibly transformed the country. Gone was the syncretic, democratic, multi-ethnic nation that had once given the world the traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and pluralistic Islam. Now India was channelling its own inner fury, claiming to avenge past imperial wrongs........