It’s the 75th Anniversary of the Holocaust. So How Come Fascism’s Rising Again?

What We Should Have Learned From the 1930s — But Haven’t

I found myself confronted by a difficult and strange question today. It’s the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz — one of humanity’s grimmest chapters. And yet here we are — watching fascism rise again.

We say — civilized people — “Never again. It can’t happen here.” So what did we fail to learn? Everything, I think, is the only reasonable answer to that question.

The answer that great minds had to the question of fascism’s origins was this. Capitalism implodes into fascism. I paraphrase. And yet from Keynes to Polanyi to Orwell to Arendt to Adorno, this thread was woven tightly in the history of modern ideas. And yet here we are. Having not learned a thing from history — we’re precisely those dunces who are doomed, as the proverb goes, to repeat it.

Today’s capitalism isn’t imploding into fascism theoretically — it’s happening quite literally, every single day. It is happening as a global system, which is why fascism is on the rise in every corner of the globe. There is a pattern to fascism’s grim resurgence in the 21st century, and the pattern is precisely the same as the 20th: it is rising in the ashes of a failed capitalism…