At the turn of the century in both epochs, societies were facing a maelstrom of change. In this period of extraordinary transition, political entrepreneurs, or “demagogues,” were able to capitalize on escalating anti-immigration sentiment, angst caused by international terrorist violence, and fear of economic decline. Nativism became widespread in right-wing circles, but also gained ground within some segments of the left. The fomenting jingoism resonated most especially with people who were not benefiting from the modern economy and whose standard of living was most in jeopardy.
At the same time, right-wing political leaders and activists were able to foment anger over changes occurring more broadly in society. In both eras, political liberalism had been gaining ground and secularism was on the rise. Liberal social movements were winning political rights for marginalized groups and working to end gender discrimination. However, these liberal reforms were not embraced by all. Among certain segments of the population, there developed a growing resentment over what many experienced as an assault on the traditional family order and an encroachment on long-accepted customs of their communities. For some, only a complete rejection of political liberalism and an embrace of authoritarian nationalism could save the nation from what they perceived to be its catastrophic decline. The world was witnessing the early signs of fascism.
In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, amid global economic crises, unpredictable anarchist bombings, serial assassinations of heads of states, and with an unprecedented number of immigrants converging on overcrowded cities, there developed anti-immigrant backlashes across Europe and the United States. Prejudicial policies and vitriolic rhetoric spiked. Nativism had arrived.
While European socialists were broadly supportive of workers of all stripes, the left-wing People’s Parties in the United States, which were concentrated in the Midwest and the South and were predominantly concerned with protecting the agrarian economy, vociferously opposed immigration. At their first national convention, the Omaha People’s Party drew up their party platform. In it, they condemned “the fallacy of protecting American labor under the present system, which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage-earners.” The platform went on to demand that “all lands now owned by aliens should be reclaimed by the government and held for actual settlers only.”1
In the West, the “army” of unemployed workers that Coxey had raised to march on Washington shared the same vision. They were as supportive of the silver movement as they were of anti-Chinese and anti- Japanese immigration laws. In an 1894 interview with a laid-off laborer in Portland who was a member of the “Coxey Army,” Adjutant R. M. Weed, made these sentiments clear: “We shall ask Congress to coin the silver seigniorage in the United States Treasury; to enact a law restricting all foreign immigration for the period of 10 years at least, and to furnish the unemployed labor on public works.”2 The anti-immigrant strain ran so deep within the American radical left that as late as 1915, Lenin denounced the “jingo-socialism” championed by “the opportunist leaders of the S.P. [Socialist Party] in America, who are in favor of restrictions of the immigration of Chinese and Japanese workers.”3
The response against foreign penetration was even more virulent for those on the right. Where on the left, anti-immigration demands were largely framed in terms of economic competition, on the right, alien populations were opposed because the danger they presented was seen to be nothing short of the destruction of the national race. The core of these fears was directed against Jewish populations across Europe.
In the 1850s, Gobineau had ascribed “the degeneration of a society to the dilution by intermarriage and ensuing degradation of the pure blood of its founders.”4 These concerns took political form in 1890s with the Antisemitic League of France and the Pan-German League Alldeutscher Verband (ADV). The latter openly called for prohibitions against breeding with “inferior races” like the Jews and Slavs to ensure German racial hygiene. This ideology reached its apotheosis in the German völkisch movement. The völkisch movement propagated a bio-mystical version of racial nationalism. “Rootedness” was an essential component of their ideology, which asserted that there was an eternal national connection between the people, the land, and the individual. This rootedness was symbolized by the union of “blood and soil” and represented the organic connection between the body of the people and the native land. Anti-Semitism was also at the core of this movement. For, “with its metaphysics of eternal national rootedness, its symbolism of blood and soil, its antiurban, antiliberal bias . . . who better fitted the requisite negative stereotype of rootlessness and alienness, of liberalism, socialism and capitalism”5 than the Jew.
The movement against the Jews was not restricted to Germany and France. In Romania, over two hundred anti-Semitic laws were passed between 1879 and 1913. In addition to legally excluding Jews from rights and privileges of the state, the Romanian government conducted a series of expulsions of Jews in 1881, particularly journalists or intellectuals critical of the government. This treatment culminated in the mass emigration of Romanian Jewry.6 More infamously, in Russia, following the assassination of Tzar Alexander II by “socialist terrorists,” anti-Jewish “pogroms” (organized ethnic massacres) spread like an epidemic from one village to another, in a manner never before seen.7 In general, even where actions against Jewish populations did not include such devastating violence, the alienness of “the Jew” became a central trope in defensive nationalist discourses of the era.
As in the preceding century, the turn of the twentieth century was a time of high migration and anti-immigrant backlashes. Sensationalized news, global terror threats, and an increasing sense of economic scarcity worked together to stoke the fires of nativism.
In the 2010s, immigration pressures intensified across Europe. With war raging in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the European migrant crisis came to a zenith in 2015: 1.3 million people streamed into Europe requesting asylum. To give a sense of the magnitude of the migrations, the number of asylum seekers who applied in that one year accounted for about one-tenth of all applications that had been received by EU countries as well as Norway and Switzerland for the past thirty years!8 Eurosceptic parties exploited the fear that these migrations engendered, helping them to achieve previously unimaginable gains. In some instances, the increase in support for far-right and far-left Eurosceptic parties was quite astounding. For example, the far-right wing “Danish People’s Party” jumped from 13.8 percent in 2007 to a commanding 21.1 percent in 2015; the Polish “Law and Justice” party garnered a walloping 37.6 of the vote share.9 The Swedish Democrats, which “before 2006 . . . was more or less out of public view and perceived as a small movement with neo-Nazi flourishes,” but over the next decade the party’s popularity “surged both in Riksdag seats and in public opinion polls” and by 2014, they were “the third largest party in parliament.”10
Exploiting xenophobic prejudices and resentments became a fundamental tool for almost all radical right-wing political organizations. Across the far right, “nativist parties, such as France’s Front National, the British National Party, the Dutch Freedom Party, Sweden’s Democrats, and Greece’s Golden Dawn, place immigration and immigrants in the focus of their political narrative.”11 Similarly, Trump, in his 2016 acceptance speech at the Republican Convention recounted stories of “children [who] were killed by illegal immigrants” and warning about the “violence spilling across our border”12 to galvanize political support. In Hungary, the far-right party, Jobbik, capitalized “on the widespread discontent at the presence of the ethnic Roma populations.”13 The party went so far as to “set up the Hungarian Guard, whose members dressed in Nazi-like uniforms and marched in villages and towns containing a relatively high ethnic Roma population.”14
Fear of specific immigrant groups was often expressed in very concrete terms. One could say that the embodiment of the enemy had been accompanied by the embodiment of the threat. Donald Trump infamously referred to illegal immigrants as rapists and murders.15 The same rhetoric was used by right-wing leaders across Europe. In 2017, the Swedish far-right party distributed a leaflet claiming that decades of mass immigration had brought to Sweden all kinds of illegal, violent problems, “Due to decades of mass immigration, our previously safe country is not safe any more [sic]. Not only do we have a very high number of shootings and gang-related violence . . . but Sweden now has the second highest number of rape reports in the entire world.”16 In like manner, in February 2017, the former leader of the Swedish far-right party Ukip, Nigel Farage, claimed in a radio interview that since large numbers of refugees arrived in Sweden, the country had seen a “dramatic rise in sexual crime and its southern port city of Malmo—the third largest city in the country—had become Europe’s and possibly the world’s ‘rape capital.’ ”17 The leader of Italy’s Fascist Party, the Leg, explained in a television interview that “For me, the problem is the thousands of illegal immigrants stealing, raping and dealing drugs.”18
But for the nativist, the danger posed by immigration goes far beyond economic and social disruptions. The core fear is nothing short of group extinction. Fear of miscegenation and white genocide once again became a rallying cry for right-wing nativists, echoing the racist xenophobia of the late nineteenth century. David Duke warned in 2004 that because of the “relentless and systematic destruction of the European genotype,” the white race “faces a world-wide genetic catastrophe. There is only one word that can describe it: genocide.”19 The extreme right-wing party in England, the British National Front, before being forced to take down their website, asserted that “Multiracialism has been a disaster for Britain—only a policy that enforces a total ban on immigration and the humane repatriation of all immigrants and their descendants to their ancestral homelands can save this country from chaos.”20 The German right-wing party, the AfD, portrayed the influx of refugees after September 2015, “as an ‘invasion’ meant to destroy Germany.”21 And the leader of the radical-right Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, underscored that “Our history compels us to fight a battle that is not an option but a necessity. After all this is a battle for the [ . . . ] survival of the Netherlands as a recognisable nation.”22
By 2022, concerns about white genocide had actually become mainstream in American politics, when the Republican Party openly embraced the “Great Replacement” theory. The Great Replacement theory holds that white people are being replaced by immigrants, Muslims, and other people of color in their “home” countries, and often blames Jews for orchestrating these demographic changes. As the Southern Poverty Law Center explains, “paranoid narratives of ‘white extinction’ have appeared to exist only on a radical fringe of racist political movements,” but it is only in recent times that elected officials in high office overtly propagate such messages.23 In its themes, the Great Replacement Theory echoes the sentiments of the proto-fascists in Europe who believed the Jews to be behind “the disintegrating forces of modern materialism, libertarianism, and internationalism,” threatening the very existence of Europe.24
However, the contemporary relationship with anti-Semitism and white nationalism is one that has become complicated in the twenty-first century. While many white nationalists believe in conspiracy theories about “international Jewry,” as was witnessed in the Charlotte March of 2017 when it was chanted “Jews will not replace us,” far-right parties have also sought to join forces with far-right Israeli leaders, in their fight against Muslims and immigrants. Georgetown University’s fact sheet on the Swedish far-right party, The Sweden Democrats, explains this complicated relationship:
The Sweden Democrats are informally connected with other far-right European parties. In December 2010, SD co-signed the “Jerusalem Declaration” along with the Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ), Belgium’s Flemish Interest (Vlaams Belang, VB), and Germany’s Freedom Party (Die Freiheit), as part of a pan-European, far-right delegation to Israel. An example of far-right parties in Europe attempting to rebrand their Nazi and anti-Semitic origins while adopting anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric and policies, the delegation met with other far-right Israeli politicians to defend “Western civilization” and “Judeo-Christian cultural values” from “a new global totalitarian threat: fundamentalist Islam.”25
For left-wing defensive nationalists, even though they almost uniformly denounce xenophobic depictions of foreigners, the goal of protecting national workers has made unchecked immigration an issue for several. Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 opposed “the wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe in order to destroy [British labor] conditions.”26 Bernie Sanders fought the 2007 guest-worker bill, arguing that bringing “many hundreds of thousands of lower-wage workers into this country will only make a bad situation even worse.”27 And in 2019, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, leader of Denmark’s Social Democrats, ran on a leftist/anti-immigration platform. She won mass support by asserting that “the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes.”28
Finally, in both turn-of-the-century eras, it was not anticipated that the extension of rights, equality, and secularism would threaten traditional, religious communities so much that it would produce a reactionary crusade against political liberalism. But that is just what happened. The cosmopolitan view of an increasingly mobile and culturally blended world was feared by many and easily used by right-wing defensive nationalist leaders to inculcate a sense of siege among the volk.
In the nineteenth century, a revolutionary intellectual movement was gestating that was the antithesis of liberalism and individualism. It was an ideological “rebellion against ‘the rationalist individualism of liberal society’ and the new industrial society.”29 Its followers decried social mobility and democratic equality. They craved the simplicity of the traditional agrarian world, exalting “the nation” over cosmopolitan society. This Counter Enlightenment movement had begun earlier, in the late eighteenth century. Perhaps the best-known reactionary conservative is Edmund Burke, who wrote one of the most famous treatises against the French Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution, published in 1790. Burke’s critiques were adopted by conservative groups across Europe over the course of the next century. But it was not until the 1870s that “a new antipositivist, antirationalist culture” emerged.30 Thereafter, “the rejection of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution exploded.”31
The anti-liberal movement of the late 1800s built off the ideas of Romanticism developed in the first half of the century. Romantic poets, novelists, and painters of the early nineteenth century had sought to reinvest the world with a sense of “awe” for the natural world and an appreciation for the beauty of the irrationality of love. Against the cold scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment, they called for a “return to Nature” and propagated a “cult of authenticity.”32 By the 1870s, the rejection of Enlightenment rationalism and embrace of nature had morphed into a deeply conservative, political movement. Conservative romantics rejected the notion that people were abstractly equal. In nature, there was no such thing as abstract humanity and, therefore, no such thing as the universal Rights of Man as had been proclaimed by the French. It was contrary to nature to hold that everyone was equal and, therefore, it would be unethical to decree that everyone had equal rights. People were naturally divided by their place in society, whether peasants and the aristocracy, or women and men. Every society had a traditional, natural order; and each nation was a unique cultural collective that had to be celebrated and preserved as one would an endangered species. Romantic conservatism was thus an expressly cultural nationalist movement.
This ideological rebellion was largely an elitist movement shaped by right-wing intellectuals. The new right-wing elites were “nationalist, populist and anti-democratic”; they “legitimized and gave respectability to the violent downfall of the liberal order, as well as supplying the conceptual framework for the take off of fascism.”33 Peter Pulzer encapsulates the views held by these late-century anti-enlightenment groups:
the later Romantic despised Rationalism and the Enlightenment. He detected the sin of intellectual arrogance in it. He championed intuition against analysis, imagination against empiricism, faith against the intellect, and history against science. He rejected the individualism and cosmopolitanism of the preceding generation which seemed to overemphasize the happiness of the individual.34
The völkisch movements that developed in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century were among those expressly positioned in opposition to France’s proclamation of the rights of man. These “Anti-Revolutionaries” fought “against the spirt of the French Revolution with its radical-democratic ideas about the sovereignty of the people.”35 What mattered was not “abstract” or “artificial” legal citizenship but rather biology and race.36 Disdaining Enlightenment rationalism, they embraced mysticism and cultural truths. George Mosse explains that “The basic mood of the ideology is well summarized by the distinction between Culture and Civilization . . . The acceptance of Culture and the rejection of Civilization meant for many people an end to alienation from their society.”37 Yet, those who advocated for a return to culture and the authentic peasant life, “did not come for the lower classes of the population. On the contrary, they were men and women who wanted to maintain their property and their superior status.”38
Similar conservative Romantic movements were stirring across Europe. In France, in 1871 Ernest Renan wrote his Reforme intellectuelle et morale de la France, “a pamphlet violently attacking the French Enlightenment,” in which he argued that the French Revolution and democracy were “responsible for the French decadence.”39 Other leading French rightists, such as “[Maurice] Barrès, [Georges] Sorel, [and Gustave] Le Bon, wrote diatribes against ‘the rationalist individualism of liberal society’ and the new industrial society.”40 Using the same lexicon, Italian conservatives “wrote against the postulates upon which liberalism and democracy were based.”41 The Italian nationalist political figure, Enrico Corradini, “opposed all facets of Enlightenment culture.”42 This new school of Italian thought was typified by the writings of Gaetano Mosca, who is credited with originating the Theory of Elitism, which posited that elites were naturally superior. Even in the Netherlands, the Anti-Revolutionary Party (Anti-Revolutionaire Partij, ARP), was founded in 1879 as a way to combat liberal democracy. Rejecting notions of equality and rights, they sought to restore religion and monarchy, and reaffirm tradition and patriarchy.43
Some of these new nationalists also embraced a masculinist vision of war as heroic and a sign of a country’s virility. Italian nationalists Alfredo Rocco and Enrico Corradini believed war and imperialism were valiant national struggles. Corradini feared that the Italian people had become effete because the “pious bourgeois platitudes about universal peace and brother-hood [had] corrupted the class from which Italy’s leaders came.” He lamented that “A new stage in the history of imperialism was about to begin, but tragically for Italy the Italians had no sense of the occasion.”44 Rocco believed nations were in a constant struggle for survival of the fittest, and that the heroic fight was essential to national survival.45 Corradini and Rocco’s ideas of martial heroism, individual sacrifice, the need for discipline and obedience, and the grandeur of Rome were early expressions of the fascist ideology that would take over Italy a few decades later. For these reasons, one of the most respected historians of fascism, Zeev Sternhell, argues that the origin of fascist ideology has to be dated back to the end of the nineteenth century.46
As the century that proceeded it, between 1990 and 2010 there was a 180-degree change in society’s understanding of liberalism and its relationship to globalization. A growing number of far-right groups began to disavow enlightenment values. Gábor Vona, former president of the Hungarian far-right party “Movement for Hungary” (Jobbik Magyarorsz.gért Mozgalom), expressed his rejection of the Enlightenment very directly: “If we identify modernity, which ranges from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment to global capitalism, with the left, then we are certainly right-wing.”47
In today’s world, the term “enlightenment” is not often evoked; but anti-science, anti-expertise, and anti-intellectualism have become all too familiar. A 2020 article in Scientific American exclaimed, “Antiscience has emerged as a dominant and highly lethal force, and one that threatens global security, as much as do terrorism and nuclear proliferation.”48 The Boston Review declared, “Science is under fire as never before in the United States.”49 Moreover, the spread of these ideologies has been far and wide. “Scientific denial is a practice that [has been] largely intertwined with far-right movements, which have expanded across Europe, with emphasis on Hungary, Austria, Italy, France and Germany and several countries in Latin America, including Brazil and the United States of America, during Donald Trump’s presidential term.”50 In trying to grapple with this unnerving movement, Cristóbal Bellolio identifies three key aspects of this twenty-first century populist zeit geist:
populist actors worldwide have grounded their scepticism, distrust, or hostility to scientific inputs, to the extent that they are relevant for political action: (1) they raise a moral objection against scientists who have been allegedly corrupted by foreign interests turning them into enemies of the people; (2) they present a democratic objection against the technocratic claim that scientific experts should rule regardless of the popular will; and (3) they employ an epistemic argument against scientific reasoning, which is said to be inferior to common-sense and folk wisdom, and antithetical to the immediateness of political action.51
Tom Nichols in his 2017 book The Death of Expertise has summed up the irony of the age best: “These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything.”52
There are, however, critical differences between today’s anti-rationalism and that of the last century. The rejection of science and rationalism in the twenty-first century has been driven more by political figures than intellectuals. It has also been less ideological and more self-serving. Anti-rationalist proclamations are frequently made by politicians when it will help them gain an advantage. For example, the prime minster of Hungary, Viktor ‘Orban, refused to attend policy-specific debates in the last two Hungarian elections, since, in his mindset, “what needs to be done is obvious; no debate about values or weighting of empirical evidence is required.”53 Trump repeatedly dismissed the overwhelming evidence that he lost the 2020 election.54 Beyond that, Trump and his allies intentionally conducted a misinformation campaign, spreading the false allegation that his opponent had stolen the election through fraud. Along similar lines, Putin, when launching his invasion of Ukraine, “used a barrage of increasingly outlandish falsehoods to prop up its overarching claim that the invasion of Ukraine is justified.” In this instrumental version of anti-rationalism, it is not surprising to see that today’s populist leaders do not reject all scientists—only those whose views threaten their power. The scientists they are willing to endorse are those whose claims support their personal endeavors. As Szabados rightly recognizes, what has emerged is a form of “patronage” science.55
One reason these kinds of outright lies have been accepted by significant portions of the population is that distrust of expertise and journalism has been cultivated, often by the very politicians who have the most to gain by discrediting factual reports. Trump began his 2015 presidential campaign slandering the professional journalists both individually as well as respected newspapers, charging that all they produced was “Fake News.” His former presidential counselor, Kellyanne Conway, infamously coined the term “alternative facts” as a way to promote false ideas. The right-wing party Five Star in Italy, which achieved representation in the Italian parliament from 2014 to 2017, “like other populist parties in Europe, attacks the press as a matter of routine, often for publishing ‘fake news.’ ”56 In Russia, since Putin gained almost complete control over the Russian media, it has become the president’s mouthpiece, regularly demonstrating “a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”57
By 2020, the rhetoric of individual politicians had been internalized by many; so much so that it had morphed into a generalized distrust of all institutional sources of information. What has emerged is essentially “a worldview” in which “the good is found in the common wisdom of the people rather than the pretensions of the expert,” and in which any claims to expertise are regarded with apprehension and suspicion.58 One cannot help but hear the echoes of Peter Pulzer’s description of the figure of the late nineteenth-century Romantic, who “despised Rationalism” because he “detected the sin of intellectual arrogance.”59 Indeed these sentiments reflect the appeal to the primordial vitality of the people in opposition to the effete rationalism of the Enlightenment that characterized rightist ideologies of the nineteenth century. As Sternhell et al. explain:
in order to ensure the welfare of the nation, one had to turn to the people and exalt the primitive force, vigor, and vitality that emanated from the people, uncontaminated by the rationalist and individualist virus. For the revolutionary Right of 1890 as for that of 1930, the incomparable merit of popular opinion was its unreflecting spontaneity, springing from the depths of the unconscious.60
Today we see the same celebration of “spontaneity” of popular opinion. This has come particularly clear with the triumph of the QAnon movement. Like the völkisch movements in Germany, QAnon has emerged as a mystical, nationalist movement that gained traction in the United States as well as among some of the more extreme groups in Europe. The Internet-led conspiracy movement espouses ideas that come very close to a form of White Christian Nationalism.61 Indeed, although people from many different walks of life have been ensnared by QAnon, in the United States it has been particularly resonant with evangelical Christians. QAnon seems to be especially compelling to people who, like the artisans and bourgeoisie in Germany at the turn of the century, feel they “are rapidly sinking to [a lower] class status and who [feel] themselves isolated.”62
As the proto-fascist ideologies of the late nineteenth century, QAnon followers reject rationalism or at least of the idea that knowledge comes from formal study. They eschew “expert opinions” as patently false manipulation of the “deep state,” and believe that only by piecing together obscure clues through their own powers of intuition can they alight upon the Truth. To paraphrase Pulzer once again, QAnon followers embrace intuition over analysis, imagination over empiricism, faith over the intellect, and history over science. Moreover, QAnon shares with the völkisch movements of the late nineteenth century the deep desire for a connection with a traditional past and an emotional way out of the troubling displacements created by the modern economy. Its followers have faith in its vision of an apocalyptic future, in which evil elites will be washed away in a deluge of biblical proportions and replaced by rightful leaders.63
Interestingly, a parallel movement has been sweeping across Italy. Italians on the far right have been mobilized by, of all things, the fantasy world created by J. R. Tolkien. Tolkien’s “agrarian universe, full of virtuous good guys defending their idyllic, wooded kingdoms from hordes of dark and violent orcs” has become a pillar for the hard-right’s reconstruction of “a traditionalist mythic age [full of] symbols, heroes and creation myths.”64 Indeed, for thousands of Italians, “hobbits are the symbol of a radical movement to reimagine fascism and restore far-right movements to glory.”65 The fascist embrace of Tolkien actually began in 1977, when far-right party and youth leaders organized the first “Hobbit Camp,” hoping to invest youth with “Traditionalism” and bypass the stigma associated with fascism. Other Hobbit Camps followed, but the movement remained on the fringes of Italian society for decades. By the early 2010s, this right-wing fantasy-fiction movement had picked up steam.66 So much so, that by 2022 Giorgia Meloni, the first women to be elected to the office of the prime minister (and who had attended Hobbit Camps as a child), openly proclaimed that she regarded The Lord of the Rings not as fantasy, but as a “sacred text.”67
There can be no doubt that we are witnessing a contemporary neo-Romantic movement, on par with those that characterized the end of nineteenth century. The growing popularity of QAnon and the political appropriation of Tolkien’s fantasy world can only be understood as harkening the return of fascism.
The virulence of anti-enlightenment movements in both eras were not only fomented by the fear of demographic displacement. These reactionary movements were also born in response to a perceived liberal attack on the traditional family and traditional religious order. And, in fact, in both eras political liberalism had chipped away at the patriarchal, religious, family order.
An indication of the degree to which liberal values were internationalized is the success of gender equality movements in both epochs. Golding (1980) describes the period from 1870 to 1920 in the United States as “the era of single women.”68 The “New Woman” was characterized as a young, single woman who had migrated to the urban center for work. In the American media, “the New Woman” was ever present. She was the subject of a “proliferation of articles, books, pamphlets, satirical verse and cartoons.”69 The concurrent emergence of the bicycle became almost synonymous with this new historical figure. These new peddle-powered machines were radical because they afforded young women an ease of movement in the urban terrain. Yet, women’s advances were not limited to bicycling. A much more profound political shift was also taking place. From Albania to Iceland, Azerbaijan to Slovakia, women’s suffrage became a reality. Between 1907 and 1921, women won the right to vote in twenty-two countries sequentially (see Table 11.1).
Table 11.1 Women’s Suffrage
| Albania (1920) | Georgia (1918) | Poland (1918) |
| Austria (1918) | Germany (118) | Russia (1918) |
| Azerbaijan (1921) | Hungary (1918) | Slovakia (1920) |
| Belarus (1919) | Iceland (1915) | Sweden (1919) |
| Czech Republic (1920) | Latvia (1918) | Ukraine (1919) |
| Denmark (1915) | Luxembourg (1919) | United Kingdom (1918) |
| Estonia (1918) | Netherlands (1919) | |
| Finland (1906) | Norway (1907) |
Source: Women’s Suffrage and Beyond, http://womensuffrage.org/?page_id=97, accessed March 17, 2017.
Table 11.2 Passage of Gay Marriage
| Argentina (2010) | France (2013) | Scotland (2014) |
| Belgium (2003) | Greenland (2015) | South Africa (2006) |
| Brazil (2013) | Iceland (2010) | Spain (2005) |
| Canada (2005) | Ireland (2015) | Spain (2005) |
| Colombia (2016) | Luxembourg (2014) | Sweden (2009) |
| Denmark (2012) | New Zealand (2013) | The Netherlands (2000) |
| England / Wales (2013) | Norway (2009) | United States (2015) |
| Finland (2015) | Norway (2009) | Uruguay (2013) |
Source: Pew Research Center http://www.pewforum.org/2015/06/26/gay-marriage-around-the-world-2013/, accessed March 17, 2017.
Nineteenth-century right-wing defensive nationalists were threatened by this historic movement for gender equality. Their goal was to reassert the nation’s “traditional culture” and “traditional values.” In Italy, proto-fascists considered women in the public sphere “a threat to the Italian race. The prevailing attitude was that women were meant to be procreators; outside the home they risked sexual degeneration, and the loss of their maternal nature was believed to imperil the future of the race.”70 Even the humble bicycle became a target of those who feared the changes these New Women would bring to the established patriarchal and religious order. In Edwardian England, it became commonplace to see postcards showing young women smoking or getting onto a bicycle juxtaposed against neglected children in a dirty home with slogans like “The Way It’s Going” or “The New Woman.”71 In the United States, “Traditionalists decried the woman cyclist, who no longer had a chaperone to protect her from a stranger’s advances.”72 For them, the bicycle was a symbol of “moral transgression . . . sometimes regarded as the yardstick for female respectability.”73
In the twenty-first century, right-wing parties have been highly threatened by women’s increased empowerment. Indeed, while opposition to liberal ideals of equality under the law lies at the heart of right-wing extremism,74 the reactionary response to gender equality movements has been especially virulent. In the United States, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s describes how many right-wing extremist groups use “hyper-masculine imagery” that “reinforces misogyny and traditional gender roles,” where “degradation and disrespect of women [is] often couched in a cherishing of women as the keepers of the home.”75 The Spanish right-wing party, Vox, even sought to repeal laws against gender violence.
At the same time, between 2000 and 2016, twenty-three countries legalized gay marriage (see Table 11.2). The marriage equality movement has been particularly threatening to traditional, religious communities and has helped fuel the reactionary rejection of universal rights and equality embedded in political liberalism. With gay marriage laws passing in country after country, opposition to gay rights became strident on both sides of the Atlantic—and even beyond, in countries like Brazil. As Fukyuma has observed, “Religious conservative thinkers decry the ‘moral laxity’ of liberalism” and embrace “overt authoritarian governance to restore ‘religiously-rooted’ standards of behavior.”76
This is especially so in Eastern Europe, where there have been strong traditionalist reactions to gender equality movements. Conservative traditionalist parties, from Estonia’s Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) to Poland’s Law and Justice Party to Hungary’s Fidesz (Hungarian Civic Alliance) to Putin’s United Russia Party, have all positioned themselves as Christian bulwarks against the destruction of society and the vile attacks on the family that gay marriage poses.77 Anti-gay sentiment was expressed more crassly by the British National Front, which posted on their former web page that “Very many of ‘our’ MPs are placemen, foreigners and queers with no interest in the future of our nation.”78
It is, thus, clear that nativism and fascism are prevalent today. This is neither partisan rhetoric nor hype. Right-wing defensive nationalism is indeed proto-fascist, meaning that it is a movement that incorporates nativism and anti-liberalism, with masculinist ideologies and militarism. Of course, not all right-wing defensive nationalist groups are the same. Some are nativist and militaristic without being anti-liberal. Others have fully embraced fascism. The latter are the movements that, in addition to espousing nativist, anti-liberal, militarist, sexist ideologies, propound the idea that revolutionary authoritarianism is the only way to cleanse society of its ills.
Right-wing defensive nationalism, therefore, has to be understood as a very real threat to the political order. It is undeniable how much the anti-rationalist, anti-enlightenment, anti-equality movements of today mirror their late-nineteenth century counterparts. As unimaginable as it was twenty years ago, it would seem that history has begun to repeat itself.
Surveying these different movements across different time periods provides answers to the questions with which this book began. By comparing the similarities across these two remarkable periods, we can ascertain very clear patterns; patterns that help make sense of the populist and nativist movements that spread so unexpectedly in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
What we have learned is that the rediscovery of society that emerged at the dawning of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be read as a resurrection of nationalism one in which populism and nationalism combined to produce an epoch of defensive nationalism. The case studies show that, in both periods, separate left-wing and right-wing defensive national movements appeared simultaneously across multiple countries, each of which was concentrated on reasserting economic sovereignty, addressing the inequities that had developed from extreme wealth concentration, and stamping down the dangers believed to be posed by mass immigrations and threats to the traditional family.
The histories traced here have also shown, as Polanyi rightly understood, that in our complex modern world the nation-state was then, is now, and will likely remain, the only entity that can protect society from international predation and market extremism. Therefore, case studies also illustrate that it is possible to account for the emergence of a second double movement, without succumbing to historicism, by examining anti-liberalism as a sociopolitical response to vast social and economic displacements that come from great technological change. Innovative global technologies are central to this process because they bring about astounding changes that effectively shorten time and flatten space (to paraphrase Tom Friedman),79 and because they change every imaginable level of human intercourse.
In the final analysis, it can therefore be said that it does appear to be true that man’s highest technological achievements can sadly also act as conduits for dangerous political movements. Technological revolutions produce magical innovations that symbolize the greatest potential of humankind. But the upheaval and flux that follows in their wake, like the dangerous trail of burning rocket exhaust, can leave exposed the fiercist and basest parts of our nature.