An individual, isolated fascist regime or movement in one country can be blamed on a personality or one nation’s unique problems, but the simultaneous rise of fascism in many places must be the result of some more structural cause. The rise of fascism in the 1930s can ultimately be attributed to the aftermath of the Great War and the 1929 stock market crash, but what is our excuse today?

Today the world is enjoying unprecedented prosperity, democracy was (until fairly recently) breaking out all over, the Cold War and the Soviet Empire were finished, China was integrated into the world economic system, Europe was fast approaching political, security and economic union and, except for a few stubborn local conflicts in the third world, there was little worldwide military activity going on. So why the rise of authoritarian regimes and movements, particularly in the most advanced and prosperous societies?

Here’s my theory, based on the proposition that fascism is the dictatorship of the middle class. Fascism doesn’t just arise when times are hard, it also can arise when large sectors of the population (like a rapidly expanding middle class) feels things aren’t as good as they should be. In other words, the wealth, prosperity and security of the New Age isn’t trickling down to those who were poised to benefit from it. National income and productivity are going up, but the benefit is being directed towards the elites, not to the middle classes, who feel they are the rightful heirs to this prosperity–after all, don’t they actually do the work? Just ask them. That’s what they’ll tell you.

Marx predicted something like this, but he felt it would be the industrial working class who would rebel, and that they would lead the struggling masses of the peasantry and the underclass to a new order. But there is no agricultural peasantry today (unless you count migrant immigrant farm labor)and the industrial proletariat is vanishing as automation and globalization eliminate those jobs. All that’s left is the petty bourgeoisie, small business owners, white collar workers, retail and clerical staff and the lower tiers of the administrative and managerial castes. These people felt that they were promised, and were entitled, to a place with the elites, but they are now sensing that not only are they being blocked from that future, but that they are in danger of sliding back into the lower classes. And it now appears their children will be prevented from sharing in that future prosperity as well.

These people feel that they are being denied that future they were promised, but they cannot bring themselves to blame those who are denying it to them, the executive and ownership classes that seem to be the main recipients of the new prosperity now available to the society. After all, how can they see as their enemies the very people they aspire to become, the very social strata they feel they are entitled to join, the culture whose ideology and ethos they desperately emulate and adopt?

Unable to engage with, or even communicate on equal terms with this lofty elite, they must seek others to blame their own social and economic deterioration on: minorities, foreigners, immigrants, and the very economic classes their parents and grandparents worked their way out of and which they feel helplessly sliding back into. And instead of perceiving those in economic supremacy over them as the origin of their troubles, they blame instead the cultural or intellectual leadership, the press, academia, the intelligentsia, the professional, artistic and scientific classes. You will note that business executives are never included in the “Liberal Elites”, unless they are businessmen who vocally support Progressive causes. Your boss outsources your job to the Philippines and fires your ass, and you blame Hollywood and the Main Stream Media. Its never Wall Street’s fault, is it? And there is no shortage of demagogues ready to exploit that fear and tell you exactly what you want to hear.

So why is this happening now? Why has an age of income inequality led to a fascist revival and not a Marxist one? That’s a topic for a future essay.
Homework assignment: Read your Picketty.