Regardless of whether the swing to Fascism is powered by fear of bourgeois economic decline, or by a middle class paranoia about loss of cultural hegemony and racial domination, it still originates in the same place: the middle classes. The commercial elites and the ownership caste may exploit this trend in order to further their own personal aggrandizement, but the real fuel is middle class paranoia.

In Latin America, where middle classes are often relatively prosperous but quite small, they almost always fall into line behind the elites whose technical, administrative and bureaucratic needs provide them their income and social position, and whose genteel manners and affectations provide a cultural goal and civic example. The exceptions, Socialist regimes like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, pay lip service to the proletariat and the peasantry, but the so-called “revolutionary parties” are dominated by failed businessmen, second sons, incompetent civil servants and university rabble rousers and pseudo intellectuals (in 1950s Cuba, it was the “bonchistas”, of which Fidel was a ringleader at the University of Havana).

This was brought home to me one day when I was trying to point out to a right-wing Cuban exile that you were just as likely to be “disappeared”, executed, tortured or imprisoned unjustly in a right wing dictatorship as in a leftist one.

His reply was; “Maybe so, but in a right wing dictatorship, if you keep your mouth shut and don’t cause the government any trouble, they’ll leave your business and property alone, let you travel abroad and not indoctrinate your kids in a public school. Decent, hard-working people who don’t rock the boat are left alone to live their lives in peace.”

And I had to admit, he was right. Fascism has always counted on the collaboration of the middle class.

“First they came for the Communists, but I wasn’t a Communist, so I said nothing…”