Roger Griffin is one of the world’s leading experts on fascism. His book The Nature of Fascism has been translated into Turkish. We had an interview with him on fascism, conservative revolutionism and Ernst Nolte. It was one of the most important and instructive interviews for me.

While the concept of populism has gained prominence in the last decade, the concept of fascism has been used less and less. To what extent can today’s far-right movements be considered fascist or protofascist?

It all depends on your concept of fascism. There is no objective answer to that. If you’re a Marxist, then fascism is a product of capitalism and any right-wing dictator or president or Prime Minister who is backed by big business and conservatives in supporting xenophobia, nationalism, etcetera, is a sort of fascist. If you’re not a Marxist, then there’s a lot of problems about how we use the word. I represent a particular technical use of the word which has become quite common, but it’s just a dominant theory. Like any definition in the human sciences, it is not “objectively true” as a taxonomic term, but a heuristic construct, an “ideal type”.  Within comparative fascist studies as an international discipline fascism is now regarded as a revolutionary form of nationalism which cannot be accommodated within democracy indefinitely. In order to realize his vision, a fascist leader must eventually overthrow the constitution and institutions of a representative democracy and replace it with a totalitarian “new order”. 

Using these criteria a corrupt democracy, even a right-wing democracy, is still not fascist because it still has institutions and freedoms which are not compatible with the governance of a fascist state and its totalizing goal of renewal and regeneration in every sphere. And if you want to see historical illustrations of this assertion, look at the difference between Mussolini as Prime Minister head of state up to January 1925 and Mussolini as il Duce after January 1925. Or look at Hitler as Chancellor in 1933 in January and February and Hitler as Führer after the Reichstag fire and the Enabling Act when he destroyed opposition parties, changed the constitution, and created a lifelong dictatorship. There were no checks and balances, no separation of powers. There was the extensive use of state violence, secret police, torture, etcetera. There was the end of pluralism, all liberal freedoms were destroyed and a new legal and justice system justifying state murder and terror was created. So, there is a big difference for me and theorists who think like me between fascism and right-wing populism. Right-wing populism is the term currently in use for what could be more accurately described as “illiberal democracy”. 

It must be remembered that democracy is not necessarily liberal. Democracy can commit crimes against humanity within its colonial empire and discriminate against entire social groups within society (the poor, women, children, homosexuals etc), but operates within constitutional democracy, within the democratic functioning of the state. And if you want an outstanding example of the inhumanity that can inflicted by a functioning democracy, don’t look at Trump, but look at Netanyahu. Netanyahu is an elected head of state, working with the legitimacy created by his freely elected coalition government. He has not destroyed all opposition parties. He hasn’t created concentration camps for his enemies. He has no needed to. He dominates but not has not monopolized the judiciary or repealed liberal freedoms. He has not closed down newspapers. There are still independent, self-governing institutions in Jerusalem. There is still relative freedom in the universities, freedom of speech in publishing, etcetera limited not by an Israeli secret police or state paramilitary force but rather by a patriotic group mind, popular anti-Palestinian sentiments and a fear to speak out against public opinion. So, it would be wrong to call Netanyahu a fascist or contemporary Israel a fascist state if you apply the definition I have outlined. 

So, to come back to your question, the reason why, if you follow this argument, people talk less of fascism and more of populism is that fascism as a revolutionary form of nationalism is a highly marginalized force now. It exists in the heads of hundreds of thousands of fantasy fascists and neo-Nazi racists all over the world in various forms of social media and internet platforms, and in external reality exists among a numerically small neo-Nazi fascist cells and racist ideologues often numbering a handful of members.  There have been sporadic acts of violence by ideological fascists since the war, notably by some “lone wolves” or rather lone actor terrorists which give a false impression of the fascist threat. In reality, all over the world actual fascists, revolutionary nationalists are a marginalized group of extremists compared with right-wing populists, who now play a conspicuous role in nearly every democracy and in some countries can number millions of voters. Nearly every democracy now has a populist party. Sometimes they’re very small, but in the case of countries like Germany, Italy, France, Austria, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, India, and at present particularly in Israel and the USA, right-wing populism has become a very powerful political force. 

When a populist heads the government, the country does not become a fascist state. Even a country like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is still part of the European Union. And if you go to Hungary, you will see that life continues in a normal “European” way as an open, individualistic society, something which would be unimaginable in the Third Reich or Fascist Italy. Thus, academics who care about how words are used now apply a term for a Modi’s India or Bolsonaro’s Brazil which stresses the way a liberal democracy is being corrupted by racism and xenophobia but not replaced. As I have said, this term is “right-wing populism”, though some experts use a more precise description such as ethnocratic or ethnocentric nationalism, monocultural nationalism or illiberal democracy. There are several terms for it. What is important to grasp is that populism is not fascism because it is not revolutionary, but reformist in an anti-humanistic direction. So the reason why fascism is used less often and populism more often in the press and in the news media nowadays is that fascism is now a marginalized force and populism a rising, ever more powerful and destructive force. 

Indeed, I would argue that that populism or illiberal democracy is now something more dangerous than fascism in the present context precisely because it is insidiously corrupting liberal democracy without destroying democracy itself.

What are the main differences between today’s fascist or far-right movements and the fascist movements of the 20th century? Which elements have persisted and which aspects have changed?

 In the interwar, there was a general crisis of Western civilization. There had been the devastating First World War which sparked the Russian Revolution resulting in the creation of the Soviet Union. The very foundations of the West seemed to be crumbling. These seismic events were followed by a deep postwar socio-economic crisis which was compounded in 1929 by the Wall Street crash and a world depression which hit Germany particularly hard. As a result, there not only were there institutional crises, massive unemployment and social unrest throughout the West, but a general sense that Western civilization itself was collapsing. It was this sense of the “decline of the West” that created the preconditions for the success of Nazism and the spread of other forms of revolutionary nationalism.  

Today, even though objectively Western civilization is far weaker structurally now than it was in the 1930s, it is not perceived to be weak or in a terminal crisis by the general population, and so the preconditions for powerful popular revolutionary movements of left and right do not exist. Western Communists do not see modern China or North Korea as their role model, and the atrocities committed by Nazism and the catastrophe of the Second World War destroyed the credibility of Nazism or radical fascism for all but a minute minority of sociopathic fantasists. Given that it is generally accepted that revolutionary solutions to the West’s problems have been discredited, nearly all the political and cultural energy in the so-called free world is now largely contained and accommodated within the parameters of constitutional democracy. Thus, the racist, ultranationalist energies that fuelled fascism in the 1930s now flow into a new political space that has been created to the right of conventional socialist, liberal and conservative parties to accommodate illiberal energies and values, and it this which is generally referred to as “right-wing populism”.

Take for example Germany. After a million Syrians were accepted by Angela Merkel into Germany the push-back of alarmed nationalists took the form not of an upsurge in fascism but the creation of a new openly xenophobic, Islamophobic and racist party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) offering, not a revolutionary alternative to democracy, but its illiberalization, or what is sometimes called “Orbanization”. The AfD promotes anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism, anti-Europeanism, anti-liberalism rationalized through dangerous s myths about the threats to Germany and Germanness. But this radicalization of the German populist right has been accommodated within democracy. It is not a return of Nazism but a new phenomenon, even if the AfD has a neo-Nazi fringe. With right-wing populism serving as the main outlet for racism, nationalism and the desire for change throughout the West, fascism itself has shrunk to a minute, marginalized political force, existing in the head of thousands of racist fantasists, but expressing itself in social space in a few cells and groupuscules and in sporadic terrorist attacks. It is no longer the main threat to Western democracy or humanistic, liberal, or socialist values. A symptom of this is the minute number of militants actively preparing for a fascist revolution anywhere in the world compared with the 500,000 members of the Nazi SA in 1930.  

In short fascism is no longer talked about so much compared with populism because populism, not fascism, is now the major threat to liberal democracy. Those who vote for Trump or Weidel, the AfD leader, do not long for a totalitarian order and single-party state, but a government which will take a firm stand against immigration and make their country “great again: WITHIN the democratic constitution. What right-wing populism has retained from fascism is the racist, xenophobic mindset that separates humanity into “our kind” which is fully human and deserving empathy, and “the others” who are dehumanized in the imagination to the point where their suffering is denied compassion and their rights passively or actively rejected.

Which current will determine the political philosophy of the right more in the post-liberal era: nationalism or conservatism? Do you observe nationalists becoming conservative or conservatives becoming nationalist today?

Here we have problems with terminology. What do we mean by conservative?  The main force in the 20th century was not conservativism in the traditional sense, namely a reactionary reaction to the prospect of change, but a modernizing force sometimes called “revolutionary conservativism”. Most of the conservatives backing Franco didn’t want Spain to stay the same. They wanted an authoritarian modern state which would keep out communism and defeat liberalism, in other words, they represented what they saw as a progressive, modernizing conservatism. To confuse terminological issues further, some postwar fascists intellectuals talk about preparing for a “Conservative Revolution”. In either case most modern conservatism is not just trying to conserve the past: it is trying to conserve the values of the past but accepts a large element of modernization as long as these values are defended from outside threats and the “home” ethnicity is prioritized over “the others”. 

Thus, I don’t find the word “conservative” very useful in talking about politics because it’s so vague. It can apply to elements within a spectrum that stretches from liberal parties right the way over to fascist parties. They’re all in their own way trying to conserve something important but do not want to go back to a mythicized past but to go forward. Moderate democrats, fascists, populists and religious fundamentalists can all be described as conservatives, so the term has little analytical value.  And the term “post-liberal era” does not help either, since liberal democracy is not dead or defeated, but is under active siege from anti-liberal forces. I suggest in answer to your question that you see the present phase of democracy instead as the site of a battle between liberal democrats and illiberal democrats. If you think of the most idealistic people in the Labour Party in Britain or in the Democratic Party in America, they are trying to defend liberal democracy against the illiberalism of the Reform Party or the Republican Party, so conservatism and post-liberalism do not come into it. It is the outcome of this global battle which will help decide the future of human civilization in the coming decades, especially since right-wing populism is generally in denial about climate change and is only fully recognized by the liberal or socialist left. 

It is thus much more fruitful general to think about the modern situation in terms of healthy and unhealthy forms of democracy. Take what’s going on in Israel. Israel is a case-study, in some ways much more important than Trumpian America, in what can happen when liberal democracy is taken over by illiberal interpretations of the modern nation. Netanyahu does not want to create a Nazi-style new order. He might want to privately, though he would not be able to think of himself as a modern type of Nazi given the suffering inflicted on the Jewish people by The Third Reich. He is fighting in order to realize his ultranationalist, anti-liberal vision of the rights and destiny of the Jewish people, one which denies the rights of Palestinian civilians and legitimatizes war crimes against them, within the constitutional process as legally elected Prime Minister and head of a coalition of illiberal nationalist and religious political factions. As long as the “operation” against Hamas in Gaza continues there is no prospect that there a vote of no confidence in him could be successful. This is right-wing populism at its most radical and lethal. It contains an ultra-conservative, Zionist component, both secular and religious, but it is far more than conservative: Netanyahuism is an expansionist and dynamic form of illiberal Israeli democratic politics bent on expanding and securing the state in the future at whatever human cost.

So, between them, Netanyahu and Trump are the most graphic illustrations or manifestations of the dangers that “monocultural nationalism” and the selective humanism and large-scale “othering” of perceived enemies that it dictates to the future of liberal democracy and human civilization. I think liberal civilization is under threat, not from fascism and not from Soviet communism, which has collapsed, and not even from Chinese communism which wants to trade with the West, and not even from North Korea, which knows it cannot defeat the US in a war. It’s got an internal enemy which is not the liberal war on the illiberal democracy of Trump and or the AfD as Vance declared to European defence experts and ministers recently, but precisely the opposite, the war of illiberal democracy on liberal democracy, and in this war the struggle to preserve conservative values has a lethal futural and totalizing thrust which intends to hi-jack capitalist democracy but not replace it by another system

What is the relationship between conservative revolutionism and fascism? Where do these two concepts overlap and where do they diverge?

As I explained earlier, conservative revolution can take many forms, and one certainly became a component of interwar fascism, but it is but only one component. In Weimar Germany, for example, some ultraconservatives moved from the Deutsche Volkspartei (which was conservative but non-revolutionary) to the NSDAP, at which point they became revolutionary ultraconservatives. In fascist Italy there were ultra-conservative Catholics who welcomed Fascism but for reactionary reasons concerned with defending Catholicism from secular modernity. After the war, Armin Mohler wrote a book called The Conservative Revolution, which changes the meaning again by presenting literary and intellectual forms of illiberal nationalism as the raw materials for inspiring a new fascist revolution at some future point. 

So, the conservaism’s and the conservative revolution’s relationship to fascism is complex. It important to remember that Nazism welcomed someone like Walter Darré who saw the German peasantry as the basis for the German revolution and pioneered the concept of “Blood and Soil”, but also celebrated ultra-modernizers like Albert Speer who ran the slave-based system of arms production and built or planned huge megalomaniacal architectural buildings with strong modernist elements. The Todt Organization which ran Nazi industry, the motorways, the development of rocket technology all point to a powerful futural dimension to Nazism. The Nazis were working on the atomic bomb when they were defeated, they industrialized mass murder: this is hardly conservativism but rather a totalitarian form of modernity and even modernism.  

What confuses the public understanding of Nazism was its folkish side, its medievalism, its cult of knights and castles, its images of preindustrial agriculture, rural idylls, and idealized mothers with children in its propaganda. But as I have explained, this nostalgia for pre-modern values is not conservative in the reactionary sense, but an appeal to a deeply mythic and imaginary eternal Germanness on which Nazism attempts to draw as part of its cult of ethnic, Aryan heroism and purity as the basis of national renewal. The same paradox is found in French fascism with its cult of rural France, reactionary Catholicism and nostalgia for the age of “greatness” under Louis X1 while at the same time admiring Le Corbusier’s ultramodernist architecture and celebrating modern technology and an athletic “new European man”. Both Italian and German fascists promoted a cult of aviation, the symbol of modernity, while at the same time invoking “eternal values” and accommodating ultraconservative factions. The overall spirit or driving force of fascism was ANTI-CONSERVATIVE, genuinely revolutionary in a spirit which celebrated the mythic values of a racial or national past, whch produced a paradoxical cult of what I call “rooted modernism”.

Ernst Nolte interpreted fascism as a reaction to Bolshevism and analyzed it in the context of the ‘European Civil War’ (1917-1945). Does seeing fascism as basically a reaction to Bolshevism mean ignoring its specific ideological and social dynamics? To what extent is Nolte’s thesis of the ‘European Civil War’ sufficient to explain the causes and development of fascism?

Nolte’s theory is a piece of historical revisionism designed to minimize national guilt about the literally millions of war crimes Germany committed against humanity under Hitler. Despite the academic knowledge, language, skills, and footnotes which he employs to develop his thesis, it is historical NONSENSE to suggest that the Third Reich developed primarily as a reaction to the Russian Revolution and the threat of communism and that the Second World War was a European civil war between two ideologies. The ideological roots of Nazism and its major components (ultranationalism, imperialism, militarism, racism, Aryanism, anti-communism, antisemitism, the cult of the New German Man, scientism) all precede 1917, and to suggest that the extermination camps were somehow a response the Gulags and Communism’s “Asian crimes” is a vast exercise in pseudo-academic mythmaking designed to disseminate a pro-fascist mindset in West Germany and undermine liberal democracy.

So yes: to see GERMAN fascism as basically a reaction to Bolshevism means ignoring its specific ideological and social dynamics but also its true genesis and evolution as a form of totalitarian and revolutionary ultranationalism whose goal was not just to destroy Communism or the European Jewry, but inaugurate an ultranationalist rebirth based on racial health: a millennial Reich. Nolte is thus a primary example of how insidiously pseudo-academic historical revisionism and negationism can become in the hands of an academic who applies professional knowledge and techniques to pervert historical truth an minimize the atrocities committed autonomously by Nazism which would have continued long after the defeat of the Soviet Union and it is perverse to portray them as somehow locked in mortal combat without stressing the ultimate goal of Nazism, namely to create a new world order based on Aryan racism and German nationalism. 

However, I would invite readers of this interview to resist being seduced by an interest in fascism, which may not be dead but is highly marginalized and in revolutionary terms impotent, in order to make sense of contemporary politics. I suggest instead that they should focus instead on the NEW battle-fronts: the global conflict between autocracy and democracy and between liberal and illiberal democracy, between technological and consumerist civilization and the attempt to preserve the biosphere on which all human life depends. It is their outcome that will decide the responses to the growing economic, demographic, political and ecological crises in the decades to come, and hence determine whether human civilization can survive the next hundred years without plunging into an abyss of inhumanity.