Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright has written a book about fascism, to be published on Tuesday. She previews it this weekend, with an opinion essay in the New York Times carrying the dire headline, “Will We Stop Trump Before It’s Too Late?” If that offers a fair sample of what Albright has to say, the whole enterprise appears curiously uninformative.
This reminds me of the old story about the famously uncommunicative President Calvin Coolidge, which is almost certainly apocryphal. Supposedly Coolidge went to church alone one Sunday, when his wife was indisposed. Upon his return, Mrs. Coolidge asked him what the preacher’s sermon had been about.
“Sin,” the president replied.
“What did he say?” the first lady inquired.
“He was against it.”
Madeleine Albright’s sermon is about fascism; she is against it. Beyond that her message seems a bit mysterious, not to mention mired in contradiction. She sees an emerging tendency in the world around her that carries far too many echoes of the 20th-century fascism of her childhood, and she is certainly not alone in that.
Perhaps in Albright’s book we will discover how she accounts for that re-emergence, but what she yearns for is clear enough: a return to the old order in which American government and foreign policy are managed by people like her, members of an educated elite who share a worldview and set of guiding principles that are almost never discussed in public. What Albright does not understand — and likely cannot understand — is that it was precisely that post-Cold War world order that she represents, variously described as “globalization” or “neoliberalism” or the “Washington consensus,” that paved the way for the resurgence of fascism in the first place.
I’m flashing back one more time to sitting in an overheated New Hampshire middle-school cafeteria, days before the 2016 primary, and hearing Jeb Bush plaintively tell a crowd of country-club-style Republicans that if America didn’t get back to “regular-order democracy” we were in deep trouble. Bush and Albright belong to different political parties and no doubt have specific policy differences, but on this central question of how things are supposed to work they are more alike than different. There is something comic in their plight, like a Buster Keaton character trying to close the barn door after the horses have bolted, only to discover that the barn has fallen down too. Or something tragic, like a medieval physician who has not quite bled the patient to death calling out for another bowl of leeches.
At least in her New York Times article, Albright does not explain exactly what she means by “fascism,” except in the negative: It’s something that is not democracy, and that undermines the shared desire of “most people in most countries … to live freely and in peace.” Those terms of art are also undefined, or are simply assumed: In the context of Albright’s career, and the context of the American foreign policy establishment, they have specific meanings that need not be elaborated.
But the real problem with Albright’s discussion of fascism is not the terminology, although her use of reductive and simplistic shorthand — addressing the readers of the New York Times as though they were an auditorium of middle-schoolers — is in itself suggestive and troubling. No one disputes that Albright carries a certain moral authority on the subject, as well as considerable academic expertise. She was born in Prague in 1937 (as Marie Jana Korbelová), to Jewish parents who were forced to flee Czechoslovakia before she was two years old. Apparently she was not fully aware of her ancestry until well into adulthood — her parents converted to Catholicism when she was a child — and did not know that many of her relatives had been killed in the Holocaust.
It’s tempting to use this painful personal history as a metaphor when discussing Albright’s difficulty with the contemporary resurgence of fascism. Let’s leave it at this: A person raised in an atmosphere of silence and secrecy and concealed trauma is well suited for the coded and cloistered world of international diplomacy, but not especially likely to say exactly what she means.
Albright also holds a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia, where she was a student of the late Zbigniew Brzezinski (yes, the father of Mika, of “Morning Joe” fame), who hired her to work in Jimmy Carter’s White House after he became national security adviser in 1977. That’s an important element in her biography and, I think, in understanding her current predicament. Albright and Brzezinski were staunch anti-Communists born in Eastern Europe who saw the world in Manichaean terms. They believed the United States had a unique role in world history and advocated a forceful strategic confrontation with the Soviet Union that stopped just short of provoking World War III.
As ambassador to the UN in 1996, Albright single-handedly forced out Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, refusing to give up the U.S. veto despite unanimous opposition. Infamously, when asked that same year by Lesley Stahl about reports that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of U.S. sanctions, Albright said, “We think the cost is worth it.” She later described the question as a “trap” and Stahl’s “60 Minutes” segment as “Iraqi propaganda,” but the response was very much in character with her persona as a hard-headed realist. When Bill Clinton nearly went to war with Iraq in 1998, Albright offered an eloquent justification that sums up both her ideology and her career: "But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."
In any case, she is eminently qualified to describe what fascism is and isn’t, and we can assume that in her book, “Fascism: A Warning,” she does so. I have only seen a few brief excerpts, but in one of those she writes that a fascist “is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.”
That seems clear enough, if rather general and likely designed as a catch-all. It certainly describes Hitler and Mussolini, as well as slightly less egregious examples like Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Does it describe Donald Trump, the proximate target of her Times op-ed? Pretty well, although we might have to fudge a little on “willing to use violence.” Can we say instead: Would like to use violence? Fantasizes about using violence, in juvenile and upsetting fashion? Fair enough. But she also intends it to capture a whole bunch of other pseudo-democratic or authoritarian leaders, who are decidedly not all the same: Vladimir Putin, of course, but also Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, Kim Jong-un of North Korea, Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Abdel Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt.
It hardly needs saying that Albright never directly mentions Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan or the Saudi royal family or India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, or other supposed U.S. allies whose commitment to democracy lies somewhere between dubious and nonexistent. It’s noteworthy that she mentions Sissi, the Egyptian leader, who was installed in a 2014 military coup that overthrew Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, with at least the tacit permission of the Obama administration. That suggests the foreign policy establishment has danced with Sissi long enough, and decided to cut him loose.
But what’s more important than the names Albright doesn’t say is the theory she doesn’t offer: Why has all this happened, and why have all those unappetizing characters (and more besides) risen to power in the last few years? At least in the Times article, she presents nary a clue, and her history of the last three decades is as insultingly redacted as any work of old-time Stalinist propaganda:
In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and the honor roll of elected governments swelled not only in Central Europe, but also Latin America, Africa and Asia. Almost everywhere, it seemed, dictators were out and democrats were in. Freedom was ascendant.
Today, we are in a new era, testing whether the democratic banner can remain aloft amid terrorism, sectarian conflicts, vulnerable borders, rogue social media and the cynical schemes of ambitious men. The answer is not self-evident.
OK then! Quite a bit is missing between freedom’s ascendancy in 1989 and the “democratic banner” struggling to remain aloft in 2018, wouldn’t you say? Specifically, what’s missing is any discussion of the world order that Albright and Brzezinski and others like them worked so hard to create, a world order of unipolar American hegemony, linked to universal market capitalism and universal parliamentary democracy. It was the world of Francis Fukuyama’s infamous “end of history,” which then collapsed after 9/11 into a period of bewildering internecine conflict that philosopher Jean Baudrillard dubbed World War IV.
Albright was a central figure in that history as the principal architect of Bill Clinton’s foreign policy, so what she has omitted in between those paragraphs is quite literally her own accomplishments and what became of them. She skips over those 30 years to rush toward an extended indictment of Donald Trump (with which nearly all Times readers will heartily agree), and then toward a conclusion consisting of Democratic Party talking points so banal and self-canceling that it’s hard to believe she takes them seriously. (Or it would be, if not for the universal human tendency toward self-justification at any cost.)
In Albright’s account, the worldwide upsurge of fascism, or at least “the tendencies that lead to fascism,” does not reflect a crisis of democratic legitimacy but rather “the abdication of America’s moral leadership,” as epitomized by You Know Who. She doesn’t quite claim that Trump is the uncaused cause of all these bad things, or that President Hillary Clinton would have stamped out fascism around the globe, but that's pretty much the implication.
That’s absurd on many levels — all the proto-fascist leaders Albright mentions preceded Trump onto the world stage, for one thing. But for an old-time Cold Warrior who believes in America as the indispensable nation, standing taller and seeing further than all others, such a narrative is far preferable to facing the fact that “how things are supposed to work” simply doesn’t work anymore. Madeleine Albright’s “warning” against fascism is, in fact, a plea to make America great again.
The political and economic order of the post-Cold War era, and then the post-9/11 era, has unleashed an enormous technical revolution and enriched and empowered an elite educated caste. To be fair, it has also expanded that caste, in some places and some contexts significantly so. But its vaunted dynamism has been disastrous for those left behind. It has worsened inequality to an unprecedented degree, has undercut labor power and driven down wages, and has left large subsets of the population disempowered, disenfranchised and mired in cultural and economic stagnation. Some of those people became the Trumpers and the Brexiteers and the conspiracy theorists, the target market for fascism and maple-bacon-chipotle doughnuts and other unsavory things. They may be deluded and dangerous, but they are not wrong to feel wronged.
In short, the world of free-market capitalism and universal democracy that Albright spent her career trying to build — under American dominance, of course — has pretty much failed. Oh, people still claim to believe in it, in almost exactly the same cynical and instrumental way that Soviet citizens of the ’70s still claimed to believe in communism. Ours is a less grotesque and inefficient system than that one, no doubt, and it excels at diverting its lower-rank denizens with disposable goods and finely crafted entertainment. So its collapse is happening much more slowly.
In Albright’s world, the world of the 20th century, history seemed to present a stark, binary choice between those two systems, and one of them seemed to emerge victorious. That was always a false dichotomy, and the global triumph of capitalism rapidly decayed into a suicidal sugar orgy. Now all that has been swept into the way-back machine of history, and Madeleine Albright's weird Reaganite nostalgia can't bring it back. Our choice is not between the “storm clouds” of fascism and a new era of muscular “American leadership.” It’s between clinging to hopeless visions of the past and building a future we cannot yet see.
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