I find the process by which an ostensible concern over government power generates support for authoritarian government, fascism, rather interesting. It’s a bit outside my normal more purely economic area of concern, but maybe I can talk about that this week?
If one imagines some interpersonal conflict of preferences, say two people want some resource X, one can imagine them resolving it in various ways: the law, discussing sensibly and coming to private agreement, hitting one another over the head with rocks, etc. Let’s consider the solution involving law, that is, the one that doesn’t correspond to either utopian anarchism, where people readily agree whose preferences should prevail, or real world anarchism, where people readily apply violence to settle the matter.
In a practical sense, what makes the law the law is the government monopoly on the legal use of force. Disobey the law, and one faces consequences. There’s no need to argue or fight over it every time. That’s the beauty of the law. Can’t have much a society without it. And where does this law come from? Mother Nature? The heavens? The right honorable Arbiter of Ethics? My back pocket? An ongoing social agreement or pact, based ultimately in the subjective ethical beliefs of the people, delivered via democratic government? Just asking. It’s an important issue because if one supports law but believes democratic government is forever threatening to make so-called laws conflicting with what believes is the One True Law, then one will tend towards anti-democracy, authoritarian government, fascism, theocracy, etc.
Most types of popular and folk political and economic ideology in the USA today fall into the friendly to fascism category. They’re based on various formulations of some One True Law or other that supersedes democratic government and hence focus on the perceived danger of democracy. They are anti-democracy, specifically, but not anti-government, in general. That is, they support the rule of law, property, markets, etc. However, for rhetorical purposes, they often suppress awareness of their vision of government and try to cast themselves as fake anarchists. One can understand the rhetorical difficulty, of course. Not many have the intellectual honesty to say they’re so egoistic, have such hubris, that they suppose their vision of the One True Law should prevail over the ethical views of all others. Confusingly, these people are often cast as representing a “classical liberal” perspective, which of course is inconsistent with another and rather more common understanding of “liberal” in the USA, which is very much pro-democracy.
Why do such people dismiss the dangers posed by the authoritarian government they implicitly support? They suppose that authoritarian government will express, and will always express, their own personal understanding of the One True Law, and will defend it against all others. Law, supported and enforced by a non-democratic, authoritarian government, will not necessarily appear burdensome if what it is doing corresponds to what one supposes it ought to be doing. Such a government will be perceived by some to be not a road to serfdom but freedom. In the past, we saw the same sort of essentially fascist ethics at play in non-economic contexts, as well. The old Nazis were quite concerned they were blocked from expressing their ethical beliefs because of what they considered bullying, degenerate, ethically weak democracy. The Nazis yearned to escape the serfdom of living in a political democracy and gain the liberty, the freedom, to live under a system that expressed what they considered the One True Ethics, which for them famously involved things like murdering children in forests and so on.
So does fascism support freedom / liberty? If one recalls the writings of the old institutionalist economists at all, their inevitable retort to someone banging on about such issues was always to ask, “Whose freedom? Whose liberty? To do what?” The point is if we’re discussing the ethics of resolving interpersonal conflicts of preferences, allocating resources, etc., talking about “freedom” and “liberty” in vague, underspecified ways, is not helpful and, indeed, can be quite misleading. It’s misleading in the way all equivocation on terms is misleading. Everyone is likely in favor of someone’s “freedom” and “liberty,” defined one way or another, to do something or other, but talking in generalities leads to confusion and conflict and gets one nowhere.
Another complication in this area is the tendency of many to think of “fascism” in terms of the “size” of government, defined by function, rather than by its non-democratic authoritarian aspect. Under this theory, a “small” government narrowly focused on expressing particular ethical beliefs relating to defining, enforcing, using economic power, and maybe a few other things, cannot by definition represent “fascism,” no matter how non-democratic it may be. By the same token, a “large” democratic government that is willing to take up policies relating to the welfare of the people, altering the distribution of economic power to reflect the forever changing and evolving subjective ethical views of the voters, setting the extent of the market according to the subjective ethical views of the voters, etc., may be seen as “fascist,” no matter how democratic it may be.
Bad economics in the conservative style plays a role because it downplays the ethical half-theory structure of neoclassical welfare economics, the discussion of the necessary ethical inputs, the subjective nature of those inputs, and the role of democratic government. In bad economics in the conservative style, democratic government is an unfortunate, unhelpful, unethical institution that threatens to “interfere” with economic systems if not held in check or, even better, eliminated. Bad economics in the conservative style supports fascism.
