In the aftermath of a fascist rally, we commonly encounter the demand that we call it something else.
Among others, Alan Sunderland, an editorial director at ABC News, has called for more cautious descriptions of what happened last Saturday in St Kilda. There, around 150 far-right thugs and a sitting Australian senator gathered for an inchoate protest against a fiction: that “African gangs” present an existential threat to Melbourne.
Sunderland tweeted that the far-right group, who even took the trouble to throw Roman salutes, should not be called Nazis because they lack the necessary “formality and consistency of belief”.
But the idea that fascists are fastidious enough to maintain such a coherent body of ideology is something that many scholars have come to reject.
Robert O Paxton, for example, shows in The Anatomy of Fascism that the common ground shared by various interwar fascist movements belonged “more to the realm of visceral feelings than reasoned propositions”, and that “what fascists did tells us at least as much as what they said”.
For Paxton, far more important than the shifting sands of fascist rhetoric and policy were the gut-level, affective components of the movement, including a suffocating sense of crisis, a belief in the beauty of violence, a desire for the restoration of an imagined national ethnic purity, a hatred of liberalism and the left, and a sense that their own group is in decline and under attack by liberalism or “alien” influences.
Such sentiments were discernible in what the St Kilda group did and said before, during and after their confrontation with anti-racist counterprotesters in Melbourne. At the megaphone on Saturday, Blair Cottrell, a convicted criminal and fan of Adolf Hitler, absurdly claimed that Australia was “under attack” by young Africans. You can be sure that his listeners believed him.
Perhaps Sunderland, and others like Mike Carlton, are afraid of over-inflating the importance of a poorly organised group. This idea is related to the notion that fascist groups will perish in the absence of attention from media and counterprotesters.
As recent experience in the United States and elsewhere has shown, these ideas are delusions. Attention is precisely what leads these groups to come apart.
The fact is that wherever we find it, the far right tends to be fractious. If this fractiousness is overcome, it is not by means of rational debate, but by the cultivation of shared hatreds that lead to unifying action.
In his work on the myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism” in inter-war Europe, and its role in coalescing fascist movements, Paul Hanebrink shows how racist attacks “were a political tool that helped different warring parties to unify their disparate forces and whip up popular support for their cause”.
Similarly, by focusing on a particular migrant community, rally organiser Neil Erikson and Cottrell were able to pull a disparate collection of far-right groups and – it bears repeating – a sitting federal politician into a park.
There, to be sure, they harnessed attention from various media outlets (some of which have themselves been complicit in creating the African gangs myth). But now, in the social media era, such groups effectively have their own media apparatus. An unopposed protest would equally have been hailed as a victory, and used in further recruitment efforts.
Paxton analyses fascism as a five-stage process. Even in the late 1990s, before the current global surge of the far right, he was able to say that “fascism exists at the level of stage one in all democratic countries” – ie, the level at which a disillusionment with liberal democracy becomes the basis for a movement which welds heterogenous resentments together to create a fascist “mood”.
The second stage, in which fascists become players on a national stage in electoral or pressure group politics, may not have arrived in Australia, but the presence of Fraser Anning shows that fascists are making connections at the heart of representative democracy.
Generally, fascists have only succeeded in moving even closer to the centre of power with the collaboration or assistance of mainstream conservatives. This brings us to the question of how this rally ever came to be.
One important thing to notice about the rally on Saturday is that it was directed at a “problem” (so-called “African gangs”) which conservatives – in politics and the media – relentlessly focused on over the course of several years. This became particularly intense during 2018 as the Victorian Liberal party, and their handmaidens in conservative media, chose to make racial panic the centrepiece of their state election campaign.
The idea that lawless African gangs are terrorising Melbourne never had any real basis, but the Liberal party, News Corp and elements of tabloid television presented it as a threat that the Labor party was not equipped to respond to. (Infamously, Channel Seven even gave a platform last year to Blair Cottrell).
Thankfully, most voters either didn’t believe them or did not consider the issue salient enough to give their vote to Matthew Guy.
But to the extent that the story was believed, and became a source of fear and resentment for a segment of Victorians, it afforded an opportunity to the extreme right.
In carrying the idea that African gangs were holding the city to ransom to a humiliating electoral defeat, the Liberals and their allies have created space for the argument that no solution to the mythical problem is available within the confines of parliamentary democracy.
In whipping up fear about a single, marginalised community, conservatives also gave a sizeable boost to the far-right project of creating visceral fears about outsiders.
The weak condemnation of the rally by the prime minister, and the silence of Matthew Guy, have done nothing to remedy this.
A nascent fascist movement is now offering to solve the “problem” in a way that they will say conservatives are too squeamish to contemplate: direct, violent action.
This is the soil in which extra-parliamentary far-right movements grow.
For now, the movement that Erikson, Cottrell and others preside over is small.
It will only be kept small if we call it by its name and support those who show up to oppose it.
• Jason Wilson is a Guardian writer and columnist
