What Studying Authoritarianism Teaches Us About Fighting It

What can studying fascism, Nazism, and kindred authoritarian movements of the 20th century teach us about today’s political scene? A lot — and the lessons are more unsettling than most people expect.

This winter, Nikos Sotirakopoulos and I co-taught an ARI course titled “Reactionary Authoritarianism: From Mussolini to the ‘New Right.’” Working through the historical readings and lectures with Nikos gave me a richer understanding of the ancestors of today’s anti-freedom factions — and the dynamics that enable them. Three brief reflections:

1. What fueled fascism, Nazism, and authoritarianism lives on.

To understand the rise of these movements in the 20th century, it’s crucial to view them as part of a wider trend, not only or primarily as responses to such upheavals as World War I and the Great Depression. The wider trend, Nikos argued, is a rejection of the best features of the Enlightenment: its emphasis on reason, individualism, and freedom. That anti-Enlightenment impulse lives on. You can see it infusing the self-described “post-liberals,” the “new right,” the National Conservatives, and other MAGA-adjacent factions today, which repudiate “individualism” and “capitalism” in favor of the nation or tribe.

2. The deliberate attacks on “individualism.”

It’s well known how fascists and Nazis vilified “individualism,” but a theme throughout the course is how thoroughly that ideal was misunderstood, misrepresented, and distorted by its detractors. Deliberately so. The individual, left free to think and act on his own, was seen as corrosive of group bonds. But in reviling the individual, they offer a false picture: a self-absorbed seeker of momentary, decadent pleasures, unconcerned with moral norms and traditions. Such people exist, but as Ayn Rand argued, it’s false to view them as (genuine) individualists. Consider how she projects the ideal of individualism in the character of Howard Roark, whose animating principle is his independent rational judgment, and who is vested deeply in building a lifelong productive career; Roark rejects moral norms and traditions when he judges them to be irrational.

The distortion relies on what Rand called a “package deal”: the fallacious bundling together of things that are essentially different. Part of how this works: they lump the rational individualist together with the self-absorbed pleasure seeker, because of superficial, non-essential commonality, since they appear self-interested and stand apart from the collective. Echoes of this are evident today in the writings of Patrick Deneen (Regime Change; Why Liberalism Failed) and Yoram Hazony (The Virtue of Nationalism), whose work we’ve written about in New Ideal and analyzed on the podcast. There’s urgent work to be done clearing away the package-deal conception of individualism and educating people about the actual nature of this ideal.

3. The power of moral sanction.

Well before Britain’s infamous appeasement of Hitler in 1938, the German political establishment had already enabled his entry into the mainstream. A similar pattern was involved in Mussolini’s rise in Italy. Broadly, the ideologists of racism, tribalism, authoritarianism, and kindred factions are often grasping for precisely this: a moral sanction from reputable, establishment figures. They want the semblance of belonging in respectable, civilized society. This is an enduring dynamic that people grossly under-recognize.

Flash forward to a recent example, but on a far smaller scale. When Tucker Carlson hosted the racist, antisemitic, misogynistic influencer Nick Fuentes for a long, friendly conversation, it was moral laundering. Fuentes was getting the same thing he enjoyed after his 2022 dinner with Donald Trump and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago.

Seeing this pattern — then and now — deepened my appreciation for Rand’s insight that evil is impotent and parasitic on the good. Put another way, there is enormous power in withholding the “sanction of the victim.”

One personal highlight of this eight-week course was working with Nikos Sotirakopoulos. He led the course, selected the readings, and lectured each week; I consulted on the outline and chimed in during class. Nikos is a dedicated, energizing teacher and a historian committed to getting at the facts of the matter.

Coming up this spring and summer are several new ARI courses, including on Rand’s individualist ethics, the corporation, and globalization — frequent targets of today’s dominant political tribes.