Didn’t Sun Tzu sort of have this in his list of needful things for success?

Make your enemy sub-human. That justifies your action and unifies an army.

This situation doesn’t appear to be much repeated, historically, prior to the 20th century. There have been middle classes in the past, but they have been characterized by wealthy and powerful groups, like merchants or landowners, who were NOT members of a hereditary aristocracy. These upstarts wanted to displace the aristocrats, and directed their anger upwards. Today’s middle classes want to JOIN the executive/ownership aristocracy. They feel they are entitled to join the club, and they adopt its ethos and ape its values. Their hostility is directed downwards, to the working classes, the immigrants, the poor, the racial underclasses they see as their competition.

You start seeing this around the late 19th century, when industrialization simultaneously created a need for increased numbers of middle-tier mangers/technocrats AND vast quantities of unskilled labor to tend the machines.

Prior to industrialization, the role of fascism was taken up by the institutions of feudalism. This form of social organization took over when the centralized empires became unworkable (Greece, Rome, Mogul India, Warlord China, the Japanese Shogunate). Feudalism at least provided social stability, even if the price to be paid was almost constant warfare.

But at least, there was law and order and the trains ran on time.

We know that there is always the undercurrent, a mantle plume, of the Fascism way. It’s always there, trying to bubble up, and wipe out progress. Every eruption is different, but they are also the same.

It only takes a generation or two to forget the last time the volcano blew.

(updated)

A period of economic growth and political progress produce a thriving and prosperous middle class with what it perceives as a bright future.

But conditions change, either because of corruption, stagnation, or perhaps just plain evolution and history, and suddenly that middle class senses a sliding back into its grim working class misery and oppression. My parents’ generation were old enough to remember what it was like growing up during the Depression. They could still remember hard times and they passed that knowledge and fear onto their children, who lived long enough to see the brane new economy start to sputter and fail. They become desperate, frightened, desperately seeking scapegoats to blame their anticipated bad future (real or imagined) on. An unscrupulous elite seizes on this anxiety to create chaos, to set one class or race against another for the benefit of their own agenda. Divide and conquer, its the oldest strategy in history.

The end of the Great War and the start of the Great Depression set the stage the last time, the end of American Hegemony and the crumbling away of the New Deal in the last quarter of the 20th century set the conditions again for a repeat. We even have our own version of the Spanish Flu to complete the symmetry. And the ghost of Communism has been resurrected from its Cold War grave to play its usual role.

‘Fascism is the dictatorship of the middle class.’ Its not just ole ER’s catchy slogan, its an observation based on the perception that similar conditions lead to parallel results. No, there is no magic theme that runs cyclically through history. Its just similar events leading to similar responses. Its not magic at all, or coincidence. Water just flows downhill.

I think Mel Brooks understood it very well.

But how to divert it, nudge it’s orbital path just a bit, send it out to be a another generation’s task? Because it always comes back. Like “springtime for Hitler”.