It’s been listening to the media talk about UKIP, Front Nationale, Golden Dawn, and whatever they call themselves in Denmark and the Netherlands without connecting the godamn dots and seeing the pattern that has been most worrying to me.
Americans in the 19th century had no trouble seeing monarchism as an ideology separate and apart from the intensely nationalistic form it took in each country where it existed. They looked at Europe and saw a continent where everyone in government wore a fancy uniform and oppressed the peasants had a title, not Russian ministers in uniforms and German ministers uniforms and Austrian ministers and uniforms and, most of the time, French ministers in uniforms. When fascism arose in the 30’s, we had no trouble seeing Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and the other fascist nations as being of a piece rather than sui generis.
But over the long decades of the Cold War I think we somehow allowed the overt (if usually phony) internationalism of communism to blind us to the existence of transnational ideologies that don’t purport to be anything but purely local. It’s what has us confusing an aggressively transnational religion with ideology and not seeing a real emerging transnational ideology where it exists.
Or, hell, I don’t know. Maybe we’re just too damn stupid to hold on to democracy. Maybe when two generations have lived under “the worst form of government except for all the others” without having exemplars of “all the others” actively threatening them, all they see is “the worst” part and don’t grasp the “all the others are even worse” part.