by GABRIEL ROCKHILL
Fascist modes of governance are a very real and present part of the so-called liberal world order.
“The model for Nazi Germany’s white-supremacist colonial expansion was the U.S.”
“There is currently one state [the United States] that has made at least the weak beginnings of a better order.” — Adolph Hitler in 1926
“Give Franco a hood and he would be a member of the Ku Klux Klan.”?— Langston Hughes
The One-State-One-Government Paradigm
It is often presumed that each individual state has a particular form of government—be it liberal, fascist or authoritarian—which constitutes the primary mode of rule throughout the entire country. We thus often hear expressions like ‘the liberal democracies of the West’ or ‘the former dictatorships of Latin America.’ This geography of governments is linked to a political chronology, which tells us that a government can shift from one form to another, hence the prevalence of sayings like ‘the return of democracy’ or the ‘resurgence of fascism.’ The dominant paradigm for understanding the relationship between states and government can thus be summed up in terms of one overarching principle: each state, if it is not in an open civil war, only has one form of government at one point in time, which rules over its entire territory and population.
The one-state-one-government paradigm dissimulates the complex ways in which populations are governed. Its naïve either-or logic provides cover for less savory forms of governance if the state is declared, for instance, a liberal democracy. It also produces a geography and chronology of faraway fascism, by which liberal states seek to convince their citizenry that fascism is something that occurred in the past, that might emerge in the future if liberal institutions aren’t preserved, or that only infests distant lands recalcitrant to democracy. Whatever the case may be, we can rest assured that fascism is not an issue right here, right now.
“The multiple-modes-of-governance paradigm insists on the multiplicity of agencies that are mobilized for governing different populations.”
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