On the past

Propaganda doesn’t win by ideology; it wins by vernacular. Fascist radio conquered North African audiences in the 1930s by broadcasting popular music in colloquial Arabic, while the French countered with formal bulletins nobody wanted to hear. Replace radio with the platforms of your choice.

There is no fascist international. Fascists are nationalists, which means they compete with one another for the same territory; in 1930s Tunisia, French and Italian fascists fought in the streets. The ideology is fissile by nature, and that may be the most useful thing about it.

France spent decades trying to manufacture loyalty with naturalization papers. It never worked. The gap between legal status and belonging may not be bridgeable by law, which is a problem if law is the only tool you have.

When a state can’t stop an idea from spreading, it stops punishing the idea and starts punishing the actions. Censorship gives way to surveillance. The transition point is worth studying, because we’re living inside one.

We treat our way of seeing as universal, but a thing can come to feel universal simply because every alternative was killed rather than refuted. Ideas are supposed to win in some marketplace; sometimes they win by lining the competition against a wall. What looks like the triumph of the best argument may only be the last one left standing.

Americans tend to believe the republic went extinct with Rome and was not seen again until 1789. It isn’t true: Venice was a republic, so was early modern Poland, and the very idea of “electors” we took from them, then quietly changed from hereditary aristocrats into something a party nominates. A hole this size in the historical memory is not an accident. Someone benefits from the belief that there was nothing in between.