Is the US really going Fascist?

Answering the question requires a definition of the word. I wanted to extract the essence of the term from the voluminous texts which have appeared on the subject since the end of second world war but have been defeated by the sheer number of relevant texts, of which I mention a few in Recommended Reading at the end. Paxton’s book ends with a bibliographical essay of almost 30 pages!  

The sociologist Michael Mann has presented a useful definition of fascism, in which he identifies three fundamentals: key values, actions, and power organizations. He sees it as ‘the pursuit of a transcendent and cleansing nation-statism through paramilitarism’.He suggests five essential aspects, some of which have internal tensions:

• Nationalism: the ‘deep and populist commitment to an “organic” or “integral” nation’.

• Statism: the goals and organizational forms that are involved when the organic conception imposes an authoritarian state ‘embodying a singular, cohesive will [as] expressed by a party elite adhering to the “leadership principle”.’

• Transcendence: the typical neither/nor of fascism as a third way – that is, as something transcending the conventional structures of left and right. Mann stresses that the core constituency of fascist support can be understood only by taking its aspirations to transcendence seriously. ‘Nation and state comprised their centre of gravity: not class.’

• Cleansing: ‘Most fascisms entwined both ethnic and political cleansing, though to varying degrees.’

• Paramilitarism: as a key element both in values and in organizational form. Like previous analysts, Mann notes that ‘what essentially distinguishes fascists from many military and monarchical dictatorships of the world is [the] “bottom-up” and violent quality of its paramilitarism. It could bring popularity, both electorally and among elites.

Recommended Reading

Articles are perhaps the easiest way in

Ur-fascism Umberto Eco (1997)

Fascism Anyone? Lawrence Britt (2003) which identifies 14 common features of fascism - 
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the
prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins,
the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the
regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always
obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity
were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually
coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on
xenophobia.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves
viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing
the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda,
the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by
marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was
egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.
3. Identification of enemies/scape-goats as a unifying cause. The most
significant common thread among these regimes was the use of
scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other
problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in
controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda
and0 disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would
incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually
communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities,
traditional national enemies, members of other religions,
secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of
these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with
accordingly.
4. The supremacy of the military/ avid militarism. Ruling
elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial
infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of
national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic
needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of
nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals,
intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the
ruling elite.
5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and
the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably
viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly
anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually
codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the
orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for
its abuses.
6.A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media
were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to
stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power
to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing
and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism,
and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often
politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually
success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’
excesses.
7. Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security
apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was
usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond
any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of
protecting “national security,” and questioning its activities
was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes,
the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless
by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves
to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray
themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the
ruling elite’s behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the
religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the
illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and
opponents of the “godless.” A perception was manufactured that
opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.
9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of
ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large
corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The
ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure
military production (in developed states), but also as an additional
means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often
pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of
interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was
seen as the one power center that could challenge the political
hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was
inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass,
viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being
poor was considered akin to a vice.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals 
and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them
were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were 
considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. 
Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed 
or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked,
silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the 
national interest or they had no right to exist.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained 
Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. 
The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to 
rampant abuse. “Normal” and political crime were often merged into trumped-up 
criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. 
Fear, and hatred, of criminals or “traitors” was often promoted among the 
population as an excuse for more police power.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to 
the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption 
worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property 
from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government 
favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast 
wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. 
With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, 
this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the 
general population. 
14. Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion 
polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, 
they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. 
Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, 
intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing 
legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the 
power elite.
Ur-fascism and Neo-fascism Andrew Johnson (2020)

Adorno write of such a danger - “National Socialism lives on, and even today we still do not know whether it is merely the ghost of what was so monstrous that it lingers on after its own death, or whether it has not yet died at all, whether the willingness to commit the unspeakable survives in people as well as in the conditions that enclose them.”

On Tyranny – reading guide Dave Forrest (2021)

How to Spot a Fascist  Terry Trowbridge (2022)

Fascism - a comprehensive reading list (2025) contains some interesting and unusual reads

Is It Fascism? Dan Garner (2025) 
When Trump first ran for office in 2016, Paxton and other scholars were asked if 
Trump was a fascist. Some said yes. Some said no. Paxton was among those who said no. 
But the January 6th insurrection changed his mind. Immediately afterward, 
he published a short essay explaining why. An excerpt:
Trump's incitement of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 
removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of 
civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label 
now seems not just acceptable but necessary. It is made even more plausible 
by comparison with a milestone on Europe's road to fascism—an openly 
fascist demonstration in Paris during the night of February 6, 1934.
On that evening thousands of French veterans of World War I, bitter at 
rumors of corruption in a parliament already discredited by its inefficacy 
against the Great Depression, attempted to invade the French parliament 
chamber, just as the deputies were voting yet another shaky government into 
power. The veterans had been summoned by right-wing organizations. 
They made no secret of their wish to replace what they saw as a weak 
parliamentary government with a fascist dictatorship on the model of Hitler 
or Mussolini.
…
In the United States, after the ignominious failure of a shocking fascist 
attempt to undo Biden's election, the new American President can begin his 
work of healing on January 20. Despite encouraging early signs and the 
relative robustness of American institutions, it's too soon for a responsible 
historian to say whether he'll be more successful in sustaining our Republic 
than European leaders were in defending theirs.
That last sentence makes for painful reading today.
Last October, after Donald Trump was called a fascist by the man who had been 
his longest-serving chief of staff — the four-star Marine Corps general John 
Kelly — The York Times ran a lengthy profile of Paxton and his changed view 
about Trump and fascism. From the Times:
"This summer I asked Paxton if, nearly four years later, he stood by his 
pronouncement. Cautious but forthright, he told me that he doesn’t believe 
using the word is politically helpful in any way, but he confirmed the diagnosis. 
“It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like 
the original fascisms,” Paxton said. “It’s the real thing. It really is.”
I agree with Robert Paxton that Trump and his movement are fascist. I also 
agree that it is not politically helpful to say so (thanks largely to 
generations of leftists who turned the word into a lazy insult.) That’s why 
I generally avoid calling them fascist. Generally. But not always.
As Paxton noted in The Anatomy of Fascism, a “radical instrumentalization of 
truth” is a routine feature of fascism. To the fascist, truth is contingent. 
What is good for the fascist is true; what is not, is not. Does that remind 
you of anyone?
This “radical instrumentalization of truth” makes standing and stating a truth 
regardless of political expedience an anti-fascist act.
And that is why, despite believing it is not politically useful to call Trump 
fascist, I sometimes do. It is my small way of insisting the fascists will 
not win.
Ray Dalio wrote an interesting book in 2021 (listed at the end) about which 
he posted today (I don't understand how he can put such a long post on X!!)
Books
Three Faces of Fascism Ernst Nolte (1969) the renowned German historian offers a 700 page 

analysis

Fascism – a readers guide ed Walter Laqueur (1976) the longest read at 488 pages
Fascism Michael Mann (2004) 436 pages
The Anatomy of Fascism Robert Paxton (2006) 335 pages summarised here
The Nature of Fascism Revisited Antonio Pinto (2012)

Chapters three and four provide a critical overview of new interpretations based on two review articles in which some major works on fascism are debated: Michael Mann’s “Fascists” and R. O. Paxton’s "Anatomy of Fascism. The first book asks the classic questions: Who were the fascists? How did they grow? Who supported them? And what are the conditions most conducive to their taking power? Mann attempts to construct a dynamic model that is not merely a taxonomy of fascism. Like Mann’s study, "The Anatomy of Fascism is also a critical reaction to some aspects of the ideological centrism of recent years. Because it was written by a historian, criticism of culturalism is more present in Paxton’s book, with the author more marked than Mann by the historiographical debates. By claiming ‘what fascists did tells us at least as much as what they said’ (a stance criticised by historians such as Sternhell and Roger Griffin), Paxton attempts to locate the ideas in their rightful place. If Mann’s research concentrates on the conditions leading to the growth of fascist movements, Paxton’s studies the processes involved in their seizure of power and the nature of the resulting regimes.

Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity Bill Robinson (2014) 
OK no mention of fascism in the title but, in 256 pages, he discusses the nature of the new 

global capitalism, the rise of a globalized production and financial system, a transnational 

capitalist class, and a transnational state and warns of the rise of a global police state to contain 

the explosive contradictions of a global capitalist system that is crisis-ridden and out of control. 

Robinson concludes with an exploration of how diverse social and political forces are responding 

to the crisis and alternative scenarios for the future.

Fascism – the career of a concept Paul Gottfried (2016) The author reveals in his intro his “paleoconservative” leanings – in 236 pages.

How Fascism Works – the politics of us and them Jason Stanley (2017 book) Probably the 

best read on the subject (and mercifully brief – at 145 pages)

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order Ray Dalio (2021)

US Democracy in action

Some 30 years ago, Robert Reich was, for some 4 years, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State for Labor. He’s now left politics and academia behind to become a successful blogger.

Every Saturday morning, he holds, with Heather Lofthouse, a wonderful “Coffee Klatch” or conversation. This morning’s was particularly inspiring since it brought in, at 35 minutes, a woman (Emily Finer) who had gone to a Town Hall meeting to ask her Republican Congressman a question. There was a massive police presence outside and everyone had to sign off/agree to a range of questions about their behaviour. Needless to say, the Congressman didn’t answer her question and when, she repeated it, she was ejected from the meeting – despite the protests of the audience who clearly supported her right to ask the question. The whole scene is a vivid illustration of the depths US democracy has reached – effectively to deny the right of protest.

What on earth were the mayor’s “storm-troopers” doing to carry her out???

the importance of countervailing power

I’ve been looking for some time for a book which does justice to our fall from innocence in the 1970s. I start from JK Galbraith’s concept of “countervailing power” which sustained the post-war period in western development. This was the theory that the corporate, union and social power held each other, for a “glorious 30 years”, in a certain balance until 1980 – with results good for everyone. That balance was destroyed by something we too easily try to explain away by the use of the meaningless phrase “neoliberalism”. I’m familiar with the various efforts a range of social scientists have made to put meat on that particular bone – such as Philip Mirowski, Vivian Schmidt and, more recently, Quinn Slobodian. But, for my money “Licence to be Bad; how economics corrupted us” by Jonathan Aldred (2019) offers the most readable explanation of how we have all succumbed in the past 40 years to a new highly individualistic and greedy virus…..The question which has been gnawing at me since the start of the new millennium is what can be done to put a new system of countervailing power in place…..????

Until now, few books dared raise or pursue that question, But Michael Lind’s The The New Class War – saving democracy from the new managerial elite (2020) offers to do precisely that……It starts powerfully – 

Demagogic populism is a symptom. Technocratic neoliberalism is the disease. Democratic pluralism is the cure.

before reminding us that -

In the 19^th and early twentieth centuries, five major schools of thought debated the future of industrial society: liberalism, producerism, socialism, corporatism, and pluralism (p39) 

……Producerism is the belief that the economy should be structured by the state to maximize the numbers of self-employed family farmers, artisans, and small shopkeepers in society. The moral ideal of this school is the selfsufficient citizen of a republic with a small-producer majority whose economic independence means that they cannot be intimidated or blackmailed by wealthy elites. In the form of Jeffersonian agrarianism, producerism has a rich history in the United States. The rise of mass production in the economy, and the shift from a majority made up of farm owners and farm workers to urban wage earners, rendered the producerist ideal irrelevant in the modern industrialized West. While small-producerism still has appeal to romantics on both the left and the right, it is and will remain anachronistic, and having criticized it elsewhere, I will not discuss it in this book.

….. A fourth philosophy, opposed to free market liberalism and state socialism alike, envisioned a harmonious society of state-supervised but largely self-governing “corporations,” by which was meant entire economic sectors, not individual firms, rather like medieval guilds.6 This tradition influenced Catholic social thought, as expressed in the papal encyclicals Rerum novarum (1891), Quadragesimo anno (1931) or Fratelli Tutti (2020). For the French sociologist Émile Durkheim and others in the secular French republican solidarist tradition, the organization of labor and business could be an antidote to “anomie,” a phrase Durkheim devised to describe the isolation and disorientation of many individuals in urban industrial societies.7 The same term, “corporatism,” is often used for both democratic and dictatorial versions of this political tradition

….. The view of society as a community of self-organized and self-governing communities, under the supervision of a democratic government, is best described as “pluralism,” the term used by the English pluralists of the early twentieth century, like Neville Figgis, F. W. Maitland, G. D. H. Cole, and Harold Laski, and by their late-twentieth century heirs, including Paul Hirst and David Marquand. 

And then goes on to argue that – 

Only a new democratic pluralism that compels managerial elites to share power with the multiracial, religiously pluralistic working class in the economy, politics, and the culture can end the cycle of oscillation between oppressive technocracy and destructive populism.

The Long Search for Democracy – final chapters

The final chapters of my book are four in number – ”the voice of praxis in administrative reform”; ”the process of change”; ”taking back control” and the Inconclusion. You can read the 74 pages here. A couple of these consist of posts from some years back and need a tighter rewrite to make it clearer what I’m trying to say. The ”process of change” is essentially an annotated list of books about change – preceded by an attempt at classifying the different genres into which they fall.

The (rare) Voice of Praxis in administrative reform (ch 6)

Introductory Remarks

Go to the ”management” section of any bookshop and you will be overwhelmed by the number of titles – with pride of place generally given to the profiles of the latest management ”heroes” whose habits we are enjoined to follow.....Despite the best intentions of academics like Mark Moore to encourage leadership in the public sector, almost no leader there has followed suit. Clearly they are too busy to write books..... As someone who has straddled the worlds of politics, academia and consultancy, I am disappointed by the sparseness of the consultants’ contribution to the literature. Clearly they keep their powder dry for those who pay them! But the public have a right to know with what sort of insights these highly-paid wizards earn their money - and

This part therefore attempts the difficult task of entering the minds of the tiny number of consultants who have actually written seriously about their metier. I focus on Chris Foster, Jake Chapman, Ed Straw and Michael Barber. A few of the academic have taken time out to train senior officials – eg Matt Andrews at Harvard and I therefore include their musings in this chapter.

The Process of CHANGE (ch 7)

“Life is flux,” said the philosopher Heraclitus. The Greek philosopher pointed out in 500 BC that everything is constantly shifting, and becoming something other to what it was before. Like a river, life flows ever onwards, and while we may step from the riverbank into the river, the waters flowing over our feet will never be the same waters that flowed even one moment before. Heraclitus concluded that since the very nature of life is change, to resist this natural flow was to resist the very essence of our existence. “There is nothing permanent except change,” he said.

As the new millennium got underway I produced an “Annotated bibliography for Change Agents” which represented the short notes I had made about the range of books my new assignment in countries recently liberated from communism required me to become familiar with – viz the challenge of transitioning to new systems of accountability and public management, European systems of local government, different civil service systems, the nature of organisations and the management of change. This updated version focuses less on the governmental aspects of change and more on the intrinsic issues of change – as it affects individuals, organisations and societies. It argues that the subject has been hugely compartmentalised in the past century and more – with scientists focusing on technology; psychologists on the individual; economists on the organisation; and sociologists and others on society as a whole. Very few have tried to integrate these perspectives – although a few attempts have been made very recently.

At one level, we are told that the pace of change has never been as great. But then we read this passage (by Keynes) written a hundred years ago

… any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend.

He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.

But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.

But the technology we had expected in the 1960s to arrive in our lifetime has not materialised – such as teletransporting and flying cars. Change had perhaps stalled? My personal introduction to this subject came in the 1960s – with the Penguin Specials of “What’s Wrong with Britain?” but crystallised in the stunning 1970 Reith Lectures by Donald Schon on “Beyond the Stable State” of which I have vivid memories listening to on my parents’ radio.

From that point on, I was hooked into the importance not only of change but of organisations – with the focus being more practical than academic. In 1968 I had become a councillor representing working class people in a shipbuilding town and about to assume managerial responsibilities for a new Social Work agency when the UK was at the start of what became the ravages of de-industrialisation. Donald Schon caught the mood of the times very well when he wrote in 1971

We’re experiencing a general rather than an isolated or peripheral phenomenon. The threat to the stability of established institutions carries with it a threat to the stability of established theory and ideology, because institutions like the Labour movement, the Church, social welfare agencies, all carry with them bodies of theory, ways of looking at the world, and when the institutions are threatened, the bodies of theory are threatened as well. Most important, when the anchors of the institution begin to be loosened, the supports that it provides for personal identity, for the self, begin to be loosened too. We’ve lost faith, I think, in the idea of being able to achieve stable solutions to these problems.

Why is the treatment of change so compartmentalised?

We use the concept of “change” all the time but there seems to be surprisingly little written about it as an all-embracing concept. The literature on change is, of course, immense but is divided very much into several completely separate fields which, curiously, seem totally uninterested in each other - dealing with the individual, the technical, the organisational and the societal respectively

• the first field draws on psychology and tends to be interested in things like stress;

• the second focuses on the technological aspects – and how they are commercially exploited

• the third focuses on the management of change aș organisations react to the technological changes (with companies, the public sector and the NGO field receiving different treatment);

• the last field is interested in collective challenges to power which often go under the label of “social change” but has also attracted the interest of scientists exploring the world of complexity

Taking Back Control? (ch 8)

Introductory Remarks

I haven’t had a chance so far to explain the quote on the front page of the book

We've spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are solutions to our confusions over government, they lie in democratic not management processes.

JR Saul

John Ralston Saul is a true original – one of the very few who has chosen to carve out his own life of choice, In 1992 he published a blast of a book called “Voltaire’s Bastards – the Dictatorship of Reason in the West” - which I found at the time simply one of the most brilliant books of the decade. Years later, when I started my blog, his words were still in my mind and used for the first-ever masthead quote. I chose the quote, I suppose, because of a certain ambivalence about the managerial role I’ve played in the final 20 years of my working life.

Feeling the Tension?

For the first 22 years of my adult life, I had been a (fairly scholastic) politician - for the next 22 years an apolitical adviser. It’s perhaps only in the past decade that I’ve been able to go back to being truly “my own man”.

In 1973 or so – based on my experience of working with community groups and trying to reform a small municipal bureaucracy – I had written a pamphlet called “From Corporate Management to Community action” (sadly no longer available) which reflected my disillusionment with the technocratic fashions of the time.

In 1977, in what is, I grant you, a rather long and technocratic article entitled Community Development – its political and administrative challenge, I drew on my reading of the previous decade’s literature (UK and US) about urban politics and community power to challenge the validity of the “pluralist” assumptions underpinning our democratic practices.

The article looked at how community grievances found voice and power and were subsequently dealt with by political and administrative processes. I wasn’t a Marxist but the sort of questions I was raising seem now to indicate a greater debt to that sort of analysis than I was perhaps aware of at the time, I wasn’t just saying that life chances were unevenly distributed – I was also arguing that, from an early age, those in poor circumstances develop lower expectations and inclination to challenge systems of authority. And the readiness of those systems to respond was also skewed because of things like the “old boy network”.

The piece explored the functions which political parties were supposed to perform under pluralist theory – and found them seriously wanting. And then I became a consultant!

Do we expect too much from our institutions?

On Thinking Institutionally was a little book published a decade ago by Hugh Heclo, now a retired American political scientist with form for an interest both in political institutions and in European aspects of political culture. I remember his name vividly from the 1970s from his superb anthropological study of the British budgetary process The Private Government of Public Money which he wrote jointly with that great doyen of political analysis (and of the budgetary process) Aaron Wildavsky.

Heclo’s later book looked at our loss of respect for institutions. Way back in the 60s, Penguin books had published a series of popular paperbacks with the series title “What’s Wrong with…….?” – in which virtually all British institutions were subjected to a ruthless critique. When I was in Germany for a couple of months in 2013, I noticed a similar rash of titles. And France has been flooded in recent years by the literature on its doom…..

I like a good critique like anyone else – but we’ve perhaps reached the point when critical analyses of our institutions has destroyed our trust in institutions. A few years ago the Britain “expenses scandal” hit the political class – was it a coincidence that this happened just when the global economic crisis required some determined political action?

For whatever reason, trust in our institutions – public and private – has sunk to an all-time low. This is the issue with which Heclo’s book starts – indeed he gives us a 5 page spread which itemises the scandals affecting the public, private and even NGO sectors in the last 40-50 years – arguing that mass communications and our interconnectedness exacerbate the public impact of such events.

“The past half-century has been most unkind to those discrete cohering entities, both formal and informal, that "represent inheritances of valued purpose with attendant rules and moral obligations." Today, people almost universally denigrate institutions, including those of which they are members.

Attacks on institutions come from our hyper-democratic politics but stem from the Enlightenment with its unshakeable confidence in human reason; its subsequent obsessive focus on the self; and, latterly, its belief that an institution has no value beyond that which an individual can squeeze from it for personal gain

The last 60 years has seen a process which designates institutions as, at best, annoying encumbrances and, at worst, oppressive tools of the past. Students are taught to believe what they like and express themselves as they see fit. Even people understood to be conservatives—at least in the way we conceptualize political ideology today—assail institutions. Free market economics places a premium on self-interest and assumes institutions stifle innovation and entrepreneurship

But institutions provide reference points in an uncertain world. They tie us to the past and present; furnish personal assistance; and institutionalize trust. They give our lives purpose and, therefore, the kind of self-satisfaction that only the wholesale rejection of them is supposed to provide.

How, then, do we protect and promote them?

Inconclusion

In 1975 Samuel Huntington and others published (for the Tripartite Commission) 

a report entitled “The Crisis of Democracy” which was a diatribe against the 

hoi poloi and our aspirations. It reflected the contemporary mood of fatalism

 and helped prepare the neoliberal onslaught which has been inflicted on us 

for the past four decades and to which there has been no real answer. 

What passes for the left seems to have accepted that individualism is here 

to stay – with Richard Wolff’s  “Democracy at Work – a cure for Capitalism”, 

Thomas Pikety’s “Time for Socialism” and Jeremy Gilbert’s “Common Ground – 

democracy and collectivity in an age of individualism ” (2014) and 

“21st century Socialism” (2020) being honourable but rare exceptions . 
What seems very clear is that progressives need to give much more thought 

to human nature if we have any chance of convincing the electorate of our 

programmes. Rutger Bregman’s Humankind – a hopeful history would be a 

good start.  
Democracy has very much been in retreat since I wrote that first book with 

a similar title in 1977 with the Thatcherite attack not only on trade unions 

but all possible challenges to corporate power. And the populism we’ve seen in 

the last couple of decades has given new energy to that attack. 
The saving grace has been the new discourse about direct democracy and citizen juries – at least in western Europe. 
But central Europe and the Balkans remain disfigured – with oligarchic elites 

consolidating their power.