Are there significant dangers of exaggerating the risk of fascism? (TLDR: I don't think so).

David Lammy caused a stir yesterday when comparing Farage and members of the ERG to interwar fascists. There are definitely rhetorical and ideological overlaps, though the context is clearly quite different.  What's more, any warning about the dangers and warning signs are always going to be made from a position of uncertainty. People will only ever be talking about risks and probabilities, not definite outcomes, with the aim of warning of them being to prevent them happening in the first place. From this position of uncertainty, it seems reasonable to risk being wrong, given the costs of being right, having failed to act. But are there risks of exaggerating the similarities of contemporary ethno-nationalism with interwar fascism? I think these are ultimately less significant, but they are worth discussing.

The first risk is a kind of 'boy who cried wolf' effect*. If you warn of dangers that don't exist now, people will not believe you when the wolf is really there. I don't think this applies in this context. The only way in which this idea would make sense if there were, at some stage in the future, recognisably different warning signs of fascism, which would make it correct to worry in that future context but not in the present one. We might suppose, for example, that we should only see a risk of fascist government in the event of military or paramilitary organisations that might use force to consolidate or achieve power. But in that circumstance, warning of these dangers would also mean something quite different, as there would be a different contextual backdrop in which the warning was interpreted. The boy who cries wolf would not work as a fable if the villagers were given new and different evidence of a wolf. What's more, it seems reasonable to suppose that greater awareness of the risks posed by the far right generally acts as a useful check. The rise of the far right in Western Europe has coincided with the receding of the experience of fascism from popular memory.

The second risk is that of political censorship of legitimate views. This seems like a straight forwardly bad argument to me as it presupposes a political power those who are most concerned with fascism at the moment do not possess. Social liberals like David Lammy do not have the capacity to censor Nigel Farage in any conventional sense even if they wanted to.

The third risk is that a little more subtle: that terms like fascism and the direct comparisons they elicit might obscure the differences between the interwar and the present day. This is a little more difficult to evaluate, but my gut feeling is the rhetorical force of the comparison is one worth keeping, as a kind of didactic tale, as much as a reference point for historical analysis.

* Chris Dillow also discusses the problems with this analogy here.