With America’s global standing now downgraded from 'full democracy to 'flawed democracy' by the Economist Intelligence Unit, this is no time for complacency. Albright outlines the warning signs of fascism and offers concrete actions for restoring America’s values and reputation. There is priceless wisdom on every page.
In Fascism: A Warning Albright (with Bill Woodward) draws on her personal history, government experience and conversations with Georgetown students to assess current dangers and how to deal with them. Albright does this via an examination of cases in Europe and America from World War I through the present day ... Albright worries that Trump’s isolationism, protectionism and fondness for dictators are eroding America’s ability to lead and help solve international challenges, deepening divisions within the West and emboldening antidemocratic forces. Despite all this, Albright is hopeful. She ends her book referencing leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela, who helped their countries move past periods of intense violence and division. Democracy’s problems can, Albright assures us, be overcome — but only if we recognize history’s lessons and never take democracy for granted.
The first chapters of her book follow the careers of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler in the 1920s and ’30s. Her account gains additional force from her own biography: As a little girl, she had to leave her native Czechoslovakia with her family after the Nazis invaded in 1939. (Her maternal grandmother, who was Jewish, was murdered by the Nazis in World War II.) The rest of the book, in which she melds her travels as secretary of state with ruminations about despots around the world, is decidedly weaker. There’s an obligatory feel to these accounts ... Almost in passing, she mentions that the Kim family regime in North Korea — she conducted talks in 2000 with Kim Jong Il, the father of the incumbent there — probably qualifies as the only truly fascist regime in the world today. I happen to agree with her on that. Unfortunately, she never really explains what she means by it ... she doesn’t add a great deal more to our understanding of what qualifies someone as a modern fascist or how fascism might have mutated to fit current conditions. And that is a pity, because it’s just the sort of clarifying discussion we desperately need.
Much of the book draws on Albright’s own experience ... Some of Fascism’s strongest sections are the ones drawn from Albright’s first-hand observations of the autocrats she dealt with while in office ... Where the book falters is in its lack of a substantial first-hand account of how and why democratic leaders failed to stop the current rise of authoritarianism. As one of the most powerful members of the west’s ruling class during the decade after the Cold War, Albright is in a prime position to recount the behind-the-scenes decision-making that led to the failures of democracy she describes ... Still, Fascism stands out for both Albright’s close vantage point to many of the leaders she describes and for its deft structure, which rests on highly readable sketches of a dozen despots, interspersed with analysis on the common traits that signal the rise of fascism.
Bookshops are full of expert guides to spotting a country’s slide into autocracy. Bearing names like How Democracies Die or Trumpocracy, they generally focus on the man in the White House. This book is broader; Mrs Albright says she first planned it as a primer for defending democracies worldwide, when she thought Hillary Clinton would win. Still, in historical chapters that a college might call Fascism 101, she has professorial fun describing despotic tactics with modern-day echoes, noting for instance that Benito Mussolini promised to 'drain the swamp' by sacking Italian civil servants. Journalists were pointed out at his rallies so that his fans could yell at them. Only in periods of relative tranquillity are citizens 'patient' enough for debate and deliberation, she writes, or to listen to experts. As for Mr Trump, a tribune of the impatient, Mrs Albright’s wariness of hyperbole does not mean that she is sanguine. She calls him America’s first modern 'anti-democratic president' ... If that sounds alarmist, it is supposed to.
Fascism: A Warning is a wise book but not an innovative one. Reading it is unlikely to change your mind or even provide you with new arguments for your existing beliefs. Such satisfaction as it brings comes from spending time in the company of a sage and admirable person who is not very keen on fascism. I share her concern about authoritarianism and didn’t disagree with anything she said. I also think there are so many stupid ideas out there, that I’m grateful to read a book filled with ones that aren’t stupid, even if I felt I already knew them. But still. When I finished reading, a friend asked me 'So what is fascism?' and I found I couldn’t give her an answer. At least not one based on the book I’d just finished. This seems quite a flaw ... There is a moment in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in which Harrison Ford attacks a number of German soldiers before exclaiming: 'Nazis. I hate these guys.' Albright has, essentially, turned this insight into an entire book. It is a sign of how worrying the times are that this doesn’t seem an altogether ridiculous endeavour.
Unfortunately like most warnings, Albright's Fascism: A Warning is full of reflections but short on concrete answers ... What Fascism: A Warning does well is present a colourful and entertaining overview of key people and places in the history of 20th century fascism ... The other problem with Albright's Fascism: A Warning is that it offers a dismal alternate vision. At times it's not even clear what inspires Albright about democracy. The system she seems to champion is a Cold War artifact; one in which the rich are rich, the poor are poor, a handful or even just a couple of nearly indistinguishable political parties take turns with each other in office, and everyone more or less accepts their lot in life. If you think that sounds less than inspiring, you wouldn't be the only one ... It's good to see elder, prestigious statespersons like Albright add their voice to the chorus singing out in defense of democracy, and Fascism: A Warning offers some interesting insights and anecdotes from her long career in international politics. But in many ways, the most useful thing about the book is its bold cover with those three stark words burning a reminder at all those who pass it by in the bookshop windows.
...it becomes apparent that Albright doesn’t really know what fascism is. Lumping together post-Stalinist dictators such as Kim Jong-un and Nicolás Maduro with rightwing nationalists such as Orbán and Vladimir Putin is not much help in understanding either the forces that brought them to power or the policies they are implementing. Albright seems to identify fascism simply with a hostility to democracy and a propensity to lie. There’s a vast literature on its history and politics, but this might as well not exist as far as she is concerned ... Why does any of this matter? If we fail to identify how the threat to democracy operates or why it succeeds in some places and not in others, we won’t be able to offer any effective opposition to it ... the former secretary of state provides an oversimple analysis of the travails of democracy ... The current threats to democracy cry out for reasoned and powerfully expressed analysis, but regrettably, [this book doesn't come] anywhere near to offering it.
Albright’s incisive analyses are enriched by her experiences as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia—her Jewish grandmother died in a concentration camp—and as America’s diplomat-in-chief; her vivid sketch of a surprisingly rational Kim Jong-Il anchors a sharp critique of Trump’s erratic approach to North Korea. Albright sometimes paints with too broad a brush in conceptualizing fascism, but she offers cogent insights on worrisome political trends.
