Gleichschaltung

The secret sauce of 20th Century fascism is making a comeback on the network (but not in the way you think).

The term fascism is being thrown around with abandon today, mainly as an epithet for denigrating political enemies as supporters of political strongmen, intolerance, and white supremacy. However, fascism is more than the petty authoritarianism of the popular narratives. It’s one of the three great ‘systems of governance’ that battled for supremacy during the 20th Century (along with democratic capitalism and communism). We all know how that contest played out, but few truly understand why fascism was a ‘great system’ and why it took a world war to eliminate it.

Fascism became a great system and a threat to the world because of Gleichschaltung. When the Nazis seized power in a state of emergency, the first thing they did was pass three laws instituting Gleichschaltung. Nominally, those laws focused on getting the entire population into alignment (coordination/facing the same direction) with Nazi ideology. In practice, it found more purchase in focusing people on existential threats to the nation, both internal and external.

Those who disagreed with these policies and those with a threat status (Jews, communists, etc.) were initially shunned and disconnected (lost jobs, businesses, and status) and, over time, attacked and killed. From the perspective of competitiveness, Gleichschaltung made it possible to unite a polarized country. It also served as a way to turn Germany’s capitalist economy, with all its moving parts, into something that operated like communism’s command economy without the overhead of a centralized bureaucracy. For example, fascists set new objectives for the entire country through propagandistic grand narratives (i.e., “strength through joy”) rather than the directives issued to subordinate bureaucracies in socialist countries.

Of course, like communism, fascism has a fatal flaw. A flaw that almost destroyed the world. The weakness of fascism is that a threat is needed to align people and corporations during peacetime, but fear and hatred diminish over time. As a result, fascist countries fell into the trap of constantly increasing the intensity of the threats, creating new threats, and taking more decisive action against them. The result was the Holocaust (the war against internal threats that killed twelve million people) and a war with nearly every other nation (WW2).