Something I want to start doing in 2026 is a brief post like this every Friday highlighting something I read this week that I’d recommend. For the inaugural “Friday Pick,” here’s an essay by Matt McManus in Current Affairs on why Marxism and socialism are so offensive to the psyche of fascism.
“Fascism is the banal dream of tiny men and deserves its place in the sewage of history.”.
This is my favorite kind of McManus essay, and my favorite kind of thing that Current Affairs publishes. (It feels like the kind of thing no one else quite does, just slightly sideways to the kind of articles I see at otherwise similar publications.) Matt reads so much he makes me feel damn near illiterate by comparison, and he’s mastered the art of communicating it all without losing either readability or conceptual clarity.
I think he does a perfect job here of capturing what he quoted Roger Griffin calling the “mythic core” of fascist rhetoric, although one place where I zig and Matt zags is that I still think if we want to understand what makes fascism most unique as a historical phenomenon, we need to understand it less in terms of that mythic core than in terms of its material and institutional role in the real world. (That fascists don’t understand themselves that way is…well, what can I say? They don’t understand anything else correctly. Why should they have a correct understanding of themselves?) So, my understanding of the fascists is closer to Trotsky (or even Dmitrov) than Paxton or Griffin. But as interesting as that difference is, it’s also pretty sideways to what I liked so much about this essay’s exploration of the fascist psyche and why socialists and Marxists are so deeply anathema to it. It reminds me me think of George Orwell’s classic observation that, while socialism and liberal capitalism both in their own ways say “I offer you a good time,” Hitler’s sales pitch in Mein Kampf was “I offer you struggle, danger, and death” but that pitch found no shortage of takers.
There are psychological itches, Orwell suggested, that “drums, flags and loyalty-parades” scratch better than “comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense.” More’s the pity.
Thanks for reading Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis! This post is public so feel free to share it.
If you want to check out my own writing this week, I had to articles in Jacobin:
The Fake Antiwar Right Goes to War
Zohran Mamdani Is Right About the Warmth of Collectivism
…and one in UnHerd:
Trump is unprepared for coming Venezuela chaos
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