(SUMMARY) “The Internal Threat”, most recent book by Vladimir Safatlehas a pertinent target, the crisis of liberal democracies around the world, but it examines it from a less than rigorous angle, applying the concept of fascism to the most diverse phenomena, which ends up depleting the thesis’ ability to explain. In this way, analysis gives way to rhetoric, and the past only serves to confirm the author’s convictions.
The last decade has seen the popularization of a powerful idea: we live under the rise of a “global fascism”, associated with leaders like donald trump (USA), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Narendra Modi (India) and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), which would be visible in wars, violence and political crises in the center and on the periphery of capitalism.
This is the central thesis of the book “The Internal Threat”in which Vladimir Safatle criticizes the tendency to limit the application of the concept of fascism to 20th century regimes in Europe or to interpret it as a historical regression, the result of irrationality or social resentment.
For the author, this reading fulfills an ideological function: preserving liberal democracies from more radical criticism, by treating fascism as an archaism or external deviation from modernity.
According to Safatle, liberal democracies are already, in fact, forms of “restricted fascism”, regimes that combine limited zones of rights and political participation with broad areas of exclusion, violence and social indifference. In moments of crisis, this arrangement would give way to “generalized fascism”, in which these dynamics become more visible and widespread.
The stretching of the concept of fascism
Throughout the book, fascism gains a series of qualifications: “restricted”, “generalized”, “global”, “structural”, “ordinary” and “insurrectionary”. Safatle builds his argument by bringing together different events, such as European fascism in the 1930s, Brazilian integralismanti-vaccine protests, attacks on the Argentine Central Bank, conflicts in the Middle East and the situation in Gaza.
For him, all these episodes illustrate processes of desensitization and naturalization of violence characteristic of fascism. However, when a concept names such different phenomena, it loses precision.
THE Italian political scientist Giovanni Sartori called this problem “conceptual stretching”. When a term is applied to increasingly heterogeneous cases, its usefulness is lost. Something similar seems to happen here.
By using the concept of fascism in such an elastic way, Safatle ends up obscuring the very change he intends to explain: the crisis of liberal democracies. After all, if these democracies are already forms of fascism, it is difficult to understand what happens when aspiring autocrats start attacking courts, restricting civil liberties, manipulating elections or violating the separation of Powers.
Some analogies presented in the book are so extreme that they compare CEOs’ speeches to concentration camp administrators’ speeches, or cafeteria owners to fascist agitators in interwar Europe.
If the concept of fascism allows us to group executives, fast-food micro-entrepreneurs and agents of the totalitarian apparatus of the 1930s into the same category, it is worth asking: what does it actually explain?
Conceptual ambiguity
For Safatle, the caution of other analysts in use the term “fascism” is a sign of reluctance in facing the problems of liberal democracies. But conceptual differences cannot be resolved this way. What he describes as fear may simply be rigor.
After all, careful construction of concepts is not optional, but an obligation. Without a clear definition, they become diluted in common sense and are applied without criteria. In “The Internal Threat”, “fascism” operates on several levels: as a structure of liberal societies, a regime of violence, an affective economy based on desensitization, among other uses.
Now, when a term changes its meaning throughout the same argument, the classic problem of the fallacy of ambiguity arises. The premises and conclusions seem linked, but the logical connection between them has already been lost. The result is a text that may sound complex, but is actually confusing.
A global diagnosis?
It is also worth asking: why call these phenomena fascism? Is the analysis presented really global?
This concept arises from a particular historical experience, interwar Europe, and this helps to explain why Safatle limits its application to consolidated liberal democracies. Authoritarian regimes like China or Russia They are not mentioned, nor are devastating conflicts in other regions of the world, such as the cases of Sudan and eastern Congo.
The work ignores entire populations that have never lived under stable liberal democracies or do not even have states capable of guaranteeing territorial control. The result is a concept that functions less as a comparative category and more as a criterion for selecting cases that favor the author’s thesis.
By excluding consolidated dictatorships or countries devastated by civil wars from the analysis, it becomes easier to maintain that liberal democracy is a form of fascism. Without this contrast, it is lost sight of the fact that democratic institutions, despite their limitations, create minimum conditions of competition and political contestation from which it is possible to claim the expansion of civil and social rights.
After all, the contemporary crisis of liberal democracies that the book deals with consists precisely in the erosion of these conditions.
History as an archive of examples
A striking feature of the book is its political uses of the past. European fascism in the 1930sLatin American dictatorships, contemporary protests, geopolitical conflicts and the transformations of global capitalism are outlined as manifestations of the same historical process.
This procedure is directly linked to the stretching of the concept of fascism. When the term starts to designate very different phenomena, it is possible to bring them together in the same argument.
The result is close to what historiography has called “therapeutic history”: instead of reconstructing chronologies and causalities of historical processes, episodes from different contexts are selected that have a superficial similarity with a previous thesis.
The past thus ceases to be a field of discovery and becomes an archive of illustrations. It works less as an explanation of the world and more as an instrument of moral mobilization.
Events separated in time and space appear as expressions of the same fascist structure, even though the connections are opaque. Therapeutic stories produce moral cohesion within a group, organize collective identities, and draw boundaries between “us” and “them.”
The past, however, remains largely misunderstood, as it only serves to confirm convictions and political mobilization of readers.
Empirical problems
The book also presents problems with empirical support. Safatle suggests that we live in an era of constant radicalization of social struggles, which would lead States to promote wars and conflicts to preserve their unity. The available evidence, however, points in the opposite direction.
In long-term historical terms, the lethality of interstate wars decreased significantly throughout the 20th century, and major social revolutions became rare. Mass protests, in fact, have become more frequent, but they rarely overthrow regimes or generate transformations comparable to classic revolutions.
The diagnosis of a world in constant insurrection, therefore, finds little support in the data. The idea, presented by Safatle, of countries on the verge of disintegration that resort to war to survive ignores the enormous asymmetry between the coercive capacity of modern states and that of civilian populations.
Concepts as subjects
These empirical problems connect to a theoretical difficulty. At various times, the book describes fascism, neoliberalism or power as entities capable of acting and pursuing their own objectives. Fascism “aims to rebuild social ties”, neoliberalism “imposes forms of subjectivation”, power “produces subjectivities”.
This type of formulation creates an impression of explanation, but does not identify concrete social agents, institutions or mechanisms. Abstract concepts begin to play the role of subjects of the story.
Something similar happens with the organicist metaphors used by the author. Society is described as a “social body” capable of becoming ill, losing sensitivity or developing autoimmune pathologies. This comparison to a body has a long tradition in political theory and classical sociology, but was heavily criticized throughout the 20th century.
Societies are not integrated organisms, but rather arenas of conflict between different groups, institutions and interests. When analysis resorts to biological metaphors, these conflicts tend to disappear, replaced by a vague language of collective pathologies.
Criticisms of decolonial studies
This approach explains why Safatle’s recent criticism of decolonial thought are pertinent, but incomplete. The author focused above all on the normative content of this field, on its political utopias. However, the weakest point of this intellectual project is less in its aspirations than in its methods.
As in “The Internal Threat”, many decolonial approaches start from a strong thesis — the structural persistence of coloniality in all dimensions of modernity — and then choose varied historical episodes to illustrate it.
In both cases, concepts such as “coloniality” or “fascism” are stretched until they lose any precision. The result is similar: history stops being a field of investigation and serves as a repertoire of examples that confirm the theories and biases of the authors.
The crisis of democracies
None of this means that the contemporary crisis of liberal democracies is any less serious. On the contrary. The advancement of personalist leaders, institutional erosion and political polarization are real and worrying challenges. But this is precisely why the diagnosis requires conceptual and historical rigor.
When concepts like fascism become so elastic and history serves only as an illustration of previous theses, analysis gives way to rhetoric. And rhetoric can mobilize emotions, but it does little to understand the challenges of the present.
