The current global embrace of fascism overshadows almost all policy endeavours, including housing affordability. We know how we must respond, so why don’t we?
Attended by far greater crowds than witnessed the current president’s inauguration, recent “No Kings” demonstrators equated his administration to fascism.
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In response, it seems that flinging excrement is now a legitimate part of that political discourse.
Umberto Eco was well placed to describe fascism.
He started his short essay “Ur-fascism” (bundled with two others in the catchily titled “How to spot a fascist”) with a brief account of his own upbringing in Mussolini’s Italy.
Entering a fascist-sponsored junior literary competition that asked, “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” his winning answer was positive. “I was a smart boy”, he observed.
The bulk of Ur-fascism concludes with a remarkably useful checklist of 14 symptoms with which to appraise modern manifestations of the menace.
It’s worth a read.
Sadly, America already ticks most boxes (see below for Eco’s checklist).
By demonstrating the metaphor that fish-rot-from-the-head, figures like the infantile Commander-in-chief “Bone-spurs” Trump, “Muttonhead” Hegseth, and an antivaxxer health secretary, the whole manifestly-defective cabal of baleful MAGA types offer a rich and distracting target for progressive disdain.
The international scourge that their grandparents heroically sacrificed a generation’s worth of blood and treasure to eradicate 80 years ago is now being embraced by their grandchildren with disgraceful indifference to that earlier cost.
MAGA petulantly spits in the eye of America’s hitherto unshakable bi-partisan reverence for this national and global commitment and its legacy of loss.
Australian would-be imitators of MAGA untruths should therefore hang their collective heads in utter shame or swiftly exit the political stage if currently elected.
It is tempting to charge all this as overstatement, in the belief that America will soon return to its consistent enlightenment mission (recalling Churchill’s alleged epithet – that America eventually does the right thing…after trying everything else), but a forward view doesn’t nourish such optimism.
Increasingly determined demolition of its many remaining national qualities by a small band of worthless American ratbags seems more likely. Jesse Plemon’s chilling scene in “Civil War” looks prescient.
America is being Russified, right down to a local variant of Tsarist “nationality, orthodoxy and autocracy”. As Sean Kelly suggests, the “land of the free” will cease to exist just as it reaches its 250th birthday.
Get back to housing will you!
But what has this to do with urban policy, the subject of this author’s seemingly incessant concerns?
Eco’s analysis alerts to the social ructions that allow fascism to seed and take root. Chief amongst them is the sense of entitlement denied.
In Australia’s case, this sense of entitlement is entirely reasonable, as affordable housing access has long been a foundational value held (with minor ideological tweaks) by both main political parties.
It is worth recalling how affordable housing has featured in recent schismatic events.
Between the wars, Vienna led many cities in the construction of visually-striking affordable housing. Alarmingly and significant to this discussion, this same housing was literally shelled by hard-right fascists just prior to the second World War. The surviving Karl Marx Hoff remains a significant tourist attraction in that city.
Provision of affordable housing comprised a large part of Europe’s post WWII reconstruction.
Sale of public housing during the Thatcher era was highly contentious and, according to many scholars, laid the foundations for the current UK housing crisis.
As we saw recently, lack of affordable housing contributes to the discontent that featured in alarming demonstrations against immigration.
Well, hasn’t it been fixed?
It is this author’s contention that housing affordability has not been addressed adequately in Australia, despite its bipartisan recognition as a major policy issue in several elections to date.
Complex policy problems, like housing affordability, can be conceived of as empty glasses. Workable solutions (no pun intended) will fill them up. The contents over time will sate thirsty electorates.
A bit like the climate emergency resists correction by simple, unitary solutions.
But, how do we measure the effectiveness of solutions?
The first and most basic answer is another question: do those solutions wholly address the problem?
Returning to the metaphor, assessment of adequacy should not measure how much liquid has been poured into the glass, think of the many recent housing affordability announcements, but how much air is left.
Though pledging to solve the housing crisis, governments (viewed collectively and indivisibly) have still left way too much air in the glass.
Where is actual action (as distinct from chat) about adjustments to investment taxation settings?
Why hasn’t the not-for-profit sector been turbocharged to deliver wholly affordable housing?
What oversight options could governments instigate to ensure integrity of this sector when developing affordable housing?
Why hasn’t there been a more aggressive focus on under-utilised land to free up room for more inner-city housing?
Why hasn’t there been a focus on grass-roots responses, such as furnishing home owners with guidance on increasing the density of their own land (like Californian ADU models and community housing development)?
Noting the unaffordable housing is evidence of market failure, what planning changes can be made to favour not-for-profit and individual providers above the for-profit sector, particularly with respect to land purchases?
What other cooperative ownership models, common in many European countries, could be employed in Australia?
What planning changes can be made to amplify all these options?
How can we shape capital provision so that it does not accelerate price rises?
Are their unexplored education and immigration channels that can be opened to accelerate the provision of currently under-supplied building skills?
What is the overall affordable housing implementation plan and what are its KPI’s?
How can individual Australians effectively participate and benefit from these initiatives?
Do democracies deliver dwellings?
Only when the policy glass contains answers to these and other related questions will it then start to look full, and democracy will be seen to deliver dwellings.
Until then, democratic governments – of all tiers – should particularly note Eco’s warning that rising popular resentment at the failure of government to address real problems is a powerful predictor of rising fascist sympathies and democratic collapse.
Generating, shaping and harnessing that resentment worked for both Hitler and is now working for “ole Bone-Spurs”…(see following cartoon).
Already, we have seen unscrupulous opportunists in Australia who don’t give a damn about being called fascists, eyeing these events with a glint.
Umberto Eco’s checklist of facism (referencing America)
- Elevation of tradition in place of progress – conventional WASP family values are the bedrock of American standards; everything else is aberrantly anti-American
- Rejection of modernism – anti-vaxxers, anti-research, new government architecture mandates, etc…
- Action for action’s sake – stoking of riots and insurrection, national guard sent to cities
- Disagreement equals treason – broadscale treatment of political opposition including through litigation
- Fear of difference (racism) – anti-immigrant rhetoric (see following cartoon)
- Appeals to political humiliation and frustrations of middle classes – illegals are taking your jobs, eating your pets
- National identity and fear of its dilution – see 6 above
- Humiliation by enemies – foundational feature of MAGA rhetoric
- Life is permanent warfare; pacifism is trafficking with the enemy – despite claiming to settle wars, Trump has used trade as a weapon that will likely crash the global economy and suggested invading Greenland, Canada and now Venezuela
- Anti-elitism, replaced by “popular elitism” – denigration of “Washington elites”, universities broadly, whole media sectors
- Cult of heroes – Charlie Kirk is the latest
- Machismo; denigration of all other sexual identities, including women – Black lesbians were probably the cause of recent air-crashes; Hegseth “no fat generals” within “Department of War”, etc
- Loss of individual rights, replaced by the will of the leader – daily edicts issued on “Truth Social”; court rulings ignored
- Use of “newspeak” – the wholesale generation of anti-truth rhetoric such as “fake news”, denigration of facts and its substitution with manipulatable appeals to personal feelings
