When Right is wrong. Fighting the good fight

My father, Dan Long, died in January, a few days shy of his 105th birthday. His remarkable life was shaped early by the Great Depression and World War II. He would often say: “Fascism must never again be allowed to rear its ugly head.” As I grieve my father’s passing, I’m haunted by signs that fascism is re-emerging.

Like many children of his generation, dad grew up poor — in his case in foster care — as the roaring 20s, with its wealth disparity, gave way to the worst economic downturn the capitalist world has seen. He joined the British Territorial Army, the equivalent of the Army Reserve, as a teenager – not, he told me, because of any ideological commitment, but for the subsidised beer and billiards. I can’t imagine he expected to be mobilised not long after and sent to battle the Nazis in Europe.

He fought in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. He was blown up by a mortar bomb and left — unconscious and presumed dead — at the bottom of a crater. He was in the D-day landing. His company entered Germany through the Black Forest, and battled the German troops at close quarters as the Allies advanced to victory.

Left hate behind

As with many of his peers, the Great Depression turned dad’s politics to the left. He emerged from the war a pacifist, a socialist and an internationalist. In his view, it was a war of worker against worker and those who fought each other had more in common than they had with the generals who commanded them.

My father believed that the battle against inequality and the fight against fascism went hand in hand — because a society divided between rich and poor, where robber barons plundered and ordinary folk struggled, was fertile ground for the scapegoating and bigotry that flourished under that hateful ideology.

After the war, amid a housing shortage, he pushed politicians to deliver on their promise to build “homes fit for heroes”. After migrating to Australia in 1965, he and my mother, Anne, joined the Labor Party, campaigning tirelessly to elect candidates in an area that usually leaned Liberal. They marched on May Day for workers’ rights and on Palm Sunday for peace. My parents protested for land rights and against militarism and nuclear proliferation. They backed the welfare state and Medicare.

‘I will not speak his name’

Dad was appalled by politicians who blew the dogwhistle, whipping up prejudice against asylum seekers for political gain — his local member, Scott Morrison, among them. When he turned 100, he seemed more irritated by the note he received from Morrison than he was pleased by the letter of congratulations from the Queen. When Morrison reigned over us, a nurse asked my father one of the questions in a standard cognitive test: who’s the prime minister? “That bloody bastard,” he shot back. “I will not speak his name!”

By the time Trump was elected for the second time, dad’s world had narrowed. Though his mind was still sharp, he no longer paid much attention to politics, a relief really. He died not long before tech billionaire Elon Musk thrust his arm out in what looked for all the world like a Nazi-style salute while celebrating Trump’s inauguration. (“Our ABC” euphemistically called it an “awkward arm gesture” and Murdoch’s Sky News attacked other media for daring to say it resembled the Sieg Heil).

Watching Musk, I thought of my father’s words: “Fascism must never again be allowed to rear its ugly head.” Yet rear it seems to. Pundits and commentators will fiercely debate whether it’s appropriate to use the “F” word. Whatever you choose to call it, I’ve seen enough to be deeply concerned.

In Europe, for years, the far right has been on the ascendency. In Germany, the extreme nationalist Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is increasingly popular. It enjoys the vocal support of Musk, the “loudhailer voice of Team Trump”. In Hungary, Victor Orban warns against “racial mixing” with non-Europeans and the American right hails him as a hero.

In America, that “awkward hand gesture” by the world’s richest man is not the only time that Trump or someone close to him has been accused of signalling to neo-Nazis. Trump tears down institutions and, Napoleon-like, asserts his right to exercise authoritarian power regardless of the law. How far he is willing to lumber down this path, nobody yet knows.

Flunkies follow their leader

Just as they did in the 1930s, the oligarchs are lining up behind the strongman leader: some out of fear of reprisals unless they are obsequious; some because they know that Trump and his advisers’ stands against fairer taxes, stricter regulations, union rights and anti-monopoly laws could constrain their ability to amass obscene wealth.

In a new Gilded Age where the rich get stratospherically richer and the rest get the picture, my father’s warning that inequality is fertile soil for fascism — a proposition backed by many scholars — looks like sage advice. Barbarism grows in the chasm between rich and poor. Decades of neoliberal capitalism have helped it germinate.

We owe it to men like my father to fight the lurch to the authoritarian right; to honour his legacy.

Stephen Long is a former ABC investigative journalist covering business and finance and now a senior fellow at The Australia Institute.