Yet the more power and influence they gain, the less they seem to cling to the hard core of their original ultranationalist ideology, focusing instead on pragmatic policy issues and the complex geopolitical questions pertaining to the European Union and Russia. Many of these parties, like the Brothers of Italy, the French Front National, the Austrian Freedom Party, the Ukrainian Svoboda, the Sweden Democrats, and the Flemish Vlaams Belang have clear roots in the fascist movement. Similarly, the increasing power of the radical right’s populist parties in Europe indicates a drift of socialists, liberals, and conservatives toward a counterhegemonic alternative. Shenfield calls “a gradual or creeping coup, accomplished by means of the steady penetration of state and social structures and the accumulation of military and economic potential.” Such an analysis can also be applied to the insinuation of fascism into and out of the US conservative movement by propagandists such as Willis Carto, Jared Taylor, and Richard Spencer. Perhaps the most important strategy of fascism is what scholar Stephen D.
Against the Fascist Creep will focus on those messy crossovers on the margins of left and right, the ways fascism cultivates a movement, and the ways that the left often unwittingly cedes the space for fascism to creep into the mainstream and radical subcultures. It lies at the extremes of ideology, courting the public through a rejection of conventional conservatism and a call for the return of a golden era. The shared ideological space cannot be tidily blamed on co-optation, although many fascists embrace co-optation and “entryism.” Instead, fascism emerges as a unique response to the same material conditions. However, fascism also embraces aspects of social and ecological movements usually attributed to the left. If we consider the left’s embrace of equality as its defining characteristic, fascism remains decisively on the right. More recently, warnings of a “creeping fascism” have returned.
Some fifty years later, scholar Philippe Burrin would refer to the “fascist drift” that attracted the left to the causes of the right. In the years before the Nazi invasion, as fascism pulled activists from the ranks of the left, Popular Front leader Léon Blum spoke of a “contagion” gripping France.
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