The Netflix series “Glória” is a thriller that shouldn’t be missed by fans of the Cold War espionage genre. It also has its similarities to “Mad Men,” which is set in Madison Avenue’s advertising world. Both feature presentable young males with suits and ties in a 1960s workplace environment. An important difference is that “Glória" refers to a small town in a country living under a fascist regime.
Well, technically you could say Portugal wasn’t fascist from the 1920s through the 1974 military coup that ended the so-called New State, at least not according to some textbook definitions; and nor was the fearsome Francoist regime next door in Spain.
But “fascism” and “fascist” in our culture are taken as short-hand for any kind of right-wing authoritarianism or right-wing dictatorship. And as the acronyms RWA or RWD are not likely to take off anytime soon, or indeed ever, we’ll have to be okay with words that were new slightly over 100 years ago.
Some on the left side of the aisle are critical of the Democratic Party establishment for overusing the terms “fascism” and “fascist,” or even mentioning authoritarianism, when discussing the acts and intentions of the Wrecking King now back in power, although not on the technical grounds of definition. Rather, they’re taking the “nothing to see here folks, please move along” approach that is favored by toadying conservatives, which is the majority of them. “The Daily Show” presenter Jon Stewart, for example, would prefer to examine things on an issue-by-issue basis, and deem certain positions as “fascisty,” and others as not.
Fascist regimes might be described as a variant of your regular right-wing dictatorships. General Francisco Franco, who ruled from his victory in the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War until his death in 1975, was himself an ultra-conservative Catholic and monarchist, who claimed he was just keeping the throne warm until a reliably anti-Marxist hereditary king could be groomed for the role. Franco’s regime contained the explicit fascists of the Falangist movement, who constituted just one of the regime’s coalition of factions or “families.”
Right-wing dictatorship might be described as any rule by conservative forces where rights have been curtailed, free elections suspended, labor's rights restricted and opposing political forces – liberals, moderates, progressives, leftists and other conservatives – suppressed. It is backed up by a compliant army and police. They make no pretense that much of the population is opposed to them.
Fascism in its purest form, in contrast, spends a good deal of its energies ideologically spoon-feeding the populace and works officially on the assumption, or pretense, that most share the world-view of the movement in power. This was portrayed to great comic effect in Federico Fellini’s 1973 autobiographical feature film “Amarcord,” set in small-town northern Italy in the 1930s. The local Blackshirted officials are also shown, less comically, cracking down upon and humiliating those who dare dissent, however benignly, as in the case of the teenage protagonist’s father.
RWA and RWDs, nonetheless, share many of the obsessions of explicit fascism and fascists, as can be seen in “Glória,” which has at its center the American-run RARET, a rebroadcast station of Radio Free Europe based in Glória do Ribatejo.
The American overseeing RARET is James Wilson, while his wife, Anne O’Brien Wilson, is a CIA agent. A Lisbon cabinet minister in one conversation with James refers to his spouse’s Irish ethnicity, making the point that Americans mostly come from somewhere else, and thus perhaps suggesting that they are not reliably attached to the soil or indeed anything.
The New State, in 1968 led by the ailing Oliveira Salazar, shares the hostility to the Soviet Union, but it’s suspicious of U.S. global power and ideology (much like MAGA is today). The Americans, for their part, are sympathetic to the Africans fighting wars of liberation against Portuguese colonial rule, at least those of them not bearing arms provided by Moscow.
RARET’s employees are mostly well-educated Portuguese engineers, and the Americans live with the possibility that any of them could have connections to PIDE, the secret police.
The Wilsons, for a time, suspect the central character João Vidal, a veteran of Portugal’s war in Angola, and son of the politician mentioned above, of being a police agent. In fact, viewers learn early on that he’s been radicalized by his combat experience in Africa, as many middle-class Portuguese were at the time; he is a communist convert who is actively working for the KGB.
Portugal’s regime was not overtly Catholic and the civilian Salazar, a lawyer and former academic, was something of a contrast to Franco, a career officer who led the revolt against the Spanish Republic in 1936 and, in conjunction with the Civil War and its aftermath, conducted a “White Terror” that claimed between 100,000 and 200,000 lives.
Tens of thousands of captured combatants were executed, a policy that appalled even some of his military allies sent from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in those years immediately prior to World War II.
But, 50 years after his passing, Franco seems to have a growing fan base on the right-wing of the Catholic church and among conservatives more generally. Last summer, the now Vice President J.D. Vance gave a nice blurb to an author who praised the Spanish dictator as a "hero" in his book “Unhumans” (though, of course, he may not have read it). By “unhumans,” we can safely say, the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec and his ghostwriter don’t mean just the “communists” referred in the book’s subtitle -- people like João Vidal, his KGB colleagues and the local underground party members working to overthrow the right-wing New State. Posobiec, after all, is, in the words of New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, “probably best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a satanic child abuse ring beneath a popular Washington pizzeria.”
We should say he’s not some obscure lunatic; he was in the news this past weekend because of reports that top military brass were unhappy that he was included in the entourage of the indefensible Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth about to depart for Europe.
Jon Stewart knows all about Posobiec and has indeed clashed with him. The comic presenter has said, though, that the Trump Administration’s most objectionable actions “have taken place within the designed democratic system.” Now, Stewart is right to suggest that people calling any directive that they don’t like “fascist” is absurd, but he’s wrong to say a leader isn’t a fascist because a popular majority voted for him. The reality is that some right-wing dictatorial regimes have come to power legally and with popular support, expressed occasionally indeed via a healthy electoral majority. It’s not “crying wolf,” as he argues, to repeatedly say “fascist.” A better animal-themed phrase might be, “the horse has already bolted.”
In 2020, the American president refused to accept the result of the people’s vote; rejected the courts’ findings on the matter; and requested his vice president ignore his constitutional duty (to certify the results in Congress). Refused. Rejected. Requested. Each of these in themselves potentially could cause a crisis in any Western democracy, but the three combined, which you might say are quintessentially Trump, would certainly have ignited a constitutional crisis and an uncertain future for American politics – if Vice President Mike Pence had acceded to that request.
In Ireland, the head of state, currently Michael D. Higgins, oversees the forming of a government. Every Irish president has been obliged to do that since 1937, the year the current constitution was passed. Queen Elizabeth from 1952 through 2022, did all of this without controversy, as people saw in the broad outlines of a career depicted in “The Crown” (the monarch was played in the latter half of her 70-year reign by Imelda Staunton, the daughter of immigrants from County Mayo). It would have been unseemly for one party or faction to have leant on Elizabeth II as she conducted the affairs of state. No mob ever rampaged through any part of Westminster or a royal residence mouthing the slogan “Hang the Queen,” and nor has anybody screamed for the blood of the president of Ireland at Government Buildings or out at Aras an Uachtaran in the Phoenix Park to prevent the head of state from doing what he or she is constitutionally required to do.
If anything like that did happen, you might reasonably believe, looking from afar, that that country was having serious dysfunctionality issues. Then, if those responsible for the mayhem were returned to power democratically, you could be forgiven for saying, “That country is broken.”
As to crying wolf, I’m reminded of the world-renowned scholar of 20th-century dysfunction who said with regard to the person who is president, “Please don’t say ‘fascist.’” And then the moment came when he put his hands to his face and said, “Oh my God, it is fascism!” Maybe we’ll discuss that moment next time.
