"Fascism" is one of the most repeated but least understood words in political discourse, perhaps second only to "socialism" in words whose meaning has been almost entirely lost to relentless, politically-motivated misuse. As far back as the 1940s, George Orwell famously lamented that in common usage, it had come to mean merely "something not desirable." For decades, it has been ubiquitously spewed like a grudge by political factions across the spectrum. Reduced to virtual meaninglessness, its emptiness encouraged people with too much time on their hands to fill it with all manner of nonsense. Thus at a point in history when it has become a more important subject than it has been in decades--because fascism and its prototypes are on the rise everywhere now--people aren't just uninformed about it, they're often very badly misinformed. This isn't just troublesome, it's potentially dangerous.
Any effort to define fascism as a body of ideas must contend with the fact that one of its defining elements is a seething anti-intellectualism and a fundamental anti-rationalism that sometimes masquerades as a faux-rationalism, travestying the real thing but counterfeiting it in the service of the fascist cause. Fascism prioritizes action over reflection. Its basic antagonism toward serious, informed thought means it isn't so much a cohesive ideology as it is an impulse; reactionary, to use another word that has gone out of fashion in common political discourse. Built not so much around ideas as mobilizing passions. Any discussion of fascism must account for this. Few of those that occur in internet forums ever do.
Oxford defines fascism as "an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization." While not really incorrect, that's far too general and incomplete, as dictionary definitions will tend to be. Among other things, fascism is a movement, something with which that definition doesn't reckon at all. To the extent that such definitions feed that vacuum that has developed around the word, they may do more harm than good.[1]
Presenting itself as "radical," even "revolutionary"--and even often aping the superficial trappings of radical and revolutionary movements--fascism is militant far-right sentiment on legs. The fascist is ultranationalistic, which is the most important thing to understand about him and the source from which nearly everything else about him flows. His conservative, excruciatingly circumscribed notion of The Nation is conceptualized as an organism. He despises modern liberal democracy, which he insists has failed and betrayed the people, and calls for national renewal by sweeping it aside and replacing it with an authoritarian regime. He holds that socialists, liberals, labor unions, immigrants, democrats, racial or ethnic minorities, sexual "deviants," non-conformists, women who don't understand their place is in the kitchen and bearing male children, those measured as less than patriotic, not of the right ethnicity or religion, those pesky "intellectuals" with all their ideas about things, etc. are, by their mere existence, an attack on the established institutions and traditions (or imagined institutions and traditions) of the particular cultural milieu chauvinistically favored by the fascists--disruptors of The Nation and its unity, enemies who have no place in society. Fascists foster a cult of aggrievement against these "enemies," who are relentlessly demonized and scapegoated as a rationale for self-righteously stamping them out in the name of that project of national renewal, and are willing to employ an incredible amount of violence, often up to and including mass murder, to crush them. As Benito Mussolini put it, "The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better." All of the fundamental values of the liberal society--freedom, self-determination, democracy, diversity, tolerance, openness, free inquiry--are held in contempt by the fascist, who projects strength, resolve and moral clarity against what he depicts as weakness, softness, incompetence, betrayal, decadence, idiocy, relativism, appeasement, impurity, indecision, indecency, bleeding heart-ism and that Great Other--that which is outside that favored milieu. The fascist typically indulges in a perverse Romanticism that revels in the imagined glories of some mythologized past and seeks to recapture them. He embraces martial values, hyper-masculinity and glorifies violence and war and conquest--means of proving strength, superiority, heroism. The fascist venerates heroism; in his story, he's the hero who is going to save civilization from these evils.
Fascist movements ally themselves with traditional conservative elites and tend to congregate around charismatic demagogues who rise to power preaching this message and presenting themselves, rather than any particular political program, as the living embodiment of it. The State, The Nation, The Leader, all intertwined. Because these movements are tied to the cultures and the times from which they emerge, some specific details about the various permutations of fascism will differ but they're a bit like slasher movies; it may not be quite accurate to say of them "if you've seen one, you've seen 'em all," but it ain't far off the mark.
That's fascism, a far-right movement that preaches national renewal by means of the destruction of the liberal society, the suppression of the left and the adoption of an authoritarian state run along ultranationalistic lines. Hopefully, this makes clear how much any brief, positivist description--like, for example, the previous sentence--necessarily leaves on the cutting-room floor and helps knock some of the ambiguity out of the subject.
Nearly everything beyond this is merely ad hoc, and the failure to understand this is where the efforts of so many of the internet's amateur lexicographers fail. It's hard to do history and political science when you don't know either, and the matter of fascism is further complicated by the almost-constant presence of politically motivated revisionism that actively seeks to take advantage of the general ignorance of the subject for partisan advantage. In the name of further demystifying the matter, some of the many hashes made of fascism are worth some attention here.
A popular one is an effort to define it via a structural model and this hash's Exhibit A-Z is the following quote by Mussolini:
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
The first big problem: While Mussolini did put forth the idea of a "corporate" or, more typically, a "corporativist" state, this quote isn't real. It appears nowhere in the recorded utterances of Benito Mussolini. The next: Those selling this notion of fascism invariably treat "corporate power" as a reference to modern business corporations, a reading that is entirely alien to fascist corporativism. A repudiation of socialism, the theoretical fascist "corporativist" state was one in which sectors of society were organized into corporate entities that made a pretense of representing these various interests but, of course, these entities would be created and run by the fascists themselves. Fascists don't do democracy.
A nugget of truth that gives strength to that "state and corporate power" hash is that fascism does entail what we could call, in more modern parlance, a "public/private partnership" with capital. The Marxists presented fascism as a form of capitalism in crisis, proposing a narrative wherein the established Big Money interests, feeling threatened by socialists and other radical reformers, turn to fascism in order to smite these foes and protect their interests. That basic narrative is largely correct (and, in fact, the Marxists deserve credit for recognizing some important aspects of fascism well before they were widely understood). The support of the, broadly, capitalist class is typically critical in bringing fascist movements to power, after which the money-men enter into a mutually profitable arrangement with the regime that develops.[2] Where the cruder Marxists sometimes collapse into hash is in suggesting that the fascist states were merely the puppets of that capitalist class, a preposterous proposition. The money-men embraced the fascists movements and were made even wealthier by them but if a dispute arose between they and the government, they may get their say but the regime got the last word. While, in practice, these regimes are invariably pro-capitalist, this is usually just part of fascism's larger alliance with traditional conservative elites, not reflective of some doctrinaire commitment to capitalism itself.[3]
Another hash--one of the most common, in fact--is made by those who attempt to present fascism as an economic doctrine or to examine it as any sort of cohesive economic system. Fascism isn't an economic system, it isn't an economic doctrine and it has no economic doctrine. As Hitler put it, "the basic feature of our economic theory is that we have no theory at all." Fascists aren't intellectuals sitting around reading economic texts--certainly not writing them--or putting any real effort into trying to learn how economies work. "Economic policy" under these regimes is ad hoc--whatever it takes at the moment to meet the ultranationalistic goals (or perceived goals) of the day. Policy could radically change on a dime with circumstances then change again shortly after. Beyond the ultranationalist sentiment driving it, there's no real consistency, either internally or between the different fascisms.[4] Trying to define fascism as an economic doctrine or economic system--as an industrial policy of a fascist regime or a welfare-state policy of another or the fiscal policy of another--is a confession of complete ignorance of the nature of fascism. That's now what fascism is about.
Many-a-hash is made by those--even, over the years, many of the top experts on fascism--who try to explain fascism as one would any other traditional political movement. If fascism's anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism doesn't trip them up, its relationship with doctrine will. If one wants to get a general picture of the policies for which most political parties stand, one need only consult that party's current platform. Fascists tend to be very opportunistic though, political omnivores who make a show of syncretistically gobbling up bits and pieces from other political movements and parties across the spectrum and deploy propaganda in the worst sense of that word. In their hands, "doctrine" in the programmatic way ordinary political parties conceive it doesn't really exist. It's treated as a fluid, the generation and exploitation of popular grievances or the steering of existing ones toward fascist ends, that which needs to be said from day to day in order to achieve then maintain power. Mussolini had originally been a socialist. He'd been expelled from the Socialist party in 1914 for a growing list of heresies, principally his support of the First World War, and in March 1919, he founded the Fasci di Combattimento--the Fascism from which we get the word--in order to, as he put it, "declare war against socialism." Initially, he tried to craft a sort of fusion of right and left views. The
original Fascist manifesto, though anti-socialist, was quite progressive in many respects, even radical in others--calculated to draw attention--but this drew little interest and after the Fascists were utterly squashed in the 1919 elections, Mussolini simply abandoned--or, more often, directly reversed--most of the left elements[5] and Fascism became a movement of reactionary ex-soldiers who mustered into far-right paramilitaries that were rented out to the industrial and agribusiness elite to physically crush the Italian left. This approach led them to power. In internet discussions of German fascism, some amateur professional will inevitably pull out the
25-point program of the National Socialist German Workers Party from 1920 as representative of that party. In that platform, there is, to be sure, plenty of the Nazism that would later emerge but the radical planks in it, the items that inevitably prove to be the reason it's brandished in these discussions, were entirely ignored once the Nazis seized power. Likewise, the German fascists' use of socialist slogans and imagery and even the word "socialist" itself amounted to little more than an effort to attract votes (at which it largely failed) and attention (at which it succeeded beyond what anyone could have expected). Those attracted to the movement who took the radical window-dressing seriously were successively purged.[6] The fascist freely poses as adopting various doctrines to which he has no real commitment to serve various ends and freely discards them if they've served their purpose or outlived their usefulness. Always in this is ultranationalist grievance. Fascism doesn't have a traditional political movement's connection to programmatic doctrine. And once in power, it's about recognizing the authority of the fascist leaders and doing what they say.
There are plenty of other sources that contribute to misunderstandings of fascism.
The history
of the entire Nazi experience, for example, is polluted by an endless
array of cranks and kooks that gravitated around Nazism and tried to create a
fuhrer in their own image or, among those opposed, their own image of evil--cranks and kooks whose claims are then picked up and perpetuated by others. That's a much larger subject than can be done justice here, so it's best to set it aside for the moment, perhaps return to it later. Suffice it to say, the study of fascism can be a real minefield for a layman.That's a brief, general overview of what fascism is, and some of what it
isn't. Hopefully, the sort of useful contribution to public discourse one wishes all of these pieces would be.
--j.
---
[1] Some of the other standard dictionary definitions are even worse. Merriam-Webster
defines it as "a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the
Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and
that stands for a centralized
autocratic government headed by a
dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition." Vocabulary.com
calls it
"a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government
(as opposed to democracy or liberalism)." The Cambridge Dictionary
defines
it as "a political system based on a very powerful leader, state
control of social and economic life, and extreme pride in country and
race, with no expression of political disagreement allowed." And so on.
Definitions so devoid of substance that they would cover nearly
any dictatorship. Perhaps the worst, most offensively inane "definition" comes from
Britannica: "
a way of organizing a society in which a
government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people and in
which people are not allowed to disagree with the government."
[2] That doesn't, of course, prevent some of those capitalists from
experiencing buyer's remorse. Even if one is becoming fantastically
rich via the arrangement, it sucks to live under a dictatorship.
[3] Nonetheless, this arguably makes fascism a form of capitalism.
There's a history of both rightist "Libertarian" capital-C Capitalist
ideologues embracing fascism and of fascism embracing them, perhaps most
infamously in the Pinochet regime in Chile. This is a large subject
that would quickly turn into an overly long tangent here, so I've set it
aside.
[4] In "The Anatomy of Fascism," Robert Paxton, one of the foremost living experts on fascism, wrote:
"This [economic policy] was the area where both fascist leaders [Hitler
and Mussolini] conceded the most to their conservative allies. Indeed,
most fascists--above all after they were in power--considered economic
policy as only a means to achieving the more important fascist ends of
unifying, energizing, and expanding the community. Economic policy
tended to be driven by the need to prepare and wage war. Politics
trumped economics... [F]ascist economic policy responded to political
priorities, and not to economic rationale. Both Mussolini and Hitler
tended to think that economics was amenable to a ruler’s will."
In a 2015 interview with Vox, Paxton said "it's hard to link those people [the fascists] to any one kind of economic idea."
In "A History of Fascism 1914-1945," historian Stanley Payne, who
specializes in Spanish fascism but has written on the broader subject,
writes that "economic policy under [Italian] Fascism did not chart an
absolutely clear course." Of Germany, Payne concludes "no completely
coherent model of political economy was ever introduced in Nazi
Germany."
Daniel Woodley, from "Fascism & Political Theory":
"...as a political innovation, fascism is distinguished by an absence of
coherent economic ideology and an absence of serious economic thinking
at the summit of the state. Not only are economic factors alone
an insufficient condition of understanding fascism, but the decisions
taken by fascists in power cannot be explained within a logical economic
framework."
Stuart Woolf, "The Nature of Fascism":
"No comparative study exists of fascist economic systems. Nor is this
surprising. For one can legitimately doubt whether it is appropriate to
use so distinctive a term as 'system' when discussing fascist
economics... Nor, in the economic field, could fascism lay claim to any
serious theoretical basis or to any outstanding economic theoreticians."
He describes fascist economics as "a series of improvisations, or
responses to particular and immediate problems" and notes that "the
actions of any single fascist regime... [were] so contradictory as to
make it difficult to speak of a coherent and consistent economic policy
in one country, let alone in a more general system..." And so on.
[5] When the movement made its sharp rightward turn, Alceste De Ambris,
the principal author of the 1919 Fascist manifesto, left it in disgust.
When the Fascists rose to power, he opposed them and was eventually
forced to flee Italy because of it.
[6] An element of the fringe right has long gnawed on the farcical
notion that fascism is some sort of movement of the left or even a
socialist movement and the internet has helped spread this far-right and wide-right. Essentially a
form of Holocaust denial, it's the sort of idiocy that could only gain
traction in a
profoundly historically illiterate population. It may be the subject of a future piece.
[If, faithful reader, this article sounds familiar, it's adapted from
an earlier one from February 2017, which defined fascism in order to delineate the similarities and differences between fascism and the then-newly-empowered Trump movement, an article I fear is now pretty out-of-date. My book-length updating of it, from Sept. 2020, was lost. This may be the beginning of further work on the subject.]
