With such a free accessible media, we’re bound to get into confusion over controversial political terminology. One term has become particularly confused with Fascism.
I suspect that most people in fact don’t know what it is, rather they know what it looks like — that is the aesthetics of Fascism: armed parades, a larger-than-life leader, massive rallies, scape-goating, brutal crackdowns, and so on. Unlike the other major political traditions of Socialism and Liberalism, Fascism was not the result of an intellectual or academic tradition rather it came about from antagonists during socio-cultural instability and uncertainty of the condition of 20th Century society. So it is quite hard to pinpoint the exact framework that Fascism relies on.
Typically when someone states ‘Fascism’ in a colloquial manner, we tend to think of something that is both nationalist and authoritarian — those features being the defining features of 20th Century fascist states. But those two terms can apply to so many authoritarian regimes. Was the Soviet Union after Stalin Fascist? Is China currently Fascist? Is Saudi Arabia or Iran Fascist? Did they all have the same roots as Hitler’s Fascism?
In popular academic discourse, we seem to narrow that definition down to certain common features seen throughout Fascist states mainly traditionalism, racism, authoritarianism, anti-liberalism, anti-communism, corporatism, and ultranationalism. However, can we truly compare the Germanic hyper-traditionalism of Nazi Germany to the secular conservatism of Suharto’s Indonesia? Can we say that Franco’s Spain or Pinochet’s Chile wasn’t Fascist given the embracing of economically liberal policies? Can we compare the totalitarian Showa Statism of Japan to the authoritarianism of Salazar’s Portugal?
Rather than looking at its policy manifestations, one must look at the ideological structure or the philosophical quandaries that are underlying all Fascist thought.
American Political Scientist Robert Paxton in his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism defined it as:
a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
This “obsessive preoccupation with community decline,” seems to be fascism's unique element. A community in decline is a national, ethnic identity that is being corrupted by clandestine forces in society. So what are the main deeper ideological features of Fascism? There must be more abstract and elusive underlying features of Fascism that seems to encapsulate what the term really means.
Of course one can find varying definitions within Marxism, liberalism,and even Fascism itself. This is where Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco comes in.
He devised a set of fourteen common features of Fascism in his essay ‘Ur-Fascism’.
“The Cult of Tradition”
“The Rejection of modernism”
“The Cult of Action for Action’s Sake”,
“Disagreement Is Treason”
“Fear of Difference”
“Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class”
“Obsession with a Plot”
Enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak.”
“Pacifism is Trafficking with the Enemy”
“Contempt for the Weak”
“Everybody is Educated to Become a Hero”
“Machismo”
“Selective Populism”
“Newspeak”
Well, what do these mean? Most of the features are mutually intertwined — they are dependent on each other.
For example, the first feature leads all the way to the fifth. An extreme emphasis on all things traditional despite contradiction leads to a rejection of enlightenment (modernist) values.
The next one is complicated: “the Cult of Action for Action’s Sake” highlights irrationalism — action must be taken for the sake of it without intellectual reflection. With the former point and the rejection of enlightenment, values would come with a disavowal of any intellectual criticism towards Fascism that would expose contradictions in its beliefs. Due to this Fascism sees disagreement as a sign of diversity. Thus Fascists would seek to create a natural consensus by exploiting or exacerbating genealogical differences such as racism and xenophobia.
From this list, we can deduce that Fascism seeks to venerate: a veneration of cultural identity, of a primordial national spirit, and of the unfearing Classical Epic Hero.
For the political theorist Roger Griffin, the core of Fascism is that of palingenesis — a revolutionary rebirth.
As Griffin defines, Palingenetic Ultranationalism is the popular mobilisation of the ethnic core against elite structures to bring about a complete rebirth of the ‘ultranation’ (Fascist perceived mythologised nation-state) from its current depraved and decadent state.
Fascists seek to radically alter the nation-state to fit their historical archetype. Essentially Fascists seek a ‘revolutionary counter-revolution’. Yet this seems to be somewhat paradoxical. A revolution to get rid of another revolution? Eco states that Fascism is by its very nature paradoxical or as he puts it “a beehive of contractions”.That is an ideology that is syncretic in nature and that rejects modern and embodied irrationality.
Now as we have the definitional core of Fascism how does the Fascist state manifest itself?
Yes, Fascist states are nationalist, traditionalist, authoritarian, and so on but, how does it affect ordinary people, the economy, r the daily functioning of the state?
For Marxists, Fascism is the massacre of the working class and the revolutionary-minded peasantry and intelligentsia in order to replace it with a docile Lumpenproletariat who has embraced the most reactionary elements of financial capital. They consider Fascism to be Capitalism in crisis. They see it as a radical reverse in the historical dialectic.
For Liberal Democrats, Fascism can manifest in the destruction of democratic norms that is a rejection of elected governance, freedom of speech, and an obsession with national security over the will of people. It is the all-out rejection of the enlightenment’s political and philosophical thought.
For Conservatives, Fascism symbolises the departure from conservative belief in reform or conservation to a rapid deacceleration to pre-enlightenment thinking.
In essence, Fascism, as understood by the Italian theorists of Fascism like Giovanni Gentile or Julius Evola, can be seen as a collection of collectivist ideas about how state power could be coordinated. In many ideologies, e see the ‘fetishisation’ of a particular concept which is held up to be the paramount unit of History. The state is that unit in Fascism for which all identities are a servant. This manifests itself in a massively hierarchical state with the omnipotent executive leader at the top vertices who is to guide all activities of the state in line with the party. The state is the forbearer of all identities thus the common ethnolinguistic group, of the nation-state, is the product of state power — the identity does uphold the state but the state upholds the common identity.
Marxist-Socialism was another collectivist ideology focused on class as the main ‘unit.’ Liberalism on the other hand was focused on the individual. They were both directly opposed to the emphasis on state authority as can be seen in Fascism.
Franz Neumann had an interesting insight into the state-apparatus of the Third Reich in a functionalist post-War analysis. His book, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, saw Nazi totalitarian, not as the essence of a rigid autocratic state of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathon but the Behemoth. The Fascist state was the perfect anti-state — chaos was amplified. Despite the famed jurist Carl Schmitt’s conservative reasoning that the Nazis could preserve peace and exercise necessary power, this regime was egoistic and ruled by convenience, not by law. The state consisted of four major factions all vying for power: the Army, Government Bureaucracy, the Party, and the Capitalist Bourgeoisie.
This is what Eco again sees as the “beehive of contradictions”; a Fascist state built on order but ruled through disorder. The Nazi state, or example, maintained a corporate capitalist framework but it seemed to paradoxically want to further the contradiction which is State-Capitalism. Mussolini’s Fascist Italy is a great example of this hidden contradiction. The combination of revolution and monarchy? A revolutionary new order that was propped up by the old conservative land ownership? The acceptance of both deep Catholic moralism and the rejection of the Clerical tradition? The ‘counter-revolution’ hidden as a revolution? The civilian executive held equally with the monarch? Again, this is what Eco calls a “political and ideological discombobulation” or for the lack of a better term- “a deeply structured mess”.
So to sum up: Fascism, in theory, is irrational and syncretic but has an underlying emphasis of ultranational revolutionary ‘rebirth’ against a perceived internal threat. In practice, it places the collective in the form of the state above anything else but it falls to a peripherally “deeply ordered mess”.
Fascists of course have differing perspectives and objectives on their current state of affairs. German Nazism did not just see the state as the ultimate ‘unit’ of History — they saw race (or blood) as the ultimate ‘unit’. For National Socialism, t was not the state but rather the ethnonationalism underneath that which was really important. This was not an element of both Italian Fascism or Japanese Showa Statism through both placed some emphasis on race. All Fascist movements lie in their respective national contexts which influences to what extent they will go to purge internal antagonisms from society and which internal antagonisms they will seek to remove. Structurally however they all function similarly: the utilisation of aesthetics to construct a utopia based on a historical myth with a national leader who acts to eliminate what ails the people.
An understanding of the far-right today requires an understanding of the far-right of the past. We must understand the underpinnings of Fascism to remedy certain social, political, and cultural issues we have today. Far-right movements in Japan, India, Germany, and the USA are not just random anomalies, they are built on a complex ideological history spanning from the last century. This is not to say that people who advocate for fascistic ideas should be immediately disregarded as irrational actors and de-platformed but there’s always some nuance in our understanding of socio-political phenomenon such as the rise of Fascism in the mid-half of the 20th Century.
