Transcription
Fascism is immensely dangerous, but fascism is also probably the most egregiously and frequently misused word in political discourse, certainly in America anyways. This combination is a huge problem. I'll get more into that later, but for now, I believe it is irresponsible and cheap to recklessly throw this word around as a partisan attack or a sensational headline. Instead, we should strive to understand history's most violently destructive political ideology, and we should learn to identify fascism in an accurate, honest way. Only then can we realistically keep fascism out of our modern systems of governance.
So, with all that said, let's get started. If you're looking for a really quick, effective definition of fascism, that's too bad. Such a thing simply does not exist. Fascism cannot be holistically summarized by one-sentence quips or turns of phrases. Roger Griffin is perhaps the historian who's accepted to have gotten the closest, saying fascism is "a genus of political ideology whose mythic core and its various permutations it's a palogenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism." Pelon genetic here as in "the rebirth of a nation," a revolution. Although elegant and accurate, Griffin's definition is a simplification that isn't functionally very useful. This definition alone doesn't make it any easier to pick out a fascist regime. A succinct definition of fascism has indeed eluded historians for decades for a lot of reasons.
People will often begin this conversation with the etymology of the word fascism. It is derived from an Italian word for a bundle of sticks. Then you could say that one stick is easily broken, whereas a bundle or stronger when united. This strength and unity accurately describes fascism, yes, but it also accurately describes a huge number of other political systems that have existed throughout history. In fact, you could argue that the point of all political systems is to create strength through unity. So, this discussion doesn't really do much for us.
Another thing we should not do is define a political movement by the particulars of its incarnations. In this video, I will give examples of fascism being applied in real life, but I will not say because Mussolini wrote X, Y, and Z, fascism as a whole means X, Y, and Z. Just like America's electoral college does not define democracy, the methodologies used by specific fascist regimes do not define fascism. Instead, we need to look at what ideologically and functionally these regimes have in common. This generic version of fascism, though, only exists as an abstract concept. The term is not intended to be an iron-clad box, but rather a framework under which to further analyze individual political movements. For example, Nazism was quite different from Italian fascism, but they were both generically fascist.
Extreme nationalism is the core tenet of fascism, which inherently makes the word difficult to define. Each nation has its own values, identity, and cultural idiosyncrasies. An English fascist utopia would look very different from a Mexican fascist utopia. By contrast, something like democracy does not inherently lean into national identity, so it manifests similarly wherever it is implemented. Fascism, by its nature, is different everywhere it appears.
There's also no universal end goal for fascist regimes. Marxists work towards a classless society; anarchists work towards a stateless society. There is no single, clear-cut objective of a fascist regime other than the vague, emotionally charged idea of a nation's greatness. More than a single practical objective, fascist movements are decidedly negative. By this, I mean fascism specifically espouses what it hates. Few movements are as purely negative as fascism, which claims to be anti-individualist, anti-liberal, anti-conservative, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, and anti-capitalist. But fascist ideology is not so specific about what it supports, and in practice, fascist movements have acted in disagreement with these aforementioned "anties," which even further muddies the water.
Fascism is really a set of philosophies and methods, and these things also appear in a bunch of other non-fascist systems of governance. So, it's easy to see something that is present in fascist regimes and then assign that thing itself as the definition of fascism. For example, if a political party is trying to silence their opposition, that alone does not make them fascists, despite that being a tool used by fascists.
Now, with all that said, we can still identify fascism. Fascist regimes, whether they came to power or not, have things in common. We can break down the ideology of fascism in a meaningful way; it just takes some patience.
In his book *Fascism: Comparison and Definition*, historian Stanley G. Payne offers this table to explain fascism. More than any single sentence or definition, this table effectively communicates what fascism is. Again, though, this is not a hardline, iron-clad definition, but rather it provides a framework for a generic idea of fascism.
Fascism is built on an idealistic, almost utopian approach to extreme nationalism. Fascism says, "With this philosophy alone, a society can build itself into a great nation, in charge of its own destiny, and united by the blood of its people." This extreme sense of national greatness is the heartbeat of fascism. Fascism promises to create a new culture and a new nation which is capable of achieving greatness in ways that previous societies simply could not. It does not promise improvement, but instead a whole new paradigm of existence for a nation.
Fascism further seeks to radically change a nation's relationship with other nations. This could come in the form of imperialist expansion, but it does not have to. Within the fascist framework, this great new nation operates under an authoritarian state, which is not based on any preceding models or government structures. The people must submit to the party.
Economically, fascism rejects the Marxist ideas of a classless society. Instead, it places value on the elite class but looks to replace former democratic thinking elites with its own set of decision-makers. Fascist economies are multi-class and highly regulated, though may exist under several categorizations. There's no unifying economic system that can be assigned to all fascist regimes.
Fascists express a positive opinion of violence and willingness to engage in violence and war. Aside from the belief in violence to enact the will of the state, fascists see violence in itself as therapeutic. They believe violent, Darwinian struggle, wherein only the strong survive, is necessary to the continuing of a successful nation. These together form the core ideology behind generic fascism.
And next, as Payne does in his work, we can look at the methods fascists use to achieve these goals. Fascism provides ways to organize and execute its plans. Again, taken individually, these methods can be found in other non-fascist regimes, but collectively, they make up the generic fascist methodology.
The first is mass mobilization. Fascists are not interested in controlling a small sector of elites like many other political movements are. Instead, fascists seek to revolutionize society from the bottom up by mobilizing the masses towards their own common goal. Mussolini himself famously said, "Our myth is the nation. Our myth is the greatness of the nation." Fascism looks to sweep people into a frenzy.
Fascism exalts a leader as a messiah in a way that intentionally mirrors religious experiences. The state intends to replace traditional religion with a secular civic religion. The state is the religion. To do this, the state creates a series of myths that unify the fascist elites and the people over which they rule. Most famously, these myths have been rooted in anti-Semitism and racism, but they don't always have to be. This civic religion, with its myths and its mission, becomes the driving force of existence for the people. It diminishes or entirely destroys the role of actual supernatural-based religious principles.
To help create this civic religion, fascists emphasize the use of aesthetics, including symbols, architecture, and design. This is to elicit an intense emotional response, in the same way that religious institutions often have. All mass movements have their own symbols, but fascism places an obsessive emphasis on visually distinct things and events like marches, ceremonies, meetings, and symbology. The idea here is to build a mystique that fully envelops participants, creating not just a political movement, but a spiritual movement. Again, the state is the religion.
True fascist regimes are made up of men and pay almost no attention to women's rights or gender equality. Fascism obsesses with the perceived strength of the male gender. This likely stems from fascism's need for constant struggle, for unending revolution and violence. The fascist notion is that men are the predominant force in society, and women naturally take a subservient place. More broadly, fascism also espouses that these sectors of a society—men, women, children, etc.—define and limit the rights of those individuals.
Because fascism is inherently revolutionary and seeks to provide nations a rebirth, youth is specifically exalted over members of older generations. In a literal sense, the youth are the future of a nation, but the daring, action-taking sensibilities of a fascist revolution appeal to the youth in a way that can be less interesting to older, more pragmatic people.
There is also authoritarian command. All movements rely on charismatic leaders, but fascism is unique in that it combines populism with elitism. Fascism looks to appeal to the masses, to the entire people of the nation, while also emphasizing the role of an elite, messianic figure. Fascism leans into the function of this leadership rather than party lines or specific procedural doctrines. This leadership figure may be elected, but the participants of fascism must ultimately subordinate to him.
Alongside this, fascism dictates that leaders should militarize government institutions. Goal here being a party militia, one military force that represents, defends, and executes the will of the party. This militia also serves in the aesthetic function of fascism; it is part of everyday life in a fascist regime. Together, these are the methodologies behind fascist movements.
And so now, we have a functioning framework and understanding of what fascism is. But in honesty, this sounds like an objectively unenjoyable society. So, how could it possibly have come to be? What conditions could produce fascist sympathies?
Sunday, March 23, 1919. A group of 100 Italians gathered in the Milan Industrial and Commercial Alliance, led by Benito Mussolini. There, Mussolini formed his fascist organization. People often credit Mussolini with naming fascism. On this day, alongside him, similar groups were coming together all across Europe. Mussolini's idea was not unique.
The Great War had created strains on Europe that existing institutions simply could not solve. Indeed, this war was the most significant and immediate thing to fuel the rise of fascism. At the time, Europe was believed to be the most civilized part of the globe, so the idea of war breaking out, much less the brutality of the Great War, simply unimaginable. When the Great War slaughtered an entire generation of men, people felt like European civilization was crumbling. By the time the war was over, it had wreaked such havoc that Europeans felt the old world was unsalvageable. Whatever promises Europe had of peace and prosperity were quickly forgotten. Meanwhile, they disagreed intensely about the future of this new world after the Great War.
Three political ideals were competing for influence over the globe: liberalism, conservatism, and communism. Liberals believed that each nation could basically determine their own fates and exist in harmony. Led in part by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, they argued that no real external force would be needed for future peacekeeping. Conservatives were mostly silent but believed that armed forces should continue to handle relations between nations. And then there was the Communist regime installed by the Bolsheviks in Russia. Lenin wanted all nations to set democracy aside and adopt his ideology. He wanted nations to create temporary dictatorial parties to install this model into a worldwide communist society.
None of these three parties had total success. Wilson's liberalism came in the form of peace treaties that had been pushed into a conservative direction by other world powers. Liberals nor conservatives were ultimately satisfied with the result. Lenin's plan, meanwhile, was contained within Russia pretty quickly. And with all three ideas seeming to fail, there was room for a fourth.
Although just an anecdote, the words of Italian soldier Italio Balbo spoke to the climate in Europe after the war: "When I returned home from the war, just like so many others, I hated politics and politicians who had betrayed the hopes of soldiers, reducing Italy to a shameles peace. I'd rather deny everything, destroy everything, to renew everything from the foundations." Balbo would later become Benito Mussolini's right-hand man in his fascist regime.
Fascism promised to settle territorial conflicts by letting the strong prevail. Unlike conservatives, fascist strength was not just military, but instead a combination of armed forces and national fervor. Liberals wanted to keep the peace through self-determination, but fascists didn't want to keep the peace at all. They said that war would weed out the weak, allowing unified nations to have dominion over divided, irresolute, weaker nations. To Lenin's argument about class struggle, fascists said the true struggle was between the clean, genetically pure members of the United Nation and those people of lesser, divided nations. By eliminating the alien and impure, the people would be united together by their nationality.
All this came at just the right time because fascism was not just a product of war, but also of unique cultural and intellectual circumstances. Foreign liberty, reason, and harmony were some of fascism's greatest enemies. Fascism was not the first to aggressively question these values. At the time, there was a host of writers, intellectuals, and academics that inspired Europe's early fascist movements.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has been given the dubious title of being fascism's intellectual grandfather. On an emotional level, there's a case to be made. Nietzsche's writings carry a decidedly hard and even angry independence of spirit. "God was dead. Christianity powerless, and science false." Nietzsche wrote about the downfall of modern society, a downfall in which fascists would later find their rise.
But more accurately, the thinker Georges Sorel was a tremendous influence on early fascists like Mussolini. Sorel wrote about the concept of a "grand myth" as a galvanizing idea that people could attach themselves to. This myth, he said, was so powerful that it could inspire people to perform well outside of their typical everyday duties, could fuel revolutions, and remember, fascism is fundamentally revolutionary.
Gustav Le Bon was an author who published *The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind* in 1895. In this book, Le Bon looks at how passions can fuel crowds to act irrationally and how crowd psychology makes large groups of people especially easy to manipulate. During this time, politics were becoming more populist; the regular people were getting involved. So, controlling these people, crowds, could yield immense power. See how this would be appealing to early fascists.
Freudian psychology was also beginning to take hold in popular culture. This approach discussed how the subconscious can irrationally affect human behavior. This helped to undermine traditional liberal values, values that said people should simply choose through reason what policies were best for their own lives. But the fascists asked, if the human mind was subject to irrational action, how could liberal democracy ever be trusted?
Meanwhile, a group of popular writers were beginning to rethink other traditional values like race and nation. Specifically, the idea of race became married to a more significant biological meaning. Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, stated that mankind had the power to improve the human race by encouraging only the best to reproduce. Galton quite literally invented the word "eugenics." This set the framework for later ideas of master races, in which Aryans (who, by the way, aren't a real race) were somehow superior.
And fear also played a significant role in setting the stage for fascism. There was a significant fear about the collapse of community. Urban sprawl began to set in, immigration increased, and individualism became a more valued trait. In this new landscape, there was a feeling of purposeless drift, wherein people did nothing meaningful because they had no significant social ties to anyone or anything, no community. Immigration flourished; ethnic minorities and cultural subversives were seen as a threat to national culture, to conformism, and again, to the already endangered idea of community. National culture, many thought, needed to be actively defended against these people. Unified nationalism would have seemed like a pretty good solution.
There was also a fear of decadence. Popular author Oswald Spengler argued that societies all had natural life cycles. He said that Europe was moving from a creative, amazing age of culture into an age of civilization, wherein people thought only of money. He advocated for a great revolution, hoping that some heroic, Caesar-esque character would come save Germany and Europe.
So, you had a sharp change in the structure of politics from elites only to mass participation. Then there were fears about the breakdown of community and national identity, as well as the cynicism about modern thinking.
However, to paint fascism as the direct result of some intellectual equation isn't really correct. I don't know that it's honest to selectively read back people's interpretations of society and say everything was pointing towards fascism. It does a disservice to the world at the time, and perhaps also the authors, by cherry-picking through Nietzsche or Sorel or Le Bon as precursors to fascism. These authors' works are seen incompletely, fragmented, and out of context. Indeed, the fascists who later cited these authors as inspiration for doing just that. You see, anti-fascists drew upon these people too. Nietzsche inspired thinkers from both sides of the political spectrum; his writings were not uniquely appealing to fascist sensibilities. Oswald Spengler, who wrote about the age of civilization, hated Hitler. The Nazis later drew on the work of the poet Stefan George, who wrote about a purified community of peasants led by an elite few, but one of George's closest students, Klaus Von Stauffenberg, tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944.
Cultural circumstances and the works of intellectuals gave fascism a place to exist, a room to live in, but they did not bring it about. In reality, you can't paint a logical map towards fascism because fascism simply isn't based in logic. No, it thrives most entirely in emotion.
After escaping Nazi Germany, the historian George Mosse dedicated his life to finding the origins, the root causes of fascism. All of his years of research led him to this conclusion: fascism does not come about through intellectual, societal, or cultural precursors, but instead through something more amorphous, through mood. Mosse points to nine mobilizing passions as the drivers of fascism: feelings within a society that build the foundation for the home of fascism. They are:
1. **Crisis:** A sense of overwhelming crisis, crisis that traditional methods are entirely incapable of fixing.
2. **Duty:** The idea that an individual has duties to a group, duties that are superior in every way to every right any individual or group otherwise would have.
3. **Victimhood:** The belief that one's group is a victim. This feeling justifies virtually any action towards an enemy without any moral or legal limits.
4. **Decline:** A feeling of a group's decline or fear of that decline due to individualism, liberalism, class conflict, or foreign influences.
5. **Community:** The need for a closer, purer community by consent, if possible, but also the feeling that violence is acceptable to create this community.
6. **Authority:** The desire for authority by male leaders, leading to a single savior figure who is alone capable of bringing about a group's desires.
7. **Superiority:** Feeling that this leader's instincts are superior to logic and reason.
8. **Violence:** An admiration for the violence and the efficacy of willpower as they relate to one group's desires.
9. **Domination:** The feeling that a chosen people have some biological right over another group of people, and that human or divine law should not infringe on that right.
Together, these nine feelings, Mosse wrote, would mobilize fascist movements in ways that logic alone could not explain. To look only at intellect, ironically, ignores the most powerful part of fascism as an ideology: feelings. Indeed, it is the feeling of fascism that has caused it to have such an enduring legacy, for better or for worse.
Today, we get so riled up in things resembling fascism that we recklessly throw the word around, and in a way that is indeed a triumph of past fascist regimes. Fascism struck humanity harder than perhaps any modern political movement in terms of physical devastation and spiritual imprint. So now, perhaps justifiably, we remain on high alert. But the problem is, when everyone is a fascist, no one is a fascist. Personally, I fear that we are dangerously close to the word fascism losing its meaning entirely. And when that happens, the real fascists can disappear into the shadows, duck under the crossfire all too easily. They can sneak into power, exploiting our ignorance, exploiting the same emotional groundwork as past fascist regimes have done. The monster of fascism is not dead, but the first step to killing it is learning what it looks like.