Is this what fascism looks like?
If the question sounds rhetorical or incendiary, it’s because we’re living in incendiary times. Terms such as fascism, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, are important words. Their meanings overlap in complex ways. They carry both semantic and moral weight; and they need to be defined clearly. But because the world is a mess (semantically and morally as well as in fact), absolute clarity or precision is never an option. At best, it’s something we can approach and approximate. In the words of Bob Dylan, “How many deaths does it take till they know that too many people have died?” Yet we can, and we must, use words like “fascism” when appropriate. We cannot shrink from them just because they sound maximally derogatory, or because someone will get angry.
Looking into the subject of fascism isn’t fun. It’s more like staring into the sewer of humanity, or one of them. Human cruelty, violence, and injustice have been around forever; but modernity has brought new forms of cruel and unjust power that don’t issue from castles or warlords or distant emperors, but from modern governments – including democracies – that enlist masses of people to support their oppression of others (typically minorities) and use mass media to get the job done.
Fascism is one of these general forms of brute power; communist totalitarianism another. Alike in some ways, but different in others, both models of misrule are predicated on 20th century technology, especially modern weaponry and electronic communication. AI and social media don’t, on balance, make democracy an easier project. They are also the essential toys of tyrants.
I began exploring this sewer because the times seemed to demand it. I’m hardly the first; and recently, scholars like Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum have been warning us about the creeping authoritarianism of the Trump movement. But in my quest to determine whether America has taken a specifically fascist turn, I found inspiration in an essay on the subject by the writer and semioticist Umberto Eco. The essay, titled “Ur-Fascism,” appeared in New York Review of Books thirty years ago, in June 1995.
Eco’s article draws on his personal experience as an Italian growing up under Mussolini, but he also makes important connections and distinctions across time and space. He identifies fourteen constituent features of what he calls “Ur-Fascism.” His list may not be exhaustive, nor does it rank the features in importance; but all that is beside the point. For, as he astutely argues, the fourteen features exemplify what Wittgenstein called “family resemblance.” Which means: not every case will exhibit every feature, and different cases may not even overlap; but they share from the same common pool of essential properties. And in the case of fascism, the overlap is considerable, even as it varies across modern history and geography.
Many of Eco’s fourteen features have an ugly contemporary ring. Fascism, invented by Mussolini perfected by Hitler, and practiced by dozens of dictators since, is defined as involving a cult of tradition (“Make America Great Again”); a total disdain for democratic norms and institutions; intense nationalism and xenophobia; a charismatic leader who sways the masses with symbols and slogans; an emphasis on action not thought, and anti-intellectualism, including controlling the media and the universities; appeal to a frustrated middle class, stoking hatred of the other, the foreign, the weak, or some racial, ethnic or religious group; using lies and distortive language; labeling of opposition or criticism as treachery or criminal.
Although fundamentally right-wing, fascism – as Eco rightly notes – isn’t an ideology or system of thought or theory of politics. It’s simply autocratic exercise of power achieved by whipping up emotions that are not the emotions of our better angels. It brings out the worst in us.
That’s not the whole list, but it’s enough to recognize where we are. There may be other features of (some) fascism that Eco doesn’t mention, and they appear in different forms and degrees in each case. Trump is not a militarist, although he’s willing to use the military for domestic ends. Unlike many classical fascists, he does not rely on a close alliance with the Catholic Church. (To the contrary, his base is more rooted in Protestant Christian Nationalism).
In addition, there’s a crucial distinction to be made between fascism as a form of non-democratic rule, i.e., rule based on force, and fascism that arises within existing democracies and erodes them. Democracy itself is, in fact, a matter of degree; some republics are more democratic than others, and all are fragile in different ways. Some get overthrown in coups, while others (as in Hungary, and Poland until recently) give way gradually.
January 6th was not an attempt to overthrow the US Government and replace it with an authoritarian regime; it was rather an attempt to subvert the democratic process to keep Donald Trump in power. Russian interference in the 2016 election was another body blow to our system.
Now, we see in America legal residents being picked up off the street by masked thugs and deported or incarcerated. Students are intimidated from protesting. Universities and law firms are brought to heel. The media are demonized. Kleptocracy has returned to Washington along with incompetence. But incompetence alone cannot achieve such stunning results in a mere few months, while defying judges and laws and other branches of government. Fascism can.