How to Use the F-Word

If you're anything like me, you've probably met a person or two who's willing to lob the F-word at almost any form of authority they don't like. You know the word I'm talking about: fascist. 

I have no qualms with anyone expressing a distaste for distasteful forms of authority, but I shudder a little when I hear someone use a word like fascist where it doesn't really apply. On the other hand, I can also understand why this happens. Fascism is notoriously difficult to describe and define. Unlike many other isms, studying fascism historically can create a sense that there's nothing really giving it any continuity over time, at least on the surface. And so, for many people, it seems to be associated broadly with misused authority, especially when that authority appears to be particularly abusive, pathological, or violent. 

One of the most mind-boggling challenges of my career as a world history teacher has been to find a way of talking about and representing the extremely complicated phenomenon of fascism for learners in a way that is both comprehensible and meaningful. In other words, the question I have continually asked myself as a teacher is: how can I help students understand this in a way that is actually applicable to their lived experience in the world? 

What I would like to attempt with this blog post is to use some of the insights I've picked up through my years of studying and teaching fascism to make a clear case that fascism is, unfortunately, a word we need to be accurately applying more often in today's world. I believe that we are looking at a global rise of fascism, possibly on an unprecedented scale, and that because fascism is an identifiable phenomenon with relatively predictable patterns when you know what to look for, we could all benefit from making an effort to understand and use the term with more consistency. 

My search for a satisfying answer to the question of how to best talk and teach about fascism is not over, and, indeed, the search for a satisfying definition of fascism continues to haunt many people who work in the world of academia. However, I do believe that we know enough about fascism to usefully draw its basic outlines, and maybe even begin to fill in some of the center. 

In the remainder of this post, I will try to walk a careful line. I do not want to give anyone the impression that I believe fascism is perfectly understood, that understanding fascism or how it works will solve all our problems, or that the world of today is just like the world of our past. At the same time, I also believe we know enough about fascism to talk about it as if it were relatively (not absolutely) comprehensible and relatively (not absolutely) predictable. One of the most dangerous things about the way many of us, especially those in the media, talk about the increasingly fascist behaviors and rhetoric in our country and world is to talk about them as if they're simply the result of incomprehensibly crazy people or incomprehensibly crazy times. I vigorously deny that sort of uninformed commentary. 

That having been said, let's get into the topic at hand.

What is Fascism?

As a teacher, the expectation is usually that I provide simple (please not longer than a sentence!) definitions for complex historical phenomena. I've tried many soundbite definitions for fascism, none of them fully satisfying or completely true. 

Here's one: Fascism is what happens when a group of people who have access to traditional forms of political power in "democracies" trade the challenges of reality for a simpler fiction in which reality is a conspiracy and they are a victim.

Pankaj Mishra opens his 2017 book, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, by introducing us to the earliest documented Italian fascist of whom I'm aware. No, not Mussolini, even though, as the story goes, Mussolini is the guy who coined the term 'fascism.' Mishra's early fascist actor, a man by the name of Gabriele D'Annunzio, appeared as early as 1919, when he and two thousand other Italians occupied the Adriatic port town of Fiume (today the Croatian city of Rijeka) and claimed it for Italy.

As told by Mishra, 

"The writer and war hero, one of the most famous Europeans of his time, had long wanted to capture all the territories that he believed had always been part of 'Mother Italy'. In 1911 he had zealously supported Italy's invasion of Libya, an expedition whose savagery stoked outrage across the Muslim world. Amid the chaos at the end of the First World War, and with the collapse of the region's previous ruler, D'Annunzio saw a chance to realize his dream of rejuvenating Italian manhood through violence." 

Fascism is patriarchy.

Mishra continues: 

"Installed as 'il Duce' of the 'Free State of Fiume', D'Annunzio created a politics of outrageous rhetoric and gestures - politics in the grand style. He invented the stiff-armed salute, which the Nazis later adopted, and designed a black uniform with pirate skull and crossbones, among other things; he talked obsessively of martyrdom, sacrifice and death. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, then obscure men, were keen students of the pseudo-religious speeches this shaven-headed man delivered daily on his balcony to his black-shirted 'legionnaires' (before retreating to his sexual partners of the day)."

As a HistoryToday.com piece from September 12, 2019 put it in reference to D'Annunzio's occupation of Fiume,

"So began an era of European showman politics, testing the limits of the peace settlements which were supposed to end the Great War - and ultimately hollowing them out entirely. The war, it turned out, had not really ended in 1918 at all. It was merely transmuted into a new set of civil wars and revolutions, conflicts and convulsions, of which the conquest of Fiume was the most theatrical."

Fascism is what happens when a group of people who feel shame and humiliation stemming from something that would otherwise have forced them to rethink themselves and their world, choose instead to double down on the sort of thinking that has always made them comfortable. They do this not by imagining and planning a new future, but by very literally living as if they remain in their wrongly written past in order to alter it through brute force and vengeance. 

Carol Anderson helps us understand the period of Reconstruction in the US South following the Civil War in her book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Although Anderson neither says nor implies it, white supremacist violence during the period of Reconstruction looks and sounds very similar to fascist movements that came a few decades later in Europe. Referring to the era of reconstruction immediately after the Civil War under President Andrew Johnson, Anderson gives us a sense for how committed those who felt wronged by the loss of the South were to righting (writing) what they thought should have been history:

"...in the spring and summer of 1866, the South's descent into an orgy of anti-black violence signaled the final break between Johnson and the Republicans. In New Orleans, nearly fifty African Americans were slaughtered and more than a hundred injured for meeting to discuss voting... In Memphis, there was another gory bloodbath, and another round of silence from the White House. In Texas, from 1865 to 1868, nearly one thousand African Americans were lynched.

"A woman pleaded with President Johnson 'to do something about the plight of the "poor negro...their masters are so angry loose [sic] them that they are trying to persecute them back into slavery."'

"As the black body count mounted, with justice nowhere to be found, least of all from the president of the United States, the Reconstruction era descended into nothing less than an age of violence and terror."

Fascism is what happens when a group of people who perceive themselves as racially superior deal with history's suggestion that they rethink that falsehood by attempting to reinstate it through psychotic violence.

Of course, fascism is more complicated than all of these things, but I hope there's some sense of continuity in the ideas and evidence I've presented above. Fascism doesn't look exactly the same all the time. The fascism of the 1930s is not the same as the fascism of today, and the fascism of Europe is not the same as the fascism of the United States, but I think there are important parallels that can teach us to delineate patterns that will help us make more sense of our politics and avoid the avoidable pitfalls. 

If I've been doing too much hinting or vague explanation above, let me try to be clear here. The definition of fascism that has helped my own thinking the most comes from Robert Paxton. He defined fascism in 2004 as, 

"a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood 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 constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

I think there are a number of significant things to pay attention to here. First, Paxton marks fascism as a behavior, not an ideology. I find this helpful because fascism, while originally defined in contrast to socialism, is much less a rational set of ideas and beliefs than it is a set of behaviors and speech with common motivations. 

Humiliation is the next major word that stands out to me. I cannot think of a fascist movement that I've studied that could not be explained by deep and disturbing feelings of humiliation, often attributable to a shift in history that makes it nearly impossible for certain people to healthfully maintain the sense of identity with which they were raised. The Nazi movement was a classic example of this. Following World War I, a great many Germans were forced to confront a recent historical piece of evidence that did not conform to their sense of being German as also being imperial giants who deserved glorious victory over other great European nations. This was the conditioning of young Germans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The humiliation of the loss of World War I festered within the Nazi movement until they built up a military capable of allowing them to relive it in attempt to rewrite history. 

I believe a sense of victimhood is also basic to any definition of fascism. In order to participate in a form of political behavior that would otherwise be easily characterized as disturbed, narcissistic, and pathological, imagining oneself as the innocent victim of a historical wrong is essential. What's crucial to understand here is that fascist movements that gain traction, by definition, are made up of people who have real access to political power. And any person who has access to real political power and can simultaneously imagine themselves as a victim is not only refusing to take responsibility for a world they are creating, but also a sure bet to make that world extraordinarily dangerous for others. Moreover, I think it's crucial to understand that wrapped up in the feeling of victimhood is a sense of history as proper and unchanging. Fascists see themselves as victims of a reality, a history, that did not do what it was supposed to do. And (here's the exceedingly dangerous part) they imagine that they are endowed with an almost divine form of knowledge that makes them the arbiters of how reality ought to be, and how history ought to have unfolded. Enter the phenomenon of the 'cult.'

One way to talk about fascist regimes is to talk about political cults. These cults rely on conspiratorial thinking and a manipulative leader to mobilize political behavior. As Timothy Snyder puts it, fascism has historically "characterized globalization as a conspiracy rather than a set of problems." The propensity to engage heavily in conspiratorial thinking is around the point at which it becomes easier to understand how prominently propaganda, mind control, and personalities inclined toward authoritarianism and hierarchy come into play with fascist movements. 

Let's lastly look at Paxton's idea that fascist regimes often focus on goals of "internal cleansing and external expansion." Fascism is built on the back of nationalism, a dominating movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that rapidly and powerfully sought to redefine people's primary political identity by suggesting that a people of common language and culture are tied together by an abstract, almost spiritual, unity that was built in a mythic past (national histories nearly always reach back to a point in history to establish their roots in ways that would not have made sense to the actual people of that past). Furthermore, these people deserve sovereignty within their own political states: nation-states. Because this is a set of ideas most of us were born into, we don't necessarily notice or understand that this movement made radical alterations to people's sense of identity and political allegiances that would not at all have been true just a century earlier.

Whereas people who lived before nationalism took hold might have located their primary political identity in their culture or religious beliefs, nationalist propaganda colonized the psychological space of primary political identity and allegiance with flags, fictional histories, and national anthems in ways that were very nearly religious, and encouraged people to participate in forms of political behavior that would have been previously unimaginable.

Because the concept of the nation is not synonymous with everybody who lives within the boundaries of the nation-state (merely those who can claim belonging within the mythical nation), it is a very uncomfortable situation for people who, because of language, race, or ethnicity, can't easily claim a spot within the imagined national community. Any nationalist leader seeking to distract their population from the very real cultural and economic challenges of globalization or climate change can attempt instead to scapegoat minoritized people as the personification of all the ails the nation. Unfortunately, this has proven time and again to be an effective strategy for maintaining power, particularly in nations that are going through difficult times. At the extreme end of this path is ethnic cleansing and genocide. Fascist movements don't always go that far, but we should be extremely aware that this is always a possibility.

Regarding Paxton's claim that fascists tend to pursue policies of "external expansion," I've heard contemporary historians and philosophers note that while external expansion was definitely a common thread in 1930s fascist rhetoric and behavior, we're seeing less of that in the 21st century. Many fascist leaders today actually seem to be attempting to withdraw from the world, perhaps imagining that the challenges of globalization will eventually disappear with the rest of reality if they just keep ignoring them.

Now that we've broken down Paxton's definition, let's look at one more scholar's definition before I offer my own way of thinking about fascism.

In his book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Jason Stanley offers us this definition: "Fascism is a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by immigrants, minorities, and leftist radicals. The fascist leader creates panic and fear about a takeover by marxists and leftists, and presents himself as the only solution." Importantly, Stanley further defines fascism as a method for attaining power.

Asked how close we are to fascism in the United States on CNN on August 30, 2020, Stanley said, "Well, we don't have a fascist regime, but, arguably, Trumpism is something akin to a fascist social and political movement, and at the very least, we have massive use of fascist tactics. We've got militias roaming the streets. We have one of our political parties turning into a cult of the leader. The RNC platform was just, 'whatever Trump wants.' That's an extremely worrisome sign."

To help us understand further, Stanley offers these ten essential characteristics of fascist movements (all of which, I believe I've heard Stanley say, need to be present for us to call a movement fascist):

• A Mythic Past
• Propaganda
• Anti-Intellectualism
• Unreality (i.e. alternative facts, conspiracy theories) 
• Hierarchy
• Victimhood
• Law and Order
• Sexual Anxiety
• Sodom and Gomorrah (i.e. fascist movements locate virtue in the rural countryside; never in diverse, urban settings)
• Arbeit Macht Frei (i.e. the idea of a natural order in which only the fit survive through work; an obsession with winning and losing)

If you're not already exhausted with making sense of fascism, I would offer one last hypothesis I've often used to make sense of it for myself.

What I think might be helpful for a lot of Americans to understand is that we (and, indeed, virtually every European country and country whose political culture and community descends from Europe) are still in the middle of a great transition in the history of political organization. As Timothy Snyder puts it: After empire, what? 

The United States has an undeniable history of imperialism. Indeed, the global stature of the US is a direct consequence of its success in imperial pursuits. The US has also struggled prodigiously to live up to its stated democratic ideals, such as enfranchising all citizens as voters and granting citizens truly equal treatment under the law. To my mind, among of the most fundamental reasons democratic practices are so difficult to attain in the US is that the political cultures that produce democracy and empire are fundamentally incompatible. 

Deep democracy depends on horizontal power structures, an individual's capacity to think for themself, and the pursuit of living up to a set of human virtues, such as empathy and compassion, that our wisest thinkers have always pointed us toward. Empire, on the other hand, is pretty much the exact opposite. Imperial culture depends on hierarchy, exploitation, and the rationalization of horrific violence through glorious myths about the past. 

I think what large segments of the US population are doing, and have been doing for some time, is trying to answer the question of how we let go of empire, and how we embrace truly democratic practices.

If that's true, what does it have to do with fascism? Well, I think that fascism can, in part, be explained as the reactionary politics of an empire that is being asked quite strongly (almost demanded) to live up to democratic ideals. The fascist reaction is sort of, "No, no, No, NO, NO!!!!"

Fascist thinking and rhetoric is generally deeply cynical about democratic practices, institutions, and virtues. It is especially allergic to horizontal power structures and the notion that all people ought to be accorded equal rights and responsibilities. This violates a fundamental pillar of fascist thinking pointed out by Stanley: that there is a natural human order with winners and losers. A fascist mentality, as a result, has an almost erotic urge toward hierarchy and authoritarianism, the basic ingredients of imperial culture. 

I don't know how many people understand just how revolutionary an idea it is that human beings might actually be able to organize themselves into political states of hundreds of millions of people AND live up to democratic ideals. While we've developed some truly inspiring political theory to guide us in how that might work, we've never seen that theory fully realized. Furthermore, democratic political culture is not only about how we guide government policy, but depends more importantly on an entirely different way of imagining ourselves and our relationships with others, much of which depends on an inherently different way of raising and educating young people. That shift is most certainly still in progress, with a great many people still being raised with the implicit conditioning of empire and the explicit conditioning of democracy. Talk about cognitive dissonance. 

If I'm right about this, then I think it's to be very much expected that the dissonance created by this tension would lead to overt skepticism and cynicism toward democracy. I think this is even more true because both political parties in this country have long pretended to be working in the interests of the people, when, in fact, the important decisions they've made in terms of policymaking have served the interests of the financial elite. If this is democracy, people understandably think, then I'll pass. Give me a leader who will get us out of this mess. Enter a demagogue like Donald Trump.

Of course, we have not truly been practicing democracy, and it's insidious to pretend like we have. Trump supporters are right to point out that politicians have not served their interests well. They're wrong when they imagine that Trump will serve their interests, or that minoritized people or leftist radicals are the root of the problems that ail them. Even more dangerously, many Trump supporters are being drawn in to a fantasy world of unreality that is already mobilizing otherwise incomprehensible violence. 

But none of this is nearly as incomprehensible as some commentators lead us to believe, and that, ultimately, is the whole point of this blog post. There is precedent for what's happening in our country, and while I agree with a great many historians who tell us that history never repeats itself, it does allow us the possibility of making connections and recognizing patterns. These insights are crucial for those of us who believe that democracy in a globalizing world is an actual possibility worth struggling for.  

One crucial step in the worthwhile struggle for global democracy is the ability see and name real phenomena that occur in the world. Fascism is one of those phenomena we all need to become better at recognizing and calling out accurately and routinely. That's how we ought to use the F-word.