What Is Fascism?

“Fascism is might over right, conspiracy over reality, fiction over fact, pain over law, blood over love, doom over hope.” — Timothy Synder

The underwhelming Democratic candidate Kamala Harris recently painted Donald Trump as a fascist. Not to be outdone, the demagogue and convicted felon called Harris a fascist, a communist and stupid. Trump added that he was “the opposite of a Nazi.”

Yet two top U.S. generals who worked with President Trump begged to differ. They described the New Yorker as clearly an authoritarian fellow with a short attention span and no appreciation for truth: a “fascist to the core,” said one.

Meanwhile, conservative commentators have begun to taunt their liberal friends about the fascist label. Have they got their passports in order? mocked one. If fascism has truly arrived in the United States, argued another, then why haven’t you packed your bags or joined the resistance?

What these Trump apologists have forgotten (and that’s easy to do in this ahistorical time) is that fascism overwhelmed Germany so abruptly in 1933 that few writers, cartoonists and artists had time to leave. Hardly any could appreciate the danger, let alone the fragility of democracy.

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who fled Hitler’s regime, later observed that “most people were not prepared theoretically or practically” for fascism. “Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.” Nor did the regime tolerate much resistance. In fact, the majority submitted in advance.

Slippery definitions

Clearly, fascism is in the air and on our minds if not our lips. It is rattling political systems from Europe to Israel where nationalist ring-wing movements have gained the upper hand. In Israel’s case the consequences have been genocidal for the people of Gaza. At the same time the globe’s now 74 autocratic regimes outnumber 63 faltering democracies, proving one thing: globalization has not expanded, let alone improved, democracies as promised.

Whatever progress is, it is not inevitable or irreversible. Around the world the power of cartels, totalitarian states and wealthy oligarchs grows in a perverse economy that increasingly treats working people as Lego-like components.

Yet there is little agreement about what the word “fascism” really means. One historian once quipped that defining fascism was like trying to nail jelly to a wall. Others have claimed the word is just bad stuff you want to pin on an opponent.

In 1944 the writer George Orwell, who had fought Franco’s fascists in Spain, noted, “If you examine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist.” He concluded the word had been so thoroughly abused that it remained little more than a slur denoting an unscrupulous bully.

And that might be what Harris meant when she used the F-word on Trump.

But Orwell had other thoughts. Defining fascism satisfactorily, argued the journalist, just might lead to some uncomfortable admissions about the development of modernity that neither fascists nor conservatives nor socialists really want to talk about.

These admissions might include the tendency of all political parties in technological societies to serve money and power. They might also include the increasing use of propaganda by governments, corporations and political parties of every political stripe. Nothing is more inimical to the spirit of democracy than propaganda. Yet name a democracy where it is not transcendent.

So Orwell saw fascism not necessarily as an easily defined reactionary movement but as a development of modernity capable of poisoning public life over time, like a coal mine releasing arsenic or selenium into a river.

The ultimate propaganda machine

My point here is that beyond banal epithets, fascism does have a particular political meaning that cannot be reduced to a textbook definition. Timothy Snyder, the noted historian and author of On Tyranny, in a blog post provides his try at a definition within the current American context. “By fascism I just have in mind (1) the cult of personality of a Leader; (2) the party that becomes a single party; (3) the threat and use of violence; and (4) the big lie that must be accepted and used to reshape reality: in this case, that Trump can never lose an election.”

Synder elsewhere notes there is probably no technology more conducive to fascism than social media. It offers finely engineered propaganda tailored to the individual. It steals and narrows attention. It cements dread and anxiety as the foundation of one’s intellectual home. It reduces life to formulas and platitudes. Most importantly, it destroys imagination. In the alternative reality of fascism, no one can imagine walking in another man’s shoes, let alone think about a child walking barefoot through the rubble of Gaza.

In such a world, power doesn’t need street thugs to induce fear when a digital gadget can divide people between us and them with a handy algorithm. At the same time, the internet can serve as a holding pen where average citizens might spend a third of their day with “influencers” that lie and charm.

We know now that a constant flood of decontextualized information confuses and disorients people so thoroughly that they will stop thinking altogether and surrender to the comfort of falsehoods. That is precisely the aim of any authoritarian leader — to rule a society hollowed of any widely shared, coherent meaning that might compete with their own supreme leader mythology.

So fascism is not a historical or static artifact wearing a brown shirt. However one defines the word, this damnable political force evolves like a COVID virus with ever-changing variants. It is not so much a definable political choice as it is a conditioned response to disorder, marginalization and loss. The philosopher John Gray put it candidly: “Capitalist economies can go badly wrong,” and when they do, fascism is one of its manifestations.

Thoroughly modern fascism

The U.S. historian Robert Paxton, in a 1998 essay, calls fascism “the most original political novelty of the 20th century.” It erupted in nations undergoing rapid technological and economic change, even where existing democracies seemed assured of stable expansion.

He also corrects a common misconception. Fascism is first and foremost “an authentic mass popular enthusiasm and not merely a clever manipulation of populist emotions by the reactionary right or by capitalism in crisis.”

As such, fascism really doesn’t have a manifesto or even an ideology. It behaves like a power-seeking missile and embraces violence as the purest of emotions. It also idolizes technique. Anything that attracts a crowd, strengthens a following and comforts elite accomplices will be said and done. Expediency commands the fascist party because thought and reason have no place while chasing greatness. Such behaviours will simply not hold our attention.

Fascism, writes Paxton, also needs a particular fertilizer: “polarization in civil society and deadlocks within the political system.” These ingredients combine with the ambitions of wealthy accomplices — whether these oligarchs own newspapers, electric car makers or oil companies.

Paxton, who wrote an illuminating book on Vichy France, concludes that fascism works as “a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.” That definition should now sound frighteningly familiar to most Canadians.

Now let’s add a few observations from Jacques Ellul, who served in the French Resistance during the Second World War and directly witnessed the emergence of fascism. He saw a populace hungry for a fictional reordering of reality. Fascism, he observed, is not created by a leader, as so many American liberals mistakenly believe. Instead, the leader is “the creation of a pre-fascist mentality.”

This mentality, which can appear in any nation-state, serves to induce an acceptance of ever more authoritarian measures. The fascist always offers a simple formula: all is lost except by restoring greatness. Ultimately what all fascist movements have in common, noted Ellul, is a shared enthusiasm for technocratic modernization and an awe for power. For Hitler it was a faster autobahn and a more devastating military machine; for Trump it is cryptocurrency, fracking and space travel. Fascism, warned Ellul, will appear wherever and whenever we cease to see men and women as human beings but instead see them as stick figures to be manipulated by calculations into some mechanical solidarity.

Last, let’s hear from Hannah Arendt, the formidable thinker and émigré who wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism. She knew that fascism ultimately promised an escape from the painful beauty and terror of reality. It seduced the people with “entities without substance.” To an atomized citizenry without direct, tangible control over their political fates, fascism offered an alternative universe with a single story of marching towards destiny. In such a fiction, greatness would be restored and order reaffirmed, but with an unspoken price: the total loss of freedom.

Fascism promised to drain the swamps of ailing democracies only to repopulate them with more frightful monsters. It’s undeniable appeal, wrote Arendt, came from its promise to provide an “escape from disintegration and disorientation.”

Waking up to the threat

It has taken the sorry remnants of the U.S. press a while to grasp that America has a long history of active fascism. The U.S. auto magnate Henry Ford and the aviator Charles Lindbergh advocated for an America First policy and openly admired Hitler’s economic achievements and antisemitism. The Ku Klux Klan, which openly dominated politics in many states in the 1920s, operated as a fascist Ponzi scheme whose debauched leaders depended on the sale of uniforms and paraphernalia.

Henry Wallace, who served as vice-president under the Roosevelt administration during the Second World War, understood this political current in American life but didn’t think it could ever prevail. “American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the KKK type of demagoguery.”

That time may have arrived with Trump. Many of his funders and supporters hail from Silicon Valley, where democracy is increasingly viewed as an obstacle to technocratic innovation.

By now it should be clear that comparing the new tide of populists like Trump to Hitler misses the point entirely. American fascism exists and has marked American life since the 1920s. That nearly half of Americans found themselves attracted to the likes of Trump should have prompted a moment of deep reflection among U.S. liberals a decade ago. It has not. Even in the course of this tragic presidential election, the Clintons and Obamas refuse to ask themselves what policies, techniques and political forces spawned such discontent and such will to destruction.

Could it be that globalization and the concentration of wealth into smaller circles shrink both democratic possibilities and sensibilities? Is there a spiritual danger to championing rootlessness as progress?

As for lessons about Trump’s fascist character, Hitler offers little insight. But comparing Trump to Roy Cohn, his longtime counsel and adviser, gets to the heart of the matter. Before joining Trump at the hip for several decades, Cohn served as the cruel and reckless lawyer for Sen. Joseph McCarthy. In the 1950s McCarthy conducted a notorious witch hunt for communists in the U.S. government. At these witch trials Cohn played judge, jury and executioner. Americans eventually recoiled at this abuse of power. It was a different time.

Years later Esquire magazine described Cohn as one of “the toughest, meanest, loyalest, vilest” lawyers in America. Cohn, who freely mixed with corporate leaders and gangsters, tutored Trump in a basic fascist creed: “Attack, attack, attack; admit nothing and deny everything; and claim victory and never admit defeat.” The law was there for the powerful to evade, taught Cohn. That creed complemented everything Trump learned from his own severe and combative father, once a supporter of the KKK. (The singer Woody Guthrie once lived in a Trump tower and knew it was fascist real estate.)

Whatever the outcome of the U.S. election, fascism will not fade away. Movements of discontent do not vanish because some elites might regard them as deplorable or garbage-like. The long-term marginalization of working people by economic and technological forces will have its say, and that might well result in a deep crisis of legitimacy for the U.S. government.

Like Ellul, the great French writer Albert Camus recognized fascism as a new force of modernism. Camus, too, served in the French Resistance. Be careful, he warned: “When a democracy is sick, fascism comes to its bedside, but it is not to inquire about its health.”