One of our Balloon Juice peeps posted a link to this in the comments on Friday or Saturday, but I think it deserves a wider audience. (If that person was you, chime in with a comment and I will credit you.) h/t RevRick, Elizabelle and possibly more!
I’m not sure what I can add to this – it was written nearly 30 years ago, but if someone can read this and NOT recognize exactly what we have been seeing today, then they haven’t been paying attention.
How do we use this information to fight back against this dangerous trend?
This is from a renowned essay authored by the Italian philosopher, novelist, and semiotician Umberto Eco. First published in 1995, this influential essay provides a comprehensive analysis of fascism, the definition of fascism, and discussing its fundamental characteristics and traits. Drawing on Eco’s personal experiences growing up in Mussolini’s Italy and his extensive research on fascist movements, the essay offers valuable insights into the nature of fascism and its manifestations.
Summary
“Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt” delves into the core characteristics of fascism. Eco outlines fourteen key elements or traits, which he refers to as “ways,” that commonly appear in fascist movements. While not all these traits are present in every fascist movement, together they create a recognizable pattern. The essay is structured around these fourteen ways, providing an in-depth exploration of fascism as a multifaceted and adaptable ideology.[1] He argues that it is not possible to organise these into a coherent system, but that “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it”. He uses the term “ur-fascism” as a generic description of different historical forms of fascism. The fourteen properties are as follows:
- “The cult of tradition“, characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.
- “The rejection of modernism“, which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.
- “The cult of action for action’s sake“, which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.
- “Disagreement is treason” – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.
- “Fear of difference“, which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.
- “Appeal to a frustrated middle class“, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.
- “Obsession with a plot” and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson‘s book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.
- Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak“. On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
- “Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” because “life is permanent warfare” – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.
- “Contempt for the weak“, which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.
- “Everybody is educated to become a hero“, which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, “[t]he Ur-Fascist herois impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.”
- “Machismo“, which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold “both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality”.
- “Selective populism” – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of “no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people”.
- “Newspeak” – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.
How do we use this information to fight back against this dangerous trend?
Baud
We can begin by try to avoid these things in our own behavior.
RevRick
I first mentioned Eco’s essay and another commenter actually looked up the reference and posted this list. The fact that he wrote this in 1995 when fascism seemed to be just a memory means he understood it wasn’t dead, just hibernating. The Soviet Union and its empire had collapsed. Radical Islam was only beginning to emerge. Democracy seemed to be on solid footing.
RevRick
@Baud: And calling attention to it when it clearly becomes a pattern in the public sphere.
TBone
@RevRick: loudly!
https://youtu.be/ZyIG0vWGkRc
TBone
I resist IRL every chance I get with mockery, and we need to use art, music, literature, media, etc. – every tool at our disposal. Bread AND roses.
jimmiraybob
A few additional sources regarding historical Fascism in America circa 1930s:
PBS American Experience: NAZI Town, USA. I believe that it will air for the first time this tuesday.
Rachel Maddow’s Ultra podcast (easy to find).
Rachel Maddow’s book expanding on Ultra, Prequel.
JPL
@Baud: Thank you for saying that. Revenge isn’t that sweet.
Frank Wilhoit
“…How do we use this information to fight back against this dangerous trend?”
We don’t, because Eco was fighting the last war. He was writing in a different time and place, and most of what he says was recycled from observations that were even older. Class doesn’t work the same way here as it does in Europe, and in neither place does it work today the same way it did a hundred years ago.
For the political theorists that Eco is quoting, fascism and peasant politics were two completely different things. There were peasant parties in inter-war Europe, and some of them even briefly gained power, and where they did, they made Mussolini’s Fascisti look like choirboys. But they never got the academic mindshare.
Historically, American politics is peasant politics. It was based entirely upon the low-population-density mindset, which was given structural privilege by the 1787 Constitution. Today, however, it is based upon devolution, which has the same manifestations, but which is society-wide and cannot be combatted by tilting the playing field towards high population density. Eco’s fascism was mirror-Communism, an essentially urban movement. The struggle between them played out on urban battlefields. American intervention in World War II did not resolve that conflict, or even end it, but froze it, inevitably to thaw after a human lifespan (~75 years). That is where they are today.
It is not where we are or were. Where we are is that education was turned off at the switch, ca. 1960, and now nearly everyone who was ever taught anything has died and the rest soon will. Eco’s criteria bear only a coincidental resemblance to our environment: all decay looks much alike, though it came from different causes.
NotMax
Feel someone ought to mention Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here from 1935. Or even, peripherally, Jack London’s The Iron Heel from 1908.
Marmot
Look up palingenetic ultranationalism. (It’s a lot like “Make America…”) That’s the basic starting point for all the rest.
Villago Delenda Est
Point 2 encapsulates the working philosophy of the Federalist Society.
RevRick
@NotMax: If we’re honest, we need to look at Jim Crow as a fascist regime. After all, Hitler sent a lawyer to Arkansas to investigate how the South did it legally.
JPL
@Frank Wilhoit: Because trump wants revenge, the magas think he speaks like them.. Where did that come from? It’s hard for me to believe that 30 to 40 percent of the country wants their children growning up to hate.
Mike in NC
@jimmiraybob: I got a gift certificate for a local book store from a neighbor for Christmas and was pleased that the shop had a copy of Prequel for sale. Haven’t started it yet.
NotMax
Couple of quotes.
“The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.”
— Adolf Hitler
.
“The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.”
— William Hazlitt
.
Leto
Another component of American fascism: The NRA wants your kid to love guns: programs promote 2nd Amendment absolutism to Kindergarteners on up
Adjacent component: Revealed: far-right figures try to create Christian nationalist ‘haven’ in Kentucky Venture fund and real estate startup linked to far-right groups promote residential development as community for rightwingers
@jimmiraybob: here’s a few more:
Kathleen Belew: Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
Matthew Dallek: Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right
Timothy Egan: A Fever in the Heartland: THE KU KLUX KLAN’S PLOT TO TAKE OVER AMERICA, AND THE WOMAN WHO STOPPED THEM
Odie Hugh Manatee
Most of these ‘manly men’ (as I call them) who love them some fascism really do not want to sacrifice their lives to make “it” happen. They make shitloads of noise about being pushed to respond in a violent manner but their real objective is to hope that their rhetoric pushes someone nuttier than they are to do violence in their stead. Then they get to sound off with:
“See! It’s not just me! That guy was so pissed off that he finally did something about it!! Just like what I was about to do! If he hadn’t done it I probably would have!!! What a patriot!!!11!!”
Thus in their mind justifying their calls for a violent response to whatever is inflaming them at that moment. The are like lemmings packed at the edge of the cliff except these lemmings are exhorting the other lemmings to jump while they stay and watch. IOW, most of them are loud mouthed whiny chickenshit bastards who would quake in fear if they tried to do the violent shit that they want done. The only value they have for the fascist movement is feeding propaganda to others to inflame the public in hopes of getting them to act on their anger.
Stop them and the fascist movement probably loses a lot of momentum. IMO it’s the mouths that feed into the fire of fascism that helps to spread it.
trollhattan
One of the best two-word descriptors of Trump I’ve seen. The nut in a nutshell.
Kathleen
Excellent post by Teri Kanefield who provides a list of books about fascism preceded by a brief comparison between Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump. Some of the books consider slavery and Jim Crow as the foundations for fascism in America:
https://terikanefield.com/making-sense-of-it-all-a-journey-through-books-part-
Villago Delenda Est
More on point 2: Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.
This is an inherent contradiction of one of the tenets of fascism, that a rural past is superior to an industrial present, BUT fascists are often friends of the machine because the machine amplifies power.
zhena gogolia
I was glad to see Haley highlighting his raving about her not calling out the troops on Jan. 6. But of course she had to liken it to Biden.
ETA: Plus she referred to it as a “riot.”
chrome agnomen
@JPL: that hate was good enough for me, so by god it’s good enough for my kids!
FelonyGovt
One complication that previous anti-fascists did not have to deal with is the Internet and social media. How do we counter the firehose of conspiracy theories, overwrought and irrational fear, misinformation and other assorted bullshit?
Villago Delenda Est
@Kathleen: The mentality of the slave patrol permeates our law enforcement culture, to such an extent that even African-American cops buy into it.
StringOnAStick
@Villago Delenda Est: Cop culture is so much about being part of a “brotherhood”. That’s where the conforming to the slave catcher ethos comes into to play, no matter your ethnicity.
Odie Hugh Manatee
My wife is upstairs practicing her violin and is playing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”. An appropriate song for this thread…lol!
HinTN
@FelonyGovt: With critical thinking. Sadly that emphasizes @Frank Wilhoit:’s point,
Frank Wilhoit
@JPL:
Believe it. And it is more than 30 or 40%.
StringOnAStick
@FelonyGovt: The fascists had their newspapers, and the opposition had theirs, at least until the fascists took over and made any but theirs illegal. We aren’t illegal yet, and that’s why Bitecofer talks about winning the meme war right now.
wjca
And here I had the impression that we here were short on commenters who long for the perfect world of the 1950s….
ColoradoGuy
I dunno. Was it me?
trollhattan
Wowzers, just rained half an inch in half an hour. Man the oars!
zhena gogolia
@wjca: Yes, I find that statement rather strange.
evodevo
@Leto: LOL looks like the counties the Libertarian/Winger paradise is located in don’t have zoning or anything else. Wonder where the water supply is coming from …
Oh, and I lost track…whatever happened to that armed winger enclave they were so enthused about in Idaho?
Betty
I am surprised no one has yet mentioned Ruth Ben-Ghiat and her book Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed and How They Fall. She is a noted scholar on fascism.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@trollhattan:
We did that here the other day but in six minutes. The street looked like a river.
trollhattan
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Yikes!
Glad leaf season is behind us because our century-old drains can’t handle both them and a gullywasher.
Next up: this kinda tropical deluge moves on and hits the mountain snowpack.
Kathleen
@Betty: She’s on Teri Kanefield’s list (link at Comment 19)
RevRick
@StringOnAStick: Wwhenever a MAGA type throws a Meme at me on X, my usual response is to say how typical and pathetic it is.
Baud
@evodevo:
Wasn’t there also supposed to be a ship for them to live on?
Elizabelle
Rev Rick brought up Umberto Eco, and I looked it up and shared the links and points, because had not before heard of Eco’s essay. Applause to RR for getting this a wider audience.
Good evening, jackals. Tipping a glass of dry Italian white to the late Professor Eco.
Leto
@Betty: it’s part of the collection of books recommended in the link by Kathleen at #19.
@evodevo: or how they took over the town in New Hampshire, which subsequently devolved into being swamped by uncollected trash, and then the bears who were enticed by all the trash.
A parallel to that article was an article I read recently about ultra-nationalists in Germany buying up unused properties and converting them into recruitment centers, as well as trying to take over towns. Pretty sure it was in The Guardian, but it talked about how local residents were 1) warned by government authorities about it and 2) how the locals started to push back against those shit-heels. As we know, this is a world wide problem that requires a collective global pushback. Ofc pushback is too kind a word, but yeah.
WaterGirl
@Leto:
If I read that, I think I will feel the need to throw up. Is that about right?
WaterGirl
@Leto:
I haven’t clicked the link yet – eating as I type – but I am curious – will we have ever heard of this woman who stopped them?
evodevo
@Baud: No, this was some gated/walled 2A community that was supposed to be self-sufficient and they were selling lots somewhere in Idaho and bragging about how it was whites only or whatever. I lost track of what happened to it and have forgotten what they named it…can’t find anything on Google…
Enhanced Voting Techniques
This isn’t quite one for one between the Blackshits and the MAGA hats. The Blackshirts had a cult of heroic sacrifice as opposed to the MAGA hats were the military are suckers.
Hitler, Mussolini and Franco were all decorated combat vets, Trump is a draft dodger who appeared on WWE. Hitler was literally leading his coup attempt from the front when the police opened fired, Trump hid in the White House during his.
MAGA hats are more like the Hollywood version of Fascism rather than the real thing. In a way I think this makes the MAGA hats more dangerous because they will do absurdly destructive and dumb things because it looks awesome, rather than part of some plan.
Jay
@evodevo:
If you are talking about Shaun Winkler and his Ayrian Nations compound, he got foreclosed out for not paying the mortgage, clearcutting the property and violating local ordinances.
BlueGuitarist
@Frank Wilhoit:
I’m inarticulate and regret not being able to cogently relate Wallace Stevens “13 ways of looking at a blackbird” to “14… blackshirt,”
but what do you mean
WaterGirl
@trollhattan: Yes! Nearly everything on that list jumped out at me, but that one really jumped out at me.
Harrison Wesley
@Leto: And leave us not forget how the tough-minded libertarian realists got fleeced over the “Galt’s Gulch” colony in Chile. Although, in fairness, the fleecers also screwed the local community there.
evodevo
@Jay: Yeah…I bet that was it…it was several years ago I read about it…THX for the info…glad the project got deep-sixed.
BlueGuitarist
@Elizabelle:
@RevRick:
thank you and WaterGirl for raising this!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@WaterGirl: The Klan Granddragon raped a young white woman on a train and she died from her injuries, the resulting scandal broke the ’20s Klan’s political power.
WaterGirl
@Villago Delenda Est: You say slave patrol, and I instantly think of tracking women who try to cross state lines and fucking nurses reporting a woman who has lost her baby.
If it’s not legal to flush or bury the remains of your miscarriage, they should fucking tell you that when they tell you to go home or sit in your car and hope you don’t bleed out.
WaterGirl
@HinTN: That is a gross exaggeration. Maybe in TX and other deep red states, but not everywhere.
Peke Daddy
@Odie Hugh Manatee: A stochastic terrorist machine. It’s the random nature of it that keeps people on their heels.
TBone
@Odie Hugh Manatee: this is why I mock them.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/far-right-nazis-proud-boys-humor-laughtivism.html
WaterGirl
@ColoradoGuy: Were you one of the people who linked to it, or brought it up? If so I will gladly add you along with RevRick.
The reference to “Friday or Saturday” was actually last week, which is when I put this post together. Someone else was making a post in the backroom and I didn’t want them to hold off on account of me, so I just picked a random date and time about a week later and pressed schedule, so the wouldn’t worry about it.
Big surprise to me when I opened BJ just now and saw my post. In my defense, I’ve been busy. :-)
WaterGirl
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: MAGAts are lemmings willingly marching into the sea.
BlueGuitarist
WG:
is an excellent question and deserves better answers than i can give.
We can use that list to label fascism as fascism.
WaterGirl
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was not expecting that!
It is true that sometimes the tide turns on something entirely random, unexpected, and totally unpredictable.
WaterGirl
@BlueGuitarist:
Maybe that is the first step.
Villago Delenda Est
@WaterGirl: That would be too humane. Too “woke”.
Matt McIrvin
@Frank Wilhoit:
If that’s true, then the only non-fascists should be people 70 and older and the youth should be the worst of all, which is not what I’m seeing.
Villago Delenda Est
@Matt McIrvin: Indeed. A lot of young people (and I mean those under thirty, the trustable ones) are very well aware of the dangers and are mobilizing to face them.
gene108
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
The Blackshirts (and every political movement in Europe, at the time) had a fuck ton of disaffected traumatized 20-something men, who had recently been involved in WW1. They were battle hardened and willing to fight. They wanted camaraderie and a purpose, and the right-wing and left-wing political parties of the era looked to recruit them.
That is a big difference between the scattered political violence in Europe, in the 1920’s and 1930’s, versus the fascist curious in the USA in 2024.
It’s imperfect to draw parallels across 100 years and different continents, but whatever shape fascism is taking here today will look different than in Europe in the 1920’s. I think it’ll be a gentler form of fascism where the levers of power are used to legally cement a Republican majority, like they’ve done in some states, with courts also on their side.
The real risk of Republican rule is they both want the USA to be the #1 nation in the world, with all the deference it entails, without doing the actual work required to get other countries to follow the USA’s lead.
The end result will be a dimished USA. Republicans can either accept their mistakes and change, or look for internal enemies to blame. I’m betting on the latter.
Matt McIrvin
@Villago Delenda Est: It’s like the claim that the problem is that we got rid of civics education. The people who are old enough to have taken a class called Civics in school… are core Trump voters.
(Incidentally, I am one of those people, though unlike most of my generation I’m not a reactionary)
TBone
“…alt-right rallies have six core goals: legitimize their views, strengthen their self-image as part of the downtrodden, unite their squabbling factions, attract new people to the movement, control media coverage, and feel powerful and heroic.
In her piece, she explains that aggressively counterprotesting the alt-right is exactly what they want. It allows them to build on the narrative of themselves as victims. In fact, she points out that when antifa protesters angrily respond, it helps alt-right groups accomplish all of the above goals. Since Charlottesville, examples of far-right violence have only been on the rise.
This means that if we want to meaningfully counter the far right, we need to choose a tactic different than anger. In our new study, Pranksters vs. Autocrats: Why Dilemma Actions Advance Democracy, we came up with a surprising answer: The best counter to the aggressive and delusional anger of the right is creative, playful, often humorous counterprotests. Strange as it may seem, there is a lot of evidence that proves that the lighthearted, fun-loving, ironic challenges to Nazis are more effective than anger.
One especially strong example of effective laughtivism is the case of clowns versus Nazis.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/far-right-nazis-proud-boys-humor-laughtivism.html
BlueGuitarist
5 Fear of Difference (xenophobia, anti-immigrant)
7 obsession with a plot (conspiracy theories) are in addition to fascist typical of the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s, which had taken over the Republican Party.
Matt McIrvin
I’ve thought about this essay for a long time and I think one lesson we need to take away from it is not to become this kind of fascist in the course of fighting the MAGA types. The temptation to start aping a “left” version of this ideology to fight our internal war is powerful–I feel it myself.
sab
Heartening, today I went to the grocery, and standing outside was a young man with a petition for another Ohio constitutional amendment to prevent gerrymandering. This was the League of Women Voters approved one that calls for a redistricting commission to keep the legislature out of it.
Hopefully it will be on the ballot come November.
Another Scott
@Leto:
Posted 6 hours ago – DW.com – Germany: Marches against the far-right draw over 200,000
Good, good.
Cheers,
Scott.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Peke Daddy:
Yup. One good thing we can do to fight it is to (see below!)
@TBone:
Exactly. Point at them and laugh at the crazy shit they say. Shoot down their crazy shit. NAFO is a perfect example of how to mock the bastards and the shit they say. Ruzzians absolutely hate the people behind NAFO because they have been effective in countering Ruzzia’s propaganda. Mocking them hurts them.
I’ve been doing the same thing locally and it pisses of a few people because I laugh at and point out the bullshit arguments that they use to feed their anger. Fuck’em, as an honored member here was fond of saying.
WaterGirl
@BlueGuitarist: You are always so good with pattern recognition!
Matt McIrvin
@gene108: Tim McVeigh was a Desert Storm veteran, if I recall correctly. He was a fascist and racist before he joined the Army, but they gave him skills. We don’t have as many as in interwar Germany but we’ve got them.
A lot of these guys, though, they have the whole heroic sacrifice cult in their bones but it’s all fantasy–Call of Duty and action movies. They’ve never been within ten miles of the opportunity, any more than I have.
Jay
@TBone:
Sadly, both need to be used. Multiple lines of defence.
Here, the first line in counter protests are the clowns, japers and merry people and the Grannies.
The second line, behind which the above group retreats when the Facists and Cops riot is the Moms, Dads and Normies.
The third line of defence are the Spartacists, (disiplined) and the Anarchists, (loose cannons).
The fourth. line of defence are the lawyers and other activists, “burning down” their clubhouses so that they can’t organize in meetings or online.
RevRick
@Elizabelle: Thank you for the shout out. And for expanding my original comment.
Miss Bianca
@TBone: Good article! Reminds me of the anti-anti-abortion rallies we used to have in Chicago back in the day, when I was a member of the Chicago Ladies Against Women (*CLAW*!!) and we used to team up with the Radical Fairies to mock the shit out of the antis while the escorts were helping women get into the clinics. Good times, good times…
WaterGirl
@TBone: I was not aware of most of that. Really interesting!
RevRick
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: At the small working class church I served in Western Pennsylvania ( then German Evangelical and Reformed), I was told of an incident that occurred in the late 20s where several Klansmen showed up in full regalia at a worship service, sat up front, stayed a few minutes, then left.
Miss Bianca
@BlueGuitarist: Actually, I believe it was the other way around – first came the Know-Nothings, who were then absorbed by the new Republican Party.
Now, fast forward to modern times and yeah…the Republicans have absorbed plenty of modern Know-Nothings.
TBone
@Odie Hugh Manatee: it’s why I own a 7′ tall inflatable, glow in the dark Gritty. The alt right neighbors don’t even know what to say.
gene108
@Matt McIrvin:
It’s a big difference between now and then.
I still think Americans are so used to the general structure of a democratic society that a full fascist takeover would be hard. It’d be like the pre-1964 Civil Rights era, where in groups got their issues addressed and out groups were largely ignored, at best.
I think the real wildcard is if Trump gets re-elected and invokes the Insurrection Act and orders the military to fire on anti-Trump protests, or has the FBI restart COINTELPRO and nab suspected “enemies” to black sites. I don’t think the typical Republican politician, outside of Trump, Stephen Miller, and a few others would go that far, but once they do the rest of the Republicans will fall in line.
TBone
@Jay: excellent point.
TBone
@Miss Bianca: nice to meet ya!
bjacques
Come to think of it, MAGA does seem to be very American in that its biggest motivators are the belief in a rigid hierarchy and the corollary that status in it is zero-sum, the usual bigotry (which predates fascism by millennia) and not much else.
If “economic anxiety” (point #6) is a factor, it doesn’t seem to be about worries of being held back by those below—being able to buy guns, oversized pickup trucks, powerboats and time at rallies—so much as anger at being surpassed by their presumed inferiors. The petit-bourgeoisie were very well represented in the thousand or so January 6 arrestees, as in the NAZI Party. Most MAGA financial ills seem to be self-inflicted—skipping child support or believing the laws of the market don’t apply to them.
In Europe, the economic anxiety is more real, thanks to permanent austerity ordained by the Troika and duly imposed locally, the same structural labor shortages as in the US, and a chronic housing shortage going back decades. Those weren’t caused by refugees and wouldn’t be solved by mass deportations tomorrow.
In the Netherlands, the Geert Wilders coalition that campaigned against all the above will ironically soon rule with the help of the party most responsible for much of it.
Steve Bannon’s aborted dreams of a Thelema Abbey and training school for fascists years ago would have been a waste of time anyway because the AfD, National Rally, the PVV, etc. don’t need any of that stuff to get votes. Western Europeans are just in an ugly mood, and “Screw the current government, things were better before” seems more than sufficient as a rallying cry. In NL, if fascist intellectual wankery counted for anything, the spectacularly lazy Thierry Baudet would have done a lot better.
BlueGuitarist
@Miss Bianca:
you’re right!
i was trying to say that *now* the know nothings have taken over the R party.
@Miss Bianca:
BlueGuitarist
@sab:
kudos to you, admire you doing the work!
TBone
@WaterGirl: education is our best defense. My step Dad had WWII Nazi history books all over the house, especially in the bathrooms. I grew up with this stuff (never knowing until late in life that bio dad was Jewish). My parents took us to Germany, I’ve ridden (rode) Hitler’s elevator up to the Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden. He also put headphones on me and let me have the run of his 8 tracks he brought home from Nam in 2 suitcases. Start ’em young.
Bill Arnold
@WaterGirl:
I’m just glad it’s getting attention again. It’s been linked multiple times in comment sections here over the years.
Here’s a couple:
UR-FASCISM (Umberto Eco, PDF, The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995)
Ur-Fascism (Umberto Eco, 1995, html)
As various people have said, The Now in the USA is a different place; notably, communications patterns have been changed a lot, e.g. with much more one-to-several communication at long geographical distances. And the sophistication of technologies (methods) for psychological manipulation has increased considerably. (E.g. in the civilian space, marketing can be considered a slow arms race against consumers.)
Ohio Mom
@Matt McIrvin: I roll my eyes every time I read a complaint that “they don’t teach civics anymore.”
When Ohio Son was in public school (he finished his senior year in 2016), civics was woven throughout the social studies curriculum in all the grades, and the high school requirements included a semester on American government.
Now the official Ohio standards result in a rather right-wing version of civics (and economics) but that’s a different complaint.
m.j.
#15 “You can’t fix stupid.”
These people want to hate. Give them something to hate. Russia is not our friend and anyone who supports Russia is a traitor.
TBone
@Bill Arnold: Quanon is marketing psy op.
Citizen Alan
@JPL: I can believe that. It was not 2 years ago that the guy I consider the closest thing i’ve ever had to a little brother tearfully came out to me as bisexual. He had buried those feelings until he reached the age of forty five after his stepfather drunkenly told him at the age of sixteen “I guess I can live with it if you bring home a black girl, but if you ever bring home a boy, I’ll kill you both.”
Matt McIrvin
@Jay: It sure seems like the US a major, major problem is to keep the various factions on the Good Guys side from mostly attacking each other.
TBone
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jj-PaqFrBc
Matt McIrvin
@Ohio Mom: That’s the thing–in my experience the civics education of yore always included a heavy dose of propagandizing about why our system was the best of all possible systems and expression of the prescient wisdom of the Founding Fathers. Whereas really understanding how it works presumably entails knowing about the bugs.
My daughter didn’t have a Civics or Government class identified as such but her education has been very history-centric for a variety of reasons. In the fall 2020 semester, she took a class called “Election Madness” that was supposed to be mostly a historical survey of pivotal or messed-up elections in American history, with occasional reference to current events. But events overtook it and it ended up just about analyzing one of the most amazingly fucked-up election situations in history as it happened in real time. I think the semester ended just before the January 6th riot though.
Jay
@Matt McIrvin:
Been attacked by cops, been attacked by Nazi’s,
Never been attacked by a Singing Granny or even an anarchist.
Citizen Alan
@TBone: That reminds me of the single best counter protest. I ever saw to a white power rally: One guy following along with them with a sousaphone playing Baby Elephant March and similar silly-sounding tunes in time with their steps.
Dan B
@TBone: Great article. I was around for the Yippies. Their tactics attracted lots of young people. The same was / is true of Dykes on Bikes and drag queens at pride parades. It’s ni wonder the Christianists want to ban Drag Queen Story Hour. It’s fun! It also demonstrates how dismal Christianists are.
Sister Golden Bear
@JPL: Seemingly at least 27%? do.
TBone
@Dan B: exactly! People tend to dismiss our superpower, underestimating the power of mockery, then they find out.
Dan B
@Miss Bianca: Reminds me of WITCH, the Women’s International Conspiracy from Hell with their cauldron and witches outfits. People always took their literature.
Disarm and then disable.
Dan B
@Jay: Very good observation of successful protests.
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: Where was this? I’m wondering if I know that guy.
Regnad Kcin
can i also recommend Karl Popper’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_Its_Enemies
Sasha
I’ve referenced this essay for a number of years now.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Elizabelle: wow. ecco was a big deal back in the day. did you never see/read the name of the rose?
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Citizen Alan: oh. that.. that’s horrible. i’m glad he felt comfortable enough to tell you. you are a good friend.
Uncle Cosmo
@TBone: Re “laughtivism:” I’ve posted recollections of the following story here once or twice, but IMO it bears repeating. I owe it to the late Dr William McClain at Johns Hopkins, my prof for “German Literature from 1914 to the Present” ca. 1970. Dr McClain was lecturing us on why there was no German literature worth mentioning during the Third Reich (1933-45) and he recounted the following story:
Dr McClain noted that it had taken the combined armed forces of most of the industrial world nearly 6 years to defeat the Nazis on the battlefield, but the German people beat them in a couple of weeks – by laughing at them. For the one thing that authoritarian types cannot stand is to be laughed at.
** NB The idea was not original to the Nazis: After the Ausgleich of 1867 gave them control of their half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Magyars aggressively purged foreign loanwords from their language, making non-Indo-European magyarul even less comprehensible to the outside world…
TBone
@Uncle Cosmo: that’s fucking awesome. I took German language courses from junior high through college but never had a teacher that inspiring. Well, maybe one. She made us learn 99 Luftballons and sing it in class in high school. Great story!
TBone
@Citizen Alan: 😍
Sasha
Don’t forget this banger observation Eco made regarding Machismo: “Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons — doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.”
Uncle Cosmo
@TBone: Everything we read for that course was in English translation. I was in my second year of German at The Hop & would’ve stood no chance of reading them auf deutsch. And couldn’t get more than a couple hundred pages into The Magic Mountain in either tongue. (FTR I tried again just last year with similar results.)
Actually there was one overlap – we were reading Dürrenmatt’s The Visit in the lit course while I was struggling through Der Besuch der Alten Dame in Kraut 2. Jahr.
ETA: Dr McClain came to a sad end some years ago – he had left his home to walk over to the JHU Homewood campus when a mugger came down the street, snatched at his briefcase and ripped it away while pushing him down. He fell back onto the cement porch, fractured his skull and died a few days later. Don’t think they ever caught the bastard.
NotMax
@Sasha
Ersatz Phallus added to list of potential band names.
:)
Carlo Graziani
Eh. In my opinion there’s both too much and too little here, if we really want to use this essay to understand American Trumpism.
Keep in mind that the term “Fascism” has a very specific historical and political freight in Italy. Fascist movements were legally banned after the war, and the term was used by Italians to connote very Italian political circumstances, and as a cudgel against political opponents by left-wing politicians and intellectuals during the Cold War. When Eco wrote that essay, Silvio Berlusconi was ascendant, and it seemed important to the appalled opposition to tar him with the Fascist label. This polemic was clearly a strenuous effort in that vein, but in my view it threw way too much into the “Fascist” category to constitute a real analysis.
For example: (2) “The rejection of modernism” describes Islamism more accurately than any 20th-Century European Fascism, all of which claimed to be superior takes on modernity than what was on offer in democracies. (4) “Disagreement is treason,” (7) “Obsession with plot”, (9) “Life is permanent warfare,” and (14) “Newspeak” are all at least as characteristic of Marxism-Leninism as they are of Fascism—and any scheme that appears to assimilate those two movements is analytically useless.
I would say that if one is looking for a classic essay that illustrates the historical continuities leading to Trumpism in a strictly US-relevant context, it is hard to do better than Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which traces those hair-raising continuities from the pre-Jacksonian era to the mid-20th Century in a way that produces eerily sharp recognition of modern MAGA..
TBone
@Uncle Cosmo: God damn it.
TBone
@Carlo Graziani: I had a tab open to that article for like two years. But I think all of this stuff is related – there is an ongoing global struggle against authoritariianism, not solely against maga.
jimmiraybob
@Carlo Graziani:
Believe it or not the following started out as a couple of quick comments. Oh well, the thread’s on life support now so what the hell.
Eco is a good enough start but there’s been considerable academic development of how we can understand Fascism. Different checklists have been developed. Not all boxes need to be checked. Every version is somewhat different and takes on unique characteristics dependent on the national soil in which it’s grown. Hitler’s fascism borrowed from American precedent (e.g., Jim Crow and anti-Semitism).
And Richard Hofstadter seems a necessary start to understand the anti-intellectual movement and the authoritarian leader-follower relationship (it seems his work was popular on the intertubes some time ago).
There are, however, certain defining characteristics of fascism that seem to appear in all varieties but the central focus is the strong state and single party rule built around the strong leader.
Other telltale characteristics include; calls for a return to mythic traditions long buried in the past, defining a singular “in” group that defines the “other,” violent rhetoric* and actions against the “others,” blood purity, reverence for women’s place in the home and the production of new acceptable national stock for the party/state, a rebuff of academic study that goes against the state (e.g., enforcement by book bans and promotion of state authorized history), and profound reliance on a coordinated state-controlled propaganda machine (e.g., right-wing media – hello Fox News and friends), etc.
[*eliminationist calls against LGBTQ+ enemies of the state, eliminationist calls against “Communist” enemies of the state, eliminationist calls against democratic/liberal enemies of the state, eliminationist calls against foreign enemies of the state, etc.]
Today it is openly expressed in code language: anti-DEI, anti “woke,” “southern border.”
Another characteristic is the urge to round up the enemies of the state and herd them to camps for “processing” (what is it that Trump’s been promoting these days?).
And, if you look at the Nazi regime in Germany, the Fascist regime in Italy, the whatever (still debated) regime in Franco’s Spain, they all codify the central party ideology in the laws, thus solidifying ideology-based law used to strengthen the state’s power over the people.
Fascism is notoriously regressive and retribution against its enemies can be fierce and deadly.
Gee, all this sounds so familiar when considering a certain American political party and its unchallenged leader. Yes, “fascism” should not be used carelessly. But then again, if people are too shy or fearful to call out fascistic trends, when they are happening all around them, then we and our traditional liberal constitutional-democratic republic are doomed.
I’ll repost these sources for perspective on an earlier American brush with 20th century European fascism:
PBS American Experience: NAZI Town, USA. I believe that it will air for the first time this Tuesday.
Rachel Maddow’s Ultra podcast (easy to find).
Rachel Maddow’s book expanding on Ultra, Prequel.
For more recent scholarly work on authoritarianism/fascism:
Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017)
Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018)
Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020)
Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2021)
With all of this being said, there will be a test in November. Hopefully we’ve all studied the materials.
cmorenc
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
You said Hitler led his coup attempt from the front while Trump hid in the White House – except recall that Trump wanted to march with the mob he had assembled to the Capitol, but was restrained from doing so by Secret Service and advisors, over Trump’s angry objection.
It is an interesting question how events might have turned out differently had Trump carried through on his insistence and personally, physically led the mob to the Capitol grounds? Would the result have made it more likely for the mob to have succeeded, or would it have failed and undone him on the spot with even a sufficient number of gop congresscritters? Would his presence have tempered the mob from actual physical attack? Or would he have egged on an even more violent attack than unfolded?
Tempting to conjecture that Trump was too chicken-shit to actually go with the mob, hence let himself be restrained from actually going with them – but OTOH when has Trump actually shown restraint in words and actions when surrounded by an eagerly supportive MAGA mob to do the actual ugly physical confrontation (rather than himself)?