What defines fascism, and could Trump’s America fit the description?: Ivo Vegter (Part 1)
Key topics:
Trump and fascism debated for policies and political actions.
Godwin’s Law limits Nazi comparisons but may block historical warnings.
Fascism defined by loyalty, action, and “mobilising passions,” not ideology.
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By Ivo Vegter*
Supporters of Donald Trump are quick to disavow the label “fascist”, which really is no surprise. It is damning, and is often used gratuitously.
Many political scientists, political analysts, journalists, and columnists, have used the term “fascism” to describe the policies and actions of the administration of US president Donald Trump.
Like “Nazi”, the label is easy to bat away as a hysterical exaggeration. After all, systematically murdering 12 million people in cold blood is a pretty high standard to meet (and a standard only communist dictators have any hope of exceeding).
Likewise, maximal fascism, which is best represented by Benito Mussolini’s pre-war Italy, sets a high bar. (By “war”, here and elsewhere, I mean to refer to World War II.)
To someone on the “radical left”, the argument goes (as if that isn’t an equally exaggerated and condemnatory label), anything to the right of Mao will appear “fascist”.
“Anyone you disagree with is fascist,” they say, as they do with any other illiberal label, like racist, religious fundamentalist, socialist, or extremist (which raises the question of why they disagree).
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“What has Trump actually done that is fascist?” ask his supporters, feigning innocence, and pointing to his electoral victory in 2024. “He’s just doing what the majority of the people elected him to do.”
Godwin’s Law
In the online community of the 1990s, before “memes” were a household term, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation named Mike Godwin became concerned that the Holocaust was being trivialised by what he called “the Nazi-comparison meme”.
To combat gratuitous Nazi analogies, he created a “counter-meme” by observing: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
He seeded it to various newsgroups and discussion forums, calling it Godwin’s Law.
It spread, as intended, and “mutated like a meme,” he said. It generated corollaries and variants.
It became tradition in the online debates of Usenet, the Well, listservs, and blogs, to observe that once a Nazi analogy was made, the usefulness of a conversation was over. Soon it became customary to deem the person making the analogy to have lost the argument (although this led to the absurd consequence that sometimes actual Nazis “won” the debate).
An empirical study of 199 million reddit posts concluded that Godwin’s reduction ad Hitlerum “law” is not valid, since the longer a conversation continues, the less likely it is to reach Nazi analogies. Moreover, when Hitler or the Nazis do get mentioned, the length of the conversation actually increases.
Aside from the valid concern that Nazi analogies trivialise what really were grave historical events, it was also aimed more at the audience, since they can hardly be expected to convince one’s debate opponents.
If such an analogy stuck, it would make the political programme to which it is applied entirely indefensible. Few debate opponents would calmly accept being compared to a Nazi and graciously concede defeat.
Barring fascism from civil discourse
Yet the difficulty with the conversation-stopping tradition of Godwin’s Law – besides handing spurious debate “victories” to actual Nazis and fascists – is that it bars an extremely consequential period of modern history from civil discourse. It prevents us from raising the alarm about events, statements or policies that in some way mirror the rise of fascism.
As Theodor Reik, a Jewish psychoanalyst who fled Nazism in Germany wrote three decades later: “It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.”
Especially now that the majority of people alive today have no experience of genuine fascism, and therefore might not fear it as much as they ought to, avoiding such labels for the sake of propriety seems like an unwise approach to the battle of ideas.
What is fascism?
I intend to focus on fascism, in part because it is a more difficult label to deal with than Nazism.
There isn’t really a good definition of what fascism is. It is easy to define liberalism (both classical and modern), conservatism, socialism, nationalism and totalitarianism.
A key feature of fascism, however, is to reject intellectualism and dogma in favour of loyalty to a leader who is portrayed as a divinely ordained representation of the popular will.
Fascism is more of a movement than an ideology. It doesn’t have principles. It is a description of how a fascist leader attains and exerts power, and how their followers triumph over their political enemies. Fascism is about actions, not ideas.
Political scientist and historian Robert Paxton is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on fascism. In 2004, he literally wrote the book on it:The Anatomy of Fascism (review).
In it, he explains: “Fascism in power is a compound, a powerful amalgam of different but marriageable conservative, national-socialist and radical Right ingredients, bonded together by common enemies and common passions for a regenerated, energised, and purified nation at whatever cost to free institutions and the rule of law. The precise proportions of the mixture are the result of processes: choices, alliances, compromises, rivalries. Fascism in action looks much more like a network of relationships than a fixed essence.”
A definition of sorts
Having said that, he did – after spending seven chapters analysing how fascist movements originate, claim power, exercise power, and ultimately fall – venture a definition of sorts. He cautioned, however, that “it encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person”.
“Fascism may be defined,” he wrote, “as a form of political behaviour 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 restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Ur-Fascism
Umberto Eco was a prodigiously learned Italian philosopher, semiotician and author who was raised Fascist (the capitalised term denotes Italian Fascism, specifically). He joined the partisan resistance during the war despite being very young: he was 11 when Mussolini fell, and 13 when the war ended, yet old enough to grasp the import of these events.
In a seminal essay entitled Ur-Fascism, written for the New Yorker in 1995, Eco wrote: “Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy. … Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric. …fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.”
Fascism was a reactionary system, born of the view that classical liberalism (as in individual liberty and laissez-faire economics, rather than the modern American identification with the left) was ill-suited to the muscular rule required to fight wars, reverse economic hardship, ensure moral regeneration, and restore a lost Golden Age.
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Eco made a list of characteristics of what he called Ur-Fascism (the Platonic ideal of fascism, so to speak, or the model from which all forms of fascism derive). He noted, however, that none of these features are essential, and some of them are contradictory. Just one needs to be present for a system that is recognisably fascist to coagulate around it.
Fourteen features
Eco lists fourteen features of Ur-Fascism. Summarised, they are:
A cult of traditionalism, cobbled together from a variety of myths, revelations and cultural habits.
A rejection of modernism, even while appearing to worship industrialisation and technology as evidence of the vitality of their system. Ur-Fascism views the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason as the beginning of modern moral depravity. It can therefore be defined as irrationalism.
A cult of action for the sake of action, and action as valuable in and of itself. “Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism,” Eco wrote, “from Goering’s alleged statement (‘When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun’) to the frequent use of such expressions as ‘degenerate intellectuals,’ ‘ eggheads,’ ‘effete snobs,’ ‘universities are a nest of reds.’ The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.”
Rejection of analytical criticism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
Fear of difference. Disagreement is a sign of diversity, and Ur-Fascism seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist movement is an appeal against intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist and xenophobic by definition.
Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. One of the most typical features of fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the economic demands of lower social groups.
Obsession with conspiracies and plots. Ur-Fascism says that one’s only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. And the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot against the good citizens of the nation. Eco highlights American televangelist and politician Pat Robertson’s book, The New World Order, as a prominent instance of this obsession with plots.
The followers of Ur-Fascists must at the same time view their enemies as powerful and wealthy elites who look down on them, but also be convinced that these enemies can be conquered by the righteousness of the popular will. Thus, Fascist rhetoric casts enemies as at the same time too strong and too weak.
For Ur-Fascism, pacifism is tantamount to supporting the enemy. It does not struggle for life, but lives to struggle. Since Fascism represents a permanent struggle against enemies, there is no possibility of an eventual victory to be followed by a promised Golden Age.
Contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism thrives on a popular chauvinism, in which every citizen is better than foreigners, and every member of the movement is better than other citizens. This sense of popular elitism requires contempt for the weak, while the Fascist leader holds everyone in contempt simply because he holds power over them.
The cult of heroism. “Viva la muerte!” cried the Spanish fascists. Long live death! Everyone is educated to be heroic, and the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death as the best reward for a heroic life. “The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die,” writes Eco. “In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.”
In the absence of true war heroism, the Ur-Fascist parades a faux facade of it, as machismo. This is reflected in both disdain for and control of women, and condemnation of sexual mores other than traditional family values, such as homosexuality.
Selective populism. The Ur-Fascist leader claims to act as an expression of the “common will”. The leader rhetorically, and often practically, delegitimises democratic institutions such as parliament or the judiciary, asserting that their attempts to curb his power thwarts the will of the people. Writes Eco: “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
Newspeak. Ur-Fascism makes use of an impoverished vocabulary and an elementary syntax in order to limit critical reasoning.
“Mobilising passions”
Paxton wrote: “I believe that the ideas that underlie fascist actions are best deduced from those actions, for some of them remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language. Many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions.”
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He offers a list of what he calls “mobilising passions”:
a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;
the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;
the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;
the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.
Pointing fingers
Eco reminds us: “We must keep alert… Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.’ Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances – every day, in every part of the world.”
In part two, later this week, I propose to point some fingers.
*Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker who loves debunking myths and misconceptions, and addresses topics from the perspective of individual liberty and free markets.
This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission