by David J. Lobina
So, then, is the American politician Ron DeSantis a fascist? Is former (and maybe next) US President Donald Trump a fascist? What about the Republican Party these two politicians belong to, is it a fascist party? Are some strands within the modern British Conservative party, to move to this side of the world, a case of fascism too? And is fascism also present, to now move out of the English-speaking world, in the current governments of Italy, Hungary, and Russia or the various opposition parties in France and Spain?
These are some of the questions I have alluded to here and there since my post on the use and abuse of the term fascism in current political commentary, the first of a series of on Nationalism and Fascism. It might be a bit Procrustean to claim that all these currents (and undercurrents) encompass fascism, but this is exactly what one finds in the media, especially in the English-speaking world. In fact, there have been further cases of this sort of talk since my opening salvo, including from the very people I had singled out at the time, whilst the reaction the post received, both publicly and privately, was quite interesting in itself – trebles all around for doubling down!
So, to recap post number 1. The word “fascism” comes from the Italian fascismo, and the political phenomenon is also Italian in origin, properly starting in the 1920s. Both the word and the politics were soon adopted in other parts of Europe, and eventually elsewhere in the world, under different conditions and often becoming, naturally enough, slightly different phenomena. Thus, whilst it is customary, and correct, to consider Mussolini’s and Hitler’s regimes as fascist under a certain reading, Fascism and Nazism (in capital letters) were different in rather important respects, and plenty of scholars treat them as distinct ideological and political movements. Renzo De Felice, for instance, an early and quite influential expert in fascism, did not regard Nazism as a species of Fascism at all, and he argued this was even more the case for Franco’s regime in Spain or Salazar’s in Portugal.[i]
I’m sympathetic to De Felice’s stance, as discussed in post 1 – the philosopher in me likes to delimit and properly define terms that under close inspection turn out to be distinct concepts – but I’m also a linguist and thus sensitive to linguistic usage. The issue here is that the meaning of the English word “fascism” has widened significantly since the 1920s and this needs to be taken into account. In my original post, I did mention that the Oxford English Dictionary lists a generic connotation of fascism as an authoritarian and nationalistic system of government, and an extended (and depreciative) use as autocratic, intolerant, or oppressive, especially to enforce conformity, and this is fine as far as it goes. Maybe.
Regarding the extended use, this is more common in informal use, and God knows it is overused in social media (you would hear it all the time in the sort of demonstrations I used to go to too); I personally dislike it and see little value in using such a connotation in any context – it is simply a slur now and thus an insult, so what’s the point? I also see little value in using the generic sense to refer, say, to the current governments of Hungary and Russia – it is just that: a generic use of the word fascism to describe certain governments and politicians as authoritarian and nationalistic, with all the additional connotations the word comes with, but with none of the nuances that each case requires.
With regards to lost nuances: Trump is a demagogue and a populist, but mostly a narcissist, in effect an example of what John Keane called the new despotism in 2020, and in the context of the US, this involves a kind of top-down state capitalism; the Meloni government in Italy is heir to a post-fascist party with direct connections to Mussolini’s latter-day regime, but the current party is a different animal, in a way more nostalgic than fascist; Vladimir Putin’s regime showcases some particular features of recent Russian history, with a wink or two to Imperial Russia, all more Russian than fascist, e così via.
Either way, whether under a generic or extended sense, the word fascism ends up being used to refer to anything and everything: a set of practices, the banning of ideas and books, a worldwide march led by Trump, attacks on trans people, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and much more (I’m dropping the capitalisation of fascism from now on, but the intended usage ought to be clear).
To be sure, this will be hardly news to historians. In 1944, the philosopher Benedetto Croce pointed out that the epithet fascist was being used by socialists and communists to insult liberals and Christian democrats, and by liberals and Christian democrats to insult socialists and communists. And before then, in the 1920s, various Italian politicians on the left were denounced as semi-fascists by other leftists – this happened to Giovanni Amendola, a famous opponent of fascism, and someone who was in fact murdered by real fascists.
My main point in post number 1, in any case, was that many commentators make too direct a connection between current political conditions, especially in the US, and historical fascism from the 1920-40s, and this is not a little preposterous. This particularly applies to classic Italian fascism, the blueprint for many subsequent “brothers in arms”, and the case study I focused on at the time. Bad analysis of the kind I highlighted then still abounds, not least from some of the very people I had mentioned in that first post.
To name but a few. Jason Stanley, in a comment to my piece, demurred and lamented that the post was rather Eurocentric (‘no shit, Sherlock’; it was about Italian fascism), offering as a counter a link to a piece on “colonial fascism”; in particular, on what the author calls settler-colonial racism in the US. An interesting article that, among other things, discusses a number of important works from the 1930s (including some by WEB Du Bois, for instance), the actual connection between settler-colonialism in the US and European fascism is solely in terms of “white supremacy” in this article, and in a sense this relates more to Nazism than it does to (Italian) fascism – racism is not a definitional characteristic of fascism in the way that it might be for Nazism; racism, let alone antisemitism, was not a preoccupation of Mussolini’s regime to begin with, only coming to the fore properly under the influence of Nazi Germany (there were many Jewish fascists in the party before the Racial Laws of 1938).[ii]
But even under such terms the nexus between settler-colonialism in the US and Nazism remains weak, centred as it is on but one feature of Nazism – a person may well be a racist without being a Nazi or a fascist. As a matter of fact, the article employs a rather wide, nay, inflated interpretation of fascism, meant to include Nazism as well as much else; the expressions racial fascism, colonial fascism, late fascism all make an appearance, and there is even a mention of Apartheid South Africa as a para-fascist regime, quite a bizarre statement (not to make too fine a point, but racism in Apartheid South Africa was quite different to the racism of Nazism; the goal of apartheid was not to eliminate the non-white population, but to oppress and exploit non-white labour; also, see endnote 3 infra).
The connection between colonialism and fascism is not a little puzzling, though it is worth noting that Stanley taught a course entitled Colonialism and Fascism in Ukraine in 2023, so at the very least we know where he was coming from with his comment. The course, curiously, hardly included any classic texts from the study of fascism in the syllabus, with the possible exception of some selections from Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Stanley’s stuff is of course there, but this doesn’t count). Hitler is somewhat ridiculously referred to as ‘fascism’s most famous 20th century leader’ on the course’s webpage, but Mein Kampf barely qualifies as a guide to fascism, really.[iii]
Robert Reich, for his part, continues his long series of articles in the Guardian on fascism as he sees the phenomenon, every other month a slightly different take. The best [sic] of the bunch is the one article of his which bothers to mention actual experts (not least Gentile), only to offer a potpourri of features purportedly identifying fascism – 5 elements of fascism, in fact (but why 5?!) – which Reich claims to derive from the works of Gentile, Umberto Eco, and others (or so Reich says, but it is unclear where he gets these 5 from, or how), and then, only to carry out a “proof by quoting” exercise – to wit, and in caricature form: ‘this is fascism characteristic number 1, and these are some quotes and actions from your favourite [sic] fascist on the topic, clearly showing that they are indeed a fascist’.
The problem with such analyses – yes, it was a caricature, but a fully deserved one – is that it deals with superficialities and facile analogies, and anything or anyone can be made to look and sound in the way that is intended, and from the beginning to boot – not so much a conclusion to an argument, but a twisted proof by induction on what makes a fascist (or should I say, on what a fascist makes?).[iv]
This talk of the characteristics of fascism, along with the relevant quotes to prove adherence, is too common these days for comfort. It often makes an appearance on Twitter (X, whatever), and often in the form of 14 features. It even shows up outside of the fake world of the internet: one heckler attempted to talk about “a few characteristics of fascism” at the National Conservatism Conference in 2023 in the UK, the implication being that the attendees and speakers were clearly fascists, and they obviously needed to be told.[v]
As far as I can see, the popularity of this talk of the characteristics of fascism is due to the oversized legacy of one article Eco wrote about fascism, a piece that is wildly misinterpreted and its precepts too widely applied. Curiously enough, Eco did not set off to define fascism as a historical phenomenon in this article, let alone Mussolini’s regime. For one reason, Eco explicitly states that classic fascism is not coming back in any form, and that the characteristics that made classic fascism were historical and therefore specific in nature, never to be repeated. Instead, Eco focused on ways of acting and talking in the piece, and on what he called “eternal fascism” – and he did so in a specific context. Delivered to a US audience on Liberation Day in 1995 – a national holiday in Italy, celebrated on the 25th of April to commemorate Italy’s liberation from Nazism and Fascism – and on the back of the electoral success of the Italian Social Movement party in 1994, an actual post-fascist party founded by the remnants of Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic from 1943-45, Eco’s article needs to be understood with this background in mind.
But for that you will have to tune back next month for the final instalment of Lobina’s long-awaited finale to this series on Fascism. In the final episode, I shall discuss Eco’s article some more and argue that the notion of an eternal fascism is unhelpful, though not nonsensical; that the elaboration of a list of fascist characteristics is misguided in design; and that Eco’s suggestion that fascism can coalesce from any one of his proposed features is ridiculous and nonsensical. Building upon this, I will contrast Eco’s take on fascism with Gentile’s more thorough analysis of the phenomenon in order to make the point that fascism is a historical phenomenon, not a way of acting or talking – it is not a temperament – and that conflating rather than separating ideas and events does not help us understand and contest contemporary political happenings that certainly require our attention, and in some cases, our activism. I will then conclude that in the majority of cases, most uses of the term fascism are the result of pisspoor scholarship; that the interpretation the term receives in much modern commentary is far too vague to be of any use; and that in the event its wide employment is manipulative.
Oh, I’ll also answer the questions I posed at the beginning of this post, I will declare some self-ascribed anti-fascists posturers (with a little help from Pier Paolo Pasolini), and at some point I will make a joke about a rifle.
[i] In brief, and channelling De Felice: Fascism was revolutionary in a way that Nazism was not (e.g., fascists aimed to create a new society and a new Italian, whilst Nazis were traditionalists and looked to a German ideal past instead); Franco’s “movement” was also traditionalist and furthermore fundamentalist catholic, and thus some distance from the radical irreligiousness of fascism (Spain’s Falange was closer to Italian fascism, but the party was subsumed under the movement soon enough and its para-fascist character diluted well enough); and, similarly to Franco’s regime, Salazar’s Estado Novo was Portuguese catholic and far too conservative to qualify as fascist at all.
[ii] Emilio Gentile, who featured heavily on my original post, and an actual expert in fascism, has argued that Italian fascists might have got there by themselves eventually, given their obsession with italianità, but it is not obvious whether Italian Jews would have been affected without German pressure – there is of course no arguing about fascists’ attitude towards Ethiopians and Libyans.
[iii] More usually, it has to be said, Stanley’s analysis of fascism is centred on points such as the cult of the leader, a radical nationalism, and the pernicious influence of outsiders, a general take that is certainly closer to what classic fascism involved, but a set of features that are not present in either the settler-colonialism of the 1930s US or Apartheid South Africa.
[iv] Another matter completely is this puff piece of Reich’s on how the mainstream media is facilitating Trump’s neo-fascism, all except the Guardian, of course. I do hope he got paid for this!
[v] It could be worse, I guess. I could have mentioned Judith Butler denouncing gender critical feminists as “fascist-adjacent”. But I won’t do that.