Ghost in the Wire

Ambiguities of Fascism

Did I just use the f-word? Fascism is a strange, uncanny term, one that seems to morph and mutate at a pace that seems to elude any final definition. As rhetoricians interested in contemporary politics are no doubt aware, fascism is a term that is used far too frequently and far too loosely. Still this conceptual looseness is the condition of possibility that makes fascism such a catch-all appellation. It is difficult to watch the changes going on in the United States, changes that are taking place at both ends of the increasingly unhelpful political spectrum of Left and Right, and not think that perhaps fascism has started to take root. In the recent election, partisans – especially partisans liberal or progressive in their political orientation – tossed fascism around the Internet as if the epithet itself might sway the general public. It didn't, and not because of lack of significant exposure.

As a term, fascism has suffered from a long history of abuse. Deployed after the fall of Hitler as a pejorative by which to mark any sufficiently authoritarian state, or even to denigrate state pursuit of objectives with which one fervently disagreed, fascism has surfaced in public diatribes against Soviet fascism, crypto-fascism, Islamo-fascism, and so on and so forth. As the one unquestioned political incarnation of evil, fascism provides a label that can be used to castigate politics of all stars and stripes, a label that can stand in for everything that supposedly goes against the values and mechanisms of democracy. Fascism has become, as Samantha Powers notes, a “smear word more often used to brand one's foes than it is a descriptor used to shed light on them.”i

Its common political usage aside, fascism has been the subject of a monumental amount of scholarship, from the 30s on. You might think this would clarify things, might provide a corrective to the term's imprecise usage. Alas, no. Much of this scholarship suffers from a basic tension, for while we can find excellent insight into the specifics of well-known fascist regimes, we unfortunately also confront relatively airy generalizations about fascism as a general phenomenon. As a consequence, much of the research concludes in ways that conflict: fascism is both a meticulous social experiment and avidly anti-theoretical, dogmatic and unyielding on the one hand while pragmatic and compromising on the other, it is both secular and religious, left and right, endemic and an aberration. It is, as any metastudy might show, somewhat of an enigma.

Some studies are, of course, more equal than others. And much of the confusion that one finds when reviewing the literature can be explained by variations among the ideologies of the researchers and by the differences in methodology that attend those ideological variations. Robert Paxton's balanced and nuanced discussion may offer the most coherent, most robust appreciation for the phenomenon. Unlike other recent accounts, or even some of the more classic discussions, Paxton focuses on fascism in stages, highlighting the intellectual and material conditions that give rise to fascist movements, the strategies by which these movements mobilize and expand, and the actual operations of fascist regimes after the movement has integrated with or become synonymous with the government. Paxton also offers a comparison with fascist ideologies and movements that failed to progress the early to the later stages, and in so doing does much to help explain, as his title suggests, the “anatomy” of fascism. Still, his study suffers from the same historicism that makes his work so impressive; as with much of the scholarship on fascism, Paxton tends to think of fascism as merely an historical and/or political phenomenon, and not a rhetorical one, a tendency that produces certain heuristic limits in the ability to think fascism's evolution.ii By thinking fascism as something to be understood post hoc, by way of its empirical successes (and by contrast with its empirical failures), one understands fascism as it was, but not necessarily as it might be.

Following Paxton, one also labors under the assumption that fascism is best understood in relation to a system of government (and we can see here the reasons why fascism is so easily conflated with authoritarianism) rather than as an ideology or an imaginary that wins adherents or that shapes subsequent behavior. This is a popular starting point for those on the left, who see in the later stages of fascism an alignment with corporate interests and a suppression of the working classes, in other words a radical right-wing authoritarianism. Those on the right, by contrast, simply key on how those fascist movements achieved early success, which of course often happened by way of anti-corporate discourses designed to mobilize the masses against elite interests, a fact that is then used to claim that fascism is inherently leftist. “They were national socialists after all,” as libertarians and objectivists are fond of saying.

The truth is that fascism did adapt in order to flourish, and its adaptation required accomplices. It required some form of allegiance with conservative elites in order to successfully install itself as a system of government. It had a consistent rhetorical content, of course – celebration of violence, xenophobia, and the state – but its particular manifestation varied greatly depending on its political context and the stage of its development. Given this reality, how are we to understand fascism today? How are we to understand the possibility for a 21st century fascism, if there is such a thing? This is an incredibly difficult and complex issue, and there are no easy answers to such a question, but I believe that we will not get find an answer if we hold to the belief that newer fascisms will be but mirror images of those fascisms that defined the 20th century. The next generation of fascism, the next evolution, will share certain structures in common, but it will not be the same. Political systems never remain static (no scholar of the American Presidency can see a strict identity between the democracy under Andrew Johnson and that under Ronald Reagan, for example). In the hopes of doing some of the initial preparatory work from which to answer this question, I want to propose that we begin to think through a explicitly “rhetorical structure” to fascism, one that looks to historical fascisms not for what they were but rather for what operations allowed for their taxonomy, for what might be properly fascist about fascism. In so doing, we have to use history as our lodestar and not as our anchor, so that the past might help us to understand and engage future fascist imaginaries without blinding us to their manifestation.

To speak of a rhetorical structure then is to speak of those systems of belief and vocabularies that give credence to and make possible arguments that might facilitate a desire for authoritarian control. Fascism, as the most substantive contribution to politics in the 20th century, as a political phenomenon that appears uniquely and unexpectedly in the 20th century, cannot dissociate itself from the question of populism and from the media environments that made its particular (20th century) populism thinkable. It is, as Robert Paxton argues, “an invention created afresh for the era of mass politics.” With growing suffrage rates and increasingly powerful media technologies, fascists of the 20s and 30s were able to cultivate and complete a sense of mass identity and a publicness that was previously unthinkable in the time of print and even the telegraph. Fascists realized that the public had to be brought into the political process in a way that mobilized (and thus directed) their involvement, and realized that the nascent art of propaganda was one way to do it.

But it would be a mistake to think that the intentions and skills of the fascist leaders and their chief propagandists were principally responsible for explaining the growth of fascism as an imaginary. And it does the human sciences no credit to reduce the masses to stupid or irrational actors in the hopes of explaining away the fascist enigma. As George Mosse and Zygmunt Bauman have shown, from the rise of fascism and well into the execution of the final solution, the parties involved believed in the implicit rationality of their behavior and their beliefs. Instead, and this is where rhetoric can offer a powerful supplement to the historical, political, and philosophical work done thus far, we need to do better in understanding what structural conditions of emergence make a fascist imaginary possible even in the absence of a galvanizing, charismatic leader. Why? Because the belief in the charismatic leader is itself a product of fascism, and not its producer, which means that any explanation that centers on the spellbinding oratory of Hitler or Mussolini is like putting the cart before the unicorn—a mystification that explains the rise of Hitler within fascism without explaining the conditions by which fascism itself was thinkable. In other words, it explains the appeal of an orator in the absence of an underlying understanding of the context that structures that orator's popular reception.

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That's enough for now.