You may have already read this essay by Umberto Eco. If not, you should. For those in a hurry, Steve Yuan provides an excellent summary of the key points which will hopefully pique your interest.
There’s a lot of talk right now about whether the movement that’s been whipped up by the Trump campaign is “fascist” or not. I think this article provides a good working definition of Fascism. There seems to be little doubt that Trumpism has some fairly obvious fascistic elements to it. The violent, cultish veneration of the past and the hatred of out-groups is bigger than Trump though. He has been shrewd in identifying and exploiting it for his own ends and may succeed in riding it all the way to the presidency.
Originally shared by Perry Stroika
What is a Fascist? I’ve always found Umberto Eco’s short essay on the subject to be quite informative. It’s a good place to start, not a last word. I’ve provided my own thoughts on each.
Well, let’s go down the checklist.
1) The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.
What is Eco describing as “the cult of tradition?” What he’s talking about is people who live in societies undergoing vast social change, rapidly urbanizing or industrializing. In these places people become socially dislocated, cut off from the traditions embedded in their culture. The cult of tradition thus represents a search for cultural roots, for bedrock values, but in a rootless social milieu where contact with the old traditions has been lost.
Eco emphasizes Syncretism as a key trait here, because urbanization usually comes with its sibling, cosmopolitanism. Take late classical Athens. Plato was worried about Athens growing rich and engaging in commerce with people from other lands; he was worried that the Athenian gods had lost their authority, because the port of Athens had brought in new gods, new traditions. Maintaining the authority of the old traditions had been easy in isolation, but now it was widely known that everyone had their gods, everyone had their beliefs.
The cultist of tradition wants contact with some kind of inviolable foundation, but there are many traditions, and not all are compatible with each other. And this is what separates the cultist of tradition from the simple traditionalist. The simple traditionalist merely lives his tradition. It is his cultural inheritance which he inhabits unreflectively. But the cultist must construct his own ancient wisdom from shards and fragments. His “tradition” is invented rather than inherited. an ad hoc construction designed to suit his own psychological needs, ergo probably useless in providing some kind of transcendence of his own ego.
2) Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.
Fascism’s appeal is based on the return to a lost golden age, some time in the past before social divisions, before antagonism. Usually there is some intruder that precipitates the fall from the paradisical state; eggheads with their fancy ideas, Jews and other ethnic minorities with their strange ideas.. It follows that the return of the golden age can be brought about by the explusion of the intruder, mobilization against the internal enemy.
Fascism is a militaristic ideology that requires an enemy to demonize. Thus, we can roll up points 3, 4, 5 and 6.
3) Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake.
Where “action” means “violence”.
4) The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.
5) Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity.
Herbert Marcuse, who had plenty of firsthand experience of fascism, invented the term “represssive desublimation”. The idea is simple; the removal of social controls against violence, murder and perversity (hence “desublimation”) as a form of social control (hence, repressive”). Society is defined by an ingroup and an outgroup. Good feelings (love, friendship, comradeship) are focused towards the in group, while the negative emotions (fear, hatred, enmity) are pushed onto the outgroup, which then becomes the target of an anarchic release of primeval instinctual energy from social constraints. All things are allowed where the outgroup is concerned, every form of rape, murder and torture, anything that can be imagined, even turning human beings into furniture.
The point of “repressive desublimation” is that the wild release of anarchic impulses is used to reinforce the social identity of the ingroup. The release of desublimation is related dialectically, supports, the social discipline of the in group, is actually a social buttress. Hence, the emphasis on social conformity in fascism, a conformity that is all embracing and ultimately allows no deviation in thought. There is no room for criticial reflection, no diversity of opinion in fascism. There is only conformity which makes you part of the in group, or nonconformity which makes you part of hte out group, and thus a target for the violence of the in group.
6 and 7 I have discussed in my gloss on 1.
6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.
7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.
Fascism grows in the compost heap of decaying social institutions. It appeals to people who feel that they’re nobodies lost in the crowd,, that they’re unimportant and that they have no place in the world by giving them a sense of belonging and telling them who they are.
8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.
The enemy is the linchpin of the fascist worldview. The enemy is a like a big bin into which are thrown everything negative or unpleasant about the world, all the fears and terrors of the common man. Eco discusses the intellectual incoherence this results in.
Slavoj Zizek, in his doc The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, discusses the role of the Jew in Nazi cinema. He notes that Jews are ascribed all kind of contradictory and paradoxical traits in Nazi discourse. They are simultaneously very dirty and crude, but also hyper refined and cultured, very stupid and vulgar but also too clever, suspciously clever, weak and ineffectual but also threatening puppet masters who secretly control the modern world.
There is this wonderful scene in a movie called The Believer about a Jewish boy play by Ryan Gosling who becomes a neo-nazi skinhead. At one point he gives a talk to a bunch of skinheads in which he asks, “Why do you hate Jews?”
Answering his own question, he says:
“Let me put it another way. Do we hate them because they push their way in where they don’t belong? Or because they’re clannish and keep to themselves? Because they’re tight with money, or because they flash it around? Because they’re Bolsheviks or because they’re capitalists? Because they have the highest IQs, or because they have the most active sex lives? Do you want to know the real reasonwe hate them?….Because we hate them. Because they exist. Because it is an axiom of civilization that just as man longs for woman, loves his children and fears death, he hates the Jews. There is no reason. If there were some smart-ass kike would give us an argument, try to prove we were wrong. And of course that would only make us hate them more. In fact we have all the reasons we need in three simple letters: J-E-W. Jew. Say it a million times. It is the only word that never loses its meaning: Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew….”
The actual traits of the enemy do no matter to the fascist. The point is the role the enemy plays for them.
9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.
10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.
Refer back to point 5.
11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero.
Fascism can be thought of as a cult of heroic violence.
12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.
I will confine myself to quoting Eco on this one: “his is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). 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.”
13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say.
Here we should discuss the role of the Leader in Fascism. I have emphasized that Fascism provides a sense of social belonging through group identity, and that this group identity is reinforced irrationally through violence. It follows that Fascists have no place for democratic process, which requires the give and take of discussion, deliberation and negotiation. It is this process by which individual wills can be brought slowly and painfully into alignment with each other, making collective action possible.
Fascists have no time for this. The point of FAscism is to subsume the individual will into the group, which is in turn an extension of the Will of the Leader.
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.
Because the Fascist worldview can only be maintained through the general social acceptance of logical contradictions, mumbo jumbo and nonsense,, intellectual incoherence is constitutionally part of the makeup of fascism. Asking whether or not one’s worldview makes sense, or if an action goes against its stated aims, becoming in actuality self defeating, becomes a subversive act, identifying you as an overthinking egghead.
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