Fascism: Those Who Use It, and Those Who Abuse It

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us, if there appeared on the scene somebody saying, ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts 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 point the finger at any of its new instances – every day and in every part of the world.

         Umberto Eco, ‘Ur-Fascism’

...[T]he major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini — which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively — but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

       Michel Foucault, 'Anti-Oedipus'

The next wave of fascists will not come with cattle cars and concentration camps, but they'll come with a smiley face and maybe a TV show.... That’s how the 21st-century fascists will essentially take over.

       Michael Moore, 'Paraphrasing Bertram Gross, "Friendly Fascism"'

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'Bashing the fash' is all the rage these days, and surely these statements stir up feelings of righteous vigilance in the hearts of the defenders of freedom, but what do we learn from such clarion calls to resistance? From what I can see, they tell us next to nothing about fascism save for a brief historical catalogue of perpetrators and sins, and give vague warnings about its possible emergence from the mists of the future. In fact, what such statements tell us is that the speaker is willing to use and abuse the moral weight of fascism and its history to score political virtue points against some opponent or other. I think such moves are, at best, eye-rollers, but are usually beneath contempt, and given how cynically thrown around 'fascist' is these days, and given how seriously effective its stain has become, I will deflate such incantations' pretensions to moral superiority by demonstrating the dishonesty of their content. 

All three statements and their variants fall prey to a cardinal sin of serious inquiry: unfalsifiability coupled with a blatant appeal to emotion. First, lets deal with falsifiability.

If one is to have fruitful examination into an issue, it must, in principle, be falsifiable; there must be some evidence that could, in theory, prove it wrong. Regarding the three above speakers, what could prove their claims wrong? If fascism is in 'all of us' and can come with a 'TV show and smile' whilst dressed in 'plainclothes', and thereby be sufficiently disguised from identification, how could we identify ‘real’ fascist movements from myriad other political movements? Are we to point to those political movements that most resemble our conception of fascism, or should we look to the ones that least resemble it? And how much of our conception of fascism is to be linked to the historical cases?

To Eco and his ilk, what are we to say about movements that exhibit superficial characteristics of fascism (mass rallies, nationalism) but lack some fundamental characteristics (palingenesis, totalitarianism)? This is important since the explosion of nationalist populist movements in the Western world is often met with claims of ‘fascism’.

To my mind, it appears that for the sufficiently-committed (read: ideologically rigid) there wouldn’t be any evidence to contradict these claims. If one were to point out that such-and-such a movement is lacking some key fascist element or other, one may well be met with the response, ‘Well, they’re hiding their true intentions. They are putting on a veneer of respectability and intellectualism so as to propagate their ideas. It's a Trojan horse.’ This is the kind of reasoning that is endemic to conspiracy theories and has no place in real intellectual discussion, however, this is baked into Moore's claim about so-called 'friendly fascism', but such reasoning gets one onto some thin ice.

If we’re to believe that fascism won’t come to 21st century America with concentration camps, then how are we to assess the violence and internment that is perpetrated in 21st century America? For instance, the media and numerous politicians have stated that the separation of families at the US-Mexico border by US border control is ‘inhuman’, ‘dehumanising’, ‘child abuse’ and ‘racist’, and that the children are being kept in 'concentration camps'. In fact, for Moore’s latest documentary, ‘Fahrenheit 11/9’, wherein he takes on Trump and myriad other disconnected faults of American capitalism, he interviewed Ben Ferencz, the last living Nuremberg prosecutor who had called the child separation policy a ‘crime against humanity’.

So, how are we to assess the situation at the border? Based on Moore's logic: since fascism will not come to the US with concentration camps, then the presence of concentration camps wouldn't count as evidence of fascism. Praise the Lord! But he cannot mean that since he uses concentration camp imagery to accompany his assessment of the border situation - thereby deliberately equating the two! So, he is either lazy or disingenuous, and means to only pluck at heart strings.
 
This emotional rhetoric is made most explicit with the Foucauldian statement, who is playing a game with our classification of 'fascism' and the emotional weight that its connotation bears. He, like Eco, recognises that fascism has a historical component that was embodied in the mobilisations of Hitler and Mussolini, but he also states there is this deeper 'fascism' - this primordial libidinal impulse that seeks domination, and resides 'in us all'. The problem with Foucault, here, is that his claim contains emotional rhetoric that exploits a switch between a necessary condition for a sufficient condition. In doing so, Foucault's claim is either trivial and true, or radical and false.

The trivial truth is merely that us humans have inclinations to aggression and, at times, control over others. The exciting falsehood that can trade here is the notion that our aggression telescopes into the totalitarian political machinations of right-wing extremism. 

In his phrase, he first makes use of the word in its redefined sense, then presents the redefinition as if it had already been established as the deeper content of the concept. By stating that 'the enemy is NOT JUST the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, but that impulse that lies underneath of pretentiously civilised veneer', he is smuggling in the vehement repugnance that is associated with the horrors of Hitler and Mussolini. We may be able to forgive the melodrama since Foucault was very French, and was writing this in 1973, however, we cannot forgive the rhetorical strategy of equivocation, circularity, and argumentum ad passiones.

Foucault's take on the matter appears to invite the surest vigilance, as we must even suspect ourselves as being harbingers of potential genocide and violence. After all, if it could happen to the Good Germans, then why couldn't it happen to you or me or us? But while violence and aggression are necessary conditions for fascism, they are not sufficient, and by trying to up the ante by stating 'fascism' is in all of us because we all have aggressive, myopic and egotistic tendencies, Foucault is trivializing one of the most important and brutal epochs of our species.

I took the time to criticise all three of these cases because all three, in one way or other, are echoed throughout the media around the world. These criticisms and vague warnings are being slung at Trump and his supporters, and a whole slew of populist movements that are popping up around the West, and instead of attempting to understand why people are drawn to such movements, they're being demonised through association with past devils. This is not to be taken as an endorsement of these movements, nor that they're beyond reproach, but I think that the criticisms are crude emotional manipulations that are uninhibited by reality.

Our societies depend on an ecology of reasonable public discourse, and if you're undermining that ecology by angrily shouting down everyone who disagrees with you as a 'fascist', you're inviting fascism not fighting it.