Defining fascism--a little light reading
Just read an interesting essay on Slate, Donald Trump Is a Fascist by Jamelle Bouie. It's billed not as a partisan attack but application of a political label that has a real meaning--"fascism" is more than just an epithet. So whether or not you agree with the essay's foreground premise about Donald Trump, it's the background on the political label "fascism" that's worth reading.
My disclosure: Well yeah, months ago I saw Benito Mussolini in Trump's manner and rhetoric, and now think of him as "Il Douche". But I digress.
Bouie relies on Umberto Eco's Ur Fascism (PDF) in The New York Review of Books in 1995. I haven't read it yet but it's waiting in a browser tab. For now, here's Bouie's summary:
Eco emphasizes the extent to which fascism is ad hoc and opportunistic. It’s “philosophically out of joint,” he writes, with features that “cannot be organized into a system” since “many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanacticism.”
With that said, it is true that there are fascist movements, and it’s also true that when you strip their cultural clothing—the German paganism in Nazism, for example—there are common properties. Not every fascist movement shows all of them, but—Eco writes—“it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it." Eco identifies 14, but for this column, I want to focus on seven.
They are: A cult of “action for action’s sake,” where “thinking is a form of emasculation”; an intolerance of “analytical criticism,” where disagreement is condemned; a profound “fear of difference,” where leaders appeal against “intruders”; appeals to individual and social frustration and specifically a “frustrated middle class” suffering from “feelings of political humiliation and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups”; a nationalist identity set against internal and external enemies (an “obsession with a plot”); a feeling of humiliation by the “ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies”; a “popular elitism” where “every citizen belongs to the best people of the world” and underscored by contempt for the weak; and a celebration of aggressive (and often violent) masculinity.
I thought Bouie did a good job summarizing Eco's definition of fascism, one that's accessible enough to rely on when inevitably, in this election more than any other, the subject of fascism is bound to come up. Over and over and over. I think in Trump we have somebody to whom the label fascist genuinely applies, and it would be intellectual cowardice to shy away from using the term, properly, just because it upsets certain people so much.