Since for them the law should be subservient to the needs of the people and the need to crush socialism or liberalism, fascists encourage party militias. These enforce the fascist will, break unions , distort elections and intimidate or co-opt the police. First and foremost, fascists want to revolt against socialism. Not only does socialism aim for equal prosperity no matter the race, but many socialists tend to envision the eventual extinction of separate nations, which offends the strong fascist belief in nation states.
Along with getting rid of aristocrats or other elites, fascists are prepared to displace the church or seek a mutually beneficial truce with it. Fascists also reject democracy, at least any democracy that could potentially result in socialism or too much liberalism. In a democracy, voters can choose social welfare policies.
They can level the playing field between classes and ethnicities, or seek gender equality. But just as extreme versions of communism suppress liberty on behalf of radical equality, so too do extreme versions of right-wing politics, namely fascism, suppress liberty in favor of tradition and dominance and power.
Your specialty is propaganda and rhetoric, and in the book you describe fascism as a collection of tropes and narratives. So what, exactly, is the story fascists are spinning? In the past, fascist politics would focus on the dominant cultural group. This is why fascism flourishes in moments of great anxiety, because you can connect that anxiety with fake loss.
The story is typically that a once-great society has been destroyed by liberalism or feminism or cultural Marxism or whatever, and you make the dominant group feel angry and resentful about the loss of their status and power.
Almost every manifestation of fascism mirrors this general narrative. Why is the destruction of truth, as a shared ideal, so critical to the fascist project? The two ideals of liberal democracy are liberty and equality. Nobody thinks of the citizens of North Korea as free, because their actions are controlled by lies. Truth is required to act freely. So freedom requires truth, and so to smash freedom you must smash truth.
And if you get people to do that, you can convince them to do anything. Part of what fascist politics does is get people to disassociate from reality. This is partly why I think of fascism as a kind of anti-politics. I remember reading a quote from Joseph Goebbels , who was the chief propagandist for the Nazis, and he said that what he was doing was more like art than politics.
The thing is, people willingly adopt the mythical past. This is probably a good time to pivot to the glittering elephant in the room: Donald Trump. Is he a fascist? I make the case in my book that he practices fascist politics. But the blame there is as much on the Republican Party as it is on Trump, because none of this would matter if they were willing to check Trump. Can you elaborate on that? He explicitly praised the Immigration Act , which severely limited the number of immigrants allowed to enter the US, as a useful model.
The s and the s was a very fascist time in the United States. Columnist Andrew Bolt has made a habit of talking of " Left fascists ". But fascism historically was a regime of the Far Right. A popular American book declaims against "l iberal fascism ".
Yet one thing that unites fascists is their deep hostility to political liberalism, in all its forms. At the same time leading European thinkers of the "Nouvelle Droite" , who draw upon the ideas that seeded interwar fascism, strenuously deny the title. Political scientists have agonised over whether there could be a " fascist minimum ". This would be some set of features that define a political agent, regime or movement as fascist.
One feature of fascism, as opposed to the other great modern "isms", as author Anthony Paxton contends with others, is its ideological fluidity or hybridity. Yet certain things should be ventured, lest this "F-word" degenerates into nothing more than an angry label that every party uses to name their enemies, of whatever political stripe. Fascisms are political movements that aim to take over the state, destroying liberal institutions like an independent media, and individual rights.
But not all movements that aim to do this are fascist. Fascists feel licensed to use fraud "fake news", propaganda and, if need be, force in order to achieve this revolutionary aim. Yet again, not all movements that aim to do this are fascist. One step further, fascists embrace the view that all life is struggle kampf or war: between the strong and the weak, within nations, and between the nations, races or peoples. Politics is a continuation of war by other means.
Ideals like equality, tolerance, progress, and pity are the ideological rationalisations of weakness. Many fascists, including leading Nazis, are thus deeply opposed to the values enshrined by the biblical prophets and Christianity, seeing in them following Nietzsche the product of a regrettable "slave revolt" against the masters in antiquity.
For the fascist, we should embrace hierarchies within nations, based on strength and "selections", to use a chilling National Socialist word. We should accept differences between peoples — so long as groups, "in essence" different, are kept separated by fences and borders. Many forms of fascism thus base their ideologies on pseudo-biological doctrines concerning race, like the Nazis. But not all fascists are biological essentialists. The cultural specificity and history of a group, nation, or "People" Volk might be what is being idealised and fought for.
Fascisms always appeal to myths of national or popular rebirth " palingenesis " , leading scholar Roger Griffin claims.
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