AmericanConscience.Org
A voice in the wilderness
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PolySci 5 / Corporate Fascism / David Neiwert
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Fascism always wraps itself in the flag, always seeks absolute power, always brands
opponents as traitors, always relies heavily on propaganda for dissemination of its ideas,
always invokes subversive enemies (at home and abroad), always embraces militarism and
permanent war, always favors politicizing of police functions (and expanding them and the
surveillance state), always scorns intellectuals, artists, and bourgeois democratic values,
always is hostile to leftist and labor movements, and is obsessed with idealized images of a
mythic "better time" of the past (while at the same time destroying that past, and the nation as a
whole).
David Neiwert / Orcinus
The Rise of Pseudo Fascism
Fascism demands racial, ethnic, or cultural unity and the collective rebirth of a
nation while seeking to purge demonized enemies that are often scapegoated
as subversive and parasitic. Fascism is a form of authoritarian
ultra-nationalism that glorifies action, violence, and a militarized culture. Fascism
can exist as an ideology, a mass movement, or a form of state government.
Fascism attacks both liberal democratic pluralism and left-wing revolutionary
movements while proposing a totalitarian version of populist mass politics.
Fascism parasitizes other ideologies, juggles many internal tensions and
contradictions, and produces chameleon-like adaptations based on the specific
historic symbols, icons, slogans, traditions, myths, and heroes of the society it
wishes to mobilize.
Over the years, there have been many attempts to define and describe fascism. Chip Berlet,
the researcher from the Cambridge, Mass., think tank Political Research Associates,
describes it thus:
In a historical sense, fascism is maybe best understood as an extreme reaction against
socialism and communism; in its early years it was essentially defined as "extremist
anti-communism."
David Neiwert / Orcinus
... [E]ach national variant of fascism draws its legitimacy, as we shall see, not
from some universal scripture but from what it considers the most authentic
elements of its own community identity. Religion, for example, would certainly
play a much larger role in an authentic fascism in the United States than in the
first European fascisms, which were pagan for contingent historical reasons.
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Probably the most concise definition comes from Oxford political-science professor Roger
Griffin, who calls it "palingenetic ultranationalistic populism". In one key essay, Griffin offers the
following definition:
Fascism: modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic,
and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national
belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as freedom and
individual rights, and often presses for the destruction of elections, legislatures,
and other elements of democracy. Despite the idealistic goals of fascism,
attempts to build fascist societies have led to wars and persecutions that
caused millions of deaths. As a result, fascism is strongly associated with
right-wing fanaticism, racism, totalitarianism, and violence.
Fascism, according to some who have studied it, is a kind of "political religion" -- that is, it
coalesces around a "sacralisation of politics" that acts as a substitute faith for its followers.
According to Italian political theorist Emilio Gentile, who studied the totalitarian movements of
interwar Europe, this sacralisation takes place when:
... more or less elaborately and dogmatically, a political movement confers a
sacred status on an earthly entity (the nation, the country, the state, humanity,
society, race, proletariat, history, liberty, or revolution) and renders it an absolute
principle of collective existence, considers it the main source of values for
individual and mass behaviour, and exalts it as the supreme ethical precept of
public life.
This imparts to fascism a particular trait that Paxton describes as one of the real telltale signs
of its presence:
What really sets fascism apart from nearly all other kinds of politics, however, is that, at its
core, it is not about thought. It's all a matter of the gut.
In his remarkable essay on "Ur-Fascism," Umberto Eco suggests the extent of this attribute of
fascism by its reappearance in most of the traits by which he describes fascism, including
"action for action's sake," "the rejection of modernism" "fear of difference," and the notion that
"life is permanent warfare." Swedish political scientist Harald Ofstad likewise has zeroed in
on "the contempt for weakness" as the essence of the norm in a fascist society.
However, it is Paxton's study that draws out this point in the greatest detail. Indeed, he
describes the centricity of emotion -- and not any intellectual forebears -- as forming the basic
architecture on which the fascist argument rests (pp. 40-41):
To focus only on the educated carriers of intellect and culture in the search for
fascist roots, furthermore, is to miss the most important register: subterranean
passions and emotions. A nebula of attitudes was taking shape, and no one
thinker ever put together a total philosophical system to support fascism. Even
scholars who specialize in the quest for fascism's intellectual and cultural
origins, such as George Mosse, declare that the establishment of a "mood" is
more important than "the search for some individual precursors." In that
sense, too, fascism is more plausibly linked to a set of "mobilizing passions"
that shape fascist action than to a consistent and fully articulated philosophy.
At bottom is a passionate nationalism.
Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between
the good and evil camps, between the pure and the corrupt, in which one's
own chosen community or nation has been the victim. In this Darwinian
narrative, the chosen people have been weakened by political parties, social
classes, unassimilable minorities, spoiled renters, and rationalist thinkers
who lack the necessary sense of community.
These "mobilizing passions," mostly taken for granted and not always overtly
argued as intellectual propositions, form the emotional lava that set fascism's
foundations:
- a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional
solutions;
- the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to
every right, whether universal or individual, and the subordination of
the individual to it;
- the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any
action, without legal or moral limits, against the group's enemies,
both internal and external;
- dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effect of
individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
- the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if
possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
- the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating
in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's
destiny;
- the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal
reason;
- the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted
to the group's success;
- the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint
from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole
criterion of the group's prowess in a Darwinian struggle.
David Neiwert / Orcinus
The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism
