Fear of Fascism and Fear of "Fascism"

I have both a fear of political and social trends reminiscent of fascism in the United States and Europe and a fear of overusing the word the word “fascism.” Much use at all, I think, would be overuse.

There certainly are troubling signs of growing dangers on the right. Is it possible that a serious fascist movement will arise? Are we already seeing the beginnings of such a movement, and, if so, should it be confronted by labeling it “fascist?”

The groundswell of positive reaction to Trump's rhetoric demonizing minorities is scary. Scapegoating was a constitutive fascist tactic, and it is disheartening to see how successful it can be in the US in 2016. Trump's use of a Mussolini quotation and his declining to repudiate the endorsement of former KKK leader David Duke reinforce the concerns about the Republican front runner.

Also scary is a September poll that asked this question : “Is there any situation in which you could imagine yourself supporting the US military taking over the powers of federal government.” 43% of Republicans responded affirmatively. You might think that means that a modestly reassuring 57% could imagine no circumstances in which they would support a coup. However, 25% were undecided, and only 32% of the Republicans polled committed against a military takeover. Democrats and independents also had more coup supporters than would expect, but they had more opponents than supporters, and in the case of the Democrats by a factor of 2.5.

It might occur to you that the problem here was the “any . . . you could imagine.” Perhaps the question brought to the minds of poll respondents space aliens secretly inhabiting the bodies of elected federal officials and bent on converting human children into snack food. That bizarre imaginings might have been stimulated by the question is itself easily imaginable, but it appears not to have been what was going on. In a subsequent question of the poll, the hypothetical was specified down to a case where the civilian government “is beginning to violate the constitution.” The support for a coup under this specification actually went up! https://today.yougov.com/news/2015/09/09/could-coup-happen-in-united-states/

We can, I think, safely anticipate that some not insignificant percentage of the respondents who could imagine supporting a coup if the government is beginning to violate the Constitution, believe that the Obama administration has begun to violate the Constitution. If they were consistent, then, these poll respondents could imagine themselves supporting a military takeover of the United States government today. I am inclined to think, however, that this poll must somewhat overstate the number of Americans who are open to a military dictatorship under present or nearly present circumstances. Yet the number must be higher than we would have thought conceivable not so long ago – say in August.

Of course a military coup is not necessarily an unambiguously right wing coup, still less a fascist coup. A junta that seizes power from an absolute monarch and establishes universal education and a schedule for instituting a one person one vote democracy might fairly be called “left wing.”

Presumably, however, all of the poll respondents in the United States understood that substitution of the military for existing institutions would be to go from a more democratic (if imperfectly democratic) to a less democratic regime, and any such is a movement to the right in one fundamental respect: It increases the inequality of political power. The equality and the scope of political power are, to my mind, the most important factors in representing political differences on a left-right dimension. (Recall the long history of the Tories and Whigs and their variously named predecessors and successors and of the Reform Acts, as well as the circumstances where the left right terminology first arose in the National Assembly in the early phases of the French Revolution.)

Popular openness to a military takeover should be a matter of serious concern. It is a concern about a rightward movement in popular opinion, but it is not by itself, a concern that licenses use of the word “fascist.” Not every movement away from democracy towards authoritarianism is fascist. Royalists, theocrats, Stalinists, and technocrats, among other supporters of dictatorship or oligarchy, are not fascists.

The use of violence and intimidation as an instrument of the exercise of political will is also not peculiar to fascism. It was, however, doctrinal principle of the Falangist (Franco Spain) form of fascism. Attacks against the communists and socialists was also a day by day way of life of Mussolini's Fascist Party. This went well beyond barroom brawls, for example the attack on the Socialist Party newspaper Avanti in 1919. Then there were Hitler's Brownshirts.

In the United States today there is evidence of an increase in right wing theoretical support for the use of political violence, of right wing organizations prepared to use and preparing to use violence, and of actual instances of right wing violence.

In an outrage worthy of the Brownshirts, two men in Boston beat a homeless Hispanic man, justifying their attack by citing Trump's take on the undocumented (although their victim was, in fact a lawful immigrant.) Despite declaring this attack “terrible,” Trump praised the “passion” of his supporters in general, and said “maybe he should have been roughed up” of a heckler who was tackled, punched and kicked by a Trump friendly crowd.

On the side of theory, there have been for some time more or less explicitly insurrectionary theories floating around "posse comitatus," "sovereign citizen," and "constitutional militia" movements. Laden with imaginative perceptions of conspiracy, wildly erroneous history, and exotic constitutional interpretations, these theories often fall short of coherence and never reach very high on the plausibility scale – except, regrettably, for their devotees for whom they achieve a status akin to that of holy writ.

Some of these marginal groups, however, have latched onto what is becoming a more influential and superficially more plausible insurrectionary theory: the “guns to overthrow the government” interpretation of the Second Amendment. It is pretended that Hamilton, the Congress, and the ratifiers of the amendment all thought that citizens should be armed so that they could overthrow the federal government if it got out of hand. This is increasingly popular theory flies in the face of all historical evidence.

What is true is that a traditional Whigish belief in the evils of a standing army was still strong in the colonies and the young union. As I argued in my post of 11/20/15, the point of having well regulated state militias was that they would obviate need for a standing army to suppress insurrection or respond quickly to land invasion.

Ironically, with Second Amendment gloss, right wing insurrectionary violence has acquired a wider hearing, being one of the themes about which hundreds of radio hosts are, as former Speaker Boehner said in October, are “trying to out-right each other.” Some of them are out-righting into rhetoric that, translated into Spanish, German, or Italian, could well have come out of the mouth of Franco, Goebbels, or Mussolini.

Ammon Bundy and self styled “militia” members staged an armed break-in of a federally owned building of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. They were provoked by a resentencing to comply with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines of two ranchers who committed arson on public land. (Aside: The Guidelines sentence here may well be too long. Many, many sentences under the Guidelines are longer than they would be in other advanced countries. Thank Congress and the Sentencing Commission. I bet that Bundy is highly selective in his concern about excessive sentences.) The purpose of their action, Bundy said, was to restore “constitutional rights.” They disclaimed any intent to use violence, with the specific exception of “defensive” violence against any attempt to end their illegal trespass.

Perhaps they seriously believed that their action would intimidate a federal judge into revising the arsonists' sentence. Perhaps they were spoiling for a firefight which they expected to spark support for wider anti-government campaign. Perhaps they were only seeking a wider public hearing, and support from politicians, on the proposition that ranchers, miners and timber companies, and not the people of the United States, are the real, constitutional, owners of all the public lands of the west. Most likely all three views existed without much sorting in their minds.

Do Bundy and his followers represent a proto-insurrectionary movement? Only time will tell. It is, at least, a group willing to put armed violence in the offing as an instrument of politics, and that has disturbing similarities to the early stages of European fascism.

Bundy's takeover of a federal building and the Boston racial assault are, of course, single incidents, from which, alone, no meaningful conclusions should be drawn. There have, however, been many incidents over the last decade in the United States of unlawful right wing activity, 18 of which, by what seems a pretty accurate count, resulted in fatalities – 48 fatalities. Securitydata.newamerica.net/extremists/deadly attacks.

This same source lists 9 attacks in the US by Jihadists from 2002, resulting in 45 deaths. For the sake of keeping the larger picture conceptually clear, it is worth remembering terrorists inspired by their version of Islam are right wingers of impeccable credentials. They are reactionary to the bone. (It is, perhaps, easy to look past the point that theirs is a politics of the right in the face of the Islamophobia infection that has been contracted by so much of the American and European right, an infection cynically nurtured by some aspiring conservative politicians.)

Militant right wing religious movements, traditionalist and fundamentalist, whether Hindu, Jewish, Catholic or Protestant will always have something in common with fascism, but only in such uncommon cases as Falangism will it be fair to call them “fascist.” It is the particular accommodation forged between Franco and Spanish wealth, similar in important respects to the industrial order of mature Nazism and Italian Fascism, that merited the “fascist” label.

The militantly religious worldwide are nearly all right wing, indeed thoroughly reactionary in their enmity towards secular life, much or all of science, and, of course, each other. They are pro-democratic only when they are in the majority, as they are fundamentally theocratic. They would like God to rule directly, but, in default of that, would place the mantel on God's chosen agents, an agenthood only their own particular sect is in a position correctly to identify. That they are capable of brutal oppression against unbelievers and false believers makes the right wing religious dangerous, but it does not make them fascists.

Nationalism, nativism, and racism, even in their most virulent forms, are also not fascism without more. What more? How is it that other right wing movements should be discriminated from fascism? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for fascism? 

There were complex debates on this question in the 1930s and 1940s, mostly among left wing intellectuals and parties. At issue was the correct specification of the relations of authoritarian dictatorship to capitalism, nationalism, militarism, and racism for a regime or movement to count as “fascist.” Something might well be gained by revisiting these issues. I do not think that the application of “fascism” is a “merely verbal” question. Perhaps there is an historically-politically-normatively best theory of fascism that would illuminate both the past and the present. I am, however, pessimistic that such a theory, if there is one, can be developed, be elucidated, and become widely accepted in time to aid in confronting current dangers. In this respect it is sobering what a mess is made in the media and public discussion of the radically contrasting term “socialism.”

Absent a satisfactory and agreed upon theory of fascism, there is a serious risk of promiscuity of name calling. Everyone of good will criticized the witch hunters of the McCarthy era for the reckless way they threw around their accusations about “the Communists.” That recklessness has now been revived, in spades, by the right wing radio talkers, and, on occasion, by politicians. Even when they avoid the incoherence of calling the President a socialist and a fascist in the same breath, their name calling degrades and muddies political discourse. We do not want to commit the same sin by too readily crying “fascist.”

There are doubtless some on the right today, American and European, who would count as fascists on almost any definition. Except, perhaps, for the very few who self-identify as fascist or Nazi, I submit that the better policy is to avoid so calling even the most deserving of right wingers.

It is difficult, I grant, to hear the vituperation aimed at the Obama administration or African-American protestors or Planned Parenthood or even climate change without entertaining images of the Brownshirts or book burnings or recalling the "Aryanization of science." We can all hope that the commentators on the US sites of Yahoo and msn.com are not a fair sampling of the population. And we can take a deep breath.

Using the language of “fascist tendencies” or “fascist movements” or “proto-fascist” or “crypto-fascist” might possibly help wake people up to very real dangers, but going into the specifics of the dangers, while sparing the label, should be nearly as anti-saporific. It is, after all, what the fascists did that we rightly hate, not what they were called. If a contemporary movement seems posed to do some of those same things, that is what deserves our attention.

A fear of fascism, or of political movements with some important similarities to fascism, is reasonable, and perhaps we should be more afraid than we are, but it is the better part of wisdom to be very stingy in using the word.