To distinguish fascism from other right of center political beliefs, and to counteract the obfuscations of the New York Times and others, a reality-based conceptual framework needs to be established.
As I have long argued, the question of political terminology in the English language has a vast importance which is frequently ignored. The media use of the term “conservatism” is the most egregious of these abuses. For the media, everything right of center is conservative, thus lumping together raving reactionaries and fascist hooligans together with the very few actual conservatives, despite the fact that each of these terms means something incompatible with the others.
CONSERVATIVES are often economically comfortable people devoted to traditions and the status quo. Reactionaries tend to reject the status quo and want to turn the clock back to some more primitive form of society, where they hope to be better off. The term conservative has to do with the desire to keep, preserve, or conserve beliefs, institutions, and practices. On a superficial level, it is not threatening but rather it sounds somewhat reassuring.
Fascists, who are themselves fanatical extremists devoted to the most radical and savage retrograde transformations of thought and society, are understandably eager to present themselves in the guise of conservatives. But fascists do not want to conserve anything of importance, often preaching palingenesis, meaning a radically new form of humanity itself.
The benefits of refusing to camouflage fascists by pretending they are conservatives could be immense. My personal estimate is that a new style book policy along these lines for Democrats, progressives, liberals, teachers, reporters, professors, intellectuals, sociologists, historians, and everyday Americans of good will could easily generate a bonus of 3% or more in the popular votes cast for the Harris-Walz ticket. This in turn might be enough to decide the election.
In any case, there is absolutely no reason to persist in the folly of obeying our domestic fascists when they demand to be called “conservatives.”
In a total world crisis like the present one, mass psychology often depends on the public perception of which contending political force is the stronger.
Letting fascists hide under the euphemism of “conservatives” communicates nothing but contemptible weakness and confusion. This is the inevitable subtext of the current misguided left of center stylebook.
The benefits of refusing to camouflage fascists by pretending they are conservatives could be immense. My personal estimate is that a new style book policy along these lines for Democrats, progressives, liberals, teachers, reporters, professors, intellectuals, sociologists, historians, and everyday Americans of good will could easily generate a bonus of 3% or more in the popular votes cast for the Harris-Walz ticket.
This in turn might be enough to decide the election. In any case, there is absolutely no reason to persist in the folly of obeying our domestic fascists when they demand to be called “conservatives.”
In a total world crisis like the present one,
A relevant factor here is that since about 1900 the United States has historically been most anti-fascist country in the world. The most distinguished anti-fascist of the 20th century and the leader of the anti-Hitler coalition was President Franklin D Roosevelt. Unlike Italy, Germany, Spain, Vichy France, and so many other nations, the United States never succumbed to a regime of domestic fascist dictatorship.
The United States never became an active ally of the fascist powers, unlike the Soviet Union, which functioned as an indispensable ally for Hitler between August 1939 and June 1941 under the auspices of the Molotov-Ribbentrop or Hitler-Stalin pact. Unlike Britain under Sir Neville Chamberlain or France under Daladier at the September 1938 Munich conference,
the United States never engaged in a systematic policy of appeasing fascism. This is the powerful historical tradition of opposition to fascism waiting to be mobilized in opposition to anti-constitutional political forces that have been convincingly identified as fascist.
Among the very few conservatives active today, we can cite former federal Judge Luttig.
If a stock market panic, economic depression, or today’s breakdown crisis of globalization has made the status quo intolerable for conservatives, many of them become REACTIONARIES. The word originally referred to people in Europe who wanted to turn the clock back to before the French Revolution, meaning monarchy, feudal nobility and aristocratic rule. In the United States,
reactionaries are often nostalgic for the way wealthy planters ruled the slave society of the American South before the Civil War. Reactionaries want to destroy labor unions, take away economic rights like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, minimum wage and child labor laws while degrading the status of women, limiting the right to vote, imposing brutal economic austerity, and discriminating against minorities.
Reactionaries, however, generally pursue these goals within the framework of established governing institutions as positions of strength, preserving the illusion of formal democracy and representative government as long as representatives of the traditional ruling class can be kept in power.
FASCISM can emerge when the economic breakdown crisis deepens, as after World War I. The ruling class and its supporters in the upper middle-classes may turn to violence and systematic political terrorism, carried out through gangs of hooligans, goons, and strikebreakers they hire to impede government functions or to smash opposition parties and labor organizations. Minorities are violently scapegoated
as part of a divide and conquer strategy to keep opposition to the regime fragmented and impotent. Concentration camps and slave labor are increasingly instituted. Deportation is a favorite tactic.
This gives rise to fascist movements, meaning that fascism is not exclusively a top-down dictatorship, but has an indispensable bottom-up radicalized mass component which is cultivated among guttersnipes, criminals, and other victims of a society ravaged by economic breakdown.
The mass movement is what makes fascism fundamentally different from a traditional police state or other form of authoritarian dictatorship. Under fascism, working people are gaslighted and manipulated into attacking and oppressing themselves based on false consciousness.
Although fascism in Italy and Germany between the world wars is most widely studied,
there is also a strong argument that the original prototype for 20th century fascism on both sides of the Atlantic is the original Ku Klux Klan in the defeated Confederacy after 1865. The KKK can be seen as a political terrorist organization acting as the armed wing of political forces determined to subjugate the former slaves, preventing their political activism and enforcing brutal economic exploitation and subordination.
Violence and political terrorism on a large scale must be seen as the hallmarks of fascism. A good way to decide if a reactionary has been radicalized into a fascist is to check for acts of political terrorism or support for such violence. Without violence, you do not have fascism. Fascism must work towards mass stupefaction and dumbing down (Verblödung, rimbecillimento)
of its dupes lest they act according to their own enlightened rational self-interest. Fascism must promote forms of raving anti-science irrationalism, obscurantism, and mysticism, as for example Hitler’s racist Aryan mythology or QAnon. Note that racism is not something different from fascism but is included in it, since racist hatred, oppression, and especially genocide have often been subsumed as an integral part of fascism itself.
Violence and political terrorism on a large scale must be seen as the hallmarks of fascism. A good way to decide if a reactionary has been radicalized into a fascist is to check for acts of political terrorism or support for such violence. Without violence, you do not have fascism. Fascism must work towards mass stupefaction and dumbing down (Verblödung, rimbecillimento) of its dupes lest they act according to their own enlightened rational self-interest.
Fascism must promote forms of raving anti-science irrationalism, obscurantism, and mysticism, as for example Hitler’s racist Aryan mythology or QAnon. Note that racism is not something different from fascism but is included in it, since racist hatred, oppression, and especially genocide have often been subsumed as an integral part of fascism itself.
Both Mussolini and Hitler were adamant that fascism is a religion. In more modern terms, we might describe it as a cult, where members cease to be individuals in the full sense.
Fascism typically develops as a personality cult around the Duce, Führer, Caudillo, Maréchal, Căpitanul, or Vozhd
. Omnipotence, omniscience, infallibility, invincibility, and magical powers are ascribed to the fetishized leader as a matter of fascist party discipline. The followers are often purblind to failures, crimes, and insanity until a breaking point is reached or the dictator is no longer on the scene. Many of these patterns are sadly familiar to the Americans of our time.
By these criteria, MAGA has transitioned into fascism as of no later than January 6, 2021. This includes MAGA supporters in the states, the Congress, the federal judiciary,
the Supreme Court, quite possibly the military. (Both Mussolini and Hitler were veterans of World War I, and veterans were a large part of their recruits.) MAGA has declared in public that it has long since left the terrain of the United States Constitution behind, and is busily abolishing long-standing rights on the way to totalitarian dictatorship.
You mean except during the McCarthy era?
@MichaelTalon Thank you for this post. The vocabulary shifts in the media as you noted are troubling, indeed.
@MichaelTalon Yes. The radicalized mass component is part of the bundle of sticks, the fascia. That's the essence of it is, all the sticks tied together, everything under one bundle of control.
Typically presented as preventing/fighting corruption, while actually locking in impunity, so the system is fully corrupt from the get-go.
mass psychology often depends on the public perception of which contending political force is the stronger. Letting fascists hide under the euphemism of “conservatives” communicates nothing but contemptible weakness and confusion. This is the inevitable subtext of the current misguided left of center stylebook.