President Biden! Scaremongering about fascism is a dangerous game!
President Biden finally used the F word! In a speech delivered at a fundraising event hosted by the Democratic National Committee in Bethesda Maryland on 25th August, he denounced the Make America Great Again (MAGA) wing of the Republican Party as akin to a fascism. He stated:
‘What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism’.
Given that the word fascism serves as the most alarmist term in the scaremonger’s dictionary, I am surprised that it has taken Biden this long to use the F word. To be sure, he qualified this word by referring to semi-fascism but that is simply an illustration of his political illiteracy. Semi-fascist is an absurd accusatory concept that merely exposes the lack of conviction of the accuser.
Accusing MAGA of semi-fascism is a dangerous step to take. For if indeed such a large section of American society is drawn towards fascism, then the very existence of democracy is put to question. In effect Biden has raised the alarm about a supposed existential peril facing American democracy. Such a claim about the clear and present danger confronting democracy implicitly serves as an invitation to panic and fear.
As I discuss in my book, Politics of Fear: Beyond Left And Right, political illiteracy and confusion goes hand in hand with scaremongering. Practitioners of the politics of fear find it difficult to resist the temptation of condemning their opponents as fascists. The rhetoric of ‘it’s just like the thirties…’ is constantly deployed to discredit political adversaries. In effect, charging opponents with being a fascist has become an integral feature of the twenty-first century anti-populist playbook.
For example, scaremongering about fascism has become a normal feature of Italian political life during the current parliamentary election campaign. Giogia Meloni, the leader of the coalition of right-wing parties, and likely to be Italy’s Prime Minister after the election, is constantly denounced as a fascist. Her main opponent, Enrico Letta, the leader of the centrist Democratic Party, ceaselessly calls on the Italian electorate to ‘unite against the fascist threat’.
Crying wolf about the threat of fascism comes naturally to the oligarchy that runs the European Union (EU). It is constantly attempting to discredit populist movements and anti-globalist supporters of national sovereignty by labelling them as fascists. A fascinating study conducted by the social anthropologist Maryon Mcdonald shows how EU functionaries have become totally addicted to the rhetoric of ‘they are just like fascists’. When she conducted interviews with EU functionaries in Brussels, she observed that there were real limits to the kind of criticisms that could be raised with them. A serious critique of the EU courted being condemned as by definition, the work of a lunatic right-wing extremist. She wrote that; ‘since the 1970s especially, it has become increasingly difficult in Europe to criticize the EU without appearing to be some lunatic right-wing fascist, racist or nationalist, the one often eliding with the other, or simply the parochial idiot of Little Britain.’1 The power of this rhetoric of condemnation has until relatively recently been quite successful in isolating many critics of the EU bureaucracy.
The response of the anti-populist EU Establishment to Brexit was to condemn it as a symptom of the rise of fascism in Europe. According to the Polish pro-EU intellectual, Adam Michnik, Brexit had to be understood as analogous to fascism and Bolshevism. ‘Brexit-fuelled nationalism is only one step removed from fascism’ argued one left-wing British commentator. Another observed, ‘There’s a warning for the Brexit age from the British fascism of the 1930s’.
The recent explosion of alarmist warnings about the imminent rise of fascism can easily create the impressions that we are in the midst of a re-run of the bad old days of interwar Europe. ‘American fascism is a deadly threat – it must be confronted now’ warns a commentator in the New Statesmen. This warning is echoed by The Washington Post, where Federico Finchelsetin, a professor of history claimed that ‘Donald Trump has blurred the line between populism and fascism in a dangerous way’. This point is also highlighted by the acclaimed British journalist Patrick Cockburn, who asserted that the ‘Republican Party has turned fascist – it is now the most dangerous threat in the world’.
Apparently, fascism is also on the rise in Europe. ‘Fascism on the rise: where does it come from, and how to stop it, with a common European response’ is the title of a report published by a unit associated with the European Union. Another report contends that ‘Spanish Democracy is now under Fascist Threat’.
Once upon a time the most consummate practitioners of the politics of fear were the fascists. Today it is anti-fascism which has become thoroughly saturated with the politics of fear!
The former American Secretary of State, Madeline Albright’s Fascism: A Warning is paradigmatic in this respect. From Albright’s perspective virtually any non-centrist individual or political movement opposed to her cosmopolitan technocratic outlook is a potential fascist. She claims that her Warning was motivated by the people of Britain being ‘lured into Brexit’ and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Adopting a patronising elitist tone, she refers to the ‘herd mentality’ of the people who voted the wrong way and adds ‘they walk in one another’s footsteps, as Hitler did with Mussolini—and today the herd is moving in a Fascist direction. For all their differences, there are also links that connect figures like Maduro, Erdoğan, Putin, Orbán, Duterte’, she claimed.
Since the election of Trump, the fuelling of anti-fascist hysteria has become a respectable academic enterprise. The association of the age of Trump with the spectre of fascism is promoted through studies such as Henry A. Giroux’s, American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism, Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, and William E. Connolly’s, Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism. These studies have as their premise, the conviction that their adversaries, be they the New Right, or Authoritarian Populist, or even ordinary populists and conservatives, possess a common fascistic mindset, attitude and behaviours. One of the first academic version of this fantasy version of fascism can be found in a 1965 collection of ‘scholarly’ essays on the European Right. In the concluding chapter, Hans Rogger claimed to have discovered a common streak in fascist minds such as a ‘nihilistic hostility to modernity, a fear of the unfamiliar, and an infantile yearning for protection’.2 This reduction of fascism to a psychological essence was most famously diagnosed in Theodor Adorno’s hugely influential 1950 study, The Authoritarian Personality. Psychological reductionism continues to characterise the contemporary caricatured version fascism. In his ‘How Fascism Works’, Jason Stanley notes ‘when voters in a democratic society yearn for a CEO as president, they are responding to their own implicit fascist impulses’.
What was fascism
The view that ‘it is just like the thirties’ shows a misunderstanding of the unique and historically specific dynamic of the rise of fascism in the 1920s. For example, Italy, Spain and Germany in the 1930s served as a terrain for intensely bitter rivalries between competing ideologies. In the first instance, fascism constituted a response to a domestic threat from political forces that were perceived as constituting a deadly threat to the nation's integrity. Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in October 1922 was preceded by what was widely perceived as a threat from the growing power of the Italian Socialist and Communist Parties. Domestic political conflict on anything like the scale experienced in the 1930s has been conspicuously absent in the West for a very, very long time.
Despite similarities with extremist movements in Spain, Portugal and Germany, fascism was a distinctly Italian movement. As the historian Gilbert Allardyce rightly noted ‘the word fascismo has no meaning beyond Italy’3. That is why when Mussolini invited the leader of the Palange Espagnola, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, to attend the international fascist congress at Montreux in 1934, he flatly refused. The Falange was not fascist, he protested, it was Spanish!
No doubt it is possible to detect similar attitudes and policies between the extreme authoritarian movements of interwar Europe, but from the outset the transformation of fascism into a generic concept was the accomplishment of its opponents who wished to turn it into a polemical weapon.
It was at the Sixth World Congress of the International Communist Movement, the Comintern, in 1928, that the meaning of fascism was expanded to characterise all opponents. From the standpoint of the Comintern, almost every non-communist party could be branded as fascists. Socialists and social democratic movements were denounced as ‘social-fascists’. During the 1932 American presidential elections Franklin Roosevelt was attacked as a fascist candidate and the socialist Norman Thomas was denounced as the social- fascist candidate. Almost a century later the 1930s style of Stalinist fascist-mongering has been embraced by not only the American Anti-Fa but by respectable scholars in prestigious universities.
Anti-fa poster!
Unless we wish to use fascism as an all-purpose swear word to be hurled at an adversary we fear and despise, it is useful to refer to it in the past tense. Contemporary attempts to turn fascism into a generic concept invariably overlook its specificity and historical dynamic. Unlike liberalism, socialism or communism, fascism was not a pre-existing doctrine or ideology that was promoted or put into practice by its advocates. Fascism emerged as a movement in response to the historic crisis of the post- First World War One political order in Europe. It emerged in Italy, a society whose institutions lacked legitimacy, and whose political system was in permanent crisis.
Mussolini in Rome
In his study Italian Fascism, 1915-1945, Philip Morgan noted that;
‘The Fascist movement emerged as an extreme and violent political response to a perceived national crisis, consequent on the social and political strains set up by the impact and outcome of the First World War and expressed in what appeared to be Socialist revolution. It became a new mass movement of the middle classes, united in a heterogeneous anti-socialist coalition with important organised sectional interests and members of liberal Italy’s political, economic and military establishment’.
One of the distinct features of this mass movement was its heterogenous character. The formation of the fascist movement in November 1919 coincided with the creation of a paramilitary formation, the fascist squadrismo. These squads of mainly World War One veterans played an important role in militarising Italian politics and lending fascism its violent dimension. Mussolini was able to create a political movement through mobilising his paramilitary Blackshirts.
However, though the mobilisation of war veterans was integral to Mussolini’s ascendancy, fascism was more than just an extra-parliamentary para-military force. It emerged as a mass movement that succeeded in gaining influence amongst sections of the elites, the middle classes and the plebeian masses. At the time, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky highlighted the capacity of Italian fascism to incorporate different sections of society into its ranks. In 1932, he observed that;
‘The fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of large masses, with new leaders from the rank and file. It is a plebeian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses; Mussolini, a former socialist, is a “self-made” man arising from this movement’.
What was a unique feature of Italian fascism was that though it was a plebeian movement it also attracted the support of sections of the Italian political and business elites, the military and the Church. This was a time of political instability and the radicalisation of working-class people, and in response, the traditional Italian Establishment supported Mussolini to restore and maintain order. That is why the leaders of even liberal and conservative political movements tolerated the political violence that the squadistas inflicted on trade unionists, left -wing and even liberal political movements. Fascism was an extra-parliamentary and militaristic plebeian movement that succeeded in gaining power because it was assisted by a sympathetic elite.
The transformation of a spontaneous nationalist movement into what would between 1919 and 1925 turn into a violent totalitarian force occurred at a time when Europe faced a crisis of authority. The upheavals of the post -World War One era led to a loss of faith in democratic politics throughout the continent. While fascist leaders like Benito Mussolini were most explicit in their condemnation of democracy, even many mainstream conservative and liberal politicians regarded the exercise of popular sovereignty with suspicion and fear.
The militarisation of politics along with its focus on extra-parliamentary mobilisation by Italian fascists was linked to an outlook that held both democracy and liberty in contempt. Mussolini had no time for majority rule. He argued that; ‘Fascism is opposed to Democracy, which equates the nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of that majority’.
The anti- majoritarian and anti-democratic sentiments that animated Italian fascism interweaved with a mood of scepticism towards the viability of liberal democracy in the post-World War One era. Following the War, there was a critical revision of modern mass democracy by political theorists and policy makers This was a point at which Europeans critically re-examined the idea of democratic citizenship, which traditionally was based on the rational capacity of participation and decision on the part of the citizen4. Public opinion was represented as a synthesis of irrational myths and prejudice. This argument was forcefully presented by the American commentator Walter Lippmann in his influential 1922 study, Public Opinion, which declared that the proportion of the electorate that is ‘absolutely illiterate’ is much larger than one would suspect, and that these people who are ‘mentally children or barbarians’ are the natural targets of manipulators.
Fascism was, authoritarian and self-consciously totalitarian. It was explicitly anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian. Contrary to the current tendency couple fascism with populism, it was profoundly hostile to it.
Fascism was bitterly hostile to populism because it despised popular sovereignty!
In his account of his doctrine, Mussolini stated that:
‘Fascism attacks the whole complex of democratic ideologies and rejects them both in their theoretical premises and in their applications or practical manifestations. Fascism denies that the majority, through the mere fact of being a majority, can rule human societies; it denies that this majority can govern by means of a periodical consultation; it affirms the irremediable, fruitful and beneficent inequality of men, who cannot be levelled by such a mechanical and extrinsic fact as universal suffrage’.
Paradoxically, Mussolini’s condemnation of the rule of a democratic majority is shared by many contemporary anti-populist accounts warning about the return of fascism.
Anti-populist authors like Jason Stanley attempt to link fascism and contemporary populism through the claim that they all possess a nostalgia for the past. Stanley suggests that like the fascists, populist want to bring back a ‘mythic past’ that has been lost or destroyed. Contrary to the widely held view that associate fascism with a conservative yearning for the past, Mussolini and his movements were thoroughly modernist and future oriented. Unlike traditional right-wing movements – reactionary and conservative- fascism was far more obsessed with novelty than with tradition. Italian fascism was a distinctly modernist movement, whose technocratic ambitions were oriented to the future. Italian fascist leaders frequently promoted the goal of a New Age and New Rome and the creation of a New Man. It possessed a distinctly anti-conservative and anti-traditional orientation. Paolo Orano, a prominent fascist idealogue noted, how fascism is animated by a ‘will to annul at all costs in us the vestiges of the past, so as to live only in the future’.
Mussolini sought to rid Italy of much of its past legacy. In October 1926, he proclaimed his ambition to ‘render unrecognisable both spiritually and physically the face of the nation’ and promised that within ten years he would create the ‘new Italian’ who would not resemble the one of the past’.
Mussolini’s utopian and totalitarian project was to transform the mentality of Italians and turn them into new men, ‘totally new human figure, an inedited model of Italian virility … a modern man wholly directed towards the future’ . Fascism was a modernist project that was not just anti-liberal but thorough anti-conservative and anti-populist. It is a testimony to the historical illiteracy that prevails in western public culture today, that the term fascist is used in a way that so distorts its meaning.
As it happens, the authors of the alarmist claims about the imminent return of fascism often have far more in common with the target of their alarmist polemic than they suspect. They both possess a visceral hatred towards the people and towards the democratic aspirations of populism. Mussolini’s anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian sentiments is shared by the contemporary critics of populism.
Since the publication of Jason Brennan’s invective against populism – Against Democracy (2006), there has been a veritable renaissance in the publication of elitist, anti-democratic tomes. Anti-populist ideology focused on two inter-related but contradictory themes. Democracy is blamed for the rise of populism and at the same time the populists are depicted as a threat to the survival of democracy. Some anti-populists have criticised democracy for allowing populist movements to make significant headway. Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt’s book How Democracies Die (2018) pointed to ‘democratic backsliding’, which apparently ‘begins at the ballot box’. In this and other studies, democracies’ defects are attributed to the unpredictable and irrational behaviour of the people. Mussolini would thoroughly approve of the anti-majoritarian sentiment that animates contemporary critiques of democracy.
What of the future?
Scaremongering about fascism is likely to become more expansive. Political opponents – especially if they are conservative or populists will be - at the very least - accused of being ‘semi-fascists’. It is evident that a growing variety of political attitudes and behaviours are likely to be denounced and labelled as fascists. A recent book titled White Skin, Black Fuel; On The Dangers Of Fossil Fascism succeeds in coupling the cultural crime of fascism, whiteness, racism with environmental vandalism. Fossil Fascism is linked to ‘eco-fascism’, which according to euronews is a ‘veneer for racist beliefs’ Others warn of the threat posed by ‘digital fascism’. On a lighter note, food fascists are said to demonise everything we eat.
Crying wolf about the fascist threat is a dangerous sport. By drawing an analogy with the catastrophic events of the 1930s and 1940s, it trivialises them. If we treat fascism so lightly, as if it is an everyday unpleasant phenomenon then we lose the capacity to understand our current predicament. The current form of anti-fascist accusatory history plunders the past to demonise political adversaries. It is a very dangerous game because it raises the stake to the point that political opponents are turned into historical ‘enemies’.
Biden is playing with fire when he denounces MAGA as semi-fascist. For if he really understood what fascism represented in the bad old days of the thirties, he would be organising for a civil war.
McDonald, M. (2005) ‘EU Policy and Destiny: A Challenge for Anthropology Guest Editorial by Maryon McDonald’, Anthropology Today, vol. 21, no.1., p.4.
Rogger, H., 1966. The European right: a historical profile (Vol. 124). Univ of California Press.
Allardyce, G., 1979. What fascism is not: thoughts on the deflation of a concept. The American Historical Review, 84(2), p.367.
Frezza, D. (2007) The Leader and the Crowd: Democracy in American, Public Discourse, 1880–1941, University of Georgia Press:Athens, G, p.128.
I'm interested in the list of conditions that you describe as existing in the 1920's which allowed for the rise in fascismo in Italy. Looking at the current Italian situation specifically would you agree that, other than the paramilitary veteran element, there are a lot of similarities? Some quotes:
"a perceived national crisis"
"a time of political instability and the radicalisation of working-class people"
"loss of faith in democratic politics throughout the continent."
"It emerged in Italy, a society whose institutions lacked legitimacy, and whose political system was in permanent crisis."
"a crisis of authority"
I appreciate your arguments and some of these statements could describe the permanent Italian state of affairs but the Pandemic has created a kind of psychic shock in the country, IMO, and I wonder about the consequences of this combination of events.