MysteriousFaith

The Anatomy of Fascism

Book Review: The Anatomy of Fascism

Learning from history is widely accepted as critical to improvement for the lot of humanity; however, while it is deemed important, lessons from history rarely transfer to meaningful policy or leadership changes in society. At one level, it can seem our ability to learn from what history has to teach resonates most specifically with leaders who either act to change or take advantage of those lessons history has to teach. At another level, the question of how history impacts average people is less clear; it seems that we have a cultural memory that ebbs and flows as our actual experiences overlap ones similar to past historical events. The painful realization this implies is that our culture responds when our actual situation parallels the past, and not before it. A realization that comes to late is helpful only in realizing our mistake, and rarely in avoiding it.

The political philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset has commented in his Toward a Philosophy of History that “Man’s real treasure is the treasure of his mistakes, piled up stone by stone through thousands of years.” Our ancient nemesis of totalitarianism is one such mistake: people recognize the dangers of totalitarian government even if only in the ambiguous sense Orwellian language commonly incorporates. Most of us can agree on many of the factors that align to make totalitarian regimes come into power, and yet the world inevitably dances with this devil time after time. Wrestling with totalitarianism is analytically complex because in attempting to outline its causation, one inevitably must fight off the desire to incorporate determinism – the belief that if certain cultural “things” happen and people respond to them in certain ways (forgive my necessary ambiguity here), it is inevitable for totalitarianism to result. The question of fascism is one such difficult analysis: it can be foolishly easy to argue for simple causes to such a large social ill. Robert Paxton, in his The Anatomy of Fascism deliberately avoids deterministic arguments in presenting the causes to European fascism.

“Mobilizing Passions” in the Development of Political Ideology

Initially, one of the more unhelpful points of analysis Paxton introduces is the emphasis on “mobilizing passions” at the foundation of fascism. At first glance, this is as good an explanation for any social movement as it is for fascism. The dangers Paxton highlights are two-fold: a rabid nationalism and a view of “us versus them” that is bifurcated along overly simplistic lines. Contemporary echoes of this can be heard in President Bush’s “good versus evil”, “us versus them” and “dead or alive” rhetoric. This is certainly not to say President Bush is a fascist, but it is helpful to be reminded that the world rarely fits into such easily bifurcated sections. Of particular importance is the reality that not only is the world rarely split into such easy divisions, but that many times doing so serves to take a complex socio-economic or geo-political question and distill it into a form that, while easily understandable, is fundamentally wrong in the worst way.

In the final chapter of Paxton’s book he explores whether or not an American fascism could arise; we will return to that point later on. But the question of what lies at the foundation of fascism can not overlook the part of it that focuses on a victim mentality from people that are still very much in power. Among the problems in the modern conservative movement – one of which is a fragmentation of political ideology seconded only by the disarray of liberalism – is its narcissism. Today’s conservative thinking, specifically that articulated by the movement’s mouthpieces like Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, manage to advocate a position that presents their opinions as the afflicted minority when, in fact, they are the effectual majority. This tension is a problem because its victim-hood increases as its power does; this is the dynamic of political ideologies that become totalitarian:

“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 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 rentiers, and rationalist thinkers who lack the necessary sense of community.” (page 41)

Paxton goes on to list the specific “mobilizing passions” that are at the root of fascism. These include:

• “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 … and the subordination of the individual to it;
• The belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
• Dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
• The need for closer integration of a purer community …” (page 41)

Compare these, bullet by bullet if you will, with the following characteristics of prevalent American conservative politics, the religious variety specifically:

• The crisis of homosexuality, abortion and rampant sexuality has gotten so bad that we have offended ______________ (if this is a religious figure speaking you may insert “God” as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell both did; if this is a political figure speaking you may insert any number of “Muslim” countries).
• America is inherently better than any other nation in the world. Our systems, whether they be governmental, financial or political are better than anyone else’s. As a consequence, we have the right and duty to protect our way of life and, if necessary, use force to make our righteousness felt.
• Post 9/11 America is a victim. We are misunderstood by the European countries who defied our invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. We have the right to take prisoners and unlawfully detain and abuse them because of the threat they may pose. Protecting ourselves against what might happen legitimizes our striking anyone anywhere without provocation or justification.
• American identity, once a supposedly homogeneous population, is being threatened by Mexicans coming from porous Southern borders and an ethnically diverse future inconsistent with the once monolithic and homogeneous racial American identity.

The Demise of Liberalism

The strength of Manichean thinking is that it touches a core truth of the human experience, specifically, that balance of power and tension between competing ideologies is necessary for healthy society. The Eastern idea of ying-yang closely follows the same line of reasoning. It is when one particular ideology so overpowers another that it becomes, by necessity, mono-polar and prone to seeking ideological purity and preserving its dominance. When a particular ideology becomes prevalent with all competing ideologies distantly second to it, such a power has to judiciously fight against the likelihood that it will become prone to destructive acts of self-preservation. Paxton argues that Europe found itself in a similar position because of the demise of liberalism. The aftermath of a horrific World War I – which stole from most Europeans their post-Enlightenment hope that war could genuinely be in their distant past – combined with the failure of Marxism to fulfill its promise of equality to make European liberalism wholly ineffectual. Liberalism as a competing ideology to conservatism fell apart. Says Paxton,

“Torn between a distorted Wilsonianism and an unfulfilled Leninism, Europe seethed after 1919 with unresolved territorial and class conflicts. This mutual failure left political space available for a fourth principle of world order. The fascists’ new formula promised, like that of the conservatives, to settle territorial conflicts by allowing the strong to triumph … They proposed to overcome class conflict by integrating the working class into the nation, by persuasion if possible and by force if necessary, and by getting rid of the ‘alien’ and the ‘impure.’” (page 32)

We have to again compare this situation to modern-day America. Today, the most definable American political ideology is conservative thinking, although even that is failing its purest doctrinal followers because of its mish-mash of ideology and implementation. An unorganized dissenting political party in America is as unhealthy for us as it was for Europeans after the Great War because it holds no ability to provide real accountability to conservative ideas.

Man’s Frustration & the Need for Objectified Enemies

“In the 1880s new steamships made it possible to bring cheap wheat and meat to Europe, bankrupting family farms and aristocratic estates and sending a flood of rural refugees into the cities. At the same time, railroad knocked the bottom out of what was left of skilled artisanal labor by delivering cheap manufactured goods to every city. At the same ill-chosen moment, unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived in western Europe.” (page 45)

This description should startle you. Its comparison to contemporary America could not be more parallel: in relatively good economic times it is easy to overlook the vanishing middle class in America that consists of former auto workers, semi-skilled manufacturing employees and similarly semi-skilled service industry opportunities. Just as European society in the mid 1920’s included large segments of formerly mid-level wage earning semi-professionals, so does today’s America involve people who are beginning to become aware that their skills will not transfer into the second half of their professional careers. Minus economically severe times, it is possible to overlook these problems; however, if our economic situation were to change, what economic fissures could lead to larger societal fractures?

Ideological Purity is Today’s Racist Nationalism

Most troubling to me is the part of fascism’s identity that requires the idea of ideological purity. As American society has grown increasingly polarized, we have all become more willing to accommodate thinkers from our own camps that mercilessly attack opposing thinkers in the vilest of terms. Ann Coulter is one such example for conservatives – her last book How to Talk to Liberals, if You Must is hateful at a humorous, theoretical and pragmatic level. Dissent is essential in a democracy and the idea, even if hopefully incorporating humor, is dangerous that representatives of a contrasting ideology are not worth talking to. Michael Moore and his now famous books and documentaries that have managed to perfect the seven-degrees of separation reasoning (if it can be called this) are other examples of this type of demagogy from the left. What both need is to focus on solutions to our problems and avoid the means of public dialogue that suggest it is only the ideologically pure (when compared to our particular ideological stripe) that can have something to contribute. In Paxton’s book he shows how the primacy given ideological purity inevitably goes hand in hand with the creation of external enemies. In time, the external enemies become internal ideological enemies. Purity is valued above all else, and society is willing to do whatever is must to maintain this position.

“Enemies were central to the anxieties that helped inflame the fascist imagination. Fascists saw enemies within the nation as well as outside. Foreign states were familiar enemies … Internal enemies grew luxuriantly in number and variety in the mental landscape as the ideal of the homogeneous national state made difference more suspect … Political and cultural subversives – socialists of various hues, avant-garde artists and intellectuals – discovered new ways to challenge community conformism.” (page 36)

Ineffectual Government

Long gone are the days where the nobility of public service and good government could be lauded as in Plato’s Republic. We have already touched on the mess of today’s liberal establishment; however, to appreciate the parallels between past fascist societies and today’s America, we have to touch on the state of conservative thinking. Whether measured against Goldwater or Reagan Republicanism, today’s conservative party is in disarray. Discretionary spending under President Bush is up 35.1%; adjusted for inflation, spending under the “great spender” LBJ was up 33.4% - and we are not yet done with Bush’s presidency! Basic questions of conservative ideology in relationship to fiscal conservatism are no less problematic than a burgeoning question of what conservative ideology means as to basic questions of personal liberty. Conservative ideology used to argue for minimal government interference in people’s lives, mocking the “it takes a village” mantra from Hillary Clinton; and yet we have only to look at Rick Santorum’s most recent book and his numerous policy speeches to see a conservative ideology developing that believes it has the obligation inside the family and home to interfere if doing so furthers its particular social cause or prevents a particular line of thinking from taking root in society. This is an assertive conservative line of thinking, and one that does not respect the past conservative boundaries between public and private questions. While this is sufficiently troubling, more so is the idea that American conservatism appears to be showing exactly the tendency past totalitarian ideologies did – they are willing to change in order to maintain their preeminence, and to do so for reasons inconsistent with their founding ideologies.

Paxton highlights a point that is perhaps less the hallmark of an early fascism, and more an indicator of a system of government in disarray:

“The fire-bells set off by Bolshevism transformed into emergencies the difficulties already faced by liberal values and institutions in the aftermath of World War I. All three key liberal institutions – parliament, market, school – dealt poorly with these emergencies. Elected representatives struggled to find the necessary minimum of common ground to make difficult policy choices. Assumptions about the adequacy of a self-regulating market, even if believable in the long run, seemed laughably inadequate in the face of immediate national and international economic dislocations.” (emphasis mine – page 44).

It is inevitable that America deal with its fiscal realities. The growing deficits and trade imbalances are not to be overlooked; they are engines of necessity when political dialogue is being shaped. At the moment, our elected officials are showing an equal unwillingness to address those “difficult policy choices” that would allow us to economically sustain our republic.

Echoes in America?

Paxton’s conclusion avoids determinism, but it can not avoid asking if the fascist experiments in Europe could find a parallel in America. Paxton does not argue for the likelihood of fascism, but he does take the past lessons and project what they might reveal about an authentically American totalitarianism:

“In any event, a fascism of the future – an emergency response to some still unimagined crisis – need not resemble classical fascism perfectly in its outwards signs and symbols. Some future movement that would ‘give up free institutions’ in order to perform the same functions of mass mobilization for the reunification, purification, and regeneration of some troubled group would undoubtedly call itself something else and draw on fresh symbols. That would not make it any less dangerous … An authentically popular American fascism would be pious, anti-Black, and since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well.” (page 175)

“The simplest boundary separates fascism from classical tyranny … Fascism … meant setting aside democracy and due process in public life, to the acclamation of the street. It is a phenomenon of failed democracies, and its novelty was that, instead of simply clamping silence upon citizens as classical tyranny had done since earliest times, it found a technique to channel their passions into the construction of an obligatory domestic unity around projects of internal cleansing and external expansion.” (page 216)

Post 9/11, Americans have often found themselves casually acknowledging we may have to give up certain freedoms and liberties in the interests of safety. History would suggest that nothing is worth sacrificing these over, and that the act of doing so may draw us closer to the reality of those who hate us. Their religious totalitarianism may become our secular fascism. The lessons of history are in front of us, but we must learn from them.

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• September 22, 2005

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