Okay, first things first: I don’t intend on spending all my time nutpicking MAGAstan and WOKEstan since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Marjorie Taylor-Green (what is it with wingnuts having three names?) get too much attention as it is. But during the Superbowl, AOC gave me the perfect excuse to talk a little about the word of the week, and I couldn’t pass it up.
You may already know the story: a Christian outreach group spent 20 million dollars for two brief ads during the “Big Game.” Aside from the conclusion that the organization must be funded by God himself, I drew little from these ads but two sentiments we, as a culture, could all probably use right now. Be kind with each other, and don’t hate each other.
Christian morality is quite complex when you start digging around in it; the “Hippie Jesus” concept was never really true, despite multiple musicals from the boomer era portraying him that way. However, there isn’t anything particularly untrue about these two deeply Christian sentiments. The first ad didn’t draw much attention, but ahh, AOC, you rapscallion, you just couldn’t resist tweeting about it thusly: “Something tells me Jesus would *not* [sic] spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign[.]” I love that I have to add appropriate punctuation to the tweet of a sitting US congresswoman—and from my own home state, too!
From grammar to usage, what the heck is AOC saying, exactly? Are Christians fascists? Or is she saying that all protesters are fascists? If she saw something partisan in the images used in the commercial, she’s got a far subtler eye than I do. It’s nearly impossible to tell who is who or what ideology they are flogging in the images used in that second advertisement. Furthermore, none of the images look at all benign. I’d argue they look pretty scary, and were well chosen for the message that Jesus enjoins us to love our enemies. The sentiment is clearly anti-fascist, a point I will get back to.
However, first, the misuse of this word is clearly a problem rife in WOKEstan, and not unheard of in MAGAstan. Political recreators of both realms have been known to blurt out “fascism!” without regard to the accused, the word’s meaning itself, and often even the act being perpetrated that led to blurting accusation.
In one of my favorite 3rd grade moments from last year, President Biden (backed by the mainstream Democratic Party establishment) and a pack of pro-Trump Stop the Steal right-wing pundits engaged in an honest to goodness “You are!” “No, you are!” back-and-forth, each crying fascism at the other (“Well, Biden started it!” Tucker Carlson said, sulking back to his room).
So what does the word mean? Dictionaries are a little vague. Generally there is agreement that a fascist regime or movement is right-wing, nationalistic, and intolerant of dissent, making what Biden said in his speech somewhat valid. Jason Stanley, a Yale professor cited here, gets even more general, claiming fascism exists on a spectrum, and is a political tool or “technique” to attain and hold power, not a distinct ideology or system of beliefs. He elaborates that the technique includes an assault on the truth since there is no freedom without truth, that one needs truth to freely operate in the world, etc. Fun Philo-101 stuff. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate . . . you know how it goes. He also agrees that fascism is essentially right-wing, though he gives no reasons for that belief. That critique and all joking aside, there’s some value in what he says. However, I just wasn’t convinced for three reasons.
One, it’s a little convenient to create a “spectrum” that an entire ideology has to navigate on your say so. Any conservative would rightfully reject the idea that they have to jump through some philosophy professors’ hoops or else suffer the label.
Second, most political tools are used in the interests of gaining and holding power. The democratic process is a tool of power, the politburo in communist nations were as well, the Shogunate system in Japan was designed to gain and hold power, etc. Seems like he’s describing most government systems, social systems, and even some aspects of religious systems, which begs the question: what, then, makes Fascism different?
But third, and more importantly, his was a very academic definition, didactic, abstract, and sadly, of limited use in real life except as the pejorative Professor Stanley was trying to avoid. I don’t doubt his intentions, he wants to get the word right according to his epistemological framework, but in that attempt he has done too good a job of extricating the word from the thing that makes it such a useful insult in the first place: its historical context.
Cue World War II montage of marching Wehrmacht soldiers through the Arc de Triomphe while Hitler salutes a Nuremberg Rally with the sound of Stuka dive bombers in the background. We can all see it in our mind’s eye, plain as day. These images and their historical ramifications have dominated everything that has occurred in the ensuing 80 years. I could argue that our entire history since the beginning of the war in 1939 has existed under the shadow of fascism as it was interpreted by Adolf Hitler. Yes, the word was coined in Italy, elaborated by Mussolini, and adopted somewhat loosely by various dictators before and during the Second World War, like Franco of Spain and. . . and Miklos Horthy of Hungary? But really, we all know what we’re talking about when we talk about fascism, and it ‘aint Horthy or Franco. It could be Mussolini, maybe. But considering how much like a fool he looks in retrospect, how much of a punchline he’s become, I doubt Il Duce is on anyone’s list of Top Ten Most Terrifying Fascists (cue buzzfeed’s chat gpt headline machine).
With that in mind, I contend that using the word fascism is just Reductio ad Hitlerum, and we all know it. I would further argue that invoking it except with the utmost care is to fall to Godwin’s law without the use of the words “Nazi” or “Hitler.” And yet the word is really important, and it needs a definition. If fascism comes for us again, we should be damn sure what the hell it is.
So what do we do? The dictionaries have left the definition too vague, the epistemologist left it too, well, epistemological. We find ourselves in the reverse position with “woke” where the left calls everything on the right it doesn’t like “fascist” and then the fasci—excuse me, old habit—the right calls the left fascists right back.
Here is my humble suggestion, that we use history as a guide to define the word, and we focus on what made fascism different from other ideologies. To wit:
A charismatic dictator with autocratic powers and limited institutional power sharing.
A fetishization of blood and soil nationalism, the ethnic "folk" of the nation-state who inhabit a nostalgia-infused myth of a time lost and/or betrayed.
A scapegoating of an internally extant "out" group or groups--Jews, Socialists, Communists, cis-gendered hetero-normative white Christian males, etc. These are the traitors of the myth-narrative in point 2.
A disregard for human/natural rights, especially speech, press, expression, association, etc.
A revolutionary triumphalist narrative within the ideology based on the loss of the myth from point 2, to be achieved in a future utopia.
A high level of militarism, and militaristic aesthetic. Before power is achieved, this will require a paramilitary wing to bully political opponents.
Support from and collaboration with a corporate moneyed elite. Passive support from previously empowered aristocratic or religious elite.
An ideological overtaking of existing institutions such as judicial, religious, military, press, education.
You can consider this a differential diagnosis of fascism. Some of the items are more important to identifying early fascism, and some are more important to understanding fascism once power is achieved by the fascists, but there aren’t that many of the features above that one could easily remove and still be able to diagnose fascism as a distinct category in contrast to the myriad forms of political tyranny humanity has conceived over recorded history.
And, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, you might notice that loving one’s enemies isn’t on the list, and is clearly antithetical to features 3, 4, and the second part of 6 in practice.
This is too important a word to know and get right to get wrong, and I am open to suggestions for amendments to this list. However, considering the lasting damage fascism has left on our collective psyche, practically at the species level, it is not a term to be bandied about lightly. We need this word, desperately, if we are to avoid the rise of fascism again. We need it, and so we should guard it carefully, and demand more from those who use it.