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What Is Fascism—And Why the Definition Matters

The label “fascism” gets tossed around a lot—but that doesn’t mean it lacks a coherent definition, or belongs solely to a bygone past. The political formation we call fascism is still very much alive, and very dangerous.

Abel G. Sterling

A shortened version of this article appeared in the Mar./Apr. 2021 issue of Current Affairs .

On January 6, 2021, the world gaped at their smartphones and television screens as Donald Trump’s bizarrely dressed and dangerously radicalized mob of marketing executives, real estate brokers, portfolio managers, live-streamers, veterans, bartenders, and others bulldozed through state security forces and stormed the United States Capitol, some of them on a mission to lynch Mike Pence , Nancy Pelosi, and any members of “the Squad” they could find . As the Capitol Police appeared to melt away, routed as decisively as France’s Third Republic when German panzers poured through the Ardennes, many wondered: was this the beginning of a fascist coup? Were America’s democratic institutions, deliberately flawed and limited as they are, crumbling before our eyes? Or, as some outspoken parties continue to argue, was this Internet-poisoned rabble largely harmless? Should we be much more concerned by tech moguls’ unchecked, unaccountable power to censor and control public discourse, or by the expansion of the surveillance state under the guise of anti-terror security? Should the left try to ally with the sort of person who attended the “Rally to Save America” —not the actual Nazis of course, but the masses imagined to be disillusioned by decades of corruption, endless warfare, neoliberal austerity, and a smugly condescending liberal coastal elite? None of these questions have anything close to simple answers (though, if you’re looking for a cheat sheet, I’m inclined to say no, and fuck no).

At the heart of these debates are conflicting explanations of what the actual fuck is going on with America and what we can do about it. On the one hand, if we choose to identify Trump and his supporters as “fascists,” we instinctively understand from history that this is a very bad thing . We are all presumably well aware of how within living memory, fascists launched the bloodiest and most destructive war in the history of the world, resulting in more than 80 million deaths. The Nazis are deeply ingrained in the popular imagination as evil incarnate, the armies of darkness that threatened to march across the face of the earth. If Trump and his supporters are determined to be “fascists,” those monsters from history, then even if he has been temporarily defeated, we should still be very alarmed. But if they aren’t fascists, or at least if they aren’t dangerous ones, then we can focus on a more familiar and, in some respects, more comfortable enemy: the 21 st century neoliberal establishment in all of its austerity-enforcing, privacy-violating, phone-tapping, and murderous drone-bombing horror.

…these labels and terms do matter, not only because fascism and liberal imperialism are in fact different things, but because fighting fascism requires different tools, arguments, and strategies than the ones used to combat liberal capitalism and its imperial project.

Some on the left might argue that this distinction doesn’t really matter. There is a long tradition in left-leaning discourse to identify fascism with liberal or neoliberal imperialism. Leftists recognize that the United States already is a brutal capitalist tyranny with a long history of aggressive warfare, racial authoritarianism, and genocide. So, the debate over fascism can also become a debate over the nature of the United States: how should we understand capitalism’s endless injustices and inequalities, the governing ideology of liberal democracy, and American imperialism? And if we dig even further, it becomes a dispute over the ideology of liberalism itself, and liberalism’s relationship to fascism. When you scratch a liberal, does a fascist really bleed?

I think that these labels and terms do matter, not only because fascism and liberal imperialism are in fact different things, but because fighting fascism requires different tools, arguments, and strategies than the ones used to combat liberal capitalism and its imperial project. “Fascism” has descriptive power beyond a pejorative term or an epithet, and it’s back, baby, posing a greater threat than at any point since the Second World War. Understanding fascism is crucial not only because accuracy in words and labels matter, but because it’s enormously important to recognize and understand fascism in order to effectively mobilize against it and destroy it.

Liberal imperialism and fascist imperialism are both murderous criminal enterprises which have and, in the former case, continue to wreak death and destruction on untold millions. It is of cold comfort for an Iraqi orphan to be told that their parents’ killers weren’t “fascists.” Nevertheless, we need to recognize that liberal imperialism and its fascist counterpart operate differently and are vulnerable in different ways. While both Bush and Obama unquestionably committed atrocities while they stood at the helm of the most powerful capitalist state the world has yet seen, they were not fascists. George W. Bush would be better condemned as a liberal imperialist, one whose speeches were inundated with now-clichéd liberal shibboleths like “liberty” and “freedom.” Admittedly, calling Bush a “liberal imperialist” rather than a fascist lacks a certain punch. But labeling Bush and Obama as fascists doesn’t work because fascism is not only explicitly and emphatically anti-communist, but anti-liberal as well.

In the 20 th century, fascism only became a powerful force when liberalism failed. The First World War threw Europe into social and political chaos, slaughtering millions, shattering ancient empires, and profoundly disrupting social and economic life. Free market liberalism did not have the answers. In Russia, liberals failed to address the twin crises of war and economic collapse, and were swept aside by the Bolsheviks. In Italy, the liberals mismanaged the war, signing a peace treaty that was a national humiliation. Soldiers returned home to face mass unemployment, uncontrolled inflation, and widespread unrest. The Italian king and governing establishment—including the discredited liberals—ended up inviting Benito Mussolini’s fascists to form a government to restore order in 1922. Elsewhere in Europe, liberal democratic politics stabilized after the immediate post-war revolutions and upheavals. In Germany, the Nazis remained relatively marginal until the Great Depression finally destroyed the inter-war liberal order. Not only did the Depression result in massive unemployment and immiseration worldwide, but the economic crisis was unsolvable, even theoretically, by traditional liberal means. The laissez-faire approach that had led to the collapse offered no solutions when it came to climbing back out of it. With Germany threatening to unravel, and the communists waiting in the wings, the Nazis had answers that maintained a form of capitalism while directly rebuking liberalism: replacing liberal notions of pluralistic democracy, individual autonomy, and free market economics with the radical centrality of the nation.

What Is Fascism?

Rejecting both liberalism and socialism, fascism is a set of radical, revolutionary ideologies and political movements of the extreme right that place the nation, however defined, above all other possibilities of human experience and social organization. For fascists, the nation is the central analytic prism through which all of world history, all knowledge, and all human social relationships are to be understood. If a Marxist sees dialectical class struggle as the motor of human history, while a liberal sees the enlightened march of progress and a conservative sees the decline from a harmonious past, the fascist sees the nation. If we want a general framework for what fascists actually believed, or believe, historian Roger Griffin’s 1991 definition, now almost a cliché, is genuinely helpful. In his book A Fascist Century, Griffin identifies fascism as a political ideology “whose mythic core… is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.” The unusual term “palingenetic” refers to central narratives of national “rebirth.” In another useful formulation, Griffin writes that fascism might be defined as “a revolutionary form of nationalism driven by the myth of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.” Emerging from illiberal, anti-democratic, and (mostly) counter-Enlightenment 19th intellectual traditions, fascism opposed liberalism’s universalist emphasis on reason, the rule of law, individual autonomy, and pluralistic representative democracy; as well as socialism’s materialistic, revolutionary, class-focused, and internationalist egalitarianism, supplanting both with the spiritual, emotional, particularist, and fundamentally irrational totalization of the nation-state.

Historical fascists pursued a revolutionary project, though not in the Marxian or socialist socio-economic sense: under a fascist regime, workers remained workers and capitalists remained capitalists. What fascists undertook was an ideological and political transformation of the nation, the state, and politics, culminating in the construction of a radical and all-encompassing authoritarianism that, in principle if not in practice, fused the nation, state, and the leader. This realized nation-state expressed its will not through liberal democratic parliamentary squabbling, but through the fascist movement and its leadership cult, and in the person of the leader: il Duce or der Führer. In Germany, where fascism historically reached its most extreme expression, a particular propaganda poster expressed this concept well: the image of Adolf Hitler above the words “Ein Volk, ein Reich! ein Fuhrer!” : one people, one realm, one leader.

Beyond this ideological core of authoritarian ultranationalism or revolutionary nationalism, theorists of fascism can disagree significantly, and fascist variants themselves differ rather dramatically. That said, there are key components for understanding fascism, at least as it existed when it came to power in the 20 th century. Some of these strike us as more familiar when we look around the contemporary world than others. I will touch on four: 1) the fascist division of the world into binaries of Us and Them, 2) the cult of the leader, 3) the corporatist vision for the national state, and 4) the fascist mass movement.

The fascist understanding of the nation and its place in the world relies on fundamental, Manichean binaries: the distinction of Us and Them, with the boundaries of the nation (Us) enforced through violence. Fascism’s Us consists of the true members of the nation, standing together to oppose Them, the sinister Other who threatens Us, destabilizing the nation’s unity and internal harmony. This demonic enemy, whose identity and nature varies between different fascist formulations, poses a profound and existential danger to the nation, poisoning it from within and from without. The enemy is pernicious and insidious, justifying any and all measures against them, but they are also vulnerable to the nation’s power: simultaneously strong and weak, in Umberto Eco’s classic formulation . Exploiting emotions of pride, humiliation, and rage, the fascists’ “enemy” is a reversal of the real: transforming victim into perpetrator and turning fascist perpetrator into victim. The nation’s vulnerability, its sense that it is under threat, justifies and celebrates acts of what historian Robert Paxton calls “redemptive violence ” to defend the nation and purge it of its enemies. Fascist rhetoric can be deceptively “anticapitalist,” with tirades against parasitic “elites” or plutocratic, internationalist, cosmopolitan bankers (by which they nearly always mean Jews). There is a real danger here for socialists to be suckered in by fascist populism: actual wealthy capitalist “elites” are, of course, a familiar enemy of socialism. But because fascism is national in focus, its apparent anticapitalism is just an illusion and a misdirection. Fascists aren’t interested in replacing capitalism at all—and certainly not with a new system that’s better for everyone. They want the system, whatever it is, to defend and enforce their dominance: the dominance of one race over others, of one gender over others, and to crush all real or perceived threats to that dominance from within or without.

In Italy and Germany, the fascist leadership cult coalesced around Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler as the voice and will of the nation mobilized into one unitary being. As the linchpin at the heart of fascism’s fusion of nation and state, the leader personally took on sacred dimensions, becoming the definitive source of truth and the legal authority superseding any precedent. Expressed in diatribe, film, and highly controlled civic discourse, Hitler—as the personification of the nation’s will and spiritual essence—was the defining fountain of transcendent truth that defied any empirical validation, becoming, as historian Frederico Finchelstein observed, the very incarnation of truth itself. Unverifiable, unfalsifiable, the leader’s vision of reality formed the alternate world of mythic fascist “truth.” This leadership concept was further expressed by the Nazis’ Führerprinzip , the philosophy that the will of the leader, embodying the national will, superseded all written law. Hitler’s autocratic decrees repudiated liberal German constitutional jurisprudence, as the regime violated liberal notions of property rights and the private sphere in directing state power to foster and protect the Volksgemeinschaft , the racially defined national community.

Some pieces of this may indeed sound familiar to anyone lived through the last four years: Trump governed as a self-described nationalist who claimed to place America first, America über alles, and wanted to “make America great again,” for it to be reborn (palingenesis) and made anew following a period of decline. Trump’s new post-presidency think tank is named “The Center for American Restoration.” His rhetoric has operated through binaries of Us and Them, celebrating and encouraging violence against the insidious Other, in the form of Mexicans, Muslims, journalists, liberals, or Antifa. His political opponents are illegitimate as a matter of course because they are his opponents. Trump’s QAnon adherents take Trump’s logic a step further, envisioning redemptive and cleansing violence to purge the nation of its internal enemies in what they call “the Storm.” Trump preferred ruling by arbitrary decree, rejecting any source of truth outside his own perspective, and built a fanatical following around frequently ridiculous, self-serving myths and lies.

But here is where it gets complicated. 20 th century fascism was largely dependent on its mobilized paramilitary organizations, which were backed by significant segments of the population. In Fascists , sociologist Michael Mann observes that these paramilitaries aimed to be seen as “popular,” posing as true expressions of the nation’s will, a national vanguard at the forefront of a mass movement. Their ranks were often first filled by traumatized and hardened First World War veterans who shared wartime bonds built around camaraderie, the military hierarchy, and the practice of violence. The groups celebrated and practiced brutality on a large and public scale, deliberately provoking altercations with their political rivals—such as communists and socialists—and then swooping in, presenting themselves as the guardians of law and order. Prior to seizing power, the paramilitaries were the core “muscle” behind fascist politics, waging street warfare and threatening the authority of the existing state. The fascist paramilitaries in Italy and Germany were enormous organizations, forming their own “state within a state” of newspapers, clubs, and social welfare measures. Fortunately, at present, while American fascist groups like the Boogaloo Boys do exist and do pursue provoking strategies , these clubs are generally smaller and more disorganized groups than the successful interwar fascist movements. And despite clear sympathies, the Republican Party has yet to fully merge with them; they haven’t literally united into a single organization.

When fascists succeeded in taking power in Italy and Germany, they worked toward a peculiar vision of the state, often termed “the corporate state.” While Trump’s plutocratic collusion with big business for brazen self-enrichment sort of falls under the umbrella of this idea, the 20 th century corporate state was envisioned as something much more radical. According to Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile ’s own definitions, under fascism, the corporate state replaces the inauthentic politics of liberal democratic pluralism, forming “an organized, centralized, authoritarian democracy.” In conception, the fascist state represents the total blending of nation and state: it “is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people.” The “corporate state,” in this sense means “corporate” like the human body, with all groups and interests and classes that make up the nation “harmonized” for the good of the totality. Crass commercial relations between capitalists and workers are, in theory at least, of secondary concern, with economic class divisions to be transcended and subsumed by the unifying power of the nation-state as the fundamental basis for reality. Mussolini and Gentile argue that in its ideal and largely unrealized form, fascism is “spiritual” rather than materialistic, and communal rather than individual. Fascism rejects the primacy of the individual at the core of 19 th century liberalism, emphasizing the nation above all. Rejecting liberal democracy’s factious parliaments and its atomizing individualism along with socialism’s concern with equality and property redistribution, the corporate state aimed to resolve the tensions of modernity once and for all with the power of the nation-state.

Historically, no corporate state ever really resembled this ideal. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were absolute clusterfucks of competing interests, corruption, and structural incoherence. Nevertheless, fascism proved to be a terrifying and enormously powerful authoritarian configuration, reaching its most radical form in Nazi Germany, where the state expanded to involve itself in every arena of human life, aiming to mobilize and reshape society while also rearming for military aggression.

In one of the most beautiful sections of The Communist Manifesto , Marx writes that the productive and destructive unfolding of capitalism meant the destruction of old social relations, conditions, and beliefs: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” For the fascist, this “real condition” is the transcendent truth of the nation-state. In a world of nations pitted against one another in Darwinian struggle and zero-sum competition, the only choice is to discard all other illusions: gather together to greet the storm. Be strong, not weak.

Economic Anxiety and Its Limits

The Marxian analysis of fascism reminds us that no matter how radical fascism was in its political theory or its populist, anti-plutocratic rhetoric, it remained a firmly capitalist system. When in power, it never really threatened capitalism’s socio-economic structure, or the power of the capital-owning classes overall. This was why traditional Marxian analyses of the movement paid less attention to fascism’s ideological contents in favor of explanations grounded in economics: fascism was a product of socio-economic class and the class struggle that underlies politics. World history is, above all, the history of class struggle, and inter-war Marxists argued that fascism represented a particular political formation in the global struggle between the capitalist bourgeoisie and the awakening proletarian masses uniting in the struggle for socialism. In July 1924, as Stalin consolidated his power, the Comintern declared that fascism “is one of the classic forms of the counter-revolution in the epoch of capitalist decay.” The declaration argued that fascism “is the instrument of the big bourgeoisie for fighting the proletariat, when the legal means available to the state have proved insufficient to subdue them. It is the extra-legal arm of the big bourgeoisie for establishing and consolidating its dictatorship.” In this view, the coercive powers held by the liberal bourgeois state—which had always been nothing more than a façade for bourgeois dictatorship—had proved inadequate, and, essentially, fascism was the maintenance of capitalism through new means. It was nothing profoundly different .

In exile, Leon Trotsky developed a more nuanced analysis of fascism. He acknowledged fascism as a mass movement, something new and distinct, with its own dynamics and unique dangers. Trotsky wrote that the supporters of fascist movements, largely the “petty-bourgeois mass,” formed the “genuine base” for fascism: businessmen, bureaucrats, shopkeepers, educated professionals, managers, land-owning small farmers, and other middle-class people with limited capital but defensive of their socio-economic position. They were joined by some members of the working class whose revolutionary aspirations had been crushed. In the form of fascism, capitalism unleashed “ the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat —all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.” The petty bourgeoisie, in Trotsky’s view, was trapped in a vise: manipulated and exploited from above and threatened by the working classes from below. Downwardly mobile, impoverished by the very logic of capitalism, crushed by economic crises, humiliated, miserable, and heavily indebted, the petty bourgeoisie as “doomed classes” tended to turn their energies and hatreds downward at the workers in the “party of counter-revolutionary despair.”

If we look at the people who stormed the Capitol, it may seem that we have uncovered fascism’s apparent social base of radicalized, struggling, petty bourgeois reactionaries. There’s the Texas real estate broker who flew to Washington D.C. in a private plane , the Chicago-area marketing CEO , and the Georgia investment manager who showed up to overthrow the outcome of a liberal democratic election. Nevertheless, this line of class analysis has its limits. Outside the Marxian tradition, generations of scholars have, in large part, struggled to prove a clean correlation between socio-economic class and support for fascist movements. It’s not entirely clear that fascism really appeals the most to those suffering from “economic anxiety,”: aka, a downwardly mobile petty bourgeoisie. Nobody struggling economically can really afford to fly to Washington D.C. with thousands of dollars worth of tactical gear for a Wednesday insurrection. I haven’t seen any evidence that the marketing CEO or real estate broker were genuinely suffering financially. The Georgia investment manager may well have been at the top of his career.

A widely-disseminated Washington Post analysis of capitol rioters’ economic conditions found that a majority of those charged at the Capitol had “signs of prior money troubles,” such as bankruptcies, bad debts, and unpaid taxes over the last twenty years. Their bankruptcy rate of 18 percent “was nearly twice as high as that of the American public,” and a fifth of them “faced losing their home at one point.” However, the Post ’s methodology is opaque at best. For one thing, other than the bankruptcy rate, there’s no indication as to how these findings compare to Americans as a whole, particularly those sharing their regional, class, race, or gender background, or even their age cohort. Terms like “prior money troubles” leave room for vast disparities of meaning: from failing to pay a handful of credit card bills (“sued for money owed to a creditor”) to owing the United States Government $400,000 in unpaid taxes (!). Most of us can only dream of suffering from enough “economic anxiety” to be hit with a $400,000 tax bill. Jenna Ryan—the private jet-flying real estate broker—is paying off a $37,000 federal tax lien. A University of Chicago study found that those arrested at the Capitol were 94 percent white and 86 percent male. 66 percent of them were older than 34, with an average age of 40 . Just 9 percent of them were unemployed, while 13 percent were business owners, and 27 percent were white collar workers.

Michael Mann has argued that historically, most fascists were not particularly economically disadvantaged, nor were they especially drawn from the middle class. There is some variance here: in Germany after 1930, the Nazis were supported by voters from all classes, and in some countries, like Hungary and Romania, fascist supporters actually tended to be more working class than not. Mann argues that, in general, the social base for fascism came not from “marginal” or “rootless” or even the struggling petty bourgeoisie, but from individuals in relatively secure social positions. They were people who “tended to come from sectors that were not in the front line of organized struggle between capital and labor.” Instead, fascists were often people “viewing class struggle from the ‘outside,’ declaring ‘a plague on both your houses.’” They were people who “viewed class struggle with distaste, favoring a movement claiming to transcend class struggle.” Unsurprisingly, fascists tended to be soldiers and veterans; somewhat surprisingly from our perspectives, they also disproportionately came from people closely involved with and invested in the state: “civil servants, teachers, and public sector manual workers.” (Other than veterans, who may have represented between 14 and 20 percent of those arrested in the Capitol , groups like teachers and civil servants would not appear to be the base for Trumpism in the United States of 2021.)

The Marxian analysis of fascism reminds us that no matter how radical fascism was in its political theory or its populist, anti-plutocratic rhetoric, it remained a firmly capitalist system.

Historical materialism doesn’t quite explain why people are drawn to fascism, and it also doesn’t explain how Nazis and other fascists behaved once they were in power. True, they immediately crushed labor unions, murdering communists and socialist activists with glee, and forced workers into fascist labor unions subordinate to state authority. But the Nazis’ ultimate goals were, by most standards, irrational and fantastical: the transformation of Germany into a world power through a total race war fought in all directions, and against the majority of the world’s wealth and industrial power. The result was 80 million dead, the Holocaust, hundreds of millions of destroyed lives, and unimaginable devastation.

To make any real sense of Nazi behavior, we have to look at their ideas. Emerging from various right-wing Völkisch intellectual currents, strands of German romantic nationalism, various reactionary and anti-liberal ideologies melded with racial social Darwinism, the Nazis envisioned a New Order fundamentally organized around racial hierarchy. At the peak was to be the Volksgemeinschaft , the racially defined national community of the master race. Below them fell the subordinated peoples of Western Europe, and the enslaved, displaced, or exterminated peoples of Eastern Europe. Jews occupied the role of the absolute racial enemy, the Other secretly orchestrating both plutocratic international capitalism and Soviet socialism. Under Nazi rule, no coexistence with Jews was possible. Once in power, the Nazi regime mobilized the nation-state on a massive scale: first to protect and grow the national community, then to purify it spiritually and physically. This entailed reasonably generous welfare provisions (particularly pro-natalist ones) in the interests of promoting “a healthy racial community,” and at best, neglect or expulsion for those outside of it. This is one of the clear points of total contradiction between fascist and socialistic visions for a welfare state. Fascists demand benefits that are exclusively for them and people like them—because they and only they are deserving of anything, and because the fascist welfare state enshrines and enforces social, political, and economic power. Depending on the fascist configuration, this could mean the power of German over non-German, of white people over Black people, of men over women, or of Christians over Muslims and Jews. In Nazi Germany, these exclusivist welfare policies meant sterilization and death for “the unfit” and the nation’s enemies.

At the same time, the Nazis pursued economically unsustainable rearmament and military expansion that could only be paid for by future plunder and conquest. For Hitler and his allies, all of this national “socialism” was capitalism mobilized and directed to a long-term geopolitical purpose: the revision of the global order and transformation of Germany into a world power. Hitler’s genocidal war for Lebensraum , living space for the German nation in the east, would obliterate the “Judeo-Bolshevik Soviet Union,” to be depopulated and transformed by German colonization. The eastern conquests, they believed, would provide sufficient exploitable resources to reconstruct Germany as continental empire capable of competition over the next few centuries with the ultimate geopolitical enemy and, clearly, the emerging superpower: the supposedly Jewish-dominated United States.

When analyzing fascism, it’s important that we don’t assign an underlying true , material logic to their madness based on what we think should motivate them, waving away what they actually say, believe, and want. The fact is that Nazis had particular beliefs which can’t be neatly boiled down to class warfare and material needs. The members of Trump’s anti-democratic mob, in many cases quite economically secure people, were mobilized to defend white supremacy : to revolt against perceived cultural and political (and possibly but not necessarily economic) erosion with violence. We need to pay close attention to fascist ideas, fascist ideology, and fascist plans. We need to take them seriously, because this shit is terrifying.

Fascism, Liberalism, and Empire

Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany also make little sense unless we understand them as imperial projects, emerging and collapsing in the context of centuries of global European imperialism. 20 th century fascism arose from a world dominated by empires. At Versailles in 1919, soon-to-be fascist Italy was tossed colonial scraps in payment for its million dead; a humiliated Germany was stripped of its overseas possessions. Surrounded by colonial empires of enormous power and prestige, fascists saw empire as an inescapable necessity for national survival. The Second World War was ultimately Germany’s suicidal war for empire: an attempt to dominate foreign states and seize land, with dispossession and death for the “natives” in their way. War for empire was itself nothing unusual: the First World War had been, after all, a war for empire . The United States fought genocidal wars of expansion to conquer and settle the North American continent with white Europeans, and it continued to plot imperial interventions across Latin America and Asia. The British Empire was, to put it mildly, not a peaceful endeavor. What then, if anything, distinguished fascist imperialism from what Europeans had been doing for centuries?

This was the line of thinking pursued by postcolonial intellectuals in the tradition of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, who understood fascism through the murderous horrors of European capitalist imperialism. Césaire argued that not only did fascism represent, essentially, the normal work of capitalist exploitation, it amounted to mostly the same barbarities that Europeans had been inflicting on non-Europeans for hundreds of years. What differentiated the tens of millions of dead from Nazi imperial aggression within Europe from those who died and even now continue to die during the centuries of global empire? In the aftermath of the Second World War, Césaire wrote that “before they [Europeans] were its victims, they were its accomplices… they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them… they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.” Hitler was the “demon” inherent in European imperialism, now brought home. He was unacceptable because his imperialism treated Europeans like natives :

what [the European] cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man , it is not the humiliation of man as such , it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.

With the arguable exception of the Holocaust, nearly every horrific Nazi measure had a precedent in the liberal democratic world, particularly in the United States and the British Empire: concentration camps, Jim Crow in the American South, slavery, the colour bar in South Africa, genocidal settler colonialism, illegal and unprovoked warfare, the appropriation of land and territory from indigenous peoples, racial segregation and racial caste systems, and murderous antisemitism. Social Darwinism emerged in the context of 19 th century European imperialism, justifying racial supremacy and colonial domination on a pseudoscientific, biological basis. Eugenics was a popular and mainstream scientific project in the 20 th century until it was discredited by Nazi excesses. Many liberals greeted these scientific developments in the oppression of “primitive” peoples as the march of progress.

Hitler, in fact, looked to the United States and British Empire as models for a continental empire. Many Nazis were admirers of American racial laws, particularly those in the American South. In Hitler’s American Model , James Whitman details extensive parallels between the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws and the Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation in the American South, the United States’ own legally enshrined and violently enforced racial caste system. According to historian Mark Mazower’s books Dark Continent and Hitler’s Empire, the United States’ conquest and settlement of the North American continent served as an important blueprint for Hitler’s empire to be built in the ashes of the Soviet Union. In October 1941, Hitler remarked that Germany intended to treat Eastern Europeans like “Red Indians… In this matter I am cold as ice.” Their welfare was absolutely no concern; Hitler observed that “[w]e eat Canadian corn and don’t think of the Indians.” One SS pamphlet compared Ukraine to a future German California: a vast and fertile territory, mismanaged by the Soviets, but suitable for feeding new generations of the Aryan race. Hitler was an open admirer of the British Empire as well, writing favorably in 1928 of the English people’s “overall governing qualities as well as… [their] political clear-headedness,” and their racial suitability for managing a global empire. He was particularly impressed by the British ability to rule over vast territories with only small numbers of white people. At times, he imagined Ukraine not as a California but a “new Indian Empire,” ruled by a small number of officers, perhaps serving as Germany’s “North-West Frontier.” Many Germans understood their territorial conquests in the East and their relationship with its inhabitants in decidedly colonial terms. For instance, one German in the Ukraine in 1942 described his situation as being “here in the midst of negroes.” On occasion, Hans Frank, the Gauleiter of occupied and dismembered Poland, thought of his territory “a protectorate-state, a kind of Tunis.” He was also known to speak of the occupied country as a sort of “life reservation” for Poles. For a time, Nazi leadership envisioned part of occupied Poland serving as a possible “reservation” for Jews.

So what really was the difference between liberal imperialism and fascist empire? During the Second World War, the United States deported its Japanese population to concentration camps. Allied air bombardments killed millions of civilians. Millions of Indians died under British control in the Bengal famine of 1943. Even after the war, the British didn’t hesitate to construct a monstrous concentration camp system in Kenya in the 1950s to fight anti-colonial rebels. In the 1960s and 1970s, the American involvement in the Vietnam War killed millions. Since 2003, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died in the invasion George W. Bush justified with a web of lies. Why should we care if some murderers were “fascists” and some weren’t?

It’s true that in practice, liberal imperialism amounts to little more than brutal exploitation and domination. But that is not how it sees itself, not how it justifies itself both at home and abroad. The liberal imperial imagination envisions the peoples of the world in a hierarchy best captured by the metaphor of a ladder: the ladder of progress. At the top of the ladder are the most enlightened, civilized, rational, and progressive: white Western liberals themselves. Perpetually below them are the Others: the developmentally delayed denizens of the backward reaches of the world in dire need of some form of intervention or uplift, often couched in terms of “economic development,” “progress,” “free trade,” or maybe “women’s rights.” Think of George W. Bush’s rhetoric of bringing “freedom” and “democracy” to Iraq, or liberating Afghan women from Islamist domination.

In its contemporary form, however, liberalism recognizes its Others as people —that is, fellow human beings not absolutely and irreconcilably different from the liberals themselves. Its stated ambition is to provide the best for everybody. If you’ll only just shut up, calm down, and listen to the experts at the World Bank or The Economist , regulated capitalism and representative democracy will eventually bring peace and prosperity to even the remotest and most backwards of nations (though with some groups deservedly reaping more benefit than others). The ideology of progress, the messianic march to the future at the heart of liberalism, means that the expansion of capitalism, reason, and democratic governance will ultimately bring peace and prosperity to everyone—just keep waiting, and believing.

While hypocritical, racist, and fatally flawed, these concessions—of supposedly universal goals and a common humanity—have allowed space for oppressed groups to confront and resist liberalism on its own terms. Across the colonial world in the twentieth century, indigenous elites educated to be the administrators and colonial intermediaries that would undergird colonial domination for another century hurled the contradictions of liberal empire back into astonished white faces. In the United States, liberal feminist and civil rights activists confronted the American imagination with the country’s failure to live up to its own image in terms that it absolutely could not ignore. The space for speech, opposition, and resistance that liberalism allows—while inadequate, bigoted, and often marginal—has been an important part of peaceful struggles for social justice.

No such possibilities exist within fascism. Fascism recognizes only the nation, power, blood, and domination. If liberals envision the world as a metaphorical ladder of civilization, enlightenment, and progress, the fascist imagines only the contented and well-fed faces of national compatriots, with slavery or the mass grave for everyone else. The fascist world is divided between two incommensurate types of people: winners and losers, superior and inferior, Us and Them, groups sharing fundamentally nothing other than, perhaps, a grudgingly acknowledged humanish shape. Nazi imperialism eliminated every justification for empire but naked force: might and might alone makes right. The all-encompassing centrality of the nation, this radical particularism, entails a total rejection of any possible or even theoretical universalism proposed by socialism or 21st century liberalism. It’s the boot smashing on a human face forever: perpetual slavery and murder for countless millions.

The naked cruelty of fascist imperialism is clearly illuminated in Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent , particularly when he examines the Nazi project of “spiritual sterilization” in Poland. The Germans closed Polish universities, murdered members of the Polish intelligentsia and ruling classes, and began implementing policies that treated “Poland” as nothing more than an exploitable resource to be tapped and, ultimately, emptied and erased from the map. In May 1940, Heinrich Himmler wrote that the goals of Polish education going forward “should be: simple arithmetic up to [the number] 500 at most; writing of one’s name; a doctrine that it is a divine law to obey the Germans and to be honest, industrious and good. I don’t think reading should be required. Apart from this school there are to be no schools at all in the East.” And the Nazis’ project had only just begun when, at tremendous cost, the combined armed forces of the capitalist and socialist world managed to grind it to a halt.

What We’re Dealing With

Fascism allows no room for opposition. It sneers at even limited notions of a common humanity. Nuanced essays on hypocrisy, cruelty, and injustice will fall entirely flat with fascists, because to them, the people who are suffering aren’t really human beings in any meaningful sense. Fascists bond over exclusion, dominance, and sadism. In the words of Adam Serwer, “the cruelty is the point.” Fascism can’t be debated, negotiated, or worked with, because fascists reject the entire premise of discourse, of multiple perspectives, and of negotiable interests. Any “alliance” between left-wing and right-wing “populists” over opposition to “elites” is a suicidal fantasy. There is no good faith engagement with a fascist qua fascist because fascism rejects pluralism in principle .

Fascists tell lies as a matter of course . They have a history of participating in democratic institutions only to take them over and destroy them. They do at times employ anti-capitalist rhetoric , but only in the service of nationalism and dominance. They may break and ignore laws, not out of any sense of injustice, but because they disavow any authority but their own. Obsessed with strength, fascists are therefore vulnerable when they appear weak and pathetic, a.k.a. like the losers they are obsessed with. This was an approach taken by the antifascists in the German town of Wunsiedel in 2014 , who transformed a neo-Nazi rally into a humiliating fundraising opportunity for the anti-Nazi organization EXIT-Germany . Mockery and humor can undermine fascists’ appeal, turning their “struggle” into a farce, damaging their pride, and striking at the core of the hypermasculine persona of strength that they love to project.

At the same, we must never forget that even when fascists appear defeated, ridiculous, and mockable, they are still dangerous. In the wake of Trump’s electoral loss and the failed coup attempt, American fascists may indeed look harmless, but so did the Nazis in the aftermath of the absurd “Beer Hall Putsch” of 1923 . Following Hitler and his allies’ failed attempt to seize power in Bavaria, many observers, The New York Times included, were quick to write their political epitaph. Hitler was given a light prison sentence; he used the opportunity to dictate Mein Kampf , and emerged from prison to national stardom. When the economic collapse of the Great Depression turned the Weimar Republic’s crippled and polarized political gridlock into an urgent crisis, the mockable Hitler and his once-dismissed Nazis were prepared to step in with radical solutions. It would be a huge mistake to believe the threat of Trump has passed. The political, cultural, economic forces that created Trump and Trumpism aren’t going anywhere.

The Nazis’ path to power was prepared by opponents who underestimated, dismissed, and belittled them, preferring to focus on older adversaries and more familiar grudges. From its Sixth Congress in 1928 through 1934, the Stalinist Comintern employed the label of “fascist” against potential allies on the left. Labeling reformist proponents of social democracy as supporters of “Social Fascism,” this infamous “Left Turn” rejected coalition-building between reformist socialist parties and communists, erasing any distinction between non-communist socialists and reactionaries. The tendency was older , but Stalin transformed it into an official party line: “Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German Communist Party, the KPD, embraced this epithet against his social democratic rivals in the SPD with particular enthusiasm. The 1929 pamphlet “What is social fascism?” argued that the “most dangerous form” of fascism was its “Social Democratic form.” Social fascism was, in the words of the Comintern, “an instrument for paralysing the activity of the masses in the struggle against the regime of fascist dictatorship.” Even more absurdly, Thälmann went so far as to declare in February 1930 that the SPD-led Müller coalition government, a fractious alliance of mostly liberal parties, indicated that “ the rule of fascism has already been established in Germany .”

…we must never forget that even when fascists appear defeated, ridiculous, and mockable, they are still dangerous.

Bad blood certainly ran both ways, and members of the KPD had good reason to distrust the SPD. The KPD was itself formed by left-wing revolutionaries who had mostly split from the SPD over the First World War and the leftist Spartacist uprising in its aftermath. When push came to shove, the SPD was reformist and decidedly not revolutionary; its supporters weren’t interested in overthrowing the new liberal democratic state and seizing the means of production. During the Spartacist uprising of 1919, the SPD supported the Freikorps, right-wing paramilitaries who crushed the Spartacists, murdering Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and many more in the process. Even when facing the Nazis, SPD leadership remained uninterested in allying with the KPD and its “Bolshevism.”

The refusal of the KPD and SPD—both left-wing and largely working class political parties—to approach any reasonable accommodation with one another famously cleared a path for the Nazi seizure of power. Rejecting an increasingly alarmed Trotsky’s public calls for the communists to ally with social democrats as “fascist and counter revolutionary,” in September 1932, Thälmann argued that Trotsky’s proposal was “the worst theory, the most dangerous theory and the most criminal that Trotsky has constructed in the last years of his counter revolutionary propaganda.” Despite the urgent and growing threat of Nazism, the KPD directed the bulk of its efforts against the SPD, confronting SPD unions with slogans such as “Drive the social fascists from their jobs in the factories and the trade unions!” and “Chase them away from the factories, labour exchanges and professional schools.” The KPD even notoriously allied with the Nazi Party in an unsuccessful August 1931 referendum to remove the Social Democratic government in Prussia, the SPD’s most important political stronghold. The SPD returned the hostility, equating Nazis with “Kozis” (communists) .

A broader left-wing alliance could have made a difference: in the final two German national elections of 1932 before Hitler came to power, the SPD and KPD received a combined 36.2 percent to the Nazi 37.4 percent in July, and a combined 37.3 percent to the Nazi 33.1 percent in November respectively. When Hitler became chancellor, the KPD called for a general strike. The SPD declined to participate.

Following the Reichstag fire of 1933, the Nazis didn’t hesitate to crush both left parties. The SPD’s Iron Front against Papen, Hitler, and Thälmann proved just as ineffective as the Communists’ Antifaschistische Aktion when facing the power of the modern state. Otto Wels, the last pre-war SPD chairman, fled before he could be arrested, but most prominent members left in the country were sent to concentration camps. Ernst Thälmann was imprisoned in March of 1933 and spent the rest of his life in Nazi captivity. On August 18, 1944, Adolf Hitler had Thälmann killed.

After the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, Stalin revised his strategy and encouraged European communist parties to once again join anti-fascist coalitions. He still, however, underestimated the immediacy of the Nazi threat. The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact briefly made the Soviet Union into Hitler’s partner in revising the liberal international order established at Versailles. Stalin greedily seized a third of Poland, all of the Baltic states, and launched a bloody and futile invasion of Finland. His reward was Operation Barbarossa: the Nazi invasion that resulted in over twenty million dead and the near total destruction of the Soviet Union.

Once entrenched in power, the only option remaining against fascism is force. Fascism cannot be compromised with: it does not leave space for healthy dissent. To defeat fascism, leftists the world over have to unite and form a broad, multiracial, working class coalition. At times, it may be necessary to unite with liberals over values we share: pluralism, democracy, autonomy, and freedom. But what leftists can never do is unite with fascists against liberals or against anyone: their anti-liberalism and anti-elitism are not ours. We are not welcome in their nation.

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Yale Professor Jason Stanley Identifies 10 Tactics of Fascism: The “Cult of the Leader,” Law & Order, Victimhood and More

in History , Philosophy | October 26th, 2021 5 Comments

What is fascism? Fascism is an ideology developed and elaborated in early 20th-century Western Europe and enabled by technology, mass media, and weapons of war. Most of us learned the basics of that development from grade school history textbooks. We generally came to appreciate to some degree — though we may have forgotten the lesson — that the phrase “creeping fascism” is redundant. Fascism stomped around in jackboots, smashed windows and burned Reichstags before it fully seized power, but its most important action was the creeping: into language, media, education, and religious institutions . None of these movements arose, after all, without the support (or at least acquiescence) of those in power.

There are differences between Italian Fascism, German Nazism, and their various nationalist descendents. Mussolini secured power chiefly through intimidation. But once he was appointed prime minister by the King in 1922 he began consolidating his dictatorship, a process that took several years and required such dealings as the creation of Vatican City in 1929 to secure the Church’s goodwill. Some later fascist leaders, like Augusto Pinochet, came to power in coups (with the support of the CIA). Others, like Hitler, won elections, after a decade of “creeping” into the culture by normalizing nationalist pride based on racial hierarchies and nursing a sense of aggrieved persecution among the German people over perceived humiliations of the past.

In every case, leaders exploited local hatreds and inflamed ordinary people against their neighbors with the constant repetition of an alarming “Big Lie” and the promises of a strongman for salvation. Every similar movement that has arisen since the end of WWII, says Yale University Professor of Philosophy Jason Stanley in the video above, has shared these characteristics: using propaganda to create an alternate reality and paying obeisance to a “cult of the leader,” no matter how repugnant his tactics, behavior, or personality. “Right wing by nature,” fascism’s patriarchal structure appeals to conservatives. While it mobilizes violence against minorities and leftists, it seduces those on the right by promising a share of the spoils and validating conservative desires for a single, unifying national narrative:

Fascism is a cult of the leader. It involves the leader setting the rules about what’s true and false. So any kind of expertise, reality, all of that is a challenge to the authority of the leader. If science would help him, then he can say, “Okay, I’ll use it.” Institutions that teach multiple perspectives on history in all its complexity are always a threat to the fascist leader.

Rather than simply destroying institutions, fascists twist them to their own ends. The arts, sciences, and humanities must be purged of corrupting elements . Those who resist face job loss, exile or worse. The important thing, says Stanley, is the sorting into classes of those who deserve life and property and those who don’t.

[O]nce you have hierarchies set up, you can make people very nervous and frightened about losing their position on that hierarchy. Hierarchy goes right into victimhood because once you convince people that they’re justifiable higher on the hierarchy, then you can tell them that they’re victims of equality. German Christians are victims of Jews. White Americans are victims of Black American equality. Men are victims of feminism.

The appeal to “law and order,” to police state levels of control, only applies to certain threatening classes who need to be put back in their place or eliminated. It does not apply to those at the top of the hierarchy, who recognize no constraints on their actions because they perceive themselves as threatened and in a state of emergency. It’s really the immigrants, leftists, and other minorities who have taken over, “and that’s why you need a really macho, powerful, violent response”:

Law and order structures who’s legitimate and who’s not. Everywhere around the world, no matter what the situation is, in very different socioeconomic conditions, the fascist leader comes and tells you, “Your women and children are under threat. You need a strong man to protect your families.” They make conservatives hysterically afraid of transgender rights or homosexuality, other ways of living. These are not people trying to live their own lives. They’re trying to destroy your life, and they’re coming after your children. What the fascist politician does is they take conservatives who aren’t fascist at all, and they say, “Look, I know you might not like my ways. You might think I’m a womanizer. You might think I’m violent in my rhetoric. But you need someone like me now. You need someone like me ’cause homosexuality, it isn’t just trying for equality. It’s coming after your family.”

Stanley offers several historical examples for his assessment of what he breaks down into a total of 10 tactics of fascism. (See an earlier video here in which he discusses 3 characteristics of the ideology .) Like Umberto Eco, who identified 14 characteristics of what he called “ur-fascism” in a 1995 essay , Stanley notes that “not all terrible things are fascist. Fascism is a very particular ideological structure” that arose in a particular time and place. But while its stated aims and doctrines are subject to change according to the psychology of the leader and the national culture, it always shares a certain grouping, or “bundle,” of features.

Each of these individual elements is not in and of itself fascist, but you have to worry when they’re all grouped together, when honest conservatives are lured into fascism by people who tell them, “Look, it’s an existential fight. I know you don’t accept everything we do. You don’t accept every doctrine. But your family is under threat. Your family is at risk. So without us, you’re in peril.” Those moments are the times when we need to worry about fascism.

Below we’re adding Stanley’s recent interview where he explains how America has now entered fascism’s legal phase. You can read his related article in The Guardian .

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Article Contents

What’s in a name, fascism in the global interwar, fascism then, fascism now, a portable definition, a warning for the present, the fascism-producing crisis, what is fascism and where does it come from.

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Geoff Eley, What is Fascism and Where does it Come From?, History Workshop Journal , Volume 91, Issue 1, Spring 2021, Pages 1–28, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbab003

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How might histories of fascism in interwar Europe help us today? Languages of ‘fascism’ are now constantly in play – as warning and slogan; as emotional rallying-point; as rhetorics of recognition and abuse; as a boundary of legitimate politics – but rarely as carefully informed argument. For effective politics, we need historically grounded analysis that can avert tendentious and direct linkages that may be emotionally satisfying, but stop short of showing how fascism builds its appeal. What makes it seem a desirable ‘extra-systemic’ solution, as an alternative to the practices of democratic constitutionalism? What kind of crisis brings fascism onto the agenda?

This essay was completed at the end of September 2020, at the height of an extraordinarily divisive United States presidential election, amid a rare concurrency of devastating national emergencies (the festering crisis of racial injustice and inequality, an unchecked pandemic, a widening paralysis of the economy), several weeks before election day itself on 3 November 2020. It contains both a reflection on the usefulness of a portable concept of fascism for making sense of contemporary political phenomena and a snapshot of rapidly moving events. The direction of its argument – particularly regarding the dynamics of a rightwing political coalescence – was distressingly confirmed by subsequent developments. The election outcome gave Democrats a finely poised victory, promising significantly greater impedance against further fascization. On the other hand, an insurgent network of far-Right pro-Trump white nationalists planned the kidnap, trial, and execution of the Democratic Governor of Michigan (not by accident a woman); a motley coalition of Trumpists, white nationalist militants, state-based Republicans, and Congressional Republicans sought with remarkable persistence to overturn the certified results of a legitimately conducted presidential election; and a rag-tag insurgency of especially angry Trump partisans stormed the Congressional seat of government on 6 January 2021, directly incited by the outgoing President himself. These were only the most dramatic flashpoints in a far more pervasively distributed climate of anxiety, endangerment, and disorder.

I decided not to update the text in light of those intervening events. Too much is happening too quickly for too much of the time. I hope my discussion, both in its framing and particular direction, proves helpful in seeing a way forward politically. Its closing sections do seem dismayingly prescient. I am grateful both to the editors of History Workshop Journal for wanting to run this essay so quickly and to Gavriel Rosenfeld and Janet Ward, the editors of the volume on Fascism in America: Past and Present , where it will also appear. My many debts in grappling with these questions are acknowledged in the footnotes. They include most immediately my fellow contributors to Fascism in America , along with Julia Adeney Thomas and our fellow contributors to the volume Visualizing Fascism: the Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right (Duke University Press, 2020). Each of those volumes, as well as my own thinking, presupposed exceptionally valuable long-maturing collective conversations.

In the early 2000s, after a notable resurgence of interest among historians and other scholars mostly in the humanities, ‘fascism’ rejoined an active political lexicon. For some, mostly on the Left, it had never exactly been dropped: sloganeering and glibness apart, it signified well-understood meanings, simultaneously historic – located firmly in a very particular past – and urgent, a warning of present dangers. The main renewed impetus came from the pervasive racialization of western European politics since the 1970s. Responding to the growth of a violently anti-immigrant and xenophobic Right, its activist left-wing opponents reached easily for a familiar language of ‘anti-Nazi’ and ‘anti-racist’ equivalence. As migrancy grew from the early 1990s into a permanent fixture of socio-political life, rightwing anger against immigrants then intensified, driven by the disruptions of globalization, ethno-political violence in the Balkans and Caucasus following the end of Communism, and the ‘freeing’ of labour markets in the European Union. 1 But outside the Left, appeals to anti-fascist principles and solidarities were not often made. In tacit recognition of its leftwing ownership, not least during the Cold War, liberals and conservatives had largely vacated such language: earlier anti-fascist associations were shed, disqualified by their use in official Communist discourse. 2 But by the turn of the new century, in contrast, moved by a no less instrumental demonizing of Sadam Hussein’s Iraq and other regimes targeted by the George W. Bush Presidency, ‘fascist’ was reclaimed across the political spectrum as an extremely mobile mainstream pejorative. In the febrile aftermath of the Iraq War, it crept back into public discourse. 3

Further re-emphasizing the term’s mobility, a second contemporary usage gathered around the militant Islamist politics attaching to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, asserting their affinities with the earlier twentieth-century appearance of fascism in Europe. Militarist violence, Jihadist warmaking, exclusionary ideology, and a totalizing vision of social organization and moral order were all cited in support of this conflation. Similarities were found most plausibly in the shared fascist/Islamist antipathy to ‘the entire legacy of the Enlightenment’ considered foundational to ‘Western civilization’ with ‘its belief in reason, toleration, open-ended inquiry, and the rule of law’. The resulting coinage, ‘Islamo-fascism’, was quickly taken up by advocates of the ‘global war against terror’, who regarded radical Islamists as channelling earlier Nazi hatred of the Jews. If Islamist enmity against Israel was paradigmatic, these voices insisted, then a chain of equivalence could join radical Islamism by means of anti-Zionism to those earlier forms of antisemitic belief. 4 Among recognized German historians, such claims were made most vehemently by Jeffrey Herf, who connected Islamist discourse directly to Nazi antisemitism of the Second World War. 5

Beyond these specific usages emerged a more generalized, still nascent, but increasingly vocal dismay regarding U.S. political developments, ranging from the consequences of the 2001 Patriot Act (reauthorized under Barack Obama in 2010 and 2011) to the racialized politics of mass incarceration and the criminalizing – actual and potential – of political dissent. Anxieties about this rightward drift, varying from the alarmist to the merely perturbed, settled around the dangers of the entangled political logics now energizing far-Right politics. Some of these were patently transnational. The worsening postcolonial crises of race inside European, North American, and other advanced capitalist societies continuously roiled perceptions of social health and disorder, chronically fixating on ‘immigrants’ and the threats they allegedly posed. As state sovereignties collapsed across a vast swathe of the Global South, from West Africa and the Sahel through the Horn of Africa to the Middle East and Central Asia, the resulting refugee movements and economic displacement of peoples kept those enmities stoked. If neoliberal globalization was the engine of that process, then the privatizing of the means of coercion – via mercenaries and profit-making security corporations, ruinous civil wars, warlord-driven systems of economic extraction, and the post-1991 international arms trade – was its fuel. 6 The results re-entered metropolitan societies through the growth of private security industries, the new societal paradigm of gatedness, expansion of the carceral state, and the militarizing of police. 7 Amid these turmoils, a major climate-related catastrophe, Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, placed their implications on brutal display: discriminatory, racialized rescue; abandoned and disposable populations; armed vigilantes and non-state paramilitaries patrolling the waters; the fortress-like gatedness of suburbs. Joined to the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq, in their home as well as overseas reverberations, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, this spectacle of apparently punitive governmentality triggered still more heightened awareness. 8

Fast-forwarding ten years, we find a much changed discursive landscape. From being a loosely defined, free-floating derogatory signifier, commonly deployed in polemics on the Left, with more recent adoptions on the Right (liberal fascism, Islamo-fascism), ‘fascism’ has become a name for the present danger. Beginning in 2011–12, developments quickened in multiple interconnected arenas. Presaged by the 2009 EU elections, far-Right parties across Europe sustained unprecedented levels of popularity, bringing new influence and even government power. During 2009–10 in the United States, the Tea Party movement sparked wider activity that pulled the Republican Party markedly to the right. The fallout from the Arab Spring in 2011 destabilized the entire North African and Middle Eastern region, most disastrously through the Libyan, Yemeni, and Syrian civil wars, and propelled a global refugee crisis with its crescendo in 2015–17. While ravaging the Middle East, Central Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, Islamist terrorism struck spectacular blows inside western Europe’s metropolitan core. Gun massacres repeatedly left U.S. society reeling, including a series of mass shootings in schools: whether in a reactive politics of anti-immigrant fear or through versions of racist, misogynist, and white nationalist fury, these actions exposed one hodgepodge after another of far-Right ideology and affiliations. The dramatic global simultaneity of such events, borne instantaneously from one place to another, was essential to their impact. From Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo, Norway on 22 July 2011 to Brenton Tarrant in Christchurch, New Zealand on 15 March 2019, far-Right race warriors were enacting each other’s manifestos, travelling the common websites, envying the same violence, imagining a shared white nationalist and racially purified future. 9

The sheer, frenetic intensity in the reportage and dissemination of these events has been essential to their effect. The current rapidity in growth of all types of hate crimes helps translate such news into an archive of the usable spectacle. The Right’s cultivated nightmare of a ceaseless and corrupting ‘invasion’ of refugees, asylum-seekers, migrants, and many kinds of foreigners lays down the soil where a militantly racialized nationalism can be tilled. Certain common and convergent histories enable this political formation across Europe, going back to the postcolonial and racialized labour regimes of the postwar boom and beyond, even as national particularities shape the society-by-society variation. Although the frontlines have moved ever further inside the continent, countries on the territorial perimeter (Greece, Italy, Balkans, Hungary) process the xenophobia differently from those further away (Germany, western seaboard, Scandinavia), just as Brexit gave Britain pathologies all of its own. Equivalent genealogies also define such sentiment in the United States, where anti-immigrant anxieties spur the virulence of right-wing political insurgency, interconnected as ever with racism against people of colour. 10 In each context, the surge in hate crimes – verbal abuse, physical assaults, trolling, arson, bombings, murder, public and hidden intimidation of every kind – inexorably shapes the prevailing socio-political climate, often in complex collusion with security forces and police. 11 Assassinations in Britain of Labour Party MP Jo Cox (16 June 2016) and in Germany of local CDU politician Walter Lübcke (2 June 2019), each chosen for their well-known pro-refugee advocacy, can be matched by the attempted murder in the United States of District Judge Esther Salas (19 July 2020). 12

For many commentators, speaking of fascism has come to make sense. At first slow and uneven, by 2016 such talk was everywhere. As concerned democrats in the United States worried about the meanings of the new Trump Presidency, ‘fascism’ and ‘anti-fascism’ were constantly in play – as warning and slogan; as emotional rallying-point; as viscerally resonant historical reminder; as a language of recognition and abuse; as a boundary of legitimate political thinking and action – but only rarely as a carefully informed argument or conceptual claim. Indeed, the most widely circulating treatments preferred some version of a vaguely descriptive typology, equating fascism to dictatorship, authoritarianism or ‘tyranny’. 13 Those possibilities were loosely conceptualized around a few core symptoms: extreme nationalism; political intolerance; an attack on the governing arrangements of constitutional democracy; a reliance on propaganda; and the steady erosion of democracy’s institutional safeguards, from the free press to the courts and an independent judiciary. For definition, the dictatorial proclivities of a few main exemplars often sufficed, from Viktor Orbán to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Jarosław Kaczyński to Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin to Donald Trump. In Madeleine Albright’s version, for example, fascist leaders deem themselves the embodiment of the nation; they are indifferent to the rights of others; they pursue goals by whatever means possible, including violence. 14

One leading skeptic is Dylan Riley, Marxist sociologist and author of a major comparative study of fascism in the early twentieth century. 15 In a no-nonsense refusal of historical parallels of the kind mentioned above (‘bad historical analogies will not aid in dealing with the present crisis’), Riley pleads for ‘a properly comparative and historical perspective’, which alone can deliver ‘greater theoretical and political clarity about the situation today’. He supplies this by ‘systematically contrasting the era of classical fascism – roughly from 1922 to 1939 – with the present period’, using ‘four comparative axes: geopolitical context, economic crisis, relations of class and nation, and, finally, the character of civil society and of political parties’. 16 In marking the difference between ‘then’ and ‘now’, in the terms he chooses, Riley is fully persuasive. If ‘fascism’ is a label to be tied directly and essentially to a distinctive political formation produced by the dynamics of the European interwar, in the four dimensions he describes, then it seems clearly unsuitable today. Particular elements in Riley’s argument might be vulnerable – for example the exact and varying nature of the symbiosis between dominant classes and fascist regimes, or the volatile dynamics of class, party, and nation. But the main point still stands: given the vital disjunctions and specificities, fascism of the classical kind will not reappear.

After this historicizing critique, Riley offers a typology of his own, drawn from Max Weber’s ‘three forms of rule, each with its own apparatus of domination and logic of legitimation: the charismatic, the patrimonial, and the bureaucratic’. In this deft and succinct application, Trump’s governing approach emerges as an idiosyncratic and dysfunctional patrimonial reversion. For Trump, the office of state is a household, ‘with little if any distinction between the public and private interests of the ruler’:

The patrimonial office lacks above all the bureaucratic separation of the ‘private’ and the ‘official’ sphere. For the political administration, too, is treated as a purely personal affair of the ruler, and the political power is considered part of his personal property, which can be exploited by means of contributions and fees. 17

This renders some primary features of Trump’s regime heuristically intelligible – most obviously the arbitrary personalistic excess, use of patronage, and incorrigible nepotism, but also the consequent shallowness of the pool of governing competence practically available to his administration. It also makes sense of his government’s endemic internal contentiousness, because ‘the conflict between Trump and the bureaucracy’ runs not ‘between an authoritarian president and the bearers of “democratic norms”’ (for example James Comey, Robert Mueller, Christopher Wray, Rod Rosenstein; FBI, CIA, Pentagon), who are barely democratic in other than inertly institutional ways, but with the upholders of the legal-rational state, the bureaucracy in its typologically Weberian guise. 18 Trump’s rule is a misfit in that sense.

In the same vein, its legitimacy can only be charismatic. Lacking either the procedural stabilities of the legal-rational order or the symbolics of ‘the weight of tradition’ (his entire political thrust denigrates both), Trump can only appeal directly to his supporters. He does so with the bullying swagger and macho taboo-breaking of his trademark demotic, using his signature media of Twitter, television, and campaign rally. As Riley says, ‘he breaks with the boring routines of official power: ripping up speeches, insulting foreign dignitaries, calling out the Bush family as a collection of mediocrities, and so on’. And there is the rub. Trump’s need of charisma cuts against his patrimonial style. He commands neither a coherent ideology, ‘creating a layer of disciples who can spread the central message outward and downward’, nor an organized political instrument. There is ‘no Trumpian ideology or “cause” to which loyalists might commit themselves when he leaves office’. So his rule remains volatile and arbitrary, a once-off fluke without ‘staying power’. It makes no sense ‘to assign him any general classification like fascism, authoritarianism or populism, even though he may exhibit traits of at least the third, if not the second – as well asnationalism, racism, and sexism’. Calling him a fascist merely confuses the necessary ground. 19

These are salutary cautions. The conjunctural circumstances of interwar Europe were indeed glaringly different from those we encounter today. From any empirical description of 1918–22, the differences will quickly emerge: no First World War and its outcomes; no total war; no Bolshevism; no revolutionary insurgency across most of Europe; no ascendant mass trade unionism; no Communist or social democratic parties; no pan-European democratization. A similar bundle of distinctiveness also surrounds the rise of the Nazis in 1928–34. The temporalities are profoundly different too. The scale and intensity of the state/society and state/economy transformations accompanying the First World War, in the context of the preceding decades of capitalist industrialization, have no counterpart in the fallout from capitalist restructuring since the 1970s. With disjunctions of this magnitude – with a different set of state/society relations, different categories of political actors, different types of possible political agency – we could never expect to find the political constellation of the 1920s replicated in our later time. In that case, how can it make sense to use the parties and regimes of Mussolini and Hitler as our measure of fascism today?

In insisting on comparison, Riley is surely right. To enable an effective politics, we need historically informed analysis that can avert tendentious conflations, easy surface similarities, and direct linkages that seem outwardly plausible and may be emotionally satisfying, but stop short of showing how fascism is able to gain its purchase and build its appeal. To think effectively about the dangers of fascism today, we need to sort through the appropriate distinctions as carefully as possible. We need to grasp not just the distinctive ideas and practices that separate fascists from others on the Right and justify using the term, but also the particular contexts that give fascists popularity and a credible claim on power. What enables fascists to offer themselves as a desirable ‘extra-systemic’ solution for urgently perceived problems, as an alternative to the pluralism, negotiation, and coalition-building associated with democratic constitutionalism? What kind of crisis brings fascism onto the agenda? What is the character of the ‘ fascism-producing crisis ’ ?

To justify using the term for present political purposes – to make it precisely useful rather than just an emotionally satisfying slogan or the expression of a justified democratic angst, to bring it fully into the realm of theory and strategy – we need a double procedure. We need first to contextualize: we need to historicize fascism by being as specific as possible about its early twentieth-century dynamics of emergence, by isolating its characteristics as a locatable, historically specific formation (Italian Fascism, German National Socialism), one that took form under the impact of those particular crisis conjunctures of interwar Europe (1917–23, 1929–34) emphasized by Riley. But we cannot stop there. We need a second step. Having first contextualized, we then need to de-contextualize in the historian’s sense of freeing the term from those immediate markers of time and place. Only then can we get to the process of abstraction that delivers the really useful knowledge we need for today.

Focusing too literally on the two primary interwar cases traps us into too narrowly drawn an understanding. For one thing, we need to widen the comparative frame. If Riley’s ‘geopolitical context’ is to be taken seriously, then what he calls ‘the imperialist goal of geopolitical revision’ has to embrace more than just the making of Italian and German foreign policy. 20 By the 1930s, the interlinked global setting of fascism’s emergence was distributed among multiple centres with multi-directional flows. That new and menacing globality marked destructive distance from the international order ratified in 1918–19 by Versailles. For the rivalrous coexistence of established empires had now dissolved into a watchful protectionism defended against newly energized, aggressively insurgent imperialisms: Nazi Germany, Italian Fascism, Imperial Japan. Just as the coming world war vastly exceeded a merely European framework of clashing national states, so did these fascist disruptions come from plural and varied origins. Fascism began from East Asia as well as Europe, from Africa as well as the Americas. 21 These fascisms displayed similar political dynamics, ideological outlook, and practices, with convergent political effects. Their partially and unevenly secured access to state power hardly disqualifies them from significance, whether inside their immediate region or in wider transnational political fields. We miss a great deal without this carefully specified global understanding.

Such a global perspective suggests another limitation of the German and Italian examples. By recognizing multiple origins , we can also see multiple forms . By pluralizing the picture, whether in fascism’s movement or its regime phases, we can explore the diverse departure points and trajectories of national and regional cases rather than simply assuming the Italian and German progenitive primacy. Fascists, and the ideas and methods they represented, came to power by variable strategies and means. Fascism sought governing authority via stealthful manoeuvres and elite-mediated brokerage as well as by the full-frontal challenge of a Nazi Machtergreifung or Mussolini’s March on Rome. It laid a claim on power by more diffuse plebiscitary appeals in addition to the highly organized, party-based mobilizing of the Nazis during 1928–32. It could use backdoor institutional leverage rather than dramatic and violent popular disorders. Nor were these modalities ever mutually exclusive or simply a binary choice. The presence of a mass party on the Nazi pattern is not in itself the sine qua non for using the fascist category; it was missing before 1922 in the formative Italian case, after all. Coming to full governing realization should not be the deciding criterion: fascisms could just as frequently fail or be held successfully at bay. The really important point is to dethrone the Nazi and Italian examples – not remotely to diminish their importance, but to see more clearly the broader political space they occupied. The interwar years revealed convergent circumstances of political polarization and societal crisis in many diverse parts of the globe, for which ‘fascism’ then supplied the shared political language, whether as readily embraced self-description or as the label that opponents bestowed.

There is a complicated question here. If fascism’s emergence during the 1920s and 1930s was globally dispersed, rather than issuing only from the Italian and German starting points, taking variable forms and multiple paths, it also settled only gradually and unevenly into generic existence. It developed cumulatively rather than unfolding from an already assembled ground of principles comparable in coherence to liberalism or conservatism and other previously formed political ideologies. ‘Fascism’ as an everyday term preceded fascism as a category of socio-political analysis. 22 But it soon named the commonalties of newly emergent radical right formations around the world, whose heterogeneous qualities caution against any restrictive typology of those movements held to qualify for the name or not. First came the loose and frenetically mobile repertoire of departures we now call ‘fascism’, borne by all of the discursive noise and visual tactics surrounding Mussolini’s and similar movements, whether as viscerally unreflected sloganeering and images or as the consciously chosen terminology and stagecraft of party intellectuals and strategists. Only then came fascism as the stabilized category of political understanding with its formalized programmes and codified outlook. That being the case, a broader definition seems more helpful and appropriate.

To become portable as a concept – usable across different times and places – ‘fascism’ needs to be defined by its politics: by the ideas that appealed to its activists and thinkers, inspired its leaders, and ran through its programmes; by its hatreds and negativities; by its stylistics, practices, and organizing modalities; by its activist preference for violence over civility, argument, and debate. Underlying all of those ideas, indeed constitutive for fascism as a distinctive political formation, were the early twentieth-century dynamics and consequences of mass democratization: on the one hand, the rise of labour movements and the electoral surge of radicalized socialist parties; on the other hand, the massive transnational convulsion of World War I and its disruptions. In grasping the resulting deadly particularity of fascism’s arrival, moreover, we need not only the critical dissection of its ideas in the philosophical and programmatic senses, along with interpretive readings of its key texts and studies of the fascist outlook or mentality, but also analysis of fascists’ popular appeal.

In a dangerously doubled context of popular democratic insurgency and liberal paralysis after 1917–18, when postwar constitution-making registered utterly unprecedented democratic gains, fascism offered itself as an extreme political remedy, a counter-revolutionary strategy of order. Fascists proposed an audaciously untrammelled activism, in a new synthesis joining radically authoritarian rule to militarized activism and coercively enforced conformity, infused with a radical-nationalist, imperialist, and racialist creed. This politics was shaped from violent antipathy against liberals, democrats, socialists, and above all Bolsheviks. It was not organized around a codified core of texts or doctrine. It was never ‘a closed canonical apparatus’ or an elaborately ‘articulated system of belief’, although individuals could certainly perform such coherence and more intricately developed self-consciousness. Rather, it formed a matrix of common dispositions. For Mussolini it was a ‘common denominator’, ‘a set of master tropes’ ordered around ‘violence, war, nation, the sacred, and the abject’. 23

Inside this new fascist ensemble, it was the turning to political violence – to repressive and coercive forms of rule, to guns rather than words, to assaulting and killing one’s opponents rather than debating them on the speaker’s platform – that marked the distance from earlier versions of the Right. Coercion as such was not the issue. Use of force, from ordinary policing and riot control to states of emergency, is an entirely conventional part of legally constituted governing authority, whether liberal, authoritarian, or democratic. The state’s coercive capacities are always potentially at hand, whether for routinely protecting property and persons, maintaining law and order, or curtailing civil liberties under pressure of a national emergency, as during wartime or a major strike. Privately organized coercion was likewise common to the polities of societies undergoing capitalist development in the later nineteenth century: workplace compulsion, strike-breaking, vigilantism, employment-based paternalism, and servile labour, especially in the countryside, could all richly be found. Yet precisely when measured against such precedents, fascist violence was shockingly new. In Germany this contrast was clear. The Anti-Socialist Law of 1878–90 and similar legislation, the harassment, deporting, and imprisonment of left-wing activists, the unleashing of police or troops against strikers and demonstrators – all these were one thing. But terror , first by means of a militarized and violently confrontational style of politics, then as a principle of state organization, was quite another.

Thus killing socialists rather than just arguing with them, or at most legally and practically restricting their rights, was the most startling of departures. The brutality of that break can never be exaggerated. Before 1914 attacks on democracy had unfolded only within normative legal and political contexts that gradually brought extra-democratic violence under significant constraint. The liberal-constitutionalist polities that became generalized across Europe as a result of the 1860s made arbitrary authority increasingly accountable to representative government, parliamentary oversight, and liberal practices of the rule of law. Moreover, as the European socialist parties gained in electoral strength and parliamentary influence from the 1890s they brought the older systems of repressive policing under further review. Although during the 1900s a fresh process of polarized contention could be seen gathering pace, this incremental strengthening of constitutional politics made it possible in much of Europe for political life to stabilize significantly on the given parliamentary terrain. 24 And it was this political culture of ritualized and respectful proceduralism that the massive disruption of the First World War so badly disordered. This was the history of cumulative progressivism that fascists now violently disavowed. The democratic constitutions of 1918–19 ratcheted forward the previous decades’ hard-won and patiently consolidated gains. It was that practical consensual ground of political civility that fascists in Italy and Germany decided so aggressively to desert and then destroy.

What can we take away from this history? If fascism began as a radically distinct politics of the Right in the wake of World War I, essentially a response to the revolutionary turmoil surrounding democratization, how might we recognize it elsewhere, in a different place and time? As a politics, I have suggested, fascism can be distilled into the following: it wants to silence and even murder its opponents rather than arguing with them; it prefers an authoritarian state over democracy; it pits an aggressively exclusionary idea of the nation against a pluralism that values and prioritizes difference. On that basis, we can separate fascism’s substance from the generative time of its beginnings, whose massive particularities will never be closely replicated. This came not merely from an unrepeatable conjuncture – the big violence and societal changes of World War I – but from other vital determinations too, from the sociology of the main collective actors and their forms of possible political agency to the differing modalities of publicness and the changing social ecologies of capitalism. Yet if we build our comparison structurally around these factors as we find them in the 1920s (for example using Riley’s four axes), we risk foreclosing the findings: if the originary context was so fundamentally different, how can we find the same politics now? It indeed makes no sense to look for direct equivalences between far-Right politics today and the movements calling themselves fascist then. But the absence today of some exact counterpart for Mussolini’s squadristi or Hitler’s NSDAP hardly precludes our use of the term, providing we say very carefully what we mean.

By focusing on the substance of what fascists wanted, we can explore how the distinctively fascist relation to politics might work in the present. Pace Dylan Riley, we can gain valuable insights by posing a differently constructed comparative question. Mutatis mutandis , how far do the ideas, methods, programmes, and stylistics of a contemporary far-Right begin to resemble those of the classical fascists? Where do present-day movements converge with those predecessors and where do they differ or depart? For such a discussion, there should be no pre-given conclusion. In the critical reading of potentials and tendencies, particular outcomes are not to be inscribed. Seeking the spaces where far-Right politics may be acquiring specifically fascist inflections presumes no predetermined political strategy in response. But likewise, such convergences may well point us to other helpful connections. In an ever-intensifying atmosphere of crisis, when the language of fascism comes promiscuously into play, we urgently need more careful explications to guard against ill-conceived and precipitous calls for action. In other words, can we detect any dynamics of radicalization that seem to be fostering the kind of politics outlined above? Where do we find a far-Right politics that openly celebrates the use of political violence, the need for authoritarianism, the dismantling of juridical democracy, and the virtues of coercively exclusionary forms of patriotism and radical nationalism?

How far is Trump himself a fascist? Critical readings of his rhetoric – from Twitter feed and Fox News phone-ins to press briefings and campaign stumps – show very easily his indebtedness to explicitly fascist or neo-Nazi tropes and ideas. The fact that he retweets this or that Nazi slogan or meme and uses the exact language the Nazis or Italian Fascists used is damningly revealing. 25 When he rails against the Beltway and the establishment and the rottenness of the party system, or talks about ‘draining the swamp’, he uses a vocabulary of ‘anti-politics’ coming directly out of early twentieth-century German history. When he descends from the sky into an airport rally, Leni Riefenstahl is instantly evoked. The aggressive jut of the jaw, the looming posture, the grim scowl – these come palpably from Mussolini’s body language. A key henchman during the Presidency’s first year, Steve Bannon, reads widely in the political writings of Julius Evola and other earlier twentieth-century fascist thinkers, warms to their ideas, and works them into his thinking. Similar applies to the longest-serving non-family member of the presidential coterie, Stephen Miller. 26 We can go further to map the wider topography of neo-Nazi, white-supremacist, militia-styled Alt-Right activism through its networks, writings, and websites to develop an elaborate picture of the Trump-aligned far-Right constituency. This is the actively mobilized part of his vaunted ‘base’, who style themselves consciously as fascist, whether by U.S. descent or vicarious attachment to Nazi or Italian Fascist models. After the 2016 presidential campaign itself, this visible, organized far-Right presence coalesced vociferously around free-speech scandalizing across college campuses, while organizing the Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally of August 2017. Three years later, in the paramilitary protests against COVID-19 restrictions, via the polarized anger against Black Lives Matter (BLM), and through the pre-election rumbling against the Left, that militancy has hardened into extremely threatening anti-democratic form. 27

Yet, the growth of neo-fascist networks may not be our best guide: invariably quite small in membership, they seldom record more than occasional local success in electoral terms, as against the notoriety gained from publicity-grabbing provocations. Their public legitimacy has often been stealthfully secured – by precisely not calling themselves ‘fascist’, while insisting on democratic credentials. They typically waver between observing the liberal protocols and giving their militancy rein. Those initiatives with greater staying-power, like Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute (NPI) or Jared Taylor’s New Century Foundation, exemplify the syndrome. From the preferred political stylistics and organizational forms to the ideological affiliations and propensities, they bear the influence of fascism in much of its early twentieth-century guise. In the cumulative record, there is no dearth of explicity affirmative statements on Nazi ideals and accomplishments, though often with idiosyncratic variance (as in Taylor’s distancing from antisemitism). Yet they profess at the same time adherence to democratic rules.

Two questions immediately arise. How might this balancing act between formal democratic legality and physical-force militancy begin to break down? And: how might a logic of coalescence toward the non-fascist Right occur? In August 2017, Charlottesville supplied provisional answers. On the one hand, white-supremacist militancy tipped easily into physical violence, with pitched melées between attendees and anti-racist counter-demonstrators and the dramatic murder of one of the latter, Heather Heyer. If the rally elicited mainly condemnation from the conservative sector of the Right, on the other hand, Trump’s very public equivocation (there were ‘very fine people on both sides’) was universally seen as a muted white-nationalist endorsement. Until this point, with various maverick and wider grassroots exceptions, Republicans had stayed officially armoured against significant white-supremacist collaboration. But with Trump’s prevarication, a first chink had appeared. 28

In the meantime, beneath the impact of the continuing war against immigration, the Trumpification of the Republican Party, the polarizing catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic, the sustained BLM mobilization, and the 2020 presidential election, the barriers between far Right and conservatives have been decisively breached. Not only have Congressional Republicans swallowed any remaining misgivings about Trump’s lack of basic presidential competence: his volatile and personalist style of leadership; his utterly shameless corruptions; his breaching of long-established protocols of governing, including most of the hallowed consitutional norms; his flouting of accountability; his lying; and his extraordinary vacating of governance during the unprecedented emergency of the pandemic. They have ceased worrying about the far Right too.

This dissolving boundary can be variously noted. In preserving their lock on judicial appointments, Senate Republicans sacrifice their remaining distance from Trump and open themselves to his supporters. This was a devil’s bargain sealed during the impeachment: protection for the President in conformity with his agenda, whether aggressively open or cravenly silent, was straightforwardly the price to be paid. By that time, the trenches were dug. So the pandemic and its consequences polarized the divisiveness further again, hardening the allegiance of Trump’s core supporters, while draining much of his wider vote back to the Democrats. With the stakes ratcheted ever upwards, politics devolving into the streets, and the confrontational language of law and order polarizing the political choice, any Republican inhibitions against the far Right were dangerously down.

If fascism requires a mobilized politics of anti-democratic political violence aimed at dismantling the given democratic frameworks of institutions, procedures, and law, then these present circumstances come threateningly close. What makes this politics seem attractive, effective, and morally justified? What kind of crisis produced these departures? How far do its characteristics resemble those of 1918–22 or 1928–34? Asking this question requires no exact equivalences. Nor do all the same elements have to be present. The crisis may not have fully arrived. But do its features display the same kind of potentials? Might these logics combine to produce outcomes of comparable severity? An especially forthright answer to these questions, borne by an extreme historicist skepticism, is Dylan Riley’s: the interwar conjuncture was so essentially different, with so distinctive a set of political actors in such specific relations with geopolitical and societal forces, that analogy make no sense. But short of an entirely contextual nominalism, how might these two conjunctures be brought helpfully into conversation?

Crises that are structurally alike never mirror each other exactly. But certain features of the crises of Weimar and liberal Italy do resonate with the circumstances of now:

We might begin with the specifically constitutional aspect: namely, the paralysis of governance and the far-reaching consequences of the post-1930 democratic impasse, combined with the autonomy and non-accountable independence of executive power.

In the same vein, moving now from the specifically German to the European and wider geopolitical arena, we might emphasize the profoundly non-accountable quality of the crucial economic decision-making, including the particular power of the bankers and finance capital (in present terms, ‘Wall Street’). This was not just a matter of unaccountable decision-making as such, but of the untouchable authority of the dominant economic expertise .

Next we might mention the accelerating turn after 1930 to tariffs and economic protectionism .

Next, the escalating political anxieties of 1930–32 were fuelled not only by direct experience of the economic hardships of job loss, hunger, destitution, and lack of relief, but also by the generalized climate of social fear . The scale and breadth of electoral support for Nazism came not necessarily from direct experience of unemployment, household collapse, business failure or bankruptcy, but from the widening perceptions of a societal crisis with no apparent exit .

Finally, the eventual outcome of that crisis, brokered during the intensifying political deterioration of December–January 1932–33 was not a fascist seizure of power, but the formation of an appointed coalition government, a regime of stabilization , charged with restoring social and political order by authoritarian means, as the perceived prerequisite for economic recovery. In this initial Hitler government, only two ministries were held by the Nazis themselves. Government was otherwise continuous with the preceding cabinets of experts who were already non-accountable to the legislature and its party majority – especially regarding the economy, finance, justice, foreign affairs, the armed services, and defence. Indeed, the most notable feature of this first Hitler government was precisely its coalition character : in the cause of restabilizing society, establishment conservatives from across the power elites now revealed themselves ready to ally with the fascists .

If we view the crises tending toward fascism between the wars structurally (Italy in 1919–22, Germany in 1930–33 or 1918–20, and for that matter France in 1934–37, Spain in 1931–36), it helps to distinguish between two clear dimensions – namely, the institutional cohesion of the national polity and the popular legitimacy of the existing governing arrangements. From the perspective of the Right, pluralist and parliamentary methods of political negotiation and containment had demonstrably exhausted their efficacy, guaranteeing neither the smooth political representation of the dominant classes nor the mobilizing of adequate popular support. In those circumstances, fascism now began offering itself, persuasively, as a violent, extra-systemic solution. 29

Fascism prospered from a paralysis of the state’s capacity for dispatching its key organizing functions, whether in the economy or for the larger tasks of keeping cohesion in society. At the worst points of the crisis, that paralysis encompassed the entire institutional machinery of politics, including the parliamentary and party-political frameworks of representation. This was so in two ways. On the one hand, sufficient co-operation could no longer be organized among the major economic interests using the given mechanics of parliamentary representation and party-based government. Parliamentary coalition-building became unbearably complicated, so that politics became factionalized into a series of manoeuvres for influence over the high governmental executive. 30 This widened the gap between a nakedly unaccountable governing practice, disastrously severed from any stable popular consent, and a febrile popular electorate, increasingly mobilized for action but with no evident place to go. On the other hand, accordingly, the popular legitimacy of the same institutional framework also crumbled into disarray. The complex entanglement of these interrelated crises defined Germany’s predicament between the suspension of normal parliamentary government in March 1930 and Hitler’s appointment in January 1933. Amid the severity of this crisis, continuing adjustments inside the given arrangements looked more and more futile. More radical solutions beyond the bounds of the system altogether consequently became more and more appealing. 31

This was the ‘fascism-producing crisis’: twin crises of cohesion and legitimacy. The political unity of the dominant classes and their major economic fractions could no longer be accomplished by the given methods of parliamentary representation and party government. And popular legitimacy for the same institutional arrangements fell concurrently into shreds. To widening circles of political actors – journalists, political theorists, party intellectuals, civil servants, businessmen and lobbyists, parliamentarians, power brokers of all kinds – tinkering with the given governing arrangements seemed increasingly unproductive. Governance as usual seemed no longer tenable. More radical solutions beyond the boundaries of the existing system altogether started coming into focus.

How might this help for the present? If ‘fascism’ is more than just a polemical weapon or everyday pejorative, then how should we use it responsibly? What is distinctive about the contemporary crisis and the politics it inspires? Once we historicize, what does this language enable us to see? What does it obscure? What can we take from the histories of fascism in the form of theory ? If we approach fascism as a type of politics – the coercively nationalist recourse to political violence and exclusionary authoritarianism under worsening pressures of governing paralysis and democratic impasse – then we can explore its very particular appearances today. What might we learn from the generative contexts of a specifically fascist politics in the early twentieth century in the form of abstraction that can aid political understanding now?

With dynamics already apparent from the early 2000s, but sharply worsening since 2008–10, the U.S. polity has entered a steadily escalating version of the dual crisis outlined above, one suddenly magnified and massively jolted by COVID-19: crisis of cohesion, crisis of legitimacy. Not only is the polity broken, but very large masses of people have stopped believing in its repair. On the one hand, we have the extreme atrophy of democratic practices in the state, whether inside the legislature or in the relations of Presidency, Congress, and Supreme Court; or in the attack on voting rights, voting access, and the conduct of elections; or in the curtailment of civil liberties and the scale and character of the carceral state. On the other hand, there is now a default conviction among the citizenry that government consists only in burdensomeness, corruption, incompetence, and non-accountability – a still widening popular belief in what I would call the non-intelligibility of power , the belief that power is exercised in a distant place, behind closed doors and opaque glass, by conspiracies of elites who are beholden to no one and simply do not care .

When these two crises occur together – crisis of representation, crisis of consent; government paralysis, democratic impasse – the prospects can be severe indeed. If we add the fields of structural determination outlined briefly at the very start of this essay, whose ruinous consequences are now immeasurably expanded and sharpened by the intervening calamity of the COVID-19 pandemic, the severity grows further again. The deeper structural setting will need to be fully filled in, proceeding from the huge transformations begun in the 1980s. Here, we need to talk about fundamental capitalist restructuring – deindustrialization and neoliberal globalization. We need to talk about drastic class recomposition , including the reorganization of work and labour circuits, the rewriting of the labour contract. We need to talk about the global environmental catastrophe , climate change in particular, which now challenges effective and accountable governance at every possible level, whether in the transformations of economic life, the immiseration of working people, and the brokenness of the polity, or in the worsening of international instability.

Big climatic events and unrelentingly arduous environmental changes will stretch the resources of already disabled national states, even as they strain the co-operative capacities of societies divisively organized around widening class inequalities. Global effects of environmental deterioration – competition among nations for basic needs, including water and all manner of natural resources; struggles to contain economic migrancy and the massed refugee populations fleeing endemic shortages, droughts, and floods; rivalries over sources for energy – are likely to reshape the language of national security ever more divisively. Fortress mentalities, emotional appeals to nativism and the necessity of protectionist barriers, idioms of politics organized by anxiety, gatedness as the emerging societal paradigm – these already drive the authoritarian and violent proclivities of contemporary governmentality. The new dialectics of international conflict and societal crisis cannot fail to boost calls for economic protectionism, for greater authority in governing, for a strengthening of law and order, for upholding ‘American values’, for the entire white nationalist programme of a racialized social order. As such a drive gathers momentum, a politics resembling fascism can easily coalesce.

Global disruptions feed back into the metropolitan societies through the politics galvanized so effectively by the 2016 Trump campaign and then institutionalized under the presidency. The effects are driven restlessly along by Trump’s embattled white nationalism, shamelessly racist dog-whistlng (by now more like a fog horn), and chauvinist sloganeering: America First, MAGA (Make America Great Again), Build the Wall, American Carnage. His rhetoric plays brazenly on fears of immigration. The creation of a borderless world (in the now-understood neoliberal sense), the collapse of state sovereignties in a vast belt of territory from West Africa through the Middle East to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the unstoppable continuance of the crisis of global migrancy all generate the materials for virulent popular anxieties about boundaries inside the societies of the advanced capitalist countries. The resulting dynamics can only become more and more destabilizing as rivalries over resources grow more and more unpredictable and extreme (hence the powerful impact exercised by climate change). Anxieties about borders, boundaries, protectiveness, and ‘difference’ drive a great deal of the white nationalist vehemence channelled by the Trump campaign and the analogous politics in Europe.

In the USA, an inwardly facing far-Right patriotism always sees itself in avowedly racialized terms, as a nationalism that is always-already ‘white’. For the toxicity of that syndrome, from his demonizing of the Central Park Five in May 1989 through his championing of the ‘birther movement’ during 2010–16, Donald Trump had long been a walking and talking exhibit. 32 In the 2016 campaigning itself, the animus was aimed first and foremost against migrants entering the USA from Mexico, beginning with his descent from the Trump Tower escalator to declare his candidacy on 16 June 2015 (‘They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people’), and continuing into the final days of the campaign: ‘They’re coming in illegally. Drugs are pouring in through the border. We have no country if we have no border … We need the wall… We’re going to get them out… we have some bad hombres here and we’re going to get them out’. 33 But his wider scaremongering inflamed the familiar white supremacist imagery of African-American danger, pitting ‘the suburbs’ against the disparaged ‘inner-city’ wastelands of urban delinquincy and decay. In pledging to ‘take our country back’, Trump conjured not only Mexican immigrants and Muslim terrorists, but also the despised black urban underclass. From these viciously interconnected negatives is then forged the protectionist white nationalist positive.

Inside these reserves of anti-immigrant anger, Islamophobia, and racial grievance are equally virulent patterns of misogynist vituperation, as the abuse hurled at Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign (‘Burn the Witch’, ‘Hang the Bitch’, ‘Lock her Up’) so dismally confirmed. 34 Explicitly anti-feminist, brutally graphic, and often obsessively detailed, the attacks on Clinton bespoke visceral presumptions of masculine entitlement – entitlement to resources, to sexual access, to the use of violence, to a claim on truth, to a presumed ownership of authority – whose expression invariably took white nationalist or racialized form. Indeed, this may be the ground where Trump’s appeal bridges most directly and effectively between the organized networks of self-consciously far-Right activists and his broader voting constituency of MAGA-enthused patriots.

Masculinist grievance against the human and societal wreckage left by deindustrialization and the gutting of earlier forms of well-paid, long-term, secure, and even reasonably rewarding employment goes far in explaining the affective registers of a Trump campaign rally, while the rhetorics of victimhood, score-settling, and backlash against an array of anathematized ‘others’ travel easily back and forth between those ordinary supporters and the alt-Right websites. From the deep well of masculine insecurities and dismay come many distinct manifestations, often circulating through the debased and counterfeit publicness of the web-based registers of opinion, with a graphically unchecked viciousness that wildly escapes older protocols of lawful speech and behaviour, let alone earlier constraints of respect, tolerance, and civility. A tipping point came in later 2014 with Gamergate, the misogynist extravaganza of hate speech and harassment among video-gamers that helped normalize new boundaries of linguistic violence, online behaviour, and practical spillage. 35 If this netherworld topography remains murky, its porousness to the alt-Right is clear enough. 36 For anyone remembering earlier presumptions of political civility, the heedless violence and hate-mongering of this discourse are a truly dismaying discovery. Here, too, are echoes of that classical time, in this case the Nazi misogyny of 1928–34. 37

This is a striking particularity of the early twenty-first century. The internet’s everyday diatribes and sloganeering act as a vital bridging medium – back and forth between the programmatic white-terrorist manifestos of a Breivik or a Tarrant and the watered-down bluster of Trump’s common-sense translations, and from the plebiscitary noise of the campaign rally to the armoured masculinity in the streets. In its penchant for seizing and repurposing imagery, whatever the provenance – what Julia Thomas calls its distinctive counter aesthetic of undisciplined eclecticism, mobile symbolics, and aggressive negations – contemporary far-Right inventiveness replicates that of the fascists of the interwar years. 38 But with the dramatic reconfiguring of publicness underway since the 1990s, this presents itself very differently now than before.

Presaged by the global diffusion of television since the 1960s, followed by the mass spread of fax-machines, computers, and early forms of the internet, the classical public sphere has become irretrievably subsumed. The startling rapidity of new electronic communications, digital techniques, and information technologies – DVDs, cable and satellite TV, laptops, cell phones, Skype, streaming, smartphones, social media, Zoom – now enables not only novel forms of web-based organizing and agitation, but also incomparably wider and easier access. Increasingly under this new dispensation, violence means not just physically harming and murdering one’s opponents (as in the interwar), but also coercively overriding democratic civility and its constitutional safeguards. It no longer relies as much on street fighting, pitched confrontations, imposing displays of paramilitary strength, and the spectacle of uniformed massed force. It operates, rather, by verbal onslaughts, internet trolling, instantly produced and transmitted visual incitements, and all the other virtual means of displaced but no less brutal assault.

Earlier patterns of politics never entirely vanish. They recede, transmute, regroup, reinspire, redeploy. For the current far Right, the fascist past delivers a highly serviceable resource, which the new electronic means also render all the more readily retrievable. In the structured characteristics of far-Right thinking, whatever the glaring specificities (for instance the relative salience of antisemitism, or the absence now of any counterpart to Bolshevism and the Soviet Union), there persist evident continuities and equivalences with the 1930s, whether in the wilful or overt indebtedness of the self-avowed neo-Nazis and white supremacists themselves, or in the more amorphously expanding gray zone of ideas aligning Republicans and conservatives with the Trump campaign. Making all due allowance for intervening differences of context and the resulting inflections, there are clear repetitions of tropes and repertoires and familiar patterns of rhetoric – in the masculine nation, the soldierly nation, the rageful nation, the misogynist nation, the racialized and racially armoured nation, and so forth. Finally, the current absence of either a Nazi Party or Socialist and Communist Parties on the model of the 1920s does not preclude finding their counterparts: that is, equivalent political actors within comparable fields of dangerously polarized political force. If hating one’s liberal and democratic opponents meant something very different in 1920 or 1932, then doing so now brings its own means of organized and discursive expression, just as suppressing those opponents requires very different kinds of allowable violence.

In thinking about fascism, I have always found the immediate crisis the best place to begin – whether paradigmatically in the years 1917–23 and 1929–1934 in Italy and Germany, or now in the portal to fascism in the United States today. 39 The most obvious difference between these two moments is in the organized social and political strength of the Left. Fascism in the 1920s was a violently counter-revolutionary backlash against an unprecedented wave of democratic enlargement in Europe after 1917–18 that registered remarkable gains all across the continent for popular citizenship, access, and participation. Neither 1922 nor 1933 could be imaginable without this prior advance of the Left. The politics coalescing a hundred years later around Trump, in contrast, confronts nothing remotely resembling that self-confidently ascendant, elaborately organized, institutionally bunkered mass movement of democratization. Instead, it comes after several decades of historic defeat of an older Left (in any case far weaker in USA than in most parts of Europe) during the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s. The conditions of possibility that brought substantial democratic gains during the 1960s and 1970s were lost, indeed systematically taken away.

Those conditions had enabled a political presence for the Left during the mid twentieth century that sustained meaningful political effects. From the 1990s what remained of that presence was steadily eroded. Concretely, there are no organized collective solidarities of comparable staying-power on that earlier model of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century any more. Their loss came systemically from each of the big processes whose impact cumulatively composed the materials of the present danger: the fiscal crisis of late-capitalist restructuring; the recomposition of class; the breaking of the polity. In fact, the transformations of the past four decades have been so destructive that the political capacities for organizing democratic agency on a sufficiently sustained, and efficaciously collective scale may have ceased being available. Before 1922 in Italy, and before 1933 in Germany, could be found the strongest Socialist and Communist parties under capitalism; but in 2020 in the United States there is …what?

At inception, Trump’s regime lacked an overall plan. Its general goals – radical deregulation throughout the economy; drastically shrinking the civil state; tax revisions; dismantling ‘Obamacare’; packing the judiciary; destroying Roe vs . Wade; assaulting public goods of whatever kind – were imposing enough. But these were the pre-existing aggregate of conservative Republican ambitions. Only in course of the presidency have they acquired additional binding force, with the sharpened political edge that justifies current fascism talk. With opportunity, Trump’s visceral authoritarianism and inventive if capricious venality – his personal despotism – has duly uncoiled. With time, aided both by executive segmentation and determined action of a few especially driven ideologues (such as Steven Miller or Betsy DeVos), a more coherent wish has materialized for maximizing executive power. As 2020 drew closer, this always promised to concentrate Trump’s ambitions into more centralist form, for which the abortive impeachment supplied the accelerant. But some further adversarial challenge was needed, an indictment of Trump from the Left, firing his anti-democratic white nationalist appetites. The events of the campaign year itself – the crisis of racialized policing amid the COVID-19 emergency, followed by sustained mobilization around BLM and polarization in the streets, with the Presidency alternately watching and colluding, Congress deadlocked, and central government all but vacated – then delivered the fuel.

This case should not be overstated or misconstrued: the 2020s will not be the 1920s. To dissect the lineaments of an evolving crisis is not to declare it altogether formed, with no way out. Its logics and potentials have no already-established single direction. There is no preset outcome. But if fascism in that fully realized sense has not yet arrived, its tendential proximity is apparent. In this emergent crisis the following elements stand out:

The national polity and its central governing arrangements stay locked in an astonishing stalemate, with no glimmerings of cross-branch good-faith conversation, let alone any policy-making exchange or constructive crisis-related collaboration. In eschewing any national co-ordination or decisive central response to the pandemic, the Presidency has vacated the space of governing, while the Senate likewise withdraws.

Supplying neither continuity of administrative expertise nor a context for collective decisions, Trump’s governing executive is united only by indifference to the established rules and practices. For the normative proceduralism of U.S. governance, it has active contempt.

Combined with the polity’s paralysis and the incoherence of government during the COVID-19 emergency, this non-accountability continuously undermines any popular confidence in the state’s operating competence and reliability.

While the Left offers no political challenge remotely comparable to the European democratic insurgencies of 1918–19, the BLM protests unleashed by the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis on 26 May 2020 attained a genuinely national resonance, with momentum lasting throughout the summer. Whether in the scope and diversity of the activism and generalized popular support, in the coherent militancy of the demands (Defund the Police, racial justice), in the closeness with a broadening progressive tendency inside the Democratic Party, and in the surprising staying power of the support, this movement confronted the Trump Presidency in terms that called the system actively to account.

The Trump regime responded in kind. On the one hand, it used the executive power of the White House and Justice Department for the purposes of re-establishing ‘law and order’, deploying troops on the streets (drawn from diverse federal agencies, including Homeland Security and Secret Service), ordering aerial surveillance, assaulting citizens, kidnapping protesters into unmarked vans, and using a full array of counter-insurgency weaponry and techniques. Trump threatened to override city and state jurisdictions, mobilize the U.S. military to suppress demonstrations, and invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act. On the other hand, his rhetoric consistently escalated the tensions, giving police unqualified support, embracing confrontations, even endorsing vigilantism (and on one occasion summary execution), while stoking conspiracy theories and demonizing protesters as criminals and extremists (antifas, anarchists, marxists, socialists, extreme leftists).

Already apparent in armed protests against state-level COVID-19 lockdown measures, a convergence of far-Right militias and paramilitary groups (Proud Boys, Three-Percenters, Boogaloo, Oath Keepers, neo-Confederates, miscellaneous white nationalists) spawned a significant counter-mobilization, whether in principal sites of BLM protests and smaller towns or across the web-based political landscape. 40 Under the plebiscitary aegis of Trump’s press audiences, Fox News interviews, and inflammatory tweets, the nascent coalescence of White House Trumpians, Congressional Republicans, and far-Right networks came palpably closer. Senator Tom Cotton (Arkansas), a leading Trump loyalist, called for paratroopers to be used against the protests (‘Antifa terrorists’), tweeting ‘No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters’. 41

These confrontational escalations pitched U.S. society into a novel and uncharted conjuncture. Executive measures to preserve public order are not in themselves so unusual, providing we overlook the particular BLM context and overall discursive environment. But a U.S. President’s readiness to incite the staging of armed protests against lawfully issued state-level lockdown precautions, along with his race-baiting demagogy, law-and-order appeals, and white nationalist rabble-rousing, was an unprecedented departure. Here we come closer than ever to the single most important fascist breach: the turning to political violence as a solution for worsening society-wide difficulty.

Amid this creeping radicalization, the white supremacism of the overtly fascist groups commingles not only with anger against the Left , but with the wider right-wing contentiousness surrounding cross-border migrancy and the refugee crisis, fear of foreigners, Sinophobia, and generalized Islamophobia. For this broader far-Right militancy, contemporary notations of ‘race’ as cultural belonging, social entitlement, angry intolerance of others, and a narrowly conceived conception of skin and birth-based citizenship supply a main mobilizing animus. These two phenomena increasingly converge: the ideologically self-conscious fascist formations and a broader-based right-wing populism centred around beliefs about race. On the shared authoritarian ground of law and order, they increasingly absorb elements of the Trumpified conservative sector too, while gathering up many petty bourgeois and working-class voters damaged by austerity and the societal dislocations from capitalist restructuring and long-run economic change. Demonstrable sympathies inside the police and security apparatuses also play a part. The ability of an ever-broadening right-wing coalescence to shift the basic terms of political discourse decisively to the right then becomes troublingly real.

The duality of the fascism-producing crisis – crisis of cohesion and crisis of legitimacy or consent – opens that political space. The governing institutions have ceased functioning effectively: a sufficiently predictable consensus can no longer be ensured inside the institutional complex of polity and state. Nor can the needed breadth of popular consent any longer be won. On the contrary, politics is driven not only by an angry, disappointed, and disbelieving alienation from the long-accepted governing practices; popular hopes are being polarized increasingly violently. In interwar Europe, the right-wing coalescence and radicalization were driven by vociferous anti-Bolshevism, for which the enemy was simultaneously internal (a mobilized working class, Communist and Socialist parties, agencies of racial corruption and degeneration, including especially the Jews) and international (Bolshevik Revolution, international Jewish conspiracy).

In the early twenty-first century, there are no longer Communist and Socialist parties any more. Instead, the danger is more completely exteriorized around foreigners, illegal migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, and interlopers of all sorts. The body politic and the national body are no longer thought to be threatened primarily by Communists and Jews, but rather from the outside, from the exotic and distant elsewhere, and especially from alien people who self-evidently do not belong . As always, that amorphously expandable category of the foreign outsider, the dangerously alien other, then becomes effortlessly elided to the racialized populations inside. This anxiety about borders will only become more and more acute as the global ecological catastrophe (‘climate change’) continues worsening the geopolitical rivalries through which the metropolitan countries seek to protect ever-diminishing resources against the needs and demands of those coming from elsewhere.

Conducing to the fascist temptation is a far-reaching collapse of publicness, civility, and the pluralist generosity in a common culture, the encroaching paralysis of any trustworthy relationship to a normative set of practices whose older habituations and guiding intuition used to be far more reliably democratic. This is what distinguishes the present. It contains a profoundly different order of crisis than the originary ones of the interwar, with a different set of state/society relations, different categories of political actors, different types of possible political agency, different forms and processes of publicness (of the possible ways of becoming public), and a different surrounding environment of capitalism, all of which have the effect of calling up a different set of coercively authoritarian political interventions and modalities than before. But if we theorize fascism as an exceptional set of relations to politics made feasible and compelling by the intensifying of a particular type of crisis, then we can surely make use of the term.

Geoff Eley teaches at University of Michigan. His most recent works include Forging Democracy: a History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (2002); A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (2005); (with Keith Nield) The Future of Class in History (2007); and Nazism as Fascism (2013). He coedited German Colonialism in a Global Age (2014), German Modernities from Wilhelm to Weimar: a Contest of Futures (2016), and Visualizing Fascism: the Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right (2020). He is writing a general history of twentieth-century Europe and a new study of the German Right between the 1860s and 1930.

See Liz Fekete, A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration, and Islamophobia in Europe , London, 2009, and Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right , London, 2018; David Tyrer, The Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power, and Fantasy , London, 2013; Arun Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror , London, 2015; Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe , Cambridge MA, 2017. For an instance of anti-Nazi politics: David Renton, Never Again: Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, 1976–1982 , London, 2018; Daniel Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down: Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone, and Red Wedge , London, 2016. I have written about the wider ideological field in Geoff Eley, ‘The Trouble with “Race”: Migrancy, Cultural Difference, and the Remaking of Europe’, in Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossmann, After the Nazi Racial State: Democracy and Difference in Germany and Europe , Ann Arbor, 2009, pp. 137–81. For the intellectual histories involved, see Fascism’s Return: Scandal, Revision, and Ideology since 1980 , ed. Richard J. Golsan, Lincoln NE, 1998.

In some political cultures, notably in Italy, ‘anti-fascism’ retained vital breadth of affiliation. See Victoria de Grazia, ‘What We Don’t Understand About Fascism’, Zócalo Public Square : https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2020/08/13/understand-fascism-american-history-mussolini-hitler-20th-century/ideas/essay/ , accessed 7 Sept. 2020.

For general contextualizing, see Alexander Reid Ross, Against the Fascist Creep , AK Press, 2017; Shane Burley, Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It , AK Press, Chico, Caifornia, 2017; George Hawley, The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know , New York, 2019. For a symptom of the term’s novel promiscuity, see Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: the Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change , New York, 2007. That book’s jacket description reads: ‘Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst? … The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn’t the SS Storm Trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.’

Michael Howard, ‘A Long War?’, Survival 48: 4, 2006-07, p. 10, makes that antipathy the main link from early twentieth-century European fascism to Islamist radicalism today.

For a sampling, see Norman Podhoretz, World War IV: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism , New York, 2008; Christopher Hitchens, ‘Defending Islamofascism’, Slate , 22 Oct. 2007: www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2007/10/defending_islamofascism.html , accessed 4 Nov. 2012; Walter Laqueur, ‘The Origins of Fascism: Islamic Fascism, Islamophobia, Antisemitism’, OUP blog: http://blog.oup.com/2006/10/the_origins_of_2/ : accessed 4 Nov. 2012; Jeffrey Herf, ‘Killing in the Name’, The New Republic , 8 April 2010. For commentary, see A. Dirk Moses, ‘Paranoia and Partisanship: Genocide Studies, Holocaust Historiography, and the “Apocalyptic Conjuncture”’, Historical Journal 54: 2, 2011, pp. 581-3; Tony Judt, ‘The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America’, in Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century , New York, 2008, pp. 384–92.

See the arguments in Eric Hobsbawm, On the Edge of the New Century: In Conversation with Antonio Polito , New York, 2000, pp. 31–2, 36, 13–15.

See above all Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (London 2007), rev. edn, Nation Books, New York, 2008; also Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War , New York, 2005; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindedness , New York, 2010; Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: the Making of Mass Incarceration in America , Cambridge MA, 2017; James Forman, Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America , New York, 2017; Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter , ed. Jordan T. Camp, London, 2016.

See Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast , New York, 2006; and for theoretical commentary, Margaret R. Somers, ‘Genealogies of Katrina: the Unnatural Disasters of Market Fundamentalism, Racial Exclusion, and Statelessness’, in Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights , Cambridge, 2008, pp, 63–117.

See Sindre Bangstad, Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia , London, 2014; Joel Achenbach, ‘Two Mass Killings a World Apart Share a Common Theme’, Washington Post , 18 August 2019; Lizzie Deardon, ‘New Zealand Attack: How Nonsensical White Genocide Conspiracy Theory Cited by Alleged Gunman is Spreading Poison Around the World’, Independent , 16 March 2019: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/new-zealand-christchurch-mosque-attack-white-genocide-conspiracy-theory-a8824671.html , accessed 24 Sept. 2020; Taylor Lorenz, ‘The Shooter’s Manifesto was designed to Troll’, The Atlantic , 5 March 2019: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/the-shooters-manifesto-was-designed-to-troll/585058/ : accessed 24 Sept. 2020; David D. Kirkpatrick, ‘Massacre Suspect Traveled the World but Lived on the Internet’, New York Times , 15 March 2019: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/world/asia/new-zealand-shooting-brenton-tarrant.html , accessed 24 Sept. 2020.

In the Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual reports on The Year in Hate and Extremism , Montgomery, Alabama, aggregate hate groups rose steadily after 1999, doubling by 2010 to 1,052, with a peak of 1,020 in 2018. If those numbers dipped slightly in 2019 to 940, their overall membership, resonance, and activity continued to grow, particularly online. During 2017–19, numbers of white nationalist groups grew by fifty-five percent; in 2018–19, anti-LBGTQ groups by forty-three percent.

See here, paradigmatically, Mark McGovern, Counterinsurgency and Collusion in Northern Ireland , London, 2019.

Cox was shot and repeatedly stabbed by fifty-two-year-old far-Right extremist Thomas Mair. Attached to U.S. neo-Nazi group National Alliance, Mair shouted ‘This is for Britain. Britain will always come first’. Lübcke was shot in the head by forty-five-year-old Stephan Ernst, supporter of the far-Right National Democratic Party (NPD) and associate of British Neo-Nazi terror group Combat 18. Salas was targeted by seventy-two-year-old Roy Den Hollander, an anti-feminist attorney known for his extreme right-wing racist and misogynist views. After presenting himself at the Salas family home, Den Hollander shot and killed Salas’s son Daniel and severely wounded her husband Mark; Salas herself escaped injury.

See Madeleine Albright, Fascism: a Warning , New York, 2018; Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: the Politics of Us and Them , New York, 2018; Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century , Ti Duggan Books, New York, 2017; Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America , ed. Cass R. Sunstein, New York, 2018. More recently: Marsha Gessen, Surviving Autocracy , Riverhead Books, New York, 2020; Eric A. Posner, The Demagogue’s Playbook: the Battle for American Democracy from the Founders to Trump , All Points Books, New York, 2020.

Albright, Fascism ,

Dylan Riley, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania, 1870–1945 (2010), 2nd edn, London, 2019.

Dylan Riley, ‘What Is Trump?’, New Left Review , 2nd Series 114, November–December 2018, pp. 6, 7.

Max Weber, Economy and Society: an Outline of Interpretive Sociology , ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, transl. Ephraim Fischoff and others, Berkeley, 1968, vol. 2, pp. 1,028–9.

Riley, ‘What Is Trump?’, p. 26.

Riley, ‘What Is Trump?’, p. 28.

Riley, ‘What Is Trump?’, pp. 7, 11.

Continentally, Africa contained at least one highly developed, if complex, ‘indigenous’ or ‘native’ fascism, namely in South Africa. But colonial theatres were crucial to the hardening of European fascist ambitions, in Portugal and Spain no less than Mussolini’s Italy. Europe’s war was initiated in Ethiopia and Franco’s Nationalist rebellion was launched from Morocco, just as Japan’s rightward march began from Manchuria. See Reto Hoffmann, The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 , New York, 2015, and Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–1945 , Durham NC, 2010. For a broader manifesto: Visualizing Fascism: the Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right , ed. Julia Adeney Thomas and Geoff Eley, Durham NC, 2020, especially Thomas, ‘Introduction: a Portable Concept of Fascism’, pp. 1–20.

The same had been true of its major political rivals. Liberalism, conservatism, and socialism all developed cumulatively as heterogeneous formations during the nineteenth century, before settling into more stable identities, with portable application and resonance across societies. The difference was the speed and intensity of fascism’s coherence, arriving during years rather than decades or even centuries.

Federico Finchelstein, ‘On Fascist Ideology’, Constellations 15: 3, 2008, pp. 321, 322, 323.

See Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: the History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 , New York and Oxford, 2002, pp. 62–118.

https://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/02/28/donald-trump-retweets-post-likening-him-to-mussolini/ : – @ilduce2016: ‘It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep’ – @realDonaldTrump #MakeAmericaGreatAgain’, 7:13 AM – 28 Feb. 2016.

Jason Horowittz, ‘Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists’, New York Times , 10 Feb. 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/world/europe/bannon-vatican-julius-evola-fascism.html . See Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency , New York, 2017; Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Power Brokers , Day Street Books, New York, 2020; Jean Guerrero, Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda , William Morrow, New York, 2020.

See especially Alexandra Minna Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination , Beacon Press, Boston, 2019; David Neiwert, Alt-America: the Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump , New York, 2017; Ross, Against the Fascist Creep ; Bray, Antifa ; Mike Wendling, Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House , London, 2018; George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right , New York, 2017, and The Alt-Right ; Burley, Fascism Today ; Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 Presidential Election , Rochester, 2017.

Trump addressed the Charlottesville events successively on 12, 14, and 15 August 2017. His initial statement condemned ‘this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides’, laying first emphasis on the ‘swift restoration of law and order’; his unwillingness to name KKK, Neo-Nazi, and other white supremacist groups was exceptional amid the outpouring of bi-partisan public censure. Next day a spokesperson briefly rectified the omission. After massive public criticism, Trump then reluctantly delivered his own perfunctory direct condemnation. On 15 August, during impromptu remarks, he took that back, saying there were ‘very fine people on both sides’, while denouncing what he called the ‘very, very violent alt-left’ (15 August). Next day, White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon called this a ‘defining moment’ of the presidency: Trump had chosen to break with the ‘globalists’ and commit himself to ‘his people’. Bannon left the White House amid the surrounding controversy on 18 August 2017. See Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, ‘Trump’s Remarks on Charlottesville Violence are Criticized as Insufficient’, and ‘Bannon in Limbo as Trump Faces Growing Calls for the Strategist’s Ouster’, New York Times , 12 and 14 August 2017. For Unite the Right, see Hawley, Alt-Right , pp. 138–45; Burley, Fascism Today , pp. 223–7; Teitelbaum, War for Eternity , 235–47.

This way of formulating the problem – as the conjunction of a dual crisis, a crisis of representation and a crisis of hegemony or popular consent – derives from the work of Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship , London, 1979.

For example David Abraham, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (Princeton 1981), New York, 1986, p. 287:

Could no bourgeois political force organize the political unity of the dominant economic fractions out of the factiousness and diversity of their economic interests? Was no political unity available and no mass political support available within the Republic, despite the single-mindedness of the dominant classes’ anti-socialism? Was the maintenance of capitalist economic relations and political democracy so antithetical in this conjuncture that abandonment and undermining of the Republic were self-evident necessities for the dominant classes?

Production of fascist potentials in Germany occurred in two instalments (1918–23, 1929–33), whereas Italy had only one (1917–22). Spain (1917–23, 1931–6) and Austria (1927–34) came close, while France (1934–7) showed similar potentials. Other interwar societies with significant fascist movements (e.g. Hungary, Finland) experienced similar polarized breakdown after World War One.

The Central Park Five were teenagers of colour wrongly convicted of raping a white female jogger in Manhattan in April 1989. Then a property developer cultivating his celebrity status, Trump purchased full-page statements in four New York newspapers demanding the death penalty:

I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer… How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS.

See Natalie P. Byfield, Savage Portrayals: Race, Media, and the Central Park Jogger Story , Philadelphia, 2014. Originating around 2004, birther conspiracy theories alleged that Barack Obama’s published birth certificate was a forgery, exploding into prominence during the 2008 presidential campaign. Trump endorsed them while declaring his interest in running for President in an interview on ABC’s Good Morning America in March 2011. See John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis: the 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America , Princeton, 2018; for deeper context, Alan I. Abramovitz, The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump , New Haven, 2018.

See Joshua D. Martin, ‘The Border, Bad Hombres, and the Billionaire: Hypermasculinity and Anti-Mexican Stereotypes in Trump’s 2016 Presidential Campaign’, in Nasty Women and Bad Hombres , ed. Kray, Carroll, and Mandell, pp. 62, 68. The second statement was made in the Third 2016 Presidential Debate with Hillary Clinton on 20 Oct. 2016.

See Jane Caputi, ‘From (Castrating) Bitch to (Big) Nuts : Genital Politics in 2016 Election Campaign Paraphernalia’, in Nasty Women and Bad Hombres , ed. Kray, Carroll, and Mandell, pp. 30, 33. As an archive, Caputi uses ‘(unofficial) commercial paraphernalia – bumper stickers, buttons, caps, T-shirts – many of which were then exchanged in images sent via email and posted on websites and social-media platforms’, p. 26.

See Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right , Zero Boooks, Alresford, 2017; Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate , pp. 97, 93–110; Adam Klein, Fanaticism, Racism, and Rage Online: Corrupting the Digital Sphere , Cham, Switzerland, 2017; Adrienne Massanari, ‘Gamergate and the Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures’, New Media & Society 19: 3, 2017, pp. 329–46. The same year disclosed another online phenomenon, the socio-political derangement of the ‘incel’ (involuntary celibate) who rages against the women who deprive him of sex. On 23 May 2014, shortly before his Santa Barbara killings (six dead, fourteen wounded), twenty-two-year-old Elliot Rodger emailed his 107,000-word manifesto, ‘My Twisted World: the Story of Elliot Rodger’, to his parents, ex-teachers, therapist, and childhood friends. In it he railed against African-American, Hispanic, South Asian, and East Asian men for their attractions to white women. Having circulated via now defunct Amazon-owned self-publishing service Createspace (2014, ISBN 978-1499679649), Rodger’s manifesto may be read at https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/1173619/rodger-manifesto.pdf , accessed 9 Nov. 2020.

In late 2017, Reddit closed down its 40,000-member ‘Incel’ support group for those ‘who lack romantic relationships and sex’, where users raged against women and the ‘noncels’ and ‘normies’ who get to sleep with them, frequently advocating rape and other forms of physical violence. A second incel Reddit group, ‘Truecels’, was also banned.

See Eley, ‘Missionaries of the Volksgemeinschaft : Ordinary Women, Nazification, and the Social’, in Nazism as Fascism , pp. 91–130.

Julia Adeney Thomas, ‘Introduction: a Portable Concept of Fascism’, pp. 10–15.

I wrote directly about fascism in ‘What Produces Fascism? “Pre-industrial Traditions” or a “Crisis of the Capitalist State”?’ Politics and Society 12: 1, 1983, pp. 53–82, reprinted in Geoff Eley, From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past , London (1990), repr. 2020, pp. 254–82.

For example Jason Wilson and Robert Evans, ‘Revealed: Pro-Trump Activists Plotted Violence Ahead of Portland Rallies’, Guardian , 23 Sept. 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/23/oregon-portland-pro-trump-protests-violence-texts , last accessed 23 Sept. 2020. Members of the paramilitary Patriots Coalition discussed using bats, knives, mace, stun guns, paintballs, and firearms in confrontation with Antifa protesters, along with political intimidation and terror tactics against elected officials and judges, including assassination.

Colin Kalmbacher, ‘Republican Senator Called for “No Quarter”: Military Response to “Looters”: Lawyers Note That’s a War Crime’, Law & Crime , 1 June, 2020: https://lawandcrime.com/george-floyd-death/republican-senator-called-for-no-quarter-military-response-to-looters-lawyers-note-thats-a-war-crime/ , accessed 23 Sept. 2020. See also Jeffrey Toobin, ‘Trump’s Inheritor: Tom Cotton and the Future of the G.O.P.’, New Yorker , 13 Nov. 2017, pp. 32–38.

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Laws, Norms, and Democratic Backsliding

Are countries less democratic than they used to be? Learn how democratic principles like checks and balances, free elections, and freedom of the press are under threat around the world.

Indian women stand in queue at a polling station to cast their vote during the third phase of India's general election in Dharwad, some 450 kilometers northwest of Bangalore, on April 23, 2019.

Indian women queue at a polling station to cast their votes during the third phase of India's general election in Dharwad, some 450 kilometers northwest of Bangalore, India, on April 23, 2019.

Source: AFP via Getty Images

Since rising to power in 2010, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has systematically chipped away at the foundations of Hungary’s democracy. His government has shut down newspapers, silenced nongovernmental organizations, dismantled the country’s independent courts, and undermined free elections.

In March 2020, the Hungarian parliament delivered stunning new power to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. It authorized him to rule by decree, meaning he could single-handedly—and without oversight—create laws, much like an emperor or king. While this measure was initially enacted to address the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic , it was extended multiple times in 2020 and 2021, during which the government used its authority to restrict civil liberties unrelated to public health concerns. In 2022, as the COVID-19 state of emergency came to an end, a new one was declared due to the war in Ukraine, further prolonging Orbán’s rule by decree.

Today, Hungary is the only country in the European Union that is considered just “partly free.” In April 2022, the European Commission announced its intention to reduce funding to Hungary due to concerns about the country not meeting the European Union ’s rule-of-law standards. The announcement was prompted by Orbán's fourth consecutive election victory, which international observers criticized for its lack of fairness.

What’s happening in Hungary is not an isolated incident. Democracies around the world are under siege—not by foreign invaders but by domestic leaders who are weakening their countries’ institutions that protect political freedoms and civil liberties. That trend is known as democratic backsliding.

What is 'democratic backsliding'?

Not long ago, Hungary was a far more democratic country—one with competitive elections and a flourishing independent media landscape. It was one of over a dozen countries to transition from authoritarianism to democracy amid the breakup of the Soviet Union .

The end of the Cold War was a triumphant moment for democracy in Europe. Prominent academic Francis Fukuyama described it as “the end of history” because democracy appeared on track to become the system of government for every country in the world. By the start of the twenty-first century, democracies outnumbered autocracies for the first time.

But soon thereafter, countries began to see many of their hard-fought democratic gains stall and sputter. The world became less free and democratic every year between 2005 and 2022. Only 54 percent of the Asia-Pacific region live under democratic regimes, almost 30 percent of people in Latin American democracies express complete distrust in their political parties, and nearly 70 percent of citizens in Italy, Greece, and Spain say they are not satisfied with the functioning of their democracies.

Several factors have contributed to the trend of democratic backsliding. For one, immense economic challenges—including the fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis, job losses associated with technological innovation and globalization, dramatic inequality, and widespread corruption—have undermined public confidence in democratic leadership and in a system of government that allows for such stark inequalities. Additionally, China has inspired faith in its model , which is premised on the belief that an efficient, nondemocratic government can provide sustained economic growth to its people just as well as—if not better than—a democratic government. China has argued that while Democracies can guarantee certain freedoms, they struggle to pass laws and promote economic growth due to political gridlock. Furthermore, Russia—trying to increase its global influence—has weakened democracies by repeatedly interfering in elections abroad. The United States, France, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom have all accused Russia of election interference.

Democratic backsliding rarely happens overnight. It is often slow, systematic, and difficult to detect—the political equivalent of death by a thousand cuts. First, a president starts questioning the value of a free press. Then, electoral corruption goes unchecked. Eventually, political opponents are barred from running for office or perhaps even imprisoned.

After years of leaders dismantling democratic institutions piece by piece, the result is unmistakable: a society that is less free and fair. Even the world’s most established democracies are not immune from that trend. They too can be eroded, alarmingly quickly.

To recognize where democracy could be in danger, first one has to know how laws and democratic institutions should function. People must be aware of how democratic norms —the unwritten rules about acceptable behavior in democratic societies—protect that form of government from declining.

What is a healthy democracy?

At their core, democracies are systems of government in which people choose who governs them. They do this through regular, free, and fair elections.

The mere presence of elections does not make a country democratic. Plenty of authoritarian countries offer the veneer of democracy by holding elections that are actually orchestrated events.

Cambodia’s National Assembly elections on July 23, 2023 resulted in a sweeping victory for Prime Minister Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party, which secured 120 out of 125 available seats. The main opposition party was banned from running by the Constitutional Council, a Cambodian judicial body, and its members were threatened and harassed. Hun Sen has held power for 38 years, making him the longest-serving non-royal leader in Asia. The United States and several other democratic nations have denounced these elections, calling them "neither free nor fair" because of the absence of political opposition in the country.

Similarly, in Egypt’s 2018 presidential election , the incumbent leader Abdel Fatah al-Sisi imprisoned, intimidated, or barred every legitimate political opponent from running against him. That left just one handpicked opposition candidate who endorsed Sisi for the presidency. Unsurprisingly, Sisi won reelection with 97 percent of the vote.

A graphic showing how four of Egyptian President Abdel Fatah Al-sisi's potential major opponents did not end up running in the 2018 presidential election, for various reasons, including potential intimidation. For more info contact us at cfr_education@cfr

Source: BBC; The Guardian; Reuters.

In addition to elections, other pillars of democracy include an independent press, a free civil society, and a government that protects individual liberties.

Healthy democracies defend those pillars with both laws and norms. Laws are passed by the government under a constitution and are enforceable by the criminal justice system, the courts, or other government mechanisms. Norms, on the other hand, are rooted in tradition; they are only truly enforceable in the court of public opinion. Both, however, are essential for the health and well-being of a functioning democracy.

The line between what is a law and what is a norm is not always clear-cut, and a law in one country could be a norm in another. For example, freedom of the press is legally protected under the U.S. Constitution but is not a constitutional right in the United Kingdom; there, however, freedom of the press is a powerful norm and expectation.

Strong (or liberal) democracies respect such laws and norms, while weak (or illiberal) democracies can adhere to only a handful. Even so, sometimes the world’s strongest democracies —such as Iceland or Norway—struggle to perfectly embody them. The degree to which countries embrace democratic laws and norms reveals both the strength of a democracy and the extent to which its citizens live in a free and fair society.

Let’s explore those democratic laws and norms—pillars of a healthy democracy—by examining countries where they thrive and where they have broken down in recent years. As we go through each pillar, we'll also look at a map that shows which countries are upholding it and which aren't. Those maps are based on questions from "Freedom in the World" reports by Freedom House, an independent organization that analyzes the status of civil liberties and political rights around the world.

Free, Fair, and Competitive Elections

Elections need to be held without voter intimidation, overly cumbersome registration rules, or disenfranchisement (denying people the right to vote). Many of those requirements are enshrined in a country’s laws. A related norm is that elections should also be competitive. Healthy democratic elections are defined by legitimate and credible opposition candidates able to run against politicians in office.

Netherlands: Since World War II, the country’s three largest political parties have regularly rotated in and out of power. Sixteen parties have seats in the Dutch parliament, a body of government that encourages collaboration and coalition-building to achieve a majority that can govern the country.
Philippines : Former President Rodrigo Duterte, who came to power through a free and fair election, regularly jailed prominent opposition figures who criticized his controversial policies. Additionally, vote buying was common around the country; a handful of wealthy families exerting outsize influence on elections.

Checks and Balances

Most democracies have three branches of government in their constitutions or legal codes: the legislative, which creates laws; the executive, which implements laws; and the judicial, which ensures laws adhere to the constitution and enforces those laws. Distributing power across and within multiple branches prevents any one from becoming too powerful. Checks and balances also ensure that laws are in line with the constitution and crafted by an array of elected officials. Additionally, independent agencies and regulators with oversight and autonomy serve as a powerful check on government authority.

Germany : A controversial 2016 law allowed Germany’s spy agency to monitor the emails and telecommunications of journalists and other foreigners working abroad. But in 2020, the country’s highest court declared the law violated the constitution’s rules on privacy and freedom of speech. The court ordered the law amended in a powerful rebuke of the federal government’s authority. Following the decision, the government accepted the court’s ruling.
United States : Although the Department of Justice falls under the executive branch, which the president leads, its mission is to defend the U.S. Constitution and enforce the laws of the land. The Department of Justice does not exist to serve as the president’s attorney. However, former President Donald Trump repeatedly questioned that separation of power. He infamously called former Attorney General Jeff Sessions a “traitor” for allowing an investigation into his actions. Trump also demanded “loyalty” from former FBI Director James Comey.

Civil Liberties and Individual Freedoms

Strong democracies defend individual rights—such as freedom of speech, religion, and assembly—under all circumstances. Even demonstrations critical of the government should be permitted. Unhealthy democracies often limit these rights, also known as civil liberties. For example, the prohibition of demonstrations or the classification of dissidents as criminals or terrorists undermines freedom and healthy democratic governance.

Guatemala: In Guatemala, mass protests began on October 2, 2023, demanding that the country's Attorney General Consuelo Porras’ resign for attempting to eliminate President-elect Bernardo Arévalo’s Seed Movement Party. Initiated by the 48 Cantones of Totonicapan, a prominent Indigenous organization, these protests united Guatemalans from diverse backgrounds with a clear political objective. Unlike the 2015 “Guatemala Spring” protests, which mostly involved the urban middle class and only led to the resignation of then-President Otto Pérez Molina, the 2023 movement has reflected louder more widespread calls for democratic change.
Hong Kong : Residents of Hong Kong have seen their right to free speech and assembly rapidly deteriorate in recent years. The government—heavily influenced by China—has violently broken up protests. Law enforcement have even arrested those who have demonstrated against policies that bring the autonomous territory closer to China. A 2020 law effectively eliminated free speech, including criminalizing calls for the territory’s independence. In that instance, the government used the law to directly undermine a pillar of democracy.

Equality Before the Law

All citizens should be treated equally, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, wealth, or other metrics. Such equality cannot be undermined through legislation, and special laws can even explicitly safeguard the rights of vulnerable groups so that all citizens—including minority populations—feel safe and secure. Though not necessarily illegal, publicly vilifying certain groups is a violation of the democratic principle that all citizens be treated equally.

Brazil : The country has one of the highest murder rates of LGBTQ+ people in the world. In 2018, two former police officers assassinated a Black lesbian politician—one of the country’s most outspoken pro-minority voices. The following year, Brazil’s first openly gay member of the National Congress resigned for fear of his life. Brazil’s government has failed to pass meaningful legislation to curb that violence. Moreover, the country’s former-president, Jair Bolsonaro, openly promoted homophobia.
India: As a religious minority group comprising 14 percent of the nation’s population, Muslims in India have historically endured multiple forms of discrimination. In 2022, this discrimination persisted as certain local governments carried out “punitive” property demolitions, specifically targeting low-income Muslim communities, without the requisite legal authorization or due process.
Czech Republic: A quarter of a million Roma people live in the Czech Republic, and 66 percent of the Czech population has unfavorable views toward them. Widespread discrimination against Roma people has led them to live in segregated settlements where they face housing deprivation and the threat of forced evictions. Many Roma children attend underfunded schools and leave the educational system early.

No One is Above the Law

The same rules apply to private citizens as well as elected officials in strong democracies. Just as equality before the law protects the rights of minority groups, no one being above the law ensures elected officials cannot abuse their power.

Argentina: On December 6, 2023, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Argentina's Vice President, was sentenced to six years in prison and a lifetime ban from holding public office. Kirchner was convicted of a $1 billion embezzlement scheme which diverted funds to a business associate of the Kirchner family through 51 public roadwork contracts. Cristina’s late husband, Néstor Kirchner, served as president from 2003 to 2007, and she herself held the office from 2007 to 2015; the embezzlement occurred over their combined twelve years in power. The sentence remains provisional until all appeals are considered and Kirchner enjoys immunity from arrest due to her role as the Vice President.
Lebanon : Corruption dominates Lebanese politics, with power concentrated in the hands of certain families and former warlords . Although the government has enriched individuals with close connections, it has also struggled to provide basic services, contributed to a failing economy, and created the conditions that led to a dramatic explosion in the Beirut port, which killed more than 190 people in August 2020.

Civilian-Controlled Military

In strong democracies, militaries are accountable to the people and act on the orders of elected officials. Indeed, in many cases, the commander in chief (the head of the military) is the president—an elected civilian leader. In this way, militaries do not have the authority to unilaterally carry out actions domestically or abroad. That’s why coups—military takeovers of civilian governments—are strictly seen as undemocratic.

Taiwan : Military generals partly composed an authoritarian government that ruled Taiwan for nearly forty years until 1987. That changed with Taiwan’s democratization. A 2000 law banned military officers from serving in government. The legislation also gave the civilian president control over the military.
Niger: On July 26, 2023, a faction of the Niger military staged a coup, overthrowing President Mohammed Bazoum. They cited the “deteriorating security situation” caused by the ongoing conflict with extremist groups. Rates of extreme poverty, along with climate change-driven droughts imperiling agriculture, further compound the crisis. This coup marks the seventh military takeover in the West and Central Africa region since 2020.

Independent Media

A free, diverse, and independent media plays a vital role in healthy democracies by shining a light on abuses of power. Although government-funded outlets can and do exist (the British government, for example, funds the British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC), strong democratic governments do not limit the creation of other media organizations, inhibit their ability to operate, or vilify journalists and the press. Though not inherently illegal, vilifying the press is a violation of a democratic norm.

Norway : The country is home to a wide range of independent media outlets. Norway’s constitution even says the government has a responsibility to “facilitate an open and enlightened debate,” and in 2016 the Norwegian government established a Commission on Media Diversity that has expanded the media landscape through measures like subsidizing ethnic and minority-language media.
India : Though India is the world’s largest democracy, its government has increasingly targeted the country’s free press. In 2019, the government cut off internet access and blocked social media sites for seven months in Kashmir to limit protests following the passing of a controversial law. Police intimidated journalists who reported on the region’s unrest.

Vibrant Civil Society

Strong democracies embrace political participation. These countries are home to organizations such as nonprofits and unions, which allow citizens to organize to achieve their political and social goals. Those organizations are collectively known as civil society. Like the media, civil society can expose abuses of power and violations of democratic norms. Rarely do laws say countries need to have civil society organizations, but such institutions serve as vital pillars of healthy democracies.

Ghana : Independent policy think tanks have encouraged political participation by training thousands of citizens to educate voters and monitor elections. That effort has contributed to Ghana having among the most peaceful and transparent elections in Africa.
Turkey : Under the presidency of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has rapidly descended into authoritarianism. One of the biggest victims is civil society. Erdogan has shut down over 1,500 nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations that deal with refugees and domestic violence. Moreover, Turkish law enforcement has arrested union organizers, teachers, and activists on charges of disloyalty to the government. Turkey has also imprisoned more journalists than any other country in the world over the past decade.

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Adolf Hitler arriving at the fourth Nazi Party Congress.

Fascism is a far-right political philosophy, or theory of government, that emerged in the early twentieth century. Fascism prioritizes the nation over the individual, who exists to serve the nation. While fascist movements could be found in almost every country following World War I, fascism was most successful in Italy and Germany.

Fascism emerged as a political movement in twentieth century Europe when Benito Mussolini founded the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) in Italy in 1919.

Germany embraced fascism more than any other country. The Nazi government that ruled under Adolf Hitler between 1933 and 1945 was a fascist government.

Fascism is a far-right theory of government that opposes the political philosophies of the Enlightenment and the 19th century, including democratic liberalism, communism, and socialism.

Definition and Beliefs

Fascism is an ultranationalist, authoritarian political philosophy. It combines elements of nationalism, militarism, economic self-sufficiency, and totalitarianism. It opposes communism, socialism, pluralism, individual rights and equality, and democratic government.

Fascism places the importance of the nation above all else. The unity of the national community is prioritized above the rights of individuals. This leads to an intense interest in defining which groups belong or do not belong to the national body. Fascism is characterized by:

strident, often exclusionary nationalism
fixation with national decline (real or perceived) and threats to the existence of the national community
embrace of paramilitarism

In fascist states, violence is accepted—even celebrated—if it serves or advances the national community. For fascists, violence often has a redemptive or purifying quality.

Fascism rejects the practices of representative or liberal democratic government. It holds that these practices interfere with the expression of the national will. Instead, fascist governments are one-party states led by an authoritarian leader who claims to embody the national will. Fascists define the national will as advancing the interests of the national community. This usually means:

protecting or elevating the rights of the national community above the rights of those seen as alien
removing obstacles to national unity and suppressing those seen as challenging it
expanding the size and influence of the national state
often, also seeking to expand territory through armed conflict

Origins and Development of Fascism

Fascism 1 Footnote 1 1 has its origins in the late nineteenth century. However, it became more defined during the turmoil of World War I (1914–1918). Following the war, fascist movements and parties existed across Europe and the United States. The Italian fascist movement, however, was the first to formally organize and stand for election. In 1919, Benito Mussolini founded the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party), and in 1921, he was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies. The following year, Mussolini staged the March on Rome. He led 30,000 armed men through the streets to seize power as the prime minister of Italy. He established a dictatorship as il Duce (“the leader”), with no responsibility to parliament.

Fascist supporters during the "March on Rome," after which Fascist leader Benito Mussolini was appointed Italian Prime Minister. Italy, October 1922.

National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD
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Mussolini’s success inspired other fascist movements across Europe. In Great Britain, Oswald Mosely met with Mussolini before he founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932. In Spain, Francisco Franco received support from Italy during the Spanish Civil War . In Germany, Adolf Hitler looked to the March on Rome as a model for the fascist takeover he attempted in the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch.

Fascism in Germany

Germany’s collapse in World War I led to significant political instability as the new government, the Weimar Republic , tried to find its footing. Multiple groups emerged to challenge the Weimar Republic, including several fascist organizations. One of those organizations was the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers’ Party), which Hitler joined as a member in 1919. In 1920, Hitler became the head of the party. He renamed it the Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, NSDAP), or the Nazi Party.

Despite the reference to socialism and workers in the party’s name, Hitler promoted National Socialism as the complete opposite of socialism and communism. He promoted it as an ideology devoted to advancing the welfare and power of the German Volk (a national or ethnic group defined by its supposed race). The party developed a 25-point platform based on nationalism, antisemitism, and expansion. The program also called for the overturning of the Treaty of Versailles . To advance their agenda, the party formed paramilitary units called the Sturmabteilungen (Stormtroopers, or the SA).

The NSDAP was a small fringe party in Germany in the early 1920s. In November 1923, the Nazis staged their own coup attempt known as the Munich Beer Hall Putsch . The coup began at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. The Nazis planned to seize control of the Bavarian state government before marching on Berlin to overthrow the Weimar Republic. They intended to establish a new state based on the unification of the German people, as envisioned in the 25 Points. Unlike Mussolini’s March on Rome, however, the Beer Hall Putsch failed. Hitler was arrested and sentenced to five years in jail, though he served only eight months.

The Nazi State: Putting Fascism into Practice

Following Hitler’s release from jail in 1924, the Nazi Party chose to pursue political power through the elections. In January 1933, Hitler became chancellor. He moved to dismantle the Weimar Republic and build the fascist single-party Third Reich . Following a series of legal, political, and propaganda maneuvers, the German Reichstag passed the Enabling Act on March 24, 1933. The Enabling Act became the cornerstone of Hitler’s dictatorship and destroyed parliamentary democracy in Germany. It allowed Hitler to enact laws without the approval of parliament or Reich President von Hindenburg. By July 1933, Hitler had banned all political parties other than the NSDAP. As the Führer or Leader, he began a process of consolidating power known as Gleichshaltung (coordination) that enforced the Nazi Party’s authority over existing state institutions.

Nazi propaganda poster of Adolf Hitler standing before a saluting crowd. The caption reads,

Nazi propaganda constantly reinforced the notion that Hitler was the embodiment of the national will. Here, a determined looking Hitler in military dress stands with clenched fist, poised for action above the adoring crowd. The text on the poster says "Yes! Leader, We Follow You!" (Ja! Führer wir folgen Dir!)

This poster, designed for a 1934 public referendum on uniting the posts of German chancellor and president, conveys unanimous popular support for Hitler.

US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Galerie Prospect

Having achieved total control over Germany, Hitler and the Nazi Party began to implement other aspects of the fascist agenda. They began with the effort to create the ideal German national community defined along racial lines, known as the Volksgemeinschaft . This effort was a two part process. First, it entailed uniting all ethnic Germans in a single German state. Second, it excluded all minorities already within the German state who did not belong in the national community—especially Jews.

In 1938, German annexed Austria in the Anschluss . The Anschluss created the greater German state many German nationalists had dreamed of since 1848. A few months later, Germany seized the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, with the tacit permission of the Munich Agreement. When World War II began in September 1939, one of the Nazis’ central war aims was to expand Germany’s territorial boundaries and influence so that all ethnic Germans could be together and that Germany would have the Lebensraum (living space) that the Nazis believed necessary for the nation to survive and grow.

The Nazis also focused on “cleansing” the national community at home. They worked to eliminate supposed threats to its health and unity. For instance, they imprisoned in concentration camps Germans seen as political opponents, criminally inclined, or “asocial.” They also forcibly sterilized Germans with mental or physical disabilities. In addition, the Nazis moved to isolate and drive out persons considered racially alien to the national community because they supposedly threatened its purity and security. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws redefined German citizenship, excluding “non-Aryans,” particularly Jews. Escalating persecution and violence isolated German Jews, depriving them of their property, livelihoods, access to education, and markets and public facilities, with the intention of forcing them to emigrate.

The Nazis framed World War II as the ultimate struggle for the survival of the German Volk . They used the war to justify the most radical measures against both internal and alien enemies, including murdering mentally and physically disabled Germans and exterminating all the Jews in Europe.

Origin of the term: The term fascism comes from the Latin word fasces , which refers to a bundle of sticks gathered around an ax with the blade pointed outwards. This Roman symbol represented the power of the magistrate. It was a common emblem of governance before the emergence of the fascist movement in the 20th century. For example, there are fasces throughout the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., a memorial built to honor Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States.

Critical Thinking Questions

What were the major principles of Nazi fascism in Germany?
Why might aspects of fascism take hold in a country? What long or short term causes might cause people to be attracted to fascism?

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What, exactly, is fascism.

Historian: authoritarians, propaganda, democracy protection. Book: Strongmen : Mussolini to the Present. MSNBC Columnist and commentator.

Are you confused about the meaning of Fascism? If so, you're not alone. Benito Mussolini, the creator of Fascism, famously did not define it until 1932 . With Nazis once again making news in America and a neo-Fascist as Italian head of state, I thought it was a good time to offer you an excerpt of an essay I wrote for a German publication on how the meaning of Fascism has changed over a century. I hope you find it useful.

“Everyone is sure they know what Fascism is,” writes Robert Paxton in his 2004 work The Anatomy of Fascism . Paxton gives perhaps the most comprehensive definition I have found, collapsing into one very long sentence many traits of Fascism:

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

The Jan. 6 coup attempt changed Paxton's mind about whether Donald Trump and Trumpism can be called Fascist. That brought Paxton into line with scholars such as Jason Stanley, who deems Fascism “a political method” that can appear anytime, anywhere, if conditions are right. This line of thought risks emptying the term of its historical specificity but is essential for understanding our new authoritarian age and the risks we face in America today.

The Fascist Years (1922-1945)

“Does Fascism aim at restoring the State, or subverting it?” Mussolini teased his followers before the 1922 March on Rome that brought him to power, playing on his movement’s ideological ambiguity.

Fascism, as a word, has its roots in the Latin term fasces , or bundle. In the late 19th century, groups of Sicilian peasants rising up against their landlords were known as the fasci Siciliani . This radical tradition found an echo in the fasci di combattimento , or Fascist combat leagues, that Mussolini founded in 1919.

In creating Fascism, Mussolini, a former leftist revolutionary, confused many by "bundling" things that were supposed to be opposite: nationalism and imperialism with socialist elements.

Mussolini's paradoxical definition of Fascism as a "revolution of reaction" is perhaps the most accurate. Fascism aims at radical change brought about by violence and backed up by law to shut down political and social emancipation and take away rights. Soon nothing much beyond rhetoric remained of Mussolini’s leftist past, and indeed leftists were the first and most consistently persecuted targets of Fascism. This pleased his powerful conservative backers, as did his prompt privatization of the insurance and other industries.

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[ fash -iz- uh m ]

(sometimes initial capital letter) a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
(sometimes initial capital letter) the philosophy, principles, or methods of fascism.
(initial capital letter) a political movement that employs the principles and methods of fascism, especially the one established by Mussolini in Italy 1922–43.

/ ˈfæʃɪzəm /

the political movement, doctrine, system, or regime of Benito Mussolini in Italy, which encouraged militarism and nationalism, organizing the country along hierarchical authoritarian lines
any ideology or movement inspired by Italian Fascism, such as German National Socialism; any right-wing nationalist ideology or movement with an authoritarian and hierarchical structure that is fundamentally opposed to democracy and liberalism
any ideology, movement, programme, tendency, etc, that may be characterized as right-wing, chauvinist, authoritarian, etc

body fascism

A system of government that flourished in Europe from the 1920s to the end of World War II . Germany under Adolf Hitler , Italy under Mussolini , and Spain under Franco were all fascist states. As a rule, fascist governments are dominated by a dictator, who usually possesses a magnetic personality , wears a showy uniform, and rallies his followers by mass parades; appeals to strident nationalism ; and promotes suspicion or hatred of both foreigners and “impure” people within his own nation, such as the Jews (see also Jews ) in Germany. Although both communism and fascism are forms of totalitarianism , fascism does not demand state ownership of the means of production, nor is fascism committed to the achievement of economic equality. In theory, communism opposes the identification of government with a single charismatic leader (the “ cult of personality”), which is the cornerstone of fascism. Whereas communists are considered left-wing , fascists are usually described as right-wing .

Other Words From

anti·fascism noun
pro·fascism noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of fascism 1

Compare Meanings

How does fascism compare to similar and commonly confused words? Explore the most common comparisons:

fascism vs. socialism
fascism vs. Nazism
fascism vs. totalitarianism
fascism vs. capitalism
fascism vs. dictatorship

Example Sentences

The monarchy faced threats from communism on the left and fascism on the right.

Byrne said he believes the 2020 election was a “soft coup” and part of a project by the political “far left” to bring fascism to America.

Josep Almudéver Mateu, the last-known survivor of the 35,000 foreign volunteers who joined the International Brigades to fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, died May 23 in a hospital near his home in Pamiers, France.

Other allegations of involvement by members of antifa — a loose-knit identity centered on opposition to fascism — were quickly debunked in the days after the attack.

In many ways, it was this moment of fascism that democratized the sneaker.

Which was the right thing to be, after all, because communism is as illiberal as fascism.

Weisberg writes about the Europeans that were flexible enough to accept Fascism as the new reality.

Can debates about right-wing philosophers encourage fascism?

The mirror-image systems of communism and fascism promised to solve problems quickly through command and control.

Therefore, Western supporters of the protests, like John Mccain, are agitating on behalf of violent Ukrainian fascism.

Franco is a fascist, and today fascism must triumph all over the world or be crushed forever.

It can grow and bring in the era of economic democracy, or it can falter and give way to fascism.

A Nazi bund to direct this propaganda was organized secretly because of the government's unfriendly attitude toward fascism.

First, she offered scholarships, with all expenses paid, for Nicaraguan students to study fascism in Italy.

The Double V campaign against fascism abroad and racism at home achieved considerably less than the activists had hoped.

About This Word

What does fascism mean.

Fascism is a system of government led by a dictator who typically rules by forcefully and often violently suppressing opposition and criticism, controlling all industry and commerce, and promoting nationalism and often racism .

The word is sometimes capitalized, especially when it specifically refers to the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini in Italy from 1922 to 1943, or authoritarian systems similar to his, including those of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Francisco Franco in Spain.

Fascism can also refer to an ideology based on this form of rule, or to the use of its methods. More broadly, fascism is used to refer to any ideology or movement seen as authoritarian, nationalistic, and extremely right wing , especially when fundamentally opposed to democracy and liberalism .

The term fascist can be a noun referring generally to someone who has such views, or, more specifically, to a member of such a government or movement. Fascist can also be used as an adjective describing something involving or promoting fascism.

Apart from their literal (and often capitalized) use to refer to the regime of Mussolini, the words fascism and fascist are typically used negatively as a criticism of such practices and ideologies—fascists typically avoid calling themselves fascists due to the negative history associated with the terms.

That history includes the rise of fascism in the 1920s and ’30s, the Holocaust perpetrated by Hitler and the Nazis, and other atrocities and oppression committed under fascist regimes. Interest in the history of fascism and the word itself has increased in the 21st century, along with a global rise of nationalism and movements associated with fascism.

Where does fascism come from?

The first records of the word fascism in English come from around the 1920s. It comes from the Italian fascismo, from fascio, meaning “political group.” Mussolini formed these small political groups into a political party, Partito Nazionale Fascista —the National Fascist Party. Fascism and the Italian fascio ultimately derive from the Latin fascis , meaning “bundle” (the plural form is fasces ). In ancient Rome, fasces consisted of a bundle of rods with an axe blade sticking out. This was used as a symbol of a government official’s power. The Italian fascists brought back the fasces as a symbol of their brand of nationalism, which became known as fascism . The suffix -ism indicates a doctrine or set of principles.

As an ideology, fascism typically centers around extreme nationalism and an opposition to democracy and liberalism. In practice, fascism revolves around a ruler who uses absolute power to suppress the individual freedom of citizens, making everyone completely subject to the power of the state. To achieve this, fascism often uses violent methods for political ends. In the context of a fascist government, this often involves the use of the military against citizens.

Fascist leaders typically gain support by appealing to people’s nationalism and racism, especially by promoting suspicion or hatred of people that they label as foreigners or otherwise cast as illegitimate citizens—as Hitler did with the Jews in Germany. Such leaders often reinforce these themes among their followers with rallies and mass parades (developing what’s sometimes called a cult of personality ).

Fascism is often considered a form of totalitarianism , in which the government controls almost every aspect of ordinary life. (Some left-wing forms of government, such as forms of communism , are also considered to be totalitarian.)

Today, the terms fascist and fascism are often applied in a general way to practices that resemble those of military dictatorships, especially when based on nationalism, racism, and authoritarian rule.

What is antifascism?

Antifascism is active opposition to fascism. Those who actively oppose fascism can be called antifascists. The first antifascist groups were those opposed to the rule of Mussolini, but there have been many others since then. The term antifascist is the basis of the word Antifa , which typically refers to a movement that opposes fascism.

Did you know ... ?

What are some other forms related to fascism ?

fascist (noun, adjective)
antifascism (noun)
profascism (noun)
fascitize (verb)

What are some words that share a root or word element with fascism ?

What are some words that often get used in discussing fascism ?

Benito Mussolini
Adolf Hitler
nationalism
authoritarianism
totalitarianism
dictatorship

How is fascism used in real life?

The word fascism is used in both specific and general ways to refer to fascist governments and the types of methods used by them. It’s typically used in a critical way due to the violence and racism associated with fascism.

“American fascist energies today are different from 1930s European fascism,” writes Sarah Churchwell. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not fascist, it means they’re not European and it’s not the 1930s.” https://t.co/kB0AUosyQE — The New York Review of Books (@nybooks) June 23, 2020

Why did my grandfather choose to become a Fascist? He joined Mussolini’s party after returning from the front in WW1. I ask historian Gianluca Scroccu in my film ‘Fascism in the Family’. What was Fascism then and could it be resurfacing now?Details in thread #FascismInTheFamily pic.twitter.com/ofYHFBVPgE — Barbara Serra (@BarbaraGSerra) June 27, 2020

Cowles’ “Looking for Trouble” is the best book you’ll ever find about the 1930s rise of fascism in Europe as it’s happening pic.twitter.com/sBNwnpIkeQ — Pat Bagley (@Patbagley) June 16, 2020

What to Know About the Origins of Fascism’s Brutal Ideology

W hen Benito Mussolini debuted the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento , the precursor to his fascist party, on Mar. 23, 1919, in Milan, he wasn’t inventing the idea of violent authoritarianism. But he put a name on a new and terrible breed of it. Under his leadership, squads of militants attacked, beat and killed fellow Italians; later, once he had become the authoritarian ruler of Italy, he oversaw brutality in Ethiopia, an alliance with Hitler and the persecution of Italy’s Jewish population and others, among other crimes.

Yet even a century later, during a new era of strongmen, his idea remains sadly powerful . “Fascism is a disease,” former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told TIME last year , “and there are symptoms. So I think it’s important to warn about that.”

To better understand the rise and fall — and rise again — of fascism, TIME spoke to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on first fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and a professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University.

What is fascism?

Fascism is a movement that promotes the idea of a forcibly monolithic, regimented nation under the control of an autocratic ruler. The word fascism comes from fascio, the Italian word for bundle , which in this case represents bundles of people. Its origins go back to Ancient Rome, when the fasces was a bundle of wood with an ax head, carried by leaders.

On March 23, 1919, the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento — a group that grew out of a number of earlier movements that had also used the image of the fascio in their names — met for the first time in Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan. At this rally, Mussolini said that membership in the new group “commits all fascists to sabotaging the candidacies of the neutralists of all parties by any means necessary.”

“Mussolini thought that democracy was a failed system. He thought that liberty of expression and liberty of parties was a sham, and that fascism would organize people under state power,” Ben-Ghiat says. “Their idea was you would be freer because you wouldn’t have any class consciousness. You’re just supposed to worship the nation. It’s nation over class.”

The corollary of that belief was the idea that anything that might impede national unity had to be gotten rid of, and violently. In fact, violence was seen as beneficial to society.

And “society” was not a loosely defined idea. Rather, Mussolini and those who came after him had very specific ideas about who got to be part of the nation. It followed that those who did not fit the mold were seen as disruptive to that unity, and thus subject to violence.

“You can look up definitions of fascism and often, if they’re not about Hitler, race won’t be in there,” Ben-Ghiat says. “That’s something that often gets left out, especially [when talking about] fascist Italy. There was this idea that Hitler was anti-Semitic and Mussolini wasn’t, but it’s about a larger concept of race. Mussolini was an imperialist, so he used colonialism to [abuse] people of color. The fear of white decline was a huge part of it. Women were supposed to go have a lot of babies to increase the white race. A lot of old-fashioned explanations of fascism don’t talk about that.”

Who created fascism?

Mussolini was a journalist who founded the Milan-based newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia. Originally a socialist party member, he left the group when he fought in World War I. After the war, fascists declared the socialists public enemy number one over their anti-war positions. He became Italy’s prime minister in 1922 and over the next few years turned that position into one of dictatorial power.

“Benito Mussolini came up with the term fascism, he created the first one-party fascist state and he set the playbook and template for everything that came after,” Ben-Ghiat says.

An important part of that was the cult of personality that emerged around the Italian leader. “[Mussolini] was in newsreels, and he would strip his shirt off,” she says. Though others, like Lenin and Stalin, may be more associated with the idea of such a cult of personality, “of these cheering fans idolizing a leader,” she gives Mussolini credit for creating the mold.

“In the past, there was this idea that Mussolini copied Hitler, but it was actually the other way around for a very long time,” she adds. “Mussolini was in power 11 years before Hitler. He had things all worked out by the time Hitler came to power. Hitler was [initially seen as] a total loser. No one wanted to buy Mein Kampf . No one was interested in him. Then the Great Depression came, and he boomed. [Fascism] is a very important part of Nazism. It began with Hitler wanting to adapt what Mussolini had created. Hitler was such a fan of Mussolini; he was writing him, trying to get an autographed picture, trying to meet him.”

What contributed to the rise of fascism?

Mussolini’s establishment of the proto-Fascist Party took place not too long after the Russian Revolution, and the fear of communism’s spread played a key role.

“The main way the fascists got to power was by killing off and intimidating what was the largest and most popular party, the Socialist Party,” Ben-Ghiat explains. “Squadrists — terrorists who would descend upon towns in trucks, uniformed in black shirts — had knives and they killed thousands of people in the years 1919 to 1922. The killing went on after Mussolini became prime minister.”

Landowners and businessmen in particular supported the suppression of socialism, and their support allowed Mussolini to come to power. Afraid of the might of labor, they “cast their lot with Mussolini” instead. And that group included none other than King Victor Emmanuel III, whose authority would be considerably diminished under Mussolini’s dictatorship.

“Without that early support,” Ben-Ghiat says, “Mussolini wouldn’t have gone anywhere and wouldn’t have had the first fascist dictatorship.”

When did fascism end?

The defeat of the Axis powers in World War II meant the end of one phase of fascism — with some exceptions, like Franco’s Spain, the original fascist regimes had been defeated. But while Mussolini died in 1945, the ideas he put a name on did not.

“It’s really not understood how influential Italian fascism was, because you had Nazism early on, but there were fascist movements in America, in Switzerland, in France, in Spain, and then fascism spread in Argentina,” Ben-Ghiat says. “It’s a transnational movement. That’s how it stayed alive after 1945.”

And that “after” extends all the way to today. Though there was a taboo against the idea, at least in theory, after World War II, she has seen its return since the 1990s as a new wave of strongmen have come to power. With the help of coded language, the old ideas are returning. “We’re living in a time when fascism is getting rehabilitated, in Italy and in other places,” she says. “The fact that this is coming back now is disturbing. Fascism is becoming rehabbed for a new generation. Mussolini and Hitler are being idealized again.”

And some of the language isn’t even coded. “Berlusconi in Italy, when he was in power briefly in the 1990s, he brought the neo-fascists back into the government,” Ben-Ghiat points out. There have been spikes in hate crimes in many places; the President of the E.U. Parliament was forced this month to explain why he had hailed Mussolini; and the man charged with the massacre at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, appears to have declared himself a fascist, according to a manifesto attributed to him.

So, Ben-Ghiat says, asking how fascism has changed during its century of existence is perhaps the wrong question.

“It’s more striking what hasn’t changed —the hyper-nationalism, the leader cult, the idea that this is a leader who is going to save us, the fear of white population decline, anti-feminism, anti-left, things like that,” she says. “None of those things have changed.”

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‘Fascism’: The Word’s Meaning and History

What to Know Fascism refers to a way of organizing society with an emphasis of autocratic government, dictatorial leadership, and the suppression of opposition. The word entered English as a result of Mussolini's political group, members of which were called 'fascisti' in Italy. The words 'fascisti' and 'fascio,' both referring to a bundle, were used to represent labor and agrarian unions in Italy since at least 1872.

The English words 'fascist' and 'fascism' are first cited in 1919 and 1921, respectively.

In simplest terms, fascism refers to a specific way of organizing a society: under fascism, a government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people in that society, and allows no dissent or disagreement. This dictionary defines the term in full as:

1 often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti ) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition 2 : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control

The Origin of 'Fascism'

The word Fascisti , mentioned in the definition’s first sense, refers to members of an Italian political organization founded by Benito Mussolini in 1919 and dedicated to violently nationalistic and totalitarian principles. The Fascisti gained control of Italy in 1922 and reorganized the country’s political and social structure to accord with fascism. The Fascisti also used the fasces —a bundle of rods with an ax among them—as a symbol of the Italian people united and obedient to the single authority of the state.

Given this set of facts, it’s not surprising that people credit Mussolini with coining the word fascisti , and with the fascisti adoption of the fasces as a symbol. The truth, however, is a bit more complex.

Before WWI and WWII

From at least 1872, the word fascio was used in Italian in the names of labor and agrarian unions. Fascio (the plural of which is fasci ), which has a literal meaning of “bundle” and a figurative meaning of “group,” harkens back to an earlier—and grander—time in the peninsula’s history: in ancient Rome, there were officers, called lictors, who accompanied the chief magistrates in public appearances, clearing the way for them and summoning and punishing offenders as the magistrate saw fit. A lictor would also carry the fasces for his magistrate. The fasces, called in Italian “fascio littorio,” was a long bundle of elm or birch rods with an ax head projecting from it, all tied up with a red strap. According to our friends at Encyclopedia Britannica , when the fasces were carried inside Rome, the ax was generally removed as a symbol of the right of a Roman citizen to appeal a magistrate’s ruling. Our colleagues mention two exceptions to this practice: the ax was kept in on the happy occasion of a general celebrating a triumph, as well as in the less happy circumstance of a magistrate also being a dictator.

Rise of Mussolini

The Italian fasci of the late 19th and early 20th century were typically focused on the interests of workers and their families, but in October 1914, a political coalition called the Fascio rivoluzionario d’ azione internazionalista (“revolutionary group for international action”) was formed to advocate Italian participation in World War I on the side of the Allies. By January 1915, this group’s members were being referred to as fascisti . Mussolini was closely associated with this interventionist movement, but the movement had no direct link with the fasci di combattimento (“fighting bands”) he gathered in 1919—bands which then inspired the many Blackshirt squads who facilitated the fascist takeover of Italy in 1922. Mussolini’s fascisti made the stronger impression, but they were not the first to be called such.

The English words fascist and fascism are first cited in 1919 and 1921, respectively, and are indeed related directly to Mussolini’s regime and its philosophy, but fascisti, and their fasces, precede him.

Debunking a Rumor

Among other assertions made about the word fascism is that Mussolini equated fascism with corporatism (sometimes rendered as corporativism ), which this dictionary defines as:

the organization of a society into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation and exercising control over persons and activities within their jurisdiction

We, being a dictionary, aim to stick to the words, and so will not address what Mussolini said about fascism and corporatism. (The fact-checkers at Snopes treat the topic ably, for those who are interested.) However, tied to the assertions about fascism and corporatism are additional assertions about how this company’s definition of fascism has been affected by changes in the company’s ownership. Those assertions are false. Merriam-Webster has been a subsidiary of Encyclopedia Britannica since 1964. No Merriam-Webster definition of fascism , before or after 1964, has ever mentioned the words corporation , corporatism , or corporativism .

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Fascism: Who is and isn't a fascist, and how you can tell the difference

Topic: Fascism

A man points angrily during a Reclaim Australia rally in Melbourne

Just calling someone a fascist doesn't make it so: Political scientists agonise over whether there could be a "fascist minimum". ( Audience submitted: Liam Giuliani )

Columnist Andrew Bolt has made a habit of talking of " Left fascists ". But fascism historically was a regime of the Far Right.

A popular American book declaims against "l iberal fascism ". Yet one thing that unites fascists is their deep hostility to political liberalism, in all its forms.

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini ( Wikimedia Commons )

In Australia, some have called Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton a fascist. At the same time leading European thinkers of the "Nouvelle Droite" , who draw upon the ideas that seeded interwar fascism, strenuously deny the title.

Political scientists have agonised over whether there could be a " fascist minimum ". This would be some set of features that define a political agent, regime or movement as fascist.

One feature of fascism, as opposed to the other great modern "isms", as author Anthony Paxton contends with others, is its ideological fluidity or hybridity.

Yet certain things should be ventured, lest this "F-word" degenerates into nothing more than an angry label that every party uses to name their enemies, of whatever political stripe.

Fascisms are political movements that aim to take over the state, destroying liberal institutions like an independent media, and individual rights. But not all movements that aim to do this are fascist.

Fascists feel licensed to use fraud ("fake news", propaganda) and, if need be, force in order to achieve this revolutionary aim. Yet again, not all movements that aim to do this are fascist.

To fascists, all life is kampf

One step further, fascists embrace the view that all life is struggle (kampf) or war: between the strong and the weak, within nations, and between the nations, races or peoples.

Fascists claim almost mystically to speak directly for a morally pure People. ( AAP: Tracey Nearmy )

Politics is a continuation of war by other means. Ideals like equality, tolerance, progress, and pity are the ideological rationalisations of weakness.

Many fascists, including leading Nazis, are thus deeply opposed to the values enshrined by the biblical prophets and Christianity, seeing in them (following Nietzsche) the product of a regrettable "slave revolt" against the masters in antiquity.

For the fascist, we should embrace hierarchies within nations, based on strength and "selections", to use a chilling National Socialist word. We should accept differences between peoples — so long as groups, "in essence" different, are kept separated by fences and borders.

Many forms of fascism thus base their ideologies on pseudo-biological doctrines concerning race, like the Nazis. But not all fascists are biological essentialists. The cultural specificity and history of a group, nation, or "People" (Volk) might be what is being idealised and fought for.

Andrew Bolt called students protesting against appearances by Canadian conservative Lauren Southern (pictured) fascists, but are they? ( AAP: Bradley Kanaris )

Not all populists are fascists

Fascisms always appeal to myths of national or popular rebirth (" palingenesis "), leading scholar Roger Griffin claims. At some point, the Nation or Race or People has lost its way, whether in 1918, after Vietnam, or indeed after 1789 — whence hailed the hated modern values of "liberty" and "equality".

Ethan with southern cross flag draped over shoulder.

Fascists are populists, claiming almost mystically to speak directly for a morally pure People. ( AAP: Dan Peled )

Fascists are thus populists, claiming almost mystically to speak directly for a morally pure but imperilled People. They prioritise appeals to emotion, aesthetic spectacles and rallies, identification with a Strong Leader, and a divisive rhetoric of Us versus Them over reasoned public debate. Yet, not all populists are fascists.

The People, for fascists, has not simply lost its way. It has been betrayed. Some "Other" (such as in Nazism, the Jews), working with treasonous internal "elites", have corrupted the naturally virtuous People. Fascisms hence always involve forms of conspiracy theory. But not all believers in conspiracy theories are fascists.

Accordingly, for fascists, minority rights must be rolled back. Ideally, dangerous minorities should be segregated from the People, deported, or even killed.

It's not a helpful word

As for the elites, we must "drain the swamp" or, as Mussolini already said , "drenare la palude".

Ideally, opposition political parties, and unfriendly media and NGOs should be shut down, using the executive arm of the state.

Fascists have often used or concocted dire national emergencies, like the Reichstag fire , to legitimate their hostile takeovers of the state. Yet not all governments that respond to crises by declaring temporary states of emergency are fascist.

If accepting all, or even most of these propositions is necessary to make someone a fascist, it seems as unhelpful to call Mr Dutton a fascist as it does for Mr Bolt to decry as fascists student activists who opposed Canadian conservative Lauren Southern staging public events .

Clearly, this is not to say that we should not passionately disagree with either Mr Dutton or these activists.

A group of women hold Australian flags and a sign calling Islam a 'death cult.'

To fascists, dangerous minorities should be segregated, repatriated, or else physically killed. ( ABC News: Cassandra Bedwell )

Fascists have scant regard for language

Fascists have often used or concocted dire national emergencies. ( ABC News: Gregor Salmon )

Albert Camus claimed in 1948 that by "defining a certain number of keywords" — like fascism and democracy — "so that they will tomorrow be effective, we work for freedom".

One final feature of a fascist (although, again, not she or he alone) is their feeling licensed to use language with scant regard for consistency, clarity or accuracy.

"If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth," as Benito Mussolini boasted, "then there is nothing more relativistic than fascist attitudes and activity."

When the end is so great, all means are good.

Matthew Sharpe is an associate professor of philosophy at Deakin University.

HISTORY & CULTURE

How Mussolini led Italy to fascism—and why his legacy looms today

Although ultimately disgraced, the Italian dictator's memory still haunts the nation a century after toppling the government and ushering in an age of brutality.

In October 1922, a storm was gathering over Italy. Fascism—a political movement that harnessed discontent with a potent brew of nationalism, populism, and violence—would soon engulf the embattled nation and much of the world.

Benito Mussolini, the leader of the Italian movement, had amassed a strong following and began to call for the government to hand over power.

“We are at the point when either the arrow shoots forth or the tightly drawn bowstring breaks!” he said during a speech at a rally in Naples on October 24 of that year. “Our program is simple. We want to govern Italy.” He told supporters that if the government did not resign, they must march on Rome. Four days later, they did just that—leaving chaos in their wake as Mussolini seized control.

Mussolini’s name is still often invoked in the country as a brutal dictator though some still revere him as a hero. But how did he rise to power and what exactly happened during that fateful march that toppled Italy’s government? Here’s what you need to know.

How Mussolini founded Italian fascism

Fascism galvanized a growing nationalist movement in Europe born in the face of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, in which Russian socialists overthrew the Russian Empire. ( Learn more about the causes and effects of WWI .)

In Italy, Mussolini led the way to fascism. Born on July 29, 1883, in small-town southern Italy to a blacksmith father and a schoolteacher mother, he grew up on his socialist father’s stories of nationalism and political heroism. Shy and socially awkward, he ran into trouble at an early age due to his intransigence and violence against his classmates. As a young adult, he moved to Switzerland and became an avowed socialist. Eventually, he made his way back to Italy and established himself as a socialist journalist.

When war broke out across Europe in 1914, Italy at first remained neutral. Mussolini wanted Italy to join the war—putting him at odds with the Italian Socialist Party, which expelled him due to his pro-war advocacy. In response, he formed his own political movement, the Fasces of Revolutionary Action, aimed at encouraging entry into the war. (Italy eventually joined the fray in 1915.)

In ancient Rome, the word fasces referred to a weapon consisting of a bundle of wooden rods, sometimes surrounding an ax. Used by Roman authorities to punish wrongdoers, the fasces came to represent state authority. In the 19th century, Italians had begun to use the word for political groups bound by common aims.

Mussolini was increasingly convinced that society should organize itself not along lines of social class or political affiliation, but around a strong national identity. He believed that only a “ruthless and energetic” dictator could make a “clean sweep” of Italy and restore it to its national promise.

Support for fascism grows

Mussolini was not alone: In the wake of the war, many Italians were chagrined by the Treaty of Versailles . They felt the treaty, which carved up the territory of the aggressor nations, disrespected Italy by awarding it far too little land. This “mutilated victory” would shape Italy’s future. ( How the Treaty of Versailles ended WWI and started WWII .)

In 1919, Mussolini founded a paramilitary movement he called the Italian Fasces of Combat. A successor to the Fasces of Revolutionary Action, this combat-focused squad aimed to mobilize war-hardened veterans who could return glory to Italy.

Mussolini hoped to translate the nation’s discontent into political success, but the young party suffered a humiliating defeat in that year’s parliamentary election. Mussolini only garnered 2,420 votes compared with the Socialist Party’s 1.8 million, delighting his enemies in Milan who held a fake funeral in his honor.

Undeterred, Mussolini began courting other groups who were at odds with socialists: industrialists and businessmen who feared strikes and slowdowns, rural landowners who feared losing their land, and members of political parties who feared socialism’s growing popularity.

Mussolini’s powerful new allies helped finance his movement’s paramilitary wing, known as “the Blackshirts.” Though Mussolini professed to stand against oppression and censorship of all kinds, the group quickly became known for its willingness to use violence for political gain.

The Blackshirts terrorized socialists and Mussolini’s personal enemies nationwide. The year 1920 was bloody, with fascists marching through towns, beating and even killing labor leaders, and effectively taking over local authority. But the Italian government, which shared the fascists’ enmity with socialists, did little to stem the violence.

Mussolini’s rise to power

Though in reality Mussolini only controlled a fraction of the militia members, their tough image helped build his reputation as a powerful, authoritative leader capable of backing up his words with violent and decisive action. Known as Il Duce, (the Duke), he exercised a powerful influence over Italians, seducing them with his personal charm and persuasive rhetoric.

a Mussolini bust turned upside down and rolling on the street while a large crowd of angry people hit it with sticks.

In 1921, Mussolini won a seat in parliament and was even invited to join the coalition government by Italy’s Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti—who assumed that Mussolini would bring his Blackshirts to heel once he was given a share of the political power.

But Giolitti had misjudged Mussolini, who instead intended to use his Blackshirts to seize absolute control. In late 1921, Mussolini transformed the group into the National Fascist Party, translating a movement that had numbered about 30,000 in 1920 into a political party 320,000 members strong. Although he had effectively declared war against the state, the Italian government was powerless to dissolve the party and stood by as fascists took over most of northern Italy.

Mussolini saw his opening in summer 1922. Socialists had announced a strike that historian Ararat Gocmen writes was “not in the name of workers’ emancipation but in a desperate cry for the state to bring an end to fascist violence.” Mussolini positioned the strike as proof that the government was weak and incapable of rule. With new supporters who wanted law and order, Mussolini decided it was time to seize power.

The March on Rome

On October 25, 1922, a day after his rally in Naples, Mussolini appointed four party leaders to lead members into the nation’s capital. Poorly trained and outfitted, these men would likely have lost a battle with Italy’s army. But Mussolini intended to intimidate the government into submission.

Fascist battalions were to congregate outside of Rome. If the prime minister did not give the fascists power—and King Victor Emmanuel III did not subsequently recognize his authority—his waiting men would march into the capital and seize control.

While Mussolini lingered in Milan, his supporters gathered. They left chaos in their wake, taking over government buildings in towns they passed through en route to Rome. Though the party consistently overstated their numbers, historian Katy Hull notes , fewer than 30,000 men joined the march.

Luigi Facta, then the prime minister, attempted to impose martial law. But the king thought Mussolini could usher in stability and refused to sign the order that would have mobilized Italian troops against the fascists.

In protest, Facta and his cabinet resigned the morning of October 28. Armed with a telegram from the king inviting him to form a cabinet, Mussolini boarded a sleeper car and took a leisurely, 14-hour journey from Milan to Rome. On October 30, he became prime minister—and ordered his men to parade before the king’s residence as they left the city.

The fall of Mussolini—and fascism’s legacy

The king, exhausted by the world war and a state of near civil war in Italy, had assumed Mussolini would impose order. But within three years, the strongman would be an outright dictator—and Victor Emmanuel let him do as he pleased.

Over the years, Mussolini increased his own power while chipping away at the population’s civil rights and forming a propagandistic police state. His agenda also went beyond domestic affairs. Mussolini’s imperial ambitions led Italy to occupy the Greek island of Corfu, invade Ethiopia, and ally itself with Nazi Germany, eventually resulting in the murder of 8,500 Italians in the Holocaust.

Mussolini’s ambition would be his downfall. Though he led Italy into World War II as an Axis power aligned with the seemingly unstoppable Adolf Hitler, he presided over the destruction of much of his country. Victor Emmanuel III convinced Mussolini’s closest allies to turn against him and, on July 25, 1943, they finally succeeded in removing him from power and placing him under arrest. ( Subscriber exclusive: Hear stories from the last voices of World War II .)

After a dramatic prison break, Mussolini fled to German-occupied Italy, where, under pressure from Hitler, he formed a weak and short-lived puppet state. On April 28, 1945, as an Allied victory neared, Mussolini attempted to flee the country. He was intercepted by communist partisans, who shot him and dumped his body in a public square in Milan.

Soon, a crowd gathered, desecrating the dictator’s corpse and venting years of hatred and loss. His barely recognizable body was eventually deposited in an unmarked grave. Il Duce was dead. But his legacy still haunts Italy today—and the fascist movement he pioneered remains alive both in Italian politics and the international imagination.

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Is Trump a fascist? 8 experts weigh in.

Call him a kleptocrat, an oligarch, a xenophobe, a racist, even an authoritarian. But he doesn’t quite fit the definition of a fascist.

by Dylan Matthews

Trump holds a rally in West Virginia in 2018.

Is Donald Trump a fascist?

That question emerged in various forms pretty early in his 2016 presidential campaign, which began with a speech railing against Mexican immigrants , and gained steam after he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” in December 2015, as a response to the San Bernardino terrorist attack.

At that point, the Muslim ban proposal, I contacted five fascism experts and asked them if Trump qualified. They all said no. Every one of them stated that to be a fascist, one must support the revolutionary, usually violent overthrow of the entire government/Constitution, and reject democracy entirely. In 2015, none were comfortable saying Trump went that far. He was too individualist for the inherently collectivist philosophy of fascism, and not sufficiently committed to the belief that violence is good for its own sake, as a vital cleansing force.

Roger Griffin, the author of The Nature of Fascism and a professor of history at Oxford Brookes University, summed it up well: “You can be a total xenophobic racist male chauvinist bastard and still not be a fascist.”

Five years have now passed, and the fascism questions have only grown more frequent. Trump has had time to implement quite anti-immigrant and anti-Black policies, and refused to denounce his most extreme and violent supporters, from the neo-Nazis and white nationalists in Charlottesville to the Proud Boys group . And every week, I receive dozens of emails from readers wondering if I stand by my conclusion in 2015, that Trump is simply a bigot with an authoritarian streak, not a fascist.

So I reached out to the experts I talked to back then. Four of the five replied, and I also got in touch with a few more scholars who have researched fascism to get a broader view.

The responses were, again, unanimous, albeit tinged with much greater concern about Trump’s authoritarian and violent tendencies. No one thinks Trump is a fascist leader, full stop. Jason Stanley, a Yale philosopher and author of How Fascism Works , came closest to that conclusion, saying that “you could call legitimately call Trumpism a fascist social and political movement” and that Trump is “using fascist political tactics,” but that Trump isn’t necessarily leading a fascist government .

But most experts did not even go that far, and some expressed concern that describing Trump as a fascist undermines the term and leads to a misanalysis of our current political situation. “If Trump was a fascist and we were in a situation akin to Germany in 1932 or Italy in 1921, certain kinds of actions would be justified,” Sheri Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard College, says. “But we are not and they are not.”

To be clear, “not fascist” is a very, very low bar for Trump to clear. The concerns that lead people to ask the question “Is Trump a fascist?” are real. Trump really is trying to discredit the coming presidential election . He really has hired officials with ties to white nationalist groups . He really did promise to ban all Muslims from the US (and implemented new rules toward that goal), said that a Mexican American judge is unfit to preside over cases involving him, called Mexican immigrants “rapists,” empathized with neo-Nazis after Charlottesville, and falsely claimed Muslim Americans celebrated the 9/11 attacks — among many, many transgressions.

But things could always get worse. There really are leaders who suspend elections, dissolve legislatures, throw large numbers of citizens into camps without trial or appeal, who turn their nations into one-party states oriented around a cult of national rebirth. The fascist leaders of the past, the University of Texas’s Jason Brownlee notes, “not only pursued right-wing policies, they also built-up mass-mobilizing parties and paramilitary organizations with the goal of sweeping aside alternative movements and establishing single-party dictatorship.”

That hasn’t happened here — but it could. It came terrifyingly close to happening in Greece, where the explicitly neo-Nazi Golden Dawn became the third-largest political party in the mid-2010s. And if and when it does happen in America, we need to have the right terms and tools to confront it.

Robert Paxton , Mellon professor emeritus of social sciences, Columbia University

I stand by what I have already written about Trump and fascism, but there is one change: I am struck now with Trump’s growing willingness to employ physical violence.

Before, Trump was already willing to tolerate some roughing-up of hecklers at rallies, and his encouragement of the “lock her up!” refrain was clearly transgressive (in America we are supposed to wait for the decision of a jury of citizens before locking someone up). But now, after Charlottesville, we have the Proud Boys and the aggression against the governor of Michigan . So Trump gets closer to having his own SA [the Nazi paramilitary group], a sobering thought as the election approaches.

But there is still no state management of the economy here (as there was to a degree in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy). Trump is content to aid business by reducing government protections of the environment and of workers … and his economic policy is mainly just to let businessmen do what they want, So I still think terms like “oligarchy” and “plutocracy” work for Trump, with the added thought that he is close to crossing the line with his toleration of violence.

Matthew Feldman , director, Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right

Although my position has not changed on Trump — less fascist than kleptocrat, more egoist than radical-right ideologue — that does little to mitigate the danger.

Four months ago , I warned that Trump was descending into naked authoritarianism. Low-information commentators seek to reassure rather than dig deeply, telling readers to look on the bright side. That the US is an exceptional country.

Democratic regression and political polarization are not unique to the US. Having more guns than people is. So are militias, usually formed of lower- and middle-class white Americans harboring anti-government sentiments. The threat posed by these anti-government extremists — though not necessarily terrorists — was thrown into relief when at least 13 members of Michigan’s Wolverine Militia were arrested for planning to kidnap, “judge,” and potentially execute for treason the state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer.

The term “fascist” regarding Trump continues to mislead rather than inform. But that cannot inure us to what Alexander Reid Ross has called the “fascist creep.”

Stanley Payne , Jaume Vicens Vives and Hilldale professor emeritus of history, the University of Wisconsin Madison

This inquiry made a little sense four years ago, when Trump was still an unknown quantity, but now he has a record. Well — that’s pretty thin gruel. Nothing much to work with here. The Democrats won the first election under Trump [ the 2018 midterms ], and I’m not aware of anything negative happening. Straining at gnats doesn’t really get us anywhere. Mostly these are just silly public remarks. Hitler’s place in history is not based on his remarks, nor for any temporary detention cages. Please do not trivialize. That indicates absence of an argument.

Roger Griffin , emeritus professor in modern history, Oxford Brookes University

His relationship to democracy, I would really insist, is the key to answering whether he’s a fascist or not. Even in four years of incoherent and inconsistent tweets, he’s never actually done a Putin and tried to make himself a permanent president, let alone suggest any coherent plan for overthrowing the constitutional system. And I don’t even think that’s in his mind. He is an exploiter, he’s a freeloader. He’s a wheeler and dealer. And that is not the same as an ideologue.

So he’s absolutely not a fascist. He does not pose a challenge to constitutional democracy. He certainly poses a great challenge to liberalism and liberal democracy. And I think real favor will be served by journalists who, instead of seeing liberal democracy as a single entity, see it as a binomial. Democracy can exist without liberalism.

If I was doing this as a bottom line in some debate, I’d say that Trump is not a fascist, but what he is quite consistently is an illiberal democrat. He is a democrat to the extent that he’s used democratic processes to be where he is, which he doesn’t radically challenge. He obviously plays fast and loose, like any wheeler dealer, with things like the Supreme Court, who he gets in, etc. He doesn’t care about the rules, but the core system he doesn’t want to change, because he’s somebody who’s profited by that system.

Basically, I think it matters whether we call Trump fascist or not fascist, not academically or intellectually, but because it’s a red herring — it actually diverts attention from where we should be doing the critique. If all our intellectual energies are, like Don Quixote, jousting with windmills and fascism, instead of actually jousting with the real enemies of democracy, and using our energies to avert the climate crisis, which is going to engulf us all, if we’re not careful, then we’re wasting our time.

By not calling him fascist, and concentrating on the way he perverts democracy, we see Trump in a different context. We don’t see him as Hitler or Mussolini. We see him in a different rogues’ gallery. And the rogues’ gallery is made up of a whole load of dictators throughout history, including Putin and Erdogan and Orbán and Assad today, who have abused constitutionalism and democracy to rationalize their abuse of power and their crimes against humanity.

Sheri Berman , professor of political science, Barnard College, Columbia University

On Trump and fascism, unlike what has become an almost majority view, I do not like applying that term to Trump or to what is going on in this country.

Partially this is for historical and intellectual reasons — just like we shouldn’t call every horrible example of ethnic violence or even ethnic cleansing “genocide” (or say that it is another Holocaust), so I think we should be careful with comparing Trump to Hitler. Genocide means something: It is an attempt to wipe out an entire people, using the full force of the modern state. Similarly, national socialism or, more broadly, fascism was a totalitarian ideology and political regime that wanted to do away not only with liberalism and democracy but to revolutionize society, economy, and politics. That’s not the same as any old dictatorship, even a nasty one, and that is not where we are today.

That said, just as ethnically based violence or ethnic cleansing shares some characteristics with genocide/the Holocaust, so too does Trump bear similarities to other strongmen, a category in which fascists like Hitler and Mussolini belong, as do Orbán, Erdogan, Putin, and their ilk. That Trump maintains his support by engaging in explicitly divisive appeals designed to pit groups against each other — particularly but not exclusively ethnic groups — also, of course, bears some similarity to what fascists did.

And, of course, Trump is undermining various norms and institutions of democracy. But this doesn’t make him a fascist, which means much more than these things. Indeed, I almost think calling Trump “fascist” gives him too much “credit” — he isn’t strategic enough, ideological enough, or ambitious enough. And as bad as things are today, we are still not in 1930s Germany.

But alongside these historical and intellectual reasons, I also don’t like applying the term fascist to Trump for practical reasons. If Trump was a fascist and we were in a situation akin to Germany in 1932 or Italy in 1921, certain kinds of actions would be justified. But we are not, and they are not. And that remains important to stress, even though that does not mean downplaying the real threat Trump and the version of the Republican Party that is backing him represents to our country.

I think Trump often engages in what the political science literature refers to as “ethnic outbidding.” Even more fitting, in my view, is the term “negative integration” — a strategy of unifying a coalition by whipping up fear/hatred of purported enemies. Bismarck was the classic practitioner of the negative integration strategy.

As for Trump overall, I would still prefer referring to him as an illiberal populist or right-wing populist. He has a lot in common with the right-wing populists roaming around Europe today.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat , professor of Italian and history, New York University

Trump certainly uses fascist tactics, from holding rallies to refresh the leader-follower bond to creating a “tribe” (MAGA hats, rituals like chanting “lock them up,” etc.) to unleashing a volume of propaganda without precedent by an American president. Yet the political cultures that form him and his close supporters are not fascist, but reflect a broader authoritarian history. Paul Manafort and Roger Stone worked for [Congolese dictator] Mobutu Sese Seko and [Philippine President] Ferdinand Marcos before Trump, and Manafort also worked for Putin. They worked on Marcos’s 1986 election that was widely denounced as fraudulent.

Trump’s role models include leaders like Erdogan and Putin who are not exactly fascists, but something more: authoritarians, or strongman rulers who also use virility as a tool of domination.

I also favor authoritarian over fascist as a description for Trump because the former captures how autocratic power works today. In the 21st century, fascist takeovers have been replaced by rulers who come to power through elections and then, over time, extinguish freedom.

Jason Brownlee , professor of government, the University of Texas at Austin

Of course Trump’s detractors are free to use whatever terms and epithets they like.

I would not say the traditional idea of fascism fits Donald Trump in 2020 any more than it did before he took office. When historians and political scientists do a full accounting of his actions and statements as president, I do not think fascism will figure prominently in their analyses. The prototypical fascist leaders — Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, [Austrian Chancellor] Engelbert Dollfuss — not only pursued right-wing policies, they also built-up mass-mobilizing parties and paramilitary organizations with the goal of sweeping aside alternative movements and establishing single-party dictatorship. I would tend to describe Trump’s brand of politics differently, and I would place him in different company.

Trump is a celebrity-turned-right-wing politician. He acts as a consummate demagogue, fabulist, and ultranationalist, and he appears to have a strong inclination for nepotism and kleptocracy. His efforts to use the presidency to finance his lifestyle and enrich his family resemble the schemes of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. In addition to profiting from his time in office, Trump, like Marcos, has challenged constraints on executive authority without investing resources into a sustainable political organization.

In other respects, Trump’s style of politics recalls portions of the career of former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević. Like Milošević, Trump has promoted a very hierarchical, ethnically based ultranationalist vision that endorses violence against out-groups but without building up a single party the way interwar fascists did.

Jason Stanley , Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy, Yale University

When I think about fascism, I think about it as applied to different things. There’s a fascist regime. We do not have a fascist regime. Then there’s the question of, “Is Trumpism a fascist social and political movement?” I think you could call legitimately call Trumpism a fascist social and political movement — which is not to say that Trump is a fascist. Trumpism involves a cult of the leader, and Trump embodies that. I certainly think he’s using fascist political tactics. I think there’s no question about that. He is calling for national restoration in the face of humiliations brought on by immigrants, liberals, liberal minorities, and leftists. He’s certainly playing the fascist playbook.

My definition is of fascist politics, not of a fascist regime. I think most of the other [fascism scholars] are just talking about something else. They’re talking about regimes. Toni Morrison in 1995 said the United States has long favored fascist solutions to national problems. Toni Morrison is talking about “fascist solutions.” She’s not talking about fascist regimes. She’s saying the United States has long favored fascist solutions in a democratic state, which I completely agree with: targeting minorities, mass incarceration, colonialism, seizing indigenous land. All these things are things that impacted Hitler . My work is based in the United States — it’s based in the movements that affected European fascism: the KKK, Jim Crow, the anti-miscegenation law, slavery, Indigenous genocide, the 1924 Immigration Act and similar US immigration laws that Hitler lauds in Mein Kampf .

If you’re only worried about fascist regimes, you’re never going to catch fascist social and political movements. The goal is to catch fascist social and political movements, and fascist ideology, before it becomes a regime.

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Meaning of fascism in English

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This year's history syllabus covers the rise of Fascism in Europe .
Fascism develops from right-wing extremism , supported traditionally by the middle classes , in contrast to Communism .
advanced capitalism
ancien régime
anti-apartheid
anti-communism
democratic centralism
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A brief but incisive discussion of the structure of fascism.
Fascism also transports this anti-pacifist spirit into the life of individuals.
Fascism came into being to meet serious problems of politics in post-war Italy.
Fascism on the other hand faces squarely the problem of the right of the state and of the duty of individuals.
The catastrophe and holocaust brought about by the two powerful movements of fascism and national socialism will mark human life always.

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What is fascism? And what does it mean in 2020 America?

By Leslie Gornstein

October 20, 2020 / 11:18 AM EDT / CBS News

It was April 2020, and Tesla founder Elon Musk was angry. The target of his ire: social distancing measures imposed by California state officials amid the coronavirus pandemic.

"If somebody wants to stay in their house, that's great," Musk said in an earnings call reviewed by CBS News. "...But to say that they cannot leave their house and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist."

But is it? Before 2016, the word "fascism" popped up mostly in history lessons or political analysis of autocratic states or the occasional terror group . But President Donald Trump's years in office have seen a surge in "fascism" talk from both supporters and opponents using the word to describe their political adversaries. Can all of them be right? Of course not.

Before you think about using the term yourself, here's what you should know about what "fascism" really means… and what it doesn't.

Strictly speaking

Fascism is generally defined as a political movement that embraces far-right nationalism and the forceful suppression of any opposition, all overseen by an authoritarian government. Fascists strongly oppose Marxism, liberalism and democracy, and believe the state takes precedence over individual interests. They favor centralized rule, often a single party or leader, and embrace the idea of a national rebirth, a new greatness for their country. Economic self-sufficiency is prized, often through state-controlled companies. Youth, masculinity and strength are highly fetishized.

The first modern fascist parties emerged in the aftermath of World War I. The ideology swept through Italy — the birthplace of the term — then Germany and other parts of Europe. German intellectual Johann Plenge expected that class divisions would disappear in favor of "racial comrades," and that the future of Germany lay in "national socialism." That phrase is often shortened to "Nazism," which is a form of fascism.

The movement gave birth to infamous strongmen such as Adolph Hitler in Germany and Italy's Benito Mussolini , who, like many fascists, saw violence — violent revolution of governments, violent punishment of opponents — as key factors in fascism.

Fascists also tend to embrace imperialism and the conquering of weaker nations. Mussolini was especially impressed with the ambitious expansion and militarism of ancient Rome. Hitler, an early admirer of Mussolini and his tactics, modeled his Nazi party on Italy's fascism in the 1920s.

Fascist regimes often meddle directly in their national economies, casting a suspicious eye on the perceived decadence of a system that relies too heavily on capitalism. The result: nationalized companies and cartels in key areas, such as manufacturing.

The end of World War II saw the downfall of several fascist regimes, but not all. In Spain, Francisco Franco, who incorporated fascist elements in his military dictatorship, hung around for several decades, while other governments, such as that of Juan Perón in Argentina, enacted a kind of fascism-lite, modeling its economy somewhat after fascist Italy.

Not a compliment

Amid the horrors of World War II, the word "fascist" eroded from a neutral description to an insult.

"Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers," George Orwell wrote in 1944, "almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come."

More recently, people also started to use the word to — inaccurately — describe any kind of far-right or violent group, as well as a range of authoritarian socialist or communist regimes such as Cuba's.

Then-Congressman Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican, did not intend any compliments in 2012 when he warned, correctly or not, that America was "slipping into a fascist system."

"We've slipped away from a true republic," Paul said . "Now we're slipping into a fascist system where it's a combination of government and big business and authoritarian rule and the suppression of the individual rights of each and every American citizen."

A rising threat

In the 21st century, foreign policy experts have raised the alarm about a number of government shifting in the direction of fascism, or, at least, fascism-lite.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has pointed to the emergence of increasingly authoritarian leaders in countries such as Hungary , Turkey, the Philippines , Poland and Venezuela .

"We should be awake to the assault on democratic values that has gathered strength in many countries abroad and that is dividing America at home," she writes in her 2018 book, "Fascism: A Warning."

But is Donald Trump a fascist?

President Trump's approach to campaigning and leadership has drawn comparisons to fascist-style authoritarianism. In a September 2020 interview, his Democratic rival Joe Biden pointed out some similarities.

Trump is "sort of like [Joseph] Goebbels," Biden told MSNBC, referring to the head of Nazi Germany's infamous propaganda machine. "You say the lie long enough, keep repeating it, repeating it, repeating it, it becomes common knowledge."

Political scientists see some troubling parallels, too.

"'Making the country great again' sounds exactly like the fascist movements. … That is a fascist stroke," Robert Paxton, a leading authority on fascism, told Slate. "An aggressive foreign policy to arrest the supposed decline. That's another one. Then, there's a second level, which is a level of style and technique. He even looks like Mussolini in the way he sticks his lower jaw out, and also the bluster, the skill at sensing the mood of the crowd, the skillful use of media."

Even some Hollywood stars have likened President Trump to fascist leaders. But is that comparison accurate?

It's true Mr. Trump has signaled encouragement for some of his more violent supporters, and he's sent federal forces into cities where protests were simmering. That "Make America great again" slogan does sound a lot like a call for a national rebirth. He has publicly flirted with holding onto the presidency beyond the legal limit of two terms, and has repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the 2020 election — prompting critics to warn those look like steps toward authoritarianism.

But in at least a few key areas , the fascism label doesn't fit. President Trump has not embraced foreign military invasions as a way to make America great again — in fact, he campaigned on a promise to bring troops home. And he doesn't obsess over youth as particularly important in America's great rebirth.

Even Albright doesn't think Trump quite falls into the fascism category, though she's disturbed by the similarities.

"I think Trump is the most undemocratic president I have ever seen in American history," she has said. "I'm saying that there's certain elements of the kinds of behavior that he has that reminds me of a variety of issues that have taken place." Among them, she said, were Trump's attacks on the press and acting "as though he's above the law ."

Despite the differences, vocal opponents of fascism — such as the loosely affiliated activists who go by antifa (short for "anti-fascist") — generally see themselves as anti-Trump as well.

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Definition of fascism noun from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

dictatorship
imperialism

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They claimed the smoking ban amounted to health fascism.

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What does ‘far right’ and ‘far left’ mean, anyway?

Labels are often demonstrably incorrect. we use them anyway..

By Jennifer Graham

Despite his recent endorsement of Donald Trump and his decision to hire a GOP strategist, Elon Musk has long insisted that his political views don’t fit neatly in a box. In 2019, he declared himself “openly moderate,” and in 2022, he said, “I am neither conventionally right nor left.”

That doesn’t stop the media from branding Musk and his beliefs “far right,” a nefarious label that people struggle to describe, and a description that relatively few people assign to themselves.

A similar misbranding occurs when people speak of Megyn Kelly, the Fox News personality turned podcaster. Despite being a registered independent who disavows party labels — “I will never wear a team jersey of either one of these (parties)” she has said — Kelly is frequently derided as “far right” by critics on social media. Certainly she is not shy about criticizing Democrats, Kamala Harris and the mainstream media she was once a part of, regardless of the label.

In both of those cases, there may be some “guilt by association” at play — Musk because of his support for Trump, Kelly because she once interviewed Alex Jones, whose name is rarely mentioned by the media unless it is preceded by the words “conspiracy theorist.” Still, the idea that we can cast aside people’s own assessment of their ideological views and assign them labels that no one can clearly define is one of the more bewildering aspects of our current political climate.

It’s even more odd when you take into account that the labels that falsely categorize Americans are a byproduct of the French Revolution.

Verlan Lewis, a political scientist at Utah Valley University and co-author of the book “ The Myth of Left and Right, ” is a proponent of purging “left” and “right” and similar labels from our political discourse altogether. “The left-right spectrum is both misleading, and it’s harming us,” he said.

But what would an America without “right” and “left” look like? How would we describe our ideological opposites? And are there ever cases when it’s appropriate to use the terms?

‘The dominant framework '

The practice of defining ideological opposites dates to Paris in the 1790s when members of the National Assembly were debating the French Revolution, Lewis, the Stirling Professor of Constitutional Studies at UVU, said. “Those who were more in favor of the revolution sat on the left hand side of the hall, and those who were opposed to the democratic revolution were sitting on the right-hand side of the speaker.”

Then, saying “right” or “left” was a useful way to describe members’ positions, since the terms only referred to one thing. “It is a unidimensional label,” Lewis said, and can be useful as such. The language was periodically used in Europe in the next century, but came to the forefront again during the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia during the 1910s as the Bolshevik revolutionaries saw their work as similar to that of the French revolutionaries. “They saw themselves as left wing and they argued that their opponents were right wing.”

American journalists reporting on the revolution started using that language, and the terms trickled into domestic politics in the U.S., although it took awhile for them to find purchase. Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, the use of the words picked up beyond academic circles.

“It really ramped up in the past few decades, whereas today, you can’t open a newspaper, you can’t turn on a television program, you can’t listen to political radio or go on social media without someone using these terms, left and right, progressive and conservative. Now it is the absolute dominant framework of the 21st century,” Lewis said, adding that you can see the rise in the terms’ usage on Google nGram , which tracks word usage in books.

In common use, the terms are something we assign to other people, not ourselves, because few people want to think they’re “on the extremes of this imaginary left-right spectrum — most people think ‘I’m center-right or center-left, I’m a moderate conservative or progressive. But those people over there, they are extremists on the far left or the far right. They are the radical left wingers or the reactionary right wingers,” Lewis said.

“Not only is the left-right spectrum misleading, but it’s harmful because it allows people to slander their political opponents without talking about actual issues.”

And not only is it wrong to denigrate someone with a label they don’t embrace, it’s usually factually wrong as well, since many people, even if they vote a straight ticket, have at least some views that diverge from their political party. For example, a person may be passionate about cutting government spending (a view typically associated with Republicans) and about green energy (a view typically associated with Democrats). “Ordinary people have positions all over the place because there are lots of different issues,” Lewis said.

Defining the terms

Journalist Heath Druzin, the creator and host of the “ Extremely American ” podcast, which examines Christian nationalism and militias in the U.S., frequently uses the the term “right wing” in the podcast. Druzin, who lives part of the year in Germany and part in Idaho, told me that he gets mixed reactions to his use of the term. “It’s a mixed bag. Some people don’t mind it. Some people lean into it. Some people don’t like it at all.”

That’s true of any descriptive, of course. One militia leader that Druzin featured joked with his group about them being labeled as “extremists,” and it’s true that in an increasingly polarized and secularized society, being a frequent church-goer, or a homeschooling parent of a large family, can get you labeled an extremist or radical by someone somewhere.

Druzin told me that when he describes a person or group as being “far right,” he considers them to have “ideas outside the traditional mainstream thinking on the right” which in America, he primarily sees as the Republican Party.

But even then, the questions that arise are confusing. A person with traditionally conservative values can be ideologically left of Donald Trump, but still considered to be on the right. Sen. Mitt Romney is often characterized by the media as a “moderate conservative” with no clear definition of what that means. And Druzin can’t figure out how he would define Utah Sen. Mike Lee: “He’s a great example of someone where you would need to weigh his record and statements, and I think you could probably argue either way,” Druzin said.

And is Fox News a “far right” cable news network? Fox has some personalities who might be considered “far right” but Druzin says the Christian nationalists that he talks to complain that the network is “not right enough,” and Druzin considers Fox’s political polling “really good and really trustworthy.”

So what are the ideas that Druzin believes unequivocally belongs to the “far” right?

For starters, “If you’re going after people’s rights based on who they are, I think those are far-right ideas,” he said.

Druzin cites people who want to repeal the 19th Amendment and strip women of the right to vote, people who want to criminalize being gay, people calling for a return to theocracy. “If you’re calling for the dismantling of democracy, I think it’s fair to call that a far-right ideology,” he said.

In some cases, Druzin’s explanation fits into Lewis’s contention that “right” or “left” only works on a unidimensional spectrum — for example, when it comes to fascism. Some people use the term “fascist” to casually deride their political opposites, much like “Marxist,” but Druzin says that in his work he encounters people who genuinely admire fascism, sometimes wearing “ free helicopter rides ” T-shirts that subtly refer to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who dropped the bodies of political opponents in the ocean from helicopters.

“That’s cheering on fascism. That’s far right,” Druzin said.

While Druzin believes it can be fair and and appropriate to carefully cast groups of people as “far right” or “far left,” he agrees that “the far right” get much more attention in America right now. He says it’s because “the far left” — of which he considers Antifa a part — isn’t as politically powerful and is mostly limited to Portland and Seattle, unlike in Europe, where they have more presence. While those groups have made headlines in America, as with calls to abolish or defund the police, or to redistribute wealth through programs like universal basic income, their influence has been limited, compared to their counterparts on the other end of the political spectrum.

“It’s not that (the far left) don’t matter at all, but they don’t matter as much as the far right at the moment. They haven’t made inroads into electoral politics,” Druzin said.

He added another definition of “far left” and “far right” — the willingness to use violence to achieve political goals.

A better way

Lewis, at Utah State University, points out that the compulsion to categorize our fellow citizens into competing tribes starts and ends with politics. Think about medicine, recreation or business, he said — we don’t think in unidimensional terms in any other field. “If you went into the doctor, and you said my leg is hurting ... and (the doctor) said you had a left-wing illness, you would run out of the room, and rightfully so because he would be trying to take the complexity of human health and collapse it onto a unidimensional spectrum.”

And yet, “almost everyone has bought into this myth that politics can be modeled on this unidimensional spectrum.”

The answer is “to think and talk about politics in the way we talk about virtually every other realm of life,” Lewis said. “We would be better off going granular, which is what we do in every other realm of life.”

Aren’t there times, however, when categorizing people as “left” and “right,” or “conservative” and “liberal,” are necessary, or even helpful?

I offered, as an example, a sentence I’d written earlier in the day, in which I said that “many conservatives believe their posts have been censored on social media.” The distinction between “conservatives” and “people” seemed important there, I said, asking Lewis what he would have written.

“I would have crossed out conservatives and written Republicans,” Lewis said.

But while that is more specific, it also leaves out people who aren’t Republicans but consider themselves leaning to the “right” — Megyn Kelly, for instance, I pointed out.

“Then just go granular,” he said. “Say ‘free speech advocates’ or ‘those concerned about censorship.’ Now you’re talking about a particular issue and not dragging in this other baggage.”

Left and right, conservative and liberal, are simply social groups; there is no fixed and detailed policy statement. As for individuals, “instead of saying left wing or right wing, just say ‘this person is very tribal — this person is very committed to a political group’,” Lewis said.

That might be a hard sell to a population steeped in the language of division. Both most of the time we use the terms, there are probably more accurate words to use, words that when chosen judiciously can help to bring the culture’s temperature down.

COMMENTS

Fascism
fascism, political ideology and mass movement that dominated many parts of central, southern, and eastern Europe between 1919 and 1945 and that also had adherents in western Europe, the United States, South Africa, Japan, Latin America, and the Middle East. Europe's first fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, took the name of his party from the ...
Fascism Definition & Meaning
The meaning of FASCISM is a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition. How to use fascism in a sentence. The Italian Origin of Fascism
What Does Fascism Really Mean?
So what exactly does fascism mean? Where does this political ideology come from? And to what extent do leaders today display fascist tendencies? This resource explores those three questions by diving into the history of the world's most notorious fascist leaders: Benito Mussolini of Italy and Adolf Hitler of Germany.
Definitions of fascism
What constitutes a definition of fascism and fascist governments has been a complicated and highly disputed subject concerning the exact nature of fascism and its core tenets debated amongst historians, political scientists, and other scholars ever since Benito Mussolini first used the term in 1915. Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly ...
What Is Fascism—And Why the Definition Matters
The label "fascism" gets tossed around a lot—but that doesn't mean it lacks a coherent definition, or belongs solely to a bygone past. The political formation we call fascism is still very much alive, and very dangerous.
Yale Professor Jason Stanley Identifies 10 Tactics of Fascism: The
What is fascism? Fascism is an ideology developed and elaborated in early 20th-century Western Europe and enabled by technology, mass media, and weapons of war. Most of us learned the basics of that development from grade school history textbooks.
What is Fascism and Where does it Come From?
How far is Trump himself a fascist? Critical readings of his rhetoric - from Twitter feed and Fox News phone-ins to press briefings and campaign stumps - show very easily his indebtedness to explicitly fascist or neo-Nazi tropes and ideas.
Laws, Norms, and Democratic Backsliding
The United States, France, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom have all accused Russia of election interference. Democratic backsliding rarely happens overnight. It is often slow, systematic, and difficult to detect—the political equivalent of death by a thousand cuts. First, a president starts questioning the value of a free press.
Fascism
Fascism is a far-right political philosophy, or theory of government, that emerged in the early twentieth century. Fascism prioritizes the nation over the individual, who exists to serve the nation. While fascist movements could be found in almost every country following World War I, fascism was most successful in Italy and Germany.
What, Exactly, Is Fascism?
Mussolini's paradoxical definition of Fascism as a "revolution of reaction" is perhaps the most accurate. Fascism aims at radical change brought about by violence and backed up by law to shut down ...
Fascism
The standard definition of fascism, given by Stanley G. Payne, focuses on three concepts, one of which is a "fascist style" with an aesthetic structure of meetings, symbols, and political liturgy, stressing emotional and mystical aspects.
FASCISM Definition & Meaning
Fascism definition: a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.. See examples of FASCISM used in a sentence.
What Is Fascism? What to Know About Its Brutal Origins
Fascism is a movement that promotes the idea of a forcibly monolithic, regimented nation under the control of an autocratic ruler. The word fascism comes from fascio, the Italian word for bundle ...
George Orwell: What is Fascism?
By 'Fascism' they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'.
PDF Microsoft Word
The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State — a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values — interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people.
'Fascism': The Word's Meaning and History
Fascism refers to a way of organizing society with an emphasis of autocratic government, dictatorial leadership, and the suppression of opposition. The word entered English as a result of Mussolini's political group, members of which were called 'fascisti' in Italy. The words 'fascisti' and 'fascio,' both referring to a bundle, were used to ...
Fascism: Who is and isn't a fascist, and how you can tell the
If you're going to call someone a fascist, it helps to know a little about fascism. For example, all who seek to take over the state or curtail their adversaries' freedom of speech may not rightly ...
Benito Mussolini and the rise of fascism in Italy
Benito Mussolini makes a speech in Italy. Known for his charisma and persuasive rhetoric, the future fascist dictator rose to power amid growing discontent in the early 20th century.
Is Trump a fascist? 8 experts weigh in.
Call him a kleptocrat, an oligarch, a xenophobe, a racist, even an authoritarian. But he doesn't quite fit the definition of a fascist.
FASCISM
FASCISM meaning: 1. a political system based on a very powerful leader, state control, and being extremely proud of…. Learn more.
What is fascism? And what does it mean in 2020 America?
Fascism is generally defined as a political movement that embraces far-right nationalism and the forceful suppression of any opposition, all overseen by an authoritarian government. Fascists ...
fascism noun
Definition of fascism noun in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Meaning, pronunciation, picture, example sentences, grammar, usage notes, synonyms and more.
Fascism Definition & Meaning
fascism 1 ENTRIES FOUND: fascism (noun) fascism / ˈ fæˌʃɪzəm/ noun Britannica Dictionary definition of FASCISM [noncount] 1 or Fascism : a way of organizing a society in which a government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government the rise of Fascism in Europe before World War II 2 : very harsh control or ...
Who belongs to the 'far right' and 'far left'?
Some people use the term "fascist" to casually deride their political opposites, ... He added another definition of "far left" and "far right" — the willingness to use violence to achieve political goals. ... "Say 'free speech advocates' or 'those concerned about censorship.' Now you're talking about a particular issue ...
Harris explains in exclusive CNN interview why she's shifted her
Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday offered her most expansive explanation to date on why she's changed some of her positions on fracking and immigration, telling CNN's Dana Bash her ...

What Is Fascism—And Why the Definition Matters

A shortened version of this article appeared in the Mar./Apr. 2021 issue of Current Affairs .

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Fascism: Who is and isn't a fascist, and how you can tell the difference

To fascists, all life is kampf