📚 Fascism

A few weeks ago I was making my way into work, catching up with the overnight news of Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Things that Trump did on inauguration day had a whiff of fascism. But seeing Elon Musk make multiple Nazi salutes on stage left me aghast. It fascinated me to see people and institutions bend over backwards to accommodate alternative interpretations of what Musk did, including the Anti-Defamation League which said “It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute“, and Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, who said that Musk “is being falsely smeared“. It’s as if calling it what it clearly was — a fascist salute — would cross a line.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend who didn’t see the Musk gesture in the same way. However, in our discussion he suggested that people going to jail in the UK for what they said on social media was fascist. I wasn’t so sure. Believing in ‘free speech’ as a principle doesn’t necessarily mean you get to say anything you like to anyone whenever you feel like it. There have to be rules. I’m definitely not a free-speech absolutist. As I wrote in my recent weeknotes:

At the forefront of my mind this week was the concept of free speech, given the widely-reported changes at Meta. A conversation with a friend and a Stratechery post by Ben Thompson challenged my thinking, which led me to try to find resources that would help me to refine my understanding. I’ve bought Regulating Free Speech in a Digital Age by David Bromell as recommended by Heather Burns, as well as Fearless Speech by Mary Anne Franks. I lean towards free speech, but having this week learned about the paradox of tolerance, I know that I’m not a ‘free speech absolutist’. But I don’t know where or how the line should be drawn.

On one level, putting people in prison for writing a post on Twitter or Facebook seems extreme. But it doesn’t seem right that people can publish posts encouraging others to burn down hotels and religious buildings without consequence. Is jailing people for their posts fascist? I didn’t think so. But I wasn’t completely sure.

By chance, I saw that Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey had posted an ‘emergency’ episode of their Origin Story podcast, called Trump’s inauguration: Can we call it fascism yet? The fact that the title was pitched as a question, while the image for the episode is a picture of Elon Musk doing his Nazi salute, shows that this wasn’t something straightforward to answer. On the podcast, Ian Dunt decided that yes, we can call this fascism, and explained why:

Dorian Lynskey: …it has to be said that Elon Musk throwing what appears to be a fascist salute more than once doesn’t require the historian Richard J. Evans to decode that one. Ian, obviously one does not like to be hysterical about this. We were talking about how not to cry fascism and everything. What did you make of the inauguration?

Ian Dunt: Oh, I would really like to cry fascism now.

DL: OK.

ID: I mean, there’s a certain… I know that you’ve discovered that apparently the frog’s in water and it’s bollocks, and apparently the frog does jump out of the water, but you do sort of feel because it’s like an everyday degree by degree by degree increase, you feel trapped by it. There is a point when you have to take a step back or deal with… I mean, I could do all of this list with Trump, obviously, but you have to do it with Musk. It’s like just over the last couple of months, this is a guy that is explicitly telling people, go out and vote and support Tommy Robinson, Alternative for Deutschland, extremist street thugs. These are the people who support him. He’s interacting with far right accounts. He’s using all of the modern day online far right imagery, Pepe the Frog and all of his nonsense monikers that he’s adopted. The accounts that he interacts with, the conspiracy theories that he spreads, they’re all on the far right. So then when he gets up and repeatedly does something that looks like a Nazi salute, if that was someone else, if it was George Bush who did it, you’d think like, “he got that all funny and it came out weird and don’t be weird about it.” But it takes so much generosity that you have really reached the point of being fundamentally irrational to not interpret it in this way, given the series of actions that led up to it. Years ago, when we did our episode on fascism, we were like, you need the alarm to be pulled when things get really sketchy. Well, to me, honestly, yesterday, that’s what really sketchy looks like.

The episode also had a reading from their most recent Origin Story book, called Fascism, which sounded exactly like what I was looking for. So I picked up a copy and dived in.

The book explores fascism primarily through the history of the two classic examples where it was indisputably how the countries were run — Italy under Mussolini (whose political party was literally called the Partito Nazionale Fascista, the National Fascist Party) and Germany under Hitler. There is general consensus that these were both fascist dictatorships, but they were very different to each other. Part of the problem with calling anything ‘fascist’ today is that you are immediately drawing a comparison to these two regimes, both of which precipitated extreme suffering through their actions in World War II:

If you invoke 1930s Germany to criticise a draconian right-wing policy, you will be widely understood. But if, for the sake of accuracy, you reference modern Hungary, 1970s Chile, 1940s Spain, or even 1920s Italy, most people will not have any idea what you are talking about. This narrow band of shared knowledge erases most of the history of authoritarianism and creates a false binary: either a country is a healthy, tolerant democracy or it is on the road to Nazism. The vast middle ground must be understood, now more than ever, because that is where the populists operate. Even if we are in the business of sounding the red alert about them, we must have a sense of the precise threat they pose if we are to effectively challenge them.

Using the word ‘fascist’ for something ‘less’ than Nazi Germany seems to either be too over-the-top, or has the effect of diluting the meaning and impact of the word. (This is echoed by Dorian Lynskey’s tentative approach in the podcast episode to the question of whether to “cry fascism” or not about Trump and Musk.)

And now, in the early twenty-first century, we seem surrounded by figures who can’t reliably be called fascists but who trade in similar feelings and inspire similar anxieties in their opponents. That makes us want to call them fascists – to shake people by the collar and tell them that we’ve played this game before and it did not end well. But it deprives us of the confidence to do so, because we’re never quite sure if we’re using the word correctly, or if deploying it will make us look like hysterics.

But trying to pin down exactly what we mean by fascism is inherently difficult. It isn’t the same as other ideologies:

There is no flawless, objective test for fascism. This is not due to any weakness in scholarly analysis, but to the weakness of fascism itself. We can define socialism very easily, as the collective ownership of the means of production. We can define liberalism as the belief in the freedom of the individual. That is because these are both meaningful political traditions with a huge body of intellectual contributions. We struggle to define fascism because it is not a meaningful political tradition and it has few, if any, intellectual contributions.

The authors suggest that something does not need to be ‘fully fascist’ for the word, or a derivative of it, to be useful in pointing out something that is on the road to fascism:

One solution is semantic: terms that allude to someone or something having fascist elements without necessarily satisfying the full definition. President Biden referred to Trump’s philosophy as ‘semi-fascism’, a term also used by the historian Stanley Payne. There are many other variants: proto-fascism, quasi-fascism or borderline fascism. And there is the term ‘fascistic’, to describe a particular element of a populist movement. These phrases can seem slightly cowardly and evasive, but they’re actually very helpful. They provide options. They let you point to worrying elements of a movement or party without having to go all the way. They add nuance while retaining the capacity for historical comparison and political warning.

The rise of populism across the worldis something to be concerned with in the same way that we should have been concerned about the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s:

Fascism and populism share a conceptual root. They both feature an all-encompassing insistence on the ‘will of the people’ as the only source of political legitimacy, unlike liberalism, which places a strong emphasis on individual rights, diversity and the separation of powers.

Ultimately, there is no easy checklist that you can use to define whether something is fascist, although Umberto Eco tried with his list of the 14 common features of fascism.

This, then, is the moral lesson of the story of fascism. It is not necessarily about precise definitions, or watertight checklists, or strictly policed usage. It is about recognising that fascism appeals to some of the darkest instincts of human nature: the hatred of difference, the yearning for order, the sublimation of the individual to the group, the enchantment of violence. At heart, Orwell suggested, fascism meant ‘something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist . . . almost any English person would accept “bully” as a synonym for “Fascist”’. The story of fascism shows us what happens when these instincts are given free rein and reach their ultimate expression. It therefore serves as a reminder to treat with extreme vigilance any individual or group that seeks to encourage those ideas, and to dedicate oneself to stopping them.

Having read the book, I don’t see how jailing people for social media posts that incite hatred and violence can be considered to be fascist. Being the bully, hating the differences that refugees, asylum seekers, people of colour or LGBTQ+ people represent and promoting violence towards them is fascist. For a tolerant society to thrive, paradoxically my belief is that it needs to be intolerant of this kind of world view and behaviour.