I suppose the only difference between "fascist" and "liberal," "socialist," or "conservative" is that few, if any, these days self-apply the label. But ultimately all these labels end up muddled through broad usage and the narrow particularities of who is on what side of a contemporary issue, sides which may not cleanly or obviously map to any one of the broader political tradition.
But you can always step back as a scholar and say "there is a fascist, a liberal, a socialist, and a conservative political tradition," and describe what you think characterizes one as distinct from the other, and justify your use of the term with historical use of it. Even if someone objects to the term you use, the only thing that really matters is whether they think the political tradition itself is a thing that more or less merits treating as something distinct, a pattern that in fact meaningfully exists in history and the present.
What's frustrating about the fascism debate is how hung up people seem to get on the aesthetics of the word without really bothering to face whether or not there is or is not some political tradition or pattern worth wrestling with. I don't care one whit whether or not we ought to call MAGA fascism, but I do find the patterns that you have drawn from history to be useful. Totally agree that the energy behind this from some academics is all about a snobby "real intellectuals don't go around calling things fascist" rather than anything more substantial.
Moyn once tweeted that he was reluctant to call it fascism because he disliked the political and intellectual consequences of such identification. What unifies much of of the "non-fascist" camp is a deep antagonism towards American liberalism for one reason or another. If Trump and the far-right were identified as fascist it would create political obligations towards a popular front that would imperil the political projects of these intellectuals. I don't think its a coincidence that many of those who oppose identifying fascists on the right are also those who nurse the strongest hopes for a new "dovish" right wing who might help create a new, more restrained American foreign policy.
Bessner: “The conditions that enabled fascism’s rise—a broad experience of total war and a powerful left on the verge of seizing power—were just never present here.” Not so sure about that. A broad experience of total war + a powerful left on the verge of seizing power doesn’t seem that far away from a pretty good description of the South post-1865, which led to fascism there post-1876.
The pose of "we're talking about fascists only because liberals have no real enemies and no one left to fight" is so weird to me... like there's no actual evidence...? Seems like there's a lot. Trump aimed a violent mob at the Capitol who were there to interrupt the transfer of power. He earlier told the Proud Boys to stand by on national tv. The mob only left when Trump tweeted at them to go home and even then he told them he loved them. And Trump's not fringe because GOP leadership has stated over and over they will support whoever the nominee is in 2024, and he's in front. They've had multiple off ramps from the Trump train and taken none of them, so it seems like they want him, no matter how personally distasteful they may find him. By legitimizing Trump, the GOP has mainstreamed what he stands for. And, unsurprisingly, I think public intellectuals have a hard time admitting that fascism, via Trump, has gone mainstream in the US. So they're trying to "yes but he's not a real fascist" their way out of that unpalatable truth, that the GOP is planning on embracing fascism (now that we know Trump's true colors and I agree that the coup attempt proves it) if he wins the primary.
This "Bessner: “The conditions that enabled fascism’s rise—a broad experience of total war and a powerful left on the verge of seizing power..." is a common anti-pattern. The idea that the threat of imminent communist revolution is the only thing that makes a fascist takeover possible is not justifiable, historically, and dangerous in its strategic implications. Quoting myself from sheer laziness...
"An example of such an error of particular interest for anti-fascists, is the common liberal centrist mistake of identifying fascism as a response to an overly-powerful and antagonistic proletariat. This error has two consequences, one annoying the other potentially lethal. The annoying consequence is that for centrists “anti-fascism” depends on the strategy of weakening the radical left as a proxy for promoting a docile, compliant and unthreatening proletariat (nb the assumed casual connection is almost certainly false), thus averting the threat of fascism. This is obviously stupid, but given it’s in the nature of the centre-left to attack the radical left anyway, it’s kinda same old, same old. The really dangerous error is the converse assumption that if the radical left is disorganised and weak, then fascism can’t really be a threat. If the theory of bourgeois disunity as a cause of fascist opportunity is correct, then this is a potentially fatal complacency."
It's that last bit - Weimar fell apart not so much because the KPD was about to overthrow German capitalism (it clearly wasn't by the early 30s) but because the ruling class was completely split - the Junkers who dominated the army and the bureaucracy, mourned the Kaiser and hated democracy and the republic (and wanted Rewenge! for war losses), the industrialists were split between the successful exporters behind the Centre Party and the loss-making heavy industrialists behind the Harzburger Front. It was this bourgeois disunity that allowed Hitler to sidle through the middle and into power.
Today we have a ruling capitalist class, in the US at least, split on at least 2 crucial existential questions - what to do about the rise of China and relative decline in US global superpowerdom; and whether or not to do something about climate change or pretend its not happening and "drill baby, drill". If a split bourgeoisie is enough to give fascism an opening, even in the absence of the threat of imminent left revolution, then there is no room for complacency
Bessner's comment about fascism arises in the context of "a powerful left on the verge of seizing power" raises an interesting question: Bessner has (from what I gather) a properly Marxist understanding of what it means to be "left," and so the idea that the far right is responding to a revitalized, viable left-wing movement seems ridiculous. But it seems that a pretty broad cross section of the right don't see the left (or at least the left that they're afraid of) primarily in economic terms anymore, but in social terms—DEI, LGBTQ rights, women's rights, etc. So in addition to an unwillingness to talk seriously about the meaning of fascism, there is also an unwillingness to acknowledge that for many right-wingers "the left" means the people willing to talk about the legacy of slavery, or saying that trans people should have rights, or that migrants shouldn't be put in camps.
That version of the left—the civil rights left, I guess—has gained a considerable amount of institutional power over the past fifteen years. Whether or not one wants to agree with this framing, it's the framing that the right is using, and from their perspective they really are in danger of losing a form of power they have been long accustomed to (obviously acknowledging this doesn't mean being sympathetic to it). Exasperating as it is for those on the economic left who want to talk about infrastructure and nationalization and foreign policy, the culture wars, insofar as they reflect a struggle for greater dignity and freedom in one's personal life, are a facet of the American left project.
Is this part of the fault line in the fascism debates, from what you've noticed? Writers more willing to credit the importance of civil rights as a value of the left are more willing to talk about American fascism, while the more classically Marxist see it as being a distraction?
1.- If fascism is such a nothing word, why the emphasis and effort on it not being applied? So many words are *literally* misapplied and misused and we more or less ignore them *irregardless* of their pervasiveness. On a related note, I call myself and Agnostic rather than an Atheist because I don't really get hung up on whether this thing I claim to not believe in is real or not.
2.- Apropos of nothing, I now fully believe the reason you keep your Twitter account active is that you're afraid that, if and when you close it, Lionel Trolling will come haunt you a la The Dark Half.
What's frustrating about the "fascism is a term of abuse and therefore meaningless" argument is that the conclusion does not follow from the premise! Terms of abuse carry with them real implications and descriptions of the people they attack in addition to personal animus. We all know after all that a clown is something substantively different from a chump which is itself a different category from an oaf.
The plain fact is that far right movements have values, tactics and goals that many people find abhorrent. If an analytical category which describes these groups can only be a valid basis of intellectual inquiry if it remains pure of people's distaste for those values, tactics and goals. . . well that's just setting absolutely impossible goalposts.
Hell, in Bessner's circles the word "liberal" is used almost exclusively as a term of abuse! Why not disqualify it as an analytical category as well?
Man, these guys really are insufferable. The need to shit on ‘liberalism’, a word which to them serves the same purpose as that which /they say/ any and every use of the word ‘fascism’ serves for their ‘liberals’, is just so god-damn tiresome. It would be nice if the failures of liberal politics and the liberal tradition—which a work like this, handwringing and tut-tutting over semantics, a thing I usually associate with ‘both sides!!!’ types, utterly distracts from without actually bringing anything new to light—it would be nice if those could be discussed without, apparently, having orders of magnitude more contempt for people who basically share the values they at least /profess/ to have than for the guys that would see their whole families hanged if they could.
Anyway, thanks as always for exposing just how basic and paper-thin this latest version of their argument is. I sincerely hope it’ll reach people who otherwise are superficially attracted to the kind of smug yet lazy thinking that this work embodies.
It’s possible that fascism is less known and taken less seriously comparing to Nazism? I wonder if Putin leadership could be called fascist behavior. Paramilitary group Wagner is probably putin affiliated.
“One reason to take seriously Trump’s proximity to fascism was because actual fascists thought that he was something like what they had always wanted and represented a real political opening. What Trump was actually able to accomplish in office is secondary to the question of whether or not his movement had some analogy or proximity to fascism.”
Nailed. It.
And whether Trump, DeSantis, or indeed, much of the Republican Party today can be accurately called fascist these days, at the very least, they are way too close for comfort.
To use the language of one of America’s most transparently career con artists (and a freshman Republican Congressman representing Long Island), they are at the very least fash-ISH.
Is there any chance I could persuade you to be as circumspect about "psychoanalysis" as you are about "fascism"? In short, while the term gets tossed about as a synonym for facile psychologizing, it also has a particular, relatively specific meaning.
Not all forms of authoritarianism are created equal. Fascism is just one modern flavor. One very problematic flavor. Because it is really good at justifying abuse.
Interesting you bring up the narcissism and psychopathy. Add in Machavilienism and you get the full ‘dark triad’ of antisocial personality. Recent research has fairly conclusively linked this to authoritarian personality types and voting preferences, both on right and left wings, across different voting populations. Again, these interrelated personalities are all joined together by….justifying domination and abuse.
I suppose the only difference between "fascist" and "liberal," "socialist," or "conservative" is that few, if any, these days self-apply the label. But ultimately all these labels end up muddled through broad usage and the narrow particularities of who is on what side of a contemporary issue, sides which may not cleanly or obviously map to any one of the broader political tradition.
But you can always step back as a scholar and say "there is a fascist, a liberal, a socialist, and a conservative political tradition," and describe what you think characterizes one as distinct from the other, and justify your use of the term with historical use of it. Even if someone objects to the term you use, the only thing that really matters is whether they think the political tradition itself is a thing that more or less merits treating as something distinct, a pattern that in fact meaningfully exists in history and the present.
What's frustrating about the fascism debate is how hung up people seem to get on the aesthetics of the word without really bothering to face whether or not there is or is not some political tradition or pattern worth wrestling with. I don't care one whit whether or not we ought to call MAGA fascism, but I do find the patterns that you have drawn from history to be useful. Totally agree that the energy behind this from some academics is all about a snobby "real intellectuals don't go around calling things fascist" rather than anything more substantial.
Moyn once tweeted that he was reluctant to call it fascism because he disliked the political and intellectual consequences of such identification. What unifies much of of the "non-fascist" camp is a deep antagonism towards American liberalism for one reason or another. If Trump and the far-right were identified as fascist it would create political obligations towards a popular front that would imperil the political projects of these intellectuals. I don't think its a coincidence that many of those who oppose identifying fascists on the right are also those who nurse the strongest hopes for a new "dovish" right wing who might help create a new, more restrained American foreign policy.
Bessner: “The conditions that enabled fascism’s rise—a broad experience of total war and a powerful left on the verge of seizing power—were just never present here.” Not so sure about that. A broad experience of total war + a powerful left on the verge of seizing power doesn’t seem that far away from a pretty good description of the South post-1865, which led to fascism there post-1876.
The pose of "we're talking about fascists only because liberals have no real enemies and no one left to fight" is so weird to me... like there's no actual evidence...? Seems like there's a lot. Trump aimed a violent mob at the Capitol who were there to interrupt the transfer of power. He earlier told the Proud Boys to stand by on national tv. The mob only left when Trump tweeted at them to go home and even then he told them he loved them. And Trump's not fringe because GOP leadership has stated over and over they will support whoever the nominee is in 2024, and he's in front. They've had multiple off ramps from the Trump train and taken none of them, so it seems like they want him, no matter how personally distasteful they may find him. By legitimizing Trump, the GOP has mainstreamed what he stands for. And, unsurprisingly, I think public intellectuals have a hard time admitting that fascism, via Trump, has gone mainstream in the US. So they're trying to "yes but he's not a real fascist" their way out of that unpalatable truth, that the GOP is planning on embracing fascism (now that we know Trump's true colors and I agree that the coup attempt proves it) if he wins the primary.
This "Bessner: “The conditions that enabled fascism’s rise—a broad experience of total war and a powerful left on the verge of seizing power..." is a common anti-pattern. The idea that the threat of imminent communist revolution is the only thing that makes a fascist takeover possible is not justifiable, historically, and dangerous in its strategic implications. Quoting myself from sheer laziness...
"An example of such an error of particular interest for anti-fascists, is the common liberal centrist mistake of identifying fascism as a response to an overly-powerful and antagonistic proletariat. This error has two consequences, one annoying the other potentially lethal. The annoying consequence is that for centrists “anti-fascism” depends on the strategy of weakening the radical left as a proxy for promoting a docile, compliant and unthreatening proletariat (nb the assumed casual connection is almost certainly false), thus averting the threat of fascism. This is obviously stupid, but given it’s in the nature of the centre-left to attack the radical left anyway, it’s kinda same old, same old. The really dangerous error is the converse assumption that if the radical left is disorganised and weak, then fascism can’t really be a threat. If the theory of bourgeois disunity as a cause of fascist opportunity is correct, then this is a potentially fatal complacency."
It's that last bit - Weimar fell apart not so much because the KPD was about to overthrow German capitalism (it clearly wasn't by the early 30s) but because the ruling class was completely split - the Junkers who dominated the army and the bureaucracy, mourned the Kaiser and hated democracy and the republic (and wanted Rewenge! for war losses), the industrialists were split between the successful exporters behind the Centre Party and the loss-making heavy industrialists behind the Harzburger Front. It was this bourgeois disunity that allowed Hitler to sidle through the middle and into power.
Today we have a ruling capitalist class, in the US at least, split on at least 2 crucial existential questions - what to do about the rise of China and relative decline in US global superpowerdom; and whether or not to do something about climate change or pretend its not happening and "drill baby, drill". If a split bourgeoisie is enough to give fascism an opening, even in the absence of the threat of imminent left revolution, then there is no room for complacency
Bessner's comment about fascism arises in the context of "a powerful left on the verge of seizing power" raises an interesting question: Bessner has (from what I gather) a properly Marxist understanding of what it means to be "left," and so the idea that the far right is responding to a revitalized, viable left-wing movement seems ridiculous. But it seems that a pretty broad cross section of the right don't see the left (or at least the left that they're afraid of) primarily in economic terms anymore, but in social terms—DEI, LGBTQ rights, women's rights, etc. So in addition to an unwillingness to talk seriously about the meaning of fascism, there is also an unwillingness to acknowledge that for many right-wingers "the left" means the people willing to talk about the legacy of slavery, or saying that trans people should have rights, or that migrants shouldn't be put in camps.
That version of the left—the civil rights left, I guess—has gained a considerable amount of institutional power over the past fifteen years. Whether or not one wants to agree with this framing, it's the framing that the right is using, and from their perspective they really are in danger of losing a form of power they have been long accustomed to (obviously acknowledging this doesn't mean being sympathetic to it). Exasperating as it is for those on the economic left who want to talk about infrastructure and nationalization and foreign policy, the culture wars, insofar as they reflect a struggle for greater dignity and freedom in one's personal life, are a facet of the American left project.
Is this part of the fault line in the fascism debates, from what you've noticed? Writers more willing to credit the importance of civil rights as a value of the left are more willing to talk about American fascism, while the more classically Marxist see it as being a distraction?
Also, thanks for the introduction to Tamás, which I had unaccountably not come across before.
My two intellectually suspect cents:
1.- If fascism is such a nothing word, why the emphasis and effort on it not being applied? So many words are *literally* misapplied and misused and we more or less ignore them *irregardless* of their pervasiveness. On a related note, I call myself and Agnostic rather than an Atheist because I don't really get hung up on whether this thing I claim to not believe in is real or not.
2.- Apropos of nothing, I now fully believe the reason you keep your Twitter account active is that you're afraid that, if and when you close it, Lionel Trolling will come haunt you a la The Dark Half.
What's frustrating about the "fascism is a term of abuse and therefore meaningless" argument is that the conclusion does not follow from the premise! Terms of abuse carry with them real implications and descriptions of the people they attack in addition to personal animus. We all know after all that a clown is something substantively different from a chump which is itself a different category from an oaf.
The plain fact is that far right movements have values, tactics and goals that many people find abhorrent. If an analytical category which describes these groups can only be a valid basis of intellectual inquiry if it remains pure of people's distaste for those values, tactics and goals. . . well that's just setting absolutely impossible goalposts.
Hell, in Bessner's circles the word "liberal" is used almost exclusively as a term of abuse! Why not disqualify it as an analytical category as well?
Steve Scalise is another one for your list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Scalise#Speech_at_white_nationalist_convention
Thank you for the link to Adolph Reed. He is always worth reading. I especially appreciate Reed's attention to Bayard Rustin and his legacy.
Man, these guys really are insufferable. The need to shit on ‘liberalism’, a word which to them serves the same purpose as that which /they say/ any and every use of the word ‘fascism’ serves for their ‘liberals’, is just so god-damn tiresome. It would be nice if the failures of liberal politics and the liberal tradition—which a work like this, handwringing and tut-tutting over semantics, a thing I usually associate with ‘both sides!!!’ types, utterly distracts from without actually bringing anything new to light—it would be nice if those could be discussed without, apparently, having orders of magnitude more contempt for people who basically share the values they at least /profess/ to have than for the guys that would see their whole families hanged if they could.
Anyway, thanks as always for exposing just how basic and paper-thin this latest version of their argument is. I sincerely hope it’ll reach people who otherwise are superficially attracted to the kind of smug yet lazy thinking that this work embodies.
It’s possible that fascism is less known and taken less seriously comparing to Nazism? I wonder if Putin leadership could be called fascist behavior. Paramilitary group Wagner is probably putin affiliated.
“One reason to take seriously Trump’s proximity to fascism was because actual fascists thought that he was something like what they had always wanted and represented a real political opening. What Trump was actually able to accomplish in office is secondary to the question of whether or not his movement had some analogy or proximity to fascism.”
Nailed. It.
And whether Trump, DeSantis, or indeed, much of the Republican Party today can be accurately called fascist these days, at the very least, they are way too close for comfort.
To use the language of one of America’s most transparently career con artists (and a freshman Republican Congressman representing Long Island), they are at the very least fash-ISH.
Is there any chance I could persuade you to be as circumspect about "psychoanalysis" as you are about "fascism"? In short, while the term gets tossed about as a synonym for facile psychologizing, it also has a particular, relatively specific meaning.
Right on. Thank you.
Not all forms of authoritarianism are created equal. Fascism is just one modern flavor. One very problematic flavor. Because it is really good at justifying abuse.
Interesting you bring up the narcissism and psychopathy. Add in Machavilienism and you get the full ‘dark triad’ of antisocial personality. Recent research has fairly conclusively linked this to authoritarian personality types and voting preferences, both on right and left wings, across different voting populations. Again, these interrelated personalities are all joined together by….justifying domination and abuse.