What was Fascism?
Note: Most people want to use the word “Fascism” purely as term of abuse for rightward critics of liberalism. If that’s your goal, go right ahead and ignore this!
I heard some on twitter try to argue contemporary China is a fascist state, presumably with their natalist, masculinist, or Uighur-related policies in mind. The comparison strikes me as pretty off base, which spurred me to look up what we think fascism was. In the wikipedia page on definitions of fascism, almost all the attempts boil down to this: it is the bad type of nationalism or it is too much nationalism. These definitions leave room for both over and under specification.
First under-specification: Every modern political movement has drawn on feelings of nationalism, including ones that are formally liberal and communist. Beyond those latent appeals, many violent left movements foreground nationalism: the French Revolution, the 1848 Revolutions, Decolonization movements, etc. Many left-inclined academics will want to say these movements appealed to civic nationalism rather than ethnic nationalism. I think this distinction is just another way of form of arbitrarily distinguishing the good nationalisms that I like from the bad ones that I think are dangerous. It is implausible that the 19th century German liberals or Gandhi were not making ethnic appeals. Then, there are the conservative, plebiscitary, and nationalist (the trifecta!) regimes that were clearly not fascist. Napoleon III’s Empire being the most obvious, and I sense that many anti-communist Latin American regimes could fit this definition as well. I would say contemporary China and Russia most closely resemble these.
Second over-specification: What about the Fascists movements that don’t see to be primarily about nationalism? The regime of Juan Peron is generally acknowledged to have been at least fascism-lite. While I am no expert, my sense is that his main political enemies were primarily Marxists, intellectuals, and big business. If demagogic defenses of the common man against elites qualify as hyper-nationalism, then we have defined nationalism so broadly as to encompass almost all of democratic (and quasi-democratic) politics.
Nationalism is a flexible term that can include any collectivist or communitarian politics, and I think thats why these definitions founder. The nationalism approach is a dead end. So here is my alternative definition: Fascism is the belief that large scale extra-legal violence should be a part of normal politics.
Large scale is meant to exclude the odd assassination of a journalist every know and again. Those strikes seem to me more like embarrassed necessities or veiled threats rather than the public celebration of unsanctioned violence that Fascism promoted.
I specify “normal politics” to exclude movements in a revolutionary period. The Boston Tea party involved extra-legal violence, but patriots did not think that unsanctioned attacks should be a regular tool of their new state.
My inspiration for this definition came from David Frum’s reflection that January, 6th made him sympathetic to Trump-Fascism comparison that he had previously resisted. He argued that a contempt for legality and excitement at violence characterizes Fascism. He cites the Argentine Anti-Fascist meme “Defend the fatherland. Kill a student.” as insightfully lampooning this romantic impulse. (I disagree with his narrow point on Trump. The overwhelming of mass of the American right is embarrassed by the violence January 6th, and those few that sympathize only embrace violence in the narrow context of a “stolen” election. They are reenacting a deluded Boston Tea Party rather than seeking to institutionalize government by militias of Buffalo-horned goons.) Yet, I think his definition can help us explain a few things.
First, it explains what connected Carl Schmidt to Fascism. To my knowledge, he was not particularly interested in nationalism or racism. His main target was the pretense that societies could be governed by laws rather by men. At some level, all legal codes will be underspecified to exact circumstance (especially in fast moving emergencies), and at these point, the strongest political leader rather than an abstract idea of what the law says will determine what happens. A moderate version of this observation strikes me as insightful (see Executive Unbound). But, you can also easily see how taking this argument to its illogical conclusion winds up with your society run by brownshirts.
Second, it explains what distinguished Communist and Fascist mass violence. In this conversation, Zizek makes an interesting observation that the Stalinist Soviet Union was obsessed with pretending their mass killings were legal. Transparently fake confessions were expensively extracted. Show trials were staged. Hypocrisy being the tribute vice plays to virtue, these episodes cared about legality and process. Meanwhile, on the Night of the Longknives Hitler had the enemies he was purging shot in the lobby of their hotel. People sent to the Gulag had trials. It is impossible to imagine a concentration camp staging a trial.
Third, it explains why Fascism is about struggle even as it promises national rejuvenation. Reviewing Mien Kampf, Orwell wrote, “Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.” I once quoted this line in a class, and someone objected that Hitler also promised better life through lower unemployment, the retaking of Alsace-Lorraine, etc. However, if you buy my analysis, you will agree with Orwell that the violent fight for these goals is somehow more appealing than the goals themselves.
Lastly, this definition can explain in what the definitions revolving around nationalism are picking up. They hyper-nationalism they condemn are about a militarist foreign policy and attacks against ethnic minorities. In foreign policy, the fascist regimes were committed reckless, illegal military adventures (Italy in Ethiopia or the breaking to the Hitler-Stalin pact). If extra-legal violence is core to their theory of politics, you can see why they made so many military adventures that cool calculation of national interest might not recommend. Second domestically, people committing street violence will often want to attack people across ethnic lines. To pick some parochial examples, this preference is on display in the mugging of Asian-Americans and historically amongst Italians and Irish kids in the Bronx. It makes perfect sense that people who street violence and join fascist movements are also going to be a constituency for ethnic hatred.
Taken together, I think the disanalogies to China are clear. The suppression of the Uyghurs is generally done with a terrifying bureaucratic control, not atavistic sadism. Even when China breaks international law, as with the militarization of reefs in the South China sea, they show no interest in steering the conflict in a violent direction.
Fundamentally, all the Fascist regimes were from the 1930’s, and I think that’s for the simply reason that it requires a large part of the public to be acclimated and excited by violence. In the context of total war, demobilizing soldiers are that constituency. In Franco’s regime, we can see an evolution away from violence (and Fascism) as the memory of the Civil War faded. In times of general peace, I doubt there will be much appetite for the Fascist appeal.