The "Good Enough" Fascist

Or, now I know my ABCs

Last week on Is It Happening Here? I wrote about Michael Jordan’s Hitler Mustache as a metaphor for Robert O. Paxton’s idea of the “elusive fascist minimum.” It’s a concept which, among other things, may help explain the seemingly endless prefixes and qualifiers one comes across: the pseudo-, the neo-, and the quasi- fascisms; the semi-, the para- and the micro, too. These are matched only by a confusion of phrases such as "fascism before fascism," the "first fascism,” “fascism without fascists,” and—naturally— “fascists without fascism.” Often considered a rightwing phenomenon, even cultural theorists such as Jürgen Habermas were known to use the term ‘left fascism.’

As it turns out, only insofar as these terms are discombobulating do they help us understand anything about fascism. Lending expression to a notion I’d sensed but didn’t have the authority to assert, Umberto Eco wrote in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism” that, “Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.”

"The contradictory picture I describe,” Eco says, “was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations."

What’s more, to my surprise, he seemed to be asserting that even at the highest level there existed a kind of ideological incompletion. “Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology.”

As I mentioned in my first post, the myths that cling to fascism, and to its leaders in particular, represent its actors as unerring representatives of the total thrust of their ideological ethos. Yet, it seems to me, if we imagine anyone possessing a fascist mindset to be a pure example—a paragon of absolute fascist identity—we may be falling prey to the same misapprehension of human nature that that ideology itself thrives on.

Both Hitler and Mussolini were known for excising, alienating, or abandoning fascist zealots, idealists, and so-called “intellectuals,” in favor of pragmatic seizure of power. In a sense, then, the most effective fascist may be the “good-enough” fascist.

Writing of how “the fascist route to power has always passed through cooperation with conservative elites,” Robert Paxton describes how Hitler—“engaged in a promising negotiation with conservative power holders”—decided to reshape his party, making “what Wolfgang Schieder calls a Herrschaftskompromiss, a “compromise for rule," in which areas of agreement are located and bothersome idealists are cast aside.”

Described by some as a “scavenger ideology,” to my mind what this implies about fascism is the possibility that such compromises for power must also occur more incrementally, as a process which ends in more complete forms of fascism. In this way, whether deliberately or by accident, a fascist might eschew the rhetorical posturing of the so-called intellectuals of the early stages (that which today we’d read as the warning signs) and morph into a pragmatic or functional fascism.

I’m reminded of how, in her book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes Steve Bannon’s “knack for identifying issues that are the natural territory of his opponents but that they have neglected or betrayed.” In the book, Klein elaborates on how Bannon used these insights to help Trump win in 2016, appealing to “unionized blue-collar workers” who “felt betrayed by corporate Democrats who had signed trade deals that accelerated factory closures in the 1990s.” She also writes of how “Bernie Sanders, whose left-populist 2016 presidential campaign grew out of [the Occupy Wall Street] movement, faced all kinds of dirty tricks from the Democratic Party establishment as it closed ranks around Hillary Clinton.”

From these disparate issues, according to Klein, Bannon crafted a campaign message: “Trump would be a new kind of Republican, one who would stand up to Wall Street, shred corporate trade deals, close the border to supposedly job-stealing immigrants, and end foreign wars—moreover, unlike Republicans before, he pledged to protect social programs like Medicare and Social Security.”

In this description, it is as important to note Klein’s indictment of the Democrats as it is to recognize the seizure of these issues for power, rather than principle.

Eco follows his insights about the diffuse and omnivorous nature of fascism with an ingenious analogy. Describing it in terms of a "family resemblance," he asks the reader to consider the following letter combinations:

ABC BCD CDE DEF

Each combination, he notes, shares two attributes of the one before; if any one attribute denotes fascism, even though ABC and DEF may appear entirely different, we can still identify the configuration as a part of the family through the transitive property.

"There was only one Nazism,” Eco explains, “We cannot label Franco’s hyper-Catholic Falangism as Nazism, since Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian... [the Italian term] Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes..."

Each fascism, in other words, was unique to not only its leader, but the particularity of its nation.

Nonetheless, Eco equips us with various key attributes of what he dubs Ur- or eternal fascism, with the caveat that, “These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism.” Which is to say, if fascism is a Family (in the Linnean sense), then perhaps despotism or authoritarianism represents the level above it—a Species in the Kingdom of Governments.

According to Eco, there are 14 “genetic markers” in all (A-N), most of which can work in concert with the others. The Cult of Tradition (A), for instance, goes hand in hand with a Rejection of Modernism (B), both of which contribute to a Fear of Difference (E) and give rise to the precept that Disagreement is Treason (D). From this foundation, an Appeal to Social Frustration (F) may follow, causing the populace to become Obsessed with a Plot (G) being enacted by an enemy who is both “powerful enough to pose a serious threat and weak enough to be easily defeated.” (H) Such an enemy provides a sense of identity for the in-group, who—through Selective Populism (M)—are instilled with the idea that they are the Elites (J), and thus have the responsibility of Heroes (K) who must Act for Action’s Sake (C) through displays of Machismo and/or Weaponry (L).

From this admittedly adumbrated summary, you may already be able to identify the relevance of Eco’s ideas to our contemporary moment. I encourage anyone reading to take a look at Eco’s essay, but throughout the rest of the series I will also refer back to this alphabet, adding to this basic framework and highlighting how many of these elements are endemic to American political, economic, and social structures, as well as the ways in which political entrepreneurs like Trump and Bannon enact them.