Fascism - a meaningful term?
Language is a funny thing. Say a word over and over again and at some point it’s going to sound strange and devoid of any meaning - it mutates into dissonant noise.
By weaponizing words for political purposes the same can happen to terms like fascism, genocide, socialism or even liberal.
Before right-leaning Americans discovered socialism as their preferred indictment of their enemies, they tended to deride center-left policies they disliked as liberal which was always unfortunate because the Rooseveltian breed of self-defined liberals misappropriated the term since their ideology was somewhat between social liberalism and social democracy. However, it wasn’t liberalism in the classical sense.
Socialism is an even more abused term because neither the proponents nor the proclaimed enemies of socialism on the American Right agree what kind of socialism they’re defending or attacking. Is it Stalinism, Maoism, Marxism-Leninism or is it Fabian socialism/democratic socialism, left-wing populism or plain social democracy. After all, the Portuguese and French socialist parties aren’t even socialist in a narrower sense of the word. So some measure of confusion is reasonable. In a broader sense all of these strains can be legitimately classified as socialist but few on the right or left are very ideologically specific these days. They prefer generalities.
By over-using the word genocide and by applying it to cases which don’t meet the elementary criteria of genocide a very crucial legal term loses its meaning.
Nevertheless, as we excessively expand a narrow definition of a word many people get almost reflexively numb to it which is a tragedy because numbness leads to indifference when actual genocide is occurring in Myanmar or in Sudan. The United States has done more to rein in Israel‘s military actions - even though they don’t constitute a genocide - than they have tried to actively rein in the Burmese junta or the rivalling Sudanese factions - in particular the RSF in Darfur. If genocide is meaningless, why bother? This isn’t whataboutism. It‘s about objective realities based on legal definitions.
I‘ve mentioned socialism, liberalism and genocide as a prelude to the examination of the term fascism because all of these terms have been distorted and abused for political purposes. So has fascism and as in these other cases, it’s tragic because fascism exists even if definitions have been intentionally blurred for political reasons.
For instance, Marxist-Leninists were all too keen to identify every non-communist as a fascist. Liberals? Fascists! Conservatives? Fascists! Social democrats? Traitorous fascists. And rest assured, there was a place for all of them in the Soviet Gulag system.
So how to define fascism in the first place? I‘m fond of narrow and specific definitions, alas, fascism is not a narrow and specific ideology, neither is socialism for instance. Liberalism is a bit more specific because it’s basically the doctrinal adherence to a catalogue of natural and inherent rights and liberties and if a constitution enshrines and protects these rights a constitution is liberal and if it doesn’t it isn’t.
Fascism is more complex. So the best way to define it is by enumerating what the ideology isn’t and what it foundationally opposes, as a fascist raison d‘être. It is a modern ideology like socialism and liberalism which means it’s a phenomenon tied to the post-feudal/ecclesiastical era. And in a sense you only have these 3 modern regime types or something pre-modern, meaning an anti-liberal monarchy (Qatar) or a theocracy (Iran, Afghanistan).
That means if a regime isn’t liberal, isn’t socialist, isn’t theocratic or feudal it’s by my definition fascist - at least as far as my historic experience is concerned. Theoretically, there are many more ideological variations like anarchism.
Historically, there’ve been two types of fascist regimes if one applies my definition to real-word regimes.
Populist-revolutionary fascists and reactionary-conservative fascists.
Mussolini‘s Italy, Hitler‘s Germany, German satellite regimes in Slovakia and in Croatia or Hungary under the Arrow Cross regime can be safely put into the first category.
Franco‘s Spain, Salazar‘s Portugal, the Greek junta, Antonescu‘s Romania, Horthy‘s Hungary, Vichy France and many Latin American military dictatorships (among them the Somoza Clan in Nicaragua, Batista in Cuba or Pinochet in Chile) can be classified as reactionary-conservative fascists.
However, there are variations in each of these groups.
In the second group the key variable is usually economic freedom, generally, the preferred economic order is designed as state-capitalist and guided by corporatism and syndicalism. But that’s not a necessary condition. Pinochet implemented neoliberal reforms (which I greatly support individually) but they didn’t turn Chile under Pinochet into a non-fascist state. The regime just adopted a flavor that was closer to liberalism than, say, Francoist Spain. Chile became a liberal state once Pinochet was out of the picture.
This spectral classification also raises certain implications for the populist-revolutionary fascism. Which isn’t limited to Italy and Germany. Post-revolutionary Mexico - until the liberal reforms of the 1990s under President Salinas was basically a more moderate fascist state and so was Argentina under Juan Perón or Peru under General Juan Velasco Alvarado.
These regimes were marked by nationalist, populist, revolutionary impulses, corporatism, authoritarianism, de facto autocracy, charismatic leaders and leadership cults, they rejected liberalism, rejected socialism and certainly rejected theocracy and feudalism. These were all modern states with leaders who pursued statist and protectionist economic policies aimed at national sovereignty, political dirigism, corruption, autarky and industrial/manufacturing prowess. They also happened to be rather militaristic - not in an expansionist sense but by diluting the traditional separation of the military and civil spheres. They were very hostile to the nascent American-led liberal world order, choosing neutralism over an alignment with the West, an alignment which most reactionary-conservative fascists, on the other hand, sought.
A modern adherent of this form of fascism was Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as the President of Mexico (he isn’t anymore), and the movement he created in Mexico.
A much more radical version of contemporary fascism could be found in Russia, but not the revolutionary-populist kind but the reactionary-conservative version. However, wartime makes the distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism exceedingly fluid in Russia.
So if you want to compare Trump and Maga to some form of fascism, you can, but it’s not Nazism or Italian fascism, it’s a more moderate fascism aligned with individuals like Perón, Velasco or aligned with the old PRI party in Mexico.
By weaponizing words for political purposes the same can happen to terms like fascism, genocide, socialism or even liberal.
Before right-leaning Americans discovered socialism as their preferred indictment of their enemies, they tended to deride center-left policies they disliked as liberal which was always unfortunate because the Rooseveltian breed of self-defined liberals misappropriated the term since their ideology was somewhat between social liberalism and social democracy. However, it wasn’t liberalism in the classical sense.
Socialism is an even more abused term because neither the proponents nor the proclaimed enemies of socialism on the American Right agree what kind of socialism they’re defending or attacking. Is it Stalinism, Maoism, Marxism-Leninism or is it Fabian socialism/democratic socialism, left-wing populism or plain social democracy. After all, the Portuguese and French socialist parties aren’t even socialist in a narrower sense of the word. So some measure of confusion is reasonable. In a broader sense all of these strains can be legitimately classified as socialist but few on the right or left are very ideologically specific these days. They prefer generalities.
By over-using the word genocide and by applying it to cases which don’t meet the elementary criteria of genocide a very crucial legal term loses its meaning.
The definition contained in Article II of the Convention describes genocide as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. It does not include political groups or so called “cultural genocide”.
Based on that narrow but arguably specific definition, neither US Indian reservations and assimilation policies nor Israel‘s military operations in Gaza meet these steep criteria. And by the way, slavery isn’t genocidal either but just because something isn’t genocidal doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be rejected or resisted. Nevertheless, as we excessively expand a narrow definition of a word many people get almost reflexively numb to it which is a tragedy because numbness leads to indifference when actual genocide is occurring in Myanmar or in Sudan. The United States has done more to rein in Israel‘s military actions - even though they don’t constitute a genocide - than they have tried to actively rein in the Burmese junta or the rivalling Sudanese factions - in particular the RSF in Darfur. If genocide is meaningless, why bother? This isn’t whataboutism. It‘s about objective realities based on legal definitions.
I‘ve mentioned socialism, liberalism and genocide as a prelude to the examination of the term fascism because all of these terms have been distorted and abused for political purposes. So has fascism and as in these other cases, it’s tragic because fascism exists even if definitions have been intentionally blurred for political reasons.
For instance, Marxist-Leninists were all too keen to identify every non-communist as a fascist. Liberals? Fascists! Conservatives? Fascists! Social democrats? Traitorous fascists. And rest assured, there was a place for all of them in the Soviet Gulag system.
So how to define fascism in the first place? I‘m fond of narrow and specific definitions, alas, fascism is not a narrow and specific ideology, neither is socialism for instance. Liberalism is a bit more specific because it’s basically the doctrinal adherence to a catalogue of natural and inherent rights and liberties and if a constitution enshrines and protects these rights a constitution is liberal and if it doesn’t it isn’t.
Fascism is more complex. So the best way to define it is by enumerating what the ideology isn’t and what it foundationally opposes, as a fascist raison d‘être. It is a modern ideology like socialism and liberalism which means it’s a phenomenon tied to the post-feudal/ecclesiastical era. And in a sense you only have these 3 modern regime types or something pre-modern, meaning an anti-liberal monarchy (Qatar) or a theocracy (Iran, Afghanistan).
That means if a regime isn’t liberal, isn’t socialist, isn’t theocratic or feudal it’s by my definition fascist - at least as far as my historic experience is concerned. Theoretically, there are many more ideological variations like anarchism.
Historically, there’ve been two types of fascist regimes if one applies my definition to real-word regimes.
Populist-revolutionary fascists and reactionary-conservative fascists.
Mussolini‘s Italy, Hitler‘s Germany, German satellite regimes in Slovakia and in Croatia or Hungary under the Arrow Cross regime can be safely put into the first category.
Franco‘s Spain, Salazar‘s Portugal, the Greek junta, Antonescu‘s Romania, Horthy‘s Hungary, Vichy France and many Latin American military dictatorships (among them the Somoza Clan in Nicaragua, Batista in Cuba or Pinochet in Chile) can be classified as reactionary-conservative fascists.
However, there are variations in each of these groups.
In the second group the key variable is usually economic freedom, generally, the preferred economic order is designed as state-capitalist and guided by corporatism and syndicalism. But that’s not a necessary condition. Pinochet implemented neoliberal reforms (which I greatly support individually) but they didn’t turn Chile under Pinochet into a non-fascist state. The regime just adopted a flavor that was closer to liberalism than, say, Francoist Spain. Chile became a liberal state once Pinochet was out of the picture.
This spectral classification also raises certain implications for the populist-revolutionary fascism. Which isn’t limited to Italy and Germany. Post-revolutionary Mexico - until the liberal reforms of the 1990s under President Salinas was basically a more moderate fascist state and so was Argentina under Juan Perón or Peru under General Juan Velasco Alvarado.
These regimes were marked by nationalist, populist, revolutionary impulses, corporatism, authoritarianism, de facto autocracy, charismatic leaders and leadership cults, they rejected liberalism, rejected socialism and certainly rejected theocracy and feudalism. These were all modern states with leaders who pursued statist and protectionist economic policies aimed at national sovereignty, political dirigism, corruption, autarky and industrial/manufacturing prowess. They also happened to be rather militaristic - not in an expansionist sense but by diluting the traditional separation of the military and civil spheres. They were very hostile to the nascent American-led liberal world order, choosing neutralism over an alignment with the West, an alignment which most reactionary-conservative fascists, on the other hand, sought.
A modern adherent of this form of fascism was Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as the President of Mexico (he isn’t anymore), and the movement he created in Mexico.
A much more radical version of contemporary fascism could be found in Russia, but not the revolutionary-populist kind but the reactionary-conservative version. However, wartime makes the distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism exceedingly fluid in Russia.
So if you want to compare Trump and Maga to some form of fascism, you can, but it’s not Nazism or Italian fascism, it’s a more moderate fascism aligned with individuals like Perón, Velasco or aligned with the old PRI party in Mexico.
M
