Bertrand Russell on the rise of fascism "First, they fascinate the fools. Then, they muzzle the intelligent."
. [Ignoring, of course, the statist, "century of humiliation", Han-racist elements of communist XiXiP dogma. In other words, enslaving a people to statist-party ends is employed at both "left" and "right" authoritarian political extremes.]
Scholars place fascism on the
far-right-wrong of the
political spectrum. Such scholarship focuses on its
social conservatism and its
authoritarian means of opposing
egalitarianism. Roderick Stackelberg places fascism—including
Nazism, which he says is "a radical variant of fascism"—on the political right by explaining: "The more a person deems absolute equality among all people to be a desirable condition, the
further farther left he or she will be on the ideological spectrum. The more a person considers inequality to be unavoidable or even desirable, the
further farther to the right he or she will be."
In the 1920s, Mussolini and
Giovanni Gentile described their ideology as right-wing in the political essay
The Doctrine of Fascism, stating: "We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right,' a fascist century."
Historian
Ian Kershaw once wrote that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall." Each group described as "fascist" has at least some unique elements, and frequently definitions of "fascism" have been criticized as either too broad or too narrow. According to many scholars, fascists—especially when they're in power—have historically attacked communism, conservatism, and parliamentary liberalism, attracting support primarily from the far-right. Historian
Stanley G. Payne's definition is frequently cited as standard by notable
scholars, such as
Roger Griffin,
Randall Schweller,
Bo Rothstein,
Federico Finchelstein, and
Stephen D. Shenfield, His definition of fascism focuses on three concepts:
- "Fascist negations" – anti-liberalism, anti-communism, and anti-conservatism.
- "Fascist goals" – the creation of a nationalist dictatorship to regulate economic structure and to transform social relations within a modern, self-determined culture, and the expansion of the nation into an empire.
- "Fascist style" – a political aesthetic of romantic symbolism, mass mobilization, a positive view of violence, and promotion of masculinity, youth, and charismatic authoritarian leadership.
Umberto Eco lists fourteen "features that are typical of what [he] would like to call
'Ur-Fascism', or
'Eternal Fascism'. 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. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it." Historian
John Lukacs argues that there is no such thing as generic fascism. He claims that
Nazism and
communism are essentially manifestations of
populism, and that states such as Nazi Germany and
Fascist Italy are more different from each other than they are similar.
In his book
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018),
Jason Stanley defined fascism thusly:
[A] cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation ... The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.
Stanley says recent global events as of 2020, including the
COVID-19 pandemic and the
2020–2022 United States racial unrest, have substantiated his concern about how fascist rhetoric is showing up in politics and policies around the world.
Roger Griffin describes fascism as "a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a
palingenetic form of populist
ultranationalism." Palingenesis is a concept of
rebirth or re-creation, used in various contexts in
philosophy,
theology,
politics, and
biology. Its meaning stems from
Greek palin, meaning 'again', and genesis, meaning 'birth'. Without palingenetic ultranationalism, there is no "genuine fascism" according to Griffin. Griffin further describes fascism as having three core components: "(i) the rebirth myth, (ii) populist ultra-nationalism, and (iii) the myth of decadence." In Griffin's view, fascism is "a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism" built on a complex range of theoretical and cultural influences. He distinguishes an inter-war period in which it manifested itself in elite-led but populist "armed party" politics opposing socialism and liberalism, and promising radical politics to rescue the nation from decadence.
Kershaw argues that the difference between fascism and other forms of right-wing authoritarianism in the
interwar period is that the latter generally aimed "to conserve the existing social order", whereas fascism was "revolutionary", seeking to change society and obtain "total commitment" from the population. In Against the Fascist Creep,
Alexander Reid Ross writes regarding Griffin's view: "Following the
Cold War and shifts in fascist organizing techniques, a number of scholars have moved toward the minimalist 'new consensus' refined by Roger Griffin: 'the mythic core' of fascism is 'a populist form of
palingenetic ultranationalism.' That means that fascism is an ideology that draws on old, ancient, and even arcane myths of racial, cultural, ethnic, and national origins to develop a plan for the 'new man.'" Griffin himself explored this 'mythic' or 'eliminable' core of fascism with his concept of post-fascism to explore the continuation of Nazism in the modern era. Additionally, other historians have applied this minimalist core to explore proto-fascist movements.
Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser argue that although fascism "flirted with populism ... in an attempt to generate mass support", it is better seen as an elitist ideology. They cite in particular its exaltation of the Leader, the race, and the state, rather than the people. They see populism as a "thin-centered ideology" with a "restricted morphology" that necessarily becomes attached to "thick-centered" ideologies such as fascism, liberalism, or socialism. Thus populism can be found as an aspect of many specific ideologies, without necessarily being a defining characteristic of those ideologies. They refer to the combination of populism, authoritarianism and ultranationalism as "a marriage of convenience".
Robert Paxton says:
[Fascism is] a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Roger Eatwell defines fascism as "an ideology that strives to forge social rebirth based on a
holistic-national radical
Third Way", while
Walter Laqueur sees the core tenets of fascism as "self-evident: nationalism;
social Darwinism; racialism, the need for leadership, a new aristocracy, and obedience; and the negation of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution."
Historian
Emilio Gentile has defined fascism thusly:
[A] modern political phenomenon, revolutionary, anti-liberal, and anti-Marxist, organized in a militia party with a totalitarian conception of politics and the state, an activist and anti-theoretical ideology, with a mythical, virilistic and anti-hedonistic foundation, sacralized as a secular religion, which affirms the absolute primacy of the nation, understood as an ethnically homogeneous organic community, hierarchically organized in a corporate state, with a bellicose vocation to the politics of greatness, power, and conquest aimed at creating a new order and a new civilization.
Historian and cultural critic Ruth Ben-Ghiat has described fascism as "the original phase of authoritarianism, along with early communism, when a population has undergone huge dislocations or they perceive that there's been changes in society that are very rapid, too rapid for their taste".
Racism was a key feature of German fascism, for which the
Holocaust was a high priority. According to The Historiography of
Genocide, "In dealing with the Holocaust, it is the consensus of historians that Nazi Germany targeted Jews as a race, not as a religious group." Several historians, such as Umberto Eco, Kevin Passmore, and Moyra Grant, stress
racism as a characteristic component of German fascism. Historian
Robert Soucy stated that "Hitler envisioned the ideal German society as a
Volksgemeinschaft, a racially unified and hierarchically organized body in which the interests of individuals would be strictly subordinate to those of the nation, or Volk." Kershaw noted that common factors of fascism included "the 'cleansing' of all those deemed not to belong—foreigners, ethnic minorities, 'undesirables'" and belief in its own nation's superiority, even if it was not biological racism like in Nazism. Fascist philosophies vary by application, but remain distinct by one theoretical commonality: all traditionally fall into the far-right sector of any
political spectrum, catalyzed by afflicted class identities over conventional social inequities.
According to the
Council on Foreign Relations, many experts see fascism as a mass political movement centered around extreme nationalism, militarism, and the placement of national interests above those of the individual. Fascist regimes often advocate for the overthrow of institutions that they view as "liberal decay" while simultaneously promoting traditional values. They believe in the supremacy of certain peoples and use it to justify the persecution of other groups. Fascist leaders often maintain a cult of personality and seek to generate enthusiasm for the regime by rallying massive crowds. This contrasts with authoritarian governments, which also centralize power and suppress dissent, but want their subjects to remain passive and demobilized.
The term
fascist has been used as a
pejorative, regarding varying movements across the far right of the political spectrum.
George Orwell noted in 1944 that the term had been used to denigrate diverse positions "in internal politics". Orwell said that while fascism is "a political and economic system" that was inconvenient to define, "as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. ... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'", and in 1946 wrote that "'Fascism' has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable." Richard Griffiths of the
University of Wales wrote in 2000 that "fascism" is the "most misused, and over-used word, of our times".
Fascist is sometimes applied to post-World War II organizations and ways of thinking that academics more commonly term
neo-fascist.
Despite fascist movements' history of
anti-communism,
Communist states have sometimes been referred to as fascist, typically as an
insult. It has been applied to
Marxist–Leninist regimes in
Cuba under
Fidel Castro and
Vietnam under
Ho Chi Minh. Chinese Marxists used the term to denounce the
Soviet Union during the
Sino-Soviet split, and the Soviets used the term to denounce Chinese Marxists, in addition to
social democracy, coining a new term in
social fascism. In the United States, Herbert Matthews of
The New York Times asked in 1946: "Should we now place Stalinist Russia in the same category as Hitlerite Germany? Should we say that she is Fascist?"
J. Edgar Hoover, longtime
FBI director and ardent anti-communist, wrote extensively of
red fascism. The
Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s was sometimes called fascist. Historian Peter Amann states that, "Undeniably, the Klan had some traits in common with European fascism—chauvinism, racism, a mystique of violence, an affirmation of a certain kind of archaic traditionalism—yet their differences were fundamental ... [the KKK] never envisioned a change of political or economic system."
