When Robert O. Paxton, Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science at Columbia University, first published The Anatomy of Fascism (Random House, 2004, Vintage Books, 2005), it was a definitive historical study of what he called "the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain." A definitive historical study of a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon it still is, of course, but 20+ years on it also speaks presciently to troubling contemporary political movements and events.
For Paxton, fascism is "the most important political novelty of the twentieth century: a popular movement against the Left and against liberal individualism. Contemplating fascism we see most clearly how the twentieth century contrasted with the nineteenth, and what the twenty-first century must avoid." Paxton clearly distinguishes fascism from conservatism and conservative authoritarianism. Thus, for example, he finds little or no fascism in Franco's Spain. (Both "Franco and Salazar reduced fascist parties to powerlessness.") On the other hand, he emphasizes the importance of conservative collaboration with historical fascism. "Fascist movements could never grow without the help of ordinary people, even conventionally good people. Fascists could never attain power without the acquiescence or even active assent of the traditional elites ... The excesses of fascism in power also required wide complicity among members of the establishment." That combination of anti-liberal populism and elite establishment acquiescence seems again relevant in our contemporary context.
Historical fascism in 1920s Italy and 1930s Germany was related to the liberal political order's inability to deal adequately with the challenges of the post World War I world. Perhaps, we can see some similar parallels today in the apparent collapse of the traditional liberal politics in the post-Cold War, post-9/11, post-financial collapse era.
Rather than articulate an abstract definition of fascism, Paxton focuses on what historical fascists actually did - "a succession of processes and choices: seeking a following, forming alliances, bidding for power, then exercising it."
Examining historical fascism in interwar Italy and Germany, he. highlights how World War I "discredited optimistic and progressive views of the future, and cast doubt upon liberal assumptions about natural human harmony. Socially, it spawned armies of restless veterans (and their younger brothers) looking for ways to express their anger and disillusion without heed for old-fashioned law or morality." This is not 1920s Italy, but we too live in a society which has increasingly rejected progressive illusions and from which young men especially are increasingly alienated and nihilistic. All this is combined again with a distinctly problematic expression of resurgent nationalism. "Fascisms seek out in each national culture those themes that are best capable of mobilizing a mass movement of regeneration, unification, and purity, directed against liberal individualism and constitutionalism and against Leftist class struggle." Fascism involves "a passionate nationalism. Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history."
Fascism presupposes the mass politics of the 20th century. Looking for 19th-century precursors, however, he identifies interestingly the American Ku Klux Klan as "the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism" and "a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe." He finds it unsurprising "that the most precocious democracies - the United States and France - should have geneerated precocious backlashes against democracy."
Italian and German fascisms contended successfully in the political arena. They offered "a new political style that would attract voters who had concluded that 'politics' had become dirty and futile." Doesn't that sound familiar? "When a constitutional system seizes up in deadlock and democratic institutions cease to function, the 'political arena' tends to narrow."
Mussolini famously lacked any actual program and adapted as opportunity presented, changing his tune to ally eventually with the Church and the monarchy. Both he and Hitler came to power by legitimate constitutional means. Neither formally abolished "the normative state" (and in Mussolini's case the state was still sufficiently strong to bring him down in the end).
While charismatic leadership is not limited to fascism, it appears that fascism requires it. That dependence on charisma "may help explain why no fascist regime has so far managed to pass power to a successor." Without necessarily pushing the analogy too far, something similar still seems to be the case.
Mussolini's compromises with traditional elites and the Church made his regime increasingly appear more authoritarian than fascist. Hence his need for a war of aggression. "War provided fascism's clearest radicalizing impulse... both Hitler and Mussolini deliberately chose war as a necessary step in realizing the full potential of their regimes."
Paxton considers the "inoculation of most Europeans against traditional fascism by its public shaming in 1945" to be "inherently temporary." Future fascism "- an emergency response to some still unimagined crisis - need not resemble classical fascism perfectly in its outward signs and symbols." He imagines an "authentically popular American fascism would be pious, antiblack, and, since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well." Also the collapse of the Soviet Union has left "the radical Right" with "no serious rivals as the mouthpiece for the angry 'losers' of the new post-industrial, globalized, multiethnic Europe" - and we might add the U.S. Armed with "reassuring language and symbols and in the event of some redoubtable setback to national prestige, Americans. might support an enterprise of forcible national regeneration, unification, and purification. Its targets would be the First Amendment, separation of Church and State ... efforts to place controls on gun ownership, desecrations of the flag, unassimilated minorities, artistic license, dissident and unusual behavior of all sorts that coudl be labeled antinational or decadent."
As "ominous warning signals," Paxton identifies "situations of political deadlock in the face of crisis, threatened conservatives looking for tougher allies, ready to give up due process and the rule of law, seeking mass support by nationalist and racialist demagoguery."
Remember, Paxton anticipated all this over 20 years ago!
Only at the end, does Paxton finally formulate this working definition of fascism:
"Fascism may be defined as 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."
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