What with Islamists being called "Islamofascists" these days by, ironically, the right wing, it pays us to consider to what extent any modern political movement is fascist. Bear with me, because this is an essay about historical relations.
Terms in history are used in one of two ways. Either you are referring to a historically connected sequence of ideas and institutions, or you are using a measure of similarity. A third alternative, popular but unhistorical, is to specify some group as an Evil Demon or Adversary, and to label all who you dislike as being the latest in that demonological taxon.
Take "fundamentalist" for example. Fundamentalism, with a capital letter, is the Christian Protestant tradition that arose in the 1910s from a series of books that were titled "The Fundamentals" of Christian faith. Jews, Muslims and Catholics cannot be Fundamentalists historically, unless they are directly or mediately influenced by these books. But there's another sense of "fundamentalism", with the lower case initial, that people use - of being strong religious conservatives aiming to impose their views on others, that is derived from the behaviour of Fundamentalists and applied analogically to other streams of culture. We even hear of "Darwinian Fundamentalists"...
This analogical sense of social movements is basically (I almost typed "fundamentally") ahistorical. Any movement at any time or culture, even in Hindu, Roman or Babylonian contexts, can be called "fundamentalist" in this sense. However, what is gained by so naming them this way? Only the similarity that motivated you to apply the label in the first place. You get no further understanding of the particular dynamics of that historical entity but what you put into it in the first place. And it is a strong temptation to misunderstand that event in its uniqueness.
Recently, I appealed to a parallel between the loss of the Republic in Rome under Tiberius, and the present rollback of liberal freedoms in the United States. And for some time now, people have been drawing parallels between the rise of the fascists in Europe, particularly how Hitler gained control of the democratic Weimar Republic in Germany, and the way the Republican Party (another historical irony!) in the United States is taking over and dismantling democratic checks and balances in the name of the eponymous "War on Terror". See, for example, this essay on the Leiter Report.
How helpful are these parallels? One of the problems in understanding history is that no two events are exactly identical, but we appeal to known cases to infer the outcomes of the present, all the time. There is a reason for this - history does have similarities, and if you happen to use the right measure in your analogy, you can, indeed, make some reasonably relible inferences. But if you are out - if you choose the wrong similarity - then all bets are off.
On the other hand, things evolve, so using the lineages of causal relations can equally be unhelpful. The Fundamentalists of today are not the same in their beliefs and institutions as those of 1909, because their conditions have changed and there have been developments since.
But one thing about historical relations is that you can see the differences as they evolve, and in the case of a record, date them. If literalism becomes a defining feature of Fundamentalism after the books were published, then that is something we can take into account.
So, is the Bush Administration fascist? Are "Islamofascists"? Let's look at the historical origins briefly. Fascism is a movement in capitalist societies where large corporate interests and nationalistic governments cooperate. Nationalists like to have strong authoritarian governments that exclude dissenters from power. Corporations like to have strong ties to those governments to advance their interests, corruptly. Fascism was a movement that used all kinds of proagandistic tactics to ensure that the general populace had no say in changing policy, while leading them to think they did through skewed popular votes.
While National Socialism was defeated in Germany, fascism survived the second world war in Spain, and various south American countries, and the ideology of fascism and the right wing parties of the Allied nations were not all that far apart, conceptually. The present fascist tendencies of the Republicans in the US are not analogical to those of the European fascisms. They are direct descendants. In part this is because of the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle - the Cold War ensured that in the late 1950s, the US combined its corporate culture with its militaristic culture to fight against communism. American fascism was born then. The 1960s and 1970s were a period of liberalism in the ascendancy but the "military industrial complex" that Eisenhower warned of, which became the slogan of the leftist movements opposing the Vietnam War, was nonetheless real and strengthened its position to the point that Democrats and Republicans alike did not challenge it.
In contrast, Islamists do not have a corporate culture as such, and decry capitalism as anti-Islam. Their analogy is less with fascism and more with the religious opposition to modernity of all religions, from the fall of Islamic high culture in the 12th century to modern Christian fundamentalists today. They are a general phenomenon that plays out in a given context in its own way.
So the irony of the modern neo-Conservative movement in the Republican Party, informed by way of Leo Strauss and other neo-fascist thinkers, calling Islamists "fascist" should not be lost on anyone. This is a common tactic of Fascism - accuse others of your own sins in order to draw attention from them. Mussolini and Hitler did it. Rove does it now. Islamists are a convenient Demon to use to unite the populace under your grab for control. So are atheists, humanists, liberals and the educated. It doesn't matter what the Enemy is, so long as there is one.
Unlike many Australians, I love America - I love its culture, its diversity, and people. I don't love all of it, of course - nobody can be expected to love everything in a nation that big. But the idea of America - democratic, liberal, ruled by law not influence - is something I grew up respecting. It pains me to say that America is on the cusp of a Fascism, a corrupted democracy that serves Big Business, with a venial opposition that serves Big Labor, and with a legal system that is increasingly skewed to serve those interests at the expense of the common person.
So the analogy between Fascism and modern America is a historical one that sheds light, both from its similarities and its differences. Islamism is not a fascism - its a much older phenomenon that needs no modern parallels to be understood. I hope that Americans will soon realise what they are undergoing, and form a democratic opposition, even if it has to be an underground movement of resistance. I truly hope that this can be done peacefully, without a civil war. But when you have a large nation that polarised and corrupted, I fear there will indeed be one.
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One of the main components of fascism is the idealization of the state and the supremacy of the military. It's very ironic that it is predominantly conservatives that are pushing these ideas, as they largely consider themselves decendants of the founding revolutionaries (particularly Madison and Jefferson), who were very stern in their warnings that the development of such things would undermine our Constitution and our Liberties.
Whether or not civil war can be avoided depends on the action taken at the crossroads we will inevitably come to. Either we will preserve political order, withdrawing our overextended military forces around the world allowing our global to recede slowly (thus going the way of the British Empire); or we lose political order, attempt to maintain our hegemony purely by force, inevtiably lose, and collapse into civil war in the process. Needless to say, I hope for the former.
Is Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S the next logical step?
shaun
You guys really need to include a send this entry to: printer icon/link with the other send to buttons.
Word.
"It's very ironic that it is predominantly conservatives that are pushing these ideas, as they largely consider themselves decendants of the founding revolutionaries (particularly Madison and Jefferson), who were very stern in their warnings that the development of such things would undermine our Constitution and our Liberties."
They may *view* themselves as something, but it doesn't mean that they resemble it in the slightest. Think of the modern right-wing 'christian' movement - how does it resemble Christianity in the Bible?
I would posit that using the term "fundamentalist" -- with the lower-case "f" -- is actually very illustrative; not in a comparing-one-movement-to-another sense, even though that is how most do view that context. The term itself, though, refers to one who believes in the fundamentals of a given faith or movement -- and you have folks like that in any movement, often to the point that they shun entertaining even any other argument. I have long believed that it is this very fundamentalism in any movement that is what causes many problems -- not *what* a person believes, but the degree to which they believe it. There is a difference between the person who says "the Bible/Q'uran/Popul Voh/Bhagavad Gita/ORIGIN OF SPECIES says THIS, but others do disagree and we still have to share a planet with them," and the person who says "the Bible/Q'uran/Popul Voh/Bhagavad Gita/ORIGIN OF SPECIES says THIS, and everyone who disagrees with them must be punished."
As for your views on fascism, I'm sending a link around to at least nine-tenths of the people I know saying "good stuff here, read this."
The most thoughtful commentary in the blogosphere on American pseudo-fascism is from David Neiwert, the proprietor over at Orcinus. He's got a lengthy essay called The Rise of Pseudo Fascism in .pdf format. His analysis includes looking at formal and informal definitions of fascism, and he spends at least as much time on the differences between the current climate in the USA and the acknowledged fascist movements in the 20th century as he does on the similarities.
He's also done a great deal of research as a journalist covering the intertwined militia movements, white racist groups, and anti-immigrant activities in the Western US, particularly in the Northwest where he's based. The articles and conversations have even taken in the Sydney beach riots of last December.
I don't think you've got the distinction right. Most Christian fundamentalists (as self-identified, and conforming to the ideas that historically defined the movement) I've known (including myself, 30 years ago) are quite happy to share the planet with those who disagree. They just think that the legitimate boundaries of Christianity end where their beliefs do. And yes, they think that their philosophy is a superior way to order one's life -- but then so do most of us, to some degree. So I see your distinction as pushing that analogy too far beyond the historical connection to be meaningful.
Your argument that modern US Republicans are fascists fails because the traits you ascribe to fascism will appear in any nation-state which permits privately-run business at all, whether it is run by "conservatives" or "liberals." Your definition of "fascism" is therefore so broad as to be meaningless, and your conclusions drawn therefrom are worthless.
When you can identify the traits that truly did distinguish fascism from other forms of government, feel free to try again.
1. Fascism is both a political ideology and an "exceptional form" of (captialist) state. Even on the most loose set of definitions neither the Bush administration (in the first sense) nor the American government (in the second) can be considered fascist without doing great violence to the term. For those unfamiliar with political science concepts, Wikipedia is as good a place to start as anywhere:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
but the corporate-State nexus is not constitutive of fascism in either sense of the term in anyone's definition. It should also be noted that none of the existing Islamic governments (Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia) can be meaningfully described as fascist.
2. Fundamentalism in contemporary usage is a much more slippery concept, even though the term can be traced to The Fundamentals of 1909 (just as the term fascism can be traced to the Italian fascismo movement while the modern concept has grown beyond that). But perhaps the following could be considered constitutive:
* A rejection of secularism and reason (in its Enlightenment historical sense and a foundational priciple of the American and French revolutions) in favour of embracement of ...
* A perceived foundational set of principles derived from an allegedly literal reading of a set of religious texts whose meaning is not subject to interpretation (a contradiction in terms, of course) and held to be inerrant.
* Assertion of a unitary and totalising world view (based on those foundational principles) that it is the responsibility of adherents to see translated into politico-juridical reality.
This would make it valid to refer to certain Christian and Muslim groups as fundamentalist not simply as a label but as a conceptual framework that unites genuinely similar phenonemon deriving from separate historical processes. This of course is something Christian fundamentalist strongly resist, for obvious reasons.
The most common misuse of the term fundamentalist is as a synonym for "dogmatic", eg "Richard Dawkins is a fundamentalist atheist" (leaving aside the question of whether or not he actually is dogmatic) is a common charge of "moderate" Christians.
3. As a sidenote, a particular irritation for me is the misuse of the term "evolution" as a synonym for "develop" or simply "change with time". (eg fundamentalism has evolved). There is also the unrelated but more clearly wrong failure to recognise that the scientific uses of the term evolution are quite different between biology and physics (particularly astronomy) - I vaguely recall that Gould may have written an essay about this.
A couple of additional thoughts on fundamentalism. Under my definitions it is problematic to refer to either Catholic or Jewish fundamentalists, given the centrality of their respective interprative traditions. Also, many cults (not just of the religious sort) may at first glance appear to have a fundamentalist-like relationship to a set of texts but this ignores the fact that the cult leader(s) exercise their power through a monopoly on textual interpretation. Cults are therefore far less "democratic" but more prone to changing positions. And finally, it would appear Islam is inherently more prone to fundamentalism because the claim that the Qu'ran is the literal (actually dictated) word of God is far more central and unavoidable in Islam than the equivalent claim in Christianity (and Judaism, whose priesthood invented the idea after the Babylonian exile).
jackd's comment refers to David Neiwert's excellent essay. Many thanks for that reference - it's an excellent piece. But his distinction between fascism and pseudo-fascism is, I think, ahistorical. As he notes, fascism has no ideology; it has no essence. All of the defining features he mentions have been expressed in many different societies and regimes, from the earliest times to the present. To define fascism in terms of these more or less "universals" is to take one particular event in history (the European fascists) and use it as the type specimen for things that occur for a variety of different reasons in many different traditions and contexts.
But to see the present neo-Conservatives as fascists is to make a historical claim about where they get many of their core practices, tropes and memes - they do indeed get it from the European fascists. They may not be aware of this, and they may even decry fascism (when it's said of others) but their use of propaganda, social unity, the primacy of the State ("national security") and so forth are directly descended from the fascist movement.
I am unconvinced that he has a case that the Republicans aren't (yet) fascist, either. There's a distinction to be made between deriving one's core program from something, and expressing it in full mode. A nascent fascism is as much a fascism as a neonate is a human. It's part of the lifecycle of political movements that they start off simply and hesitantly (although I think Neiwert shows that many of the so-called partially fascist views are in fact in full flower and just not yet widely known, such as the undercutting of democracy and democratic institutions). He simply did not know, at that time, how well developed the fascist phenotype was. It's clearer now.
So I stick by my original claim - this is a fascist regime in the making. Americans had better start a resistance movement soon, and it won't be the Democrats, who have taken to emulating their harder line cousins.
John,
While I agree that Neiwert's interesting essay is unconvicing, I perhaps have more problems with some of your characterisations:
This statement is, in my view, simply wrong, but at a minimum would require some substantiation for it to be taken seriously.
It is also not clear whether you are ascribing the alleged trend to fascism to the 1. the neo-conservative movement, 2. the Republican party, or 3. the American state apparatus. This is of some importance since it is probable that the Republicans will lose control of both the legislature and the executive over the next 4 years - with a resulting upheaval in the GOP whose consequences cannot be currently predicted.
But most of all, the question for me is: do we gain any deeper insight by assigning the label fascist, proto-fascist, pseudo-fascist or nascent fascist to these developments, and if so what?
In the absence of any evidence that political dictatorship (an obligatory defining characteristic of actual fascism) is a remotely likely outcome of the neocon ascendency, the designation seems singularly unhelpful in plotting a fightback strategy.
Okay, I'm not saying that the neo-Cons are directly cribbing from Mussolini. I'm saying that the ideas that they draw from derive, through western political discourse, from fascist roots. To make that claim I have to say that fascism has deeper roots than the 1920s, but considerable sharing of ideas occurred in the period from 1920 to 1940 from European fascists to American discourse (and also to British, South African, Australian and I presume also Canadian politics) of the time. That makes them descendants of the fascist movement. At a pinch I would say they are sister species.
Glad to contribute, albeit indirectly, to the conversation.
John,
Well, here is where the initial lack of precision leads to the unravelling of the entire fabric of this argument. If we search for the roots of neo-conservative ideology in the inter-war period, they are actually in the Left (particularly Shachtmanite, but social democrat more generally), transformed in the 1960s ("mugged by reality" to use Irving Kristol's self-pitying phrase) into the line of thinking represented today by writers such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams, Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Kristol, etc. I don't think these are the people you have in mind - which means you cannot mean neo-conservatives.
A slightly better case can perhaps be made for the "paleoconservatives" (see excellent Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoconservatives) of which Pat Buchanan is perhaps the best-known example. But such a link involves many highly attentuated steps from the anti New Deal Right and is not really credible as any kind of political pedigree.
Much closer to some kind of proto-fascism are the groupings clustered around the Christian Reconstructionist movement, whose support the administration has actively sought but whose true program is simply not a political starter, even with Bush (whatever loopy rhetoric he may use from time to time).
But the point is that these right-wing groupings do not have identical, or often even complementary, agendas once the going gets tough. The Neiwert amalgamation of these tendencies in one "conservative movement" verges on conspiracy theory. Indeed, in the absence of a charismatic and populist leader the Right remains electorally vulnerable to any half-competent Democrat (if one can be found). Note also the absence of a profound economic crisis, which has always been an obligatory context for the emergence of fascist movements.
Consider, for instance, that the Foley scandal - a relatively trivial matter from the point of view of policy -could trigger a Republican route in the forthcoming mid-term elections.
Collectively, the American Right is serious, scary and very stupid - but it's not fascist, not even remotely, at least not yet :-)
JohnC: Forgive me if I'm wrong here, but isn't it the case that many fascists came from the left, including Mussolini? The sort of left wing corporatism that was common in the 70s is not so far fram fascist corporatism (and I mean here, corporatism of the state against the insterests of the individual). Nazism was itself a combination of nationalism and leftist corporatism. I don't find this to be an argument against the persistance of fascist ideas influencing the same folk.
Ceratinly there are deeper roots. Leo Strauss, for example, interpreted Hobbes in the light of late 19th century conservatism and Machiavelli. But as fascism is a historical tendency rather than a single set of doctrines, when we see that sort of corporatism, militarism, and antiliberalism combined in a polity that evolved from a shared set of these attitudes (the US has been consistently more favourable to fascist regimes than liberal or socialist ones), then the only answer is when it quacks, it's a duck.
John, If you choose a sufficiently high level of generalisation, then everyone on the Right quacks, and so they're all ducks. Okay for rhetoric, but pretty useless for analysis. Confrontation of China (blue team membership), unwavering support for Israel, belief in the military export of democracy and foreign policy unilateralism - all hallmarks of the neocons - are not natural positions for many other conservatives (corporate and traditional), while the Bush domestic agenda often conflicts with other neo-con values (which tend to be relatively liberal). The attempt to broker these conflicting interests is in large measure behind the incoherence of the overall Bush agenda.
Looked at from an Austrlian perspective, the Bush ascendency is like a Joh-for-PM campaign that succeeded (courtesy of those hanging chads)! It is only the legacy of 9/11 (and the incompetence of the Democrats) that is holding this rotten block together, and the key component of that legacy - the invasion of Iraq - is clearly a catastrophe for the US.
But on the topic, the case for the fascist historical roots of neo-conservatism is at best unproved, and may well be seriously misleading when it comes to formulating fightback strategies.
An evolutionary account of political lineages doesn't prevent later instances evolving their own features such as you cite here. In biology, they're called apomorphies (derived characters), while the fascism of old is what we might call the plesiomorphies (ancestral characters). It is not true that all conservatives adopt the standard plesiomorphies of fascism. Nor need it be true that all neocons are fascist - it merely happens that in power, they are. [But I don't think that is coincidence much.]
As to the catastrophe, and formulating a fightback, I do not think that this replies upon our recognition of the fascist roots of the Bush Administration. It is a catastrophe, no doubt about it. But you will need to fight back by understanding both the preserved similarities of fascism, and the particular differences of this instance of it.
Orwell had it exactly right when he wrote "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.'". The Bush administration certainly is in favor of many things that are "not desirable" and even authoritarian in my opinion, but the idea that it is in favor of merging corporations into the government like historical fascists did is just dotty. If anything it is in favor of the exact oppposite, in favor of privatizing many jobs currently held by civil servants (who would probably lose their benefits and pensions, not to mention receiving a cut in pay, in the process).
Just as long as the trains run on time!