The Desire of the Masses for Fascism
They came for the American education, and then nobody saw reasons to speak out. We didn’t know how to identify problems anymore, and an irresponsibly polite relativism reassured us that both sides had a good point.
There is a curious phrase that floats around in my niche of studies: "the desire of the masses for fascism." It rings immediately true and then triggers the question why?. A proto-fascism has been brewing under careful watch for years now, and it is currently bearing its fruit, as always, by those who haven't any clue their ideals are fascist. What percentage of Americans could correctly articulate where fascism sits on the political spectrum or what the common characteristics might be? To even ask such crucial questions make you a pariah.
Nobody "Experiences" Themselves as a Bigot
An exercise I use in my class presents the arguments Civil War-era Christians used to support slavery; oddly enough, the arguments are perfectly clear extensions of specific biases. Nobody experiences themselves as a bigot, and every example of bigotry has its clever self-justification in the bigot's heart. You only ultimately detect bigotry by listening to the minority voices who've been excluded from the picture. It takes very little effort for students to see that each argument is still alive and active today, used by those who imagine they'd have reacted differently. The detail missed (or never taught in the first place) is that for every horrific instance of oppression of the past, there were always specific reasons for that oppression. You think this is different because Muslims are dangerous? I know that feels reassuring, because I thought that same way before I learned to read.
If an outright fascist (who is merely expressing the full, rational conclusion of a carefully-cultivated sentiment) is dethroned, it will only be so that a crypto-fascism may take his place. The Citizens United decision made sure of this. This is very much a “big picture” post, because it needs to be said, but that means there are details over which I admittedly skim. You might see Umberto Eco’s 14 points on fascism, and I highly recommend Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which is a fascinating study of fascism in the real time of the war. I have my own ideas about why fascism has become so suddenly popular, but history will not look kindly on this moment of white rage.
A Close (But Not Quite) Symptom-Disease Relationship
There are only thin shades of grey between neoliberalism and a new fascism; it isn’t clear where one ends and another begins. In old fascism, the state exerted its full control over economic processes. By the late-twentieth century, an emerging crypto-fascism (with the full support of Cold War era “anything but Communism” sentiments) rendered this explicit state control unnecessary. Government and economy were intertwined such that state desire and corporate desire were one and the same. This was true whether corporations and PACs wrote legislation for which a small-town congressman could take credit or whether instead the DC/NY “revolving door” ensured the Federal Reserve board and Wall Street boards were literally the same people. The conscious reasons don't much matter; the effect was the same. What emerged from this arrangement was financially beneficial for a few and disastrous for most; how does a system with disastrous results keep itself voted into power?
It should go without saying that prejudice must be called out for what it is. I’ve been really proud to see so many of my friends in academic and religious fields calling out this behavior even though they have a lot to loose by doing so. What concerns me is that I also see many supremacists denouncing outright supremacy so that we can instead have “supremacy with a smile.” The prejudice of fascism is not merely a symptom-disease relationship; to be sure, the fascist leader uses the tool of prejudice regardless of his personal beliefs, but prejudice is only useful because it is already there, operating in the background with massive social support.
The Desire of the Masses
Thus as a political category, fascism has undergone revisions of definition throughout the twentieth century. We already see supposed experts telling us the candidate is not fascist, and they can reasonably make this argument by pinning the definition of a polymorphous term to a specific historical iteration. Educators know all this, but elections bring with them the frequent transgressions of Godwin’s Law that decry a term while never defining it. We do this all the time; it isn’t an accident that we have no standard definition for “terrorism.” The term needs to float on a case-by-case basis in order to keep us from asking critical questions. The same is true of fascism. Fascism has a set of fairly specific definitions in political theory, but on Facebook it gets misrepresented as nothing more complex than prejudice and fear. A fascist system doesn’t mind. In fact, it thrives on being misrepresented as xenophobia, which is merely the preferred affect that fascism deploys in order to keep the masses cheering in its favor. And the masses certainly do desire fascism, because control feels safe.
“In the affirmation of the desire of the masses for fascism, what is troubling is that an affirmation covers up for the lack of any precise historical analysis. In this I see above all the effect of a general complicity in the refusal to decipher what fascism really was a refusal that manifests itself either in generalization—fascism is everywhere, above all in our heads—or in Marxist schematization. The non-analysis of fascism is one of the important political facts of the past thirty years. It enables fascism to be used as a floating signifier, whose function is essentially that of denunciation.” - Michel Foucault [1]
I’ve always loved this quote from Foucault, because it has a chastising effect on me. As an educator, I have a responsibility to think in systems and give people a certain picture. The risk is that sometimes the picture is overly broad, and at other times the picture seems clear to me but nobody else. My friends who’ve devoted themselves to critical theory would have more to say, but this is how I try to make this understandable in my book:
The right-wing leader has the education and experience to know that much of what he needs to say to win the hearts of a demographic will be purely foolish. Take the extreme example of fascism, an abused word with a rather simple meaning, namely, the perfect union of capital interests and the state. Fascism, like liberalism, exists in a democracy and requires the support of the people. The obstacle it faces is the simple matter that capitalism’s defining profit reallocation does not work out well for the vast majority. Capitalism thrives when its population lacks the understanding of a system that, by definition, cannot ever pay its workers for the value they contribute to their corporations; if we are paid for all the value we contribute, it is by definition not a specifically capitalist enterprise. Economic crises, wealth inequality, and even lack of basic necessities are not accidents of this arrangement but are instead predictable and required sacrifices. Thus the fascist, in order to capture the support of a population whose lifestyle is directly threatened by moneyed interests, must deploy the perverse strategy of fetish disavowal.
The figure of the Jew became the standard exclusionary device in the West, but modern forms of fascism in Europe and North America deploy the same basic structure by blaming the immigrant, the ethnic or sexual minority, education and science, etc. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, who are interesting to read as intellectuals processing anti-Semitism during the war, describe the phenomenon as a repressed mimesis. “Anti-Semitism is based on a false projection. It is the counterpart of true mimesis, and fundamentally related to the repressed form; in fact, it is probably the morbid expression of repressed mimesis. Mimesis imitates the environment, but false projection makes the environment like itself.” [2] Psychoanalysis views anti-Semitism (and xenophobia in general) as a case of morbid projection where the subject’s own unconscious taboo impulses are transferred upon an external object.[3] The exclusion of the object (whether in sacrificial or murderous form) reveals some truth about the subject. They continue, “But in Fascism this behavior is made political; the object of the illness is deemed true to reality; and the mad system becomes the reasonable norm in the world and deviation from it a neurosis.”[4] The consequences between extremist exclusion in the 1940s and today clearly have vast differences, but the structure of exclusion—for the purposes of projection and distraction—remains the same. Also remaining the same is the fact that the leader on the far right does not need to believe what he says in order for his rhetoric to function.
When in the upcoming election you feel tired of choosing between lesser evils (perhaps a neoconservative and an all-but-in-name fascist), what you are actually tired of is a natural, predictable, and likely inevitable result of politics in late-capitalism.
[1] Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 130.
[2] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 178.
[3] Ibid.,192.
[4] Ibid.,178.
