If I’m completely honest, this topic deserves a much fuller treatment than I’m going to give it here. I thought about holding off so that I could do a more robust job of what I’m going to do here, bring in a few more sources, things like that. However, two things happened. First, I realized I hadn’t done a blog yet today and I want to keep my momentum going. Second, as I thought again on what I needed to write this for, I realized that just laying everything out now would enable me to move forward with analysis.
With all that said, I’m just going to go for it. What is it I’m going for? I’m going to give a definition of general fascism. Now, I have previously written an article called “What Is General Fascism?” that tried to get at this question. I believe my thinking was somewhat hasty there. Mostly, I was again responding to Umberto Eco’s “Ur-Fascism”, and I think that constrained how I thought about the question to some extent. There is also a level to which the point of “What Is General Fascism?” was agitation over analysis. I won’t give you an answer as to which I’m doing more of here; that would defeat the point either way.
The definition I give here is going to build off of what I wrote in “What Is General Fascism?”, but I am going to argue from a slightly different direction. The definition I will eventually come to will easily encompass the earlier one, but I think it is specific in a way that the earlier one isn’t. The goal here is to provide a framework by which I (and anyone else) can assess a government as generally fascist or not.
One of the main devices that will need to be used here is recursion, which is when something goes back in on itself. In this case, what I mean is that I’m going to start out with a basic definition of general fascism, then I’m going to break down that basic definition and explain it so that we can get to a truer definition of general fascism. The next part of my project is to apply this standard to some historical cases in order to see if the definition holds up.
But before we can take the eighth step, we’ve got to take the first.
What is fascism? If you don’t have a firm idea in your head, you probably have a couple of historical movements in mind. Nazi Germany and fascist Italy are almost always in the top 5, if not #1 and #2, no matter who you ask. They are among the few independent states to have ever called themselves fascist and, of course, they were the primary belligerents of World War II.
But there are other regimes which are seen as either fascist or quasi-fascist, even if they don’t consider themselves that way. The regimes of Francisco Franco in Spain and the military rule in Japan are chief examples. Many people, even many leftists, call Soviet rule (especially under Stalin) a form of fascism. Should these groups be called fascist or not? Especially in the case of the Soviet Union, one objection is that their government was communist and therefore fundamentally cannot be fascist, since fascism is a far-right movement and communism is a far-left movement.
While I have less contempt for the left-right schema than other people, that is obviously a bullshit justification. Trying to erase this conception is why I came up with this idea of “general fascism”, to give me a way to describe fascistic government without just relying on the outreach of the ruling party. The primary reason that I feel this needs to be done should become clearer when I give this first definition, which I will actually just quote from “What Is General Fascism?”
“[G]eneral fascism is any political ideology which attempts to impose an illiberal order on a liberalized society.”
Even though what comes right after this is not as thought-through as I would like, this definition is still at the core of what I’m investigating. The definition I will ultimately arrive at is more refined than this one. What this definition shows is both the goal of fascism and the idea that the liberalized society is in need of protection.
To truly define general fascism, then, we first need to come up with a definition of general liberalism. This is an area that I will want to thoroughly revise sometime in the future. For now, with a bit of thought and some reference work, I’ve come up with three basic tenets that would make up general liberalism:
- popular sovereignty, including consent of the governed
- individual rights and liberties
- equality of all before the law
- individual rights and liberties
Each of the major tenets proceeds from another one, with popular sovereignty being the foundation of it all. That doesn’t mean the list is reducible to popular sovereignty, however. Fascism claims to uphold popular sovereignty while subverting it. While liberalism’s values logically derive from one another, the three points must all be upheld for us to say that a society is generally liberal in character.
There should be a historical discussion here to help illustrate the change in ruling ideology between the pre-liberal and liberal eras; this will also be a future project. For now, I’m going to make a statement that I won’t support, but which should ring as plausible if not true.
Wiktionary defines authoritarianism as “[a] form of government in which the governing body has absolute, or almost absolute, control. Typically this control is maintained by force, and little heed is paid to public opinion or the judicial system.” I will come up with a definition more appropriate to this context later, but I bring this up to suggest that all governments prior to the French Revolution were essentially authoritarian in character. Pre-Revolutionary republics, at least in Europe, were all aristocratic republics rather than democratic ones where full political participation was not available to everyone. Even in Rome, where all citizens supposedly had a voice, the majority of citizens lived outside of the vicinity of Rome itself and would never be able to actually vote.
I say that to suggest that if we can say that all pre-Revolutionary governments were authoritarian, we can further say that there were effectively only two explicit justifications for the ruling class’s position: 1) lordship, which is to say that the ruler (or ruling party) claims the state as its property and therefore assumes ultimate privilege; or 2) protectionism, which is when the ruler claims to be the only one fit to protect the state and therefore assumes ultimate control. These justifications are practically similar but philosophically distinct, with the former more usual in monarchies and the latter typifying regimes like the Most Serene Republic of Venice.
Of the two, protectionism makes more pragmatic sense; as there could be no fully-accountable higher power to grant property rights to a “top level” lord, the basis of lordship (such as the divine right of kings) is a legal fiction. Despite this disadvantage, the advantage of lordship is that it makes the lord legally unaccountable to others (even though, practically, no one rules alone). Protectionism implies that the ruler is ruling specifically on behalf of others, which means there is an accountable base that can constrain or even reject the ruler.
The liberal revolutions, most prominent being the French Revolution, introduced another justification for the government: democracy. Considered in this sense, democracy is a radical expansion of the logic of protectionism; rather than the small constituency/aristocracy of pre-Revolutionary protectionism, democracy demanded that the government rule on behalf of all people in “the nation”, a new type of identity grouping based directly on the state-society. That’s how “the subjects of the king of France” transformed into “the people of the nation of France”.
This is a tangent I shouldn’t even start down now, but I can’t help myself: I need to clarify that democracy does not mean a real expansion of constituency, even though it should. If you are familiar with my theory about state formation and composition, it may make sense that democracy is the same thing as expanding the constituency outward. That would make protectionism and democracy equal terms. While that’s the supposed goal, in reality, democracy primarily gestures at such an expansion, usually through granting citizenship and/or voting rights. It is primarily an ideological recognition that the only realistic way that a vast group of people would let themselves be ruled by a smaller number is through some kind of consent. Since coercion is considered immoral, the only valid way to run a democratic government is by demonstrating that the consent is voluntary. This is one function of elections and why they are so often used as a litmus test for democracy.
As should be clear from this, the development of democracy as a justification for the state structure made the two justifications for authoritarianism effectively obsolete. Since lordship relied upon a legal fiction, it could never successfully argue its way back into prominence against the fact of the numbers dilemma. I believe that this is the basic reason that no ideology like “divine right of kings” or “the mandate of heaven” has resurfaced, even among strong conservatives who would support a monarchy. These know that some sort of appeal to the people must be made. As for protectionism, this state of affairs still does come about from time to time; many military regimes are best described in this way. Despite this, “classic” protectionism answers only to a small class rather than all the people, and therefore it runs into the numbers dilemma as well. Because of that, classic protectionism requires disproportionate force and/or exploitation in order to keep its regime in power, and this state of affairs will eventually make the rulership unpopular.
Because democracy so completely defeated the justifications for authoritarianism, it was believed by many that there would be no future for authoritarian politics, and that liberal democracy would be the standard from that point forward. This was until the development of totalitarianism. This justification subverted democracy by changing the logic from a bottom-up one to a top-down one. They conceived of the body politic as a true body, one that functioned best when it was continuous, where all parts of it served their function according to the higher, leading will. Rather than rejecting the claim of democracy, it pushed that claim to its absurd extreme: the masses did not only deserve to be listened to, there was nothing but the masses, and rather than pushing with a single force, the masses were one force, one body, one creature, and such a creature did not have many wills to be ascertained by questioning, but just one will that only had to be tapped into.
Totalitarianism is the technology which separates fascism from other forms of authoritarianism. That said, it will not always be as recognizable as the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany. Policies of forced integration are as totalitarian as the presence of branded groups like the Hitler Youth. The elimination of media that carries messages contrary to the regime, reduction of voices in media, the homogenization of education, praise of the nation, all these and more are signs of totalitarian politics. The point is not just to eliminate competition but also to actually construct the state of affairs where the leader’s will can be equated with the national will. This is a process of culture, law, economics, and violence.
Now we can come back to a definition of general fascism. If we are looking for this in a regime, we are looking to see if it has two features: authoritarianism and totalitarianism. The definition of totalitarianism I’ve given just above will be good enough for now. While I did give a definition of authoritarianism earlier, I want to redefine it more accurately and in my own terms. An authoritarian regime is one that exhibits both absolutism and monovocality. Absolutism is seeking or achieving a monopoly on political authority that cannot be shaken from within the formal political system. Monovocality, or one-voicedness, means that the regime wants there to be only one voice in the state; in other word, it rejects political expression from possible rival power centers (for example, religion, labor, other parties, minority groups, etc.).
It should be made clear that though I’ve stated all of these things as if they’ve been accomplished (such as giving the traits of an “authoritarian regime”), these ideologies can function in rising political parties as well. General fascism as an ideology (or category of ideologies) means simply the desire to put these ideas into practice.