Fascism

Based on Wikipedia: Fascism

Historian Ian Kershaw once observed that trying to define fascism is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. The frustration is understandable. Every movement that scholars call "fascist" has unique characteristics, and any definition risks being either so broad it encompasses movements that clearly aren't fascist, or so narrow it excludes ones that obviously are.

Yet fascism has been one of the most consequential political forces in modern history. It reshaped the twentieth century, provoked the deadliest war humanity has ever fought, and carried out industrial-scale genocide. Understanding what fascism actually is—not as a vague insult thrown at political opponents, but as a distinct ideology with identifiable features—matters enormously.

So let's try anyway.

A Bundle of Sticks

The word itself comes from Italian. Fascismo derives from fascio, meaning a bundle of sticks. This was the name Italian political organizations called themselves—fasci—groups similar to trade guilds or labor syndicates. Benito Mussolini claimed he founded the Fasces of Revolutionary Action in 1915, during the First World War. Four years later, in Milan, he established the Italian Fasces of Combat, which became the National Fascist Party in 1921.

The fascists deliberately associated their movement with an ancient Roman symbol called the fasces or fascio littorio: a bundle of rods tied around an axe. Roman magistrates had their attendants carry these bundles as symbols of civic authority. The imagery was intentional. A single rod breaks easily. The bundle is much harder to break.

Strength through unity.

Interestingly, before Mussolini claimed it, the fasces symbol had been used by all sorts of political movements, many of them left-wing or liberal. The French Republic's personification, Marianne, was often depicted carrying the fasces in the nineteenth century, representing republican solidarity against aristocrats and clergy. You can still see the symbol today on the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford and on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The Core Characteristics

Despite the definitional difficulties, scholars have identified certain features that appear consistently across fascist movements. Fascism sits at the far right of the political spectrum. It is authoritarian and ultranationalist. It supports dictatorial leaders, centralized power, and the forcible suppression of opposition. It believes in natural social hierarchies—the idea that some people are simply better than others and deserve to rule.

Fascism subordinates individuals to the collective. Your personal interests matter less than what the regime defines as the interests of the nation or the race. Society and the economy are strictly regimented. Everyone has their place. Deviation is not tolerated.

What fascism opposes is almost as defining as what it supports. Fascists reject communism, democracy, liberalism, pluralism, and socialism. They are anti-egalitarian—the more someone believes that inequality is unavoidable or even desirable, the further right they sit on the political spectrum, and fascism occupies the far edge.

Violence is not an unfortunate necessity for fascists. It is a positive value. Political violence, imperialist violence, war itself—these are seen as means of national rejuvenation, of cleansing weakness and decadence, of forging a stronger people through struggle.

The Myth of Rebirth

One of the most influential schools of fascism studies centers on a concept called palingenesis—a Greek word meaning rebirth or regeneration. Scholars like Stanley Payne, Roger Griffin, and Roger Eatwell argue that fascism is fundamentally a movement built on the myth of national rebirth.

The story fascism tells goes something like this: Our nation was once great. We have fallen into decadence and decline. Foreign influences, internal enemies, and moral decay have corrupted us. But we can be reborn. Through purification, through struggle, through the iron will of a leader who embodies our true national spirit, we can become great again.

This isn't mere nostalgia. Fascism claims to be revolutionary and modern. It wants to create something new—a "new man," a new society, a new civilization—while drawing on ancient myths of racial, cultural, ethnic, and national origins. It's simultaneously backward-looking and future-oriented, traditional and revolutionary.

Griffin calls this "palingenetic ultranationalism" and argues it constitutes the minimum core without which genuine fascism cannot exist. The nation must be reborn. The decadent elements must be purged. A new order must rise from the ashes of the old.

Born in the Trenches

Fascism emerged from the First World War. That conflict transformed everything—the nature of warfare, the relationship between citizens and states, the very fabric of society.

Before 1914, wars were fought by armies while civilians largely continued their lives. The First World War erased that distinction. Total war meant total mobilization. Entire economies were reorganized around military production. Governments gained unprecedented authority to intervene in citizens' daily lives—rationing food, controlling industry, conscripting labor. Millions served on the front lines, with massive logistical systems supporting them from behind.

A new concept emerged: military citizenship. Everyone was involved with the military in some way, whether fighting, producing, or supporting. The powerful state that coordinated all this became a model for what government could be.

Fascism synthesized contradictory elements. Its founders in Italy were national syndicalists who borrowed organizational tactics from the left while embracing political views from the right. By the early 1920s, Italian fascism had gravitated firmly rightward, but it retained a revolutionary energy that distinguished it from traditional conservatism.

This is a crucial distinction. Traditional right-wing authoritarians generally want to conserve the existing social order. Fascism wants to transform it. It seeks total commitment from the population, not merely obedience. As Kershaw notes, fascism is "revolutionary" in ways that other forms of right-wing authoritarianism are not.

The Leader and His Enemies

Jason Stanley, in his book "How Fascism Works," defines the ideology in terms that illuminate how it functions politically:

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.

The leader is essential. Not just any leader—a charismatic, authoritarian figure who embodies the nation's will, who alone can see clearly what must be done, who demands and receives total loyalty. Opposition to this leader isn't merely political disagreement. It's betrayal. It's treason.

The enemies are equally essential. Fascism requires an outgroup to define itself against—an Other to blame for the nation's humiliation, to target for purification, to unite the ingroup in opposition to. Different fascist movements have chosen different targets: various ethnicities, immigrants, political opponents, religious groups, sexual and gender minorities. For German fascism specifically, this meant racial ideology and the concept of a master race.

This isn't abstract theorizing. The demonization of Others has motivated fascist regimes to commit massacres, forced sterilizations, deportations, and genocides. During the Second World War, the fascist regimes of the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and their allies—murdered millions of people pursuing their genocidal and imperialist ambitions.

Autarky and the Corporate State

Economically, fascists typically advocate for what's called a dirigiste system—a market economy where the state plays a strong directing role through intervention, with the principal goal of achieving national economic self-sufficiency, called autarky. The nation should be able to produce everything it needs. Dependence on foreign trade is weakness.

This differs from both free-market capitalism and socialist central planning. Private property and market mechanisms continue to exist, but the state coordinates and directs economic activity toward national goals. Business owners remain in charge of their enterprises, but they operate under close government supervision and must align their activities with state priorities.

Fascist economic theory often frames economic relationships in organic, hierarchical terms—different sectors of the economy as organs in a body, each with its proper function, coordinated by the head. Workers, managers, and owners are all part of the same national community, their class conflicts superseded by shared national identity.

Populism's Dark Marriage

Scholars Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser make an interesting distinction between fascism and populism. Fascism, they argue, "flirted with populism in an attempt to generate mass support," but is better understood as an elitist ideology. It exalts the Leader, the race, and the state—not the people themselves.

Populism, in their framework, is a "thin-centered ideology" that attaches itself to "thick-centered" ideologies like fascism, liberalism, or socialism. You can find populism across the political spectrum, partnering with different substantive belief systems. When populism combines with authoritarianism and ultranationalism, they call it "a marriage of convenience."

This helps explain why fascism could attract mass support while maintaining contempt for the masses themselves. The people are mobilized, celebrated, appealed to—but also manipulated, controlled, and ultimately subordinated to the leader and the state that claims to embody their will.

Fourteen Warning Signs

The Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco, who grew up under Mussolini's regime, identified fourteen features of what he called "Ur-Fascism" or "Eternal Fascism." He noted something important about this list: the features cannot be organized into a coherent system. Many contradict each other. Some appear in other kinds of despotism or fanaticism too. But, Eco argued, "it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it."

This captures something essential about fascism's nature. It is contradictory and syncretic—cobbling together elements that don't logically fit. It is anti-intellectual, privileging action over thought, gut feeling over careful analysis. It adapts to circumstances, taking whatever form serves its pursuit of power.

Historian Emilio Gentile offers perhaps the most comprehensive definition:

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.

That's a mouthful. But each element matters: revolutionary, anti-liberal, anti-Marxist, militia-based, totalitarian, activist over theoretical, mythical, masculine, quasi-religious, ultranationalist, ethnically defined, hierarchical, corporatist, warlike, expansionist, and seeking a new civilization.

Racism at the Core

Racism was central to German fascism. The Holocaust was a high priority for the Nazi regime, not a side project or an unfortunate excess. Historians generally agree that Nazi Germany targeted Jews as a race, not as a religious group. The goal was racial purification—creating what Hitler envisioned as a Volksgemeinschaft, a racially unified and hierarchically organized community where individual interests would be strictly subordinated to those of the nation or Volk.

Not all fascist movements emphasized biological racism to the same degree as Nazism. But as Kershaw notes, common factors across fascism included "the 'cleansing' of all those deemed not to belong—foreigners, ethnic minorities, 'undesirables'"—and belief in the nation's superiority, even when that superiority wasn't defined in strictly biological terms.

Cultural historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat describes 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." This captures the social psychology that makes populations receptive to fascist appeals: displacement, anxiety about rapid change, a sense that the world has become unrecognizable and threatening.

The Fascist Negations

Payne's framework for understanding fascism includes what he calls "fascist negations"—the things fascism defines itself against. Three stand out: anti-liberalism, anti-communism, and anti-conservatism.

The first two are straightforward. Liberalism, with its emphasis on individual rights, limited government, and tolerance of difference, represents everything fascism rejects. Communism, with its internationalism and class-based analysis, is equally despised—the communist idea that workers across nations share common interests against capitalists contradicts fascism's ultranationalism fundamentally.

Anti-conservatism is more complicated. Fascists did ally with traditional conservatives to gain power. Italian fascism drew support from rich landowners and big business who feared leftist uprisings. But fascism wasn't trying to preserve the existing order. It wanted revolution—a different kind of revolution than communists proposed, but revolution nonetheless.

This created tensions that critics of the "national rebirth" school of fascism studies point out. How can fascism be both anti-conservative and allied with conservatives? How can it be revolutionary while preserving capitalist property relations? The answer is that fascism is inherently contradictory, opportunistically adopting whatever positions serve its pursuit of power while maintaining its core commitments to ultranationalism, authoritarianism, and violence.

After the Fall

Since 1945, fascism has been largely disgraced. Few political parties openly describe themselves as fascist anymore. The term has become primarily pejorative—an insult hurled at political opponents rather than a label anyone willingly claims.

This creates complications for analysis. Parties with ideologies similar to or rooted in twentieth-century fascist movements are sometimes called "neo-fascist" or "post-fascist." But the stigma attached to the word means that movements which share fascism's core characteristics often present themselves in different terms.

Robert Paxton offers what might be the most useful working definition for identifying fascism in practice:

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.

Notice what Paxton emphasizes: behavior, not just ideology. The obsession with decline and victimhood. The compensatory cults—unity, energy, purity. The collaboration with traditional elites. The abandonment of democratic liberties. The pursuit of redemptive violence without ethical constraints. Internal cleansing and external expansion.

These are things you can observe in practice, regardless of what a movement calls itself.

Why Definitions Matter

Some scholars, like historian John Lukacs, argue there's no such thing as generic fascism. Each instance is too specific to its national context. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, he claims, were more different from each other than similar.

There's something to this. German fascism's racial obsessions differed from Italian fascism's emphasis on Roman imperial revival. Spanish Francoism had its own character, as did the various fascist movements in Romania, Hungary, Croatia, and elsewhere. Each drew on particular national histories, grievances, and mythologies.

But the family resemblances are undeniable. The ultranationalism. The authoritarianism. The cult of the leader. The demonization of enemies. The glorification of violence. The rejection of liberal democracy. The myth of national rebirth from decadence. These recur too consistently to be coincidental.

Understanding these patterns matters because the conditions that gave rise to fascism—social dislocation, rapid change, economic anxiety, perceived national humiliation, distrust of democratic institutions—are not unique to the early twentieth century. The psychological appeals fascism makes—the promise of strength, unity, and restored greatness; the identification of enemies to blame; the offer of simple answers to complex problems—remain potent.

Fascism may be disgraced as a label. But the impulses it channeled, the fears it exploited, the violent solutions it offered—these persist. Recognizing them requires understanding what fascism actually was, not as a vague term of abuse, but as a specific political phenomenon with identifiable characteristics.

Even if nailing jelly to a wall remains difficult, we can at least describe what the jelly looks like.