The four foundational essays of American Samizdat:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Fascism has been a contested term in recent years. Almost any meaningful word is. One way to contest a usage is to try to hold a word โ the concept it represents โ to a precise application that includes secondary, variable qualities that extend beyond its otherwise clearly distinguishing and identifying characteristics. A pencil is almost always wood (there is the mechanical variety), and as often includes an eraser, but neither is an essentially identifying characteristic. Itโs the encased, solid marking substance โ in everyday usage, graphite โ that marks the pencil.
Some people like to limit fascism to a replication of Mussoliniโs originating type, named from the Italian fasci (bundle of sticks), which identified economic guilds or syndicates of common interests. Syndicalism is one of those circular points of contact between communist and fascist origins. The reactionary conservative form of syndicalism, which came to represent commercial rather than communist workersโ interest, distinguished itself as National Syndicalism. Fascist movements are reactionary nationalist movements.
People are generally willing also to apply the word fascist to the Falange movement of Francoโs Spain, though of course there were differences, one being the strong identification of the movement with the Catholic Church, another that some falangists didnโt accept the appellation. The Lebanese Phalangists were inspired by the Spanish Falange. There have been Falange parties โ reactionary, nationalist, more or less religiously identified, authoritarian โ all around the world.
Arab Ba'athism, a pan-Arab nationalist ideology, introduced an instructive variation. Ba'athists hardly consider themselves fascists. They are, they say, Marxist-inspired socialist revolutionaries. But, then, North Korea calls itself, officially, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. As Ba'athism has been espoused philosophically, and as it governed in Syria and Saddam Husseinโs Iraq, it sought a restoration of a hallowed Arab cultural past and, in Saddamโs case, revanchist reclamation of territory, from Kuwait and Iran. We see an abundance of reโs there, and two more are renaissance and reactionary. One might take time to think through what distinguishes a civilizational rebirth, in renaissance, from the cultural retardation of the reactionary. (Apologies โ got carried away.)
But Marxism is not a nationalist ideology. That was one of the Russian Revolutionโs first betrayals. And the Assads and Saddamโs Ba'athists were no more champions of the working man than Stalin or Brezhnev. Though Ba'athism is philosophically secular, it also opposed communist materialism in pursuit of an idealistic, intellectually coherent Arab cultural nation. Rather than socialist, Ba'athist parties operated state capitalist economies. Ba'athism is, within historical definitions, rife with contradictions.
The most identifiably Marxist characteristic of Ba'athism, in appearance, is its anti or postcolonial rhetoric, a rhetoric that is a modern lingua franca of the historic third world, including the Middle East, and of Western โprogressiveโ movements. Ba'athists were, in presentation, that very thing Trumpists like to call American progressives and even the Democratic party: cultural Marxists. But what Ba'athism is, in essence, is fascism: state nationalist and capitalist, religiously or ethno-culturally defined to xenophobic extremes of exclusion and persecution, authoritarian, and, most definitively, though not sufficiently, fully and expressly anti-liberal.
Fascism focuses a repulsed reaction to modernity, a rejection of the Enlightenment, and a repression of individual autonomy in exaltation of the state and its declared historical community values.
The Republican Party in its capitulation to Donald Trump has evolved into a fully fascist party, including in its practices: corrupt manipulations of the electoral system, at the state level, attempts violently to overthrow the government, a cult of personality, and a stream of propaganda accusing opponents of its own practices. Itโs an American brand of fascism, sure, but in that, too, we learn, Americans are not so special as they think they are. The religious piety? Check. The rejection of enlightened modernity, with its frameworks of reasoned, critical thinking and the scientific method, represented by professional and intellectual expertise? Check. The attraction to violence (guns)? Check. The aversion to liberal tolerance and inclusiveness? Check.
Ah, but the Trumpist rightโs much-trumpeted devotion to liberty โ thatโs not fascist, is it?
And whoโs more devoted to โlibertyโ than the American, โdeep stateโ hating, โlive free or dieโ Trumpist?
What might be consistent across such vastly variable contexts as the early twentieth century and now? Fascism silences and even murders its opponents rather than arguing with them; it prefers authoritarianism over democracy; it pits an aggressively exclusionary idea of the nation against a pluralism that values and prioritizes difference. So what are the circumstances under which fascism builds its appeal? What makes it desirable as an โextra-systemicโ solution, as an alternative to the practices of democratic constitutionalism? What kind of crisis brings fascism onto the agenda? What is the character of the fascism-producing crisis?
โLiberalism in Crisis: What Is Fascism and Where Does It Come from?โ by Geoff Eley, in Fascism in America
While there are commonalities among fascists in different contexts and different historical moments, the term is most useful when understood as a โcluster conceptโ: a cluster of ideas, values, and actions not all of which will be found in each exemplar of fascism.
โThe American Fascists,โ by Linda Gordon, in Fascism in America
If you have never seen the full film of The Conformist, by Bernardo Bertolucci, from which the Platoโs allegory scene above is taken, it is one of the greatest films ever made, an unsurpassed aesthetic achievement and an extraordinary look, for its subject time and place, Mussoliniโs Italy, into the psyche of a fascist personality.
AJA
If you like writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, emotional explorations that range, I hope youโll subscribe. If you do, consider becoming a paid subscriber of Homo Vitruvius and American Samizdat. Youโll gain access to the full archive and a free digital download of Waiting for Word on request. Youโll also have the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote. Most importantly, youโll be supporting writing you appreciate, writing to which I give my all.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
SAMIZDAT.
Wonderful piece, Jay.
Ba'athism is such a good contribution to this conversation, both because of how seamlessly it bridges a stultifying Western gap in how we talk about fascism as a cluster of ideas, and because it provides a better working vocabulary than the sort of "Talibama" jokes in colloquial discourse that pass for the use of geopolitical comparison to warn against the rise of fascistic groups at home.
You've also hit upon one of the classics that I never managed to watch, so The Conformist is going straight up my list!
(Also, I love the pace of this series; I hope it's manageable and rewarding for you.)
Good one. Thanks for the restored Conformist trailer (one of my top ten. desert island movies) - that music will haunt me today - you'll be amused by this: I attended its American premiere at the NY Film Festival, and when it was over, half the audience was on its feet shouting Bravo - and the other half was booing and yelling; at the time, JLG had recently criticized Bertolucci for selling out to "Nixon-Paramount." Ah, those were the days...