American Samizdat: Fascismo Intellettuale
And perhaps one day, looking serenely at the past, it will be judged that the test we are now enduring, harsh and painful to us, was a stage that Italy had to go through to rejuvenate its national life, to complete its political education, to feel more severely its duties as a civilized people.
— Benedetto Croce
Among the common critiques of Trumpism, which includes in its critical attention Trump’s supporters, is the broad claim of their ignorance — ignorance of facts, ignorance of specialized knowledge about which they are easily influenced to hold opinions they cannot support, ignorance of both world and contemporary history, ignorance of the standards of critical, reasoned thought. It isn’t as if these weaknesses before the challenge of living are confined only to Trump supporters. They are more than fairly common. But such weaknesses are what make those who possess them uniquely vulnerable to the predations of populist demagogues like Trump. Stoke those people’s sense of social grievance and cultural alienation — whatever it may be particularly at any given time, in any given country over time — aggravate any personal feelings of futility and failed aspiration, activate their fears, and what is formed from the admixture provides the public base of demagogic power.
Despite this characterization, there isn’t an American democrat over this past decade who hasn’t once or a thousand times marveled at the presence among us of Trump supporters who are not, in fact, so roundly ignorant. We may find them, on the contrary, professionally successful, personally and familiarly blessed, and educationally highly achieved. Aside from those people we might know personally, there are those public figures, too, of whom we may hear, for instance, of a Ted Cruz, that he graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School, or of Josh Hawley that he hails from Stamford and Yale Law. Tom Cotton, that Yankees to the bone, is an alumnus of both Harvard College and Havard Law.
Of course, the wonder is hardly that people of such intellectual capacity can emerge in their full form simply as political conservatives: longstanding jurist and conservative icon Michael Luttig, for whom Cruz once clerked, has enlarged himself in the Trump years as one of the even greater intellectual and civic heroes of our time. No, quite differently, the wonder is how people of such apparent smarts can succumb to and serve so cruel and debased an idiot savant of the social world as Donald Trump — but they do. With Trump’s genius for both the masquerade of commerce and career climbing and the politics of personal power and vendetta, he spent a lifetime replacing one masque with another at each turn on the floor, this one up and then that one in its place, and his coterie all now stand offering servile smiles and delicate applause while whispering behind gloved hands. Which is to say, this is nothing new.
To understand how those of talent and intelligence can be led to ally themselves with crudity and barbarism, with hateful fear mongering and the glorification of violence, one has to study not political science but human nature, and not only on the grand scale of history but also at the miniature level of friends, family, and community. One has to study, more than philosophy, literature, the literature of our struggle to make sense of ourselves, in drama and fiction and all the narratives that seek to tell us what we did and what happened to us and to all around us. There we will find all the Commedia dell’arte-like stock characters in their individual, iterative instances, including the ambitious, the intrepid, the inspired, the driven, the world conquering and changing, the directionless and shapeshifting, and those who just want to be in the room — and who will utter whatever secret password it is they are told will gain them entry to it.
Among the world-conquering and world-changing are not just the explorers and warriors but also the dreamers and the intellectual visionaries. An angry mob needs words to shape its thoughts and feelings and ideas to rationalize the words, and it is the intellectual who will provide them.
Benito Mussolini may have published “The Doctrine of Fascism” in 1932, but unlike Donald Trump (“I can handle things... I'm smart! Not like everybody says! Like, dumb! I'm smart... and I want respect!”), Mussolini fashioned himself an intellectual long before that, and long before he took power in 1922. Still, it was not Mussolini but rather Alceste de Ambris and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who in 1919 authored the paradoxical "The Manifesto of the Italian Fasces of Combat”:
Revolutionary because anti-dogmatic and anti-demagogical; strongly innovative because anti-prejudicial. We place the valorization of revolutionary war above everything and everyone.
De Ambris, a journalist and social activist, migrated over his career from socialist to syndicalist to fascist manifesto writer to antifascist, nothing more of his nature in life than the role disruptive rebel.
Marinetti, a poet and art theorist, is more famous as author of the earlier, 1909 “Declaration of Futurism,” published on the front page of Le Figaro. (It was an age of manifestos and declarations.)
1 We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2 The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3 Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
To speak of poets, who are not immune to the lure of intellectual fascism (not just the intellectual representation of fascist ideas but also a fascist-tempered intellectuality), Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet, orator, journalist, soldier, and celebrant of his own celebrity, co-authored with De Ambris the “Charter of Carnaro” for a small, precursor fascist Italian state. Like many of the other visionary intellectual agitators, D'Annunzio, too, passed through a series of self-conceptualizing revolutionary stages from left to right and sometimes back again, writing manifestoes and declaring human futures while refusing labels. Mussolini is said to have kept him close while feeling his threat.
The "Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals" was authored in 1925 by philosopher Giovanni Gentile. It summarized the ideas promulgated at the March 29, 1925 Conference of Fascist Culture in Bologna. Signed by 250 writers, artists, journalists, politicians and thought leaders, the list of signatories included among them most famously the name of Luigi Pirandello.
It was not necessary to succumb to the fascist tide, however, then or now. Then, in response to Gentile, philosopher Benedetto Croce authored the “Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals,” published by the liberal newspaper Il Mondo on May 1, 1925. It contained the names of over 270 intellectuals, most notably the future, 1975 Nobel Prize winner in literature Eugenio Montale.
We can see in our own, American era of fascist threat some less glamorous iterations of these intellectual activists, though the glamour of the past may be largely the patina of time and a more concise, vital prose than Project 2025’s 920 pages. Still, the assembled brain trust of the Claremont Institute, the Federalist’s scribes, the National Review, Steve Bannon (so much in the style of his Italian forebearers), and all those shockingly reactionary legal lights of the elite institutions against which they make showy war — these are the intellectual covers for the fascist brutalism of Trump. They bear in their persons the fruits of the most successful socio-political and cultural enterprise of the modern world, the United States of America, and they return for this favor of their good fortune the counter-enterprise of undoing it for others.
They have to offer in exculpation for this foul crime something far less than ignorance to elicit our forbearance.
AJA
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
In most cases, I think the well educated writers, thinkers, and the politicians you cite are acting on behalf of their careers and personal self-interest. Joe Biden was acting on behalf of his career over the interest of country when he refused to resign until forced to do so.
Most of those right wing politicians and intellectuals and writers who opposed Trump have found themselves in a wilderness. Perhaps we should be lauding the resisters more vigorously.
As usual an extraordinary essay that gives us background I at least knew little of"the manifesto" you enlighten us with. What follows may seem the ultimate paradox: Last night rewatched the film Lincoln with Daniel Day Lewis and Spielberg's marvel of directing. The flick, incredibly au courant as a reminder of what the Republican Party once was, let alone the prejudice that has outlived the historic 13th amendment.