After defeating two fascist powers in a world war, the citizens of the democratic West have gradually come to throw the label ‘fascist’ around with abandon. Police officers are fascists to the protesters they confront. University administrators are fascists to the students they discipline. Think back: many of you probably had parents who were fascists — at least with regard to your curfew. Alas, the term has come to be used rather freely even in political discourse: to the Left, postwar non-communist dictatorships under generals Franco and Pinochet were fascist, and to today’s pro-war Right, Muslim fundamentalists are Islamo- fascists’, in Christopher Hitchens’ colourful phrase.
Since we seem so fond of the term, it would be nice to know exactly what fascism is. Robert O. Paxton, Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences at Columbia University and the respected author of books on Vichy France and European history, addresses this very question in The Anatomy of Fascism. Yet despite fascism’s status as ‘the major political innovation of the 20th century’, Paxton hesitates from the outset to simply hand over a definition. Unlike the other big ‘isms’ — communism, liberalism, and conservatism — fascism is not really an ideology, at least in the formal sense. Its foundation is, rather, a set of ‘mobilising passions’ about the beauty of violence, the primacy of the group, victimisation by internal and external enemies, and the right to dominate others. Or, as Mussolini succinctly explained a few months before becoming prime minister, ‘The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our programme? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.’
Paxton argues that it’s therefore more productive to try to understand fascism as a process, rather than as a set of ideas —though he is careful to describe the intellectual and cultural climate of the late 19th and early 20th century, the anti-liberal aspects of which ‘made it possible to imagine fascism’.
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