Thread by @BretDevereaux

Ok twitter, it's time we talked about the F-word: Fascism.

And I want to talk about it in a narrow sense; not in the (basically useless) popular sense of "political thing I do not like" or only marginally more useful "political thing I do not like on the right." 1/23

Rather, I want to talk about fascism as a human proclivity and thus a (very bad) tendency within human societies.

And I am going to lean on Umberto Eco's famous essay on the topic, "Ur-Fascism."

Eco sought to tease out the common elements of various fascisms...2/23

...terming his umbrella intellectual category 'Ur-Fascism' - a template on to which any violent, radical ideology might be grafted; add genocidal racism, you get Nazism; add radical trad. Catholicism, you get Falangism...3/23

...add radical anti-capitalism, and you get (more or less) Stalinism.

But if Ur-Fascism is the umbrella term, what use does that leave regular old fascism? Here I break with Eco, who really understands the two terms to be nearly synonyms. 4/23

(I promise, this is coming to something relevant here shortly).

First though, Eco lays out the 14 common characteristics of fascism. The one I want to focus on is (12), machismo, which Eco presents as the necessary conclusion of the former elements... 5/23

Machismo, for Eco, is the consequence of the need to have an external enemy (7&8), to live in permanent warfare (9) and thus to have contempt for weakness (10) and so cultivate the cult of the 'hero' (11).

And here I think Eco has it exactly backwards. 6/23

Machismo, the bloated over-extension of supposedly masculine strength in the absence of the restraints of honor, discipline or virtue (in the modern sense), is not the product of the ideology, it is the root. It is the core emotional pull - the rest is just to justify it. 7/23

And here I think is where the term fascism has real use in providing a diagnostic term for this form of Ur-Fascism, stripped of all of its ideological content *except* for this gendered element of machismo: a vanilla, non-ideological form of Ur-Fascism. 8/23

I think we have all known someone caught in machismo: someone for whom things were going poorly, who didn't feel effective in their life, who began - as compensation - to over-enact the stereotypes of traditional masculinity and to seek out exemplars of the same. 9/23

Of course, machismo is to actually masculinity like cancer is to healthy cells: overgrown to the point that all virtue is lost and all that remains is destructive.

But I want to point out that we all know someone trapped at machismo (or entranced by it) at some point. 10/23

This is a common pitfall of the human mind, a 'weak point' in our collective psyche, like excessive desire for food or other pleasures.

If I had to guess, I'd say we are wired to look for dominance, and machismo, in its grotesqueness looks like super-dominance. 11/23

And as with any human weakness, there are, in every society, hucksters who have trained themselves to signal that machismo.

They are almost never actually capable, but the super-normal signal triggers that weakness in us all the same. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernorm… 12/23

But the cornerstone of this sort of fascism is rooted in the performance of power and strength as understood through (distorted) masculine gender roles of the same.

Put another way, if Ur-Fascism+Racism=Nazism, then Ur-Fascism+Masculinity=Fascism, narrowly understood. 13/23

And I think that is important to understanding nascent modern fascisms that seem to otherwise lack meaningful ideology, but are deeply, fiercely concerned with the 'strength' and 'manliness' of the charismatic ruler figure.

See: basically all Putin propaganda. 14/23

It also goes to explain the hyper-concern of these sorts of neo-fascist strongmen on gender issues. As @anneapplebaum has pointed out, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric is a core part of the rhetoric for these neo-fascists abroad. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… 15/23

Since the machismo is the core of this narrow-fascism, the performance of strength by the leader, often an absurd farce to outsiders, is actually central to its appeal&function.

Those laughable staged photos of the dictator being 'manly' are actually the point. 16/23

Because those laughable displays are precisely what triggers both the emotional gratification of the huckster-leader (whose whole life has conditioned the behavior) and the emotional loyalty-response of the receptive followers, seeking a 'strong' leader. 17/24

And if all of this description so far - the overwrought displays of pseudo-masculinity (in the absence of any real mastery), even in defiance of obvious facts (Eco's #14 of Ur-Fascism) sounds quite a lot a recently hospitalized (and still contagious) leader near you...18/24

...well, yes, at long last, that is my point.

Because this form of fascism isn't dangerous because of the laughable machismo, but because of the inevitable logic that machismo entails.

Remember where I said that Eco had it backwards? 19/24

See, the cult of the 'hero' (who seeks violent death with enthusiasm, shows his contempt of it), the contempt for the weak and the vision of life as a state of permanent warfare -

these are the inevitable rationalization which must arise to sustain machismo's foolishness. 20/24

Not the cause, but the unavoidable result. Machismo of this sort of narrow-fascism, which begins as an emotional impulse, not a rational ideology, cannot help but march down Eco's path of cruelty.

Or as Adam Serwer put it, the cruelty is the point: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… 21/24

Not for its own sake, but because wanton cruelty, absent reason or purpose, is the ultimate display of power over others which is in turn the ultimate super-normal signal of the kind of cancerous 'masculinity' of machismo. 21/24

If you think "he's not that smart" he doesn't need to be - he just needs to read a crowd and then make mistakes.

As Eco says, "Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of
objectively evaluating the force of the enemy." 22/24

Of course the fascist strong-man can do a lot of damage starting fights and violence he cannot win in an effort to display his (illusory) machismo strength.

Alas in this world, a leader's recklessness usually brings sorrow to everyone else and only the leader last. 23/24

So do not laugh at the absurd farce of 'big man' trying to appear macho and strong (Mussolini was short, balding and weak, you may remember). Instead, think to how he might try to display that 'macho strength' next - with what violent, catastrophic end?

(Then vote.)

end/24

Addendum: I try to avoid being too political here, but all I have done here is describe a well documented historical phenomenon in human societies.

If you are reading this&thinking, "Hey, that's an attack on my team" - maybe it's time to get a new team leader?