Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

Is fascism making a comeback?

In 2004, Professor Emeritus of Social Science, Robert Owen Paxton, a widely respected & influential American political scientist & historian specializing in Vichy France, fascism, & Europe during the WWII era, wrote The Anatomy of Fascism.

The average British voter's understanding of exactly what fascism is, is extremely limited.

Given the 'shameless normalisation' of far-right/fascist rhetoric across our media & politics, this is enormously concerning.

I've written about this before.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1530506330452246529?s=20

This #thread focuses on Paxton's work on fascism, taking in some reviews of his 2004 book, 'The Anatomy of Fascism' (linked below).

For several decades, Paxton has focused his work on exploring models & definition of fascism.

files.libcom.org/files/Robert%2…

In his 1998 paper "The Five Stages of Fascism," he suggests that fascism cannot be defined solely by its ideology, since fascism is a complex political phenomenon rather than a relatively coherent body of doctrine like communism or socialism.

Instead, Paxton focuses on fascism's political context and functional development.

The 1998 article identifies five paradigmatic stages of a fascist movement, although he notes that only Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy progressed through all five.

They may seem familiar:

1. Intellectual exploration, where disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of 'lost national vigour'.

2. Rooting, where a fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage.

3. Arrival to power, where conservatives seeking to control rising leftist opposition invite fascists to share power.

4. Exercise of power, where the movement and its charismatic leader control the state in balance with state institutions such as the police and traditional elites such as the clergy and business magnates.

5. Radicalization or entropy, where the state either becomes increasingly radical, as did Nazi Germany, or slips into traditional authoritarian rule, as did Fascist Italy.

pryan2.kingsfaculty.ca/pryan/assets/F…

Preface to 'The Anatomy of Fascism':

"This book is an attempt to draw the monographic literature more closely into a discussion of fascism in general, & to present fascism in a way that takes into account its variations & complexity. It seeks to find out how fascism worked."

"That is why it focuses more closely on the actions of fascists than on their words, contrary to usual practice. It also spends more time than usual on the allies & accomplices of fascism, & on the ways fascist regimes interacted with the societies they sought to transform."

In Paxton’s view, ‘fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century and the source of much of its pain’.

In 'The Anatomy of Fascism', Paxton refines his five-stage model & offers a definition for fascism:

As previously stated, while fascist rhetoric is undoubtedly extremely important, in The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton is much more concerned, however, with what fascists actually did, rather than with what they said.

While the rhetoric of transforming social hierarchies & restoring a rural past may have drawn followers, in practice this often meant little except to ‘catapult a few adventurers into high places’; portray Hitler in ‘weekend lederhosen’; or to produce postcards of a bare-chested

It's not the high points & the drama, though aesthetics & style were important, which explain fascist durability - it was the ‘solid texture of everyday experience & the complicity of ordinary people’ that ensured the success or failure of a movement & its longevity as a regime.

On the matter of fascism & modernity, Paxton suggests that fascism offered an ‘alternative modernity’ which could combine the new ‘science’ of eugenics and the more conventional modernizers of industrialization and technology.

And whatever the rhetoric, whether about a rural idyll or a futurist utopia, the imperatives of war everywhere privileged manufacturing & heavy industry.

The book doesn't follow the usual geographical/nation/regime structure of histories of fascism, but is arranged by ‘the five stages of fascism’: creating the movements; their taking root; achieving power; exercising it; & long-term outcomes, whether of radicalization or entropy.

Within these chapters, there are discussions of the ‘successful fascisms’, Italian and German, and the great range of the unsuccessful in France and the rest of Western Europe and in parts to the south and east.

The analysis tracks the overall trajectory while keeping a close eye on the particularities of region and national movements. Paxton makes clear that, at each stage of accretion and change, the progress towards a full-blown fascism was never inevitable.

The manifestations of new right movements between the wars may have been nearly ubiquitous, from the Antipodean New Guard to the Icelandic Greyshirts, & Britain's own British Union of Fascists Blackshirts, led by Oswald Mosley, but most were ephemeral.

To become fully-fledged, the movement required a complex process of crisis, a political space to occupy & grow within, a set of strategic alliances with conservatives & the aggrieved, & some form of collaboration with existing elites.

Again, this might sound familiar to you.

Paxton’s discussion of each stage encompasses a broad analysis of contemporary politics, as well as consideration of why fascism took root in certain places but elsewhere bolshevism succeeded as the new political formation.

In The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton rejected the search for the ‘fascist essence’, ‘fascist minimum’ or a simple list of ‘fascist attributes’ approaches which seem to predominate nowadays, & which emphasize a process of palingenesis that turns ultra-nationalism into fascism.

To the pressing question of whether fascism is still possible (imho, & recently in Paxton's too, it is) or, as Ernst Nolte & Renzo de Felice argued, is a product of the interwar epoch that is no more, Paxton offered a thoughtful survey of European developments since 1945.

Paxton traced the effect of colonial independence movements, immigration, & the state of parties & movements on the right. The crises that marked the decade of the 1990s (similar to the post-2008 crash period to the present) brought the spectre of fascism back onto the agenda.

Back in 2004, in Western Europe, according to Paxton, despite an efflorescence of new right parties and racism, the conditions no longer existed for a classical fascism that could pass through a cycle of growth into an established and rooted state.

Paxton warned that in the post-Soviet east, however, conditions were more congenial. In a survey of admirable clarity dealing with the rest of the world in the twentieth century, Paxton concluded there were few authentic fascisms &, in his schema, did not include Peron & Evita.

The nasty mimicry of the accoutrements of fascism that emerged in the late twentieth century - hate crimes, racism, attacks on immigrants, & swastika tattoos - were important warning signals, but not sufficient for full-blown fascism.

Just to reiterate, the best strategy to understand contemporary developments is to know what happened in the past, & there could hardly be a better place to come to terms with fascism and the twentieth century than that offered under Robert Paxton’s purview.

A review of The Anatomy of Fascism by Samantha Power in the New York Times sheds further light on Paxton's analysis.

Following 9/11, US President George Bush said Fascism had been revived by Islamic militants: ''The terrorists are the heirs to fascism."

latimes.com/archives/la-xp…

''They have the same will to power, the same disdain for the individual, the same mad global ambitions. And they will be dealt with in just the same way. Like all fascists, the terrorists cannot be appeased: they must be defeated.''

Bush laid out his checklist for what constitutes fascism.

Such checklists are required because 'fascism' - unlike Communism, socialism, capitalism or conservatism - is a smear word that is more often used to brand one's foes than it is a descriptor used to shed light on them.

Why should readers then or now care about fascism?

Paxton offers one answer at the outset. ''Fascism was the major political innovation of the 20th century, and the source of much of its pain.''

But in exploring how such uncouth nobodies as Hitler & Mussolini introduced what the Italian philosopher & historian Benedetto Croce described as an ''onagrocracy'' (''government by braying asses'') Paxton hoped to enable us to recognize ''what the 21st century must avoid.''

Paxton's main emphasis was on Mussolini's Italy & Hitler's Germany, but to demonstrate why certain fascist movements were able to seize power while most remained marginal, he contrasts these with fascist sputterings in Britain, France, Hungary, Portugal, Spain & elsewhere.

Paxton traced how fascist movements are born, take root, assume power, govern & self-destruct. At every stage he explores the interaction among the leader, the state, the party & civil society, the socioeconomic conditions & the political agents who seize upon & shape them.

WWI & the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 contributed mightily to the advent of fascism.

The war generated acute economic malaise, national humiliation, & legions of restive veterans & unemployed youths who could be harnessed politically.

The Bolshevik Revolution, but one symptom of the frustration with the old order, made conservative elites in Italy & Germany so fearful of Communism that anything - even fascism - came to seem preferable to a #Marxist overthrow.

Still, Paxton retains an important capacity for incredulity. How on earth was it that Benito Mussolini, who won a mere 4,796 votes out of 315,165 in the 1919 election, could find himself appointed prime minister in 1922?

The answer, Paxton makes clear, was not Mussolini's policy platform. ''They ask us what is our program,'' Mussolini said. ''Our program is simple. We want to govern Italy.''

Rather, it was the societal ills, the conservatives' fear of a Communist revolution, the paralysis of Italy's liberal constitutional order and the violence inflicted by fascist militia -- violence that made the state eager to co-opt the violent themselves.

How could Hitler, whose Nazi Party placed ninth in 1928 (with only 2.8% of the popular vote), soar to first in 1932 (with 37.2%)?

In Germany, storm troopers intimidated enemies, Hitler delivered mesmerizing harangues, & the Nazi Party became a catchall movement that appealed to Germans from all classes who were disillusioned with the bankrupt mainstream parties.

Sound familiar?

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1684137041334882306?s=20

But none of this was enough to bring about fascist rule.

One of Paxton's main contributions is to focus less on the ''Duce myth'' and the ''Führer myth'' and more on the indispensable ''conservative complicities'' behind the fascist takeovers.

Paxton debunks the consoling fiction that Mussolini & Hitler seized power.

Rather, conservative elites desperate to subdue leftist populist movements ''normalized'' the fascists by inviting them to share power. It was the mob that flocked to fascism, but elites who elevated it.

''At each fork in the road, they choose the antisocialist solution,'' Paxton wrote.

King Victor Emmanuel III responded to Mussolini's ''gigantic bluff,'' the Black Shirt march on Rome, not by imposing martial law but by offering him the prime ministership.

And in 1933 it was the ambitious German Catholic aristocrat Franz Von Papen, believing he would be the one who gained power, who arranged the deal that gave Hitler the chancellorship.

Fascists never assumed power in countries where governing structures functioned ''tolerably well,'' where conservatives retained confidence, or where local fascists remained ''pure'' by avoiding political compromise or elections.

''It wasn't enough to don a coloured shirt & beat up a local minority to conjure up the success of a Hitler or a Mussolini. It took a comparable crisis, a comparable opening of political space, comparable skill at alliance building & comparable cooperation from existing elites.''

Fascist movements and regimes are different from military dictatorships and authoritarian regimes.

They seek not to exclude, but rather to enlist, the masses.

They often collapse the distinction between the public and private sphere (eliminating the latter).

In the words of Robert Ley, the head of the Nazi Labour Office, the only private individual who existed in Nazi Germany was someone asleep. And, crucially, their durability depends on their ability to remain in constant motion.

It was this need to keep citizens intoxicated by fascism's dynamism that made Mussolini and Hitler see war as both desirable and necessary. ''War is to men,'' Mussolini insisted, ''as maternity is to women.''

A reminder of Paxton's 2004 working definition of fascism:

Fine-tuning definitions, however, is less important for the future than identifying and neutralizing fascist threats.

This recognition will come, Paxton believes, ''not by checking the color of shirts'' but ''by understanding how past fascisms worked.''

We should ''not look for exact replicas, in which fascist veterans dust off their swastikas,'' he writes; nor should we look for hate crimes and extreme nationalist propaganda.

Rather, we should address the conditions and the enablers - political deadlocks in times of crises, and conservatives who want tougher allies and elicit support through nationalist and racist demagogy.

In the early twenty-first century, for every official American attempt to link Islamic terrorism to fascism, there was an anti-Bush protest that applies the fascist label to Washington's nationalist rhetoric, assault on civil liberties and warmongering.

Paxton's 2004 study made it no less likely that the label will be appropriated. But the lasting contribution of The Anatomy of Fascism is to remind us that fascism, if it returns, will do so not simply because of a rousing leader, but because of his timid accomplices.

Are there significant differences between right-wing (nationalist) populists & actual fascists?

In 2021, Paxton wrote in Newsweek that he believed Donald Trump was a fascist, after insisting for several years that he was instead a right-wing populist.

newsweek.com/robert-paxton-…

In 2016, a newsreel clip of Trump's plane taxiing up to a hangar where cheering supporters awaited reminded Paxton eerily of Hitler's electoral campaign in Germany in July 1932, the first airborne campaign in history, where the arrival of the Führer's plane electrified the crowd.

Once the rally began, just like with Hitler & Mussolini, Trump mastered the art of back-and-forth exchanges with his enraptured listeners. There was the threat of physical violence ("lock her up!"), sometimes leading to the forceful ejection of hecklers.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1536685629513383937?s=20

The Proud Boys stood in convincingly for Hitler's Storm Troopers and Mussolini's squadristi. The MAGA hats even provided a bit of uniform. The "America First" message and the leader's arrogant swagger fit the fascist model. But these are matters of surface decor.

How did Trump relate to more profound social, political, economic, & cultural forces in American life?

Like Hitler, among the first political leaders to master radio, Trump mastered @Twitter & won the support of Fox News - TV channels replicated in the UK with GB News & TalkTV.

Like the fascist leaders Trump understood the deep disaffection of parts of society for traditional leaders & institutions, & he knew how to exploit a widespread fear of national division & decline.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1371265857108738048?s=20

Like Hitler and Mussolini, Trump knew how to pose as the only effective bulwark against an advancing Left, all the more fearful because it took on cultural forms unfamiliar to provincial rural America—feminism, Black Power, trans rights...

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1679778648952303617?s=20

But Trumpism differs in important ways from historical fascisms. The circumstances are different. Although the US (& UK) has problems, these are minor compared to those of the defeated Germany of 1932, with 30% unemployment, or the divided Italy at the brink of civil war in 1921.

Most Americans & Britons are employed. American political & British institutions are not deadlocked, as were those of Germany in 1932, when President Hindenburg believed that only Hitler could stop the rapidly growing Communist Party.

American & British circumstances are unlike those of Italy in 1921, where the King believed that the only way to stop the runaway take-overs of Italian cities by Mussolini's new nationalist and anti-socialist mass movement he called Fascism was to invite its leader into office.

The crisis created by Trump's refusal to accept a legitimate electoral outcome, or Britain's "invasion" by asylum seekers in small boats seem almost trivial by comparison.

A further fundamental difference is Trump's & UK @Conservatibes' relation to the world of business.

Hitler & Mussolini won their mass audiences with promises to shake up capitalist power, & once in power, with the support of the same businessmen against Labour, the fascist leaders had subjected businessmen, often against their preferences, to the demands of forced rearmament.

Trump & UK PMs gave American & British business what they wanted: relaxation of regulations & access to world markets.

It seemed to Paxton better to avoid one more facile & polemical use of the fascist label in favour of a more unemotional term, such as oligarchy or plutocracy.

But Trump's incitement of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6th removed Paxton's objection to the fascist label. Trump's open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crossed a red line. The label, Paxton argues, now seems not just acceptable but necessary.

It is made even more plausible by comparison with a milestone on Europe's road to fascism—an openly fascist demonstration in Paris during the night of February 6, 1934.

wienerholocaustlibrary.org/event/exhibiti…

Thousands of French veterans of WWI, bitter at rumours of corruption in a parliament already discredited by its inefficacy against the Great Depression, attempted to invade the French parliament chamber, just as the deputies were voting yet another shaky Government into power.

The veterans had been summoned by right-wing organizations.

They made no secret of their wish to replace what they saw as a weak parliamentary government with a fascist dictatorship on the model of Hitler or Mussolini.

Unlike the demonstrators in Washington on January 6, the French demonstrators of February 6, 1934 did not succeed in penetrating the parliament building. But the outcome was much graver.

The French government, fearing that the demonstrators, crossing the bridge leading from the Place de la Concorde, were going to break in to the Chamber, authorized the police to shoot. Fifteen demonstrators and one policeman were killed.

The French Third Republic had blood on its hands. The ensuing bitter division helps explain why the French prepared only haltingly before 1940 for Hitler's attack, and why the French defeat of June led to the replacement of the Third Republic with the authoritarian Vichy regime.

Curiously, it seems the Washington demonstrators' success at breaching the Capitol gives them less support in American society today than the unsuccessful French demonstrators of February 1934 acquired in their country.

In France, elections in 1936 saw installation of a Jew & a Socialist, Leon Blum, as PM. French fascists remained opponents of Blum until June 1940 with Hitler's defeat of the French Army, & the replacement of the French parliamentary republic with the authoritarian Vichy regime.

In the United States, after the ignominious failure of a shocking fascist attempt to undo Biden's election, the new American President began his work of healing on January 20.

Time will tell if Trump will become US President for a second time.

Despite some encouraging signs & the relative robustness of American institutions, it's too soon for any responsible historian to say whether Biden will be more successful in sustaining the US Republic than European leaders were in defending theirs.

And the future for Britain?