Finding Fascism

By Oliver Traldi

Thursday, January 05, 2023

 

One of the pieces of writing most popular during the 2016 election was, strangely enough, from 75 years earlier. Dorothy Thompson’s essay “Who Goes Nazi?” took the view of a party attendee classifying other guests as different kinds of human archetypes and explained, for each person present, why they would or would not end up “going Nazi.” Thompson had been married to Sinclair Lewis when he wrote the novel It Can’t Happen Here, about fascism coming to America in the form of authoritarian leaders. References to such works have abounded in the Trump-is-a-fascist furor that has continued for the better part of a decade now: It can, in fact, happen here, and it is happening — you’re at the nightmarish party right now, and if you’re not one of the good guys, you’re one of the bad ones.

 

Before reading Bruce Kuklick’s new book, Fascism Comes to America, I hadn’t known that Lewis and Thompson were husband and wife, or that Thompson had called a great number of things in American life fascist. Peter Kurth, in his tellingly titled 2019 book American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson, notes that she said of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “I have an increasing distrust of Roosevelt and the people around him. It is a kind of smell.” Her review of Disney’s Fantasia (1940), a film in which masterworks of classical music were matched with cartoons, called it a “holocaust of the masters” and a “performance of satanic defilement committed before the largest possible public.” These features rendered her almost speechless: “All I could think to say of the ‘experience’ as I staggered out was that it was ‘Nazi.’ The word did not arise out of an obsession.” The theme returned: “If the man who turned against Napoleon” — that is, Ludwig van Beethoven, whose music is featured in Fantasia — “had lived to see the inside of a Nazi concentration camp his torturers might have driven him mad by the performance of Mr. Stokowsky and Mr. Disney.”

 

“The word did not arise out of an obsession.” But there is something obsessive about it here; as Kuklick puts it, Thompson “found fascism in any politician [she] did not favor.” And she offered two rather ad hoc analyses — when speaking of Roosevelt, of fascism as a “compact between the masses and a man,” which Roosevelt had “worked himself up to the point” of believing existed between the American people and him personally as a charismatic leader; when speaking of Fantasia, of Nazism as “the abuse of power, the perverted betrayal of the best instincts, the genius of a race turned into black magical destruction” — that do not have much to do with each other. This is just what Kuklick is trying to show: The word “fascism”

 

does not have a bundle of coherent significations. It expresses loathing more than it identifies a reality. . . . It does not so much refer to anything that exists as it accomplishes disapproval. To put fascism on paper or to utter it in conversation complexly resembles canceling a magazine subscription in disgust or throwing a tomato at a speaker. 

 

The word is “a part of language that is more evaluative than factual” — put differently, the word “fascism” is merely a kind of slur. Here Kuklick echoes George Orwell, whose 1946 “Politics and the English Language” he later quotes as saying: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”

 

The vagueness of the term “fascism” was probably there from the beginning. The modern use of it began, Kuklick tells us, with Mussolini’s political parties Fascio d’Azione Rivoluzionaria and Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. Azione, rivoluzionaria, Italiani, and combattimento mean exactly what they sound like. Fasci simply means something like “groups” or even “clubs” — “Italian Fight Clubs,” believe it or not, is probably an acceptable translation for the latter party. The odd part is that it’s the word for “clubs” that became the term for Mussolini’s ideology. You might think the “fight” part provides more insight — though it might fit some contemporary “fascists,” wartime isolationists, poorly. Mussolini and his movement also liked the symbolism of the ancient Roman fasces, a bundle of sticks bound around an axe, representing the state’s power of the sword and the strength that comes from collectivism — connotations that remained strong in 20th-century Italy. Then again, this symbol is also on display in the U.S. House of Representatives — one on each side of the American flag.

 

This has real consequences. Some names for political groups are related to words with real political meanings — it’s clear that “capitalism” has some relationship to capital, for instance, and that “liberalism,” in the sense used by political theorists, has some relationship to liberty. But others aren’t. “Left” and “right” float around quite a bit; they come from the seating arrangement of the French Estates General around the time of the French Revolution. It could be that terms like these reflect something deep in political psychology, that the world really does divide neatly into leftists and rightists, into fascists and non-fascists, and therefore that analyzing these categories holds some intellectual interest. This is where treatments like Kuklick’s come in. There seems to be as little agreement about the use of the word “fascism” as there is about politics itself, which suggests that trying to understand fascism as a robust phenomenon won’t really pay off. The more interesting phenomenon is that of people calling stuff they don’t like “fascist.”

 

That pattern took time to develop, though, and much of the early part of the book chronicles the temptations that fascism once held for American intellectuals. Some devotees of the pragmatist philosophy of William James and John Dewey saw fascism as its political logic: In pragmatism, man and what man finds useful are the measure of truth, while fascism seems to permit one powerful man to remake the world. Or something like that. The extremely wealthy publisher William Randolph Hearst bankrolled the movie Gabriel over the White House, in which a car accident seems to cause a president to become a fascist — a good decision, in the movie’s presentation. Fans of the pro-fascist film apparently included Walter Lippmann, perhaps the single most influential journalist in American history, and FDR himself. That Mussolini made the trains run on time, as the saying goes, seemed to some commentators to be a strong qualification, and in Kuklick’s telling, it was the horrors of Hitler, beginning with the Night of the Long Knives, that caused American intellectuals to finally turn against fascism in both theory and practice.

 

“Fascism” became a term of abuse that targeted the political Right mostly, but not exclusively — communism was called “Red Fascism” even as McCarthyism was attacked as domestic fascism. The question of whether to call communism a kind of fascism (or a left-wing “totalitarianism,” a mirror of fascism) seems to have taken up a great deal of scholarly attention. Meanwhile, historians extended fascism’s reach backwards in time. For some, the American Revolution was a struggle against British fascism. For others, it was the beginning of a fascist regime that, like Nazi Germany, was founded on the idea of a master race that committed Hitler-like atrocities against other races, such as African Americans and Native Americans. Presidents with powerful personalities such as Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt became semi- or proto-fascists.

 

Over the past 60 years or so, in Kuklick’s telling, the word has simply become “unmoored.” Liberal centrists such as Nelson Rockefeller who deployed it against right-wing politicians such as Barry Goldwater then saw it deployed against them by left-wingers who, in the Vietnam era, thought of centrist pussyfooting as simply a front. Tony Kushner’s 1985 play A Bright Room Called Day made Ronald Reagan out to be a fascist. In the early 21st century, Michelle Goldberg wrote a book called “Kingdom Coming” about the supposed fascism of Evangelicals, who themselves thought secularism was the root of fascism; another Goldberg, Jonah, wrote a book called “Liberal Fascism,” and Fox News called Barack Obama a fascist. Feminists were fascists for wanting to ban pornography; progressives might be fascists for wanting more censorship, but then again their opponents might be fascists for supporting hate speech. Anti-fascists were fascists. Everyone, everywhere, is flirting with fascism.

 

Kuklick occupies an interesting place in what we might call the academic debate about contemporary “fascism.” Like many politico-academic debates at present, it is essentially an intramural left-wing affair, between those who think the modern American Right is horrible and fascist and those who think the modern American Right is horrible but not fascist, for the reason that “fascism” refers to some specific sort of political formation exemplified by Mussolini. Both sides, however, seem to allow that “fascism” is a useful term for scholarly analysis. Kuklick disagrees; this disagreement emerges in a comment about the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.:

 

More important than [his] politics was his success in making the keywords of real politics the categories through which the learned understood politics. . . . The dictionary of politicians became the dominant research scheme at the university. The political ideas daily contested, bitterly disputed and steamy with passionate beliefs, were sufficient for political analysis. 

 

It is hard not to read in this passage a sort of etiology of the nonsense that plagues American campuses today. Academics wrongly take political buzzwords to be intellectually probative.

 

The book closes with some more-general claims about political language, anticipated by an earlier discussion of the Vienna Circle and the roots of analytic philosophy in attempts to make the way we talk and write more precise. “Political talk is puzzling, artful distortion,” Kuklick writes, but “academics were lured into participating in politics, or into shaping it, when they examined fascism.” Such a politics-first approach to intellectual inquiry has, it seems to me, two possible outcomes: first, academics quite consciously become politicians of sorts, though usually highly ineffective ones; second, academics struggle needlessly against the emotionalism and malleability of the political language that is their mode of expression and even sometimes their target of analysis.

 

There are some leaps in Kuklick’s general method of proving his point. The fact that the word “fascism” has been used to target virtually every sort of politician does not mean that it’s empty of content. Perhaps some of those uses have been correct and others have been incorrect. Similarly, the fact that “fascism” is a slur does not show that it doesn’t mean anything at all — or rather, the question of whether it does is much debated among linguists. Even people who overuse the word “fascism” tend to do so in certain contexts — for instance, in contexts where politicians are embracing rather than eschewing the use of state power, or more generally where people are suggesting that someone shouldn’t be allowed to do something.

 

Yet the cumulative force of the evidence Kuklick brings to bear over the course of the text is undeniable. I think the justified conclusion is best put in the following way: In general, when people decide to use the term “fascism” in American politics, the decision is driven only minimally by a desire to communicate something nonevaluative about the target of the term — such as what sorts of policies we might expect them to endorse and what sorts of things we might expect them to do if they were to gain power — and much more centrally by a desire to castigate that target. Such castigation might itself be warranted, but it is not warranted by the target’s being fascist, since that term carries only vague associations and not concrete implications. Terms like this may have their place in fiery campaign speeches or to boost network ratings. But they serve little useful role in American intellectual life.