Designer Fascism
Available in a wide selection of styles and colors, suitable for any smear campaign
A favorite tactic of postmodern progressives is to accuse the political opposition of being fascist, and by extension to claim that America is or is going fascist. But no matter how hard they try, progressives can’t really make a plausible, history-based case that George W. Bush or Donald J. Trump is the American Hitler, or that America itself is or is becoming some sort of Fourth Reich. And though such notions may pass muster with the historically illiterate—a group well represented on the Left—no serious student of history takes them seriously.
Ah, but there’s a way to skate around this difficulty: Just treat fascism as a social-science postulate instead of an historical phenomenon.
I’ve become something of a connoisseur of progressive propaganda and my collection includes a 2020 Medium article by a contributor who goes by the name of The Happy Neutron. In “The US Has A Fascism Problem. I’ll Prove It,” he argues that it’s time for “a blunt, academic discussion about fascism” including whether it’s on the rise in America. And believe me, you’d rather have several teeth drilled, for the lesson is delivered in the ponderous patois of the social sciences:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
That’s from The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) by Robert O. Paxton, a professor emeritus of history and political science at Columbia University, where he taught from 1969 to 1997. He established his reputation in 1972 with the publication of a study of Vichy France and its ideological kinship with National Socialist Germany. The Anatomy of Fascism is an expansion of a 1998 paper in which he first sketched out his thesis.
Now as a very general characterization of politics and society in Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany Paxton’s definition seems all right, if somewhat prolix. Anyone taking a close look at National Socialist Germany would likely to come up with something similar. But that’s precisely the point: Paxton’s definition is derived from an actual historical example of fascism. Or to put it another way, it’s a tool of historical analysis. Terms like a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants refer to very specific phenomena that occurred in a very specific time and place.
The Happy Neutron, however, employs Paxton’s definition as a tool of political analysis, decoupled from history—or to put it more bluntly as a propaganda tool. If you can characterize some grievance as “an obsessive preoccupation,” if you can portray some opposition group as “committed nationalist militants,” if you can portray acts of protest as “redemptive violence,” you can slap the fascist label on your opponents without reference to the history of actual fascisms.
Here’s how The Happy Neuron runs his con:
First Stage [of Fascism]: Intellectual Exploration. This stage involves the people becoming disillusioned with democracy and basic liberties. Pundits, intellectuals, and other leaders begin to speak of returning to a better time with better values, which have slowly been eroded away. Paxton says that there is no clear plan to return but that the rhetoric often involves taking control of society. He uses the example of the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War. In this case, former Confederate officers lamented social changes caused by freeing the slaves and so began to speak of ways to return order.
Supposedly, America has already advanced past this initial milestone on the road to fascism:
Regarding the first stage, certain far-right groups in the US are continually pushing the narrative that family values, Christian values, Western values, etc. are being trampled on. They lament the changes in society brought about by liberals, and in fact the president’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is an appeal to their sense of having something taken from them.
Alas, there are problems with this analysis. First—and here I’ll criticize Professor Paxton, who really ought to have known better—National Socialism did not advocate “returning to a better time.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler was scathingly critical of the foreign and domestic policies of Germany between 1871 and 1918. He advocated a turn from traditional nationalistic and imperialistic ideas. He envisioned the creation of a Greater German Reich incorporating all so-called Aryan peoples, such as the Scandinavians, pari passu with an extreme version of Drang nach Osten, turning all Eastern Europe as far as the Urals into an Aryan colonial space. That is to say, National Socialism was a radical, transnational, millennial ideology, not conservative at all. Indeed, toward traditional German conservatives the Nazis’ attitude was one of suspicion and dislike. Far from being partners in the imposition of fascism on Germany, the two groups maneuvered to use one another for their own purposes—a game that Hitler won.
Second, the trampling of “family values, Christian values, Western values” is not a “narrative.” In America today, it’s an observable reality. We live at a time when one of the great American novels, Huckleberry Finn, is effectively banned in public schools; when to teach Shakespeare to students of color is considered a heinous act of cultural imperialism; when such traditional virtues as hard work, punctuality, evidence-based reasoning, etc. are reviled as “acting White.” In Portland, Oregon, during the George Floyd protests, rioters wrapped an American flag around a statue of George Washington, set it alight, then toppled the statue from its pedestal. It doesn't require a fascist mentality to be disgusted by such behavior, at once malevolent and juvenile.
Finally, what gets ignored in the social-science definition is the seminal question of politics and ideology. We’re asked to accept the proposition—the dubious proposition— that fascism is a process, a mechanism, a recipe even, existing independently of the ideas that set historical fascisms in motion. For only by severing fascism from its historical roots can the charge that Trump = Hitler and America = fascist hellhole be made to appear at all plausible.
It will be seen that the “Five States of Fascism” as set forth by The Happy Neutron are phrased in such general terms that all sorts of people, groups and organizations can be caught in its tentacles. What is meant, for instance, by “certain far-right groups”? What is the precise definition of “far-right”? What are the “liberal ideas” that the proto-fascists oppose? We’re told that “Paxton here uses entropy to not mean chaos, as is commonly misunderstood, but to mean a loss of information that can be collected from a given system. In this case, authoritarianism means increasing entropy by imposing rules and standards, creating homogeneity, such as what happened under Mussolini.” Say what? You can be pretty sure that when words like entropy and homogeneity creep into the lesson, something fishy is going on.
Paxton offers a list of “Mobilizing Passions” characteristic of a fascist movement. And they do indeed apply in whole or part to historical fascisms. But one again, they’re vague and general: “The Primacy of the Group,” “Victimhood,” “Enhanced Identity and Belonging,” etc. If these sound familiar it’s because they're just as applicable to postmodern progressivism as they are to historical fascisms. “Increasing entropy by imposing rules and standards, creating homogeneity” is certainly a plausible definition of progressive cancel culture!
This brings us to The Happy Neuron’s second definer of fascism, the Italian writer Umberto Eco, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose. His theory of “Eternal Fascism” is basically a long list of signs and wonders that supposedly denote fascism: “Cult of Traditionalism,” “Rejection of Modernism,” “Demonizing Intellectualism,” “Suppressing Disagreement,” “Humiliating Followers,” “Orwellian Newspeak,” etc. Eco, who was a witness to Italian Fascism, is describing what he saw, which is fair enough. But once again, the terms employed are too vague and global to serve as a reliable diagnostic tool.
In contemporary America, “Suppressing Disagreement” is hardly the preserve of the “far right.” In fact it’s one of the major projects of po-mo progressivism. People can lose their jobs and have their lives ruined merely by suggesting that “all lives matter.” And “Orwellian Newspeak”? When the arrested adolescents of The New York Times pitched a fit, throwing their rattles out of the crib over an op-ed piece by a Republican senator, they characterized its publication as an act of “violence” that made them feel “unsafe.” Simultaneously, one of them denounced as thought crime characterizations of rioting, looting and arson as “violence.” Got that? publishing an op-ed that vexes Woke progressives is violence; burning down someone’s business isn’t.
You can’t have a “blunt, academic discussion of fascism” when the predicate is a sludge of pretentious social-science blather, disconnected from history and even from reality. But of course, the call for “discussion” is fake. It’s more like a demand: First, accept my terms and definitions, then sit quietly with your hands clasped in your lap while I lecture you.
What we really need is a “blunt, academic discussion” of the rise of postmodern progressivism, which exhibits more features of totalitarianism and, dare I say it, fascism, than anything to be found in the ranks of conservatism.
Thomas really, really loves himself. And he really, really hates women. He appears in every article he writes trying to look cool in his aviator glasses as an old man. Except that Thomas is the guy who cheered the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys on as they stormed the Capitol on January 6. White male supremacy that is the greatest domestic terrorist threat ain’t cool and neither is Thomas.