Fascism Plain and Simple

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In 1919, Benito Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan with about 200 members, most of them war veterans who felt cheated by the peace settlement and threatened by socialist organizing in the factories. Three years later he was Prime Minister of Italy; twelve years after that, he was a war criminal presiding over the industrial massacre of Ethiopian civilians, a campaign in which his air force dropped mustard gas on villages that had neither anti-aircraft weapons nor gas masks.

The word fascism comes from fascio, the bundle of rods bound around an axe that was a symbol of Roman state authority. Mussolini chose it deliberately to present his movement presented as both ancient and new, drawing on the prestige of classical Rome while claiming to represent a modern, technological future. Hitler and Franco both borrowed freely from Mussolini’s aesthetics and methods. In each case, these movements came to power by promising order, strength, and national restoration to people who felt humiliated and afraid.

What made these movements fascist rather than merely authoritarian? This matters because the word is used so loosely today that it risks meaning nothing at all. Military dictatorships, monarchies, and one-party states have maintained power through repression for thousands of years without being fascist. General Augusto Pinochet’s Chile was brutally authoritarian; the Soviet Union under Stalin was even more so, but Neither was fascist in the technical sense.

What distinguished the fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s was a specific combination of features that Robert Paxton identified after studying what fascists actually did rather than what they said. He found that fascism is characterized by:

Umberto Eco, who grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, offered a complementary description in a 1995 essay. He identified fourteen features of what he called “Ur-Fascism”, including the cult of tradition, the rejection of modernism, fear of difference, the treatment of disagreement as treason, contempt for the weak, machismo, and a theatrical populism in which “the People” becomes a fiction invoked to justify the will of a few. Eco’s list describes political style—the aesthetic and rhetorical patterns that fascism uses to recruit and mobilize. A movement can display many of Eco’s features without meeting Paxton’s structural definition; equally, a movement can satisfy Paxton’s criteria while wearing ideological clothing that looks nothing like the 1930s.

Fascism does not emerge from nowhere. It is a response to something—specifically, to the threat that democratic equality poses to existing hierarchies. In 2018, Frank Wilhoit posted a comment on the political blog Crooked Timber that captures this logic concisely:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Wilhoit is not describing fascism specifically. He is describing the basic architecture of hierarchical societies: there is a group whose interests the legal system serves, and there is everyone else. The first group enjoys rights and protections that the second group cannot invoke. The second group bears obligations that the first group can ignore.

Fascism is one extreme expression of this logic. It doesn’t invent in-groups and out-groups; it makes them violently explicit, strips away the polite fictions that normally obscure them, and unapologetically weaponizes the state against the out-group. The people who supported fascist movements in Italy, Germany, and Spain were not all sadists or criminals. Many were ordinary people who had occupied in-group positions and wanted to restore or defend them against perceived encroachment. The factory workers who voted for socialist parties threatened one kind of hierarchy. The Jewish professionals and intellectuals who had achieved middle-class status threatened another. Fascism offered the in-group a restoration of its position.

This pattern is not uniquely European. In Japan in the 1930s, the military government mobilized its population around ethnic nationalism and imperial expansion into Manchuria, China, and Southeast Asia. The logic was structurally identical: a hierarchy of Japanese over the colonized peoples of the region, enforced by systematic violence, justified by a mythology of racial and civilizational superiority.

Myanmar’s military government offers a more recent example. For decades it cultivated Buddhist nationalist movements that portrayed the Rohingya Muslim minority as alien invaders. The 2017 campaign of genocide followed Wilhoit’s logic precisely: a group whom the law had never protected was subjected to the full weight of state violence, while the perpetrators faced no domestic legal consequences whatsoever.

In Brazil, the Bolsonaro government of 2019-2022 combined nostalgia for the military dictatorship of 1964-1985 and glorification of the officers who ran it with systematic attacks on Indigenous land rights, press freedom, and electoral institutions. When Bolsonaro lost the 2022 election, his supporters stormed the Congress, Presidential Palace, and Supreme Court in January 2023, directly mimicking the January 6, 2021 events in the United States. The movements were in close contact with each other, shared tactics and rhetoric, and understood themselves as part of a common project.

In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Narendra Modi offers the most electorally successful contemporary example of fascist politics outside Europe. The BJP draws its ideological roots from Hindutva, the doctrine that India is fundamentally a Hindu nation and that Muslims, Christians, and other minorities belong to it only on sufferance. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the paramilitary organization that trained Modi as a teenager and serves as the BJP’s ideological parent, explicitly admired European fascist movements in its founding documents. When anti-Muslim violence swept Gujarat in 2002, Modi was Chief Minister; a Supreme Court-appointed panel found evidence that his administration facilitated rather than stopped the killing of over a thousand people.

After the BJP won parliamentary majorities in 2014 and 2019, it stripped citizenship rights from millions of Muslim residents in Assam, passed a national citizenship law that explicitly excluded Muslims from its protections, revoked the autonomous status of Muslim-majority Kashmir, and imprisoned journalists, academics, and opposition politicians under anti-terrorism statutes. Those who supported these measures understood them as restoration: a reclamation of the hierarchy in which Hindus occupy the in-group position that centuries of Mughal rule and British colonialism had disrupted. Their victims felt otherwise…

Fascism is not primarily an ideology. It is a style of politics, and it can arrive wearing the rhetoric of the left as easily as the right. Precision here is not pedantry: if you call everything fascism, you lose the ability to recognize it when it is actually forming.

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Black2001
Edwin Black: IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. Crown, 2001, 9780609607992.
Eco1995
Umberto Eco: “Ur-Fascism.” New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995.
Jaffrelot2023
Christophe Jaffrelot: Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2021, 9780691247908.
Paxton2004
Robert O. Paxton: The Anatomy of Fascism. Knopf, 2004, 9781400040940.
Robin2018
Corey Robin: The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. Oxford University Press, 2018, 9780190692001.
Wilhoit2018
Frank Wilhoit: Comment on “Liberals Against Progressives.” Crooked Timber, March 21, 2018. https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288.