by Elisa Forgey
(This short essay grew from a brief presentation given at a Refuse & Resist! teach-in at the University of Pennsylvania in October, 1995, and has profited much from the comments I received there.)
The rise of right wing influence in our prominent political arenas in the past decade and a half, and especially its quickened pace since the 1994 elections, has brought the term "fascism" back into everyday usage. Most of us on the Left would agree that there seems to be something particularly "fascist" about contemporary politics, and that these fascist characteristics differentiate this era from previous ones.
Yet the term itself remains vaguely defined, in popular usage as well as in theoretical and historical scholarship. In fact, it's exact definition has been so debated, and these debates have been so fraught, that by the late seventies it had fallen into disuse in many circles, while in others it came to designate all political opposition. Today more than ever, the definition of fascism needs to be clearly defined and hotly debated, for the term retains a very real utility, such as "conservative," "right-wing" and "reactionary," do not.
Furthermore, the use of the term to designate particular political actors and more general formations has significant implications for analyses of the nature and future role of right-wing, and hence of the means we use to fight them. Thus, the purpose of this short essay is to suggest ways we may begin to identify just what this specific form of political barbarism might look like in the present-day United States.
Comparing the political context in the United States today with the short-lived German constitutional democracy called the Weimar Republic (1919-1930/33) is one way to go about this. Although there are crucial differences between these two periods, there are also striking and worrisome similarities. Five main trends in particular form the basis for comparison here. The first is economic: shifts in the international economy causing crisis within the boundaries of the nation-state. This is marked by the increasing power of monopolies, and now multinationals, at all levels of economic decision-making. Concomitant with these economic shifts is a cultural obsession with large and uncontrollable forces, the prevalent sense that one's fate lies in the hands of impersonal and alien powers. In each case these changes coincided with the loss of an imperialist was (World War One and Vietnam), which this provides the second basis of comparison. This combination of economic crisis and military loss creates the third similarity; the widespread disaffection with liberalism as a viable, and desirable, political agenda, what Antonio Gramaci has defined as an "organic crisis," a period in which "social classes become detached from their traditional parties" (Selections, 210). The fourth and fifth similarities are separate but intertwined reactions to this state of affairs: banal right-wing persecution complexes, whereby the social actors which grew from social movements during and after the war are targeted as a massive threat to their power and as the cause of a whole constellation of problems: economic crises, the loss of war, the resulting national humiliation, etc.; and cultural pessimism, that is, a constellation of belief systems which predict Armageddon, proclaim the end of history and preach "preparedness" for disaster, be it Judgment Day or a United Nations invasion.
Given this context, it seems that the political situation the United States is vulnerable to increasing fascist politicization. In this essay, I will not draft a general theory of fascism; instead, I will make three basic points about fascism is Weimar Germany that seem useful to consider when analyzing the contemporary American political scene.
1. During the Weimar Republic, fascist parties, the most important of which became the National Socialist Party (NSDAP), were forced to organize within a state governed predominantly be Social Democrats. An analysis of the mobilization strategies employed by them demonstrates that fascism when mobilizing support is a many-faceted beast. It looks very different when participating in electoral politics under capitalist liberal democracy than when it has gained power. Although the main thrust of Nazi demagogues was anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic, in local party cells they often posed as anti-capitalist, anti-system, and pro-worker; indeed, they tended to represent their mission in accordance with whatever issue seemed to be preoccupying the inhabitants of a specific locale at any given time, all the while attempting to integrate these preoccupations into their ideological system based on racialist principles. Today, much of the confused rhetoric of the new right, and its representatives in Congress, who insist ad nauseum that they are not, for example, racist, must be considered in this light. Perhaps their strategy is only partially conscious, but their opportunistic dance meant to mesmerize "the people" who they so thoughtlessly invoke, is aimed only at winning for themselves complete control over the state with minimal opposition along the way.
2. Even though the NSDAP organizational structure was rather decentralized during the 1920s, the party was at its root always fundamentally about power, and not about empowerment. They masked themselves as populists, but they were not about empowering their rank and file supporters any more than they were about empowering the citizens and residents of Weimar in general. Since fascist parties require a mas base from which to overtake the main institutions of the state with their own party functionaries, they will often make contradictory appeals to gain widespread support across class divisions, without considering, or caring about, how these contradictions might later be resolved, They may temporarily devise rhetorical strategies which gloss over these contradictions- for example, the National Socialists invoked the "Volksgemeinschaft" (Volk-Community) - but the very real and material divisions are to be finally "reconciled" through the ever-present violence of full-scale totalitarian rule.
3. Yet, it would be wrong to assume that fascist mobilization strategies are solely a cynical ploy to gain power. They are so energetic and effective because fascists believe they have the truth of history behind them, Fascist parties are not conservative, anti-modern or reactionary in the classical sense. They are progressive (of course they redefine the meaning of this term), futuristic and dynamic. Fascist ideologues aim to find in the past the seeds of the future and to plant these seeds; hence, they do not "go away," In their ranks we find people who desperately need to demonstrate their power, time and time again. They are not necessarily satisfied with gaining control. Alfred Rosenberg, a key Nazi ideologue, wrote in the early 1920s a treatise which redefined the history of Germany along racialist lines; reacting against political liberalization, he argued that it would be wrong for Germans to wish to return an authoritarian past, because in the past the truth of race had not yet manifested itself. Only his generation was capable of recognizing that racialist categories should be the fundamental basis of authoritarian state rule. The Nazi state made these barren categories its fundamental basis, but Nazis consistently devised new means of persecuting those human beings suddenly caught in these categories, going so far as to invent a technocratic system of genocide whose evil the world has still not recovered from, and they did this while still claiming that they were under attack, that they were the ones threatened with annihilation.
In my opinion, it is this racially-based aspect of fascist ideology and rule which should become a central clement of any future debate on the definition of the term. For comparative purposes the National Socialist brand of fascism seems more useful to us than the Italian, for it would be difficult to imagine an "American fascism" without a central racialist component. A somewhat useful comparison can be made in this respect between Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century and the celebrated movie "Forrest Gump." While "Forrest Gump" is considerably more subtle, and not obviously aligned with any political agenda, the end result follows a frighteningly similar pattern: the mentally weak, politically overlooked, and socially silenced Forest brutalized by the war (the seed of the past) and his bright, robust, white male progeny (the truth of the future) stand above the grave of the dead woman of evil ways; she is a stand in for all those things that are supposed to be at the heart of America's problems and the cause of its misguided ways: feminism, civil rights, leftist mobilization, gay rights, anti-war demonstrations, etc. We are supposed to celebrate the rise of the young Gump, for in him all the wrongs of the past will be overcome, order will be restored, and a happiness never possible in the past finally attained. And look at over whose dead bodies.
Comparisons of this sort necessarily deal with worst-case scenarios, and it is not clear that racialist fascism is the main threat to our country in the short or long term. Nevertheless, a consideration of Weimar Germany tragically underscores the fragility of democracy. There was no clear and linear path from Nietzche to Hitler in Germany, and no natural rule which decided that German history should "culminate" in the Holocaust. Germany in the 1920s enjoyed one of the strongest social democratic traditions in the West; as late as 1928, leftist parties, mainly the Social Democrats and the Communists, polled forty percent of the votes. Although the NSDAP had unarguably gained a large mass following by 1932, in 1933 support seemed to be on the wane. Hitler's installation as Chancellor was essentially an extra-parliamentary affair - the conservatives, led by President von Hindenberg, appointed him in the belief that they could control him and ostensibly for the purposes of using him to quell social disaffection and leftist radicalization.
Thankfully, it is doubtful that the United States is in the depth of crisis as was Weimar after 1929, when the depression intensified political and economic security on all levels of society. Some potent lessons for the Left can still be learned from the Weimar example. One lesson is that a strategic necessity in the face of insecurity and prevalent anti-system sentiment is to work to overcome fragmentation and shore up democratic institutions, even if these institutions are perceived to be inimical to longer-term goals. In the process, we can only hope that these democratic institutions, and our sense of democracy, may be revitalized and radicalized, so much so that they become more purposefully democratic. This process must take place on many levels, involve many coalitions, and include a reinvigoration of our political agenda and our sense of the past. It must be a positive, rather than a purely oppositional or defensive, response to the barbaric numbers-game being played on the Hill. And it must take place now, before there is very little left to bother defending and transforming.
This essay was originally published
in the March/April '96 issue of Counterattack.
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