D the USA, that Trump regime, ICE and the MAGA lunatics – is that fascism? Are the rabid right-wing parties in Europe also fascist, which are at least partially becoming increasingly radicalized from right-wing populism to right-wing extremism? More and more researchers are answering the question with yes. The counter-opinion, which is quickly and hastily put forward, is that democracy and the rule of law have not been eliminated, not even in the USA and certainly not in Europe, where most of the parties in question are in the opposition or in some form of coalition.
This is of course an extremely thin argument, since all fascists in world history operated in democracy until they abolished it. It would be a crazy thesis that a fascist in the opposition is not a fascist.
The abolition of democracy, pluralism, human rights and the rule of law does not happen suddenly, but was a more or less gradual process in all historical phases, even in Nazi Germanyfor which the expelled lawyer Ernst Fraenkel coined the term “dual state” in a legendary study. Well into the late 1930s, the constitutional state had not been completely destroyed by the dictatorship. Lawlessness and arbitrariness and the rule of law existed side by side. Court decisions that did not suit the Nazis could no longer be enforced. Because the judges have no military they can send out, the power, on the other hand, lies with their Gestapo, SA, SS, ICE, etc.
It is therefore too cheap to use the term fascism only for the totalitarian final expansion of a terror regime, but not for the steps that lead to it. Fascism doesn’t start with Auschwitz, it ends with it.
Fascism doesn’t start with Auschwitz, it ends with it
Not only fascism, but also the fascists themselves are not that easy to define. Fascist movements are characterized by a number of characteristics: leader cult, paranoid worldviews that are constantly fueled, absolute black and white thinking, antagonistic enemy images, especially of minorities, but also against internal enemies. Aggression that is constantly whipped up. Maximum negative emotionalization to turn a following into an agitated and angry crowd. The supporters are declared a movement and the party is declared an “anti-party” that stands against the “system parties”.
A large part of these characteristics are undoubtedly fulfilled by the right-wing extremist movements in their spiral of self-radicalization.
Beyond these characteristics, things become difficult because fascism has no doctrine of its own, apart from (ethno-)nationalism. My colleague Robert Pausch just said in the Time pointed out: “Right-wingers can be anti-Semitic and Israel-friendly at the same time, pacifists and militarists at the same time, neoliberal and socialist at the same time. While the left is constantly suspected of hypocrisy, the right has not had this problem so far. Precisely because consistency obviously did not seem to be a category for them – and they were never measured by it.”
Currently, the ultra-right are attacking each other, largely unnoticed by the larger public: some are suddenly fans of America and dream of an imperial “large-scale order” in their spirit Idols Carl Schmittthe others cannot so quickly desert and switch from the traditional right-wing anti-Americanism, and they also cannot easily reconcile the fact that Germany is a colonized satrap of some hegemonic power with nationalist gigantomania.
But the blatant inconsistencies of fascism are not its weakness. Any recommendations to put the finger on these contradictions may miss the point.
Because one thing is actually interesting, both historically and currently: The fact that fascism does not have a clear doctrine and fixed principles has always been the strength of fascism and even partly explains its success. It operates smoothly under changing circumstances and is, as the US fascism researcher Robert O. Paxton once put it with unsurpassed elegance, a “fog of subliminal attitudes”. A mood, an attitude, which in turn is nourished by moods that are favorable to it. Cult of harshness, joy in the mean and nasty, the sadism and the sacrifice of those who always feel short-changed, destructive fantasies and the imagination of all kinds of cruelty that one would like to inflict on those who one holds responsible for one’s own injustice.
This is the background noise above which any opinion on any problem can arise – or even the opposing opinion. Not a single thinker, says Paxton, has ever developed a philosophical system of fascism. He does not need it because he is carried by “mobilizing passions”.
The theatricality of fascism, the pose-like nature of leaders and agitators, is rooted in this: they can adopt any opinion that promises the greatest success with the audience, as long as they are able to weave it with fascist emotionality. They are therefore, even more than normal politicians, actors of the political. They can easily say one thing today and the opposite tomorrow, all while still grinning scornfully at their old-fashioned opponents, for whom internal consistency is more important than for them.
Hence the density of eccentric showmen in the fascist leadership of history and the present. The common misconception of underestimating the fascists may have its roots in this, as you can see that they often don’t take what they say seriously and even know that it is outrageous nonsense. But this is a dangerous mistake, because the evil is real, only the victims are interchangeable, depending on who fits best at the time. You have to take them seriously, but not literally.