Know them by their deeds

We have had to wait a long time for this book. As its author notes, “Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century,”other political ideologies, such as Marxist socialism, having roots in the 19th or earlier. Yet until now there has been no satisfying account of fascism that includes a convincing diagnostic kit for identifying its symptoms. Researched with scholarly attention to an enormous array of sources and written with a cool lucidity and sense of order, Robert O. Paxton’s “The Anatomy of Fascism” reviews the literature of theory about fascism and sets its horrible manifestations into a matrix of interpretation.

Why has this approach taken so long to emerge? In part because a sensible account of fascism has been befogged by faulty theorizing -- some popular, some academic. Two such versions have been particularly misleading. The first is the popular notion (still held on the English left) that fascism is one stage in a sequence of almost chemical reactions: Nationalism leads to fascism, which leads to racism, which leads to war. The sequence is derived from vulgarized Marxism and condemns all nationalism as a bourgeois counter-strategy against the class struggle; this assumption can exist only in societies ignorant of nationalism’s complex nature. The second is the theory of totalitarianism as propounded in the Cold War by Zbigniew Brzezinski and others to suggest a moral and political equivalence between fascism, especially in its Nazi variety, and Stalinist communism.

Paxton, emeritus professor of social sciences at Columbia University, reminds us that the term “totalitarian” was first popularized, if not invented, by Mussolini. His book more than ever convinced me that no fully totalitarian society has ever existed, although totalitarian ideologies were deafeningly promoted in much of the world from the 1920s to the 1940s and survive into this century. It is futile to examine Fascist Italy or Hungary or even Nazi Germany (let alone Communist states) on the assumption that all public and private activity was directly and effectively controlled by the leader, the party and the secret police. That monolithic image is just what the propaganda bosses of those regimes wanted to promote. But it conceals the web of compromises, inconsistencies and exceptions that formed part of the real fabric of these dictatorships, assisting them to take power and maintain control in times of economic disaster and war.

Paxton’s method is to concentrate on what the European fascists did, rather than on what they said. The contradictions are many. They called themselves revolutionaries yet carried out no fundamental redistribution of power, as in classical revolutions; followers who showed signs of wanting to overthrow capitalism or eliminate private property were almost always suppressed and often murdered. They preached a return to older, purer values: “[F]ascists often cursed faceless cities and materialist secularism, and exalted an agrarian utopia free from the rootlessness, conflict, and immorality of urban life.” Yet the effect of their regimes was usually to accelerate modernization, the dominance of cities and the advance of technology (Germany being a good example). This is not to say that fascism lacked originality or did not bring about astonishing transformations. It “redrew the frontiers between private and public [and] changed the practice of citizenship from the enjoyment of constitutional rights and duties to participation in mass ceremonies of affirmation and conformity. It reconfigured relations between the individual and the collectivity, so that an individual had no rights outside community interest.” The notion of truth became “whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.”

The difficulty about defining fascism, as Paxton says, is that fascisms are diverse. Communism derived from the European Enlightenment and was universalist. Fascism put the national community before the human race and emphasized all that made that community particular. Each fascist state pursued its own track, and no “fascist international” ever worked effectively. To cope with this lack of a conscious paradigm, Paxton constructs his book as a series of comparative studies. He assesses the performance of these regimes and parties as they pass through a cycle of five stages: creation, rooting themselves in their national political systems, seizing power, exercising power and finally “the long duration, during which the fascist regime chooses either radicalization or entropy.”

Put simply, this last stage poses the question of where fascism goes to die. Does it grow more and more extreme until it is destroyed by its own insane violence, as in Nazi Germany? Or does it reach a peak and then deflate until it is no more than a one-party state run by some aging general who has long since demobilized any mass movement? Spain and Portugal went that way. Historians will always ask what the Third Reich would have become if the July 1944 plot against Hitler had succeeded. Was a German “liberal fascism” imaginable -- something like the “Eurocommunism” that arose as Moscow’s authority disintegrated? A national-conservative government purged of the SS and run by patriotic army officers? It may be true that a fascism without state terror, mass rallies and the cult of brutality is no longer fascist.

Paxton tries to answer two questions that are still urgent: What are the necessary conditions for fascism to arise? And could it recur in the 21st century? Research has eliminated the idea that the popular base for these movements was a small middle class threatened by economic ruin. Their support from the start was always much wider and more diverse. Shrewdly, Paxton suggests that one precondition was growing disunity on the socialist wing of politics, so that protest ceased to be a left-wing monopoly. Another was a plural democratic system that had become discredited, so that party politics could be replaced by mass movements appealing for unity and national assertion. Existing dictatorships or military juntas can give way to new “leaders on white horses” but very seldom to popular fascism.

Bertolt Brecht wrote after the fall of National Socialism that “the womb from whence That crept / Is fertile yet.” This is true in the sense that people in many countries can still embrace anti-democratic politics inspired by extreme, injured nationalism and the demonizing of an Other (Jews? Islamists? Black immigrants?). What’s missing is the essential condition for the “rooting” stage: a right-wing elite frightened enough and stupid enough to make common cause with gutter demagogues. The real barrier to fascist revival -- in Europe, at least -- has been the appearance since 1945 of broad-based, socially responsible conservative movements, especially Christian Democracy in all its forms. Paxton mentions post-1989 Eastern Europe briefly, but he could have pointed to the ominous disintegration of the right wing in countries like Poland, a disintegration opening the way to extreme parties peddling militant nationalism, racism and violent hostility to the free-market economy of the European Union.

Paxton saves his definition of fascism for the end of the book. It consists of one enormous catch-all sentence, comprehensive but unwieldy. I prefer his nine-point list of what he calls fascism’s “mobilizing passions,” also too long to quote but worth pinning on one’s wall. Here’s a sample: “the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external.” I dare any reader to go through this list without being reminded of things said or done in his or her country today.

Two omissions should be mentioned: One is an adequate discussion of nationalism, still the strongest political force abroad in the world. Nationalism has been sympathetically studied in recent decades. Even Anglo American political scientists, who once thought all nationalism was a prelude to aggressions and gas chambers, have learned to discriminate between its reactionary and its liberal manifestations. Paxton’s discussion is incomplete without a survey of that new thinking.

Second, Paxton does not discuss the subjective fascist experience -- the difficulty of remembering what it was once like to be one. It was the German Social Democrat Erhard Eppler who pointed out that the image of the original fasces, the bundle of chastising rods carried by the Roman lictor, fits the nature of fascism perfectly. Fascism is just such a bundle of rods, a collection of prejudices and demands and grievances that may have nothing whatever to do with one another but are bound into a single artifact by the cord of the leader and the party. When that cord is cut, as it was in 1945, the rods fall apart and return to mutual irrelevance.

How often have I heard old Nazis say: “Yes, I thought the Versailles Treaty must be overthrown; and yes, I thought party democracy had failed; and yes, I wanted the trade unions banned. But I was never against the Jews, and I thought Hitler was criminal for attacking Russia, and the racial-purity doctrine always seemed ridiculous to me. So, you see, I was never really a Nazi.” Maybe nobody, not even Hitler or Mussolini, believed in all the rods in the fasces. So did fascists never exist? Robert Paxton steps in to restore sanity, with his view that fascism is not what was believed but what was done. *