The Anatomy of Fascism

Fascism, by contrast, was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric. The role programs and doctrine play in it is, on closer inspection, fundamentally unlike the role they play in conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples. It has not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like Marx, or by any major critical intelligence, like Mill, Burke, or Tocqueville.

In a way utterly unlike the classical “isms,” the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is “true” insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract and universal reason. The first fascists were entirely frank about this.

Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war.

Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent.79 Programs were casually fluid.

What Roger Chartier had to say about cultural preparation as the “cause” of the French Revolution is exactly right for the history of fascism as well: “attributing ‘cultural origins’ to the French Revolution does not by any means establish the Revolution’s causes; rather, it pinpoints certain of the conditions that made it possible because it was conceivable.”

New forms of anxiety appeared with the twentieth century, to which fascism soon promised remedies. Looking for fears, indeed, may be a more fruitful research strategy than a literal-minded quest for thinkers who “created” fascism.

One necessary precondition was mass politics. As a mass movement directed against the Left, fascism could not really exist before the citizenry had become involved in politics.

After the revolutions of 1848, while most conservatives and cautious liberals were trying to restore limits to the right to vote, a few bold and innovative conservative politicians chose instead to gamble on accepting a mass electorate and trying to manage it.

Indeed fascists can find their space only after socialism has become powerful enough to have had some share in governing, and thus to have disillusioned part of its traditional working-class and intellectual clientele. So we can situate fascism in time not only after the irreversible establishment of mass politics, but indeed late in that process, when socialists have reached the point of participating in government—and being compromised by it.

The role of intellectuals was crucial at three points already suggested in chapter 1: in discrediting previous liberal regimes; in creating new poles outside the Left around which anger and protest (until recently a monopoly of the Left) could be mobilized; and in making fascist violence respectable.

One of the most important preconditions was a faltering liberal order.69 Fascisms grew from back rooms to the public arena most easily where the existing government functioned badly, or not at all. One of the commonplaces of discussions of fascism is that it thrived upon the crisis of liberalism.