That is, perhaps, the important thing to remember about both the undercurrent with which we are faced: Fascism, at its core, is a fraud. It promises the triumphal resurrection of the nation, and delivers only devastation. Strength without wisdom is a chimera, resolve without competence a travesty.
[David Neiwert, "The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism," p.22]

The four-part series on David Neiwert's essay, "Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism" can be found at the links above; he also wrote a sequel, "The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism," which merits some additional discussion. Much of this sequel is a review of material covered in "Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism," but like most reviews of material, reflects more thought and consideration than the first version.

The Problem of Fascism as an Ideology

In "The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism," Neiwert revisits the initial dilemma faced by everyone who attempts to write about fascism as a phenomenon: is it a political ideology or a political system? The major experts to whom Neiwert defers, Robert O. Paxton (The Five Stages of Fascism) and Prof. Roger Griffin (e.g., "Paper Tiger or Cheshire Cat?") conclude that it is an ideology. Griffin defines fascism as "palingenic ultranationalist populism," which requires some explanation: "palingenic" means, "rebirth from ashes." The fascist movements, like other totalitarian organizations, dream of society being remade anew, after the total destruction of the existing one. In the interwar years 1918-1939, most of the world had suffered drastic upheaval, including two severe depressions, two waves of global financial panics, civil wars, widespread fear of a Bolshevik revolution, and a revival of violent racial conflicts. Huge proportions of the population had suffered an involuntary change of state, as, for example, eight million Germans now living in Poland. The new polities of Europe and Latin America were also hardpressed to manage the new powers. The combination of economic crises, political maladministration of fiat currencies, and farming collapses, then exploded into public life with general mutual distrust, panic, and hysteria. The red scares of the United States, for example, touched off a wave of secret societies (the revived KKK) and lynchings. Again, the mutual trust and helpfulness of civilized life was badly strained. Criminality flourished; fanatical imbeciles, hitherto regarded with scorn, now seized the popular imagination. Evidence that society was ablaze, and in danger of destruction, could be found in the astonishing acceptance of egregious stupidity in public life.

"Ultranationalism" is another, somewhat confusing, concept. Nationalism is a story, or narrative, that humans have about history. In it, character development is minimal: there are only national "types." The behavior of nations is imagined to reflect their respective national characters, scaled up to reflect the number of people living in it. The nationalist, as a political type, is forever angry at the government for failing to adequately safeguard the interests of the nation. However, the ultranationalist takes this step further: the ultranationalist accepts no other causative force in the universe. For the ultranationalist, the nation is not merely a personification of the people and cherished institutions that function in it, but an eternal martyr. The greatest good is whatever serves the nation, while the greatest evil is any affront to the national honor. For a "mere" nationalist, the wickedness and unworthiness of some particular foreign power is part of the story, but so is economics, or common sense, or prudence. For the ultranationalist, "economics" is just a red herring, "common sense" a form of cowardice, "prudence" the most rotten temporizing with evil. The ultranationalist's frustration with insufficiently nationalist politicians is so obsessive a source of anger that it boils over into total scorn for democratic institutions. Even if the society is not a democracy, the norms of a legal society are intolerable. Since so many people are inevitably going to violate the ultranationalist's standards of zeal, this leads to the fantasy of a huge cataclysm that will either open everyone's eyes, or eliminate those whose eyes aren't open already. Hence, the hatred of "politicians," "liberals," or "pointy-headed intellectuals."

This leads us ineluctably to "populism." So far, I've outlined the fascist as a person whose nationalism, having become a fundamentalist ideology, having supplanted any empathetic or timeless foundation of morality, having displaced any objective factual explanation of events, has led to utter hatred of democracy. Democracy is hateful because, to the ultranationalist, it spawns politicians who temporize with the enemy, and spawns a population of individuals. Individuals, of course, are self-seeking and make poor soldiers. They cannot be relied upon to defend the nation. Yet the fascist is these things and populist. Populism often seeks to repudiate democracy, and replace it with social regimentation. In this way, the "national essence" is fused into a single actor. Democratic republics, in reality, are seldom "tyrannies of the majority"; they are more likely the birthplace of compromise, bargaining, and federalisms. The conflicting motives and preferences of democratic electorates means a softening or mitigation of the popular will; it is populism that actually imposes mob rule. The populist assumes "the people" can be united behind a crudely self-serving idea and fused into something more extreme than an absolute dictatorship. The democratic state must govern by passing laws that apply uniformly to everyone and every situation; mob rule rejects this constraint. The democratic state must allow people the privilege of remaining safely in the minority; the populist demands that the minority be punished for resisting the popular will.

In the previous paragraph, we see the dialectic by which democratic institutions, despised by the populist, can degenerate into fascism. Neiwert points out that Griffin's definition of fascist ideology includes features that are unique to fascism, and not really consequential in other forms of totalitarianism ("Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism," p.16). Nor are they present in all manifestations of the extreme right, ultra-conservativism, or pietism. For Neiwert's own impressive body of research on fascist movements in the USA, Griffin's description has the additional benefit of describing an ideology out of power. Neiwert's own article has examined numerous case histories of fascist movements that germinated, flourished in a blaze of squalid bullying, and then died—all without assuming executive power. In the cases he examined, the trajectory arose from some "para-nationalist" ideology that sought to supplant loyalty to the United States. Most typically, this para-nation was the white race or a subset thereof. It would typically feature a nihilistic scenario in which some calamity triggers a massive populist backlash against the temporizings of democracy: the most common example is The Turner Diaries (by William Pierce), a fantasy in which urban society ends in a colossal mass slaughter of nonwhites, liberals, and intellectuals.

While this is quite useful for analyzing political movements, I've noticed it doesn't quite fit Griffin's definition. Perhaps this is because I'm thinking of neo-confederate movements, such as the Conservative Citizens' Councils (formerly the White Citizens' Councils), white power groups like the Ku Klux Klan, white nationalist movements like White Aryan Resistence (WAR) and the Christian Identity Movement (CIM). With the possible exception of the CCC, KKK, and John Birch Society (JBS), none of these movements are nationalistic towards the United States. However, the CCC and JBS are not populist, but elitist. The KKK comes closest to fitting Griffen's description perfectly, but is hampered by its lack of rhetorical abilities; for all its size and age, it's remarkable how hard it is to think of a single prominent Klan quote. The other movements I've named have a pretension of being persecuted by a mongelized host population, and dream of displacing the United States, not restoring it. Indeed, as Griffin points out, these movements "Where revolutionary nationalism pursued violent tactics they were no longer institutionalised and movement-based, but of a sporadic, anarchic, and terroristic nature" (Neiwert, Ibid., p.25)

The reason I dwell on this is that I remain convinced of the inherently instrumental and temporal character of fascism. Fascism is instrumental, in the sense that it is recruited to serve a particular cohort of society; and it is temporal, in the sense that it is a function of time and circumstance. The fascist movements of Japan, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere were cultivated by political adventurers in an era of revolutionary upheaval; they were funded and promoted by professional politicians with far-reaching, accidental power. The most obvious example is the industrialist Von Papen, who orchestrated Hitler's invitation to form a gov (Jan. 30, 1933). In contrast, the groupuscular organizations, while horrible, are not fascist so much as hard right. They aren't populist, and they aren't usually nationalist; in many cases, they bitterly despise the entire urban population, and they aren't palingenetic so much as nihilistic; they want to see civil society destroyed, not reborn. In "Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism," Neiwert furnishes many examples of how business associations have successfully recruited the "Patriot Movement" to fight health and safety regulations; yet, clearly these outfits will never form the shock troops of a future US fascist movement; they're far too fragmented and far too narrow in appeal.

Then again, in Neiwert's sequel ("The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism", February '05), he again is compelled to observe the temporal character of fascist ideology. It's irrational; it's illogical; it's not normative. He quotes his earlier study, In God's Country:

As with previous forms of fascism, its affective power is based on irrational drives and mythical assumptions; its followers find in it an outlet for idealism and self-sacrifice; yet on close inspection, much of its support actually derives from an array of personal material and psychological motivations. It is not merely an accident, either, that the movement and its belief systems are directly descended from earlier manifestations of overt fascism in the Northwest...[p.320-321; quoted on p.27 of "Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism"]

The reason is that fascism is instrumental, and temporal. It despises planning or prudence; rather, it chases after final solutions. The absence of any coherent ideology makes it impossible for fascism to attempt a realistic economic program for any length of time, since it has no consistant economic doctrines; it cannot attempt a serious strategic policy, since it rejects compromise and fair dealing with other nations. It is impressionistic, meaning that it does not correlate actions to explanations logically, as a Communist regime tries to do, but rather, relates the impressions it seeks to create of its own acts to the anxieties of the "people." Such a phenomenon can only be described as an ideology if one expands the definition of "ideology" to exclude virtually nothing.

David Neiwert's Warning to Readers

Neiwert's sequel, as the title plainly indicates, spells out the extreme right's conquest of the Republican Party, and of the conquered GOP's conquest of all the machinery of power. The tactics employed are stunningly heavyhanded, and stunningly effective, and the effects are obvious today. And yet, the whole system of coercion and extortion works because there's money in it. On pp.28, 48, & 68, Neiwert observes the now-obvious parallels to the Stalinization of the Bolshevik Revolution. The principle of democratic republicanism has fallen into disrepute; the market of ideas has been overtaken by the determination to end any uncertainty about the future. The fascist movement required a desperate game played by the topmost ranks of interwar bourgeoisie, to enable a single movement to reach absolute power, take up arms, trump the state's monopoly on violence, and utterly destroy any conceivable enemy of the bourgeoisie. Such a movement, though, was dangerous because it could turn on the bourgeousie.

Since 1945, the tools of rightwing totalitarianism have been refined. "Fascism" has become obsolete; the technology of control has become much more effective. The sight of paramilitaries marching down the street in lockstep is liable to provoke panic even among the most conservative observers; besides, such formations are tactically useless (thanks to the RPG and submachine gun, rare items in interwar Europe). The administration of totalitarianism is far more refined and far more bureaucratic. Rather than logistical tours-de-force like the mass rallies at Nuremburg, totalitarianism seeks passivity. The mere idea of technology, as a distinct mystical force, has become a crucial part of the cult of superiority and mastery. The object of the totalitarian movement is to conquer not through the unprecedented regimentation of masses, but to atomize. In the quest for a final political solution to class struggle, the old bourgeoisie launched the political equivalent of global thermonuclear war against the left, and against democracy. They themselves were scorched in the blast. Since that time, the industrial management of business enterprise has tamed the weaponry; they seek a final solution not only to any middle class challenge of their mastery, but to the uncertain outcomes of fascist movements.