How to (Make a Troll) Disappear Completely: A Primer on Americanized Fascism

NinaIllingworth December 14, 2020November 17, 2022 a fascism primer, a Marxist analysis of fascism, Alt Right, anticommunism, Benito Mussolini, Blackshirts and Reds, Bolsonaro, Books, class, class war, colonialism, contrarian left, David Olusoga, definition of fascism, Donald Trump, Essays, Eternal Fascism, FA1, fascism, fascist politics, Frantz Fanon, Glenn Greenwald has no idea what fascism is, Glenn Greenwald is a not left wing, How Fascism Works, JA5, Jason Stanley, Jim Crow, keyboard warrior, left wing theory, Leon Trotsky, Marxism, Masha Gessen, Media, Michael Parenti, Modi, mythic past, nativism, News, Nina Illingworth, Offsite Writing, online right, Politics, Racism, Rants, Rec Reads, Recommended Reading, Robert Paxton, Social Darwinism, ST2, The Anatomy of Fascism, Theory, Timothy Snyder, trolls, Trumpism is fascism, Umberto Eco, Ur Fascism, volk, What is Fascism, white nationalism

Editor’s note: quite frankly I wrote this article because after four straight years of Wikipedia Warrior bullshit and gaslighting, I’m sick of politely explaining what fascism is to cracker imperials who don’t comprehend the profound effect American anticommunism has had in distorting their understanding of what fascism actually looks like; so I’ve written a short, extremely snarky primer to share with low-information social media trolls who would otherwise waste my time and energy online.

If you are by happenstance not a social media troll looking to explain why your fave, who is pushing fascist ideology online, is not actually a fascist, please forgive the mocking tone of the piece below in advance; it’s still a pretty good primer on what Americanized fascism is, featuring links to not just essays but also full books you can read online for free, that all helped shape my understanding on the subject.

I thank you for your indulgence in advance.

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Hello my pasty friend! I am so glad to see you again; in the time since your last visit, I’ve built this relaxing digital mini-library to help make our seemingly endless discussions more comfortable. If you click on the links in the article below, you’ll find numerous (completely free) sources of important information, written by highly qualified observers, about the nature of fascism; I do so sincerely hope you like it.

What’s that you say? You’ve never been to my website before in your entire life? That may indeed be so my distinguished Twitter troll but as you may perhaps be able to imagine, I’ve already had several hundred conversations about the nature of fascism with you, or rather other chuds whose essential contrarian nature makes them largely indistinguishable from you. Indeed, I’ve grown so familiar with our little ritual at this point, I’m going to describe to you in precise, step-by-step detail how this interaction will unfold – and because the impatience and general illiteracy of the “stan” community is legendary, I will do my utmost to make this as brief as possible.

Shall we begin? For what feels like the longest time, the first thing you’d always be dying to ask me is “what makes you think Donald Trump is a fascist?“

In reply, I’d politely ask you to read my short listicle-style essay “Stop Making Excuses: Trump is Definitely a Fascist And Here is the Evidence” and click on the links inside.

Of course, time marches ever forward and it’s entirely possible you’re here to ask me “why I believe Americanized fascism will have no trouble outlasting the Trump era” and “why I’m sure it’s still a serious political crisis going forward?”

In that case, I’d politely ask you to read my short essays “No Magic Man” and “American Fascism and Networks of Power,” clicking on the links in those articles as necessary.

The plain truth however is that you didn’t really come here to ask me to prove Trump is a fascist; you came here to tell me I don’t know what fascism is. So you aren’t going to read my article, you’re just going to allow a little time to pass before telling me you’ve read it and clicked on the links. Afterward, you will coyly ask me “okay, but how do you define fascism then?“

I will in turn respond by asking you to read the essay “Eternal Fascism” by Umberto Eco, check out this article and read the pamphlet by Leon Trotsky linked inside, watch this Some More News Youtube video that defines fascism in a modern context and then review this summary by Professor Jason Stanley, the author of “How Fascism Works: the Politics of Us And Them.”

In response and likely after only skimming the related material, you will tell me you “don’t agree“ with my experts about what fascism is and then quote a Harper’s article from 2017 by the esteemed Robert Paxton, despite the fact that you have not read The Anatomy of Fascism and I have.

I will retort by telling you that neither Paxton, nor most of his contemporaries are Marxist historians, which causes them to not only miss the crucial role of capitalist manipulation in the rise of fascism, but also to adopt a European, or Western-centric view of fascism that generates huge flaws in their analysis; by way of providing an example, I will remind you that Paxton doesn’t think Axis-aligned Imperial Japan was fascist, for “reasons.” I will then further suggest that if you want to understand how Pig Empire propaganda worked to narrow the western historical understanding of fascism down to something that looks a lot like “Hitler or bust,” you should listen to this five-part podcast series or read the excellent book “Blackshirts And Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism” by Marxist historian and social critic Michael Parenti.

At this point if you actually are here to dispute the argument that Downmarket Mussolini is a fascist, you’ll probably mutter something about the unreliability of “bloodthirsty communists,” and I’ll be forced to remind you that Jill Stein isn’t a communist, President Roosevelt was not a communist, nor are congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, congresswoman Ilhan Omar, or former US president Barack Obama; growing weary of arguing in circles, I’ll tell you to take my word for it as a genuine anarchist that Democrat doesn’t actually mean communist – you only think that because you have brain worms.

Sensing your formulation of an absurd and disingenuous retort, I’ll furthermore quickly cut you off by pointing out you sure as hell can’t say that former Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson is a socialist without getting laughed out of the room. Then, moving in for the kill, I’ll remind you that even without factoring in the fascist connections to the rule of capital, Trump’s hard fascist turn this past summer convinced numerous mainstream observers and historians of fascism to change their mind; some discreetly, and others like Jason Stanley, Masha Gessen and even the blatantly anticommunist historian Timothy Snyder, quite openly.

You will likely then storm off in a huff convinced that I have my opinions, but you have your facts and obviously, I’m just wrong; thus our encounter will mercifully end.

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Or, perhaps not. Perhaps I’ve misjudged you and you’re not a sub-literate reactionary forum troll after all. It may well be that you’ve actually perused much of the material above and you still have a number of good faith questions. If that were the case, I’d hope our discussion went something like this:

“Okay, but doesn’t applying a Marxist analysis to the phenomenon of fascism imply that all capitalist countries, even democratic ones, are secretly fascist?”

I’d say yes in a very minor sense, but ultimately no on the whole. Due to the anti-democratic and predatory nature of capitalism, it is entirely possible that on a long enough timeline, all sufficiently powerful (in the geopolitical sense) capitalist societies will eventually turn to fascism at some point. As such, the idea that capitalism and fascism are essentially (but not exactly) the same thing, or at least that capitalism leads to fascism, can be quite useful for organizing purposes and as a shorthand place-holder when there’s little time to painstakingly define a complex and notoriously divisive word like fascism. However, if we’re looking for a more precise understanding of fascism, this short-hand concept is no longer very useful to us because it fails to account for three important “features” of the fascist phenomenon:

First because fascism is not simply capitalism, but rather an openly anti-democratic, violent and repressive defense mechanism that allows a wealthy capitalist minority to maintain control over the state and society in the face of various types of mass opposition, the ruling classes generally prefer to rule through liberal democratic means; albeit, while simultaneously using their wealth to rig the political process in favor of the status quo, otherwise known as the absolute rule of money. Fascism is historically very chaotic, extremely unpopular among people who aren’t fascists, and has a weird habit of eating itself because it’s ultimately entwined with a death cult; while the ruling capitalist order is happily prepared to push the panic button if that’s what it takes to maintain control over the golden goose and ensure the supremacy of profits, they would prefer not to from a bottom line perspective. Indeed, one of the key reasons that some decreasingly effective semblance of Pig Empire democracy still exists even in this new gilded age of capitalism, is because liberal democracies are more stable and more profitable for the ruling bourgeoisie as a whole; if the labor class cannot threaten their control over the state and society (and thus, profits) through democratic means, there is no reason for the ruling classes to fund, tolerate and support fascist political systems.

Secondly, as Trotsky succinctly notes in the pamphlet I linked to above, the key purpose behind the use of fascist forms in organization and strategy is to smash, or atomize the working class and destroy their organizations. If the working class, including numerous more specific classifications of exploitation and marginalization that would ultimately put one in the larger modern underclass, is already completely atomized and doesn’t have any sufficiently influential organizations to effectively attack capitalist power on behalf of the exploited masses, fascism is once again unnecessary and ultimately not worth the trouble. In this scenario, it’s typically preferable to simply maintain a hyper-capitalist police state, or even a barely restrained military dictatorship as neither of those governing philosophies require a costly and destabilizing perpetual mobilization of the volk against demonized or scapegoated internal enemies.

And finally, as I learned from reading Frantz Fanon and David Olusoga, it is seemingly impossible to make a society embrace the condition of fascism, without their prior embrace of the historical conditions of colonialism; albeit not necessarily always as the colonizer. This is why I said sufficiently geopolitically powerful capitalist societies may ultimately devolve into fascist rule, because in terms of economic exploitation, as well as individual human and civil rights, fascism is merely the application of colonial methods of dominance, including (often racialized) violence, terror and hyper-exploitation, applied instead to colonizer nations in the imperial core, or what is sometimes called “the civilized world” by racists and people who should know better by now. Thus crucially, a society in a globalized and financialized economy that isn’t geopolitically and financially strong enough to prevent itself from being colonized, will never be in a position to enact fascism on its own but is rather more likely to fall under the controlling influence of the ruling classes in more powerful colonizer societies, and thereby be managed under a standard colonial dictatorship. While the difference between fascism and colonialism will rightfully seem frivolously academic to a hyper-exploited or enslaved person in a colonized society, if we’re being precise the colonial model enforces the absolute rule over the exploited majority, under pain of death, by the colonial minority and thus a colonial society has neither the ability, nor the need (under optimal conditions) to mobilize the volk into a posture of perpetual conflict with internal enemies. Furthermore, because at the end of the day you can’t put a bayonet behind every person’s back, at all waking moments, fascist politics and the installation of fascist rule ultimately require the common embrace of the same open brutality and social Darwinist principles that are required to maintain colonial rule outside the imperial core.

Taken altogether then, fascism, which cannot be installed without a complicit ruling class and at least some degree of general popular support, would seem to require the wealthy ruling classes to experience three specific types of crisis; a crisis of political control, a crisis of economic control in the form of an oppositional and politically activated labor class and finally what one might deem a crisis of Enlightenment morality, or perhaps simply human empathy – a broad societal sense that ruthlessly exploiting one’s neighbors under the threat of horrifying violence is in fact, not good cricket, even if they don’t look like you and don’t pray the same way as you do, or to the same prophet as you do.

“Wow, that’s a lot to take in; do you think you could summarize everything we’ve learned so far into one easy-to-memorize definition?“

“Fascism isn’t merely a stage of capitalism, but rather a defense mechanism for capitalists that is used to protect the ability to extract profits, by atomizing, terrorizing and disenfranchising the labor class using brutal colonial methods of control in an imperialist, colonizer society, and which is always activated by a wealthy, bourgeoisie ruling order that finds itself unable to dominate the lower classes through the traditional levers of liberal democratic power.”

“I will never remember that, could you put it in an easy to copy and share meme or infographic?“

Yeah, why not? Here you go, but you might have to pop it out to save it at full size:

“Wait, what about those checklists and common features of fascism in the writing of Umberto Eco, Jason Stanley and Robert Paxton; given your definition above, are those purely aesthetics?“

In a word, no; but I think the real issue here is that you’re probably conflating methodology, form and function – although I can’t say I blame you because Paxton does essentially the same thing. Keeping in mind that fascism never really seizes power, but rather requires the cooperation of both elite capital, and a certain percentage of the (typically affluent) petite bourgeoisie to be successfully imposed and begin consolidating power, there are really only so many ways you can package demolishing democracy, human rights and labor class organization to enough people to get away with it. When we talk about concepts like the exaltation of a mythic past, the mobilization of a chosen in-group (or the Volk) against a scapegoated out-group as “enemies of the nation” or the establishment of a cult of personality around a leader figure, we’re not just talking about random choices here, but rather tried and true fascist political techniques that even fascist organizers themselves have admitted they copy from each other – the most infamous example is of course Hitler, who borrowed heavily from Mussolini’s playbook when steering the Nazi Party to power in pre-war Germany. Fascist movements often look very similar to each other, because they are very similar to each other, they believe very similar things that other fascists movements believe, and they’re all applying similar fascist political strategies in the same kind of capitalist, unstable liberal democracies as each other. This in turn makes Robert Paxton’s shorthand definition of fascism, Umberto Eco’s checklist featuring mostly the common ideological structures of fascism, and Jason Stanley’s collection of fascist political techniques all useful for identifying fascist movements by their common characteristics, before they are able to shatter their political opposition; which is after all, when it’s important to identify them because they can still be stopped at that point.

I should also mention as an aside that this is actually what baffles me about contrarian left snarky hot takes that Trump and Trumpism aren’t fascist; I mean I think we’re all fully aware that Downmarket Mussolini didn’t transform the United States into a dictatorship, but as the work of both Eco and Stanley demonstrate succinctly, there is nothing alarmist about calling a government or even a political movement that embraces fascist ideology and fascist political tactics, well, fascist – they are after all doing all that fascist stuff for a reason. This phenomenon is even more perplexing when you consider that even Eurocentric historians who refuse to use the word fascist to describe Trump, or Modi, or Bolsonaro and so on, as technically fascist, will still invariably acknowledge the terrifying rise of right wing authoritarianism, reactionary violence and anti-democratic political ideologies in these same nations, including America. For a bunch of people who’re supposedly left wing and antifascist, the online “left wing” influencers howling “Trump is not a fascist goddamnit” sure do seem to get bent out of shape about what they themselves are acknowledging is pretty much a semantic difference.

“Has America always been fascist?“

Technically no, but for many people who’ve endured brutal (and often racialized) oppression at the hands of the state, the difference between fascism and a colonial capitalist dictatorship is hardly relevant. I think it would be very hard for a rational person to argue that post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow America was not essentially a fascist society as was crucially demonstrated when the (often brutal) restriction of the franchise to whites immediately restored the Confederate planter class to absolute power in their own states, and a largely controlling influence in national politics. The sustained censorship, criminalization and retributive violence campaigns conducted against the American left and particularly its political organizations as well as its unions, effectively reduced the country to a state of fascism from about 1917, until the onset of the Great Depression. American anticommunism in the forties, fifties and much of the sixties produced an objectively fascist society – albeit in all cases, the illusion of elections were maintained; it just didn’t much matter who you voted for. I think what’s really important to understand here however is that as a white supremacist country founded on colonialism, genocide and chattel slavery, that has successfully exported its own brand of imperial rule and capitalist thought to most of the world at gunpoint, fascism and the threat of fascism has always been in America’s bones. Throughout most of this country’s history, whether or not America has been at least a covertly fascist nation, has by and large been a question of geopolitics, legal fictions and the thinnest veneer of justice hiding a false “color-blind” gulag system designed to replicate the effects (and profits) of slave labor; we are perpetually one crisis away from overt (as opposed to covert, or corporate) fascism and that really should keep more of us awake at night than it does.

“I think I understand what you’re saying, but I’m still not sure I’ve got all the details sorted out – where can I explore the topic of the rise of 21st century, American fascism in greater detail?“

Frankly I’ve been writing about the current (global) fascist phenomenon for almost five years now and even I still don’t have it all sorted out, it’s entirely possible the evidential history of American fascism is just too vast to go through in any reasonable amount of time. You can find all my articles about fascism on the “Amerikan Musik: Fascism Ascendant in the USA“ page, featuring literally dozens of essays that themselves typically feature hundreds of clickable citations. If you’re serious about exploring modern fascism, it should keep you clicking for weeks.