Fascism: A Patchwork Mockery of Movement Politics

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Triumph of the Shrill

I think it’s sometimes hard for people whose understanding of fascism comes primarily from popular culture imagery to understand what a chaotic, irrational, travshamockery of an “organized” movement fascism actually is. Most folks obtain an understanding of what fascism looks like and how it operates from studying snapshots of fully realized fascist movements at the height of their power. This suggests fascism is a highly organized, completely unified, hyper-competent structure built around a rational, definitive, and immutable ideology of well-considered opinions and positions.  The truth is that this image of a “Triumph of the Will” sort of fascism is but a product of fascist propaganda; this is what fascists want you to think of them (and also what they desperately need to believe themselves.) I dunno if you realize this, but fascists aren’t known for their honesty, and they certainly don’t have your best interests, or revealing the truth, at heart.

If you dig past the propaganda and examine the history (including the brief but heavily documented record of modern Pig Empire fascist movements) you discover that every fascist movement is a hastily-bound, patchwork ideological quilt stitched together from a truly stunning number of constantly morphing factions, groups, and tendencies, and driven by vaguely related but not always compatible antipathies, conspiratorial beliefs, and cults of personality. Furthermore, even while attempting to present an out-facing impression of unity and ideological conformity, all of these internal factions of a given fascist movement are engaged in a constant struggle against each other for control of the larger movement, and to define its ideological tenets. Indeed, the only *real* unifying principles at work here are a hatred of  the “other”, and a desire to totally subjugate the “othered” members of various out-groups, typically through the application of force and violence at all levels – from the street, up on through their most important target for a takeover: the very machinery of state.

Peering below the oily surface of our contemporary fascist movement in America, for example, you find an alliance between nazi street gangs like the Proud Boys, unhinged parent’s rights groups like Moms for Liberty, faux populist political movements loosely connected to libertarian groups and the Republican Party, apocalyptic evangelical Christian Zionist organizations like CUFI, revanchist TradCath groups like the folks steering Project 2025, and even Tech-authoritarian coalitions spawned in Silicon Valley by rich people who don’t believe in anything but accumulating power and preserving capitalism. None of these factions willingly claim the mantle of fascism; yet they all work together towards fascist goals, and thus form the patchwork quilt of modern American fascism.

From outside of the movement, these groups (and there are many other components of the modern American fascist quilt I haven’t listed here) appear quite dissimilar and distinct and occasionally even oppositional to each other on the surface. They claim different motivations, adhere to different organizational structures, and rally under a myriad of different banners; indeed, they are often only obviously united by that which they oppose, and seek to eliminate or control.

This carnival of nonsense can make it difficult for casual observers to even realize that they’re looking at the components in a larger picture. Recognizing this is made all the more difficult by the fact that folks raised on Pig Empire, Cold War propaganda tend to have an incomplete or entirely false understanding of what fascism is and how it functions. There are after all still a large number of Americans who cannot conceive of fascism unless there’s a man with a funny little moustache, armies of soldiers decked out in Hugo Boss uniforms invading Poland, and a fully developed plan to build gas chambers and crematoriums for use on a racially-defined enemy. All of which is ridiculous when you realize that even historically defined 20th century fascist movements weren’t all led by Hitler, and were fully fascist well before they assumed total control of various states in Europe. The Nazis themselves only enacted plans for what would be known as “the final solution” (and thus, the Holocaust) in 1941; roughly eight years after the Enabling Act gave them absolute power in Germany, and almost three years after they began invading the rest of Europe.

All of which leaves us with a plain, and yet infuriatingly difficult question to answer: if fascism itself is a constantly shifting chimera, how do you identify who is, and who isn’t, part of a given fascist movement? Even assuming we’ve properly identified what fascism is and who fascists are (no small task in itself, but I’m partial to Umberto Eco’s definition as detailed in the 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism”) we’re still left with the puzzle of separating ideas or beliefs, from organizational structures and alliances. The varied, shifting and often irrational composition of the enemy coalition works against any sort of easy collection of identifying characteristics. This in turn forces us to identify fascist movements not by what they profess to believe or what they claim as motivation, but rather by their actions and associations. It doesn’t matter why or under what banners these freaks seek to ban books, smash protestors, re-segregate American life, and destroy what passes for democratic systems in our society; what matters is that they’re working together to accomplish these reactionary and revanchist goals. After all, fascists are people who work with other fascists, to do fascism.

– Nina Illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.

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