I have my own, fundamental definition of fascism. It’s simple, really. It goes like this:
Whoever’s in power, deserves to be in power.
The implication hiding in those eight words is the devil in the details. The line really says it doesn’t matter how you got into power. It doesn’t matter if you’ve lied, cheated, slandered, bullied, assaulted, battered, or assassinated your way to the top. You needn’t have done all those things, but if you’ve done any of them, unapologetically, brazenly, aggressively, you’re a fascist to one degree or another. In fact, if you have done any of those things to get to the top, why, you merit power far more than the schlub who’s hamstrung by silly notions like decency, civility, altruism, empathy, and love.
In that sense, pretty much everybody who’s ever led, who’s ever been in power, is on the spectrum of fascism.
The fasces was an ancient Etruscan symbolic weapon carried by those authorized to mete out corporal or capital punishment at will.
One of my American idols, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, lied easily. Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose War on Poverty, whose Great Society, whose Civil Rights Act of 1964 all were brilliant and beautiful governmental prescriptions for the endemic ills of American society, cheated his way to victory in the 1948 Democratic primary for US Senator from Texas. He won the nomination by 87 votes through polling place intimidation, ballot box stuffing, and ghost voters. So, he too was on the fascist spectrum well before he led this nation into the quagmire of Vietnam.
If that sounds like a broad brush argument, so be it. I’ll say it again: everyone in power possesses, to some extent, the sin of fascism in his or her heart.
I also paint billionaires with a broad brush. No can have become a billionaire and continue to be, at heart, a decent human being. That is, if billionaires, present or aspiring, ever were decent human beings in the first place. Amassing that kind of scratch demands the amasser to be obsessive, greedy, at very least borderline sociopathic, and likely psychopathic. Take Elon Musk…, I rest my case. Or how about Donald Trump? Okay, now I’m just showing off.
Now then, considering my assertion that all leaders exist on the fascism spectrum, it’d really be overkill to suggest all leaders are fascists, period. For instance, we — all of us — carry in our hearts at least some tinge of racism. All of us, deep down, have to grapple with our own fear of The Other. The good among us regularly triumph over that unhealthy, reptilian urge. Real racists let that fear and its subsequent hatred flourish within. So I wouldn’t say all of us are racists. There’s a line separating the good among us from the bad. Just as there’s a line separating fascist leaders from…, well, FDR.
Mussolini wrote a summary thesis of Fascism. Here it is. Even though Italian Fascism (capital F) has morphed into a more broad, global fascism (lower case F), the same principles apply. Chief among them was Il Duce‘s belief that all of life was a violent struggle and the true victors in life were those who loved war and gore. It’s that bloodthirsty-ness that defines the all-stars, the hall-of-famers of fascism like Mussolini himself, Hitler, Franco, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Putin, and, yes, Henry Kissinger.
I’m thinking and writing about this because a number of countries have been flirting with fascism the last few decades. Hungary, Poland, Brazil, Great Britain, Germany, Myanmar, North Korea, among others either are ruled by strongmen or have powerful right wing authoritarian movements within. The United States, too.
The good news is recent elections have ousted fascists and tyrants. Brazil’s Bolsanaro, Serbia’s Vucic, and Hungary’s Orban have been dumped. Even Israel’s Netanyahu holds on to power by his fingernails following this past weekend’s election. And the far right movement that has swept America the last ten…, no, twenty…, okay, 55-plus years seems about to suffer it’s biggest comeuppance since Barak Obama’s win in 2008.
Fingers crossed.
Chicago, August 1968, the police run riot.