Understanding the Power of "Fascism"

What exactly is fascism? It has been such a bugaboo for so long that a guy wants to know. Why should we be so terrified of it? Why should all good people want to cut it down the moment it appears? Why do the young lefty thugs of AntiFa choose anti-fascism as their escutcheon?

I read a piece about fascism at Quillette and I'm still not sure. Obviously, fascism as a monster was created by Stalin in the 1930s. Why, exactly? Because fascism was a rival to Communism? Because Stalin needed an enemy for his Bolsheviks and for other lefties to hate? No doubt, as Paul Gottfried has written, fascism is a

slur “hurled at anyone who holds what are now unpopular opinions.”

And, I suppose, anyone that wants to occupy the commanding heights of culture or politics tends to need a convenient lightning bolt to hurl at the despicables and the deplorables.

And, I suppose, after the glorious victory of 1945 both the ruling class of the US coalition and the Soviet Union found it convenient to have something "that must never happen again." Still, what exactly was it that we were supposed to fear?

Even in the 1940s, at a time when genuinely fascist dictatorships threatened to extinguish freedom over much of the world’s surface, George Orwell noted that misuse of the term had rendered it “entirely meaningless.” Decades later, American journalist Tom Wolfe would note the “morbid tendency” of his colleagues to apply the word to everything from Christian revivalist movements to hippies.

Maybe the meaning is just as Tom Wolfe described it in "The Land of the Rococo Marxists."

Anti-fascism, he wrote, “became a universal ray gun, good for zapping anybody, anywhere, from up here… on the intellectuals’ Everest of Indignation.”

Really, then, it is no different than the universal kill-shot, the accusation of racism. The whole point of calling someone a racist-sexist-homophobe is to shut them up, because there is no defense against it.

So the accusation of "fascism" or "Nazism" is just a ranging shot, because if you say a word in its favor then you are obviously in favor of killing Jews.

I suppose that is why I have developed my usual "across the grain" aphorism, where I say that

Trump is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have screwed up.

For you can also say that "fascism is the idiocy that people grab for when the usual idiots have screwed up."

But really, I think that fascism is much more cunning than socialism or communism. Because fascism and Nazism exploit the obvious power of nationalism, the identification that ordinary Commoners have with the nation state. It is a powerful combination of the ancient and the modern.

The power of socialism as an idea is its lurch to the primitive. We all have programmed within us the yearning for the community of the kindred, where people are as one and are perfect social animals. And we all have the other primitive instincts, that if something goes wrong there is a fault at the bottom of it, either our own fault of the malevolence of another. And the solution is vengeance or the scapegoat of Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred.

But we humans have learned over the last 500 years to identify with the community of the nation. So when things go wrong we look to the leader of the nation to lead us back to safety. The lesson of World War I was that the workers of Germany, supporters of the Social Democratic Party, identified first as Germans before they identified as the class of proletarians.

And the lesson of World War II is that when Stalin wanted to rally the Russian people he did it by appealing to them as Russians and not as Communists. Hey, guess what: Stalin (and Bukharin) came up with the notion of "socialism in a single country" in 1924! According to La Wik.

So, when the rubber hits the road, even socialists need to rally the workers to the nation. Because that is what works.

Really "fascism" is just a pejorative that people with cultural power use to shut other people up. 

So, the only question is: how do we respond? And I would say that we should understand that all lefty 

heroes are really fascists, national socialists at heart.

So the way to respond is to say, if you are a man, "Whatabout Obama? Here was a progressive trying to bend the arc of history towards social justice in one country. Fascism, in all but name."

For "Obama" you can substitute any Democratic leader that seems appropriate, from FDR to Speaker Karen Pelosi (D-CA).

If you are a women, you say, "I can't believe you said that." And then you text your friend to complain.