We must use must use these terms precisely. They are not simply the same.
Authoritarianism
“Authoritarian” is the broadest category.
In politics, the term “authoritarian” registers what widely differing regimes like the USSR, Gaddafi’s Libya, and contemporary Singapore have in common. But it is doubly confused to misunderstand authoritarianism as meaning “overly-powerful government”.
Authoritarianism is not only a property of governments. There are authoritarian religious cults, corporations, families, and other authoritarian orders.
Nor is power itself necessarily authoritarian. The defining quality of authoritarianism is individuals or groups exercising power unchecked by rules, due process, tests of legitimacy, or other institutional limits. It reflects a weakness in institutions, rather than them being too strong.
Totalitarianism
The term “totalitarian” refers to a type of authoritarianism; neither all authoritarianisms nor all fascisms are totalitarian.
A totalitarian order pursues limitless exercise of power over every aspect of life. East Germany was totalitarian, trying to put every individual under active surveillance by the secret police, torturing people for deviance from government wishes in the minutiae of their private lives.
The term “totalitarian” points to the similarities between Stalin’s USSR, late Nazi Germany, and ISIL despite the huge differences between their ideologies and projects.
Fascism
Scholars famously have a hard time tidily defining “fascism” because of how it adapts to particular conditions. Each fascist movement has its idiosyncratic national and historical characteristics. To understand what stands behind those variations, I recommend spending time with Wikipedia’s suprisingly good index of definitions of fascism.
To sneak up on a good understanding, it helps to first dismiss some misunderstandings.
Common confusions
Overlapping with authoritarianism and totalitarianism
Not all authoritarianisms are fascist, but fascism is inherently authoritarian, seeking unrestrained power justified by supposed necessity. Because fascist movements frame themselves as offering a kind of anti-politics which rejects “misuse” of state power “in the wrong hands”, fascists often cannot see their own obvious authoritarianism.
Likewise, fascists’ claims to reject totalitarian ambition can reflect a genuine misunderstanding of the implications of their own ideology. But after seizing control of a state, fascist logics tend to drive them toward totalitarianism.
Part of the far right
Fascism is a far right ideology. It stands on the right because it opposes equality. It qualifies as far right because it demands revolutionary change. But fascism is more than just a name for far right authoritarianism; it has other distinctive qualities.
Most military juntas are are far right authoritarians but not fascists, for instance, and neoreaction is a contemporary far right authoritarian movement in the US distinct from fascism.
Not a policy ideology
Political “ideology” refers to a few distinct things. Some political ideologies have a vision of society & governance, like liberal democracy, monarchism, or theocracy. Others have a policy program compatible with multiple modes of governance, like neoliberalism, socialism, or Islamism. Some ideologies address both, like Leninism’s far left combination of revolution, authoritarian governance, and socialist policy.
Fascism does not just focus on society & governance, it has a radical distinterest in policy specfics. Though fascist movements sometimes address policy, they offer shifting, even incoherent positions in service of their pursuit of power. The fascist method often produces loud advocacy for absurd policies as a tactic which diverts attention away from policy questions.
Not an instrument of liberalism / capitalism
Leftists rightly dread how anti-left liberals and the capitalist class too often accept — or even court alliances with — fascists. But they are confused when they describe or even define fascism as an instrument created to defend the capitalist order against the left, or even as capitalism’s true face revealed.
Capitalist elites try to harness fascist movements for their own purposes but they neither author nor inspire them. Fascism is a mass popular movement.
Nor do fascists care about quotidian economic policy. Mussolini did not define fascism as “corporatism”. Fascists do feel deep ideological disgust at the left, but their resemblance to ardent capitalists ends there; to fascists, alliances with capitalist elites are tactical politicing in pursuit of power, lacking any true allegiance.
Understanding fascism
I think scholar David Griffin provides the most useful single thesis, summarizing fascism as “palingenetic ultranationalism”: a dream of violent, transformative national rebirth. He and other scholars find a host of characteristics common among fascist movements, but his description of that dream as the “core” of fascism helps see through confusion created by the ways in which fascist movements vary dramatically.
I have my own distillation of Griffin’s and others’ theories. Fascism is a myth combined with a method:
Fascism’s myth
- our nation and its true people have a great essence: unique, strong, noble, united, and rightfully among the first rank of nations
- our nation is thus destined to prevail in the inexorable violent contest between peoples of the world
- but alien, corrupting influences who hate the nation have sown weakness & division
- we must destroy these agents of corruption, at the direction of a strong leader of profound insight, using violence and every other means possible
- that purge will eliminate national strife & petty politics, restoring meaning & unity to society, producing a rebirth into national greatness
In this we can see fascism’s disinterest in policy; it imagines a good society magically emerging once the nation’s greatness is unleashed, without having to fuss over nerdy details of regulations or government spending.
This fantasy embraces simpleminded irrationalism:
The Conspiracy Theory offers a paradoxically comforting nightmare. Someone is in control of All This. The world can be made right simply by eliminating Them.
[⋯]
Since Nazis put The Jews at the top of the list of Those Who Corrupt, drawing on the Protocols and its decendants, it is tempting to imagine that antisemitism is part of the definition of fascism. But neither fascism nor The Conspiracy Theory are always or simply antisemitic.
Fascism’s method
Fascists twist the liberal-democratic institutions & sensibilities they hate in order to discredit & break them, in particular making a virtue of acting in bad faith, doing things like:
- lying brazenly and claiming that the press are motivated solely by politics, to make citizens stop trying to figure out what the truth is
- sowing violence in society, so that limits on the use of force by the state seem pointless
- yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, to make free speech seem naïve and dangerous
In the US
The fascist sensibility has deep taproots in American political culture. We can see precursors to it in the logic of the Confederacy, and in the Klan in the Reconstruction era. We see echoes and rhymes with the fascist sensibility in the John Birch society and the “Patriot” movement.
And we have long had fascism itself. The 20th century revival of the Klan was a fascist movement, arguably the first in the world. Few remember Timothy McVeigh as a fascist, but we should.
Our hesitation to name American movements as “fascist” partly reflects how our deep rhetorical commitment to liberal democracy complicates our distinctive national fascist voice. (Again, not “liberal” as in “not conservative” or “not leftist”, but rather “liberal” as in “universal rights and rule of law”.) Since our politics constantly references “freedom” and “rights” and so forth, American fascism cannot directly reject libdem principle as most other fascisms do, instead twisting what those ideas mean.
MAGA
For a long time, I referred to DJT and Team Trump as “para-fascist”: the differences from historical fascism were sufficient to give me pause while the resemblances were too strong to ignore. Partly this reflected how Trump himself is barely interested in politics qua politics, driven instead by his personal narcissism. He is fascist in his fundamental urges rather than out of any considered ideology. The fascist qualities of his movement reflect the team he attracts and him learning to appeal to his supporters.
As more and more pieces fell into place, it became unmistakable that I could not understand “Trumpism” without reading it as a form of fascism. The slogan “Make America Great Again” perfectly distills Roger Griffin’s “palingenetic ultranationalism” thesis!
Not everyone who finds MAGA rhetoric appealing can be understood simply as a fascist, nor does all of American fascism identify or align itself with MAGA, but “MAGA” is the right way to name the fascist movement which we have to face.
Returning to The Conspiracy Theory, we should recognize how American fascism has adapted to the pseudo-philo-semitism of Christian nationalism.
Many contemporary fascists cast trans people as Them, a frightening and frighteningly effective innovation, since in amplifying fascism’s anxieties about masculinity, in being a small-yet-pervasive population, in and many other ways trans people fulfill the function of Them in fascism and The Conspiracy Theory even better than Jews do.
Though MAGA fascism now dominates US conservatism and the Republican Party, we should recognize this as unstable in a time of transition. Movement conservatism, the style of conservatism which consumed the Republican Party and US politics in the wake of Reagan and Fox News, sold itself to many voters with oblique dogwhistles which nourished fascist sensibilities, but was not itself fascist. MAGA is voters moving away from movement conservatism which failed to deliver what they wanted, putting the US into a major political reälignment. It is impossible to predict who will have a chair when the music stops.
A correction
After originally writing this post I came to rely on it heavily, and have thus made a number of edits since. In particular, the initial version implied that the Confederacy and original Klan were simply fascist, which was misleading — they differ in a fraught relationship with the Westphalian nation-state, and in other ways. In refining the phrasing on that point and many other things, I have tried to bring greater clarity without destroying the sense.