18 October 2020

Authoritarian? Fascist? Totalitarian?

a Venn diagram showing ‘totalitarian’ as a subset of ‘authoritarian’, with ‘fascist’ a subset of ‘authoritarian’ which partly overlaps with ‘totalitarian’

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 (or at least David Neiwert’s post with the highlights) and other writing about its history and distinctive character.


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.

Refining this post

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.

Nonviolence

Proper non-violence understands that violence is justified but believes that it is unwise. Non-violence means facing violence without returning it; retreating from confrontation is not non-violent action, it is passivity.

Too many people think that nonviolence means a white liberal quietism which drapes itself in a vague and false moral claim to reflect the logic of the Civil Rights Movement. Claiming nonviolence as an absolute value rather than as a considered tactic reflects a combination of ignorance and moral laziness.

Non-violence is vitally important because violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly; is existence changes your destination.

There are a lot of ways that things could go in which we will need a lot of white bodies on the street facing guns. We need bourgeois white people like me standing at the front, braving the bullets.

2017 doesn’t make me confident that enough of us will step up, but it does give me hope.

Case #1 for nonviolence: it is working for BLM

The re-acceleration of street protest and reporting on it which emerged after the street execution of George Floyd has produced dynamics similar to protests of the Civil Rights Movement.

That the movement has been primarily and overwhelmingly nonviolent only underlines how the few outbreaks of vandalism (most notably the capture and burning of the Minneapolis Third Precinct police station) demonstrates that there is a huge capacity for popular violence which has been held in check.

That police in cities across the country have demonstrated repeatedly that they will engage in increasingly frantic brutality in response to nonviolent street protest has conclusively proved what anti-police advocates have been saying all along.

And the result has been that now clear majorities now favor vigorous reform in a way which was politically inconceivable just a year ago, and even more incredibly police abolition is on the table as something which popularly credible people are advocating and which opponents need to actively argue against. This is a huge victory, and the contrast of nonviolence was integral in demonstrating the reality of police culture and conduct.

White liberals’ clarity here is not what it should be, but it is improving every day; a turn toward broader violence in response to police violence would reverse that trend.

Case #2 for nonviolence: it is working against far right street demonstrators

In 2017, far right street actions tried to provoke street violence in order to feed their story about their strength and the ordinary conservatives to support them against the violent leftist hordes. Instead, overwhelmingly nonviolent counterprotest got bigger and bigger while those far right gangs fell apart over their inability to deliver sufficient thrills and glory to their members. The mess at the “Unite The Right” rally did not unite the right; massive popular turnout in nonviolent counterprotest against them which followed at San Francisco, then even moreso in Boston, embarrassed them and made them look silly and weak, breaking the far right street movements’ momentum until their resurgence this year.

These kinds of confrontations are happening again this year, but again the mass of nonviolent counterprotest has made far right would-be brownshirts look silly and weak. Instead of looking like brave badasses facing down the scary antifa thugs of their authoritarian fantasies, their exemplar is scrawny, panicked Kyle Rittenhouse flailing around wildly.

We have too many fascist true believers who accept their story but they have not been able to swell their numbers or persuade the inattentive white middle as they had imagined.

There are always going to be liberals who are King’s White Moderates who will find that any shadow of evidence of “violence” (which is usually only vandalism) allows them to rationalize their rejection of any action at all. One object of non-violence is to limit their ranks by keeping the facts off their side.

Case #3 for non-violence: what if things get very bad?

The hard test is the moment to come in the wake of the election. There are a lot of people on the right who are hungry for a shooting civil war against a “violent takeover by the radical left”.

Anti-left liberals will be tempted to side with the right against the left if they can be persuaded that we are violent. And yeah, some of them are going to be suckered no matter what we do.

But the longer the interval in which it is clear that the far right are bringing guns and blood while the left are not, the more it will erode the credibility of the far right. We don’t just need it to be true that they are the ones who shoot first; we need it to last long enough that it is clear even to people who are not paying attention that they shot first. If we can hold that line, the far right will lack popular support ... which translates into an unwillingness for the US military to fire on US civilians.

It is our best chance for avoiding an authoritarian death spiral.

And if that fails — either through a failure to step up, or us getting stepped on — the calculus changes.

Up to that point, the ideal response would be a massive and entirely nonviolent movement. There is no getting that ideal, but it is useful to aspire to it. An overwhelmingly nonviolent movement is more plausible and still very good.

But after that point, if we move from the fascist ascendancy we have now to the fascist control we fear, then the only way to dislodge fascist power is through violent action.

That said, even in that eventuality, while we would need violence to win that war, the more active nonviolence there is in the resistance the better the peace we can hope for when we win. Nonviolence will always need recruits.




Update: A commentary on the kind of people who we are talking about:

I’m getting really tired of the wise serene pacifist trope in fiction. Every committed pacifist, prison abolitionist, antiwar activist, etc I’ve ever met in real life has been vibrating with compressed rage at all times. Do you know what it’s like to believe deeply in your heart that doing harm to others is wrong and the goal of society should be to alleviate suffering for all people and live in the United States of America? IT’S NOT FUN. Show Us The Pissed-Off Pacifists.

Dude there might be a word for the emotion that is forged when someone’s deep abiding love and compassion for all people and living things welds itself into decades of built-up foaming fury at how those people been treated their whole life by those in power to create a sort of alloyed super-commitment to a set of ethical principles but i promise you “tranquility” is not that fucking word




I will pile up some resources here: