Fascism Within the Self

Fascism has been and continues to be one of our most pressing issues. As an ideology that espouses ultranationalist ideals of superiority to justify authoritarian enforcements of exclusion and conformity, it is a direct and existential threat to freedom. But fascism has taken many faces, and the defeat of Mussolini's Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) did not prevent the rise of new forms of fascism decades later. Today, neo- and proto-fascisms continue to emerge in ultranationalist, authoritarian and extremist consolidations of power across the globe. Even in the United States, where fascism has long been dismissed as an historical or exclusively European problem, the recent popular emergence of rhetoric and postures evocative of or even explicitly related to fascist ideology has inspired widespread comparison and a new sense of the real, imminent danger that fascism poses. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari point out in Anti-Oedipus, fascism was not just a ‘bad moment’ or an ‘historical error’: fascism has yet to be overcome (AO 29–30). Why this is the case and what we might do about it are the frame in which the project of this book should be understood.

But perhaps the label of fascism is thrown around too easily. Political scientist Sheri Berman argues that attempts to equate ‘historical fascism’ with global trends toward far-right authoritarian extremism, particularly in the United States, ignore the fact that historical fascism was anti-democratic, suspicious of capitalism, and made a virtue of blind obedience to authority. Berman worries that looseness in the definition of fascism threatens to occlude the real problems, which are exclusionary rather than inclusionary practices. The legitimisation of exclusionary policies such as anti-immigration laws only increases in the wake of the failure of the habits, norms and institutions necessary for democracies to function – not in the wake of anti-capitalist military coup d’états. Moreover, Berman worries that the looseness in the definition deflects attention away from the responsibility that the left carries in contributing to the creation of a state of affairs conducive to a rise in exclusionary practices. However, as Eugene Holland has pointed out, ‘the point of revisiting a political concept such as fascism is not to erect a catch-all definition valid for all time, but to reconstruct the concept in relation to an Event – in this case, the advent of twenty-first century fascism in the United States’.