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Fascist ideology isn't particularly well-defined and is mostly notable for its role among the Axis countries during WW2. This provides a good sanity-check when comparing something to fascism: is it more or less similar to fascism than the Allies were? If something wasn't distinctive to the fascist countries, but in fact was widespread among other countries as well, then one begins to suspect that the purpose of associating it with fascism (rather than with the countries that defeated fascism) is because the former has a worse reputation. You can define fascism so broadly that all of WW2 was just fascist infighting, but that makes it a much less useful label and means people have less reason to care about it.
Your point is well taken. However, I would argue that Western Allies displayed some characteristics which were clearly fascist in tendency.
I am not going to accept that putting minorities in camps is healthy, normal, non-fascist behavior just because the US did so in WW2 wrt Japanese-Americans.
More broadly, I think that switching an economy to war production (controlled rather directly by the government), which in the US created the military-industrial complex which has been around ever since is rightfully associated with fighting total wars which is in turn weakly associated with fascism.
Presumably something can be bad without being fascist, then? Communist countries are also known for putting minorities in camps, after all.
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These all seem like points in favor of the idea that "fascism" is just too vague a label to use with any solid semantic meaning.
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Mussolini specifically did not even bother to attempt to comprehensively define it for good:
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I'd argue that the most common and consistent definition of fascism is "people who are willing to oppose communist revolutionaries with force".
Outside of the WW2 context it's usually what people on the left mean when they say it.
Fascism is when White people are excited to promote their collective flourishing and use the traditional means of art, ritual, hierarchy, and solemnity to accomplish it. It’s just anything that would successfully secure their exclusive interests. So, marches and men’s groups trigger “fascism”, but not if it’s hoteps / black panthers. Uniforms are fascist, songs are fascist, salutes are fascists. Characters like Pepe the Frog were fascist. Etc
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This is silly. This makes simply almost everyone fascist, the Axis countries, Tsarist Russia, the western Allies. Even Stalin might qualify given that he had Trotsky killed.
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This is eminently practical from a leftist point of view, as people unwilling to oppose communist revolutionaries with force will inexorably end up being ruled by those very revolutionaries, resulting in their dispossession, deportation and eventual destruction, thus removing them as a potential right-wing threat and permitting future leftist to sing their praises as principled, moderate conservative martyrs. Either way it's the leftists who win.
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I've recently come up with an even more biting definition that's guaranteed to please no one, yet I think fits most actual "use cases": fascism is using communist means to achieve non-communist ends.
(Paramilitary youth groups, mass surveillance, centralization of power, expropriation of private enterprises, media censorship, etc.)
This is, iirc, Moldbug's definition, though naturally it takes him a couple paragraphs rather than a pithy sentence. I also liked Nick Land's: "Fascism is a late-stage leftist mutation made toxic by its comparative practicality."
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I tend to agree with this, if by "communist means," you mean the sort of overly aggressive ways that communist regimes have traditionally trampled on human rights -- secret police; arrests in the middle of the night for speaking out against the regime; gulags; mass surveillance; etc.
I think that in practice, when a person is accused of "fascism," that's what the accuser is trying to imply --(1) that the person is using or supports these sorts of tactics; and (2) that the person is not a Leftist or Communist.
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There's nothing particularly communist in those means. Those are just totalitarian means.
Agreed, I think “Leninist means” would have been closer to the mark
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Orwell once described fascism as "socialism shorn of all its virtues".
My immediate reaction was "what virtues?"
For many people, "meaning well" and being nice is very important, sometimes even more than actually accomplishing anything. There is in particular a stark divide between left and right (and also men vs women) on this issue. Plenty of my friends and acquaintances, when confronted with the dysfunction of some left-wing regulations, will nevertheless defend them and not want them abolished, mostly on account that they were originally meant well and should at most be reformed (which nobody ever kicks off and thus never actually happens). Aristocrats who never actually accomplished anything and certainly don't deserve their wealth will often be more popular on account of modest charitable spending and a public image carefully designed to be maximally inoffensive (which is much easier if you're not constrained by trying to accomplish something) than a revolutionary entrepreneur.
Their view, as I understand it, is that communism at least sounds nice in theory and means well originally, and the same goes for communist activist, whereas fascist activist are just irredeemable monsters. Which I even partially agree with, the problem is just that the people they call fascists pretty much never identify as such and have only little commonalities with the historic concept. It's always Adorno-style sophistry where you use a definition of fascism that is 50% totalitarism and 50% being right-wing and then, upon showing that the right-wingers are indeed right-wing, claim that there are large parallels between fascism and whatever right-winger you choose. Not to mention that irrespective of the good intention of the communist, I don't want to end up in the gulag anyway.
I can't help but notice how well this parallels the discourse around generative AI and whether or not it has a "soul" in the sense of the author's intentions. To some people, this intent of the author exists in an image (or video or song or a block of text or etc.) only insofar as the actual final pixels represent such an intent; the actual thoughts that went through the author's head in the moment don't matter. To others, it's the actual thoughts that matter, and how well the pixels convey those thoughts are merely a curiosity.
Right now, the culture war lines drawn in the world of generative AI doesn't seem to neatly match other lines of older culture wars, but I wonder if this aspect will mean we'll see support/opposition to treating media generated by AI as having exactly as much meaning as those generated by humans without AI getting split up in right/left or male/female. It's possible we're seeing it happen already (it's hard to get a sense of the latter, especially, since new tech is almost always heavily male-dominated by default).
That issue is somewhat confused by postmodernism and death-of-the-author being associated with left-wing intellectual discourse, even though it's also left-wing to hate on AI for lacking soul. It's not quite irreconcilable - you can say, for example, that the fun thing about experiencing art is trying to guess what the author meant, so that the game is equally spoiled by rigid adherence to factually documented authorial intent or by the knowledge that the content was spat out by a machine and there is no 'there' there to guess at. But it's an interesting paradox.
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I use a similar definition - fascism is totalitarian socialism with right-wing aesthetics. (As opposed to communism, which is totalitarian socialism with left-wing aesthetics).
Incidentally, although Singapore is a long way off being totalitarian socialism with neoliberal aesthetics, it is proof of concept that it would be possible.
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And so we circle back to ye olde "national socialism".
The problem with this definition is that it indeed won't please the only people who have an interest in using the label of "fascist" in the first place.
Hardly the only people. There are plenty of leftists with an interest in condemning right-wing figures as fascists who would also regard themselves as being against communism - from mainstream Dems who don't even go as far as calling themselves socialists or anti-capitalists, to radical leftists of a more libertarian-adjacent, anarchist bent.
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Yeah that’s an interesting take.
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