What we are being pushed towards in this country needs a new word to describe it. Authoritarian will not do. It is a mushy word, even vaguely sentimental, as if referring to an overbearing daddy or slightly too strict teacher. I don’t think fascism works either, not as an exact definition. No organized gangs of black shirts or storm troopers are gathering by the 100,000 in stadiums and no one is suggesting that the economy should be controlled to serve the State.
Something else is happening here, something we do not yet have an adequate word to describe.
It feels more like an awful modernist symphony, one with a melody that rises out of lots of smashing and yelling and shouted threats. One can follow the thread of melody and yet know that it can only be woven into the ruptures of the noise.
First, a reference to the past:
The word Fascism comes from the Italian ‘fascista’, a reference to the bundles of instruments of punishment used under Roman law, an axe and iron rods. A fascist belonged to associations. He or she bundled with others in pursuit of power.
The definition of Fascism certainly has applicability to our present moment. In these descriptions of Mussolini, I feel as if I am looking at a mirror image of what I see happening here.
Mussolini brought the term into modernity. He arose with “the active backing of industrialists and landowners” and the Church. The super-wealthy sought to use him to keep everyone else under their control.
He never really promised an end result, a final stage of success, because to do so would be to invite an end to chaos. Chaos drove him forward. To achieve power, he used chaos to make Italy ungovernable. Government gone or weakened means more loot for those who wish to grab it. It meant he could impose whatever order he wished to impose. A hero promises to restore stability, even if he contributed mightily to the chaos.
He relied “on propaganda before policy, mythology before history.” Facts were whatever he deemed as facts.
He wanted “not being but becoming, not a creed but a dynamic.” The perpetual churning was the point. There must always be a crisis, an enemy at the gates, a threat to the nation.
He wanted “the continuous creation of illusion” and believed in a kind of “political mysticism, a belief in the common bond of nationhood enshrined in the personality of a charismatic leader.”
A threat to him was a threat to the nation. Criticism of him was a lie, a plot, an unfair attack and was punished with arrest, imprisonment, and frequently, torture.
This was fascism in the 1920’s and 30’s in Italy.
Much of what described fascism in Italy is applicable to our present American moment, but it’s not enough. It doesn’t encompass the multiple crises, the foreboding signs.
What word do we use to describe all of this: the wealthiest Americans becoming more reactionary, willing not only to accept the end of democracy but to actively undermine it. All of this as public education is attacked. All of this as climate change remakes every part of the solid world we so take for granted. All of this as pesticides and habitat loss lead to the mass deaths of animal species. All of this in an environment of disease that has left 900,000 dead, hospitals crippled, doctors and nurses exhausted. All of this as Russia and China become more totalitarian and aggressive by the month, as North Korea refines its nuclear weapons and their delivery systems.
What word do we use now to describe one political party’s undermining of the law and of democracy, not only its acceptance of violence but its decision to see violence as “legitimate political discourse”; its promises of revenge, the pathological lying of many of its members, its Supreme Court decreeing that the power flowing from the vote is a province of the white and privileged alone – all of this in the eternal noise of a 24 hour news cycle, of entire TV networks devoted to propaganda, of podcasts and talk shows and websites that relentlessly promote misinformation and stoke fear.
I sense that we are not close to the apotheosis of these trends. I do not know one thoughtful person who does not deal with a rising sense of dread about the near future.
The right word will eventually reveal itself as the language accommodates these present strains … and whatever other surprises are in store for us.
All quotations taken from The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930’s by Piers Brendon. Pages 24, 25, 26.
