What even is fascism? And why you need to know

By Spencer Merritt

Note: The purpose of this article is to define fascism to give you context for this article where I argue why fascism is a threat to America right now! So if you find this interesting, read this next: Yes, you should be scared.

When you hear the word fascism you probably think of the Nazis, and if you’re a normal sensible person, you know that these were the worst humans to exist. So when you hear someone accuse someone else of being a fascist you might think that it’s very over the top and for the most part you’re probably right. Fascism, like socialism, gets thrown around a lot as an insult by people who likely don’t know what the word actually means. However, I am here to tell you with no exaggeration that right now, fascism is the most pressing danger that Americans face. Which is why we all need to know: What even is fascism?

Fascism is an ideological spectrum of reactionary identity politics that is illiberal, anti-left, and anti-empirical. Now, that definition is word soup and I know it. Unfortunately, fascism is purposely vague and contradictory, so a simple definition is difficult to make. However, I assure you that every ingredient of this word soup does mean something, and it’s actually pretty straightforward when you break it down.

Identity Politics

Identity politics is when someone bases their political opinions and activity off of things like their race, religion, sexuality, gender, or nationality, in other words. In recent years, most of the national attention on identity politics has been on left-wing and liberal identity politics. Its the “check your privilege” crowd. The type of person you see on TikTok saying that classical music is bad because it was written by white men. Making fun of or fear-mongering about left-wing and liberal identity politics is the bread and butter of many right wing media personalities, like when Tucker Carlson complained that M&Ms has gone woke because the green M&M isn’t sexy anymore. But of course, the irony is that the right is full of identity politics as well. And while left-wing identity politics’ most frequent sin is being cringe, the sins of right-wing identity politics include lynchings, state repression, and atrocities like the holocaust.

The man who drove his car into a crowd of peaceful protestors in Charlottesville in 2017 was shouting “you will not replace us.” His comments refer to a common talking point in far-right identity politics called “great replacement theory.” The basic idea is that liberals and Jews want to bring non-white immigrants into the country to replace white people. This is hardly new. In the 1920s, when KKK membership reached 8 million, one of their main focuses was on the threat of immigrants. Of course, people like the Charlottesville terrorist and the neo-Nazis on 8chan are, thankfully, a pretty small group of extremists.But the problem is that millions of Americans are at least somewhat sympathetic to these extremists. The Institute of Family Studies surveyed over three thousand white Americans and found that 5% of them held a “strong sense of white identity,” a feeling of “solidarity with other whites” and most troublingly felt that white people were being discriminated against. If these results are representative of the population, that means that around 9 million white Americans have a persecution complex and feel that something needs to be done. While most would no doubt stop short of terrorism, this white identity politics leads to harmful reactionary policies.

2. Reactionary

Reactionary politics gets its name because it is all about strong negative reactions to social change. Stop me if you’ve heard this one, “Transgenders are child grooming pedophiles.” That is a reactionary statement. Though trans people have obviously always existed, widespread mainstream attention on them is relatively new. We have something new that challenges our traditional ideas about masculinity and femininity; those who find this threatening or even disgusting are being reactionary. Now, is a guy who rolls his eyes at someone for changing their pronouns a fascist? No, of course not. Is a guy who gets elected on a platform about how gender ideology will lead to your kids wanting to mutilate themselves and then writing a law that sends men to prison for wearing makeup a fascist….well it’s certainly a lot closer.

Florida’s laws that ban teachers from teaching about racial segregation and LGBTQ people are textbook examples of reactionary politics. Increased visibility of LGBTQ people makes reactionaries uncomfortable, so others aren’t allowed to talk about it. Reactionaries are tired of talking about race so now other people aren’t allowed to talk about it either. Because change is part of life, any reactionary measure taken to prevent or undo said change will always be authoritarian. That’s why fascism, the most reactionary of all ideologies, is also the most authoritarian and totalitarian of all of them. And this is why for one to be fascist, one must also be illiberal.

3. Illiberal

You may think this has already been covered by the reactionary section. After all, liberalism is about promoting social change right? Well, not in this context. Typically when Americans hear “liberal” we think of a person who drives a hybrid car, votes for Democrats and has a Black Lives Matter poster in their window. While fascists certainly hate this type of liberal, they also hate the founding father type of liberal.

I know it sounds weird, but I’m not talking about blue-haired liberals, I’m talking about powdered-wig liberals.

Think about it, who wrote that all men have unalienable “rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness”? The founding fathers were primarily inspired by the work of 17th-century philosopher John Locke, who in his essays “Two Treatises of Civil Government” wrote that all men are born with a right to life, liberty, and property. Locke argued that humans create government for the purpose of protecting their life, liberty, and property. Google “liberal thinkers,” and you won’t find people with pronouns in their Instagram bios, you’ll find people who look and sound a lot like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

To the founding fathers, the entire point of government was to protect the liberty/freedom of the people, even from the government itself. This is why they drafted a constitution that is more powerful than any politician or party, and it’s why they created three equal branches of government with the ability to keep one another in check. Rule of law, checks and balances, all the things you learned in civics class, that’s liberalism. It’s liberalism because its point is to protect your liberty.

Here is what the original fascist Benito Mussolini had to say about this liberalism:

“Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism^”1

There are many reasons why fascism hates this old-school liberalism, and they all relate back to its reactionary nature. As I said before, you can not prevent or reverse social change without an authoritarian government. Freedom means being free to change and to be different. To a reactionary, to a fascist, that is simply unacceptable. Individual rights just get in the way of whatever greater good the fascist thinks he represents.

But if what I have just said is true, why is it most of the examples I gave are of Republicans, the people who seem to worship the founding fathers? Well, the short answer is because America is weird. Modern liberals tend to be more critical of the liberals who founded our country while the GOP, whose actions are antithetical to the liberalism of the founding fathers, talk about the founders like they are gods. And yes, I am saying that the Republican party has become fascist or has at least become beholden to fascists. This was not always the case, but I do go into more detail to justify this claim here. In any case, this bizarre situation is not all that surprising because fascism is anti-empirical.

4. Anti-empirical

I’ve had arguments with people who I would consider on or near the fascist spectrum where I attempted to give them the same spiel about liberalism that I just gave you and the response usually goes something like, “Shut the f*ck up liberal, you’re brainwashed lmao”

….Yeah.

Historically fascism has always been more about feelings than facts. The fascist writers of the 19th and 20th centuries pushed the idea that their movement was one of passion and gut feeling rather than silly liberal rationality or Jewish science². This is why fascism is reactionary politics in its purest form. After all, reactionism is what happens when one commits fully to a negative knee-jerk reaction and ignores evidence to the contrary. But despite rejecting empiricism, fascists have historically gone to great lengths to seem scientific and logical. One could even say they go looking for their own alternative facts.

The Nazis were the ur-example of these alternative fact-finding missions. Hitler believed in a lost advanced civilization of ancient Germans which demonstrated German racial superiority. Not a shred of evidence was found beforehand to give him or anyone else this idea, but he just felt it was true and sent his “scientists” to find evidence. Unfortunately for Hitler, the evidence that his archeologists did find showed that ancient Germans were living in “mud huts”³ when their supposed racial lessers in Italy, the Middle East and Africa were already building grand cities.

Flash forward to today’s American reactionaries and we can see a similar pattern: a rejection and a disdain for science and evidence while claiming to be the rational ones with science on their side. For instance the American Medical Association⁴, the American Association of Pediatrics⁵, The Endocrine Society⁶ and the American Psychiatric Association⁷ all recommend hormone therapy (within specified guidelines) as a treatment for gender dysphoria. Years of rigorous peer-reviewed studies have found that this treatment leads to mental health benefits for those who suffer from gender dysphoria and that the effects of said hormone therapy can be easily reversed if needed. Despite this, Republican-controlled states like Arkansas have made it illegal for doctors to administer this care to anyone under 18. The evidence is irrelevant, it’s about the vibe, it’s about their reaction to the social change this treatment represents.

Since the evidence flies in the face of their reactionary goals many right-wingers accuse “big science” of being “too woke.” Is this as bad as the Nazis calling physics Jew science? No. But is it the same mentality? Evidence I don’t like is just made up by my enemies? Yes, yes it is. But of course, it wouldn’t be complete without a heaping dose of irony. The very people who dismiss scientific facts as “woke garbage” have the audacity to make “facts don’t care about your feelings” into a catchphrase. Long story short, fascists are not fans of facts.

5. Anti-left

Fascism has always been a sworn enemy of leftism, Marxism, Communism, Socialism, and whatever other left-wing ideology you can name. Now just to preempt the point, yes the Nazis called themselves the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, but they never claimed to be left-wing socialists. Socialists were the first people that the Nazis sent to concentration camps all the way back in 1933, eight years before the holocaust began. Hitler himself said ”The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.”⁸ In Italy, Mussolini’s Blackshirts were hired by landowners to attack and kill socialists who had won local elections. Moreover, Mussolini explicitly wrote “Fascism is therefore opposed to Socialism which sees in history nothing but the class struggle. Fascism is likewise opposed to trade unionism as a class weapon.”⁹ With that out of the way, why does fascism hate the left?

Once again, this goes back to reactionary politics. Left-wing ideologies are revolutionary, the literal opposite of reactionary. They seek to radically restructure society, in fact they seek to do away with the old society and put a new one in its place, which is a reactionary’s worst nightmare. What’s more, and this will get me in trouble with certain leftists, far-left politics is really just taking liberalism a few steps further. The left-wing critique of liberalism is that liberalism claims to promote a society of freedom and equality, yet produces capitalism, a system which depends on inequality and suppresses the freedom of billions of poor people. Socialism’s aim is to make the world liberalism claims to aspire to a material reality. On the other hand, fascism embraces subjugation to hierarchy (I’m getting this from Mussolini by the way)¹⁰. So, if fascism does not like liberalism because of liberalism’s love of liberty and tolerance of change, then socialism’s militant demand for radical change is the actual boogie man that fascism is afraid of.

In some ways, this is even more true in the modern American context, where liberal and socialist are often lumped together or even used interchangeably by many on the right. It’s the liberals and socialists who want to replace white people by bringing immigrants into the country, it’s the liberals and socialists who want to turn our all-American boys into pink-haired hermaphrodites, it’s the liberals and socialists who want white people to be ashamed…so says the American fascist and their conservative enablers.

Why you need to know

You may have noticed that most of my examples of the components of fascism did not come from 1930s/40s Italy and Germany, but from contemporary America. At this point I could understand if you still feel that this is overly dramatic. I will go into greater detail as to why I believe the threat posed by the current Republican Party is fascist in nature but for now, look at this:

And look at this:

And look at this:

That last photo was taken at CPAC, the largest annual convention of conservatives in the United States. It is not some fringe group of backwoods militiamen or people on the Donald Trump subreddit, this is CPAC, a convention sponsored by some of the top contributors to Republican campaigns. CPAC is attended by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. At the first CPAC convention since January 6th, when domestic terrorists (including members of neo-Nazi organizations) tried to kill the vice president and overturn a democratic election, they chose to put “we are all domestic terrorists” up on the stage for all the world to see. These people are courting evil, and we must see them for what they are. If you are a Republican who believes in freedom and small government, this is not your party anymore and, as hard as this may be to swallow, you may need to vote Democrat to get them to change. If you are a Democrat you can not treat this issue with kid gloves, it will take more than a Change.org petition to defeat this. If you are an American with a conscience, you have to know fascism when you see it and fight back. We have to be vigilant…because they are certainly being vigilant.

Still not convinced that we’re dealing with fascism? Read this for my in-depth case: Yes, you should be scared

Note: Some believe that fascism is not just reactionary but also revolutionary because of how many changes they wanted to make to society in Germany and Italy in the 20th century. In regards to that, I’ll say this: All those changes were basically just taking social conditions that already existed, militarism, nationalism, hierarchy, and ethnic division and rigidly enforcing them through the state. So it was taking how society used to be (be it real or imagined) and dialing it up to 100. Not what I’d call revolutionary.