Fascism is hard to define. For the time being, we’ve all accepted that it is a bad thing, which makes things even more confusing because no one — not even fascists — wants to claim the label. To make matters worse, there are a lot of fash-adjacent groups (e.g., neoliberals, capitalists) who want to define it in a way that makes it sound like they are the farthest thing from fascism while also including their enemies to the left (e.g., socialists) in the definition. The most popular list of characteristics of fascism is a list from 2003 by Lawrence Britt. I find it to be both inadequate and a little bit wrong, so I came up with my own list.
The following are some important characteristics of fascists:
- Fascists limit the definition of who “citizens” are according to their conception of what people “the nation” includes. Anyone who is not a citizen is considered to be less than fully human, while members of the nation are portrayed as superior. Often, but not always, fascists will pretend that citizens are a biologically distinct “race” and that non-citizens are members of other races. Examples: Nazis decided that Jewish people were not citizens (even if born in Germany); Trumpers decided that Muslims and atheists are not citizens (even if born in the US); European colonists who came to the Americas decided that the natives that they found there were not citizens.
- Fascists advocate for physically removing non-citizen groups from society by instituting some form of genocide. They believe this is necessary because the non-citizens are somehow harmful to citizens. Genocidal strategies might include outright killing, forced expulsion from the national territory (deportation), forced sterilization, imprisonment (often including forced work with inadequate/no compensation), and suppression of a group’s culture. Examples: Nazis moved various groups to ghettos (impoverished, walled parts of cities), then to concentration camps (which included forced work), then began systematically executing them; Trumpers created laws to prevent gay and lesbian couples from adopting children (making it so they could not pass their culture on to those children) and separated immigrants from their children and placed those children with right-wing families; the Trump administration deported individuals who were in the process of becoming citizens because they were from “bad” countries (places where people tend to have brown skin) but allowed people from “good” countries (places where people tend to have pale skin) to continue the process.
- Fascists want power, and will use any ideas or symbols that they believe will increase their power, even if it does not really make sense. Examples: Hitler called his ideology “national socialism” because socialism was popular at the time, but then had all the socialists imprisoned or killed once he was in power; The Nazis used the swaztika as their symbol even though it was already established in Hindu (Indian) culture as a symbol of good luck; Trumpers say that they favor democracy, but also create laws that make it harder for their perceived enemies to vote; Republicans say they are in favor of civilian gun ownership, but opposed it when they learned the Black Panthers were armed (Mulford Act in California); Trumpers say that they favor free-market capitalism, but want Facebook to be forced by the government to publish their ideas.
- Fascists engage in real-time hallucination; aka “will to power”. This means that they actively choose to believe certain things are true if those things being true would increase their power or create leverage. Put another way, will to power is believing something is true in order to force it to be manifested into reality. This probably isn’t a conscious process most of the time, so it isn’t that they are “lying” or “fooling themselves”, but more like their imagination is plugged directly into their perception of reality without a filter. They also imagine that their enemies are plotting to attack them in the same way that they have attacked their enemies or have plotted to attack them; they imagine themselves as the most marginalized group (they are usually the most powerful group but have begun losing power). All this makes them very susceptible to conspiracy theories. Examples: Nazis (and many Trumpers) chose to believe that the world was controlled by a global conspiracy of Jewish people – it isn’t; Trumpers choose to believe that the 2020 election was stolen – it wasn’t; since slavery times, American fascists have imagined that Black people were about to organize a genocide against white people, yet it was white people who went into predominantly Black towns and burned them to the ground.
- Fascists advocate for strict gender roles and are opposed to LGBTQ people existing and any type of feminism. In service of strict gender roles (and not in service to “unborn babies”), fascists are strongly opposed to abortion and birth control. The “ideal woman” of fascism is self-sacrificing and obedient to men, but it is also seen by some women as empowering as this idea recognizes and respects their roles as caregivers for children and other relatives (which is typically neglected by liberalism/capitalism). Examples: The Nazis awarded the “Cross of Honor of the German Mother” to women who bore 4 or more children; Nazis imprisoned and killed gay people; Republicans advocate for gay people to be imprisoned and forcibly “converted” to become straight; the Trump administration was aggressively anti-trans and Trump himself was openly misogynistic and a womanizer; Republicans have a long history of being anti-abortion while also refusing to support welfare programs that benefit children (the baby production supports gender roles by forcing women to become mothers, while they believe that the welfare program aids their perceived enemies, especially people of color).
- While it is true that all social power (including economic power) can be reduced to violence, fascists actively and sincerely advocate for violence (while also creating plausible deniability; e.g., by claiming satire) and see their violence as both morally good and noble. Under fascism, violence flows “down” to people with less power; in contrast, far left ideologies encourage violence to flow “up” (though fascists frequently try to portray themselves as punching up). Examples: Both Hitler and Donald Trump encouraged their followers to commit acts of violence against anti-fascist protesters and portrayed those protesters as the bullies who were oppressing their supporters; Trump encouraged his supporters to overthrow American democracy, but portrayed that action as a fight against “the elites”; American fascist group “Operation Werewolf” used as their slogan, “We want the total war.” In contrast to fascists, leaders of the French Revolution encouraged violence against the monarchy and other nobles, and leaders of communist revolutions encouraged violence against monarchists and wealthy capitalists.
- Fascists are preoccupied with appearing dominant, and want their country to be dominant as well because they see the country as a reflection of themselves. If an enemy beats them (or their country), they will claim that the enemy cheated. They will even express that weak or submissive people deserve to be hurt. Examples: Fascists drive physically large vehicles and drive in a domineering fashion; fascists were very angry with Barack Obama for making progress toward peace with both Cuba and Iran.
The following characteristics are often attributed to fascism, but do not necessarily apply depending on what the fascists perceive as beneficial at the moment: opposition to capitalism, support of religion, opposition to democracy. What really matters is if they believe capitalism, religion and democracy favor them at the moment. In the case of religion, they will typically have very specific ideas about which religious groups are good, but can also reject religion entirely if they think that will be beneficial to their cause.
Finally, there are some people who say that fascists exhibit “communalism”; they are wrong. Fascism is made up of individuals who use their association with their skin color, ethnicity, religion, nation, etc. as a means of attaining their individual superiority (thus satisfying their narcissism). My guess is that those who are trying to associate fascism with communalism are attempting to associate it with left-wing ideologies, like socialism or communism, and distinguish it from its cousin, liberal capitalism. Typically, both fascists and classical liberals (e.g., American libertarians) are happy to extol the virtues of individualism.
A Lengthy Side Note
It is true, though, that Giovanni Gentile, who Mussolini called the “philosopher of Fascism”, considered fascism to be a communal order with all citizens serving the state, but if you read about his philosophy, I think you’ll see it is a convoluted mess that doesn’t really reflect reality or the mental functioning of normal human beings. Moreover, do we care about arcane theories or do we care about what fascists actually do in practice? I’d say the latter, and literally the first thing they did was to attack the communists — fascism was a reaction to communism. If their goals were similar, you’d think they would have cooperated, and we know that fascists purposefully misrepresent themselves to gain power.
What may explain things is that at the time fascism was imagined by Gentile, communists and trade unionists were the same people, and they were in opposition to the state. Moreover, the communists wanted to set up “soviets” which were distributed elected governments intended to make Italy more democratic. Democracy is directly opposed to concentrations of power, and a concentration of power is exactly what Gentile truly wanted; he didn’t necessarily care how that was structured except that he wanted a structure that would work to uphold the power of the few, which is exactly what a centralized state does well. Remember that fascists will latch on to anything that they believe will increase their power, but will discard the same thing just as quickly if conditions change.
After consulting with someone else in the club who knows something about philosophy, I can tell you that Gentile’s convoluted mess has a couple of features that distinguish it from communist or communalist thought. First off, while both Marx and Gentile were inspired by Hegel, they came to very different conclusions. Where Marx decided that the most important factor in life and politics is the material conditions the people are facing (e.g., can you eat? Can you afford gasoline?), Gentile came to the opposite conclusion, deciding that a person’s internal mental state is the most important thing and that reality is subordinate to thought (100% nuts, but a popular idea in the US). You might recognize Gentile’s perspective as a different way to describe “will to power” which I typically describe as “active hallucination”; today, we hear conservatives say people should “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and use “the power of positive thinking”. Second, the purpose of Gentile’s philosophy is to allow the few to dominate the many without the many revolting; since being dominated is a materially unpleasant state of being, Gentile attempts to keep the many in check by getting them to ignore their material conditions.
The elephant in the room is the Soviet Union. In the west, our understanding of the Soviet Union is that it was a horrific, authoritarian nightmare — not democratic at all — and that the material conditions were quite bad. First off, the Soviet Union was an improvement over Czarist Russia; that should go without saying. Second, it’s my opinion that though the goals of the Bolsheviks (and the Marxists and the Leninists) were all good and supportive of democratic principles, the revolution was co-opted by bad actors, and that is why the plutocratic Russia of today (with its invasions of sovereign nations, assassinations, suppression of democracy, and oppression of LGBTQ people) looks so similar to the middle to later-stage Soviet Union; their leader even came from the Soviet Union’s powerful intelligence agency.
If you founded a non-profit that provides free wheelchairs to children in need, but then some villains managed to get control of it later and used the organization to enrich themselves, and the quality of the wheelchairs dropped to where they were hazardous to the children, does that mean you or your initial project were villainous? Of course not. The entire project of communism and its goals are villainized in the US because our media is controlled by capitalist plutocrats — the enemies of democracy — who rightly see communism as an existential threat to themselves. Certainly, we should not believe the narrative put forth by villains — that all people are selfish, that true goodness is not possible, and therefore, anyone claiming (or even attempting) to be good is the “real” villain. (For example, a Democrat told me the other day that “everyone lies” and then implied that we should never judge anyone for any lie.) That toxic narrative effectively encourages people to give up on making the world a better place and allow villains to stay in power.