When ‘fascist’ stops being a joke and why the word matters again

In one episode of the 80s comedy The Young Ones, the four housemates discover oil in the basement of their London student house. This leads Mike and Vyvyan to mount a household coup d’état and force Rik and Neil to become the oppressed proletariat. Rik’s popular uprising earns him a whack in the goolies with Vyvyan’s cricket bat. ‘You fascist junta!’ he screams, using the Spanish pronunciation of junta, which makes it a lot funnier. Try it out: say fascist junta out loud with the Spanish pronunciation. 

Fascist has long been a word we throw at anything that smacks vaguely of authoritarianism, bullying, discrimination, or a traffic warden, police officer, uncooperative shop assistant, arsehole boss, or a friend who doesn’t want to hang on for the extra pint even as the pub closes. We used to call Boris Johnson a fascist. He may be the result of a terrible anal bleaching accident, but that is not necessarily the same thing as being a fascist. 

‘Fascist’ has been used as a synonym for arsehole. Not all arseholes are fascists; though all fascists are arseholes. 

How are we using the word now? We all sort of know what fascism is — see Rik’s expostulation above. But when we refer to Trump or Farage or any of the many other people who are placing their boots on the face of humanity,  do we really mean fascist, as in the dictionary sense — the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler sense — or do we mean  fascist as in mean, or having unreasonable tendencies, or do we just mean prick?

Surely humanity has done fascism. We’re not going to go back and do it again, are we? No species could be that stupid, could it? To quote the meme, the difference between America now and Germany in the 1930s is that Germany in the 1930s didn’t have 90 years of books and films telling them how horrifying Germany in the 1930s was. 

The second world war killed, globally, between 70 and 85 million people, fully three per cent of the world’s population at that time. Three per cent of the people in the world killed because of one ideology!

Orwell wrote one of the most famous books in the English language all about authoritarianism, and Hannah Arendt dissected it in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Whether we are facing real or rhetorical fascism is not an academic or pedantic question at the moment. There is the Trump administration in the US; Reform is positioned to be the next government in the UK; all across Europe, all around the world, far-right parties are climbing in the polls. Internationally, oligarchs and ideological tapeworms like Steve Bannon are networking and aligning. 

Textbook fascism requires five conditions be met. 

1. Democracy is hollowed out but still used as theatre
2. The state defines an internal enemy or enemies
3. The leader becomes the nation
4. Violence becomes political but deniable
5. Capital is protected, labour is crushed

In the first condition, the hollowing out of democracy, elections, courts, and parliaments are retained but their power removed; courts are packed with pliant judges, opponents are harassed or jailed, the media is captured, rules are bent or ‘reinterpreted’ so the ruling party cannot lose; the people vote but the elections are shams. 

The second condition hardly needs any comment. There is always a ‘real people’ that is being subverted, undermined, and persecuted by an enemy within. The enemy within is blamed for economic decline, perceived cultural change, crime, and loss of individual status. We have a culture war. The enemies are generally migrants, minorities, lefties (hi!), LGBTQ people, intellectuals, journalists (despite the media being captured), and these days, ‘globalists’ (whoever they are), and ‘elites’ (even while the ‘elites’ rule). Repression is justified as ‘self-defence’.

In the third case, the leader is supposed to be the embodiment of the nation. The leader is supposed to be strong (Fight! Fight! Fight!), plain-spoken, and the only one who ‘tells the truth, the only one who can fix it.’ Institutions become irrelevant next to personal power. 

It’s difficult to see how an orange-saturated, dilapidating, cognitively impaired, incontinent blob of a moron is supposed to represent the USA — yet that is precisely the myth being insisted upon.

Four: Violence becomes political but deniable. Perhaps no comment is necessary here, either — Renee Good, Alex Pretti; ICE.  The police and courts are co-opted, and you see a selection of vigilantes, gangs, ‘patriots’, or ‘volunteers’. The regime does not always give the order.

It creates a climate where violence is rewarded and protected. That’s how fascism avoids looking like a classic, toothbrush-moustache dictatorship at first.

Capital is protected, labour is crushed. This is where people get confused. The state does not replace capital; it cushions it. We saw this with the intimate relationship between the Nazis and the big companies of the time. Internationally, capital was so unconcerned by the rise of fascism that US companies continued to do business in Germany and Italy right up to America’s entry into the war, despite the US government propping up the war effort of (the equally capitalist) UK. In this arrangement, wealth remains concentrated, unions are hobbled or outlawed, strikes are banned, wages suppressed, and the state directs the economy towards national power (military, infrastructure, prestige).

A tiny but exciting reminder: fascism emerges when capitalism enters systemic crisis. Economist Yanis Varoufakis has described the 2008 Global Financial Crisis as our generation’s equivalent of the 1929 stock market crash.

The US clearly ticks many of the boxes. It is apparently one step away from full-on clinical fascism, needing only complete autocracy — the abandonment of the last vestiges of democratic participation — to complete the set.

When researching this article, I discovered there is a term within political science for the condition in which the US currently finds itself: competitive authoritarianism, a transitional phase immediately preceding full-blown fascism. The fact that this condition has a name — that it is known, recognised, and sufficiently familiar to humanity to be named — is chilling. It emphasises the reality of the situation.

Whether the US, and fascism’s eager acolytes around the world, will make that final leap into the properly autocratic remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, on the street, opposition is growing and mobilising, academic questions are beside the point: if your elected representative looks like a fascist, walks like a fascist, and quacks like a fascist, they probably are a fascist junta. 

This article first appeared on Psipook.Substack.com