What is fascism?

Spoiler Alert: It's Hiding in Plain Sight

A New Year's Note:

I know it's fashionable to talk about a PhD like it's the worst kind of stress in the world. A large part of me thinks those saying this never spent five years measuring out their life in split shifts, balancing between multiple zero-hours contracts.

I love research. I love being a researcher. I love being able to extend my knowledge production work to anyone with three minutes to spare on Tiktok (@openbookshelf), Instagram (@theopenbookshelf), BlueSky (Abbey.Heffer) and, now, Substack.

I always say academic knowledge should not be hidden behind paywalls and institutional access. Yet, the biggest barrier to knowledge that I faced, growing up working class, was time. When working full time just to survive, time is our most valuable commodity. Which is why I've always tried to give you as much as possible in as short a timeframe as I can.

My work on Substack will be no different. I will pack as much (referenced and/or peer reviewed) information as possible into every 3-minute read. If you have the time and energy to read the works I cite, amazing. If not, the knowledge is still power.

What is fascism?

I am a specialist in authoritarianism which, like fascism, thrives on intentionally over-simplified ideas of "us" and "them". Many aspects of fascism tip otherwise authoritarian regimes into totalitarianism. For example, the extreme ethno-nationalism of the fascist project lends itself well to settler colonialism and total mass-mobilisation.

Yet, fascism is rooted in idealism: A passionate dream for totally transforming society that many on the progressive "left" may find oddly familiar. By default of opposing the status quo and fighting for system overhaul -- even if that overhaul wants to set the clock back to some bygone "Golden Age" of the nation -- fascism cannot so comfortably be categorised as "right wing". At least, not according to the origins of "the right" and "the left".

Within the French revolutionary context from whence "left wing" and "right wing" came, the positioning was almost accidental: “Those that adhered most to the ideals of the Revolution increasingly grouped themselves to the left of the president, while the supporters of the Ancien Régime congregated more to the right” (Bienfait and van Beeka 2014).

The division between the revolutionary “left” and the royalist “right” became entrenched in the decisions made by the French legislature, in which the royalists on the right were in favour of old power relations and the revolutionaries on the left sought transformation and change.

In the 19th Century, however, the "left" shifted, pushing traditional liberals into a new, disturbingly-conservative centre. The new "left" set out to give more rights to more people, expanding political citizenship to the working class. What many forget, however, is that the "working class" has never and will never be a monolith. While some were attracted to the rights-expanding rhetoric of chartists and socialists or, later, Marxists and Communists, others found their political imagination more readily inspired by the heroic violence and military aesthetic of fascism.

Fascists are not the villains of their own story. As Roger Griffin argues, fascism is a "palingenetic" ideology, its proponents dream of "rebirth". Specifically, they dream of using violent revolution to bring about the rebirth of the "nation". All nation states are artificially constructed for political purposes, however, the fascist project seeks to reconstruct the nation by revoking the rights of those the fascist group does not consider a part of it. This is how Griffin defines fascism, "palingenetic ultranationalism", which hides in plain sight among the populist movements of today's mainstream politics.

"The longing for total renewal continues to shape postwar fascism, but, now its populist base has collapsed, many forms of it have been forced to pursue a hidden agenda, deliberately concealing the illiberal, totalizing or violent implications of achieving their ultimate goal. This is done in order for fascist extremism to be accommodated in an age in which revolutionary nationalism is still overwhelmingly discredited by association with the horrors of the Second World War" (Griffin 2018).

Fascism is an ideology dedicated to violently bringing about the "rebirth" of the nation, according to some previous, "traditional" imagining of what that nation state is and who it represents.

If a political party, movement, or government dedicates itself to revitalising or transforming the “nation” according some some imagined, vaguely-historical, often racialised or tribal sense of ethno-nationalism, it is fascist.

Your Open Bookshelf To Be Read (TBR):

Roger Griffin. (2018). Fascism. Polity: Key Concepts in Political Theory.

Frits Bienfait and Walter E. A. van Beeka. (2014). "Political Left and Right: Our Hands-On Logic", Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 2(1), 335–346.

From The Open Bookshelf on TikTok:

On the origins of left/right wing thinking:

On the problematic concept of the “nation state”: