On Capturing 'Fascism'

The difficult consequences of stretching definitions

Précis/TL;DR: in which we discuss some problems inherent with any attempt to use the term ‘fascist’ in a rigorous, comparative, and scholarly sense when describing the past, let alone the present. I suggest that there are at least three major problems with deploying it outside of a very narrow conceptualization. These problems are: 1) a universe of cases problem; 2) a unit (or levels) of analysis problem; and 3) a normative usage problem. A brief set of links to newly-published articles from me concludes the newsletter, as always.

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A Prefatory Note

This essay was originally a Twitter thread. I’ve smoothed it out a little bit and added a bit more meat to it, but otherwise kept it intact. It was intended to provide some nay-saying context about a swirling - and ongoing - discourse on the internet. To avoid being unnecessarily esoteric or coy, we can summarize that discourse simply: various academics and commentators are in a big fight over whether former President Trump is a ‘fascist,’ or leads a ‘fascist movement,’ or is a ‘proto-fascist’ or is ‘ partly fascistic,’ or whatever. Frankly, it’s a very annoying conversation and does not lend itself to dispassionate analysis.

Nevertheless, it reminded me that sometimes smart people really don’t recognize exactly how tricky working with the ‘fascism’ term is in a rigorous way. That is, there is in fact something baked into the concept (and the historical experience from which it is derived) that makes it difficult to apply to other areas or time-periods without difficulty.

Of course, if one simply wants to use ‘fascist’ as a pejorative or to bash political opponents - that’s totally fine (very Stalinist, even). But if we have higher expectations about explaining or even predicting phenomena in the social and political world using terms like this, things get difficult quickly. The thread, and therefore this essay, are small efforts at raising those issues. Naturally, the thread itself has mostly been ignored. I am cross-posting it here because the impermanence of Twitter is so very limiting, and also to prompt the ideas from moving beyond the algorithm to my modest Substack mailing list.

For those uninterested, you may skip to the bottom for a few new articles related to Russia and other sundry authoritarian topics. In any case, enjoy.

Some Annoyances Inherent to the ‘Fascism Debate’

I am in the process of drafting an essay on the question of ‘Is Russia Fascist?’ for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia. So, naturally I've had to think through what it means for a regime to be ‘fascist’ in the first place over the last several months. Funnily enough, the wider world on Twitter seems to be complying with a parallel, and obviously fraught, debate on fascism in contemporary politics closer to home.

What is notable is how much more difficult settling on a definition or useful characterization of ‘fascism’ is - a surprise perhaps for what one might expect on first glance. Calling something fascist in a rigorous way is a far harder task than calling something ‘liberal’ or ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’ or any other sort of standard ideological label (even if those too have their quirks and confusions). You may find this hard to believe, but I assure you it is true. The rest of this essay intends to point out exactly why this is, and why it ends up causing so much trouble.

To this end, I want to raise three points of interest about these sorts of debates over concepts and definitions. Especially ones that naturally get heated so very quickly. For what it's worth, I’ve ultimately come down on the side of a fairly narrow conceptualization of fascism, which I think is defensible, rigorous, and useful. Your mileage may vary.

Taking a narrow conception has the great benefit of excluding most contemporary political phenomena as plausibly ‘fascist,’ and casts doubt on its utility as a term of art analytically useful for modern politics. Many do not like this. But let me suggest that any more expansive alternative has to grapple with a few major problems. These points aren’t meant to be systematic, and I'm not the first to raise them. But I'm quite certain they're worth thinking through seriously when engaging in these sorts of periodic debates.

First, Fascism has a Universe of Cases Problem

The issue is very simple: there are only two country-cases whose regimes were unambiguously fascist without the need for nuances, asterisks, or clarifications. These are Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. They were clear and consistent about stating that they were fascist. They were the direct inspiration for all other figures, movements, and imitators that also called themselves fascist, or variations thereof. They are where all subsequent scholarly studies on fascism start.

Even so, these two are already difficult countries from which to inductively derive a single, general ideology, as their internal politics were actually quite distinct. The literature tends to land at a definition of fascism that looks something like ‘modernist, statist, ultranationalist national-rebirth-through-hyper-violence authoritarian regime with imperialist goals with an extreme cult of personality heading a mass movement driven by deep psychological insecurities and pathologies.’ That’s already a hard sell connecting both Interwar Italy and Germany easily. And if they’re the only two that this is truly based off of, that is a major difficulty.

Meanwhile, other potential cases which are often raised as potentially fascist or probably-fascist-like have the unfortunate tendency to be suspect for various reasons, and often fit less well than we imagine they should. Indeed, they are usually subject to heated in-country debates by historians, legal scholars, and social scientists to this day.

We can take a few examples. The key ‘maybe fascist’ states that emerged organically in the Interwar Era are Franco’s Spain (perhaps for a little while), the Dollfuß/Schuschnigg regime in Austria (notably very anti-Nazi, but perhaps fits the Italian model), Salazar's Portugal (an even more difficult fit than Spain), and Metaxas' Greece (probably too traditionalist and conservative). Each one has a contentious and longstanding debate associated with them about whether they really fit as examples, even when we man-handle the concept a bit. Most can be happily fitted into the ‘national-conservative’ or ‘national-authoritarian’ labels without the extra baggage and stretching needed to call them ‘fascist.’ Again, some will do so, but it's no slam dunk for any of them.

If we go down from state to ‘movement’ or party, we do get more cases - but they also get considerably more diverse. Here you can find good fits like Hungary’s Arrow Cross, Romania’s League of the Archangel Michael/Iron Guard, or Brazil's Integralist Action, as well as more contested ones such as France's Action Française, Belgian Rexism, the minor ‘shirt’ movements in the Anglo-American world, etc. So at least we have some more fairly unambiguous examples beyond Italy and Germany.

But these aren’t regimes, so we're already moving to different units of analysis (more on that below). Other options are the regimes directly or indirectly imposed by the Nazis during the war (Romania, Croatia, Slovakia, Norway, etc). They may have been ‘fascist’ for a few years, but using them doesn’t tell us anything about origins or means of capturing power in the ways we tend to be interested in for the core fascism cases. Nor why we really care about bringing the concept to bear on questions of modern politics.

Indeed, those cases of imposition during a wartime period makes their fascism overdetermined and hard to derive any real lesson from. To take a different ideological case-set, it would be hard to derive a lesson on communism’s inherent properties (or what we conceptualize communism as a concept denoting a real-world political ideology/system) just comparing the USSR and USSR-occupied socialist Poland. But we also have Cuba, Vietnam, China, and Yugoslavia to work with, which makes our assessments of what communism usually looks or ‘is’ like much stronger.

The general problem of cases is one reason why the literature on fascism is so odd. It is essentially inductive, taking two cases that called themselves fascist and everyone agrees were fascist (even though they are quite different already), and then notes a broader set of quasi-/semi-/maybe-fascisms, each of which is a little off from any definition that works for the two core cases. If we stretch what fascism means to make sure we have all of the above cases within it, suddenly the concept is considerably wider.

That stretched definition looks less tenable as the literature’s usual ‘modernist, statist, ultranationalist national-rebirth-through-hyper-violence authoritarian regime with imperialist goals with an extreme cult of personality heading a mass movement driven by deep psychological insecurities and pathologies’ (as suggested above) and more like ‘nationalist authoritarianism with a personalist dictator at the head.’ That’s much, much broader!

Which then raises the question of what else might fit that considerably more capacious definition? You will find that many more countries fit the bill, most controversially (yet also most obviously) in the postcolonial ‘Global South.’ Many understandably shy away from making ‘generic fascism’ that broad.

Second, Fascism has a Unit (or Levels) of Analysis Problem

Fascism is in principle a term for an ideology. But as noted above, it’s often used to describe the ideology and political system of individual states... as well as assumptions about their international behavior. But ideology and structural features are not necessarily the same, and only some ideologies require certain political systems.

And note that fascism is also a descriptor for a party or social movement, which is neither regime-type nor political system and may have fairly bespoke ideas highly specific to the context. And also it turns out fascist ideology in its most abstract sense doesn’t have much systematic thought or a long canon of sophisticated writings to which there is cross-national relevance, relative to other big ‘ism’ ideologies. We can find ourselves comparing apples and oranges quickly.

These are not necessarily insurmountable issues - other big ‘isms’ have these kinds of differing dimensions as well - but it means that we can find ourselves rapidly eliding the distinctions and move from regime or state to movement to ideas to what have you without realizing we’ve changed the unit or level of analysis. This matters because as I've suggested, we ultimately care a lot about origins, process, and outcomes. Especially for the current ‘fascism debate.’

What’s at stake here is that saying x politician or political movement is ‘fascist’ (or ‘fascist-like’ or ‘fascistic,’ etc ad nauseam) presumably implies a model for both development and for takeover. But it also implies a way of governing - fascists govern in specific ways and act on the international arena distinctly as well, we think. So we have a congeries of different units (individual personalities, political movements, governments, and ideas in an ideology sense) that are theoretically supposed to do fairly specific things in fairly specific ways in the real world. Again, our lack of many cases makes these predictions a lot more specific than they might otherwise be - and if we abstract them out, we dilute the concept considerably (more on that below as well).

How much can we trust a pattern relying on just a few cases (as above) that also has such a special kind of definition, that also is trying to capture very different units of political actor, and the levels at which they sit, from micro- to macro-foundations. When we say something is fascist, it’s actually a pretty specific claim, and has a very specific location in the broader political ecosystem.

All of this means that it’s not always clear what we get from relying so much on the fascism label. We have other perfectly good concepts (authoritarianism, for example, or nationalism) that may provide superior explanatory power without relying on such a weird case set with such a specific group of assumptions as to what it entails. Which gets us to the third problem when thinking about fascism.

Third, Fascism has a Normative Usage Problem

Very simply, in the West (and in the former Soviet Union as well) fascism is not just a characterizing or classifying label for an historical political phenomenon, but carries very strong normative content. Fascism is bad. But not only is fascism ‘bad,’ it is something like ‘so normatively (morally) bad that its existence justifies a violent response.’ Very few labels convey that kind of specific, emotionally heightened information content. But fascism historically has.

That’s a problem because if you decide that you do want to stretch the definition and make it more inclusive to other cases that might fall out of a narrow conceptualization, you are going to render this normative component weaker and less tenable. To be very clear here, people are pretty comfortable saying Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy should be deemed broadly ‘unacceptable.’ But that’s a very narrow scope.

Maybe you can agree that all the other national-authoritarian and corporatist states of the Interwar Era are also unacceptable (although note you are quickly peeling people off already). But if those are truly fascist, then many more places are as well. That’s the trick with concepts, is that we expect them to travel if we think we’re capturing something ontological about the political world.

Which means, if not only Italy and Germany (and their conquered allies) are fascist, but Spain, Austria, Portugal, Greece and elsewhere were… many more cases may have to be coded as fascist as well far beyond Europe. Were postcolonial Syria, Iraq, and Egypt fascist? Maybe? But it gets worse. Was Nkrumah's Ghana or Sukarno's Indonesia? Why not, if we are stretching to aggressive, cult of personality style nationalist polities? Or we could make it even more interesting if we keep stretching and abstractly highlight personalism, statism, and party machines. Was Peronism fascist? Was the New Deal fascist? At that point, can one maintain convincingly that fascism remains universally ‘bad’ to people? Suddenly we need to take great care.

Many understandably shy away from these sorts of comparisons. But that’s the box that gets opened when the definition is broadened. This another reason why there is such resistance to expanding the concept too much, but also why that concept either ends up looking very specific and much less useful.

Summing Up

At the end of the day, it’s hard enough to find a good characterization that captures the core cases of the 1920s-1940s we tend to agree on. If we must have a ‘generic fascism’ or a ‘fascist minimum,’ then something like a synthesis of Roger Griffin’s (focus on violent, revolutionary rebirth of the nation), Ernst Nolte’s (modernist political reaction to communism and liberalism - in that order), and Stanley Payne’s (mass-mobilized vitalist imperialism with a cult of youth, aesthetics, and aggression) work on fascism is probably good enough. I thoroughly recommend reading their books.

But that concept is still somewhat fraught and really quite narrow. It’s not easily applied to today’s world. And yet so many people seem desperate to do so. So we need to think through what that means and what the analytic consequences are when we conceptually stretch beyond those confines. It really does get messy, and there’s no way around it without veering into relying on unsustainable blinders, huge inevitable caveats, or plain intellectual dishonestly.

My honest recommendation for the current debate is to just eschew the term and focus efforts on less specific and historically-contingent political phenomena. It’s unwieldy and hard to get right. And people that want to stretch the definition also want to maintain its moral valence - the tradeoff noted above is inescapable however. And it’s all unnecessary. There really are better conceptual tools out there. But that’s just me. And I’ve already written a piece on how authoritarianism could come to America, so that’s very convenient as well if you want to make life easier.

And as a final coda, no: Russia is not fascist. Although there are some actors on the side that do merit a closer look using the fascism lens. You can read all about that later this year. 🙃

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Further Reading

For those uninterested in fascism, I have four new publications out since this past February that you may find of interest:

• First, an article in the conservative-liberal FUSION online journal, which asked me to review a new book on American right-wing support for foreign dictators. You can find it here, “Understanding the Call of the Authoritarian.” I found the book interesting, but an account that only very partially captures a much broader phenomenon of American elite interest in non-democracies around the world.

• Second, the editors at the national security journal War on the Rocks asked me to review my article on Russia’s authoritarian public politics that I wrote for them last year (you can find it here). We did so in a back-and-forth written interview, “Rewind & Reconnoiter: Public Politics in the Wartime Russian Dictatorship with Julian Waller.” I claim that my argument at the beginning of 2023 held up quite well actually, although we now need to think differently as the ground has shifted notably.

• Third, an academic book chapter in the new Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, edited by Marlene Laruelle. My entry is “Illiberalism and Authoritarianism,” and provides a systematic overview of different ways scholarship has conceptualized and defined ‘authoritarianism.’ I come down quite hard in favor of a political regime

• Fourth, a relatively short analytic article in The National Interest titled “What Does Tucker Carlson’s Vladimir Putin Interview Mean for the Ukraine War?” which does what it says on the tin. Funnily enough, it is also a formalization of a Twitter thread I made at the time.

Finally, if you missed my latest Substack essay “On Ukrainian Politics,” you can find it below:

- Julian