All about 'fascism': the word of the day.

IN early August, President Bush said that we are at war with "Islamic fascists." This brought predictable harrumphs and guffaws from various American quarters and shouts of outrage from the Middle East. Seemingly in response, Bush quickly played down the narrow fascist angle, arguing that jihadis aren't fascists so much as co-marchers in the same parade of horribles. "They are successors to fascists, to Nazis, to Communists, and other totalitarians of the 20th century," he told an American Legion audience. Around the same time, Donald Rumsfeld warned that we face "the rising threat of a new type of fascism." He went on to suggest that those who fail to acknowledge this threat are akin to those who sought to appease Hitler. In response to all this, the talk shows went batty, the White House unleashed a phalanx of spinners to defend its argumentum ad Hitlerum, the Left erupted in a tizzy of tuttutting, and just about everyone jumped into a big argument about what fascism was, is, and should be.

You might be thinking: Boy, this sounds like a good time for someone to write a book about fascism. And if you're not, my publisher is. Two years overdue, I'm at work on just such a book. One reason It's taken so long is that I've tried to make sense of the academic literature. Fascism scholarship is a strange land, and being a stranger in it reveals all sorts of unexpected things.

For example, you might have noticed that, amid all the Sturm und Drang over Bush's comments, very few people offered simple definitions of what fascism is. And those who did offer what appeared to be technical definitions almost never referred to a source. There's a simple explanation for this: Everyone thinks he knows what fascism is, except for the people who study it.

Indeed, this has become something of an inside joke in the academic literature. "Such is the welter of divergent opinion surrounding the nature of the term," writes Roger Griffin in his introduction to The Nature of Fascism, "that it is almost de rigueur to open contributions to the debate on fascism with some such observation." One of the main reasons the scholarly compass hasn't been fixed is that the magnetic pull of Marxism distorted its reading for so many years. Marxist theory--which operated as a secular gospel for an army of intellectuals--predicted that the capitalist ruling classes would mount a "last gasp" attack on the progressive historical juggernaut of Communism. When fascism popped up, some Communists said, in effect, "Aha! Marx's prophecy has been fulfilled!" Others recognized that fascism and, even more acutely, National Socialism were dangerous competitors to Bolshevism. National Socialism, which allowed Germans (or Romanians, Frenchmen, etc.) to be both nationalistic chauvinists and socialists, was very appealing to people who liked left-wing economics but rejected an "international" socialism run out of the Kremlin.

As a result, Stalin ordered every loyal party member and organ to paint fascism as a right-wing phenomenon and ban the word "socialist" from any discussion of avowedly socialist fascist groups. Indeed, for a brief time Stalin's doctrine of "social fascism" held that any ideology or movement that was not loyal to Moscow was fascist. The rationale was that if you weren't helping the One True Faith, you were helping the capitalists. FDR, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, the American Federation of Labor, the Socialist Party of America and its president Norman Thomas--all were "social fascists," according to the Communist Party of the United States of America.

Particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Marxist notion of fascism as a capitalistic tool of the ruling classes has fallen into disrepute among scholars--though it continues to thrive in the more moonbatty domains of the Internet. But the Left has never abandoned the conviction that it has an exclusive right to the word "fascist," and it's never stopped using the word promiscuously to describe anything it dislikes. That's because the Left is convinced--and has convinced many others, including its liberal allies--that it is the sole possessor and judge of political virtue. Hence, the farther you get from the Left, the closer you get to being a fascist. Orwell spotted this trend early, writing in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" that "fascism" had come to mean nothing more than "something not desirable."

And what could be more undesirable than conservatives? In the 1950s, a whole pseudoscience developed around works like Theodor Adorno's Authoritarian Personality, holding that, for example, opposition to the welfare state was prima facie evidence of bigoted and fascist tendencies. And this was intellectually rigorous compared with what followed. New York congressman Charlie Rangel compared the Contract with America to Nazism, with the Nazis coming out favorably: "Hitler wasn't even talking about doing these things." That statement at least had the benefit of being technically true: Hitler wasn't talking about tax cuts and entitlement reform, because Hitler was a socialist. A better example of liberal legerdemain with the meaning of "fascism" is Bill Clinton's declaration in 2000 that the Texas GOP platform "was so bad that you could get rid of every fascist tract in your library if you just had a copy."

Things aren't much better in the popular culture, where "fascism" has long meant little more than "bullying" and "unnice"--from the "soup Nazi" in Seinfeld (ah yes, Communists would never bully anyone waiting in a soup line) to films like Bull Durham, in which Kevin Costner instructs a baseball-pitching Tim Robbins: "Don't try to strike everybody out. Strike-outs are boring and besides that, they're fascist. Throw some ground balls. They're more democratic."

This is not a propitious climate for a serious conversation about fascism. Many War on Terror hawks welcomed President Bush's "Islamic fascists" comments because they have been using the term "Islamofascism" for years. But it's doubtful Bush's definition of fascism is much more sophisticated than "'fascism' equals 'bad,'" let alone in sync with those who want to take the fight to Riyadh. Moreover, if what some call "jihadism" is a form of fascism, then it cannot be the ideology of terrorists alone. It must also be the ideology of those who sympathize with and defend terrorists. Not every Italian Fascist was a member of Mussolini's "action squads," and not every Nazi was a Brown Shirt. One could similarly argue that Bush and Rumsfeld are appeasing Islamofascism by maintaining alliances with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other countries that export, support, or harbor Islamofascist terrorists. This is not to say that such ugly deal-making isn't a justifiable tool in the war--we sided with Stalin to defeat Hitler after all. But it does dull and smudge the bright moral lines this White House is trying to paint.

On the other hand, it's difficult to take seriously liberals like Paul Krugman--who saw nothing wrong with comparing the backlash against the Dixie Chicks to the rise of Nazism--or the countless jabberers who have over the years denounced William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, et al. as fascists. One gets the sense that today's liberals--beyond their phobia of offending the coalition of the oppressed (in this case, the Muslims of CAIR)--are reluctant to let Bush use "Islamic fascism" because they don't want to give up their monopoly on the F-word.

I think Islamism is a form of fascism, though Michael Ledeen is probably right that its closest Western analogue is to be found in the little-discussed clerical fascisms of Eastern Europe, particularly the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael. This was, in the words of Stanley Payne, "the most anomalous of fascist movements" because it maintained a Christian character even as it went in for the more typical fascist mysticism (to become a member of a cell or "nest," you were expected to suck the blood from fellow members' arms and perform other macabre acts). Perhaps its Christian flavor came from the fact that the region had often been the frontline in Europe's historical clash with Islam.

Regardless, the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the founding ideologue of what could be called "bin Ladenism," are rife with fascist sentiment. Wahhabism--a statist ideology--was itself born during the fascist period of the 1920s and 1930s. Its obsession with social cleanliness and purity, its us-versus-them conception of community, its territorial and ideological expansionism, its radical anti-Semitism (which, to be precise, is not central to fascism as it was to Nazism), its utopian desire to restore the caliphate, its hatred of corrupt democracy with its modernity and bourgeois values: All of these fit the numerous checklists scholars have come up with in lieu of workable definitions of "fascism."

And these checklists exist for a reason. Fascism is not an intellectual disease, some contagion that escaped a German lab and poisoned humanity. A person not inclined to be a Nazi probably won't become one by reading Mein Kampf. Fascism was, rather, a real and coherent ideology. But we rarely use it in that sense. For most of us it is instead a word to describe a bundle of human desires and passions that, for historically contingent reasons, have a tendency to run amok. Yes, ideas have consequences. But receptivity to them has consequences as well. The enemy we face is evil and a serious threat to our way of life, no matter what name we give it. If calling it fascist helps Americans recognize this fact, by all means let's call it fascist. But the sad truth is that if more Americans understood the nature of our enemy, we wouldn't need to argue about it.