I don’t want to dogpile and axont already pointed out a pretty good scholar who talks about the subject, but I did want to add for clarity the reason that it’s important to have a precise definition: We could look at, say, Victorian Britain, Ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire and Suleiman the Magnificent and argue that they were all unquestionably ruled by either a single or a small handful of rulers with no real checks on their power, that they oriented the economy and society around themselves, that they suppressed dissent etc. and conclude, from Webster there, that basically every government except modern American government is fascism. Simply in historical terms that would be an enormous problem, because it collapses all the nuance and distinctions that exist, obviously, between these extremely diverse forms of government.
When people talk about fascism, there’s a reason they think of Hitler and Mussolini (who self-described, which makes that a bit easier I guess) even if it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what the unifying factors are. Very clearly, Mussolini and Hitler thought their projects were incompatible with communism/socialism, it’s why their first steps upon achieving power in their countries were to purge the left and ensure that left resistance couldn’t be organized against them. Even if you have critiques of Stalin (I certainly do) I think there are pretty obvious differences between the USSR and the fascist axis that it ended up fighting against, reasons that were ultimately persuasive to Roosevelt and Churchill despite their own misgivings about communism. Everyone at the time understood there was a difference, and we need to be able to distinguish if we’re going to talk intelligently about forms of government that western countries don’t themselves use.
So in short, I’d say that definition from Webster is too vague to be useful, I’d say there are factors like palingenetic ultranationalism and hostility to the left that seem to be constant in any real fascist regime that should really be a part of a definition of the term. Otherwise ‘fascist’ just means ‘mean’ or ‘bad’ because all of its distinctives are gone.
Mussolini and Hitler thought their projects were incompatible with communism/socialism, it’s why their first steps upon achieving power in their countries were to purge the left and ensure that left resistance couldn’t be organized against them
I think something liberals trip on is that Hitler and Mussolini didn’t just attempt to suppress leftists. They did that after gaining power. Before gaining power they did any number of weasel-like things to convince the average person that fascists were in fact better socialists than the socialists. They appealed hard to working class interests, especially the ones with national chauvinist tendencies. They appealed to racism and scorned international cooperation. It didn’t help that the average person in this was often confused, coming out of the problems of post WW1 Europe, and mainly wanted a party that would put food on the table. The so called “beefsteak nazi” was a type of person who’d join the Nazis believing they’d put forward more genuine socialist policies. Beefsteak, red on the inside, brown on the outside. Then you had people like Ernst Röhm and Strasser, who identified publicly as socialist. Then once gaining power in 1934, they were killed.
Fascists don’t really have beliefs so much as they’re an emergency tool for capital to rid itself of its primary internal enemies.
I don’t want to dogpile and axont already pointed out a pretty good scholar who talks about the subject, but I did want to add for clarity the reason that it’s important to have a precise definition: We could look at, say, Victorian Britain, Ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire and Suleiman the Magnificent and argue that they were all unquestionably ruled by either a single or a small handful of rulers with no real checks on their power, that they oriented the economy and society around themselves, that they suppressed dissent etc. and conclude, from Webster there, that basically every government except modern American government is fascism. Simply in historical terms that would be an enormous problem, because it collapses all the nuance and distinctions that exist, obviously, between these extremely diverse forms of government.
When people talk about fascism, there’s a reason they think of Hitler and Mussolini (who self-described, which makes that a bit easier I guess) even if it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what the unifying factors are. Very clearly, Mussolini and Hitler thought their projects were incompatible with communism/socialism, it’s why their first steps upon achieving power in their countries were to purge the left and ensure that left resistance couldn’t be organized against them. Even if you have critiques of Stalin (I certainly do) I think there are pretty obvious differences between the USSR and the fascist axis that it ended up fighting against, reasons that were ultimately persuasive to Roosevelt and Churchill despite their own misgivings about communism. Everyone at the time understood there was a difference, and we need to be able to distinguish if we’re going to talk intelligently about forms of government that western countries don’t themselves use.
So in short, I’d say that definition from Webster is too vague to be useful, I’d say there are factors like palingenetic ultranationalism and hostility to the left that seem to be constant in any real fascist regime that should really be a part of a definition of the term. Otherwise ‘fascist’ just means ‘mean’ or ‘bad’ because all of its distinctives are gone.
I think something liberals trip on is that Hitler and Mussolini didn’t just attempt to suppress leftists. They did that after gaining power. Before gaining power they did any number of weasel-like things to convince the average person that fascists were in fact better socialists than the socialists. They appealed hard to working class interests, especially the ones with national chauvinist tendencies. They appealed to racism and scorned international cooperation. It didn’t help that the average person in this was often confused, coming out of the problems of post WW1 Europe, and mainly wanted a party that would put food on the table. The so called “beefsteak nazi” was a type of person who’d join the Nazis believing they’d put forward more genuine socialist policies. Beefsteak, red on the inside, brown on the outside. Then you had people like Ernst Röhm and Strasser, who identified publicly as socialist. Then once gaining power in 1934, they were killed.
Fascists don’t really have beliefs so much as they’re an emergency tool for capital to rid itself of its primary internal enemies.