While most people believe they know what fascism is, an easy and thorough definition remains elusive. Fascism has been described as a movement defined more by what it hated than what it endorsed: anti-socialist, anti-conservative, and anti-liberal. Liberals received a special kind of scorn from fascists, mocked for their preference for deliberate discussion and broad consensus as well as their disinclination to violent solutions; liberals were oblivious to the real problems facing society and their helplessness held the door open for socialists to seize power. But conservatives, on the fascist view, weren’t much better, promoting hopelessly outdated solutions to the problems of the present, clinging to traditions—like aristocracy and the church—that the fascists recognized as moribund. The 1917 Russian revolution made it seem entirely possible that socialism could sweep through Europe, stripping property and blocking power for anyone right-of-center. Striking, unruly socialists could create disorder and dampen a country’s morale. Worse, by preaching class conflict they set the nation against itself. Equivalent living conditions and wages for workers would rob fascism of rank-and-file supporters, stopping it cold. One common perception is that fascism names a politics of the far Right—the Righter than Right. But in another sense, fascism can be seen as beyond left and right, a third way—not the moderates’ third way but the vanguardists’ third way—that gained power by playing on the fears and desires of an increasingly frustrated population. So back to the question at hand, is the Tea Party fascist? One way to answer this question is to figure our who and what the Tea Partiers most loathe.
Is the Tea Party anti-liberal? I realize that seems like a silly question, given all the anti-liberal rhetoric that Tea Party candidates have churned out over the past two years. But it’s a necessary question all the same. “Liberal” has served as an epithet in American political speech for the last forty years or so, and yet classical liberalism, as a body of political doctrine—a belief in freedom as guiding principle—is absolutely and indisputably the common coin of American politics. Liberalism (albeit one that has forgotten its own name) provides the shared language by which activists and politicians across the political spectrum seek to press their claims; it is the edifice in which the most devout leftie and the most fervent right-winger can both have homes. It is impossible to be taken seriously as a public figure in the US if you don’t pay homage to freedom in this sense, which means that one of the most peculiar features of American politics is the ongoing spectacle of politicians shouting “Freedom!” while denouncing liberalism. And the Tea Party is notable in this regard, ever-sharpening the paradox, positioning themselves as defenders of freedom while at the same time looking for ways to repeal the amendment that provides for the direct election of senators, or to disenfranchise otherwise eligible voters who do not own property, or to put restrictions on birthright citizenship. While the Tea Party makes claims to the be the party of freedom, it has very specific ideas about whose freedom it will defend, prizing second-generation native-born property owners above other Americans. This impulse to pare back on the Bill of Rights places the Tea Party well outside the main traditions of American liberalism.
Is the Tea Party anti-conservative? Of course not. Tea Partiers, steeped like a fine oolong in nostalgia for national greatness and a preoccupation with American origins, brandish their conservative credentials far more than most European fascists did, and this is one of the ways in which the Tea Partiers in their current form are furthest from fascists: they are still more or less within the wide mainstream of the conventional right. And yet even this is more complicated than it appears. The generation that the Tea Party lionizes – the Revolutionary generation of the 1770s and ‘80s – is the great Left generation in American history. Conservatism, by definition, seeks its solutions in tradition—and has in practice tended to promote social hierarchy—but the American revolutionaries only became the heroic figures that the Tea Party takes them to be once they stopped seeking remedies in the shared traditions of the early British Empire. The American revolution was a radical event in which American colonists rose up against their political and economic overlords to declare autonomy and, in the eyes of most ordinary Americans then living, to prevent the formation of an American elite through tax and property reform. One of the fascinations of the Tea Party is to watch them devise a conservative stance towards a revolutionary moment, to petrify the historical Left, inspiration and model for French and Haitian revolutionaries, into an inert and stony Right. The Tea Partiers have become conservators of a (simplified) revisionist history, using the legacy of a Leftist generation as a springboard for their conservative revolution.
Despite the ways in which the Tea Party contradicts itself and its singularly narrow-minded interpretation of revolutionary history, we still have to take seriously the way in which this right-wing movement is borrowing from the Left, because that is itself one of the hallmarks of fascism. Counter-revolution is at the center of modern conservative (as opposed to fascist) thought: the status quo is its touchstone. One of fascism’s scarier innovations was the rise of a Rightist movement that began to plan revolutions of its own. The Fascist Revolution appealed to people who were hostile to the Left’s goals and tired of the Conservatives’ inept governing. Fascism summoned its followers to restore the glory of the nation, stirred up nationalist fervor and combined radical individualism (the Fascist ideal of the “new man”) with groupthink. It was exciting, carrying the political momentum of the day because it offered the average citizen complete solutions – for example, taking the unwanted elements like criminals, Gypsies, Marxists and Jews off the streets – rather than difficult compromises. Fascism reassured people that they could be in the rush of the revolution and still not have to share the wealth. What’s disturbing about the Tea Party’s revolution is that it claims to offer much the same thing: the exhilaration of fire-breathing revolutionary rhetoric swaddling the promise that nothing at all about America will ever change again.
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