So Is Fascism Left Or Right?

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 But conservatives, on the fascist view, weren’t much better, promoting hopelessly outdated solutions to the problems of the present, clinging to traditions—like aristocracy and the church—that the fascists recognized as moribund.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.

Is Fascism Anything But An Epithet? (Part Two-and-three-quarters)

Paxton's work continues to provide more jaw-drops and shivers than a George Romero film. I've worried before that Obama's presidency may be more like the Weimar Republic than one would care to realize: well-meaning, measured, willing to compromise, oblivious. It seems that there is a more direct comparison available between these two historical moments: in 1929 Germany had a malfunctioning parliamentary majority -- socialists with laissez-faire moderates, Left Catholics with secular conservatives -- there was no agreement to be had in the coalition. Add to this massive job losses and the 1929 market crash, smothering what was left of the economy.


"In 1930, as unemployment soared, the government had to decide whether to extend unemployment benefits (as socialist and Left Catholics wanted) or balance the budget to satisfy foreign creditors (as middle-class and conservative parties wanted). A clear choice, but one about which no majority available in Germany would be able to agree (92)."


As Walter Benjamin said, sometimes there are flashes from the past that illuminate our understanding both of the past and the present. The government's insistence on indecision, despite history that shows the consequences of indecision in moments like this is worse than folly.

Is Fascism Anything But An Epithet? (Part Two-and-a-half)

     One of the books I’ve been reading to prepare for the next essay in the series is Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism. Paxton is Mellon Professor Emeritus of the Social Sciences at Columbia University. In 2009 he received the Legion d’honneur from the French Government, in part for his 1972 book Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, where he argued that the collaborationist Vichy government was not forced upon the French by Germany but entered into voluntarily – a premise that upended the received wisdom of the times. Paxton is highly regarded as a historian and his efforts to update fascism scholarship has renewed debate and thought within the field.


     Published in 2004, the following selection predates the development of the Tea Party:




           The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.


     Around such reassuring language and symbols and in the event of some redoubtable setback to national prestige, Americans might support an enterprise of forcible national regeneration, unification, and purification. Its targets would be the First Amendment, separation of Church and State (creches on the lawns, prayers in schools), efforts to place controls on gun ownership, desecrations of the flag, unassimilated minorities, artistic license, dissident and unusual behaviors of all sorts that could be labeled antinationalist or decadent.






Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Allen Lane, 2004. (p 202)

Is Fascism Anything But An Epithet (Part 2)

 I guess I should say before I go any further that I don’t think the Tea Party is straightforwardly fascist. I think it’s useful to measure the Party against historical fascism, to identify the points of convergence as well as the differences, simply in order to clarify what might yet happen in the U.S., but if we’re being thorough, those differences will also matter. 

That said, I still want to begin with the easy stuff, by naming the obvious resemblances, the points where the Tea Party has already donned the jackboots. You don’t have to read these affinities as a plain indictment, but we should seriously examine why some people, when asked if the Tea Party is fascist, wouldn’t hesitate to say “of course.” 

Let’s start with the nationalism. The Tea Party proclaims that gently loving America isn’t enough: true patriots will wrap themselves in the red-white-and-blue and shout from the mountaintops that America is the best country in the world. They will root and then they will toot. “Nationalism,” in fact, doesn’t even begin to describe it. One thing about hyper-nationalists of this kind: They sure do love some old flags; the American flag is great, but it flies in front of every elementary school and post office, and if you want to signal an allegiance more intense than that of a Cub Scout, you’re going to need something historical and recondite—the don’t-tread-on-me Gadsden flag in the Tea Party’s case, which in this sense has become a rather precise functional substitute for the Confederate flag that no serious person is allowed to fly any longer. The Tea Partiers aren’t yet sporting tri-corner hats and knee-breeches—well, some of them are—but their banners will never touch the ground. Feeding their hyper-nationalism is the paranoia that immigrants and smug lefties are systematically dismantling the liberties they heroically defend. The position does make for some easy judgments: there is no equivocation, nuance or diplomacy needed – only the understanding that America the Beautiful is the Number-One Country That Has Ever Existed and must be defended against all enemies: enemies from without, Mexicans sneaking across the locked-down southern border, Muslims sneaking across the unguarded northern one, and enemies from within, too, Japanese-Americans in need of a round-up or gay people fired en masse from the State Department.

OK, so those last two aren’t exactly recent. But then that’s the thing about this kind of aggressive patriotism. It isn’t especially new, and it isn’t the distinguishing mark of either the Tea Party or fascism. Nationalism has always been a big part of the generic right-wing platform, shoring up an American identity and culture presumed white on both fronts. The rhetoric is familiar: it’s us versus them; protect America; deport illegals; fire radicals when you can’t arrest them. The history here is a long one, from this year’s controversial Arizona law to the 1924 Immigration Act, designed to stop the flow of Southern Europeans and Jews to America, to the anti-Catholic fears of the Know-Nothings in the 1850s. On this front, just about the only thing new about the Tea Party is that some of them are Italian, which I guess in this case counts as integration. One self-described Tea Partier I know says it better than me. “It is the People. It is the People who will return us to a nation 'Of the People.'” Now one tweak: Read those sentences again, but substitute for the word People, which my friend has already helpfully capitalized, its German equivalent. “It is the Volk. It is the Volk who will return us to a nation ‘Of the Volk.’” Bear in mind, too: My friend wrote this when he was trying to explain to me why the Tea Party wasn’t fascist. But then Fascism utterly emphasized the People. It wanted to create a nation of the strong and the healthy and the pure, not dirtied by the dark and the radical. 

I think what my friend means is that the Baggers are a populist movement and that when a sizeable minority of people mobilize, it by definition has to be a democratic movement—to which I would say that before you can declare it democratic, you have to know where the Tea Party lies on the political spectrum. And one often gets the feeling that the Tea Party itself doesn’t even know where it lies on the political spectrum and certainly doesn’t understand that an organization can be democratic in form but still not in content—that it can be democratically organized and still not believe in democracy. Stanley Payne’s description of fascism – a description that is loose enough to allow for the variants that spread across Europe in the inter-war period – is helpful. There have been many variants of fascism; Nazi Germany was only the most radical manifestation; but none of the historical fascisms, not even the Nazi one, involved cartoonish dictators wresting political control from democratically elected leaders and forcing an unwilling public into its authoritarian regime. Payne explains that fascism had its origins in mass populist movements which were usually better organized than those found on the left. Those movements were steered by small but numerous meetings where “the goal was to envelop the participant in a mystique and community of ritual that appealed to the religious as well as to the merely political” (11). The Tea Party’s right-wing grassroots movement has developed enough critical mass to become a political force, and it has pulled this off mostly via small meetings, groupuscules that combine a sixth-grader’s Johnny Tremain vision of the Founding Fathers with a singularly uncharitable version of Christianity. This makes it seem at least a little bit like a nascent fascist movement.                   

Fascism also embraces the “positive evaluation of and willingness to use force” (Payne 12). The name Tea Party is, of course, oddly genteel, suggesting as it does crumpets, but its violence is plain to see: its romance with the Second Amendment and militias; the guns that Tea Partiers have been bringing to rallies; Sarah Palin endlessly crying “don’t retreat, reload!”; a Tea Party leader in Montana asking to get the Wyoming manual on “hanging fruits,” Matthew Shepard-style; not to mention the rash of brick-throwing that occurred after the health-care bill passed. The Tea Party is rife with violence potential and real and what’s more, openly endorses it. New York gubernatorial Tea Party candidate Carl Paladino’s statement that he would “take out” a reporter who pressed him on an extra-marital affair, his promise to leave his opponent’s “blood on the floor,” and that he would take a baseball bat to Albany’s legislators--these show his willingness to threaten bloodshed. Let it start adding-up: grassroots hyper-nationalists who openly advocate violence. 

But then here’s one facet of the issue that I have found especially striking: The Tea Party’s rage is coming from people who already hold power. As the demographics show, Tea Partiers trend white, male, wealthy and educated; the very group that has had economic, political and social power in this country since its inception, the beginning they long to return to. Ongoing shifts in the country’s racial makeup—and the racism that accompanies them – can no longer be ignored. Don’t believe that the Tea Party is about race?—perhaps because some TPers insist that it isn’t. I’m going to let a picture do my talking:

The Tea Party’s racism against Obama is so eye-rollingly obvious that it would be boring if it wasn’t also ugly and craven and dangerous. Swapping emails that portray the president as a pimp; suggesting he eat fried chicken rather than host an inauguration dinner; Dick Armey helpfully explaining that “it’s not who Obama is, it is what he is”—the racism against Obama is so lived-in that Tea Partiers barely see it. But those that make up the Tea Party—those white middle-class people that have up until now been the power-holders in this country – are experiencing, somewhat ahead of the curve, the shock that democracy deals to political minorities. Minorities will tend to believe, almost by definition, that what the majority is doing is wrong. Affluent baby- and echo-boomers are crying out that they are suffering from racism, claiming a sort of weird faux-victimhood and coming up with more and more extreme reasons for why their rage should be taken seriously. Now we hear from boomers who, having raised their own children, no longer want their taxes to pay for schools and social programs that would benefit growing black and Latino populations. Now we hear the baby boomers who want to take the working poor off Medicaid to ensure their social security. Actually, let me rephrase that: I’m the one forced to listen to that last group. Maybe two weeks back, I sat in a coffeehouse near my house while a well-nourished, well-dressed, sixty-something boomer proclaimed very loudly that all poor people in America should be dropped from government programs because they were taking money away that was due to him in his retirement. It is one of the hallmarks of the Tea Party that they treat ordinary forms of power-sharing, as exist in all advanced democracies, as a complete and intolerable disempowerment. 

To some extent, though, I don’t want to put too much emphasis on the anti-Obama racism, because the baseline test of political intelligence at the moment is whether or not a person registers the completely stinking obvious parallels between Islamophobia and historical anti-Semitism: the widespread notion that these people from the Middle East—Semites, indeed—cannot be assimilated to a white and Christian culture and will persist as a dangerous leftover; the massive confusion of religious and racial categories; the attacks on religious buildings; insinuations of shadowy and globe-spanning money networks; the suspicion of a people who follow an alternate law; the sense that this foreign religion has a unique capacity for violence. (The Jews, we’ll remember, were once after the blood of Christian babies.) That list is helpful, but it is also rather abstract. I think I can show you something more concrete that should render further argument unnecessary. Here’s a recent caricature of Osama Bin Laden:

And now here’s one of the most famous images of the Nazi era, a film poster for Jud Süss, which you can think of as a kind of Jew-bashing Casablanca: 

Indeed, the construction of Muslims as the Enemy is now so complete one has a hard time remembering through the fog that President George W. Bush said after the September 11 attacks that America was not at war with Islam, but with extremism. That sentiment today strikes many on the Right as hopelessly naïve, as new-model anti-Semites like David Horowitz, Pamela Geller and Bill O’Reilly insist that indeed Christian America is at war with Islam and its people. One can simply follow the timeline of responses on the Park51 community center to watch the hate-mongers unload their wares: it went in no time from a non-issue that even Laura Ingraham approved of to a complete barn- and book-burner. What’s more, it served to formalize Islamophobia as a mass movement; rallies in California, Tennessee, and Florida were held to protest mosques in those places. It would be possible to believe that the Right was sincere in its belief that southern Manhattan should, exceptionally, be treated as hallowed ground, if it weren’t simultaneously fighting Islamic buildings in the unhallowed strip malls and suburbs of the nation. From the Tea Party crowd in Manhattan harassing a man they took to be Muslim (but who was actually a construction worker from the World Trade Center site wearing a skull cap; the mix-up is emblematic of the movement’s blind, blundering rage) to Pastor Terry Jones’s threat to torch Korans on 9/11, along with soaring reports of vandalism against mosques nationally, the anti-Muslim rhetoric and assault on Islam repeat, almost ritually, earlier European attacks on Jews. Only a clod adheres to anti-Semitism in its historical form; that’s the fringe domain of Holocaust deniers and nitwit Nazi reenactors like Ohio Tea Party candidate Rich Iott, who recently defended German fascists as men who “were doing what they thought was right for their country. And they were going out and fighting what they thought was a bigger, you know, a bigger evil." The Tea Party’s infinitely more insidious service to anti-Semitism has been to give it a living target. 



Payne, Stanley G. Fascism: Comparison and Definition. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980.

Is Fascism Anything But An Epithet? (Part One)

I have a friend who recently asked me whether I would prefer Lipton or Tetley this November 2.  There has been plenty of talk, some of it from Republican quarters, framing the Tea Party as a spoiler for the GOP. The point is easy enough to grasp: in primary elections, even candidates with more radical views have a chance to win the party’s nomination but in the general election, where there is almost always higher turnout for both parties, it is more likely such candidates will lose. Even Karl Rove, who is basically the dentist from Marathon Man (“are we . . . safe?”), thinks the Tea Party may be a threat to his dream of a permanent Republican majority. Regarding the Delaware primary election upset of  Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell over Republican congressman Mike Castle, Rove told Sean Hannity: “I’m for the Republican, but I have to tell you we were looking at [picking up] eight or nine seats in the Senate and we’re now looking at seven to eight, in my opinion. This is not a race we’re going to be able to win.” Tea Party Express organizer Amy Kremer responded that Rove should stay out of it and claims her candidates don’t need national GOP support, though she wouldn’t kick their money out of bed. Many Tea Partiers agree with Kremer: they don’t care about party alignment. For them, it’s about a movement.


Because the Tea Party is a movement, it’s hard to pin down. There is no central headquarters, no spokesperson, no-one to substantiate or refute rumors of racism or nativism. There are several organizations that fall under the Tea Party umbrella: Tea Party Express, Tea Party Patriots, Tea Party Nation, all of which do have organizers and main offices, none of which speak for the Tea Party as a whole. While Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are closely associated with the Party, neither of them publicly claim the mantle of leadership. Tea Partiers have spoken about not needing a centralized headquarters because despite their name, they are not actually a party. Rather, they are a cluster of autonomous groups working independently of each other, sharing only ideals and a name.

But what are these ideals? This is where the Tea Party as a movement gets difficult. The opportunities of outsiders to criticize those in power are boundless. As a movement Tea Partiers are able to stay in the abstract: they can criticize wasteful spending without having to decide whether it's school funding or bridge repairs that are going to have to get cut or can claim to "defend freedom" without having to work out detailed foreign policy positions. You dig into Tea Party details and it feels like barely controlled chaos: some Tea Party cells exist only as single-issue groups: anti-gay marriage or pro-gun. Some have extensive goals but no details to enact said goals. Some of the Tea Party positions seem downright ludicrous: Delaware congressional candidate Glen Urquhart said into an open microphone that the separation of church and state started with Hitler. But to write off Tea Partiers as loons is to make a mistake. These people matter, and we ought to pay attention.

The American public is used to two types of Republicans. Those that call themselves values voters who believe in a kind of Christian nationalism, the sort that hold Jesus and the American flag dear to their hearts as the ultimate political statement. The second is the patrician conservative often seen on the tennis courts and dining rooms of country clubs, the sort that graduated from ivy league schools and have come to be very concerned about the estate tax. From these two kinds of Republicans, you can guess where the Tea Party draws from right?

Or can you? Your mistake is interesting and here is why: statistically, Tea Party supporters trend white, older, male, middle-class and educated.  The Tea Partiers aren’t poor illiterate rednecks. But their style of politics is not the sedate bourgeois kind of the patrician Republicans, it is fully demotic. Mass grassroots movements on the right can provide plenty of room for worry and the Tea Party has mobilized a sizable minority of the country to its causes: it should be taken seriously. What happens when the bourgeoisie stop being sedate? What happens when people we think of as wealthy middle-class people start acting in ways that many people would consider provocative and rabble-rousing? In Germany, when the bourgeoisie stopped acting like the bourgeoisie they started throwing bricks through shop windows.

So let’s pose the question directly: Can there be an American fascism? Is the Tea Party a fascist movement? Grassroots dissatisfaction that mobilized into political movements and parties have caused massive destruction in the past. Does the Tea Party show the possibility of being one of those groups? While you may have a knee-jerk auto-response to the second question, it is important to remind ourselves what fascism really is and what fascism means, beyond an all-purpose epithet. In re-examining fascist movements its possible to learn what the Tea Party is and is not.

More to come . . . .