Payton Gendron called himself a fascist. Tucker Carlson calls himself a conservative (and says poor Payton is “mentally ill”). Donald Trump calls himself a Republican (and says Vlad the Invader is a “genius”). And now Timothy Snyder, the eminent Yale historian, calls Putin a fascist (and says Carl Schmitt proves it), in an op-ed for The New York Times, 5/19/22.
Do these distinctions still make a difference?
“In all its varieties,” Snyder declares, fascism “was about the triumph of the will over reason.” But he acknowledges that this characterization is so elastic that it threatens to make any taxonomy of political extremism meaningless: “Because of that, it’s impossible to define [fascism] satisfactorily.” He’s a little worried that he’s calling the man who glorifies the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany a fascist.
Even so, Snyder goes on to insist that Putin wields the power of a fascist state: “Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply” in defining fascist regimes. These criteria boil down to three: (1) a “cult around a single leader”: (2) a “cult of the dead [the heroes of the Great Patriotic War]”; and (3) a myth of a “past golden age [the USSR as a world power during the Cold War[.”
We’re on dangerous ground here. You may remember the hysterical rhetoric that catapulted the US into the atrocity of the war on Iraq 20 years ago. Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, David Frum, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol—all those Vulcans from the Project for a New American Century plus leftists and liberals like Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, George Packer, Thomas Friedman—framed this nation’s aggression as a necessary struggle against the existential threat of “Islamofascism,” a self-evidently evil terrorist movement that, if not annihilated by American force of arms, would destroy liberal democracy throughout the world.
You can’t appease or negotiate with fascists, that just emboldens them. You have to kill them off—war is the drug that cures the liberal state by restoring its resolve, by turning a divided people into a united front willing to die in defense of its “way of life.” Left-liberals like Hitchens and Berman were especially eager to demonstrate their mettle in these bloodthirsty terms.
Snyder has joined their ranks: “There is no answer to fascism. After all, fascist politics begins, as the Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt said, from the definition of an enemy.” (He was, in fact, an esteemed and still influential political theorist/philosopher and, to be sure, a Nazi, far more actively and fervently than his counterpart, Martin Heidegger; Schmitt, a favorite of Hermann Goering himself, was defiantly unrepentant until his death in 1985.)
Actually, Schmitt, who built his theories on the foundations laid by the pluralists of the early 20th century, including William James and Harold Laski, wrote that politics as such was constituted, as it were, by drawing the line between friend and enemy: “Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and of what it consists. . . . . The specific distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” [1]
So war was not merely the continuation of politics by other means, as per Clausewitz’s apocryphal aphorism, it was the beginning and the end, the premise and the purpose, of politics. The crime of liberalism had been its separation of state and society, and its consequent demotion of political action to just one of the settings in which a man could achieve genuine selfhood—unlike the ancients, who assumed citizenship was both the means and the end of selfhood, modern liberals believed that the site of self-discovery and self-determination was civil society, a sphere separate from the state as well as the family, where individualism rather than political community could flourish. Modern liberals did collateral damage to politics, so conceived, by inventing the impossible (unknowable) category of “humanity,” which produced not enemies subject to elimination but criminals subject to legal discipline. [2]
Like the pragmatist pluralists, like Antonio Gramsci, and like his contemporary academic and political comrade, Otto Brunner, the historian of medieval Europe, Schmitt thought that the modern liberal distinction between (or opposition of) state and society was breaking down under the hammers of modern democracy. But the dispersal of power from state to society carried out by labor unions, councils or soviets, and corporations promised a new identity of these two spheres; the polemical cause and political effect of this interpenetration would be the “total state.” [3]
Schmitt wasn’t particularly original in noticing this confusion of spheres, but he was prescient in suggesting that modern democracy would re-politicize the “social” issues 19th-century liberalism had remanded to the private sector, where they were adjudicated by legal decision, not political conflict. We live in the hyper-political “total state” he predicted, where the most private, even intimate moments of everyday life are now subject to public deliberation and legislation. [4]
In this sense, we already live on the dangerous ground where fascism thrives. It’s not just another country, a world elsewhere, it’s right here in River City, and among its sponsors are the social justice warriors of the Left and the Right who treat the personal and the political as interchangeable moments of a metastasized public sphere.
So much for Snyder’s invocation of Schmitt. What about those other scholars he mentions, the ones with the criteria he wants to apply to Putin? He cites his Yale colleague Jason Stanley, a philosopher, but his book treats fascists as epistemological outlaws—cynical propagandists—who don’t tell the truth, as if that is a unitary property uniformly (“objectively” or verifiably) available to anyone who looks.
Snyder does not cite The Anatomy of Fascism (2004), by Robert O. Paxton, a retired Columbia historian, perhaps because it remains the definitive book on the subject, the one you can’t ignore in pronouncing on extremist politics that pass for “conservatism.” Here’s his list, slightly compressed, of its “mobilizing passions,“ that is, what makes fascism a special case of authoritarianism (see pp. 40-41):
§ a sense of overwhelming crisis
§ a belief in the primacy of the group as against the individual
§ a dread of this group’s decline due to liberal, individualistic, alien influences
§ a desire for closer integration of this group
§ a need for authority by “natural leaders”
§ a belief in such leaders’ instincts over abstract reasoning
§ an infatuation with violence
Paxton writes of the group in question as if the nation is its obvious source and grounding: “At bottom [fascism] is a passionate nationalism.” But then fascism has always been a way of defining a nation as a people, das volk, in divisive, exclusionary terms, as a fixed, racially derived entity, so that, for example, German Jews, who had been crucial participants in the making of modern, cosmopolitan German culture—see Vienna, 1900—became aliens, outsiders, the Other.
With Paxton’s historical taxonomy in mind, we might summarize the difference between fascism and authoritarianism in one word: populism. Fascism has constituencies, genuine popular support registered as social movements, mass mobilization, and at least pretenses of electoral legitimacy; authoritarian regimes are self-justifying state apparatuses that typically don’t bother with public opinion or the niceties of consent. Hitler had willing executioners; Putin has a military that makes US conscripts in Vietnam look disciplined. [5]
Still, Snyder’s claim that Putin is a fascist has one redeeming feature. It reminds us that the various isms invented in the course of the long age of bourgeois and then proletarian/peasant revolution, from the mid-18th to the mid-20th century—capitalism, nationalism, radicalism, socialism, liberalism, conservatism, Marxism, communism, fascism, feminism, the list could go on—have no predictable political valence: each can be a left or a right-wing phenomenon. Syndicalism, for example, the genus from which fascism springs, has spawned left-wing species like the Industrial Workers of the World and the councils or soviets that briefly replaced parliamentary bodies in the European revolutions of 1917-1919.
Snyder’s claim also reminds us that, like socialism, fascism can and does exist in the absence of leaders or parties or programs that accept or brandish the designation. It can and does exist at the level of unspoken social relations, popular culture, laws that expand the scope of state power in limiting the rights of property, and, not least, personality types, celebrities and their fans alike.
Tucker Carlson would angrily refuse the fascist label, for example, even though he articulates, indeed embodies, the “mobilizing passions” of fascism as Paxton outlines them, by speaking to and for Republican constituencies—particularly the MAGA crowd—that have no regard for constitutional scruple and no interest in democratic procedures or outcomes. So would Vladimir Putin, the absolute dictator Carlson defends, Viktor Orban, the would-be dictator Carlson praises, and Donald Trump, the pimp turned party boss Carlson advises. Payton Gendron is the only one of them who would gladly accept the designation.
But Trump and his loyalists are no less dangerously and immediately fascist than Gendron because they refuse to be called what they perform. Nor is the leadership of the Republican Party, “conservatives” all, any less culpable—since Newt Gingrich’s time in office, its ideological shock troops have portrayed the opposition as “aliens,” intruders on the “real America,” figurative immigrants with ideas foreign to native customs and “legacy” traditions, rootless liberal cosmopolitans with no ties to nation, family, or faith, and finally, in keeping with the most paranoid conspiracy theories, “groomers” and “pedophiles.”
In sum, then, the distinctions once easily made between fascists, conservatives, and Republicans in general are now moot at best, pointless at worst—they make no difference. These factions have pooled their resources and drawn the line between themselves and the enemy, in terms Carl Schmitt would approve. Opposition to their ideas and policies (not to mention the daft jurisprudence they sponsor) can’t be loyal, because the anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic politics they require for success means the destruction of republican government as such. Any “common ground” furnished by an oath to the Constitution is gone.
Hence compromise along the lines of “bipartisanship” or “grand bargains” is impossible, even laughable. But our present condition is no joke. We, us liberals and socialists, must recognize the Republican Party for what it is—the political apparatus of a fascist social movement that is the sworn enemy of democracy—and act accordingly.
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[1] See Schmitt, “The Concept of the Political” [1927, 1932, 1963], Parts 2, 4; William James, A Pluralistic Universe [1909]; Harold Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty [1921], and A Grammar of Politics ]1925]. See “Concept,” trans. George Schwab [2007], notes 15-18 and related text at pp. 39-45, for references to the pluralist literature, including William Y. Elliot’s critique of what he called “the pragmatic revolt in politics.”
[2]. “Concept,” Parts 3, 8. Cf. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision [1960] and other scholars who criticized liberalism in these very terms, e.g., those who rehabilitated the classical republican tradition as per Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition [1958] and On Revolution [1962] or J.G.A. Pocock in The Machiavellian Moment [1975], and those who developed a post-liberal communitarian strand of political theory in the late-20th century as per Arnold Kaufman, the University of Michigan philosopher who inspired Tom Hayden, et al., in writing “The Port Huron Statement” [1962]; Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue [1981]; and Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart [1985].
[3]. “Concept,” Part 1; Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks {1971], pp. 210-76; Brunner, Land und Herrschaft [1939, trans. Land and Lordship 1992].
[4] The fascists of early-to-mid 20th century celebrated this collapse of the distinction between state and society. But so did the communists, who subordinated society to the state as thoroughly as Mussolini, Franco, or Hitler. That is why social scientists invented the concept of “totalitarianism” in the aftermath of World War II, to decipher the differences, if any, between left and right-wing renditions of what Schmitt had glimpsed as the “total state.”
[5]. See my “Anatomy of Populism” at politicsandletters.wordpress.com.