WEEK 12: FASCISM

1. Neither an emerging capitalist economy nor an increasing secular culture could create the sense of political obligation that a democracy required from its citizens; loyalty to the nation-state filled the void, uniting individuals around a common cause and a higher purpose;
2. The nation and the state: the nation is distinct from the state: nationalism refers first and foremost to a people’s living and active corporate will, to their felt sense of community;
3. Superpatriotism and real patriotism: After the war torn twentieth century, the idea that patriotic nationalism could be a positive force in international politics may seem naïve; yet, according to Michael Parenti, real patriots are internationalists; they feel a special attachment to their own country but not in some competitive way that pits the United States against other powers; they regard the people of all nations as different members of the same human family;
4. Charles Nusser: superpatriotism involves the tendency to place nationalistic pride and supremacy above other public consideration, the readiness to follow our leaders uncritically in their dealings with other nations, especially confrontations involving the use of military force and violence; Love: superpatriotism is nationalism gone terribly wrong;
5. Benito Mussolini: Fascism as an idea, a doctrine, a realization, is universal; it is Italian in its particular institutions, but is universal by reason of its nature.

Symbolic politics
1. Murray Edelman: political scientists’ standard definition of politics as “who gets what, where, and how” is one-sided; in emphasizing resource allocation, it neglects the symbolic functions of politics, the myriad ways the state arouses and addresses its citizens’ hopes and fears;
2. Edelman: politics is obsessional, mythical, and emotional, as well as rational and strategic; political forms come to symbolize what large masses of men need to believe about the state to reassure themselves; it is the needs, the hopes, and the anxieties of men that determine the meanings; but political forms also convey goods, services, and power to specific groups of men;
3. Referential symbols and condensation symbols—Edelman: referential symbols represent the objective elements in objects or situations, the elements identified in the same way by different people; condensation symbols evoke the emotions associated with the situation; they frequently condense into one symbolic event, sign, or act patriotic pride, anxieties, remembrances of past glories or humiliations, promises of future greatness, some one of these or all of them;
4. Referential symbols help individuals know and control external reality; condensation symbols help individuals adjust to society and address their ambivalence about politics; they perform the latter function by allowing citizens to externalize their unresolved inner problems—that is, to displace and/or project their fears and hopes on other objects;
5. Adversary and enemy—Edelman: adversaries are legitimate opponents who engage in limited struggles over tactical issues; to defeat an adversary, we require the relatively accurate information that referential symbols provide;
6. An enemy is fundamentally flawed, a morally depraved person or persons (a leader, nation, or race) who poses a continuing threat to the survival of our state; in opposing an enemy we unite against them;
7. Although referential and condensation symbols are analytically distinct, symbolic politics often includes aspects of both;
8. Edelman: there are two ways in which these symbols pervade politics: as rituals and as myths; rituals: motor activity that involves its participants symbolically in a common enterprise, calling their attention to their relatedness and joint interests in a compelling way. It thereby both promotes conformity and evokes satisfaction and joy in conformity;
9. Myth: functions to account for extraordinary privileges or duties, for great social inequalities, for severe burdens of rank, in short for sociological strain;
10. As myth and ritual, symbolic politics takes on aesthetic qualities that increase as empirical reality fades; Edelman: condensation symbols are artistic creations, and their expressive power depends on their distance from ordinary experience; Walter Benjamin’s aura;
11. At first glance, the symbolic politics of modern democracies seemingly follows the same trend; the aura that surrounds gods and kings has been replaced by the selling of the president;
12. Autocratic remnants persist in mass democracies: the sovereign people of a liberal democracy worship themselves when they express patriotism toward their nation-state;
13. In modern democracies, aura is used to shape public opinion for a variety of purposes: to gain reelection, to maintain legitimacy, to reaffirm loyalties, to mobilize for war, and so on; yet autocratic art in its pure form has no external goal; it is an end in itself;
14. Within this aesthetic frame, Michael Parenti describes superpatriotism in similar terms: the nation-state is transformed into something more than an instrumental value whose function is to protect other social values. For the superpatriot, the nation becomes an end in itself, a powerfully abstracted symbol that claims out ultimate loyalty, an entity whose existence is taken as morally self-justifying;
15. Aura, an aesthetic quality suggests that the fascist state, especially its leader, is a form of pure art. Love: nationalism goes terribly wrong when politics abandons its ties to reality and becomes an end in itself.

Masses, Leaders, and the State
1. The two international reasons for the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism: WWI, especially the Versailles Treaty; and the Great Depression;
2. Other reasons were specific to Germany and Italy: the absence of a civic culture to support constitutional government; the strain of late, state-supported economic modernization; political fragmentation, complicated by weak middle class parties and strong right- and left-wing opposition; proportional representation electoral systems resulting in coalition governments; and, in Germany, a constitutional provision for emergency powers;

The masses
1. Seymour Martin Lipset: The ideal-typical Nazi voter in 1932 was a middle-class self-employed Protestant who lived either on a farm or in a small community, and who had previously voted for a centrist or regionalist political party strongly opposed to the power and influence of big business and big labor;
2. The Italian Fascists’ self-portrait as the party of “law and order” had gained them the support of civil servants, army officers, business and industrial leaders, and skilled tradesmen;

The Leaders
1. Hitler and Mussolini offered their charismatic leadership as an escape from liberal democracy;
2. Yet the people can neither recognize nor appreciate genius; Hitler: the revulsion of the masses for every outstanding genius is positively instinctive; sooner will a camel pass through a needle’s eye than a great man be discovered by an election;
3. The Führerprinzip, or leadership principle, is Hitler’s alternative: in it there is no majority vote on individual questions, but only the decision of an individual [the Führer] who must answer with his fortune and his life for his choice;
4. Thus, in terms of aestheticized politics, Führer embodies the essence of the people; in his person, the individual, the nation, and the race converge;
1. The Führerstaat, or leader-state, transcends liberals’ social contract based on individual rights; fascism has more spiritual goals: the highest purpose of a folkish state is concern for the preservation of those original racial elements which bestow culture and create the beauty and dignity of a higher mankind; in such a state, liberty again takes on a positive meaning—it involves self-sacrifice, not self-interests;
2. Mussolini argued that liberal politics wrongly subordinates the power of the state to the individual; his slogans: everything within the state, everything for the state, nothing outside the state; Fascism is Mussolini; Mussolini is always right; Mussolini’s Fascist state is an unique and original creation. It is not reactionary but revolutionary;
3. Mussolini—everything depends on that: to dominate the masses as an artist;

The state
1. Gleichschaltung (synchronization) was the Nazi’s term for their top-down penetration of all aspects of society; Hitler: responsibility towards above, authority towards below;
2. The Nazi Party became a state within the state and a part of citizens’ daily lives;
3. In 1927, Mussolini declared the creation of a “corporate state;” according to Mussolini, the state was the dictatorship of the state over many classes competing;
4. Why did Germans and Italians elect Fascist governments? Theodor Adorno: mass society leads modern men to revert to patterns of behavior which flagrantly contradicts their own rational level and the present stage of enlightened technological civilization; to overcome their emptiness, loneliness, and powerlessness, the democratic masses identify with a charismatic leader and embrace a totalitarian state;
5. Hannah Arendt: the problems of tribalism, of racism, and of conceiving of the other with hatred, is an understandable response to the tremendous moral burden placed upon people by the claims that all share in the rights of man;
6. Many citizens may ultimately find a liberal-capitalist society intolerable because of the tremendous responsibility that real freedom requires of them;

Corporatism
1. Societal corporatism evolves alongside a liberal democratic welfare state, as the requirement of maintaining economic prosperity and political loyalty begin to exceed the coordinating capacities of freemarkets;
2. State corporatism is more often imposed from above as part of a revolutionary program to facilitate industrial development;
3. Mussolini: corporatism solves the crisis of capitalism by (re)directing human energies toward the nation-state; economic needs are better served when classes are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of state;
4. Italian Fascism brought classes together as a nation but it did so without abolishing capitalism and its attendant inequalities;
5. Hitler: the Aryan no longer works directly for himself, but with his activity articulates himself with the community, not only for his own advantage, but for the advantage of all;
6. German corporatism was less extensive than that in Italy; hitler implemented his labor and social policies with the cooperation of relatively autonomous agricultural, business, and industrial elites;
7. From a Marxist perspective, fascists’ call for class compromise or conciliation is bourgeois ideology; under fascism, the capitalists continue to claim that their class interests really serve the whole of society; to support those interests, Adam Smith’s once invisible hand must become a highly visible state;
8. For socialists, symbolic politics remain a means to a future society; for Fascists, they are an end in itself.