By Robert O. Paxton

Project Syndicate

Jan 07/2016.

NEW YORK – In 2015, “fascism” once again became the highest-octane political epithet in general use. Of course, the temptation to apply the fascism label is almost overwhelming when we confront language and behavior that superficially resembles that of Hitler and Mussolini. At the moment, it is being widely applied to cases as disparate as Donald Trump, the Tea Party, the National Front in France, and radical Islamist assassins. But, though the temptation to call such actors “fascist” is understandable, it should be resisted.

At its creation in the 1920s (first in Italy and then in Germany), fascism was a violent reaction against a perceived excess of individualism. Italy was scorned and Germany was defeated in World War I, Mussolini and Hitler claimed, because democracy and individualism had sapped them of national unity and will.

So the two leaders put their followers into uniforms and tried to regiment their thoughts and actions. Once in power, they tried to extend dictatorship to every corner of life. Even sports, under Mussolini, were to be organized and supervised by the state agency called il Dopolavoro.

The fascists set themselves up (and acquired elite support) as the only effective barrier to the other political movement that surged following World War I: Communism. To international socialism the fascists opposed a national socialism, and while they crushed socialist parties and abolished independent labor unions, they never for a moment questioned the state’s obligation to maintain social welfare (except for internal enemies such as Jews, of course).

The movement that calls itself the Islamic State may seem to fit this template rather well. Its followers’ wills and personal identities are subordinated to the movement, all the way to the ultimate self-abnegation: suicide. But there are fundamental differences as well.

The Islamic State is less a state than a would-be caliphate, devoted to the supremacy of a religion in a way that cuts across and even threatens existing nation-states. Central authority remains inconspicuous, and policy and operational initiative is dispersed to local cells, without the need for a geographic core.

The fascists were nationalists, rooted in nation-states and devoted to the strengthening and aggrandizement of those states. The fascist leaders and regimes did their best to subordinate religion to state purposes. At most, we might identify in the Islamic State a sub-species of religious totalitarianism; but it is fundamentally distinct from classical fascism’s centralized secular dictatorships and glamorized leaders.

The Tea Party is at the farthest remove from fascism’s state-enhancing nature. With its opposition to all forms of public authority and its furious rejection of any obligation to others, it is better called right-wing anarchism. It is individualism run amok, a denial of any community obligations, the very opposite of a fascist appeal to the supremacy of communal obligations over individual autonomy.

The National Front, of course, had its roots in Vichy France, and its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, long expressed contempt for the French republican tradition. But its emerging success nowadays under Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, is at least partly due to the party’s effort to distance itself from its street-fighting, Holocaust-denying past.

Donald Trump is a special case altogether. Superficially, he seems to have borrowed a number of fascist themes for his presidential campaign: xenophobia, racial prejudice, fear of national weakness and decline, aggressiveness in foreign policy, a readiness to suspend the rule of law to deal with supposed emergencies. His hectoring tone, mastery of crowds, and the skill with which he uses the latest communications technologies also are reminiscent of Mussolini and Hitler.

And yet these qualities are at most derivative of fascist themes and styles; the underlying ideological substance is very different, with the entitlements of wealth playing a greater role than fascist regimes generally tolerated. Trump’s embrace of these themes and styles is most likely a matter of tactical expediency – a decision taken with little or no thought about their ugly history. Trump is evidently altogether insensitive to the echoes his words and oratorical style evoke, which should not be surprising, given his apparent insensitivity to the impact of every other insult that he hurls.

It is too bad that we have so far been unable to furnish another label with the toxic power of fascism for these abhorrent people and movements. We will have to make do with more ordinary words: religious fanaticism for the Islamic State, reactionary anarchism for the Tea Party, and self-indulgent demagoguery on behalf of oligarchy for Donald Trump. There are fringe movements today, such as Aryan Nations in the United States and Golden Dawn in Greece, that draw openly upon Nazi symbolism and employ physical violence. The term “fascist” is better left to them.

Robert O. Paxton

Robert Owen Paxton, Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, is the author of The Anatomy of Fascism, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, Parades and Politics at Vichy, and Vichy France and the Jews. (From Project Syndicate).

Robert Owen Paxton (born 1932 in Lexington, Virginia) is an American political scientist and historian specializing in Vichy France, fascism, and Europe during the World War II era.

Early life: Paxton was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1932. After attending secondary school in New England, he received a B.A. from Washington and Lee University in 1954. Later, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and spent two years earning an M.A. at Merton College, Oxford, where he studied under historians including James Joll and John Roberts. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1963.

Career: Paxton taught at the University of California, Berkeley and the State University of New York at Stony Brook before joining the faculty of Columbia University in 1969.

Paxton is best known for his 1972 book Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944. In opposition to the traditional view pioneered by Robert Aron, he argued that the Vichy government was eager to collaborate with Nazi Germany and did not practice "passive resistance" to German rule. Upon its publication in French translation in 1973, he became the subject of intense vitriol from French historians and commentators; during a televised debate with Paxton in 1976, the Vichy naval leader Gabriel Auphan called him a liar. However, the translation sold thousands of copies, particularly to the young generation shaped by the civil unrest of May 1968 and uninterested in the "cozy mythologies" of Vichy apologists. Today, the book is considered a historical classic and one of the best studies on France in the Vichy era.

As an expert on the Vichy era, Paxton co-wrote Claude Chabrol's 1993 documentary The Eye of Vichy and in 1997 testified at the trial of Vichy bureaucrat Maurice Papon.

Paxton retired from Columbia University in 1997, but remains a professor emeritus. In 2009, the French government awarded him the Legion d'honneur.[2] He has contributed more than twenty reviews to The New York Review of Books, beginning in 1978 and continuing through 2013.

Fascism: Much of Paxton's work has focused on models and definition of fascism.

In his 1998 paper "The Five Stages of Fascism", he suggests that fascism cannot be defined solely by its ideology, since fascism is a complex political phenomenon rather than a relatively coherent body of doctrine like communism or socialism. Instead, he focuses on fascism's political context and functional development. The article identifies five paradigmatic stages of a fascist movement, although he notes that only Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy have progressed through all five:

1. Intellectual exploration, where disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor

2. Rooting, where a fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage

3. Arrival to power, where conservatives seeking to control rising leftist opposition invite the movement to share power

4. Exercise of power, where the movement and its charismatic leader control the state in balance with state institutions such as the police and traditional elites such as the clergy and business magnates.

5. Radicalization or entropy, where the state either becomes increasingly radical, as did Nazi Germany, or slips into traditional authoritarian rule, as did Fascist Italy.

In his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton refines his five-stage model and puts forward the following definition for fascism:

- Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

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