What ‘fascism’ really means

In 1944, George Orwell complained that the word ‘fascism’ had been rendered meaningless. Eighty years later, and we still have the same problem.

We have all grown accustomed to the hysterical finger-pointing and thundering cries of ‘fascist!’ which appear to dominate today’s discourse. But there is nothing new in the use of ‘fascism’ as a catch-all smear. Even during the Second World War, George Orwell was complaining that the word was subject to multiple definitions. In his column for Tribune on 24 March 1944, Orwell argued that the word had been rendered ‘entirely meaningless’ through misapplication:

‘I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else… By “Fascism” they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept “bully” as a synonym for “Fascist”. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.’

Orwell recognised that there is some ‘kind of buried meaning here’, insofar as there are clear differences between ‘the regimes called Fascist and those called democratic’, but his eventual conclusion was that people ought to ‘use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword’.

He returns to the topic in his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), in which he notes that the word ‘fascism’ has ‘now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”’. The importance of mutually agreed definitions desperately needs to be restated today. The comparison of mainstream viewpoints to an ideology that instigated mass atrocities in the past century is unhelpful and historically illiterate.

To restore some kind of clarity, it might be worth returning to the definition provided by that grisly father of fascism, Benito Mussolini. We know that one of his key implementations had been the ‘corporate state’, which is to say that the economy would be managed by workers and their employers as relatively autonomous bodies of political representation. These ‘corporations’, more akin to early guilds than the modern commercial companies of today, operated in tandem with the government but were always subordinate to it.

This was in line with the common Fascist refrain ‘tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato’, which translates as ‘everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state’. ‘At its fullest development,’ writes historian Robert O. Paxton, ‘fascism redrew the frontiers between private and public, sharply diminishing what had once been untouchably private’.

The most significant aspects of Mussolini’s conceptualisation of fascism were embodied in an essay he wrote in 1927 in collaboration with the philosopher Giovanni Gentile called ‘La dottrina del fascismo’ (‘The Doctrine of Fascism’), eventually published in 1932 as part of the Enciclopedia Italiana. The essay advances the key principles that one would expect, most notably that the interests of the individual should only be taken into account when they ‘coincide with those of the State’, which must have ‘absolute primacy’.

According to Mussolini, fascism demands that the citizen develops his mind and body for the betterment of the nation, that he prioritises education and intellectual pursuits – the artistic, the religious and the scientific – as much as his physical prowess. This is a specifically spiritual worldview, represented through the Ancient Roman symbol of the fasces, the bundle of sticks bound together to connote strength through unity.

Fascism, says Mussolini, is the repudiation of three key ideas: socialism, democracy and liberalism. He explicitly opposes liberalism as an ideology which has ‘exhausted its historical function’, and further rejects Marxian Socialism with its assumption that the class struggle can explain all aspects of human history. With the needs of the individual subordinated to those of the collective, democracy as traditionally understood is unnecessary, since the principle of ‘quality rather than quantity’ suggests that ‘the conscience and will of the few, if not, indeed, of one’ must ultimately serve as ‘the conscience and the will of the mass’.

Democracy is represented by Mussolini as a kind of myth, in which the masses are conned into thinking that they have any sovereignty at all, while clandestine forces are busy exercising their power. He claims that fascism is forward-thinking, but at the same time insists that it rebuffs the utopian dream that a perfect society is at all achievable. While he acknowledges the importance of tradition, he insists that ‘history does not travel backwards’. That is to say, fascism ‘preserves what may be described as “the acquired facts” of history; it rejects all else’.

According to Mussolini, fascism satisfies a fundamental human need for authority and the ordered life, hence the sacralization of the state and the absolutism it entails. ‘If liberalism spells individualism,’ he writes, ‘Fascism spells government’. His ideology is explicitly imperialistic, seeing in ‘the tendency of nations to expand’ a ‘manifestation of their vitality’. He maintains that pacifism is a decadent abhorrence, that war is not only necessary but desirable because it ‘keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and sets the seal of nobility on those peoples who have the courage to face it’.

We can already see where these broad principles simultaneously dovetail and depart from National Socialism. Hitler’s emphasis on racial purity and his pseudo-pagan and utopian concept of the destiny of the Fatherland seems barely compatible with Mussolini’s worldview. ‘Fascism’ has become a protean term, with as many varying definitions as can be imagined, which is why it can be applied to just about anybody. If all it takes to justify the epithet ‘fascist’ is a concurrence with a few elements of Mussolini’s manifesto, then the word could be used to describe any of today’s mainstream political movements.

Similarly, if we take as our benchmark the key features of most fascist regimes – the violent suppression of opposition, a hostility to democracy and due process, restrictions on free speech and freedom of assembly, extreme nationalism and worship of the state, and a hyper-racialised conceptualisation of society – we see that there is some overlap with all major parties in the Western world. The continual misuse of the term ‘fascism’ confuses the seeds of authoritarianism with the horrors of totalitarianism. It is recklessly misleading.

Of course, charges of ‘fascism’ are often more opportunistic than authentic. They fall squarely into what has become known as ‘Godwin’s Law’, which suggests that the longer an online discussion continues, the greater the likelihood that a comparison with the Nazis or Hitler will occur. The man who invented the law, Mike Godwin, had been objecting to the infantilism of online political discourse, but in an article for the Washington Post in December 2023, he attempted to carve out an exception in an opinion piece entitled ‘Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you’. It seems that even Godwin is susceptible to Godwin’s Law.

Such tactics are appealing to all sides, particular when egos are bruised and retaliation is the only balm. During a town hall event in Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris was directly asked whether she considered Trump to be a fascist. Her answer was ‘Yes, I do’. She later clarified her view by saying that voters would not welcome ‘a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist’. For his part, Trump referred to Harris as a ‘fascist’ on multiple occasions during his campaign, and even called her a ‘Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist’.

This normalisation of such language is symptomatic of a form of hysteria, a nation divided into two factions who simply cannot see the world beyond their own specific phantasmagoria, driving themselves insane within the confines of their echo chambers. We might suppose that the reading of a few history books might help them to break out, except there are plenty of educated people who are likewise susceptible to this collective fantasy.

To lower the temperature of this debate, it would surely be prudent to remind ourselves that fascism was a very specific, and uniquely evil, ideological movement of the twentieth century. To casually conflate the various forms of mainstream authoritarianism we see today with the horrors of the Second World War is a tremendous insult to those who have lived through genuinely fascistic regimes. The recent rise of political violence shows plainly what can happen if you convince a significant part of the population that fascism has returned as a dominant force.

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This is an excerpt from “The End of Woke” by Andrew Doyle. You can buy your copy here.

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