A Summary of Paxton's "Anatomy of Fascism" - Ch. 2
Creating Fascist Movements
Introduction
Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism can be read here. Read my notes on chapter 1 here.
Especially interesting in this chapter is fascism’s relation to intellectualism, or rather, its rejection of it. As someone interested in Nietzsche and syndicalism, it is fascinating and disgusting to see these figures used by fascism. But as this chapter makes clear, even when fascists did engage them, it was never for intellectual content. Rather, it was for the power of these figures to make myths and invigorate these “mobilizing passions.”
There is nothing wrong with passion by itself, and in fact it is important for any social movement seeking justice. But great care must be used to look beyond this aesthetics too. When radicals reach out to the rest of the people, it is not enough to merely excite them. New ways of engaging the world with care, discipline, and self-criticism is important, because abandoning these for motivating myths plays right into fascist hands. While this type of appropriation cannot be stopped, it can be fought and people can be immunized against it.
Chapter 2: Creating Fascist Movements
Fascism began under that name on March 23, 1919 in Milan.
But it was not the first group of its kind, and similar ones had already been appearing in Europe.
Hungarian Proto-Fascism
In Hungary, there was something very similar to fascism which, although not sharing the name, held a strong family resemblance.
Hungary had been part of the mighty Austria-Hungarian Empire, where they held a privileged position over the Romanians and the Slavic peoples. However, they massively lost in WW1, destroying their multinational empire. During the truce of November 1918, their former subjects began governing their own territories under Allied protection.
Count Mihály Károlyi tried to salvage the empire by democratizing and federalizing Hungary to maintain his borders. But the Allies just annexed these territories, seemingly permanently. Karolyi abandoned his position in March 1919.
A socialist-communist coalition led by a Jewish revolutionary Bela Kun took power in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, appealing to the Soviet Union to preserve Hungary over the Allies. But Lenin was not strong enough to back them at that point.
Hungarian elites faced a choice between the Allies dismantling their territory and the socialists declaring a social revolution. They focused on fighting the socialists and set up a provisional government. They waged a bloody counterrevolution, killing thousands.
This counterrevolution had two parts. The top leadership were traditional elites, led by an established Navy Admiral. But there was also those who believed traditional authority was insufficient, led by Captain Gyula Gömbös, which had distinctly fascist characteristics.
Karolyi’s democracy was discredited, and these officers had no attachment to the traditional authority that had fallen. They were also moved by extreme anti-semitism and anti-communism against Kun’s Soviet, using this to appeal to a militant mass base for national renovation rooted in xenophobia and traditional Hungarian symbols and myths. This is obviously quite close to fascism.
The traditional elites were able to rule without Gombos for the moment, but he would serve as prime minister in 1932-35, and built an alliance with Mussolini against German power.
German-Austrian Proto-Fascism
In the Austrian part of the Habsburg Monarchy, German nationalists were scared of the autonomy gained by the Czech. German workers saw them as rivals rather than as fellow proletarians. They took power when Karl Lueger became the Mayor of Vienna in 1897. He ran on anti-Semitism, anti-corruption, the defense of artisans and small shopkeepers, catchy songs and slogans, and efficient municipal services.
This had a profound impact on a young Adolf Hitler.
It had a similar impact on others. Soon after, a Vienna lawyer set up the German Workers’ Party. It held three seats in 1911 and was later revived in May 1918 as the German National Socialist Workers’ Party, when they also adopted the swastika as their symbol. (Keep in mind, Hitler’s Nazi party was the “National Socialist German Worker’s Party.” This is a different organization with a similar name.)
Post-war Germany saw a revival of anti-socialism.
Postwar Germany offered particularly fertile soil to popular-based antisocialist movements of national revival. Germans had been shaken to their roots by defeat in 1918. The emotional impact was all the more severe because German leaders had been trumpeting victory until a few weeks before. So unbelievable a calamity was easily blamed on traitors. The plummet in German fortunes from the bold Great Power of 1914 to the stunned, hungry loser of 1918 shattered national pride and selfconfidence.
Veterans turned to Left and Right extremism. Some formed mercenary units, the Freikorps, who in January 1919 murdered socialist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
Hitler joins the fascists
Corporal Adolf Hitler was sent by Army Intelligence in September 1919 to investigate the German Workers’ Party (DAP), one of the nationalist movements causing disorder.
He then joined them, receiving party card No. 555. The party began counting at 500 to make themselves seem larger. Although sent as an agent, he soon became one of their most effective speakers.
In early 1920, Hitler was put in charge of their propaganda. They gained a wider audience, and on February 24, 1920, Hitler gave them a new name: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, or the “Nazi” party for short).
They also presented a political program. It was made of 25 points, mixing nationalism, anti-Semitism, and attacks on department stores and international capital.
In April, Hitler left the army to join the NSDAP full time. He was increasingly recognized as their leader, the Führer.
As the postwar turmoil ceased, things tampered down. Borders were set, the Bolsheviks were contained, and something like peace was established.
But the Italian Fascists, Hungarian officers, and Austrian and German National Socialists remained, as did similar movements in France.
They clearly expressed something more enduring than a momentary nationalist spasm accompanying the final paroxysm of the war.
The Immediate Background
The many problems left from WW1
World War 1 creates the space for mass-based nationalist activism against socialism and liberalism. Culturally, it discredited optimistic views of the future and the liberal assumption of harmony. Socially, it also created a bunch of restless veterans looking for a new outlet. Politically, it placed massive economic and social strains on liberal and conservative institutions.
The experience of war also gave immediate context for fascism. Italy’s successful campaign was used to justify Mussolini’s claim to power, as a pro-war activist. The Great War is often seen as the immediate cause of Fascism and Bolshevism.
Before 1914, war in Europe was unimaginable to anyone living. Battles were rare and isolated. They could not picture a long war wiping out a generation of men. War was for “primitive” societies, not modern industrialized economies.
And in the end, no belligerent achieved their goal. Instead of a short war with clear results, there was a long war that was pointless.
Every belligerent government engaged in massive propaganda campaigns. The French and British governments did this well. The German empire and Italian monarchy did less well.
Places with a large body of landless peasants lacking civil liberties broke left, as in Tsarist Russia.
Places with a large and threatened middle class broke right.
They could not return to the old world. And they were bitterly divided about the new world.
The inflation of a post-war economy ruined thrift and savings.
The veterans resented the system that sent them into trenches. Even the best compensated were not adequately cared for.
As the survivors, they felt they had a right to rule.
The other “isms” attempted solutions
Liberals and some democratic socialists aimed at the self-determination of nations, as with Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points.
Conservatives quietly tried to restore the old world, such as when the French PM Georges Clemenceau tried to reestablish military supremacy over a weakened Germany.
Socialists were spurred on by the Bolsheviks to follow their same model of revolution, creating dictatorial conspiratorial parties.
No camp had complete success. The world was left with a distorted Wilsonism and an unfulfilled Leninism.
This left space for a fourth alternative. Unlike conservatives, they cared not only about military might, but fervor and national unity. Instead of keeping the peace, they were eager for war.
The fascists did not want to keep the peace at all. They expected that inevitable war would allow the master races, united and self-confident, to prevail, while the divided, “mongrelized,” and irresolute peoples would become their handmaidens.
Fascism was conceivable pre-1914. But it could only be practically realized after the Great War.
Intellectual, Cultural, and Emotional Roots
The late 19th century revolt against liberalism also laid the groundwork for fascism. There was a revival of more aggressive nationalism and racism, and an aesthetic for instinct and violence.
Thinkers that influenced fascism
Mussolini did not read Marx. He read Nietzsche, Gustave Le Bon, and Georges Sorel.
Hitler absorbed by osmosis the pan-Germanic nationalism and anti-Semitism of Georg von Schonerer, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Mayor Lueger, and the Vienna streets, and the music of Richard Wagner.
Nietzshce is often considered fascism’s progenitor. He hated the complacency of bourgeois moralism, instead praising the free spirited Superman that lived authentically. But Nietzsche himself hated patriotism and anti-Semites, and his writings inspired the rebellious across the political map, for Nazis and anti-Nazis alike.
Georges Sorel was a more direct influence on Mussolini. The syndicalist dream of a general strike to sweep away capitalism is the kind of motivating “myth” he focused so much on.
Social theorists that undermined democracy were also important, especially the focus on propaganda and the irrational subconscious.
Social Darwinism and Eugenics
Social Darwinism was also a huge force at the time, as well as the invention of eugenics.
Nationalism was transformed into a ranking of peoples, with a “master race” that dominates the “inferior” peoples.
War was praised as masculine and ennobling, even after the horrors of the Great War.
Fears of Societal Collapse
Fascism promised to solve new social ills.
New forms of anxiety appeared with the twentieth century, to which fascism soon promised remedies. Looking for fears, indeed, may be a more fruitful research strategy than a literal-minded quest for thinkers who “created” fascism.
Free individualism was seen as destroying social bonds, and would lead to cultural collapse.
This was largely a fear of conservatives, like Thomas Carlyle.
This fear was pushed by urbanization, industrial conflict, and immigration, and deeply studied by sociologists.
Fascists were directly influenced by the sociologists Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Roberto Michels.
Anxiety of Decadence
Fascists feared that societies were doomed by their own comfort and declining birth rates.
In particular, they feared the vision of doom from conservative Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. Society passed from an “Age of Culture” into an “Age of Civilization,” incapable of great action. He advocated for a heroic “Caesarism” for Germany, a spiritual revolution that would not change social structures like Bolshevism.
Obsession with Enemies
Enemies are central to the anxieties of fascist imagination.
Enemies were central to the anxieties that helped inflame the fascist imagination. Fascists saw enemies within the nation as well as outside. Foreign states were familiar enemies, though their danger seemed to intensify with the advance of Bolshevism and with the exacerbated border conflicts and unfulfilled national claims that followed World War I. Internal enemies grew luxuriantly in number and variety in the mental landscape as the ideal of the homogeneous national state made difference more suspect.
Fascists feared not only other countries, but refugees spurred on by eastern European pogroms, and socialist, artistic, and intellectual subversion.
The natural culture needed to be protected from these corrupting influences.
Joseph Goebbels declared at a book-burning ceremony in Berlin on May 10, 1933, that “the age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit.” Though Mussolini and his avant-garde artist friends worried less than the Nazis about cultural modernism, Fascist squads made bonfires of socialist books in Italy.
The discovery of bacteria and hereditary traits in the 1880s made whole new categories of enemies possible. Forced sterilization for habitual criminals in Sweden and the United States, especially against African Americans, would be extended by Nazi Germany. Fascist Italy was less focused on biological purification, as its idea of “la razza” was more political.
The German Right had traditionally been völkisch, devoted to the defense of a biological “people” threatened by foreign impurities, socialist division, and bourgeois softness. The new Italian nationalism was less biological and more political in its determination to “do over” the Risorgimento that had been corrupted by liberals and weakened by socialists.
Fascists need an enemy to mobilize against, but which enemy group they pick depends on the culture. Alongside the Jews, the Nazis also targeted the Romani and Slavs. American fascists picked blacks and Catholics as well as Jews. Italian Fascists picked the Slovenes and anti-war socialists, and later added Ethiopians and Libyans.
The place of fascism in intellectual history
Fascism drew from some socialist “heresies” and liberal values, making its palce in the European intellectual tradition disputed. Some see it as a development of European culture, while others see it as rejecting culture in favor of “intoxication of destruction as an actual experience.” But it is true that fascism draws on older cultural ideas like “race” and “community” or “people” (volk), as well as racial supremacy, pessimism, etc.
It’s wrong to read back an intellectual teleology into fascism. When fascists did pick from thinkers like Nietzsche and Sorel it was always cherry-picked and out of context. The same thinkers were used by anti-fascists too. Many contemporary thinkers that the fascists liked became anti-fascists. This included Oswald Spengler, Stefan George, Ernst Niekisch, Othmar Spann, Gaetano Mosca, and Giovanni Prezzolini.
The themes they touched on were not inherently fascist. In places with better functioning democracies or that went left, these themes existed without producing fascism.
Fascism draws from symbols unique to each nation, with no inherent link to fascism.
In any event, it is not the particular themes of Nazism or Italian Fascism that define the nature of the fascist phenomenon, but their function. Fascisms seek out in each national culture those themes that are best capable of mobilizing a mass movement of regeneration, unification, and purity, directed against liberal individualism and constitutionalism and against Leftist class struggle. The themes that appeal to fascists in one cultural tradition may seem simply silly to another. The foggy Norse myths that stirred Norwegians or Germans sounded ridiculous in Italy, where Fascism appealed rather to a sun-drenched classical Romanità.
Fascism had its widest intellectual appeal early on, before its anti-bourgeois energy was compromised in the quest for power.
Once in power, fascism discarded the ideas that got it there.
Mobilizing Passions of Fascism
The intellectual ideas of fascism matter far less than the underlying passions. The “mood” is more important than the content.
In that sense too, fascism is more plausibly linked to a set of “mobilizing passions” that shape fascist action than to a consistent and fully articulated philosophy. At bottom is a passionate nationalism. Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between the good and evil camps, between the pure and the corrupt, in which one’s own community or nation has been the victim. In this Darwinian narrative, the chosen people have been weakened by political parties, social classes, unassimilable minorities, spoiled rentiers, and rationalist thinkers who lack the necessary sense of community. These “mobilizing passions,” mostly taken for granted and not always overtly argued as intellectual propositions, form the emotional lava that set fascism’s foundations:
a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny;
the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;
the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;
the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.
Fascism is “an affair of the gut more than of the brain.”
Long-Term Preconditions
Fascism was a late-comer politically. It needed certain preconditions to be fulfilled.
Firstly, mass politics. For a mass movement against the Left, citizens needed to be politically involved. For authoritarians, this was pushed by people like Emperor Napoleon III, who pushed against the liberal idea of restricting voting to the wealthy and educated. Instead, he won mass approval with simple slogans, symbols, and name recognition. The shift was to manipulate the masses, rather than disenfranchise them (with an obvious exception here for racial minorities). The Right could no longer avoid mass politics.
Secondly, a mature socialist movement was needed that people could become disillusioned with. There needed to not only be mass politics, but socialists established as a real force, participating in government, yet was compromised. People were disappointed with the reformism of moderate parliamentary socialists. Revolutionaries went to either Bolshevism or fascism. The 1917 rise of Bolshevism especially pushed this, scaring the middle and upper classes. They desperately looked for a response.
Liberal institutions seemed to fail here, given the immediate threat of Bolshevism and the war, and self-correcting markets or free schooling did not seem like quick enough responses.
Precursors
There were early signs of fascism
Fascism is not a linear projection of any 20th century tendency. But there were some signs of its coming. The 19th century had the first anti-international, anti-cosmopolitan movements. The 1880s saw the first globalization economic crisis, and increased immigration, especially of Jews fleeing oppression in eastern Europe.
Wider suffrage also created a new class of politicians from conservative elites, now building new populist support networks, such as Freemasonry. Anti-semitism and nationalism were similarly powerful forces.
Examples of 19th century proto-fascism
The French General Boulanger tried to build support from the radical left and right, with the aim of a coup d’etat once in power. But he failed, and eventually committed suicide.
Similar signs arose with the 1896 French trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer wrongly accused of spying for Germany.
The anti-Dreyfus movement appealed to conservatives and some leftists with anti-capitalist anti-semitism and Jacobin nationalists. The pro-Dreyfus movement mostly consisted of the Left, championing universal human rights.
The anti-Dreyfus “Action Francaise,” led by Charles Maurras, is sometimes considered the first fascist movement. When the document used to incriminate Dreyfus proved fake, Maurras called it a “patriotic forgery.”
Austria-Hungary had anti-Catholic anti-Jewish movements pushing for German nationalist reunification.
Germans appealed to anti-Semitism in the 1880s, as Protestant pastors used it to turn people conservative.
Arguably the first “national socialism” group was the Cercle Proudhon in France 1911, looking to unite nationalists and left-wing anti-democrats against “Jewish capitalism.”
It was formed by Georges Valois, who was part of Action Francaise, and tried to counter the internationalist Marxist approach.
“National socialism” was coined by Maurice Barres, describing the adventurer Marquis de Mores in 1896, who raised Jewish shops.
The Italian anti-parliamentarian disciples of Sorel went in a similar direction. The failure of general strikes, as with the “red week” in Milan of July 1914 disillusioned them again. Instead they turned to the expansionist war effort of a “proletarian” Italy. Hence a “national syndicalism.”
Debating the first fascist movement
France and Russia are often seen as having the first fascist movements. Germany is not typically considered.
The United States seems to have given the earliest example though with the Ku Klux Klan, formed after the Civil War by defeated Confederate generals in 1867.
The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state, which, in the eyes of the Klan’s founders, no longer defended their community’s legitimate interests. By adopting a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as by their techniques of intimidation and their conviction that violence was justified in the cause of their group’s destiny, the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe. It should not be surprising, after all, that the most precocious democracies—the United States and France—should have generated precocious backlashes against democracy.
Today we can perceive these experiments as harbingers of a new kind of politics to come. At the time, however, they seemed to be personal aberrations by individual adventurers. They were not yet perceptible as examples of a new system. They become visible this way only in restrospect, after all the pieces have come together, a space has opened up, and a name has been invented.
Recruitment
The founding fascists often included embittered veterans. But to be more than a pressure group, it needed recruits.
Early fascists were predominantly young. They felt like the older generation was out of touch, and liked fascism’s “antipolitical politics.”
Successful fascists swept their members up in an intense fraternity of emotion and effort. They brought people in from different social classes into one movement.
But early fascists did not recruit equally from all social classes. They were largely middle class, with fascism sometimes seen as the embodiment of lower-middle class resentment. But most political parties are middle class, and fascists did appeal to the upper class too.
Early fascists appealed to lower class workers more than is sometimes thought. The proletariat were not uniquely immune to nationalism. It’s just that those already involved in socialist movements were “immunized” against it, already having a rich subculture of socialism. Workers not involved in socialist movements more readily joined. Those involved in direct action could move over, as in Italy with the traditionally anarchist Carrara. The unemployed could also be recruited to fascism, although they would more likely break towards communism.
There are some exceptions. The British Union of Fascists had largely unskilled workers angry at Jewish immigration.
The Hungarian Arrow Cross was able to succeed in an industrialized center that lacked a strong antigovernment Left.
Fascism clearly has a powerful emotional element. But its dangerous to blame fascism on mental illness or sexual deviancy.
It needs to be reemphasized that Hitler himself, while driven by hatreds and abnormal obsessions, was capable of pragmatic decision-making and rational choices, especially before 1942. To conclude that Nazism or other forms of fascism are forms of mental disturbance is doubly dangerous: it offers an alibi to the multitude of “normal” fascists, and it ill prepares us to recognize the utter normality of authentic fascism. Most fascist leaders and militants were quite ordinary people thrust into positions of extraordinary power and responsibility by processes that are perfectly comprehensible in rational terms. Putting fascism on the couch can lead us astray. Suspicions about Hitler’s own perverse sexuality rest on no firm evidence, though he was notoriously no conventional family man. Both homosexuals (such as Ernst Röhm and Edmund Heines of the SA) and violent homophobes (Himmler, for example) were prominent in the masculine fraternity that was Nazism. But there is no evidence that the proportion of homosexuals was higher among Nazis than in the general population. The issue has not risen for Italian Fascism.
Fascist leaders were a new kind of “outsider” politician. They were not soldiers of fortune, upwardly mobile politicians, or mechanics. They were just good at manipulating crowds. Hitler the failed artist, Mussolini the schoolteacher, Goebbels the jobless college graduate, Goering the WW1 fighter ace, and Himmler the failed chicken farmer. They were from a diverse number of backgrounds.
What united them was values more than profile: hatred for bourgeois politics, opposition to the Left, fervent nationalism, and a tolerance for violence.
The makeup of fascists changes over time however as it develops.
Someone has said that a political party is like a bus: people are always getting on and off. We will see as we go along how fascist clientele altered over time, from early radicals to later careerists. Here, too, we cannot see the fascist phenomenon in full by looking only at its beginnings.
Understanding Fascism by Its Origins
Looking at the origins of fascism does not tell us the whole story, as the demographics radically change as the movement takes power.
The origins of fascism get disproportionate attention. Some think that if we study fascism’s origins, we see the blueprint for the direction it went. Others think the widespread nature of early fascism is more interesting than the secretive and practical deal making for getting power. Others focus on early movements because many fascists movements never got past this stage. The fascism of Scandinavia, Britain, and even France did not develop fully.
Looking at early fascism can put us on false trails. It focuses too much on intellectuals, rather than the power-seeking men of action. Fascist intellectuals had little influence after this early stage until radicalization reasserted it. It puts too much weight on fascism’s anti-capitalist or anti-bourgeois rhetoric. It privileges fascism as a “poetic movement.”
But fascist intellectual creativity does not match to political success. Fascists creativity was well developed in France, but did not take root.
Mussolini tried out an electoral fascist strategy in 1919, and lost by a wide margin. Changes were needed for fascism to succeed.
To understand fascism whole, we need to spend as much energy on the later forms as on the beginnings. The adaptations and transformations that mark the path followed by some fascisms from movement to party to regime to final paroxysm will occupy much of the rest of this book.