I have read a book 1 by Robert Paxton called The Anatomy of Fascism.
Here are quotations. (This, by the way, is a classic example of `fair use' in operation. I have been told that Australia lacks the legal principle. I understand that as part of a trade agreement, Australia is expected to accept United States restrictions on readily reproducible information. If so, the consequences will be worse for freedom in Australia than in the United States.)
Robert Paxton says:
.... fascism should not be discussed without reaching, at some point in the debate, an agreed concepts of what it is. This book proposes to arrive at such a concept at the end of its question, rather than to start with one. I propose to set aside for now the imperative of definition, and examine in action of core set of movements and regimes generally accepts as fascist.... (p 15)
He goes on to say:
I propose to examine fascism in a cycle of five states: (1) the creation of movements; (2) their rooting in the political system; (3) their seizure of power; (4) the exercise of power; (5) and, finally, the long duration, during which the fascist regime chooses either radicalization or entropy. (p 23)
And Paxton then does so. He puts his definition at the end. However, I will place Paxton's definition — actually, two quotations from the end of his book — here at the beginning of this series of quotations:
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. (p 218)
... mobilizing passions:
Earlier, I described my strong ideas on the subject. I wrote that
... I thought that it had been fairly well agreed that fascism was an authoritarian movement of those who had lost in the transition to the modern, who were not against certain technologies of the modern, and who were willing to make alliances with capitalists and conservatives against communist authoritarians.
Paxton ends up giving the definition that I quote above. He touches on the alternative concepts, which I quote here without his criticisms of them:
The sociologist Talcott Parsons suggested already in 1942 that fascism emerged out of uprooting and tensions produced by uneven economic and social development .... Another sociological approach alleged that urban and industrial leveling since the late nineteenth century had produced an atomized mass society in which purveyors of simple hatreds found a ready audience unrestrained by tradition of community. .... The sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset systematized in 1963 the widely held view that fascism is an expression of lower-middle-class resentments ... an "extremism of the center" based on the rage of once-independent shopkeepers, artisans, peasants, and other members of the "old" middle classes now squeezed between better-organized industrial workers and big businessmen .... (p 209 – 210)
As early as World War II, the American ethnographer Gregory Bateson employed "the sort of analysis that an anthropology applies to the mythology of a primitive or modern people" to pick apart the themes and techniques of the Nazi propaganda film Hitler Youth Quex. (p 214)
Returning to the sequence that Paxton himself follows, here are quotations of what I felt important in the book:
More generally, conservatives in Europe still rejected in 1930 the main tenets of the French Revolution, preferring authority to liberty, hierarchy to equality, and deference to fraternity. Although many of them might find fascists useful or even essential, in their struggle for survival against dominant liberals and a rising Left, some were keenly away of the different agenda of their fascist allies and felt a fastidious distaste for these uncouth outsiders. Where simple authoritarianism sufficed conservatives must preferred that. (p 22)
The fascisms we have known have come into power with the help of frightened ex-liberals and opportunist technocrats and ex-conservatives, and governed in more or less awkward tandem with them. (p 23)
The failure of fascism in France was not due to some mysterious allergy, though the importance of the republican tradition for a majority of French people's sense of themselves cannot be overestimated. The Depression, for all its ravages, was less severe in France than in more industrially concentrated Britain and Germany. The Third Republic, for all its lurching, never suffered deadlock or total paralysis. Mainstream conservatives did not feel sufficiently threatened in the 1930s to call on fascists for help. Finally, no one preeminent personage managed to dominate the small army of rival French fascist chefs, most of whom preferred intransigent doctrinal `purity' to the kind of deal making with conservatives that Mussolini and Hitler practiced. (p 71)
... fascist interlopers cannot easily break into a political system that is functioning tolerably well. Only when the state and existing institutions fail badly do they open opportunities for newcomers. (p 72 – 73)
Although conservatives might accept violence against socialists and trade unionists, they would not tolerate it against the state. .... ...those very elements — the army and the police — that the fascists would need later for planning and carrying out aggressive national expansion. (p 98)
... fascist success in reaching power varies less with the brilliance of fascist intellectuals and the qualities of fascist chiefs than with the depth of crisis and the desperation of potential allies. (p 115)
German and Italian conservatives wanted to harness the fascists' power in public opinion, in the street, and in the nationalist and antisocialist sections of the middle and working classes to their own leadership. They seem to have believed that it was too late to demobilize the public politically. It must be won over to the national and antisocialist cause, for it was too late to reduce it once more to nineteenth-century deference. (p 115)
.... No dictator rules by himself. he must obtain the cooperation, or at the acquiescence, of the decisive agencies of rule — the military, the police, the judiciary, senior civil servants — and of powerful social and economic forces. In the special case of fascism, having depended upon conservative elites to open the gates to him, the new leaders could shunt them casually aside. Some degree, at least, of obligatory power sharing with the preexisting conservative establishment made fascist dictatorships fundamentally different in their origins, development, and practice from that of Stalin. (p 119)
All these enduring tensions within fascist regimes pitted against each other four elements that together forged these dictatorships out of their quarrelsome collaboration: the fascist leader; his party (who militants clamored for jobs, perquisites, expansionist adventures, and the fulfillment of some elements of their early radical programs); the state apparatus (functionaries such as police and military commanders, magistrates, and local governors); and, finally, civil society (holders of social, economic, political, and cultural power such as professional associations, leaders of big business and big agriculture, churches, and conservative political leaders). This four-way tension gave these regimes their characteristic blend of febrile activism and shapelessness. (p 123 – 124)
... the deliberate arousal of expectations of dynamism, excitement, momentum, and risk that were inherent to fascism's appeal, and which it was dangerous to abandon completely for fear of undermining the leader's principal source of power independent of the old elites. (p 153)
The orderly procedures of bureaucracy gave way to the wild unstructured improvisations of inexperienced party militants thrust into ill-defined positions of authority over conquered peoples. (p 158)
In the end, fanatical fascists prefer to destroy everything in a final paroxysm, even their own country, rather than admit defeat. (p 171)
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