“What exactly is semi-fascism, Karine?" Lemon asked.During a fundraising event in Maryland, Biden told the crowd that America is under threat, blaming the GOP for supporting former president Trump’s MAGA movement, linking their ideology to “semi-fascism.”“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy… it’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism,” Biden said.However no one, including Jean-Pierre, seemed to know exactly what Biden was trying to say by this comment, and frankly the president himself probably didn’t even know.“The American people have a choice in front of them and the president laid that out very clearly, very powerfully tonight," [she said.]
The problem is that the idea that gives "fascism" its name is one that no successful politics of any sort can do without: the idea that 'we' must 'come together' in order to be stronger than we would be separately.
The term “fascist” derives from a Roman weapon, a weapon that was as much a symbol as anything else. The fasces was a bundle of sticks tied together (often depicted with an ax-head attached). The Romans could make perfectly good ax-handles. They didn’t do it this way because they needed to do it. They did it to make a point. Each of the sticks making up the fasces was weak by itself. Hit a man with it and it would break on him. But if you tied the bundle together, the sticks became strong. The Roman magistrate who punished with the fasces was making a point about Rome. Its strength came from the unity of its citizens. It was because they held together as Romans that they could impose a Roman order on the world.The Founders of the United States of America adopted the fasces in a lot of our national symbols. It is small wonder that they did so.
The problem with fascists is not that the base idea is flawed, it is that they apply it in inappropriate ways. Instead of using it to unite the polity in defense against the outside world, they begin to deploy it internally to create a faction that can dominate everyone else in society. This usage of the power of unity is tyrannical or oligarchic rather than democratic or constitutional: and it unfairly eliminates the right of the excluded parts of the fascist society from having their interests defended or advanced. Healthy politics use the idea of the fasces to defend a space in the world in which they can exist in mutual peace. Fascist politics aims at creating a permanent subjugation within a society, or even in radical cases a complete elimination (as of Jews) from a society.
Earlier this week AVI posted a complaint against Republicans adopting a long-standing Democratic political rhetoric of "fighting for you" rather than "working for you." There is a parallel here: working to defend your class interests within society, while accepting that others have other interests that must be compromised with, is healthy politics; dividing the society to fight against and subjugate the hated other is not.
Now "semi-" as a modifier conventionally means "only partly" and technically means "half." If you are paid semi-monthly, it means every half of a month you get paid. The trucks we sometimes call "semis" are trucks that can be divided into two parts, truck and trailer.
As mentioned, the base idea from which fascism gets its name is one that any successful politics needs. "Semi" might be the right amount of it. Some proportion is the right amount, because zero percent would lead you to an incoherent society that could not pull together, neither for any common interests nor for mutual defense. You could make an argument that half was the right proportion, or more, or less, but not that the idea should be rejected outright.
In any case, this discussion provides the right hook for the following song, whose title and lyrics derive from a pun on the several ways in which "semi" is used by Americans.
"Semi-crazy" can be the right amount, too.
Orwell wrote in 1946 in his extremely still relevant essay "Politics and the English Language" that "...The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’."
ReplyDeletePeople are just saying whatever they think will stick now.
It's not a good thing that semi-fascist might mean that the unity of our citizens is now only at half-strength.
ReplyDeleteHell, if we’ve got that much left we’re lucky.
ReplyDeleteWorthwhile, I think, to take a look at how Fascism was originally defined by its most important proponents. I think Mussolini should count as a serious expert on Italian Fascism, and Goebbels as a primary expert on the German version.
ReplyDeleteFor Mussolini on Italian Fascism, see his paper The Doctrine of Fascism, dating from 1932. Key quote:
"The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State — a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values — interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people."
https://sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/2B-HUM/Readings/The-Doctrine-of-Fascism.pdf
For Goebbels on German National Socialism, see his propaganda piece Those Damned Nazis, which first appeared in 1929. Four basic principles:
–Nationalism
–Socialism
–A Workers’ State
–Anti-Semitism
https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm
The right amount of Anti-Semitism might be zero percent, but the rest of those are admissible by degrees. Workers make up a large share of the populace; their interests should be considered. Nationalism is the whole point of the fasces as a model. Socialism could be zero percent, but us all pitching in for some of us is also consistent with the fasces model. Almost nobody wants hospitals turning people out to die in the streets if they can't pay, right now, for whatever is needed to keep them alive.
ReplyDeleteThese are issues where the right amount could be 50%, or 1%, or 70%. That's the point: 'semi-fascism' might be a reasonable position.
Good comments.
ReplyDeleteOur Mercury Dime featured a fascio on the reverse:
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.prismnet.com%2F~dierdorf%2Fmercurydime.jpg&f=1&nofb=1
In keeping with "out or many, one."
Every time the House of Representatives sits, they are staring at a couple of bronze relief Fasces flanking the speakers chair.
ReplyDeleteIT also makes perfect sense that antifa would be anti-fascist, as they're anarchists.
Even Antifa needs some sense of solidarity and coming-together-to-pursue-the-goals. It's genuinely indispensable to any successful politics. They just want to do it with affinity groups of friends who are all volunteers; that is not in principle a bad way to organize to do things either. Instead of a formal leader, maybe everyone gets to discuss it and see what kind of consensus emerges; that's quite inefficient at some scale, but for small groups who really do share most of their values it's not terrible.
ReplyDeleteYou know what a tell is. In this post the tell is in the very first sentence. Biden called MAGA Republicans semi-fascist. But that’s not what you report.
ReplyDelete-bc
I've already talked about how weird it is that an American President keeps trying to use the phrase 'Make America Great Again" as if it were something anyone should oppose. At one point it was 'ultra-MAGA' -- let's definitely avoid making America really great!
ReplyDeleteThis is a different philosophical issue, and deserves a separate post. It's not even about Biden being good or bad; it's an exploration of whether being 'semi-fascist' is actually something that is good or bad. I think it's arguable that there might be levels of it that are acceptable or even necessary.
CS Lewis in The Great Divorce talked about problems of love not being an excess - for which there can be none - but a wrongness right from the start, a love that is not Too Much but Wrongly Ordered from the start. I think something similar applies here.
ReplyDeleteAll evils are mockeries or imitations of good. They depend on goodness for energy, organisation, determination, loyalty, etc. But they have bent some quality, sometimes right down to the root, that makes them dangerous. So cooperation among humans is good for the practical reason of accomplishment and the spiritual reason of being at least a step away from utter selfishness. Holding to a discipline is good for similar reasons. Yet both can be used in the service of evil goals.
I would say that where fascism goes wrong is in valuing the state over the individual. Individuals lasts forever, for good or ill, states are temporary, even ephemeral. They count for nothing in the end. To steal things of eternal value to misdirect them to things of temporary value is then a sort of spiritual entropic accelerator. The problem is in regarding the entirely abstract state as of greater importance just because it is larger in this life.
If there is no persistence of the individual after death the weighting would change, and the state would be both larger and longer-lived, and could thus be regarded as more important. It is not accidental that totalitarianisms are ultimately hostile to all philosophical systems that regard humans as having eternal value.
That's an interesting approach.
ReplyDeleteThe Medieval way of addressing that division -- which was ordered according to Christian theology -- was more embracing of the dignity of the soul. Obviously the Medievals killed a lot of people in wars and so forth, but there was at least a nod to the salvation of the soul even when they were being executed for the purposes of the state. We still provide a priest if wanted at one's execution, of course, but the fascists rejected it (as did the Communists).
Yet the state still had the power to execute -- indeed the Catholic Church used to endorse execution, which it now rejects -- precisely because of the corporate model of the state. The soul is eternal, but the body needs to be cared for according to the facts of the divinely-mandated incarnation. Thus the child needs to be born into a family, and the family supported by a society that has peace and order and law; and the child must grow into institutions run by people whose duty is to shape the child for adulthood responsibilities; and then, as an adult, the child should become one of those members and perform in the institutions -- some as husbands or wives, some as priests or friars, some as kings and lords.
The duty of each class is understood by reference to the society as a common whole that is like a body (thus 'corporatist' not from 'corporation' but from the Latin root for 'corpse' or 'corporeal'). The king acts as the mind, the knight as the hands, the priests as the heart, and the ordinary working people as the feet, arms and legs.
Thus if yeomen archers died at war in the service of the king, the king was doing his job and so were they. They were burning up their temporary forms in maintaining an enduring society that supported life in the manner God intended human life to go, from birth to death: even war was ordered to the maintenance of peace, as law's violence to order. At ever step things were sacralized and the eternal remembered, but the temporal order required (they thought) a state that could compel individuals to serve it.
Mussolini himself invoked corporatism as a kind of explanatory model for fascism: everything within the state just like all the parts of the body are 'in' the body, and nothing against the state just like it would be senseless and self-destructive for one of the parts of the body to turn against it. (Cancer, indeed, is effectively one of the parts of the body turning to its own purpose -- cancer cells refuse to die, and grow out of order -- rather than submitting to the corporal union of purpose.)
So even here there are very strong similarities between the formally religious model of the earlier age and the Modern fascist model. Yet the rejection or subordination of religion by the state is a difference; perhaps that is itself sufficiently disordered to meet your terms.