Fascism has always been difficult to define, or even sometimes to identify. It seemed to contain common elements: racism, militarism, nationalism, leader worship — but that’s a laundry list. I used to wonder, as I got interested in politics in my teens, where its essence lay.
The classic fascisms of the interwar years were within recall then. In my 20s, it was more an epithet flung at figures you despised, like Nixon and, later, Reagan — under the heading, Friendly Fascism, due to his chucklehead style.
The most compelling definition was Uri Avnery’s, who lived through the classic Mussolini-Hitler-Franco decades. He said he couldn’t define it but he knew it when he saw it. (He didn’t claim credit for the phrase.) It leaves you hanging though; it’s like saying: to each era its own fascism, including ours.
There are many current candidates: Trump and his “I alone can fix it”; Hungary’s Orban; Bolsonaro in Brazil; the Ottawa convoy (more tenuous, I grant); the assault on the U.S. Capitol and Sunday’s coup facsimile in Brasilia. We still may lack a definition but we’re seeing so much that it feels silly to debate whether something fascistic is actually going around.
The latest was Brazil. Ex-president Bolsonaro claimed the election winner, leftist ex-president Lula, hadn’t won, because the vote was “rigged.” This impeccably mimicked Trump’s claims about the 2020 U.S. election he lost. These dismissals of electoral process, without proof, seem typical of fascism in our time. A Brazilian poll showed 40 per cent felt Lula hadn’t beaten Bolsonaro. The point isn’t that they didn’t vote for Lula but they didn’t believe others had.
In earlier times, right and left tended not to challenge electoral processes, even if they had cause. Nixon was probably cheated of victory in 1960 and Gore in 2000 but both accepted the results, out of deference to accepted practice and social stability. I’ve always felt elections are a flawed, limited form of democracy, versus more direct versions, but I concede that they’re a lot better than militarized uprisings to install some glorious leader instead.
One reason I’ve been reluctant to apply the term currently has been an absence of paramilitary forces or militias that marked classic fascisms. “Where are the brownshirts?” I’d say. But it now seems clear that the role is being filled by members of actual police and armed forces, along with militias like the Proud Boys, to whom Trump — still in office — commanded, “Stand back and stand by.”
In Brasilia and D.C., you could see cops like “the notoriously pro-Bolsonaro military police” (Guardian) let the invaders pass. In Ottawa there was direct funnelling of police intel to convoy leaders, along with ex-soldiers joining the protest.
This week, CBC ran a story on a Mountie in Trail, B.C., with an online show mocking the “church” of Justin Trudeau, for preaching socialism. A report last year by retired officers said our military wasn’t doing enough to prevent “white supremacists and other violent extremists from infiltrating its ranks.”
So what seems to characterize fascism in this era is a resort to force, with reliance on support from police and military, to overthrow as illegitimate any government that is not their own preference, usually in the name of a strong, racist leader.
This is especially ominous in the U.S., where one of the two mainstream parties, the Republicans, seems to widely accept the premise that elections haven’t been fair unless they and their leader win.
And I think I understand what Avnery meant by saying he knew it when he saw it. Not that all fascism has the same underlying essence but the opposite. Fascism, whatever it may be, takes distinct shapes in different times. Indeed: To each era, its fascists.
FDR said in 1936 that his generation of Americans had a rendezvous with destiny — a line Reagan, who admired FDR, repeated. It also starts to seem that every generation has its rendezvous with fascism.
This column originally appeared in the Toronto Star.
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