Ur-Fascism

My knowledge of Umberto Eco extends to The Name of the Rose (which I read before the movie came out, thank you very much), but not far enough to know anything about his work as a critic.

Today I learned — very belatedly — that he published an essay in 1995 called "Ur-Fascism" (or "Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt"), which is considered essential in defining the difference between fascism and your everyday authoritarianism. It came out right after I stopped going to grad school, it looks like.

This kind of specificity seems important these days.

I heard about Eco's essay from a podcast called Behind the Bastards, which has been around for about six years. The host, Robert Evans, looks at the worst people ever. In 2019, Evans wrote a long essay called The War on Everyone about white supremacy and fascism in the U.S. and read it on his podcast over seven episodes. The first segment (which I listened to today) begins by talking about Eco's essay.

I've heard present-day experts like Ruth Ben-Ghiat talk about fascism, and read Timothy Snyder's little book On Tyranny, but I maybe I've been avoiding lists like Eco's. When you see his list, it's hard to not recognize our current friends in the MAGA cult.

Here are Eco's 14 (yes, he identified 14) "ways of fascism" (from the Wikipedia page about the essay). All of the bolded parts are quoted from Eco:

1. The cult of tradition — all truth is revealed by tradition.
2. The rejection of modernism
3. The cult of action for action's sake. The cult has no truck with intellectual reflection, including science. Evans and his cohosts talked about this disdain as equating reflection with emasculation.
4. Disagreement as treason. They fear that analysis will expose contradictions.
5. Fear of difference. Hello, racism and xenophobia.
6. Appeal to a frustrated middle class
7. Obsession with a plot. Obviously, this pairs well with scapegoating people who are different.
8. Portraying enemies as at the same time too strong and too weak
9. Life is permanent warfare
10. Contempt for the weak
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero, meaning be ready to die heroically for the cause
12. Machismo, with its disdain for women and hatred of anyone who doesn't conform to strict heterosexual norms
13. Selective populism, in which the leader is the voice of the people because democratic institutions "no longer represent" us.
14. Newspeak, with its limited vocabulary that curtails critical thinking.

Evans posits a 15th property: humor, and particularly ironic humor, "used to disguise its intentions and test the waters for its most extreme goals." He lays out examples from the rise of the Nazis, as well as from our own recent past.

Eco argued that the 14 traits he identified were not organized or structured into a system. Instead, he thought that "it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it." 

Coagulating like clots. An apt metaphor.

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By the way... coming to a more-than-weekly podcast like "Behind the Bastards," six years after it started, in a historically active time like ours is a fraught endeavor. I just tried to go backward through the podcast list to get to this episode from 2019 in order to link to the specific episode, and it's almost like reliving the past five years. I couldn't do it. Evans has been covering just about everything that happened in real time, plus lots of other bastards various times. I only got back to early 2021. 

Check through the list for yourself.