In search of fascism.("Fascism: The Career of a Concept" by Paul E. Gottfried)

• Published in: American Conservative Vol. 15; no. 3; pp. 55 - 57
• Main Author: Mendenhall, Allen
• Format: Book Review Magazine Article
• Language: English
• Published: Arlington The American Conservative LLC 01.05.2016; American Conservative LLC
• Subjects: Activists; Fascism; Gottfried, Paul E; Nonfiction
• ISSN: 1540-966X

The term fascism, as it has gained currency in our radio-television lexicon, lacks a clear referent. Its use reveals more about the speaker than about the signified phenomenon: the context in which the term is used can determine the speakers place on the left-right spectrum. "Fascism" has become a pejorative and disparaging marker for views a speaker dislikes; its a name that relegates the named to pariah status, provoking censorship and shaping basic notions about political figures and policies. "Fascism now stands," [Paul E. Gottfried] says, "for a host of iniquities that progressives, multiculturalists, and libertarians all oppose, even if they offer no single, coherent account of what they're condemning." So what exacdy is fascism? This question, Gottfried insists, "has sometimes divided scholars and has been asked repeatedly ever since [Mussolini]'s followers marched on Rome in October 1922." Gottfried presents several adjectives, mosdy gleaned from the work of others, to describe fascism: reactionary, counterrevolutionary, collectivist, authoritarian, corporatist, nationalist, modernizing, and protectionist. These words combine to form a unified sense of what fascism is, although we may never settie on a fixed definition because fascism has been linked to movements with various distinct characteristics. For instance, some fascists were Christian (e.g., the Austrian clerics or the Spanish Falange) and some were anti-Christian (e.g., the Nazis). There may be some truth to the "current equation of fascism with what is reactionary, atavistic, and ethnically exclusive," Gottfried acknowledges, but that is only part of the story. Probably all treatments of "fascism" as a cohesive, homogeneous philosophy held together by likeminded adherents are wrong, incomplete, careless, or dishonest. Gottfried believes that the term "fascism" has undergone unwarranted manipulation since the German historian Ernst Nolte conflated fascism and Nazism in a manner that enabled less astute critics on "the multicultural Left" to justify "their attack on their opponents as Nazis and not simply generic fascists."