Defining Fascism

Brad DeLong delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU
Fri Jun 29 11:29:05 PDT 2001



>Hi,
>
>OK. Let's just look at regimes. My argument would be that even if a
>regime is authoritarian, totalitarian, repressive, militarist, involves
>major scapegoating, supports eugenics, has formed an alliance with some
>forms of capitalism, it is still not necessarily "fascist." The left
>has a tendency to call everything that it doesn't like that involves
>statism and capitalism "fascist.
>

I always thought that fascism had five important elements:

--A strong belief that--through social darwinism--morality is ultimately tied to blood and race, understood as descent and genetic relationship.

--A strong rejection of the classical "liberal" belief that individuals have rights that any legitimate state is bound to respect.

- -In its place, an assertion that individuals have duties to the state, seen as the decision-making organ of the collectivity.

--A strong belief that parliamentary democracy is not the way to choose the leaders of the state: a combination of charismatic expression and bureaucratic oligarchism is.

- -A strong fear of Marxist communism, and an eagerness to use any and all weapons--suspension of parliamentary democracy, mass propaganda, rallies, street violence, and so forth--to combat it.

So I don't think calling the current Russian or the current Chinese governmetn "fascist" is terribly useful. They have some of these elements, but not all of them.

Brad DeLong



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