The Five Stages of Fascism

Abstract

At first sight, nothing seems easier to understand than fascism. It presents itself to us in crude, primary images: a chauvinist demagogue haranguing an ecstatic crowd; disciplined ranks of marching youths; uniform-shirted militants beating up members of some demonized minority; obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood; and compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, pursued with redemptive violence. Yet great difficulties arise as soon as one sets out to define fascism. Its boundaries are ambiguous in both space and time. Do we include Stalin? Do we reach outside Europe to charismatic dictators in developing countries like Nkrumah, with his single party and official ideology of Nkrumaism, or Saddam Hussein, gigantic statues of whose own forearms raise crossed swords over a Baghdad avenue? What about imperial Japan in the 1930s or the nationalist syndicalism of Juan Peron in Argentina (1946–55)? How far back in time must we go? If we choose to trace a conservative pedigree, we may reach all the way back to Joseph de Maistre, whose dark vision of violence and conspiracy in human affairs and conviction that only authority could repress human destructive instincts offer a prophetic glimpse, according to Isaiah Berlin, of