A Fascist in Every Garage

[Dave Monroe]

A Fascist in Every Garage

Geoff Nunberg
"Fresh Air" Commentary, 10/21/03


You'd figure that no one would quarrel with a
description of Saddam Hussein's regime as fascist. It
may not have been a corporatist state like Hitler's or
Mussolini's regimes, but it had a lot of the features
of classical fascism: the militaristic nationalism, a
secular religion of the state, and a government by
secret police terror -- and that's not to mention the
grandiose monuments and the silly high-peaked
officers' hats like the ones the Germans and Italians
used to wear. 

But Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi stirred
up a controversy recently when he complained to some
British journalists that labeling Saddam a fascist
disparaged Mussolini's regime, which he called
comparatively benign. "Mussolini never killed anyone,"
he said, not quite accurately. "Mussolini used to send
people on vacation in internal exile." A Berlusconi
spokesman later acknowledged that the fascists had
been guilty of some crimes, but insisted that the
their regime "can't in any way be compared to Nazism
or communism."1

Those fine distinctions are apt to be lost on
Americans, who don't have any intimate historical
memories of fascism with a capital F. "Fascist" is a
word that we throw around as easily as "bastard," and
with no more heed to its literal meaning. That
lower-case use of the word began with the sixties
radicals, who borrowed it from the international left.
It was a moment when "polarizations were the common
syntax [and] extremities were ordinary," as Todd
Gitlin has put it, and the charge of "fascism" became
a way of distancing yourself from the tired civilities
of liberalism; the word stood in for all the forms of
social control that disinclined people to work on
Maggie's farm no more. 

By then, the word had lost most of its historical
resonances. When William F. Buckley brought a
defamation suit against the author of a 1969 book for
calling him a fascist, the court ruled that the word
was too vague to be actionable.

The collapse of the radical movements of the sixties
temporarily bleached "fascist" of its tone of rage,
and left it as a jocular term for anyone who was
trying to impose a rigid pattern of behavior. There
are fashion fascists and wine fascists, fascistic
anti-smoking ordinances and those fascistic seat belts
that lock you in automatically when you close the car
door.

But lately, "fascist" has been making a comeback as a
political epithet. The anger stirred up by the Iraq
war and domestic anti-terrorism programs has leftists
pulling the word out of the closet along with tie-dye
T-shirts and chants of "hey hey ho ho." You don't see
the word used as an epithet much in publications like
The Nation or the American Prospect, but the Web is
full of it -- an AltaVista search turns up more than
7500 pages where "fascist" or "fascism" appear within
ten words of "Ashcroft" or "Bush." 

True, the left uses the word more selectively now.
Anti-war demonstrators may call Bush and Ashcroft
fascists, but you rarely hear them yelling "fascist
pigs" at the police -- a sign of the restraint that
both protesters and cops have learned since the bloody
confrontations of the sixties.

But this time around, the right has adopted the
epithet as well. Granted, it's appropriate when
supporters of the Iraq war describe Saddam Hussein's
regime as fascist, but even there, it's striking that
not many people were making that comparison at the
time of the first Gulf War. In the past year there
have been 102 stories in American newspapers where
someone described Saddam's regime as fascist; over the
corresponding period surrounding the Gulf War in
1990-1991 there were just 22.

It's more of a stretch when people use phrases like
"Islamo-fascist" to describe Islamic fundamentalists.
The Taliban government may have been a nasty and
repressive theocracy, but it didn't try to make
religion subordinate to the state, the way Hitler and
Mussolini did -- quite the opposite. It's as if the
evils of the Taliban or Osama bin Laden aren't
sufficient to the day. We can't go after anyone now
without comparing the campaign to the "good war"
against Hitler, and bringing the old rhetoric of
"appeasement" into play.

In fact the right has taken to using "fascist" with a
reckless brio that we used to associate with Abbie
Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Rush Limbaugh has described
Dick Gebhardt's health care program as fascist, and a
while ago the director of the American Conservative
Union attached the label to Tim Robbins. When Jerry
Springer was considering a run for the Senate in Ohio
in July, the National Review's Jonah Goldberg likened
him to a fascist demogogue. And the irrepressible Ann
Coulter compared Katie Couric to both Eva Braun and
Joseph Goebbels, a hermaphroditic mix of images that
testifies to Coulter's impressive powers of
visualization.

The right's new enthusiasm for "fascist" has a lot to
do with the fall of Communism, which left old epithets
like "pinko" and "communistic" sounding quaint and
retro. There was a time when the right would routinely
refer to the ACLU as communist sympathizers or a
communist front. That association was implicit when
the elder George Bush described Michael Dukakis as "a
card-carrying member of the ACLU," in an echo of the
phrase that Senator McCarthy used for members of the
Communist Party. 

Nowadays, though, Bill O'Reilly describes the group as
a "fascist organization," which "uses their legal
clout to terrorize various school districts and
individuals." That doesn't make a lot of historical
sense. Real fascists didn't try to litigate their way
to power -- if they did, they wouldn't have been
fascists. 

But then few of the Americans who use "fascist"
nowadays have much interest in dotting their
historical i's. Like "Big Brother" or "Orwellian,"
it's a spandex specter that you can stretch over
anything that smacks of excessive control and
surveillance, whether it's coming from the left, the
right, or the seat-belt makers. 

The loose use of "fascist" comes particularly easy to
Americans. For most of the peoples of Europe, the word
still conjures up a shameful episode that has to be
lived down, or in Berlusconi's case, excused away. 

But we can toss the "fascist" label around with easy
abandon, secure in the conviction that really "it
can't happen here," as Sinclair Lewis ironically
entitled his 1935 novel about a fascist takeover of
the US. Americans may not have a vivid sense of
history, but we react viscerally against anything that
someone can get us to picture in leather boots and a
high-peaked hat.

Notes:

1. According to an article in La Stampa (September 18,
2003), Berlusconi later said that he had been tricked
by the journalists into making the remarks while
drinking a bottle of champagne "at the end of a long
day, when I was very tired." He didn't withdraw the
remarks, however.

http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/fascist.html

Nunberg, Geoffrey.  Going Nucular: Language,
   Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times.
   New York: Public Affairs, 2004.  139-43.

http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/publicaffairsbooks-cgi-bin/display?book=1586482343


		
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