If I can shoot fascists

Do words lead to violence?

In Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, lawyer Elizabeth Fink reminisced about her time representing the radical Weather Underground. ‘Everything started with the Black Panthers,’ she said: ‘The thrill of being with them. When you heard Huey Newton, you were blown away…. The country was turning into Nazi Germany, that’s how we saw it. Were you to stand up? The Underground did… and oh the glamour of it. the glamour of dealing with the Underground – they were my heroes. Stupid me. It was the revolution, baby. We were going to make a revolution. We were so so so deluded.’

Deluded indeed. In hindsight the United States was clearly not turning fascist, a system that took root in poor, weak and immature European states traumatised by world war. Americans in contrast had a deeply rooted respect for democracy, an ancient constitution, an acceptance of liberalism, the founding idea of the country, but also a far stronger attachment to the idea of free speech.

In fact, by any measurement, the US was becoming more liberal during this period, a word which Weathermen spat out as an insult, and it was already notably freer even than comparable western nations. Months before the student radical started their revolution, respected French journalist Francois Fonvieille-Alquier was brought to court charged with ‘attacks on the honour’ of the head of state, the 300^th individual to be charged with insulting Charles de Gaulle. Americans could call their presidents fascist precisely because they weren’t; indeed, they have a long history of insulting their leaders, as well as excessive partisan rhetoric.

Today that rhetoric has come to focus on one word in particular - ‘fascist’, or sometimes its more excessive synonym, ‘Nazi’. As far back as the Second World War, George Orwell noted that fascist had become an essentially meaningless term, so liberally applied to domestic opponents, but in the 21^st century its use has accelerated just as lifestyle freedom has (paradoxically) reached new heights. Among US commentators and politicians this has become especially intense, driven by a mixture of social media neurosis and the fact that Trump does indeed have Caesarean tendencies.

It’s not just Trump, however; use of the phrase ‘fascist takeover’, for instance, began to steadily increase not in 2015, when Orange Hitler entered the arena, but in 2013, when smartphone use reached a critical level and the ‘Great Awokening’ is viewed as starting. As with partisanship more generally, Trump was a reaction and an accelerant, rather than the cause - and it’s worth remembering that this comparison has been used against every single Republican politician in recent years.

George W Bush was repeatedly compared to Hitler, with eerie warnings that America was heading down the same dark path as Germany in the 1930s. When Alastair Campbell recently cited a list pointing to the warning signs of fascism, which he believed was from a ‘yellowing, thinning (piece of) paper’ at the Holocaust Museum, he was in fact quoting something devised only in 2003 following the Iraq invasion. A country’s leaders lying in order to launch a war – a chilling historical echo. Read yourself a history book.

I tend to think that the evocation of fascism is unhealthy for a number of reasons, one of which is that it is psychologically harmful to the people who come to believe it. As a self-confessed hypochondriac, I don’t think it’s helpful to suggest that every lump is the Big C, especially when dangerous political cancers share numerous symptoms with less threatening maladies - most of those ‘warning signs’ apply to countless non-fascist regimes.

Perhaps a stronger argument against the misuse of fascism is that it helps to create an atmosphere where political violence is justifiable. After all, fascism is an oppressive and hateful system that can only be defeated by force: if your opponent really is a fascist, you not only have a right to resist violently, but a duty, and it’s clear that some people take this rhetoric literally: Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin engraved the words ‘Hey, fascist! Catch!’ on one unfired bullet casings. The idea that violence is a righteous response grew in popularity in 2017 with the debate about whether it was right to ‘punch a Nazi’ following the assault on white nationalist Richard Spencer. Many people seemed quite keen on the idea, without really contemplating who got to decide who is a Nazi and what the implication was.

The intensification of public anxiety about fascism is by no means limited to the United States; Brexit produced a similar neurosis in Britain, with television dramas reflecting a somewhat hysterical fear that we were reliving the 1930s. Public attitudes to immigration, meanwhile, became increasingly liberal, progressive dominance of institutions ramped up and immigration reached record levels. Yet it was nothing like on the same scale, and while fascism may be a particularly European ideology, this type of rhetorical excess seems quintessentially American.

Indeed the entire worldview of ‘antifascism’, as Paul Gottfried characterised the prevailing moral impetus of modern politics, is also American, revealing ‘a sharp American imprint’ as he described, related to the country’s evangelical moral fervour and the influence of post-war thinkers in its universities.

Fascism is the central evil against which many modern people identify against, the world of ‘thou shalt not’ replaced by one with only one directive: never again. Gottfried compared antifascist demonology to ‘the Christian view of Satan’, drawing on older dualistic ideas in which believers are locked in a battle between good and evil. The end logic of antifascism, in Gottfried’s view, is a growing obsession with the idea that fascists are lurking everywhere, which has come to prove a powerful idea in an age of rampant anxiety among young progressives.

It also serves to form a bond between groups who otherwise strongly disagree about politics, especially over economic issues. Socialists and woke capitalists may have unresolvable differences about how the world works, but they are both antifascist. ‘Calling someone a fascist identifies one’s enemy, and the invocation of a shared enemy helps bring together all members of the Left, past and present.’