What is Fascism, and who is Carl Schmitt?
10/28/07
Like many words I have spent years defining and subsequently refining in my own mind, such as classical, technique, power, leadership, and love, the term "Fascism" has been simplistically coopted as derisive without analysis for merit.
Hardest to do is to cleanse one's mind of the assorted bar bores or the few full-blooded bigots who compose the stereotypical proponents of the Far Right. This include the half-drunk, testosterone-guided skinheads in tight jeans or combat fatigues, bawling out slogans richly spiced with obscenity. While the anti-fascists and FOXnews knuckle-dragging mouthbreathers continue to define the term as "authoritative mean person", I thought I'd give some basic definitions.
Huey Long once said "when we get it we won't call it fascism -- we'll call it antifascism" and there's a lot of truth to this. There's a real and legitimate lack of free speech in America, and especially on campuses and in the media, because both of them are controlled by a group. Out-groups (in these cases conservatives) are denied free speech even more strongly then they themselves denied liberals previously. Like The Who said, "meet the new boss/same as the old boss."
Generally, Fascism is the psychological and spiritual tendencies of the man, embodied in the modern nation-state. While the quirks of the modern and relatively new State apparatus is being refined by Man, the essence of Man and his psychological underpinnings change little. It is this characteristic that conflates Fascism and conservativism. But Fascism cannot be understood only from its ideologues; instead, it needs to be looked at in practice and in my opinion the practice of Fascism, as indeed the rise to power of Fascism, requires collaboration and support from the much older, stronger, and more respectable conservative and establishmentarian foundations of any society.
In practice, Fascism is a progressive if not revolutionary movement that firstly seeks the reconciliation of class conflict by protecting wages and the integrity of domestic labor markets from exploitation via free-market profiteers. Secondly, Fascism marshalls the resources of the national organism to cultivate cultural, military, and scientific excellence and create harmony within said national organism.
Often (and highly paradoxically) Fascism is seen as militarily aggressive and Imperialist. It is in fact Communism that requires war to enhance its burgeoning Class Society. In fact, the USSR was not Nationalist (chauvinst and exclusive) but Imperial (messianic and inclusive). Socialism can't happen without World War. Luckily, Stalin was stopped or encountered resistance on both sides of the Iron Curtain, to the cost of 10,000,000s of lives.
Fascism it more Traditional than Conservative. Tradition embodies all the organic and tribal actions, thoughts, and even peculiar climactic and geography details of a group. Fascism done with a organic Tradition as the core is considered the true Fascism, which only as a secondary benefit removes the need for socialism because it addresses the root problem that caused the symptom to arise. Class cooperation not class warfare.
As you might know the word Fascism (initially created by Mussolini) comes from the Fasces, which is a bundle of birch rods wrapped together to form a cylinder. The Fasces symbolizes the fact that any one birch rod is weak but as a whole they are strong. While the Fasces dates back to pre-Roman (and even pre-historic) Italy, it is truly all over the American government, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Seal of Brooklyn.
A more (little r) romantic definition of Fascism from Coogan:
"We seek in vain the book of Fascism, although no such bible exists because Fascism is not a doctrine but an obscure and remote longing written in our blood and in our souls. Fascists are men who feel more deeply and more desperately than other men, that the ideal of Fascism is a means of salvation, the secret of life and well-being which every zoological species preserves like an instinct in the depths of its conscience. But how were those who feel more deeply and desperately to survive in the wintertime of the West?"
A good quote from Mussolini: "Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. And if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society."
Carl Schmitt was a 20th century German philosopher. His most famous work, The Concept of the Political, was originally published in 1927. In this work Schmitt asserts that the state is a manifestation of the political realm of life. Importantly, Schmitt argues that the need for the state to govern the political is due to the existence of political enemies. Schmitt describes friends, foes, and enemies within the political realm and differentiates such terms from their personal analogues. In fact, Schmitt defines the term political as the distinctions among political friends, political foes, and political enemies. Much is made of Schmitt’s opposition to liberalism as well.
Importantly, Schmitt sees enemies as having the potential of being wonderful, beautiful, and quite superior, and yet enemies nonetheless.
Schmitt ran into some issues during his career, due to his membership in the Nazi Party, but his philosophical constructs were rigorous and form the basis for much of today's international political economy, and war.
What would be interesting, and I haven’t yet found, is an analysis the differences between friend and foe in both the internal and external realms. For example, Schmitt was a Nazi for a while, but obviously the German Jews were, well, German, so there were intra-national enemies and foes, which in fact often took precedence of external enemies, such as the Soviets. This is reminiscent to internal struggles within companies, which can often overshadow the very real threat from a company’s competitors. As a timely issue, this is also something happening in the Republican Party. For many within the party who would call themselves paleoconservatives, there is a really attraction to laying siege to the party, essentially killing any chance for a GOP victory in '08. In this case, again, internal enemy-hate trumps external enemy-hate, and you have the paradox of Rightists supporting Sens. Clinton or Obama.