Here in SW Virginia, it was 81-degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday, the day after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, which yielded a sweeping mandate–a mandate damningly, tragically scored with misogyny, xenophobia, and economic desperation. Woo, don’t catch you slippin’ now. Bracketing momentarily the political climate, the unseasonably hot and dry weather of late tends to slip us into passing small talk about how uncanny it is, this late fall heat, to be sweating in the sun this time of year as the hens roam close gobbing grubs. We haven’t lived through the burning up of this planet before, most of us. We’re in its midst, the changes at a scale (and of an ideological order) imperceptible, what Timothy Morton theorized as a hyperobject, the everywhere all around and in motion planetslide whose signs are rising, whose mildest symptoms tempt us into grimly ironic reflections, “sun sure is warm,” “nice day for shepherding the flock,” “don’t remember the last time it was this hot in early November.”
But laxly waste and exhaust-addled ecocide is just a parallel, intertwined example to grasp the rebound of fascism, in that although perceptible, the most tangible forms of evidence (e.g., stark articulations direct from the mouth of the winning candidate, or concepts of plans drawn up in the Project 2025 report, an especially “rigid discombobulation”) are encased in a squishy frame of might-mean-nothing. In other words, overt threats and grim warnings can be dusted aside as meaningless, forgivable bloviation (“he long-talks and says lots of random stuff he doesn’t mean”). Many of his proxies and surrogates filled the air in the second half of the week with shrugs of uncertainty; “his waste and exhaust, though noncommittal and vague, is notoriously well-received by his supporters.”
But what even is fascism? If only it was as easy as pointing our cell phones at the sky and letting their lenses do the work of casting it in a purple-pink halo, the way we do with the Northern Lights, we’d know-know. See? Look here. The trouble, in part, seems to be from the inexact matches among the variations on fascism, their family resemblances abiding both similarity and alibi; alibi, or that skeptical, dusting-aside loophole that hedges and qualifies, ultimately dismissing the premise that fascism is upon us, queued up and substantively in motion.
In his 1995 essay, “Ur-Fascism,” Umberto Eco, who was born in 1932 and who grew up in Mussolini-era Italy, wrote about the common-ish features shared among fascism’s subtly shifted forms. If you, like I do, perceive that something deeply troubling is afoot, something dangerous, misguided, and poisonous, “Ur-Fascism” is a must-read; the contextual resonances add up; the fourteen features of fascism listed in the second half of the essay point a blazing, blinking arrow to the past eight years, to now, to January 2025’s inauguration, to this is US. A friend sent Eco’s essay to me late this week with the purple-pink haloed message, “so we are on the same page.”
An excerpt from Eco:
During those twenty years, the poetry of Montale and other writers associated with the group called the Ermetici was a reaction to the bombastic style of the regime, and these poets were allowed to develop their literary protest from within what was seen as their ivory tower. The mood of the Ermetici poets was exactly the reverse of the fascist cult of optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated their blatant, even though socially imperceptible, dissent because the Fascists simply did not pay attention to such arcane language.
All this does not mean that Italian fascism was tolerant. Gramsci was put in prison until his death; the opposition leaders Giacomo Matteotti and the brothers Rosselli were assassinated; the free press was abolished, the labor unions were dismantled, and political dissenters were confined on remote islands. Legislative power became a mere fiction and the executive power (which controlled the judiciary as well as the mass media) directly issued new laws, among them laws calling for preservation of the race (the formal Italian gesture of support for what became the Holocaust).
The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations.
