Musk, Mars and Ur-Fascism

American society throws up niche subcultures all over the place. There’s a small group of people that specialise in making cakes that look like everyday objects, and from such a group has spawned the tv show ‘Is it Cake?’ where contestants compete to create cakes that replicate common objects in an effort to trick celebrity judges.

The whole world is now playing a variant of the game on a much grander scale asking: ‘Is it Fascism?’ of the incoming US government. It’s a fun-game, with devastating real-world consequences for millions of people. All the lights on the dashboard were lighting up in the months of the campaign as Trump’s messaging highlighted all of the keynotes of Umberto Eco’s ‘Ur-Fascism’.

Writing in The New York Review in 1995 Umberto Eco states:

“Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.”

“But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

In a moment we’ll explore what Eco thought these features were, but it’s worth pausing to see what just happened in Washington yesterday. The richest man in the world stood up in front of the seal of the United States of America and conducted a Nazi salute on live television, twice. The anti-fascist writer Jim Stewartson has said: “Messianic psychopathy fueled by ketamine — and reinforced by an impenetrable bubble of cultish sycophancy — is a hell of a drug. The Frankenstein of unregulated capitalism officially has its Monster.”

The mainstream media was immediately coy. Newsnight said: “Some Israeli newspapers have reported that Musk appeared to make a fascist salute.” Others called it an “odd gesture”. Most were content with playing the “Was it a fascist salute?” game.

We are in a place where the far-right are caught between plausible deniability, trying desperately to hide the very obvious truth from plain sight, for fear of the repercussions (there are none) – and fully embracing the reality of this. Some dance between the two – on one hand using the Pepe the Frog approach laughing it off – and on the other (in private) endorsing it. Elements of the Left reject any notion that what we are witnessing is Fascism. They use a 19th C Ideology to explain away a 21st C Technology.

These then are Eco’s 14 features, abbreviated for clarity:

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia. As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge—that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
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   2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
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   3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.
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   4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
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   5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.
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   6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.
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   7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the US, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.
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   8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
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   9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.
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   10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.
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   12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.
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   13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments. One of the first sentences uttered by Mussolini in the Italian parliament was “I could have transformed this deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my maniples”—“maniples” being a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As a matter of fact, he immediately found better housing for his maniples, but a little later he liquidated the parliament. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.
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   14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

As Trump sat on stage signing decrees and promising invasions, like a Roman Emperor dispensing panem et circenses none of this made any sense. Yet, according to Eco’s No 3 ‘Irrationalism’ – it doesn’t have to make any sense.

This means you can have Nazi symbolism alongside a radical support for Israeli, machismo and repressive misogyny alongside (supposed) sexual libertarianism, hyper-traditional family roles alongside crude sexual language, and you can draw on elements of the Christian church whilst disavowing any of its meaning. You can be deeply homophobic and use the Village People as your signature song, or you can be deeply racist and quote Martin Luther King.

Occasionally the absurdities collide in reality – as with the recent clash between Musk and his colleagues over whether they should allow foreign workers to work in tech. The appeal to xenophobia (7) clashing with the zeal for technology and action.

If Trump – and his supporters here hit all the high-notes of Eco’s Ur Fascism, there are some differences. Nobody in 1985 could have predicted the technology now in the hands of the Sieg Heil! billionaire, and what that means. And the ‘Drill Baby Drill’ rhetoric as we stagger into further climate catastrophe is the exact mirror of the Mars fantasy, the idea that we will somehow inhabit a second planet, once this one is done. It is dystopian beyond our wildest writers’ imaginations.

Richard Seymour (‘A return to civility will not begin to quell the threat of fascism in the US’) warned of another difference:

“This is all indicative of an incipient fascism, laying the cultural and political groundwork for a violent, extra-parliamentary mass movement of the right. It is a mistake to assume that fascism must take the form of dictatorship. Far-right movements today are shaped by the same factors: the decomposition of parliamentary legitimacy and their inherited organisational weaknesses. In that context, wielding the power of office is a pedagogical, formative experience. It allows movements with thin civic roots to project influence at a national level and try things out. Fascism does not arrive on the scene with full uniform and programme.”

Imperial Disintegration

Now, as Trump settles into power the war on minorities begins in earnest with the full power of the military likely to be unleashed on the US border, cheered on by a maniacal support. Already immigration agents have been instructed to fan out across the United States today to arrest and deport undocumented migrants. The raids will follow executive orders Trump signed yesterday that implemented hardline policies intended to prevent undocumented migrants from entering the country. The scale of the actions is unprecedented in US history.

The J6 rioters are pardoned in a spasm of fascism that will bring joy to his base. The war on women and transgender people will be waged as one.

The writer T.J. Clarke writes in the London Review of Books, trying to understand what we are witnessing:

“Ressentiment, Nietzsche taught us, is a deep feeling – a determinant fact of our being in the world. We all look around hungrily for someone to blame, someone to wreak vengeance on – for everything we were denied back then, at the beginning. We know we’ll never find the culprit, really; we know we’re making things up; we’re bewildered by our feelings, half ashamed of baying for the scapegoat’s blood – but boy! it feels good.”

“Supposing we take the whole form of politics and leadership described so far, including its ludicrous deficiencies and so far unanswerable strengths, as a phenomenon, an expression, of an empire in decline. In particular, of an empire whose immense superiority over its rivals in terms of military power, control of (most) dependencies, dictatorship of ‘innovation’, image of the good life, and sheer mind-boggling wealth, remains unquestioned, but depends now on an economic system that fails to satisfy its own ordinary middle (read, working) class. This for reasons that have been analysed to death. Globalisation, offshoring, the end of manufacturing, techno-feudalism, vast inequality, the necessity (for growth) of a world of un-tax.”

This for Clarke is the genius of Trump’s Ressentiment politics:

“But however berserk or bizarre the particulars of decline, it is easier and easier to look through them to the simple bitterness of those who once, so recently, were empire’s low-level beneficiaries. Where did my job go (and with it my health plan)? What are my kids on? What the hell is racial sensitivity training? (Wasn’t whiteness the keystone of the whole deal?) You read the words in the mouths of the mob at the start of Coriolanus, and it’s all familiar, the anger over lost bread and circuses; but you wonder why the Roman saps haven’t yet seen who their real oppressors are. They need replacement theory. It’s the elites. Antisemitism. The lab in Wuhan. Abortion. Marxists. The Pizza Paedophiles. Hollywood. Muslims. Mexicans. Anthony Fauci. The EPA. The politics of an empire in decline are invariably a mixture of the cruel and the ludicrous. (Ask the Brits.)”

Ouch.