The Rectification of Names: Fascism

Toward a semiotic account of fascist language

Scene outside Madison Square Garden, before the big political rally, as reported dramatically by Candace Fleming in Salon:

A couple of Firsters stepped assertively toward a reporter. Would the media cover the rally fairly this time? they wanted to know. Or would the newspapers be biased and inaccurate, as usual? Many rallygoers believed the press couldn't be trusted. Their hero, the face of America First and the man they'd come to hear speak, had told them so. "Contemptible," he'd called the press. "Dishonest parasites." In a recent speech he'd even told supporters that "dangerous elements" controlled the media, men who placed their own interests above America's. That's why he had to keep holding rallies, he'd explained. Someone had to tell it like it was. Someone had to speak the impolite truth about the foreigners who threatened the nation. It was time to build walls — "ramparts," he called them — to hold back the infiltration of "alien blood." It was time for America to close off its borders, isolate itself from the rest of the world, and focus solely on its own interests. It was the only way, he claimed, "to preserve our American way of life."

No, not last night. The Salon article was posted March 9 2020, and the occasion they were reporting was a lot earlier than that. Almost 80 years earlier, in fact, and it wasn't the open Nazis of the German-American Bund in February 1939 at the "Pro-America" rally that we've been hearing so much about in the last week or so; it was the America First Committee led by heroic pilot Charles A. Lindbergh, perhaps on October 31 1941, barely two months before Pearl Harbor; or, perhaps more likely, the Garden rally of May 23 that year (Fleming doesn't give us enough clues to say, unfortunately), where a nonpartisan group joined him on the dais—Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D-MT) and the popular novelist Kathleen Norris, as well as the Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas (a genuine pacifist, not a mere anti-anti-fascist like the others). Either way, Lindbergh in New York was not using the "racially charged" language that got him into trouble in Des Moines in September:

Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.

Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.

We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.

But at the May rally, he and Wheeler and Norris (I hope that's not Thomas's arm behind Norris's head) had allowed themselves to be photographed in a half-assed emulation of the Sieg Heil salute:

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Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

It's as easy to imagine the secret German-American Fred Trump (as you'll remember, he billed himself as Swedish-American at the time, and so would his as yet unborn son Donald, until much later, worried their many Jewish tenants in Queens and Brooklyn might be upset if they knew the truth) might have been there, or home listening to the speeches on the radio, as it is to imagine him being involved on one side in the Ku Klux Klan demonstration at which he was arrested as a 22-year-old in 1927, or much later grousing around the house about the injustice of income tax, and how government should go back to the 19th-century habit of financing itself with import taxes, the way Republicans had tried to do with the reactionary Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 ("We could use a man like Herbert Hoover again"), a lesson young Donald could have absorbed without any clear idea of what the old man was talking about. 

I'm thinking about the degree to which fascism is nourished by crazy linguistic imprecision, from the full-on incoherence Trump shares with Mussolini and Hitler in his long divagations to the esoteric-exoteric ambiguity he uses to give himself deniability; like the slyness with which he seems to have acknowledged at last night's rally how Speaker Mike Johnson might be crowning him president-for-life or something similar on January 6 2025:

“We gotta get the congressmen elected and we gotta get the senators elected, because we can take the Senate pretty easily, and I think with our little secret we’re going to do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact,” Trump said while looking in Johnson’s direction.

Appearing to point at the House speaker, the former president added, “He and I have a secret. We’ll tell you what it is when the race is over.”

If the election goes the way he hopes it will, he won't have to worry about whether the Electoral College elected him or not; he'll be able to have the House appoint him, like Rutherford B. Hayes, only as a fascist. But not quite, because as Newsweek points out, Trump may have been "looking in Johnson's direction", but he was directly addressing Rep. Matt Gaetz:

And they're gonna be angry, they won't speak to me for probably a month or so but it'll calm down after that, right Matt Gaetz? It'll calm down. It'll calm down.

(We may hope, I think, that the little secret is that Gaetz is planning to challenge Johnson for the Speakership in the first week in January if the Republicans win the House in November, because Trump doesn't trust Johnson to appoint him—doing that would certainly make a number of members pretty angry, but more importantly a secret conspiracy led by Trump and Gaetz is pretty certain to fail because they're both bigmouth dunderheads, as evidenced by Trump's behavior right there, and under federal investigation, and everybody hates them both, including the ones pretending to worship Trump for now. Basically the same conspiracy failed repeatedly throughout 2023 and 2024, and there's no reason for that to change. But please, everybody, let's just elect a Democratic House, to be on the safe side.)

What I wanted to say about fascist language is something aroused by a text I just started looking at (The Rhetoric of Violence and Sacrifice in Fascist Italy: Mussolini, Gadda, Vittorini by Chiara Ferrari, University of Toronto Press, 2013), which I may be reading wrong, so you can consider it my own idea if you want: that when we analyze particularly in terms of meaningfulness, of the message the fascist speaker is trying to convey, we're making a categorical mistake. Ferrari, anyway, seems to be entertaining a different idea of what a Mussolini speech is: it's not a speech, in the first place, but a dialogue, between the Duce and the audience, even if the audience doesn't so much speak as deliver a responsory, and its significance lies less in the verbal part of the content as the whole procedure, like a ritual; that it is a ritual, in fact, to all intents and purposes, a sacrificial ritual, to be specific, in which the Leader offers up his body toward the creation of the social harmony promised by Mussolini's version of "corporatism" (not a reference to corporate business ownership structures, as many people mistakenly think, but to the socioeconomic "bodies" of which society is composed, of farmers, workers, soldiers, business owners, etc. who must dedicate their own personal bodies to the ideal (of course the way the factory worker dedicates his or her body is very different from the way the factory owner does, but you're not supposed to dwell on that).

Or in the terminology of linguistics and analytic philosophy (J.L. Austin), the language of the Mussolini speech is "performative": it doesn't send a message as much as it performs an action, like ending a meeting ("the meeting is adjourned") or naming a baby ("Ego te baptizo..."). Ferrari deploys the word "performative" in a more postmodern sense, I think, to refer to performance as the object of a kind of art, but that's appropriate too. When the curtain goes up and the actor playing Orsino says, "If music be the food of love, play on!" he's not actually wondering what the purpose of music is, or ordering the band to deliver a song, but performing the part of somebody who is; the purpose of the language is to create the imaginary scene in which the Duke is doing these things, for the pleasure of an audience that knows the Duke doesn't even exist.

Likewise, Mussolini is acting the part of a kind of god, of the Osiris type, who ritually dies for the good of the congregation, and Trump does that too. So did Ferdinand Marcos, or Huey Long, in their buffoonish ways, while others, like Lee Kuan Yew or Viktor Orbán, ask their audiences to be more dignified and adult, but the content is always the same: that of a dialogue between a priest (the god's "vicar") and the faithful (like the god's body—"corpus Christi"), in the construction through performance of social unity towards an end that the members of the congregation, if they were thinking rationally, might not wish to cooperate in, like the conquest of Eastern Europe or the wholesale destruction of labor unions—or modernizing the national economy on behalf of the bourgeoisie, like Louis-Napoléon, elected first president of the Second French Republic after the 1848 revolution, who made himself emperor rather than relinquish power as the constitution required, and who genuinely "did some good things" among the awful ones, but whose foremost goal seems always to have been to hold the most power.

That's my idea, anyhow, of where a definition of fascism ought to begin: with the idea of a post-political politics: in opposition to democracy, but not as an ideology, as a performance of compliance with the democracy it is meant to subvert. Then you can fill in in the characteristics of the standard definitions as functions of that primary anti-democratic purpose, as in Lawrence Britt's list (the one I've mostly worked with), for instance in terms of the Wilhoit categories:

• powerful and continuing nationalism to give the audience a false sense of belonging to an ingroup

• disdain for human rights to license torturing the outgroup and keeping the ingroup in line

• identification of enemies/scapegoats as the outgroup for the supposed ingroup to fear

• supremacy of the military as the topmost ingroup, because they are the ones with the guns

• rampant sexism because society should model the patriarchal ruling structure in an ingroup of men and outgroup of women (plus untouchable caste of the "deviant")

• controlled mass media, obviously, so the members of the false ingroup don't start catching on

• obsession with national security bringing together the scapegoating with the military

• intertwining of religion and government because the regime looks for monopoly control over the irrational

• favoring of corporate power (meaning in this case corporations) as ingroup to finance the regime

• suppression of labor as an outgroup, the force without capital

• disdain for intellectuals as an outgroup because they are "critical" in more senses than one

• obsession with crime and punishment to dramatize the audience's sense of being in the ingroup

• cronyism and corruption because their crimes are not the ones of the outgroup

• fraudulent elections, duh, because otherwise you might lose them 

That's just a sketch, of course. Comments welcome.