Fascist Legacies: Far Right Ideologies Then and Now, edited by Ari Kohen and Gerald J. Steinacher

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Fascist Legacies: Far Right Ideologies Then and Now edited by Ari Kohen and Gerald J. Steinacher

Many of the actions and attitudes associated with fascism exist, to one degree or another, in any modern society—at least in larval form. Whether they hatch depends on conditions. Most of the contributors to his essay collection agree with Robert O. Paxton, the foremost historian of fascism, who defined it as political behavior preoccupied with decline, humiliation and victimhood with “compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity.” Violence is inherent. Fascism is also militarily nationalistic. As put by Paxton, quoted several times in Fascist Legacies, “American fascism would speak of American heritage and American values.” 

While several essays offer instructive lessons from the past, others are pathfinding in their understanding of the present. In “Fascism and Firearms,” Amanda Gailey denounces the U.S. gun industry for offering the far right “both material support and a playbook for leveraging firearms to do the essential work against a pluralistic liberal society.” They have contributed to cycles of lethal violence, “conditions that lead to tolerance for unjustified police violence” 

In “Ctrl+V Fascism,” Casey Ryan Kelly and William J. Snipe fathom the sickening memes and manifestos of the far right, including the screeds posted by mass killers. They find lack of originality—and a bizarrely ironic tone, as if to say that killing and race hatred is good fun in “the kind of nihilistic, playpen attitude espoused by the internet’s earliest adopters.” 

In their introduction, the editors are careful, as are most of their contributors, to avoid hurling “fascist” as a brickbat or slur at disagreeable people. They discuss the rebranding of extremism as mainstream conservatism through “the megadonor-funded” Turning Point USA. But is it fascism? They look for guidance to Italy’s Umberto Eco (Foucault’s Pendulum), a child under Mussolini. Eco identified 14 characteristics of fascism, among them exclusive ethno-nationalism, an us-v.-them mentality, machismo bluster, a strong man cult… How close are we? 

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