Last updated on 2023-04-11
Published in 1995, Umberto Eco’s essay “Ur Fascism” is an overview of the author’s recollection and reflections on fascism, and his direct experience of it as a child in Italy during the Second World War. He lists fourteen points that define the “fuzzy” fascism, noting that the defining characteristics can be contradictory and really cannot be made into a coherent ideology. The overarching purpose of the program is to require, and obtain, compliance and simplified reasoning that will be incapable of refuting their program.
The fourteen characteristics listed by Eco are:
- The cult of tradition
- Rejection of modernism
- Action for action’s sake – without thought
- Disagreement is treason
- Fear of difference
- Appeal to a frustrated middle class
- Obsession with a plot
- The enemy is both weak and too strong
- Life is permanent warfare and struggle
- Contempt for the weak
- Heroic death is celebrated – Viva la Muerte
- Misogyny is requisite
- Selective populism – the leader is the interpreter of the peoples’ will
- Newspeak – a language of reduced complexity to limit facilities of critical reasoning
I will not go through the exercise of applying this list to modern American politics on the right. It seems evident to me that our politics in the United States have drifted towards fascism since the 1980s. This drift accelerated rapidly after 2016.
God help us.
I hope there are enough people who are willing to fight for liberty and enlightenment to push back against the gather storm. I fear that we will go through dark times before the revolting stench is banished, if only temporarily, from our political discourse.