I have long resisted calling the United States government — or the Bush administration — fascist because it simply isn’t. There are elements of fascism in the way the country has been governed, especially in the expansion of executive power and the grasp of the state into nearly all fields of endeavor. But I don’t think there has been enough domestic violence deployed on the part of one or the other ruling party, by either the state, or by “private” groups acting on behalf of an ideological party.

Australian academic R.J.B. Bosworth wrote a mess of a book, Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (it could have benefited from much tighter editing) as an attempt to describe just how Fascism worked (or mostly didn’t) in Italy.

One of the commonalities, however, between Mussolini’s Italy and the America of Potus the Wonderful and All-Powerful (whoever who may be), is the harnessing of “intellectuals” by the state and the ruling party. Consider who in our day and time this passage might be describing:

In Critica Fascista [a party publication] and other such places, it became easy to find portentous justifications for what was happening at the Mostra [a cultural fair] and throughout the regime’s expanding set of cultural events. Perhaps it was now that texts or, more likely, performance and display, became a social laboratory in which the totalitarian regime successfully manufactured the new mass subject. Yet one analyst has underlined sceptically how the regime utilized promises of creative autonomy and state subsidies in order to “domesticate and normalize intellectuals while giving them the illusion that they worked within a pluralist system.” It was equally true that urban and generally bourgeois intellectuals, more or less accepting of Fascism, succeeded in enhancing Mussolini’s and some other leading politicians’ longstanding assumptions that ideas and will mattered more than material concerns and so assisted the general drift of the dictatorship to be “on display” in all its actions. In this sense, Fascism in the 1930s became a sort of relief organization for a slew of otherwise potentially unemployed intellectuals. [Emphasis mine.] By boosting the intellectuals’ self-importance and anchoring the Fascist regime more firmly to words than to material matters, Mussolini, Bottai and the rest were deepening the unreality, later to be exposed so dramatically in the war. They were not so much controlling culture as allowing culture or its veneer to occupy the centre of Italian life and to become Fascism. The unreality of this project, impossible wholly to overlook, in turn deepened the dictatorship’s longstanding nervousness, its half-expressed fear that things were not what they were said to be and therefore its glimmering of recognition that the regime and its ideology were not built to last.

For more discussion comparing Fascism and American presidential government, please see my blog.

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