Show Don’t Tell – Review of Robert O. Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism

Robert O. Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism provides historians of political and intellectual history with an important argument about the role of ideas in political movements. While not denying how the ideas behind fascism tell us much about its origins and early stages, Paxton convincingly argues that what fascists did once installed in positions of power is at least as, and probably more, crucial to the quest to diagnose and understand fascism as a political movement with extraordinary consequences.

Being receptive to this argument requires historians of ideas to perhaps tune down some of their key proclivities. After all, the power of approaching the various frames of history — political history, social history, cultural history — via the study of ideas automatically presents an argument about the ways ideas can reveal and explain how and why shit went down the way it did. Again, Paxton by no means denies this, but he does suggest that the role of intellectual history cannot be central when it comes to dissecting fascism, since these ideas often morphed or disappeared altogether once fascists took power. Therefore, we need to look at how there can be as much disconnect between actions and ideas as there is causation, and how rhetorical maneuvers can just as often represent calculated or subconscious political strategy as genuine wellsprings of the sources of discontent.

One example of this dynamic that Paxton explores is the antiestablishment, even antipolitical attitude of fascist parties in their earliest stages. Disparaging all the institutions of the country and claiming to be somehow “above politics” were common threads in both early German and Italian fascism, although the Nazis were particularly skilled at creating alternative social organizations for every conceivable function in order to peel Germans away from more traditional loyalties and tie them emotionally to the party. As Paxton writes, “Posing as an ‘antipolitics’ was often effective with people whose main political motivation was scorn for politics. In situations where existing parties were confined within class or confessional boundaries, like Marxist, smallholders’, or Christian patries, the fascists could appeal by promising to unite a people rather than divide it.”^[1] However, this was a trait hardly peculiar to fascists, who did particularly well in nations facing serious crises of legitimacy. In Germany, Paxton reminds us, “All the antisystem parties joined in blaming the Weimar Republic for its failure to cope with either crisis.”^[2] When contemporary American commentators draw facile comparisons between Trump voters and Sanders supporters, we encounter just one limitation of mining this aspect of fascism in search of an “essential” soul.

And once in power, fascists largely discard these antiestablishment talking points. Of course, fascists do many drastic and revolutionary things with a state apparatus; as Arendt so artfully put it, the Holocaust can only be understood as a form of “radical evil.” Yet in terms of their transformation of the state, fascists generally left existing structures in place but simply sought to control them, either through replacing them with loyalists or (as more common in Germany) building parallel party structures that essentially carried out the same work while allowing a more traditional civil service bureaucracy to exist. In Italy, in particular, Mussolini tampered so little with some original points of ire (such as the Catholic Church) that some of his original and more puritanical followers had to be either displaced or discarded. “In practice,” writes Paxton, “although fascist regimes did indeed make some breathtaking changes, they left the distribution of property and the economic and social hierarchy largely intact (differing fundamentally from what the word revolution had usually meant since 1789).”^[3] Moreover, gaining power in the first place required corporating and compromising with conservatives (and to a lesser degree, some liberals) in a way which clearly failed to live up to notions of early fascist antipolitics.

The same pattern can be observed in early fascist economic rhetoric versus the reality of policies pursued once in power. While fascists certainly engaged in antibourgeois, even anticapitalist rhetoric in their early organizing days (rhetoric which in Germany was soaked in heavy doses of antisemitism), these talking points failed to make much of a noticeable dent on the economic systems of their nations once they came to power. Paxton puts it clearly: “It turned out in practice that fascists’ anticapitalism was highly selective. … In no domain did the proposals of early fascism differ more from what fascist regimes did in practice than in economic policy.”^[4] Neither is it the case, however, that fascists were simply tools of capital. Rather, they viewed the economy — including its capitalists — as a means to a greater end. “[F]ascist economic policy responded to political priorities, and not to economic rationale.”^[5] This provides a very clearheaded and compelling way to understand the relationship between fascism and capitalism. While I would still consider fascism as a crisis born of capitalism, it does not follow that it was either merely a creature of capital or an inevitable result of its consequences. Fascists did in fact prioritize many things over the bottom line — such as territorial expansion — but they proved to be much more consistent about being antisocialist and antiegalitarian than some of their early rhetoric might have suggested.

I decided to read The Anatomy of Fascism to enrich a lecture I had written on fascism, and it’s hard to imagine a better book for this purpose. Not too long and successful at overviewing the immense historiography without getting bogged down in specialist debates, it should be accessible to undergraduates for both lower and upper division classes. There is much more of value than has been reviewed here — for example, Paxton argues that fascism as we understand it only arises in failed democracies; it is not a traditional tyranny but what authoritarianism mixed with mass politics can look like. He also is careful to understand fascism at its varying stages, rather than trying to distill it into an essence; what fascism “is” at its early mobilizing stages is not the same thing as fascism in power, which relies much more on the consent or complicity of other groups in society than a common understanding of fascism recognizes.

However, its value is of course much more immense than historical understanding; this is a critical book for anyone concerned about the overlap between contemporary far-right movements and the classic fascisms. Paxton is refreshing here in that he avoids being excessively historicist without abandoning a quest for useful definitions. Most refreshing to me, from the perspective of an intellectual historian, is how Paxton engages with the ideas of fascism but without assuming that this is all, or even the primary, place you need to look to understand fascism. Political ideas are political tools, and more often than not, they can be picked up and put down when no longer useful. What a simple idea, to focus as much or more on what fascists actually do, which is of course how it came to play the role of the ultimate possible evil in our modern imaginations in the first place.

This simple insight becomes incredibly relevant to the contemporary right when we consider the massive disconnect between what conservatives say they believe in compared to what policies they actually pursue or choose to condemn. From the religiously inclined sort to the free market disciples, there is little to no consistency to be found; anti-choice activists value life, it seems, right until a baby is actually born and needs medical care and attention, and libertarians believe in freedom in every sphere of life except the one you actually spend most of your days in; at work.

These contradictions result not from confusion among conservatives themselves, self-delusional though they may be; they are built into their political ideology because they serve to make otherwise offensive or patently immoral notions acceptable and legitimate. The ideas are, therefore, no less important for being insincere — and the work of concerned citizens to document how disastrously effective such ideas can be, no less urgent.

^[1] Paxton, 58.

^[2] Paxton, 67.

^[3] Paxton, 141.

^[4] Paxton, 56, 145.

^[5] Paxton, 145.