The Anatomy of Fascism

An immensely learned consideration of the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain. The folks at MoveOn.org notwithstanding, George Bush is no Hitler, John Ashcroft likely no fascist. The looseness of terms and equations disguises the complexity of the deadly far-right ideology, which Paxton (Emeritus, Social Sciences/Columbia Univ.; Europe in the Twentieth Century, not reviewed, etc.) defines, quite comprehensively, as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. A mouthful, but Paxton ably demonstrates why precision is wanted here, having spent the preceding chapters analyzing the many brands of fascism on the world stage. The best known, of course, is the first: Mussolini's pompous, theatrical regime, which came to power a full decade before Hitler's; as Paxton writes, Mussolini coined the term fascismo and set the tone for many a dictatorship to come. These allied but subtly different fascisms shared a radicalism that belied their socialist origins, which has caused some historians to regard fascism as anticapitalist at heart. Not so, Paxton argues: Fascism was at once a revolt against the left and against liberal individualism and a slap in the face of old-school, elitist conservatism, whose exponents wanted obedience and deference, not dangerous popular mobilization of the sort that working-class fascism drew on. But, all the same, it was a very willing crony of big business, which was quite happy with the anti-leftist new man that once threatened to rule the world. A solid contribution to political literature, and of much interest to students of 20th-century history. (Kirkus Reviews)