A Fuzzy Totalitarianism
The total incoherence of fascism is its greatest strength
Umberto Eco, an Italian philosopher, political commentator, and generally hyper-intelligent man, wrote as clearly as one can write about 20th century fascism, a monstrously and maddeningly incoherent ideology, if it can even be deemed an ideology.
Eco in 1995 – shortly after history had ended, when fascism belonged to children’s history books – wrote eloquently about Ur-facism, or “eternal fascism” that “cannot be organized into a system” no matter how much scholars and historians and political philosophers wanted it to be. Eco was one of just a few who lived through the horrors of 20th century European fascism who rejected the notion that one can make sense of fascism. It can’t be understood like liberalism or conservatism or libertarianism or socialism can be understood, Eco said.
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That fascism in the 20th century made no sense gave it mass appeal and confounded its opponents. Ur-fascism, Eco wrote, can be “defined as irrationalism.” And good luck opposing an inherently irrational political movement, Eco wrote in so many words.
I took a stab in 2024 of making sense of the 21st century fascism that infects global politics via social media algorithms controlled by fascists and fascist collaborators and came away with a conclusion similar to Eco’s: The sheer incoherence of 21st century fascism – particularly the curdled American version – is its superpower. In a calcified republic ruled by power structures made unresponsive by the country’s fanatical plutocrats, opponents of fascism were never going to effectively counter the threat without a shock to the system, a poke in the eye, a punch in the gut. The incoherence of American fascism has proven unstoppable for much of the past decade. The aesthetic, content-centric assault on the country in this second Trump term seems to have been the poke in the eye we required, if every single special election result over the past 18 months is to be believed.
Denny Carter
Probably Eco, who died a few weeks into Trump’s first term, would be less than surprised by these ten disorienting years of American flailing against Ur-fascism, rising from its slumber with the strength of algorithms that shape reality and break brains of every kind.
Americans paying even passing attention to current events might see Eco's description of fascism as "fuzzy totalitarianism" and nod knowingly because nothing makes much fucking sense today. An age of societal and political and cultural fragmentation has brought us the fragmented version of fascism, updated for an era in which everyone is online all the time and life is lived through the screen of your choosing.
"Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions," Eco wrote in his famed Ur-fascism essay.
Fascist movements in the 20th century combined monarchy with revolution (our current monarchs, the Silicon Valley tech-fascists and the beleaguered working-class man sick of all this woke white); "absolute state control with a free market" (Trump bending every major CEO to his will with threats of financial annihilation paired with a feigned belief in libertarian-style free market economics); support of the Christian church paired with "state education extolling violence" (Trump as a messenger from God alongside a belief that all enemies shall be vanquished). You get the idea. Eco's analysis holds up well in this era of 21st century fascism.
Denny Carter
You, like me, want shit to make sense. So you read and watch and think and you come up with rationales for why the Trump regime does what it does: Why it invades cities governed by Democrats, why it re-segregates American society, why it manipulates the stock market in favor of its oligarch allies, why it randomly kidnaps another nation's president and launches a war in the Middle East that was always going to be a generational quagmire. You ask these questions because you want their actions to make sense. This, you believe, will make the world slightly less terrifying. Eco would probably urge you to stop this and understand the nonsensical and deeply-rooted impulses of fascist thought.
It is, Eco said, a cult of tradition for tradition's sake, a worshipping of technology as a means of domination and subjugation, and a centering of "popular elitism," which states emphatically that "every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party." There are qualities of fascism lying on the periphery of these three features, all combining to create a force that cannot be properly analyzed like a traditional political movement with a coherent ideology and coherent, clearly-stated policies and goals.
Fascists desire power because they want to wield power. They want to shower their enemies – both real and perceived – with pain and misery and, yes, death because they like doing these things. Their grand plan in the 21st century is to make you upset on the internet and fuck you up if you stand in the way. That's it. There's nothing beyond that.
“They ask us what is our program,” Mussolini said in 1922, after abandoning every guiding principle that had defined Italian fascism from 1919 to 1921. “Our program is simple. We want to govern Italy.”
Umberto Eco
I see folks on Bluesky every day losing their minds trying to understand the mind of a Trump supporter. I've done the same and it leads nowhere in a hurry, leaves you frustrated as hell, and generates the kind of dooming on which fascist movements thrive.
Over the past couple weeks this longing to understand the twisted mind that can mangle itself into backing a plutocratic monster who has nothing but hatred for working people and the United States more generally has turned to Trump's war against Iran, declared without the consent of Congress, which under Republican leadership has deleted itself from existence.
Eco's writing on fascism might as well address this current conflict directly. It's as if Eco is listening to the regime officials and fascist podcasters and online influencers telling their stupid flocks that their enemies – this month Iran is the enemy – are simultaneously getting their shit wrecked by the almighty American war machine and on the verge of sending the most advanced brand of nukes across the ocean into every major American city.
The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
It does not make sense because it isn't meant to make sense. Fascists say what they need to say to keep their followers in line, something the Trump regime has struggled to do in recent months. The war against Iran will never make sense so stop trying to make it make sense. A fourth-rate cable news talking head is our secretary of defense; incoherence isn't a feature of the U.S. government, it is the only feature.
Denny Carter
I think expecting fascism to be understandable is an outsized part of why it has taken so many years to properly respond to the threat against constitutional democracy. If we just read one more book or one more news article or watched one more explainer video on YouTube, we would grasp what the fuck is going on around us, the thinking went. No part of American society was designed to push back against the incoherence of fascism, especially a mainstream media apparatus made toothless through generations of Republican whining about bias against their hideous causes.
Eco's mid-90s warning went unheard by western democracies. It's my hope that the lessons of 21st century fascism will stick in the hearts and minds of people who thought the threat to democracy would be easier to spot. Accepting that fascism is immune to your analysis – and mine – is a good first step in that direction.
"Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, 'I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares,'" Eco wrote. "Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world."
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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