Kenneth Rufo considers approaching fascism in terms of its rhetorical structures, we might say a rhetorical machine capable of producing belief in a charismatic leader, belief in a collective public, belief in a national body. One particular benefit of this approach: it allows for the adaptability of fascism, for the way it will morph and change. This suggests the possibility of thinking current fascism as a kind reflexive fascism, one that builds from past failures and criticisms to become more deadly, more individous, harder to defeat.
From Ghost in the Wire:
Fascism is a strange, uncanny term, one that seems to morph and mutate at a pace that seems to elude any final definition. As rhetoricians interested in contemporary politics are no doubt aware, fascism is a term that is used far too frequently and far too loosely. Still this conceptual looseness is the condition of possibility that makes fascism such a catch-all appellation. It is difficult to watch the changes going on in the United States, changes that are taking place at both ends of the increasingly unhelpful political spectrum of Left and Right, and not think that perhaps fascism has started to take root.
The truth is that fascism did adapt in order to flourish, and its adaptation required accomplices. It required some form of allegiance with conservative elites in order to successfully install itself as a system of government. It had a consistent rhetorical content, of course – celebration of violence, xenophobia, and the state – but its particular manifestation varied greatly depending on its political context and the stage of its development. Given this reality, how are we to understand fascism today? How are we to understand the possibility for a 21st century fascism, if there is such a thing? This is an incredibly difficult and complex issue, and there are no easy answers to such a question, but I believe that we will not get find an answer if we hold to the belief that newer fascisms will be but mirror images of those fascisms that defined the 20th century. The next generation of fascism, the next evolution, will share certain structures in common, but it will not be the same. Political systems never remain static (no scholar of the American Presidency can see a strict identity between the democracy under Andrew Johnson and that under Ronald Reagan, for example). In the hopes of doing some of the initial preparatory work from which to answer this question, I want to propose that we begin to think through a explicitly “rhetorical structure” to fascism, one that looks to historical fascisms not for what they were but rather for what operations allowed for their taxonomy, for what might be properly fascist about fascism. In so doing, we have to use history as our lodestar and not as our anchor, so that the past might help us to understand and engage future fascist imaginaries without blinding us to their manifestation.
To speak of a rhetorical structure then is to speak of those systems of belief and vocabularies that give credence to and make possible arguments that might facilitate a desire for authoritarian control. Fascism, as the most substantive contribution to politics in the 20th century, as a political phenomenon that appears uniquely and unexpectedly in the 20th century, cannot dissociate itself from the question of populism and from the media environments that made its particular (20th century) populism thinkable. It is, as Robert Paxton argues, “an invention created afresh for the era of mass politics.” With growing suffrage rates and increasingly powerful media technologies, fascists of the 20s and 30s were able to cultivate and complete a sense of mass identity and a publicness that was previously unthinkable in the time of print and even the telegraph. Fascists realized that the public had to be brought into the political process in a way that mobilized (and thus directed) their involvement, and realized that the nascent art of propaganda was one way to do it.
But it would be a mistake to think that the intentions and skills of the fascist leaders and their chief propagandists were principally responsible for explaining the growth of fascism as an imaginary. And it does the human sciences no credit to reduce the masses to stupid or irrational actors in the hopes of explaining away the fascist enigma. As George Mosse and Zygmunt Bauman have shown, from the rise of fascism and well into the execution of the final solution, the parties involved believed in the implicit rationality of their behavior and their beliefs. Instead, and this is where rhetoric can offer a powerful supplement to the historical, political, and philosophical work done thus far, we need to do better in understanding what structural conditions of emergence make a fascist imaginary possible even in the absence of a galvanizing, charismatic leader. Why? Because the belief in the charismatic leader is itself a product of fascism, and not its producer, which means that any explanation that centers on the spellbinding oratory of Hitler or Mussolini is like putting the cart before the unicorn—a mystification that explains the rise of Hitler within fascism without explaining the conditions by which fascism itself was thinkable. In other words, it explains the appeal of an orator in the absence of an underlying understanding of the context that structures that orator's popular reception.
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