Is the Alt-Right Fascist?

Is the alt-right fascist? The ideological overlaps between the modern alt-right, and to some extent contemporary European and American right wing populism and inter-war fascist movements are  certainly striking. These include conspiracy driven explanations of world events, ethno-nationalism, a cult of masculinity, demonization of outsider groups, the belief that liberal or progressive values are at the root of social decay, the tendency towards idolization of strongmen, the desire to replace institutional rationality and the rule of law with common sense action to name a few. But there are clear differences also. Racial ideology, biological racism, or racial determinism, as theoretical frameworks that purport to explain historical events, are less at the forefront of the contemporary alt-right (though not absent). Racism, on the other hand, plays quite a significant role. 

How, therefore, are we to evaluate this question? Firstly, it must be noted that it is not an entirely an analytic one. Very few people would be happy to openly identify with a fascist movement, so the question is to some extent about whether an political movement is viewed as legitimate or not (a sillier variant of this, on the right, is the reminder that the term “National Socialist” contains the word ‘socialist). 

Secondly, it is worth remembering that the fascist movements of the inter-war period were in some ways ideologically divergent. Racial theory was one, if not the defining feature of German National Socialism. With Italian Fascism, at least in the 1920’s, this was not really the case. This is not to trivialize the horrors of the Italian Fascist experience, or deny the significance Mussolini’s apparent conversion to racial ideology in the mid to late 1930’s, ultimately resulting in the implementation of brutal race laws in 1938. But racial ideology was not part of the foundational mythology of Italian fascism in the way it was of National Socialism, however we are to understand the regime’s ideological shift.  Anti-clericalism, on the other hand, was a foundational idea of Italian fascism. The same can hardly be said to be true of Spanish, Portuguese or Austrian (pre-Nazi) fascism, all heavily supportive of Catholicism.

Moreover, as Mark Mazower’s brilliant Dark Continent shows, some of the peculiar (and grotesque) obsessions of interwar fascist movements had more general appeal at the time.  Concern with falling birth rates was near universal in Europe following the First World War, and pro-natalist policies were by no means unique to fascist countries. Eugenics drew support from figures as enlightened as John Maynard Keynes, and virulent anti-semitism was not confined to fascist countries.

Finally, the nature of political movements is not purely about their ideology, but the social, political and technological context in which they find themselves. Here the contrasts could not be clearer. Interwar fascism always required, in combination with popular support, the use of military or paramilitary force. There is nothing analogous to the paramilitaries of inter-war Germany or Italy in contemporary Europe or North America, though one could imagine something similar quickly arising in the US due to prevalence of firearms.

Where does all this leave us, with regard to the initial question? As a rhetorical device, the comparison is powerful, and, I think, important. As a starting point for political analysis, it has some use too, but not without qualifications. It can help understand certain developments, traits, and possibilities by providing a set of useful comparisons with a degree of family resemblance. This should not be to the exclusion of other, more contextually specific forms of analysis, even less leave us with a kind of deterministic pessimism about the prospects for resisting this wave of right wing populism.