Patrick Lawrence: This Isn’t Fascism

Political confusion and deluded notions of fascism colored Max Azzarello’s tragic death by self-immolation.

On April 19, just as a court in Lower Manhattan finished selecting a jury to hear the farcical “hush money” case against Donald Trump, a 37-year-old Floridian named Max Azzarello set himself ablaze across the street from the courthouse.

Azzarello, by subsequent accounts, was a peaceable man, an agreeable neighbor, and was much taken up with questions of social justice. He was also no slouch on the academic side: Azzarello had a degree in anthropology from the University of North Carolina and a master’s in urban planning from Rutgers.

To go by the mainstream press reports, Azzarello seems to have lost it somewhat after his mother died two years ago this month. But it is not anyone’s place, other than those close to him, to go any more deeply, or even this far, into the man’s psychiatric profile.

Max Azzarello did have something to say to the rest of us as he stood in the park across from the Center Street Courthouse, however. Just before setting himself ablaze, he held up a placard that read, in all caps, “TRUMP IS WITH BIDEN AND THEY’RE ABOUT TO FASCIST COUP US.”

We ought to pay attention to this. An apparently capable man, by all accounts a compassionate man, died dreading an imminent Fascist takeover in America. This makes me very angry. To go straight to my point: A human life is wasted in consequence of a ridiculous, paranoiac idea that has for some time circulated among us either out of foolishness or for the most cynical of political motives.

I was very sad to learn of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation before the Israeli Embassy in Washington on February 25. I was sad to read of Max Azzarello’s final act, too, but in a different way.

Bushnell died for “what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers,” as he put it in his final moments. An Air Force enlistee, Bushnell declared he could “no longer be complicit in genocide.” His last words were “Free Palestine!” One would rather Bushnell were still with us, but his was an honorable death.

Azzarello died in a state of confusion and delusion, and I draw this conclusion from the message on his placard. His death honored no one. I will go so far as to say there are many among us who dishonorably bear responsibility for it.

Readers of this column may have noted over the months that I am a stickler for nomenclature. To name things properly is essential to our understanding. It enables us to act, if we are so inclined, because we are clear in our minds as to what is to be done.

Misnomers on a Sinking Ship

To name things improperly causes all kinds of problems. It leaves us confused and deluded, as in the case of Max Azzarello. It can paralyze us. Or if we choose to act, we are likely to act wrongly. As in the case of Max Azzarello.

There are so many misnomers abroad among us, amid the panic on our sinking ship, one sometimes grows weary of language altogether. Russia is an aggressor, China is an imperialist power, Israel is a democracy, and so on through the Orwellian lexicon: War is peace, etc.

On the domestic side, the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol were an attempted coup. Or an insurrection. We have Donald Trump is a tyrant. We have Donald Trump is a dictator — “King Trump,” I am now reading in The New York Times. And we have it that America, as per the late Max Azzarello and countless other like him, is on the eve of a Fascist takeover.

Much of this, let’s call it the pollution of public discourse, comes from the liberal authoritarians. Rachel Maddow, to take one of the more pitiful cases, wants us to think Trump the dictator will end elections, destroy the courts, and render the Congress powerless. The MSNBC commentator has actually said these things on air.

One-man rule is the theme, if you listen to the Rachel Maddows. The evident intent is to cast Donald Trump in the most fearsome light possible, as it becomes clear Trump could well defeat President Biden at the polls come Nov. 5.

We can mark this stuff down to crude politicking in an election year, surely. There is nothing new in it. But this is not the point.

There is a straight line between this relentless, politically motivated fear-mongering and the thought that Fascism in some American incarnation is hard upon us — a straight line, this is to say, from our Rachel Maddows to the self-immolation of Max Azzarello. This is the point.

Definitions of Fascism

I cannot quite tell what people mean when they speak of fascism in our current circumstances. And so far as one can make out, a lot of people who use the term, and maybe most, do not know what they mean, either.

Fascism, in the generic usage, arose in the years after World War I, and for a long time there were more versions of it than one could count. There was Hitler’s, of course, and a variant in Austria. The Croatians had the Ustaša, the Portuguese, under Salazar, had their Estado Novo, and Spain had its Falangists. You had fascist movements in France, Scandinavia, Latin America.

These shared a common ideology, but there were as many differences as similarities, one movement to the next. And so “fascism” gets a small “f” if we mean the broad interwar phenomenon.

Fascist movements were invariably and vigorously anti-Marxist. They considered parliamentary democracy a waste of time, there was a reactionary aspect to all of them. They thought in terms of totalizing mobilizations of the population. Twentieth-century liberalism was out of the question.

But the differences were often pronounced. Some fascist movements were secular, some put religion at the core of the ideology. António de Oliveira Salazar, the Portuguese dictator from the 1930s through most of the 1960s, had no use for the godlessness of Nazism (although he borrowed plentifully from the Reich).

Some fascists thought the Enlightenment was a mistake, while others were highly rational as they served their constituencies. Some were populist, others capitalist. The Nazis claimed to be socialist, but depended on Germany’s big industrialists.

The first Fascist government was Benito Mussolini’s, which came to power in 1922. It gets a capital “F” because Il Duce named his party the National Fascists. When you read The Doctrine of Fascism, Mussolini’s 1932 treatise, it is clear his thinking was in the “new man” mode fashionable at the time. “Like all sound political conceptions, Fascism is action and it is thought,” Mussolini began. And a short while later:

“Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his energies; it wants him to be manfully aware of the difficulties besetting him and ready to face them. It conceives of life as a struggle in which it behooves a man to win for himself a really worthy place, first of all by fitting himself (physically, morally, intellectually) to become the implement required for winning it. As for the individual, so for the nation, and so for mankind.”

Mussolini’s Fascism is a complicated read, I have found. “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power,” he once said. Did he mean the corporatization of the economy as we use this term?

In theory no, in practice yes, I would say. Corporatism refers to a system wherein people are represented in the polity according to their interests or functions — farmers, industrial workers, business-owners, and so on. It has something in common with the Medieval guild system — which Mussolini referenced in his Doctrine.

But by the mid­-1930s, Il Duce’s intent on the economic side was to erase the distinction between political and corporate power precisely by way of the merger he spoke of. The state sector, was, by then, very large.

Is there anything in this pencil-sketch of a century-old ideology that should threaten us? With this history in view, brief and unscholarly as it is, what do we think of the placard Max Azzarello held up in Lower Manhattan just before committing what amounts to suicide?

I suppose it might make America’s many-sided crisis — political, economic, social — more comprehensible if we name it to suggest it has a frightening antecedent. But this is profoundly counterproductive. So long as we, some of us, go on persuading ourselves we face the threat of fascism or Fascism, either one, we simply obscure what it is we actually face.

We name it wrongly, to return to my earlier point. I do not see fascism in any form anywhere on America’s horizon. To call it such is to render ourselves incapable of acting effectively.

What we face has no precedent in our history, it seems to me. It is a thoroughly decadent form of democracy — elite, Hamiltonian democracy as against popular, Jeffersonian democracy. Nothing too exotic here.

Liberal Authoritarianism

De Tocqueville warned us nearly two centuries ago about “soft despotism,” meaning the liberal authoritarianism that now confronts us. I term this apple-pie authoritarianism because it is a peculiarly, even uniquely American phenomenon — which was the prescient French traveler’s point.

Martin Wolf, a Financial Times columnist, published a piece a few weeks ago under the headline “Fascism has changed, but it is not dead.” Wolf cited Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist, who, in turn, published a long essay called “Eternal Fascism” in The New York Review of Books many years ago.

Social frustration, blind allegiance to leaders, a suspicion of difference, hostility toward ostentatious wealth, a populist belief in the sovereignty of the populace: These are the worrisome signs of an incipient return to the Fascism of the 1920s and 1930s, according to these two. (And I assume Eco meant Mussolini’s, cap “F,” as he served in a Fascist youth brigade of some kind.)

What is Wolf, leaning heavily on Eco, writing about? These are subjective features that describe who knows how many societies at any given time. To answer my own question, Wolf uses Eco’s précis of his memories of Mussolini to cast Donald Trump as a Fascist threat — his very own outing in the Rachel Maddow mode.

Of the structural characteristics of fascism or Fascism, Wolf, and before him Eco, seem to have more or less nothing to say. Why is this?

Wolf might have engaged, for instance, the extreme over-corporatization of America’s political economy and the near-impossibility of finding where the Fortune 500 ends and the U.S. government begins. But this would have implicated liberals as well as conservatism in the soft despotism that, indeed, besets the United States.

Considering Max Azzarello’s placard one more time — “Trump is with Biden”– he seems to have got that right. How sad that he mistook what he thought he saw for fascism. He would otherwise still be with us.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.

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