Superficially, he seems to have borrowed a number of fascist themes for his presidential campaign: xenophobia, racial prejudice, fear of national weakness and decline, aggressiveness in foreign policy, a readiness to suspend the rule of law to deal with supposed emergencies. But its emerging success nowadays under Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, is at least partly due to the party’s effort to distance itself from its street-fighting, Holocaust-denying past.ĭonald Trump is a special case altogether. The National Front, of course, had its roots in Vichy France, and its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, long expressed contempt for the French republican tradition. It is individualism run amok, a denial of any community obligations, the very opposite of a fascist appeal to the supremacy of communal obligations over individual autonomy. With its opposition to all forms of public authority and its furious rejection of any obligation to others, it is better called right-wing anarchism. The Tea Party is at the farthest remove from fascism’s state-enhancing nature. At most, we might identify in the Islamic State as a sub-species of religious totalitarianism but it is fundamentally distinct from classical fascism’s centralized secular dictatorships and glamourized leaders.

The fascist leaders and regimes did their best to subordinate religion to state purposes. The fascists were nationalists, rooted in nation-states and devoted to the strengthening and aggrandizement of those states. Central authority remains inconspicuous, and policy and operational initiative is dispersed to local cells, without the need for a geographic core. The Islamic State is less a state than a would-be caliphate, devoted to the supremacy of a religion in a way that cuts across and even threatens existing nation-states. But there are fundamental differences as well.

Its followers’ wills and personal identities are subordinated to the movement, all the way to the ultimate self-abnegation: suicide. The movement that calls itself the Islamic State may seem to fit this template rather well. To international socialism the fascists proposed a national socialism, and while they crushed socialist parties and abolished independent labour unions, they never for a moment questioned the state’s obligation to maintain social welfare (except for internal enemies such as Jews, of course). The fascists set themselves up (and acquired elite support) as the only effective barrier to the other political movement that surged following World War I: communism.

Robert paxton the anatomy of fascism