By DIEGO VIANA*

Electorally, fascism has never been so strong. In the USA, Brazil and India, all highly populated countries, it obtained votes of over 45%, surpassing the maximum of 37% of the Nazis in Germany in 1932.

1.

The controversy over the fascist (or neo-fascist) nature of Donald Trump's candidacy and the regime he intended to establish had already been rekindled when his puppeteer Elon Musk made that Nazi salute – in full – during the inauguration of the new American president. Unsurprisingly (but there should have been surprise), the media and right-thinking people treated the episode as a continuation of the controversy, not its definitive conclusion.

Ultimately, it's not so bad: it would be useless to have widespread awareness that we are facing yet another institutional advance of fascism (an enormous advance, considering the weight of the United States) without taking advantage of the opportunity to better investigate what is implied in the current configuration of the fascist movements that have been gaining space and power in various parts of the world.

In fact, in form, Elon Musk's gesture exactly reproduces the movement of the Nazis in their salutes, with chest beating and everything: the salute not only to the leader, but to his victory (Victory). However, in a deeply significant paradox, what is most fascist about the spoiled billionaire's attitude is not the salute itself, but the intention with which it was performed. In this madness, more than method, there is calculation. In other words: the act of reproducing the Nazi gesture is what gives the fascist spirit of the government that is being inaugurated in Washington a clear example.

What does this mean? Let's see. All the reactions we actually encountered could have been expected and were undoubtedly anticipated by Elon Musk. I have already mentioned the lucid and balanced ones who, in the style of New York Times, cast doubt on the nature of what we all saw: “Was that aggressive gesture, identical to the Nazi salute, really a Nazi salute? It is controversial…”

There were also apologists who, while clearly recognizing what was at stake, tried insincerely to draw a distinction between the gesture of Hitler's followers and a (somewhat folkloric) "Roman salute" - which was exactly what the Nazis took as their source of inspiration. There are two other groups: the neo-Nazis who immediately recognized the sign and felt represented; and the whole range of anti-fascists, from the left to people who merely still value the minimum of decency, who were horrified, feeling added to an unpleasant sense of impotence.

It is hard not to notice that this game of is/isn’t/isn’t/is it anchored in a very precise and well-executed production of cacophony: during that speech by Elon Musk at Donald Trump’s inauguration, there was no context whatsoever for any gesture, with any meaning whatsoever, that involved beating one’s chest and raising one’s arm. Furthermore, not even a modern-day reactionary, no matter how “provocative” he might be, would risk greeting his audience with a Nazi salute, not only because of the meaning that the image carries, but also because the gesture refers to a symbolism of masses gathered together that is no longer ours.

The only reason for making such a gesture at that precise moment was precisely to exploit the semiotic charge of the reference to Nazism, playing on the pusillanimous reception and the masked ambiguity of its author's intention. In today's click-oriented environment, where expression rarely seeks communication but almost always impact, cacophony is a triumph, not a mistake.

Elon Musk has certainly provoked, with full awareness, a wave of controversies, recognitions and criticisms that, without reaching any concrete resolution, an effective widespread repudiation, capable of leading to the dismissal of the very powerful magnate minister – after all, Donald Trump would have full power to remove the person who is officially his subordinate, if he repudiated a Nazi reference of his in public –, could only reach one result: to spread even more cacophony (what does this mean?) and reinforce the feeling of absurdity (where have we ended up?) and impotence (no one is going to do anything?).

2.

It turns out that promoting cacophony is one of the hallmarks of fascism of all time. It is probably the first major sign, perhaps even the most unequivocal, that some social phenomenon is ultimately fascist or leads directly to it. Anyone who enters politics and grows in it using the tactic of cacophony, confusion, and communication breakdown is definitely, undeniably, a fascist.

In Italy, Germany and also in countries where they did not take power, fascist leaders have always played with the lines of expression very carefully, proposing absurdities and then retreating or advancing according to the response (feedback) they received. Outside of government or within it, fascism can increase or reduce its dose of anticlericalism, racism, xenophobia, sexism, anti-communism, etc., depending on the impact that these messages provoke in the public. We cannot forget how much fascism is linked to spectacle.

In fact, this characteristic is one of the elements that makes it so difficult to define. It is no coincidence that the Portuguese historian João Bernardo chose the term “labyrinth” for the title of his titanic work on the subject: in his terms, studying fascism in depth is to get entangled in dead-end, meaningless paths: “like someone who, locked in a house, looks for the exit to the street, the garden, the sun, but with each door he opens he only enters new rooms and bedrooms, with other doors, which lead to other rooms and bedrooms. It is a nightmare, obviously”. In the age of social media, it is clear that this strategy of vertigo gains enormous power. But it is not only because the message reaches more people and more quickly: it is also because reactions can be evaluated and the message modulated almost instantly. That is why we continue to fall into traps such as “this time they went too far” or “now they will lose support”, which we have said and heard so many times since 2018 in Brazil.

It has been decreed many times, for example, that fascism does not have a program, only the impulse, only the action. But there have been fascisms “with a program”, starting with Mein Kampf and for now, finishing with the 2025 Project. It has also been stated that fascism is totalitarian – in fact, the term arose to critically refer to Mussolini's first measures and was quickly adopted by the dictator in a famous speech in 1925. But the Italian regime shared power, quite concretely, with the Church and the monarchy, and at all times sought to “normalize itself”.

Is Italian fascism deficient in fascism? On the other hand, some very authoritarian regimes are only partly classifiable as fascist, because strictly speaking they are classic dictatorships, but at the same time they mobilize an enormous imaginary and several rigorously fascist political techniques: Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, Pinochet in Chile.

In Robert Paxton's famous book Anatomy of fascism (2004), for example, this difficulty is explored in depth, leading to some interesting embarrassments, especially in the case of Franco: is the recourse to the Falange, a strictly fascist group, enough to make the regime as a whole fascist? After all, the dictator relied on the traditional institutions of the church and the army to govern and sidelined the Falangist leaders. With this, Robert Paxton excludes Franco from the list of fascists; but if the support of traditional conservative institutions is enough to make Franco a non-fascist dictator, what can be said of Mussolini himself? Furthermore, are the chauvinistic discourse, the love of violence and the cult of the leader that permeated the regime from the landing in 1936 until the dictator's death in 1975 any less fascist than the cases in Italy and Germany? And so on.

Faced with the difficulties of conceptualization imposed by fascism as a regime, government or coordinated and historically determined political movement, authors often turn to examining fascism as a social phenomenon. This is what happens with Robert Paxton himself, but it is also what we find in Umberto Eco’s famous lecture on “eternal fascism”, where he presents the idea of ​​14 characteristics that configure “Urfascism”, that fascism “of the origins” or “of the depths” – but which are not always present in a particular movement or regime. Hence Eco’s argument about “family resemblance”, in the style of Wittgenstein: groups that have different parts of the listed categories belong to the same set of fascisms, just like relatives who inherited non-coincidental traits from their ancestors.

But this is also a too comfortable move, not least because it is not faithful to the name Eco chose: the prefix “Ur” presupposes something that provokes an emergence, a consequence; there must be, in the idea of ​​an “Ur”-fascism, a constitutive movement that is absent from the list. On the contrary, Eco limits himself to listing traits that have been identified with fascism (especially what he witnessed as an Italian child), but that can be found in any conservatism.

Without going into the intricacies of the emergence of a palpable fascism in the social field, the list seems arbitrary and somewhat redundant, since several items overlap in part. For example: fascism is nationalist and worships violence; but how does a nationalist individual develop the fascination for aggression that we most recognize as fascist? Eco's list does not help us answer this – and it does not even have that ambition, of course.

3.

Another character who has been revived in our times of resurgent fascism is Félix Guattari, with or without the company of Gilles Deleuze. Guattari has the enormous advantage of thinking in terms of desire and micropolitics, which strengthens that genetic perspective that we miss in Eco. There are some texts that develop this perspective in a way that remains very rich even today, such as “Micropolitics and Segmentarity”, with Deleuze, in A Thousand Plateaus, the conference “Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist” (1973), or the article “Micropolitics of Fascism”, published in The Molecular Revolution (1981)

Félix Guattari points out a fruitful path for the current case because he is the author who examines fascism most deeply as a tendency, not as a form or historical episode. He arrives at this theme through a critique of classical psychoanalysis, seeing in the manifestations of fascist attitudes a production of desire that, instead of expanding relationships and connections, creates barriers and castrations. Using a language that is not that of Félix Guattari, we can say that fascist desire produces, but is entropic; it may sound paradoxical, but this is precisely how fascism absorbs and exhausts the energies of the social field, which is essentially multiple and metastable. It is the desire to police, to control, to segment, to sectorize. In potential, there is a tendential fascism in everyday life, which leads Foucault to name his preface Anti-Oedipus, by Deleuze and Guattari, “Introduction to Non-Fascist Life”.

If we return to Eco and other authors who have dealt with the subject, there seems to be, first and foremost, a phenomenology of fascism, perhaps involuntary, in many works of history and political science. That is, their attempts at definition or description point to emergent phenomena, which arise on the path to fascism and in its establishment. These emergencies always involve something of the order of tendency: fascism leads to chauvinism, inspires the rejection of modernity, encourages attacks on intellectuals and artists, etc. Or, in the opposite direction: when the tendency towards chauvinism, anti-modernity, and attacks on artists and intellectuals flourishes… then there is a tendency towards fascism.

This tendential character suggests something that, put in direct and simple terms, seems a bit banal: fascism feeds on elements available in the social field. In other words, on tendencies, precisely. Guattari, writing with Deleuze, expresses this idea with an enigmatic and provocative formula: in fascism, they say, “a war machine is installed in every hole, in every niche”. In other words, fascism promotes centralization and purification, but its main nourishment is the diversity of singular impulses of division, segmentation, domination and exclusion: “rural fascism and fascism of the city or neighborhood, fascism of youth and fascism of ex-combatants, fascism of the left and the right, of couples, of families, of schools or of government departments”, they list.

If we take, for example, the classifications of fascism as characterized by nationalism and xenophobia, traditionalism and patriarchy, it is not difficult to see manifestations of the same tendency. Let us begin by remembering that the term “nation”, used today basically to refer to the nation-state or ethnic groups, originally referred to any group cohesive around the same principle. It can, in fact, be ethnic, linguistic and national – so that peoples without a defined territory are nations – but it has also been religious, ideological, etc. As Habermas points out, for many centuries scholars and students of the same university discipline were called “nation”.

So all these visible forms of fascism refer to a desire for unity and cohesion that may concern the “homeland,” the “family,” the “people,” or all of these – deep down, it doesn’t matter. On the other side of the coin is the need to weaken the other or the different, whether in terms of race, language, sexual behavior, gender identity, etc. Everything that is deviant, and we must take seriously the movement implicit in the notion of deviance, which involves bifurcations, the creation of new paths, the introduction of relationships between poles that are intrinsically different, a reality of greater complexity.

In the first half of the last century, this type of tendency was known as “communitarian,” in works such as those of Tönnies, Bergson, or Simondon. Perhaps this is not the best word to use today, but what we should retain is this idea of ​​a closure in oneself, of a search for unity that excludes otherness as much as possible. Once again, none of these manifestations alone is capable of determining the fascist character of someone, of a group, or even of a movement. The “purifying” tendency itself can be found in countless groups and movements, without us calling them fascist—although it is always reductive and sclerotic. But it is possible to say that this is the first fascistizing step, a kind of hard core without which fascism would be impossible.

4.

Before proceeding, it is important to make an important observation about all these categories that manifest the unifying, communitarian, purifying tendency that sustains fascism. It is important to understand that these categories are not well defined, nor are they filled with a meaning that truly communicates with reality (which is always confused, dirty, hybrid). What the fascist loves is always abstract. Thus, if the fascist says “homeland,” he thinks of emblems such as the flag, the coat of arms, or the anthem; it is not the common living space of a people who share certain economic, linguistic, and cultural relations.

The same goes for the fascist notion of “people,” which has nothing to do with the population itself, with its experiences, manifestations, and suffering. One cannot in any way confuse fascist nationalism, abstract and entropic, with the anti-imperialist nationalism of a Brizola, for example: it is the difference between “loving the country” and aiming for shared prosperity.

We have already begun to glimpse where the strength of the cacophony in fascism comes from, in direct connection with its protean and abstract aspect. We must say it clearly: the perspective of fascism is always an impossible horizon, simply because such perfect unity, such purity, does not exist, it is obvious. But proposing something that does not exist and cannot be achieved is perfectly viable, as long as one can work with malleable signs, to the point that each group in society, even each individual, can project onto them whatever they desire, whatever their fantasy.

Fascist communication is dubious and absurd because it is not made to deliver meaning, but to receive it. Contrary to what it may seem, fascism does not propagate; rather, it absorbs. I do not want to repeat here everything that Letícia Cesarino wrote in The World Upside Down, but the way social media algorithms are organized seems to be designed to favor this communication that uses noise as raw material to create signals and embraces the absurd.

Let’s take, for example, a statement that has been quite common: when someone is criticized for repeating some racist, misogynistic, xenophobic or other proposition, they immediately respond: “So now everything is fascism?” In a way, the reaction has its meaning, although not exactly what the person who utters it intends. After all, racism is racism, misogyny is misogyny and xenophobia is xenophobia, each of these attitudes condemnable in itself. Wouldn’t adding the category of “fascism” be redundant or excessive?

It turns out that when we understand fascism as a tendency, not as a classificatory category, we understand something that is usually contradictory: for there to be fascism, and even a lot of fascism, it is not necessary for anyone to be a fascist. Strictly speaking, it is possible to imagine a society completely given over to fascism but composed only of perfect democrats. It is enough for the castrating tendencies to prevail over the connective ones.

It is thanks to this malleability that fascism manages to form a sufficiently cohesive movement for a sufficiently long period: it captures these entropic tendencies, in the different forms they may take, already available in the social field, and connects them. The most successful fascism is the one that manages to link the most disparate, even contradictory, worldviews. Religious fanatics arm in arm with militiamen, ultraliberals embraced by micro-entrepreneurs from the outskirts of the city, and so on. As long as each of these groups can imagine that the leader's message actually perfectly reflects their conception, and not that of the other cells, the movement flourishes.

We find the latency of fascism once again. No surprise there. The aspiration to immaculateness, to perfect identity, is a common tendency, in fact quite natural, in the social field. There are expectations of behavior, for example, of a certain group, which are sometimes taken too seriously: “every x acts in such a way”; “x who respects himself does such a thing”; “whoever doesn’t do this and that is not really x”… and so on. This type of thinking is limiting, but it is not fascist in itself. What is still missing is an impulse to move into action. Once all its confusion is cleared, what remains for us to find the “fascist message” is the injunction to make the above sentences a concrete reality: “every x will act in such a way”; “x will always do such a thing”; “there will be no x who does not fulfill his obligation to do this and that”…

From this perspective, it is this need to take action that has served to associate the emergence of organized and sufficiently strong fascist movements, as a concrete social and political possibility, with moments of crisis, in particular the imminence of a victory of the left. The middle classes feel their small privileges threatened and the dominant classes see a concrete risk to their property. Unable to respond directly to the fury of the masses, they turn to the fascists, who, like no one else, articulate violence with an alternative discourse on the left – generally nationalist and/or religious.

It was undoubtedly like this in 1919, with the return of the trenches and the dismantling of the war economy, as recounted by Clara Mattei in The Order of Capital. Perhaps even more so in the early 1930s, when the attempt at an industrial recovery in Germany was stifled in its cradle by the Great Depression. Let us leave for later the case of the 2010s, which has often been treated as an exception, because there would have been no imminent triumph of the left, at least not a revolutionary one.

For now, it is worth adding that, outside of crises, the fascist himself, that is, the one who carries out the propositions of the previous paragraph with all his might, is considered ridiculous – and with good reason, I don’t even need to say. But the threat to living standards, especially to small privileges, is the serpent’s egg, which begins with the search for scapegoats, passes through the complicity of the powerful who feel their power is threatened, the cowardice of those who could oppose but think that ridicule will never be able to gain a position of respect, and culminates in the often organic emergence of leaders who combine radicalism and charisma.

5.

There remains the question of the crisis that fuels current fascism, “late fascism” (Alberto Toscano) or “neofascism”. One difficulty that remains even with Guattari is precisely the historical inscription of fascism. As Paxton (among others) says, there is no fascism before the 20th century, because it is a phenomenon of the industrial era, of the urban middle classes and of the mass media.

This is why it is not even permitted to speak of fascism in the 1848th century: the absence of large demonstrations called by radio excludes, for example, Napoleon III in 1851-1920, with his articulation of conservatives and lumpens, his recourse to groups of paramilitary ruffians and other traits that, when they occurred after XNUMX, we immediately identify with fascists. It also excludes equally fanatical movements, usually of religious inspiration, that existed in previous centuries and occasionally seized power, causing great violence – say, someone like Savonarola.

The same question can be asked about the present: if we cannot speak of fascism before 1918, are we facing the same phenomenon today, in the age of atomized digital communication, of the industry that has elevated just-in-time to a global scale, of the urban precariat? Or are we facing something entirely new (deserving of another name) or only partially so (justifying the use of “neo-fascism” – but then we would call Napoleon III and the Savonarolas of history “proto-fascists”?)

Historically, Paxton is circumscribing fascism to those movements that followed World War I, reacting to the economic crisis of the return to the liberal order, to demobilization, to defeat (in the case of Germany) and to frustration with the spoils (in the case of Italy). Fascism thus seems to be a monstrous elaboration of the (mute, as Walter Benjamin would say) experience of the trenches and of mechanized warfare. The consequence is that the Decembrists, the Ku Klux Klan, Action Française and others like them are relegated to the status of precursors.

In order not to leave this important point blank, it is worth mentioning the great recent criticism of this perspective that circumscribes fascism to a historical moment and produces this series of precursors: it is about Late Fascism, a book by Alberto Toscano published in 2023. As much as one might wish to reserve the category of fascism to a doctrine that, in Europe, joins the more traditional liberalism, conservatism and socialism, it is merely convenient to limit the set of authoritarian, exclusionary and dehumanizing practices that characterize it to an exceptional moment within the Western political field.

As Toscano points out, these practices had already been practiced, and with great success, in the colonies and against the non-white population of the United States. The exercise of arbitrary power with two rhythms, the dissemination of a logic of purification and expulsion in the social fabric, the formation of violent paralegal groups to enforce segregation laws, all of this was commonplace for those outside Europe but under the European yoke. Incidentally, the first concentration camps were built by the English in South Africa.

6.

Perhaps the difficulty arises, in part, not only from the protean nature of fascism, but also from the circumstance that it was the name of one of the movements that emerged at the end of World War I, and the first to achieve success, that is, to come to power. The characteristics of Mussolini's fascism are easily transplanted into the concept in general, which almost inevitably leads to confusion. If it was not practiced in Italy from 1 to 1922, is it not fascism? Is everything that occurred in those years fascism? Do the far-right movements of that period, of which there were many, only count as fascism if they were “similar” to the groups of Mussolini and Hitler? (In other words, their imitators?)

There are other sources of confusion, especially of a terminological nature, that developed after 1945 and seem to have worsened in the last decade. For example, the somewhat hasty absorption of fascism into the category of totalitarianisms, making it a particular case of the complete absorption of society by the State; partly to blame for this confusion is Arendt, who made Nazism a kind of paradigm of all possible fascisms and brought it too close to the Soviet regime. But how can we compare the ultranationalist experience of those who strangled the workers in the name of anti-communism and in favor of reaction with the process that led from Kerensky to Stalin? There is no viable parameter.

Much worse, because it has dire consequences for our days and, therefore, for our lives, is the shameless imposture that consists of reducing movements with a clear (or not so clear) fascist inspiration to the miserable category of “populism,” as we find in the oft-cited work of Jan-Werner Müller. This is an umbrella term that, in recent times, has only served to throw into the same basket of undesirables policies that have relied on the mobilization of the masses and workers, whether to obtain improvements in their living conditions or to subjugate them under a forged nationalist banner.

It is a comfortable definition, based on “us versus them”, in which “them” is always the ruling class, something that is definitely not the case with fascism. If that were not bad enough, today we still have the category of the “illiberal”, which seeks to equate neoliberalism with democracy, as being the only possible democracy, and on top of that erasing from the record the repeated complicity of actually existing liberals with the fascisms of yesterday and today.

We should have been concerned even before this about the tendency, especially in American cinema and audiovisual media (which is quite influential), to reduce the entire traumatic experience of the years 1920-1945 to German Nazism and this to anti-Semitism, the Holocaust in particular. Symbolic in this respect is the Inglourious Basterds by Tarantino, in which everything about the Nazis seems common and passable, except the discomfort of the occupation of Paris (how dare they?) and the pursuit of the picturesque and opportunistic Hans Landa by the young Jewish girl Shosanna.

It should come as no surprise that assessments have begun to emerge that Nazism was not so bad or, even worse, that Italian fascism, in comparison, was “soft”. ​​This stance has left us with figures such as Berlusconi, Salvini and now Meloni, to name just Italy. But it has also generalized a conception that extremely repressive governments, with policies of crushing work and “returning to traditions”, are perfectly acceptable – as long as there are no extermination camps (for now).

Both the choice of the term “populism” and the reduction of fascism to Hitler indicate that for at least two decades the world has been predisposed to embrace or at least tolerate the return of institutional fascism. It is hardly surprising that Musk’s gesture has been met with so little repudiation. The symptoms that stand out most are elements such as the “war on terror,” the dehumanization of migrants, and the anti-charitable turn that has hit the world of religion hard.

The economy, where an atomized logic of brutal competition has come to dominate even in areas of existence considered not exactly economic, has also served to thin out social ties that could have remained non-fascist. In terms of discourse, we have the system of social networks that propagates division rather than communication, absurdity rather than meaning – and I refer once again to Cesarino's book.

7.

Let us return, then, to the return of fascism as a political power in the last decade, even more so now that it is becoming the dominant force. In fact, in electoral terms, fascism has never been so strong. In the United States, Brazil and India, all highly populated countries, it obtained votes of over 45%, surpassing the maximum of 37% for the Nazis in Germany in 1932. Defeated with great difficulty in the land of Uncle Sam, it returned even stronger and more violent. Something similar happened in Italy and, to a lesser extent, in Germany.

Likewise, despite the well-known alliances between Hitler, Franco and Mussolini, there was no fascist international in the “first phase of fascism” like the one that was formed in this century. The association between capital and fascist groups was also much less direct, since the industrial groups of the 1920s and 1930s believed that they were simply “taking advantage” of some buffoons to get rid of the communists until the situation returned to “the way things were”.business as usual"Today, on the contrary, we have fascist leaders who seem to spring from the personal project of some billionaires thirsty for domination. One of them, who should have better things to do, is getting his hands dirty to destroy the last vestiges of a functional public power in the largest empire on the planet.

Many people are confused by this turn of history, because they fail to see the conditions that have always been seen as necessary for the emergence of a triumphant fascism. The 2008 crisis, for example, is old news. The revolutionary left has no prospect of coming to power. There is not even a shadow of a threat to the control of capital on a global scale; on the contrary, we have increasingly articulated and unchallenged oligopolies.

And yet there is a sense of crisis, of a threat to our way of life, of imminent transformation. In fact, we have long since realized that ours is a time of constant crisis: we have jumped, and will continue to jump much more quickly, from one extreme situation to the next. Pandemics, wars, fires, floods, blockades of international trade, financial meltdowns… I know.

The philosopher Marco Antônio Valentim refers to fascism as the political principle par excellence of the Anthropocene. It is clear: a policy of constant crises for an environmental and social context of constant crises. The conditions of what was understood as democracy throughout the 20th century, such as general prosperity (although unequal) and supposedly rational, but at least guided, communication, seem to be outside the equation.

What remains is the reduction of collective life to generalized conflict, the attempt by each individual to secure a share of whatever well-being remains and, of course, the search for alternative forms of inter-individual connection – from religions to nationalism, from political affiliation to free fascist association.

Are there alternatives? Without a doubt. Moments of prolonged or profound crisis can also give rise to forms of economic organization based on solidarity, a social approach that recognizes the indistinctness of risks and therefore embraces difference, and so on. Polanyi outlined this scenario as early as 1944. But today all this seems to be just a menu of responses to the crisis, when what is needed are concrete preparations.

And if there is one thing that sets current fascism apart from its centuries-old history, it is that it seems to have come ahead of its traditional conditions of emergence. It seems like an accelerated and intensified version of the “preventive fascism” that Marcuse identified in the 1960s and 1970s. That only came ahead of the advances of a socially anchored left.

This time, when the first signs of climate catastrophe were barely beginning to appear to the general public, its deniers were already shouting, placing the blame on migrants, liberals, transgender people and atheists. Fascism, from delirious, seems to have become premonitory.

*Diego Viana is a journalist.

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