The Anatomy of Fascism

"The Anatomy of Fascism has great strengths. Paxton set out to look at what fascists do, not what they say. He does an excellent job of looking at how Hitler and Mussolini in Germany and Italy were able to use ‘conservative complicities’, as he calls them. They wouldn’t have gotten to power without conservative elites, who wanted to use them to get rid of the threat presented by the left. Throughout the book, he looks at how the pacts fascists made to get into power played out during the dictatorship. He’s very good at mapping the geography of power, and what I call the ‘authoritarian bargains’ among groups, parties, organs of the state and leaders. “The eternal mystery of fascism is: Why did so many people buy into it?” The book has been criticized for shortchanging the role of ideology in wanting to show what fascists did and not what they said. He argues that fascists like Mussolini and Hitler had “empty and contradictory rhetoric.” This goes back to an old school of thought in Italy, represented by Noberto Bobbio and others, who argued, in essence, that fascism had no culture; it was just violence. In my way of thinking, this is not a helpful way to proceed to understand how fascism appealed to so many people. In my work, I look at how ideology and rhetoric precede and influence action, including violence. The eternal mystery of fascism is: Why did so many people buy into it? The protean nature of fascism is key to unlocking that mystery. Its ideology was protean, if not inherently contradictory. Mussolini, who was a great sloganeer, said in 1921, “fascism is a revolution of reaction.” What does that mean? Fascism took from the left, in its ideas about revolution and its practice of disrupting everything. And yet fascism was profoundly conservative: it wanted to turn back the clock on female emancipation and worker autonomy. Fascism is a revolution to impose order. In that sense, it is protean. It’s also protean because leaders like Hitler and Mussolini had many different policies to enfold different people in the fascist state. For example, they had social welfare policies, like pre- and postnatal assistance, to appeal to women."