Fascist Spectacle

"Fascist Spectacle is a valuable book from a sociologist who is quite theoretical but also very, very attentive to how policies play out in daily life and to the connection between rhetoric and action. Falasca-Zamponi looks at how fascism used aesthetics in every realm of life as an anesthetic. She examines their rallies, newsreels and rituals like the adoption of black shirts. She makes the important point that these rituals made people into uncritical automatons who were willing to trust what they were told, even when it was contradictory to what they saw, heard or sensed. “Fascist leaders appeal to sore points in the psyche” Today, Trump tells his followers the exact same thing: “what you’re seeing and hearing is not what’s happening.” That statement has a very long genealogy. Authoritarian-minded rulers want us to lose all trust in ourselves. Falasca-Zamponi shows us the role of fascist spectacle in getting people to believe that reality was what the leader said it was. Intellectuals bought into fascism for many reasons. Fascist leaders appeal to sore points in the psyche. In the case of Italy, Mussolini knew that intellectuals were sensitive to the idea that Italians were backwards, soft, sentimental, mandolin-playing old men, rather than a modern and martial forward-looking people. So, Mussolini proposed a utopian vision of modernity and invited different groups to express their own fascist vision. The mirage of modernity and empire that Mussolini offered seduced some. The book also includes cameos of eminent intellectuals who were initially antifascist, but who became collaborators after many years of living under the Mussolini machine. Watching a Trump rally is what prompted me to do political commentary. When I saw the ecstatic emotion around his person, how he bonded with supporters by stoking hatred toward a common enemy like immigrants, when I saw the rituals of chanting “lock her up” about his political opponent, and of course, how he demonized the press—all of this was familiar to me as a scholar of fascism. “Watching a Trump rally is what prompted me to do political commentary” The stylistic similarities certainly extended beyond his rallies. The way he retweets racist propaganda and seduces people with mirages about “making America great again.” The right wing in the United States has a very long tradition of mocking the liberal press, but Trump goes far further. In the tradition of what fascist leaders do, he turns his supporters against any voices that are independent of his own."