On Liberal Democratic Contradiction and its Polar Opposite Fixes: Fascism and Democracy-as-Human-Rights

To what extent can we understand fascism to be intrinsically linked to liberalism? This article, addressed to social scientists, provides a framework for understanding whether, and to what degree, your government is fascist.

//kevin chamow

Introduction

The following is a polemical argument.[1] It was originally inspired by my thinking about the War on Terror, and asking myself, as a human being and citizen, whether or not my government’s (the US) actions in waging this war could be considered fascist. I haven’t gotten to the “and if so, what is to be done?” part yet. Or even to the “is our government really fascist?” part yet. I’ve been busy just trying to figure out a better way of asking the question (are "we" fascist?). In doing this, I’ve had to think about what these terms really mean, and ask some nuanced questions. Who or what is the "we" that is fascist in relation to the "we" who lives under fascist rule or suffers under fascist laws? What is fascism in a country like the US (what does it look and sound like), which does not have a (clear) dominant ethnic majority (white is not an ethnicity) in the way early 20th century fascist movements in Europe involved having a clear ethnic majority in a given political territory? What is it about liberal democratic discourse that makes room for non-democratic (fascist) social movements and political takeovers since the discourse’s inception? Is it possible to think of a government as having fascist elements or agendas, without declaring the entirety of it a fascist organization that must be fought tooth and nail; meaning, can we index fascism, use it conceptually without making it into a binary (yes or no) category when applied to governments? 

I don’t answer all of these questions here, but they are just some that I feel need answering before any of these terms are applied consistently and effectively in reality to describe reality. In summary, it is an argument about how the concepts of "liberal democracy," "fascism," and "human rights" are logically related, and explanatory of our political field (our "space of possibilities"), when they are understood or used in the way I’m suggesting. This argument confesses to suppositions and untested theses, and offers lessons based on their hypothetical validity. If one isn’t invested in using any of these terms (liberal democracy, fascism, human rights), I admit this piece of writing is not for them.

Supposition 1:

The entity that is Fascist and/or Democratic is a governmental entity.[2] These are psychological-behavioral characteristics of governments, not societies. It makes no sense under this supposition to speak of a society as Fascist or not Fascist, only governments.

Supposition 2:

Fascism and Democracy are symmetrical ideas within a materialist philosophy. Using them to understand governmental psyches-behaviors becomes easier when one understands this symmetry.[3]

2a. Democracy’s normative/moral appeal is a materialist one founded on human rights.

Human Rights (as in, specific rights for "humans"/citizens) has always been both the conceptual and programmatic foundation of electoral majoritarianism (the popular/populist conception of Democracy).

As conceptual foundation, this is seemingly simple, when we focus on the "human" part of the phrase. For we are all biologically human, equally human, and therefore equally capable of engaging in politics; this is the Democratic dictum. Nobody is more human than anyone else — more or better evolved. In 2020, this is the common sense. And therefore, it is a sound material theory/fact to base a pragmatic political philosophy on, in 2020. However, in the West, in 1920, this is a hotly debated thesis that flies in the face of centuries of nationalistic storytelling and empire-building by the most powerful governments on Earth. The mainstream shift away from pseudo-science eugenics after World War II (among all WWII participants) signals a conceptual-attitudinal shift that becomes the visceral, material condition for the formidable growth of the Human Rights movement in the 1970s.[4]

As programmatic foundation, this is also seemingly simple, when we focus on the "rights" part of the phrase, and address the question historically. Michael Goodhart, professor of Political Science, Philosophy, and Gender Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, did so in his Democracy as Human Rights. Reframing his argument slightly, putting it in materialist terms: "Human Rights'' is the concrete matter, the political materiality, that has historically been fought over in "Democratic struggles." Meaning, wherever there has been actual struggle for Democratic institutions (for electoral institutions for positions of power within government), the actual rallying cry behind them is: "Rights." The ballot is consistently conceived of, is appealed to, as a means to an end, as instrumental, as one right, perhaps an essential one, but essential because of its instrumentality for defending all the other ones. It is the struggle for rights in relation to government authority that gets democrats out of bed in the morning, and keeps them up and in the streets at night. This is why the struggle for Democracy is far from over, even within countries with impeccable electoral accountability.

2b. Fascism’s normative/moral appeal is a materialist one founded against human rights.

Fascism is zweckrationality by the government. Zweckrationality, as one type within Max Weber’s four-fold typology of social action (zweck, wert, affective, traditional) — is a kind of social action undertaken with reference to goals and, within a strict zweckrational mindset, only with reference to goals. Wertrationality, with reference to values, affective rationality, with reference to emotions, and traditional rationality, with reference to customs, hold no appeal over zweckrationality, which is technical, concerned only with the most efficient way of achieving a goal.

What is the Fascist interpellation in relation to this? It is this: You, the people, the real people, the ones who ethnically make up a majority of the multi-ethnic nation, you are in charge; you can do what is necessary to achieve your goals, without reference to values, affect, or customs. It actually goes deeper: You, the people, the majority, are being denied, are denying yourselves the opportunity to do X — to change X, get rid of X, do any X — because of values, affect, or customs.[5] That is, most frequently: You, the people, are not safe, are being denied safety or prosperity, because there is another group of people whose legal rights are getting in the way, or who are simply in the way themselves (genocide as "final solution"). There is always a problem in need of technical solving despite moral, affective, or customary challenges — this strict zweckrationality vs. all others is the hallmark antagonism of Fascism.

Supposition 3:

Frustrations with the contradictions of Liberalism lay at the heart of DHR (Democracy as Human Rights) and Fascism.

Liberal Democracy, as it existed for hundreds of years, was rife with contradictions. Despite having conceptual origins in the natural equality between persons, Liberal Democracy has always undeniably been exclusionary in practice.[6] Goodhart shows how those exclusions can create discursive contradictions, which then create openings for excluded parties to join the table, so to speak. That is, although Liberalism cannot in any way be equated with democracy, Liberal Democracy as a discourse and set of institutions does set the stage for Democracy as Human Rights (that is, DHR can be understood as a critique of Liberal Democracy — for excluding too many people and too many rights).[7] This can be seen most clearly, so far, in domestic contexts, where previously excluded populations (propertyless men, women, nonwhite peoples) have been explicitly incorporated into the political body of the nation, and granted rights on account of this incorporation.[8]

Aimé Césaire, in his 1950 classic Discourse on Colonialism, paints a picture of a cognitively dissonant Europe, long propagating fascism in the colonies, long creating apologies for fascism in the colonies based on eugenics, long stumbling over itself trying to rationalize the lessons of the enlightenment — the "rights of man," Descartes’s universal cogito, etc. — with the gruesome hierarchies and atrocities of empire. Césaire is brilliant when he writes to Europe on its recent domestic experiences with Fascism: “before you were its victims, you were its accomplices.” Fascism was always the mindset of the colonizer, within the colonies, with regard to the colonized. The same colonizing body would then hold elections, protect free speech, assembly, etc. for "the people" back at home. Twentieth-century Fascism was not a new ideology, psyche, or governmental practice, it just finally "boomeranged" back home, according to Césaire.

Whether we focus on the domestic contradictions (with respect to women, people of color, propertyless people, etc.) or foreign ones (colonialism, hyperexploitation, enabling undemocratic regimes), the grand scheme of 16th–20th-century Euro-American democracy was contradiction.

The DHR solution to liberal contradiction is inclusion and expansion. This is logical, revolutionary, and indeed seems to presage a global government with a broad and universal conception of human rights.

The Fascist solution to liberal contradiction is psychologically more interesting.[9] It says, so what? It doubles down on its contradictions, and in doing so, it takes on a cynical attitude toward liberal principles. Proto-fascism plays the electoral game, espouses fidelity to Democratic rights when it has to, shamelessly (cynically, to distract from its true ideology), then does what it wants or needs to do in order to achieve its ultimate aims. In short, it acts zweckrationally (toward some specific X), while still paying lip service to wertrationality (collective values), affect, and tradition — importantly, this lip service should be understood as integral behavior within its zweckrationality. Furthermore, on this point, the ironic, comedic stance proto-fascism often takes toward liberal governance (governing under any (let alone all) rights restrictions) should be understood as the overt mockery of liberal wertrationality, liberal affective commonsense, and liberal tradition that it is.

So what … to what? In one significant respect, to the problem of being "the bad guy." Make no mistake about it; there is a congruence between Nietzschean philosophy and Fascism.[10] Why is it that the powerful must feel guilty about it? What kind of Christian complex are we still suffering from long after the enlightenment and the corresponding death of God? The rise of the Klan in the post-bellum US South, the rise of Fascism (in name) after World War I. Both cries are the same: The rights of others be damned, we are the people and it is our will — regardless of its impact on the rights of others — that steers government action. There is a fact of power here that cannot be denied, the Fascists are saying-without-saying. So what that we are morally wrong, affectively disgusting, and do not follow polite customs, they suggest. We are still in power and nobody can stop us!

Stop them from doing what? Who is stopping them? There is always a "what" that needs to be done, and a somebody who is stopping them from doing it. Islamic Terrorism needs to be eradicated entirely from the planet, according to White Americans. Fascists among them simply believe that — regardless of its impact on the human and civil rights of Muslims, lawyers, academics, activists, frequent fliers, "liberals," etc. — they should be allowed, they are in actuality allowed because they hold governmental power and are allowing themselves, to eradicate Islamic Terrorism from the planet, period. As in, by any means necessary. And anybody stopping them from doing it is by definition not a part of their nation, not even discreetly human in any humanist sense, but instead just an obstacle, something in their way.

By any means necessary is the slogan of Fascism. Pure zweckrationality.

Building mainly off Žižek,[11] we can say: This elevation of the government to a transcendental position that proceeds in accomplishing its objectives without reference to Democratic social authority (by effectively negating the rights upon which democracy is founded) could be called the ideological fantasy of Fascism.[12] When a government believes itself transcendent to Democratic social authority, it is deriving its authority not Democratically (in the DHR sense), but ethni-majoritarianly (we are the majority in this political territory and what we say goes).

Fascism exposes the (when viewed a certain way) "theoretical problem" at the heart of Liberal Democracy. A majority can take over the government by way of an election, claim "democratic" authority, then abuse the human rights of minorities, political dissidents, foreigners, etc., under the guise of liberal Democratic authority. This is only possible, however, due to a misunderstanding of "Democratic" authority. Following the Goodhart argument above, human rights violations are by definition violations of Democratic authority, regardless of any election outcome certifying their majoritarian backing.

Therefore, there is a "fetishistic inversion" happening here.[13] What is being fetishized, brought to highest moral principle, is elections-in-themselves (majoritarianism in principle). Instead of elections being instrumental, they become arbiters of truth and justice in themselves (insofar as they represent the majority’s will). Instead of majoritarianism existing to safeguard human rights, it rationalizes their destruction, without ever leaving the discourse of liberalism. This is why Fascism as it is understood here can arise only from liberalism. It needs the discourse of majoritarianism. Only by elevating majoritarianism to its highest moral principle does fascism survive and thrive.

By denying the impulse to fetishize majority-rule as such within a liberal population, liberal political observers miss fascism’s appeal in terms of desire within the discourse of liberalism.

POLITICAL LESSON #1: In order to decrease the potentiality of Fascist government, majoritarianism is to be de-fetishized and re-symbolized as instrumental for the rights struggle. Fascism’s overt enemy is Human Rights. Fascism’s secret friend, its fetish, is Majority-Rule.

Supposition 4:

Governments are sets of agendas. And as such, they can be partially (X%) Fascist.

The problem with current methodologies for typologizing governments is that they take a binary approach (this or that) that leaves no room for contradiction. That is, if a government is to be considered Fascist, then it cannot be considered Liberal at the same time, under current typologies. The state either respects Democratic rights or it does not, according to this methodology. It is Democratic or Fascist, not both; these designations are mutually exclusive, and therefore cannot overlap to describe one and the same entity.

This insistence on governmental homogeneity, on its consistency, belies the empirical reality, which seems starkly more heterogeneous. In reality, central governments are not unified bodies with consistent mentalities with respect to any objective or goal they are tasked with accomplishing.[14]

A government is a set of agendas. The set can be three things long (national defense, schooling of citizenry, criminal prosecution) or five thousand things long (national defense, schooling, criminal prosecution, food and drug regulation, air traffic control, pollution minimization, road building, weather forecasting, etc.). But it is always a set. It does not exist prior to the set or outside the set: It is the set.

When understood as a set of agendas, the government’s psyche and behavior can be disaggregated. No longer must we proclaim that a government either is or is not Fascist/Democratic. When understood as a set of agendas, governments can be categorized as partially both. Hypothetically, it can then be stated that a given government has a Fascist mandate with respect to certain objects or objectives while having a Democratic one with respect to others. To put it another way, some government agendas can be empirically Fascist (they trample rights under the logic of zweckrationality), while others belonging to the same government still retain their Democratic character (they respect rights, despite any potential zweckrational effects on their objective). Meaning, as sets of agendas, governments can be contradictory entities (on moral and technical levels).

You cannot identify a government as Fascist/Democratic based on its agenda. Two governments with the exact same agenda (let’s say: eliminate terrorism) can act differently, one Fascisticly (zweckrationally, without regard to rights) and the other Democratically (with respect for rights, and therefore not purely zweckrationally), in attempting to accomplish their agenda.

Three Theses Stemming from These Four Suppositions

Thesis 1: From a psychological-behavioral perspective, Fascism/Democracy is a question of means (with respect to rights), not ends (with respect to objectives).

Thesis 2: A given government is a collection of particular ends. Fascism/Democracy describes the correlated attitudes of a given government toward their particular ends.

Thesis 3: A government can be scientifically observed and determined to be X% Democratic/Fascist based on the percent of their objective actions that are undertaken with respect for rights, as opposed to zweckrationally.

SOCIAL SCIENCE LESSONS:

1. The classification of governments as Fascist/Democratic with respect to certain agendas can only be done through rigorous empirical analysis. No shallow, idealist analysis of government discourse and legal structure will do — any attempt to make sweeping generalizations about a government as a whole (the set as a whole) by way of this analysis is wrongheaded and borderline egomaniacal. It is instead the psyche-behaviors of programmatically defined government agents that is the real empirical object of investigation in regard to this question (you can analyze discourse and laws, yet, they are not the real object under investigation when one poses the question of fascism, but simply clues, context, and technology related to that object).

2. Yes, it is in theory possible to say, the Republic[15] of Whatever (the government itself, not the country — see Supposition 1) is X% Fascist. What this would require, however, is beyond the empirical grasp of current social science (see next lesson). What it would require, empirically, is a complete accounting of said government’s psyche-behaviors (actually existing governmentalities).[16] Every agent of the Republic of Whatever would be considered a data point, as someone with a particular (sometimes balancing multiple) agenda. Their mentalities with respect to their agendas would combine into an index for the collective mentality of the government (as X% Fascist/Democratic).[17] A simple thought experiment with the Republic of Whatever illustrates this idea:

The Republic of Whatever is in Antarctica. They are a small government, charged with only four tasks/agendas: teach the children science, put out fires, prosecute property crimes, and guard the sacred pond from fishermen. Let’s say each agenda is afforded 2 human agents, picked out of the total population of 100 citizens. Two agents to teach children, two agents to put out fires, two agents to prosecute property crimes, and two agents to guard the sacred pond. To keep things simple here, each agenda is given the same budget.

The Republic of Whatever is a Liberal republic, and it therefore offers its citizens constitutional protections of their human rights (speech, assembly, association, due process, elections, protection against cruel and unusual punishment, just to name a few). All the government agents charged with teaching children, putting out fires, and prosecuting property crimes must abide by these restrictive protections, even if they feel that any one of them get in the way of their duties. However, the community has also decided, by way of an 80-20 vote, that when it comes to protecting the sacred pond from fishermen, the government will do whatever they deem they must. So the two agents in charge of deterring fishing do all sorts of things that violate human rights, in practice, even if they do so under democratic cover, carrying a banner that says: "You said, by any means necessary." They beat up fishermen who assemble in public to call for the pond’s opening to fishing. They shut down publications that do the same, that attack the pond’s sacred mystique. And when they do catch someone fishing in the sacred pond, they publicly crucify them. They have only had to crucify one person though, just to prove they would. The population used to be 101.

People are generally happy living under the rule of the Republic of Whatever. The government has high approval ratings (by historic Liberal standards) and its subjects feel that, as long as they do nothing to jeopardize the pond’s sacred safety, all their rights will be protected. Although they don’t particularly enjoy seeing scenes of governmental violence in the streets, or publications being shut down, and certainly did not enjoy seeing Tom being crucified in a public square two years ago, they don’t change the agenda that allows these things to happen.

Applying Social Science Lesson #2 to this example to answer the question: is the Republic of Whatever Fascist?

Two government agents out of eight, 25%, can be classified as Fascist. Therefore, since six government agents, out of eight, adhere strictly to human rights in accomplishing their objectives, 75% of government agents can be classified as Democratic. The Republic of Whatever is therefore 25% Fascist, 75% Democratic.

If this sort of "splitting the baby" conceptualization of Fascism is uncomfortable for you (whoever you are) to buy into, given its empirical demands and affective-political ramifications, you know precisely why the binary, antagonistic modern political phenomenon that is Fascism/Democracy has in social science avoided binary indexing in these terms to this date.

3. No, it is in practice, not currently possible to put specific numbers to the X% Fascist question. The thought experiment above is deliberately as simple as can be, to illustrate the idea. In reality, in practice, there are many facts that make the creation of an actual, empirically based index of Fascism, for a given government, currently impossible. Some of those facts include:

• In reality, the laborpower a government devotes to an agenda (as a percent of the total laborpower it employs) does not reflect in a 1=1 way the energy a government devotes to that agenda. Energy = laborpower + resources. In the Republic of Whatever example I explicitly assume (1) equal laborpower and (2) equal budgets (equal resources) afforded to each government agenda, and therefore simplify the laborpower math and make energy expenditure on each agenda (as a percent of total government energy) proportional to the laborpower deployed for that agenda. In reality, both laborpower and resources are distributed unevenly — ("Defend the Nation" gets more labor and budget allocation than "Teach the Children," "House the Poor," and "Keep our Food Safe" (more than these three combined, in fact, in the US today, to cite one specific reality)) — so agendas expend vastly different amounts of governmental energy.

• In reality, government agents are often tasked with more than one agenda. This creates the potential, according to the theses/theory above, for a singular government agent to act Fascist with regard to one agenda-domain, while acting Democratic with regard to another. Not only is this not a weakness of the theory — that government agents can be walking contradictions—the ability of the theory to center contradiction itself as not just possible within any given unified body (footnote 13) but as the ideological fantasy of Fascism, [18] in a way its penultimate fetishized object, is the theory’s core strength.

• In reality, agendas do not map neatly onto government agencies/departments. Agencies/departments are often tasked with multiple agendas, and agendas have a way of becoming distributed throughout multiple government agencies. Declaring any one agency/department Fascist/Democratic is usually wrongheaded. Likewise, the knee-jerk assumption that getting rid of or creating an agency/department is akin to getting rid of or creating an agenda is faulty.

• In reality, agendas rarely announce themselves as Fascist, in the way the agenda "Guard the Sacred Pond" does in our example. That is, they rarely announce themselves as states of exception.[19] This is why Social Science Lesson #1 is listed as #1. In reality, Liberal governments usually do considerable work to conceal their Fascist agendas. That is, they bathe these agendas in liberal apologetics, gray-area legal loopholes, and civil (remunerative) remedies, so that they come out smelling democratic-ish (that is, like they have at least some respect for human rights). The social scientist must do the tough research to determine if a given government, at a given time, with respect to a given agenda, is fascist. No legalistic or narrative-based approach will spoon-feed them the correct answer.[20] How do governments actually go about accomplishing their agenda? That is the question. And there is no short answer, only long, empirical work to be done, if we are intent on using these terms analytically in the first place.

POLITICAL LESSON #2: Progressivism and progressive visions of politics are nonsensical notions within a Liberal system. There is no linear progress, only a pendulum (Fascism←→ DHR) of possibility and a temporary current position. Within Liberalism, we will never reach a point where Fascism is not acutely possible, or a point where DHR is truly achieved.

//Kevin Chamow attended the University of Pittsburgh, The American University in Cairo, and Rutgers University between 2007 and 2015. He holds degrees in political science, economics, and sociology. He is a 30-year-old father of one. He has no current institutional affiliations.

Sources:
[1] This piece was written in a rare two day window of quiet solitude, yet encompasses years of political thinking. Please have mercy on its rough edges and lack of decorative details beyond the immediate argument at hand.
[2] Note on capitalization: Terms are capitalized when they refer to governmentalities of governing bodies. Terms are put in lowercase when they are referring to ideas of governmentalities, or the governmentalities of non-governing bodies (those who do not operate as government agents). Example: Capital-F Fascists are the actual government agents operating under a rubric of lowercase-f fascism; your neighbor with the SS insignia tattooed on his neck, who believes Hitler was mostly right, who sits on his butt all day surfing the internet, consuming hate-speech about foreigners and enemies within, is just a little lowercase-f fascist.
[3] Or maybe they are actually pseudo-symmetrical, the way sadism and masochism are only pseudo-symmetrical; while responding to the same psychic challenge, they follow formally distinct logics (Gilles Deleuze, On Coldness and Cruelty).
[4] The colonial world starkly was divided into "Humanitas" and "Anthropos:" Humanity and Others. (Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity). It’s from this same colonial binary that we derive the arbitrary sociology/anthropology distinction among our social science disciplines (Immanuel Wallerstein, Introduction to World Systems Analysis).
[5] It does not matter what X is. X could be anything, explicitly. Following Žižek (The Sublime Object of Ideology), “Fascism is obscene in so far as it perceives directly the ideological form as its own end, as an end in itself — remember Mussolini’s famous answer to the question 'How do the Fascists justify their claim to rule Italy? What is their programme?': ‘Our programme is very simple; we want to rule Italy!’ The ideological power of Fascism lies in the feature which was perceived by liberal or leftist critics as its greatest weakness: in the utterly void, formal character of its appeal, in the fact that it demands obedience and sacrifice for their own sake. For Fascist ideology, the point is not the instrumental value of the sacrifice, it is the very form of sacrifice itself, ‘the spirit of sacrifice’, which is the cure against the liberal-decadent disease.” Thirty years later, I think we can add that what is really being sacrificed, under the banner of zweckrationality, by contemporary fascism, is Democracy-as-Human-Rights, as an idea and active mission. That is, Žižek is right that fascists do not align with any specifically accountable technical rationality (did they actually fix X?), but instead implicitly propose zweckrationality as such as an antidote to decadent humanism and internationalism (whether they fix X or not, what is understood is they have the right to do everything necessary in order to fix X, and that is what separates them politically).
[6] One can take a trip back to ancient Greece, following Foucault (The Government of Self and Others) and see how even then, there were both informal and formal constraints on who could speak, and who would in fact be heard in a "Democracy." Formal constraints were obvious and legalistic: one third of the population living under the coercive power of the Greek state were slaves. Informal ones were more subtle, and involved criteria for ethnic authenticity, which allowed one to be taken seriously in the actual field of democracy. See Foucault’s analysis of the Greek myth Ion, by Euripides — where the right to be considered, and therefore to speak in a meaningful way, in a democratic setting, rests not on citizenship status but perceived ethnic authenticity (perceived unquestionable fidelity to the best interests of the ethnically-defined nation). 
[7] Goodhart only briefly engages with Marxism in relation to DHR in Democracy as Human Rights. Clearly, Marxism too was a critique of liberalism. I am still thinking about where Marxism fits into the political typology I’m describing here. 
[8] I use this notion of a national body deliberately. There is still no global body politic. This is perhaps one reason why DHR has stalled on the international stage. Whether it will continue to stall or once again gain traction is uncertain; but it can be hypothesized that the ability to re-start DHR internationally rests on an original imagining of a global body politic.
[9] Following Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus), I am attempting to formulate a theory of fascism that takes human desire seriously. In his words, "Even the most repressive and the most deadly forms of social reproduction are produced by desire within the organization that is the consequence of such production… The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: 'Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?' How can people possibly reach the point of shouting: 'More taxes! Less Bread!'? As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for."
[10] Roberto Bolano, 2666.
[11] Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology.
[12] "The Fascist ideology is based upon a purely formal imperative: Obey, because you must!" (Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology). Meaning, fascism’s appeal is not grounded in the logic of universal, rational human consciousness and the rights to be associated with that consciousness. Instead, it is grounded in a might-equals-right philosophy founded on ethnic nationalism in an age of majoritarian democracy.
[13] I think Žižek used the right term to describe what’s happening here — "fetishistic inversion." But I believe what is being fetishized by fascism is not the state as such, but the electoral, majoritarian element of state authority. The election — as a living metaphor for the concept of majority-rule — is taken out of its proper instrumental context and given moral weight of its own, lending justification to the undermining of human rights based on its transcendental authority.
[14] Even if they were unified bodies, actual unified bodies too can include contradictory elements. That is, even within the mind of a single 20th-century human, there can be both fascist and democratic currents/impulses. So it should go without saying that governments, as collections of individuals working toward specific ends, can likewise be marked by contradiction.
[15] Re-public: a repetition of "the public" into an objective governing body.
[16] Foucault.
[17] Insofar as the entire government — every agenda within the set — creates agents with no respect for human rights, that government can be classified Totalitarian Fascist. Insofar as the entire government — again, every agenda within the set — creates agents who always adhere to human rights, that government can be classified Truly Democratic. Insofar as neither of these conditions are met, that government can be declared X% Fascist and, indeed, conversely, X% Democratic.
[18] Majoritarianism is used to undermine human rights. Ethnic-majority-rule is fetishized to the highest principle of government. In short, the nation reigns sovereign, over the citizenry.
[19] A juridical concept founded by a Nazi (Carl Schmitt). See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception.
[20] As much as Žižek is a brilliant theorist, he fails in his pronouncements regarding these matters (whether X government is Fascist or Democratic) for this particular reason.