Few words today are more worn out than “fascist.” As a mere term of abuse, particularly in the Obama era, it has lost all conceptual and political precision. Thus, Obama is a “fascist” as are Dick Cheney and a range of other people, from the Pope to the “Judeofascist Zionists,” to “Islamofascists,” to any third world satrap. “Tree huggers” are environmental fascists.  Gay men in New York complain about “bodily fascism,” the high standards of muscularity that predominate in certain gay subcultures.  “Fascist” has taken this increasingly clichéd side-road, it would seem, because actual fascist politics have virtually no relevance today, and so we have no point of reference when we say that so and so is a fascist.  Of course, there is always the old Duce, Benito Mussolini and the History Channel. But the Duce has reemerged, transformed in the eyes of many consumers of the cultural industry, which often depicts him as a generic and predictably scripted evil character, a pompous lout in the business of world-domination (Charlie Chaplin’s Benzino Napaloni remains a personal favorite).

That Obama and Cheney are “fascists” is a clear indication that we no longer know who the Duce was, and what fascism meant; namely, a catastrophic collapse of modernity under its own ideological and technological weight, a breakdown of the project of the Enlightenment itself, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, two German philosophers concerned with fascism, may agree.

Yet, the triteness of the word aside, I have been wondering if fascist types, the personality characteristics that Adorno unsuccessfully tried to measure with the so called “F-scale” (F for fascist),  are still around.  I wonder if the regular guy who would have fitted well in the Duce’s ranks is with us in the subway and in the supermarket.  And if so, I also wonder whether he (or she) may become politically relevant, even if by small degrees and at a local level.

In my Race and Ethnicity class, here in Abilene, the heart of Protestant Texas, I had a quiet, punctual, and occasionally agitated student who made no more than two comments throughout the semester.  Uncharacteristically, by the end of the semester, he came to my office “just to talk.”  Something was amiss, it seemed, something needed resolution and he needed to talk about it. Without ado, he straightforwardly explained the problem. His family, he said, was “very racist.” His parents were racists: his grandparents, “extremely racist,” his friends, “very racist.”  His buddies, in their early twenties as well, had some fun calling him on the phone, after he moved to the university, to mock him for sharing the same grounds with black and Hispanic students.  “I am not going to lie to you,” he said: “I was also racist.”  Hence, he needed to talk.

He was facing the uncomfortable situation of seeing family and friends as though for the first time, and in an unflattering light at that.  In one of my introductory classes we were talking about slavery in the U.S.  A hand in the back of the class went up. The student, a woman in her early twenties, explained to the class that though slavery has had a bad rap in the U.S., it actually wasn’t that bad.  After all, she reasoned, the slaves had food in their stomachs and a roof over their heads.  I have other examples, but let me leave it here.  (I must add, I have and have had here in Abilene many excellent students who are also excellent persons worthy of emulation; likewise many fine friends and acquaintances.)   I moved to Abilene almost three years ago. During this time, KKK folk have done their rounds twice, to my knowledge, distributing “literature,” as the local paper reported, to their neighbors. (“Make no mistake, we are not here to entertain you”).

To clarify, in places such as New York, for instance, when someone says that so and so “is racist,” they mean, in general and save exceptions, that so and so is inappropriate and a bit of an embarrassment.  But in this part of Texas, that so and so “is racist” means, it seems to me, that such person believes himself or herself to be a member of the superior human subspecies, and that this superior being has certain strong feelings and ideas about the world and other people. To be sure, I don’t know if these stories are isolated or if racism is actually prevalent in this area, but as a teacher of Race and Ethnicity who is in the business of discussing these things all the time, I easily bump into these sorts of narratives, from students, but also from friends and acquaintances who have witnessed such situations.

This doesn’t seem to be old school racism, however. Back to fascism, these narratives often involve properly fascist, Italian School plots and features. These expressions of racism seem to go hand in hand with strong religious beliefs, anti-intellectualism, stereotyping, sexism, including of course heterosexism, nationalism, a strong sense of “us” and “them,” and, one is tempted to add, working class pride mixed with such things as anti-unionism and what one may call a Spenserian economic sense (e.g., “some minorities are poor” because, “you know, survival of the fittest”).  What I have not found in these conversations is one of the central characteristics of the Duce’s ideology: the idolatrous faith in the role of the state. I have found, so to speak, F-scale worldviews, attitudes and ideas without the love of the state.

Again, I am not sure if these narratives are very prevalent.  And perhaps I exaggerate, but it seems to me that, as Adorno and Horkheimer feared, here in the middle of the country elements of fascism may be brewing.  The ethnographer in me tells me, in any case, that when it comes to fascism today, the Pascalian wager is worth considering. Trite such as it is, the word “fascism” is nonetheless worth taking into account when thinking about the American future.