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.

Sometimes the solution to theoretical problems become apparent not through careful research or close reading of important texts, but in the course of thinking about everyday life, in the course of leading a reflective life.  You have an everyday encounter. You give it thought, and a major intellectual problem is solved.

I had such an experience and revelation at a lunch in Berlin in November of 1994.  I remember the discussion.  I remember the setting, an Italian restaurant in the leafy outskirts of the city.  But I have only a vague recollection of my lunch partner, a female German scholar.

I was in Berlin in 1994 on a leg of a United States Information Agency sponsored lecture tour in Europe.  The main event was in Poland, where I helped inaugurate a short lived American Cultural Center there.  Following my stop in Warsaw, I flew to Berlin to speak in the well established American Cultural Center there about my book The Cynical Society, but also gave a talk at the Free University about my other relatively recent books, Beyond Glasnost and After the Fall.  The first Berlin talk was about my work on American political culture, the second on my work in Central and Eastern Europe.  After the second talk, I had a lunch with my hostess.  We engaged in the normal small talk.  No doubt, we discussed the presentation I gave and the reaction of the audience.  The details escape me except for one exchange.  It went something like this:

Jeff – “I think that it is not at all clear that Hitler’s crimes were qualitatively different than those of Stalin.”

Hostess –  “No!  Hitler was unique.  The intentional project of modern industrial genocide was unprecedented, uniquely evil, something that must not be forgotten.”

We went on and discussed this, I, as an expert on the Soviet bloc and its democratic opposition, she as a German scholar.   The conversation was warm, not at all heated, though the subject matter was tough.  I emphasized the immensity of Stalin’s crimes, of the gulag, of the mass starvation in Ukraine, the brutal treatment of those who dissent and of inconvenient national minorities.  She countered with recollections of the Holocaust.

At some point, I don’t remember when, I realized a paradox.  The meaning of this exchange would be precisely reverse, if I argued the position she presented, and she argued the position that I presented.  The embodiment of the argument determined the meaning of the exchange.

If I, as an American Jewish scholar, argued the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and she, as a German scholar, argued that Nazism was no worse than Soviet Communism, we would have been emphasizing the differences between us, revealing suspiciousness of the other, moving in the direction of nationalism.  As it was, we recognized each other as open people, as colleagues.  The meeting that we had was one of mutual respect and understanding.  The meeting of the imagined encounter would have been antagonistic.  Discussion could continue in the actual encounter, it would end in the hypothetical one.  Learning would accrue in the real one, probably wouldn’t in the imagined one.

As the author of The Cynical Society, I am quite critical of reductive reasoning, reasoning that reduces the meaning of an utterance to the qualities of the speaker, particularly related to positions and motives of wealth and power.   I emphasize that text should not be reduced to context.  On the other hand, as a sociologist, I know that context matters.  At the Berlin lunch, I think I saw how the criticism of sociological reduction and the insight of sociological knowledge can both stand.  Text and context are related in important ways, but context doesn’t determine text.  It culturally informs it.

This has many practical applications.  The cultural context of American racism, thus, informs how blacks and whites can speak to each other effectively.  This is why being race blind is funny when Stephen Colbert asserts it. It is why when whites complain that there is a need to struggle for equal rights for whites; they actually intend the opposite of what their words on the surface apparently say.  Indeed it is why when the Supreme Court rules that the law must be color blind, it is on very dubious grounds.