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.
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