by Rebecca Hill
about Rebecca Hill
Rebecca Hill is Professor of American Studies at Kennesaw State University. She is the author of Men, Mobs and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History and editor, with Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello and Joseph Entin, of Teaching American Studies: State of the Classroom as State of the Field.
Fascism
The Italian _fascio_ is best translated as “band” or “league,” a term shared by a variety of Italian activist groups in the early twentieth century. Benito Mussolini bound the “Fasci” indelibly to the modern understanding of “fascism” when he and about a hundred radical nationalists and syndicalists formed the “_Fasci Italiani de Combattimento_” in 1919 to “declare war against socialism” (Paxton 2004; Payne1995). Starting with an attack on the office of the Socialist party newspaper, the fascists grew in power as, backed by landowners, they attacked socialists across Italy, killing as many as 900 people between 1920 and 1922. After this violent campaign, Italy’s king invited Mussolini to lead the government, ultimately disbanding parliament and criminalizing opposition parties. During the same era, the anti-Semitic German National Socialist (Nazi) party also attacked socialists and communists in the streets while forming political alliances with existing conservative nationalists, finally coming to state power in 1933. As uniformed groups spread across Europe, “fascism” became the generic term used to describe an international phenomenon of nationalist authoritarian mass movements, leaders and states. Although the word fascism originated with Mussolini, it was and is still used to refer to multiple movements and states, the most catastrophic...
Fascism
[For a limited time, read the full keyword essay on “Fascism”](/american-cultural-studies/essay/fascism/) In the days following the right-wing attack on the certification of the electoral college votes in the U.S. Capitol, the debate still churns on among scholars and political commentators: “is this fascism?” As the commentary populates our social media feeds and podcast queues, it is worth considering why determining whether or not “fascism” is the accurate term for what is currently happening has become so important to so many people. Opposition to something called “fascism” represents one of the very few points of unity on both sides of the Cold War; and “fascism” has replaced “monarchy” as the “other” against which democracy is defined. For this reason, defining something as fascism means to oppose it. The definition comes with the moral imperative: never again! That moral imperative is what makes the argument over the “f-word” heated. For some leftist scholars, the argument that Trump is _not_ a fascist is accompanied by arguments that neither he nor the movement around him represent a serious threat. Informed by the history of Cold War liberal anti-totalitarianism that lumped fascism and communism together as equal dangers to democracy, this group cautions against the...