1.Important twitter debates these days regarding “fascism” and its potential use for current political developments. Check tweets by @FinchelsteinF @DavidAvromBell @Notorious_RSG @adam_tooze @samuelmoyn @ruthbenghiat !

Some reflections...:

2.Most specialists in the history of fascism tend to agree on using “fascism” flexibly to refer to and explain the current far-right including T rump. However, historians from other fields of expertise see this use as inappropriate (mere labeling).

3. As a specialist in fascism, I do think that the current populist far-right are the “fascists of today”. The most recent analyses of fascism from transnational perspectives and current research on fascism after 1945 support this view.

4.Non-specialists stick to the “ideal type” and “classificatory” logics prevalent in 1990s historiography of fascism: Payne, Griffin… These approaches are no longer useful to understand the expansion and persistence of fascist ideology and movements across borders and periods.

5.The futility of trying to establish clear borders between what was fascist and what was not has led historians to develop more sophisticated analytical tools such as “fascistization”, “hybridization”, “recontextualization” (Kallis, Costa-Pinto).

6.Non-specialists also have some point, as they are able to highlight the relevance of other not-fascist traditions (charismatic authority) and contexts (the US) with which they are evidently more familiar.

7. But such traditions and contexts were never isolated from the historical fascist phenomenon. Fascist charismatic leadership was also embedded in other non-fascist traditions. US was never isolated from fascist influence, despite unhistorical claims of “exceptionalism”.

8. This is a good read to see the latter point: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/06/22/american-fascism-it-has-happened-here/

9. Yes, World War I was the crucial immediate origin of fascism and the violence of the period was essential...
https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/1288114634428305409?s=20

...but the interwar period is no isolated monad in history, and the traditions and reverberations of fascist war & violence persist.

10. The history of the extreme-right in France is particularly expressive of the complex connections that go from De Maistre to Interwar Fascism and the Le Pens today.

10. Other case in point is Franco’s Spain, dismissed as conservative/authoritarian (non-fascist) by non-specialists who rely on Payne’s outdated work. In fact, classificatory logic aside, Francoist Spain was part of the same fascist phenomenon as Italy or Nazi Germany.

11. Unless one cuts out history in slices to create artificially separated components of reality, the transnational and transtemporal linkages between the interwar fascism phenomenon and today’s far-right are important enough to normalize the use of “fascism”.