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In 1995, Eco published "Ur Fascism," an essay in which he described what he saw as the fundamentals of fascist ideologies. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
Fascism, Eco said, was a "fuzzy totalitarianism," able to combine disparate and sometimes contradictory principles into an ideological whole.
Fascism, he says, was a "structured confusion," "philosophically out of joint, but emotionally fastened to some archetypal foundations."
The title, "Ur Fascism," refers to his attempt to distil the factors which can be useful for categorising a movement as "fascist." Not all of these features are necessary for every fascism, but the presence of these features indicates a "family resemblance" with fascism.
1) The Cult of Tradition. "Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message."
2) The rejection of modernity, another side of point one. The "blood and soil" of the Nazis, a rejection of a society which has turned its face away from an old "truth" and, thus, is degraded and depraved.
3) A love of Action for Action's Sake, and a distrust of intellectualism as a both an activity and system. "Thinking is a form of emasculation." Attacks on academia for undermining traditional values.
4) "Disagreement is treason."
5) Fear of Outsiders, fear of the foreign, the Invader, the Other.
6) Appeal to a frustrated middle class, "suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of social humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups."
7) "Obsession with a plot." The national identity is formed by its enemies, and these must be external and internal. The followers must feel besieged. The internal enemy is often "the Jews" but there are always other options too.
8) The enemies, both internal and external, must be at the same time too strong and too weak. They are rich, powerful, and also decadent, effete. Their strength is humiliating, but their weakness makes them easy to crush.
9) Life is lived for the struggle. Permanent warfare is the nature of life. The enemy is ever constant and thus must always be resisted. The enemies *will* be defeated in the future, but this future always recedes and never becomes the present.
10) Mass Elitism and contempt for the weak. Everyone despises their subordinates, who in turn despise those in lower stations. Status is won by establishing your superiority, and is thus always deserved (unless you are The Enemy, in which case it is unjust.)
11) A cult of heroism and death. The Ur Fascist longs to die gloriously in battle against The Enemy, like his glorious ancestors. In his impatience for this, he often sends others to a premature death.
12) an obsession with machismo, and the tools and trappings of overt masculinity, with tools and industry and weaponry, and, concomitantly, disdain for the feminine.
13) "The People" as a mass fiction. There are no longer individuals within Ur Fascism, there are The People and The Enemies of The People. Rotten parliaments that oppose The Voice of the People are illegitimate.
14) "Newspeak." An impoverished syntax which stifles critical thought (which is effeminate and deviant), but also the peculiar language of the talkshow or the tabloid.
Eco was clear - there was and will ever only be one Nazism, but "the fascist game can be played in many forms."
We can point to the presence of these Ur Fascist archetypes in our society, and say that these are worthy of comment, that they should stand as warning.
Others might say "do not mistake mere conservatism for the singular evil of Fascism." That modern conservatism and western imperialism contains many of the same hallmarks of Eco's Ur Fascism may be a sign Eco was overbroad in his diagnosis.
But let us consider the idea that, just as Hitler borrowed from American treatment of black and Native American populations, and as America later recruited Nazis for its fight against the Soviet Union, there might not be such a hard distinction.
Which is to say that Western Societies, though they self-aggrandise as liberals, exist on a continuity where an Ur Fascist outcome simply requires an amplification of existing tendencies.
