The 14 Traits of All Fascist Governments
- Sep 8
- 7 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Z0s6lEm7HbM
In 1995, Umberto Eco wrote the definitive guide to what he called Ur-Fascism, or “eternal fascism.” There are lots of different versions of the authoritarian ideology that have popped up in different times and different places, but aside from the minute details, there are fourteen traits, he argued, that we can pin down to define the underlying essence of fascism. An eternal, evergreen list that will always point toward people who adopt and embody this authoritarian political stance.
And if anyone could write this list, it’s him. In 1942 Italy when Eco was ten, he wrote an essay to this prompt: “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?" In adulthood, he grew up to become a renowned professor of semiotics, which is a field that investigates signs and symbols the meaning and interpretation of those symbols. He was also a novelist who wrote The Name of the Rose, which became a movie with Sean Connery, and Foucault’s Pendulum, which is a cult classic. I’m Kevin Lankes. Please join me as we go down the list of traits of eternal fascism.
Number 1: First on the list is what Eco calls a cult of tradition. Traditionalism is a very old and very reactionary mode of thought. It wasn’t just invented by your pap pap who wants men to be men and keep their hair short and their slacks pressed. We know traditionalist thought goes at least back to Ancient Greece, and likely it’s always been around in some form. In nazi Germany, this popped up all over the place. The name of the Third Reich itself was a call to traditionalism. It’s purpose was to call up the memory of two past periods of glorious German civilization and triumph. Also, esoteric archeology, and mysticism, and claiming traditional values out of some ancient past, and deciding that the current regime was the inheritor of all the culture and glory, and the secrets of power it all held. When the real power is simply psychological, and it comes from the collective social recognition of all traditionalist propaganda.
Number 2: The second point Eco makes is to say that this traditionalism also become an outright rejection of Modernism. Even though the Nazis were industrialists, and they were proud of their work, they also believed things like the Enlightenment was a mistake. They thought advancing technology and culture brought about an era of depravity. Learning and culture are going to be major antagonists to Fascist governments, as we’ll continue to uncover.
Number 3: Because the third point Eco makes is that what’s important to Fascists is action. He calls this action for action’s sake. Action opposed to thought. And the critical thinkers of the time might stop and analyze and theorize about context and ambiguity. And that might create questions, where the regime required blind loyalty. Hans Johst, a playwright popular with the Nazi party, who wrote a play that was performed on Hitler’s 44th birthday, wrote a line in that play that reads, “When I hear talk of culture, I reach for my gun.” In the 1920s, Mussolini revamped the education system in Italy using the Italian fascist youth organization. He said that, "Fascist education is moral, physical, social, and military: it aims to create a complete and harmoniously developed human, a fascist one according to our views." He replaced the standard Italian curriculum with an "educational value set through action and example.”
Number 4: Disagreement is treason. Because science and critical thought is about replacing previous knowledge with new discoveries, proving yourself wrong over and over and iterating until you have a perfect understanding of something, then science is in direct opposition to Fascism. Fascism is stagnant and can’t allow itself to be wrong. It’s a completely anti-science ideology.
Number 5: Eco points out that disagreement is also a sign of diversity. And eternal Fascism thrives on the fear of difference. He goes on to say that the first thing you find in these regimes is an identification of intruders, of undesirables, and the targeting of those people. Ur-Fascism, Eco claims, is by definition a racist ideology.
Number 6: Eco wrote that Ur-Fascism thrives on social frustration of the middle class. Finding some enemy, like in the example of race, or convincing people that lower class social groups are threatening to replace them, coming for their jobs, their money, their loved ones. There are always people moving from one socio-economic class into more comfortable circumstances, and therefore, there are always new people to subsume into your audience and convince them to be terrified of the people they left behind.
Number 7: Ur-Fascism will always strive to replace the social identities of their citizens with ardent nationalism. It’s the easiest form of forced conformity, because the country you live in is the lowest common denominator. It’s an automatic ready made team. So fascism cements a nationalist, monotone culture under one focused identity. To maintain that identity it creates plots and conspiracies with international enemies. With people on other teams. Ur-Fascism strives to make its citizens feel besieged from all sides, and even from within, in the case of the Jewish population. Eco argues that Jews are often a convenient target of oppression because they’re immediately both a part of society and also somehow something outside the inner circle.
Number 8: is probably the most recognizable sign of Fascism to our modern meme-filled brains. The enemy is both too weak and too strong at the same time. Citizens have to fear the other, but they also have to believe that they can overcome them. So, they’re told things about the immense wealth and power and secret connections of the Jewish cabal that runs the world, or the oppulent foreign nations who have so much when you have so little. The contradiction is just one more in an ongoing collection of them. Eco writes that, “Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.” I’m reminded of the reports of Putin’s misunderstanding of Ukraine’s military situation in the ongoing war that was supposed to take three days.
Number 9: Life is struggle. Conflict must be permanent in the regime. A feeling of armaggeddon crops up and talk of final battles or final solutions are rampant. Eco points out here that even though winning battles is a priority focus, it’s genuinely destructive to the success of the regime. Because fascists would lose control if they had to adapt to a world without enemies and battles. So new enemies and new battles will always pop up. Mussolini once said at the International Conciliation: “And, above all, fascism…believes neither in the possibility for the utility of perpetual peace…War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.”
Number 10: Society is organized into a hierarchical system of mass elitism. The Fascist elitism is based on strength. Becoming a member of the regime and following the party politically makes you strong. The leader himself believes he’s the strongest of all, because he conquered the party, and the country, by force. Force despises weakness, and therefore the leader despises his followers, and at every level of the pyramid, each follower is despised by his superior. It’s elitism, all the way down. There’s always somebody less deserving below you.
Number 11: Ur-Fascism consistently creates a cult of the hero. Because strength is what’s valued, a heroic mythos takes hold of people, each one believing themselves to be a hero. And the government will encourage heroic people, even up to the point of pushing them to sacrifice themselves for the regime. There’s nothing more valuable than a heroic death to Fascist ideologues.
Number 12: Eco argues that strength and violence and endless war extends from the battlefield to the domestic space. He wrote that oppression of women and what’s seen as deviant sexual behavior is a key factor of Ur-Fascism. This also conveniently calls back to the othering of citizens and the alienation of people who aren’t idealized members of the party.
Number 13: The will of the people is a theatrical exercise. Eco writes that because Fascism treats people not as individuals but as a cohesive block, and because no block of people is ever in complete agreement, then the leader simply pretends to interpret the will of the people, and the people themselves are relegated to simply playing the part of the people, like the chorus in a play. Then fascist leaders can immediately work to disassemble the working pieces of a representative government, because those get in the way of the new narrative. Eco wrote that, “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” I don’t want to be the one to tell him, but I think that’s already here.
Number 14: Ur-Fascism communicates in Newspeak, the term coined by Orwell in the novel 1984. The leader and the regime do things like limit their vocabulary and use elementary language and syntax. They do this because of their opposition to learning, because of the critical analysis that can only be done when you can speak better than a kindergarten grade level, and because they pretend it sounds strong, clear, and powerful to use monosyllabic words. Eco said that we need to be careful that we can track newspeak wherever it pops up, even in something like an innocent-seeming tv show. I don’t think he was around for reality tv, or he probably would have pointed to that right away.
The term fascism has been thrown around a whole lot since a certain orange man came down a certain golden escalator. Ever since then, we’ve been having a very public national debate about what exactly constitutes a political ideology that we’re all pretty familiar with but don’t really want to admit might be happening in present-day America. So we keep moving the goal posts and justifying words and behavior that crossed all the lines a long time ago. Fortunately for us, other people like Umberto Eco have already done the work of identifying fascism for us, so all we have to do is compare current events against a checklist. And that’s what we’ve done here. So please share this around so that everyone can benefit from the simple ability of checking off items on a list. Maybe it’ll wake some people up if they see what’s laid out plainly by a man who grew up inside a fascist regime, and one of the big bad ones that everyone knows was bad, and all the cult followers screech when you compare it to what’s happening today. And Eco is just showing us that he’s putting the shoe on and the shoe fits. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell everyone to watch this. Because when we can finally agree on the facts, that’s when we can start to do some f*cking good in the world around us. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more videos like this. I’ll see you in the next one.
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