Umberto Eco: Ur-Fascism (1995) [pdf]

Something that for many years I've seen as "Ur-Fascist" in our culture is the popularity and continuous production of relatively vapid superhero movies. The majority of these are power fantasy porn, and like porn the only focus is really on the fetish and the orgasm. There's little characterization and little plot, and the villains are always cast as either pure evil or as a straw man representation of some other point of view.

The rough cop and action movies of the 1980s and 1990s are far more subtile and intelligent than most superhero flicks. Watch Die Hard for example. It has actual characterization. You get at least a bit of a sense for who the characters are, their motives, and their flaws. I'm not saying it's high art but compared to the average comic book flick it's quite deep. The hero is a divorced cop who has obviously thrown himself into his work to numb his emotional pain. The villain comes off like a narcissist whose crimes are motivated by a burning desire to become the moneyed aristocrat he believes himself entitled to be. Throughout the film you can see the hero at least indirectly confront some of his personal demons while the villain's narcissism drives him further into depravity and in the end is his ruin.

I wonder if the rise of fascist thinking of the 4chan /pol variety among younger people can in part be explained by their entire generation having been raised on a steady diet of comic book flicks and of course similar "fanservice" Anime.

I know this is usually how americans explain democrats vs republicans, but is it really how the parties function? As an outsider (not american) looking in, and judging by the policies of the last couple decades, it seems republicans always increase government spending (therefore they don't actually believe in "small government"), and democrats pretty much rule for the oligarchs (therefore they don't really believe in the better of the "collective")?

both sides are very ok with using power of government to further their agenda, and both sides are making the government as big as possible when and where it serves their interests. What worst is both sides are using power of majority to attack, instead of protecting, the rights of the minority. That usage of democracy as an attack weapon destroys public trust for democracy and transforms the democracy into ochlocracy, and thus moves the society one step closer to totalitarism.

Which oligarchs do you have in mind?

This is perhaps a tangent, but I always struggle in conversations about fascism. Wikipedia describes fascism as a specific collection of qualities:

* Rejection of liberal democracy

* Support for a totalitarian, single-party state

* Led by a single strong dictator

* Rejection that violence is automatically negative in nature

* Imperialism, violence, and war can rejuvenate the state

* Desirability for an economically self-sufficient state

* Frequently incorporates some notion of a "master race"

I want to be delicate with this next part because it's controversial and touches on people's deeply held convictions, so I want to be sensitive and disclaim that I'm trying to understand better and not offend:

So I understand that the collection of ills seems to denote fascism, but it often seems that the people who are the most vocally anti-fascist seem to be fine with many of those ills individually (or put differently, they seem not to be "ills" when they're unbundled from fascism). It seems like they're only against the whole package arranged in a particular way. For example, a lot of people who have vocally criticized America in the last 5 years as being a fascist country seem to be pretty opposed to liberal values like freedom of speech and nonviolence with many such people either rationalizing left-wing violence (BLM riots as well as general antifa violence) if not outright arguing that political violence and even (capital-R) Revolution is necessary. Many support communism and talk about how great life was in the USSR or how amazing China is, which suggests that they're not just referring to some abstract communism that "hasn't been tried yet", but rather specific instances of communist regimes that tick many (all?) of the 'fascism qualities' boxes. I don't know if they can be described as having some "master race" ideology, but the USSR and China are hardly paradigms of tolerance, and many left-wing Americans seem to have pretty segregationist views on race even if they don't have a "master race" per se (perhaps one could argue that "people of color" is their "master race" in the way that various European identities coalesced into "white" in prior centuries?).

So I guess I'm trying to understand what it is about fascism in particular that preoccupies us--why are we on such high alert for fascism specifically, but we don't seem to be concerned at all about other ideologies which incorporate many of the elements of fascism? To me at least it seems very horse-shoe like: the far right and the far left seem very similar in nearly all important respects, and I want to understand why it frequently feels like I'm the only one who sees things this way.

Again, I hope I was minimally offensive.