Sydney Unitarian Church
Cultural Fascism Today Political Aesthetics of Far-Right Movements
Part 2
Kelvin Auld
Sunday Talk
Sydney Unitarian Church
14 April 2019
DRAFT for Discussion Purposes
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Cultural Fascism Today:
The Challenge of Far-Right Movements
• Cultural fascism, of Far-Right movements, communicates an extreme, aggressive and somewhat irrational reaction against change and the alleged shortcomings of representative democracy. It directly opposes universalism and humanity’s quest for peace, equity, the protection of nature and progressive representative government.
• Cultural fascism of Far-Right movements today (including various coded guises) transmits ideologies of deception and division that attack rationality, truth, good sense, freedom and Unitarian Universalism itself.
• Cultural fascism of Far-Right movements is a fundamentally destructive anti-life, anti-nature and anti-social project that undermines the long standing democratic institutions and standards that prescribe representative democracy.
• The Sydney Unitarian Church is opposed to cultural fascism of Far-Right movements because it directly attacks and undermines the 7 Unitarian Universalism Principles and Sources and key aspects of the church constitution.
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The Concept of “Cultural Fascism”
Cultural Fascism
“Cultural fascism, of far right social movements and politics, is the cultural
transmission and normalization of the core myths, themes and symbolism
of the new faces of fascism, inclusive of eternal, generic and post fascism”.
Source: Kelvin Auld, Cultural Fascism Today: Aesthetics of the Alt-Right Movement, SUC, 2018.
Selected Authors
• Eternal fascism: Umberto Eco (1995)
• Generic fascism: Jason Stanley (2018), Roger Griffin (2018)
• Post fascism: Enzo Traverso (2019)
• Fascism as a social movement: Robert Paxton (1998, 2004, 2016), Michael Mann (2004)
Normalization of Fascist Myth – A warning by Professor Jason Stanley, Yale
“What normalization does is transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. It
makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is
the way it has always been”, Professor Stanley writes.
The assertion that immigrants are responsible for social ills that threaten to ruin a
once-great nation, for example, might represent run of the mill racism or
xenophobia. But the idea is also drawn from a blueprint shared by the most robust
fascist regimes in recent history. Professor Stanley reassures us that it is OK to use
the word “Fascism”.
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Cultural Fascism Today: Core Myths, Themes and Symbolism of Far-Right Movements
• Cultural fascism, of Far-Right movements, communicates an extreme, aggressive and somewhat irrational reaction against change and the alleged shortcomings of liberal representative democracy. Themes may include:
• A cult of tradition, ultra-nationalism and rebirth which idealizes and mystifies the past. It tends to advocate a selective reinterpretation, simplification and misrepresentation of Western and other civilizations.
• Obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation and victimhood and compensatory cults of national identity, unity, energy, purity and rebirth.
• A cult of authority, power and militant violence (authoritarianism).
• A fear of differences, whether they be sexual, gendered, religious, philosophical, ethnic or racial. Anti-feminism, Anti-Multiculturalism, Anti-Egalitarianism etc.
• Anti-Semitism, Anti-Islam, Anti-liberalism and Racism etc (overt, covert & coded)
• A cult of “Masculinism”, ultra machismo and misogyny that tends to manifest itself in an obsession with gender politics and the roles of women.
• An hostility towards Representative Democracy, parliamentary politics, critical analysis (evidence based), tolerance, creativity, reason and good sense.
• A cult of permanent warfare, struggle, violence and repression and a corresponding cults of “action for action’s sake” and “aggressive intolerance”.
• A worship of technology and weapons, not in the manner of an Enlightenment worship of reason, but faith in technology to conquer nature and assert top down authority, hierarchy and social inequality.
• Disregard for nature and the interdependent web of all existence.
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Three Features of Cultural Fascism
Three essential features of cultural fascism today:
Invoking a Mystical Past
Sowing Division
Attacking Truth
Ref : Professor Jason Stanley, Philosophy, Yale University
How Fascism Works: The politics of Us and Them, 2018
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How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
Professor Jason Stanley, Philosopher, Yale University
Yale philosopher Professor Jason Stanley clarifies what fascism is and how it functions in the modern
world. Stanley focuses on propaganda and rhetoric, so his book is largely about the tropes and narratives that
drive fascist politics. Professor Stanley explores what fascism looks like today, why the destruction of truth is so
essential to fascist movements.
Stanley thinks of fascism as a method of politics. It’s a rhetoric, a way of running for power. “Of course,
that’s connected to fascist ideology, because fascist ideology centers on power. But I really see fascism
as a technique to gain power. People are always asking, “Is such-and-such politician really a fascist?” Which is
really just another way of asking if this person has a particular set of beliefs or an ideology, but again, I don’t
really think of a fascist as someone who holds a set of beliefs. They’re using certain techniques to acquire and
retain power”.
Stanley identifies the various techniques that fascists tend to adopt, and shows how someone can be more
fascist or less fascist in their politics. “The key thing is that fascist politics is about identifying enemies,
appealing to the in-group (usually the majority group), and smashing truth and replacing it with power.”
Fascist politics focus on the dominant cultural group. “The goal is to make them feel like victims, to
make them feel like they’ve lost something and that the thing they’ve lost has been taken from them by a
specific enemy, usually some minority out-group or some opposing nation”.
“Fascism flourishes in moments of great anxiety, because you can connect that anxiety with fake loss.
The story is typically that a once-great society has been destroyed by liberalism or feminism or cultural
Marxism or whatever, and you make the dominant group feel angry and resentful about the loss of their
status and power. Almost every manifestation of fascism mirrors this general narrative”.
“We’re not on the brink of some fascist takeover. But there are reasons to be concerned, and we should
always be on guard — that’s the lesson of history.”
Source Material:
https://www.vox.com/2018/9/19/17847110/how-fascism-works-donald-trump-jason-stanley
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Cultural Fascism Today: “Eternal Fascism” or “Ur-Fascism” by Umberto Eco (1995)
1. The Cult of Tradition
2. The Rejection of Modernism
3. The Cult of Action for
Action’s Sake
4. Disagreement is Treason
5. Fear of Difference
6. Appeal to a Frustrated
Middleclass
7. Obsession with a Plot
8. Enemies at the same time
too strong and too weak
9. Life is Permanent Warfare
10. Contempt for the Weak
11. A cult of Death
12. Machismo
13. Selective Populism
14. NewSpeak, coded and
limited language
“I think it is possible to outline a list of (14)
features that are typical of what I would like to
call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These
features cannot be organized into a system;
many of them contradict each other, and are also
typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism”.
“But it is enough that one of them be present
to allow fascism to coagulate around it ”.
“Ur-Fascism (eternal fascism) is still around us,
sometimes in plainclothes”. “Ur-Fascism (eternal
fascism) can come back under the most innocent
of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point
our finger at any of its new instances – every day,
in every part of the world”.
Note the 14 features of Eternal Fascism outlined
by Umberto Eco (1995)
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Definition of Fascism The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) by Robert Paxton:
Fascism is “A form of political behavior marked by obsessive
preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victim hood and by
compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based
party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective
collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and
pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints
goals of internal cleansing and external expansion”.
The Five Stages in the Development of Fascist Movements
• Intellectual Exploration, where disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor, purity and unity.
• Growing Roots, where a fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage (i.e. rooted in the political process of State power)
• Arrival to Power, where a fascist party (or similar) is invited by ruling elites, seeking to control rising opposition, to take control of state power.
• Exercise of power, where the fascist movement controls the state in balance with state institutions such as the police and traditional elites such as the clergy and business magnates.
• Radicalization or Entropy, where the state either becomes increasingly radical, as did Nazi Germany, or slips into traditional authoritarian rule, as did Fascist Italy.
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Fascism in the 21st Century: A Continuing Social Movement
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Far-Right NewSpeak and Tropes: A Deceptive, Coded Dialect of Disinformation
• Far-Right NewSpeak is a deceptive, coded dialect of disinformation, irony,
ambiguity, euphemism and hateful dialogue.
• Far-Right movements are mobilizing coded NewSpeak, irony and symbolism etc
to spread the core myths, themes and symbolism of the new faces of fascism
inclusive of eternal, generic and post-fascism.
• Far-right movements have stormed mainstream media and the internet by using
irony, ambiguity and disinformation as tactics to disseminate and normalize Far-
Right myths, politics and agendas.
• Recently the Data and Society Institute released a report on the online
disinformation and manipulation that is increasingly shaping politics. The report
focused on the way in which Far-Right actors spread their extreme ideologies
through irony via an intimate knowledge of internet culture.
• The report finds that fascist tropes first merged with irony on the internet before
being adopted by the Far-Right as a tool. Irony has a strategic function. It allows
people to disclaim a real commitment to far-right ideas while still espousing them.
• Angela Nagle says in her book, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan
and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, that for the “alt-right”, online irony “is a
mechanism for undermining the confidence of their critics.”
• The following diagram shows how Far-Right actors spread their myths and
extreme ideologies through disinformation and irony via an intimate knowledge of
internet culture.
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Cultural Themes: “ALT- RIGHT” vs. “ALT- LIGHT” Dogma and NewSpeak
The so called “Alt-Light” could be read as a sub-faction of the “Alt-Right” or as a
populist new right social movement, developing in the US, within the orbit of the “Alt
Right” and “Far-Right” movements.
Source of graphic: Gavin McInnis, Rebel Media, YouTube, 2017
Far-Right Dogma, Newspeak and Disinformation
Western Identity – Often used as a euphemism for white superiority and identity.
The Muslim Problem – Muslims portrayed as the enemy of Western Civilization.
Gender Realism - Euphemism for pseudo-scientific sexism and discrimination.
Libertarian – Reinterpreted to support a Post-Democratic unfettered Capitalism.
Civic Nationalism – Reinterpreted as an anti-liberal and exclusionary nationhood.
Anti-Feminism – Opposition to gender equality in the home, workplace & society.
Anti-Social Justice Warrior (SJW) – Opposition to human rights and equity.
Opposes Multi-Culturalism – Aggressive opposition to policy of cultural intermixing.
White Identity – Usually used as a euphemism for white supremacy & overt racism.
The Jewish Problem - Jews portrayed as the enemy of Western Civilization.
Race Realism - Used as a euphemism for pseudo-scientific racism and discrimination.
Authoritarianism – Support for top down authoritarian control of society by an elite.
Ethnic Nationalism – Nation states based on race and ethnicity.
Anti-Egalitarianism – Opposed to the liberal quest for equity and equality.
Anti-Cuckservative – Opposed to a Conservative democratic agenda.
Opposes Miscegenation – Opposition to relationships between different ethnicities.
Far-Right’s Use of Mystical Symbolism
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