Analytical Fascism: What stares back when one stares into the De-Enlightenment

As much as I am disheartened by this, fascism seems to being playing the same counter-cultural role in the world today that the anti-war, student, and civil rights movements played in the 1960s and early 70s. By this I mean that those that embrace fascist values are trying to push society to the right, just as those in these older, liberalizing, movements were trying to push it to the left. But while those enamored with the fascist way of life are clear about what they are against, it is less clear what they are for. Not in the sense of how they want to remake society—this is usually clear enough. What is less clear is the fundamental values that are driving their desire to create a different kind of order. In the conventional terms of the analytic political philosopher, fascists wear their practical reason, their reasons for action, on their sleeves, but the workings of their pure reason, their reasons for belief, are very hard to see. But this does not mean that those values do not exist. It is common for liberals today to treat those they think are fascists as either making gross mistakes about empirical matters, pursuing their own self-interest in order to prioritize their interests over the interests of others, driven by despots who are inflaming one portion of the population as means of personal advancement, and/or best described as crazy, irrational. But these purported explanations for the current move to the right throughout the liberal capitalist world apply at most only to a small number of people. What I will argue is that the move toward fascism is mostly a principled move, even if it is based on principles that are perverse from the liberal point of view. Indeed, I will argue that fascism has a coherent, consistent, historically well-sourced and rational value system behind it. And it is the purpose of this paper to set that value system forth. The importance of doing so cannot be overstated. Having only a vague idea of the values that fascists embrace is not sufficient if we want to engage with fascism and defeat it. Without knowing what values are at work, we cannot know what we need to challenge and what we need to defend. For it should be obvious by now that the wrongness of fascist values is not self-evident to significant and growing portions of the population. And acting as if it is, which is what liberals tend to do, makes us unable to debate the core beliefs that make fascism such a resilient and irrepressible form of social life despite the toll in blood and treasure that it periodically inflicts on those who allow it to prosper in their midst.