Today’s faint fascist echoes are not very interesting

So many excitable Americans are hurling accusations of fascism, there might be more definitions of “fascism” than there are actual fascists. Fascism, one of the 20th century’s fighting faiths, has only faint echoes in 21st-century America’s political regression.

Europe’s revolutionary tradition exalted liberty, equality and fraternity until revolutionary fascism sacrificed the first to the second and third. Fascism fancied itself as modernity armed — science translated into machines, especially airplanes, and pure energy restlessly seeking things to smash. Actually, it was a recoil against Enlightenment individualism, the idea that good societies allow reasoning, rights-bearing people to define for themselves the worthy life.

The Enlightenment exalted freedom; fascism postulated destiny for those on “the right side of history.”

Fascism’s celebration of unfettered leaders proclaiming “only I can fix it” entailed disparagement of “parliamentarism,” the politics of incrementalism and conciliation. “Democracy,” said Mussolini, “has deprived the life of the people of ‘style’ ... the color, the strength, the picturesque, the unexpected, the mystical; in sum, all that counts in the life of the masses. We play the lyre on all its strings ... . ”

Fascism was entertainment built around rallies — e.g., those at Nuremberg — where crowds were played as passive instruments. Success manipulating the masses fed fascist leaders’ disdain for the led. Imagine the contempt a promiser feels for, say, people gulled by a promise that one nation will pay for a border wall built against it by another nation.

Mussolini, a fervent socialist until his politics mutated into a rival collectivism, distilled fascism to this: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

Fascism based national unity on shared domestic dreads — of the media as enemies of the people, of elites or others who prevented national homogeneity and social purification.

In the 1920s, fascism captured Italy, in which, it has been said, the poetry of the

Risorgimento — national unification achieved in 1870 — was followed by “the prose of everyday existence.” Mussolini, the barechested, jut-jawed, stallion-mounted alpha male, promised — as Vladimir Putin today does in diminished, sour Russia — derivative masculinity for men bored by humdrum life in a bourgeois “little Italy.”

Communism had a revolutionary doctrine; fascism was more a mood than a doctrine. It was a stance of undifferentiated truculence toward the institutions and manners of liberal democracy.

In the 1930s, Spain acquired a bland fascism — fascism without a charismatic personification: nervous nationalism, leavened by clericalism and corruption. Spain’s golden age was four centuries past; what was recent was the 1898 humiliation of the Spanish-American War.

Donald Trump, an envious acolyte of today’s various strongmen, appeals to those in thrall to country-music manliness: “We’re truck-driving, beer-drinking, big-chested Americans too freedom-loving to let any itsybitsy virus make us wear masks.” Trump, however, is a faux nationalist who disdains his nation’s golden age of international leadership and institution-building after 1945.

Trumpism, too, is a mood masquerading as a doctrine, an entertainment genre based on contempt for its bellowing audiences. Fascism was and is more interesting.