The Deep Roots of Fascist Thought

Abstract

For decades, the word ‘fascist’ existed solely as a hyperbole — a term meant to insult rather than describe. But lately, politics have grown so hyperbolic that the label looks increasingly sincere. For example, when a powerful man advocates far-right politics and brazenly performs Nazi salutes in front of a cheering crowd, it seems like we have a word for that. What was it again? Ah yes … fascist. Of course, fascism is easy to see when it happens elsewhere. But when it grows under your nose within your own culture, even the most blatant signs can seem obscure. So what we need, then, is a hard-nosed way to measure the spread of fascist ideology — a method that is calmly quantitative, immune to both apologetics and hyperbole. In my mind, the best option is to study patterns in written language. Backing up a bit, all ideologies have words that they emphasize, corresponding to concepts that they deem important. Now, we can get a qualitative sense for these words by reading a corpus of ideological text. But if we want to quantify an ideology, a better approach is to count words. When we do so, we can objectively identify the ‘jargon’ of an ideology — the words that it uses frequently and (crucially) overuses relative to mainstream writing. And once we’ve got this jargon, we can return to written language at large and track the changing frequency of our ideological jargon. The goal is to use word frequency to measure the spread (or collapse) of the ideology in question. In this essay, I’ll use word frequency to track the spread of fascist ideology. The journey starts with a trip to 1930s Europe, where we’ll encounter the works of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler (translated into English). The rantings of these two villains will serve as our corpus of fascist text. From this text, we’ll extract the ‘jargon’ of fascism — the words that Mussolini and Hitler use frequently and overuse relative to mainstream English. With this jargon, we’ll then track the popularity of fascist thinking in written language. Because I’m an anglophone, I’ll start with English writing. Running the numbers, I find that in English books, fascist jargon has been on the rise since the 1980s. Now this trend is admittedly alarming. But I’m going to resist the urge to focus myopically on the present. And that’s because the best way to understand today’s neo-fascism is by studying the deep past. Here, then, is my key finding. Although ‘fascism’ was ostensibly born in the early 20th century, the linguistic data tells a different story about fascism’s origin. Looking at five European languages (English, German, Italian, Spanish, and French), I find that the high point of fascist jargon came several centuries before Hitler and Mussolini were born. In short, what we call ‘fascism’ may be best treated as a repackaging and rebranding of a set of dark ideas that have longed plagued humanity. So when fascists look into the future, they’re really peering into the long-dead past.