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So, on a recent trip through the northeast US, I ran across no shortage of these flags, and other signs of this ‘tea party’ movement which has lately drawn the attention of the media. No less a luminary than Noam Chomsky has publicly equated these gatherings with the masses of Nuremberg, claiming that

“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.

Normally I defer to Prof. Chomsky’s judgment on matters political, and though my own anarchic political leanings lie slightly to the right of Chomsky’s, I consider myself a fellow-traveller. But I think he’s grossly misapplied the ‘fascist’ tag here, as have many others drawing this connection, and I think Chomsky’s mistake speaks to the wider issue of invoking ‘fascism’ in public discourse. So here, I’d like to offer a few comments about the misapplication of an early 20th-century Italian political movement’s name to any vaguely populist, vaguely scary political clique which one opposes.

First off, we have to think a little about what National Socialism and Italian Fascism really were. It’s crucial to not fall into the trap of conceiving them simply as collections of racist mobs which gave rise to autocratic regimes. If this were all it took to qualify a government as ‘fascist,’ we could find examples leading back many centuries. While racial ideologies, crowd phenomena, and totalitarian dictators were their most obvious manifestations, these movements need to be considered on their own terms, as forming – in the minds of their leaders and adherents – a relatively specific and consistent political ethos. Taking the German example as my case in point, some crucial additional elements to be taken into account when drawing comparisons such as Chomsky’s are their völkisch character, their corporatism, and their Führerprinzip. While individually the Tea Party movement may present parallels with certain aspects of these elements, taken together they make it clear just how far the Tea Partiers are from Fascism.

It is worth pointing out that, as clichéd as such comparisons became toward the end of his presidency, the reign of Bush II was much more closely aligned with the policies of National-Socialism than is the Tea Party ‘ideology’ (if one can call it that) of today. Amongst other policies, its insistence on ‘homeland security’ and the exclusion of ‘undocumented workers’ can be interpreted as means of emphasize the twin dimensions of communal ’security’ and ‘purity;’ its claiming of a ‘right-wing,’ small-government lineage while overseeing an enormous expansion of government powers and a blurring of the lines between government and business presents obvious connections to Nazi corporatism; and its doctrine of an ‘executive privilege’ which transcends the rule of law is a direct borrowing from Weimar-turned-Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his doctrine of the ’state of exception.’

Now consider, point by point, the Tea Party. To be sure, its mass rallies have many features in common with those at Nuremberg, and crowd phenomena more generally. There is a sense in which a mob is simply a mob, irrespective of its ideological justifications. The 1920s/1930s German mobs, like the contemporary American ones, were spurred by economic catastrophes – the ruinous hyperinflation which followed the Treaty of Versailles, and the recent housing crisis, respectively – and a diffuse sense that the current regime was making things worse. And while I think it clouds the issue to simply call either set of mobs ‘racist,’ there can be no doubt that in both sets there were a higher-than-average number of overt racial supremacists, and a far larger cohort of individuals feeling, to greater or lesser degrees, that the traditional positions and privileges of the dominant ethnic group were being usurped by ‘foreign’ populations. In other words: while few Tea Partiers would throw around racial slurs in public, the NYT reports that they “are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.” In the contemporary context, the anti-Semitism of earlier movements (while no doubt still present to some degree) has been supplanted by a conviction that blacks, Latinos, and other minority groups have unjustly benefitted from social welfare policies and programs such as Affirmative Action. This means that, while Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly white, there are some middle and upper-class blacks and Latinos who can identify with the movement. Hence it shares many crucial similarities with the völkisch movements of early 20th-century Germany, but its ideology is not as unambiguously or explicitly ‘racist’ (as in the ethnocentric ideology which became known as ‘Blut und Boden‘ under National-Socialism).

There were many völkisch movements which were not ‘fascist’ in the sense of Hitler’s NSDAP, however, and many similar populist movements which have led to very different sorts of regimes in other parts of the world. Thus the two other elements, corporatism and Führerprinzip, are of the essence in determining a specifically ‘fascist’ trajectory, and I contend that the Tea Party movement not only lacks either but would actively resist steps in those directions. While I have no interest in defending the movement per se – as I will suggest, I think it could lead to any number of frightening dystopian scenarios if some variant of its ideology ever came to power – I reject the label of ‘fascist’ for it, specifically because it is laissez-faire and individualistic where fascism is centrally-organized and corporativist. While the people who make up this movement likely have no idea of the nuances which distinguish communist from broadly fascist dictatorships, and in fact would be the sort to reject National-Socialism out of hand for its name (disregarding its having nothing to do with Marxist socialism), there are any number of steps down the road to Fascist serfdom that the Tea Partiers would unquestionably reject.

Consider, for instance, the origins of the Tea Party movement: could a group which began organizing in response to a simple government transfer of wealth to large businesses possibly accept the kind of close integration of government, corporations, and trade unions that was a first principle of both Italian and German fascism (ie, corporativism or national syndicalism)? No doubt many of the Tea Partiers are as resistant to ‘Big Companies’ as they are to Big Government, especially when they perceive these companies as mismanaged or as the beneficiaries of government aid; indeed, as a side note, I have often felt that a huge step in bringing these libertarian movements around to a more sensible ideology would be to recast large corporations as the main villains with respect to ‘handouts’ in their collective imagery, in place of the imaginary ‘welfare queens’ of Reaganite rhetoric. What of the necessary step toward a smoothly-functioning Fascist state, whereby firearm ownership by the general public is made illegal? We all know what these and other well-armed groups in the US think of even the slightest steps toward that particular policy. In these and other respects, I think that any steps toward a traditionally fascist type of government would be violently resisted by the Tea Party.

While this by no means precludes the usurping of the movement’s political clout for purposes contrary to its original ends, I would say that the Tea Party is individualistic and fragmented enough that it could never lead to something closely resembling twentieth-century Fascism. It has its disturbing, charismatic, and often eerily dictatorial figureheads, like Glenn Beck, but in general its only rallying points are a very basic economic individualism (‘keep your hands off my stuff!’) and a hazy dissatisfaction with the current order of things. Even though they sometimes slavishly parrot the talking points of Fox News, in no way do they have anything resembling the coherent, autocratic ideology of the NSDAP’s Führerprinzip. (I find, in fact, that it grates even to call it an ‘ideology,’ lacking as it is in any internal logic.) Even its leaders are wildly inconsistent and incoherent, while its members have difficulty reconciling their individualism with the benefits they receive – to the point that they can shout at politicians to keep their ‘filthy government hands’ off their Medicare. In this sense, I find such right-wing populist movements generally less frightening than left-wing ones: insofar as left-wing populism is more coherent and already prepared to let its leaders abrogate individual rights (to whatever ends fit the ideology of the particular movement), it may lead more readily to authoritarianism; a movement like the Tea Party, by contrast, is so deeply fragmented and resistant to any perceived encroachment on individual rights, that I think it can ultimately accomplish very little but a destabilization of the Republican voting base.

My point in this is not simply to attack a brief remark of Chomsky’s, but to point out the importance of rethinking the ‘fascist’ analogy. If we speculate a bit on what sort of dystopian future might come of the Tea Party movement, a few possibilities arise – none of which resemble twentieth-century fascism in any important respects. The closely-aligned programmes of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, along with the so-called social policy of the present administration, give us some interesting clues. Perhaps the future which would arise from the Tea Party would have to be such that individual rights were quietly eliminated without any real government oversight, and with any possibility of resistance by arms rendered irrelevant. Consider, for instance, that in the midst of our ostensibly democratic societies there are myriad authoritarian structures called ‘corporations,’ and that these are progressively taking over many of the functions traditionally reserved to government in the United States (from criminal justice to military operations, intelligence gathering, and who knows how much further afield). All the connotations of an analogy with fascism misguide us, inasmuch as they lead us to imagine futures according to a collectivist model of totalitarianism. Perhaps we might imagine an individualistic dystopian future in which one’s access to security, justice, and medicine were still more closely and formally linked to one’s wealth; where still more of the elements of government have been transferred to nondemocratic corporate entities, and the privileges of citizenship are reserved to stockholders; and where resistance has been foreclosed either by technological means (either much better weapons, drugs, à la Brave New World, or other advances in biotechnology) or simply by maintaining the general public in a state of (more) total ignorance. In a sense, I admire the consistency of a libertarian-individualist position, yet in practice I find libertarians woefully ignorant of these sorts of dystopian possibilities, as opposed to the all-too-obvious failures of authoritarian collectivism.

This world of individualism run amok, and not the dystopia of gulags or concentration camps, is the sort of frightening future I imagine when I think about the Tea Party or I watch Fox News for too long; this, I believe, is the sort of future that we ignore when drawing sweeping analogies with ‘fascism,’ and a possible future of which the teabaggers seem to be wholly ignorant. To be sure, I think that we must be on the lookout for direct and obvious lineages from these earlier forms of totalitarianism, as seen in the policies of Bush II and his neoconservative allies. But the Tea Party represents a very different sort of movement from the intellectual one called neoconservatism. Indeed, in many respects it formed as a reaction to that movement, and it comes with its own distinct set of problems. Pace von Hayek, there are many roads to serfdom, and we must not let the ease with which we can draw comparisons to one, particularly Fascist, road blind us to other possibilities.