Who Inherited the Fascists?

When Mussolini stole the symbol of Roman power and prestige for his nascent Fascist movement, placing it in the claws on an eagle on the Italian flag, his followers never would have dreamed that in 80 years, after a crushing defeat in World War Two, members of diametrically opposed political groups would be trying to pin the same bundles of sticks on one another in a modern rhetorical battle. The fight is symptomatic of a desire to simplify unfamiliar movements and create a Manichaean split between good and evil that rarely exists in the real world. Both desires can easily be found in the movement to label Islamic extremists "Islamofascists" by members of the American Right.

The characterization is politically dangerous and-worse-wholly inaccurate. As hyper-conservative movements that claim provenance from eras of racial or religious superiority hundreds or thousands of years ago, radical Islam and European Fascism both oppose many of the great successes of progressive societies, particularly political liberty. But they differ so much not only in goals, but also in focus, that they can barely be compared to one another-let alone equated.

Were the term "Islamofascism" an honest attempt to grapple with a new political movement, it would still be problematic, in that it attempts to describe a political trend that most Americans should understand in a way that is not at all useful. The fascist parties of early 20th-century Europe were secular nationalist movements that sought a close alignment of an authoritarian government, a corporate economy, an expansionist military, political homogeneity, and opposition to the left wing. To the extent that some of them coordinated with religious movements, it was with highly institutionalized manifestations of Christianity-particularly the Catholic Church.

On the other hand, extremist Islamic movements seek the imposition of a religious state on the entirety of the Muslim world. Their political goals extend only as far as "restoring" a mythical caliphate in which a puritanical version of Islam is enforced as the state religion and nonbelievers are not tolerated. Other than opposition to the influence of foreign cultural institutions and corporations, few specific economic demands are usually attached to these appeals for religious power and purity. Nationalism, too, is not only absent-it is explicitly rejected in favor of religious universalism.

Of course, not one of the Michael Savages and Rush Limbaughs actually believes the comparison to be accurate. Instead the term is a cynical attempt to equate poorly defined "radical" movements in Islam with something that Americans have "studied" in history class since kindergarten and that they understand to be evil. The success of the American Right in reducing complex political and social issues to stark, inaccurate dualisms has been tremendous since at least the Reagan era. This type of anti-intellectual simplicity is characteristic of the sort of nationalist totalitarian state that its purveyors would like to equate with Islam. As the Catholic Church cooperated with fascists like Franco, the Church of Jerry Falwell, et al. is working hand-in-hand with the fringe of the Republican Party to reduce the various actors in the Middle East to political footballs for the neoconservative movement.

This is the true similarity between fascism and extremist Islam: both are perversions. Far-right Christianity and neoconservatism are the same. Fascism is a perversion of national pride and desire for order, extremist Islam and far-right Christianity are perversions of noble religions, and neoconservatism is a perversion of the na've Wilsonian desire to spread American values throughout the globe. Perversions of this sort accompany perversions in language. Leftists become traitors; westerners, infidels; secularists, pagans; and radical Muslims, Islamofascists. These perversions of language turn legitimate complaints into deep-seated hatreds that cannot be solved through rational or even irrational discourse. The rabid repetition of the phrase "Islamofascist" by members of the American Right is not meant to inform or even target fanatical terrorists. It reduces the world of the person who accepts it to a dangerous black-and-white surreality. The term is meant to demonize Muslims and shut down rational dialogue that might solve the conflicts that cause so much hatred in the Middle East. It is a line in the sand, a fortified trench from which American neoconservatives cannot move-cannot negotiate with Syria, cannot speak to Iran, cannot bother to mediate the Israel-Palestine conflict, cannot leave Iraq, cannot effectively address any of the contemporary problems of global politics. This is much more than an offensive phrase-it is a nominal manifestation of the confusion and anger that has reduced the American Right to the ineffective and grotesque political beast that it has become.