Fascism's Erotic Register

GROWING UP IN MUSSOLINI'S ITALY, Umberto Eco knew only Fascism. In 1942, at the age of ten, he writes an essay for the Italian Fascists. The essay must address this question: “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” Eco knows the “right” answer. He wins, receiving what may have been his first award. By 1943, Mussolini is deposed. In 1945, Milan is liberated by partisans, and Il Duce is executed. Once he was all-powerful and idealized. Now his body is kicked and spat upon. Clandestine political parties celebrate their freedom in a public cacophony of difference. Eco learns that “freedom of speech is freedom from rhetoric” (Ur-Fascism, p. 1).

Many years pass, and Eco writes another essay; this one is an antidote to the first. In Ur-Fascism he revisits these memories, and asks, “Is there still another ghost stalking Europe?” (p. 2). Illuminating this ghost, Eco argues that fascism has no particular ideological essence. The content of its ideologies differ, but its structure reoccurs. He lists fourteen features that characterize Eternal Fascism. Many of these coexist in unquestioning contradiction, because fascism disdains thought and reflectivity. Thinking is considered passive, effete, and it is feminized. Fascism is a muscular “cult of action for action's sake,” in which “life is permanent warfare” (p. 7, italics in original). To Eco, fascist violence is an erotic register of machismo. The predations of hyper-hetero-masculinity; the contempt for women; the assault on sex ed and gendered variance; the attribution of perversion to racial/ethnic minorities: all of this is bedrock to fascist structures.

Once there were Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar. Now, in 2024, we have Putin, Orbán, Modi, and Trump. Democracy is at risk. In the United States, the enticement of fascism is manifest in MAGA fever. But fascism is not new to the United States (see Maddow, 2023). Paxton identifies the Ku Klux Klan as the firs