Umberto Eco’s 14 Features of Fascism Explained by the President
What a few tweets can teach us about the current state of American politics
This post is inspired by a reddit comment by u/distantapplause.
In 1995, Umberto Eco published an essay title Ur-Fascism in The New York Review of Books. In it, Eco states while there was “only one Nazism,” the “fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.”
Fascism is hard to define as it changes shape constantly, but Eco was able to outline 14 core features of all fascist movements.
Surely, none of these can be observed in America today…
Here are the 14 features as superbly summarised by Kottke in this great post and further illustrated by none other than the president.
1. The cult of tradition
One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.
