Paxton Quotes

Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.

No, it wasn't an accident, I didn't say that. It was carefully planned, down to the tiniest mechanical and emotional detail. But it was a mistake.

That is sacrilegious. You just totally dissed man code. If we don’t have man code, the world will fall apart." Kip Paxton

But that would leave Paxton to fend for herself, and the last thing any woman wanted in this kind of situation was to look around and see all the people who could help her doing nothing.

Ochoa pulled the door and held it open for her. Nikki pivoted around the jamb, squaring her aim up the hall. She stopped, still holding her combat stance, shook her head, and mumbled, “Mother...” ...Rook was standing halfway up the hall with Paxton snugged behind him holding the gun to his head. He looked at Nikki sheepishly and said, “So, I’m gonna guess it’s Noah.

The only thing that's changed is the way Blake looks at me. And it takes my breath away. Blake's eyes glow in the firelight. But it's the flames behind his eyes that make my whole body run hot. I can feel myself blush as he brings his hands to my cheek, branding me with his touch. "Brianna Paxton." He lets his fingers rest against my skin, stroking just beneath my chin. "You are even more beautiful than I remembered.

The man gave him an appraising up and down. "You look like a witch." Loki looked down at himself. He'd forgone the glamoured clothes he'd been wearing and purchased an actual suit on the way here to save energy — all black, complete with a tiny dark pin through the tie and the highest-heeled boots that Paxton's had for men — disappointingly quite low. "Thank you." "Witches are girls." "Does that make it less of a compliment?

Looking for fears, indeed, may be a more fruitful research strategy than a literal-minded quest for thinkers who “created” fascism.

In "Anatomy of Fascism," Robert Paxton includes in his concise definition "the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external.

Maybe Paxton was a daredevil because he’d grown up swimming with sharks. I

Historian Robert Paxton begins one of his books by asserting: “Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain.

Laken, how well do you really know Wesley Paxton?” “I don’t know Wesley Paxton.” I lift my brows amused. “I know Wesley Parker.” “Who’s Wesley Parker?” “Who’s Wesley Paxton?” I cock my head to the side happy to take control of the conversation, albeit lopsided and psychotic.

The moment has come to give fascism a usable short handle, even though we know that it encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person. Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

I told you this one’s not right in the head. I just show her my killer weapons and all she wants to do is jump my bones.

An interlocking set of new enemies was emerging: globalization, foreigners, multiculturalism, environmental regulation, high taxes, and the incompetent politicians who could not cope with these challenges. A widening public disaffection for the political Establishment opened the way for an “antipolitics” that the extreme Right could satisfy better than the far Left after 1989. After the Marxist Left lost credibility as a plausible protest vehicle when the Soviet Union collapsed, the radical Right had no serious rivals as the mouthpiece for the angry “losers” of the new postindustrial, globalized, multiethnic Europe.

I am serenading you sweetheart,” Kip says, “The way I figure it, you like those idiots who play guitars, so I figure I will learn how to play so I can seduce you. Jagger will understand. I mean he can’t play drums for shit, so you will have no choice but to fall madly in love with my guitar and drum playing skills.” He grins like a Cheshire cat.

We are not required to believe that fascist movements can only come to power in an exact replay of the scenario of Mussolini and Hitler. All that is required to fit our model is polarization, deadlock, mass mobilization against internal and external enemies, and complicity by existing elites.

I never knew the difference between loving someone and being in love,” he began. “I don’t know why, because now it seems so obvious. I mean, it’s in the name: in love. When you love someone that just means you care; but when you’re in love, that means you’re a part of it.” He scanned the audience and landed on Paxton and Jade holding hands in the third row. “The feeling consumes you,” he continued. “And when you’re surrounded by that want and that need to make that other person happy, you can’t see anything else. You’re blind to all of the hate and the hurt that’s waiting on the outside. None of it matters, because in here – in love – nothing hurts.” Larson watched as a drop of his own tears fell onto the surface in front of him. “I don’t care if I’m blind for the rest of my life. I loved Owen. I’m in love with him. And even though he’s gone, I’ll never leave this place we made.

What did you learn in school today, Dear little boy of mine? What did you learn in school today, Dear little boy of mine? I learned that Washington never told a lie. I learned that soldiers seldom die. I learned that everybody's free. And that's what the teacher said to me. That's what I learned in school today. That's what I learned in school.

Paxton choked on the tears that were gushing uncontrollably down his face. “This feels... a lot like falling,” he let out through his gasps for air. Jade pulled Paxton’s trembling frame against hers. His hoodie was warm from his body heat and it smelt like cigarette smoke and deodorant. “No,” she corrected him. “This is just... slipping gracefully.

We're all about 4 or 5 decisions away from shittin in a bucket.

Fascism is “true" insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle,

Into this unfolding crisis stepped the calm figure of Joseph Paxton, head gardener of Chatsworth House,

Clarify—night soil,” Paxton said. “Shit,

Paxton Pierce was an impossible man. One that no woman could please. Not even me.

It was the most improbably wise move any aristocrat has ever made. Paxton leaped into the job with levels of energy and application that simply dazzled. He

which was instead filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

while a new fascism would necessarily diabolize some enemy, both internal and external, the enemy would not necessarily be Jews. An authentically popular American fascism would be pious, antiblack, and, since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well; in western Europe, secular and, these days, more likely anti-Islamic than anti-Semitic; in

Paxton walked over to the box and opened it, still feeling a little of that thrill she used to have at the thought of party dresses, the fantasy of it all. She smiled when she saw the shimmering pink material, the sparkling jewels at the neckline.

The surviving human beings there could do nothing but wait for the end to come. They chose different ways to live out their final days. That was the plot.** It was a dark movie offering no hope of salvation. (Though, watching it, Aomame reconfirmed her belief that everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.) ** On the Beach, the 1959 movie, director: Stanley Kramer, writer: John Paxton, starring: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire & Anthony Perkins. On the Beach, the 1957 novel, writer: Nevil Shute.

It was Paxton Osgood, wearing a cute pink dress and gorgeous shoes. She was tall like her brother, but had wide curves, as if one of her angular French ancestors had scandalized everyone by marrying a pretty stout milkmaid, and several generations later, Paxton was the result.

For a hoarder, staying clean isn't really about bins and labels; it's about processing items that come into the house. A good organizer can help a hoarder develop methods for sorting mail, for staying on top of recycling, and for making sure donated items get to their destinations... The repetition of bad cleaning skills is usually what got the hoarder into trouble in the first place, so an organizer works on repetition of new, positive cleaning skills.

Fascism exists at the level of Stage One within all democratic countries—not excluding the United States. “Giving up free institutions," especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is recurrently attractive to citizens of Western democracies, including some Americans. We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular “march" on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national “enemies" is enough. Something

It's a lesson too late for the learning, made of sand, made of sand. In the wink of an eye my soul is turning, in your hands, in your hands. Are you going away, with no word of farewell, will there be not a trace left behind? I could of loved you better, didn't mean to be unkind. You know it was the last thing on my mind.

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Fascisms seek out in each national culture those themes that are best capable of mobilizing a mass movement of regeneration, unification, and purity, directed against liberal individualism and constitutionalism and against Leftists class struggle. The themes that appeal to fascists in one cultural tradition may seem simply silly to another. The foggy Norse myths that stirred Norwegians or Germans sounded ridiculous in Italy, where Fascism appealed rather to a sun-drenched classical Romanita.

PAXTON OSGOOD'S FUTURE HUSBAND Will be kind Will be funny Will be accepting Will be be able to cook Will be a good kisser Will always surprise me Will argue with me and sometimes let me win, but not always Will be mysterious Will always love me, no matter what I look like Mama will not like him, which means I will love him even more

Hoarding isn't about how much stuff someone has, it's about how they process those things.

Say what you will about junk food, it’s the vice least likely to pose a danger to others.

the hottest fire forges the strongest steel.

Ain’t easy for a child to use their free will when adults dance with the devil.

The secret of success was to screw up as late as possible. Then look good in a coffin.

Happiness meant taking risks. No one had ever told Paxton that before. It was like a secret the world had been keeping from her. Paxton didn't take risks, at least not when she was sober. She knew what she was getting into before she ever committed to anything. The fact that all the changes she'd made in the past few days scared her to death had to be a good sign.

I've always believed that a hoarder house is a house full of quitting. To make a change, the hoarder has to stop quitting and start trying. The hoarder has to want to change... When hoarders quit, they are cheating their potential. Every time they quit, they are taking a shortcut and they know it. The guilt builds, which is why hoarders can't allow themselves to quit again, not even once. Quitting on small actions eventually leads to completely giving up.

Some hoarders choose to be alone because they have lost someone in the past. On the surface it looks like a hoarder wants to be alone, but the truth is the hoarder doesn’t want to get close to someone else and risk another loss or death.

They expected that inevitable war would allow the master races, united and self-confident, to prevail, while the divided, “mongrelized,” and irresolute peoples would become their handmaidens. Fascism had become conceivable, as we will soon

...fascism is more plausibly linked to a set of "mobilizing passions" that shape fascist action than to a consistent and fully articulated philosophy. At the bottom is a passionate nationalism. Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between the good and evil camps, between the pure and the corrupt, in which one's own community or nation has been the victim. In this Darwinian narrative, the chosen people have been weakened by political parties, social classes, unassimilable minorities, spoiled rentiers, and rationalist thinkers who lack the necessary sense of community. These "mobilizing passions," mostly taken for granted and not always overtly argued as intellectual propositions, form the emotional lava that set fascism's foundations: -a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions; -the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it; -the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external; -dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences; -the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary; -the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the groups' destiny; -the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason; -the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success; -the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle. ...Fascism was an affair of the gut more than the brain, and a study of the roots of fascism that treats only the thinkers and the writers misses the most powerful impulses of all.

I don’t even want to think about all the animals--livestock, pets, strays--left out to battle the elements. The very idea makes my heart hurt. “You okay?” Ryder asks me. “Yeah, why?” “I dunno.” He shrugs. “You just looked…sad or something.” I’m shocked at how well he can read me. “I was just thinking about anyone--anything--stuck out there in this. You know, dogs, cats, horses. Cows,” I add, sighing heavily. “We’ve got cows!” Rider quips, quoting that old movie about tornadoes--you know, the one with Bill Paxton. I admit, it makes me smile. “Sorry, I couldn’t help myself,” Ryder says.

The hoarder usually has been avoiding emotions for so long that getting back in touch with them is scary and painful. We want hoarders to reconnect with their emotions, and expressing anger is often the first step toward that goal. Anger is a powerful emotion, but it is often better to vent it than to succumb to a more debilitating and paralyzing emotion like grief or fear.

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cult of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working with uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

For example, while new fascism would necessarily diabolize some enemy, both external and internal, the enemy would not necessarily be Jews. An authentically popular American Fascism would be pious, antiblack, and since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well; in western Europe, secular and, these days, more likely anti-Islamic than anti-Semitic; in Russia and easter Europe, religious, anti-Semitic, Slavophile and anti-Western. New Fascism would probably prefer the mainstream patriotic dress of their own in place and time to alien swastikas or fasces.

For Wendy and Sam, the best rule was "everything has a home.” We made a list of their main household items and where they went - for example, pill bottles in the bathroom medicine cabinet, laundry in the hamper, and food in the kitchen cabinets. This may seem like a fundamental rule that everyone learns as a child, but many hoarders didn’t pick that up either because they grew up in hoarding houses themselves, or they grew up in traumatic households where finding a meal and avoiding a beating was a daily reality. Cleaning was the least of their worries.

How could a cultivated nation like Germany unleash a murderous frenzy against the Jewish people? Many authors have described the killings. A few authors have warned that explaining is in itself a profanation. But Dan McMillan takes a different course. With eloquence and clarity he sets the Shoah in a broad historical context. McMillan shows how step by step, ideas and institutions came into place in western nations, especially in Germany, that made the killings conceivable, then possible, and even likely, but never inevitable. This book is an impressive achievement.

I’ve learned that for hoarders, every cleanup is a grieving process. We are asking them to say goodbye to items that are heavy with memories - some wonderful, some painful. But all are important and deserve respect. A hoarder finds safety in the hoard, in the stacks and piles, and he or she will grieve over the loss of those items when they are gone. The week after the house cleaning is usually the worst. Instead of being happy and enjoying the new space, hoarders go through a difficult process. They miss their possessions, which were their closest friends for years.

Fascists need a demonized enemy against which to mobilize followers, but of course the enemy does not have to be Jewish. Each culture specifies the national enemy. Even though in Germany the foreign, the unclean, the contagious, and the subversive often mingled in a single diabolized image of the Jew, Gypsies and Slavs were also targeted. American fascists diabolized blacks and sometimes Catholics as well as Jews. Italian Fascists diabolized their South Slav neighbors, especially the Slovenes, as well as the socialists who refused the war of national revival. Later they easily added to their list the Ethiopians and the Libyans, whom they tried to conquer in Africa.

One device used by fascist parties, but also by Marxist revolutionaries who have given serious thought to the conquest of power, was parallel structures. An outsider party that wants to claim power sets up organizations that replicate government agencies. The Nazi Party, for example, had its own foreign policy agency that, at first, soon after the party had achieved power, had to share power with the traditional Foreign Office. After its head, Joachim von Ribbentrop, became foreign minister in 1938, the party’s foreign policy office increasingly supplanted the professional diplomats of the Foreign Office. A particularly important fascist “parallel organization” was the party police. Fascist parties that aspired to power tended to use their party militias to challenge the state’s monopoly of physical force. The fascist parties’ parallel structures challenged the liberal state by claiming that they were capable of doing some things better (bashing communists, for instance). After achieving power, the party could substitute its parallel structures for those of the state.

Considering these precursors, a debate has arisen about which country spawned the earliest fascist movement. France is a frequent candidate. Russia has been proposed. Hardly anyone puts Germany first. It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan. Just after the Civil War, some former Confederate officers, fearing the vote given to African Americans in 1867 by the Radical Reconstructionists, set up a militia to restore an overturned social order. The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state, which, in the eyes of the Klan’s founders, no longer defended their community’s legitimate interests. By adopting a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as by their techniques of intimidation and their conviction that violence was justified in the cause of their group’s destiny,88 the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe. It should not be surprising, after all, that the most precocious democracies—the United States and France—should have generated precocious backlashes against democracy.

But first Hitler, taken in by Mussolini’s mythmaking, attempted a “march” of his own. On November 8, 1923, during a nationalist rally in a Munich beer hall, the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler attempted to kidnap the leaders of the Bavarian government and force them to support a coup d’état against the federal government in Berlin. He believed that if he took control of Munich and declared a new national government, the Bavarian civil and military leaders would be forced by public opinion to support him. He was equally convinced that the local army authorities would not oppose the Nazi coup because the World War I hero General Ludendorff was marching beside him. Hitler underestimated military fidelity to the chain of command. The conservative Bavarian minister-president Gustav von Kahr gave orders to stop Hitler’s coup, by force if necessary. The police fired on the Nazi marchers on November 9 as they approached a major square (possibly returning a first shot from Hitler’s side). Fourteen putschists and four policemen were killed. Hitler was arrested and imprisoned,8 along with other Nazis and their sympathizers. The august General Ludendorff was released on his own recognizance. Hitler’s “Beer Hall Putsch” was thus put down so ignominiously by the conservative rulers of Bavaria that he resolved never again to try to gain power through force. That meant remaining at least superficially within constitutional legality, though the Nazis never gave up the selective violence that was central to the party’s appeal, or hints about wider aims after power.

We can dismiss any notion that the Nazi regime murdered Jews in order to gratify German public opinion. It took elaborate precautions to hide these actions from the German people and from foreign observers. In official documents the responsible authorities referred to the killings with euphemisms like Sonderbehandlung (“special handling”), and undertook major operations to eliminate all traces of them, at a time when men and materiel could hardly be spared from the fighting. At the same time, there was no particular effort to keep the secret from German troops on the eastern front, many of whom were regularly assigned to participate. Some soldiers and officials photographed the mass executions and sent pictures home to their families and girlfriends.57 Many thousands of soldiers, civil administrators, and technicians stationed in the eastern occupied territories were eyewitnesses to mass killings. Many more thousands heard about them from participants. The knowledge inside Germany that dreadful things were being done to Jews in the east was “fairly widespread.” As long as disorderly destruction such as the shop-front smashings, beatings, and murders of Kristallnacht did not take place under their windows, most of them let distance, indifference, fear of denunciation, and their own sufferings under Allied bombing stifle any objections. In the end, radicalized Nazism lost even its nationalist moorings. As he prepared to commit suicide in his Berlin bunker in April 1945, Hitler wanted to pull the German nation down with him in a final frenzy. This was partly a sign of his character—a compromise peace was as unthinkable for Hitler as it was for the Allies. But it also had a basis within the nature of the regime: not to push forward was to perish. Anything was better than softness.59

Can fascism still exist? Clearly Stage One movements can still be found in all major democracies. More crucially, can they reach Stage Two again by becoming rooted and influential? We need not look for exact replicas, in which fascist veterans dust off their swastikas. Collectors of Nazi paraphernalia and hard-core neo-Nazi sects are capable of provoking destructive violence and polarization. As long as they remain excluded from the alliances with the establishment necessary to join the political mainstream or share power, however, they remain more a law and order problem than a political threat. Much more likely to exert an influence are extreme Right movements that have learned to moderate their language, abandon classical fascist symbolism, and appear “normal.” It is by understanding how past fascisms worked, and not by checking the color of shirts, or seeking echoes of the rhetoric of the national-syndicalist dissidents of the opening of the twentieth century, that we may be able to recognize it. The well-known warning signals—extreme nationalist propaganda and hate crimes—are important but insufficient. Knowing what we do about the fascist cycle, we can find more ominous warning signals in situations of political deadlock in the face of crisis, threatened conservatives looking for tougher allies, ready to give up due process and the rule of law, seeking mass support by nationalist and racialist demagoguery. Fascists are close to power when conservatives begin to borrow their techniques, appeal to their “mobilizing passions,” and try to co-opt the fascist following. Armed by historical knowledge, we may be able to distinguish today’s ugly but isolated imitations, with their shaved heads and swastika tattoos, from authentic functional equivalents in the form of a mature fascist conservative alliance. Forewarned, we may be able to detect the real thing when it comes along.

The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Léon Gambetta, the grocer’s son, or the beer wholesaler’s son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights). But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments: Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens. Yet the early fascist cadres were far too diverse in social origins and education to fit the common label of marginal outsiders. Alongside street-brawlers with criminal records like Amerigo Dumini or Martin Bormann one could find a professor of philosophy like Giovanni Gentile or even, briefly, a musician like Arturo Toscanini. What united them was, after all, values rather than a social profile: scorn for tired bourgeois politics, opposition to the Left, fervent nationalism, a tolerance for violence when needed.

German voters never gave the Nazis a majority of the popular vote, as is still sometimes alleged. As we saw in the last chapter, the Nazis did indeed become the largest party in the German Reichstag in the parliamentary election of July 31, 1932, with 37.2 percent of the vote. They then slipped back to 33.1 percent in the parliamentary election of November 6, 1932. In the parliamentary election of March 6, 1933, with Hitler as chancellor and the Nazi Party in command of all the resources of the German state, its score was a more significant but still insufficient 43.9 percent. More than one German in two voted against Nazi candidates in that election, in the teeth of intimidation by Storm Troopers. The Italian Fascist Party won 35 out of 535 seats, in the one free parliamentary election in which it participated, on May 15, 1921. At the other extreme, neither Hitler nor Mussolini arrived in office by a coup d’état. Neither took the helm by force, even if both had used force before power in order to destabilize the existing regime, and both were to use force again, after power, in order to transform their governments into dictatorships (as we will see shortly). Even the most scrupulous authors refer to their “seizure of power,” but that phrase better describes what the two fascist leaders did after reaching office than how they got into office. Both Mussolini and Hitler were invited to take office as head of government by a head of state in the legitimate exercise of his official functions, on the advice of civilian and military counselors. Both thus became heads of government in what appeared, at least on the surface, to be legitimate exercises of constitutional authority by King Victor Emmanuel III and President Hindenburg. Both these appointments were made, it must be added at once, under conditions of extreme crisis, which the fascists had abetted. Indeed no insurrectionary coup against an established state has ever so far brought fascists to power. Authoritarian dictatorships have several times crushed such attempts.

No sound strategy for studying fascism can fail to examine the entire context in which it was formed and grew. Some approaches to fascism start with the crisis to which fascism was a response, at the risk of making the crisis into a cause. A crisis of capitalism, according to Marxists, gave birth to fascism. Unable to assure ever-expanding markets, ever-widening access to raw materials, and ever-willing cheap labor through the normal operation of constitutional regimes and free markets, capitalists were obliged, Marxists say, to find some new way to attain these ends by force. Others perceive the founding crisis as the inadequacy of liberal state and society (in the laissez-faire meaning of liberalism current at that time) to deal with the challenges of the post-1914 world. Wars and revolutions produced problems that parliament and the market—the main liberal solutions—appeared incapable of handling: the distortions of wartime command economies and the mass unemployment attendant upon demobilization; runaway inflation; increased social tensions and a rush toward social revolution; extension of the vote to masses of poorly educated citizens with no experience of civic responsibility; passions heightened by wartime propaganda; distortions of international trade and exchange by war debts and currency fluctuations. Fascism came forward with new solutions for these challenges. Fascists hated liberals as much as they hated socialists, but for different reasons. For fascists, the internationalist, socialist Left was the enemy and the liberals were the enemies’ accomplices. With their hands-off government, their trust in open discussion, their weak hold over mass opinion, and their reluctance to use force, liberals were, in fascist eyes, culpably incompetent guardians of the nation against the class warfare waged by the socialists. As for beleaguered middle-class liberals themselves, fearful of a rising Left, lacking the secret of mass appeal, facing the unpalatable choices offered them by the twentieth century, they have sometimes been as ready as conservatives to cooperate with fascists. Every strategy for understanding fascism must come to terms with the wide diversity of its national cases. The major question here is whether fascisms are more disparate than the other “isms.” This book takes the position that they are, because they reject any universal value other than the success of chosen peoples in a Darwinian struggle for primacy. The community comes before humankind in fascist values, and respecting individual rights or due process gave way to serving the destiny of the Volk or razza. Therefore each individual national fascist movement gives full expression to its own cultural particularism. Fascism, unlike the other “isms,” is not for export: each movement jealously guards its own recipe for national revival, and fascist leaders seem to feel little or no kinship with their foreign cousins. It has proved impossible to make any fascist “international” work.

If asked what manner of beast fascism is, most people would answer, without hesitation, "fascism is an ideology." The fascist leaders themselves never stopped saying that they were prophets of an idea, unlike the materialist liberals and socialists. Hitler talked ceaselessly of Weltanschauung, or "worldview," an uncomely word he successfully forced on the attention of the whole world. Mussolini vaunted the power of the Fascist creed. A fascist, by this approach, is someone who espouses fascist ideology - an ideology being more than just ideas, but a total system of thought harnessed to a world-shaping project... It would seem to follow that we should "start by examining the programs, doctrines, and propaganda in some of the main fascist movements and then proceed to the actual policies and performance of the only two noteworthy fascist regimes." Putting programs first rests on the unstated assumption that fascism was an "ism" like the other great political systems of the modern world: conservatism, liberalism, socialism. Usually taken for granted, that assumption is worth scrutinizing. The other "isms" were created in an era when politics was a gentleman's business, conducted through protracted and learned parliamentary debate among educated men who appealed to each other's reasons as well as their sentiments. The classical "isms" rested upon coherent philosophical systems laid out in the works of systematic thinkers. It seems only natural to explain them by examining their programs and the philosophy that underpinned them. Fascism, by contrast, was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric. The role programs and doctrine play in it is, on closer inspection, fundamentally unlike the role they play in conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples. It has not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like Marx, or by any major critical intelligence, like Mill, Burke, or Tocqueville. In a way utterly unlike the classical "isms," the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is "true" insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract and universal reason. The first fascists were entirely frank about this. "We [Fascists] don't think ideology is a problem that is resolved in such a way that truth is seated on a throne. But, in that case, does fighting for an ideology mean fighting for mere appearances? No doubt, unless one considers it according to its unique and efficacious psychological-historical value. The truth of an ideology lies in its capacity to set in motion our capacity for ideals and action. Its truth is absolute insofar as, living within us, it suffices to exhaust those capacities." The truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.

Late in the nineteenth century came the first signs of a “Politics in a New Key”: the creation of the first popular movements dedicated to reasserting the priority of the nation against all forms of internationalism or cosmopolitanism. The decade of the 1880s—with its simultaneous economic depression and broadened democratic practice—was a crucial threshold. That decade confronted Europe and the world with nothing less than the first globalization crisis. In the 1880s new steamships made it possible to bring cheap wheat and meat to Europe, bankrupting family farms and aristocratic estates and sending a flood of rural refugees into the cities. At the same time, railroads knocked the bottom out of what was left of skilled artisanal labor by delivering cheap manufactured goods to every city. At the same ill-chosen moment, unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived in western Europe—not only the familiar workers from Spain and Italy, but also culturally exotic Jews fleeing oppression in eastern Europe. These shocks form the backdrop to some developments in the 1880s that we can now perceive as the first gropings toward fascism. The conservative French and German experiments with a manipulated manhood suffrage that I alluded to earlier were extended in the 1880s. The third British Reform Bill of 1884 nearly doubled the electorate to include almost all adult males. In all these countries, political elites found themselves in the 1880s forced to adapt to a shift in political culture that weakened the social deference that had long produced the almost automatic election of upper-class representatives to parliament, thereby opening the way to the entry of more modest social strata into politics: shopkeepers, country doctors and pharmacists, small-town lawyers—the “new layers” (nouvelles couches) famously summoned forth in 1874 by Léon Gambetta, soon to be himself, the son of an immigrant Italian grocer, the first French prime minister of modest origins. Lacking personal fortunes, this new type of elected representative lived on their parliamentarians’ salary and became the first professional politicians. Lacking the hereditary name recognition of the “notables” who had dominated European parliaments up to then, the new politicians had to invent new kinds of support networks and new kinds of appeal. Some of them built political machines based upon middle-class social clubs, such as Freemasonry (as Gambetta’s Radical Party did in France); others, in both Germany and France, discovered the drawing power of anti-Semitism and nationalism. Rising nationalism penetrated at the end of the nineteenth century even into the ranks of organized labor. I referred earlier in this chapter to the hostility between German-speaking and Czech-speaking wage earners in Bohemia, in what was then the Habsburg empire. By 1914 it was going to be possible to use nationalist sentiment to mobilize parts of the working class against other parts of it, and even more so after World War I. For all these reasons, the economic crisis of the 1880s, as the first major depression to occur in the era of mass politics, rewarded demagoguery. Henceforth a decline in the standard of living would translate quickly into electoral defeats for incumbents and victories for political outsiders ready to appeal with summary slogans to angry voters.

The most interesting aspects of the story lie between the two extremes of coercion and popularity. It might be instructive to consider fascist regimes’ management of workers, who were surely the most recalcitrant part of the population. It is clear that both Fascism and Nazism enjoyed some success in this domain. According to Tim Mason, the ultimate authority on German workers under Nazism, the Third Reich “contained” German workers by four means: terror, division, some concessions, and integration devices such as the famous Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) leisure-time organization. Let there be no doubt that terror awaited workers who resisted directly. It was the cadres of the German Socialist and Communist parties who filled the first concentration camps in 1933, before the Jews. Since socialists and communists were already divided, it was not hard for the Nazis to create another division between those workers who continued to resist and those who decided to try to live normal lives. The suppression of autonomous worker organizations allowed fascist regimes to address workers individually rather than collectively. Soon, demoralized by the defeat of their unions and parties, workers were atomized, deprived of their usual places of sociability, and afraid to confide in anyone. Both regimes made some concessions to workers—Mason’s third device for worker “containment.” They did not simply silence them, as in traditional dictatorships. After power, official unions enjoyed a monopoly of labor representation. The Nazi Labor Front had to preserve its credibility by actually paying some attention to working conditions. Mindful of the 1918 revolution, the Third Reich was willing to do absolutely anything to avoid unemployment or food shortages. As the German economy heated up in rearmament, there was even some wage creep. Later in the war, the arrival of slave labor, which promoted many German workers to the status of masters, provided additional satisfactions. Mussolini was particularly proud of how workers would fare under his corporatist constitution. The Labor Charter (1927) promised that workers and employers would sit down together in a “corporation” for each branch of the economy, and submerge class struggle in the discovery of their common interests. It looked very imposing by 1939 when a Chamber of Corporations replaced parliament. In practice, however, the corporative bodies were run by businessmen, while the workers’ sections were set apart and excluded from the factory floor. Mason’s fourth form of “containment”—integrative devices—was a specialty of fascist regimes. Fascists were past masters at manipulating group dynamics: the youth group, the leisure-time association, party rallies. Peer pressure was particularly powerful in small groups. There the patriotic majority shamed or intimidated nonconformists into at least keeping their mouths shut. Sebastian Haffner recalled how his group of apprentice magistrates was sent in summer 1933 on a retreat, where these highly educated young men, mostly non-Nazis, were bonded into a group by marching, singing, uniforms, and drill. To resist seemed pointless, certain to lead nowhere but to prison and an end to the dreamed-of career. Finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute. These various techniques of social control were successful.

Two kinds of development help explain how a readiness built up to kill all Jews, including women and children. One is a series of “dress rehearsals” that served to lower inhibitions and provided trained personnel hardened for anything. First came the euthanasia of incurably ill and insane Germans, begun on the day when World War II began. Nazi eugenics theory had long provided a racial justification for getting rid of “inferior” persons. War provided a broader justification for reducing the drain of “useless mouths” on scarce resources. The “T-4” program killed more than seventy thousand people between September 1939 and 1941, when, in response to protests from the victims’ families and Catholic clergy, the matter was left to local authorities. Some of the experts trained in this program were subsequently transferred to the occupied east, where they applied their mass killing techniques to Jews. This time, there was less opposition. The second “dress rehearsal” was the work of the Einsatzgruppen, the intervention squads specially charged with executing the political and cultural elite of invaded countries. In the Polish campaign of September 1939 they helped wipe out the Polish intelligentsia and high civil service, evoking some opposition within the military command. In the Soviet campaign the Einsatzgruppen received the notorious “Commissar Order” to kill all Communist Party cadres as well as the Jewish leadership (seen as identical in Nazi eyes), along with Gypsies. This time the army raised no objections. The Einsatzgruppen subsequently played a major role, though they were far from alone, in the mass killings of Jewish women and children that began in some occupied areas in fall 1941. A third “dress rehearsal” was the intentional death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. It was on six hundred of them that the Nazi occupation authorities first tested the mass killing potential of the commercial insecticide Zyklon-B at Auschwitz on September 3, 1941. Most Soviet prisoners of war, however, were simply worked or starved to death. The second category of developments that helped prepare a “willingness to murder” consisted of blockages, emergencies, and crises that made the Jews become a seemingly unbearable burden to the administrators of conquered territories. A major blockage was the failure to capture Moscow that choked off the anticipated expulsion of all the Jews of conquered eastern Europe far into the Soviet interior. A major emergency was shortages of food supplies for the German invasion force. German military planners had chosen to feed the invasion force with the resources of the invaded areas, in full knowledge that this meant starvation for local populations. When local supplies fell below expectations, the search for “useless mouths” began. In the twisted mentality of the Nazi administrators, Jews and Gypsies also posed a security threat to German forces. Another emergency was created by the arrival of trainloads of ethnic Germans awaiting resettlement, for whom space had to be made available. Faced with these accumulating problems, Nazi administrators developed a series of “intermediary solutions.” One was ghettos, but these proved to be incubators for disease (an obsession with the cleanly Nazis), and a drain on the budget. The attempt to make the ghettos work for German war production yielded little except another category of useless mouths: those incapable of work. Another “intermediary solution” was the stillborn plan, already mentioned, to settle European Jews en masse in some remote area such as Madagascar, East Africa, or the Russian hinterland. The failure of all the “intermediary solutions” helped open the way for a “final solution”: extermination.

Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war. Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento,” Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program” of May 1920, “. . . do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” “The fist,” asserted a Fascist militant in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory.” Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize” his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.” Hitler did present a program (the 25 Points of February 1920), but he pronounced it immutable while ignoring many of its provisions. Though its anniversaries were celebrated, it was less a guide to action than a signal that debate had ceased within the party. In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say “show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before this Volk and make cheap promises.” Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent. Programs were casually fluid. The relationship between intellectuals and a movement that despised thought was even more awkward than the notoriously prickly relationship of intellectual fellow travelers with communism. Many intellectuals associated with fascism’s early days dropped away or even went into opposition as successful fascist movements made the compromises necessary to gain allies and power, or, alternatively, revealed its brutal anti-intellectualism. We will meet some of these intellectual dropouts as we go along. Fascism’s radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program, as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification. Das Blut or la razza would determine who was right.

It became harder for them to indulge their initial freedom to mobilize a wide range of heterogeneous complaints, and to voice the scattered resentments of everyone (except socialists) who felt aggrieved but unrepresented. They had to make choices. They had to give up the amorphous realms of indiscriminate protest and locate a definite political space3 in which they could obtain positive practical results.

You make me feel like I'm drowning.

punch

Paxton…” Hearing her say my name, almost pleading with me, makes me lose control. I grab her and hoist her on top of the counter, smashing my lips to hers.

Never pass up the opportunity to go to the bathroom, and never refuse a breath mint.

I never met a book I didn't like, although "Herzog" and "Howl" come close.

When cleaning starts, hoarders tend to pick up and clutch items in their hands without putting them down. Pretty soon their arms and pockets start to fill up like they are a squirrel storing for the winter. They talk very fast and won’t look people in the eye. These are sure signs that the anxiety is taking over. Someone having a anxiety attack can’t function.

The freak out is actually a good sign. Many hoarders have literally built a wall of trash around themselves to mentally and physically protect them from the real world. A cleanup crew is tearing down this wall of protection. A hoarder who shows no emotions at all is probably not processing the cleanup seriously. Chances are the house will be full again very soon.

Family and friends, in fact anyone on the "team” that has a continuing relationship with a hoarder, needs to understand that, like a recovering addict, a hoarder is going to struggle for the rest of his or her life.

After Jim passed away, his sons and daughters went through a mourning period. Because they couldn’t handle the emotions of the cleanup on top of the loss in their family, they closed up the house and let it sit for about a year. Had they jumped into cleaning right away, it would have been tempting to keep a lot of Jim’s things, especially because so many of them were actually valuable historical items. This is one way I see hoarding passed from generation to generation.

After my gambling problem, I lost everything and was forced to use cash only. Although it was hard, not having credit cards was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I learned during those years to ask myself if I needed an item or just wanted it, and I also figured out how to make myself happy by doing something instead of buying something. I encourage hoarders to ask themselves these questions whenever they are tempted to shop: Will this item make my life better? Does it help me keep my home in order? If this is a gift, does the person I am buying it for really want or need it? If I don’t have enough cash for this, am I willing to wait until I do?

The big challenge with Aimee was her emotional attachment to much of her stuff. Her "keep” items consisted mostly of things that had belonged to her late mother, who had been her closest friend and a major source of support during a difficult divorce from an abusive man. Aimee came to realize that the trauma of losing her mother had, in fact, triggered her hoarding.

If happiness is the end result, if it’s that single want that matters, if we had to through that to get here, I’d do it all over again. If it’s the love that matters, then why does it matter how we got there? We were the perfect storm of two kinds of crazy. Paxton Pierce

Paxton If happiness is the end result, if it’s that single want that matters, if we had to through that to get here, I’d do it all over again. If it’s the love that matters, then why does it matter how we got there? We were the perfect storm of two kinds of crazy.

For the first time since I had met Paxton, I defied him. Not with little things that irked him, like being a few minutes late. I mean something big. Something like this. I would be punished for a month, but I would face it. It was worth it to spend an hour with my sister.

Is he good to you, Gabby? Are you happy?” I didn’t respond to Izzy’s question right away. I stared straight ahead, contemplating my answer. “For the most part, yes.” “What does that mean? For the most part?” “Paxton can be a little overbearing sometimes,

Indeed, fascist regimes tried to redraw so radically the boundaries between private and public that the private sphere almost disappeared. Robert Ley, head of the Nazi Labor Office, said that in the Nazi state the only private individual was someone asleep. For some observers, this effort to have the public sphere swallow up the private sphere entirely is indeed the very essence of fascism. It is certainly a fundamental point on which fascist regimes differed most profoundly from authoritarian conservatism, and even more profoundly from classical liberalism.

Kyle Paxton was my weakness. My pain. My love. My antagonist.

The anti-Dreyfus camp enlisted in defense of the authority of the state and the honor of the army both conservatives and some Leftists influenced by traditional anticapitalist anti-Semitism and Jacobin forms of nationalism. The pro-Dreyfus camp, mostly from Left and center, defended a universal standard of the rights of man. The nation took precedence over any universal value, proclaimed the anti-Dreyfusard Charles Maurras, whose Action Française movement is sometimes considered the first authentic fascism. When a document used to incriminate Dreyfus turned out to have been faked, Maurras was undaunted. It was, he said, a “patriotic forgery,” a faux patriotique.

Arguably the first concrete example of “national socialism” in practice was the Cercle Proudhon in France in 1911, a study group designed to “unite nationalists and left-wing anti-democrats” around an offensive against “Jewish capitalism.” It was the creation of Georges Valois, a former militant of Charles Maurras’s Action Française who broke away from his master in order to concentrate more actively on converting the working class from Marxist internationalism to the nation. It proved too early, however, to rally more than a few intellectuals and journalists to Valois’s “triumph of heroic values over the ignoble bourgeois materialism in which Europe is now stifling . . . [and] . . . the awakening of Force and Blood against Gold.” The term national socialism seems to have been invented by the French nationalist author Maurice Barrès, who described the aristocratic adventurer the Marquis de Morès in 1896 as the “first national socialist.” Morès, after failing as a cattle rancher in North Dakota, returned to Paris in the early 1890s and organized a band of anti-Semitic toughs who attacked Jewish shops and offices. As a cattleman, Morès found his recruits among slaughterhouse workers in Paris, to whom he appealed with a mixture of anticapitalism and anti-Semitic nationalism.80 His squads wore the cowboy garb and ten-gallon hats that the marquis had discovered in the American West, which thus predate black and brown shirts (by a modest stretch of the imagination) as the first fascist uniform. Morès killed a popular Jewish officer, Captain Armand Meyer, in a duel early in the Dreyfus Affair, and was himself killed by his Touareg guides in the Sahara in 1896 on an expedition to “unite France to Islam and to Spain.”81 “Life is valuable only through action,” he had proclaimed. “So much the worse if the action is mortal.

Several features distinguished the most successful fascisms from previous parties. Unlike the middle-class parties led by “notables” who condescended to contact their publics only at election time, the fascist parties swept their members up into an intense fraternity of emotion and effort. Unlike the class parties—socialist or bourgeois—fascist parties managed to realize their claim to bring together citizens from all social classes. These were attractive features for many. Early fascist parties did not recruit from all classes in the same proportions, however. It was soon noticed that fascist parties were largely middle class, to the point where fascism was perceived as the very embodiment of lower-middle-class resentments. But, after all, all political parties are largely middle class. On closer inspection, fascism turned out to appeal to upper-class members and voters as well. Early fascism also won more working-class followers than used to be thought, though these were always proportionally fewer than their share in the population. The relative scarcity of working-class fascists was not due to some proletarian immunity to appeals of nationalism and ethnic cleansing. It is better explained by “immunization” and “confessionalism”: those already deeply engaged, from generation to generation, in the rich subculture of socialism, with its clubs, newspapers, unions, and rallies, were simply not available for another loyalty

A few fascist movements became much more successful than the general run of fascist streetcorner orators and bullies. By becoming the carriers of substantial grievances and interests, and by becoming capable of rewarding political ambitions, they took root within political systems. A handful of them played major roles in public life. These successful fascisms elbowed a space among the other contending parties or interest groups, and persuaded influential people that they could represent their interests and feelings and fulfill their ambitions better than any conventional party. The early ragtag outsiders thus transformed themselves into serious political forces capable of competing on equal terms with longer-established parties or movements. Their success influenced entire political systems, giving them a more intense and aggressive tone and legitimating open expressions of extreme nationalism, Left-baiting, and racism. This bundle of processes—how fascist parties take root—is the subject of the present chapter.

Hitler and Mussolini, by contrast, not only felt destined to rule but shared none of the purists’ qualms about competing in bourgeois elections. Both set out—with impressive tactical skill and by rather different routes, which they discovered by trial and error—to make themselves indispensable participants in the competition for political power within their nations. Becoming a successful political player inevitably involved losing followers as well as gaining them. Even the simple step of becoming a party could seem a betrayal to some purists of the first hour. When Mussolini decided to change his movement into a party late in 1921, some of his idealistic early followers saw this as a descent into the soiled arena of bourgeois parliamentarism. Being a party ranked talk above action, deals above principle, and competing interests above a united nation. Idealistic early fascists saw themselves as offering a new form of public life—an “antiparty”—capable of gathering the entire nation, in opposition to both parliamentary liberalism, with its encouragement of faction, and socialism, with its class struggle. José Antonio described the Falange Española as “a movement and not a party—indeed you could almost call it an anti-party . . . neither of the Right nor of the Left." Hitler’s NSDAP, to be sure, had called itself a party from the beginning, but its members, who knew it was not like the other parties, called it “the movement” (die Bewegung). Mostly fascists called their organizations movements or camps or bands or rassemblements or fasci: brotherhoods that did not pit one interest against others, but claimed to unite and energize the nation. Conflicts over what fascist movements should call themselves were relatively trivial. Far graver compromises and transformations were involved in the process of becoming a significant actor in a political arena. For that process involved teaming up with some of the very capitalist speculators and bourgeois party leaders whose rejection had been part of the early movements’ appeal. How the fascists managed to retain some of their antibourgeois rhetoric and a measure of “revolutionary” aura while forming practical political alliances with parts of the establishment constitutes one of the mysteries of their success. Becoming a successful contender in the political arena required more than clarifying priorities and knitting alliances. It meant offering a new political style that would attract voters who had concluded that “politics” had become dirty and futile. Posing as an “antipolitics” was often effective with people whose main political motivation was scorn for politics. In situations where existing parties were confined within class or confessional boundaries, like Marxist, smallholders’, or Christian parties, the fascists could appeal by promising to unite a people rather than divide it. Where existing parties were run by parliamentarians who thought mainly of their own careers, fascist parties could appeal to idealists by being “parties of engagement,” in which committed militants rather than careerist politicians set the tone. In situations where a single political clan had monopolized power for years, fascism could pose as the only nonsocialist path to renewal and fresh leadership. In such ways, fascists pioneered in the 1920s by creating the first European “catch-all” parties of “engagement,”17 readily distinguished from their tired, narrow rivals as much by the breadth of their social base as by the intense activism of their militants. Comparison acquires some bite at this point: only some societies experienced so severe a breakdown of existing systems that citizens began to look to outsiders for salvation. In many cases fascist establishment failed; in others it was never really attempted.

The European states resembled each other rather closely in their luxuriant growth of antiliberal criticism as the twentieth century opened. Where they differed was in those political, social, and economic preconditions that seem to distinguish the states where fascism, exceptionally, was able to become established. One of the most important preconditions was a faltering liberal order. Fascisms grew from back rooms to the public arena most easily where the existing government functioned badly, or not at all. One of the commonplaces of discussions of fascism is that it thrived upon the crisis of liberalism. I hope here to make that vague formulation somewhat more concrete. On the eve of World War I the major states of Europe were either governed by liberal regimes or seemed headed that way. Liberal regimes guaranteed freedoms both for individuals and for contending political parties, and allowed citizens to influence the composition of governments, more or less directly, through elections. Liberal government also accorded a large measure of freedom to citizens and to enterprises. Government intervention was expected to be limited to the few functions individuals could not perform for themselves, such as the maintenance of order and the conduct of war and diplomacy. Economic and social matters were supposed to be left to the free play of individual choices in the market, though liberal regimes did not hesitate to protect property from worker protests and from foreign competition. This kind of liberal state ceased to exist during World War I, for total war could be conducted only by massive government coordination and regulation. After the war was over, liberals expected governments to return to liberal policies. The strains of war making, however, had created new conflicts, tensions, and malfunctions that required sustained state intervention. At the war’s end, some of the belligerent states had collapsed...What had gone wrong with the liberal recipe for government? What was at stake was a technique of government: rule by notables, where the wellborn and well-educated could rely on social prestige and deference to keep them elected. Notable rule, however, came under severe pressure from the “nationalization of the masses." Fascists quickly profited from the inability of centrists and conservatives to keep control of a mass electorate. Whereas the notable dinosaurs disdained mass politics, fascists showed how to use it for nationalism and against the Left. They promised access to the crowd through exciting political spectacle and clever publicity techniques; ways to discipline that crowd through paramilitary organization and charismatic leadership; and the replacement of chancy elections by yes-no plebiscites. Whereas citizens in a parliamentary democracy voted to choose a few fellow citizens to serve as their representatives, fascists expressed their citizenship directly by participating in ceremonies of mass assent. The propagandistic manipulation of public opinion replaced debate about complicated issues among a small group of legislators who (according to liberal ideals) were supposed to be better informed than the mass of the citizenry. Fascism could well seem to offer to the opponents of the Left efficacious new techniques for controlling, managing, and channeling the “nationalization of the masses,” at a moment when the Left threatened to enlist a majority of the population around two non-national poles: class and international pacifism. One may also perceive the crisis of liberalism after 1918 in a second way, as a “crisis of transition,” a rough passage along the journey into industrialization and modernity. A third way of looking at the crisis of the liberal state envisions the same problem of late industrialization in social terms.

Certain liberal states, according to this version, were unable to deal with either the “nationalization of the masses” or the “transition to industrial society” because their social structure was too heterogeneous, divided between pre-industrial groups that had not yet disappeared—artisans, great landowners, rentiers—alongside new industrial managerial and working classes. Where the pre-industrial middle class was particularly powerful, according to this reading of the crisis of the liberal state, it could block peaceful settlement of industrial issues, and could provide manpower to fascism in order to save the privileges and prestige of the old social order. Yet another “take” on the crisis of the liberal order focuses on stressful transitions to modernity in cultural terms. According to this reading, universal literacy, cheap mass media, and invasive alien cultures (from within as well as from without) made it harder as the twentieth century opened for the liberal intelligentsia to perpetuate the traditional intellectual and cultural order. Fascism offered the defenders of a cultural canon new propaganda skills along with a new shamelessness about using them.

A typology of crises that could give fascism an opening is not enough. An equally important consideration is the capacity of liberal and democratic regimes to respond to these crises. Leon Trotsky’s metaphor of the “least-barricaded gate” works just as well for fascism as it did, in Trotsky’s opinion, for Bolshevism. Trotsky used this metaphor to help explain how Bolshevism made its first breakthrough to power in a relatively unindustrialized country, rather than, as more literal-minded Marxists expected, in highly industrialized countries with powerful working-class organizations such as Germany. Fascism, too, has historically been a phenomenon of weak or failed liberal states and belated or damaged capitalist systems rather than of triumphant ones. The frequent assertion that fascism stems from a crisis of liberalism might well be amended to specify crises in weak or failed liberalisms.

Before fascism could become a serious contender, one chief would have to emerge as the “gatherer”—the one able to shove his rivals aside and assemble in one tent all the (nonsocialist) discontented.

Both Mussolini and Hitler could perceive the space available, and were willing to trim their movements to fit. The space was partly symbolic. The Nazi Party early shaped its identity by staking a claim to the street and fought with communist gangs for control of working-class neighborhoods of Berlin. At issue was not merely a few meters of urban “turf.” The Nazis sought to portray themselves as the most vigorous and effective force against the communists—and, at the same time, to portray the liberal state as incapable of preserving public security. The communists, at the same time, were showing that the Social Democrats were unequipped to deal with an incipient revolutionary situation that needed a fighting vanguard. Polarization was in the interest of both. Fascist violence was neither random nor indiscriminate. It carried a well-calculated set of coded messages: that communist violence was rising, that the democratic state was responding to it ineptly, and that only the fascists were tough enough to save the nation from antinational terrorists. An essential step in the fascist march to acceptance and power was to persuade law-and-order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity in the face of Left provocation. It helped, of course, that many ordinary citizens never feared fascist violence against themselves, because they were reassured that it was reserved for national enemies and “terrorists” who deserved it. Fascists encouraged a distinction between members of the nation who merited protection and outsiders who deserved rough handling. One of the most sensational cases of Nazi violence before power was the murder of a communist laborer of Polish descent in the town of Potempa, in Silesia, by five SA men in August 1932. It became sensational when the killers’ death sentences were commuted, under Nazi pressure, to life imprisonment. Party theorist Alfred Rosenberg took the occasion to underscore the difference between “bourgeois justice,” according to which “one Polish Communist has the same weighting as five Germans, frontsoldiers,” and National Socialist ideology, according to which “one soul does not equal another soul, one person not another.” Indeed, Rosenberg went on, for National Socialism, “there is no ‘law as such.’” The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism. For some, fascist violence was more than useful: it was beautiful. Some war veterans and intellectuals (Marinetti and Ernst Jünger were both) indulged in the aesthetics of violence. Violence often appealed to men too young to have known it in 1914–18 and who felt cheated of their war. It appealed to some women, too. But it is a mistake to regard fascist success as solely the triumph of the D’Annunzian hero. It was the genius of fascism to wager that many an orderly bourgeois (or even bourgeoise) would take some vicarious satisfaction in a carefully selective violence, directed only against “terrorists” and “enemies of the people.” A climate of polarization helped the new fascist catch-all parties sweep up many who became disillusioned with the old deference (“honoratioren”) parties. This was risky, of course. Polarization could send the mass of angry protesters to the Left under certain conditions (as in Russia in 1917). Hitler and Mussolini understood that while Marxism now appealed mainly to blue-collar workers (and not to all of them), fascism was able to appeal more broadly across class lines. In postrevolutionary western Europe, a climate of polarization worked in fascism’s favor.

Fascist success depended as much on allies and accomplices as on the tactics or special qualities of the movements themselves...it took the decisions of powerful individuals to open the gates to fascism. That was the final essential precondition of successful fascism: decision-makers ready to share power with fascist challengers.

It is tempting to identify with Resistance and to say ‘That is what I would have done.’ Alas, we are far more likely to act, in parallel situations, like the Vichy majority. Indeed, it may be the German occupiers rather than the Vichy majority whom Americans, as residents of the most powerful state on earth, should scrutinize most unblinkingly. The deeds of occupier and occupied alike suggest that there come cruel times when to save a nation’s deepest values one must disobey the state. France after 1940 was one of those times.

At bottom, however, lay a more subtle intellectual culprit: fear of social disorder as the highest evil. Some of France’s best skill and talent went into a formidable effort to keep the French state afloat under increasingly questionable circumstances. Who would keep order, they asked, if the state lost authority? By saving the state, however, they were losing the nation. Those who cling to the social order above all may do so by self-interest or merely by inertia. In either case, they know more clearly what they are against than what they are for. So blinded, they perform jobs that may be admirable in themselves but are tinctured with evil by the overall effects of the system...

Fascists had also found a magic formula for weaning workers away from Marxism. Long after Marx asserted that the working class had no home-land, conservatives had been unable to find any way to refute him. None of their nineteenth-century nostrums—deference, religion, schooling—had worked. On the eve of World War I, the Action Française had enjoyed some success recruiting a few industrial workers to nationalism, and the unexpectedly wide acceptance by workers of their patriotic duty to fight for their homelands when World War I began foretold that in the twentieth century Nation was going to be stronger than Class.