The always worth reading Greg Olear had a fine post up working critically through some of the classic definitions of fascism and coming to his own kind of diagnostic approach that can be applied to the ongoing emergency—which I might want to get back to at some point. But the thing that has me triggered at the moment is a minor quibble with a point that isn't even from Olear, but rather from a quotation he offers of Umberto Eco, the great semiotician, feuilletoniste, and novelist, in his own 1995 essay on "Ur-Fascism":
Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing — far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.
I would maintain that the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country was that of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the first president of the Second French Republic, who got himself elected following the decidedly leftist Revolution of 1848, having made something of a leftist name for himself (as the author of a treatise calling for the "extinction of poverty" and the instigator of a number of anti-royalist coup attempts against the "roi citoyen" Louis Philippe), under the political aegis of his dead but still revolutionary uncle Napoléon, Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1814 or 1815, depending how you count; but in his presidential campaign quickly aligned himself against liberals, socialists, and radicals with the rightmost faction, of Adophe Thiers ("who believed he could be the most easily controlled," sound familiar?) and Victor Hugo, not yet the heroically progressive author of Les Misérables; and after the election, ordered an expeditionary force sent by the National Assembly to Rome to support the republicans under Mazzini and Garibaldi, to support the Pope instead.
And then, in 1852, about to be term-limited out of office by the Second Republic constitution, staged his own auto-golpe, naming himself Emperor Napoléon III (on the silly claim that the first Napoléon's son, the Duc de Reichstadt, had in fact been the Emperor Napoléon II), prompting Hugo to flee into exile in the Channel Islands (first Jersey, then Guernsey), and to refer thereafter to the newly minted Emperor as Napoléon the Little, and the occasion for Karl Marx's famous maxim according to which history always repeats itself, first time as tragedy (with the first Napoléon) and second time ( with the third) as farce.
I had a dream about this once, I'm not kidding, which I've never figured out a way to use, though it's maybe the best dream I've ever had from a literary point of view: not a dramatic dream about things happening, but a narrative dream about telling a joke, which I was either telling or listening to, which I now remember something like this:
