This is the current draft of chapter 11 of my "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long 20th Century 1870-2016". This is the chapter of the book that I am currently having the mos...
I think you've missed the key problem with fascism; it's deepest, most fundamental flaw.
Fascism contains the "triumph of the will" doctrine -- the idea that "willpower" and "unity of purpose" can accomplish anything. Mussolini was pretty explicit about it. He claimed that forcing everyone to unify with him would make Italy able to accomplish anything, and that all he needed to do to make the trains run on time was to shoot railway directors. Hitler's propaganda film was actually called "Triumph of the Will", and the same level of wishful thinking is visible in his attempts to invade Russia and pointless slaughtering of German troops when they were losing; no such thing as a strategic or tactical retreat to those who think in "triumph of the will" terms. Japan's militarists were even worse; it was perfectly obvious that continuing to occupy Manchuria would have predictable negative consequences, and it was clear that once the US had blockaded Japan, Japan would not have the resources it would need for the war. But the Japanese militarists thought that if they attacked Pearl Harbor, it would "break America's will" and that they would win through "willpower".
The problem is that this doesn't work. Ever. It's magical thinking and it's wishful thinking. And it's at the *core* of fascism. This is why Franco isn't fascist, despite being a right-wing authoritarian, he didn't engage in magical thinking, and used a realistic assessment of what was possible, and so his regime survived until his death.
You can see the same "triumph of the will" idiocy in Trump's behavior and in Bolsonaro's behavior and even in Modi's behavior, and you can see the pandemic, which does not respond to "willpower", discrediting them as it proves that reality always wins over magical thinking.
It is difficult to offer constructive criticism without giving offense, if you provide no hints as to what you find unsatisfactory. Perhaps what I single out as problematic is something in which you take particular pride!
So I will start with flattery. The chapter held my interest from start to finish; it contains many insights that are new to me. I particularly approve of the use of Mussolini as the perspective from which to approach fascism, and not merely on chronological or linguistic grounds. I also like the formulation that the appeal of fascism combines resentment against inequality (with our betters) and resentment against equality (with our inferiors.) There is a whiff of anachronism about this enterprise - one feels you would not have written quite the same words without the experience of the Trump presidency - but I think that is no bad thing.
However, the scope of this material seems unmanageably vast for a single chapter, and consequently what you have written here is awkwardly compressed, and somewhat inchoate and diffuse. You are mainly in need of editing, if I may be so bold. As I am ignorant as how this chapter fits into the overall theme of your book, I am unsure what can safely be cut. I will say this much with confidence: the question of why people are attracted to follow fascist leaders is much more interesting than the question of what motivates the leaders to seek followers. That is an obvious place to start.
If you are really going to argue that Nazism is not fascism, you ought to write a book arguing that point alone. The claim that Nazism isn't true fascism seems to be a no true Scotsman propostion.
Regarding the question of whether actually existing socialism ought to be grouped with fascism, having started from the perspective that nationalism trumps class consciousness, I don't think you can afford to switch to a consequentialist view in the conclusion. To lump the Soviet Union with Italian or German fascism, you ought to be able demonstrate that the former was essentially a nationalist movement. I do not think you will succeed in that task. On the other hand, it is certainly true that Russian nationalism was relied on to fight the Great Patriotic War. But who's nation? Did the modal Uzbek really fight for the sake of the Russian nation? And if so, why did the Uzbek Soviet form its own nation when the Soviet Union dissolved? Well that is a rabbit hole you cannot explore in the space of a chapter ostensibly devoted to another question entirely, and so I think the prudent thing is to avoid the question altogether.
A couple of things strike me that are really only thought pieces. First, very well done. Reading this is why I come to this page. I always leave with notes to myself to read something you quoted. Second, I wonder if others read this and immediately thought of Tolstoy laboring through War and Peace trying to reconcile a notion that "power" is meaningless and yet we see its effects and that historians see cause and effect only because they see X and Y at a time but don't see W and Z. Is Napoleon a powerful leader or just one particular cork that bobbed up along this particular wave on this particular tide at this particular pull of the moon on this particular spin through this particular arm of this particular galaxy...? What cause is there that people from the West decide to kill people from the East and then a generation later that tide is reversed other than simply the cause of the tide? Why attribute it to history Tolstoy might ask, just because you find historians have written it down? Maybe Tolstoy had it right, the important historical events are the characters you don't read about and who very likely, unbeknownst to themselves and thus absolved, are the real causes. How do we remain true to our little bark on this wave because the events are going to either happen or not? Third, I've lived under fascism of the generalissimo type. Not long. 2 years. In Africa. One tyrant--more the con man, crook type-- who came on the heels of another much worse tyrant --who at the time I lived there was locked away-- who made the then "President" look beneficent. A madman crowning himself emperor of a poor, land-locked central African nation and for whom my neighbor once told me, "He was evil. A monster. You know he ate his enemies? He once stopped his motorcade and beat a child --who threw a rock-- to death with his cane right here! In this neighborhood! But we didn't have any crime. And the schools were good." Wait, what? Is that justification "but the trains ran on time" part of some human rationalization that we all have? If it is all just "movement" and political decisions, does it make us think that the regression equation has mostly been figured out? The more I read Tolstoy the more I think we are not paying enough attention to the error term, but like Tolstoy, I don't know what that error term actually is, but I can't shake that it is the most important part.
It's taken me a few days to collect my thoughts on this. Some of them have been already been mentioned, but I think knowing that folks came to the same independent conclusion is worth the duplication.
My first thought is that you need to define the term "ideology". An online dictionary says it's "a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy." When I was getting my degree in political theory, we were told to use Max Weber's definition: "alienated thought".
Either one brings up the point that I think it's hard to separate fascism from other authoritarian systems (e.g., slavery; Adrian Vermuele's Catholicism). And while I won't go through the exercise here, I'm pretty sure I could make a plausible argument that Vermeule's Catholicism -- which is pretty much pre-20th C Catholicism -- would fit all 5 of the criteria you mention (macroeconomic failure; distributional failure; moral failure; common interests above individual ones; and the need for a strong leader).
This brings to the point that you have, consistent with the way historians in general approach the problem of fascism, treated it as a European phenomenon. I'm a lot less sure of that than I once was. Today's Neo-Fascists in the US have caused me to the indigenous roots of fascism in America -- white supremacy, authoritarianism, violence, corporatist economics (fascist populism is always and everywhere a lie, a point I'd emphasize more strongly), and some others as well. I'm not sure you shouldn't have a separate chapter on the US. Maybe you do and I haven't seen it.
If there were to be consideration of American fascism, then I think it's worth exploring the common elements which led to fascism both here and in Europe. I'm pretty confident we might start identifying proto-fascist strains in both hemispheres which would cast a revealing light on the American identity.
Finally -- and again you may deal with this elsewhere -- there's the issue of how a liberal democracy can/should deal with the fascist challenge. It *can* happen here, and we need the historical background to help us out.
I don't view fascism as an ideology. I think that fascism is the intersection of mass democracy, peoples' need for transcendence, and the decline of religious belief. Fascism did not exist in any form before Louis Napoleon. Neither did mass democracy, and widespread disbelief was just beginning to percolate out of the elites.
Some people don't need transcendence; most do. Work suffices for a few, but not many. Interpersonal relations suffice for more people. But a lot of guys (and some women) aren't really into interpersonal relations. Without religion, what's left? I suggest two alternatives: one's sports team, and one's state. (The Olympic movement has been ridden with fascism: no coincidence.) A few people can achieve transcendence through ideology--the socialists or the few remaining believers. But that's a minority taste. The state has much greater popular appeal. Even in Iran.
If there is enough demand for transcendence through the state, some entrepreneur will try to fill the demand in culturally acceptable ways. If the entrepreneur can get enough votes through mass democracy, the entrepreneur will control the state. The state then becomes a vehicle for transcendence. This is not something that a state can do particularly well, except for its ability to employ violence and struggle. Think sports fan. Also, if you're not a sports fan, you should know that my team's gamesmanship is your team's foul cheating. The rest follows from there.
The preconditions are always present in a modern liberal democracy, although they were temporarily obscured by the crushing defeat of fascism in 1945. And you can't do much about young men or the need for transcendence. Religion won't work. The weak point of fascism, I think, is that it requires entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs need a platform. Our current First Amendment jurisprudence may be misconceived. Germany and Canada use their law to deplatform fascists, and do not seem to be authoritarian hellholes.
"At the core of fascism as an ideology was that semi-liberal industrial capitalism and parliamentary government had had its chance, and had failed."
I think that while this is strictly true -- fascists did indeed say that -- what they _meant_ is a lot closer to "give the wrong answers"; failure not in material terms, but in the collective expectations being produced. Co-operation and rapprochement instead of victory.
There's a systems theory aphorism that if you've dealing with a mass of contradictions, you're approaching the problem at the wrong scale.
I think you're getting tangled in the context-of-the-historical-actors justifications and rationalizations; I don't think that's a productive angle of analysis, especially towards "why the 20th century?" Pretty much all of the historical actors were pretty much entirely wrong in their understanding and analysis. (Not in every particular, but in their resulting systemic understandings.)
Facts are collective, communal, and co-operative; you can't have any facts on your own. You need to be able to do the thing with a bunch of other people to know what's a fact and what's just this notion you have stuck in your head. That's why the 20th century is so strange; the 20th is when facts become sufficiently general so as to have social force. The Great War is when it becomes obvious to everyone that facts produce material power; it took a century of increasing co-operation to discover facts to produce the means of having the Great War at all. And then it was a terrible surprise that such a thing was possible, and an even more terrible surprise that worse was not merely possible but inevitable.
One response to this revelation is to have a moral crisis; the whole deicide of progress. The progressive, socialist, communist, and various other responses was (and is!) to say "we have enough facts; we can build a system, we can Not Do That, we can have a better world if we will dispose of the old". Another response is to say "I know what I know"; to be, in effect, a materialist heretic. Facts are what you believe them to be. And you get substantial increases in your social status if you can convince other people to agree with you, irrespective of the nature of what you're asserting. (It has been ever thus; "normal" is a prescriptive statement in every human culture that isn't too materially marginal to tolerate conflict, because being the person who says what normal is grants you power. (Inuit culture is fascinating in this regard.))
No fascist movement has ever built a stable system; you get collapse into something else. (Franco's Spain as simple autocracy, for example.) It's the idea that if you have enough will, you will have victory; social, military, and political, all tangled together. You can make people agree you're important and dangerous.
Which works like cutting taxes; it takes about decade for people to notice things have got worse. In a democracy, the numerate party gets in and raises taxes to sufficient levels and starts repairing the damage. (Though it gets worse every cycle.) With fascism, they start a war. They have to start the war; the alternative is not be feared, to not be dangerous.
And it's dangerous, all right, but it's dangerous not because it's scary and effective but because it's false. That's not how you get the most out of your industry, your ability to make your store of facts become material power. (In some sense, industrial and post-industrial societies are machines for turning facts into agency. How to have a society in that new context is much of the wailing and flailing of the 20th, because just a agriculture is an environment and cities are an environment, so is this agency-generating machine.) It's certainly not how you pick achievable strategic objectives. It is how you decide killing lots of people solves whatever problem you've got.
Any take on the rise of fascism or how it keeps recurring needs to include that, hey, it's not like it's _accurate_; as a description of the world, it's false. People didn't (and don't) care because they want that world more than the real one. It's very very close to "tell me my magic works or I'll hurt you".
So, anyway; that's the take. Fascism is the materialist heresy for people who want to live in a world where they're safe and important and desirable because they are feared, the baddest motherfucker in the valley. It's incapable of civilisation because civilisation is (however imperfectly and inadequately) about bounds rather than norms; stay inside the rules and you're safe, your money is good, you get to participate in the economy.
It's tempting because it's an easy alternative to acknowledging defeat. Imperial Germany lost. The US boomer generation and US white supremacy have lost, and can't cope. You can just _decide_ you're tough and scary and will be important and dangerous if only people are afraid of you enough.
Individuals have been doing that for as long as there have been people; doing it communally, as an in-group, as a sort of badass kabuki with real corpses, isn't even the fascist innovation; it's easier to frighten people as part of a group, and it's easier to get people to take you seriously if they're frightened because fear makes you stupid. That goes back at least to Jomsvikings. The fascist innovation is noticing that you don't have to _really_ be able to do it; you can fake being conquering heroes and nearly all the immediate social benefits you image that conquering heroes ought to have. This can get a long way before some immutable part of reality intervenes. (and when it does, even after you lose the war, you get true believers! Because having to deal with facts AND being wrong is intolerable for a fair chunk of the true believers afterwards, no matter what happened.)
Some excellent points. However, I think, like Brad, you obscure the underlying issues with extraneous details.
Firstly, we evolved from hierarchical ape societies. There is a continuum of desire in the hierarchy to reach teh peak and dominate. Usually, that was male strength backed with testosterone.
Most "stable" societies are hierarchical. However to reach the top no longer only possible with physical strength and desire. You can also stay within the existing hierarchy, create a new one with you at the top, find ways to change the rules so that you end up on top, etc.).
The various approaches from using fear in small tribes and villages, creating religions, political systems, ideologies of all kinds, are just the diverse ways that those with teh desire to be at the top find ways to do so. You can see this in so many smaller ways and at all scales. That is human nature. That is teh overriding fact of life. I see no difference is religious hierarchies (especially the cults) and fascists, or even communists systems.
The best we can do is temper the extremes to try to prevent mass murder by arms, starvation, or disease.
The human trick is ganging up on problems. We're almost eusocial in consequence. (Thought experiment; fill an airliner's seats with chimps and send them on a trans-atlantic flight. What happens?)
So, yes, _band status_ is a thing, but we're not baboons; you don't get band status through being violent nearly as much as you get it from being able to construct a coalition. (with all the planning, story-telling, and social conciliation that implies.) This shows in our genetic history; the biochemical changes to prefer putting metabolic energy into brains rather than muscles got selected for.
This in no way implies that the resulting coalition won't be oppressive; it also in no way implies that the resulting coalition _must_ be oppressive.
It's also very much not the case that there needs to be one single hierarchy, and indeed in "co-operate effectively" terms there should NOT be. Which is one of the reasons we're seeing the general political problems we are; post-industrial society is a co-operation contest, which means you want contextual hierarchy (that is, put the expert in charge of the area in which they are expert) which is a direct challenge to white supremacy, which numbers among its faults advancing a fixed and rigid hierarchy.
(Note just how much of the anglosphere failure and incompetence in response to COVID has been driven by a determination to maintain the single fixed hierarchy of established status and how much even supposedly authoritarian societies have done much better in dealing with the pandemic through being able to comprehend, if not contextual authority, at least an emergency.)
Primates can cooperate. They form alliances through food gifts, grooming, and sex. Humans do this too, but with more options. Language has made human cooperation far more effective. But competition and hierarchies still dominate, from family structure up to nations.
I agree there doesn't have to be one hierarchy, although they often will be (c.f. monarchy). But this can be fractal with many smaller hierarchies down to patriarchal families.
Expertise is more usually exploited than rewarded. This is just as we would expect where climbing the greasy pole is a drive that is orthogonal to expertise.
It is how hierarchies are maintained that is interesting. Coercive or voluntary (or a combination of both). I see little difference between different coercive hierarchies.
It seems to me that you overstate the uniqueness of mass murderer in the twentieth century. The Crusades were motivated by Christian ideology and when the Crusaders took Jerusalem the streets ran with blood. Tamerlane's tower of skulls seems to be pretty convincing evidence of mass murderer, although what role ideology had in motivating that is obscure.
tzompantli is a useful search term in this regard.
I am not sure "ideology" isn't just a word for "this is a structured system of belief that hasn't got any supernatural entities in it, but it otherwise serves the same functions as religion". (It tells you if you're a good person or not, and thus how to think of yourself as good.)
Ideology needs structure. Structure requires hierophants, who could be priests, lawyers, or (these days) economists. Hierophants intermediate--which is antithetical to fascism's emotional bond between the leader and the led. Priestcraft in the service of power is very different than power unmediated. The first is ideological; the second fascistic. As John Brown pointed out, both can be very very bloody.
"It offered no counterweight able to even through sand into the gears..." through -> throw
I think you've missed the key problem with fascism; it's deepest, most fundamental flaw.
Fascism contains the "triumph of the will" doctrine -- the idea that "willpower" and "unity of purpose" can accomplish anything. Mussolini was pretty explicit about it. He claimed that forcing everyone to unify with him would make Italy able to accomplish anything, and that all he needed to do to make the trains run on time was to shoot railway directors. Hitler's propaganda film was actually called "Triumph of the Will", and the same level of wishful thinking is visible in his attempts to invade Russia and pointless slaughtering of German troops when they were losing; no such thing as a strategic or tactical retreat to those who think in "triumph of the will" terms. Japan's militarists were even worse; it was perfectly obvious that continuing to occupy Manchuria would have predictable negative consequences, and it was clear that once the US had blockaded Japan, Japan would not have the resources it would need for the war. But the Japanese militarists thought that if they attacked Pearl Harbor, it would "break America's will" and that they would win through "willpower".
The problem is that this doesn't work. Ever. It's magical thinking and it's wishful thinking. And it's at the *core* of fascism. This is why Franco isn't fascist, despite being a right-wing authoritarian, he didn't engage in magical thinking, and used a realistic assessment of what was possible, and so his regime survived until his death.
You can see the same "triumph of the will" idiocy in Trump's behavior and in Bolsonaro's behavior and even in Modi's behavior, and you can see the pandemic, which does not respond to "willpower", discrediting them as it proves that reality always wins over magical thinking.
It is difficult to offer constructive criticism without giving offense, if you provide no hints as to what you find unsatisfactory. Perhaps what I single out as problematic is something in which you take particular pride!
So I will start with flattery. The chapter held my interest from start to finish; it contains many insights that are new to me. I particularly approve of the use of Mussolini as the perspective from which to approach fascism, and not merely on chronological or linguistic grounds. I also like the formulation that the appeal of fascism combines resentment against inequality (with our betters) and resentment against equality (with our inferiors.) There is a whiff of anachronism about this enterprise - one feels you would not have written quite the same words without the experience of the Trump presidency - but I think that is no bad thing.
However, the scope of this material seems unmanageably vast for a single chapter, and consequently what you have written here is awkwardly compressed, and somewhat inchoate and diffuse. You are mainly in need of editing, if I may be so bold. As I am ignorant as how this chapter fits into the overall theme of your book, I am unsure what can safely be cut. I will say this much with confidence: the question of why people are attracted to follow fascist leaders is much more interesting than the question of what motivates the leaders to seek followers. That is an obvious place to start.
If you are really going to argue that Nazism is not fascism, you ought to write a book arguing that point alone. The claim that Nazism isn't true fascism seems to be a no true Scotsman propostion.
Regarding the question of whether actually existing socialism ought to be grouped with fascism, having started from the perspective that nationalism trumps class consciousness, I don't think you can afford to switch to a consequentialist view in the conclusion. To lump the Soviet Union with Italian or German fascism, you ought to be able demonstrate that the former was essentially a nationalist movement. I do not think you will succeed in that task. On the other hand, it is certainly true that Russian nationalism was relied on to fight the Great Patriotic War. But who's nation? Did the modal Uzbek really fight for the sake of the Russian nation? And if so, why did the Uzbek Soviet form its own nation when the Soviet Union dissolved? Well that is a rabbit hole you cannot explore in the space of a chapter ostensibly devoted to another question entirely, and so I think the prudent thing is to avoid the question altogether.
A couple of things strike me that are really only thought pieces. First, very well done. Reading this is why I come to this page. I always leave with notes to myself to read something you quoted. Second, I wonder if others read this and immediately thought of Tolstoy laboring through War and Peace trying to reconcile a notion that "power" is meaningless and yet we see its effects and that historians see cause and effect only because they see X and Y at a time but don't see W and Z. Is Napoleon a powerful leader or just one particular cork that bobbed up along this particular wave on this particular tide at this particular pull of the moon on this particular spin through this particular arm of this particular galaxy...? What cause is there that people from the West decide to kill people from the East and then a generation later that tide is reversed other than simply the cause of the tide? Why attribute it to history Tolstoy might ask, just because you find historians have written it down? Maybe Tolstoy had it right, the important historical events are the characters you don't read about and who very likely, unbeknownst to themselves and thus absolved, are the real causes. How do we remain true to our little bark on this wave because the events are going to either happen or not? Third, I've lived under fascism of the generalissimo type. Not long. 2 years. In Africa. One tyrant--more the con man, crook type-- who came on the heels of another much worse tyrant --who at the time I lived there was locked away-- who made the then "President" look beneficent. A madman crowning himself emperor of a poor, land-locked central African nation and for whom my neighbor once told me, "He was evil. A monster. You know he ate his enemies? He once stopped his motorcade and beat a child --who threw a rock-- to death with his cane right here! In this neighborhood! But we didn't have any crime. And the schools were good." Wait, what? Is that justification "but the trains ran on time" part of some human rationalization that we all have? If it is all just "movement" and political decisions, does it make us think that the regression equation has mostly been figured out? The more I read Tolstoy the more I think we are not paying enough attention to the error term, but like Tolstoy, I don't know what that error term actually is, but I can't shake that it is the most important part.
It's taken me a few days to collect my thoughts on this. Some of them have been already been mentioned, but I think knowing that folks came to the same independent conclusion is worth the duplication.
My first thought is that you need to define the term "ideology". An online dictionary says it's "a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy." When I was getting my degree in political theory, we were told to use Max Weber's definition: "alienated thought".
Either one brings up the point that I think it's hard to separate fascism from other authoritarian systems (e.g., slavery; Adrian Vermuele's Catholicism). And while I won't go through the exercise here, I'm pretty sure I could make a plausible argument that Vermeule's Catholicism -- which is pretty much pre-20th C Catholicism -- would fit all 5 of the criteria you mention (macroeconomic failure; distributional failure; moral failure; common interests above individual ones; and the need for a strong leader).
This brings to the point that you have, consistent with the way historians in general approach the problem of fascism, treated it as a European phenomenon. I'm a lot less sure of that than I once was. Today's Neo-Fascists in the US have caused me to the indigenous roots of fascism in America -- white supremacy, authoritarianism, violence, corporatist economics (fascist populism is always and everywhere a lie, a point I'd emphasize more strongly), and some others as well. I'm not sure you shouldn't have a separate chapter on the US. Maybe you do and I haven't seen it.
If there were to be consideration of American fascism, then I think it's worth exploring the common elements which led to fascism both here and in Europe. I'm pretty confident we might start identifying proto-fascist strains in both hemispheres which would cast a revealing light on the American identity.
Finally -- and again you may deal with this elsewhere -- there's the issue of how a liberal democracy can/should deal with the fascist challenge. It *can* happen here, and we need the historical background to help us out.
to look more closely at the indigenous roots of fascism
I don't view fascism as an ideology. I think that fascism is the intersection of mass democracy, peoples' need for transcendence, and the decline of religious belief. Fascism did not exist in any form before Louis Napoleon. Neither did mass democracy, and widespread disbelief was just beginning to percolate out of the elites.
Some people don't need transcendence; most do. Work suffices for a few, but not many. Interpersonal relations suffice for more people. But a lot of guys (and some women) aren't really into interpersonal relations. Without religion, what's left? I suggest two alternatives: one's sports team, and one's state. (The Olympic movement has been ridden with fascism: no coincidence.) A few people can achieve transcendence through ideology--the socialists or the few remaining believers. But that's a minority taste. The state has much greater popular appeal. Even in Iran.
If there is enough demand for transcendence through the state, some entrepreneur will try to fill the demand in culturally acceptable ways. If the entrepreneur can get enough votes through mass democracy, the entrepreneur will control the state. The state then becomes a vehicle for transcendence. This is not something that a state can do particularly well, except for its ability to employ violence and struggle. Think sports fan. Also, if you're not a sports fan, you should know that my team's gamesmanship is your team's foul cheating. The rest follows from there.
The preconditions are always present in a modern liberal democracy, although they were temporarily obscured by the crushing defeat of fascism in 1945. And you can't do much about young men or the need for transcendence. Religion won't work. The weak point of fascism, I think, is that it requires entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs need a platform. Our current First Amendment jurisprudence may be misconceived. Germany and Canada use their law to deplatform fascists, and do not seem to be authoritarian hellholes.
"At the core of fascism as an ideology was that semi-liberal industrial capitalism and parliamentary government had had its chance, and had failed."
I think that while this is strictly true -- fascists did indeed say that -- what they _meant_ is a lot closer to "give the wrong answers"; failure not in material terms, but in the collective expectations being produced. Co-operation and rapprochement instead of victory.
There's a systems theory aphorism that if you've dealing with a mass of contradictions, you're approaching the problem at the wrong scale.
I think you're getting tangled in the context-of-the-historical-actors justifications and rationalizations; I don't think that's a productive angle of analysis, especially towards "why the 20th century?" Pretty much all of the historical actors were pretty much entirely wrong in their understanding and analysis. (Not in every particular, but in their resulting systemic understandings.)
Facts are collective, communal, and co-operative; you can't have any facts on your own. You need to be able to do the thing with a bunch of other people to know what's a fact and what's just this notion you have stuck in your head. That's why the 20th century is so strange; the 20th is when facts become sufficiently general so as to have social force. The Great War is when it becomes obvious to everyone that facts produce material power; it took a century of increasing co-operation to discover facts to produce the means of having the Great War at all. And then it was a terrible surprise that such a thing was possible, and an even more terrible surprise that worse was not merely possible but inevitable.
One response to this revelation is to have a moral crisis; the whole deicide of progress. The progressive, socialist, communist, and various other responses was (and is!) to say "we have enough facts; we can build a system, we can Not Do That, we can have a better world if we will dispose of the old". Another response is to say "I know what I know"; to be, in effect, a materialist heretic. Facts are what you believe them to be. And you get substantial increases in your social status if you can convince other people to agree with you, irrespective of the nature of what you're asserting. (It has been ever thus; "normal" is a prescriptive statement in every human culture that isn't too materially marginal to tolerate conflict, because being the person who says what normal is grants you power. (Inuit culture is fascinating in this regard.))
No fascist movement has ever built a stable system; you get collapse into something else. (Franco's Spain as simple autocracy, for example.) It's the idea that if you have enough will, you will have victory; social, military, and political, all tangled together. You can make people agree you're important and dangerous.
Which works like cutting taxes; it takes about decade for people to notice things have got worse. In a democracy, the numerate party gets in and raises taxes to sufficient levels and starts repairing the damage. (Though it gets worse every cycle.) With fascism, they start a war. They have to start the war; the alternative is not be feared, to not be dangerous.
And it's dangerous, all right, but it's dangerous not because it's scary and effective but because it's false. That's not how you get the most out of your industry, your ability to make your store of facts become material power. (In some sense, industrial and post-industrial societies are machines for turning facts into agency. How to have a society in that new context is much of the wailing and flailing of the 20th, because just a agriculture is an environment and cities are an environment, so is this agency-generating machine.) It's certainly not how you pick achievable strategic objectives. It is how you decide killing lots of people solves whatever problem you've got.
Any take on the rise of fascism or how it keeps recurring needs to include that, hey, it's not like it's _accurate_; as a description of the world, it's false. People didn't (and don't) care because they want that world more than the real one. It's very very close to "tell me my magic works or I'll hurt you".
So, anyway; that's the take. Fascism is the materialist heresy for people who want to live in a world where they're safe and important and desirable because they are feared, the baddest motherfucker in the valley. It's incapable of civilisation because civilisation is (however imperfectly and inadequately) about bounds rather than norms; stay inside the rules and you're safe, your money is good, you get to participate in the economy.
It's tempting because it's an easy alternative to acknowledging defeat. Imperial Germany lost. The US boomer generation and US white supremacy have lost, and can't cope. You can just _decide_ you're tough and scary and will be important and dangerous if only people are afraid of you enough.
Individuals have been doing that for as long as there have been people; doing it communally, as an in-group, as a sort of badass kabuki with real corpses, isn't even the fascist innovation; it's easier to frighten people as part of a group, and it's easier to get people to take you seriously if they're frightened because fear makes you stupid. That goes back at least to Jomsvikings. The fascist innovation is noticing that you don't have to _really_ be able to do it; you can fake being conquering heroes and nearly all the immediate social benefits you image that conquering heroes ought to have. This can get a long way before some immutable part of reality intervenes. (and when it does, even after you lose the war, you get true believers! Because having to deal with facts AND being wrong is intolerable for a fair chunk of the true believers afterwards, no matter what happened.)
Some excellent points. However, I think, like Brad, you obscure the underlying issues with extraneous details.
Firstly, we evolved from hierarchical ape societies. There is a continuum of desire in the hierarchy to reach teh peak and dominate. Usually, that was male strength backed with testosterone.
Most "stable" societies are hierarchical. However to reach the top no longer only possible with physical strength and desire. You can also stay within the existing hierarchy, create a new one with you at the top, find ways to change the rules so that you end up on top, etc.).
The various approaches from using fear in small tribes and villages, creating religions, political systems, ideologies of all kinds, are just the diverse ways that those with teh desire to be at the top find ways to do so. You can see this in so many smaller ways and at all scales. That is human nature. That is teh overriding fact of life. I see no difference is religious hierarchies (especially the cults) and fascists, or even communists systems.
The best we can do is temper the extremes to try to prevent mass murder by arms, starvation, or disease.
The human trick is ganging up on problems. We're almost eusocial in consequence. (Thought experiment; fill an airliner's seats with chimps and send them on a trans-atlantic flight. What happens?)
So, yes, _band status_ is a thing, but we're not baboons; you don't get band status through being violent nearly as much as you get it from being able to construct a coalition. (with all the planning, story-telling, and social conciliation that implies.) This shows in our genetic history; the biochemical changes to prefer putting metabolic energy into brains rather than muscles got selected for.
This in no way implies that the resulting coalition won't be oppressive; it also in no way implies that the resulting coalition _must_ be oppressive.
It's also very much not the case that there needs to be one single hierarchy, and indeed in "co-operate effectively" terms there should NOT be. Which is one of the reasons we're seeing the general political problems we are; post-industrial society is a co-operation contest, which means you want contextual hierarchy (that is, put the expert in charge of the area in which they are expert) which is a direct challenge to white supremacy, which numbers among its faults advancing a fixed and rigid hierarchy.
(Note just how much of the anglosphere failure and incompetence in response to COVID has been driven by a determination to maintain the single fixed hierarchy of established status and how much even supposedly authoritarian societies have done much better in dealing with the pandemic through being able to comprehend, if not contextual authority, at least an emergency.)
Primates can cooperate. They form alliances through food gifts, grooming, and sex. Humans do this too, but with more options. Language has made human cooperation far more effective. But competition and hierarchies still dominate, from family structure up to nations.
I agree there doesn't have to be one hierarchy, although they often will be (c.f. monarchy). But this can be fractal with many smaller hierarchies down to patriarchal families.
Expertise is more usually exploited than rewarded. This is just as we would expect where climbing the greasy pole is a drive that is orthogonal to expertise.
It is how hierarchies are maintained that is interesting. Coercive or voluntary (or a combination of both). I see little difference between different coercive hierarchies.
It seems to me that you overstate the uniqueness of mass murderer in the twentieth century. The Crusades were motivated by Christian ideology and when the Crusaders took Jerusalem the streets ran with blood. Tamerlane's tower of skulls seems to be pretty convincing evidence of mass murderer, although what role ideology had in motivating that is obscure.
tzompantli is a useful search term in this regard.
I am not sure "ideology" isn't just a word for "this is a structured system of belief that hasn't got any supernatural entities in it, but it otherwise serves the same functions as religion". (It tells you if you're a good person or not, and thus how to think of yourself as good.)
Ideology needs structure. Structure requires hierophants, who could be priests, lawyers, or (these days) economists. Hierophants intermediate--which is antithetical to fascism's emotional bond between the leader and the led. Priestcraft in the service of power is very different than power unmediated. The first is ideological; the second fascistic. As John Brown pointed out, both can be very very bloody.