PurgePolitik: The political functions of decadence in fascism

The intellectual strength of workers and peasants grows in the struggle to overturn the bourgeoisie and their acolytes, those second-rate intellectuals and lackeys of capitalism, who think they are the brains of the nation. They are not the brains of the nation. They're its shit. V.I. Lenin to Maxim Gorky, 1922

In race there is nothing material but something cosmic and directional, the felt harmony of a Destiny, the single cadence of the march of historical Being. It is incoordination of this (wholly metaphysical) beat that produces race-hatred, which is just as strong between Germans and Frenchmen as it is between Germans and Jews ... O. Spengler, The Decline of the West

Abstract

This paper seeks to add a new facet to the definition (s) of fascism, that amorphous social, cultural, political, and aesthetic conception that has inspired no small degree of controversy over the years since the defeat of the Nazis—indeed, even since the ascension of Mussolini. I argue that the conception of “decadence” by ruling or vanguard party circles, and the expression of a need for such decadence to be purged for the health of the society, is a central tenet of fascist or crypto-fascist ideology in either its rise to power or renewed consolidation of power. In this view, “fascim”, does not necessarily mean the Nazis, and “decadence” need not signify a circumscribed artistic definition, connoting a certain circle of late-nineteenth-century painters in poets, especially in France. Though I regard period-circumscribed views of fascism and decadence as informative, I hope to offer a new framework in which the two concepts, seen in perpetual, relation to each other, break historical bonds and tell us about deeper, transhistorical political trends. In doing so, we may be better equipped to guard against the renewed emergence of crypto-fascist ideology by taking this rhetoric of a “purgation of decadence,” wherever it comes from, as a serious warning. Thus I will use historical cases outside of the standard Hitler-Mussolini axis that I view to exhibit overtly fascist tendencies, such as Khmer Rouge Cambodia and Cultural Revolution Maoist China, and I will make normative claims about current ideological currents that, while certainly not neo-Nazi, may also contain fascist or crypto-fascist tendencies.