Fascism is the most loaded word in modern political conversation, and the one most often used badly. On the left it is regularly applied as a generic insult to anything sufficiently right-wing or authoritarian. On the right it is regularly dismissed as a meaningless slur from the left. Both habits damage the work the word should be doing. Fascism names a specific 20th-century political tradition with identifiable features, a working historical record, and a current trajectory of partial revival. Using the word precisely matters because failing to use it precisely produces the dual failure of normalising actual fascism by misnaming everyday conservatism, and of obscuring actual fascism when it appears.

This piece is a short primer. The minimum definition. The historical variants. The core features the major scholarly accounts agree on. What fascism correctly diagnoses about the failure modes of liberal democracy, which is more than its critics usually concede. What it has done that no responsible citizen can accept. Where the contemporary far right sits relative to the historical tradition. And specifically the Irish situation, which has had less direct fascist development than most of Europe but is not exempt from the broader contemporary current.

This is one of the harder pieces in the series to write because the requirement to be precise without being either dismissive or alarmist runs through every section. I will try.

A definition that survives the major scholarly accounts

Fascism is a 20th-century political tradition built around a small cluster of recurring commitments. Different scholars frame the cluster differently. The features that almost all serious accounts include:

A myth of national rebirth from current decadence and humiliation, achieved through the unified mobilisation of the nation under charismatic leadership. The current condition is presented as fallen and shameful. The lost greatness is recoverable. The mobilisation that recovers it requires sweeping aside the institutions, parties, and norms that produced the fall.

Hostility to liberal democracy, parliamentary politics, and the institutions of pluralism. Dissent is treated as treason. Independent civil society is treated as obstruction. Free press is treated as enemy. The political party of the movement is treated as the only legitimate voice of the nation.

A cult of action over deliberation. Decisive will, drama, force, and physical struggle are valorised. Careful argument, evidence, and procedural restraint are dismissed as decadent and feminine. Violence against perceived internal enemies is increasingly normalised.

The valorisation of inequality. The strong are entitled to lead, the weak to be led. Internal hierarchy mirrors the perceived natural order. Sympathy for the weak is treated as sentimental and weakening.

Identification of internal and external enemies whose elimination is presented as necessary for national rebirth. The internal enemy is typically a minority defined by ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, political dissent, or some combination. The external enemy is typically a competing nation or supranational order. Both are presented as conspiratorially linked.

Charismatic-leader politics. The leader is presented as the embodiment of the national will, with intuitive access to truths that conventional institutions cannot grasp. Loyalty to the leader takes precedence over loyalty to programme, party, or institution.

A political programme that is intentionally vague on substantive economic and policy questions but specific on enemies, symbols, ritual, and aesthetics. Fascist movements typically capture power without clear policy commitments and improvise once in office.

This cluster of features is what Robert Paxton, Stanley Payne, Roger Griffin, and most of the major academic accounts use to identify fascism. No historical fascism showed every feature in pure form. The cluster is what the family resembles, and any serious fascist or fascist-adjacent movement will show most of them most of the time.

Where the tradition came from

Fascism emerged from the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The war had produced four years of mass industrial slaughter on an unprecedented scale, the collapse of four empires, the Russian Revolution and its international resonance, and a generation of demobilised soldiers struggling to reintegrate into civilian life. The political systems of inter-war Europe were stressed in ways that 19th-century constitutional structures had not been designed for.

Italian Fascism, founded by Benito Mussolini in 1919 and in power from 1922, was the first movement to call itself fascist. The name comes from the Italian fasci, originally meaning bundles (the Roman fasces, an axe surrounded by bound rods, became the movement's symbol) and used in late-19th-century Italian politics to mean small political associations. Mussolini's Fasci di Combattimento (Combat Leagues) gave the movement its name. The Italian movement combined nationalist, syndicalist, and futurist intellectual currents into a programme that promised to restore Italian greatness, suppress Communist organising, and modernise the country through state-led industrial mobilisation.

German Nazism, founded under various names from 1919 onwards and consolidated under Adolf Hitler from the mid-1920s, in power from 1933, was the most extreme of the historical fascisms. It combined the Italian fascist framework with a particular biological-racial ideology drawn from late-19th-century pan-German and racial-anthropological sources. The Nazi extension of the fascist framework into systematic genocide of European Jews, Roma, and other targeted populations is what gives 20th-century fascism its blackest historical reputation.

Spanish Falangism, the dominant political form of Franco's Spain (1939-1975), was a more conservative-Catholic variant that combined elements of Italian fascism with traditional Spanish Catholic-conservative authoritarianism. The Falange Española, founded in 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, provided the ideological scaffolding. Franco's regime is variously classified as fascist, authoritarian-conservative, or hybrid. The internal Spanish-historiographical debate about the precise classification is ongoing.

Smaller European fascist movements included the Romanian Iron Guard (Codreanu's Legionary Movement), the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Croatian Ustaše, the Belgian Rexists under Léon Degrelle, the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley, the French collaborationist movements during the Vichy period, and a long list of smaller formations across most European countries. Most reached significant power only through German occupation. The British and French movements were politically marginal in their home countries even at peak.

Outside Europe, the question of whether interwar Japanese militarism counts as fascism is contested. Most scholars classify it as a related but distinct authoritarian-imperial phenomenon. Most Latin American military regimes of the 20th century, including the Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean dictatorships, are similarly best understood as authoritarian rather than fascist in the strict sense, although some included fascist elements.

The post-1945 period was, for several decades, broadly marked by the discrediting of fascism as an explicit political identity. Neo-fascist movements continued to exist (the Italian MSI, various small groupings across Europe, the British National Front and later BNP, the American neo-Nazi groups) but were largely electorally marginal. The tradition did not disappear. It went underground, drifted into adjacent ideological positions, and waited.

The post-2008 period has seen a substantial resurgence of far-right politics across Europe and the United States, with varying relationships to the historical fascist tradition. Some movements explicitly draw on the historical sources (Casa Pound in Italy, the Identitarians, parts of the Alternative for Germany, the Greek Golden Dawn before its 2020 prosecution). Others operate in the broader national-conservative or right-populist register without explicit fascist commitment. The line between the two is sometimes hard to draw and is genuinely contested by scholars working on the contemporary scene.

The empirical record

Worth being explicit about, because the historical record is the strongest case against the tradition and any treatment of fascism that does not engage with it directly is incomplete.

Italian Fascism produced about twenty years of one-party rule, the suppression of opposition, the murder of internal dissidents (Matteotti, the Rosselli brothers, others), the colonial wars in Libya and Ethiopia with their attendant atrocities, alliance with Nazi Germany, racial laws against Italian Jews from 1938 onwards, and ultimately the destruction of Italian sovereignty in the Second World War. The internal record is substantially less catastrophic than German Nazism but still produced thousands of political murders and the destruction of Italian democratic institutions for a generation.

German Nazism produced the most catastrophic political-historical record of the modern era. The Holocaust, with approximately six million Jewish victims and several million additional victims among Roma, disabled people, political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, and others. The Second World War in Europe, with somewhere between 40 and 50 million deaths. The systematic destruction of European Jewish civilisation. The reduction of much of Eastern Europe to ruin. The slow corrosion of German civic, religious, and intellectual life across twelve years of regime. The detailed historical record of these years has been extensively documented by historians, judicial proceedings, archival recovery, and survivor testimony, and is not in serious dispute among professional historians.

Spanish Francoism produced thirty-six years of one-party rule, the systematic execution and exile of Republican opposition, mass political imprisonment, the suppression of regional languages and cultures, deeply conservative Catholic-clerical control of education and social life, and a slow internal reform that eventually produced the post-Franco transition. The Spanish historical reckoning with this period is ongoing and incomplete.

The smaller European fascist regimes and movements produced their own records of political violence, persecution of minorities, and collaboration with Nazi Germany during the war. The Croatian Ustaše regime in particular committed atrocities against Serbs, Jews, and Roma that were extreme even by the standards of the period.

The cumulative record is one of the worst political-historical records of any modern political tradition. This is not a contestable judgment. The question of how to assess the contemporary far right is partly a question of how closely it actually resembles the tradition with this record.

What fascism correctly diagnoses

This is the section that is hardest to write and most necessary, because pretending fascism's appeal was incomprehensible is part of how it gains ground in conditions like the present. A serious account has to acknowledge that fascism, in its historical successful versions, was responding to real failures of the surrounding liberal-democratic and capitalist order. The diagnosis was, in some respects, accurate. The prescription was catastrophic.

Worth being explicit about three of these.

Fascism correctly identified that liberal-democratic societies often fail to provide meaning, community, and shared purpose. The disenchantment-of-modern-life problem, articulated in different terms by Weber, by Durkheim, by Tönnies, by the McGilchrist piece elsewhere in this series, is a real feature of liberal-modern societies. Fascism offered a substitute meaning-structure (national community, historical destiny, ritual participation, hierarchical clarity, shared enemies) that filled the gap. The substitute was bad. The gap was real. Liberal democracies that fail to address the underlying meaning-deficit leave space that something else will eventually occupy.

Fascism correctly identified that economic liberalism produces material insecurity and alienation that liberal democratic institutions struggle to address. The post-2008 trajectory of Western economies, with stagnant wages, asset-price inflation, the erosion of regional industrial economies, and the rise of precarious gig employment, has reproduced many of the conditions of inter-war Europe at a smaller scale. Fascist movements thrive when liberal-democratic and social-democratic politics fail to deliver material security to ordinary citizens. This is not a defence of fascism. It is an observation about the conditions of its emergence.

Fascism correctly identified that the pace of social and cultural change in modern societies can produce real psychological and communal dislocation. The mass migration, urbanisation, technological transformation, and cultural-religious shift of the late 19th and early 20th centuries produced widespread experience of dislocation that fascism was able to mobilise. Comparable contemporary changes (post-1990 globalisation, post-2008 financial restructuring, post-2015 mass migration into Europe, the post-2020 cultural-political reconfiguration) produce comparable dislocations. Liberal-democratic responses that dismiss the dislocation as bigotry, or treat it as a psychological problem to be managed rather than a political condition to be addressed, leave room for fascist or fascist-adjacent movements to organise around it.

Naming these honestly is not endorsing fascism. It is identifying the conditions under which fascism becomes politically possible, which is the necessary precondition for resisting it intelligently.

Why the prescription is catastrophic

Worth being equally explicit about, because the diagnosis can be partly granted while the prescription remains unacceptable.

Fascism's response to the failures of liberal-democratic and capitalist modernity is the destruction of the institutional and procedural structures that allow ordinary citizens to address those failures peacefully. The replacement of pluralism with one-party rule. The replacement of independent civil society with state-controlled mass mobilisation. The replacement of legal protection for minorities with systematic persecution. The replacement of contested political argument with leader-cult ritual. The replacement of negotiation and compromise with violence.

Each of these moves removes the tools that a society would need to actually solve the problems fascism is responding to. Once a society has destroyed its parliamentary institutions, its independent press, its protected minorities, and its tradition of legal restraint, it has destroyed the conditions under which any future course-correction can be made peacefully. The internal logic of fascism is that the leader and the movement embody the national will perfectly, so course-correction is unnecessary. The empirical record is that the leader and the movement are very seldom right, that course-correction is constantly needed, and that fascist regimes consistently produce catastrophic policy errors which the destroyed institutional structure can no longer correct.

The result is the historical record described above. This is not an accident. It is the predictable consequence of removing the structures that catch and correct mistakes.

The contemporary case for liberal-democratic institutions, even with their substantial failings, rests heavily on this argument. The institutions are not adequate to the failures fascism diagnoses. They are, however, the structures that allow those failures to be addressed without catastrophic side-effects. Replacing them with something else has, every time it has been tried at scale, produced outcomes worse than the failures it was supposed to address.

What it is commonly mistaken for

Three persistent confusions, each damaging.

First, "fascism" is often used as a generic term for any politics one finds sufficiently right-wing or authoritarian. This usage damages the word's analytical content and the work it can do. A military dictatorship, a clerical-conservative regime, a Marxist-Leninist authoritarianism, and a fascist movement are different phenomena with different internal dynamics, different relationships to civil society, and different trajectories. Lumping them all together as fascism makes serious comparative political analysis harder.

Second, fascism is often confused with the broader category of right-populism or national-conservatism. The relationship is real but the categories are not identical. Some right-populist movements have substantial fascist elements (the National Rally in France has historical roots in the fascist tradition, the Italian Brothers of Italy descend from the post-war neo-fascist MSI). Others are closer to traditional conservative-authoritarianism without the specifically fascist commitment to the destruction of liberal-democratic institutions. The political analysis of which contemporary movements are fascist requires looking at what they actually do and say rather than at general similarity in tone.

Third, fascism is sometimes confused with conservatism. Most conservatism is not fascism. Conservatism, as discussed in the Conservatism piece in this series, is a broader and older tradition that has frequently been hostile to fascism on principled grounds. The Burkean and Catholic-social-teaching strands of conservatism have produced substantial intellectual resources for resisting fascist appeals, and many conservative writers have been clearer-headed about the threat of fascism than some of their progressive contemporaries. Treating conservatism as crypto-fascism is both empirically wrong and politically counter-productive.

Where you find fascism in Irish politics

Ireland has had less direct fascist development than most European countries. The reasons are partly geographical (the absence of land borders with continental fascist movements), partly political (Irish independence had been substantially achieved by 1922 and the post-independence settlement absorbed most of the radical political energy), partly cultural (the Catholic-conservative consensus of the new state had its own internal authoritarian tendencies but was generally hostile to the secular-revolutionary aspect of Continental fascism), and partly demographic (a small and largely homogeneous population was less susceptible to fascist mobilisation around internal-minority enemies).

The closest Ireland came to a serious fascist movement was the Blueshirts, the Army Comrades Association under Eoin O'Duffy, active 1932-1933. O'Duffy, formerly Garda Commissioner and removed from that position by the incoming Fianna Fáil government in 1932, organised the Blueshirts initially as a defensive formation against perceived Fianna Fáil intimidation of pro-Treaty supporters. The movement adopted blue shirts (modelled explicitly on the Italian black-shirts and the German brown-shirts) and Roman-salute ritual. O'Duffy travelled to Italy and Germany and met fascist leaders. The movement merged with Cumann na nGaedheal and the National Centre Party in 1933 to form Fine Gael, with O'Duffy as the party's first president.

The Blueshirt episode is rarely volunteered in modern Fine Gael self-presentation, for understandable reasons. O'Duffy was eased out of FG within a year, partly because his fascist enthusiasms made him politically unviable and partly because the broader pro-Treaty tradition was uncomfortable with the explicit fascist alignment. He subsequently led an Irish Brigade to fight for Franco in Spain (about 700 men, mostly from a Catholic-traditionalist religious motivation rather than from explicit fascist commitment). The Brigade saw limited combat and returned in 1937. O'Duffy died in 1944.

The Irish historical reckoning with the Blueshirt period has been mixed. Modern Fine Gael does not deny the episode but does not foreground it. The broader Irish historical narrative has tended to treat it as a temporary aberration rather than as a serious instance of Irish fascist development. The point worth making for current readers is that an Irish fascist movement did briefly exist, did have substantial mainstream-political support before its excesses became evident, and was assimilated into one of the surviving major Irish parties. The pattern is not unique to Ireland. It is worth knowing about.

Wartime Irish neutrality is a separate and contested question. The Irish state remained neutral throughout the Second World War while the broader Allied effort was, in retrospect, the central anti-fascist political project of the period. The internal Irish reasoning for neutrality (preservation of sovereignty against the British, recent civil war making any war participation politically impossible, perceived strategic insignificance) is defensible on its own terms. The international moral position of Irish neutrality in the specific context of the war against Nazism is more difficult to defend. The internal Irish historical conversation about this is ongoing and was substantially reopened by Robert Fisk and others in the 1980s and 1990s.

Modern far-right movements in Ireland are small but have grown noticeably in the post-2015 period. The National Party (founded 2016, currently led by Justin Barrett), the Irish Freedom Party, and various smaller and more openly fascist groupings have built modest organisational infrastructure. The November 2023 Dublin riot, in the aftermath of a stabbing incident, brought elements of this current to public attention and prompted substantial political and journalistic engagement with the question of how serious the Irish far-right threat actually is.

The honest assessment, on the available evidence, is that Ireland currently has a small but real far-right movement with some explicitly fascist elements, that it has substantially benefited from the post-2015 European migration crisis as an organising opportunity, and that it has not yet broken into mainstream electoral politics in any substantial way. The 2024 European and local elections produced limited gains for explicitly far-right candidates. The 2024 general election did not produce a fascist or fascist-adjacent breakthrough. Whether the trajectory continues to develop in this direction depends on a complex set of conditions including the broader European trend, the trajectory of Irish housing and cost-of-living pressures, and the response of the mainstream political system to the underlying concerns the far right is mobilising around.

Aontú, Independent Ireland, and the rural-populist groupings are not fascist. They are socially-conservative and nationalist in different combinations, drawing on Catholic-traditionalist and rural-populist sources rather than on fascist intellectual traditions. The line is real and worth respecting. Treating these formations as fascist makes the analysis worse rather than better. They share some concerns and some constituencies with the explicitly far-right movements but are working in different intellectual traditions and propose different political programmes.

The broader political conversation about Irish far-right development is currently held in vocabularies that mostly do not distinguish well between the various positions. Mainstream Irish journalism has improved on this question in the last several years but the public conversation lags. Citizens trying to think clearly about it should read carefully and assess specific movements on their actual content rather than on associations.

Why this matters for the citizen

A citizen confronting contemporary far-right politics, whether in Ireland or in the broader European and American context, needs to be able to distinguish between fascism, national-conservatism, right-populism, and other adjacent traditions. This is not a pedantic distinction. The political response that works for fascism does not necessarily work for the broader category, and the political response that works for national-conservatism is not necessarily adequate for fascism. Treating all of them as the same thing produces analytical and political failures.

The Irish situation specifically is, on the available evidence, currently one in which a small but real fascist current exists and is organising, but in which mainstream Irish politics has so far avoided the kind of national-conservative breakthrough that has occurred in several other European countries. Whether this remains the case depends partly on the trajectory of the underlying conditions (housing, cost of living, immigration, cultural change) and partly on the response of mainstream political institutions and parties to those conditions. A serious civic-republican response that addressed the underlying conditions while preserving the non-sectarian commitment of the Tone tradition is, on most reasonable readings, the most useful Irish political resource for resisting the far-right development. Whether the Irish political system actually delivers such a response is one of the more important open questions in current Irish politics.

The broader cultural responsibility is to use the word fascism with precision. Calling everyday conservatism fascism makes the word do less work when it is needed. Refusing to call actual fascism fascism makes its growth easier. Both failures damage the work of defending democratic institutions seriously. The empirical record gives us substantial knowledge about what fascism is and how it operates. Using that knowledge well is part of being a serious citizen in a period when it matters more than it has in eighty years.

Further reading

If you have an evening: Umberto Eco, "Ur-Fascism" (1995). The essay, written for the New York Review of Books, lists fourteen features Eco identified across the historical fascist movements. It is short, accessible, and remains one of the more useful diagnostic resources for assessing contemporary movements. Read it with awareness that no historical fascism showed all fourteen and that contemporary movements vary in how many they show.

If you have a week: Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004). The standard scholarly account, framed around five stages through which fascist movements develop. Demanding but rewarding, and probably the single most useful book for an educated reader trying to think clearly about the tradition.

For the historical record specifically: Ian Kershaw's two-volume Hitler biography (1998, 2000), and Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men (1992), are the standard accessible treatments of the German case. R.J.B. Bosworth's Mussolini (2002) for Italy. Stanley Payne's The Spanish Civil War (2012) for the Spanish case.

For the contemporary debate: Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works (2018), is the most readable popular treatment of the recent resurgence question, with the caveat that Stanley is more inclined to apply the term broadly than some other scholars. Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History (2017), is the more careful scholarly counterpart. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen (2020), is the best survey of the contemporary authoritarian-leader phenomenon.

For the philosophical context: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), remains the canonical philosophical treatment of the conditions under which 20th-century totalitarianism, both fascist and Stalinist, became possible. Demanding but essential for serious engagement with the question.

For the Irish-specific story: Mike Cronin, The Blueshirts and Irish Politics (1997), is the standard scholarly treatment of the Blueshirt episode. Maurice Manning, The Blueshirts (1970), is the older but still readable account. For the contemporary Irish far-right development, the journalism of Mark O'Brien, Aoife Moore, and others in The Irish Times, The Currency, and The Journal across 2022-2024 is the best current resource. There is not yet a comprehensive scholarly treatment of the contemporary Irish far right.

The thing fascism asks, that liberal-democratic societies have to take seriously, is what to do about the conditions of meaning-deficit, material insecurity, and cultural dislocation that fascism mobilises around. The wrong answer is to dismiss the conditions. The wrong answer is also to adopt the fascist response to them. The right answer is to address the conditions through institutional and political means that the fascist tradition seeks to destroy. That, simply put, is most of the political work of the current period. It is not new work. It is the same work that the post-war social-democratic settlement was, at its best, trying to do, and that the post-1980 neoliberal turn has substantially abandoned. Recovering some version of it, in current circumstances, is the largest political question in front of European democracies, including Ireland.

Related in the Political Literacy series

  • What Is Conservatism? — the broader tradition that has historically been clearest about resisting fascism
  • What Is Nationalism? — the broader political family fascism is one pathological development of
  • What Is Populism? — the related but distinct political style frequently confused with fascism
  • What Is Communism? — the 20th-century alternative totalitarianism fascism was simultaneously fighting and resembling
  • What Is Social Democracy? — the post-war settlement built specifically as the institutional alternative to fascist appeal

Plus the framing piece, What Do Ireland's Parties Actually Stand For?, and the full Political Literacy archive.