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Fascism is considered reactionary by academics because it is. In the Nazi case, it was also revolutionary, just in a direction which specifically criticized the Weimar liberals and the socialists. Yes, they also fought the junkers for political power; that doesn’t diminish their traditionalist aesthetics.
Then you’ve got Italy, pining for long-lost Rome and adopting traditionalist slogans: “La guerra è per l'uomo come la maternità è per la donna.” Francoist Spain, claiming monarchist symbols and called his war a Catholic crusade.
Though…is Road to Serfdom where Moldbug got his ideas about “demotism”?
I refer you to George Orwell's essay, "What is Fascism?" The point being that the word had already been diluted beyond any sort of agreed upon meaning before WW2 had even finished. No one can agree on what fascism actually is:
https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc
Modern definition: Everybody I don't like is a fascist
Liberal definition: Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini were fascists.
Conservative definition: Franco was a fascist but not Hitler.
Schismatic Conservative definition: Hitler was a fascist but not Franco.
Orthodox definition: Franco and Hitler weren't fascists.
Ultraorthodox definition: Mussolini wasn't a fascist.
Portuguese position: Thank God everyone forgets about Salazar
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I don't think traditionalist aesthetics alone make something reactionary, particular when it is employed to push the envelope forward. The Founding Fathers of America heavily leaned on Classical aesthetics but were not Reactionary. The Futurist movement was associated with Fascism, and even today the Vaporwave aesthetic broadly used across the DR shows the uncanny nostalgia of the combination of classical aesthetics and futurist artistic expression. Within science fiction, fascism seems to aesthetically fit all too well, with Starship Troopers and Star Wars being two of many such cases, also pointing to a futuristic rather than reactionary ideological inertia.
Of course fascism became associated with eugenics and the trope of "science going too far." It was a revolutionary ideology, it is only accused of being Reactionary from the point of reference of left-wing academics who are doing basically what Hlynka is doing by accusing the DR and Wokeism as being cut from the same cloth.
"Fascism" has basically become synonymous in common parlance with Right-wing futurism as opposed to Right-wing conservatism or reaction. "Fascists" aren't "super conservative" they are revolutionary futurists.
Having a vision of the future doesn't disqualify them from being reactionaries, though. It's part of having an effective political machine. Christian millenarians are perfectly capable of holding reactionary beliefs despite having very clear claims about 1) the shape of the future and 2) how everyone ought to get there. So too with the agrarian conservatives whom the Nazis supplanted.
The key feature of reaction is opposition to liberalism. Nazis were very eager to check those boxes. It's that, more than the aesthetics, which I find dispositive.
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Many reactionaries were obviously deeply critical of fascism, but the nuance of their criticism is usually about the approach rather than the goal (building a society with, in generalized terms, traditional values and built around faith, family and fatherland all defined vaguely). All reaction today is revolutionary, even obviously-not-futurist reaction like French traditional Catholicism of the SSPX kind is ‘revolutionary’ in a country that has been secular and progressive for the best part of 250 years (some exceptions excepted). Milquetoast Americana ‘Christian nationalism’ is revolutionary in the modern US.
Fascist aesthetics are interesting but complicated by the huge differences between Italy/Germany/Spain and the fact that even within countries there was a huge amount of inconsistency; the Nazis selectively deployed both modern sans serif futurist fonts and Fraktur until they arbitrarily decided the latter was Jewish in 1941. Architecturally there was always tension between a veneration of classicism and the fact that fascism had its roots in part in architectural modernism/futurism, such that you get complicated and extremely interesting, but also arguably aesthetically incoherent (especially when one looks at interior design and exterior design side by side) buildings like Hitler’s chancery.
I think one of the few points of agreement is that fascism sees the centralized state as playing a much more central role in cultural, economic and political life than other forms of reactionary conservatism (a term that I disagree is oxymoronic, almost all hard rightists today agree that conservatism is revolutionary because there is very little left to conserve). Other reactionaries typically want a smaller state and a larger role for other institutions (religion, social organizations, communal groups and local politics, gender and age-based associations etc).
Fascism never had a Karl Marx figure to consolidate a general philosophy, hence the inconsistency. It is expressed more organically relative to the people and their historical context rather than a monotone global revolution. I still do not agree that harnessing the immense power of classical aesthetics makes you a Reactionary. Talk about confused!
"Democrats are the real racists, please stop DEI because it's the real racism" is not a revolutionary ideology. People like Hlynka have long been appropriated as Enforcers for the prevailing cultural ethos and moral paradigm as one kosher side of the anti-fascist dialectic: the Progressives claim the right is more fascist due to their social conservatism, while the Right claims the left is more fascist because of their cultural and economic authoritarianism. So the prevailing dialectic is defined by the debate over who claims the moral high ground by being the most anti-fascist. Conservatism is highly entrenched in this game, with Hlynka being a quintessential example of many people we all know in real life and which completely dominated right-wing discourse during the Bush era and prior.
Fascism is neither liberal nor pre-liberal. It is post-liberal. That's why any sort of gesture towards a Right-wing post-liberalism is automatically tagged as fascist or Nazi no matter how irrelevant it is to 1930s German National Socialism.
So I feel you are playing into the game here by claiming a Right-wing post-liberalism is impossible. It either must be liberal or reactionary. But this obviously isn't the case. I do not consider myself a reactionary. I do not want to go back to the 1950s, or Retvrn further back than to whatever year Moldbug pegs. The only way out is through, not backwards. I and many on the DR don't associate with NRx for this very reason.
I very much agree, but I don’t think Hlynka was on the hard right, for all of his strange and contradictory ideas. I don’t really think Hlynka was an enforcer for the status quo, just a believer in a strange form of classical Anglo-American liberalism with some additional characteristics that is, today, probably more embodied by the GOP than the left in some ways.
I think I’m mostly in agreement with you (not politically, obviously, but on this point) but I’d still describe myself as a reactionary. I think pretty much anyone who opposes the progress cult is, at least on some level. I don’t want to go back to the 1950s or any particular previous time. I don’t think Moldbug does either; he argues that liberalism traces its roots to the reformation or even renaissance, but he’s not advocating a return to 1400, he doesn’t think it’s possible in any case.
All post-liberal ideologies of the right (as opposed to liberal ideologies of it, like Hlynka’s), for all their diversity, are reactionary. That’s not a criticism, it’s just obvious, because in their rightism they will be, necessarily, reactionary.
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Oh come on, it's a lot more complicated than that. Evola's Fascism Viewed from the Right makes a compelling argument that Fascism is a modernist ideology, and there's very many brands of reactionary criticism of Fascism, notably because it tended to abolish the Church in favor of State worship and pagan occultism.
And despite its falangist roots, I believe very strongly that Francoism is not a Fascism for this reason among others. And I'm not exactly alone in that in the literature.
Fascism's palingenetic component is inherently reactionary for certain definitions of reaction and inherently not reactionary for others. You can't just pretend it's a simple, obvious, settled issue when it's still debated after almost a century.
You've got me; I oversimplified it to match the OP's choice of simple, obvious, settled boundaries.
I'm arguing that the layman's definition of fascism, the one that your average communist had in mind, really is more reactionary than progressive. Ongoing debate on the fringes of the category doesn't take away from the fact that Nazi Germany was specifically reacting to Weimar liberalism, multiculturalism, internationalism, and especially the communist project.
Same goes for you, @ChickenOverlord. I don't mind admitting that fascism is an umbrella concept for some surprisingly different ideologies. But if that rules out general statements about the category, I think you ought to take it up with the OP.
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