By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) January 6, 2023; see related articles from July 11, 2021, Media Keeps Portraying Democrats and Biden as a Mess, Ignoring Data Proving that Could Not Be Further from Truth and November 15, 2021, A BIG F**KING DEAL: Biden’s Infrastructure Bill in Historical Perspective. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

SILVER SPRING—It is time to acknowledge the historic greatness of the Biden Administration for what it is, and the performance the Democrats under Biden in the 2022 midterm elections is one of several strong examples of this greatness.

With the final seat of Congress decided by the Great State of Georgia after the December runoff victory of Rev. Raphael Warnock, who beat a walking public service announcement for football-related traumatic brain injury in the form of Herschel Walker (and far more emphatically than in November, by a percentage margin over three times greater), we can truly take stock of the historic overperformance of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party under his leadership.

Of course, a lot of this was about individual candidates.  And Biden has had an excellent partner in Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in the Senate (he doesn’t get enough credit) and has had an incredible ally in the House with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, certainly one of the best—one of the most effective and accomplished—speakers in U.S. history, perhaps the best.

Still, in our presidential system, midterm election performance has always been one of the major measures of how presidents are judged during their term and throughout American history: no matter what happens, it is always to a large extent a metric tied to the president’s performance and leadership as leader of his party (with only the exception of John Tyler simply not having a party by his only midterm in 1842-1843 after he inherited the presidency upon the death of Whig President William Henry Harrison, whose people did not vet Tyler enough to realize he was, well, not really a Whig).  Of course, the degree to which a midterm should reflect and does in the popular consciousness and amongst pundits and scholars can and does wax and wane due to a variety of factors and circumstances at the time, but it is there, an inescapable part of the equation of evaluating presidents.

I have already discussed in detail how legislatively and in terms of party unity in Congress, the Biden Administration in its first two years and the Democratic Party under Biden in the 117^th Congress are the most impressive since LBJ in the 1960s and, well, ever in U.S. history, respectively (in terms of party unity with the possible only exception of one Federalist Senate at the dawn of our republic).  And I have further explained how these very accomplishments are even more impressive in that they came in an era of far more division (the most divided in modern American history and with the smallest governing majorities), but here, after these midterms, we have even more hard data that places Biden’s and his party’s midterm election performance in proper historical perspective, confirming this performance is among the highest in American history, especially in the modern era.

How do I know this?  I have literally (to use a Bidenism) put together data on every president’s first midterm since the dawn of the republic, available in a full set of Excel spreadsheets I created, but I will cut and paste images of some of that data here, images you can zoom in on by clicking on them.  You can see the full data in a close-up image by clicking on images or on the link in this paragraph for the Excel version.  And if I may toot my own horn, I am pretty sure this is by far the most comprehensive presentation of data in table form of American presidents’ first midterm performances you can find anywhere (if you find a more detailed presentation do please let me know; it took me way longer that I had hoped to put this together).

Here, first, are all the first midterms for presidents from 1914 onward, as the House had the same number of seats—435—since then and also as 1914 was first midterm when every regular U.S. Senate election was determined by popular vote (as opposed to being selected by the state legislatures) with the implementation of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution; we shall call these midterms the midterm elections of the “modern era.”  Elections from this era, then, will be the most useful for comparison as the losses and gain are all from a House of the same size and the Senate’s size did not change very much, with all its races actually decided by popular elections.

This dataset includes presidents who came to power after a death (Truman in 1945 after FDR died), assassination (Teddy Roosevelt, or TR, in 1901 after McKinley was killed), or resignation (Ford after Nixon’s 1974 resignation) and had their first midterm without being elected; if applicable, in addition to the midterms for their first partial terms, I have also included when applicable their first midterms after being actually elected president as well as after their inherited midterms (Roosevelt in 1906 after 1902, Truman in 1950 after 1946; Ford never won a presidential election as he was defeated by Carter in 1976), as comparisons can be difficult and a midterm after inheriting the presidency and a midterm after actually being elected are not exactly apples and oranges (inherited term data is in italics in the tables).

This data is even more telling if we arrange these modern-era presidents in a ranking based on seats won or lost in Congress, starting with the House.

Among modern presidencies spanning more than a century, Joe Biden is tied for 5^th in terms of the best absolute performance for his party in the House of Representatives (a loss of 9 seats): only 4 modern presidents over 4 midterms—FDR and his Democrats gaining 9 seats in 1934, George W. Bush and his Republicans gaining 8 seats in 2002, JFK and his Democrats losing 4 in 1962, and George H. W. Bush and his Republicans losing 8 in 1990—did better.

It is also quite telling that in the entirety of the modern era, only 2 presidents have actually gained seats at all in the House during their first midterms: presidents almost always have their party lose seats.

Biden ties with Calvin Coolidge’s and his Republicans’ performance from 1926, only losing 9 seats (though in Biden’s case, this meant Democrats lost control of the House, while Coolidge kept control of the House for his Republicans, so I put ol’ Calvin above Joe on the tie order).  This puts Biden over 13 other presidents and 14 first midterms (per my explanation above, Truman gets 2 in our accounting) in terms their first post-elected and/or post-inherited midterms.

But not all elections are equal, and I account for some extraordinary circumstances in the notes section.  In this spirit, if we consider the conditions of each election, Biden’s specific ranking is unique and far more impressive: FDR got to have his first midterm not far from the nadir of the Great Depression; George W. Bush was riding a high-level of unity and support after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and during the early phase of the war in Afghanistan; Kennedy had literally just days earlier resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis, averting nuclear war and ending a major standoff with the Soviet Union, saving the world (partnering with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev) from destruction; and George H. W. Bush had his midterm while he was presiding over a Cold War victory (Germany was reunified just a month before the election) and during the Gulf War, Bush’s handling of which enjoyed widespread support.

But while each of those four presidents enjoyed considerable winds at their backs, Biden in 2022 had been dealing with decades-high inflation, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the worst levels of partisanship since the Civil War and Reconstruction that are tied to an ongoing Trumpist insurrection seeking to destroy American democracy.

In other words, while those “scoring” “better” by having their parties fare better in the House than Biden saw massive levels of broad, historic support in the face of various domestic and geopolitical consensus moments—with history on their side in historic ways—Biden had the wind blowing in his face and was able still to perform as well as he did and close enough to those with far better circumstances.  In that light, Biden and his Democrats’ performance is perhaps the most remarkable performance considering the difficulties they faced and those other four presidents and their parties did not.

The biggest winner in the modern era was FDR in 1934 with a gain of 9 seats and the biggest loser Warren Harding in 1922 losing a massive 77 seats!

Biden’s modern House first midterm ranking: 5^th (4 presidents and midterms ahead, 13 presidents and 14 midterms behind, tied with 1) out of 19 presidents and 20 first midterms

Let’s also look at the Senate-side of things.

In the Senate, too, Biden is also 5^th in the modern era, tied with Richard Nixon with a gain of 1 seat each, ahead of 12 other presidents over 13 relevant midterms (Truman, again, is counted twice).  With the exception of Reagan, who oversaw Senate Republicans hold steady, the rest of those presidents all had their parties lose seats.  Only 5 other presidents also gained seats:  FDR and his Democrats (+9), JFK and his Democrats (+4), Woodrow Wilson and his Democrats (+3), and George W. Bush and Donald Trump each with their Republicans (+2; not in line with House results for Trump as he and his Republicans lost 42 House seats that same year in 2018, as the Senate can easily be out of sync with the House, especially considering all 435 House seats are up for election every two years while only a third of Senate seats are at stake in any given election).  Keeping in mind the challenging circumstances in which Biden is governing, remember also that 3 of the 5 “scoring” ahead of Biden faced very favorable circumstances, as discussed, also leading to relatively quite strong House results for them, as discussed.  Thus, Biden and Democrats’ performance Senate-side is also quite remarkable.  In fact, their performance in 2022 is the first time since 1934 a president’s party successfully defended every Senate seat up for election that they held before the election, a real history-making series of victories, indeed.

The champ is FDR with +9 seats in 1934, the biggest loser Truman with -11 in 1946 (sorry, Harry).

Biden’s modern Senate first midterm ranking: 5^th (5 presidents ahead, 12 presidents and 13 midterms behind, tied with 1) out of 19 presidents and 20 first midterms

If you want to get really meta, you can go all the way back to George Washington’s first midterm.

Which I did.

Here we are using “premodern” to refer to all midterms from Washington’s first in 1790/1791 and up through the last elections in the early twentieth century (1910) before all Senate midterm elections were conducted as popular votes, à la the Seventeenth Amendment.

And if we rank everyone from 1790 to 2022, first with the House?

Here, Biden still stands out, tied for 10^th with premodern John Quincy Adams in addition to the modern Coolidge.  Included among those surpassing him are some of greats from a much earlier period in American history where there was, relatively speaking, a lot more unity during particular midterm years: Jefferson comes in 1^st well into his “Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800”, with James Monroe and James Madison tied for 2^nd (all with their Democratic-Republican Party and the era of the latter two ending up being so unified their time in part was referred to as the “Era of Good Feelings” and was essentially one-party ruling with an overwhelming majority).  You also have giants like Teddy Roosevelt and his Republicans in 1902 after his first midterm (5^th place) after he took over after the assassination of William McKinley, and you have our first two presidents—George Washington in 1790 and John Adams in 1798 with their Federalists—tied for 6^th.

Only 12 presidents and 12 first midterms rank higher than Biden out of 45 individuals to hold the office (yes, Biden is the 46^th president, but Grover Cleveland was both the 22^nd and 24^th president since he singularly won non-consecutive terms—and let’s hope Trump does not repeat this feat—so there are only 45 people in question, and less because of exclusions and deaths, which I will discuss below), but of those 12, 1 is Teddy Roosevelt and he ranks above Biden with his non-elected, inherited midterm after McKinley’s assassination but below him with his first midterm after he was actually elected to the presidency, so take that that for what you will.  Biden ranks ahead of 25 other presidents and 26 midterms.  Except, since we have Teddy Roosevelt as 2 “others” here, 1 election ahead and 1 election behind, I suppose we could say Biden is loosely-tied as a president with Teddy and more closely tied with Coolidge and Quincy Adams—tied with 3 presidents and 2 two midterms—with only 11 presidents ahead of Biden (subtracting TR) and 12 midterms ahead of Biden’s (keeping 1 of TR’s) and 24 presidents and 26 midterms behind Biden (since he beat both of Truman’s midterms and we are including the other TR midterm).

And for some real perspective?  Even Lincoln, our greatest president, lost 23 seats (and his party’s majority in the House, but it would govern through a plurality coalition) in his first midterm in 1862-1863 during the Civil War.

The all-time winner is Thomas Jefferson gaining 35 House seats for his Democratic-Republicans in 1802 and Benjamin Harrison losing the most—a whopping 93 Republican seats—in 1890.

Biden’s all-time House first midterm ranking: 10^th (11 presidents and 12 midterms ahead, 24 presidents and 26 midterms below, 2-way tie with 1 more “tie”: tied with 3 presidents and 2 midterms) out of 39 eligible presidents and 41 eligible first midterms (see the discussion of which 6 presidents were removed from consideration in the final section)

Now, for the full Senate history:

These should not be weighted as heavily as House results because most of the premodern Senators were chosen by state legislatures and not the people directly, but, still, as the state legislators were mostly chosen by the people, it still involves some degree of (indirect) popular selection and is something of a representative choice.  The Senate also has much smaller margins and swings, so the results are all a lot closer and therefore harder to differentiate and chance plays a much wider role in variations.  So, out of our four major measures, we can confidently say that this one has the least value. 

In any case, Biden still comes out pretty well, with some of the same crowd that has outperformed him—along with some others—coming in ahead, and some surprising ties, while still being ahead of most of the competition in the end.

Biden comes in at 7^th but in a five-way tie; they all come in with a gain of 1 Senate seat (behind a five-way tie for 6^th with 2+ Senate-seat gains).  His fellow 7^th-placers are George Washington from 1790, Andrew Jackson in 1830, Abraham Lincoln in 1862, and Richard Nixon in 1970 (wow to all of that).  12 midterms from 11 presidents are ahead of Biden (including both of Teddy Roosevelt’s) and 24 midterms behind him from 23 presidents (including both of Truman’s terms).

Same champ and biggest loser from the modern era, but factoring out the modern era, among the premoderns McKinley fares the best at +8 in 1898 (but then he was assassinated, so, small consolation for his fans) and William Taft the worst in 1910 at -9 (trimming a lot of fat, relatively; sorry, I couldn’t resist).

Biden’s all-time Senate first midterm ranking: 10^th (11 presidents and 12 midterms ahead, 23 presidents and 24 midterms below, 5-way tie with 5) out of 39 eligible presidents and 41 eligible midterms

There you have all the data (remember, available in a full Excel file), with quirks and nuances explained by a key and accompanying notes in the file and the images.

I’d say that the House results are much more meaningful because, again, they reflect the mood of the whole nation and have always been chosen directly by the people, while Senate elections only reflect one-third of the country and were not always popularly elected.  And, again, perhaps the most important context to consider is that most of the people doing better than Biden in these rankings had history and some big unifying advantages on their side right at the time of the elections or at the very least did not usually have terribly divisive issues plaguing the country, while Biden had some major issues dividing the nation much more intensely during his first midterm as a time, again, of historic division.  That does not mean there were not crises those other leaders faced, but some crises—the Great Depression and WWII, for example, or 9/11 and the early days in Afghanistan, or the Gulf War or the Cuban Missile Crisis—unify the nation while others—slavery in the mid-1800s or inflation and COVID-19 for Biden—divide the nation.  This, for the most part, places Biden in his own special category, objectively speaking, especially in the modern era.

This historic 2022 midterms performance is, of course, tied to the historic legislative accomplishments of the Biden Administration, the historic and (near-?)unprecedented party discipline of the Democrats of the 117^th Congress, and the historic and unprecedented support Biden and that Congress offered Ukraine on the front line of the war for democracy and freedom against fascism and tyranny.

Contrast Biden and his Democrats with the current House Republicans, who are more than flirting with fascism (I do not use that term lightly and took some pains to define it) and showing the most dysfunction of an incoming House majority or plurality party since the 1850s, still unable to elect a House Speaker after an incredible fourteen ballots (last few of these ballots happening on the second anniversary of Trump’s Capitol insurrection in the very chamber assaulted by Trump’s insurrectionists!), much to the embarrassment of invertebrate Kevin McCarthy.

Yes, this whole first midterm thing is just one metric of several major metrics by which a president can be evaluated, some of which are qualitative and hard to measure, and, yes, even this one can be tricky to really properly measure, but the data is still clear: Biden and his Democrats stood out in league with some very good company ahead of most presidents and most of their parties, and were able to do so facing national divisions those outperforming him did not.  History has already been written here, and credit is due where credit is due.

The media should more and more be explaining all this to voters, avoiding false equivalence, and properly contrasting the options for voters, which it is, simply put, not very good at (as I have noted repeatedly before).  Yet voters need to realize these stark truths as they consider their choices in the crucial elections ahead, as the survival of both our very democracy and Western democracy itself may depend on that realization.

On My Imperfect Ranking System, Its Methodology and Data

Compared to just the modern presidents’ midterms, ranking the comprehensive set is trickier.  Again, quick summary of the combined House data: 11 ahead of Biden + 1 Biden himself + 2 tied +1 “tied” (TR) +24 behind Biden + 3 excluded + 3 who died before any midterms and you account for all 45 presidents (11+1+2+1+24+3+3=45) with 44 midterms, 2 midterms being considered each for TR and Truman, just so you see from where I got my numbers.  Depending on what you want to count, you have options your own options.

Out of 45 presidents, 3 were dead before their first midterm would have happened.  In terms of the number of midterms, there were 44 first midterms (including 2 each by my parameters for Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman, as they are the only 2 presidents to inherit a presidency, have a first midterm not after being elected, and then actually win a presidential election and have another midterm, the first after being elected), but 3 of these midterms and presidents were excluded from the rankings to make a total 6 ineligible presidents, all in the premodern era: William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor died (in 1841 and 1850, respectively) before any midterm could happen and James Garfield was assassinated in 1881 before any midterm for him; as for the 1842-3 midterms of William Harrison’s successor John Tyler, Tyler had no party affiliation and this cannot be evaluated; during Reconstruction (1863-1877), Andrew Johnson and his Democrats in 1866-7 and Ulysses Grant and his Republicans in 1870-1 are excluded from rankings for very specific reason, explained in the next paragraph.

During the Civil War and after (an era known as Reconstruction), most of the Southern proslavery states that had attempted to secede were not seated for some time in the Congress, but were readmitted during a period of varying degrees of U.S. military government operating in those states in the face of white supremacist terrorist insurgencies that would eventually succeed and establish Jim Crow apartheid (let’s just be honest here) until the Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s.  Therefore, the Reconstruction results of Johnson and Grant’s first midterms are not included in the rankings due to the complications of military government during major insurgencies and states being readmitted under such conditions.

Even pulling three midterm results out, there are other complications. When you include the premodern data, these rankings are a lot more complicated considering both the House and the Senate grew dramatically in size in the premodern period.  Some examples from the House of this and how tough it is to properly rank in this era and rank against presidents in much later periods within the premodern era and after it: Washington gained three House seats in 1790/1 at a time when the entire House was just 67 seats and is ranked below both FDR in 1934 (3^rd, +9) and George W. Bush in 2002 (4^th, +8) at a time when the House had 435 members to Washington’s 67 or Adams’s 106 (who with his 1798/9 +3 is tied with Washington even with significantly more House seats).

So, in the end, that means 39 of 45 different individuals who were president are considered across 41 ranked out of 44 first midterms, allowing for the flukes and deviations.  No system would be perfect and, without getting into advanced weighting and statistics (for example, calculating what a 3-seat gain for Washington in a House with 67 seats would be proportionally adjusted for a modern 435-seat House), I challenge anyone to come up with a better yet-relatively-simple system and welcome anyone who will answer that challenge.

A lot of the data initially came from Wikipedia gateways but with easily verifiable official records from Congress just a link away and with often easy-(but sometimes not-so-easy)to-access data confirming and/or clarifying what was presented in Wikipedia.  You can check my numbers against whatever you are able to find, but I did spend a lot of time reviewing and confirming the data and am highly confident in the numbers I posted, which you are free to double-check for yourselves.

And, since a lot of this involved rankings, I used numerals for single and double-digits and for rankings to stay consistent for your eyes.

Finally, if you would like the premodern data separately, well, here’s that too:

And don’t forget: all that data is available in my multiple-spreadsheet Excel file! See related articles from July 11, 2021, Media Keeps Portraying Democrats and Biden as a Mess, Ignoring Data Proving that Could Not Be Further from Truth and November 15, 2021 A BIG F**KING DEAL: Biden’s Infrastructure Bill in Historical Perspective

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) January 1, 2023; see related articles from February 17, 2017: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II

SILVER SPRING—Not even a full month after Trump’s inauguration, I published a massive two-part essay discussing what I called the rise of “democratic fascism,” with Trump’s victory and being sworn into office one of largest developments on this front.

This is not a democratic fascism as in the Democratic Party of the U.S., but in terms of fascists nonviolently and legally winning elections, using their resulting power to chip away enough at what I have called the four main pillars of democracy—1.) popular elections, 2.) a law enforcement and highly-independent judicial system that is applied relatively equally and not used as a political tool for aggrandizement or persecution (“rule of law”), 3.) a free press that can hold all parties accountable and provide an accurate picture of reality to the public, and 4.) a public free to express itself and not stupid enough to be manipulated too much by propaganda and demagogues, that can make at least somewhat informed decisions based on reality—to twist the system into unfairly favoring themselves and keeping themselves in power as they continue to enact illiberal policies that only further stack the political and societal deck in their favor.

The first part of the two-parter focused on definitions of important terms like “democracy,” “fascism,” and my conception of what I called “democratic fascism.”  In particular, the term “fascism” is highly overused and often poorly understood or defined, a lot like the word “terrorism,” an issue I have previously discussed in detail: as I argued some time ago, “terrorism” must mean more than simply violence or threats of violence from people and organizations we personally dislike, and, similarly, fascism must mean more than the politics of someone or something we personally dislike.  The first part also discussed the difference between political spin and outright lies and how fascism embraces outright lies, as fascism is, among its other horrendous characteristics, a war on truth and reality itself.

In the second part, I looked specifically at why Trump very much fit the definition of “democratic fascist” as I had defined it.  As the word fascist is so strongly associated with Nazis, the Holocaust, and mass arrests and mass executions, I felt separating the traditional conception of fascism from the current wave that was, at least for the time being then, eschewing violent means to achieve and maintain power was useful back in 2017.  But in the roughly five years since Trump’s democratic fascist movement emerged to take over the Republican Party—one of America’s two major parties—and transformed it into a cult of Trump, the leader himself and bulk of that Trumpist movement have clearly transitioned already to accepting and embracing violence and overthrowing the rule of law illegally in their quest to achieve and maintain power, as most notably demonstrated in the culmination of the Trump Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021.  That coup attempt did not stop with its failure on that day, but has since continued through the present. 

Once their embrace of violence and their failure to repudiate Trump’s insurrection became clear, I have felt “fascist” became more appropriate label for them, as the Trumpists are now trying to use undemocratic and/or violent means to achieve power, the latest being MAGA Republican Kari Lake trying to use false lawsuits to overturn her clear defeat in the Arizona governor’s race (I think she is a favorite to be Trump’s vice presidential-nominee in what I think will be his highly successful quest to rewin the Republican Party’s nomination for president).

The rest of my second part detailed how Russia’s Vladimir Putin was leading a global fascist movement as part of his war on Western democracy and how all who opposed such fascism needed to put pettier differences aside to defeat it (a spirit recent political victories in France, the United States, and Brazil embody).

As fascism has very much become an important theme in global politics today—from the Trumpist movement to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, from multiple political parties in Europe to Putin’s Russia and its war on Ukrainian democracy, from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel to the Narendra Modi’s India, from the Taliban’s Afghanistan to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, I think it is important to revisit the definition of “fascism.”  In this spirit, I am reposting parts of part one of the two-part piece discussed above because I think they are deeply relevant to our current circumstances. Not all fascism will be as obvious and violent as Putin’s Russian fascism, so a common definition is essential to fight fascism in all its forms (and on a side note, please do see the 10/10 spectacular Andor television series for a beautiful meditation on the nature of fascism and of resisting it).

Excerpt begins:

Fascism comes in many forms; if Hitler and genocide can be one end of the spectrum, there’s plenty of room for fascism that falls far short of that standard, eschewing pogroms and other forms of mass violence, forms of fascism that include what we are seeing now: a democratic fascism (small “d” referring to democracy in general, as opposed to a capital “D” associated with America’s Democratic Party) empowered by populations, media, and elections that rewards and empowers those willing to feed off division and fear as it overwhelms norms, dissenting minorities, and even the law. As this democratic fascism rises, the losers are the liberal democratic governments that have been dominant since the end of WWII; in effect, it is no longer a question of if, as I posed nearly a year ago, but how fast we will see the unraveling of the post-WWII U.S.-led international order. What we do now will define the West and the world for decades to come, but the growing far left must grow up quickly and act within the clear choices of present reality if we are to have a good chance of stopping democratic fascism from destroying our societies, the West, and the international order as we know it.

“American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.”— Henry A. Wallace, 1944, Vice President of the United States 1941-1945

One can easily go back to the domestic tyranny of Athens’ democracy in ancient Greece, of the will of the demos often trampling over minority rights, to begin a long history of systems that were democratic in that a majority had power and chose leaders or voted on legislation, but with that being the extent of the democracy. In fact, as happens all too often, people—especially when consumed by fear and hate—will choose someone who merely reflects the base instincts of their majority, will use democracy to create a political culture of persecution, intolerance, and even brutalization of those who are not in the majority, will create a system designed to favor and perpetuate the rule of this majority, and will actively suppress those speaking, acting, and organizing against it. 

This is a Tocquevillian tyranny of the majority on steroids, a system where only the people in power and those who support them can even approach having the feeling they live in a democracy or that their opinions count in the public square, while everyone who feels differently is made to understand that even expressing their counternarrative, their dissent, their dissatisfaction will carry consequences for their level of freedom, or even their health, up to and including the lethal variety. Such “democracies” exist to empower the majority or the plurality of those supporting the current leader/government/system and only them; the rest of the population is made to feel that they are tolerated at best by the good graces of those in charge and to embrace their second-or-third-class status meekly and enthusiastically, to be deferential to their oppressors’ views and whims, or else…

Such a system uses democracy to destroy it. Such a system embraces limited (and the most salient) forms of democracy, mainly elections and the right of those winning the elections to rule (and in this case, rule uncontested)…

…the following quote illustrates, if in a slightly oversimplified way, some of the dynamics behind this as far as people and mentalities are concerned:

The following joke circulated in Italy in the 1920s. According to Mussolini, the ideal citizen is intelligent, honest, and Fascist. Unfortunately, no one is perfect, which explains why everyone you meet is either intelligent and Fascist but not honest, honest and Fascist but not intelligent, or honest and intelligent but not Fascist.—Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit, The Art of Multiprocessor Programming

Yes, as before, a cadre intelligent people willing to be extremely dishonest are leading a new move towards fascism that wins the hearts and minds of the unintelligent who are honest with their backwards beliefs, leaving a cadre of intelligent, honest, non-fascists to be in the unenviable positions of selling less attractive trusts juxtaposed to often more attractive fascist lies. Sure, there are rich exceptions, but you could do far worse as far as accuracy than categorize most people in politics these days into one of these three categories.

No, it’s not the 1930s, but today, the democracies of the world are collectively facing a cancer of populist, and, yes, democratic fascism that threatens to erase democratic norms, destroy liberal democratic values, and that seeks to remake many of the world’s leading democracies in the image of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its “democracy” that relies on an intolerant majority that understands democracy simply as the gratification of their emotional desires, with dissenters, minorities, and others who don’t agree with them be damned, their complaints of abuse at the hands of the state dismissed and ignored.

Yet terms like democracy and fascism are thrown about quite casually, and not necessarily in a way that is accurate; in fact, I earlier engaged in an exercise in defining the word “terrorism” usefully that amply demonstrates how important it is for a reasonable and universal definition of certain commonly-used-in-our-political-discourse terms to be sounded out so that the terms are spared from being bandied about in a way that virtually anyone can use to make any point, rendering them meaningless and their use pointless.

In his seminal 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell expressed his understanding of how slippery the uses of both “democracy” and “fascism” not only could be, but were when he wrote that

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Such tendencies that flourished in Orwell’s time still, sadly, flourish today, over 70 years both after Orwell penned those thoughts and after the defeat of fascism in Europe. We shall do our best to avoid such traps in the discussion below by discussing the definition…of…“fascism.”…

Defining Fascism

Which brings us to a discussion of what we should understand fascism to be…

“Fascism” as a word in English comes into English in the 1920s from the Italian fascismo, describing the movements (maybe gangs is a better word) that would eventually put Mussolini in power in Italy but a word also alluding to the ancient Roman symbol of authority, the fasces. The English definition of “fascism,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is mainly twofold: “An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization” and a subdefinition: “(in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practices;” both are useful, and, especially, the subdefinition is applicable here, but a further, less vague, and more detailed definition is needed for our discussion.

Like “terrorism” and “democracy,” “fascism” as a term can easily become overly and poorly used. Writing in 1944, Orwell noted how “there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist.” Still, even noting the sharp disagreements of the people of his day over who or what was fascist, he noted that “[b]y ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’.”

The enthusiastic admirer of Orwell and recently (and very sadly) late Christopher Hitchens, unsurprisingly, echoes some of what his hero had to say, but goes farther; for Hitchens, “[h]istorically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure,” is “based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind…[and is] hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons).” He also describes fascism as “bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories,” as “obsessed with real and imagined ‘humiliations’ and thirsty for revenge,” as “chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia),” as “inclined to leader worship,” and as a “threat…to civilization and civilized values;” perhaps Hitchens’ most pithy description is as follows: “[t]he historic essence of Fascism is the most retrograde people using the most revolutionary rhetoric.”

For Rebecca West, writing in 1935, “Fascism…is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought…persons supporting Fascism behave as if man were already in possession of principles which would enable him to deal with all our problems, and as if it were only a question of appointing a dictator to apply them.”

In his preface to the Third Edition of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism, written in 1942, Wilhelm Reich notes that:

In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. To the narrow-minded sociologist who lacks the courage to recognize the enormous role played by the irrational in human history, the fascist race theory appears as nothing but an imperialistic interest or even a mere “prejudice.” The violence and the ubiquity of these “race prejudices” show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression.

For U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), one of the handful of men who can be said to have been a primary architect of the successful plan to defeat fascism in the 1940s, he felt that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself,” and what stood out for him was that “[t]hat, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” In other words, when one ruler/party/faction/group considers that it owns the state and that the state’s machinery, power, and largesse exist as personal tools for those in power, when that controlling entity does not feel it needs to share the state, and its machinery, power, and largesse with others different from themselves, we have fascism.

Henry A. Wallace, FDR’s Vice President before Truman, told The New York Times in 1944 that

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

Wallace notes how American fascism is different from Nazi German fascists in a way that is quite relevant today when we are attempting to discuss democratic fascism:

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

For Umberto Eco, whose own childhood took place in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, fascism was something that could be any combination of a number of key elements. Writing in 1995 in an incredibly prescient and far-too-underappreciated essay on what he termed “Ur-Fascism”—that eternal and incoherent fascist current within humanity—the Italian master saw fascism as something that espouses a “cult of tradition” in a way that was “syncretistic” and produced little if anything original (in this, Eco’s fascism resembles the evil forces in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which is described here in The Lord of the Rings in a discussion of the nature of Sauron’s orc minions: “The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.”). He also saw it as a “rejection of modernism” and, in turn, an embodiment of “irrationalism.” For Eco, fascism values “action for action’s sake” in a sense that despised deliberation and intellectual discourse and the intellectual world in general; building upon this, he also noted how fascism is unable to “withstand analytical criticism” to such a degree that “disagreement is treason.” As a natural follow-up to this, he notes fascism’s hatred of diversity and its “exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference,” that (nascent) fascism’s “first appeal…is an appeal against intruders,” making fascism “racist by definition;” it feeds on “individual or social frustration” in a way that is an “appeal to a frustrated middle class” that is “frightened by the pressure of lower social groups;” Eco feared that “the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.” The psychology of fascism is obsessed with identity, particularly appealing to those lost and confused in a changing and challenging world, and offers them a crude way out based on nationalism (for Orwell, “power-hunger tempered by self-deception”), a nationalism defined by exclusion of “enemies” of the nation; this psychology is based on “the obsession with a plot” against them, domestically and internationally. Those subscribing to such a fascist movement “must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies” but also “be convinced that they can overwhelm” them (leaving them “constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.”) With such movements, “pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” and “life is permanent warfare” such that even in victory, there is still a pervasive sense of insecurity, unspoken inferiority, and anxiety. Eco’s fascism is also embodied by a “contempt for the weak” that is crucial for its “popular elitism:” the leaders of the movement convince their mass followers that they are the true elite, even as they thrive by exploiting the weaknesses of their captains and both, in turn, exploit the weaknesses of their mass followers, who feel superior to those not in the movement in a dynamic of trickle-down elitism (“Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on,” as Sinclair Lewis writes in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, in which a man remarkably like Donald Trump becomes president running a campaign remarkably like Trump’s and ends up transforming America into a fascist dictatorship). Here, Eco continues, “everybody is educated to become a hero” in a sense that engenders a constant hero martyr-complex (often literally reached by death or sending “other people to death”). In fascism, Eco also finds a misogynistic, homophobic machismo that addresses its sexual inadequacy through the “ersatz phallic exercise” of “play[ing] with weapons.” He also finds fascism to be based on a “selective populism” that is “qualitative” not “quantitative” in nature; “the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction,” and “[t]here is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” Fascism, then, is “against ‘rotten’ parliamentary [i.e.., democratic] governments,” and “[w]herever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.”

Pondering the reality of a fictional German Nazi and Imperial Japanese-occupied America in the 1960s in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, a Nazi defector to Japan’s Pacific States of America defines the fascist system of insanity and its adherents as one explained by:

…something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn’t it. I don’t know; I sense it, I intuit it. But—they are purposelessly cruel… is that it? No, God, he thought. I can’t find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans…Something frenzied and demented…

Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time…

…They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history.

For long-time New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik,

What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners. That it can appeal to those who do not understand its consequences is doubtless true.

*****

From these writers, thinkers, and leaders, then, like democracy, we can approach a definition of fascism that avoids the pitfall of being too specific but is still meaningful past use as a simple pejorative, thus avoiding Orwell’s trap as well.

For a brief, poetic, and literary understanding of what we may now say about fascism, allow me to satirize Paul’s lovely passage on love from First Corinthians (by far “Saint” Paul’s best work when compared to the rest of his generally contemptible legacy):

Fascism is impatient, fascism is cruel. It is jealous, is pompous, it is inflated,it is rude, it seeks its own interests, it is quick-tempered, it broods over injury, it rejoices over wrongdoing but does not rejoice with the truth. It bears only itself, believes only itself, hopes only itself, endures only itself. Fascism always fails.

Furthermore, fascism is hateful, irrational, fearful, childishly boastful; it thrives and survives on misinformation and disinformation, lies and deceit; it brooks no criticism and is an eternal enemy of intellectual discourse, debate, diversity, inclusion, and being part of the wider world, relies on racism, bigotry, ignorance, misogyny, and brute bullying in all manners of ways, loves cultish leader-worship, lusts after a false imagined past and “tradition,” is corporatist, nationalistic, incoherent, and contradictory, and is all of these things not mildly but intensely; it takes more typical, offensive, intolerant, and reactionary right-wing politics to a far more elevated level, so that even liberals will wistfully miss their old right-wing nemeses with the advent of the new fascism. There may not be a clear line where it is absolutely obvious where one has passed the realm of the more banal, typical right-wing politics into the realm of the far more dreadful (but still banal) and less manageable fascism (democratic or otherwise), but when one is well past that ill-defined line there can be a sickening clarity, a retroactive realization of one’s fetid new surroundings and a sheer terror that there may not be any going back anytime soon…

Henry A. Wallace…was onto the same truth that Orwell would most masterfully present to the world in his masterpiece 1984 with its concept of Newspeak, a formal language of propaganda, deception, and control: “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the regime], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” In his earlier-cited essay, Eco also identified Orwell’s Newspeak as the final enumerated element of fascism, noting how it makes “use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.” Eco also echoed Wallace when he noted that

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world.

End excerpt

It is my earnest hope that, with the above discussion perhaps shared widely and profusely, we can more easily combat fascism by agreeing on what fascism is, and I do believe that herein I have presented a useable and workable definition by citing minds far greater than my own. From our elections at home to the battlefields of Ukraine, nothing is more urgent than defeating this fascism and calling it out by name and agreeing on what that name means is a crucial step to defeating it.

See related articles from February 17, 2017: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II and see all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine journalism has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

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