I know fascists do this, but doesn't everyone kind of? If you don't think your enemy has strengths then they're not worth being your enemy and if you don't think they have weaknesses then opposing them is pointless.
edit: I guess one difference is fascists pick enemies that genuinely are powerless, but that doesn't really seem to line up with the original claim
honestly a lot of scholarship on fascism was done after the end of the World War II and i think the foundational definitions of fascism ascribe to it habits and attitudes that are now so universally pervasive that they aren't distinctive. fascism is an ideology of willful self deception, of sentimental yearning for an imaginary bygone era, of rejecting the realm of politics as such for a purely aesthetic realm. except by these definitions, we're functionally all fascists some of the time.
So here's my take:
The "strength" and "weakness" ascribed to the "other" are fundamentally oppositional ascriptions of those qualities. The "weakness" is a moral failing that places them inferior to the fascist. The "strength" is a wrongfully acquired material power that poses a tangible threat to the fascist. It resolves down to the fascist's primary thesis: those who do not deserve power should not have power. Allowing those who are morally "weak" to acquire material "strength" is the greatest threat to the fascist.
No you're correct. Eco wasn't employing a material analysis of fascism, but rather trying to approach it through describing its ideology which is why his description of Ur-fascism is incredibly broad, vague, and easily challenged. To your common liberal Ur-Fascism seems like a radical idea, but it rapidly breaks down under historical scrutiny unless you dig yourself deeper into the hole of liberalism and embrace ideas about "totalitarianism".
Contrast Ur-Fascism with a common Marxist definition of Fascism such as "when the bourgeoisie recognize the unsustainable of their situation and begin employing more overtly authoritarian measures and exralegal formations of the petite bourgeois and lumpen to crush the communist movement", or perhaps another typical materialist description such as "when imperial modes of control are employed in the imperial core". These offer concrete, universal descriptions of fascism. While they might require knowing some different jargon, this theory is crucial in understanding how to struggle against fascism and to destroy it for good.
I don't know the specifics of Marxism that well to be honest, but I thought the point of material analysis was not to completely discard the idea of analyzing ideology but to recognize it as arising from material conditions.
Okay so a couple of things:
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I brought up Umberto Eco because my mind immediately jumped to him but the specific question you first asked about how an enemy can be weak and strong at the same time was specifically put forward by an American political scientist in an article called Fascism Anyone? which was calling the Bush regime fascist. This was probably derivative of Eco's essay Ur-Fascism which is why I got them mixed up, though the critique largely remains true.
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You're correct about material analysis but nowhere in either piece does either author describe class struggle (maybe with the small exception in Eco's sixth point but otherwise it is absent) or the crisis of capitalism. For instance, lets look at Eco's second point
Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
Now to be fair to Eco, his whole idea is that fascism coalesces around these ideas and is not necessarily defined by or limited to them, but in this instance he specifically ascribes rejection of modernity to the arise of political liberalism in the American and French revolutions and calls rejection of capitalist relations a "disguise". Now what seems more likely? That the Nazis wanted to return to the political relations of the 18th century, or that they recognized urban industrial capitalism sucks and wanted to go back to their romanticized version of the past as peasant farmers?
As you point out in your post, anyone with enemies will consider them simultaneously weak and strong. Doomed to failure, but they'll succeed if we don't act. Idealists like Eco say that plainly contradictory stances like this are what people (or fascists specifically) look for in political movements, materialists say that this is a product of the experiences those people have and how they've come to understand the world.
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Clara Zetkin's The Struggle Against Fascism is my answer on this. Because fascism is a coming together of several groups with conflicting interests, all fascism can offer is a sham revolution, and by extension a sham enemy. It's up to the subject and their class to decide what the enemy is specifically. Like a rorschach test. But under this subjectivity, they are united as one universal movement.
The role of a fascist in history is to unite proletarians, with petite bourgious and with the bourgious. There's no way of doing this without animating an imaginary enemy that all members of the piggish masses can agree with.
A fascist leader can do with this vague enemy whatever they wish. If they want to do something which a majority of their masses will be against, a leader can say the imaginary enemy has won the battle, but not the war. If they succeed in something, the leader can get their masses drunk off their imaginary victory.
This is Trump's entire administration imo.
I like this answer, but it makes me think that maybe "the enemy is both strong and weak" could be better phrased as "the enemy is defined in vague and contradictory terms" with the strong/weak doublethink being one example
:this:
Zetkin also highlights that fascism will be somewhat weak/vulnearable as it starts to take power and becomes inevitably beauracratised. As its a sham revolution, it will never be able to provide the degree of strength, prosperity and security that it promised its followers.
Thus its appropriation of anti-capitalist rhetoric is revealed as demagogy instead of a real, material, political program for the working class. Contradictions re-emerge and the sections of the working class that supported it turn against it, giving socialists a chance to agitate and fight back against it.
It's not really about seeing real strengths and weaknesses. It's about the enemy simultaneously being weak, inferior, non-threatening, and obviously deserving of its place at the bottom of our glorious hierarchy, and dangerous, strong, with wide-reaching ideas and allies in every corner of society, poised to take control at any moment.
it's also characteristic of liberalism, hence the current ubiquity
why would the two share characteristics, you may ask
Who doesn't do this, though?
For example if you're a socialist, capitalists are strong because they control the means of production but weak because there aren't very many of them and they are dependent on subjugating others to maintain their power.
that's just a realistic evaluation of strengths and weaknesses, which is not the same as "trump is a competent fascist dictator who also shits in a diaper and eats hamberders all day like a little hamberder baby" or "antifa are shrimpy pathetic soyboys, I will defend my family with flamethrowers and with my dying breath as they tear my body apart i will caw like the mighty eagle"
edit: that's not to say that leftists can't fall victim to liberal/fascist thought and demonstrate it, us being libs and all
But if everyone falls victim to it then how is it specifically fascist thought, that just makes it sound like bad reasoning
It's a form of bad reasoning that is typical of fascist thought. A characteristic ≠ a direct indicator
I think it's more just that it's a necessary rhetorical thing
Like your enemies have to be subhuman and pathetic, cos it defeats the purpose if they're actually superior to you (and strength ~= superiority in fashy thought)
But they also have to be an overwhelming threat to your way of life to justify what needs to be done
I mean tbf, I wouldn't say the two ideas are opposed to begin with. An enemy can be strong, but have weakpoints that you can take advantage of. Isn't that the whole idea of David vs Goliath?
It's convenient: they are strong so we should fear them and respond violently, but they are also weak because we are so mighty and powerful. The fear felt at the beginning of the sentence is fuel for relief at the end.
I dunno if I have the time to give a real effortpost, but it's not that they have strengths and weaknesses. Or that some people on the same side think the enemy is strong yet others disagree and think the enemy is weak.
It's that, from a single narrative source, the enemy is both far too strong and far too weak at the same time.
It's that they're contradictory, that they're needed for fascism, and that they'll lead to the fascists' eventual demise, because they don't know how to objectively size up and effectively fight against, their opponents, in the long term.
It's needed by fascism because they need to be scared for it to work. Fascists try to pretend their aggression is actually self defense. They need to feel afraid of them, to posit them as an existential threat, to their existence and/or their way of life, hence the enemy being incredibly strong. Yet need to also feel superior to them, feel like they can win, and feel like the superior race/class/caste/nationality/culture/etc, hence the enemy being incredibly weak.
For instance, antifa are all ineffective limp wristed girly men who can't even throw bricks because they're too heavy, while also all being highly trained assassins at the same time.
Yes, this sort of thing can/does pop up on the left, though not as much, and yes, it's just as bad when people who self identify as socialists do it.
