What Is Fascism?

In recent years lots of people have been calling lots of other people fascists.

During the Trump Presidency, for example, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and others decided after careful reflection that Donald Trump qualified as a fascist.  Trump himself seemed not to notice, and if he did, he most likely dismissed the label as just another pejorative hurled by his enemies.

In contemporary Europe important political figures have been called fascists.  Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and President Recep Tayyip Ergodan of Turkey sometimes wear the label.  In France critics suggest right-wing leader Marine Le Pen is a fascist, but she complicated the labeling by expelling her father Jean-Marie Le Pen from their political party because he was a fascist.

Fascist-labeling, to coin a term, has been rampant during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  Vladimir Putin’s Russian government has long since ceased to be Communist, but in the opinion of some Putin is certainly a fascist.  For his part, Putin has stated that the Ukrainian government is dominated by fascists, an allegation Ukrainian President Vodymyr Zelinsky has ridiculed since, as a Jew, he could not possibly be a fascist.

Many of the allegations that somebody is a fascist amount to calling a person a bully or perhaps an autocrat.  But what is fascism? 

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Au Revoir To Kill a Mockingbird

A photo of the cover of "To Kill a Mockingbird"My oldest daughter teaches bilingual English in a City of Milwaukee high school, and I greatly enjoy our conversations regarding the literary works she assigns.  However, I was surprised when she told me recently that she and her fellow teachers no longer felt comfortable assigning Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird.

Published in 1960, Lee’s novel has for over sixty years garnered great admiration and respect as an American literary work.  Many have considered the novel’s Atticus Finch to be an inspiring lawyer hero and taken the novel’s law-related narrative to be one of courageous resistance to racial injustice.  As recently as ten years ago, virtually every American high schooler was expected to have read To Kill a Mockingbird Bird.

Why has the novel fallen so precipitously?  I can think of at least three developments that have hurt its standing:

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A Tenancy in Common Tragedy

pic of Surfside, Florida condo building, showing collapseThere is lots of blame to go around for the horrifying collapse of the Champlain Towers condominiums complex in Surfside, Florida, in June 2021:

(1) Engineers’ reports on structural flaws in Champlain Towers could have been more forceful and explicit,

(2) Members of the Champlain Towers condo board could have been more attentive and willing to act regarding the dangerous conditions, and

(3) State and local governments could have made inspections earlier and warned that the residents of Champlain Towers of their vulnerability.

Add to the list of causes for the disaster the tenancy in common (TIC) and the modern-day attitudes about ownership of property that the TIC brings to the surface.

Many will recall from first-year Property that a TIC is a shared tenancy in which each owner has a separately transferable share of the property but may not claim ownership of a specific part of the property.  All of the tenants in common are able to use the whole property.  TICs emerged in early-modern England and were much treasured by the gentry as a way to consolidate family interests.  Family bloodlines, after all, were often indistinguishable from family property lines.

A variety of the TIC has lived on into the contemporary United States and is common in what seems sometimes like our ubiquitous condominium complexes.

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