Fascism becomes intelligible only when condemnation yields to explanation.

Evidence

There is an ethical imperative in intellectual work, which Leonardo called ‘obstinate rigour’. It means, in practical terms – and especially when one is dealing with political matters, which are always highly charged with emotion – that one has to resist several temptations. They can be condensed into a single formula: never succumb to the terrorism of words. As Freud wrote, one must avoid making concessions to faintheartedness: ‘One can never tell where that road may lead one; one gives way first in words, and then little by little in substance too.’ One of the main forms this faintheartedness takes in our time is the replacement of analysis with ethical condemnation. Some subjects, such as Fascism or the Holocaust, are particularly prone to this type of exercise. There is nothing wrong, of course, in condemning the Holocaust. The problem begins when condemnation replaces explanation, which is what happens when some phenomena are seen as aberrations dispossessed of any rationally graspable cause. We can only begin to understand Fascism if we see it as one of the internal possibilities inherent to contemporary societies, not as something beyond any rational explanation. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 486

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The demand that one understand Fascism as an internal possibility of contemporary societies rather than an aberration is the methodological core of the whole book, resisting moral panic in favor of analysis.
• XREF: Reverses the book’s ch2 observation that moral condemnation has driven supposedly objective analyses of populism — same move now applied to fascism. — connects to: Populism is a permanent possibility of political structuration, not a deviance — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 46
• SEED: Angle for the existing sacrifice/immodesty piece pattern: an essay on when genuine analysis of the unforgivable is itself an ethical act.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source