Over at Foreign Policy, Christian Caryl offers a primer on how to identify authentic fascists from mere rightwingers or ultranationalists or simply protestors being accused of fascism by reactionary regimes. No surprise, I have some problems with the overall framing. But I’ve written enough about that of late. And most of it is perfectly defensible. However, I do have my quibbles. Here are a few objections to his “six ways to tell a garden-variety bigot from a diehard Mussolini-lover” is deeply flawed. He writes:

1. It all starts with the chimera of racial purity.
Historically, fascism was born out of the anxieties of the late 19th century, when right-wing radicals in a variety of European countries began to see themselves as part of organic “nations” that faced existential threats from the powerful new ideologies of socialism and capitalism. For these people, late 19th-century racial pseudoscience and abstruse ethnic theories seemed to confirm the idea that “inferior” minorities (Jews or Slavs) were plotting to attack them (or subvert them from within). The collapse of ruling monarchies and traditional value systems in World War I opened up a spiritual vacuum that fascists rushed to fill.
And what about today’s world? There are plenty of racialist xenophobes out there. Some even describe themselves as “neo-Nazis.” But racism alone doesn’t make you a fascist. (The photo above shows a member of Greece’s Golden Dawn party at a rally last month.)

I certainly agree that being racist alone isn’t enough to qualify as fascist. But Caryl seems to miss the fact that you don’t need to be racist to be a fascist. Many of the original “die-hard Mussolini lovers,” to use his phrase, weren’t racist either. It’s absolutely true that many of the nationalist movements that fueled fascism were racist, but some of them were not, including the first movement to call itself fascist, Italian Fascism.

Italian Fascism isn’t born out of pseudoscientific racial theories, but out of “the socialism of the trenches” as Mussolini and his fellow war veterans called it. Jews were over-represented, as a share of the population, in the Italian Fascist Party for the first decade or so of its existence (they were also over-represented in anti-Fascist parties). Before Hitler solidified power, Mussolini often denounced the racism of German Nazism. Nazi firebrands in turn denounced Italian Fascism as “Kosher Fascism.” Of course there were Fascist anti-Semites, as there were Italian anti-Semites generally. But, historically, Italian anti-Semitism wasn’t biological but theological or cultural. A racially polyglot and very Catholic country, biological racism never found much purchase in Italy. When it did, it tended to be imported, which is why Italy only become decisively racist and anti-Semitic as the Germans start to impose their will on the country. The invasion of Ethiopia (which finally caused many Western progressives to turn their back on Mussolini) also fueled racist attitudes and policies.

None of this is to defend Italian Fascism either in its more benign origins or at any stage until its well-deserved demise. Rather, it is simply to say that you don’t have to be a racist to be a fascist, just as you don’t have to be a fascist to be a racist.