Episode 4 - Aesthetic and Propaganda From Mussolini’s Fasces to the MAGA Hat
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This episode is about how extremists take control using a language of war, of violence, a call to action. A capacity to enthral is crucial — through charisma, through energy, through sheer force of presence — this is a fundamental tool in the populist leader's kit.
They understood the power of oratory. Followers are drawn in, bedazzled by the tricks of speech, enraptured by ideas that test then break the boundaries of social convention.
Chanting simple phrases repeatedly.
The incantations of the populist wash over rows of followers like a tide — oral and visual at once, and viscerally emotive. Everything in that combination of sound and image is calibrated to stir feeling rather than thought. Romantic, hysterical, deliberately so.
Threading through it all are the senses: the acrid drift of gunpowder smoke from fireworks lending an air of controlled drama; the heat rising from a packed crowd; the press of bodies. Each small sensory detail becomes part of the experience — lodged permanently in the memory of those adoring, rapturous, and sometimes genuinely hysterical masses.
Hitler understood this, and spent a decade honing his speechmaking skill until he had perfected the art of tension. Trump has achieved the same, developing symbolism on the stage, managing each part of his performance for maximum effect, tapping into the energy of a crowd — chanting Stop the Steal, or Lock her Up, shouting, directing emotions.
Mussolini perfected this technique before either Hitler or Trump, and Trump has drawn much from Mussolini's playbook — the lowered brows, the furrowed fury, the pout — these are Mussolini's gestures. As is the balcony. Mussolini understood the theatre of elevation, appearing above the Roman crowd, arms akimbo, head thrown back. Trump's appearances on the White House balcony or stage carry that same choreography, whether consciously borrowed or arrived at by some instinct for spectacle.
Long before fascism became a political system, it was an aesthetic system. The strongman movements of the 20th and 21st centuries understood people do not emotionally attach themselves to policy documents. They attach themselves to symbols, colours, uniforms, songs, flags, and rituals.
Then the emblem becomes the gateway drug to belonging. Fascism, and later populist-nationalist movements, mastered the art of reducing vast and often contradictory ideas into a handful of emotionally charged visual signals. The symbol says: you are either inside our tribe, or outside it - and therefore either friend or enemy.
It begins most clearly with Benito Mussolini.
Italian Fascism was obsessed with the aesthetics of imperial rebirth. Mussolini understood that the modern mass age required theatre, and theatre required visual coherence. He reached backward into Ancient Rome, reviving the *fasces*—the bundle of rods wrapped around an axe carried before Roman magistrates as a symbol of authority and collective power. The symbolism was psychologically brilliant.
A single rod snaps easily; a bound bundle becomes unbreakable. Unity through force. Submission through cohesion. This is where the word fascism originates, from this object — the fasces bundle —revived by the Italian fascist for whom the word was not an insult but his identity. This is one of the reasons Donald Trump accepts it when he is called a fascist, for him it is a verbal medal of honour not an insult. He believes himself to be a strongman, part of the strongmen of the world like Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban, Xi Zinping and if strongmen are fascists, then he wants to be one. Mussolini wrapped his movement in black shirts, polished leather, torchlight, Roman salutes, banners drenched in dramatic contrasts of black, red, and white. Black was especially important: It is the colour of authority, of death, mystery, and intimidation. It flattens individuality and transforms crowds into a single organism.
They understood the power of oratory. Followers are drawn in, bedazzled by the tricks of speech, enraptured by ideas that test then break the boundaries of social convention.
Chanting simple phrases repeatedly.
The incantations of the populist wash over rows of followers like a tide — oral and visual at once, and viscerally emotive. Everything in that combination of sound and image is calibrated to stir feeling rather than thought. Romantic, hysterical, deliberately so.
Threading through it all are the senses: the acrid drift of gunpowder smoke from fireworks lending an air of controlled drama; the heat rising from a packed crowd; the press of bodies. Each small sensory detail becomes part of the experience — lodged permanently in the memory of those adoring, rapturous, and sometimes genuinely hysterical masses.
Hitler understood this, and spent a decade honing his speechmaking skill until he had perfected the art of tension. Trump has achieved the same, developing symbolism on the stage, managing each part of his performance for maximum effect, tapping into the energy of a crowd — chanting Stop the Steal, or Lock her Up, shouting, directing emotions.
Mussolini perfected this technique before either Hitler or Trump, and Trump has drawn much from Mussolini's playbook — the lowered brows, the furrowed fury, the pout — these are Mussolini's gestures. As is the balcony. Mussolini understood the theatre of elevation, appearing above the Roman crowd, arms akimbo, head thrown back. Trump's appearances on the White House balcony or stage carry that same choreography, whether consciously borrowed or arrived at by some instinct for spectacle.
Long before fascism became a political system, it was an aesthetic system. The strongman movements of the 20th and 21st centuries understood people do not emotionally attach themselves to policy documents. They attach themselves to symbols, colours, uniforms, songs, flags, and rituals.
Then the emblem becomes the gateway drug to belonging. Fascism, and later populist-nationalist movements, mastered the art of reducing vast and often contradictory ideas into a handful of emotionally charged visual signals. The symbol says: you are either inside our tribe, or outside it - and therefore either friend or enemy.
It begins most clearly with Benito Mussolini.
Italian Fascism was obsessed with the aesthetics of imperial rebirth. Mussolini understood that the modern mass age required theatre, and theatre required visual coherence. He reached backward into Ancient Rome, reviving the *fasces*—the bundle of rods wrapped around an axe carried before Roman magistrates as a symbol of authority and collective power. The symbolism was psychologically brilliant.
A single rod snaps easily; a bound bundle becomes unbreakable. Unity through force. Submission through cohesion. This is where the word fascism originates, from this object — the fasces bundle —revived by the Italian fascist for whom the word was not an insult but his identity. This is one of the reasons Donald Trump accepts it when he is called a fascist, for him it is a verbal medal of honour not an insult. He believes himself to be a strongman, part of the strongmen of the world like Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban, Xi Zinping and if strongmen are fascists, then he wants to be one. Mussolini wrapped his movement in black shirts, polished leather, torchlight, Roman salutes, banners drenched in dramatic contrasts of black, red, and white. Black was especially important: It is the colour of authority, of death, mystery, and intimidation. It flattens individuality and transforms crowds into a single organism.
