Fascist grammar

Fascist grammar is a term emsenn introduces in “A storm is a storm is a storm” (2025-09-22) to describe the rhetorical sequence that fascist political speech follows regardless of its surface vocabulary. The grammar consists of six steps:

1. Declare crisis — assert that the present moment is one of existential threat.
2. Name a pure community — identify the group whose survival is at stake.
3. Denounce enemies as sterile or corrupt — characterize opponents as agents of decay who contaminate the community from within or without.
4. Reframe suffering as sacrifice — convert the community’s pain into evidence of its moral standing.
5. Promise destiny — assert that the community’s future greatness is assured if it acts now.
6. Assert inevitability — collapse the distinction between what should happen and what will happen.

emsenn’s central argument is that this grammar persists across vocabularies. Joseph Goebbels built it around Volk and national humiliation. Postliberal intellectuals build it around “the West” and martyrdom. The same sequence can appear in queer-progressive idioms, as emsenn demonstrates by tracing it through COVID-era public health discourse.

The grammar survived 1945 through what emsenn calls “strategic forgetting” — the process by which fascist categories were laundered into post-war conservative discourse, stripped of their explicit associations while retaining their structural function. Carl Schmitt and his enemy distinction provided much of the conceptual infrastructure for this laundering: the grammar needs an enemy, and Schmitt’s framework made enmity foundational to politics without requiring racial vocabulary.

emsenn contrasts fascist grammar with what they call “anarchist grammar,” which follows a different sequence: condition, commons, relation, solidarity, desire, immanence. Where fascist grammar moves from crisis to inevitability, anarchist grammar moves from present conditions to present possibility.