Fascism and the cult of authenticity

Fascism pursues authenticity. This give it its need for a spirituality (which can perfectly well be a fascist and even Nazi one, for which it may suffice that it is a narcissistic spirituality), cultivating a self, including a collective self or community, and its proper culture, in familiar propriety. It may be welcoming, genuine, humanistic, and as inclusive as it is exclusive, for community is also immunity: as we come together, we are bonded, bounded, thusly content, within fortress walls we will defend against whatever threatens our real and imaginary well-being.  Fascism demands authenticity.  You must be who you really are, desire what you really want, acknowledge and pay your debts to who you really belong to and with. The assertion, which always implies its enforcement, of patriotic identification is always presented as a demand that you recognize your debt to the nation, which is the imaginary site and culture, assembling congregated people with their proper manners and idiomatic ways in a the place proper to them, and legislating, dictating, that you must be true to your proper self. The nation-state at internal war for and implicitly against its own people will assert its claim upon you that disloyalty to whatever agenda or explicit formation the leaders and bosses give to the represented collective identity is binding on you at the risk of a treasonous betrayal of your very (collective or national) self. Fascism constructs a community not as involving internal conflict openly encouraged, as in a participatory democracy, but united consensual, speaking as a chorus, working together as a team, like a sports team, modeling life in war.  None of these problems can be addressed by treating them as moral risks and avoiding the potentialities as excesses.  They are problems of an ontological ethics consequent upon how we think about our social and political desire.   That all this is yet another reason to expect that a left politics that is really a capitalist liberalism will fail to stop fascism because fascism is a possibility intrinsic to its constitutive logic, is perhaps clarified in the simplest way by noting that there is no way to think the propriety of a self except as modeled on the ownership of property.