Is the Bush administration fascist? In the words of one of the twentieth century’s great ontologists, William Jefferson Clinton, “It depends upon what the meaning of the word is means.”

But I’ll tip my hand early: no. No, and let’s not go down that road. I’ll admit there are some compelling comparisons to be drawn, but that equation is deeply unjust to the victims of historical fascism and doesn’t do a lot of good in the present. The comparison of everything and everyone to fascism has not only become trivialized; it’s gone through cycles, like clamdiggers. A few years back when grading a large number of essays by in-coming college freshmen asked to write an essay on a particular moral conundrum, a fellow grader pointed out that there would probably be a lot of examples involving Hitler. And sure enough, every few minutes, for hours: “I got one!” “Hitler!” “ . . . and Hitler.”

That being said, I have to admit that the experience of recently watching Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (about the 1934 Reichsparteitag rally in Nuremburg) was quite different than it would have been, say, ten years ago. What struck me most was not how ominous it was, but how ominous it wasn’t, or rather how much of it was ominous through a kind of unintended irony. This is a film full of sunlight and majestic clouds (“Let the eagle soar!”), full of smiling faces. The film turns darker, of course, but almost always by way of recalling the wounds of the First World War, to which the various speakers return again and again. The dominant rhetorical tone is one not of domination or aggression, but of self-defense, of coming together against a great injustice. These people are, the Leader himself tells us a few time, “peace-loving and courageous.”

For me the latest lesson to be learned from Triumph of the Will has nothing to do with deciding whether or not our government is “fascist,” as if nothing less would be worth opposing. (Think of those who defend the torture at Abu Ghraib by pointing out that things were worse under Saddam Hussein. Call me an idealist, but that seems to be setting the bar for moral righteousness a little low). The lesson is that in an age of mass media the public face of state power is usually if not always smiling, compassionate even. Few political movements have ever identified themselves as parties of hate, of unnecessary war, of corruption, of racism; no, they were all parties of justice, truth, and light, parties of life and above all freedom. Clearly this doesn’t mean we should oppose every party that espouses these values: the segment of the film where the various regions of Germany hold up their standards and cheer by turns recalls how little party rallies have changed, how much they are all alike.

So, banally enough, I am led to conclude that we should judge parties and politicians by what they do and by the consequences of their actions. Despite the various ways in which knowledge of the world is filtered and controlled, we know plenty, even without dusting off the yardstick of fascism. You should watch this film if you haven’t seen it or haven’t seen it in a while, even though you probably won’t acquire much new information about fascism. As Friedrich Schlegel writes:

Here’s one: looking at what was can help us see what is.

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