Not Every Fictional Dictator is a Fascist

In Which I Engage in Game of Thrones Discourse in the Year of Our Lord 2024

Is Cersei the face of fascism in Westeros?

You might be thinking about fascism right now. You might be thinking about it a lot, given how the last election went. We got quite a bit of discourse about fascism in 2016 for the exact same reason so we’re probably going to get quite a bit of it again now, so before that gets started I want to go ahead and say: not every fictional dictator is a fascist. Fascism does not mean ‘any bad person’ and that is particularly true when you are talking about a TV show (or a movie or a book or whatever). Trying to shove every media antagonist into the label ‘fascist’ obscures what fascism is, and usually ends up missing whatever commentary is actually being made with the character.

Let’s use the case of Cersei from Game of Thrones (the TV show, not the book) as an example. Is Cersei a fascist? To answer that, we need to figure out what we mean when we say something (or someone) is fascist, and that brings us to our first problem: fascism is hard to define. It’s not complicated, not exactly, but it is nebulous. This is partially because historically fascists lie a lot (witness how the Italian Fascists criticized the bourgeoisie before coming to power but then adopted policies that primarily benefited the rich). But fascism is also hard to pin down because part of it is a yearning for a return to the pre-ideological world, before power had to justify itself. This is part of why you see Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism cited so much. Eco understood the problem you run into when you try to define fascism, so instead created a list of fourteen recurring tropes of fascism. So rather than try to see if Cersei fits any specific definition of fascism, I’m going to follow Eco’s lead and look at a variety of common fascist attributes and see how many apply to her.

Let’s start with something that often gets lost in the weeds when discussing fascism: its relationship to gender. Robert Paxton, Umberto Eco, and Klaus Theweleit, among others, all connect fascism to maleness - male cults of machismo, male fear of female bodies, male psychosexual repression. There are female fascists, of course, but fascism seems to be specifically connected to male tensions and male desires. Paxton even goes so far as to say that the fascist cult of personality must be centered on a man. You could point to figures like Evita Peron, Marine Le Pen, and Giorgia Meloni as counterexamples, but Peron’s politics were ambiguous, Le Pen has yet to be elected to a nationwide office, and while Meloni’s party is descended from the Italian Fascist Party she has so far governed as a fairly standard, albeit particularly right-wing, neoliberal. A fascist cult of personality based on a woman runs into the problem that in fascism, the ideal woman is absent - she is what Theweleit describes as the “White Woman” (as opposed to the leftist Red Woman): a sister, mother, or nurse, silent or dead, nurturing her men but taking no action on her own - attributes antithetical to a cult of personality.

We can potentially imagine a female dictator fitting this mold, perhaps presenting herself as the mother-of-the-nation, a distant queen caring for her citizen-children and calling upon her sons to protect the motherland from the foreign hordes that would overrun it. But Cersei doesn’t do that, not really, even when she has pretty good opportunities to do so. Daenerys, her roots in Westeros notwithstanding, is a foreign monarch, raised in a far-away continent, ruling over strange people with strange customs. Her principal armies are the Dothraki and the Unsullied - one a group of notorious raiders and looters, the other a child-army of castrated boys. Cersei, a widow with three children, stands in sharp contrast to Daenerys, who bore no children for her warlord husband and is now surrounded by handsome male suitors, none of whom she marries. And as Khaleesi, she was tied up with a foreign religion, as she was prophesied to birth the Dothraki’s “Stallion Who Mounts the World” - a title that itself implies Westeros not only being conquered but also sexually dominated. A fascist dictator would make ideological hay out of these differences, but Cersei doesn’t bother.

Cersei, admittedly, has sexual baggage of her own - she’s just not beating the incest allegations - but so did plenty of fascist, and that didn’t stop them from playing up fears of female, working-class, Jewish and queer sexuality. Cersei mostly doesn’t - while she empowers the High Sparrow and the Faith Militant to try and outmaneuver her rival Margery by striking against Margery’s homosexual brother, after that blows up in her face we don’t really hear about it again. And how could we? Bourgeoisie morality can’t be imperiled by proletariat licentiousness in Westeros because Westeros has no proletariat and barely has a bourgeoisie. The material conditions - crowded tenement halls, indigent men and women living side by side, and the dissolution of the countryside’s social structures - that caused working class sexuality to seem so threatening to the upper classes don’t exist. The vast majority of people in Westeros are peasants, while most of the people in the cities are tradesmen and guild members - the predecessors of the modern middle class - and it is not until the peasantry is forced into the city to work in factories that we see the middle class become unnerved by the working class’s supposedly unrestrained sexuality. This is why the Victorians, living in a more industrialized era, were more prudish than their predecessors - a common stock character of the early Victorians is the excessively libertine older relative.

The relative power of the bourgeoisie, whether positive or negative, might be key here. Scholars of fascism, both liberal and leftist, have linked fascism to liberalism, either as a reaction against it or an extension of it. Either way, Cersei does not fit in as a fascist - there is no liberal world order for her to attack or for her to defend. She can’t revolt against modernity because modernity hasn’t arrived yet; there is no imagined past for her or her followers to year for, and no one is disillusioned with democracy because no one’s thought of it yet.¹ When Cersei says “power is power,” she is not describing something that she wants; she is saying something that, in Westeros, is simply true. Cersei isn’t just not a fascist - you can’t even really call her a monarchist. All of her rivals have the same justification for their right to rule as she does: conquest and birthright. Daenerys, for all of her talk of ‘ breaking the wheel,’ doesn’t actually challenge the wheel’s existence; she is, after all, the one who says she will take what is hers “with fire and blood” in the first place. Even the High Sparrow, the most radical character on the show, doesn’t challenge the monarchy as an institution, describing it and the church together as the two pillars of the Seven Kingdoms. Individual rulers might risk losing their spot on the throne, but the throne itself is never in any danger.²

And since there is no modernity to revolt against, there is no need for Cersei to try and rearrange society according to her aesthetic preferences the way fascism - a totalitarian ideology - does. There is no attempt to make politics beautiful - we don’t see military parades held in Cersei’s honor or sweeping changes to the architectural styles of King’s Landing, no bonfire of the intellectual vanities or exhibitions of degenerate art. Cersei has little use for art as a political weapon because art in Westeros still maintains its cult function, being primarily used for private exhibition rather than public display - there is no way for Cersei to create a Westerosi equivalent of The Triumph of the Will. The fascist, meanwhile, is guided by the beauty of their weapons - the Futurists spoke of wanting to “[...] exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist,” and Leni Riefenstahl’s films are filled with imagery of the beauty of the German military machine, both its soldiers and its armaments. The ultimate culmination of this aestheticization of politics, per Walter Benjamin, is war, as the fascist regime seeks to channel the energy of class conflict into foreign conquest. But the wars that Cersei engages in bear little resemblance to the wars of the fascist - she is mostly resisting being replaced by rival aristocrats instead.

Westeros itself does not particularly look like the sort of empires that gave birth to fascism in the early twentieth century. The Seven Kingdoms isn’t really an empire at all - it’s a medieval kingdom, blown up a thousand times to fit the scale of a modern fantasy novel. King’s Landing seems to have little extractive power over its constituent kingdoms compared to imperial metropoles like London, Washington, and Moscow, and there is minimal ethnic diversity in Westeros. The three most foreign constituencies in the Kingdoms - the Iron Isles, the North, and Dorne - are also the most independent, with Dorne especially subdued primarily through feudal arrangements like marriage alliances. Because of this, it doesn’t really suffer the pathologies that led empires to fascism - it hasn’t hit the limit of imperial extraction because it’s not doing imperial extraction, so it has no need to turn in on itself to accumulate more wealth. The kingdoms are surprisingly stable, and the spasms of violence they experience, rather than being newly arrived at King’s Landing, are just the result of Westeros being based off of medieval (or really, early Modern) Europe.

This seems worryingly familiar…

Here’s the thing: there is a critique of fascism in Game of Thrones - or rather, the thought process that lead to fascism. Remember, fascism is reactionary - it looks to a past that has supposedly been lost but never actually existed in the first place; what does that sound like? Part of what Game of Thrones does is pick apart the way that the fantasy genre has idealized the past. This isn’t a full on The Iron Dream situation, but it is there, if you’re paying attention. For one, not only is every single claimant to the Iron Throne basing their right to rule on blood and conquest rather than a mandate from the masses, they’re all implicitly bad rulers, even if not as bad as Cersei. Jon is incompetent - he ends up running the Night’s Watch and gets repaid by having them stab him to death,³ and despite having personal experience with being honorable blowing up in your face, he still tells Daenerys that he’s the lost Aegon Targaryan. Margery is significantly more competent than Cersei, but she’s just as manipulative and is kind to the common people mostly as a way to secure a power base. And Daenerys - well, she’s a monster. She tries to be a good ruler, but it’s mostly a hobby - remember, fire and blood! Her conquest of Slaver’s Bay is a disaster, her reforms sporadic and unsure: at one point, she essentially re-legalizes slavery. When graffiti appears in one of the cities declaring “Mhysa [Daenerys] is a master” it heralds the start of an insurgent campaign against her rule that only ends when she uses her dragons to destroy the fleet of the former masters of Slaver’s Bay. And she is just as ruthless as Cersei - her climax in the first season involves setting a former slave of her husband’s on fire, and this preferences for deaths by immolation follows her throughout the series, culminating with her using her dragons to lead her armies in the brutal pillaging of King’s Landing. The last episode of the series even indulges in framing her with fascist imagery - a common shorthand for evil in American cinema - as she gives a speech declaring her intention to conquer the world to her meticulously organized army. Daenerys isn’t a fascist either, but she (and Cersei and Jon and all the rest) are part of how Game of Thrones picks part the fascist idea of a better, more beautiful past by showing how ugly the past really was; focusing on Cersei alone as the emblem of fascism misses all of that.

1. With the weird exception of Samwell Tarly in the last episode.

2. Even after Drogon immolates the literal Iron Throne, the monarchy persists as an institution, with only the North gaining independence.

3. He gets better.