Many American fascist groups arose in the 1930s out of the Northern Ku Klux Klan (KKK) of the 1920s. We can see the continuity by using British socialist theorist Raymond Williams’ concept, a “structure of feeling.” The 1920s KKK targeted Catholic, Jewish, and other non-white Protestant immigrants – though never abandoning its anti-Black racism – and the fascists narrowed their target to Jews alone, but common to both was the construction of fear and then anger. Yet a fundamental difference between the Klan and the fascists is equally important: the Northern Klan was a mass, largely nonviolent movement that won major victories by relying on electoral politics, while the small fascist groups used violence as their primary tactic. Too often “fascism” has been used as a condemnation without specific content. Examining the Ku Klux Klan and the fascists side by side and focusing on what fascist groups did can yield better analyses. While there are commonalities among fascists in different contexts and different historical moments, the term is most useful when understood as a “cluster concept”: a cluster of ideas, values, and actions not all of which will be found in each exemplar of fascism.

Moral rationalists have claimed a priori status for moral principles, including the commonsense principles described in Chapter 4. Intuitionists – prominently including Ross – have even claimed self-evidence for such principles. How can this claim be justified? Central to the case is the idea that normative properties are a priori grounded in certain non-normative natural properties. This chapter explains such grounding. In doing so, it distinguishes two kinds of normativity: a kind belonging to a priori grounds of obligation, e.g. promising – normativity in upshot – and another belonging to propositions, such as moral judgments, that employ normative concepts: this is normativity in content. The chapter shows how the commonsense principles control critical discourse in the constitutive ways appropriate to entrenched a priori generalizations. It also shows how their apriority squares with the empiricality of singular moral judgments and how, even where obligations conflict, singular judgments of overall obligation may be justified and known.