In popular myth the 1960s was a gentle Utopian movement that opposed the colonialist Vietnam War abroad and sought greater social equality and harmony at home. And it is true that the vast majority of those young people who were drawn to what they called the movement were starry-eyed idealists who thought they were ushering in the Age of Aquarius. Still, in its strictly political dimension, there is no denying that the movement’s activist core was little more than a fascist youth cult. Indeed the “movement” of the 1960s may be considered the third great fascist moment of the twentieth century. The radicals of the New Left may have spoken about “power to the people” and the “authentic voice of a new generation,” but they really favored neither. They were an avant-garde movement that sought to redefine not only politics but human nature itself.
Historically, fascism is of necessity and by design a form of youth movement, and all youth movements have more than a whiff of fascism about them. The exaltation of passion over reason, action over deliberation, is a naturally youthful impulse. Treating young people as equals, “privileging” their opinions precisely because they lack experience and knowledge, is an inherently fascist tendency, because at its heart lies the urge to throw off “old ways” and “old dogmas” in favor of what the Nazis called the “idealism of the deed.” Youth politics—like populism generally—is the politics of the tantrum and the hissy fit. The indulgence of so-called youth politics is one face of the sort of cowardice and insecurity that leads to the triumph of barbarism.
While there’s no disputing that Nazism’s success was deeply connected to the privations of the great German Depression, that should not lead one to think that Nazism itself was a product of poverty. Even before World War I, Germany was undergoing a revolution of youth. The war merely accelerated these trends, heightening both idealism and alienation. Klaus Mann, the secular Jew and homosexual novelist, spoke for much of his generation when he wrote in 1927, “We are a generation that is united, so to speak, only by perplexity. As yet. we have not found the goal that might be able to dedicate us to common effort, although we all share the search for such a goal.” Mann understated the case. While young Germans were divided about what should replace the old order, they were united by more than mere perplexity. A sort of youthful identity politics had swept through Germany, fired by the notion that the new generation was different and better because it had been liberated from the politics of corrupt and cowardly old men and was determined to create an “authentic” new order.
German youth culture in the 1920s and early 1930s was ripe with rebelliousness, environmental mysticism, idealism, and no small amount of paganism, expressing attitudes that should be familiar to anyone who lived through the 1960s. “They regarded family life as repressive and insincere,” writes one historian. They believed sexuality, in and out of marriage, was “shot through with hypocrisy,” writes another. They, too, believed you couldn’t trust anyone over thirty and despised the old materialistic order in all its manifestations. To them, “parental religion was largely a sham, politics boastful and trivial economics unscrupulous and deceitful, education stereotyped and lifeless, art trashy and sentimental, literature spurious and commercialized, drama tawdry and mechanical.” Born of the middle class, the youth movement rejected, even loathed, middle-class liberalism. “Their goal,” writes John Toland, “was to establish a youth culture for fighting the bourgeois trinity of school, home and church.”
In cafes they howled at the decadence of German society in cadences reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg. In the woods they’d commune with nature, awaiting “messages from the forest.” A fuhrer—or popularly acclaimed “leader”—might read passages from Nietzsche or the poet Stefan George, who wrote: “The people and supreme wisdom yearn for the Man!—The Deed!...Perhaps someone who sat for years among your murderers and slept in your prisons will stand up and do the deed!” “These young people,” Toland writes, “thriving on mysticism and impelled by idealism, yearned for action—any kind of action.”
Even before the Nazis seized power, student radicals were eager to challenge the stodgy conservatism of German higher education, which cherished classically liberal academic freedom and the authority of scholars and teachers. A wave of Nietzschean pragmatism (Julien Benda’s phrase) had swept across Europe, bringing with it a wind that blew away the stale dogmas of their parents’ generation, revealing a new world to be seen with fresh eyes. The Nazis told young people that their enthusiasm shouldn’t be restrained through academic study—rather, it should be indulged through political action. The tradition of study for its own sake was thrown aside in the name of “relevance.” Let us read no more of Jewish science and foreign abstractions, they cried. Let us learn of Germans and war and what we can do for the nation! Intuition—which young people have in abundance—was more important than knowledge and experience, insisted the radicals. The youth loved how Hitler denounced the theorists—”ink knights,” he spat. What was required, according to Hitler, was a “revolt against reason” itself, for “[i]ntellect has poisoned our people!” Hitler rejoiced that he stole the hearts and minds of youth, transforming universities into incubators of activism for the Fatherland.
The Nazis succeeded with stunning speed. In 1927. during a time of general prosperity, 77 percent of Prussian students insisted that the “Aryan paragraph”—barring Jews from employment—be incorporated into the charters of German universities. As a halfway measure, they fought for racial quotas that would limit the number of racially inappropriate students. In 1931, 60 percent of all German undergraduates supported the Nazi Student Organization. Regional studies of Nazi participation found that students generally outpaced any other group in their support for National Socialism.
A key selling point for German youth was the Nazi emphasis on the need for increased student participation in university governance. Nazis believed that the voice of the students needed to be heard and the importance of “activism” recognized as an essential part of higher education. Foreshadowing a refrain common to American student radicals of the 1960s, like Columbia’s Mark Rudd, who declared that the only legitimate job of the university was “the creation and expansion of a revolutionary movement,” the Nazis believed that the university should be an empowering incubator of revolutionaries first and peddlers of abstraction a very, very distant second.
The Nazis’ tolerance for dissident views sharply declined, of course, once they attained and solidified power. But the themes remained fairly constant. Indeed, the Nazis fulfilled their promise to increase student participation in university governance as part of a broader redefinition of the university itself. Walter Schultze, the director of the National Socialist Association of University Lecturers, laid out the new official doctrine in an address to the first gathering of the organization, wherein he explained that “academic freedom” must be redefined so that students and professors alike could work together toward the larger cause. “Never has the German idea of freedom been conceived with greater life and vigor than in our day...Ultimately freedom is nothing else but responsible service on behalf of the basic values of our being as a Volk.”
Professors who deviated from the new orthodoxy faced all of the familiar tactics of the campus left in the 1960s. Their classrooms were barricaded or occupied, threats were put in their mail denunciations were posted on campus bulletin boards and published in student newspapers, lecturers were heckled. When administrators tried to block or punish these antics, the students mounted massive protests, and the students naturally won, often forcing the resignation of the administrator.
What cannot be overstated is that German students were first and foremost rebelling against the conservatism of both German higher education and the older generation’s “bourgeois materialism” The churches, too. were suspect because they had become so closely associated with the old, corrupt World War I regime. The students wanted to run the universities, which to traditional academics was akin to inmates running the asylum. Meanwhile, most of the progres
sive professors, at least those who weren’t Jews or Bolsheviks, gamely went along. Indeed, many such academics—like Hans-Georg Gadamer—who in later years would exploit their victim status under the Nazis, were quite happy to take a better office vacated by a Jewish colleague. Martin Heidegger, the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, took to the Nazi revolution instantly.
The Cornell takeover echoed these and other fascist themes. Black student radicals, convinced of their racial superiority and the inherent corruption of liberalism, mounted a sustained campaign of intimidation and violence against the very institution that afforded them the luxury of an education. President Perkins himself was a quintessentially progressive educator. With degrees from Swarthmore and Princeton, he cut his teeth as a New Dealer in the Office of Price Administration. Intellectually. Perkins was a product of the progressive-pragmatic tradition of William James and John Dewey, rejecting the idea that universities should be dedicated to the pursuit of eternal truths or enduring questions. He ridiculed the “intellectual chastity” of traditional scholarship and mocked non-pragmatic scholars—modern-day ink knights—who spent their time devoted to “barren discussions of medieval scholasticism.” Like so many of the New Deal intellectuals, Perkins was hostile to the idea that the past had much to say about the present. For him, the watchword was “relevance,” which in the 1960s quickly led to “empowerment.”
Perkins believed that universities should be laboratories for social change, training grounds for “experts” who would parachute into the real world and fix society, like the progressives of Wilson’s and FDR’s day. For these reasons—plus a decided lack of courage—Perkins prostrated himself to fascist goons while he ruthlessly turned his back on those whose educations, jobs, and even lives were threatened by Black Power radicals. German students insisted that they be taught “German science” and “German logic.” The black radicals wanted to be taught “black science” and “black logic” by black professors. They demanded a separate school tasked to “create the tools necessarily for the formation of a black nation.” They backed up these demands not with arguments but with violence and passionate assertion. “In the past it has been all the black people who have done all the dying,” shouted the leader of the black radicals. “Now the time has come when the pigs are going to die.” Perkins supinely obliged after only token opposition. After all he explained, “there is nothing I have ever said or will ever say that is forever fixed or will not be modified by changed circumstances.” The first course offered in the new program was Black Ideology.
Since then, what we now call identity politics has become the norm in academia. Whole departments are given over to the exploration and celebration of race and gender differences. Diversity is now code for the immutable nature of racial identity. This idea, too, traces itself back to the neo-Romanticism of the Nazis. What was once the hallmark of Nazi thinking, forced on higher education at gunpoint, is now the height of intellectual sophistication. Andrew Hacker, then a young professor at Cornell, today perhaps the preeminent white liberal writer on racial issues, has written that “historically white” colleges “are white...in logic and learning, in their conceptions of scholarly knowledge and demeanor”
Readers of a certain age probably know next to nothing about the Cornell uprising, and an even larger number probably have a hard time reconciling this spectacle with the image of the 1960s conjured by the popular culture. They believe in the Sorelian myth of the 1960s as an age when the “good guys” overturned a corrupt system, rebelled against their “square” parents, and ushered in an age of enlightenment and decency, now under threat from oppressive conservatives who want to roll back its Utopian gains. Liberal baby boomers have smeared the lens of memory with Vaseline, depicting the would-be revolutionaries as champions of peace and love—free love at that! Communes, hand-holding, marching arm in arm for peace and justice, and singing “Kumbaya” around the campfire: these are the images the New Left wants to put at the front of our collective memory. Some on the left still argue that the 1960s was a period of revolutionary politics, though they are split over the extent of the revolution’s failures and triumphs. More mainstream liberals want us to remember John R Kennedy uniting the nation with his call to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Others emphasize the antiwar or civil rights movements.
Speaking as a presidential candidate in 2003, Howard Dean offered the consensus view when he told the Washington Post that the 1960s was “a time of great hope.” “Medicare had passed. Head Start had passed. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the first African American justice [appointed to] the United States Supreme Court. We felt like we were all in it together, that we all had responsibility for this country...That [strong schools and communities were] everybody’s responsibility. That if one person was left behind, then America wasn’t as strong or as good as it could be or as it should be. That’s the kind of country that I want back.”
There’s no reason not to take Dean at his word. Indeed, unlike many liberal Democrats who were products of that time. Dean is admirably willing to admit that he was decisively shaped by the decade—while the Clintons and John Kerry, who were vastly more influenced by radical politics, insist on pretending that the 1960s was little more than a movie playing in the background. In a sense, however, one could say that Dean is the bigger liar. For almost everything about this gauzy rendition of the 1960s is a distortion.
First of all, young people were not uniformly “progressive.” Public opinion surveys found that young Americans were often the most pro-military while people over fifty were the most likely to oppose war. Numerous studies also show that radical children were not rebelling against their parents’ values. The single best predictor of whether a college student would become a campus radical was the ideology of his or her own parents. Left-leaning parents produced left-leaning children who grew up to be radical revolutionaries. The most significant divide among young people was between those attending college and those not. But even among campus youth, attitudes on Vietnam didn’t turn negative until the 1960s were almost over, and even then there was much less consensus than the PBS documentaries would suggest.
Moreover, the student radicals themselves were not quite the antiwar pacifists that John Lennon nostalgists might think. They did not want to give peace a chance when the peace wasn’t favorable to their agenda. The Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, did not start out as an antiwar organization. Indeed, its leader, Tom Hay den, considered the early antiwar activism a distraction from its core mission in the streets. Even after the New Left became chiefly defined by its stance against the war, it was never pacifistic, at least at its most glorified fringes. The Black Panthers, who assassinated police in ambushes and plotted terrorist bombings, were revered by New Left radicals—Hayden called them “our Vietcong “ The Weathermen, an offshoot of the SDS, conducted a campaign of domestic terrorism and preached the cleansing value of violence. Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the group John Kerry spoke for and led, internally debated whether or not it should assassinate politicians who supported the war. Gandhis they were not.
This raises an even more fundamentally dishonest aspect of the 1960s myth. Dean, speaking for many, paints the 1960s as a time of great unity. “People my age really felt that way.” But this is patent nonsense. “People” didn’t feel that way. The people Howard Dean knew felt that way—or at least their nostalgia causes them to think they did. It’s bizarre how many people remember the 1960s as a time of “unity” and “hope” when it was in reality a time of rampant domestic terrorism, campus tumult, assassinations, and riots. Nostalgia for their own youth can’t explain this myopia, since liberals also pine for the 1930s as a time when “we were all in it together.” This, too, is a gross distortion. The United States was not unified in the 1930s; it was torn by political unrest, intense labor violence, and the fear that one totalitarianism or another lay just around the corner. If
unity alone was the issue, the left would pine for the 1950s or even the 1920s. But the left didn’t thrive in these decades, so any unity enjoyed by Americans was illegitimate.
In other words, it is not unity the left longs for but victory; unity on terms not their own (such as the “staid conformity” of the 1950s) is false and misleading. In the 1930s and 1960s, the left’s popular-front approach yielded real power—and that is the true object of liberal nostalgia; nothing more, nothing less.
THE NEW LEFT’S FASCIST MOMENT
The elevation of unity as the highest social value is a core tenet of fascism and all leftist ideologies. Mussolini adopted the socialist symbol of the fasces to convey that his movement valued unity over the liberal democratic fetish of debate and discussion. That clanking, unrhymed chant we hear at protest rallies today—”The people united will never be defeated!”—is a perfectly fascist refrain. Perhaps it is true that “the people united will never be defeated,” but that doesn’t mean the people are right (as Calvin Coolidge liked to say, “One with the law on his side is a majority”). We tend to forget that unity is, at best, morally neutral and often a source of irrationality and groupthink. Rampaging mobs are unified. The Mafia is unified. Marauding barbarians bent on rape and pillage are unified. Meanwhile, civilized people have disagreements, and small-d democrats have arguments. Classical liberalism is based on this fundamental insight, which is why fascism was always antiliberal. Liberalism rejected the idea that unity is more valuable than individuality. For fascists and other leftists, meaning and authenticity are found in collective enterprises—of class, nation, or race—and the state is there to enforce that meaning on everyone without the hindrance of debate.
The first task of any fascist reformation is to discredit the authority of the past, and this was the top priority of the New Left. The Old Left was “suffocating under a blanket of slogans, euphemisms and empty jargon,” while the New Left’s mission lay in “getting people to think.” Received wisdom, dogma, and “ritualistic language,” Tom Hayden wrote in his 1961 “Letter to the New (Young) Left,” would be swept aside by a revolutionary spirit that “finds no rest in conclusions [and in which] answers are seen as provisional, to be discarded in the face of new evidence or changed conditions.” Hayden, like Mussolini, Woodrow Wilson, and the New Dealers, placed his hopes in a pragmatism that would yield a Third Way between the “authoritarian movements both of Communism and the domestic Right.” Hayden, of course, also promised that his new movement would transcend labels and take “action.”
LIBERAL FASCISM: The Secret History of the AMERICAN LEFT from MUSSOLINI to the POLITICS OF MEANING Page 21
