LIBERAL FASCISM: The Secret History of the AMERICAN LEFT from MUSSOLINI to the POLITICS OF MEANING

by Jonah Goldberg

  In academia a parallel revolt was under way. In 1966, at a conference at Johns Hopkins University, the French literary critic Jacques Derrida introduced the word deconstruction—a term coined by Nazi ideologues—into the American intellectual bloodstream. Deconstruction—a literary theory which holds that there is no single meaning to any text—caught fire in the minds of academics and students alike who hoped to be liberated from the dead weight of history and accumulated knowledge. If all texts were diversely interpretable with no “true” meaning at their core, then the important thing—the only thing really—was the meaning the reader imposed upon the text. In other words, meaning is created through power and will The right interpretation is the one held by the interpreter who “wins” the academic power struggle. According to Derrida and his acolytes, reason was a tool of oppression. Beneath every seemingly rational decision was pure Nietzschean will to power. Derrida hoped to snatch the veil from the Enlightenment and reveal the tyranny of “logocentrism” beneath (another word with fascist roots).

  This, too, was a replay of the pragmatic spirit that had sought to liberate society from the cage of inherited dogma. Pragmatism inspired Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Benito Mussolini, as well as their court intellectuals, to discard the putrefying corpse of classical liberalism and parliamentary democracy in order to empower “men of action” to solve society’s problems through bold experimentation and the unfettered power of the state. As one progressive reformer put it, “We were all Deweyites before we read Dewey.” Similarly, many in the academy were deconstructionists before they read Derrida.

  The literary critic Paul de Man was one such sleeper deconstructionist. De Man, who first met Derrida at the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference, became the foremost champion of deconstruction in the United States and a huge influence on Derrida himself. De Man taught at Cornell in the first half of the 1960s, and then moved to Johns Hopkins and Yale. Derrida’s and de Man’s writings served as an intellectual warrant for the radicalization of faculty who wanted to find common cause with the marchers in the streets by “speaking truth to power.” At Cornell, in the years preceding the takeover, de Man championed the defenestration of the “core curriculum,” arguing that nothing worthwhile would be lost if the university turned its back on the traditional benchmarks of a liberal education. How could it be otherwise if all those ancient texts were in effect meaningless?

  Such ideas contributed to the implosion of the American university in much the same way that they accelerated the Nazi takeover of German universities. Polite liberals were forced to choose between doing their jobs and siding with the radicals. For the more politicized professors this was no choice at all, since they already agreed with the aims of the revolution. But for individuals like Clinton Rossiter, a decent liberal centrist and one of America’s most distinguished historians, the choice was destructive. A professor at Cornell during the uprising, Rossiter at first fought for the ideal of academic freedom along with other threatened faculty, but eventually he threw in his lot with the black fascists. Just two days before he made his decision, he’d told the New York Times, “If the ship goes down, I’ll go down with it—as long as it represents reason and order. But if it’s converted to threats and fear, I’ll leave it and take a job as a night watchman at a local bakery” Fine words. But when truly forced to choose between working at a bakery and giving in to threats and intimidation, he turned his back on his friends and his principles.

  The parallel between the reformation of American universities in the 1960s and what occurred in Nazi Germany runs even deeper. Deconstruction is a direct and unapologetic offshoot of Heidegger’s brand of existentialism, which not only was receptive to Nazism but helped foster it. Heidegger was the great inheritor of Nietzsche’s assault on truth and morality, which held that we make our own truth and decide our own morality. For Heidegger and Nietzsche alike, good and evil were childish notions. What matters is will and choice. Self-assertion was the highest value. Choices were worthwhile only if they were authentic choices, heedless of conventional morality. This was the ethos of Nazism that Heidegger wholeheartedly embraced and never forthrightly renounced, even decades after the extent of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes were known. The Nazi critique of Western civilization was total. In his infamous rectorial address, Heidegger looked forward to the time—hastened by Hitler’s efforts—”when the spiritual strength of the West fails and its joints crack, when the moribund semblance of culture caves in and drags all forces into confusion and lets them suffocate in madness.”

  Deconstruction’s indebtedness to the fascist avant-garde remains one of the most controversial subjects in academia today, precisely because that debt is so obvious and profound. Paul de Man, for example, was a Nazi collaborator in Belgium who wrote seething pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic articles for a fascist newspaper during the occupation. Herbert Marcuse, a protege of Heidegger’s, became the leader of the New Left’s academic brain trust. He attacked Western society mercilessly, arguing that “liberal tolerance” was “serving the cause of oppression”—an argument that echoed the fascist assault of the 1930s almost perfectly. Frantz Fanon, who preached about the “redemptive” power of violence, was widely seen as a direct heir of Georges Sorel the pre-fascist theorist admired and emulated by Italian Fascists and Bolsheviks alike. The Nietzschean pragmatist Michel Foucault—revered by postmodernists and feminist theorists—set as his North Star the “sovereign enterprise of Unreason.” Foucault’s hatred for Enlightenment reason was so profound that he celebrated the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the dictatorship of the mullahs precisely because it was a premodern assault on Enlightenment principles. Carl Schmitt, a grotesque Nazi philosopher, is among the most chic intellectuals on the left today. His writings were passed around as samizdat by New Left radicals in Europe, including Joschka Fischer, who spent the 1970s beating up policemen in West German streets and later became foreign minister and vice-chancellor in the government of Gerhard Schroder from 1998 to 2005.

  For more than sixty years, liberals have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream of the political right. And yet with the notable and complicated exceptions of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, no top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger. All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment—John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke—and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism. Meanwhile, the ranks of left-wing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition. And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word “Marxist” to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents. The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values—even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments.

  In a seminar there may be important distinctions to be made between, say, Foucaulf s “enterprise of Unreason,” Derricla’s tyrannical logocentrism, and Hitler’s “revolt against reason.” But such distinctions rarely translate beyond ivy-covered walls—and they are particularly meaningless to a movement that believes action is more important than ideas. Deconstruction, existentialism, postmodernism, Pragmatism, relativism: all of these ideas had the same purpose—to erode the iron chains of tradition, dissolve the concrete foundations of truth, and firebomb the bunkers where the defenders of the ancient regime still fought and persevered. These were ideologies of the “movement.” The late Richard Rorty admitted as much, conflating Nietzsche and Heidegger with James and Dewey as part of the same grand project.

  Few were more adept at using the jargon of the “movement” than fascists and pre-fascists. Hitler uses the phrase “the Movement” over two hundred times in Mem Kampf A Nazi Party journal was called Die Bewegung (The Movement). The word “movement” itself is instructive. Movement, unlike progress, does
n’t imply a fixed destination. Rather, it takes it as a given that any change is better. As Allan Bloom and others have noted, the core passion of fascism was self-assertion. The Nazis may have been striving for a Utopian Thousand-Year Reich, but their first instincts were radical: Destroy what exists. Tear it down. Eradicate “das System”—another term shared by the New Left and fascists alike. “I have a barbaric concept of socialism,” a young Mussolini once said. “I understand it as the greatest act of negation and destruction...Onward, you new barbarians!...Like all barbarians you are the harbingers of a new civilization.” Hitler’s instincts were even more destructive. Even before he ordered the obliteration of Paris and issued his scorched-earth policy on German soil, his agenda was to rip apart everything the bourgeoisie had created, to destroy the reactionaries, to create new art and architecture, new culture, new religion, and, most of all, new Germans. This project could only commence upon the ashes of das System. And if he couldn’t create, he could take solace in destroying.

  How exactly is this different from the “Burn, baby, burn!” ethos of the late 1960s?

  THE ACTION CULT

  Five months after the Cornell takeover, the Weathermen gathered in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. Armed with baseball bats, helmets, and, in the words of the historian Jim Miller, “apparently bottomless reserves of arrogance and self-loathing,” they prepared to “smash through their bourgeois inhibitions and ‘tear pig city apart’ in a ‘national action’ they called The Days of Rage/ “ Like Brownshirts and fascist squadristi, they smashed windows, destroyed property, and terrorized the bourgeoisie. They’d already bloodied themselves the previous year at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where, the Weathermen claimed, their violence had done “more damage to the ruling class...than any mass, peaceful gathering this country has ever seen.”

  The desire to destroy is a natural outgrowth of the cult of action. After all, if you are totally committed to revolutionary change, any boundaries you run into—the courts, the police, the rule of law—must be either converted, co-opted, or destroyed. All fascists are members of the cult of action. Fascism’s appeal was that it would get things done. Make the trains run on time, put people to work, get the nation on the move: these are sentiments sewn into the fiber of every fascist movement. The fascist state of mind can best be described as “Enough talk, more action!” Close the books, get out of the library, get moving. Take action! What kind of action? Direct action! Social action! Mass action! Revolutionary action! Action, action, action.

  Communists loved action, too. That’s not surprising considering the family bonds between communism and fascism. But fascists valued action more. Communism had a playbook. Fascism had a hurry-up offense, calling its plays on the field. Sure, fascism had its theorists, but in the streets, fascists cared about victory more than doctrine. “In a way utterly unlike the classical ‘isms,’ ” writes Robert O. Paxton, “the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is ‘true’ insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood.” Or as Mussolini himself put it in his “Postulates of the Fascist Program,” “fascists that do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.”

  The word “activist” enters the English language at the turn of the century with the rise of pragmatic Progressivism. The early fascist intellectuals fancied themselves “activist philosophers.” Mussolini, while still a socialist in good standing, wrote in 1908. “The plebs, who are excessively Christianized and humanitarian, will never understand that a higher degree of evil is necessary so that the Superman might thrive...The Superman knows revolt alone. Everything that exists must be destroyed.” This represented an early marriage of Leninism and Nietzsche. Instead of the individual superman, the vanguard of the revolution would be the new breed of supermen. The Nazis were likewise inspired by Nietzsche but also by the Romantics, who believed that the spirit of the act is more important than the idea behind it. This was the Nazi “Cult of the Deed.” The French fascists even dubbed their movement the Action Franqaise, putting action on an equal footing with nation. Mussolini defined both socialism and fascism as “movement, struggle, and action.” One of his favorite slogans was “To live is not to calculate, but to act!” Hitler mocked those who believed that arguments and reason should trump the naked power of the people. When four renowned economists sent Hitler a letter disputing his socialist schemes. Hitler responded, “Where are your storm troopers? Go on the street, go into folk meetings and try to see your standpoint through. Then we’ll see who is right—we or you.”

  Sixties radicalism was suffused with an identical spirit. The early intellectuals of the SDS—centered on the Institute for Policy Studies (a think tank today closely affiliated with the left wing of the Democratic Party)—were adherents of what they called “existential pragmatism,” a blend in equal parts of Jean-Paul Sartre and John Dewey. “I’m a nihilist! I’m proud of it, proud of it!” shrieked a delegate to a 1967 meeting of the Princeton SDS. “Tactics? It’s too late...Let’s break what we can. Make as many answer as we can. Tear them apart”

  Mark Rudd, the chairman of the SDS at Columbia University and the leader of the takeover there in 1968, represented the ascendancy of what SDS “moderates” called the “action freaks” or the “action faction” A voluptuary of violence, Rudd subscribed to the Sorelian view that “direct action” would “raise consciousness” (then a freshly minted phrase). When the “moderates” told him the movement needed more organization and outreach, he responded. “Organizing is just another word for going slow” Mussolini, who divided his squadrisfi into “action squads,” could certainly sympathize.

  As the reader may recall from our earlier discussion, it was Georges Sorel, the French engineer turned intellectual, who pioneered the idea that the masses needed myths to be moved to action. Recognizing that Marxism, like all social science, rarely panned out in real life, Sorel married William James’s will to believe to Nietzsche’s will to power and applied them to mass psychology. Revolutionaries didn’t need to understand the reality of Marxism; they needed to believe in the myth of Marxism (or nationalism, syndicalism, fascism, and so on). “[T]o concern oneself with social science is one thing and to mold consciousness is another,” he wrote. Passion, not facts, was the fuel for action. “It is faith that moves mountains, not reason,” Mussolini explained in a 1932 interview (echoing Woodrow Wilson’s Leaders of Men). “Reason is a tool, but it can never be the motive force of the crowd.”

  As the cross-burning incident at Cornell demonstrated, this preference for arousing passions at the expense of truth and reason defined the agenda of those fighting in the trenches. The practice of “lying for justice”—always acceptable on the communist left—was infused into the American New Left with new potency. The catch-phrase at the Columbia uprising was “the issue is not the issue.” No wonder, since the actual “issue”—building a gym in adjacent Harlem—was such small beer. For most of the activists, deceit wasn’t the point. The point was passion, mobilization, action. As one SDS member proclaimed after he and his colleagues seized a building and kidnapped a dean, “We’ve got something going on here and now we’ve just got to find out what it is.”

  BUILDING A POLITICS OF MEANING

  The movement of the 1960s didn’t start out destructive. In fact it started out brimming with high-minded idealism and hope. The Port Huron Statement, the signature document of the New Left, was for all its overwrought verbiage a well-intentioned statement of democratic optimism and admirable honesty. The authors—chief among them Tom Hayden—conceded that they were in fact bourgeois radicals, “bred in at least modest comfort.” Driven by a sense of alienation from the American way of life, the young radicals craved a sense of unity and belonging, a rediscovery of personal meaning through collective political endeavors. Life seemed out of balance. “It is difficult today to give human meaning to the welter of facts that surrounds us,” the authors proclaimed. Their aim wa
s to create a political system that would restore “human meaning” (whatever that is). “The goal of man and society,” they insisted, “should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic.” This urge for self-assertion should be translated into a politics that could unleash the “unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.”

  At the time, youth activists found a willing ear in mainstream liberalism, which was preaching more and more about “national service,” “sacrifice,” and “action.” John F. Kennedy—the youngest president ever elected, replacing the oldest president ever elected—simultaneously fed and appealed to this atmosphere at every turn. “Let the word go forth,” he declared in his inaugural address with an almost authoritarian tempo, “that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by wan disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” His most famous line. “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” resonated with a generation desperate to find collective redemption in peace the way their parents had in war.