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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Of course, there was a great deal of playacting among the revolutionaries as well. Abbie Hoffman, the co-founder of the yippies (the Youth International Party) along with Jerry Rubin, was the son of prosperous Jewish parents in Worcester, Massachusetts. The product of private schools—where he was a troublemaker from the start, no doubt due in part to his bipolar disorder—Hoffman attended Brandeis University, where he studied under the New Left intellectual icon Herbert Marcuse. Hoffman bought into Marcuse’s view that bourgeois America was “radically evil” and that it had to be radically challenged as a result. But Hoffman had something over Marcuse, Rudd, Hayden, and the rest: he could be legitimately funny about his mission (though not nearly as funny as he thought he was). His was a funny fascism, a naughty nihilism. His book titles alone give a good flavor of his approach: Steal This Book, Fuck the System, and Revolution for the Hell of It. “Personally. I always held my flower in a clenched fist,” he wrote in his autobiography. He mastered the art of calling anybody he disliked or opposed a “fascist,” dubbing Ronald Reagan “the fascist gun in the West.” Hoffman, another member of the Chicago Seven, was a fugitive from justice for most of the 1970s, eluding charges that he was a cocaine dealer.

  His antics were less an echo of the Nazis—a generally humorless bunch—and more an updating of the Italian Futurists, the artistic auxiliary to Italian Fascism. The Futurists were actors, poets, writers, and other artists determined to bring all of the qualities of youth and revolution into the streets and cafes of Italy. Their fascism was theatrically violent, glorying in shock and disruption. The Futurists embraced the rush of speed and technology, the yippies glorified the rush of drugs. But it was really the same shtick. Hoffman and Rubin, for example, proposed a “Theater of Disruption” during the Chicago convention that would blend “pot and politics into a political grass-leaves movement.” Updating Sorel’s doctrines of myth and violence—no doubt without credit—Hoffman set out to create a “vast myth” of bloodshed and shock. “We will burn Chicago to the ground!” “We will fuck on the beaches!” “We demand the Politics of Ecstasy!” It may sound funny now, but the intent was to force a confrontation that would spill blood in the streets. In August a yippie underground newspaper, Seed, announced it had withdrawn its request for a permit for a youth rock festival. The editorial explained, “Chicago may host a Festival of Blood...Don’t come to Chicago if you expect a five-day Festival of Life, music and love”

  For those willing to look past a lot of meaningless rhetoric about Marxism, the fascist nature of all this was glaringly obvious. Indeed, one could simply take countless radicals at their word when they said they were “beyond ideology” and all about action. One of the most obvious giveaways was the New Left’s obsession with the “street.” The radicals talked incessantly about “taking it to the streets,” of the need for “street theater,” street protest, street activism, even “dancing in the street,” as the song went. Many of the best books during and about the period use “street” in their titles, James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street, Jim Miller’s Democracy Is hi the Streets, and Milton Viorst’s Fire in the Streets being just a few examples.

  Fascists were always fixated with the street. Horst Wessel, the martyred street fighter, captured the spirit of the street in the poem that became the Nazi anthem: “Clear the streets for the brown battalions...Soon will fly Hitler-flags over every street.” The Futurists considered the street the only authentic stage. “The raging broom of madness swept us out of ourselves and drove us through streets as rough and deep as the beds of torrents,” declared F. T. Marinetti, the founder of the Futurist movement. The Futurists, according to Marinetti’s famous phrase, glorified “the beautiful ideas which kill.” “For anyone who has a sense of historical connections, the ideological origins of Fascism can be found in Futurism,” wrote Benedetto Croce in 1924, “in the determination to go down into the streets, to impose their own opinions, to stop the mouths of those who disagree, not to fear riots or fights, in this eagerness to break with all tradition, in this exaltation of youth which was characteristic of Futurism.”

  That violence was central to fascism is often an exaggerated point. Violence has been essential to nearly all revolutionary movements, save the few explicitly nonviolent ones. But the avant-garde fascists idealized violence as an end in itself, seeing it as “redemptive” and “transformative.” Mussolini talked about the power and importance of violence but committed far less of it than you might expect. Yes, his goons beat people up and there were a handful of killings, but mostly Mussolini liked the aesthetics of violence, the sound of brutal rhetoric, the poetry of revolutionary bloodshed. “For revolutions are insane, violent, idiotic, bestial,” he explained. “They are like war. They set fire to the Louvre and throw the naked bodies of princesses on the street. They kill, plunder, destroy. They are a man-made Biblical flood. Precisely therein consists their great beauty.”

  Here again, the similarities to the New Left are striking. Violence suffused their political talk; physical violence merely punctuated it. Violence for the New Left and Fascists alike worked on numerous symbolic levels. It elevated the sense of crisis that revolutionaries crave in order to polarize society. Indeed, polarization was an identical strategic objective for the New Left and the Nazis. Forcing mainstream liberals to choose sides on the assumption that most would follow their sympathies to the left was the only way Hayden and others could usher in their revolution. That was what they meant by “bringing the war home.” (One of Rudd’s comrades who was killed in the Greenwich Village blast, Ted Gold, argued that the only way to radicalize liberals was to “turn New York into Saigon.”) The Nazis similarly assumed that Germans who favored socialist economic policies but who rejected the idea of thralldom to Moscow would ultimately side with the National Socialists over the International ones. German Communists made a similar gamble, believing that Nazism would accelerate the historical march toward Communism. Hence, again, the German socialist mantra “First Brown, then Red.”

  Somewhat paradoxically, support for violence—even violent rhetoric, as in Rudd’s fondness for expletives—helped radicals differentiate themselves from liberals, whom the hard left saw as too concerned with politeness, procedure, and conventional politics. When “moderates” at the Columbia takeover tried to dissuade a member of the “defense committee” at the Math Hall (where the most radical students were holed up), he responded, “You fucking liberals don’t understand what the scene’s about. It’s about power and disruption. The more blood the better.” At the march on the Washington Monument to end the war in 196, Phil Ochs sang his contemptuous “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Saul Alinsky, whose Rules for Radicals served as a bible for the New Left (and who later became one of Hillary Clinton’s mentors), shared the fascist contempt for liberals as corrupted bourgeois prattlers: “Liberals in their meetings utter bold words; they strut, grimace belligerently, and then issue a weasel-worded statement ‘which has tremendous implications, if read between the lines.’ They sit calmly, dispassionately, studying the issue; judging both sides; they sit and still sit.”

  Substitute the word “fascist” for “radical” in many of Alinsky’s statements and it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference: “Society has good reason to fear the Radical...He hits, he hurts, he is dangerous. Conservative interests know that while Liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, Radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of Conservatives.” And: “The Radical may resort to the sword but when he does he is not filled with hatred against those individuals whom he attacks. He hates these individuals not as persons but as symbols representing ideas or interests which he believes to be inimical to the welfare of the people.” In other words, they’re not people but dehumanized symbols. “Change means movement,” Alinsky tells us. “Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.”

  New Lef
t violence also supported numerous other fascist themes, from the cult of unreason, the lust for action, the craving for authenticity—talk was cheap—to a sense of shame about the martial accomplishments of the older generation. Just as many Nazi youth missed the Great War and were desperate to prove their mettle to their parents and themselves, many in the New Left had “issues” with their parents’ participation in World War Il (and for many Jews, their parents’ Holocaust ordeal). In addition, many radicals were desperate to prove they weren’t cowards for refusing to fight in Vietnam.

  Lastly, violence served as an homage to the true radicals and revolutionaries at home and abroad. Black Panther envy is a recurring theme in the history of New Left radicalism. The blacks were the “real thing,” and the whites were desperate to gain their approval and support. French intellectuals and Upper West Side liberals achieved new heights of sycophancy in their desire to prove their radical bona fides. They cheered when black athletes at the 1968 Olympics raised their fists in defiance at the American national anthem, not caring (or knowing) that the imagery was entirely derivative of fascist aesthetics. “The fist,” an Italian Fascist proclaimed in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory” And when George Foreman paraded an American flag at the same Olympics, the Norman Mailer crowd called him an Uncle Tom.

  You can tell a lot about a movement by its heroes, and here, too, the record reflects very poorly on the New Left. For all their prattle about “participatory democracy” it’s shocking how few democrats ranked as heroes to even the “peaceful” members of the movement. At Columbia, Berkeley, and campuses across America, the student activists plastered up posters of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, and Ho Chi Minh. Under Rueld’s leadership, the SDS formed quasi-official ties with Castro’s government. In Chicago and elsewhere, they chanted, “Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh.” Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book of revolutionary maxims became a huge best seller.

  Rather than call these regimes fascist—which I firmly believe they were—we’ll merely note the similarities between these Third World movements and regimes and the conventional fascist ones. Mao, Ho, Castro, and even the Panthers were all ethnocentric movements of “national liberation.” This is precisely how Mussolini and Hitler depicted their causes. Hitler promised to get Germany out from under the thumb of Versailles and “international finance capitalism” Mussolini argued that Italy was a “proletarian nation” deserving, like Germany, its “moment in the sun” Mao’s Cultural Revolution, his mixture of socialism and folk Chinese custom, fits perfectly in the fascist wheelhouse. What is Castro but a military dictator (note the constant uniform) who has burnished his leadership cult with socialist economics, nationalist rhetoric, and unending Nuremberg Rally populism?

  That Che Guevara has become a chic branding tool is a disgusting indictment of both American consumer culture and the know-nothing liberalism that constitutes the filthy residue of the 1960s New Left. Ubiquitous Che shirts top the list of mass-marketed revolutionary swag available for sale at the nearest bobo chic retailer—including a popular line of children’s wear. Here’s the text for one ad promoting this stuff: “Featured in Time magazine’s holiday web shopping guide, ‘Viva la revolution!’ Now even the smallest rebel can express himself in these awesome baby onesies. This classic Che Guevara icon is also available on a long-sleeve tee in kids’ sizes...Long live the rebel in all of us...there’s no cooler iconic image than Che!”

  The Argentine henchman of the Cuban revolution was a murderer and goon. He penned classically fascist apothegms in his journals: “hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine.” Guevara was a better writer, but the same muse helped to produce Mein Kampf. Guevara reveled in executing prisoners. While fomenting revolution in Guatemala, he wrote home to his mother, “it was all a lot of fun, what with the bombs, speeches and other distractions to break the monotony I was living in.” His motto was “if in doubt, kill him,” and he killed a great many. The Cuban-American writer Humberto Fontova described Guevara as “a combination of Beria and Himmler” Guevara certainly killed more dissidents and lovers of democracy than Mussolini ever did, and Mussolini’s Italy was undoubtedly more “free” than any society Guevara the “freedom fighter” was seeking. Would you put a Mussolini onesie on your baby? Would you let your daughter drink from a Himmler sippy cup?

  One can have a Jesuitical argument about the precise political labels these men deserve, but the fact remains that what made these liberationism movements so popular were precisely those attributes Guevara, Castro, Mao, and the rest shared with the heroes of fascism. And if you scrub the names Marx and Lenin from their speeches, what remains is the stuff of any diatribe Mussolini delivered from a balcony (indeed, sometimes with Mussolini you don’t even need to scrub the Marx and Lenin away). These were all nationalists committed to national socialism promising to enact a “truer” and more “organic” democracy, one that rejected the “formulaic,” “superficial,” and “decadent” “sham democracy” of the bourgeois West. Figures like the Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba were heroes for no other reason than that they opposed the United States and claimed to represent a racially pure revolutionary cause. The United Nations and affiliated elites adopted the racist stance that when blacks or other oppressed peoples killed each other or killed whites, it was a legitimate expression of Third World will to power. Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, the Chinese way, and anticolonialism generally were recast versions of Hitler’s Pan-Germanism and Mussolini’s effort to be the ruler of “Latin civilization” and “Italians everywhere.” Third Worlders needed lebensraum, too.

  Under doctrines of black liberation, “revolutionary” violence was always justified so long as you insisted that the bloodied corpse had somehow been an accomplice to oppression. Whites became the new Jews. “[T]o shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time,” observed Jean-Paul Sartre in his preface to one of Frantz Fanon’s books. All of this blood chic was retailed in Norman Mailer’s White Negro, which fetishized black crime as hip, cool, and revolutionary. The New Left not only bought this line; they sold it. A poll found 20 percent of American students identified with Che Guevara—beating out Nixon (19 percent), Humphrey (16 percent), and Wallace (7 percent).

  Madness, cruelty, and totalitarianism were “in.” Thugs and criminals were heroes, while champions of the rule of law were suddenly “fascists.” Almost from the outset, this logic poisoned the civil rights movement’s early triumphs. At Cornell most of the black students were admitted on what we’d today call affirmative action, with lower-than-average SAT scores. Particularly revealing is the fact that many of the gun-toting revolutionaries were recruited to the school precisely because they fit Mailer’s stereotype of the noble “ghetto youth,” the authentic Negro, and as such were given preference over other blacks with higher scores and better qualifications—because more qualified blacks were too “white.”

  By the end of the decade, the civil rights movement had for all intents and purposes become a Black Power movement. And Black Power, with its clenched fists. Afro-pagan mythology, celebration of violence, emphasis on racial pride, and disdain for liberalism, was arguably America’s most authentic indigenous fascism. Stokely Carmichael—at one time the “prime minister” of the Black Panther Party—himself defined Black Power (a term he originated) as “a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created.” Carmichael shared Hitler’s dream of building a folkish racial state upon the ashes of the old order.

  Indeed, when one reads the racial indoctrination taught to the children of Nazi Germany, it’s difficult to see the difference between Carmichael’s black pride and Hitler’s German pride. “What is the first Commandment of every National Socialist?” asked a Nazi catechism. “Love Germany above all else and your ethnic comrade as yo
ur self!” The connections between Black Nationalism and Nazism, Fascism, and other supposedly right-wing racist groups aren’t merely theoretical—or recent. Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Back to Africa movement, admitted in 1922 that his ideology was perfectly simpatico with Mussolini’s. “We were the first fascists,” he declared. Indeed, his rhetoric was often eerily consonant with German fascism: “Up You Mighty Race. Accomplish What You Will.” “Africa for the Africans...at Home and Abroad!” and so forth. In the 1960s Elijah Muhammad, the head of the Nation of Islam, formed a cordial relationship with George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell was even invited to speak at the Nation of Islam National Convention in 1962, at which he praised Elijah Muhammad as the black Adolf Hitler. On January 28, 1961, Muhammad sent Malcolm X to Atlanta to negotiate an agreement with the Ku Klux Klan whereby the Klan would support a separate black state.

  More generally, the Black Power movement became addicted to violence, setting the tone for the white left. H. Rap Brown had exhorted his followers to do what John Brown did, “pick up a gun and go out and shoot our enemy.” Malcolm X repeatedly exhorted blacks to employ “any means necessary.” James Forman. a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, declared that if he were assassinated, he’d want in retaliation “10 war factories destroyed...one Southern governor, two mayors and 500 racist white cops dead.” Good thing he belonged to an avowedly nonviolent group! Benjamin Chavis, the future head of the NAACP, first attained national recognition when he was arrested and convicted as a member of the Wilmington Ten. a group that allegedly conspired to firebomb a grocery store and then shoot the police when they responded to the scene. And always and everywhere there were the Panthers, in their paramilitary garb and black shirts sporting fascistic or militaristic ranks and titles (minister of defense, minister of information), robbing banks, calling for the slaughter of “pigs” and honkies, staging ambushes for police, kidnapping judges and children, and calling for a separate black state.