THE KULTURKAMPF. THEN AND NOW
The phrase “culture war” is traceable to two very different thinkers. The more recent is the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who argued that the only way to throw off the old order was to launch a “long march” through elite cultural institutions. This was the strategy taken by the New Left insurgents of the 1960s, who in short order conquered English departments, editorial boards, movie studios, and the like. But the earlier and more relevant wellspring was Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf.
It is common among educated liberals to use the term “Kulturkampf” in referring to the supposed efforts of the right to impose its values on the rest of the country by demonizing liberals. The Germanic overtones are obviously meant to evoke a Hitlerian parallel. Quite the contrary’, however, the original Kulturkampf was not a right-wing crackdown on liberal dissenters or imperiled minorities but an onslaught from the left against the forces of traditionalism and conservatism. Ostensibly, the Kulturkampf was a war against German Catholics, absorbed for the first time into greater Germany. Bismarck feared that they might not be sufficiently loyal to a Germany led by Prussia, and even more pragmatically, he wanted to avoid the formation of a German Catholic political party.
Bismarck’s intentions were grounded in realpolitik and political triangulation. It was the progressive forces in the Reichstag who were the true believers. Catholicism was seen by progressive Germans as foreign, antiquated, backward, and un-German. It stood in the way of nationalism, scientism. and progress. The word “Kulturkampf” itself was coined by the influential scientist Rudolf Virchow, a renowned liberal who hoped the Kulturkampf would liberate men from the clutches of Christian superstition and wed them to progressive principles. Behind that impulse, however, lay a desire to impose a new religion, a progressive religion of the Volk-state.
The first Kulturkampf laws, passed with great fanfare in 1873, were hailed as enormous progressive strides in the separation of church and state. Emil Friedberg, a liberal architect of the anti-Catholic “May Laws,” explained the state’s obligations toward the Catholic Church: “to suppress it. to destroy it, to crush it with violence.” In a riot of neo-Jacobinism, liberals harassed and shut down Catholic schools. Mandatory civil marriages weakened the power and influence of the Church. The state claimed the right to appoint, promote, discipline, and even deport Church officials. Most of Germany’s Catholic bishops were either thrown in jail hounded from office, or chased into exile. Eventually the Kulturkampf exhausted itself; but the idea that traditional Christianity was a threat to national progress took permanent root.
In the 1870s the acid predictably worked its way through the body politic and transformed itself into anti-Semitism. Indeed, the word “anti-Semitism” was coined in 1879 by the atheist and radical leftist Wilhelm Marr in his tract The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism. Marr’s contribution was to transform hatred of Jews from a theological passion into a “modern” racial and cultural one (he hated assimilated Jews more than orthodox ones, for example). “Anti-Semitism”—as opposed to the more theological Judenhass—was intended to ground hatred of Jews in the progressive language of scientific eugenics.
During his rise to power Hitler—in many respects the heir of the Bismarckian progressives—could hardly launch an all-out attack on Christianity. National Socialism, after all, was supposed to unite all Germans. It’s “not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death,” Hitler explained to his aides. “A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that’s left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic.”
In 1937 the German Social Democratic Party, operating in exile in Prague, enlisted a spy to report from Germany on Nazi progress. The reporter, working in secret, offered a crucial insight into what the Nazis were really up to. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was constructing a new religion, a “counter-church,” complete with its own priests, dogmas, holidays, rituals, and rites. The agent used a brilliant metaphor to explain the Nazi effort. The counter-church was being built like a new railway bridge. When you build a new bridge, you can’t just tear down the old one willy-nilly. Traffic and commerce will be snarled. The public will protest. Instead, you need to slowly but surely replace the bridge over time. Swap out an old bolt for a new one. Quietly switch the ancient beams for fresh ones, and one day you will have a completely different structure and barely anyone will have noticed.
Like the engineers of that proverbial railway bridge, the Nazis worked relentlessly to replace the nuts and bolts of traditional Christianity with a new political religion. The shrewdest way to accomplish this was to co-opt Christianity via the Gleichschaltung while at the same time shrinking traditional religion’s role in civil society. To this end. Hitler was downright Bismarckian. The German historian Gotz Aly explains how Hitler purchased popularity with lavish social welfare programs and middle-class perks, often paid for with stolen Jewish wealth and high taxes on the rich. Hitler banned religious charity, crippling the churches’ role as a counterweight to the state. Clergy were put on government salary, hence subjected to state authority. “The parsons will be made to dig their own graves,” Hitler cackled. “They will betray their God to us. They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes.”
Following the Jacobin example, the Nazis replaced the traditional Christian calendar. The new year began on January 30 with the Day of the Seizure of Power. Each November the streets of central Munich were dedicated to a Nazi Passion play depicting Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch. The martyrdom of Horst Wessel and his “old lighters” replaced Jesus and the apostles. Plays and official histories were rewritten to glorify pagan Aryans bravely fighting against Christianizing foreign armies. Anticipating some feminist pseudo history, witches became martyrs to the bloodthirsty oppression of Christianity.
Under the progressives, the Christian God had been transformed into the God of lower food prices. Under the Nazis, the Christian God would be transformed into an Aryan SS officer with Hitler his right hand. The so-called German Christian pastors preached that “just as Jesus liberated mankind from sin and hell, so Hitler saves the German Volk from decay.” In April 1933 the Nazi Congress of German Christians pronounced that all churches should catechize that “God has created me a German; Germanism is a gift of God. God wills that I fight for Germany. War service in no way injures the Christian conscience, but is obedience to God”
When some Protestant bishops visited the Fuhrer to register complaints, Hitler’s rage got the better of him. “Christianity will disappear from Germany just as it has done in Russia...The German race has existed without Christianity for thousands of years...and will continue after Christianity has disappeared...We must get used to the teachings of blood and race.” When the bishops objected that they supported Nazism’s secular aims, just not its religious innovations, Hitler exploded: “You are traitors to the Volk. Enemies of the Vaterland and destroyers of Germany. “In 1935 mandatory prayer in school was abolished, and in 1938 carols and Nativity plays were banned entirely. By 1941 religious instruction for children fourteen years and up had been abolished altogether, and Jacobinism reigned supreme. A Hitler Youth song rang out from the campfires:
We are The happy Hitler Youth;
We have no need for Christian virtue;
For Adolf Hitler is our intercessor
And our redeemer
No priest, no evil one
Can keep us
From feeling like Hitler’s children.
No Christ do we follow, hut Horst Wessel!
Away with incense and holy water pots.
Meanwhile, the orphans were given new lyrics to “Silent Night”:
Silent night! Holy night! All is calm, all is bright,
Watches o’er Germany by day and night,
Always caring for us.
In like manner, the American Kulturkampf of the 1960s begins not with the hippies, the Vietnam War, or even civil rights. As befits an attempt to clear the way for a new political religion, it starts with the effort to eliminate prayer in school. As Jeremy Rabkin has argued, the school prayer decisions of the 1960s should be seen as the beginning of the Supreme Court’s role as the primary engine of the American Kulturkampf.
Consider abortion. The fundamental logic of the Supreme Court cases legalizing abortion hinges not on the “right to choose” but on the idea that religion and religiously informed morality have no place in public affairs. Roe v. Wade and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, stemmed directly from the 1965 case Griswoki v. Connecticut, in which the Court invalidated a ban on birth control (almost never enforced) on the grounds that the right to privacy can be found in the emanation of a penumbra to the Constitution. But the Court’s underlying motivation stemmed from a conviction that religiously inspired laws (Connecticut has a large Catholic population) are suspect. Just two years before Roe, in a Pennsylvania case, the Court quashed state aid to Catholic parochial schools on the grounds that it would divide the public along sectarian lines. Moreover, the Court held, religious concerns “tend to confuse and obscure other issues of great urgency.” When Roe v. Wade finally appeared before the Court, the justices had already concluded that traditional religious concerns can have little weight in public affairs. Laurence Tribe, America’s leading liberal constitutional lawyer, argued in the Harvard Law Review in 1978 that religious views were inherently superstitious and hence less legitimate than “secular” ones.
In 1987 the Supreme Court ruled that moments of silence at the beginning of the school day constituted a government endorsement of prayer. In 1992 it held that a nonsectarian prayer at a school graduation (offered by a Reform rabbi) was an impermissible endorsement of religion. In 1995 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the “right to die” could not be hindered simply “in order to satisfy the moral or religious precepts of a portion of the population.” Never mind that laws against murder, theft, and perjury can be traced directly back to the same “religious precepts.”
More recently, we’ve seen courts rule that the Pledge of Allegiance, displays of the Ten Commandments, and Christmas crèches are unconstitutional anywhere near a public facility. Justice Antonin Scalia had it right in 1996 in the Rower v. Evans case (dealing with the public accommodation of homosexuality in Colorado). “The Court has mistaken a Kulturkampf for a fit of spite,” he declared. He went on to castigate his colleagues for “taking sides” in the “culture wars.”
Why belabor this point about religion? Because it is impossible to understand liberalism’s cultural agenda without understanding that modern liberalism is building its own railway bridge, replacing the bricks and beams of traditional American culture with something else. I do not claim that everything in the new liberal structure is bad or wrong. But I reject the clever argumentation of liberals who claim that their effort is merely “pragmatic” or piecemeal. “Oh, just this one brick. What’s wrong with this brick?” is how liberals argue about every stage of their project. But it’s not just one brick. Nor should conservatives believe it is merely a slippery slope. That image suggests forces outside of our control pulling us in a direction not of our choosing. If society is moving in a direction not of its choosing, it is often because it is being pushed by the self-appointed forces of progress.
Tom Wolfe, in his essay “The Great Relearning,” details how the counterculture, inspired by the German Bauhaus, wanted to start over, to declare a new Year Zero (much as the Jacobins and Nazis did), to go back to the fork in the road where Western civilization allegedly took the wrong path. The counterculture author Ken Kesey even organized a pilgrimage to the pagan mecca of Stonehenge, believing that this was the last place Western man was on the right track and, presumably, took a wrong turn by leaving his paganism behind. In the remainder of this chapter we will look at how this overarching vision informed the movements and ideas both of classical fascism and of today’s cultural left in a few discrete areas of culture: identity, morality, sex, and nature.
THE LIBERAL FASCIST KULTURKAMPF
Isaiah Berlin summarized the neo-Romantic outlook that gave rise to Nazism: “If I am German I seek German virtues. I write German music, I rediscover ancient German laws, I cultivate everything within me which makes me as rich, as expressive, as many-sided, as full a German as it is possible for me to be...That is the romantic ideal at its fullest.” Such thinking led inexorably to the Nazi conception of right and wrong. “Justice,” explained Alfred Rosenberg, “is what the Aryan man deems just. Unjust is what he so deems.”
This vision most concretely manifested itself in the effort to purge the influence of the Jewish mind from Nazi Germany. The Jew symbolized everything that kept the German people back. Even “conscience,” according to Hitler, “is a Jewish invention” to be discarded in an act of self-liberation. As a result, the Nazis played the same games against the Jews that today’s left plays against “Eurocentrism.” “whiteness,” and “logocentrism.” When you hear a campus radical denounce “white logic” or “male logic,” she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced “Jewish logic” and the “Hebrew disease.” While still a Nazi collaborator, Paul de Man—the revered postmodern theorist who eventually taught at Yale and Cornell—wrote of the Jews, “Their cerebralness, their capacity to assimilate doctrines while maintaining a cold detachment from them,” is one of “the specific characteristics of the Jewish mind.”
The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism. The “key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race,” writes the whiteness studies scholar and historian Noel Ignatiey. Whiteness studies is a cutting-edge academic discipline sweeping American higher education. Some thirty universities have WS departments, but many more schools teach the essentials of whiteness studies in other courses. The executive director of the Center for the Study of White American Culture explains, “There is no crime that whiteness has not committed against people of color...We must blame whiteness for the continuing patterns today...which damage and prevent the humanity of those of us within it.” The journal Race Traitor (ironically, a Nazi term) is dedicated “to serve as an intellectual center for those seeking to abolish the white race.” Now, this is not a genocidal movement; no one is suggesting that white people be rounded up and put in camps. But the principles, passions, and argumentation have troubling echoes.
First, there is the left’s shocking defense of black riot ideology and gangsterism. The glorification of violence, the romance of the street, the denunciations of “the system,” the conspiratorialism, the exaltation of racial solidarity, the misogyny of hip-hop culture: all of these things offer a disturbing sense of deja vu. Hip-hop culture has incorporated a shocking number of fascist themes. On college campuses, administrators routinely look the other way at classically fascist behavior, from newspaper burnings to the physical intimidation of dissident speakers. These attitudes ultimately stem from the view that the white man, like the Jew, represents every facet of what is wrong and oppressive to humanity. As Susan Sontag proclaimed in 1967, “The white race is the cancer of human history.” Meanwhile, Enlightenment notions of universal humanity are routinely mocked on the academic left as a con used to disguise entrenched white male privilege.
Just as the Nazi attack on Christianity was part of a larger war on the idea of universal truth, whole postmodern cosmologies have been created to prove that traditional religious morality is a scam, that there are no fixed truths or “natural” categories, and that all knowledge is socially constructed. Or as the line goes in The Da Vinci Code, “So Dark, the Con of Man “
The “con” in question is, in effect, a conspiracy by the Catholic Church to deceive the world about Jesus’ true nat
ure and his marriage to Mary Magdalene. The book has sold some sixty million copies worldwide. The novel, and movie, have generated debates, documentaries, companion books, and the like. But few have called attention to the ominous roots and parallels with Nazi thought.
Dan Brown should have dedicated his book to “Madame” Helena Blavatsky, the theosophist guru who is widely considered the “mother” of New Age spirituality as well as a touchstone in the development of Nazi paganism and the chief popularizer of the swastika as a mystical symbol. Her theosophy included a grab bag of cultish notions, from astrology to the belief that Christianity was a grand conspiracy designed to conceal the true meaning and history of the supernatural. Her 1888 book. The Secret Doctrine, attempted to prove the full extent of the grotesque Western conspiracy that The Da Vinci Code only partially illuminates. Christianity was to blame for all the modern horrors of capitalism and inauthentic living, not to mention the destruction of Atlantis.
Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, the second most important book in the Nazi canon, borrowed ideas wholesale from Blavatsky. Rosenberg lays out one Christian conspiracy after another. “Before it could fully blossom, the joyous message of German mysticism was strangled by the anti-European church with all the means in its power,” he insists. Like Blavatsky and Brown, he suggests the existence of secret Gospels, which, had they not been concealed by the Church, would debunk the “counterfeit of the great image of Christ” found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
“Christianity,” writes Hitler in Mein Kampf, “was not content with erecting an altar of its own. It had first to destroy the pagan altars.” It was “the advent of Christianity” that first unleashed the “spiritual terror” upon “the much freer ancient world.”
Large segments of the cultural left today subscribe to similar notions. For example, Wicca and paganism constitute the fastest-growing religion and religious category in America, with adherents numbering anywhere from 500.000 to 5 million depending on whose numbers you accept. If you add “New Age spirituality,” the number of Americans involved in such avocations reaches 20 million and growing. Feminists in particular have co-opted Wicca as a religion perfectly suited to their politics. Gloria Steinem is rhapsodic about the superior political and spiritual qualities of “pre-Christian” and “matriarchal” paganism. In Revolution from Within she laments in all earnestness the “killing of nine million women healers and other pagan or nonconforming women during the centuries of change-over to Christianity.”
LIBERAL FASCISM: The Secret History of the AMERICAN LEFT from MUSSOLINI to the POLITICS OF MEANING Page 45
