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

by Jonah Goldberg

  The SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, was convinced that the anti-witch craze was an anti-German plot concocted in large part by the Catholic Church: “The witch-hunting cost the German people hundreds of thousands of mothers and women, cruelly tortured and executed.” He dedicated considerable resources for the SS to investigate the witch hunts and prove they were attempts to crush Aryan civilization and the true German faith. The SS put together what amounted to their own X-Files unit—dubbed Special Unit H (for Hexen, or “witches”)—to ferret out the truth of over thirty-three thousand cases of witch burning, in countries as far away as India and Mexico.

  Indeed, most of the founders of National Socialism would be far more comfortable talking witchcraft and astrology with a bunch of crystal-worshipping vegans than attending a church social. Consider the Thule Society, named after a supposed lost race of northern peoples hinted at in ancient Greek texts. The society was founded as the Munich chapter of the German Order, and while its occult and theosophical doctrines were nominally central to its charter, the glue that held it together was racist anti-Semitism. Anton Drexler was encouraged by his mentor Dr. Paul Tafel, a leader of the Thule Society, to found the German Workers’ Party, which would soon become the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Its membership was a veritable Who’s Who of founding Nazis, according to Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw.

  Dietrich Eckart, a poet, painter, occultist, morphine addict, playwright, fancier of magic, and devotee of the racial mysticism of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was a major force in this bohemian circle. Eckart was a father figure and mentor to Hitler, teaching him about public speaking, giving him his first trench coat, and introducing him to leading members of Munich society. As an editor, Eckart transformed the Thule Society’s newspaper into the official Nazi Party paper and wrote the anthem “Germany, Awake!” Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf’ to him. writing in the epilogue that he was “a man who devoted his life to reawakening his and our people.”

  The myth of the Wrong Turn at the heart of liberal fascist ideology doesn’t merely generate exotic conspiracy theories and pseudo history, but, as suggested above, it promotes a profound moral relativism. Indeed, feminism’s embrace of Wicca is a perfect illustration of the pagan narcissism mentioned earlier. Many Wicca ceremonies conclude with the invocation “Thou Art Goddess.” There are no explicit rules to Wicca. merely exhortations to cultivate “the Goddess within.” to create the spirituality that best conforms to your already-formed prejudices, desires, and instincts.

  Heidegger, the Nazi philosopher, and Thomas Mann, the literary giant—who became a passionate and perceptive anti-fascist but was an early dabbler in fascism’s themes—represented the philosophical and literary sides of the push to throw off the chains of bourgeois morality and custom. Heidegger (echoing Nietzsche) argued that a truly authentic individual chooses his own path, whether it conforms with conventional morality or with some individually manufactured morality. Even the right choice is wrong if it is made under the influence of others. To “forgo normal choice and to adopt those offered me by the world or other people,” writes Heidegger, is the essence of “inauthenticity.” Mann located fascism’s appeal to the artist in its invitation to the “self-abandonment to the instincts.” Hitler’s favorite sculptor explained that his nude works display “the pure air of instinctive drives” and show the “revolutionary youth of today, which tears the veil from the body hidden in shame.”

  HOLLYWOOD FASCISTS

  These once-radical notions now saturate mainstream popular culture. A brief survey serves to illustrate how pervasive their influence has become among the scriptwriters and producers of films coming out of Hollywood, the most powerful de facto propaganda agency in human history.

  In the five-Oscar-winning film American Beauty, as mentioned above, Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham. a bourgeois professional with a bourgeois-professional wife and a conventionally alienated daughter. Lester suddenly realizes that he hates his conventional life when he becomes sexually obsessed with a friend of his teenage daughter. “I feel like I’ve been in a coma for the past twenty years. And I’m just now waking up,” he declares. He then commences a campaign of “self-improvement” that involves a narcissistic obsession with his own body, flipping off all social conventions, and indulging every desire in defiance of reason.

  “Janie, today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go fuck himself, and then I blackmailed him for almost sixty thousand dollars. Pass the asparagus,” Lester tells his daughter at the dinner table.

  “Your father seems to think this type of behavior is something to be proud of,” Lester’s controlling, materialistic wife explains.

  “And your mother seems to prefer I go through life like a fucking prisoner while she keeps my dick in a mason jar under the sink.” he replies.

  This sort of thing, where the “real” person is to be found not in the head or the heart but in the crotch, seems to pass for high wisdom in Hollywood.

  Of course, sometimes it is not a psychosexual breakthrough that redeems the white man but a physical abnormality or injury usually resulting in the suppression of his ability to reason. In Forrest Gump a retarded white man is the only reliably moral force during the chaos of the 1960s and 1970s. In Regarding Henry, Harrison Ford plays a career-minded, philandering corporate lawyer with no time for his family who is redeemed with the help of a bullet in his frontal lobe and the sagacity of a black physical therapist who helps the lobotomized Ford discover that it’s morally preferable to be a child. In As Good as It Gets, Jack Nicholson is a vicious bigot until he starts taking powerful psychotropic drugs, which in effect cure him of his whiteness (Adorno might call it the “anti-fascism pill”) and make him tolerant of gays and blacks and able to love. In the Sean Perm vehicle 1 Am Sam, we are told that intelligence, knowledge, and basic coping skills are all irrelevant to good parenting so long as even a severely retarded parent loves his child. Talk to people with severely retarded children or siblings, and they will tell you how pernicious this message can be.

  The recurring theme is that men must be awakened from the comfortable nightmare we call life, or what Hillary Clinton in her youth described as “the sleeping sickness of our soul.” We are all “slaves” to the “IKEA nesting instinct,” according to the protagonist of Fight Club, a film whose fascist pretensions have been so well discussed there’s no need to revisit them here. The idea that the slumbering masses must be roused from their doldrums is central to Fascism. Marinetti’s first Futurist manifesto begins, “Up to now. literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.” The pamphlet that first attracted a young Adolf Hitler to National Socialism was titled “My Political Awakening.” Pro-Nazi and pre-fascist films and novels often shared a common premise of somnolent young men roused from their passive acceptance of the machine of Western bourgeois democracy.

  Is there any doubt that a young Hitler would have given Dead Poets Society a standing ovation? The film begins with the students learning poetry by formula, plotting its “perfection along the horizontal of a graph” and its “importance” on the vertical in order to find the “measure of its greatness.” You can almost hear Hitler denouncing such a “Jewish” way of gauging art. Along comes Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams, who tells his students simply to rip those pages from the book! Mr. Keating encourages the students to do even more violence to convention, exhorting them to stand on the teacher’s desk in a simultaneous display of superiority and contempt for traditional roles.

  One boy in particular, Todd, is afraid of Mr. Keating’s new approach. But Mr. Keating browbeats the lad to release his “barbaric yawp.” Holding his eyes shut, he forces the lad to craft a poem from the bowels of his soul. Todd conjures the image of a “sweaty-toothed madman,” and with Mr. Keating’s encouragement he gives him form and function. “His hands reach out and choke me...Truth...T
ruth is like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold.”

  Keating encourages his yawping barbarians to live by the maxim “Seize the day!” in a glorious cult of action. Following his example, the truly “free” students join a secret society where they adopt pagan names and meet in an old Indian cave to “suck the marrow out of life.” make new gods, and read Romantic poetry.

  Neil, another student, is awakened by Mr. Keating and rebels against his bourgeois father’s pressure to become a doctor. He wants to live a life of passion as an actor. “For the first time in my life, I know what I want to do!” he shouts. “And for the first time, I’m going to do it! Whether my father wants me to or not! Carpe diem!” The boy finds his true calling playing the pagan fairy of the forest Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When his father forbids him to indulge his passions any further. Neil chooses suicide over compromise—a similar ending to Hitler’s favorite play, Der Konig (as mentioned earlier, Hitler saw the play seventeen times in three years). Neil is depicted as Christlike, despite his selfishness.

  The tragedy of Neil’s suicide shatters the school, and Mr. Keating is fired. The surviving members of the Dead Poets Society risk expulsion if they even look at Mr. Keating: yet they cannot resist his charisma. One by one, they stand on their desks, defiant of their new teacher. These beautiful young overmen, united in their will, look to their “captain” and away from traditional authority. All that was missing were the Nazi salutes.

  In The Matrix, a thoroughly fascistic allegory (with some Marxist notes as well), Keanu Reeves plays a trapped, bourgeois cubicle dweller. His “handle” as a computer hacker, Neo, not only represents his truer party name, as it were, but also encapsulates his status as a New Man, an Ubermensch who can bend the world to his will and eventually even fly. The falseness of his worker-drone lifestyle is revealed to him when he awakes, as if from a dream, and realizes that what he thought was his real life was a prison, a cage, where parasitic and manipulative forces literally fed on him. Instead of bloodsucking Jews, the enemy is what nineteenth- and twentieth-century New Agers called the Machine, or das System. What awakes him from his nightmare is his authentic choice, which he makes solely so he can be true to himself. Afterward, he joins a pagan secret society, Zion, where the only authentic vestiges of mankind live in Dionysian glory in the warm bowels of Mother Earth, wholly dedicated to awakening the worthy few among their slumbering brethren. The parasitic, puppet-string-pulling “agents” of the system may look human, but are anything but. Colorless, austere white men dressed in dark business suits, they reject the authenticity of human life for cold logic and mechanistic priorities. They are literally rootless, not merely prone to abstraction but actual abstractions. There seem to be few of them, but they’re everywhere, can take human form, and run everything. In short, they are comic-book versions of everything the Nazis said about the Jews.

  It’s important to recognize that we are talking not so much about left-wing culture or liberal culture as about American culture. In many respects. Hollywood’s addiction to fascist aesthetics is non-ideological. Gladiator used fascislic imagery because that was the best way to tell the story. In other cases, Hollywood exhibits a deeper fascination with fascism. In films like V for Vendetta, the envy for the cool aesthetics of well-dressed cruelty and violence is palpable. The villains and the hero alike are all fascists.

  Conservatives are hardly immune to the allure of fascism. Left-wing cultural critics were not wrong to spot fascistic themes in the vigilante films of the 1970s. In the Death Wish and Dirty Harry movies, for example, unlawful violence was glorified on the grounds that “the system” was irredeemably corrupt, swamped by the usually dark-skinned criminal classes and the clever lawyers who protected them. Pauline Kael of the New Yorker dubbed Dirty Harry a brand of “fascist medievalism.” And if you look at the evolving themes in Clint Eastwood’s work, you can tease out a thread of nihilism culminating in the bleakness of Unforgiven and his ode to euthanasia in Million Dollar Baby (both Academy Award-winning films).

  Just because I am noting the fascistic themes in these films doesn’t necessarily mean they are bad. Triumph of the Will was a masterpiece (so the critics tell us). Similarly, I am a fan of the Dirty Harry films (as well as many others discussed in this chapter). I would even argue that as a form of artistic protest, those vigilante films had many redeeming qualities. But there’s no denying that conservatives are just as willing to embrace fascistic films if they come from the right. Consider such popular films as Braveheart, The Last Samurai, and 300. Many conservatives loved them because they depicted resistance to tyranny and celebrated “freedom.” But the “liberty” of these films was not individual liberty per se so much as the freedom of the tribe to behave according to its own relativistic values. The clans of the Scottish Highlands were hardly constitutional republics. Tom Cruise portrays the proto-fascist culture of the Meiji-era samurai as morally superior to that of the decadent West, echoing the German fascination with the Orient. And the Spartans of 300 are a eugenic (and vaguely homoerotic) warrior caste that would have had Hitler applauding in the aisle, despite valiant efforts to Americanize them. There are defenses to be made of all these films, in that they represent forward progress in the unfolding Western tradition of liberty—and are also good fun. But the simple fact is that fascism is good box office and conservatives, with a few exceptions, are powerless to combat it because they don’t even know what they are seeing. Liberals, for their part, are quick to label any “glorification” of war or battle as fascistic. but they cheer nihilism and relativism in the name of individual freedom and rebellion at every turn. This is where conservatives should mount their counterattack, on the prevalent notion that we are all our own priests, and so long as we are faithful to our inner gods, we are authentic and good. Nonetheless, there’s no avoiding the fact that in terms of what we like on both big screens and small, we are all fascists now.

  THE POLITICS OF SEX

  Almost inexplicably, the popular perception these days is that Nazism was a kind of prudery run amok. Ken Starr, John Ashcroft, Laura Schlessinger, and Rick Santorum are just the latest symbols of a supposedly fascistic judgmentalism and hypocritical piety on the American right. In order to make these arguments stick, the debate is skewed so as to paint the champions of traditional morality as crypto-fascists, incapable of thinking maturely about sex.

  Arthur Miller’s propagandistic play The Crucible has become a classic statement of the left’s obsession with the “sex panic” of the right. Originally a thinly veiled indictment of McCarthyism, the story is now seen as one of puritanical Comstockery leading to an outbreak of murderous political paranoia. Powerful men who can’t handle sexually autonomous women use the tools of the state to launch a witch hunt. This tiresome meme has conquered the liberal imagination. J. Edgar Hoover is now universally depicted as a drag queen despite the flimsiest of evidence. Sidney Blumenthal has argued that anti-communism in the United States was little more than an example of homophobic panic by closeted gay right-wingers. Tim Robbins echoes a similar idea in his film The Cradle Will Rock, in which anti-communists and New Deal opponents are little more than sexually repressed fascists. Advocates of family values are now associated with fascism across the international left. “To favor the traditional family over here is to open oneself to the charge of being a Nazi,” explains a member of the Swedish parliament.

  There’s only one problem: none of this has anything to do with Nazism or fascism.

  The idea that “family values” are philosophically linked to fascism actually has a long pedigree, going back, again, to the Frankfurt School. Max Horkheimer argued that the root of Nazi totalitarianism was the family. But the truth is as close to the opposite as one can get. While Nazi rhetoric often paid homage to the family, the actual practice of Nazism was consonant with the progressive effort to invade the family, to breach its walls and shatter its autonomy. The tra-ditional family is the enemy of all political totalitarianisms because it i
s a bastion of loyalties separate from and prior to the state, which is why progressives are constantly trying to crack its outer shell.

  Let us start with the obvious. It would be funny were it not tragically necessary to note that the Nazis were not “pro-life.” Long before the Final Solution, the Nazis cast the aged, the infirm, and the handicapped onto the proverbial Spartan hillside. It is true that women were second-class citizens in the Nazi worldview, relegated to the status of breeders of the master race. But prudery and Judeo-Christian morality were hardly the justification for these policies.

  Nazi attitudes toward sexuality were grounded in unremitting hostility to Christianity and Judaism, both of which rejected the pagan view’ of sex as gratification, imbuing it instead with deep moral significance. Indeed, if you read Hitler’s Table Talk, it is almost impossible not to see him as an open-minded freethinker. “Marriage, as it is practiced in bourgeois society, is generally a thing against nature. But a meeting between two beings who complete one another, who are made for one another, borders already, in my conception, upon a miracle.” “Religion,” Hitler explains, “is in perpetual conflict with the spirit of free research.” “The catastrophe, for us, is that of being tied to a religion that rebels against all the joys of the senses.” Der Flihrer talks at length about his contempt for the social prejudices that look down on out-of-wedlock birth. “I love to see this display of health around me.”