Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

by Jonah Goldberg

  In Germany the aristocracy and business elite were generally repulsed by Hitler and the Nazis. But when Hitler demonstrated that he wasn't going away, these same elites decided it would be wise to put down some insurance money on the upstarts. This may be reprehensible, but these decisions weren't driven by anything like an ideological alliance between capitalism and Nazism. Corporations in Germany, like their counterparts today, tended to be opportunistic, not ideological.

  The Nazis rose to power exploiting anticapitalist rhetoric they indisputably believed. Even if Hitler was the nihilistic cipher many portray him as, it is impossible to deny the sincerity of the Nazi rank and file who saw themselves as mounting a revolutionary assault on the forces of capitalism. Moreover, Nazism also emphasized many of the themes of later New Lefts in other places and times: the primacy of race, the rejection of rationalism, an emphasis on the organic and holistic--including environmentalism, health food, and exercise--and, most of all, the need to "transcend" notions of class.

  For these reasons, Hitler deserves to be placed firmly on the left because first and foremost he was a revolutionary. Broadly speaking, the left is the party of change, the right the party of the status quo. On this score, Hitler was in no sense, way, shape, or form a man of the right. There are few things he believed more totally than that he was a revolutionary. And his followers agreed. Yet for more than a generation to call Hitler a revolutionary has been a form of heresy, particularly for Marxist and German historians, since for the left revolution is always good--the inevitable forward motion of the Hegelian wheel of history. Even if their bloody tactics are (sometimes) to be lamented, revolutionaries move history forward. (For conservatives, in contrast, revolutions are almost always bad--unless, as in the case of the United States, you are trying to conserve the victories and legacy of a previous revolution.)

  You can see why the Marxist left would resist the idea that Hitler was a revolutionary. Because if he was, then either Hitler was a force for good or revolutions can be bad. And yet how can you argue that Hitler wasn't a revolutionary in the leftist mold? Hitler despised the bourgeoisie, traditionalists, aristocrats, monarchists, and all believers in the established order. Early in his political career, he "had become repelled by the traditionalist values of the German bourgeoisie," writes John Lukacs in The Hitler of History. The Nazi writer Hanns Johst's play Der Konig centers on a heroic revolutionary who meets a tragic end because he's betrayed by reactionaries and the bourgeoisie. The protagonist takes his own life rather than abandon his revolutionary principles. When Hitler met Johst (whom he later named poet laureate of the Third Reich) in 1923, he told him that he'd seen the play seventeen times and that he suspected his own life might end the same way.8

  As David Schoenbaum has noted, Hitler viewed the bourgeoisie in almost the exact same terms as Lenin did. "Let us not deceive ourselves," Hitler declared. "Our bourgeoisie is already worthless for any noble human endeavor." Several years after he was firmly in power, he explained: "We did not defend Germany against Bolshevism back then because we were not intending to do anything like conserve a bourgeois world or go so far as to freshen it up. Had communism really intended nothing more than a certain purification by eliminating isolated rotten elements from among the ranks of our so-called 'upper ten thousand' or our equally worthless Philistines, one could have sat back quietly and looked on for a while."9

  A related definition of the right is that it is not merely in favor of preserving the status quo but affirmatively reactionary, seeking to restore the old order. This perspective obviously leaves much to be desired since most libertarians are considered members of the right and few would call such activists reactionaries. As we shall see, there is a sense in which Hitler was a reactionary insofar as he was trying to overthrow the entire millennium-old Judeo-Christian order to restore the paganism of antiquity--a mission shared by some on the left but none on the right today.

  "Reactionary" is one of those words smuggled in from Marxist talking points that we now accept uncritically. Reactionaries in Marxist and early-twentieth-century progressive parlance were those who wanted to return to either the monarchy or, say, the Manchester Liberalism of the nineteenth century. They wished to restore, variously, the authority of God, Crown, patriotism, or the market--not Wotan and Valhalla. It is for this reason that Hitler saw himself in an existential battle with the forces of reaction. "We had no wish to resurrect the dead from the old Reich which had been ruined through its own blunders, but to build a new State," Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. And elsewhere: "Either the German youth will one day create a new State founded on the racial idea or they will be the last witnesses of the complete breakdown and death of the bourgeois world."10

  Such radicalism--succeed or destroy it all!--explains why Hitler, the anti-Bolshevik, often spoke with grudging admiration of Stalin and the communists--but never had anything but derision for "reactionaries" who wanted merely to "turn back the clock" to the nineteenth century. Indeed, he considered the German Social Democrats' greatest achievement to be the destruction of the monarchy in 1918.

  Consider the symbolism of Horst Wessel, the party's most famous martyr, whose story was transformed into the anthem of the Nazi struggle, played along with "Deutschland uber Alles" at all official events. The lyrics of the "Horst Wessel Song" refer to Nazi "comrades" shot at by the "Red Front and reactionaries."

  If we put aside for a moment the question of whether Hitlerism was a phenomenon of the right, what is indisputable is that Hitler was in no way conservative--a point scholars careful with their words always underscore. Certainly, to suggest that Hitler was a conservative in any sense related to American conservatism is lunacy. American conservatives seek to preserve both traditional values and the classical liberal creed enshrined in the Constitution. American conservatism straddles these two distinct but overlapping libertarian and traditionalist strains, whereas Hitler despised both of them.

  THE RISE OF A NATIONAL SOCIALIST

  The perception of Hitler and Nazism as right-wing rests on more than a historiographical argument or Hitler's animosity to traditionalists. The left has also used Hitler's racism, his alleged status as a capitalist, and his hatred of Bolshevism to hang the conservative label not only on Hitler and Nazism but on generic fascism as well. We can best address the merits--or lack thereof--of these points by briefly revisiting the story of Hitler's rise. Obviously, Hitler's personal tale has been so thoroughly dissected by historians and Hollywood that it doesn't make sense to repeat it all here. But some essential facts and themes deserve more attention than they usually get.

  Hitler was born in Austria, just over the border from Bavaria. Like that of many early Nazis, his youth was marked by a certain amount of envy toward the "true" Germans just across the border. (Many of the first Nazis were men from humble backgrounds in the hinterlands determined to "prove" their "Germanness" by being more "German" than anyone else.) This attitude flowed easily into anti-Semitism. Who better to hate than the Jews, particularly the successfully assimilated Germanized ones? Who were they to pretend they were Germans? Still, exactly when and why Hitler became an anti-Semite is unknown. Hitler himself claimed that he didn't hate Jews as a child; yet youthful contemporaries later recalled that he'd been an anti-Semite for as long as they could remember. The only reason Hitler might have been reluctant to admit he was a lifelong Jew hater would be that doing so would undermine his claims to have deduced the evilness of Jews from careful study and mature observation.

  This introduces one of the most significant differences between Mussolini and Hitler. For most of his career, Mussolini considered anti-Semitism a silly distraction and, later, a necessary sop to his overbearing German patron. Jews could be good socialists or fascists if they thought and behaved like good socialists or fascists. Because Hitler thought explicitly in terms of what we would today call identity politics, Jews were irredeemably Jews, no matter how well they spoke German. His allegiance, like that of all practitioners of identity polit
ics, was to the iron cage of immutable identity.

  In Mein Kampf, Hitler declares that he is a nationalist but not a patriot, a distinction with profound implications. Patriots revere the ideas, institutions, and traditions of a particular country and its government. The watchwords for nationalists are "blood," "soil," "race," "Volk," and so forth. As a revolutionary nationalist, Hitler believed the entire bourgeois edifice of modern German culture was hollowed out by political or spiritual corruption. As a result, he believed Germany needed to rediscover its pre-Christian authenticity. This was the logical extension of identity politics--the idea that experience of a personal quest for meaning in racial conceptions of authenticity could be applied to the entire community.

  It was this mind-set that made Pan-Germanism so attractive to a young Hitler. Pan-Germanism took many forms, but in Austria the basic animating passion was a decidedly un-conservative antipathy toward the liberal, multiethnic pluralism of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which accepted Jews, Czechs, and the rest of the non-Teutonic rabble as equal citizens. Some Pan-German "nationalists" wanted to break out of the Empire entirely. Others simply believed that the Germans should be first among equals.

  Of course, young Hitler's nationalist inferiority complex had to compete with a host of other resentments swirling around in his psyche. Indeed, no psyche in human history has been so thoroughly mined for various explanatory pathologies, and few subjects have offered a richer lode. "The search for Hitler," writes Ron Rosenbaum in Explaining Hitler, "has apprehended not one coherent, consensus image of Hitler but rather many different Hitlers, competing Hitlers, conflicting embodiments of competing visions." Psychologists and historians have argued that Hitler's personality stems from the fact(s) that he was abused by his father, had a history of incest in his family, was a sadomasochist, a coprophiliac, a homosexual, or was part Jewish (or feared that he was). These theories vary in plausibility. But what is certain is that Hitler's megalomania was the product of a rich complex of psychological maladies and impulses. Taken as a whole, they point to a man who felt he had much to compensate for and whose egocentrism knew no bounds. "I have to attain immortality," Hitler once confessed, "even if the whole German nation perishes in the process."11

  Hitler suffered from an enormous intellectual inferiority complex. A lifelong underachiever, he was eternally bitter about getting poor grades in school. More important, perhaps, he resented his father for any number of perceived offenses. Alois Hitler--born Alois Schicklgruber--worked for the Austrian civil service, which is to say for the Empire and against "German interests." Alois wanted Adolf to be not an artist but a civil servant like himself. Alois may also have been partly Jewish, a possibility that kept Hitler's own racial history a state secret when he became dictator.

  Hitler defied his father, moving to Vienna in hopes of attending the Academy of Fine Arts, but his application was rejected. On his second try, his drawings were so bad he wasn't even allowed to apply. Partly thanks to some money he inherited from an aunt, Hitler slowly clawed out a professional life as a tradesman-artist (he was never a housepainter, as his enemies claimed). He mostly copied older paintings and drawings and sold them to merchants as frame fillers, place holders, and postcards. Constantly reading--mostly German mythology and pseudo history--Hitler ignored Vienna's cafe society, puritanically refusing to drink, smoke, or dance (women in his mind were little more than terrifying syphilis carriers). In one of his few moments of understatement, he wrote in Mein Kampf, "I believe that those who knew me in those days took me for an eccentric."

  It was in Vienna that Hitler was first introduced to National Socialism. Vienna at the turn of the century was the center of the universe for those eager to learn more about Aryan mumbo jumbo, the mystical powers of the Hindu swastika, and the intricacies of Cosmic Ice Theory. Hitler swam in these bohemian waters, often staying up nights writing plays about pagan Bavarians bravely fighting off invading Christian priests trying to impose foreign beliefs on Teutonic civilization. He also spent days wandering the poorer sections of the city, only to come home to work on grandiose city plans that included more progressive housing for the working class. Indeed, he would rail against the unearned wealth of the city's aristocrats and the need for social justice.

  Most of all, Hitler immersed himself in the burgeoning field of "scientific" anti-Semitism. "Once, when passing through the inner City," he wrote in Mein Kampf, "I suddenly encountered a phenomenon in a long caftan and wearing black side-locks. My first thought was: Is this a Jew? They certainly did not have this appearance in Linz. I watched the man stealthily and cautiously; but the longer I gazed at the strange countenance and examined it feature by feature, the more the question shaped itself in my brain: Is this a German?" Hitler the scholar continues: "As was always my habit with such experiences, I turned to books for help in removing my doubts. For the first time in my life I bought myself some anti-Semitic pamphlets for a few pence."

  After making a careful study of the subject, he concluded in Mein Kampf, "I could no longer doubt that there was not a question of Germans who happened to be of a different religion but rather that there was question of an entirely different people. For as soon as I began to investigate the matter and observe the Jews, then Vienna appeared to me in a different light. Wherever I now went I saw Jews, and the more I saw of them the more strikingly and clearly they stood out as a different people from the other citizens."

  The leading intellectual in Vienna touting "Teutonomania"--the neo-Romantic "discovery" of German exceptionalism very similar to some forms of Afrocentrism today--was Georg Ritter von Schonerer, whom Hitler followed closely and whom he later called a "profound thinker." A drunk and a brawler, as well as a perfectly loutish anti-Semite and anti-Catholic, von Schonerer was something of a product of Bismarck's Kulturkampf, insisting that Catholics convert to German Lutheranism and even suggesting that parents reject Christian names in favor of purely "Teutonic" ones and calling for a ban on interracial marriages in order to keep Slavs and Jews from spoiling the genetic stock. And if Germans couldn't unify into a single, racially pure German fatherland, the very least that could be done was to adopt a policy of racial preferences and affirmative action for Germans.

  But Hitler's true hero in those days was the burgomaster of Vienna himself, Dr. Karl Lueger. The head of the Christian Social Party, Lueger was a master politician-demagogue, a Viennese Huey Long of sorts, who championed--usually in explosive, sweaty tirades--a mixture of "municipal socialism," populism, and anti-Semitism. His infamous calls for anti-Jewish boycotts and his warnings to Vienna's Jews to behave themselves or end up like their co-religionists in Russia were reported in newspapers around the world. Indeed, the emperor had overruled Lueger's election twice, recognizing that he could only mean headaches for those who favored the status quo.

  In 1913 Hitler inherited the remainder of his father's estate and moved to Munich, fulfilling his dream of living in a "real" German city and avoiding military service for the Hapsburgs. These were among his happiest days. He spent much of his time studying architecture and delving deeper into pseudo-historical Aryan theories and anti-Semitism (particularly the writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain). He also renewed his study of Marxism, which both fascinated and repulsed him, appreciating its ideas but becoming utterly convinced that Marx was the architect of a Jewish plot. At the outbreak of World War I, Hitler immediately petitioned King Ludwig III of Bavaria for permission to serve in the Bavarian army, which, after some entanglement with Austrian authorities, was granted. Hitler served honorably during the war. He was promoted to corporal and received the Iron Cross.

  As countless others have observed, World War I gave birth to all the horrors of the twentieth century. A host of banshees were let loose upon the Western world, shattering old dogmas of religion, democracy, capitalism, monarchy, and mankind's role in the world. The war fueled widespread hatred, suspicion, and paranoia toward elites and established institutions. For belligerents on both sides, economic plan
ning lent political and intellectual credibility to state-directed war socialism. And, of course, it led to the enthronement of revolutionaries throughout Europe: Lenin in Russia, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany.

  Not surprisingly, Hitler's experience during the war was very similar to Mussolini's. Hitler witnessed men of high and low station fighting side by side in the trenches. These men experienced the corruption and duplicity--real and perceived--of their own government.

  Hitler's hatred of communists was also given new heat and strength during the war, thanks largely to antiwar agitation on the home front. German civilians starved along with the troops. They made bread with sawdust and turned pets into meals. Cats were called "roof rabbits." German Reds fed off this suffering, organizing strikes against the government and demanding peace with the Soviets and the establishment of German socialism. Hitler, who as it would turn out had no problem with German socialism, saw communist antiwar mobilization as treason twice over: it not only betrayed the troops at the front but was done at the behest of a foreign power. Infuriated by the fifth columnists, he railed, "What was the army fighting for if the homeland itself no longer wanted victory? For whom the immense sacrifices and privations? The soldier is expected to fight for victory and the homeland goes on strike against it!"12

  When the Germans surrendered, Hitler and countless other soldiers famously protested that they had been "stabbed in the back" by a corrupt democratic government--the "November criminals"--that no longer represented the authentic needs or aspirations of the German nation. Hitler was recovering in a hospital, stricken with temporary blindness, when news of the armistice was announced. For him it was a transformative event, a moment of religious vision and divine calling. "During those nights my hatred increased, hatred for those responsible for this dastardly crime," he wrote. The perpetrators in his mind were a diverse coalition of capitalists, communists, and cowards, all of whom were fronts for a Jewish menace. Hitler's hatred for communism was not--as communists themselves have claimed--grounded in a rejection of socialist policies or notions of egalitarianism, progress, or social solidarity. It was bound up inextricably with a sense of betrayal of German honor and pathological anti-Semitism. This is what launched Hitler's political career.