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

by Jonah Goldberg

  After recovering from his wounds, Corporal Hitler found a post in Munich. His job was to monitor organizations promoting what the army considered to be "dangerous ideas"--pacifism, socialism, communism, and so on. In September 1919 he was ordered to attend a meeting of one of the countless new "workers' parties," which at the time was generally code for some flavor of socialism or communism.

  Young Hitler showed up at a meeting of the German Workers' Party ready to dismiss it as just another left-wing fringe group. But one of the speakers was Gottfried Feder, who had impressed Hitler when he'd heard him speak previously. The title of Feder's talk that night: "How and by What Means Is Capitalism to Be Eliminated?" Feder was a populist ideologue who had tried to ingratiate himself with the socialist revolutionaries who briefly turned Munich into a Soviet-style commune in 1919. Like all populists, Feder was obsessed with the distinction between "exploitative" and "productive" finance. Hitler instantly recognized the potential of Feder's ideas, which would appeal to the "little guy" in both cities and small towns. Hitler understood that, just as in America, the increasing power of big banks, corporations, and department stores fostered a sense of powerlessness among blue-collar workers, small farmers, and small-business owners. While Feder's economic proposals were little better than gibberish (as is almost always the case with populist economics), they were perfect for a party seeking to exploit resentment of national elites and, particularly, Jews. Rarely did a day go by that Feder didn't call Jews "parasites."

  Although Hitler was impressed by Feder's speech, he recounts in Mein Kampf that he remained underwhelmed by the German Workers' Party, considering it just another of those groups that "sprang out of the ground, only to vanish silently after a time." He did take a moment to dress down an attendee who dared to suggest that Bavaria should break from Germany and join Austria--a comment that was bound to horrify a Pan-German like Hitler. Hitler's tirade so impressed some of the officials at the meeting that one of them--a meek-looking fellow named Anton Drexler--stopped him as he was leaving and gave him a copy of a party pamphlet.

  At 5:00 a.m. the next morning, Hitler was lying on his cot at the barracks watching the mice eat the bread crumbs he usually left for them. Unable to sleep, he took out the pamphlet and read it straight through. Written by Drexler himself and titled "My Political Awakening," the autobiographical booklet revealed to Hitler that there were others who thought as he did, that his story was not unique, and that there was a ready-made ideology available for him to adopt and exploit.

  Even if Hitler's nationalism, populism, anti-Semitism, and non-Marxist socialism took more time to germinate, the relevant point is that what came to be known as Hitlerism or Nazism was already a significant current in Germany and elsewhere in Central Europe (particularly Czechoslovakia). Hitler would give these inchoate passions a name and a focus, but the raw materials were already there. Unlike Mussolini's Fascism, which was mostly a creation of his own intellect, Hitler's ideology came to him largely preassembled. Mussolini's Fascism, moreover, played no discernible role in the formation of early Nazi ideology or Hitler's embryonic political vision. What Hitler would later confess to admiring about Mussolini was Il Duce's success, his tactics, his Sorelian exploitation of political myth, his salesmanship. These ideas and movements were swirling all around Europe and Germany. What the masses didn't need was some new doctrine. What they needed was someone who could pull them into action. "Action" was the watchword across the Western world. Action got things done. That's what Hitler realized when he read that pamphlet on his cot in the predawn hours: his time had come. He would become National Socialism's greatest salesman, not its creator.

  Even while Hitler was still pondering whether he should join the German Workers' Party, he received a membership card in the mail. He'd been recruited! He was given party number 555. Needless to say, it wasn't long before he was running the show. It turned out that this antisocial, autodidactic misanthrope was the consummate party man. He had all the gifts a cultish revolutionary party needed: oratory, propaganda, an eye for intrigue, and an unerring instinct for populist demagoguery. When he joined the party, its treasury was a cigar box with less than twenty marks in it. At the height of his success the party controlled most of Europe and was poised to rule the world.

  In 1920 the Nazi Party issued its "unalterable" and "eternal" party platform, co-written by Hitler and Anton Drexler and dedicated to the overarching principle that the "common good must come before self-interest." Aside from the familiar appeals to Germany for the Germans and denunciation of the Treaty of Versailles, the most striking thing about the platform was its concerted appeal to socialistic and populist economics, including providing a livelihood for citizens; abolition of income from interest; the total confiscation of war profits; the nationalization of trusts; shared profits with labor; expanded old-age pensions; "communalization of department stores" the execution of "usurers" regardless of race; and the outlawing of child labor. (The full platform can be found in the Appendix.)

  So, we are supposed to see a party in favor of universal education, guaranteed employment, increased entitlements for the aged, the expropriation of land without compensation, the nationalization of industry, the abolition of market-based lending--a.k.a. "interest slavery"--the expansion of health services, and the abolition of child labor as objectively and obviously right-wing.

  What the Nazis pursued was a form of anticapitalist, antiliberal, and anti-conservative communitarianism encapsulated in the concept of Volksgemeinschaft, or "people's community." The aim was to transcend class differences, but only within the confines of the community. "We have endeavored," Hitler explained, "to depart from the external, the superficial, endeavored to forget social origin, class, profession, fortune, education, capital and everything that separates men, in order to reach that which binds them together."13 Again and again, Nazi propaganda, law, and literature insisted that none of the "conservative" or "bourgeois" categories should hold any German back from fulfilling his potential in the new Reich. In a perversely ironic way, the Nazi pitch was often crafted in the same spirit as liberal sentiments like "a mind is a terrible thing to waste" and "the content of their character." This sounds silly in the American context because to us race has always been the more insurmountable barrier than class. But in Germany class was always the crucial dividing line, and Nazi anti-Semitism provided one of many unifying concepts that all "true" Germans, rich and poor, could rally around. The tectonic divide between the National Socialists and the communists wasn't over economics at all--though there were doctrinal differences--but over the question of nationalism. Marx's most offending conviction to Hitler was the idea that the "workingmen have no country."

  The Nazis may not have called themselves left-wingers, but that's almost irrelevant. For one thing, the left today--and yesterday--constantly ridicules ideological labels, insisting that words like "liberal" and "left" don't really mean anything. How many times have we heard some prominent leftist insist that he is really a "progressive" or that she "doesn't believe in labels"? For another, the "social space" the Nazis were fighting to control was on the left. Not only the conventional analysis typified by Shirer but most Marxist analysis concedes that the Nazis aimed first to "destroy the left" before they went after the traditionalist right. The reason for this was that the Nazis could more easily defeat opponents on the left because they appealed to the same social base, used the same language, and thought in the same categories. A similar phenomenon was on display during the 1960s, when the New Left in the United States--and throughout Europe--attacked the liberal center while largely ignoring the traditionalist right. In American universities, for example, conservative faculty were often left alone, while liberal academics were hounded relentlessly.

  The Nazis' ultimate aim was to transcend both left and right, to advance a "Third Way" that broke with both categories. But in the real world the Nazis seized control of the country by dividing, conquering, and then replacing the left.

&nb
sp; This is the monumental fact of the Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our collective memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists. Yes, they were also nationalists, which in the context of the 1930s was considered a rightist position, but this was at a time when the "internationalism" of the Soviet Union defined all nationalisms as right-wing. Surely we've learned from the parade of horribles on offer in the twentieth century that nationalism isn't inherently right-wing--unless we're prepared to call Stalin, Castro, Arafat, Chavez, Guevara, Pol Pot, and, for that matter, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, right-wingers. Stalin himself ruled as a nationalist, invoking "Mother Russia" and dubbing World War II the "great patriotic war." By 1943 he had even replaced the old Communist anthem ("The Internationale") with one that was thoroughly Russian. Moreover, historically, nationalism was a liberal-left phenomenon. The French Revolution was a nationalist revolution, but it was also seen as a left-liberal one for breaking with the Catholic Church and empowering the people. German Romanticism as championed by Gottfried Herder and others was seen as both nationalistic and liberal. The National Socialist movement was part of this revolutionary tradition.

  But even if Nazi nationalism was in some ill-defined but fundamental way right-wing, this only meant that Nazism was right-wing socialism. And right-wing socialists are still socialists. Most of the Bolshevik revolutionaries Stalin executed were accused of being not conservatives or monarchists but rightists--that is, right-wing socialists. Any deviation from the Soviet line was automatic proof of rightism. Ever since, we in the West have apishly mimicked the Soviet usage of such terms without questioning the propagandistic baggage attached.

  The Nazi ideologist--and Hitler rival--Gregor Strasser put it quite succinctly: "We are socialists. We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today's capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, its unfair wage system, its immoral way of judging the worth of human beings in terms of their wealth and their money, instead of their responsibility and their performance, and we are determined to destroy this system whatever happens!"14

  Hitler is just as straightforward in Mein Kampf. He dedicates an entire chapter to the Nazis' deliberate exploitation of socialist and communist imagery, rhetoric, and ideas and how this marketing confused both liberals and communists. The most basic example is the Nazi use of the color red, which was firmly associated with Bolshevism and socialism. "We chose red for our posters after particular and careful deliberation...so as to arouse their attention and tempt them to come to our meetings...so that in this way we got a chance of talking to the people." The Nazi flag--a black swastika inside a white disk in a sea of red--was explicitly aimed at attracting communists. "In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of Aryan man."15

  The Nazis borrowed whole sections from the communist playbook. Party members--male and female--were referred to as comrades. Hitler recalls how his appeals to "class-conscious proletarians" who wanted to strike out against the "monarchist, reactionary agitation with the fists of the proletariat" were successful in drawing countless communists to their meetings.16 Sometimes the communists came with orders to smash up the place. But the Reds often refused to riot on command because they had been won over to the National Socialist cause. In short, the battle between the Nazis and the communists was a case of two dogs fighting for the same bone.

  Nazism's one-nation politics by its very definition appealed to people from all walks of life. Professors, students, and civil servants were all disproportionately supportive of the Nazi cause. But it's important to get a sense of the kind of person who served as the rank-and-file Nazi, the young, often thuggish true believers who fought in the streets and dedicated themselves to the revolution. Patrick Leigh Fermor, a young Briton traveling in Germany shortly after Hitler came to power, met some of these men in a Rhineland workers' pub, still wearing their night-shift overalls. One of his new drinking buddies offered to let Fermor crash at his house for the night. When Fermor climbed the ladder to the attic to sleep in a guest bed, he found "a shrine to Hitleriana":

  The walls were covered with flags, photographs, posters, slogans and emblems. His SA uniforms hung neatly ironed on a hanger...When I said that it must be rather claustrophobic with all that stuff on the walls, he laughed and sat down on the bed, and said: "Mensch! You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers, sickles, pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World Unite!...Then, suddenly when Hitler came to power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me. All of a sudden!" He snapped his fingers in the air. "And here I am!"...Had a lot of people done the same, then? "Millions! I tell you, I was astonished how easily they all changed sides!"17

  Even after Hitler seized power and became more receptive to pleas from businessmen--the demands of his war machine required no less--party propaganda still aimed relentlessly at workers. Hitler always emphasized (and grossly exaggerated) his status as an "ex-worker." He would regularly appear in shirtsleeves and spoke informally to blue-collar Germans: "I was a worker in my youth like you, slowly working my way upward by industry, by study, and I think I can say as well by hunger." As the self-described Volkskanzler, or "people's chancellor," he played all the populist notes. One of his first official acts was to refuse to accept an honorary doctorate. A Nazi catechism asked, "What professions has Adolf Hitler had?" The expected reply: "Adolf Hitler was a construction worker, an artist, and a student." In 1939, when the new Chancellery was built, Hitler greeted the construction workers first and gave the stonemasons pictures of himself and fruit baskets. He promised "people's cars" for every worker. He failed to deliver them on time, but they eventually became the Volkswagens we all know today. The Nazis were brilliant at arguing for a one-nation politics in which a farmer and a businessman were valued equally. At Nazi rallies, organizers never allowed an aristocrat to speak unless he was paired with a humble farmer from the sticks.18

  What distinguished Nazism from other brands of socialism and communism was not so much that it included more aspects from the political right (though there were some). What distinguished Nazism was that it forthrightly included a worldview we now associate almost completely with the political left: identity politics. This was what distinguished Nazism from doctrinaire communism, and it seems hard to argue that the marriage of one leftist vision to another can somehow produce right-wing progeny. If this was how the world worked, we would have to label nationalist-socialist organizations like the PLO and the Cuban Communist Party right-wing.

  Insight into the mind-set of early members of the Nazi Party comes in the form of a series of essays written for a contest conducted by Theodore Abel, an impressively clever American sociologist. In 1934 Abel took out an ad in the Nazi Party journal asking "old fighters" to submit essays explaining why they had joined. He restricted his request to "old fighters" because so many opportunists had joined the party after Hitler's rise. The essays were combined in the fascinating book Why Hitler Came Into Power. One essayist, a coal miner, explained that he was "puzzled by the denial of race and nation implicit in Marxism. Though I was interested in the betterment of the workingman's plight, I rejected [Marxism] unconditionally. I often asked myself why socialism had to be tied up with internationalism--why it could not work as well or better in conjunction with nationalism." A railroad worker concurred, "I shuddered at the thought of Germany in the grip of Bolshevism. The slogan 'Workers of the World Unite!' made no sense to me. At the same time, however, National Socialism, with its promise of a community...barring all class struggle, attracted me profoundly." A third worker wrote that he embraced the Nazis because of their "uncompromising will to stamp out the class struggle, snobberies of caste and party hatreds. The movement bore the true message of socialism to the German workingman."19

  One of the great ironies of history is that the more sim
ilar two groups are, the greater the potential for them to hate each other. God seems to have a particular fondness for contradicting the cliched notion that increased "understanding" between groups or societies will breed peace. Israelis and Palestinians, Greeks and Turks, Indians and Pakistanis understand each other very well, and yet they would probably take exception to this liberal rule of thumb. Academics who share nearly identical worldviews, incomes, and interests are notoriously capable of despising each other--even as they write learned papers about how increased understanding brings comity. So it was with Communists and Nazis between the two world wars.

  The notion that communism and Nazism are polar opposites stems from the deeper truth that they are in fact kindred spirits. Or, as Richard Pipes has written, "Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism."20 Both ideologies are reactionary in the sense that they try to re-create tribal impulses. Communists champion class, Nazis race, fascists the nation. All such ideologies--we can call them totalitarian for now--attract the same types of people.

  Hitler's hatred for communism has been opportunistically exploited to signify ideological distance, when in fact it indicated the exact opposite. Today this maneuver has settled into conventional wisdom. But what Hitler hated about Marxism and communism had almost nothing to do with those aspects of communism that we would consider relevant, such as economic doctrine or the need to destroy the capitalists and bourgeoisie. In these areas Hitler largely saw eye to eye with socialists and communists. His hatred stemmed from his paranoid conviction that the people calling themselves communists were in fact in on a foreign, Jewish conspiracy. He says this over and over again in Mein Kampf. He studied the names of communists and socialists, and if they sounded Jewish, that's all he needed to know. It was all a con job, a ruse, to destroy Germany. Only "authentically" German ideas from authentic Germans could be trusted. And when those Germans, like Feder or Strasser, proposed socialist ideas straight out of the Marxist playbook, he had virtually no objection whatsoever. Hitler never cared much about economics anyway. He always considered it "secondary." What mattered to him was German identity politics.