Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
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For more than sixty years, liberals have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream of the political right. And yet with the notable and complicated exceptions of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, no top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger. All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment--John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke--and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism.22 Meanwhile, the ranks of left-wing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition. And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word "Marxist" to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents. The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values--even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments.
In a seminar there may be important distinctions to be made between, say, Foucault's "enterprise of Unreason," Derrida's tyrannical logocentrism, and Hitler's "revolt against reason." But such distinctions rarely translate beyond ivy-covered walls--and they are particularly meaningless to a movement that believes action is more important than ideas. Deconstruction, existentialism, postmodernism, Pragmatism, relativism: all of these ideas had the same purpose--to erode the iron chains of tradition, dissolve the concrete foundations of truth, and firebomb the bunkers where the defenders of the ancien regime still fought and persevered. These were ideologies of the "movement." The late Richard Rorty admitted as much, conflating Nietzsche and Heidegger with James and Dewey as part of the same grand project.
Few were more adept at using the jargon of the "movement" than fascists and pre-fascists. Hitler uses the phrase "the Movement" over two hundred times in Mein Kampf. A Nazi Party journal was called Die Bewegung (The Movement). The word "movement" itself is instructive. Movement, unlike progress, doesn't imply a fixed destination. Rather, it takes it as a given that any change is better. As Allan Bloom and others have noted, the core passion of fascism was self-assertion. The Nazis may have been striving for a utopian Thousand-Year Reich, but their first instincts were radical: Destroy what exists. Tear it down. Eradicate "das System"--another term shared by the New Left and fascists alike. "I have a barbaric concept of socialism," a young Mussolini once said. "I understand it as the greatest act of negation and destruction...Onward, you new barbarians!...Like all barbarians you are the harbingers of a new civilization."23 Hitler's instincts were even more destructive. Even before he ordered the obliteration of Paris and issued his scorched-earth policy on German soil, his agenda was to rip apart everything the bourgeoisie had created, to destroy the reactionaries, to create new art and architecture, new culture, new religion, and, most of all, new Germans. This project could only commence upon the ashes of das System. And if he couldn't create, he could take solace in destroying.
How exactly is this different from the "Burn, baby, burn!" ethos of the late 1960s?
THE ACTION CULT
Five months after the Cornell takeover, the Weathermen gathered in Chicago's Lincoln Park. Armed with baseball bats, helmets, and, in the words of the historian Jim Miller, "apparently bottomless reserves of arrogance and self-loathing," they prepared to "smash through their bourgeois inhibitions and 'tear pig city apart' in a 'national action' they called 'The Days of Rage.'" Like Brownshirts and fascist squadristi, they smashed windows, destroyed property, and terrorized the bourgeoisie. They'd already bloodied themselves the previous year at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where, the Weathermen claimed, their violence had done "more damage to the ruling class...than any mass, peaceful gathering this country has ever seen."24
The desire to destroy is a natural outgrowth of the cult of action. After all, if you are totally committed to revolutionary change, any boundaries you run into--the courts, the police, the rule of law--must be either converted, co-opted, or destroyed. All fascists are members of the cult of action. Fascism's appeal was that it would get things done. Make the trains run on time, put people to work, get the nation on the move: these are sentiments sewn into the fiber of every fascist movement. The fascist state of mind can best be described as "Enough talk, more action!" Close the books, get out of the library, get moving. Take action! What kind of action? Direct action! Social action! Mass action! Revolutionary action! Action, action, action.
Communists loved action, too. That's not surprising considering the family bonds between communism and fascism. But fascists valued action more. Communism had a playbook. Fascism had a hurry-up offense, calling its plays on the field. Sure, fascism had its theorists, but in the streets, fascists cared about victory more than doctrine. "In a way utterly unlike the classical 'isms,'" writes Robert O. Paxton, "the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is 'true' insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood." Or as Mussolini himself put it in his "Postulates of the Fascist Program," fascists "do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form."25
The word "activist" enters the English language at the turn of the century with the rise of pragmatic Progressivism. The early fascist intellectuals fancied themselves "activist philosophers." Mussolini, while still a socialist in good standing, wrote in 1908, "The plebs, who are excessively Christianized and humanitarian, will never understand that a higher degree of evil is necessary so that the Superman might thrive...The Superman knows revolt alone. Everything that exists must be destroyed." This represented an early marriage of Leninism and Nietzsche. Instead of the individual superman, the vanguard of the revolution would be the new breed of supermen. The Nazis were likewise inspired by Nietzsche but also by the Romantics, who believed that the spirit of the act is more important than the idea behind it. This was the Nazi "Cult of the Deed." The French fascists even dubbed their movement the Action Francaise, putting action on an equal footing with nation. Mussolini defined both socialism and fascism as "movement, struggle, and action." One of his favorite slogans was "To live is not to calculate, but to act!" Hitler mocked those who believed that arguments and reason should trump the naked power of the people. When four renowned economists sent Hitler a letter disputing his socialist schemes, Hitler responded, "Where are your storm troopers? Go on the street, go into folk meetings and try to see your standpoint through. Then we'll see who is right--we or you."26
Sixties radicalism was suffused with an identical spirit. The early intellectuals of the SDS--centered on the Institute for Policy Studies (a think tank today closely affiliated with the left wing of the Democratic Party)--were adherents of what they called "existential pragmatism," a blend in equal parts of Jean-Paul Sartre and John Dewey. "I'm a nihilist! I'm proud of it, proud of it!" shrieked a delegate to a 1967 meeting of the Princeton SDS. "Tactics? It's too late...Let's break what we can. Make as many answer as we can. Tear them apart."27
Mark Rudd, the chairman of the SDS at Columbia University and the leader of the takeover there in 1968, represented the ascendancy of what SDS "moderates" called the "action freaks" or the "action faction." A voluptuary of violence, Rudd subscribed to the Sorelian view that "direct action" would "raise consciousness" (then a freshly minted phrase). When the "moderates" told him the movement needed more organization and outreach, he responded, "Organizing is just another word for going slow."28 Mussolini, who divided his squadristi into "action squads," could certainly sympathize.
As the reader may recall from our earlier discussion, it was Georges Sorel, the French engineer turned intellectual, who pioneered the idea that the masses needed myths to be moved to action. Recognizing that Marxism, like all social science, rarely panned out in real life, Sorel married William James's will to believe to Nietzsche's will to power and applied them to mass psychology. Revolutionaries didn't need to understand the reality of Marxism; they needed to believe in the myth of Marxism (or nationalism, syndicalism, fa
scism, and so on). "[T]o concern oneself with social science is one thing and to mold consciousness is another," he wrote.29 Passion, not facts, was the fuel for action. "It is faith that moves mountains, not reason," Mussolini explained in a 1932 interview (echoing Woodrow Wilson's Leaders of Men). "Reason is a tool, but it can never be the motive force of the crowd."
As the cross-burning incident at Cornell demonstrated, this preference for arousing passions at the expense of truth and reason defined the agenda of those fighting in the trenches. The practice of "lying for justice"--always acceptable on the communist left--was infused into the American New Left with new potency. The catchphrase at the Columbia uprising was "the issue is not the issue." No wonder, since the actual "issue"--building a gym in adjacent Harlem--was such small beer. For most of the activists, deceit wasn't the point. The point was passion, mobilization, action. As one SDS member proclaimed after he and his colleagues seized a building and kidnapped a dean, "We've got something going on here and now we've just got to find out what it is."30
BUILDING A POLITICS OF MEANING
The movement of the 1960s didn't start out destructive. In fact it started out brimming with high-minded idealism and hope. The Port Huron Statement, the signature document of the New Left, was for all its overwrought verbiage a well-intentioned statement of democratic optimism and admirable honesty. The authors--chief among them Tom Hayden--conceded that they were in fact bourgeois radicals, "bred in at least modest comfort." Driven by a sense of alienation from the American way of life, the young radicals craved a sense of unity and belonging, a rediscovery of personal meaning through collective political endeavors. Life seemed out of balance. "It is difficult today to give human meaning to the welter of facts that surrounds us," the authors proclaimed. Their aim was to create a political system that would restore "human meaning" (whatever that is). "The goal of man and society," they insisted, "should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic." This urge for self-assertion should be translated into a politics that could unleash the "unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity."31
At the time, youth activists found a willing ear in mainstream liberalism, which was preaching more and more about "national service," "sacrifice," and "action." John F. Kennedy--the youngest president ever elected, replacing the oldest president ever elected--simultaneously fed and appealed to this atmosphere at every turn. "Let the word go forth," he declared in his inaugural address with an almost authoritarian tempo, "that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace." His most famous line, "Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country," resonated with a generation desperate to find collective redemption in peace the way their parents had in war.
A subconscious current ran through the entire society, a quest for community and galvanizing leadership. As Tom Hayden noted in March 1962, "Three out of every four students believe 'that what the nation needs is a strong fearless leader in whom we can have faith.'" The embryonic youth movement hoped that Kennedy might prove to be that leader. The Peace Corps, and later VISTA, drew volunteers from the same wellspring of youthful activism. The University of California at Berkeley--the home of the first campus revolt of the 1960s--provided "the single most important source of volunteers for the Peace Corps in the early 1960s." When the Student Peace Union, or SPU, protested in front of the White House in February 1962, Kennedy ordered his kitchen to send the picketers coffee while the SPU proudly distributed copies of a New York Times article which claimed that the president was "listening" to them.32
And then there was the quest for community. The Red Diaper Babies of the 1960s inherited from their parents the same drive to create a new community organized around political aspirations. According to Todd Gitlin, the former president of the SDS, "There was a longing to 'unite the fragmented parts of personal history,' as The Port Huron Statement put it--to transcend the multiplicity and confusion of roles that become normal in a rationalized society: the rifts between work and family, between public and private, between strategic, calculating reason and spontaneous, expressive emotion." Gitlin continues, "At least for some of us, the circle evoked a more primitive fantasy of fusion with a symbolic, all-enfolding mother: the movement, the beloved community itself, where we might be able to find in Yale psychologist Kenneth Keniston's words, 'the qualities of warmth, communion, acceptedness, dependence and intimacy which existed in childhood.'" Mark Rudd likewise reminisced about the glories of the "communes" set up at Columbia: "For many it was the first communal experience of their lives--a far cry from the traditional lifestyle of Morningside Heights [at Columbia], that of individuals retiring into their rooms or apartments. One brother remarked to me, 'The communes are a better high than grass.'"33
The SDS's original mission wasn't radical; it was humane: community outreach. The first significant project the group undertook was the Economic Research and Action Project, begun in 1963. SDS members fanned out like knights from the roundtable in search of the grail of self-fulfillment by moving into inner-city ghettos in an earnest effort to politicize the poor, the oppressed, and the criminal underclass. It should tell us something that the most compelling catchphrase for liberals and leftists alike in the 1960s was "community": "community action," "community outreach," "communities of mutual respect."
As Alan Brinkley has noted, most of the protests and conflagrations of the 1960s had their roots in a desire to preserve or create communities. The ostensible issue that launched the takeover of Columbia University in 1968 was the encroachment of the campus into the black community. The administration's appeasement of Black Nationalists was done in the name of welcoming blacks to the Cornell community, and the Black Nationalists took up arms because they felt that assimilation into the Cornell community, or the white community generally, amounted to a negation of their own community--that is, "cultural genocide."
The Berkeley uprising was sparked in large part by the school's expansion into a tiny park that, at the end of the day, was just a place for hippies to hang out and feel comfortable in their own little community. Hippies may call themselves nonconformists, but as anyone who's spent time with them understands, they prize conformity above most things. The clothes and hair are ways of fitting in, of expressing shared values. Peace signs may symbolize something very different from the swastika, but both are a kind of insignia instantly recognizable to friend and foe alike. Regardless, the Berkeley protesters felt that their world, their folk community, was being destroyed by a cold, impersonal institution in the form of the university and, perhaps, modernity itself. "You've pushed us to the end of your civilization here, against the sea in Berkeley," shouted one of the leaders of the People's Park uprising. "Then you pushed us into a square-block area called People's Park. It was the last thing we had to defend, this square block of sanity amid all your madness...We are now homeless in your civilized world. We have become the great American gypsies, with only our mythology for a culture."34 This is precisely the sort of diatribe one might have heard from a bohemian Berliner in the 1920s.
There is no disputing that Nazism was an evil ideology from the first spark of its inception. But that does not mean that every adherent of Nazism was motivated by evil intent. Germans did not collectively decide to be Hollywood villains for all eternity. For millions of Germans the Nazis seemed to offer hope for community and meaning and authenticity, too. As Walter Laqueur wrote in Commentary shortly after the Cornell uprising:
Most of the basic beliefs and even the outward fashions of the present world-youth movements can be traced back to the period in Europe just before and after the First World War. The German Neue Schar of 1919 were the original hippies: long-haired, sandaled, unwashed, they castigated urban civilization, read Hermann Hesse and Indian philosophy, practiced free-love, and distributed in their m
eetings thousands of asters and chrysanthemums. They danced, sang to the music of the guitar, and attended lectures on the "Revolution of the Soul." The modern happening was born in 1910 in Trieste, Parma, Milan, and other Italian cities where the Futurists arranged public meetings to recite their poems, read their manifestos, and exhibit their ultra-modern paintings. No one over thirty, they demanded, should in future be active in politics...
For the historian of ideas, the back issues of the periodicals of the youth movements, turned yellow with age, make fascinating reading...It is indeed uncanny how despite all the historical differences, the German movement preempted so many of the issues agitating the American movement of today, as well as its literary fashions.35
Let us return to the example of Horst Wessel, the most famous "youth leader" of the early Nazi movement, "martyred" in his battle against the "Red Front and reactionaries" as immortalized in the Nazi "Horst Wessel Lied" ("Horst Wessel Song"). Wessel fit the 1960s ideal of a youth leader "from the streets" fighting for social justice. The son of a Lutheran pastor, he rebelled against his middle-class upbringing by dropping out of law school at twenty-one and enlisting in the Nazi storm troopers. He moved into a shady working-class part of town and, with his comrades, joined in bloody street battles against the communists. But Wessel also earned a reputation as an idealistic and sensitive proselytizer for the "revolution from below," which would usher in a united racial community transcending class differences. He walked the walk, living among criminals and the struggling proletariat: