Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
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Whoever is convinced that the Germany of today is not worthy of guarding the gates of true German culture must leave the theatre...the salons...the studies...their parents' houses...literature...the concert halls. He must take to the streets, he must really go to the people...in their tenements of desperation and woe, of criminality...where the SA is protecting German culture...Every beer hall brawl is a step forward for German culture, the head of every SA man bashed in by the communists is another victory for the people, for the Reich, for the house of German culture.36
An amateur poet, Wessel wrote a small tribute to the cause, "Die Fahne hoch" ("Raise High the Flag"), which promised, "The day breaks for freedom and for bread" and "Slavery will last only a short time longer." Around the same time, he fell in love with Erna Jaenicke, a prostitute whom he first met when she was being beaten up by pimps at a neighborhood bar. The two soon moved into a rundown boardinghouse together, over the protests of his mother. There's some evidence that Wessel grew increasingly disenchanted with the Nazis, realizing that the communists shared many of the same aspirations. He certainly became less active in the ranks of the Brownshirts. But whether he would have broken with them is unknowable because he died at the hands of the communists in 1930.
And that was all that really mattered to Joseph Goebbels, who translated Wessel's death into a propaganda coup. Overnight, Wessel was transfigured into a martyr to the Nazi cause, a Sorelian religious myth aimed at the idealistic and perplexed youth of the interwar years. Goebbels described him as a "Socialist Christ" and unleashed a relentless torrent of hagiography about Wessel's work with the poor. By the beginning of World War II, the places of his life and death in Berlin had been made into stations of the cross, and shrines had been erected at his birthplace in Vienna as well as his various homes in Berlin. His little poem was set to music and became the official Nazi anthem.
In the German feature film Hans Westmar: One of Many, the young protagonist, based on Wessel, peers from his fraternity window and declares to his privileged comrades: "The real battle is out there, not here with us. The enemy is on the march...I tell you, all of Germany will be won down there, on the street. And that's where we must be--with our people. We can no longer live in our ivory towers. We must join our hands in battle with the workers. There can't be classes anymore. We are workers too, workers of the mind, and our place now is next to those who work with their hands."37
Even if the propagandized Wessel were a complete fabrication--though it was not--the mythologized version illustrates the more interesting, and important, truth. Germany was filled with millions of young men who were receptive to the shining ideal that Wessel represented. Of course, the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis makes it difficult to see (and impossible to forgive), but the dream of a unified, classless Germany was deeply heartfelt by many Nazi joiners; and if reduced to that alone, it was not an evil dream at all.
But just as the line between "good" totalitarianism and bad is easily crossed, dreams can quickly become nightmares. Indeed, some dreams, given their nature, must eventually become nightmares. And for the Horst Wessels of the American New Left, whatever admirable idealism they might have had quickly and unavoidably degenerated into fascist thuggery.
The most famous of these figures was Tom Hayden. The son of middle-class parents in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park (near Father Coughlin's parish) and the chief author of The Port Huron Statement, Hayden played an admirable role in the early civil rights struggle in the South. He certainly believed himself to be a young democrat, but the seeds of a totalitarian bent were evident from his earliest days at the University of Michigan. In a speech delivered to the Michigan Union in 1962--which became a manifesto titled Student Social Action--Hayden proclaimed that the youth must wrest control of society from their elders. To this end the universities had to become incubators of revolutionary "social action." Richard Flacks, a young academic who would join Hayden in the new crusade along with his wife, Mickey, was thunderstruck. He went home and told his wife (an activist in a group called Women Strike for Peace), "Mickey, I've just seen the next Lenin!"38
By the end of the decade, Hayden had indeed become a forthright advocate of "Leninist" violence and mayhem, glorifying crime as political rebellion and openly supporting Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and, of course, the murderous Black Panthers. He helped write the "Berkeley Liberation Program." Among the highlights: "destroy the university unless it serves the people" "all oppressed people in jail are political prisoners and must be set free" "create a soulful socialism" "students must destroy the senile dictatorship of adult teachers." His "community outreach" in the slums of Newark preceded and in part fomented the horrific race riots there. "I had been fascinated by the simplicity and power of the Molotov cocktail during those days in Newark," he writes in his autobiography. Hayden hoped that with the use of violence, the New Left could create "liberated territories" in the ghettos and campus enclaves and use them to export revolution to the rest of the United States. At a 1967 panel discussion with leading New York intellectuals, Hannah Arendt lectured Hayden about his defense of bloody insurrection. He snapped in response, "You may put me in the position of a leper, but I say a case can be made for violence in the peace movement." At the Columbia occupation, Hayden explained that the protests were just the start of "bringing the war home." Echoing Che Guevara's chant of "two, three, many Vietnams," Hayden called for "two, three, many Columbias."39
One of the most illuminating symptoms of left-wing revolutionary movements is their tendency to blur the difference between common crime and political rebellion. The Brownshirts beat up storekeepers, shook down businessmen, and vandalized property, rationalizing all of it in the name of the "movement." Left-wing activists still refer to the L.A. riots as an "uprising" or "rebellion." A similar moral obtuseness plagued the movement in the 1960s. "The future of our struggle is the future of crime in the streets," declared Hayden. The only way to "revolutionize youth," he explained, was to have "a series of sharp and dangerous conflicts, life and death conflicts" in the streets. Hayden was no doubt inspired by (and inspiring to) the Black Panthers, who regularly staged ambushes of police in the streets. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention demonstrations in Chicago his co-organizer Rennie Davis implored the crowd, "Don't vote...join us in the streets of America...Build a National Liberation Front for America." Hayden was put on trial for his incitement of violence in Chicago. In June 1969 he pronounced on the "need to expand our struggle to include a total attack on the courts."40
Hayden was a moderate, according to Mark Rudd, the leader of the so-called action faction of the SDS. Rudd, who organized the Columbia "rebellion," was born to a middle-class Jewish family in New Jersey, and his parents hardly encouraged his behavior. When he called his father to explain that he "took a building" from the president of Columbia University, his father replied, "Then give it back to him." Rudd's preferred rallying cry at the time was "Up against the wall, motherfucker!" which he used on teachers and administrators with abandon. "Perhaps nothing upsets our enemies more than this slogan," he explained. "To them it seemed to show the extent to which we had broken with their norms, how far we had sunk to brutality, hatred and obscenity. Great!" The term, he explained, clarified that the administrators, faculty, and police who opposed the radicals were "our enemies." "Liberal solutions, restructuring, partial understandings, compromise are not allowed anymore. The essence of the matter is that we are out for social and political revolution, nothing less."41
Rudd eventually joined the Weathermen, who, out of deference to the female terrorists in the group, soon changed their name to the Weather Underground (though they sometimes went by the moniker "The Revolutionary Youth Movement"). In 1970 the group declared a "state of war" against the United States of America and commenced a campaign of terrorist attacks. Rudd took the position that the best way to foment revolution was to target military installations, banks, and policemen. One of their first bombings was intended to target a dance for noncommi
ssioned officers at Fort Dix, New Jersey (though another version says that the bomb, wrapped in roofing nails, was intended for Columbia). In any event, the inexperienced bomb makers famously blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village town house, killing three members and leaving the survivors fugitives for life. The explosion was one of the reasons Rudd had to go underground. He did not surface again for several years, eventually turning himself in after technical violations of wiretapping laws made the federal case against him difficult to prosecute. Today he is a math teacher at a community college in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rudd has expressed remorse for his violent youthful activities, but he is still a passionate opponent of American (and Israeli) foreign policy.
Many of us forget that the Weather Underground bombing campaign was not a matter of a few isolated incidents. From September 1969 to May 1970, Rudd and his co-revolutionaries on the white radical left committed about 250 attacks, or almost one terrorist bombing a day (government estimates put that number much higher). During the summer of 1970, there were twenty bombings a week in California. The bombings were the backbeat to the symphony of violence, much of it rhetorical, that set the score for the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rudd captured the tone perfectly: "It's a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building." "The real division is not between people who support bombings and people who don't," explained a secret member of a "bombing collective," but "between people who will do them and people who are too hung up on their own privileges and security to take those risks."42
Bourgeois self-loathing lay at the very heart of the New Left's hatred of liberalism, its love affair with violence, and its willingness to take a sledgehammer to Western civilization. "We're against everything that's 'good and decent' in honky America," declared one rebel. "We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's worst nightmare." The Weathermen became the storm troopers of the New Left, horrifying even those who agreed with their cause. Convinced that all whites were born tainted with the original sin of "skin privilege," the fighting brigade of the New Left internalized racialist thinking as hatred of their own whiteness. "All white babies are pigs," declared one Weatherman. On one occasion the feminist poet Robin Morgan was breast-feeding her son at the offices of the radical journal Rat. A Weatherwoman saw this and told her, "You have no right to have that pig male baby." "How can you say that?" Morgan asked. "What should I do?" "Put it in the garbage," the Weatherwoman answered.43
Bernardine Dohrn, an acid-loving University of Chicago law student turned revolutionary, reflected the widespread New Left fascination with the serial-killing hippie Ubermensch Charles Manson. "Dig It! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" In appreciation, her Weather Underground cell made a three-fingered "fork" gesture its official salute.44
Of course, there was a great deal of playacting among the revolutionaries as well. Abbie Hoffman, the co-founder of the yippies (the Youth International Party) along with Jerry Rubin, was the son of prosperous Jewish parents in Worcester, Massachusetts. The product of private schools--where he was a troublemaker from the start, no doubt due in part to his bipolar disorder--Hoffman attended Brandeis University, where he studied under the New Left intellectual icon Herbert Marcuse. Hoffman bought into Marcuse's view that bourgeois America was "radically evil" and that it had to be radically challenged as a result. But Hoffman had something over Marcuse, Rudd, Hayden, and the rest: he could be legitimately funny about his mission (though not nearly as funny as he thought he was). His was a funny fascism, a naughty nihilism. His book titles alone give a good flavor of his approach: Steal This Book, Fuck the System, and Revolution for the Hell of It. "Personally, I always held my flower in a clenched fist," he wrote in his autobiography. He mastered the art of calling anybody he disliked or opposed a "fascist," dubbing Ronald Reagan "the fascist gun in the West." Hoffman, another member of the Chicago Seven, was a fugitive from justice for most of the 1970s, eluding charges that he was a cocaine dealer.
His antics were less an echo of the Nazis--a generally humorless bunch--and more an updating of the Italian Futurists, the artistic auxiliary to Italian Fascism.45 The Futurists were actors, poets, writers, and other artists determined to bring all of the qualities of youth and revolution into the streets and cafes of Italy. Their fascism was theatrically violent, glorying in shock and disruption. The Futurists embraced the rush of speed and technology, the yippies glorified the rush of drugs. But it was really the same shtick. Hoffman and Rubin, for example, proposed a "Theater of Disruption" during the Chicago convention that would blend "pot and politics into a political grass-leaves movement." Updating Sorel's doctrines of myth and violence--no doubt without credit--Hoffman set out to create a "vast myth" of bloodshed and shock. "We will burn Chicago to the ground!" "We will fuck on the beaches!" "We demand the Politics of Ecstasy!" It may sound funny now, but the intent was to force a confrontation that would spill blood in the streets. In August a yippie underground newspaper, Seed, announced it had withdrawn its request for a permit for a youth rock festival. The editorial explained, "Chicago may host a Festival of Blood...Don't come to Chicago if you expect a five-day Festival of Life, music and love."46
For those willing to look past a lot of meaningless rhetoric about Marxism, the fascist nature of all this was glaringly obvious. Indeed, one could simply take countless radicals at their word when they said they were "beyond ideology" and all about action. One of the most obvious giveaways was the New Left's obsession with the "street." The radicals talked incessantly about "taking it to the streets," of the need for "street theater," street protest, street activism, even "dancing in the street," as the song went. Many of the best books during and about the period use "street" in their titles, James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, Jim Miller's Democracy Is in the Streets, and Milton Viorst's Fire in the Streets being just a few examples.
Fascists were always fixated with the street. Horst Wessel, the martyred street fighter, captured the spirit of the street in the poem that became the Nazi anthem: "Clear the streets for the brown battalions...Soon will fly Hitler-flags over every street." The Futurists considered the street the only authentic stage. "The raging broom of madness swept us out of ourselves and drove us through streets as rough and deep as the beds of torrents," declared F. T. Marinetti, the founder of the Futurist movement. The Futurists, according to Marinetti's famous phrase, glorified "the beautiful ideas which kill." "For anyone who has a sense of historical connections, the ideological origins of Fascism can be found in Futurism," wrote Benedetto Croce in 1924, "in the determination to go down into the streets, to impose their own opinions, to stop the mouths of those who disagree, not to fear riots or fights, in this eagerness to break with all tradition, in this exaltation of youth which was characteristic of Futurism."47
That violence was central to fascism is often an exaggerated point. Violence has been essential to nearly all revolutionary movements, save the few explicitly nonviolent ones. But the avant-garde fascists idealized violence as an end in itself, seeing it as "redemptive" and "transformative." Mussolini talked about the power and importance of violence but committed far less of it than you might expect. Yes, his goons beat people up and there were a handful of killings, but mostly Mussolini liked the aesthetics of violence, the sound of brutal rhetoric, the poetry of revolutionary bloodshed. "For revolutions are insane, violent, idiotic, bestial," he explained. "They are like war. They set fire to the Louvre and throw the naked bodies of princesses on the street. They kill, plunder, destroy. They are a man-made Biblical flood. Precisely therein consists their great beauty."48
Here again, the similarities to the New Left are striking. Violence suffused their political talk; physical violence merely punctuated it. Violence for the New Left and Fascists alike worked on numerous symbolic levels. It elevated the sense of crisis that revolutionaries crave in orde
r to polarize society. Indeed, polarization was an identical strategic objective for the New Left and the Nazis. Forcing mainstream liberals to choose sides on the assumption that most would follow their sympathies to the left was the only way Hayden and others could usher in their revolution. That was what they meant by "bringing the war home." (One of Rudd's comrades who was killed in the Greenwich Village blast, Ted Gold, argued that the only way to radicalize liberals was to "turn New York into Saigon."49) The Nazis similarly assumed that Germans who favored socialist economic policies but who rejected the idea of thralldom to Moscow would ultimately side with the National Socialists over the International ones. German Communists made a similar gamble, believing that Nazism would accelerate the historical march toward Communism. Hence, again, the German socialist mantra "First Brown, then Red."
Somewhat paradoxically, support for violence--even violent rhetoric, as in Rudd's fondness for expletives--helped radicals differentiate themselves from liberals, whom the hard left saw as too concerned with politeness, procedure, and conventional politics. When "moderates" at the Columbia takeover tried to dissuade a member of the "defense committee" at the Math Hall (where the most radical students were holed up), he responded, "You fucking liberals don't understand what the scene's about. It's about power and disruption. The more blood the better." At the march on the Washington Monument to end the war in 1965, Phil Ochs sang his contemptuous "Love Me, I'm a Liberal."50 Saul Alinsky, whose Rules for Radicals served as a bible for the New Left (and who later became one of Hillary Clinton's mentors), shared the fascist contempt for liberals as corrupted bourgeois prattlers: "Liberals in their meetings utter bold words; they strut, grimace belligerently, and then issue a weasel-worded statement 'which has tremendous implications, if read between the lines.' They sit calmly, dispassionately, studying the issue; judging both sides; they sit and still sit."51