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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Substitute the word "fascist" for "radical" in many of Alinsky's statements and it's sometimes difficult to tell the difference: "Society has good reason to fear the Radical...He hits, he hurts, he is dangerous. Conservative interests know that while Liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, Radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of Conservatives." And: "The Radical may resort to the sword but when he does he is not filled with hatred against those individuals whom he attacks. He hates these individuals not as persons but as symbols representing ideas or interests which he believes to be inimical to the welfare of the people." In other words, they're not people but dehumanized symbols. "Change means movement," Alinsky tells us. "Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict."52

  New Left violence also supported numerous other fascist themes, from the cult of unreason, the lust for action, the craving for authenticity--talk was cheap--to a sense of shame about the martial accomplishments of the older generation. Just as many Nazi youth missed the Great War and were desperate to prove their mettle to their parents and themselves, many in the New Left had "issues" with their parents' participation in World War II (and for many Jews, their parents' Holocaust ordeal). In addition, many radicals were desperate to prove they weren't cowards for refusing to fight in Vietnam.

  Lastly, violence served as an homage to the true radicals and revolutionaries at home and abroad. Black Panther envy is a recurring theme in the history of New Left radicalism. The blacks were the "real thing," and the whites were desperate to gain their approval and support. French intellectuals and Upper West Side liberals achieved new heights of sycophancy in their desire to prove their radical bona fides. They cheered when black athletes at the 1968 Olympics raised their fists in defiance at the American national anthem, not caring (or knowing) that the imagery was entirely derivative of fascist aesthetics. "The fist," an Italian Fascist proclaimed in 1920, "is the synthesis of our theory."53 And when George Foreman paraded an American flag at the same Olympics, the Norman Mailer crowd called him an Uncle Tom.

  You can tell a lot about a movement by its heroes, and here, too, the record reflects very poorly on the New Left. For all their prattle about "participatory democracy" it's shocking how few democrats ranked as heroes to even the "peaceful" members of the movement. At Columbia, Berkeley, and campuses across America, the student activists plastered up posters of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, and Ho Chi Minh. Under Rudd's leadership, the SDS formed quasi-official ties with Castro's government. In Chicago and elsewhere, they chanted, "Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh!" Mao Tse-tung's Little Red Book of revolutionary maxims became a huge best seller.

  Rather than call these regimes fascist--which I firmly believe they were--we'll merely note the similarities between these Third World movements and regimes and the conventional fascist ones. Mao, Ho, Castro, and even the Panthers were all ethnocentric movements of "national liberation." This is precisely how Mussolini and Hitler depicted their causes. Hitler promised to get Germany out from under the thumb of Versailles and "international finance capitalism." Mussolini argued that Italy was a "proletarian nation" deserving, like Germany, its "moment in the sun." Mao's Cultural Revolution, his mixture of socialism and folk Chinese custom, fits perfectly in the fascist wheelhouse. What is Castro but a military dictator (note the constant uniform) who has burnished his leadership cult with socialist economics, nationalist rhetoric, and unending Nuremberg Rally populism?

  That Che Guevara has become a chic branding tool is a disgusting indictment of both American consumer culture and the know-nothing liberalism that constitutes the filthy residue of the 1960s New Left. Ubiquitous Che shirts top the list of mass-marketed revolutionary swag available for sale at the nearest bobo chic retailer--including a popular line of children's wear. Here's the text for one ad promoting this stuff: "Featured in Time magazine's holiday web shopping guide, 'Viva la revolution!' Now even the smallest rebel can express himself in these awesome baby onesies. This classic Che Guevara icon is also available on a long-sleeve tee in kids' sizes...Long live the rebel in all of us...there's no cooler iconic image than Che!"54

  The Argentine henchman of the Cuban revolution was a murderer and goon. He penned classically fascist apothegms in his journals: "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine." Guevara was a better writer, but the same muse helped to produce Mein Kampf. Guevara reveled in executing prisoners. While fomenting revolution in Guatemala, he wrote home to his mother, "It was all a lot of fun, what with the bombs, speeches and other distractions to break the monotony I was living in." His motto was "If in doubt, kill him," and he killed a great many. The Cuban-American writer Humberto Fontova described Guevara as "a combination of Beria and Himmler."55 Guevara certainly killed more dissidents and lovers of democracy than Mussolini ever did, and Mussolini's Italy was undoubtedly more "free" than any society Guevara the "freedom fighter" was seeking. Would you put a Mussolini onesie on your baby? Would you let your daughter drink from a Himmler sippy cup?

  One can have a Jesuitical argument about the precise political labels these men deserve, but the fact remains that what made these "liberationist" movements so popular were precisely those attributes Guevara, Castro, Mao, and the rest shared with the heroes of fascism. And if you scrub the names Marx and Lenin from their speeches, what remains is the stuff of any diatribe Mussolini delivered from a balcony (indeed, sometimes with Mussolini you don't even need to scrub the Marx and Lenin away). These were all nationalists committed to national socialism promising to enact a "truer" and more "organic" democracy, one that rejected the "formulaic," "superficial," and "decadent" "sham democracy" of the bourgeois West. Figures like the Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba were heroes for no other reason than that they opposed the United States and claimed to represent a racially pure revolutionary cause.56 The United Nations and affiliated elites adopted the racist stance that when blacks or other oppressed peoples killed each other or killed whites, it was a legitimate expression of Third World will to power. Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, the Chinese way, and anticolonialism generally were recast versions of Hitler's Pan-Germanism and Mussolini's effort to be the ruler of "Latin civilization" and "Italians everywhere." Third Worlders needed lebensraum, too.

  Under doctrines of black liberation, "revolutionary" violence was always justified so long as you insisted that the bloodied corpse had somehow been an accomplice to oppression. Whites became the new Jews. "[T]o shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time," observed Jean-Paul Sartre in his preface to one of Frantz Fanon's books. All of this blood chic was retailed in Norman Mailer's White Negro, which fetishized black crime as hip, cool, and revolutionary. The New Left not only bought this line; they sold it. A poll found 20 percent of American students identified with Che Guevara--beating out Nixon (19 percent), Humphrey (16 percent), and Wallace (7 percent).57

  Madness, cruelty, and totalitarianism were "in." Thugs and criminals were heroes, while champions of the rule of law were suddenly "fascists." Almost from the outset, this logic poisoned the civil rights movement's early triumphs. At Cornell most of the black students were admitted on what we'd today call affirmative action, with lower-than-average SAT scores. Particularly revealing is the fact that many of the gun-toting revolutionaries were recruited to the school precisely because they fit Mailer's stereotype of the noble "ghetto youth," the authentic Negro, and as such were given preference over other blacks with higher scores and better qualifications--because more qualified blacks were too "white."58

  By the end of the decade, the civil rights movement had for all intents and purposes become a Black Power movement. And Black Power, with its clenched fists, Afro-pagan mythology, ce
lebration of violence, emphasis on racial pride, and disdain for liberalism, was arguably America's most authentic indigenous fascism. Stokely Carmichael--at one time the "prime minister" of the Black Panther Party--himself defined Black Power (a term he originated) as "a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created."59 Carmichael shared Hitler's dream of building a folkish racial state upon the ashes of the old order.

  Indeed, when one reads the racial indoctrination taught to the children of Nazi Germany, it's difficult to see the difference between Carmichael's black pride and Hitler's German pride. "What is the first Commandment of every National Socialist?" asked a Nazi catechism. "Love Germany above all else and your ethnic comrade as your self!" The connections between Black Nationalism and Nazism, Fascism, and other supposedly right-wing racist groups aren't merely theoretical--or recent. Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Back to Africa movement, admitted in 1922 that his ideology was perfectly simpatico with Mussolini's. "We were the first fascists," he declared. Indeed, his rhetoric was often eerily consonant with German fascism: "Up You Mighty Race, Accomplish What You Will," "Africa for the Africans...at Home and Abroad!" and so forth. In the 1960s Elijah Muhammad, the head of the Nation of Islam, formed a cordial relationship with George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell was even invited to speak at the Nation of Islam National Convention in 1962, at which he praised Elijah Muhammad as the black Adolf Hitler. On January 28, 1961, Muhammad sent Malcolm X to Atlanta to negotiate an agreement with the Ku Klux Klan whereby the Klan would support a separate black state.60

  More generally, the Black Power movement became addicted to violence, setting the tone for the white left. H. Rap Brown had exhorted his followers to "do what John Brown did, pick up a gun and go out and shoot our enemy." Malcolm X repeatedly exhorted blacks to employ "any means necessary." James Forman, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, declared that if he were assassinated, he'd want in retaliation "10 war factories destroyed...one Southern governor, two mayors and 500 racist white cops dead." Good thing he belonged to an avowedly nonviolent group! Benjamin Chavis, the future head of the NAACP, first attained national recognition when he was arrested and convicted as a member of the Wilmington Ten, a group that allegedly conspired to firebomb a grocery store and then shoot the police when they responded to the scene.61 And always and everywhere there were the Panthers, in their paramilitary garb and black shirts sporting fascistic or militaristic ranks and titles (minister of defense, minister of information), robbing banks, calling for the slaughter of "pigs" and honkies, staging ambushes for police, kidnapping judges and children, and calling for a separate black state.

  Meanwhile, what of the supposedly fascistic American right? While the New Left relentlessly denounced the founding fathers as racist white males and even mainstream liberals ridiculed the idea that the text of the Constitution had any relevance for modern society, conservatives were launching an extensive project to restore the proper place of the Constitution in American life. No leading conservative scholar or intellectual celebrated fascist themes or ideas. No leading conservative denigrated the inherent classical liberalism of the United States' political system. To the contrary, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, Jr., and the conservatives around National Review dedicated themselves to restoring the classically liberal vision of the founders.

  What confused the left then and now about American conservatism is that love and support for one's country do not necessarily put one on the road to fascism. Patriotism is not the same thing as extreme nationalism or fascism. The Nazis killed a great many German patriots whose love of their homeland was deep and profound. In a sense, one of the Jews' greatest offenses was that they were patriotic Germans. It was in the 1960s that the left convinced itself that there is something fascistic about patriotism and something perversely "patriotic" about running down America. Anti-Americanism--a stand-in for hatred of Western civilization--became the stuff of sophisticates and intellectuals as never before. Flag burners became the truest "patriots" because dissent--not just from partisan politics, but from the American project itself--became the highest virtue. In 2003 the professor at Columbia who hoped America would face "a million Mogadishus" is a patriot in the eyes of the left. But Americans eager to maintain limited government--of all things!--are somehow creeping fascists.

  Witnessing how the brutality and wanton destruction of the Nazis had swept Hitler to power, the novelist Thomas Mann wrote in his diary that this was a new kind of revolution, "without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice." The "common scum" had won the day, "accompanied by vast rejoicing on the part of the masses."62 Liberals in the 1960s who lived through a similar degradation of decency by the same intellectual rot began to rebel. Confronted with an ideology that always assumed America was the problem and never the solution, they chose to mount a counterassault. These patriots in both parties became in large part that band of intellectuals known as neoconservatives. They were given that name by leftists who thought the prefix "neo" would conjure associations with neo-Nazis.

  But since the testimony of neoconservatives counts for nothing in most corners of liberal thought, it's worth noting that even some titans of the left still had the clarity of vision to understand what they were dealing with. Irving Louis Horowitz, a revered leftist intellectual (he was the literary executor of C. Wright Mills) specializing in revolutionary thought, saw in 1960s radicalism a "fanatic attempt to impose a new social order upon the world, rather than await the verdict of consensus-building formulas among disparate individuals as well as the historical muses." And he saw this fanaticism for what it was: "Fascism returns to the United States not as a right-wing ideology, but almost as a quasi-leftist ideology."63

  Peter Berger, a Jewish refugee from Austria and a respected peace activist and left-wing sociologist (he helped popularize the phrase "social construction of reality"), saw much the same thing. When "observing the [American] radicals in action, I was repeatedly reminded of the storm troopers that marched through my childhood in Europe." He explored a long list of themes common to 1960s radicalism and European fascism and concluded they formed a "constellation that strikingly resembles the common core of Italian and German fascism." In 1974 A. James Gregor wrote The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics, which synthesized and cataloged these trends with sweeping detail and intellectual rigor. "In the recent past," he observed, "student radicals and the 'new left' have legitimized a political style calculated to be maximally serviceable to an American variant of fascism."

  Even some in the SDS recognized that the more extreme members were degenerating into fascism. An editorial in the Campaigner (published by the New York and Philadelphia Regional Labor Committee of the Students for a Democratic Society) observed of the SDS faction that spawned the Weathermen, "There is a near identity between the arguments of anarchists (around the Columbia strike movement, e.g.) and Mussolini's polemics for action against theory, against program."64

  The "youth movement" theorizing sparked by Charles Reich's Greening of America, the indictment of reason, the populist appeals to defeating "the system," the table thumping for a new Volk-centric community that would replace capitalism with a more organic and totalitarian approach, was too much for some leftists with a clear understanding of the historical roots of fascism. The fascistic "overtones," Stewart Alsop wrote of The Greening of America, "are obvious to anyone who has seen those forests of arms raised in unison by the revolutionary young, or heard their mindless shouted chants. Professor Reich is certainly a good and kindly man, without a fascist bone in his body," Alsop continued, "and most of the 'liberated' young he worships are good and kindly too. But surely anyone with a sense of the political realities can smell the danger that these silly, kind, irrational people, in their cushioned isolation from reality, are bringing upon us all. The danger starts with the universities, but it does not end there.
That is what makes the mush so scary." No less a socialist icon than Michael Harrington declared Reich's sweeping indictment of modernity--he called it "elite existentialism"--to have much in common with the Romantic roots of Nazism.

  Today the liberal left's version of the 1960s makes about as much sense as it does to remember Hitler as the "man of peace" described by Neville Chamberlain. In its passions and pursuits, the New Left was little more than an Americanized updating of what we've come to call the European Old Right. From Easy Rider to JFK, Hollywood has been telling us that if only the forces of reaction hadn't killed their Horst Wessels, we would today be living in a better, more just, and more open-minded country. And if only we could rekindle the hope and ambition of those early radicals, "what might have been" will turn into "what could still be." This is the vital lie of the left. Western civilization was saved when the barbarians were defeated, at least temporarily, in the early 1970s. We should be not only grateful for our slender victory but vigilant in securing it for posterity.

  Such vigilance is impossible without understanding the foundations on which contemporary liberalism stands, and that in turn requires a second look at the 1960s--this time from the top down. For while the radicals in the streets were demanding more power, the progressives already in power were playing their parts as well.

  It is understandable that the 1960s is viewed as an abrupt change or turning point in our history, because in many respects the changes were so sudden (and in some cases for the better). But there was also a profound continuity underlying the events of the decade. When Kennedy said that the torch had been passed to a new generation, he was referring in no small part to a new generation of progressives. These men (and a few women) were dedicated to continuing the projects of Wilson and Roosevelt. When the torch is passed, the runner changes, but the race remains the same.