There is simply no denying that liberalism is deeply committed to the creation and imposition of culture. Indeed, it's transparently obvious that liberals care primarily about culture. During the 1990s, for example, liberalism dove headlong into the culture-formation business, from Hillary Clinton's politics of meaning to the gender norming of college sports, to gays in the military, to the war on smoking. In 2007, to pick an offbeat recent example, a progressive child-care center in Seattle banned LEGOs because "the children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys--assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society--a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive." In response, they created a playtime that reflected the morally superior standards of "collectivity."2
The simple fact of the matter is this: liberals are the aggressors in the culture wars. Why this should seem a controversial point is somewhat baffling. It is manifestly clear that traditionalists are defending their way of life against the so-called forces of progress. When feminist groups finally persuaded the courts to force the Virginia Military Institute to accept women, who was the aggressor? Whose values were being imposed? Which side's activists boast of being "agents of change"? My point is not that the forces of change are always wrong. Far from it. My point is that the left is dishonest when it pretends that it is not in the business of imposing its values on others.
We've discussed how, in the 1950s, the left updated the traditional Marxist critique of capitalism by arguing that fascist reaction was really a psychological response to progress. Whereas once the left argued that fascism was the political reaction of economic ruling classes against the revolutionary workers, now fascism is expressed as one of many "phobias," or simply "rage," aimed at the advancement of certain groups and causes. These rages and phobias are felt almost exclusively by white male heterosexuals (and the women who love them), the scions of those evil "Dead White European Males." In the 1930s the left claimed that fascists wanted to protect their factories and titles of nobility; now we are told that the fascists--a.k.a. "angry white males"--want to preserve their unfair "privilege." Homophobia, racism, nativism, and, in a neat moral equivalence, both Islamic extremism and Islamophobia are the white male power structure's instinctive fascistic response to the shock of the new.
These kinds of arguments, to borrow a phrase from Carl von Clausewitz, represent the continuation of war by cultural means. And indeed, nowhere is this logic more visibly on display than in popular culture.
Take the movie Pleasantville. An imaginary Mayberry of a town seemingly frozen in the repressive, white-male-dominated 1950s is shaken up by the introduction of freedom-loving, sexually liberated young people from the 1990s. It's the 1960s all over again. The town elders can't handle the challenge--their liberated wives no longer have martinis and slippers waiting for them at the end of the day. In response, the white male elite--led by the Chamber of Commerce, of course--becomes increasingly fascistic. One of the film's clever conceits is that the tradition-bound people of Pleasantville are filmed in black and white while the fully realized human beings are portrayed in living color. This prompts the monochromatic fascists to start treating the "coloreds" as second-class citizens.
A similar theme can be found in the playfully fascistic film Falling Down, in which a white middle-class defense contractor played by Michael Douglas becomes violent when he is downsized and thrown out of work. In American Beauty, Kevin Spacey's sexually confused ex-marine neighbor snaps and becomes a murderer when he can't handle the idea that his son might be gay. It isn't surprising that Hollywood keeps churning out these chestnuts, but it is amazing that each time it does, so many critics hail them as novel and pathbreaking interpretations, when they are really just a series of recycled cliches.
But there's a larger point behind the effort to cast opponents of change as fascists: to make change itself the natural order by ridiculing the very notion of a natural order. The underlying dogma of these movies is that social and gender roles are not fixed, that tradition, religion, and natural law have no binding power or authority over the individual's will to power, and that the day we made the mistake of thinking otherwise was the day we took a tragic Wrong Turn.
THE KULTURKAMPF, THEN AND NOW
The phrase "culture war" is traceable to two very different thinkers. The more recent is the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who argued that the only way to throw off the old order was to launch a "long march" through elite cultural institutions. This was the strategy taken by the New Left insurgents of the 1960s, who in short order conquered English departments, editorial boards, movie studios, and the like. But the earlier and more relevant wellspring was Otto von Bismarck's Kulturkampf.
It is common among educated liberals to use the term "Kulturkampf" in referring to the supposed efforts of the right to impose its values on the rest of the country by demonizing liberals. The Germanic overtones are obviously meant to evoke a Hitlerian parallel. Quite the contrary, however, the original Kulturkampf was not a right-wing crackdown on liberal dissenters or imperiled minorities but an onslaught from the left against the forces of traditionalism and conservatism. Ostensibly, the Kulturkampf was a war against German Catholics, absorbed for the first time into greater Germany. Bismarck feared that they might not be sufficiently loyal to a Germany led by Prussia, and even more pragmatically, he wanted to avoid the formation of a German Catholic political party.
Bismarck's intentions were grounded in realpolitik and political triangulation. It was the progressive forces in the Reichstag who were the true believers. Catholicism was seen by progressive Germans as foreign, antiquated, backward, and un-German. It stood in the way of nationalism, scientism, and progress. The word "Kulturkampf" itself was coined by the influential scientist Rudolf Virchow, a renowned liberal who hoped the Kulturkampf would liberate men from the clutches of Christian superstition and wed them to progressive principles. Behind that impulse, however, lay a desire to impose a new religion, a progressive religion of the Volk-state.
The first Kulturkampf laws, passed with great fanfare in 1873, were hailed as enormous progressive strides in the separation of church and state. Emil Friedberg, a liberal architect of the anti-Catholic "May Laws," explained the state's obligations toward the Catholic Church: "to suppress it, to destroy it, to crush it with violence." In a riot of neo-Jacobinism, liberals harassed and shut down Catholic schools. Mandatory civil marriages weakened the power and influence of the Church. The state claimed the right to appoint, promote, discipline, and even deport Church officials. Most of Germany's Catholic bishops were either thrown in jail, hounded from office, or chased into exile. Eventually the Kulturkampf exhausted itself; but the idea that traditional Christianity was a threat to national progress took permanent root.3
In the 1870s the acid predictably worked its way through the body politic and transformed itself into anti-Semitism. Indeed, the word "anti-Semitism" was coined in 1879 by the atheist and radical leftist Wilhelm Marr in his tract The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism. Marr's contribution was to transform hatred of Jews from a theological passion into a "modern" racial and cultural one (he hated assimilated Jews more than orthodox ones, for example). "Anti-Semitism"--as opposed to the more theological Judenhass--was intended to ground hatred of Jews in the progressive language of scientific eugenics.
During his rise to power Hitler--in many respects the heir of the Bismarckian progressives--could hardly launch an all-out attack on Christianity. National Socialism, after all, was supposed to unite all Germans. It's "not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death," Hitler explained to his aides. "A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that's left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic."4
In 1937 the German Social Democratic Party, operating in exile in Prague, enlisted a spy to report from Germany on Nazi progress. The reporter, working in secret, offered a crucial insight into what the Nazis were really up to. The National Socialist German Workers' Party was constructing a new religion, a "counter-church," complete with its own priests, dogmas, holidays, rituals, and rites. The agent used a brilliant metaphor to explain the Nazi effort. The counter-church was being built like a new railway bridge. When you build a new bridge, you can't just tear down the old one willy-nilly. Traffic and commerce will be snarled. The public will protest. Instead, you need to slowly but surely replace the bridge over time. Swap out an old bolt for a new one. Quietly switch the ancient beams for fresh ones, and one day you will have a completely different structure and barely anyone will have noticed.
Like the engineers of that proverbial railway bridge, the Nazis worked relentlessly to replace the nuts and bolts of traditional Christianity with a new political religion. The shrewdest way to accomplish this was to co-opt Christianity via the Gleichschaltung while at the same time shrinking traditional religion's role in civil society. To this end, Hitler was downright Bismarckian. The German historian Gotz Aly explains how Hitler purchased popularity with lavish social welfare programs and middle-class perks, often paid for with stolen Jewish wealth and high taxes on the rich. Hitler banned religious charity, crippling the churches' role as a counterweight to the state. Clergy were put on government salary, hence subjected to state authority. "The parsons will be made to dig their own graves," Hitler cackled. "They will betray their God to us. They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes."5
Following the Jacobin example, the Nazis replaced the traditional Christian calendar. The new year began on January 30 with the Day of the Seizure of Power.6 Each November the streets of central Munich were dedicated to a Nazi Passion play depicting Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch. The martyrdom of Horst Wessel and his "old fighters" replaced Jesus and the apostles. Plays and official histories were rewritten to glorify pagan Aryans bravely fighting against Christianizing foreign armies. Anticipating some feminist pseudo history, witches became martyrs to the bloodthirsty oppression of Christianity.
Under the progressives, the Christian God had been transformed into the God of lower food prices. Under the Nazis, the Christian God would be transformed into an Aryan SS officer with Hitler his right hand. The so-called German Christian pastors preached that "just as Jesus liberated mankind from sin and hell, so Hitler saves the German Volk from decay." In April 1933 the Nazi Congress of German Christians pronounced that all churches should catechize that "God has created me a German; Germanism is a gift of God. God wills that I fight for Germany. War service in no way injures the Christian conscience, but is obedience to God."7
When some Protestant bishops visited the Fuhrer to register complaints, Hitler's rage got the better of him. "Christianity will disappear from Germany just as it has done in Russia...The German race has existed without Christianity for thousands of years...and will continue after Christianity has disappeared...We must get used to the teachings of blood and race." When the bishops objected that they supported Nazism's secular aims, just not its religious innovations, Hitler exploded: "You are traitors to the Volk. Enemies of the Vaterland and destroyers of Germany."8
In 1935 mandatory prayer in school was abolished, and in 1938 carols and Nativity plays were banned entirely. By 1941 religious instruction for children fourteen years and up had been abolished altogether, and Jacobinism reigned supreme. A Hitler Youth song rang out from the campfires:
We are the happy Hitler Youth;
We have no need for Christian virtue;
For Adolf Hitler is our intercessor
And our redeemer.
No priest, no evil one
Can keep us
From feeling like Hitler's children.
No Christ do we follow, but Horst Wessel!
Away with incense and holy water pots.9
Meanwhile, the orphans were given new lyrics to "Silent Night":
Silent night! Holy night! All is calm, all is bright,
Only the Chancellor steadfast in fight,
Watches o'er Germany by day and night,
Always caring for us.
In like manner, the American Kulturkampf of the 1960s begins not with the hippies, the Vietnam War, or even civil rights. As befits an attempt to clear the way for a new political religion, it starts with the effort to eliminate prayer in school. As Jeremy Rabkin has argued, the school prayer decisions of the 1960s should be seen as the beginning of the Supreme Court's role as the primary engine of the American Kulturkampf.
Consider abortion. The fundamental logic of the Supreme Court cases legalizing abortion hinges not on the "right to choose" but on the idea that religion and religiously informed morality have no place in public affairs. Roe v. Wade and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, stemmed directly from the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the Court invalidated a ban on birth control (almost never enforced) on the grounds that the right to privacy can be found in the emanation of a penumbra to the Constitution. But the Court's underlying motivation stemmed from a conviction that religiously inspired laws (Connecticut has a large Catholic population) are suspect. Just two years before Roe, in a Pennsylvania case, the Court quashed state aid to Catholic parochial schools on the grounds that it would divide the public along sectarian lines. Moreover, the Court held, religious concerns "tend to confuse and obscure other issues of great urgency." When Roe v. Wade finally appeared before the Court, the justices had already concluded that traditional religious concerns can have little weight in public affairs. Laurence Tribe, America's leading liberal constitutional lawyer, argued in the Harvard Law Review in 1978 that religious views were inherently superstitious and hence less legitimate than "secular" ones.
In 1987 the Supreme Court ruled that moments of silence at the beginning of the school day constituted a government endorsement of prayer. In 1992 it held that a nonsectarian prayer at a school graduation (offered by a Reform rabbi) was an impermissible endorsement of religion. In 1995 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the "right to die" could not be hindered simply "in order to satisfy the moral or religious precepts of a portion of the population." Never mind that laws against murder, theft, and perjury can be traced directly back to the same "religious precepts."
More recently, we've seen courts rule that the Pledge of Allegiance, displays of the Ten Commandments, and Christmas creches are unconstitutional anywhere near a public facility. Justice Antonin Scalia had it right in 1996 in the Romer v. Evans case (dealing with the public accommodation of homosexuality in Colorado). "The Court has mistaken a Kulturkampf for a fit of spite," he declared. He went on to castigate his colleagues for "taking sides" in the "culture wars."
Why belabor this point about religion? Because it is impossible to understand liberalism's cultural agenda without understanding that modern liberalism is building its own railway bridge, replacing the bricks and beams of traditional American culture with something else. I do not claim that everything in the new liberal structure is bad or wrong. But I reject the clever argumentation of liberals who claim that their effort is merely "pragmatic" or piecemeal. "Oh, just this one brick. What's wrong with this brick?" is how liberals argue about every stage of their project. But it's not just one brick. Nor should conservatives believe it is merely a slippery slope. That image suggests forces outside of our control pulling us in a direction not of our choosing. If society is moving in a direction not of its choosing, it is often because it is being pushed by the self-appointed forces of progress.
Tom Wolfe, in his essay "The Great Relearning," details how the counterculture, inspired by the German Bauhaus, wanted to start over, to declare a new Year Zero (much as the Jacobins and Nazis did), to go back to the fork in the road where Western civilization allegedly took the wrong path. The counterculture author Ken Kesey even organized a pilg
rimage to the pagan mecca of Stonehenge, believing that this was the last place Western man was on the right track and, presumably, took a wrong turn by leaving his paganism behind. In the remainder of this chapter we will look at how this overarching vision informed the movements and ideas both of classical fascism and of today's cultural left in a few discrete areas of culture: identity, morality, sex, and nature.
THE LIBERAL FASCIST KULTURKAMPF
Isaiah Berlin summarized the neo-Romantic outlook that gave rise to Nazism: "If I am German I seek German virtues, I write German music, I rediscover ancient German laws, I cultivate everything within me which makes me as rich, as expressive, as many-sided, as full a German as it is possible for me to be...That is the romantic ideal at its fullest." Such thinking led inexorably to the Nazi conception of right and wrong. "Justice," explained Alfred Rosenberg, "is what the Aryan man deems just. Unjust is what he so deems."10
This vision most concretely manifested itself in the effort to purge the influence of the Jewish mind from Nazi Germany. The Jew symbolized everything that kept the German people back. Even "conscience," according to Hitler, "is a Jewish invention" to be discarded in an act of self-liberation. As a result, the Nazis played the same games against the Jews that today's left plays against "Eurocentrism," "whiteness," and "logocentrism." When you hear a campus radical denounce "white logic" or "male logic," she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced "Jewish logic" and the "Hebrew disease." While still a Nazi collaborator, Paul de Man--the revered postmodern theorist who eventually taught at Yale and Cornell--wrote of the Jews, "Their cerebralness, their capacity to assimilate doctrines while maintaining a cold detachment from them," is one of "the specific characteristics of the Jewish mind."11
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning Page 44
