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

in an interview in 1932, 'It is faith that moves mountains, not reason. Reason is a tool, but it can never be the motive force of the crowd.' This kind of thinking has been commonplace on the left ever since. Think of Al Sharpton when allegedly confronted by the fact that the Tawana Brawley 'assault' was a fake. 'It don't matter,' he's reported to have said. 'We're building a movement.'²²

Even more impressive was Sorel's application of the idea of myth to Marxism itself. Again, Sorel held that Marxist prophecy didn't need to be true. People just needed to think it was true. Even at the turn of the last century it was becoming obvious that Marxism as social science didn't make a whole lot of sense. Taken literally, Marx's Das Kapital, according to Sorel, had little merit. But, Sorel asked, what if Marx's nonsensicalness was actually intended? If you looked at 'this apocalyptic text... as a product of the spirit, as an image created for the purpose of molding consciousness, it...is a good illustration of the principle on which Marx believed he should base the rules of the socialist action of the proletariat.'²³ In other words, Marx should be read as a prophet, not as a policy wonk. That way the masses would absorb Marxism unquestioningly as a religious dogma.

Sorel was deeply influenced by the Pragmatism of William James, who pioneered the notion that all one needs is the 'will to believe.' It was James's benign hope to make room for religion in a burgeoning age of science, by arguing that any religion that worked for the believer was not merely valid but 'true.' Sorel was an irrationalist who took this sort of thinking to its logical conclusion: any idea that can be successfully imposed — with violence if necessary — becomes true and good. By marrying James's will to believe with Nietzsche's will to power, Sorel redesigned left-wing revolutionary politics from scientific socialism to a revolutionary religious movement that believed in the utility of the myth of scientific socialism. Enlightened revolutionaries would act as if Marxism were gospel in order to bring the masses under their control for the greater good. Today we might call these aspects of this impulse 'lying for justice.'

Of course, a lie could not become 'true' — that is, successful — unless you had good liars. This is where another of Sorel's major contributions comes in: the need for a 'revolutionary elite' to impose its will upon the masses. On this point, as many have observed, Mussolini and Lenin held almost identical views. Central to their common outlook was the Sorelian conviction that a small cadre of professional intellectual radicals — who were prepared to reject compromise, parliamentary politics, and anything else that smacked of incremental reform — were indispensable to any successful revolutionary struggle. This avant-garde would shape 'revolutionary consciousness' by fomenting violence and undermining liberal institutions. 'We must create a proletarian minority sufficiently numerous, sufficiently knowledgeable, sufficiently audacious to substitute itself, at the opportune moment, for the bourgeois minority,' Mussolini channeled Lenin in pitch-perfect tones. 'The mass will simply follow and submit.'²⁴

JACOBIN FASCISM

If Mussolini stood on Sorel's shoulders, then in an important respect Sorel stood on Rousseau's and Robespierre's. A brief review of the intellectual origins of fascist thought reveals its roots in the Romantic nationalism of the eighteenth century, and in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who properly deserves to be called the father of modern fascism.

Historians have debated the meaning of the French Revolution for centuries. In many respects, their contending views of this event embody the fundamental difference between liberal and conservative (compare Wordsworth and Burke, for example). Even our modern distinction between 'left' and 'right' derives from the seating arrangements in the revolutionary assembly.

Whatever else it may have been, however, one thing is clear: the French Revolution was the first totalitarian revolution, the mother of modern totalitarianism, and the spiritual model for the Italian Fascist, German Nazi, and Russian Communist revolutions. A nationalist-populist uprising, it was led and manipulated by an intellectual vanguard determined to replace Christianity with a political religion that glorified 'the people,' anointed the revolutionary vanguard as their priests, and abridged the rights of individuals. As Robespierre put it, 'The people is always worth more than individuals...The people is sublime, but individuals are weak' — or, at any rate, expendable.²⁵

Robespierre's ideas were derived from his close study of Rousseau, whose theory of the general will formed the intellectual basis for all modern totalitarianisms. According to Rousseau, individuals who live in accordance with the general will are 'free' and 'virtuous' while those who defy it are criminals, fools, or heretics. These enemies of the common good must be forced to bend to the general will. He described this state-sanctioned coercion in Orwellian terms as the act of 'forcing men to be free.' It was Rousseau who originally sanctified the sovereign will of the masses while dismissing the mechanisms of democracy as corrupting and profane. Such mechanics — voting in elections, representative bodies, and so forth — are 'hardly ever necessary where the government is well- intentioned,' wrote Rousseau in a revealing turn of phrase. 'For the rulers well know that the general will is always on the side which is most favorable to the public interest, that is to say, the most equitable; so that it is needful only to act justly to be certain of following the general will.'²⁶

That fascism and communism promised to be more democratic than democracy itself was axiomatic for their twentieth-century proselytizers in Europe and America. 'The movement' represented, variously, the Volk, the people, the authentic nation and its providential mission in history, while parliamentary democracy was corrupt, inauthentic, unnatural.²⁷ But the salience of the general will is more profound than the mere rationalization of legitimacy through populist rhetoric. The idea of the general will created a true secular religion out of the mystic chords of nationalism, a religion in which 'the people' in effect worshipped themselves.²⁸ Just as individuals couldn't be 'free' except as part of the group, their existence lacked meaning and purpose except in relation to the collective.

It followed, moreover, that if the people were the new God, there was no room for God Himself. In The Social Contract, Rousseau tells us that because of Christianity's distinction between God and Caesar, 'men have never known whether they ought to obey the civil ruler or the priest.' What Rousseau proposed instead was a society in which religion and politics were perfectly combined. Loyalty to the state and loyalty to the divine must be seen as the same thing.

The philosopher and theologian Johann Gottfried von Herder, credited somewhat unfairly with laying the intellectual foundation for Nazism, took Rousseau's political arguments and made them into cultural ones. The general will was unique in each nation, according to Herder, because of the historic and spiritual distinctiveness of a specific Volk. This Romantic emphasis led various intellectuals and artists to champion the distinctiveness or superiority of races, nations, and cultures. But it is Rousseau's divinization of the community under the direction of the most powerful state ever proposed in political philosophy to which the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century were most indebted. Rousseau's community is not defined by ethnicity or geography or custom. Rather, it is bound together by the general will as expressed in the dogmas of what he called a 'civil religion' and enforced by the all-powerful God-state. Those who defy the collective spirit of the community live outside the state and have no claim on its protections. Indeed, not only is the state not required to defend antisocial individuals or subcommunities, it is compelled to do away with them.²⁹

The French revolutionaries put these precepts into effect. For example, Rousseau had suggested that Poland create nationalistic holidays and symbols to create a new secular faith. Therefore the Jacobins — who had nearly committed Rousseau to memory — immediately set about launching a grand new totalitarian religion. Robespierre argued that only a 'religious instinct' could defend the revolution from the acid of skepticism. But the revolutionaries also knew that before such faith could be attached to the state, they had to exterminate every trace of 'deceitful' Christianity. So they embarked on a sweeping campaign to dethrone Christianity. They replaced venerated holidays with pagan, nationalistic celebrations. The Cathedral of Notre Dame was renamed a 'temple of reason.' Hundreds of pagan-themed festivals were launched across the country celebrating such abstractions as Reason, Nation, and Brotherhood.

Mussolini's Italy in turn aped this strategy. The Italian Fascists held pageants and performed elaborate pagan rites in order to convince the masses, and the world, that 'Fascism is a religion' (as Mussolini often declared). 'Two religions are today contending...for sway over the world — the black and the red,' Mussolini would write in 1919. 'We declare ourselves the heretics.' In 1920 he explained, 'We worked with alacrity, to...give Italians a 'religious concept of the nation'...to lay the foundations of Italian greatness. The religious notion of Italianism...should become the impulse and fundamental direction of our lives.'³⁰

Of course, Italy faced a special challenge in that the nation's capital also contained the capital of the worldwide Catholic Church. As such, the battle between secular religion and traditional religion became muddied by