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

plus pages, only two paragraphs make mention of either word. But the reader does get a good sense of what Hitler thought of the Italian experiment and what it had to teach Germany. 'The appearance of a new and great idea was the secret of success in the French Revolution. The Russian Revolution owes its triumph to an idea. And it was only the idea that enabled Fascism triumphantly to subject a whole nation to a process of complete renovation.'¹

The passage is revealing. Hitler acknowledges that fascism was invented by Mussolini. It may have been reinvented, reinterpreted, revised, or extended, but its authorship — and, to a lesser extent, its novelty — were never in doubt. Nor did many people doubt for its first fifteen years or so that it was essentially an Italian movement or method.

National Socialism likewise predated Hitler. It existed in different forms in many countries.² The ideological distinctions between Fascism and National Socialism aren't important right now. What is important is that Hitler didn't get the idea for Nazism from Italian Fascism, and at first Mussolini claimed no parentage of Nazism. He even refused to send Hitler an autographed picture of himself when the Nazis requested one from the Italian embassy. Nevertheless, no Nazi ideologue ever seriously claimed that Nazism was an offshoot of Italian Fascism. And during Nazism's early days, Fascist theorists and Nazi theorists often quarreled openly. Indeed, it was Mussolini who threatened a military confrontation with Hitler to save Fascist Austria from a Nazi invasion in 1934.

It's no secret that Mussolini didn't care for Hitler personally. When they met for the first time, Mussolini recounted how 'Hitler recited to me from memory his Mein Kampf, that brick I was never able to read.' Der Fuhrer, according to Mussolini, 'was a gramophone with just seven tunes and once he had finished playing them he started all over again.' But their differences were hardly just personal. Italian Fascist ideologues went to great lengths to distance themselves from the Nazi strains of racism and anti-Semitism. Even 'extremist ultra-Fascists' such as Roberto Farinacci and Giovanni Preziosi (who was a raving anti-Semite personally and later became a Nazi toady) wrote that Nazism, with its emphasis on parochial and exclusivist racism, 'was offensive to the conscience of mankind.' In May 1934 Mussolini probably penned — and surely approved — an article in Gerarchia deriding Nazism as 'one hundred per cent racism. Against everything and everyone: yesterday against Christian civilization, today against Latin civilization, tomorrow, who knows, against the civilization of the whole world.' Indeed, Mussolini doubted that Germans were a single race at all, arguing instead that they were a mongrel blend of six different peoples. (He also argued that up to 7 percent of Bavarians were dim-witted.) In September of that same year, Mussolini was still referring to his 'sovereign contempt' for Germany's racist policies. 'Thirty centuries of history permit us to regard with supreme pity certain doctrines supported beyond the Alps by the descendents of people who did not know how to write, and could not hand down documents recording their own lives, at a time when Rome had Caesar, Virgil, and Augustus.'³ Meanwhile, the Nazi ideologues derided the Italians for practicing 'Kosher Fascism.'

What Hitler got from Italian Fascism — and, as indicated above, from the French and Russian revolutions — was the importance of having an idea that would arouse the masses. The particular content of the idea was decidedly secondary. The ultimate utility of ideas is not their intrinsic truth but the extent to which they make a desired action possible — in Hitler's case the destruction of your enemies, the attainment of glory, and the triumph of your race. This is important to keep in mind because Hitler's ideological coherence left a great deal to be desired. His opportunism, pragmatism, and megalomania often overpowered any desire on his part to formulate a fixed ideological approach.

Hermann Rauschning, an early Nazi who broke with Hitler, encapsulated this point when he famously dubbed Hitler's movement 'The Revolution of Nihilism.' According to Rauschning, Hitler was a pure opportunist devoid of loyalty to men or ideas — unless you call hatred of Jews an idea — and willing to break oaths, liquidate people, and say or do anything to achieve and hold power. 'This movement is totally without ideals and lacks even the semblance of a program. Its commitment is entirely to action...the leaders choose action on a cold, calculating and cunning basis. For National Socialists there was and is no aim they would not take up or drop at a moment's notice, their only criterion being the strengthening of the movement.' Rauschning exaggerated the case, but it is perfectly true that Nazi ideology cannot be summarized in a program or platform. It can be better understood as a maelstrom of prejudices, passions, hatreds, emotions, resentments, biases, hopes, and attitudes that, when combined, most often resembled a religious crusade wearing the mask of a political ideology.⁴

Contrary to his relentless assertions in Mein Kampf, Hitler had no great foundational ideas or ideological system. His genius lay in the realization that people wanted to rally to ideas and symbols. And so his success lay in the quintessential techniques, technologies, and icons of the twentieth century — marketing, advertising, radio, airplanes, TV (he broadcast the Berlin Olympics), film (think Leni Riefenstahl), and, most of all, oratory to massive, exquisitely staged rallies. Time and again in Mein Kampf, Hitler makes it clear that he believed his greatest gift to the party wasn't his ideas but his ability to speak. Conversely, his sharpest criticism of others seems to be that so-and-so was not a good speaker. This was more than simple vanity on Hitler's part. In the 1930s, in Germany and America alike, the ability to sway the masses through oratory was often the key to power. 'Without the loudspeaker,' Hitler once observed, 'we would never have conquered Germany.'⁵ Note the use of the word 'conquered.'

However, saying that Hitler had a pragmatic view of ideology is not to say that he didn't use ideology. Hitler had many ideologies. Indeed he was an ideology peddler. Few 'great men' were more adept at adopting, triangulating, and blending different ideological poses for different audiences. This was the man, after all, who had campaigned as an ardent anti-Bolshevik, then signed a treaty with Stalin, and convinced Neville Chamberlain as well as Western pacifists that he was a champion of peace while busily (and openly) arming for war.⁶

Nevertheless, the four significant 'ideas' we can be sure Hitler treasured in their own right were power concentrated in himself, hatred — and fear — of Jews, faith in the racial superiority of the German Volk, and, ultimately, war to demonstrate and secure the other three.

The popular conception that Hitler was a man of the right is grounded in a rich complex of assumptions and misconceptions about what constitutes left and right, terms that get increasingly slippery the more you try to nail them down. This is a problem we will be returning to throughout this book, but we should deal with it here at least as to how it related to Hitler and Nazism.

The conventional story of Hitler's rise to power goes something like this: Hitler and the Nazis exploited popular resentment over Germany's perceived illegitimate defeat in World War I ('the stab in the back' by communists, Jews, and weak politicians) and the unjust 'peace' imposed at Versailles. Colluding with capitalists and industrialists eager to defeat the Red menace (including, in some of the more perfervid versions, the Bush family), the Nazis staged a reactionary coup by exploiting patriotic sentiment and mobilizing the 'conservative' — often translated as racist and religious — elements in German society. Once in power, the Nazis established 'state capitalism' as a reward to the industrialists, who profited further from the Nazis' push to exterminate the Jews.

Obviously, there's a lot of truth here. But it is not the whole truth. And as we all know, the most effective lies are the ones sprinkled with the most actual truths. For decades the left has cherry-picked the facts to form a caricature of what the Third Reich was about. Caricatures do portray a real likeness, but they exaggerate certain features for a desired effect. In the case of the Third Reich, the desired effect was to cast Nazism as the polar opposite of Communism. So, for example, the roles of industrialists and conservatives were grossly exaggerated, while the very large and substantial leftist and socialist aspects of Nazism were shrunk to the status of trivia, the obsession of cranks and Hitler apologists.

Consider William Shirer's classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which did so much to establish the 'official' history of the Nazis. Shirer writes of the challenge facing Hitler when the radicals within his own party, led by the SA founder Ernst Rohm, wanted to carry out a 'Second Revolution' that would purge the traditional elements in the German army, the aristocracy, the capitalists, and others. 'The Nazis had destroyed the Left,' Shirer writes, 'but the Right remained: big business and finance, the aristocracy, the Junker landlords and the Prussian generals, who kept tight rein over the Army.'⁷

Now, in one sense, this is a perfectly fair version of events. The Nazis had indeed 'destroyed the Left,' and 'the Right' did remain. But ask yourself, how do we normally talk about such things? For example, the right in America was once defined by the so-called country-club Republicans. In the 1950s, starting with the founding of National Review, a new breed of self-described conservatives and libertarians slowly set