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

about taking over the Republican Party. From one perspective one could say the conservative movement 'destroyed' the Old Right in America. But a more accurate and typical way of describing these events would be to say that the New Right replaced the old one, incorporating many of its members in the process. Indeed, that is precisely why we refer to the rise of the New Right in the 1970s and early 1980s. Similarly, when a new generation of leftists asserted themselves in the 1960s via such organizations as the Students for a Democratic Society, we called these activists the New Left because they had edged aside the Old Left, who were their elders and in many cases their actual parents. In time the New Left and the New Right took over their respective parties — the Democrats in 1972, the Republicans in 1980 — and today they are simply the left and the right. Likewise, the Nazis did indeed take over — and not merely destroy — the German left.

Historians in recent years have revisited the once 'settled' question of who supported the Nazis. Ideological biases once required that the 'ruling classes' and the 'bourgeoisie' be cast as the villains while the lower classes — the 'proletariat' and the unemployed — be seen as supporting the communists and/or the liberal Social Democrats. After all, if the left is the voice for the poor, the powerless, and the exploited, it would be terribly inconvenient for those segments of society to support fascists and right-wingers — particularly if Marxist theory requires that the downtrodden be left-wing in their orientation.

That's pretty much gone out the window. While there's a big debate about how much of the working and lower classes supported the Nazis, it is now largely settled that very significant chunks of both constituted the Nazi base. Nazism and Fascism were both popular movements with support from every stratum of society. Meanwhile, the contention that industrialists and other fat cats were pulling Hitler's strings from behind the scenes has also been banished to the province of aging Marxists, nostalgic for paradigms lost. It's true that Hitler eventually received support from German industry, but it came late and generally tended to follow his successes rather than fund them. But the notion, grounded in Marxist gospel, that Fascism or Nazism was the fighting arm of capitalist reaction crashed with the Berlin Wall. (Indeed, the very notion that corporations are inherently right-wing is itself an ideological vestige of earlier times, as I discuss in a subsequent chapter on economics.)

In Germany the aristocracy and business elite were generally repulsed by Hitler and the Nazis. But when Hitler demonstrated that he wasn't going away, these same elites decided it would be wise to put down some insurance money on the upstarts. This may be reprehensible, but these decisions weren't driven by anything like an ideological alliance between capitalism and Nazism. Corporations in Germany, like their counterparts today, tended to be opportunistic, not ideological.

The Nazis rose to power exploiting anticapitalist rhetoric they indisputably believed. Even if Hitler was the nihilistic cipher many portray him as, it is impossible to deny the sincerity of the Nazi rank and file who saw themselves as mounting a revolutionary assault on the forces of capitalism. Moreover, Nazism also emphasized many of the themes of later New Lefts in other places and times: the primacy of race, the rejection of rationalism, an emphasis on the organic and holistic — including environmentalism, health food, and exercise — and, most of all, the need to 'transcend' notions of class.

For these reasons, Hitler deserves to be placed firmly on the left because first and foremost he was a revolutionary. Broadly speaking, the left is the party of change, the right the party of the status quo. On this score, Hitler was in no sense, way, shape, or form a man of the right. There are few things he believed more totally than that he was a revolutionary. And his followers agreed. Yet for more than a generation to call Hitler a revolutionary has been a form of heresy, particularly for Marxist and German historians, since for the left revolution is always good — the inevitable forward motion of the Hegelian wheel of history. Even if their bloody tactics are (sometimes) to be lamented, revolutionaries move history forward. (For conservatives, in contrast, revolutions are almost always bad — unless, as in the case of the United States, you are trying to conserve the victories and legacy of a previous revolution.)

You can see why the Marxist left would resist the idea that Hitler was a revolutionary. Because if he was, then either Hitler was a force for good or revolutions can be bad. And yet how can you argue that Hitler wasn't a revolutionary in the leftist mold? Hitler despised the bourgeoisie, traditionalists, aristocrats, monarchists, and all believers in the established order. Early in his political career, he 'had become repelled by the traditionalist values of the German bourgeoisie,' writes John Lukacs in The Hitler of History. The Nazi writer Hanns Johst's play Der Konig centers on a heroic revolutionary who meets a tragic end because he's betrayed by reactionaries and the bourgeoisie. The protagonist takes his own life rather than abandon his revolutionary principles. When Hitler met Johst (whom he later named poet laureate of the Third Reich) in 1923, he told him that he'd seen the play seventeen times and that he suspected his own life might end the same way.⁸

As David Schoenbaum has noted, Hitler viewed the bourgeoisie in almost the exact same terms as Lenin did. 'Let us not deceive ourselves,' Hitler declared. 'Our bourgeoisie is already worthless for any noble human endeavor.' Several years after he was firmly in power, he explained: 'We did not defend Germany against Bolshevism back then because we were not intending to do anything like conserve a bourgeois world or go so far as to freshen it up. Had communism really intended nothing more than a certain purification by eliminating isolated rotten elements from among the ranks of our so-called 'upper ten thousand' or our equally worthless Philistines, one could have sat back quietly and looked on for a while.'⁹

A related definition of the right is that it is not merely in favor of preserving the status quo but affirmatively reactionary, seeking to restore the old order. This perspective obviously leaves much to be desired since most libertarians are considered members of the right and few would call such activists reactionaries. As we shall see, there is a sense in which Hitler was a reactionary insofar as he was trying to overthrow the entire millennium-old Judeo-Christian order to restore the paganism of antiquity — a mission shared by some on the left but none on the right today.

'Reactionary' is one of those words smuggled in from Marxist talking points that we now accept uncritically. Reactionaries in Marxist and early-twentieth-century progressive parlance were those who wanted to return to either the monarchy or, say, the Manchester Liberalism of the nineteenth century. They wished to restore, variously, the authority of God, Crown, patriotism, or the market — not Wotan and Valhalla. It is for this reason that Hitler saw himself in an existential battle with the forces of reaction. 'We had no wish to resurrect the dead from the old Reich which had been ruined through its own blunders, but to build a new State,' Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. And elsewhere: 'Either the German youth will one day create a new State founded on the racial idea or they will be the last witnesses of the complete breakdown and death of the bourgeois world.'¹⁰

Such radicalism — succeed or destroy it all! — explains why Hitler, the anti-Bolshevik, often spoke with grudging admiration of Stalin and the communists — but never had anything but derision for 'reactionaries' who wanted merely to 'turn back the clock' to the nineteenth century. Indeed, he considered the German Social Democrats' greatest achievement to be the destruction of the monarchy in 1918.

Consider the symbolism of Horst Wessel, the party's most famous martyr, whose story was transformed into the anthem of the Nazi struggle, played along with 'Deutschland uber Alles' at all official events. The lyrics of the 'Horst Wessel Song' refer to Nazi 'comrades' shot at by the 'Red Front and reactionaries.'

If we put aside for a moment the question of whether Hitlerism was a phenomenon of the right, what is indisputable is that Hitler was in no way conservative — a point scholars careful with their words always underscore. Certainly, to suggest that Hitler was a conservative in any sense related to American conservatism is lunacy. American conservatives seek to preserve both traditional values and the classical liberal creed enshrined in the Constitution. American conservatism straddles these two distinct but overlapping libertarian and traditionalist strains, whereas Hitler despised both of them.

THE RISE OF A NATIONAL SOCIALIST

The perception of Hitler and Nazism as right-wing rests on more than a historiographical argument or Hitler's animosity to traditionalists. The left has also used Hitler's racism, his alleged status as a capitalist, and his hatred of Bolshevism to hang the conservative label not only on Hitler and Nazism but on generic fascism as well. We can best address the merits — or lack thereof — of these points by briefly revisiting the story of Hitler's rise. Obviously, Hitler's personal tale has been so thoroughly dissected by historians and Hollywood that it doesn't make sense to repeat it all here. But some essential facts and themes deserve more attention than they usually get.

Hitler was born in Austria, just over the border from Bavaria. Like that of many early Nazis, his youth was