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

was on the left. Not only the conventional analysis typified by Shirer but most Marxist analysis concedes that the Nazis aimed first to 'destroy the left' before they went after the traditionalist right. The reason for this was that the Nazis could more easily defeat opponents on the left because they appealed to the same social base, used the same language, and thought in the same categories. A similar phenomenon was on display during the 1960s, when the New Left in the United States — and throughout Europe — attacked the liberal center while largely ignoring the traditionalist right. In American universities, for example, conservative faculty were often left alone, while liberal academics were hounded relentlessly.

The Nazis' ultimate aim was to transcend both left and right, to advance a 'Third Way' that broke with both categories. But in the real world the Nazis seized control of the country by dividing, conquering, and then replacing the left.

This is the monumental fact of the Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our collective memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists. Yes, they were also nationalists, which in the context of the 1930s was considered a rightist position, but this was at a time when the 'internationalism' of the Soviet Union defined all nationalisms as right-wing. Surely we've learned from the parade of horribles on offer in the twentieth century that nationalism isn't inherently right-wing — unless we're prepared to call Stalin, Castro, Arafat, Chavez, Guevara, Pol Pot, and, for that matter, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, right-wingers. Stalin himself ruled as a nationalist, invoking 'Mother Russia' and dubbing World War II the 'great patriotic war.' By 1943 he had even replaced the old Communist anthem ('The Internationale') with one that was thoroughly Russian. Moreover, historically, nationalism was a liberal-left phenomenon. The French Revolution was a nationalist revolution, but it was also seen as a left-liberal one for breaking with the Catholic Church and empowering the people. German Romanticism as championed by Gottfried Herder and others was seen as both nationalistic and liberal. The National Socialist movement was part of this revolutionary tradition.

But even if Nazi nationalism was in some ill-defined but fundamental way right-wing, this only meant that Nazism was right-wing socialism. And right-wing socialists are still socialists. Most of the Bolshevik revolutionaries Stalin executed were accused of being not conservatives or monarchists but rightists — that is, right-wing socialists. Any deviation from the Soviet line was automatic proof of rightism. Ever since, we in the West have apishly mimicked the Soviet usage of such terms without questioning the propagandistic baggage attached.

The Nazi ideologist — and Hitler rival — Gregor Strasser put it quite succinctly: 'We are socialists. We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today's capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, its unfair wage system, its immoral way of judging the worth of human beings in terms of their wealth and their money, instead of their responsibility and their performance, and we are determined to destroy this system whatever happens!'¹⁴

Hitler is just as straightforward in Mein Kampf. He dedicates an entire chapter to the Nazis' deliberate exploitation of socialist and communist imagery, rhetoric, and ideas and how this marketing confused both liberals and communists. The most basic example is the Nazi use of the color red, which was firmly associated with Bolshevism and socialism. 'We chose red for our posters after particular and careful deliberation...so as to arouse their attention and tempt them to come to our meetings...so that in this way we got a chance of talking to the people.' The Nazi flag — a black swastika inside a white disk in a sea of red — was explicitly aimed at attracting communists. 'In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of Aryan man.'¹⁵

The Nazis borrowed whole sections from the communist playbook. Party members — male and female — were referred to as comrades. Hitler recalls how his appeals to 'class-conscious proletarians' who wanted to strike out against the 'monarchist, reactionary agitation with the fists of the proletariat' were successful in drawing countless communists to their meetings.¹⁶ Sometimes the communists came with orders to smash up the place. But the Reds often refused to riot on command because they had been won over to the National Socialist cause. In short, the battle between the Nazis and the communists was a case of two dogs fighting for the same bone.

Nazism's one-nation politics by its very definition appealed to people from all walks of life. Professors, students, and civil servants were all disproportionately supportive of the Nazi cause. But it's important to get a sense of the kind of person who served as the rank-and-file Nazi, the young, often thuggish true believers who fought in the streets and dedicated themselves to the revolution. Patrick Leigh Fermor, a young Briton traveling in Germany shortly after Hitler came to power, met some of these men in a Rhineland workers' pub, still wearing their night-shift overalls. One of his new drinking buddies offered to let Fermor crash at his house for the night. When Fermor climbed the ladder to the attic to sleep in a guest bed, he found 'a shrine to Hitleriana':

The walls were covered with flags, photographs, posters, slogans and emblems. His SA uniforms hung neatly ironed on a hanger...When I said that it must be rather claustrophobic with all that stuff on the walls, he laughed and sat down on the bed, and said: 'Mensch! You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers, sickles, pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World Unite!...Then, suddenly when Hitler came to power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me. All of a sudden!' He snapped his fingers in the air. 'And here I am!'...Had a lot of people done the same, then? 'Millions! I tell you, I was astonished how easily they all changed sides!'¹⁷

Even after Hitler seized power and became more receptive to pleas from businessmen — the demands of his war machine required no less — party propaganda still aimed relentlessly at workers. Hitler always emphasized (and grossly exaggerated) his status as an 'ex-worker.' He would regularly appear in shirtsleeves and spoke informally to blue-collar Germans: 'I was a worker in my youth like you, slowly working my way upward by industry, by study, and I think I can say as well by hunger.' As the self-described Volkskanzler, or 'people's chancellor,' he played all the populist notes. One of his first official acts was to refuse to accept an honorary doctorate. A Nazi catechism asked, 'What professions has Adolf Hitler had?' The expected reply: 'Adolf Hitler was a construction worker, an artist, and a student.' In 1939, when the new Chancellery was built, Hitler greeted the construction workers first and gave the stonemasons pictures of himself and fruit baskets. He promised 'people's cars' for every worker. He failed to deliver them on time, but they eventually became the Volkswagens we all know today. The Nazis were brilliant at arguing for a one-nation politics in which a farmer and a businessman were valued equally. At Nazi rallies, organizers never allowed an aristocrat to speak unless he was paired with a humble farmer from the sticks.¹⁸

What distinguished Nazism from other brands of socialism and communism was not so much that it included more aspects from the political right (though there were some). What distinguished Nazism was that it forthrightly included a worldview we now associate almost completely with the political left: identity politics. This was what distinguished Nazism from doctrinaire communism, and it seems hard to argue that the marriage of one leftist vision to another can somehow produce right-wing progeny. If this was how the world worked, we would have to label nationalist-socialist organizations like the PLO and the Cuban Communist Party right-wing.

Insight into the mind-set of early members of the Nazi Party comes in the form of a series of essays written for a contest conducted by Theodore Abel, an impressively clever American sociologist. In 1934 Abel took out an ad in the Nazi Party journal asking 'old fighters' to submit essays explaining why they had joined. He restricted his request to 'old fighters' because so many opportunists had joined the party after Hitler's rise. The essays were combined in the fascinating book Why Hitler Came Into Power. One essayist, a coal miner, explained that he was 'puzzled by the denial of race and nation implicit in Marxism. Though I was interested in the betterment of the workingman's plight, I rejected [Marxism] unconditionally. I often asked myself why socialism had to be tied up with internationalism — why it could not work as well or better in conjunction with nationalism.' A railroad worker concurred, 'I shuddered at the thought of Germany in the grip of Bolshevism. The slogan 'Workers of the World Unite!' made no sense to me. At the same time, however, National Socialism, with its promise of a community...barring all class struggle, attracted me profoundly.' A third worker wrote that he embraced the Nazis because of their 'uncompromising will to stamp out the class struggle, snobberies of caste and party hatreds. The movement bore the true message of socialism to the German workingman.'¹⁹

One of the great ironies of history is that the more similar two groups are, the greater the potential for them to hate each other. God seems to have a particular fondness for contradicting the cliched notion that increased