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

5

The 1960s: Fascism Takes to the Streets

THE SELF-STYLED revolutionaries had grown increasingly brazen in their campaign to force concessions from the university. Students and professors who were labeled race traitors received death threats. Enemies of the racial nation were savagely beaten by roaming thugs. Guns were brought onto the campus, and the students dressed up in military uniforms. Professors were held hostage, badgered, intimidated, and threatened whenever their teaching contradicted racial orthodoxy. But the university administration, out of a mixture of cowardice and sympathy for the rebels, refused to punish the revolutionaries, even when the president was manhandled by a fascist goon in front of an audience made up of the campus community.

The radicals and their student sympathizers believed themselves to be revolutionaries of the left — the opposite of fascists in their minds — yet when one of their professors read them the speeches of Benito Mussolini, the students reacted with enthusiasm. Events came to a climax when students took over the student union and the local radio station. Armed with rifles and shotguns, they demanded an ethnically pure educational institution staffed and run by members of their own race. At first the faculty and administration were understandably reluctant; but when it was suggested that those who opposed their agenda might be killed, most of the 'moderates' quickly reversed course and supported the militants. In a mass rally reminiscent of Nuremberg, the professors recanted their reactionary ways and swore fidelity to the new revolutionary order. One professor later recalled how easily 'pompous teachers who catechized about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.'¹

Eventually, the fascist thugs got everything they wanted. The authorities caved in to their demands. The few who remained opposed quietly left the university and, in some cases, the country, once it was clear that their safety could not be guaranteed.

The University of Berlin in 1932? Milan in 1922? Good guesses. But this all happened at Cornell in the spring of 1969. Paramilitary Black Nationalists under the banner of the Afro-American Society seized control of the university after waging an increasingly aggressive campaign of intimidation and violence.

The public excuse for the armed seizure of the Cornell student union was a cross burning outside a black dorm. This was later revealed to be a hoax orchestrated by the black radicals themselves in order to provide a pretext for their violence — and to overshadow the administration's fainthearted and toothless 'reprimands' of six black radicals who'd broken campus rules and state laws. This Reichstag-fire-style tactic worked perfectly, as the gun-toting fascist squadristi stormed Straight Hall in the predawn hours, rousting bleary- eyed parents who were staying there for Parents Weekend. These bewildered souls who had the misfortune to bankroll the educations of the very gun-toting scholarship students now calling them 'pigs' were forced to jump from a three-foot-high cargo deck into the freezing Ithaca rain. 'This is Nazism in its worst form,' declared a mother with breathless, if understandable, exaggeration.² The university president, James A. Perkins, was required to cancel his morning convocation address, sublimely titled 'The Stability of the University.'

In popular myth the 1960s was a gentle utopian movement that opposed the colonialist Vietnam War abroad and sought greater social equality and harmony at home. And it is true that the vast majority of those young people who were drawn to what they called the movement were starry-eyed idealists who thought they were ushering in the Age of Aquarius. Still, in its strictly political dimension, there is no denying that the movement's activist core was little more than a fascist youth cult. Indeed the 'movement' of the 1960s may be considered the third great fascist moment of the twentieth century. The radicals of the New Left may have spoken about 'power to the people' and the 'authentic voice of a new generation,' but they really favored neither. They were an avant-garde movement that sought to redefine not only politics but human nature itself.

Historically, fascism is of necessity and by design a form of youth movement, and all youth movements have more than a whiff of fascism about them. The exaltation of passion over reason, action over deliberation, is a naturally youthful impulse. Treating young people as equals, 'privileging' their opinions precisely because they lack experience and knowledge, is an inherently fascist tendency, because at its heart lies the urge to throw off 'old ways' and 'old dogmas' in favor of what the Nazis called the 'idealism of the deed.' Youth politics — like populism generally — is the politics of the tantrum and the hissy fit. The indulgence of so-called youth politics is one face of the sort of cowardice and insecurity that leads to the triumph of barbarism.

While there's no disputing that Nazism's success was deeply connected to the privations of the great German Depression, that should not lead one to think that Nazism itself was a product of poverty. Even before World War I, Germany was undergoing a revolution of youth. The war merely accelerated these trends, heightening both idealism and alienation. Klaus Mann, the secular Jew and homosexual novelist, spoke for much of his generation when he wrote in 1927, 'We are a generation that is united, so to speak, only by perplexity. As yet, we have not found the goal that might be able to dedicate us to common effort, although we all share the search for such a goal.'³ Mann understated the case. While young Germans were divided about what should replace the old order, they were united by more than mere perplexity. A sort of youthful identity politics had swept through Germany, fired by the notion that the new generation was different and better because it had been liberated from the politics of corrupt and cowardly old men and was determined to create an 'authentic' new order.

German youth culture in the 1920s and early 1930s was ripe with rebelliousness, environmental mysticism, idealism, and no small amount of paganism, expressing attitudes that should be familiar to anyone who lived through the 1960s. 'They regarded family life as repressive and insincere,' writes one historian. They believed sexuality, in and out of marriage, was 'shot through with hypocrisy,' writes another. They, too, believed you couldn't trust anyone over thirty and despised the old materialistic order in all its manifestations. To them, 'parental religion was largely a sham, politics boastful and trivial, economics unscrupulous and deceitful, education stereotyped and lifeless, art trashy and sentimental, literature spurious and commercialized, drama tawdry and mechanical.' Born of the middle class, the youth movement rejected, even loathed, middle-class liberalism. 'Their goal,' writes John Toland, 'was to establish a youth culture for fighting the bourgeois trinity of school, home and church.'⁴

In cafes they howled at the decadence of German society in cadences reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg. In the woods they'd commune with nature, awaiting 'messages from the forest.' A fuhrer — or popularly acclaimed 'leader' — might read passages from Nietzsche or the poet Stefan George, who wrote: 'The people and supreme wisdom yearn for the Man! — The Deed!...Perhaps someone who sat for years among your murderers and slept in your prisons will stand up and do the deed!' 'These young people,' Toland writes, 'thriving on mysticism and impelled by idealism, yearned for action — any kind of action.'⁵

Even before the Nazis seized power, student radicals were eager to challenge the stodgy conservatism of German higher education, which cherished classically liberal academic freedom and the authority of scholars and teachers. A wave of Nietzschean pragmatism (Julien Benda's phrase) had swept across Europe, bringing with it a wind that blew away the stale dogmas of their parents' generation, revealing a new world to be seen with fresh eyes. The Nazis told young people that their enthusiasm shouldn't be restrained through academic study — rather, it should be indulged through political action. The tradition of study for its own sake was thrown aside in the name of 'relevance.' Let us read no more of Jewish science and foreign abstractions, they cried. Let us learn of Germans and war and what we can do for the nation! Intuition — which young people have in abundance — was more important than knowledge and experience, insisted the radicals. The youth loved how Hitler denounced the theorists — 'ink knights,' he spat. What was required, according to Hitler, was a 'revolt against reason' itself, for '[i]ntellect has poisoned our people!'⁶ Hitler rejoiced that he stole the hearts and minds of youth, transforming universities into incubators of activism for the Fatherland.

The Nazis succeeded with stunning speed. In 1927, during a time of general prosperity, 77 percent of Prussian students insisted that the 'Aryan paragraph' — barring Jews from employment — be incorporated into the charters of German universities. As a halfway measure, they fought for racial quotas that would limit the number of racially inappropriate students. In 1931, 60 percent of all German undergraduates supported the Nazi Student Organization. Regional studies of Nazi participation found that students generally outpaced any other group in their support for National Socialism.⁷

A key selling point for German youth was the Nazi emphasis on the need for increased student participation