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

supported the war.¹⁴ Gandhis they were not.

This raises an even more fundamentally dishonest aspect of the 1960s myth. Dean, speaking for many, paints the 1960s as a time of great unity. 'People my age really felt that way.'¹⁵ But this is patent nonsense. 'People' didn't feel that way. The people Howard Dean knew felt that way — or at least their nostalgia causes them to think they did. It's bizarre how many people remember the 1960s as a time of 'unity' and 'hope' when it was in reality a time of rampant domestic terrorism, campus tumult, assassinations, and riots. Nostalgia for their own youth can't explain this myopia, since liberals also pine for the 1930s as a time when 'we were all in it together.' This, too, is a gross distortion. The United States was not unified in the 1930s; it was torn by political unrest, intense labor violence, and the fear that one totalitarianism or another lay just around the corner. If unity alone was the issue, the left would pine for the 1950s or even the 1920s. But the left didn't thrive in these decades, so any unity enjoyed by Americans was illegitimate.

In other words, it is not unity the left longs for but victory; unity on terms not their own (such as the 'staid conformity' of the 1950s) is false and misleading. In the 1930s and 1960s, the left's popular-front approach yielded real power — and that is the true object of liberal nostalgia; nothing more, nothing less.

THE NEW LEFT'S FASCIST MOMENT

The elevation of unity as the highest social value is a core tenet of fascism and all leftist ideologies. Mussolini adopted the socialist symbol of the fasces to convey that his movement valued unity over the liberal democratic fetish of debate and discussion. That clanking, unrhymed chant we hear at protest rallies today — 'The people united will never be defeated!' — is a perfectly fascist refrain. Perhaps it is true that 'the people united will never be defeated,' but that doesn't mean the people are right (as Calvin Coolidge liked to say, 'One with the law on his side is a majority'). We tend to forget that unity is, at best, morally neutral and often a source of irrationality and groupthink. Rampaging mobs are unified. The Mafia is unified. Marauding barbarians bent on rape and pillage are unified. Meanwhile, civilized people have disagreements, and small- d democrats have arguments. Classical liberalism is based on this fundamental insight, which is why fascism was always antiliberal. Liberalism rejected the idea that unity is more valuable than individuality. For fascists and other leftists, meaning and authenticity are found in collective enterprises — of class, nation, or race — and the state is there to enforce that meaning on everyone without the hindrance of debate.

The first task of any fascist reformation is to discredit the authority of the past, and this was the top priority of the New Left. The Old Left was 'suffocating under a blanket of slogans, euphemisms and empty jargon,' while the New Left's mission lay in 'getting people to think.' Received wisdom, dogma, and 'ritualistic language,' Tom Hayden wrote in his 1961 'Letter to the New (Young) Left,' would be swept aside by a revolutionary spirit that 'finds no rest in conclusions [and in which] answers are seen as provisional, to be discarded in the face of new evidence or changed conditions.' Hayden, like Mussolini, Woodrow Wilson, and the New Dealers, placed his hopes in a pragmatism that would yield a Third Way between the 'authoritarian movements both of Communism and the domestic Right.' Hayden, of course, also promised that his new movement would transcend labels and take 'action.'¹⁶

In academia a parallel revolt was under way. In 1966, at a conference at Johns Hopkins University, the French literary critic Jacques Derrida introduced the word 'deconstruction' — a term coined by Nazi ideologues — into the American intellectual bloodstream. Deconstruction — a literary theory which holds that there is no single meaning to any text — caught fire in the minds of academics and students alike who hoped to be liberated from the dead weight of history and accumulated knowledge. If all texts were diversely interpretable with no 'true' meaning at their core, then the important thing — the only thing really — was the meaning the reader imposed upon the text. In other words, meaning is created through power and will. The right interpretation is the one held by the interpreter who 'wins' the academic power struggle. According to Derrida and his acolytes, reason was a tool of oppression. Beneath every seemingly rational decision was pure Nietzschean will to power. Derrida hoped to snatch the veil from the Enlightenment and reveal the tyranny of 'logocentrism' beneath (another word with fascist roots).

This, too, was a replay of the pragmatic spirit that had sought to liberate society from the cage of inherited dogma. Pragmatism inspired Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Benito Mussolini, as well as their court intellectuals, to discard the 'putrefying corpse' of classical liberalism and parliamentary democracy in order to empower 'men of action' to solve society's problems through bold experimentation and the unfettered power of the state. As one progressive reformer put it, 'We were all Deweyites before we read Dewey.'¹⁷ Similarly, many in the academy were deconstructionists before they read Derrida.

The literary critic Paul de Man was one such sleeper deconstructionist. De Man, who first met Derrida at the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference, became the foremost champion of deconstruction in the United States and a huge influence on Derrida himself. De Man taught at Cornell in the first half of the 1960s, and then moved to Johns Hopkins and Yale. Derrida's and de Man's writings served as an intellectual warrant for the radicalization of faculty who wanted to find common cause with the marchers in the streets by 'speaking truth to power.'¹⁸ At Cornell, in the years preceding the takeover, de Man championed the defenestration of the 'core curriculum,' arguing that nothing worthwhile would be lost if the university turned its back on the traditional benchmarks of a liberal education. How could it be otherwise if all those ancient texts were in effect meaningless?

Such ideas contributed to the implosion of the American university in much the same way that they accelerated the Nazi takeover of German universities. Polite liberals were forced to choose between doing their jobs and siding with the radicals. For the more politicized professors this was no choice at all, since they already agreed with the aims of the revolution. But for individuals like Clinton Rossiter, a decent liberal centrist and one of America's most distinguished historians, the choice was destructive. A professor at Cornell during the uprising, Rossiter at first fought for the ideal of academic freedom along with other threatened faculty, but eventually he threw in his lot with the black fascists. Just two days before he made his decision, he'd told the New York Times, 'If the ship goes down, I'll go down with it — as long as it represents reason and order. But if it's converted to threats and fear, I'll leave it and take a job as a night watchman at a local bakery.' Fine words. But when truly forced to choose between working at a bakery and giving in to threats and intimidation, he turned his back on his friends and his principles.¹⁹

The parallel between the reformation of American universities in the 1960s and what occurred in Nazi Germany runs even deeper. Deconstruction is a direct and unapologetic offshoot of Heidegger's brand of existentialism, which not only was receptive to Nazism but helped foster it. Heidegger was the great inheritor of Nietzsche's assault on truth and morality, which held that we make our own truth and decide our own morality. For Heidegger and Nietzsche alike, good and evil were childish notions. What matters is will and choice. Self-assertion was the highest value. Choices were worthwhile only if they were authentic choices, heedless of conventional morality. This was the ethos of Nazism that Heidegger wholeheartedly embraced and never forthrightly renounced, even decades after the extent of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes were known. The Nazi critique of Western civilization was total. In his infamous rectorial address, Heidegger looked forward to the time — hastened by Hitler's efforts — 'when the spiritual strength of the West fails and its joints crack, when the moribund semblance of culture caves in and drags all forces into confusion and lets them suffocate in madness.'²⁰

Deconstruction's indebtedness to the fascist avant-garde remains one of the most controversial subjects in academia today, precisely because that debt is so obvious and profound. Paul de Man, for example, was a Nazi collaborator in Belgium who wrote seething pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic articles for a fascist newspaper during the occupation. Herbert Marcuse, a protege of Heidegger's, became the leader of the New Left's academic brain trust. He attacked Western society mercilessly, arguing that 'liberal tolerance' was 'serving the cause of oppression' — an argument that echoed the fascist assault of the 1930s almost perfectly. Frantz Fanon, who preached about the 'redemptive' power of violence, was widely seen as a direct heir of Georges Sorel, the pre-fascist theorist admired and emulated by Italian Fascists and Bolsheviks alike. The Nietzschean pragmatist Michel Foucault — revered by postmodernists and feminist theorists — set as his North Star the 'sovereign enterprise of Unreason.'²¹ Foucault's hatred for Enlightenment reason was so profound that he celebrated the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the dictatorship of the mullahs precisely because it was a premodern assault on Enlightenment principles. Carl Schmitt, a grotesque Nazi philosopher, is among the most chic intellectuals on the left today. His writings were passed around as samizdat by New Left radicals in Europe, including Joschka Fischer, who spent the 1970s beating up policemen in West German streets and later became foreign minister and vice- chancellor in the government of Gerhard Schroder from 1998 to 2005.