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

For more than sixty years, liberals have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream of the political right. And yet with the notable and complicated exceptions of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, no top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger. All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment — John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke — and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism.²² Meanwhile, the ranks of left-wing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition. And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word 'Marxist' to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents. The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values — even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments.

In a seminar there may be important distinctions to be made between, say, Foucault's 'enterprise of Unreason,' Derrida's tyrannical logocentrism, and Hitler's 'revolt against reason.' But such distinctions rarely translate beyond ivy-covered walls — and they are particularly meaningless to a movement that believes action is more important than ideas. Deconstruction, existentialism, postmodernism, Pragmatism, relativism: all of these ideas had the same purpose — to erode the iron chains of tradition, dissolve the concrete foundations of truth, and firebomb the bunkers where the defenders of the ancien regime still fought and persevered. These were ideologies of the 'movement.' The late Richard Rorty admitted as much, conflating Nietzsche and Heidegger with James and Dewey as part of the same grand project.

Few were more adept at using the jargon of the 'movement' than fascists and pre-fascists. Hitler uses the phrase 'the Movement' over two hundred times in Mein Kampf. A Nazi Party journal was called Die Bewegung (The Movement). The word 'movement' itself is instructive. Movement, unlike progress, doesn't imply a fixed destination. Rather, it takes it as a given that any change is better. As Allan Bloom and others have noted, the core passion of fascism was self-assertion. The Nazis may have been striving for a utopian Thousand-Year Reich, but their first instincts were radical: Destroy what exists. Tear it down. Eradicate 'das System' — another term shared by the New Left and fascists alike. 'I have a barbaric concept of socialism,' a young Mussolini once said. 'I understand it as the greatest act of negation and destruction...Onward, you new barbarians!...Like all barbarians you are the harbingers of a new civilization.'²³ Hitler's instincts were even more destructive. Even before he ordered the obliteration of Paris and issued his scorched-earth policy on German soil, his agenda was to rip apart everything the bourgeoisie had created, to destroy the reactionaries, to create new art and architecture, new culture, new religion, and, most of all, new Germans. This project could only commence upon the ashes of das System. And if he couldn't create, he could take solace in destroying.

How exactly is this different from the 'Burn, baby, burn!' ethos of the late 1960s?

THE ACTION CULT

Five months after the Cornell takeover, the Weathermen gathered in Chicago's Lincoln Park. Armed with baseball bats, helmets, and, in the words of the historian Jim Miller, 'apparently bottomless reserves of arrogance and self-loathing,' they prepared to 'smash through their bourgeois inhibitions and 'tear pig city apart' in a 'national action' they called 'The Days of Rage.'' Like Brownshirts and fascist squadristi, they smashed windows, destroyed property, and terrorized the bourgeoisie. They'd already bloodied themselves the previous year at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where, the Weathermen claimed, their violence had done 'more damage to the ruling class...than any mass, peaceful gathering this country has ever seen.'²⁴

The desire to destroy is a natural outgrowth of the cult of action. After all, if you are totally committed to revolutionary change, any boundaries you run into — the courts, the police, the rule of law — must be either converted, co-opted, or destroyed. All fascists are members of the cult of action. Fascism's appeal was that it would get things done. Make the trains run on time, put people to work, get the nation on the move: these are sentiments sewn into the fiber of every fascist movement. The fascist state of mind can best be described as 'Enough talk, more action!' Close the books, get out of the library, get moving. Take action! What kind of action? Direct action! Social action! Mass action! Revolutionary action! Action, action, action.

Communists loved action, too. That's not surprising considering the family bonds between communism and fascism. But fascists valued action more. Communism had a playbook. Fascism had a hurry-up offense, calling its plays on the field. Sure, fascism had its theorists, but in the streets, fascists cared about victory more than doctrine. 'In a way utterly unlike the classical 'isms,'' writes Robert O. Paxton, 'the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is 'true' insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood.' Or as Mussolini himself put it in his 'Postulates of the Fascist Program,' fascists 'do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.'²⁵

The word 'activist' enters the English language at the turn of the century with the rise of pragmatic Progressivism. The early fascist intellectuals fancied themselves 'activist philosophers.' Mussolini, while still a socialist in good standing, wrote in 1908, 'The plebs, who are excessively Christianized and humanitarian, will never understand that a higher degree of evil is necessary so that the Superman might thrive...The Superman knows revolt alone. Everything that exists must be destroyed.' This represented an early marriage of Leninism and Nietzsche. Instead of the individual superman, the vanguard of the revolution would be the new breed of supermen. The Nazis were likewise inspired by Nietzsche but also by the Romantics, who believed that the spirit of the act is more important than the idea behind it. This was the Nazi 'Cult of the Deed.' The French fascists even dubbed their movement the Action Francaise, putting action on an equal footing with nation. Mussolini defined both socialism and fascism as 'movement, struggle, and action.' One of his favorite slogans was 'To live is not to calculate, but to act!' Hitler mocked those who believed that arguments and reason should trump the naked power of the people. When four renowned economists sent Hitler a letter disputing his socialist schemes, Hitler responded, 'Where are your storm troopers? Go on the street, go into folk meetings and try to see your standpoint through. Then we'll see who is right — we or you.'²⁶

Sixties radicalism was suffused with an identical spirit. The early intellectuals of the SDS — centered on the Institute for Policy Studies (a think tank today closely affiliated with the left wing of the Democratic Party) — were adherents of what they called 'existential pragmatism,' a blend in equal parts of Jean-Paul Sartre and John Dewey. 'I'm a nihilist! I'm proud of it, proud of it!' shrieked a delegate to a 1967 meeting of the Princeton SDS. 'Tactics? It's too late...Let's break what we can. Make as many answer as we can. Tear them apart.'²⁷

Mark Rudd, the chairman of the SDS at Columbia University and the leader of the takeover there in 1968, represented the ascendancy of what SDS 'moderates' called the 'action freaks' or the 'action faction.' A voluptuary of violence, Rudd subscribed to the Sorelian view that 'direct action' would 'raise consciousness' (then a freshly minted phrase). When the 'moderates' told him the movement needed more organization and outreach, he responded, 'Organizing is just another word for going slow.'²⁸ Mussolini, who divided his squadristi into 'action squads,' could certainly sympathize.

As the reader may recall from our earlier discussion, it was Georges Sorel, the French engineer turned intellectual, who pioneered the idea that the masses needed myths to be moved to action. Recognizing that Marxism, like all social science, rarely panned out in real life, Sorel married William James's will to believe to Nietzsche's will to power and applied them to mass psychology. Revolutionaries didn't need to understand the reality of Marxism; they needed to believe in the myth of Marxism (or nationalism, syndicalism, fascism, and so on). '[T]o concern oneself with social science is one thing and to mold consciousness is another,' he wrote.²⁹ Passion, not facts, was the fuel for action. 'It is faith that moves mountains, not reason,' Mussolini explained in a 1932 interview (echoing Woodrow Wilson's Leaders of Men). 'Reason is a tool, but it can never be the motive force of the crowd.'

As the cross-burning incident at Cornell demonstrated, this preference for arousing passions at the expense of truth and reason defined the agenda of those fighting in the trenches. The practice of 'lying for justice' — always acceptable on the communist left — was infused into the American New Left with new potency. The catchphrase at the Columbia uprising was 'the issue is not the issue.' No wonder, since the actual 'issue' — building a gym in adjacent Harlem — was such small beer. For most of the activists, deceit wasn't the point. The point was passion, mobilization, action. As one SDS member proclaimed after he and his colleagues seized a building and kidnapped a dean, 'We've got something going on here and now we've just got to find out what it is.'³⁰

BUILDING A POLITICS OF MEANING