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

pimps at a neighborhood bar. The two soon moved into a rundown boardinghouse together, over the protests of his mother. There's some evidence that Wessel grew increasingly disenchanted with the Nazis, realizing that the communists shared many of the same aspirations. He certainly became less active in the ranks of the Brownshirts. But whether he would have broken with them is unknowable because he died at the hands of the communists in 1930.

And that was all that really mattered to Joseph Goebbels, who translated Wessel's death into a propaganda coup. Overnight, Wessel was transfigured into a martyr to the Nazi cause, a Sorelian religious myth aimed at the idealistic and perplexed youth of the interwar years. Goebbels described him as a 'Socialist Christ' and unleashed a relentless torrent of hagiography about Wessel's work with the poor. By the beginning of World War II, the places of his life and death in Berlin had been made into stations of the cross, and shrines had been erected at his birthplace in Vienna as well as his various homes in Berlin. His little poem was set to music and became the official Nazi anthem.

In the German feature film Hans Westmar: One of Many, the young protagonist, based on Wessel, peers from his fraternity window and declares to his privileged comrades: 'The real battle is out there, not here with us. The enemy is on the march...I tell you, all of Germany will be won down there, on the street. And that's where we must be — with our people. We can no longer live in our ivory towers. We must join our hands in battle with the workers. There can't be classes anymore. We are workers too, workers of the mind, and our place now is next to those who work with their hands.'³⁷

Even if the propagandized Wessel were a complete fabrication — though it was not — the mythologized version illustrates the more interesting, and important, truth. Germany was filled with millions of young men who were receptive to the shining ideal that Wessel represented. Of course, the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis makes it difficult to see (and impossible to forgive), but the dream of a unified, classless Germany was deeply heartfelt by many Nazi joiners; and if reduced to that alone, it was not an evil dream at all.

But just as the line between 'good' totalitarianism and bad is easily crossed, dreams can quickly become nightmares. Indeed, some dreams, given their nature, must eventually become nightmares. And for the Horst Wessels of the American New Left, whatever admirable idealism they might have had quickly and unavoidably degenerated into fascist thuggery.

The most famous of these figures was Tom Hayden. The son of middle-class parents in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park (near Father Coughlin's parish) and the chief author of The Port Huron Statement, Hayden played an admirable role in the early civil rights struggle in the South. He certainly believed himself to be a young democrat, but the seeds of a totalitarian bent were evident from his earliest days at the University of Michigan. In a speech delivered to the Michigan Union in 1962 — which became a manifesto titled Student Social Action — Hayden proclaimed that the youth must wrest control of society from their elders. To this end the universities had to become incubators of revolutionary 'social action.' Richard Flacks, a young academic who would join Hayden in the new crusade along with his wife, Mickey, was thunderstruck. He went home and told his wife (an activist in a group called Women Strike for Peace), 'Mickey, I've just seen the next Lenin!'³⁸

By the end of the decade, Hayden had indeed become a forthright advocate of 'Leninist' violence and mayhem, glorifying crime as political rebellion and openly supporting Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and, of course, the murderous Black Panthers. He helped write the 'Berkeley Liberation Program.' Among the highlights: 'destroy the university unless it serves the people' 'all oppressed people in jail are political prisoners and must be set free' 'create a soulful socialism' 'students must destroy the senile dictatorship of adult teachers.' His 'community outreach' in the slums of Newark preceded and in part fomented the horrific race riots there. 'I had been fascinated by the simplicity and power of the Molotov cocktail during those days in Newark,' he writes in his autobiography. Hayden hoped that with the use of violence, the New Left could create 'liberated territories' in the ghettos and campus enclaves and use them to export revolution to the rest of the United States. At a 1967 panel discussion with leading New York intellectuals, Hannah Arendt lectured Hayden about his defense of bloody insurrection. He snapped in response, 'You may put me in the position of a leper, but I say a case can be made for violence in the peace movement.' At the Columbia occupation, Hayden explained that the protests were just the start of 'bringing the war home.' Echoing Che Guevara's chant of 'two, three, many Vietnams,' Hayden called for 'two, three, many Columbias.'³⁹

One of the most illuminating symptoms of left-wing revolutionary movements is their tendency to blur the difference between common crime and political rebellion. The Brownshirts beat up storekeepers, shook down businessmen, and vandalized property, rationalizing all of it in the name of the 'movement.' Left-wing activists still refer to the L.A. riots as an 'uprising' or 'rebellion.' A similar moral obtuseness plagued the movement in the 1960s. 'The future of our struggle is the future of crime in the streets,' declared Hayden. The only way to 'revolutionize youth,' he explained, was to have 'a series of sharp and dangerous conflicts, life and death conflicts' in the streets. Hayden was no doubt inspired by (and inspiring to) the Black Panthers, who regularly staged ambushes of police in the streets. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention demonstrations in Chicago his co-organizer Rennie Davis implored the crowd, 'Don't vote...join us in the streets of America...Build a National Liberation Front for America.' Hayden was put on trial for his incitement of violence in Chicago. In June 1969 he pronounced on the 'need to expand our struggle to include a total attack on the courts.'⁴⁰

Hayden was a moderate, according to Mark Rudd, the leader of the so-called action faction of the SDS. Rudd, who organized the Columbia 'rebellion,' was born to a middle-class Jewish family in New Jersey, and his parents hardly encouraged his behavior. When he called his father to explain that he 'took a building' from the president of Columbia University, his father replied, 'Then give it back to him.' Rudd's preferred rallying cry at the time was 'Up against the wall, motherfucker!' which he used on teachers and administrators with abandon. 'Perhaps nothing upsets our enemies more than this slogan,' he explained. 'To them it seemed to show the extent to which we had broken with their norms, how far we had sunk to brutality, hatred and obscenity. Great!' The term, he explained, clarified that the administrators, faculty, and police who opposed the radicals were 'our enemies.' 'Liberal solutions, restructuring, partial understandings, compromise are not allowed anymore. The essence of the matter is that we are out for social and political revolution, nothing less.'⁴¹

Rudd eventually joined the Weathermen, who, out of deference to the female terrorists in the group, soon changed their name to the Weather Underground (though they sometimes went by the moniker 'The Revolutionary Youth Movement'). In 1970 the group declared a 'state of war' against the United States of America and commenced a campaign of terrorist attacks. Rudd took the position that the best way to foment revolution was to target military installations, banks, and policemen. One of their first bombings was intended to target a dance for noncommissioned officers at Fort Dix, New Jersey (though another version says that the bomb, wrapped in roofing nails, was intended for Columbia). In any event, the inexperienced bomb makers famously blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village town house, killing three members and leaving the survivors fugitives for life. The explosion was one of the reasons Rudd had to go underground. He did not surface again for several years, eventually turning himself in after technical violations of wiretapping laws made the federal case against him difficult to prosecute. Today he is a math teacher at a community college in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rudd has expressed remorse for his violent youthful activities, but he is still a passionate opponent of American (and Israeli) foreign policy.

Many of us forget that the Weather Underground bombing campaign was not a matter of a few isolated incidents. From September 1969 to May 1970, Rudd and his co-revolutionaries on the white radical left committed about 250 attacks, or almost one terrorist bombing a day (government estimates put that number much higher). During the summer of 1970, there were twenty bombings a week in California. The bombings were the backbeat to the symphony of violence, much of it rhetorical, that set the score for the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rudd captured the tone perfectly: 'It's a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building.' 'The real division is not between people who support bombings and people who don't,' explained a secret member of a 'bombing collective,' but 'between people who will do them and people who are too hung up on their own privileges and security to take those risks.'⁴²

Bourgeois self-loathing lay at the very heart of the New Left's hatred of liberalism, its love affair with violence, and its willingness to take a sledgehammer to Western civilization. 'We're against everything that's 'good and decent' in honky America,' declared one rebel. 'We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's worst nightmare.' The Weathermen became the storm troopers of the New Left, horrifying even those who agreed with their cause. Convinced that all whites were born tainted with the original sin of 'skin privilege,' the