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

But she indisputably draws her vision from the same eternal instinct to impose order on society, to create an all- encompassing community, to get past endless squabbles and ensconce each individual in the security blanket of the state. Hers is a political religion, an updated Social Gospel — light on the Gospel, heavy on the Social — spoken in soothing tones and conjuring a reassuring vision of cooperation and community. But it remains a singular vision, and there's no room in it for those still suffering from the 'stupidity of habit-bound minds,' to borrow Dewey's phrase. The village may have replaced 'the state,' and it in turn may have replaced the fist with the hug, but an unwanted embrace from which you cannot escape is just a nicer form of tyranny.

10

The New Age: We're All Fascists Now

It is generally thought that National Socialism stands only for brutishness and terror. But this is not true. National Socialism — more broadly, fascism — also stands for an ideal or rather ideals that are persistent today under other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community, the repudiation of the intellect, the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders). These ideals are vivid and moving to many people...because their content is a romantic ideal to which many continue to be attached and which is expressed in such diverse modes of cultural dissidence and propaganda for new forms of community as the youth/rock culture, primal therapy, anti-psychiatry, Third-World camp-following, and belief in the occult.

 — Susan Sontag, 'Fascinating Fascism'

LIBERALS CONSTANTLY COMPLAIN that conservatives are trying to impose their cultural vision on the rest of the country. In contrast, they themselves only care about the 'real' issues of class and economics. Thomas Frank, author of the best-selling What's the Matter With Kansas?, leads a whole school of liberals who argue that middle-class GOP voters have been hoodwinked by Republican strategists pushing manufactured 'values' issues. Frank's argument boils down to the old Marxist doctrine of false consciousness, which says that to disagree with the left about the nature of political and economic self-interest is a form of brainwashing or dementia.

But are liberals and leftists really dedicated to economic justice rather than divisive issues like gay marriage or partial-birth abortion? If you look closely, you'll see that liberals object to 'values issues' in politics only when they expose liberal weaknesses. When liberals are on the defensive, they use Marxist or, if you prefer, socialistic arguments to delegitimize the opposition's cultural agenda. When conservatives have the upper hand on a cultural issue, liberalism is all about 'solving problems' for the average Joe, about paychecks and health care. But on offense, it's about racial quotas, mainstreaming gay culture, scrubbing the public square of Christianity, and a host of explicitly cultural ambitions.

This socialist-parry, cultural-thrust tactic mirrors Nazi maneuvers in interesting ways. When the Nazis were debating traditionalists, monarchists, and the few classical liberals left in Germany, they sounded much like generic socialists lamenting how 'big capitalism' was screwing the little guy. Hitler charged that other parties were dividing Germans along sectarian and class lines, while he wanted to focus like a laser on the economy. It was only when the National Socialists had the upper hand that they dropped their economic arguments in favor of imposing a new cultural order.

This economics-on-defense, culture-on-offense approach remained an important tactic for Hitler even after his consolidation of power. For example, in 1938, when he realized that the Nazi cultural agenda was starting to alienate significant segments of the population, he explained in a speech, 'National Socialism is a cool, reality-based doctrine, based upon the sharpest scientific knowledge and its mental expression. As we have opened the people's heart to this doctrine, and as we continue to do so at the present, we have no desire to instill in the people a mysticism that lies outside the purpose and goals of our doctrine.' Such language should be familiar to liberals who like to call themselves members of the 'reality-based community.'¹

There is simply no denying that liberalism is deeply committed to the creation and imposition of culture. Indeed, it's transparently obvious that liberals care primarily about culture. During the 1990s, for example, liberalism dove headlong into the culture-formation business, from Hillary Clinton's politics of meaning to the gender norming of college sports, to gays in the military, to the war on smoking. In 2007, to pick an offbeat recent example, a progressive child-care center in Seattle banned LEGOs because 'the children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.' In response, they created a playtime that reflected the morally superior standards of 'collectivity.'²

The simple fact of the matter is this: liberals are the aggressors in the culture wars. Why this should seem a controversial point is somewhat baffling. It is manifestly clear that traditionalists are defending their way of life against the so-called forces of progress. When feminist groups finally persuaded the courts to force the Virginia Military Institute to accept women, who was the aggressor? Whose values were being imposed? Which side's activists boast of being 'agents of change'? My point is not that the forces of change are always wrong. Far from it. My point is that the left is dishonest when it pretends that it is not in the business of imposing its values on others.

We've discussed how, in the 1950s, the left updated the traditional Marxist critique of capitalism by arguing that fascist reaction was really a psychological response to progress. Whereas once the left argued that fascism was the political reaction of economic ruling classes against the revolutionary workers, now fascism is expressed as one of many 'phobias,' or simply 'rage,' aimed at the advancement of certain groups and causes. These rages and phobias are felt almost exclusively by white male heterosexuals (and the women who love them), the scions of those evil 'Dead White European Males.' In the 1930s the left claimed that fascists wanted to protect their factories and titles of nobility; now we are told that the fascists — a.k.a. 'angry white males' — want to preserve their unfair 'privilege.' Homophobia, racism, nativism, and, in a neat moral equivalence, both Islamic extremism and Islamophobia are the white male power structure's instinctive fascistic response to the shock of the new.

These kinds of arguments, to borrow a phrase from Carl von Clausewitz, represent the continuation of war by cultural means. And indeed, nowhere is this logic more visibly on display than in popular culture.

Take the movie Pleasantville. An imaginary Mayberry of a town seemingly frozen in the repressive, white-male-dominated 1950s is shaken up by the introduction of freedom-loving, sexually liberated young people from the 1990s. It's the 1960s all over again. The town elders can't handle the challenge — their liberated wives no longer have martinis and slippers waiting for them at the end of the day. In response, the white male elite — led by the Chamber of Commerce, of course — becomes increasingly fascistic. One of the film's clever conceits is that the tradition-bound people of Pleasantville are filmed in black and white while the fully realized human beings are portrayed in living color. This prompts the monochromatic fascists to start treating the 'coloreds' as second-class citizens.

A similar theme can be found in the playfully fascistic film Falling Down, in which a white middle-class defense contractor played by Michael Douglas becomes violent when he is downsized and thrown out of work. In American Beauty, Kevin Spacey's sexually confused ex-marine neighbor snaps and becomes a murderer when he can't handle the idea that his son might be gay. It isn't surprising that Hollywood keeps churning out these chestnuts, but it is amazing that each time it does, so many critics hail them as novel and pathbreaking interpretations, when they are really just a series of recycled cliches.

But there's a larger point behind the effort to cast opponents of change as fascists: to make change itself the natural order by ridiculing the very notion of a natural order. The underlying dogma of these movies is that social and gender roles are not fixed, that tradition, religion, and natural law have no binding power or authority over the individual's will to power, and that the day we made the mistake of thinking otherwise was the day we took a tragic Wrong Turn.

THE KULTURKAMPF, THEN AND NOW