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

beginning of the Supreme Court's role as the primary engine of the American Kulturkampf.

Consider abortion. The fundamental logic of the Supreme Court cases legalizing abortion hinges not on the 'right to choose' but on the idea that religion and religiously informed morality have no place in public affairs. Roe v. Wade and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, stemmed directly from the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the Court invalidated a ban on birth control (almost never enforced) on the grounds that the right to privacy can be found in the emanation of a penumbra to the Constitution. But the Court's underlying motivation stemmed from a conviction that religiously inspired laws (Connecticut has a large Catholic population) are suspect. Just two years before Roe, in a Pennsylvania case, the Court quashed state aid to Catholic parochial schools on the grounds that it would divide the public along sectarian lines. Moreover, the Court held, religious concerns 'tend to confuse and obscure other issues of great urgency.' When Roe v. Wade finally appeared before the Court, the justices had already concluded that traditional religious concerns can have little weight in public affairs. Laurence Tribe, America's leading liberal constitutional lawyer, argued in the Harvard Law Review in 1978 that religious views were inherently superstitious and hence less legitimate than 'secular' ones.

In 1987 the Supreme Court ruled that moments of silence at the beginning of the school day constituted a government endorsement of prayer. In 1992 it held that a nonsectarian prayer at a school graduation (offered by a Reform rabbi) was an impermissible endorsement of religion. In 1995 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the 'right to die' could not be hindered simply 'in order to satisfy the moral or religious precepts of a portion of the population.' Never mind that laws against murder, theft, and perjury can be traced directly back to the same 'religious precepts.'

More recently, we've seen courts rule that the Pledge of Allegiance, displays of the Ten Commandments, and Christmas creches are unconstitutional anywhere near a public facility. Justice Antonin Scalia had it right in 1996 in the Romer v. Evans case (dealing with the public accommodation of homosexuality in Colorado). 'The Court has mistaken a Kulturkampf for a fit of spite,' he declared. He went on to castigate his colleagues for 'taking sides' in the 'culture wars.'

Why belabor this point about religion? Because it is impossible to understand liberalism's cultural agenda without understanding that modern liberalism is building its own railway bridge, replacing the bricks and beams of traditional American culture with something else. I do not claim that everything in the new liberal structure is bad or wrong. But I reject the clever argumentation of liberals who claim that their effort is merely 'pragmatic' or piecemeal. 'Oh, just this one brick. What's wrong with this brick?' is how liberals argue about every stage of their project. But it's not just one brick. Nor should conservatives believe it is merely a slippery slope. That image suggests forces outside of our control pulling us in a direction not of our choosing. If society is moving in a direction not of its choosing, it is often because it is being pushed by the self-appointed forces of progress.

Tom Wolfe, in his essay 'The Great Relearning,' details how the counterculture, inspired by the German Bauhaus, wanted to start over, to declare a new Year Zero (much as the Jacobins and Nazis did), to go back to the fork in the road where Western civilization allegedly took the wrong path. The counterculture author Ken Kesey even organized a pilgrimage to the pagan mecca of Stonehenge, believing that this was the last place Western man was on the right track and, presumably, took a wrong turn by leaving his paganism behind. In the remainder of this chapter we will look at how this overarching vision informed the movements and ideas both of classical fascism and of today's cultural left in a few discrete areas of culture: identity, morality, sex, and nature.

THE LIBERAL FASCIST KULTURKAMPF

Isaiah Berlin summarized the neo-Romantic outlook that gave rise to Nazism: 'If I am German I seek German virtues, I write German music, I rediscover ancient German laws, I cultivate everything within me which makes me as rich, as expressive, as many-sided, as full a German as it is possible for me to be...That is the romantic ideal at its fullest.' Such thinking led inexorably to the Nazi conception of right and wrong. 'Justice,' explained Alfred Rosenberg, 'is what the Aryan man deems just. Unjust is what he so deems.'¹⁰

This vision most concretely manifested itself in the effort to purge the influence of the Jewish mind from Nazi Germany. The Jew symbolized everything that kept the German people back. Even 'conscience,' according to Hitler, 'is a Jewish invention' to be discarded in an act of self-liberation. As a result, the Nazis played the same games against the Jews that today's left plays against 'Eurocentrism,' 'whiteness,' and 'logocentrism.' When you hear a campus radical denounce 'white logic' or 'male logic,' she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced 'Jewish logic' and the 'Hebrew disease.' While still a Nazi collaborator, Paul de Man — the revered postmodern theorist who eventually taught at Yale and Cornell — wrote of the Jews, 'Their cerebralness, their capacity to assimilate doctrines while maintaining a cold detachment from them,' is one of 'the specific characteristics of the Jewish mind.'¹¹

The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism. The 'key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race,' writes the whiteness studies scholar and historian Noel Ignatiev. Whiteness studies is a cutting- edge academic discipline sweeping American higher education. Some thirty universities have WS departments, but many more schools teach the essentials of whiteness studies in other courses. The executive director of the Center for the Study of White American Culture explains, 'There is no crime that whiteness has not committed against people of color...We must blame whiteness for the continuing patterns today...which damage and prevent the humanity of those of us within it.'¹² The journal Race Traitor (ironically, a Nazi term) is dedicated 'to serve as an intellectual center for those seeking to abolish the white race.' Now, this is not a genocidal movement; no one is suggesting that white people be rounded up and put in camps. But the principles, passions, and argumentation have troubling echoes.

First, there is the left's shocking defense of black riot ideology and gangsterism. The glorification of violence, the romance of the street, the denunciations of 'the system,' the conspiratorialism, the exaltation of racial solidarity, the misogyny of hip-hop culture: all of these things offer a disturbing sense of deja vu. Hip-hop culture has incorporated a shocking number of fascist themes. On college campuses, administrators routinely look the other way at classically fascist behavior, from newspaper burnings to the physical intimidation of dissident speakers. These attitudes ultimately stem from the view that the white man, like the Jew, represents every facet of what is wrong and oppressive to humanity. As Susan Sontag proclaimed in 1967, 'The white race is the cancer of human history.' Meanwhile, Enlightenment notions of universal humanity are routinely mocked on the academic left as a con used to disguise entrenched white male privilege.

Just as the Nazi attack on Christianity was part of a larger war on the idea of universal truth, whole postmodern cosmologies have been created to prove that traditional religious morality is a scam, that there are no fixed truths or 'natural' categories, and that all knowledge is socially constructed. Or as the line goes in The Da Vinci Code, 'So Dark, the Con of Man.'

The 'con' in question is, in effect, a conspiracy by the Catholic Church to deceive the world about Jesus' true nature and his marriage to Mary Magdalene. The book has sold some sixty million copies worldwide. The novel, and movie, have generated debates, documentaries, companion books, and the like. But few have called attention to the ominous roots and parallels with Nazi thought.

Dan Brown should have dedicated his book to 'Madame' Helena Blavatsky, the theosophist guru who is widely considered the 'mother' of New Age spirituality as well as a touchstone in the development of Nazi paganism and the chief popularizer of the swastika as a mystical symbol. Her theosophy included a grab bag of cultish notions, from astrology to the belief that Christianity was a grand conspiracy designed to conceal the true meaning and history of the supernatural. Her 1888 book, The Secret Doctrine, attempted to prove the full extent of the grotesque Western conspiracy that The Da Vinci Code only partially illuminates. Christianity was to blame for all the modern horrors of capitalism and inauthentic living, not to mention the destruction of Atlantis.

Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century, the second most important book in the Nazi canon, borrowed ideas wholesale from Blavatsky. Rosenberg lays out one Christian conspiracy after another. 'Before it could fully blossom, the joyous message of German mysticism was strangled by the anti- European church with all the means in its power,' he insists. Like Blavatsky and Brown, he suggests the existence of secret Gospels, which, had they not been concealed by the Church, would debunk the 'counterfeit of the great image of Christ' found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. 'Christianity,' writes Hitler in Mein Kampf, 'was not content with erecting an altar of its own. It had first to destroy the pagan altars.' It