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

was 'the advent of Christianity' that first unleashed the 'spiritual terror' upon 'the much freer ancient world.'¹³

Large segments of the cultural left today subscribe to similar notions. For example, Wicca and paganism constitute the fastest-growing religion and religious category in America, with adherents numbering anywhere from 500,000 to 5 million depending on whose numbers you accept. If you add 'New Age spirituality,' the number of Americans involved in such avocations reaches 20 million and growing. Feminists in particular have co-opted Wicca as a religion perfectly suited to their politics. Gloria Steinem is rhapsodic about the superior political and spiritual qualities of 'pre-Christian' and 'matriarchal' paganism. In Revolution from Within she laments in all earnestness the 'killing of nine million women healers and other pagan or nonconforming women during the centuries of change-over to Christianity.'¹⁴

The SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, was convinced that the anti-witch craze was an anti-German plot concocted in large part by the Catholic Church: 'The witch-hunting cost the German people hundreds of thousands of mothers and women, cruelly tortured and executed.'¹⁵ He dedicated considerable resources for the SS to investigate the witch hunts and prove they were attempts to crush Aryan civilization and the true German faith. The SS put together what amounted to their own X-Files unit — dubbed Special Unit H (for Hexen, or 'witches') — to ferret out the truth of over thirty-three thousand cases of witch burning, in countries as far away as India and Mexico.

Indeed, most of the founders of National Socialism would be far more comfortable talking witchcraft and astrology with a bunch of crystal-worshipping vegans than attending a church social. Consider the Thule Society, named after a supposed lost race of northern peoples hinted at in ancient Greek texts. The society was founded as the Munich chapter of the German Order, and while its occult and theosophical doctrines were nominally central to its charter, the glue that held it together was racist anti-Semitism. Anton Drexler was encouraged by his mentor Dr. Paul Tafel, a leader of the Thule Society, to found the German Workers' Party, which would soon become the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Its membership was a veritable Who's Who of founding Nazis, according to Hitler's biographer Ian Kershaw.

Dietrich Eckart, a poet, painter, occultist, morphine addict, playwright, fancier of magic, and devotee of the racial mysticism of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was a major force in this bohemian circle. Eckart was a father figure and mentor to Hitler, teaching him about public speaking, giving him his first trench coat, and introducing him to leading members of Munich society. As an editor, Eckart transformed the Thule Society's newspaper into the official Nazi Party paper and wrote the anthem 'Germany, Awake!' Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf to him, writing in the epilogue that he was 'a man who devoted his life to reawakening his and our people.'

The myth of the Wrong Turn at the heart of liberal fascist ideology doesn't merely generate exotic conspiracy theories and pseudo history, but, as suggested above, it promotes a profound moral relativism. Indeed, feminism's embrace of Wicca is a perfect illustration of the pagan narcissism mentioned earlier. Many Wicca ceremonies conclude with the invocation 'Thou Art Goddess.' There are no explicit rules to Wicca, merely exhortations to cultivate 'the Goddess within,' to create the spirituality that best conforms to your already-formed prejudices, desires, and instincts.

Heidegger, the Nazi philosopher, and Thomas Mann, the literary giant — who became a passionate and perceptive anti-fascist but was an early dabbler in fascism's themes — represented the philosophical and literary sides of the push to throw off the chains of bourgeois morality and custom. Heidegger (echoing Nietzsche) argued that a truly authentic individual chooses his own path, whether it conforms with conventional morality or with some individually manufactured morality. Even the right choice is wrong if it is made under the influence of others. To 'forgo normal choice and to adopt those offered me by the world or other people,' writes Heidegger, is the essence of 'inauthenticity.' Mann located fascism's appeal to the artist in its invitation to the 'self-abandonment to the instincts.' Hitler's favorite sculptor explained that his nude works display 'the pure air of instinctive drives' and show the 'revolutionary youth of today, which tears the veil from the body hidden in shame.'¹⁶

HOLLYWOOD FASCISTS

These once-radical notions now saturate mainstream popular culture. A brief survey serves to illustrate how pervasive their influence has become among the scriptwriters and producers of films coming out of Hollywood, the most powerful de facto propaganda agency in human history.

In the five-Oscar-winning film American Beauty, as mentioned above, Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham, a bourgeois professional with a bourgeois-professional wife and a conventionally alienated daughter. Lester suddenly realizes that he hates his conventional life when he becomes sexually obsessed with a friend of his teenage daughter. 'I feel like I've been in a coma for the past twenty years. And I'm just now waking up,' he declares. He then commences a campaign of 'self-improvement' that involves a narcissistic obsession with his own body, flipping off all social conventions, and indulging every desire in defiance of reason.

'Janie, today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go fuck himself, and then I blackmailed him for almost sixty thousand dollars. Pass the asparagus,' Lester tells his daughter at the dinner table.

'Your father seems to think this type of behavior is something to be proud of,' Lester's controlling, materialistic wife explains.

'And your mother seems to prefer I go through life like a fucking prisoner while she keeps my dick in a mason jar under the sink,' he replies.

This sort of thing, where the 'real' person is to be found not in the head or the heart but in the crotch, seems to pass for high wisdom in Hollywood.

Of course, sometimes it is not a psychosexual breakthrough that redeems the white man but a physical abnormality or injury usually resulting in the suppression of his ability to reason. In Forrest Gump a retarded white man is the only reliably moral force during the chaos of the 1960s and 1970s. In Regarding Henry, Harrison Ford plays a career-minded, philandering corporate lawyer with no time for his family who is redeemed with the help of a bullet in his frontal lobe and the sagacity of a black physical therapist who helps the lobotomized Ford discover that it's morally preferable to be a child. In As Good as It Gets, Jack Nicholson is a vicious bigot until he starts taking powerful psychotropic drugs, which in effect cure him of his whiteness (Adorno might call it the 'anti-fascism pill') and make him tolerant of gays and blacks and able to love. In the Sean Penn vehicle I Am Sam, we are told that intelligence, knowledge, and basic coping skills are all irrelevant to good parenting so long as even a severely retarded parent loves his child. Talk to people with severely retarded children or siblings, and they will tell you how pernicious this message can be.

The recurring theme is that men must be awakened from the comfortable nightmare we call life, or what Hillary Clinton in her youth described as 'the sleeping sickness of our soul.' We are all 'slaves' to the 'IKEA nesting instinct,' according to the protagonist of Fight Club, a film whose fascist pretensions have been so well discussed there's no need to revisit them here. The idea that the slumbering masses must be roused from their doldrums is central to Fascism. Marinetti's first Futurist manifesto begins, 'Up to now, literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.'¹⁷ The pamphlet that first attracted a young Adolf Hitler to National Socialism was titled 'My Political Awakening.' Pro-Nazi and pre-fascist films and novels often shared a common premise of somnolent young men roused from their passive acceptance of the machine of Western bourgeois democracy.

Is there any doubt that a young Hitler would have given Dead Poets Society a standing ovation? The film begins with the students learning poetry by formula, plotting its 'perfection along the horizontal of a graph' and its 'importance' on the vertical in order to find the 'measure of its greatness.' You can almost hear Hitler denouncing such a 'Jewish' way of gauging art. Along comes Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams, who tells his students simply to rip those pages from the book! Mr. Keating encourages the students to do even more violence to convention, exhorting them to stand on the teacher's desk in a simultaneous display of superiority and contempt for traditional roles.

One boy in particular, Todd, is afraid of Mr. Keating's new approach. But Mr. Keating browbeats the lad to release his 'barbaric yawp.' Holding his eyes shut, he forces the lad to craft a poem from the bowels of his soul. Todd conjures the image of a 'sweaty-toothed madman,' and with Mr. Keating's encouragement he gives him form and function. 'His hands reach out and choke me...Truth...Truth is like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold.'