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

freethinker. 'Marriage, as it is practiced in bourgeois society, is generally a thing against nature. But a meeting between two beings who complete one another, who are made for one another, borders already, in my conception, upon a miracle.' 'Religion,' Hitler explains, 'is in perpetual conflict with the spirit of free research.' 'The catastrophe, for us, is that of being tied to a religion that rebels against all the joys of the senses.' Der Fuhrer talks at length about his contempt for the social prejudices that look down on out-of-wedlock birth. 'I love to see this display of health around me.'¹⁹

Recall that Hitler dreamed of transforming Germany into a warrior nation led by cadres of black-garbed Aryan Spartans loyal to him alone. Heinrich Himmler created the SS in the hope of making Hitler's dream come true. He ordered his men 'to father as many children as possible without marrying.' To this end Himmler created Lebensborn (Wellspring of Life) homes in Germany and occupied Scandinavia, where children sired by SS men and racially pure women would be raised by the state, fulfilling a dream (minus the racial angle) of Robespierre's. After a racial background check, a baby was admitted through a ceremony where an SS dagger was held over the child while the mother took an oath of loyalty to the Nazi cause.

Nazi attitudes toward homosexuality are also a source of confusion. While it is true that some homosexuals were sent to concentration camps, it is also the case that the early Nazi Party and the constellation of Pan-German organizations in its orbit were rife with homosexuals. It's well-known, for example, that Ernst Rohm, the head of the SA, and his coterie were homosexuals, and openly so. When jealous members of the SA tried to use this fact against him in 1931, Hitler had to remonstrate that Rohm's homosexuality was 'purely in the private sphere.' Some try to suggest that Rohm was murdered on the Night of the Long Knives because he was gay. But the Rohm faction posed the greatest threat to Hitler's consolidation of power because they were, in important respects, the most ardent and 'revolutionary' Nazis. Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams write in The Pink Swastika that 'the National Socialist revolution and the Nazi Party were animated and dominated by militaristic homosexuals, pederasts, pornographers, and sadomasochists.' This is surely an overstatement. But it is nonetheless true that the artistic and literary movements that provided the oxygen for Nazism before 1933 were chockablock with homosexual liberationist tracts, clubs, and journals.²⁰

The journal Der Eigene (meaning 'self-aware' or 'self-owner') had some 150,000 subscribers — more than twice the New Republic's readership today in a population roughly a fifth the size of that in the United States. The journal was dedicated to men who 'thirst for a revival of Greek times and Hellenic standards of beauty after centuries of Christian barbarism.' Der Eigene — virulently anti-Semitic and nationalistic — grew into an actual movement for homosexual rights demanding the repeal of laws and social taboos against pederasty. The Viennese journal Ostara — which surely influenced a young Adolf Hitler — extolled a Spartan male ethic where women and Christianity alike were shackles on the Teutonic male warrior's will to power.

What ties these threads together was the idea of the Wrong Turn. Men were freer before they were caged by bourgeois norms, traditional morality, and logocentrism. Keep this in mind the next time you watch Brokeback Mountain, one of the most critically acclaimed and celebrated films of the last decade. Two perfect male specimens are at home only in the pastoral wild, away from the bourgeois conventions of modern life. At home in nature, they are finally free to give themselves over to their instinctual desires. But they cannot live in the hills, indulging their instincts. So they spend the rest of their lives trapped in soul-crippling traditional marriages, their only joy their annual 'fishing trips,' where they try to re-create the ecstasy of their authentic encounter, the only thing that can liberate them from bourgeois domesticity.

According to a secular liberal analysis, if traditional morality was ever necessary at all (a dubious proposition for many), it has outgrown its utility. In a premodern age when venereal disease was a death sentence and out- of-wedlock birth a calamity, rules and norms for governing personal behavior had their place. But today, conventional morality is merely a means by which the ruling classes oppress women, homosexuals, and other sexually nonconforming rebels. Tom Wolfe's essay 'The Great Relearning' begins by recounting how, in 1968, doctors at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic discovered diseases 'no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.'²¹ Why were these maladies springing up? The hippie communards, much like the bohemians of Weimar Germany, believed that traditional morality was an antiquated husk with as much relevance as the divine right of kings. They discovered otherwise; we have rules and customs for a reason.

Liberals dismiss abstract arguments involving universal moral principles almost as cavalierly as hippies did in the 1960s. One can argue that abortion might have a downside because it can lead to higher rates of breast cancer, but complaints that it takes a human life or displeases God, we are told, have no place in reasonable discourse. This poses a dilemma for conservatives. For some this means only arguing about what the data show. The problem is that resorting to regression analysis is another way of conceding that notions of right and wrong have no place in public debate. Meanwhile, conservatives of a religious bent hurl charges and epithets that do nothing to persuade the opposition.

Moreover, the culture is so shot through with narcissism and populism that even progressive arguments are denied to the conservative. Thus we are told it is elitist to argue that celebrities and rich people can afford to indulge loose morals in ways the poor cannot. If you're a millionaire, you can handle divorce, out-of-wedlock birth, or drug abuse with little risk to your quality of life and social status. If you are working-class, the same behaviors can be destructive. But to point these things out violates today's egalitarian-populist ethos: What's good enough for Paris Hilton must be good enough for us all.

Fascism was a human response to a rapidly unfolding series of technological, theological, and social revolutions. Those revolutions are still playing themselves out, and since the left has defined fascism as conservative opposition to change, it's unlikely we'll ever stop being fascists by that definition. But conservatives aren't reactionaries. Few conservatives today would — or should — try to put the entire sexual revolution back in the bottle. Women's suffrage, birth control, civil rights, these are now part of the classically liberal order, and that's a good thing. Homosexuality is a fresher, and therefore tougher, issue for conservatives. But at least at the elite level, there are few conservatives who want to criminalize homosexuality. My guess is that gay marriage in some form is inevitable, and that may well be for the best. Indeed, the demand for gay marriage is in some respects a hopeful sign. In the 1980s and 1990s gay radicals sounded far more fascistic than the 'radicals' of the early twenty- first century who ostensibly want to subject themselves to the iron cage of bourgeois matrimony.

The relevant question for conservatives hinges on the sincerity of the left, which is impossible to gauge because they have internalized an incremental approach to their Kulturkampf. Is gay marriage an attempt to blend homosexuals into a conservative — and conservatizing — institution? Or is it merely a trophy in their campaign for acceptance? In the 1990s 'queer theorists' declared war on marriage as an oppressive force. The ACLU has already taken up polygamy as a civil rights issue. Al and Tipper Gore wrote a book arguing that families should be viewed as any group of individuals who love each other. These are echoes of ideas found in the fascist past, and conservatives can hardly be blamed for distrusting many on the left when they say they just want marriage and nothing more.

GREEN FASCISM

Nowhere is the idea of the Wrong Turn more starkly expressed in both National Socialist and contemporary liberal thought than in environmentalism. As many have observed, modern environmentalism is suffused with dark Rousseauian visions about the sickness of Western civilization. Man has lost his harmony with nature, his way of life is inauthentic, corrupting, unnatural.

Perhaps the most prominent exponent of this vision is the ubiquitous Al Gore, arguably the most popular liberal in America. As he writes in his thoroughly postmodern manifesto, Earth in the Balance, 'We retreat into the seductive tools and technologies of industrial civilization, but that only creates new problems as we become increasingly isolated from one another and disconnected from our roots.' Gore relentlessly sanctifies nature, arguing that we have been 'cut off' from our authentic selves. 'The froth and frenzy of industrial civilization mask our deep loneliness for that communion with the world that can lift our spirits and fill our senses with the richness and immediacy of life itself.'²² Of course, one can find similar statements from all sorts of Romantics, including Henry David Thoreau. But let us remember that German fascism was born out of a Romantic revolt against industrialization that philosophically mirrored aspects of transcendentalism. The difference is that while Thoreau sought to separate himself from modernity, Gore seeks to translate his Romantic