Fascism and the Left

ONE OF THE CURSES of our time is people trying to turn “Left” and “Right” into moral categories on their own, as if very broad beliefs about the ends and means of politics are so morally determinant that further attention to details, specific implications and actions are insignificant.

One of the saddest variants of this pointless casuistry is to tag one’s opponents with the label of “fascist!” It is a game that has mainly been played from the Left—on the grounds that fascism is clearly a “right-wing” movement—and started early: Stalinists labelled social democrats as social fascists until the Popular Front strategy required a change of rhetoric. When the Popular Front strategy was abandoned, the alliance with Nazism made returning to the insult impolitic, so social democrats merely became lackeys of capitalist imperialism—until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, led to an abrupt embracing of said capitalist imperialists and their lackeys.

The onset of the Cold War led to a re-launching of the fascist! canard as a rhetorical indulgence of the Left. Apart from its simple offensiveness, it has always been a silly and stupid indulgence. Part of the glue of the liberal-conservative alliance is an overlapping belief that there are real limits to what one can expect politics to do and that it is dangerous to go beyond those limits—on the grounds that the state is potentially dangerous; that political mechanisms are of limited effectiveness; that salvation is entirely a religious matter, not a political one. To accuse people whose politics is grounded in a sense of the limitations of politics as being “fascist” is to show either that you do not understand fascism, or that you do not understand liberal-conservatives, or that you do not care whether there is any truth to your rhetoric.

Conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg has turned the Left’s use of the fascism canard on its head in his bestselling Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, arguing that fascism is—au contraire!—a left-wing movement and that US liberals such as Hillary Clinton are the real inheritors of the fascist mantle.

There is no doubt Goldberg has touched a nerve—hence his book being a bestseller. And his sense of why it is so popular is probably correct. In a recent radio interview Goldberg said: “I think a lot of conservatives, they say hey, wait a second, I like free markets and individualism, I don’t like the state, I don’t like people meddling with me, I don’t like socialism. How come I’m the fascist? … this book tapped into a lot of that.”

There are years of entirely understandable resentment to get off people’s chests, and Goldberg has tapped into that. And tapping into unexpressed hopes or fears is what makes a successful intellectual entrepreneur.

Goldberg’s thesis is clearly cathartic for many folk. But, a small voice asks, is it true? Is fascism really a “left-wing” movement? Are modern US liberals “nice” fascists, as Goldberg alleges? No, no and no.

Goldberg’s book is a curious running together of two books, one sensible and useful, one silly and distracting. The sensible and useful book shows how much fascism (including Nazism) had Left roots and how much more overlap modern progressivism (such as contemporary US liberalism) has with fascism than fascism has with Anglo-American conservatism. Goldberg’s book explicates and adds to the tradition of defending Anglosphere decency against various Continental corruptions.

The sensible and useful book includes many perceptive comments. Goldberg understands the difference between nationalism—that ancestry should determine political allegiance—and patriotism—a more inclusive notion of loyalty to one’s area or polity regardless of the details of ancestry. He notes that Bismarckian welfarism encouraged much of the German middle class to see enlightened government as an alternative to, rather than a product of, democracy. His discussion of how government activism drives corporate lobbying is well worth reading, as is his explication of Anglosphere conservatism. He understands the unlimited nature of politics conceived as “doing good”. He is also very good at exposing how the Left has airbrushed and reframed history to its own convenience, dropping past inconveniences (such as thoroughly left-wing racism, eugenics, imperialism, militarism and McCarthyism-before-McCarthy) down the memory hole.

The silly and distracting book is the one trying to show US liberalism as largely of the same broad political movement as the various fascisms and therefore a form of fascism and the heir of fascism. (In a sense, claiming that they are all broadly the same Continental corruption.) It is the silly book that portrays President Woodrow Wilson’s wartime administration as the prototype fascist dictatorship, the New Deal as fascist, the Kennedy administration, Johnson’s Great Society and the student radicalism of the 1960s as fascist.

What’s Left, What’s Right

THE MATTER TURNS on what fascism is and what makes something “of the Left”. Goldberg’s answer is based on fascism as a manifestation of the broad (and Left) movement of politics as a secular religion seeking unity by remaking society. As part of this, Goldberg has ultimately a simple categorisation of politics. Fascism is collectivist (true), the Left is collectivist (true), therefore fascism is of the Left.

One may, of course, note that this argument only works if all collectivism is of the Left. If one holds that the Right is individualist (and every major political movement is either Left or Right) then the argument sticks. And this is, indeed, Goldberg’s position.

Goldberg wraps this in a larger argument about politics-as-secular-salvation involving deification of the state being inherently leftist, and a characteristic of fascism, hence fascism is leftist.

Not an original argument in either form. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot (an update of his 1974 Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse) argued both the larger and the lesser positions almost two decades ago. (Goldberg has a catchier title—with a great logo: a smiley-face with a Hitler moustache—and is not burdened by von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s contempt for democracy.)

Goldberg stresses Mussolini’s socialist roots, his lifelong rhetorical commitment to socialism; Hitler’s commitment to identity politics, his anti-capitalist rhetoric, his advocacy of an idealised Germanic social unity, his politicisation of everything and Nazism’s social egalitarianism; fascism and Nazism as advocates and agents of change; the common intellectual roots of fascism and progressivism; as well as the public mutual admiration between Mussolini and American progressives-cum-New Dealers to make his case that fascism (including Italian fascism and German Nazism) is left-wing. As he says of the Nazi platform:

“[s]o, we are supposed to see a party in favour of universal education, guaranteed employment, increased entitlements for the aged, the expropriation of land without compensation, the nationalization of industry, the abolition of market-based lending … the expansion of health services, and the abolition of child-labor as objectively and obviously right-wing.”

How do we define the Left? Being Left involves a commitment to change—that is, a rejection of the past: the more complete the rejection, the more Left you are. It involves a commitment that this change be delivered politically: the more encompassing the use of political mechanisms (and the political mechanisms one is willing to use) the more Left you are. It also involves a commitment to equality: the more complete the commitment to equality, the more Left you are. So a revolutionary socialist engages in a near total rejection of the past, is willing to use any political mechanism, if judged to be effective, to politicise all aspects of society, and is committed to as complete equality as is practicable.

There are, of course, many objections that might made against this program—such as that the concentration of power needed to transform society must result in profound inequalities of power. Or that it must become ever more ungrounded in reality the more successful the society defined as desperately needing change is: the Left’s habit of defining virtue against success has led to it embracing a lot of failure. But said program’s extreme left-wing character can hardly be denied.

Since being Left is based on rejection of the past, it is also free to reject its own past. Which it does, when convenient. Evading responsibility for past failures, the glorious imagined future provides moral trumps through its own perfection, unsullied by responsibility for anything real. (Conversely, those who fail to reject the past are deemed to be burdened with all its sins.)

It is also to be noted that collectivism falls out of the program. Things have to be structured collectively to get the stated goals. Individualism just will not get you there. Just as individualism will not get you to politics-as-secular-salvation.

So, can we envisage a collectivism that is not Left? Easily. One that is not based on rejection of the past and does not have equality as its prime public value. That would be fascism, then. So is fascism clearly “right-wing”?

If “Right” is the political opposite of “Left” then to be Right is to have no particular commitment to change—that is, not reject the past: the less you reject the past, the more Right you are. It involves some level of scepticism, or even hostility to political mechanisms: the more sceptical, the more Right you are. It involves rejecting the primacy of equality: the more you reject the primacy of equality, the more Right you are.

So an extreme right-winger wants as little change as possible, is highly sceptical about political mechanisms and is committed to something other than the primacy of equality. The last being the problem with talking about “the Right” since a range of values can be held to be not trumped by equality—such as liberty, authority, order, religion—and in almost any arrangement (such as including serious commitment to equality).

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were proponents of change, but proponents who wished to decrease, rather than increase, reliance on political mechanisms in support of a strong commitment to freedom. Merely advocating change does not place you on the Left.

Still, not wanting things to be politicised, and putting a high value on liberty, does not sound very fascist. Particularly as scepticism about politicisation combined with valuing freedom is naturally individualist—especially in the Anglosphere, with its highly individualist cultural roots.

So, what are the features of fascism? What is fascism? And if Nazism is fascism, how come Italian fascism and German Nazism had such vastly different death tolls?

Actual Existing Fascism

WESTERN CIVILISATION began in the squabbling alliance of church and warlords. The original founding under Constantine and his dynasty failed with the collapse of the western Roman empire. The alliance was reforged with Germanic warlords in the turmoil of post-imperial Western Europe. The church provided legitimacy, administrative capacity, information networks and spiritual consolations. The warlords provided armed protection and rulership.

Trade having collapsed to something like a fifth of its level at the height of the Roman empire, the two main sources of wealth were land-with-labour—since that supplied food and other necessities of life—and violence—since that allowed you to take, by raid or rule, from those who supplied food and other necessities of life. The new, radically decentralised, civilisation was based on peasants supplying labour to their local protectors. It was a distinctly one-sided deal, but much better than not having any protectors.

Over time trade revived, though not until about 1250 did it achieve levels comparable to those at the height of the Roman empire. The entire history of Western civilisation can be read as the long saga of the retreat of land and violence as sources of wealth in favour of trade, commerce and industry, a process that increased dramatically as the industrial revolution took off in the nineteenth century.

It led to huge social disruptions, not least as a growing working class sought a commensurate role in social life and public affairs. It also led to the rise of an atavistic traditionalism: a strain of thought that looked to an earlier, “purer” time against frightening modern corruptions. The more frightening, the more atavistic. Various such proto-fascist and proto-nazi movements existed prior to the catastrophe of 1914.

The “long nineteenth century” (1789 to 1914) of the “Proud Tower” of liberal Europe ended with the Great War, a catastrophe made much more frightening by the Leninist seizure of power in Russia and similar attempts elsewhere.

Lenin’s great achievement was to jacobinise Marxism, to turn a movement for whom the classless society was something history would create to a movement that would create the classless society by applying revolutionary will. (That is, appropriate amounts of tyranny and murder.) In Lenin’s words (and emphasis), “A Jacobin who wholly identifies himself with the organisation of the proletariat—a proletariat conscious of its class interests—is a revolutionary Social-Democrat.” What Lenin did was modernise the politics of Robespierre; develop a working model of unrestrained politics—unrestrained in both means and ends.

A few particularly perceptive observers of politics then realised that Lenin’s methods could be used for other political projects. The first use of this insight was by a former firebrand of the radical wing of the Italian Socialist Party, Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini was a keen observer of Lenin’s successes and failures, having come from the same milieu (including time in radical socialist circles in Switzerland). In the outpouring of emotion that started the Great War, Mussolini, who volunteered for the front, had felt that nation had a much stronger pull on people’s sense of identity than class. So he abandoned the collectivism of class for the collectivism of nation. Fascism was born in the application of Lenin’s political methods to the project of national greatness through national unity. Mussolini jacobinised nationalism just as Lenin jacobinised Marxism. If Lenin was Marx-plus-Robespierre, Mussolini was Mazzini-plus-Robespierre.

Where class excluded, nation included. The deliberate creation of a classless society requires the liquidation of entire classes. In a nation without any significant minority nationalities, Mussolini’s project of national unity and greatness simply required enough violence to gain and keep power—particularly as, to Mussolini, you were Italian if you thought you were Italian. Strictly speaking, Mussolini jacobinised patriotism, rather than full blood-and-soil nationalism. So Jews could be, and many were, good Fascists. (Italian nationalism tended to be friendly to Jews since the Papacy—which enforced the ghetto and other anti-Jewish laws until the end of its secular power—had been a great enemy of Italian nationalism.)

And there was a clear and present danger to national unity—the apparent imminence of a revolutionary socialist takeover on the Leninist model. The name Fascist came from fasces—the symbol of authority in Ancient Rome—and fasci, working-class fighting groups in Sicily and Tuscany during the 1890s. Mussolini’s fasci di combattimento organised war veterans into squadristi who fought revolutionary socialists. Since nation included while class excluded, Mussolini was able to appeal to a broader range of support—especially by abandoning any notion of mass appropriation of property. Between the wars in Europe, it was only where appropriation of land was widely supported on the Left that fascism, Nazism or authoritarian traditionalism were able to break through into mass support.

All of which led to the March on Rome in 1922 and Mussolini’s appointment as head of government by King Victor Emmanuel III. That the opportune moment for socialist revolution had almost certainly well passed did not matter—what people feared was possible was what mattered.

Even given broader middle (and upper) class support due to a softer line on private property, there were considerable Left residues in the official policies of Italian fascism. Indeed, Fascist policies and those of Roosevelt’s New Deal had a great many similarities, as was much remarked on at the time (positively by both Fascists and New Dealers). Nor was nationalism itself definitely “right-wing”: neither Garibaldi nor Mazzini were men of the Right. Indeed, nationalism was widely seen as a demotic and destabilising force, as it often was—conversely, aristocracy was pre-nationalist and transnational.

But Mussolini was using nationalism to stop socialist revolution. Fascist theory as well as practice was openly contemptuous of democracy and—while clearly and proudly anti-traditionalist—it did not reject the past so much as atavistically invoke it in the form of the Roman empire before Christianisation. There was a deal of leftism in Italian Fascism, but that was not all there was. Particularly as “nation-in-arms” nationalism had started as the weapon and rallying cry of the French Revolutionary Republic against rule by legitimate dynasties but ended the “long nineteenth century” as the weapon of such dynasties against the democratic implications of modernity: a weapon that proved disastrous for those dynasties when used in the catastrophe of 1914–18. In his drive to label fascism “left-wing”, Jonah Goldberg has no sense of how limited social change was under the Fascists.

Still, Italian fascism, intellectually and ideologically, had very little in common with Anglo-American liberal-conservatism: apart from both being enemies of Leninism. Which, for many, has clearly been enough. Characterisation of Italian fascism as simply “extreme Right” is far more grounded in the Left’s conceits of itself than on anything real. Fascism was not part of the “official” Left (to Mussolini’s periodic and partial frustration), but always had a significant overlap with it.

The Nazi Variation

THERE WAS ANOTHER OBSERVER who learnt from Lenin’s example and Mussolini’s adaptation of it. But his project was neither Marxism nor nationalism, but “Aryan” racism. If Lenin jacobinised Marxism and Mussolini jacobinised nationalism then Hitler jacobinised “Aryan” racism—volkisch blood-and-soil nationalism. He was Houston Stewart Chamberlain-plus-Robespierre. And nationalism—if conceived according to a myth of common ancestors—was as apt as class politics to extermination by category: to the identification of categories of people who should not exist (at least, not within our borders).

While Germany went through its own revolutionary disturbances as a result of wartime defeat, Hitler had nowhere near the pre-existing prominence of Mussolini, and no single leader emerged to organise the nationalist forces. Hitler participated in the beer hall putsch but the moment of fear of socialist revolution had passed and the putsch was suppressed by the conservative Bavarian government.

With the rise of Stalin and the economic collapse of the 1930s Depression, the fear returned. While Stalin’s only contributions to Leninism were caution in foreign policy, applying to fellow Bolsheviks the political methods Lenin had applied to everyone else and the organised personality cult (the latter two went together, since Stalin became the singular embodiment of the revolutionary vanguard), the persistence of the Soviet Union, its apparent economic success and the development of a highly organised (and controlled) international communist movement made it the focus of apocalyptic fears and hopes.

Which is the other half of the fascism story. Leninism not only provided Italian fascism and German Nazism with an adaptable model of political action, it also provided a source of genuine—and entirely rational—fears to rally people against. There was little a respectable German or Italian might hold dear—liberty, life, family, property, faith or culture—that was not threatened by the prospect of a Leninist takeover. Anticommunism was a staple of Western politics across the political spectrum: the issue was how likely—and therefore how threatening—a Leninist takeover seemed. Indeed, there was so much rational basis for fear of Leninism, the more striking question is to explain its appeal. (Which, of course, made its supporters seem even more alien to those who viewed its potential success with dread.)

Italian fascism and German Nazism functioned as protectors against communism as well as substitute channels for similar hopes and aspirations of collective purpose, unity and social change. Yet Mussolini and Hitler could only appeal as protectors against the “red menace” if they were identifiably different in a less threatening way. The focus on inclusive nation as against exclusive class, and the eschewing of any program of wholesale appropriation of property, provided such differentiation. Reassurance was more important than rhetoric when it came to social change.

As for the Nazi and fascist rhetoric of violence and glorification of the Will, that a new order could be created by blood and violence was simply sober truth after the fall of four empires in the carnage of the Great War. (The war also created aggrieved nationalisms, political disorientation and a mass of veterans of the binding experience of war.) In the midst of apparently revolutionary chaos and economic collapse, to have someone “in control” was deeply attractive.

Its atavism and Will-worship gave fascism a certain protean quality, aggravated by its relatively short existence. The past was invoked or rejected, the future imagined or re-imagined, as needed. In Mussolini’s words, “The fascisti are the gypsies of Italian politics; not being tied down to any fixed principles, they proceed unceasingly towards one goal, the future well-being of the Italian people.”

In countries—such as Hungary—where leftist parties were less organised, one can talk more plausibly of a Left-fascism because that was the available political space. Nor was fascism necessarily anti-Christian, despite the strong anti-Christian paganism within Nazism—the Romanian Iron Guard was deeply Orthodox, the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party and the Spanish Falange extremely Catholic: but their religiosity was literally reactionary. Movements of national renewal tend to reflect particular national circumstances, while movements based on the heroic Will were naturally driven by the specific political projects of their dominating personalities.

Political Placement

ALL OF THIS CREATES major difficulties in placing fascism in congenial analytical frameworks. The crossover nature of fascism is central to its nature, and no genuine understanding can be had unless that is understood. Indeed, its crossover nature gave it a range of rhetorical appeals no other political movement or parties could equal. If the enemy was organised Catholicism, then anticlericalism could be stressed; if “bourgeois” parties and politics, then welfarism, socialism and egalitarianism; if leftist class politics, then the unity of national forces (even to the extent of parading as a defender of religion). To attack those tied to current practices, the glorious future of purified national unity could be invoked; to attack those offering a future of threatening change, the glorious past could be invoked.

But its atavism is also central to its nature. Both Italian fascism and German Nazism were atavistic rejections of Christianity (however pragmatic their relationships with Christian churches, particularly the Catholic Church), not the selective secularisations of it that liberalism and socialism represent.

If the past Italian fascism looked to was the pre-Christian Roman empire, the past German Nazism looked to was Roman and Germanic before the Christian alliance. Where Martin Luther had wanted to tie Christianity to Germanism but rejected pagan-Classical influences, Hitler wanted to tie Germanism to the pagan-Classical and reject Christian influences. Nazism had more of a fixed program than fascism, and that program was deeply atavistic in its glorification of land and violence as the basis for its new order.

Nazism also had to deal with more political competitors for a longer period in political opposition, so it was more thorough than Italian fascism in its adoption of innovative (and very modern) political methods. Its military ambitions were vaster, so it was more thorough in its modernisation of industry. Mussolini failed to modernise Italy, not merely because of his compromise with royal structures, but because his political project was more limited than Hitler’s. Fascism was a modernising revolt against modernity: the more atavistic the revolt, the grander the project, so the more thorough the modernising.

There is much about fascism that is grounded in the French Revolution: the glorification of the nation-in-arms, the adaptive updating of the political methods of Robespierre, the redirection of the religious impulse into redemptive politics— grounded both in the Revolution and in the opposition to it.

This is particularly so with Nazism, which did not stand for liberté—except the liberty of the German master race to smash the existing European order and remake it in its own image. In international affairs, Hitler was a revolutionary, the most wilful revolutionary of the twentieth century. It did not stand for égalité or fraternité, except within and among the German master race. It did stand for the blood-and-soil romanticism that had grown out of the German rejection and opposition to both the French Revolution and the sceptical (dealing with human nature as it is) and radical (transforming human nature) Enlightenments. Nazism sought a unity and harmony, but one based on brutal exclusion and which turned out to be drenched in blood.

The Will-celebrating atavism of fascism also made it much more exciting. The emphasis on the image of the hero led naturally to its grand pageantry, providing dramatic contrasts to the far duller common-man worship of socialism or the calculating utilitarianism of liberalism. How much of the Aryan occultism Hitler read in his youth carried through into his later worldview is doubtful (even given the role of the esoteric Thule Society in starting his political career): but it clearly gave Hitler-the-frustrated-artist an excellent grounding in the use of evocative images.

Goldberg’s claim that Nazism conquered the social space of the Left is flatly not true—either in its program or in its electoral support. The German socialist Left did not become more powerful under the stress of the 1930s Depression—its vote share fell between 1928 (40 per cent) and 1932 (36 per cent). It merely became more threatening as the communist KPD (rightly seen as violent, manipulative and untrustworthy) vote increased and the social democratic SPD vote shrank. The Nazi Party mainly gained its votes from previously liberal-conservative Protestant voters, particularly in rural areas, and new voters: an argument can be made that the Nazis “bled off” votes that might have gone leftwards. At its electoral peak (July 1932) before gaining power, the Nazi vote exceeded the socialist Left vote with support across all social classes: dramatic expression of class excluding but nation including.

Goldberg has hit a nerve about the Left elements within fascism, and fascist echoes within Left politics. Fascism was a product of Left methods, of fear of the Left, and incorporated some of the aspirations and policies of the Left. But that does not make it a phenomenon of the Left. On the contrary, it was by being able to differentiate itself from the Left that it could garner support by claiming to be the only effective bulwark against the Left. Russian émigrés and businessmen traumatised by the attempted Leninist takeovers of 1918-19 were important early Nazi supporters.

Goldberg lacks a sufficient sense of European history. He has no sense, for example, of how the experience of German “war socialism” could make economic control seem perfectly compatible with national greatness and preservation of traditional order. What Hitler explicitly states to be tactics (such as using the colour red or adapting Marxist policies or practices), Goldberg sees as defining because it suits his polemical political taxonomy. Goldberg even manages to imply that fascism was militaristic because early twentieth-century progressivism was militaristic, without any sense of how militarism had been used to uphold traditional authority. While it was true that Bismarck’s welfarist and Kulturkampf policies sought to harness worker and liberal opinion (and acquired progressive admirers for the Iron Chancellor on the way) this does not make Bismarck—the Prussian Junker and authoritarian Royalist—a man of the Left. Anyone who, as Goldberg does, cites admiration for the Iron Chancellor and his policies as a way of showing how Left and fascist something is, has a problem of political taxonomy.

Goldberg also has no grasp of the importance of the Great War experience: of the camaraderie of veterans and their alienation from the revolutionary mobs who affronted, and often mocked them, on their return. But fascism as the great enemy of revolutionary socialism gets in the way of his polemic.

Contemporary Echoes

THERE IS NOTHING in the British Glorious Revolution or the American Revolution—or their legacies—that is remotely proto-fascist, because there is nothing in them of politics as redemption or as the path to some transcendent unity and harmony. Nor is there anything fascist about seeking to forcibly export the American Revolution to Mesopotamia and the Hindu Kush—as the British had previously tried to export the Glorious Revolution thereto.

Where Goldberg sees a fascist temptation in modern American conservatism is in compassionate conservatism—the willingness to harness government to expansive social amelioration. And if an expansive role for government is fascistic, then clearly social democracy in all its forms—including modern progressivism—is fascistic.

It is always a dubious exercise to apply a political label to someone who would reject it. The deeply misleading label neo-liberal suffers precisely from being used by folk to express their moral and intellectual distance from what they are labelling. Goldberg’s use of fascist suffers exactly the same problem. Worse, it is precisely what he is reacting against himself.

For Goldberg, fascism stops being a specific historical movement and becomes a generic phenomenon. Of course, it has to be so construed to make the blanket accusation he wishes to make stick. He can therefore apply it to those who never claimed to be fascist and would repudiate the label. Precisely, of course, what many on the Left have done and which Goldberg starts by rejecting so strongly.

It is reasonable to argue that a notion of politics as redemptive, as the path to some greater social unity and harmony, as the agent of social salvation, is common to revolutionary socialism, fascism and social democracy, including modern progressivism. But it is one thing to say A, B and C are all manifestations of X. It is quite another to claim that they are all therefore essentially the same manifestation of X.

Goldberg establishes the commonality by showing that the policies, rhetoric and intellectual origins of fascism and progressivism were similar or have large overlaps, and that these are distinctively different from those of Anglo-American liberal-conservatism. Goldberg is clearly correct that American conservative intellectuals lack common intellectual roots with fascism. Which is not true of Left intellectuals—Heidegger being the obvious example. And it is not hard for Goldberg to assemble a range of rhetorical and policy overlaps. But many of Goldberg’s Nazi parallels could also be Leninist parallels. Claiming that contemporary US liberals were both fascistic and communistic would, however, be too transparently silly.

Goldberg constantly conflates similar and same. Worse, he typically acknowledges that, in any particular example, the most morally repellent element in fascism does not apply to US liberals (striking a blow for political civility) but then argues that they are so similar they are really fascist (thus reverting to incivility by smuggling the moral pejoration back in).

It is by playing these sorts of games that he portrays the Wilson administration as a proto-fascist dictatorship, the New Deal as fascistic, the Kennedy administration and Johnson’s Great Society as fascistic and Hillary Clinton’s “it takes a village” social amelioration as fascistic—though, because he is so “committed” to political civility, nice fascism.

Goldberg successfully shows that US liberals are social democrats with a highly expansive view of political action. Let’s consider the democrat bit. Fascism was built on rejection of democracy. American democracy seems to have survived these repeated bouts of “fascism” just fine. How so? Goldberg’s explanation is that America is simply a nicer place, so they do not get to “reveal” their full fascism. Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” lives!

I have an alternative explanation—they were not fascists; there were no hidden features to their social democratic politics. In particular, they did not scorn representative democracy, were not setting themselves up as the only saviours from a threatening Left nor did they atavistically invoke the past. One may have all sorts of grounds for disagreeing with various aspects of what they did—including that their alleged successes have been oversold—but spurious name-calling does not make for better critique, just more hysterical propaganda.

The one area where Goldberg does score some telling points is—unsurprisingly—in an area of extra-parliamentary politics. There were many similarities between the youth politics of the 1920s, which the Nazis harnessed so effectively, and the youth politics of the 1960s. To start with, it was another manifestation of jacobinised politics. Goldberg—in his constant trumpeting of the generic over the actual—thereby claims that all youth movements are fascistic.

In the case of his main example for the prosecution—the Black Panthers—he has a point. After all, they did have a racist ideology, they were violent, they did engage in paramilitarism and they did scorn conventional democratic politics. Which just emphasises how different they were from the conventional politicos Goldberg wants to damn.

Goldberg does manage to focus on the embarrassing truth that the politics of modern progressivism has far more overlap with the politics, particularly the cultural politics, of Hitler than of Lenin. And far more overlap than do the politics of Hayek, Friedman, Reagan, Thatcher and Howard.

The failure of socialism is one of the great drivers of the politics of our time. It has seen the revival of liberal economics (in the sense of markets, private property and scepticism about political action). It has seen the retreat from Enlightenment universalism on the Left.

If Enlightenment-descended modernity is not doing what you want, it is natural to make the same moves in opposition. This is the romantic move of emotive, common-feeling, cultural-identity politics, philosophically descended from Kant’s epistemological subjectivism. In Susan Sontag’s words, quoted by Goldberg:

“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.”

It is the sort of politics that marries cultural relativism with moral ostentation and leads various folk on the Left to see the atavistic politics of the jihadis as an understandable manifestation of anti-imperialism.

That the overlap between the modern progressivist Left and fascism has increased is true: anti-globalisation, identity politics and deep-green environmentalism are all forms of anti-Enlightenment romanticism, as is much anti-commercialism. Their self-righteous parading of morally heroic purposes has affinities with the Will glorification of fascism. There is much of Gleichschaltung in the progressivist Left’s constant treatment of dissent against its premises as malignancy, including rednecks-have-no-speech-rights jurisprudence—particularly in the global warming panic, with the patent desire to forge a Volksgemeinschaft from decarbonisation. That does not make modern progressivists fascists, however. Not even in their penchant for rhetorical incivility. Overlap is not identity. The true root of George Monbiot finding the deliberate drowning of airline executive “climate criminals” “strangely attractive” is not fascism (not even Nazi “Versailles criminals” denunciations), it is Robespierre or Saint Just deeming all opposition to the virtuous common will to be wicked and malignant and thus worthy of the guillotine. That the jacobin impulse of redemptive politics keeps reinventing itself does not mean its various manifestations are the same manifestation.

The Fluidity of Politics

GOLDBERG DOES MANAGE to provide a great deal of detail on how fluid the flow of ideas is, how full of cross-currents politics turns out to be. He certainly shows that US liberals are social democrats with a typically social-democratic level of confidence in state action. He even lays out how politics-as-salvation has common logics. But Goldberg wants to go further and say that said cross-dressing social democrats are also “social fascists”. So, we are rhetorically back with the Stalinists: with polemic trumping both truth and civility. Surely, not a place we really want to be?

Hamas, Hezbollah and the jihadis are the contemporary analogues of fascism—modernising revolts against modernity (seen as alien, anti-religious and Western), preaching an atavistic (and anti-traditionalist) form of Islam, promoting a cult of death and violence, engaged in brutality and murder; the rhetoric of violence backed up by deeds of violence: in Hezbollah’s case with a uniformed paramilitary, straight-armed salute and all. (Osama bin Laden even has the war-veteran mystique that both Mussolini and Hitler did.) Do we really think that US liberals look like them? Even a little bit?

It has always been offensive and stupid for the Left to label those whose politics is based on a sense of the limitations of politics and political mechanisms as “fascist”. The sceptical conservatism of Hume, the humanitarian, anti-slavery conservatism of Johnson and Wilberforce (all Tories), the cautious liberalism of Burke (lifelong Whig) and Smith (who knew of no economic subject on which he and Mr Burke disagreed) is not remotely fascistic; nor is the politics that descends therefrom. It is no less stupid to label those whose politics are based on a public aversion to the use of state violence (however keen they may be in other ways to make use of state coercion), who are also clearly democrats, and who so obviously want international affairs to be a charming talkfest, as “fascist”.

In his last column, William F. Buckley Jnr wrote of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama: “The two performers in the debate struck the observant conservative as intelligent, resourceful, and absolutely uninterested in the vector of political force.” That may be a lack in people running for President of the United States: but they are clearly not fascists. To deride those otherwise deemed insufficiently tough-minded to be reliable on crime or national security matters—because they want to see criminality and hostility, not as enmity or predation, but as friends not yet made or aggrieved not yet mollified—as fascist, is the triumph of polemic over analysis.

It is certainly not a blow for the political civility Goldberg ends by hypocritically endorsing.

Michael Warby is a freelance teacher and social analyst who is a principal in a business that puts on medieval and ancient history days for schools.