Here the similarities with German fascist thought become most apparent. Isaiah Berlin famously argued that fascism was the progeny of the French reactionary Comte Joseph de Maistre. Berlin was clearly exaggerating de Maistre’s influence (both Nazis and Italian Fascists explicitly rejected de Maistre), but his argument nonetheless helps us understand how fascism and identity politics overlap and interact.
Inherent to the Enlightenment is the idea that all mankind can be reasoned with. The philosophes argued that men all over the world were each blessed with the faculty of reason. It was the European right which believed that mankind was broken up into groups, classes, sects, races, nationalities, and other gradations in the great chain of being. The reactionary de Maistre railed against the notion that there were any “universal rights of man.” In his most famous statement on the subject he declared, “Now. there is no such thing as ‘man’ in this world. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him. If he exists, I don’t know about it.”
De Maistre meant that we are all prisoners of our racial and ethnic identities. (He didn’t mention gender, but that likely went without saying.) Indeed, there is less difference between today’s identity politics and the identity politics of the fascist past than anyone realizes. As one fascist sympathizer put it in the 1930s, “Our understanding struggles to go beyond the fatal error of believing in the equality of all human beings and tries to recognize the diversity of peoples and races.” How many college campuses hear that kind of rhetoric every day?
Today it is the left that says there is no such creature as “man.” Instead, there are African-Americans, Hispanics. and Native Americans. Left-wing academics speak of the “permanence of race,” and a whole new field of “whiteness studies” has sprouted up at prominent universities and colleges, dedicated to beating back the threat of whiteness in America. The sociologist Andrew Hacker decries “white logic.” and a host of other scholars argue that blacks and other minorities underperform academically because the subject matter in our schools represents white-supremacist thinking. Black children reject schoolwork because academic success amounts to “acting white.” This welter of nonsense enshrines and empowers a host of collectivist notions that place the state at the center of managing the progress of groups; those who oppose this agenda get clubbed over the head with the charge of racism. For example, the Seattle public school system recently announced that “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology” is a form of “cultural racism.” Indeed, the case for Enlightenment principles of individualism and reason itself is deemed anti-minority. Richard Delgado. a founder of critical race theory, writes: “If you’re black or Mexican, you should flee Enlightenment based democracies like mad, assuming you have any choice.”
In the 1960s, when the civil rights movement still relied on the classically liberal formulation of judging people by the content of their character, enlightened liberals denounced the “one-drop” rule which said that if you had a single drop of “black” blood you were black, a standard transparently similar to National Socialist notions of who counted as a Jew. Now. according to the left, if you have one drop of black blood, you should be counted as black for the purposes of positive discrimination. So valuable are the privileges associated with blackness that some black intellectuals want to make “racial fraud” a crime. It’s a strange racism problem when people are clamoring to join the ranks of the oppressed and lobbying for laws to make sure “oppressors” don’t get to pass themselves off as “victims.”
The glorification of racial permanence has caused the left to abandon narrow rationales for affirmative action in favor of the doctrine of multiculturalism. The diversity argument—which, by the way, is only used to defend favored groups; Asians and Jews almost never count toward the goal of diversity—is an argument for the permanence of race and identity. In other words, if the left has its way, racial preferences will no longer have anything to do with redressing past wrongs (except when such preferences are under attack). Rather, the pursuit of diversity will become the permanent license for social-engineering bean counters to discriminate against whatever group they see fit in order to reach the desired “balance.” For example, quotas unfairly kept Jews out of universities to help white Protestants. Now quotas unfairly keep Jews (and Asians) out of universities to help blacks and Hispanics. What’s different is that now liberals are sure such policies are a sign of racial progress.
Diversity depends on, and therefore ratifies, racial essentialism. Not only do rich (and. increasingly, foreign-born) blacks count as much as poor ones, but the argument now is that mere exposure to blacks is uplifting in and of itself. The policy is condescending and counterproductive because it assumes that blacks come to school not as Tom Smith or Joe Jones but as interchangeable Black-Perspective Student. Professors turn to black students for “the black point of view,” and students who don’t present the party line are counted as inauthentic by condescending white liberals (that is, most faculty and administrators) or by race-gaming blacks. I’ve been to dozens of campuses, and everywhere the story is the same: blacks eat, party, and live with other blacks. This self-segregation increasingly manifests itself in campus politics. Blacks become a student body within a student body, a microcosm of the nation within a nation. Ironically, the best way for a white kid to benefit from exposure to a black kid, and vice versa, would be for there to be fewer black students or at least no black dorms. That way blacks would be forced to integrate with the majority culture. But of course, integration is now derided as a racist doctrine.
You might say it’s outrageous to compare the current liberal program to help minorities with the poisonous ideology of fascism and Nazism. And I would agree if we were talking about things like the Holocaust or even Kristallnacht. But at the philosophical level, we are talking about categorical ways of thinking. To forgive something by saying “it’s a black thing” is philosophically no different from saying “it’s an Aryan thing.” The moral context matters a great deal. But the excuse is identical. Similarly, rejecting the Enlightenment for “good” reasons is still a rejection of the Enlightenment. And any instrumental or pragmatic gains you get from rejecting the Enlightenment still amount to taking a sledgehammer to the soapbox you’re standing on. Without the standards of the Enlightenment, we are in a Nietzschean world where power decides important questions rather than reason. This is exactly how the left appears to want it.
One last point about diversity. Because liberals have what Thomas Sowell calls an “unconstrained vision.” they assume everyone sees things through the same categorical prism. So once again, as with the left’s invention of social Darwinism, liberals assume their ideological opposites take the “bad” view to their good. If liberals assume blacks—or women, or gays—are inherently good, conservatives must think these same groups are inherently bad.
This is not to say that there are no racist conservatives. But at the philosophical level, liberalism is battling a straw man. This is why liberals must constantly assert that conservatives use code words—because there’s nothing obviously racist about conservatism per se. Indeed, the constant manipulation of the language to keep conservatives—and other non-liberals—on the defensive is a necessary tactic for liberal politics. The Washington, D.C.. bureaucrat who was fired for using the word “niggardly” correctly in a sentence is a case in point. The ground must be constantly shifted to maintain a climate of grievance. Fascists famously ruled by terror. Political correctness isn’t literally terroristic, but it does govern through fear. No serious person can deny that the grievance politics of the American left keeps decent people in a constant state of fright—they are afraid to say the wrong word, utter the wrong thought, offend the wrong constituency.
If we maintain our understanding of political conservatism as the heir of classical liberal individualism, it is almost impossible f
or a fair-minded person to call it racist. And yet. according to liberals, race neutrality is itself racist. It harkens back to the “social Darwinism” of the past, we are told, because it relegates minorities to a savage struggle for the survival of the fittest.
There are only three basic positions. There is the racism of the left, which seeks to use the state to help favored minorities that it regards as morally superior. There is racial neutrality, which is. or has become, the conservative position. And then there is some form of “classical racism”—that is. seeing blacks as inferior in some way. According to the left, only one of these positions isn’t racist. Race neutrality is racist. Racism is racist. So what’s left? Nothing except liberalism. In other words, agree with liberals and you’re not racist. Of course, if you adopt color blindness as a policy, many fair-minded liberals will tell you that while you’re not personally racist, your views “perpetuate” racism. And some liberals will stand by the fascist motto: if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Either way, there are no safe harbors from liberal ideology. Hence, when it comes to race, liberalism has become a kind of soft totalitarianism and multiculturalism the mechanism for a liberal Gleichschaltung. If you fall outside the liberal consensus, you are either evil or an abettor of evil. This is the logic of the Volks-gemeinschaft in politically correct jargon.
Now, of course you’re not going to get a visit from the Gestapo if you see the world differently; if you don’t think the good kind of diversity is skin deep or that the only legitimate community is the one where “we’re all in it together.” you won’t be dragged off to reeducation camp. But you very well may be sent off to counseling or sensitivity training.
8
Liberal Fascist Economics
IN RECENT YEARS liberals have largely succeeded in defining the conventional wisdom when it comes to economics. “Corporations are too powerful.” They have a “stranglehold” on “the system,” the entirety of which is now corrupted by the soiled touch of commerce. Every liberal publication in America subscribes to this perspective to some extent, from the Nation to the New Republic to the New York Times. The further you move to the left, the more this conviction becomes a caricature. Thus Bill Maher showed up at the Republican National Convention in 2000 dressed in a NASCAR-style tracksuit festooned with corporate logos to mock how the Republicans were stooges of Wall Street. Arianna Huffington supposedly switched from right to left due to her disgust with corporate “pigs at the trough.” William Greider. Kevin Phillips. Robert Reich, Jonathan Chait, and every other would-be Charles Beard on the American left hold similar views. Corporations are inherently right-wing, we are assured, and if left unchecked, these malign and irresponsible entities will bring us perilously close to fascism. The noble fight against these sinister “corporate paymasters” is part of the eternal struggle to keep fascism—however ill defined—at bay.
Ever since the 1930s, there has been a tendency to see big business—”industrialists,” “economic royalists,” or “financial ruling classes”—as the real wizards behind the fascist Oz. Today’s liberals are just the latest inheritors of this tradition. On the conspiratorial left, for example, it is de rigueur to call George W. Bush and Republicans in general Nazis. The case is supposedly bolstered by the widely peddled smear that Bush’s grandfather was one of the industrialists who “funded” Hitler. But even outside the fever swamps, the notion that liberals must keep a weather eye on big business for signs of creeping fascism is an article of faith. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recycles this theme when he writes, “The rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930s offers many lessons on how corporate power can undermine a democracy. Mussolini complained that ‘fascism should really be called corporatism.’ Today, George Bush and his court are treating our country as a grab bag for the robber barons.” Countless others have echoed these sentiments, arguing, in the words of Norman Mailer, that America is already a “pre-fascist” society run by corporations and their lickspittles in the Republican Party. The political scientist Theodore Lowi has said that the Republicans are “friendly fascists, a dominant effort to combine government and corporations.” The Canadian novelist John Ralston Saul argues in his book The Unconscious Civilization that we live in a corporatist-fascist society but we are unwilling to see it. Corporate CEOs, Saul laments, are “the true descendants of Benito Mussolini.”
There is much unintentional truth to this collective diagnosis, but these would-be physicians have misread both the symptoms and the disease. In the left’s eternal vigilance to fend off fascism, they have in fact created it, albeit with a friendly face. Like a medieval doctor who believes that mercury will cure madness, they foster precisely the sickness they hope to remedy. Good medicine, like good economics, depends on discarding unproven mythology. Yet for nearly a century the left and liberals have been using textbooks brimming with superstition. These myths are entwined with one another in a magnificent knot of confusion. Among the strands of this knot are the palpably false notions that big business is inherently right-wing or conservative (in the American sense); that European fascism was a tool of big business; and that the way to keep business from corrupting government is for government to regulate business to within an inch of its life.
In reality, if you define “right-wing” or “conservative” in the American sense of supporting the rule of law and the free market, then the more right-wing a business is, the less fascist it becomes. Meanwhile, in terms of economic policy, the more you move to the political center, as defined in American politics today, the closer you get to true fascism. If the far left is defined by socialism and the far right by laissez-faire, then it is the mealy mouthed centrists of the Democratic Leadership Council and the Brookings Institution who are the true fascists, for it is they who subscribe to the notion of the Third Way. that quintessentially fascistic formulation that claims to be neither left nor right. More important, these myths are often deliberately perpetuated in order to hasten the transformation of American society into precisely the kind of fascist—or corporatist—nation liberals claim to oppose. To a certain extent we do live in a fascistic “unconscious civilization,” but we’ve gotten here through the conscious effort of liberals who want it that way.
CUI BONO?
The notion that fascism was a tool of big business is one of the most persistent and enduring myths of the past century. It has been parroted by Hollywood, countless journalists, and generations of academics (though not necessarily by historians who specialize in the subject). But as Chesterton said, fallacies do not cease to be fallacies simply because they become fashions.
Doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism defined fascism as “the most reactionary and openly terroristic form of the dictatorship of finance capital, established by the imperialistic bourgeoisie to break the resistance of the working class and all the progressive elements of society.” Trotsky, an admirer of Mussolini’s, conceded that fascism was a “plebeian movement in origin” but that it was always “directed and financed by big capitalist powers.” This interpretation was foreordained because by the 1920s communists were convinced that they were witnessing capitalism’s long overdue collapse. Marxist prophecy held that the capitalists would fight back to protect their interests rather than face extinction in the new socialist era. When fascism succeeded in Italy, communist seers simply declared. “This is it!” At the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922, less than a month after the March on Rome—long before Mussolini consolidated power—the assembled communists settled on this interpretation with little debate over the actual facts on the ground.
That the defeated Italian Reds had already spread the rumor that their former comrade had betrayed the movement for his thirty pieces of silver only made this self-serving myth easier to swallow. Convinced that they alone were on the side of the people, the Reds responded to every political defeat by asking, “Cui bono?”—”Who benefits?” The answer had to be the ruling capitalists. “Fascism” thus became a convenient label fo
r “desperate capitalists.”
Ever since, whenever the left has met with political defeat, it has cried. “Fascism!” and insisted the fat cats were secretly pulling the strings. Max Horkheimer. the Frankfurt School Freudian Marxist, declared that no anticapitalist theories of fascism could even be entertained. “Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism.” “Central to all socialist theories of fascism,” writes the historian Martin Kitchen, “is the insistence on the close relationship between fascism and industry.” Yale’s Henry Ashby Turner calls this an “ideological straightjacket” that constrains virtually all Marxist-influenced scholarship. “Almost without exception...these writings suffer, as do those of ‘orthodox’ Marxists. from over-reliance on questionable, if not fraudulent scholarship, and from egregious misrepresentation of factual information.” In point of fact, there is zero evidence that Mussolini was the pawn of monolithic “big capitalism.” Far from being uniformly supportive of fascism, big business was bitterly divided right up until Mussolini seized power. Fascist intellectuals, moreover, were openly contemptuous of capitalism and laissez-faire economics.
LIBERAL FASCISM: The Secret History of the AMERICAN LEFT from MUSSOLINI to the POLITICS OF MEANING Page 35