Is This Neocon Right About Fascism?

At the recent Scholars’ Conference (sponsored by the L von M Institute) I asserted that while anti-New Deal commentators between the two wars were not entirely wrong in their analysis of fascism, current attempts to identify fascism with the Left are rarely more than GOP rhetoric.  Since this point may have puzzled my listeners, it may be helpful to explain what my statement meant. My clarification may be all the more necessary since I said roughly the same thing on Tom Woods’s radio program, without going into details. In the 1930s and 1940s, such critics of the New Deal and FDR’s liberal internationalism as John T. Flynn, Albert J. Nock, Garet Garrett and Frank Chodorov were fond of associating the politics of the American government with European fascism. This criticism went back to the 1930s and in the case of Flynn, was originally aimed at the Italian fascist regime. Flynn and his followers feared that fascism, which like the New Deal offered a halfway house between capitalism and socialism, was more insidious for the West than Communism:  “A man could support publicly and with vehemence this system of the Planned Economy without incurring the odium of being too much of a radical for a polite and practical society.” Fascism with its “Planned Capitalism,” insisted Flynn, was the “direct opposite of liberalism.” (Flynn in this passage was using the word liberal in its true historical sense.) This newly conceived regime was “an attempt, somewhere between Communism and capitalism, to organize a stable society and to do it by setting up a state equipped with massive powers over the lives and fortunes of its citizens.”

While New Deal critics tried to understand fascism in their time, today’s GOP propagandists do not try to understand anything about this interwar movement. They make their living by labeling the Democrats “fascists” and then identifying fascism and the Democrats with the Left.  Jonah Goldberg’s best-selling pseudo-scholarship Liberal Fascism (2007) may be the most popular example of this propaganda technique but (alas) Goldberg’s nonsense is far from the worst of its genre. In researching my monograph, I unearthed so many abuses of the “f” word by GOP publicists and conservatism, inc., that I finally gave up cataloging them. I also discovered that no one (except perhaps for old-fashioned Habsburg monarchists) really believes that “fascism” was or is a leftist movement. When neocons start screaming about “Islamofascism,” I doubt that they’re suggesting that Muslim terrorists and multicultural Americans are ideological soulmates.

By this point fascism is not an ideological reference point but the verbal equivalent of a chair that one throws at one’s enemy’s head. Just a few minutes ago, I found this substantiated when neoconservative luminary Robert Kagan announced that “Trump will bring fascism to America.” Finally, I can’t believe that anyone but a total idiot would imagine that American affirmative action programs (when enforced by Democrats but supposedly not Republicans) resemble Hitler’s exclusion of Jews from professions and from German citizenship during the 1930s. When I encountered this comparison in Goldberg’s turgid screed, I remember saying to myself I hope he’s joking or simply lying to sell books to Dittoheads. Any other reason for his lunatic statements is too scary to consider.

In any case, I get exasperated by those who try to trace Goldberg’s opinions back to Flynn and other anti-New Deal critics of fascism. Contrary to what is suggested in the introductory chapter of Fascism: Career of a Concept Goldberg and his fellow-publicists in the GOP establishment are not offering an interpretation of fascism that goes back to the interwar American Right. These specialists in PR have never thought seriously about the “f” word and happily run together Italian fascism, German Nazis, Hillary Clinton and whatever else the GOP establishment is currently running against.  By contrast, Flynn and others of his time and persuasion were better-informed analysts. Their critical commentaries on the “fascist revolution” and its relation to the New Deal are still worth revisiting.

The post Is This Neocon Right About Fascism? appeared first on LewRockwell.