By Nate
Hochman
Tuesday,
December 06, 2022
Certain conversations
and debates on the left can be fascinating. The MSNBC-style, boilerplate
#Resistance genre is dull and uninteresting; toeing the party line of Jen Rubin
Thought is a lucrative endeavor, but it requires little to no critical
thinking. The thinking of the actual Left, however, is unique and
worthwhile; that Left defines itself in opposition to the
institutional progressive mainstream, and its relative lack of proximity to
power gives it a critical perspective. (For examples of this distinction in
practice, just look at the vitriolic divisions between Bernie Sanders
supporters and the Democratic Party establishment in both 2016 and 2020.)
Serious left-wing political theory, too, offers insights that even
conservatives can find useful — aspects of the Frankfurt School, for example,
are surprisingly
reminiscent of traditionalist critiques of modernity, and neo-Marxist theorists such as
Antonio Gramsci have been an object of fascination among right-wing thinkers
for decades.
A
popular debate in American political discourse lately has featured progressives
of all stripes fastened on the question of whether, why, and to what extent the
Trump-era GOP is a vehicle for fascism. As a Republican who happens not to
think of himself as a fascist, I naturally greet this debate over who in
conservative politics is implicated as fascist, semi-fascist, or
fascist-adjacent with skepticism. On Twitter a couple of days ago, I
inadvertently sparked a rehash of the debate over fascism and conservatism,
asking what distinguishes fascism from “normal” right-wing politics.
The
question was genuine — and, I think, quite reasonable if taken in good faith. I
probably should have known that, given the nature of Twitter’s incentive
structure, good-faith engagement wasn’t going to characterize the majority of
the replies. There were hundreds of silly “you’re so close to getting it,”
“huh, I wonder why that is,” “maybe that’s because you guys are fascists,”
etc. responses that didn’t engage with the actual question. And even if
we were to concede the dubious premise that most of modern
conservatism is fascist, it would effectively render the
“fascism” term and its attendant debates useless, as a practical matter.
One of
the central purposes of political language is the drawing of distinctions that
make the complexities of political life more coherent. This is hardly an
original insight. Noting “the special connection between politics and the debasement
of language,” George Orwell was complaining about the numerous political terms
that had been drained of any substantive meaning all the way back in 1946:
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as
it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice,
have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with
one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is
there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all
sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we
are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that
it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it
were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a
consciously dishonest way.
With
that being said, some of those who replied to my question made serious efforts
to arrive at an answer. I can’t claim to be an expert on the academic
literature regarding fascism, but my frustration with what I have read on the
matter — and most of the responses I received on Twitter — stems from two
primary problems.
The
first is that the ideological tenets that ostensibly characterize fascism are
themselves broad and contested terms. Chuck Anesi’s “Fascism: The Ultimate Definition” surveys the definitions offered by
three established scholars of the ideology, all of whom were commended to me by
my interlocutors on Twitter: Michael Mann, Robert Paxton, and R. J. B.
Bosworth. While there are important differences among their conceptions, “all
three authors agree that statism, nationalism, unity, authoritarianism, and
vigor are essential elements of fascism,” Anesi writes.
Two of
these terms — “statism” and “authoritarianism” — are pejorative. “Nationalism”
can be negative or positive, depending on the context. “Unity” and “vigor” are
usually seen as positive. But all of these concepts, to one degree or another,
have been ascribed to right-wingers of every stripe, across time and place.
Writing in Scientific
American in
2012, the political activist Shawn Lawrence Otto argued that Mitt Romney’s
“path to endorsement exemplifies the problem” of the GOP’s “authoritarian
approach” to “attacking the validity of science itself as a basis for public
policy.” Ross Perot, a 1996 Independent editorial argued,
“represents an unattractive side of American politics: personalist, xenophobic,
authoritarian.” Alexander Hamilton, according to the New Republic,
was a “statist.” But then again, according to
David Stockman, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget
under Ronald Reagan, so was Reagan: “Rather than a permanent era of robust free
market growth, the Reagan Revolution ushered in two spells of massive statist
policy stimulation before it finally ran out of steam,” Stockman declared in
2014. Abraham
Lincoln’s “nationalism” has been written about at length. And as for “vigor”
and “unity” — what politicians haven’t used such terms when touting their
policy agendas?
The
second problem, as I see it, is that much of the literature on the difference
between conservatism and fascism is oddly lacking in ideological specificity,
focusing on means rather than ends. A blog post penned by the left-wing writer
John Ganz in response to my original tweet, in spite of Ganz’s obvious discomfort at engaging with conservatives
in anything other than sardonic and mocking terms, was one of the more
thoughtful and comprehensive efforts to answer my question.
With
some important exceptions, Ganz’s delineation of conservatism from fascism
largely makes reference to tactics rather than goals: “While both imagine a
‘traditional’ and ‘wholesome’ social order characterized by certain
hierarchies—husbands and fathers over wives and children, bosses over workers,
the nation over all, etc.—fascists and conservatives have different notions of
how to assert and maintain them,” he writes. Conservatives, for example, “tend
to believe that the existing elite, or at least its right-flank, ought to stay
in power,” while “fascism—at least on the level of its propaganda—is populist:
it speaks of the entire existing ruling class as corrupt and hopeless.” And
while “authoritarian conservatives can countenance a break with constitutional
legality, they would prefer this to originate within the existing elite of the
state.” Fascists, by contrast, “strive for a putsch ‘from below,’ originating
from their own cadre,” led by paramilitary cliques. “In general,” Ganz argues,
“mass mobilization is a desideratum of fascists, while conservatives generally
would prefer to not stir up the public and disturb the social order.”
The
problem here is that tactical distinctions are effectively
content-neutral; the description of the strategic differences between fascism
and nonfascist conservatism could feasibly be applied to the extremist versus
moderate factions of any number of political ideologies. The preference for
mass mobilization led by a paramilitary elite, for example, is reminiscent of Vladimir
Lenin’s “vanguard of the proletariat” — which, as a 32-year-old Lenin argued in
the 1902 political pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, would fulfill “the
pressing needs of the working class for political knowledge and political
training” and eventually lead the masses to revolution. This revolutionary
vanguard strategy, of course, was distinct from progressive reformism in its
belief that, as Ganz aptly put it, “the entire existing ruling class” was
“corrupt and hopeless,” and necessitated wholesale overthrow via violent
revolution. But it was also distinct from the more moderate Menshevik wing of
the Russian socialist movement, which ostensibly shared many of its long-term
political goals.
To be
fair, Ganz does point to some specific ideological divergences between fascism
and conservatism. The distinction between fascism’s preference for “mass
mobilization” and the conservative reluctance to “stir up the public and
disturb the social order,” for example, gets to an important difference between
a form of Burkean institutionalist conservatism and a fascist ideology that has
no particular use for Chesterton’s fence.
But the
other examples Ganz cites are more aesthetic than substantive. This category
includes “the degree of national crisis” — in which conservatives “shake their
heads at declining mores, and propose alternatives,” while “fascist propaganda
is hysterical and shrill,” holding that “things have gotten so bad that only a
radical move break the present regime can save the nation” — and fascism’s “cult
of masculinity” that “explicitly centers violence and war.” (Conservatives, in
contrast, “tend to emphasize the patriarchal and staid parts of traditional
masculinity—the stern but beneficent father as pillar of community stability
and so forth,” he writes.)
These,
too, run into the same problem of ideological neutrality: Just as the rhetoric
of “crisis” may distinguish fascism from conservatism, it also distinguishes
more radical leftists from liberal reformers. The “crisis of capitalism” is a
core tenet of Marxism, and the theory implicates every facet of modern society:
As the Marxist economist Kuruma Samezō wrote in his 1929 Introduction
to the Study of Crisis, “my use of the term ‘theory of crisis’ is not
limited to the theory of economic crisis. This term naturally also encompasses
the study of the necessity of imperialist world war as the explosion of the
contradictions peculiar to modern capitalism.” And while the radical Left’s
centering of violence and war may be less “hyper-macho,” as Ganz puts it in
reference to fascism, it delineates the more extreme versions of leftism from
their more moderate counterparts. Frantz Fanon’s seminal Wretched of
the Earth was a perfect illustration of this cult-of-violence impulse,
celebrating the violent aspects of anticolonial revolts as an act of both
political and psychological liberation:
At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the
native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes
him fearless and restores his self-respect. . . . When the people have taken
violent part in the national liberation they will allow no one to set
themselves up as “liberators.” . . . Illuminated by violence, the consciousness
of the people rebels against any pacification.
None of
this is meant as an attempt at “both-sidesism” — it’s an attempt to explain the
deeper problems with the conventional ways in which “fascist” is defined and
applied. Ganz concludes his response to me by arguing: “If you are a
conservative, you might ask yourself if you’ve already been sucked into the
blob—especially if you are already having trouble differentiating your own
politics from fascism.”
But I have no problem differentiating my own politics from fascism. My challenge is to those who operate on a flawed definition of the term such that they are incapable of meaningful differentiation.
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