By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, January 24, 2025
So, I’m in a mood to annoy everyone—but for a reason, so
bear with me.
Let’s start here. They told me that if America elected
Donald Trump, the president would pardon fascists—and they were right.
I’m referring to Joe Biden and
his pardon of Marcus Garvey.
Now first of all, I did warn you I’d be annoying (you can
skip the Garvey discussion if you like).
In the 1920s, when Italian fascism was new, and German
Nazism was an obscure fringe political cult almost no one had heard of, fascism
was very popular in America. In 1923, the New York Times declared
that Benito Mussolini “has many points in common with that of the men who
inspired our own constitution – John Adams, Hamilton and Washington.” Legendary
progressive economist Charles Beard had similar, albeit more pointed views.
Sure, Mussolini was hostile to democracy, but so what? The “fathers of the
American Republic, notably Hamilton, Madison, and John Adams, were as
voluminous and vehement [in opposing democracy] as any Fascist could
desire.”
Fact check: Untrue.
When someone asked how anyone could consider Mussolini’s
brutality a “good thing,” Herbert Croly, the godfather of American
progressivism and the cofounder of The New Republic, wrote that it was
not “any more than it was a ‘good thing’ for the United States, let us say, to
cement their Union by waging a civil war which resulted in the extermination of
slavery. But sometimes a nation drifts into a predicament from which it can be
rescued only by the adoption of a violent remedy.” That might explain some of
his support for eugenics.
Fascism remained popular in some quarters well into the
1930s. Indeed, in 1937, Garvey, the founding father of black nationalism,
insisted to the famous black historian J.A. Rogers that,
“We were the first fascists.” He continued: “We had disciplined men, women, and
children in training for the liberation of Africa. Mussolini copied fascism
from me, but the Negro reactionaries sabotaged it.” (This quote is often
truncated or slightly modified as it appears—and disappears—in different
editions of Rogers’ work.)
The influential historian C.L.R. James—a Trinidadian
Trotskyist (say that 10 times fast!)—wrote in 1938, that “All the things that
Hitler was to do so well later, Marcus Garvey was doing in 1920 and 1921. He
organized storm troopers, who marched, uniformed, in his parades and kept order
and gave color to his meetings.”
James later recanted this assessment as the full scope of
Hitlerism made the comparison unfair.
I’m no expert on Garvey, and things do get sufficiently
confusing that I’m open to correction on some of this, but that Garvey passed
the fascist duck test seems pretty defensible. He marched like a fascist,
dressed like a fascist, and sounded like a fascist —particularly when he said
he was a fascist! If you translated a lot of his rhetoric into German—“up, you
mighty race!” and all that—you’d assume it was from a Nazi.
But it’s still all very complicated. For instance, Colin
Grant, in his biography of Garvey, Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of
Marcus Garvey, writes:
With his invasion of Ethiopia,
Mussolini’s rapacious imperial instincts had come to the fore. For any Negro
worthy of the name, it was monstrous and galling. In July 1935, Garvey wrote to
dispel some of the misleading statements in the English press like the Saturday
Review which had printed a full-page photograph of the dictator under the
caption, “Mussolini – the World’s Most Benevolent Ruler”. Garvey countered that
“the real facts reveal Mussolini as a barbarian, compared to Haile Selassie,
the Emperor of Abyssinia… the one man is a tyrant, a bully, an irresponsible
upstart, whilst the other is a sober, courteous and courageous gentleman.”
But then Garvey zagged again, and began blaming Selassie
for his own defeat. The emperor, you see, hadn’t followed Garveyite principles.
Selassie thought he was white, Garvey claimed, and surrounded himself with
white advisers, so he sorta had it coming. Even more confusing, Garvey’s
original statement that “we were the first fascists” came after Mussolini
invaded Ethiopia.
I think it’s fair to say that Garvey was a power
worshipper and authoritarian. “Government should be absolute,” he insisted.
“When we elect a President of a nation, he should be endowed with absolute
authority to appoint all of his lieutenants from cabinet ministers, governors
of States and Territories, administrators and judges to minor offices.” But he
was also an anticommunist (communism, he said, was “a white man’s creation to
solve his own political and economical problems”). And he was a capitalist. “Capitalism,”
he insisted, “is necessary to the progress of the world, and those who
unreasonably and wantonly oppose or fight against it are enemies to human
advancement.”
He wasn’t particularly antisemitic (though it’s worth
noting, neither was Benito Mussolini in the 1920s). He’d offer the rare and
occasional swipe at international Jewry, but he also supported Zionism as the
Jewish version of his own Back to Africa movement. It wasn’t until his 1923
trial for mail fraud in the U.S. that he started really tearing into the Jews,
because he believed they were biased against him at his trial. Both the
prosecutor and the judge were Jewish, and the fraud scheme involved a Jewish guy,
Anton Silverstone. ‘The peculiar and outstanding feature of the whole case is
that I am being punished for the crime of the Jew, Silverstone … ”
Why would the Jews—and perhaps the Catholics—have it out
for Garvey? He believed, not altogether unreasonably, that it might have
something to do with the fact that Garvey formed a—mostly rhetorical—alliance
of convenience with the Ku Klux Klan. “I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs
and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better
friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together.”
At least the Klan was honest about its racism, Garvey insisted, unlike the more
genteel progressives who made pleasant noises about tolerance but were just as
racist.
In 1972, historian
William J. Moses wrote in The
Black Scholar that:
Garvey never supported wholesale
migration, however. He felt that only the best (and the purest) blacks should
migrate to Africa. The rest, he said, would die out in fifty years. In other
words, Garvey seems to have intended to migrate to Africa with his chosen few,
while all other people of African blood were abandoned to the tender mercies of
the Ku Klux Klan — to die out in fifty years.
Not great, in my opinion.
Garvey was sentenced—way too harshly from what I can
tell—to five years in prison for a single count of mail fraud. His sentence was
commuted by President Calvin Coolidge—a good man—but he was deported back to
Jamaica.
I think it’s fair to say Garvey contained multitudes. But
none of that complexity seemed relevant to the fawning fanfare
that greeted Biden’s decision.
History is complicated.
But America contains multitudes, too. You know who else
was keen on Italian fascism early on? The American Legion. “Do not forget,” the
legion’s national commander, Alvin Owsley, declared
in 1923, “that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the
United States.”
Now, I am a huge fan of the American Legion in its modern
form. I’ve had my share of drinks in the American Legion Hall in Friday Harbor,
Washington. Good folks all around.
But, again, history is complicated. I’ve been thinking
about this since my conversation
with Michael Moynihan for The Remnant. He told me about
Rachel Maddow’s work
on America’s fascist tradition and her podcast-turned-bestselling-book Prequel.
Her familiar thesis is that there’s a kind of nascent fascist spirit in
America that, under the right circumstances, can be triggered.
And I agree! But that’s because I think that spirit
is part of the human condition, and it can manifest itself in all sorts of
ideologically inconvenient ways. Garvey was a racial separatist, nationalist,
and at least quasi-fascist. So were Klansmen and all sorts of other bad actors
across the American historical waterfront. But you shouldn’t just cherry pick
the ones convenient to your just-so story. It’s bad faith, and it blinds you to
threats from your own side.
Maddow’s version of this history from what I can
tell—I’ve only dipped in and out of the book since talking to Moynihan—focuses
on a particular period, right before World War II, and picks its cast of
characters very selectively. We don’t hear about the New Dealers and Brain
Trusters who looked favorably on fascism from their perches in power. But we do
hear about priest and radio personality Father
Coughlin. She starts telling the story of Coughlin in 1935-36, when the
pro-fascist and antisemitic “radio priest” was an enemy of FDR. She leaves out
that in 1932 Coughlin was one of Roosevelt’s most passionate supporters,
running around the country proclaiming it was “Roosevelt
or Ruin” and “The
New Deal is Christ’s Deal.” He described Roosevelt as a “Protestant
President who has more courage than 90 per cent of the Catholic priests in the
country.”
Why did Coughlin break with FDR? Because Roosevelt’s
economic program wasn’t left-wing—or if you prefer statist or, heh, fascistic—enough
and didn’t go sufficiently hard at—wink, wink—international financiers and the
“money changers.”
Again, I don’t want to be too unfair to Maddow without
reading the book, but this sort of thing is extremely common. Come up with a
thesis about how the other side in a contemporary political conflict is a
dangerous threat, call the threat “fascism” or some other label, and then just
grab the examples that fit the thesis. This was my
complaint about
Robert Kagan’s book, Rebellion:
How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart—Again. Now, I agree that
anti-liberalism is a huge problem today, and I have enormous respect for Kagan
and his other books. But his history of anti-liberalism illuminates just one
thread—a tendentious version of conservative intellectual history—and proclaims,
in effect, this is how you got Trump.
There’s another explanation for how we got Trump.
Actually, there are dozens—history is complicated, and so is the present. But
one of them is the anti-liberalism of the left.
I’m running way too long to get in the weeds on this, but
it’s worth noting that one of the reasons Hillary Clinton lost is that she
campaigned on the claim that it was “her turn.” This played into both her
gender—vote for the woman, it’s time—and as the long-suffering spouse of Bill
Clinton. Both the identity politics pitch and the dynastic pitch are illiberal
at a very fundamental level.
But let’s fast forward to 2024. The backlash against
wokism, DEI, censorship, and progressivism is a backlash against perceived
anti-liberalism. It’s not just that. There’s lots of indefensible stuff
in nationalism, MAGA, and the rest. But excessively policing speech is
illiberal. Rewarding members of your coalition—whether in the form of student
loan relief or racial preferences—is illiberal. Enforcing hate crimes laws for
favored “victims” while invoking freedom of speech for hate against Jews is
illiberal. Celebrating the murder of a health care executive, even
backhandedly, is illiberal.
And just to continue my piss-off-everybody approach, I
should say that Trump lost in 2020 because his authoritarian cos-play was
illiberal, too. So are his demands for loyalty above all else, his blanket
pardons for people guilty of political violence on his behalf, and lots of
other hallmarks of Trumpism.
That brings us to this week. You can insist that he
was utterly insincere in his second inaugural address when he said, “This week,
I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and
gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will forge a society
that is colorblind and merit based.” You’re free to claim that some of
that talk from him and his biggest supporters is a racial dog whistle. I think
some of it is. I am totally open to the argument that his executive
order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity”
goes too far or has constitutional problems. But you’ve got to make
the argument. Saying that opposition to DEI is racist isn’t an argument,
it’s an attempt to anathematize people and ideas you disagree with.
But it’s significant that Trump didn’t say we’re going to
favor white people or discriminate against black people. He said the government
was getting out of the business of discriminating based on race. Indeed, his
defenders rightly note that there are plenty of anti-discrimination laws on the
books and that they should be enforced. Again, some of those defenders may not
mean it, but they feel compelled to frame the issue that way all the same
because that is the (classically) liberal way—the American way—to sell
it. It’s similar to the way authoritarian and totalitarian regimes still feel
compelled to call themselves “republics” and “democracies.” Their deceit is the
tribute illegitimate autocracy pays to legitimate liberal democracy.
I know I’m a broken record invoking Wayne Booth’s
definition of rhetoric as “the art of probing what men believe they ought to
believe.” But it’s relevant here. Whether it’s sincere or not, talk of
restoring merit is liberal. Opposition to notions of merit is illiberal.
And, simply put, this is a liberal country. I hate having
to clarify that I don’t mean it’s a progressive country, though in many ways
it’s that, too. I mean that Americans believe in some foundationally liberal
ideas—about competition, fairness, merit, the rule of law, etc. There are lots
of illiberal politicians and activists out there, but the successful ones still
feel the need to sell their ideas—including DEI—on those terms. Few mainstream
defenders of DEI say, “certain groups deserve special treatment” even though
that is exactly what many of them want as a matter of law. They say this group
or that group deserves “opportunity” and “fairness.” And few mainstream
opponents of DEI say, “we need to put the white man back in the saddle.” Some
may mean that, but they can’t say that. And you shouldn’t accuse them of it
without proof.
Some readers have told me that I talk too much about
“horseshoe theory.” Fair enough. But the simple fact is that when you are
outside the very broad liberal consensus in this country, you’re going to
encounter other illiberal people and find them allies of convenience who share
the same hostility to liberal values, the same will-to-power, and the
power-worship that goes with it. That’s why Marcus Garvey considered the Klan a
friend. It’s why Trump lavishes praise on dictators but belittles allies. It’s
why so many illiberals across the ideological spectrum had nice things to say
about Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, and in some cases even Hitler. And it’s also
why, ultimately, fascists fought communists: because they were fighting over
who would control the illiberal future. That didn’t make them “opposites,” it
made them rivals.
While notions of fairness are inherent to human nature,
ideas about who deserves fairness—i.e. everybody—aren’t. Fairness for my team
comes naturally. Fairness for the other team—the idea that’s the essence of
liberalism (and in many profound ways, Christianity)—isn’t. The system of
liberalism is unnatural and must be carefully taught. When it isn’t, we define
and perceive politics tribally, and selectively, which is why so many otherwise
decent, liberal, people are blind to the illiberalism of their friends and
allies but so horrified by the illiberalism of their foes.
The fault lies not in the fascists, but within ourselves.
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