Who Are the Real Fascists?

On Tuesday of this week I opined on the advent of anti-fascism. People who would be hiding under the bedspreads if they ever encountered any real fascists are up in arms against Republicans, who they now consider to be fascistic.

In so doing, I remarked that the anti-fascists have blinded themselves to the dangers inherent in radical leftist politics. They have ignored Communism and the horrors it visited on the world. 

It feels strangely consonant with the liberal war against bigotry, conducted over the past decades, whose proponents woke up one day to discover that people of color were largely infested with anti-Semitism.

Allow yourself a moment to reflect on the anti-fascists who are standing tall and proud for Hamas, and for what they call the Palestinian cause. How many of them are surprised to find themselves aligned with anti-Semites? How many of them understood what they were buying when they rummaged through these outworn ideas?

So, these intrepid warriors, fighting the good fight against bigotry, find themselves working to sustain some of the world’s worst bigots. Islamic radicalism is murdering people around the world, but our culture warriors are going to war against Donald Trump and the American Republican Party.

Dare we call them cowards?

If you ask yourself which side of the political divide is supporting Israel in its war against Hamas and which group is promoting the interests of Hamas, you will arrive at an obvious conclusion: the anti-fascists are more fascistic than the fascists. Does anyone seriously believe that the group that calls itself Antifa-- short for Antifascist-- does not count among the most fascistic segments of American society today. 

If irrationality and the will to get one’s way-- aka the will to power-- define a fascistic impulse, surely the anti-Trump crowd has been thoroughly irrational. 

To that we can add BLM, another purportedly anti-fascist group that has fomented violent insurrection. Many people believe that Donald Trump ought to be drawn and quartered for making occasional reference to vigilante violence. And yet, how many of these same people denounce BLM protesters and Antifa radicals for practicing vigilante violence?

So, the normally rational Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf declared war on fascism the other day. He based his analysis on the theories propounded by one Umberto Eco. I admit to being a fan of Eco, but he is basically a novelist and a semiotician, not a political philosopher.

Yet, Eco is of Southern European origin and we must observe that European fascism comes from the South of that continent. There has never really been any Northern European fascism. 

As it happens, Wolf embarrasses himself while trying to offer something of an analysis:

One fea­ture is the cult of tra­di­tion. Fas­cists wor­ship the past. The corol­lary is that they reject the mod­ern. “The Enlight­en­ment, the Age of Reason,” Eco writes, “is seen as the begin­ning of mod­ern deprav­ity. In this sense Ur-Fas­cism can be defined as irra­tion­al­ism.”

Rather than call this a word salad-- it is utterly incoherent-- we should call it a thought salad.

As it happens, conservatives respect tradition. They respect the past and believe in learning from experience. Do you have a problem with that? Besides, doesn’t radical Islam worship tradition, to the point where it has stubbornly refused to reform?

As for the Enlightenment, it was not singular. Europe knew two different Enlightenments. There was the idealism offered on the continent by Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, among others. And there was the more empirical version that we owe to Great Britain, to John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith.

One does well not to confuse the two. They employ different versions of reason. Surely, the Continental Enlightenment ought not to be glorified; it gave us both Nazism and Communism. It may have paid occasional lip service to rationality, but reason was not its middle name.

Wolf continues, not recognizing that his thought has gone off the rails. 

Another fea­ture is the cult of action for action’s sake, from which flows a fur­ther one: hos­til­ity to ana­lyt­ical cri­ti­cism. And it fol­lows from this that “UrFas­cism . . . seeks for con­sensus by exploit­ing and exacer­bat­ing the nat­ural fear of dif­fer­ence . . . Thus Ur-Fas­cism is racist by defin­i­tion.”

And Islamic radicalism, the kind that is proud of its anti-Semitism, is perhaps also worthy of being called racist? All of the hatred for white people-- isn’t that racist?

Wolf continues:

Next, for Eco, is the fact that Ur-Fas­cism advoc­ates a pop­u­lar elit­ism. In UrFas­cism, he writes, “Every cit­izen belongs to the best people of the world.” Moreover, “every­body is edu­cated to become a hero.”

Again, this is a muddle. Those who believe in action for the sake of action might well be considered to be followers of an ethic of machismo. And yet, machismo is not a Northern European or even an American production. As the word suggests, it comes to us from Southern European and South American cultures. 

And, naturally, Wolf gets confused. True enough, proud Americans feel that they have something to be proud of. They know that our nation is a world leader, the role model that others have, at least until recently, wanted to emulate. 

All politicians tell us that we are the best. Exception given for those who think that we are the worst. 

Wolf continues, echoing Rousseau’s concept of common or general will, a concept that formed the basis for totalitarian leftism. Does this sound familiar? Does it sound like the theocracy in Iran?

For Ur-Fas­cism, Eco adds, “the People is con­ceived as a . . . mono­lithic entity express­ing the Com­mon Will. Since no large quant­ity of human beings can have a com­mon will, the Leader pre­tends to be their inter­preter.”

The ori­gin of Ur-Fas­cism’s dis­tinct­ive mach­ismo is that “the Ur-Fas­cist trans­fers his will to power to sexual mat­ters”. Implied here is both dis­dain for women and intol­er­ance and con­dem­na­tion of non-stand­ard sexual habits.

The will to power did not arise from the Scottish Enlightenment. It comes to us from everyone’s favorite syphilitic philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.                      

If one looks at today’s rightwing pop­u­lism, one notices pre­cisely the cults of the past and of tra­di­tion, hos­til­ity to any form of cri­ti­cism, fear of dif­fer­ences and racism, the ori­gins in social frus­tra­tion, nation­al­ism and fer­vent belief in plots, the view that the “people” are an elite, the role of the leader in telling his fol­low­ers what is true, the will to power and the mach­ismo.

Without spending too much of your time arguing against a lot of nonsense, we will note that the people today who are hostile to any form of criticism inhabit the political left, the cancel culture left and the American academy.

One last note: I am looking for a literary agent and/or a publisher for my latest book, Can’t We All Just Get Along? Please send suggestions of recommendations to my email: StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com