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Students of history inevitably think in terms of periods: the New
Deal, McCarthyism, "the Sixties" (1964-1973), the NEP,
the purge trials - all have their dates. Weimar, whose cultural
excesses made effective propaganda for the Nazis, now seems like
the antechamber to Nazism, though surely no Weimar figures perceived
their time that way as they were living it. We may pretend to know
what lies ahead, feigning certainty to score polemical points, but
we never do.
Nonetheless, there are foreshadowings well worth noting. The last
weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right
about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these
pages wrote of the "brownshirting" of American conservatism
- a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael
Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow,
former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration,
and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking.
Several weeks later, Justin Raimondo, editor of the popular Antiwar.com
website, wrote a column headlined, "Today's Conservatives are
Fascists." Pointing to the justification of torture by conservative
legal theorists, widespread support for a militaristic foreign policy,
and a retrospective backing of Japanese internment during World
War II, Raimondo raised the prospect of "fascism with a democratic
face." His fellow libertarian, Mises Institute president Lew
Rockwell, wrote a year-end piece called "The Reality of Red
State Fascism," which claimed that "the most significant
socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked,
and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie
from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional
elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas
the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of
the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central
state, particularly its military wing."
I would argue that Rockwell - who makes the most systematic argument
of the three - overstates the libertarian component of the 1994
Republican victory, which could just as readily be credited to heartland
rejection of the '60s cultural liberalism that came into office
with the Clintons. And it is difficult to imagine any scenario,
after 9/11, that would not lead to some expansion of federal power.
The United States was suddenly at war, mobilizing to strike at a
Taliban government on the other side of the world. The emergence
of terrorism as the central security issue had to lead, at the very
least, to increased domestic surveillance - of Muslim immigrants
especially. War is the health of the state, as the libertarians
helpfully remind us, but it doesn't mean that war leads to fascism.
But Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention
to a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist.
Rockwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied
for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as "hate-filled ... advocating
nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now."
One of the biggest right-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for
the mass destruction of Arab cities. Letters that come to this magazine
from the pro-war Right leave no doubt that their writers would welcome
the jailing of dissidents. And of course it's not just us. When
USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote a column suggesting that
American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was
blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose and demanding
that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs
anything that existed during the Cold War. "It celebrates the
shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The
new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe
that the US is God marching on earth - not just godlike, but really
serving as a proxy for God himself."
The warnings from these three writers would have been significant
even if they had not been complemented by what for me was the most
striking straw in the wind. Earlier this month the New York Times
published a profile of Fritz Stern, the now retired but still very
active professor of history at Columbia University and one of my
first and most significant mentors. I met Stern as an undergraduate
in the spring of 1974. His lecture course on 20th-century Europe
combined intellectual lucidity and passion in a way I had never
imagined possible. It led me to graduate school, and if I later
became diverted from academia into journalism, it was no fault of
his. In grad school, I took his seminars and he sat on my orals
and dissertation committee. As was likely the case for many of Stern's
students, I read sections of his books The Politics of Cultural
Despair and The Failure of Illiberalism again and again
in my early twenties, their phraseology becoming imbedded in my
own consciousness.
Stern had emigrated from Germany as a child in 1938 and spent a
career exploring how what may have been Europe's most civilized
country could have turned to barbarism. Central to his work was
the notion that the readiness to abandon democracy has deep cultural
roots in German soil and that many Europeans, not only Germans,
yearned for the safeties and certainties of something like fascism
well before the emergence of fascist parties. One could not come
away from his classes without a sense of the fragility of democratic
systems, a deep gratitude for their success in the Anglo-American
world, and a wary belief that even here human nature and political
circumstance could bring something else to the fore.
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He is not a man of the Left. He would have been on the Right side
of the spectrum of the Ivy League professoriat - seriously anticommunist,
and an open and courageous opponent of university concessions to
the "revolutionary students" of 1968. He might have described
himself as a conservative social democrat, of the sort that might
plausibly gravitate toward neoconservatism. An essay of his in Commentary
in the mid-1970s drew my attention to the magazine for the first
time.
But he did not go further in that direction, perhaps understanding
something about the neocons that I missed at the time. One afternoon
in the early 1980s, during a period when I was reading Commentary
regularly and was beginning to write for it, he told me, clearly
enjoying the pun, that my views had apparently "Kristolized."
It is impossible to overstate my pleasure at being on the same side
of the barricades with him today. That side is, of course, that
of the antiwar movement; the side of a conservatism (or liberalism)
that finds Bush's policies reckless and absurd and the neoconservatives
who inspire and implement them deluded and dangerous. In the past
year, I had seen Stern's letters to the editor in the Times
("Now the word 'freedom' has become a newly invoked justification
for the occupation of a country that did not attack us, whose people
have not greeted our soldiers as liberators. The world knows that
all manner of traditional rights associated with freedom are threatened
in our own country. ... The essential element of a democratic society
- trust - has been weakened, as secrecy, mendacity and intimidation
have become the hallmarks of this administration. ... Now 'freedom'
is being emptied of meaning and reduced to a slogan. But one doesn't
demean the concept without injuring the substance.") In the
profile of him in the Times, he sounds an alarm of the very
phenomenon Roberts, Raimondo, and Rockwell are speaking about openly.
To an audience at the Leo Baeck Institute, on the occasion of receiving
a prize from Germany's foreign minister, Stern noted that Hitler
had seen himself as "the instrument of providence" and
fused his "racial dogma with Germanic Christianity." This
"pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics largely ensured
his success." The Times' Chris Hedges asked Stern about
the parallels between Germany then and America now. He spoke of
national mood - drawing on a lifetime of scholarship that saw fascism
coming from below as much as imposed by elites above. "There
was a longing in Europe for fascism before the name was ever invented...
for a new authoritarianism with some kind of religious orientation
and above all a greater communal belongingness. There are some similarities
in the mood then and the mood now, although significant differences."
This is characteristic Stern - measured and precise - but signals
to me that the warning from the libertarians ought not be simply
dismissed as rhetorical excess. I don't think there are yet real
fascists in the administration, but there is certainly now a constituency
for them - hungry to bomb foreigners and smash those Americans who
might object. And when there are constituencies, leaders may not
be far behind. They could be propelled into power by a populace
ever more frustrated that the imperialist war it has supported -
generally for the most banal of patriotic reasons - cannot possibly
end in victory. And so scapegoats are sought, and if we can't bomb
Arabs into submission, or the French, domestic critics of Bush will
serve.
Stern points to the religious (and more explicitly Protestant) component
in the rise of Nazism - but I don't think the proto-fascist mood
is strongest among the so-called Christian Right. The critical letters
this magazine receives from self-identified evangelical Christians
are almost always civil in tone; those from Christian Zionists may
quote Scripture about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in ways that
are maddeningly nonrational and indisputably pre-Enlightenment-but
these are not the letters foaming with a hatred for those with the
presumption to oppose George W. Bush's wars for freedom and democracy.
The genuinely devout are perhaps less inclined to see the United
States as "God marching on earth."
Secondly, it is necessary to distinguish between a sudden proliferation
of fascist tendencies and an imminent danger. There may be, among
some neocons and some more populist right-wingers, unmistakable
antidemocratic tendencies. But America hasn't yet experienced organized
street violence against dissenters or a state that is willing -
in an unambiguous fashion - to jail its critics. The administration
certainly has its far Right ideologues - the Washington Post's
recent profile of Alberto Gonzales, whose memos are literally written
for him by Cheney aide David Addington, provides striking evidence.
But the Bush administration still seems more embarrassed than proud
of its most authoritarian aspects. Gonzales takes some pains to
present himself as an opponent of torture; hypocrisy in this realm
is perhaps preferable to open contempt for international law and
the Bill of Rights.
And yet the very fact that the f-word can be seriously raised in
an American context is evidence enough that we have moved into a
new period. The invasion of Iraq has put the possibility of the
end to American democracy on the table and has empowered groups
on the Right that would acquiesce to and in some cases welcome the
suppression of core American freedoms. That would be the titanic
irony of course, the mother of them all - that a war initiated under
the pretense of spreading democracy would lead to its destruction
in one of its very birthplaces. But as historians know, history
is full of ironies.
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