LIBERAL FASCISM 4
I continue this mini-series on Jonah Goldberg’s 2007
book Liberal Fascism.* (In these
Posts, Jonah Goldberg will be shortened to ‘JG’.)
FDR slyly made a virtue out of necessity: not having
much of a plan nor actually a deep understanding (few did at the time) as to
just what had gone wrong and thus what had to be done to correct it, FDR simply
asserted that the government would embrace “action” and “above all, try
something”. (p.132)
Making full use of the shallow but catchy American
Pragmatist approach popularized by William James (if it works it’s true and has
“cash value”; if it doesn’t work then it’s not true), FDR pledged that the
government would “take a method and try it … if it fails, admit it frankly and
try another … but above all, try something”. (p.132)
This, I would say, was a crucial Moment in American
History: something very vital (the economy) had somehow gone wrong; nobody at
the time could get a confidently clear grasp on just what had gone wrong, and there
was too much danger of public suffering (and consequent unrest) to simply keep
on the same course and see what would happen.
It was a genuine Crisis and Emergency (just the type
of flood-tide Progressivism and the European totalitarian approaches always
require to float their plans over the rocks and shoals which thinking-about
would simply slow down the march to ‘progress’). But if the fundamental statist
and government-heavy Progressive approach wasn’t threat enough, it would under
FDR be wedded to an enthusiastic and thorough-going embrace of the idea that a
major government should simply start ‘trying stuff’ to see what might work. This
is not the way to handle a great ship or large aircraft that’s in difficulty:
Folks, we don’t really know what’s wrong but we’ll be trying whatever we can
think of and see if it helps … so buckle up.
(And in the end, it was not FDR’s economic efforts
that pulled the country out of the mess, but rather the Crisis and Emergency of
world-war. But that left the country’s political classes and even the public
expectations of what the government might do – or try – imprinted with the idea
that government can sort of just try stuff … and make everybody go along with
it.)**
Thus anybody who agreed with the FDR approach was ‘flexible’
and ‘cutting-edge’ and ‘open-minded’, and anybody who didn’t was simply an
unimaginative fuddy-duddy wedded to outmoded dogmas and clearly not ready for
the bright possibilities (and brutal possibilities) of the 20th century.
JG rightly points out that (genuine) conservatives
are always wary of unconsidered change. Much like prudent ship captains and
pilots, they are aware of how much is at stake if something goes wrong, and
they’d rather not play games with people’s lives and economic livelihood and
means of subsistence.***
Ominously, JG notes, there were three Great Events
that in 1932 seemed to be bearing great and wonderful fruit and were thus
available for trying-out as solutions: the Bolshevik Revolution, Mussolini’s
Great-Man fascism in Italy, and Wilson’s own recent ‘war socialism’ of a dozen
years or so before. (p.132)
The Soviet method was seen as merely a more robust
and ‘bottom-up’ popular version of Bismarck’s ‘top-down socialism’ of the later
1800s in Prussia and Germany. And, in the opinion of the elites here, looking
dreamily at the new Soviet state, “it worked”. Lincoln Steffens went so far as
to express it this way: there was what he called the “Russian-Italian” method,
accurately and acutely capturing the kindred dynamics of both the Soviet and
the Fascist efforts. (p.133)
Worse was the induced presumption that since We had
won the Great War, then Wilson’s ‘war socialism’ actually ‘worked’ (whatever
that might mean) and the further
assumption that since Wilson’s
Progressive ‘war socialism’ “worked”, then it was and had to be ‘good for’ the
country and would produce no
fundamentally ill effects or consequences of any sort.
The elite assessment of the postwar years was that the
Russians and Italians were beating us at our own game “by continuing their
experiments in war socialism while America cut short its project, choosing
instead to wallow in the selfish crapulence of the Roaring Twenties”. (p.133) Nor,
conveniently, did the Progressive elites care to waste any thought or risk any
optimism by considering just how their signature achievement of Prohibition had
fueled that admittedly dispiriting decade.
One commentator in 1932 plaintively whined: “Why
should Russians have all the fun of remaking the world?” (p.133) Why indeed?
And here JG connects to a natural human tendency,
pronounced in can-do America but also powerfully operative in the younger members
of the species: “the important role that boredom and impatience play in the
impulse to ‘remake the world’”. (p.133)
Boredom, “sheer, unrelenting ennui with the status
quo – served as the oxygen for the fire of progressivism because tedium is the
tinder for the flames of mischievousness”. (p.133) And it did so “in much the
same way as Romanticism laid many of the intellectual predicates for Nazism”.
(p.133) He could have added the genuinely gaga infatuation with Italian
Futurism – in Italy and throughout the West – in the very early years of the
century.
The world was “clay to be sculpted by human will”,
or – in the Futurists’ vision – a great machine whose powers were merely
waiting to be harnessed by those with the vision and enthusiasm to toss aside
the ‘old’ and embrace the oh-so-very-Modern and up-to-date.****
JG also connects to the “spiritual languor of the
age”. (p.133) But this is a far more complex reality than can be envisioned in
merely two dimensions, I would say. There is a “spiritual languor” that goes
with any age of human existence; it is the result of the inevitable
incompleteness of human life and of humanity’s perennial inability to fully
realize or actualize even its most cherished ideals.
This is far different from a spiritual-languor that
arises like a miasm from a particular cultural Moment or era. The Twenties, the
Jazz Age, were certainly an era when material ‘abundance’ was so widely
embraced and enjoyed that it blotted out all concern for the more ‘spirit’-based
concerns of humanness. That materialist cacophony, of course, ended with the
onset of the (first) Great Depression.
And it requires a careful and discerning assessment
to distinguish the two types of ‘spiritual languor’: one stems from particular
cultural situations, the other from the very nature of what it means to be
human (an incomplete, if marvelous being, dwelling in an incomplete world that
is simultaneously comprised of the Mono-planar realities of this-world and the
Multi-planar intimations of a world/existence Beyond).
Why go to the trouble? Because the this-worldly
languor might well be addressed by making adjustments in the this-worldly
surround; whereas the existential languor cannot be eliminated by government or
social action and rather must be accepted and maturely incorporated into one’s
Stance toward life. A government, thus, that took as its writ the elimination
of all such languor whatsoever would be increasingly expanding its writ and
authority in a this-worldly sense, but remain forever unable to achieve its
promised objective.
And no constitutional republic can survive a
government authority forever expanding and intensifying but equally forever
failing to achieve its visions, and demanding that the nation travel just a
while further down the flat road nonetheless.
Thus, “sickened by what they saw as the spiritual
languor of the age, members of the avant-garde convinced themselves that the
status quo could be easily ripped down like an aging curtain and just as easily
replaced with a vibrant new tapestry”. (p.133)
When you are dealing not only with an existential,
Multi-planar element of the Beyond and of fundamental incompleteness that is of
the essence of the human, but also with making deep changes to profound
cultural and societal (and with the Progressives, political) foundations … when
you are dealing with all that, there is nothing easy or blithe or
simply-glorious about it: the tasks you have undertaken are of a first-order
seriousness, and it is immoral (there, I’ve said it) to simply start whacking
and hacking away, in the cheeribly sure and certain knowledge that whatever
follows – intended or unintended – can only be better and Good.
Thus JG will concur with Richard Pipes’s assertion
that Bolshevism and Fascism were each and both “twinned heresies of Marxism.
Both sought to impose socialism of one sort or another, erase class
differences, and repudiate the decadent democratic-capitalist systems of the
West”. (p.139)
I would note here that “democratic-capitalist”: where
the two systems, one political and one economic, are so deeply enmeshed, you
can’t easily whack away one without doing damage to the other. Which is
precisely the ominous reality ignored by socialists and Progressives: in trying
to eradicate capitalism, they did grave damage to democracy as well.*****
All of the ‘isms’ of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries were – JG quotes Eric Vogelin – “premised on
the idea that men could create utopias through the rearrangement of economic
forces and political will”. (p.139) And all that has happened in the more
recent era of the past forty years is to add the rearrangement of cultural and
social forces and structures as well.
And thus the core Struggle of the past century has
been merely one between left-wing and right-wing socialists, with “all camps subscribed to some hybridized version
of Marxism, some bastardization of the Rousseauian dream of a society governed
by a general will”. (p.139)
And, of course, since there is actually no such
thing as the ‘general will’ actually existing on the hoof, then it’s up to
somebody – the government, advised by the Progressive-socialists, preferably –
to say just what that ‘general will’ is. We see this dynamic at play in the viva voce political ploy: the Chair asks
for all the Yeas to say Yea, and for all the Nays to say Nay – but it is the
Chair that gets to say which group was, in its own estimation, the loudest. Such
democracy.
And JG raises the example of Huey Long, who was so
essentially a fascist (in the guise of a populist) because of his “contempt for
the rules of democracy” – which Long spun, famously, as a virtue: “The time has
come for all good men to rise above principle”. (p.144)
There is a difference, I say again, between outmoded dogmas and principles, especially first
principles. The former are approaches erected into standard operating
procedures that may – may – have become “inadequate to the stormy present” (to
use Lincoln’s phrase). But the latter are vital Grounding and Shaping
foundational beliefs that cannot be altered any more easily than you can rip
out and replace the keel of a ship at sea or the airframe of an airliner in the
air.
To try to rip out the first-principles is not proof
of one’s ‘genius’ and ‘transgressive creativity’ but rather is the sign of an
almost criminally witless and treacherous imbecility.
Long was also “absolutely convinced that he was the
voice of the people”. (p.144) But in the Framing Vision The People don’t need a
‘voice’ in the form of a Great Man or his ‘leadership’ because The People –
each of the Citizens – has a voice.
And I think it is precisely to finesse this
difficulty that current American ‘liberalism’ places so much rhetorical
emphasis on ‘giving [fill in the blank] a voice’. That voice has to be either a
Great Man (or Woman) or an organized vanguard-elite ‘advocacy’ or both. But in
either case, that ‘voice’ will speak only those lines determined by the Great
One or by the party-line of the vanguard advocacy.
Thus neither Fascists nor Communists nor Nazis required
‘democracy’ because their Great One (Mussolini, Lenin/Stalin, Hitler) embodied
the ‘voice’ and ‘will’ of the masses.
But whatever that ‘voice’ will say, it will trumpet
the “exhaustion” of traditional ideas and first-principles and the structures
that they undergird.
And – the carrot – there will always be an
oft-voiced concern for “the forgotten man” (or woman) and for “youth”. (p.144)
The scam will be: since you have been victimized and
forgotten by the government (especially your Western democratic government)
then the Great One – scooping up all the reins of government power and
authority – will put government to work for you and give you the recognition
you deserve. And the Great One will never become ‘exhausted’; and there will be
no need for another revolution “for a thousand years”, to use Hitler’s undying
phrase.
Nor will you need intermediaries between you and
your government: the Great One will hear and feel you (Hitler actually uses
this trope: “I cannot see all of you, but I can feel you and you can feel me” …
it must have been as quease-making a comment in Germany of the 1930s as it
sounds now … and yet We have seen it and heard it here far more recently.)
So no need for the ‘exhausted’ mechanisms of
representative democracy, then.
And even American Communist Norman Thomas observed: to
what extent can you expect to have the economics of fascism without its
politics? (p.148) Of course, the same goes for his beloved Communism.
Because it will take strong centralized
(ideologically as well as administratively) government, interpreting the
general will of the masses as it sees fit, to rearrange or redistribute the
national economics.
As I have said before, the only interesting twist in
recent American politics is that the Beltway indentured itself not only to the
Left, but to the Right: the Left was given entitlements and through
intensifying regulations and policies various special considerations and the expansion
of the illusory ‘wealth’ of credit; the Right – Big Money and Big Capital – was
given the increasingly un-regulated opportunity to amass actual wealth for
itself.
And here We are.
NOTES
*Goldberg, Jonah. Liberal Fascism. Doubleday: New York, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-385-51184-1
(hard cover). It’s also out in paperback.
**Of course, in the era of Identity Revolution,
beginning in 1968 or 1972 at the latest, the government took part of FDR’s
approach – we are going to be trying a whole lot of odd new stuff – but not the
rest of FDR’s approach – if it doesn’t work we’ll stop it and try something
else.
Instead, desperately indenturing themselves to fresh
political demographics, the Beltway pols intended to continue on their initial
path no matter what happened; and when their initial efforts didn’t bear the
promised glorious-fruit, they simply doubled-down, decade after decade. While,
as I have often said, those same pols increasingly indentured themselves to the
Right’s corporatist financial interests.
Thus the country now finds itself lethally bethumped
by both a new Leviatha of the Left and the old Leviathan of the Right. And
thus, as Scripture saith, our last condition is worse than the first.
***The profound wrack and ruin caused by the Great
Depression would have worked in any case toward softening the public’s own
sense of prudence, in the desperation engendered by the economic mess. But in
the late-1960s and early-1970s the ‘crises’ were far less vital and indeed were
possessed of a strong flavor of having been ‘created’ or ‘whomped up’ precisely
to generate waves of emotion necessary to float – it was hoped – the Great Ship
over the awesome rocks and shoals toward which the ‘cutting edge reforms’ and ‘revolutions’
embraced by the Beltway were taking it.
****Jut recently
Slate legal commentator Dahlia Lithwick went down this same path: just as
Science and Medicine don’t allow themselves to become trapped in “obsolete”
practices, so too Law should not allow itself to be trapped in fuddy-duddy ‘old’
ways of conducting itself or envisioning its purpose and practice. That Law
somehow participates in vital national first-principles, and that those
principles are not merely ‘stale dogmas’ but are actually the non-material
vital animating and structuring ideals that hold the foundations of the
American polity and American culture together … this did not detain her for a
moment.
And in her you can also hear echoes in the 2010s of
Wilson’s blithe but forceful rejection in the 1880s of the Framing Vision
embraced back in those “horse and buggy” days of 1776 and 1787.
*****It’s worth repeating myself yet again: when in
the Age of Identity (1972 or so and continuing) ‘capitalism’ was joined by
racism (however defined) and genderism (ditto) and victimism (ditto), democracy’s
chances of surviving such multiple and pervasive ‘reform’ intact were hugely
lessened. Indeed, as the radical-feminists, drawing their political philosophy
from all the fonts of Marxism, insisted: there’s no use having democracy since
most of The People ‘just don’t get it’ in the first place. Which takes Marx and
Mussolini and Hitler and Woodrow Wilson and updates them all for the 21st
century.
And it’s also stunning that whereas materialist and
quasi-Marxist Charles Beard’s ‘economic’ interpretation of the Framers (i.e.
they were all rich men looking to lock-out the non-rich from governance under
the Constitution of 1787) claimed that democracy was undone by the Framers for ‘economic’
reasons, yet the dynamics of Gender-based political theory will seek to lock
out vast swaths of the Citizenry for ‘gender’ reasons.
The neat Beltway solution to this shocker was to
quietly a) weaken the ‘white male patriarchal’ Citizenry while both b) turning
education into a social-indoctrination into the gender-based ideological formation
while also c) embracing as many non-white and thus presumably non-patriarchal
new residents (Citizenship not necessarily required) as quickly as possible.
Something for ‘everyone’.
TAGS:
Progressivism, American political history, American
political development since the Sixties, contemporary Liberalism, socialism,
fascism, Marxism
Labels: American political development since the Sixties, American political history, contemporary liberalism, fascism, Marxism, Progressivism, socialism
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