Fascists All the Way Down
Meet historical fascism’s true heirs.
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In the famous anecdote usually attributed to Bertrand Russell, a scientist lecturing on the earth’s position in the solar system is corrected by an old lady who says the earth is actually supported by a giant turtle. When the scientist asked what supports the turtle, she triumphally answered, “It’s turtles all the way down!”
Since the Twenties and the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism––which eventually become the main referent of the word––the term has become an all-purpose question-begging epithet so promiscuously abused in the Thirties that, as George Orwell said in 1944, “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable.”
As the word’s use by progressives and leftists––at this point synonyms for “Democrats”––have shown for decades, their understanding of conservatism’s principles and tenets is limited to the infinite regression of “fascists all the way down.” In this election season, they are binging 24/7 on “fascists” with plenty of “Hitlers” thrown in to ratchet up the evil quotient with evocations of genocide and the horrors of the death camps.
The problem is not just the blatant abuse of history, truth, and language, which since ancient Athens has been a habit typical of representative governments that give widely diverse citizens freedom of speech. The more pertinent and dangerous point about this misuse of “fascist” as a political smear is that it obscures how much American progressivism has in common with historical fascism––an oversight made worse by the left’s assumption that conservativism and capitalism are ideologically and organically fascist, and thus profoundly more unjust and dangerous than socialism and other forms of statism.
In reality, as Jonah Goldberg explained in his 2008 book Liberal Fascism, fascism is a phenomenon of the left, not the right––an “inconvenient truth,” Goldberg writes, “if ever there was one.” This confusion about fascism’s origins is furthered by the misleading Manichean contrast the left makes between fascism and communism, a consequence of Hitler’s 1941 invasion of Soviet Russia, his erstwhile ally, that ended the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement of 1939.
In fact, as Goldberg shows, “they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to control and dominate the same social space,” a space opened up by secularism and the decline of Christianity, which both ideologies denigrated and dismissed; and by Enlightenment scientism that promoted the technocratic management of society, the economy, and government, and promised to create a material earthly paradise. Moreover, both shared, along with American progressivism, the belief that “the era of liberal democracy was drawing to a close,” that it was time to abandon “the anachronisms of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism and the like: God was long dead, and it was long overdue for men to take His place.”
As Goldberg goes on to document, historical fascism indeed had much in common with American progressivism, and their shared notions that political, social, and economic “experiments” conducted by rational technocrats––“experts” liberated from traditional religions superstitions, dogmas, and customs––could correct the injustices and inefficiencies created by laissez-faire capitalism and rampant individualism. Then the utopia of “equity” and “social justice,” as our “woke” progressives put it, would blossom.
Let me emphasize that Goldberg’s point is not that progressives are fascists, but that the shared assumptions behind much of progressive politics and historical fascism need to be identified and their implications for individual freedom acknowledged and confronted.
A particularly significant affinity between progressivism and fascism can be seen in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s aggressive expansion of the federal state by means of New Deal policies that reestablished the intellectual continuity of liberal ideals with those of fascism in the Twenties and Thirties, which accounts for the mutual admiration among Mussolini, Hitler, and Roosevelt evident everywhere before Hitler’s military aggression began to manifest itself in 1939.
The New Deal in particular––that revered icon of modern progressives––“was conceived at the climax of a worldwide fascist moment,” Goldberg writes, a time when nationalism and socialism coalesced and the yearning for lost community became the rationale for increasing state power. “As a consequence of Roosevelt’s policies, today we live with the fruits of fascism, and we call them liberal. From economic policy, to populist politics, to a faith in the abiding power of brain trusts to chart our collective future––be they at Harvard or on the Supreme Court––fascistic assumptions about the role of the state have been encoded upon the American mind, often as a matter of bipartisan consensus.”
The Sixties was another “fascist” moment in our history: “Politically, the glamorized cult of violence evident in groups like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen likewise derived from fascistic idealizations of ‘men of action’ like Mussolini, who called his brand of socialism ‘the greatest act of negation and destruction.’”
Indeed, much of the baleful legacy of the Sixties, from the smarmy “politics of meaning” to the worship of callow youthful “idealism” and spurious “authenticity” found in anarchic violence finds its antecedents in the fascism of the Twenties. More recently, the 2020 “summer of love” riots, arson, and assaults produced and directed by Black Lives Matter and Antifa are examples of this malign dynamic.
The Sixties also marked the increased growth in the technocratic Leviathan state and its vast expansion of federal agencies staffed by “experts” who usurp the lawmaking powers of Congress in order to aggrandize and politicize power for one party at the expense of the citizens’ rights and freedom.
As Goldberg writes, “Lyndon Johnson called it the ‘Great Society,’ which in Johnson’s own telling, ‘rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice,’ and is a place ‘where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect,’ where ‘the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.’”
As a consequence of such progressive policies, fascistic statist assumptions today most obviously impact our lives in economic policy. Despite the liberal lie that big business is inherently fascist, Goldberg writes that “if you define ‘right-wing’ or conservative in the American sense of supporting the rule of law and the free market, then the more right-wing business is, the less fascist it becomes.” The “Third Way” economic policies that want the heavy hand of the state involved in the free-market economy is closer to traditional fascism, which was a populist movement frequently railing against big business and blood-sucking corporations.
Today, the devil’s bargain accepted by big business basically allows corporations to make their huge profits as long as they go along with the government’s political program––with the added bonus that the metastasizing government regulations furthering that social agenda are affordable for big businesses, but often ruinous for smaller ones.
Thus, today we see big corporations and social media firms eagerly embracing the “woke” Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity nostrums, making themselves into what Goldberg calls “government by proxy.” We saw this during the Biden administration when social media colluding with the Executive branch and security agencies in order to abrogate the First Amendment rights of anyone challenging or criticizing government policies.
These, of course, are carried out in the name of the same utopian promises made by the bloodiest tyrannies of the 20th century, yet continue to comprise the policies of progressive Democrats down to the Biden administration–– and Kamala Harris’ proposed policies to tax, print, borrow, and redistribute trillions of dollars to political clients, as well as expanding the intrusive regulatory state and its scores of entitlement programs, many of which, like Social Security and Medicare, are dangerously close to bankruptcy.
Finally, the choice in this election is not between cartoon “fascists,” but historical fascism’s true heirs, who for a century have been assaulting the Constitution to dismantle its guardrails that protect our unalienable rights and freedom to manage our lives according to our own lights, rather than submitting to tyranny.
Bruce Thornton
Bruce S. Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an emeritus professor of classics and humanities at California State University, Fresno, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents: The Tyranny of the Majority from the Greeks to Obama.
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