Julius Evola: philosopher of Fascism and Trumpism?

Jason Horowitz analyses the work of Julius Evola on Presidential adviser Steve Bannon (Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists New York Times 02/10/2017):

Evola, who died in 1974, wrote on everything from Eastern religions to the metaphysics of sex to alchemy. But he is best known as a leading proponent of Traditionalism, a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions.

Continue reading the main story Evola became a darling of Italian Fascists, and Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to him as a spiritual and intellectual godfather.

They called themselves Children of the Sun after Evola’s vision of a bourgeoisie-smashing new order that he called the Solar Civilization. Today, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn includes his works on its suggested reading list, and the leader of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, admires Evola and wrote an introduction to his works.

Horowitz writes that Benito Mussolini became a fan of Evola because he admired Evola's authoritarian concept of the "ideal order."

The dictator already admired Evola’s early writings on race, which influenced the 1938 Racial Laws restricting the rights of Jews in Italy.

Mussolini so liked Evola’s 1941 book, “Synthesis on the Doctrine of Race,” which advocated a form of spiritual, and not merely biological, racism, that he invited Evola to meet him in September of that year.

Evola eventually broke with Mussolini and the Italian Fascists because he considered them overly tame and corrupted by compromise. Instead he preferred the Nazi SS officers, seeing in them something closer to a mythic ideal. They also shared his anti-Semitism.

A. James Gregor's Mussolini's Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (2006) devotes a full chapter to Evola along with references elsewhere in the book:

Among the desperate efforts made to find the irrationality and malevolence that typifies contemporary mayhem in a Fascist source, some have seized on the work of Julius Evola. Elevated to the stature of “the philosopher of Fascism,” Evola has been identified as one of the principal sources of “right-wing extremism.”

The fact is that whatever the case might be with respect to Evola’s connections with contemporary extremism, there are virtually no grounds for identifying him as a spokesman for Fascist doctrine [i.e., during the Mussolini period]. Such an identification has become possible only because Fascism as an historic reality has receded further and further into the mists of stereotypy and political science fiction. An entire quarter century of Italian history has taken on the banal qualities of a poor morality play. Fascism no longer appears as an historical reality, but becomes a waking horror, without substance and without an intellectual history. [p. 16]

Gregor may be underestimating the ideological continuity between the original Fascists and today's versions. He continues directly, "In fact, Italian Fascism has very little, if anything, to do with either Julius Evola or modern extremism of whatever sort. Those today identified as 'neofascists,' 'cryptofascists,' and 'parafascists' are, most frequently, not fascists at all, but persons suffering clinical afflictions."

As we have seen often, people with clinical afflictions do play real roles in real-life politics.

But Gregor's warning that ideas of notable thinkers, or notorious ones, need to be understood in their historical context, even when their ideas have a much longer temporal influence, is a good one. Many such treatments of the precedents of Hitler's thinking have been published, including Brigitte Hamaan's Hitlers Wien. Lehrjahre eines Diktators (1998) and the extensive scholarly annotations to the 2016 Mein Kampf.Eine kritische Edition, published by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte.

It's possible that Evola is more of an influence on Trumpism than it was on Italian Fascism. Horowitz reports:

As Mr. Bannon suggested in [a 2014] speech, Mr. Putin’s most influential thinker is Aleksandr Dugin, the ultranationalist Russian Traditionalist and anti-liberal writer sometimes called “Putin’s Rasputin.”

An intellectual descendant of Evola, Mr. Dugin has called for a “genuine, true, radically revolutionary, and consistent fascist fascism” and advocated a geography-based theory of “Eurasianism” — which has provided a philosophical framework for Mr. Putin’s expansionism and meddling in Western European politics.

Gregor writes in a footnote (p. 158):

Thus, in 1937, Julius Evola, a marginal thinker in Fascist Italy, published his Il mito del sangue that was presumably read and approved by Mussolini himself. Evola wrote that “the theory of race,” which inspired National Socialist Germany, was not a “concept” that could be evaluated employing “properly scientific, philosophic, or historical” criteria. Evola identified National Socialist race theory as a “myth”—not a fiction, but a nonrational device, which through “suggestive force” would be capable of moving persons to action. He reminded his audience that Mussolini had always insisted that race was a “matter of sentiment, not a reality.” [my emphasis in bold]

Looking at Evola's development over the years as a thinker, Gregor certainly doesn't present him as a very perceptive or admirable advocate for his positions, which owed a lot to a vague mysticism. He even argues that Evola's reputation as a significant influence on Italian Fascism was not a contemporary view but one developed later and superficially associated with Italian Fascism of the 1920s and 1930s:

In retrospect, it appears evident that Evola was never particularly interested in Fascism, as such. In effect, he actually has no place in any history of Fascist social and political thought. He is accorded a place because, years after the passing of fascism, discussants have chosen to identify him as the “fascist” source of the irrationalism and antihumanism of contemporary “extremism.” He presumably provided the meaning of fascism for modern revolutionaries.

In fact, Evola was never a fascist, however the term is understood. He provided idiosyncratic meaning for all its principal concepts in his candid effort to further the interests of that arcane Tantric and Vedic Wisdom that he had made his own. [pp. 197-8]

None of this is to say that Evola was a misunderstood democrat or a closet leftist of some kind. He wasn't. Nor could he be described as an opponent of the Mussolini regime. But Gregor argues at some length that Evola's influence on Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany was marginal, a minor sideshow of highbrow propaganda.

Roger Giffith, in a critical remark on the Evola chapter in Gregor's book (Roger Griffith, American Historical Review 110:5 Dec 2005, pp. 1625-6), reinforces the point that Evola's influence on postwar neofascism is more significant than for Mussolini's Fascism:

[Gregor's] efforts in chapter nine to show that Evola was never a true representative of Italian fascist ideology under Benito Mussolini is tilting at windmills, since no serious scholar has ever claimed this. What experts such as Marco Revelli, Franco Ferraresi, and Richard Drake have demonstrated in considerable empirical detail is that Evola has had a major impact both on postwar fascism in Italy and on several currents of revolutionary nationalism, both cultural and terrorist, that emerged elsewhere in Europe after the defeat of the Axis powers. As a philosopher of generic fascism, Evola eclipses in importance Giovanni Gentile, whose impact outside the confines of fascist Italy has been minimal. [my emphasis in bold]

Walter Laqueur in his Foreward to What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe (2003) also refers to "postwar neofascists such as Julius Evola."

Robert Payne writes that Evola became "Italy's leading 'racial philosopher,' and later yet the chief ideologue of the country's terrorist radical right in the period after World War II." (my emphasis; A History of Fascism, 1914-1945; 1995; p. 113) Payne also observes, "Evola was largely ignored in Fascist Italy by all save some of the most radical sectors of Fascism (though Mussolini seems to have held his intellectual dynamism in some esteem)."

Payne elaborates on the views of Evola's that had particular influence after the Second World War:

Strictly speaking, therefore, Evola had never been a complete Fascist and was never a full neofascist, but after the war he became the intellectual leader of the most extreme radical right. Though anti-Jewish, he later considered Hitler's demonic anti-Semitism to have been a "demagogic aberration." What made Evola so attractive both to genuine neofascists and to the radical right after the war was the fact that he developed eloquently and incisively an alternative concept of history and of culture, based on uncompromising antidemocratism, elitism, mysticism, and the call for a revolutionary elite to create a hierarchic, organic new order, structured on socioeconomic corporation. The goal, as in Fascist doctrine, was to achieve a "new man" with a "soul of steel" capable of "transcendence against temporality," who would live a "warrior epic" imbued with "legionary spirit." In all this there lay a scarcely veiled encouragement of terrorist action against the present rotting order. Evola thus provided inspiration for a wide range of right radical, neofascist, and even neo-Nazi groups in Italy. [my emphasis; pp. 502-4]

The fact that Evola was a mystical racist crank with little intellectual influence among Italian Fascism in Mussolini's day doesn't make the fact that a man currently as powerful as Steve Bannon favors his ideas any less creepy. And it's cold comfort that one of the erratic new President's most influential advisers may be significantly inspired by a crackpot extremist who had a major influence "both on postwar fascism in Italy and on several currents of revolutionary nationalism, both cultural and terrorist, that emerged elsewhere in Europe after the defeat of the Axis powers."

Neoliberalism and rightwing authoritarianism

Jonathan Chait gives a reliably conventional take on third-party candidate Jill Stein of the Green Party, Jill Stein Explains Her Plan to Stop Trump by Electing Him President New York 07/28/2016.

Someone on Facebook called attention in particular to this quote from Stein, "The answer to neofascism is stopping neoliberalism."

I try to be sparing in the use of the label "fascism" or variations like "neofascism." Chait sneers at Stein's comment as "jargon-laced evasion." Meaning evasion of Chait's assumption that a vote for Stein is effectively a vote for Donald Trump.

This seems like a modified version of a (relatively) famous 1939 quote from Max Horkheimer, "Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism." Horkheimer was the head of the Frankfurt School (Institute for Social Research), whose members had to emigrate once the Nazis took over. They were alert enough prior to 1933 to transfer most of the Instutute's assets to Switzerland because they were realistic about the chances for a Nazi takeover. Not incidentally, Horkeimer headed the studies on anti-Semitism sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, the most famous of which was the pathbreaking sociological study of The Authoritarian Personality, part of a larger project called Studies of Prejudice. The AJC website has the full text of all five published volumes of the Studies in Prejudice.

In other words, he was kind of an authority on the topic of fascism. The historical/poli-sci discussions of whether Hitler's regime should be called fascist or whether it was a distinct type of dictatorship came later; everybody took it for granted in the 30s and 40s that Nazism was a variation of fascism.

One of the important findings of The Authoritarian Personality study was that there was a significant amount of among white and black workers in America. And both that and the larger AFJ research project focused heavily on the role that authority structures in the family and childrearing practices play in producing authoritartian tendencies. Horkheimer and the Institute had previously done a major study based on survey results in Germany published as Studies on Authority and the Family. So that did some of the most important groundbreaking work on how family structures and psychological factors are important independent variables from economic ones in shaping people's political attitudes.

But Horkheimer's point about capitalism and fascism is still true, even when we attach "neo" to both. "Neoliberalism" is finally becoming a widely-used term in the US, at least among economists. And it has been the dominant economic-political ideology in the US and Britain since the 1980s. And it's an ideology that's very, very focused on letting corporations and especially banks run wild. And its political side has a very undemocratic tendency (to put it very mildly).

Citizens United is neoliberal political theory in action. Deregulating the banks including abolishing Glass-Steagall is neoliberal political theory in action. So is the push to privatize what is now public education. (Pioneered by the White Citizens Council back in the day.) So is the Flint, Michigan poisoned water situation. And private prisons. It's a toss-up for me which of those last two is the more obscene.

So are deregulation treaties like TPP dressed up as "trade" treaties that allow international corporations to override national standards on health and safety regulation, environmental laws and labor protections by going through a corporate-run court system. Germany dictating to Greece, Italy and Portugal is neoliberal governance in action.

There are two very descriptive sentences on neoliberal economics and politics. One is TINA, There Is No Alternative, a favorite slogan of Maggie Thatcher and Angela Merkel, meaning that governments have to do what The Market demands, not what the voters put them in office to do. Even more representative is what Angie's Finance Minister told Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis just after the Syriza government took power in early 2014, “Elections cannot be allowed to change an economic programme of [an EU] member state!”

I've paid hardly paid any attention to Jill Stein, and the American Green Party has never made much of an impression on me.

But, yeah, people who won't talk about the substance of neoliberal policies, even if they use other words for it, might as well not bother talking about fascism either. Because the social developments in the US and the EU that created the conditions for the current surge in rightwing movements have an awful lot to do with neoliberal economic policies and political practices. Not least of which is that center-left parties have largely embraced neoliberalism even to the point of, say, proposing to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits in the United States. To take a random example.

How do you know if you're seeing fascism?

I gave up years ago on trying to characterize what counts as a "fascist" movement. Mussolini clearly qualifies because he called his party Fascist and that's pretty much where the label came from. They used From the Roman symbol of authority, the fasces (plural of the Latin fascis) in the picture, as their symbol. The Dollfuss-Schuschnigg "corporate state" regime I count in because it was pretty much modeled on Mussolini's. There's even a serious scholarly debate about whether Hitler's regime should be classified as fascist or whether it was a distinct form of dictatorship. My working definition is like Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography: I don't know how to define it, but I know when I see it. At least I think I do. Because I'm pretty sure I caught some glimpses of it on TV Thursday evening.

BTW, I've creating my own variant on Godwin's Law: whoever first brings up Peronism in an online discussion of fascism loses. Peronism is complicated. The current Pope back in the 1970s was affiliated with a Peronist group called the Sons of Iron (Hijos de Hierro) that had a paramilitary wing and was considered more-or-less neofascist. Go figure. Although I guess I just violated my own Godwin's Law variant already. Also, Peronism and Martin Heidegger? Don't go there.

Another pass at defining "fascism"

One of the reason I'm hesitant to use "fascism" as a descriptive political term is the lack of any common historical or political science definition of what it is.

Samir Amin gives one kind of conventional listing of historical fascist regimes in The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism Monthly Review 66:4 (2014):

Political movements that can rightly be called fascist were in the forefront and exercised power in a number of European countries, particularly during the 1930s up to 1945. These included Italy’s Benito Mussolini, Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Spain’s Francisco Franco, Portugal’s António de Oliveira Salazar, France’s Philippe Pétain, Hungary’s Miklós Horthy, Romania’s Ion Antonescu, and Croatia’s Ante Pavelic. The diversity of societies that were the victims of fascism—both major developed capitalist societies and minor dominated capitalist societies, some connected with a victorious war, others the product of defeat—should prevent us from lumping them all together.

Speaking of the period when "fascism" seemed easy to define, this article is interesting in a strange way, Not Chicago 1968, but Berlin 1932 The American Prospect 03/28/2016. When I started reading it, I thought it was just going to be a way to call Bernie Sanders a Commie. But it's actually a somewhat clumsy historical analogy about the need for Democratic unity after the primaries.

Jamie Galbraith in Inequality and Instability (2012) talks about "the uneasy coalition between working-class voters and elite contributors and candidates that characterizes the Democratic Party." I'm not sure the Wall Street wing of the party will be completely on board with Sanders as the candidate. And if Clinton should become the nominee, the conservative Democrats will have to work to earn the trust, much less the enthusiasm, of Sanders voters.

Rallies then ... and now

This may seem too easy. But it's worth a moment's comparison. Here is Cenk Uygar from The Young Turks today reporting on a black protester being thrown out of a Trump rally, with a punch to the face as an extra, Cops Swarm Black Man For Getting Punched At Trump Rally 03/10/2016:

Then there's this report on an American Nazi Party rally in Madison Square Garden in 1938. Note especially the part beginning at around 2:00, The Nazi Rally in Madison Square Garden American Heroes Channel 02/24/2015:

I'm just sayin'.

Trump may be a fascist but Dems should be careful about panicking their own selves with that label for him

There is a lot of talk about Donald Trump as a genuine "fascist."

I said earlier that my functional definition of fascism is the same as Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography: I know it when I see it. And I see in the Donald Trump of 2015.

Whether at this stage, "fascist" is a better word or "fascistic," or maybe "fascistoid," I don't know. I'm not sure it makes much difference at this point. (See Dave Neiwert, Donald Trump May Not Be a Fascist, But He is Leading Us Merrily Down That Path Orcinus 11/28/2015.

But being a netroots Democrat, I also chronically worried about the timidity of Democrats. If Trump becomes the Republican Party's Presidential nominee, the Democratic candidate could do what LBJ did against Goldwater in 1964: take the chance to build a mandate for actual Democratic policies.

But today's corporate Democrats tend to think very differently. So I'm worried that many Democrats may look at Donald Trump and think, "This guy's a fascist. So we Democrats need to take conservative positions to reduce the chance Trump will get elected."

That kind of thinking leads the Democrats to take the approach of Alison Lundergan Grimes, the losing Democratic candidate for Senate in 2014, whose campaign produced this classically terrible campaign ad:

Alison for Kentucky TV Ad "Skeet Shooting" Alison for Kentucky YouTube 09/15/2015:

Also, the Goldwater movement was just beginning to contest other Republicans for full control of the party. Now the Republican Party generally is more hardline conservative than Goldwater, although not by that much, depending on your perspective.

There was a nasty split in the Republican Party in 1964 that helped produce the landslide for LBJ. It's hard to imagine a Trump victory in the primaries and winning the Republican nomination would produce anything remotely similar to that in 1964. Also in 1964, the Solid South voting for the Democratic Party was still in the process of breaking down. And the Texan Lyndon Johnson could compete effectively in Texas with its large number of electoral votes. Now the South is a Solid South for Republicans, although Florida is closer to being genuinely competitive. Goldwater carried only the state of Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. It's nearly unthinkable that a Trump-Clinton or Trump-Sanders race would be that lopsided.

Digby takes note of the indications that today's Republican Party can be expected to be unified behind Trump if he wins the nomination in Sure, he's a problem. But not so much that they can't make the best of it. Hullabaloo 12/08/2015:

For all the hosannas being raised in the press this morning over the likes of Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney condemning the ban on Muslims as un-American, it rings just a bit hollow when most of the other candidates were happy to jump on the idea of only allowing Christian Syrians into the country and they've all stood silent as he endorsed torture and killing wives and children and rounding up and deporting 12 million undocumented workers (who he defames as rapists and criminals) along with their American children.

They're not going to abandon him. He can run as an independent and 68% of his voters say they'll stick with him if he does it. And then they'll definitely lose. No principle is so important to them that they'll knowingly jeopardize their chances.

This is a real opportunity for the Democrats to emphasize how radically today's Republican Party is alienated from values of civic decency and democracy held by most Americans.

Trump has major disadvantages as a Presidential candidate in the general election. But he won't be a weak candidate in the sense Barry Goldwater was in 1964. This is not your grandfather's Republican Party we're dealing with today. Their far more conservative, far more white-racist and xenophobic and as mean as Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney at all levels. And the Republicans can count on a partisan media network unmatched by anything they had in 1964. And the "quality press" in its various incarnations (broadcast, cable, print, online) is far more dysfunctional than it was in 1964.

The Democrats need to fight hard in 2016. Doing what Alison Grimes did, advertise how little you are committed to your own Party's program and lose to the Republican, is definitely not the way the Dems should approach 2016.

Digby on the "f-word" (no, the other "f" word)

The "fascism" word is popping up quite a bit in progressive analyses of Donalp Trump and and his followers, some of whom clearly have a neo-Brownshirt.

Digby takes a pass at it in On the "F" word Hullabaloo 11/24/2015

I generally avoid using "fascism" for current groups because defining it does turn out to be very tricky. We can be sure with Mussolini, because he actually called his movement Fascist. There's even a long-running debate in history and political science about whether Hitler's government should be called fascist versus seeing the Nazi regime as a qualitatively different kind of dictatorship. I'm okay with calling it fascist just because that's what most of the world called it at the time.

My own operative definition of fascism is the same as Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography, "I know it when I see it." And I do see it in Trump's movement.

Bob Kuttner gives it a shot in America's Political Landscape Providing Fresh Soil for Fascism Alternet 11/23/2015.

Frankfurt School, 1936: Julian Gumperz on Lawrence Dennis

I’ve written in an earlier post about Julian Gumperz, who wrote for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung on American-related topics but by the late 1930s had become a flaming rightwinger.

As I wrote there about an article he did in ZfS 1/1932:

It's cringe-inducing today to see him citing Lawrence Dennis' book Is Capitalism Doomed? (1932). In fairness, in that book Dennis wasn't yet advocating an American brand of fascism to solve the problems he saw in American society, and hadn't yet become the leading intellectual of the Hitler-loving far right in the US. (Lawrence was a thoroughly weird character, an African-American who passed for white and became a leading American fascist, as Gary Younge describes in The fascist who 'passed' for white Guardian 04/04/2007.) And what he quotes from Dennis is a fairly straightforward observation that the displacement of rural farm populations to the cities where they became part of the industrial work force didn't tend to reinforce their devotion to prevailing doctrines concerning private property. (In the 3/1933 number of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung,Gumperz gives Is Capitalism Doomed? a glowing review.)

He did an English-language review for the 3/1936 number of ZfS that included a review of Lawrence Dennis’ book that openly advocated a fascist system, The Coming American Fascism (1936). Gumperz commented as followed on the book, it what seems to be in the context a disturbingly neutral tone:

Adherents of Mr. [Lewis] Corey's or Mr. [Alfred] Bingham's ways of thinking, in view of the fascist threat that, in Mr. Dennis' pages, appears as a boon, might find comfort in the latter's statement that it seems „too obvious to need saying that there is little likelihood that within the next four or five years the United States will be transformed into a fully rationalized national state which, in this book, is called fascist."

The basic ill of the present system, according to the author, is its instability, which is brought about by the financial machinery of the system, which increases the debt burden in a geometrical progression, and therefore operates in the end towards its own annihilation. The remedy is a „debtless economy", which can be achieved by progressive taxation, which, in effect, is equivalent to a cancellation of debts. Politically speaking, such a remedy, however, cannot be applied within the framework of the present political system, but can be brought about only by a fascist dictatorship. The program for such a dictatorship, the changes which it will impose upon present American institutions and ideas, the methods by which such changes can be achieved, the ideology and attitudes that it will have to develop in order to insure its own success, are the chief subjects of this book. „Integration of governmental agencies and coordination of authority may be called the keystone principles of fascist administration. Applied in the Untied States, these principles would mean the end of our federal system, of states’ rights and of the fictions of a functional separation of power as between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government.” To this end the organization of a fascist party which in the Untied States will certainly be called by a different name, and the leadership of the elite, are necessary. „All that will keep the world from going back to a pattern of banditry similar to that which prevailed all over Europe for hundreds of years, and which prevails today in large parts of Asia, will be such changes in the rules of the game as will keep enough of the now frustrated elite satisfied.” [my emphasis]

Tags: fascism, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, radical right

Figuring out fascism, 1933-4

In the course my continuing reading on the Frankfurt School, I came across a review in their flagship journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 2/1934 by Robert Briffault (1876-1948) of a book called The Menace of Fascism (1933) by John Strachey (1901-1963), a (then-former) British Member of Parliament (M.P.) and political writer John Strachey who had a colorful career; some might say a checkered one. (Or "chequered", since he was British?) He was elected to Parliament on the Labour Party ticket in 1929. He left Labour in 1931 and allied with the British Communists. Here is a sketch of his history from Encyclopædia Britannica (Ultimate Reference Suite DVD 2006):

Defeated [for re-election to Parliament] in 1931, Strachey began writing and giving lectures, eventually breaking with the Communists with the outbreak of World War II in 1939. During the war he served in a succession of posts - air raid warden, public relations officer, radio commentator, and Royal Air Force wing commander. With the war's end, Strachey was returned to Parliament in the June 1945 elections and was appointed undersecretary for air in the new Labour government. In May 1946 he became minister of food and began the rationing of bread. He also carried out an unsuccessful scheme to mechanize the growth of peanuts (groundnuts) in East and Central Africa. After serving as war minister (1950–51), he continued in Parliament as Labour spokesman on defense and commonwealth matters.

The Wikipedia entry for him as of this writing seems to be well-sourced.

(I'm still a little cautious about linking to Wikipedia entries; as in this case, I try to verify them when I do. While I'm at it, I'm always a touch embarrassed by using Encyclopædia Britannica as a source. But it has a stodgy kind of credibility, and it also carries many signed articles by leading scholars in the fields being discussed. So there.)

Answers.com has a more detailed biography of Strachey, which includes a discussion of his relationship with Sir Oswald Mosley (1896-1980), which is now best known as the main leader of British fascists via the British Union of Fascists (1932-1940) and the Union Movement (1932-1980). Mosley was a Labour M.P. in the 1920s, which is when Strachey was closely associated with him. Mosley was best man at Strachey's wedding in 1929 to "Esther Murphy, a wealthy heiress and sister of Gerald Murphy, the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night." Answers.com describes his eventual break with Mosley this way:

In early 1931, following a rebuff of the radical Labourites by the party, Mosley decided to form a new political party, which he called the New Party. Strachey resigned from Labour and joined his friend, becoming the New Party's intellectual mainspring.

Strachey did not remain very long in the New Party [a short-lived socialist party founded by Mosley]. He quickly saw that the workers were antithetical to it and that Mosley, after a trip to Italy, was turning toward fascism. This was happening at a time when Strachey was turning toward communism. In the general election of 1931, Strachey lost his seat to the Conservative candidate. Thereafter, he devoted himself to writing and lecturing until the Second World War. He was deemed one of the left's most eloquent interpreters. During this period he wrote The Coming Struggle for Power (1931), The Menace of Fascism (1932), The Nature of the Capitalist Crisis (1935), The Theory and Practice of Socialism (1936) and What Are We to Do? (1938). In late 1931, Strachey divorced his wife and married Celia Simpson, whom he had known for many years.

He returned to the United States in December 1934 for a lecture tour. While on tour, Strachey was arrested in Chicago for advocating the overthrow of capitalism. He immediately gained publicity. After several deportation hearings, the U.S. government dropped its case against him.

Strachey broke with the Communist Party in 1939, becoming (among other things) a wing commander in the British Air Force (RAF). Elected again in 1945 as a Labour M.P., he became Undersecretary for Air and then Minister of Food in the postwar Labour government.

Strachey's account which Briffault reviews came from Strachey's Communist period. In 1933, the Comintern (Communist International, directed by Moscow) was still holding onto its position that revolution was immanent as a result of the Great Depression. Briffault writes:

Mr. John Strachey's analysis of Fascism is the clearest and soundest which has appeared. He effectually disposes of the psychological explanations put forward by several able radical writers, which represent the phenomenon as a middle-class delusion, the product of bewilderment, or as a „youth movement“, the fruit of ignorance and of the blank outlook of post-war generations. Those may be factors in the development of Fascism, but, Mr. Strachey insists, it is primarily a definite policy of capitalist power at bay, promoted, supported, and financed by threatened capitalistic interests.

The Communist view of fascism (which included German Nazism) was officially leery of looking at the mass basis of movements like Mussolini's or Hitler's. Parliamentary democracy was seen as a false front of what was in fact already a dictatorship of the capitalist class. Fascism was taken to be a more severe form of the dictatorship of capital:

Without such support, neither middle-class pauperisation nor youthful restlessness would have brought about the Fascist coups d'etats in Italy and in Germany, and secured the triumph of Fascist tendencies in all the countries where it represents to-day, overtly or tacitly, the dominant policy. The means of control over the exploited classes which constitutional democracy afforded were adequate so long as capitalist society was safe from serious menace; they are inadequate to resist the forces which are now in revolt against it. The pretenses of constitutional democracy have never been but a disguise for domination by force and economic power. Fascism consists in throwing off that disguise. It is the open declaration of class war, taking the place of the pretence of armed peace.

On a factual matter, Hitler and his NSDAP (Nazi Party) did not assume power in a coup. The conservative government brought in Hitler as Chancellor at the end of January, 1933. The at-best-semi-free elections of March 1933 gave the NSDAP a plurality in Parliament. With the Communists expelled, only the Social Democratic Party voted against the Emergency Law by which Hitler assumed dictatorial powers immediately after that election. It was a very complicated process, and it would misleading to say that Hitler and the NSDAP were somehow freely elected to do what they did. But it wasn't a coup d'etat.

To put the view Strachey and Briffault were describing another way, this view expected a kind of domino effect in which capitalist countries would relatively quickly adopt fascist rule, parliamentary democracy (aka, "bourgeois democracy") having essentially run its historical course in advanced capitalist countries. A return to parliamentary democracy like that of the Weimar Republic was no longer possible, nor did it make sense for Communist Parties to cooperate with Social Democratic or other "bourgeois" parties in preserving capitalist democracy. The only alternative was to press the socialist revolution forward on more-or-less the lines of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The victory of National Socialism in Germany in 1933 and its rapid success in outlawing and suppressing the other political parties had already given a fatal body blow to this Communist strategy. It would soon be replaced with the strategies of the United Front and the Popular Front, in which Communist Parties were expected to cooperate with Social Democratic and other democratic parties that opposed fascism, despite their disagreements on ultimate ends. This new policy led to the formation of the Popular Front government in France in 1936, in which the French Communist Party provided full parliamentary support to Léon Blum's Socialist Party government, without having Communist cabinet members. Comintern chief Georgi Dimitrov gave an official description of the new approach this way in his Main Report delivered at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International of 08/02/1935, in words that were effectively a description of why the German Communist Party's (KPD) strategy of fundamental opposition to the Weimar government and refusal to cooperate with the democratic parties that were its primary support (Social Democrats and the Catholic Center Party) had been a disaster. It could also be read as an description of why the analysis of fascism such as that in John Strachey's 1933 book missed the boat:

Comrades, the accession to power of fascism must not be conceived of in so simplified and smooth a form, as though some committee or other of finance capital decided on a certain date to set up a fascist dictatorship. In reality, fascism usually comes to power in the course of a mutual, and at times severe, struggle against the old bourgeois parties, or a definite section of these parties, in the course of a struggle even within the fascist camp itself -- a struggle which at times leads to armed clashes, as we have witnessed in the case of Germany, Austria and other countries. All this, however, does not make less important the fact that, before the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bourgeois governments usually pass through a number of preliminary stages and adopt a number of reactionary measures which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism. Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie [capitalist class] and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory. [italics in original]

Continuig with Briffault's review of Strachey's book:

Mr. Strachey shows that Fascism cannot be regarded as an Italian, or German, or Polish phenomenon. Every country where the capitalist regime is menaced by social and intellectual revolt must inevitably, whether it desires it or no, resort to the methods of Fascist violence. England is no exception. In a very interesting chapter, Mr. Strachey, who was lately secretary to Sir Oswald Moseley, analyses the gravitation of English politics towards Fascism, the betrayal of the socialist and labourite parties, the growth of authoritarianism and ultra-nationalism. He gives at the same time an autobiographical account of the evolution of his own mind towards the logic of Communism. The only portion of the book in which Mr. Strachey's realism fails him is that in which he seeks optimistic comfort in the pious hope of a resistance against social trends which he has shown to be inevitable.

The author analyses very ably and thoroughly the claims put forward for the organising success of Fascism in Italy and Germany. Fascism has no economic or social remedies to offer for the breakdown of capitalist society. The only prospect it holds out is that of war.

There is no book more timely, and none better on the timeliest of themes. [my emphasis in bold]

Obviously, Briffault obviously bought into the essentials of Strachey's analysis, which had effectively already shown itself to be deeply flawed. What Briffault criticizes as Strachey's one lapse of realism in the book - "that in which he seeks optimistic comfort in the pious hope of a resistance against social trends which he has shown to be inevitable" - in fact proved to be very realistic. A Bolshevik-style revolution was not the only option to fascism in the advanced capitalist countries.

The Frankfurt School itself actually was an independent scholarly body, not committed to the line of any particular party, and already in exile from Hitler Germany in 1934. Two decades after the end of the Cold War and eight decades after the beginning of the Great Depression, it may be hard for many people to envision that a political cooperation like that of the French Popular Front government could take place. Or to imagine that the prospect of a very-soon end of the capitalist system through a revolution was widely understood as a real possibility, and not only by Communists or paranoid reactionaries. The German revolution of 1918-19, in which the Imperial government was replaced with a real parliamentary democracy and Bavaria was ruled by several months by a soviet regime - was closer in time to Germans like those of the Frankfurt School than the Gulf War of 1991 is to us today.

And in 1934, everyone who was paying the slightest attention to European politics was first coming to terms with Hitler's assumption of power in 1933 and what the implications of that were likely to be. Since people today are still grappling with that question, and not just as a purely historical matter, emphasizes how wide-ranging the discussion of what it meant would have been in 1934.

Tags: fascism, frankfurt school, national socialism

Some of the "isms" we're having to talk about these days

Mussolini and Hitler

January is only half over. But already the liberal blogosphere find ourselves contending with often-weirdly-provoked discussions of racism, anti-Semitism and (gulp!) fascism.

Not that I'm hesitant to discuss any of this stuff. Except that in my blogging days I've generally avoided discussing "fascism" in terms of contemporary politics, for reasons I mentioned in my review of Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism last year. Except for Benito Mussolini's Fascist Party in Italy, which actually called itself the Fascist Party, scholars of the phenomenon have a range of opinions on which historical regimes should be called fascist that would probably surprise most people who haven't dug into the topic a bit.

As much as my poli-sci-geek side enjoys this stuff, until now I've tried to avoid using the term "fascism" when discussing either historical regimes (except Italy) or contemporary movements. Also, in the sometimes eccentric American political vocabulary, "fascism" has been more like a cuss word than a definition. Everyone knows that "fascists" were the people we fought in our prototypical Good War, the Second World War. But beyond that, it hasn't had a whole lot of conceptual content in the ordinary political vocabulary.

Now along comes the National Review's Jonah Goldberg, son of Lucianne Goldberg (who made Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky famous), with a completely hack but high-profile argument that only liberals are "fascists". His book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, was just published and he's actively promoting it now. So, despite his argument being about as frivolous as it could be in content, I guess we're going to have to learn to talk about fascism explicitly now in current political terms.

Dave Neiwert has been way ahead of this curve. He's been writing for years not only about the real existing far right in the US but also specifically about the concept of fascism and how it applies to today's US political scene. He argues that the present-day conservative movement, including characters like Rush Limbaugh, Mad Annie Coulter and nativist groups who are very much a part of the Republican Party sphere, exhibit certain traits that he calls "proto-fascist". He has been giving Goldberg's book quite a lot of attention, not because it's substantive but because it presents a "teaching moment" to talk about the substantive issues involved and how hackwork like Goldberg's obscures them. One of his latest posts on the subject is The methodology of Liberal Fascism Orcinus blog 01/13/08.

When it comes to anti-Semitism, one of the anti-Obama themes that's floating around cyberspace, and has now broken into the once-prestigious pages of the New York Times, is that Obama is a closet Muslim and is at least soft on anti-Semitism. M.J. Rosenberg discusses this meme in Playing With Fire: Smearing Obama Among Jews TPM Cafe 01/15/08. See also Richard Cohen: Bad for the Jews by Ari Kelman, Edge of the American West blog 01/15/08 and Six degrees of Louis Farrakhan by Henry Farrell, Crooked Timber blog 01/15/08.

This is an instance similar to the infamous "swiftboating" of John Kerry in 2004 in which frivolous charges are cranked out by someone and then are picked up by the Establishment press without any kind of meaningful information provided to readers about the factual accuracy or substance of the charges. This particular technique under discussion in one way resembles the one used in the 1992 campaign when someone floated the completely groundless lunacy that Bill Clinton had once been an agent of the Soviet KGB and then Republicans flogged it by saying, hey, we're not saying it's true but why doesn't he come clean about it?

More-or-less obvious pandering to racist sentiment has been a standard part of Republican Presidential campaigns for some time. So it's no surprise that we're seeing a lot of it surfacing already, especially with Barack Obama one of the most prominent figures in today's Democratic Party. Pat Buchanan is a reliable source of such stuff and he's playing his role. In The Brothers and Sisters War Human Events Online 01/11/08. He reminds today's Republicans of one of those segregationist phrases that's so painfully obvious you wonder why they even bothered to "code" it at all:

This could get ugly. As Hillary's victory in New Hampshire is being attributed to the Bradley Effect - i.e, white racism - any Barack victory in South Carolina will now be attributed to the black vote, what in the Old South they used to call "the bloc vote."

And January is only half over!

Tags: anti-semitism, dave neiwert, fascism, jonah goldberg, liberal fascism, m.j. rosenberg, pat buchanan, racism

Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism

The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) has gotten quite a bit of attention from political observers concerned over the painfully obvious authoritarianism of today's Republican Party.

But Paxton's book is much stronger on its description of the historical fascist regimes in Germany and Italy than on describing the sort of warning signs of present-day versions that one might expect to find.

As a bit of a skeptic about how much we actually learn from history, that doesn't particularly surprise me. And maybe my own view gets caught up in my mind's poli-sci screens that remind me than even defining fascism is a difficult and controversial task. In fact, probably the only one on which everyone can agree to apply the term is that of Mussolini's Italy, because his party was called Fascist and he described his regime that way.

Most people would use the term for Hitler's Third Reich, as well. But even that is actually a question on which serious historians and political scientists have no consensus. The question there is whether National Socialism (Nazism) actually shared enough fundamental characteristics of the Mussolini regime that they can be meaningfully classified together, or whether it represented something distinct enough that it was qualitatively different. Virtually no one would dispute that in terms of its toll on human life and freedom, that National Socialism was worse than Mussolini's regime.

Paxton ducks the problem of defining fascism until the final chapter by saying its much more informative to compare the fascisms that we know about. It may be a wise approach. But it also brings to mind Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous 1964 definition of pornography: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced ... [b]ut I know it when I see it."

When he finally gets there, on the third page before the end of the book, he comes up with this:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Paxton examines the history of the Third Reich and Italian Fascism in five stages:

I propose to examine fascism in a cycle of five stages: (i) the creation of movements; (2) their rooting in the political system; (3) their seizure of power; (4) the exercise of power; (5) and, finally, the long duration, during which the fascist regime chooses either radicalization or entropy. Though each stage is a prerequisite for the next, nothing requires a fascist movement to complete all of them, or even to move in only one direction. Most fascisms stopped short, some slipped back, and sometimes features of several stages remained operative at once. Whereas most modern societies spawned fascist movements in the twentieth century, only a few had fascist regimes. Only in Nazi Germany did a fascist regime approach the outer horizons of radicalization.

This five-stage approach serves him well in describing those two regime. His account reminds us that these movements and regimes went through a definite evolution. This may sound obvious in the abstract. But in practice, very much of the discussion about those regimes, especially the Hitler regime, takes place with the Second World War and the Holocaust as the main point of reference. Understandably so.

But it's also important to understand that those regimes did not look like what they later came to be in 1935 or 1937. They were clearly dictatorships, and often brutal ones. And there were danger signs about the directions in which they were going. But it was only in war that the Hitler regime especially could become the true horror that we now know it was.

Paxton doesn't adduce new factual discoveries but rather concentrates on analyzing the familiar histories. And his analyses of those two regimes is refreshingly insightful. He doesn't fall into the haze of "totalitarianism", a term originally used by Western conservatives to blur the distinctions between fascist regimes and Soviet Communism. If the notion brought more fog than light to the subject, that was the purpose of the "totalitarian" idea.

His brief description of the changes in European politics that set the stage for fascism is a good one. His observation about their leadership is perceptive:

The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Leon Gambetta, the grocer's son, or the beer wholesaler's son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights).

But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments; Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens.

He also emphasizes that for both Hitler and Mussolini, the support of conservatives was important both in coming to power and to consolidating their regimes. But he also reminds us that there was a populist element to those regimes that made them different from simple reactionaries.

Paxton is also right in seeing war as a central factor of fascism:

War provided fascism's clearest radicalizing impulse. It would be more accurate to say that war played a circular role in fascist regimes. Early fascist movements were rooted in an exaltation of violence sharpened by World War I, and war making proved essential to the cohesion, discipline, and explosive energy of fascist regimes. Once undertaken, war generated both the need for more extreme measures, and popular acceptance of them. It seems a general rule that war is indispensable for the maintenance of fascist muscle tone (and, in the cases we know, the occasion for its demise).

It seems clear that both Hitler and Mussolini deliberately chose war as a necessary step in realizing the full potential of their regimes. They wanted to use war to harden internal society as well as to conquer vital space. Hitler told Goebbels, "the war ... made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times."

War was not an incidental feature of National Socialism and Italian Fascism. It was at the core of the movements and the regimes they formed. That's why it makes no sense to speculate counter-factually about what things would have been like if those regimes hadn't sought war. Even as a speculation, it makes no sense. Had those regimes not sought war, they wouldn't have been the regimes that they were. Some things were accidental features of those regimes. War was the core of them:

Expansionist war lies at the heart of radicalization. Insofar as Fascist Italy radicalized, it did so most fully in conquered East Africa and in the final paroxysm of the Italian campaign. The Nazi regime reached the outer limits of radicalization with its war of extermination against the Soviet Union. In that specially charged situation Nazi officials felt free to take more violent action than they had done in the western campaigns of 1940, first against the enemies of the regime, then against fascism's conservative allies, and eventually against the German people themselves, in an ecstasy of terminal destruction.

Whereas in traditional authoritarian war regimes, the army tends to extend its control, as it did in the German Reich during 1917-18 and in Franco's Spain, the German army lost control of occupation policy in the east after 1941, as we have seen, to the Nazi Party's parallel organizations. Party radicals felt free to express their hatreds and obsessions in ways that were foreign to the traditions of the state services. The issue here is not simply one of moral sensitivity; some officers and civil servants were appalled by SS actions in the conquered territories, while others went along because of group solidarity or because they had become hardened. It was to some degree an issue of turf. It would be unthinkable for a traditional military dictatorship to tolerate the incursions of amateurish party militias into military spheres that Hitler — and even, in Ethiopia, Mussolini—permitted.

Paxton here also makes a distinction between the behavior of the Hitler and Mussolini regimes:

The Nazi and Soviet cases shared a rejection of the state of law and due process; both subordinated them to the imperatives of History [and, he might have added to the Party]. In other respects, however, fascist radicalization was not identical to the Stalinist form. Fascism idealized violence in a distinctive way, as a virtue proper to a master race.

Communism was a radical form of democracy which emerged as the far left wing of the European democratic movements of the 1840s. However much the Soviet practice departed from democratic ones, Communist ideology did emerge from democratic thought and practice originally, and always used the language of democracy. Fascism in both its Nazi and Italian variants explicitly rejected democracy as a decadent ideology. And those differences did manifest themselves in the actual behaviors and self-understandings of the regime. As Paxton writes, fascism idealized violence and war in a way that neither Soviet Communism nor Western democracy did.

When Paxton moves beyond his analyses of the German and Italian movements, though, his observations are not so solidly grounded. And here we stumble again on the problem of defining fascism. Francisco Franco's regime in Spain is often regarded as fascist, but Paxton argues that it was not. Even more surprising, he argues the the Austrian dictatorship of 1933-1938 under Engelbert Dollfuss and later Schuschnigg was not a fascist regime. That government is commonly referred to as "clerical-fascist", and its own self-description as a Standestaat (corporate state) reflected the fact that it was largely modeled on Mussolini's Fascist regime, though Austria's variety had a more distinct Catholic touch. (Hence the "clerical" in "clerical-fascist".) German and Austrian writers are more likely to refer to it as Austrofascism.

Paxton writes about some of the rightwing organizations in the United States in the 1930s that were more directly inspired by the German and Italian models, such as the Silver Shirts led by William Dudley Pelley. He's correct in arguing:

Much more dangerous are movements that employ authentically American themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan revived in the 19205, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to cities and the Middle West. In the 19305, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around an anticom-munist, anti-Wall Street, pro-soft money, and—after 1938—anti-Semitic message broadcast from his church in the outskirts of Detroit. For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union Party and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt. The plutocrat-baiting governor Huey Long of Louisiana had authentic political momentum until his assassination in 1935, but, though frequently labeled fascist at the time, he was more accurately a share-the-wealth demagogue. The fundamentalist preacher Gerald L. K. Smith, who had worked with both Coughlin and Long, turned the message more directly after World War II to the "Judeo-Communist conspiracy" and had a real impact. Today a "politics of resentment" rooted in authentic American piety and nativism sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same "internal enemies" once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion rights.(my emphasis)

Whether Huey Long represented an American variety of fascism is still disputed, as we see in Paxton's quote here. But I disagree with him on that point, as well; Long was a down-home American fascist type. If there was an American Hitler during the 1930s, it was Huey Long. Franklin Roosevelt once remarked that Long was one of the two most dangerous men in America. When asked who the other was, he replied, "Douglas MacArthur".

On the whole, Paxton's generalizations about other varieties of fascism or not-fascism are interesting but don't tell us that much about political dynamics. The real value in the book is in its descriptions and analysis of the Third Reich and Italian Fascism.

Tags: authoritarianism, anatomy of fascism, fascism, national socialism, nazism, robert paxton