D'Souza is now back with The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, an apologia for Trump and another attempt to paint the left with the brush of the far right. D'Souza attempts, like his predecessors Friedrich Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) and Jonah Goldberg (in Liberal Fascism), to demonstrate that fascism generally and National Socialism particularly were far left ideologies and not, as scholarly and popular consensus would have it, ideologies of the far right. This blog series will examine the specific claims that D'Souza makes in this volume.
The First Two Chapters
The first chapter of D'Souza's book offers essentially an overture of things to come. There are no solid arguments so much as the introduction of the leitmotifs to which he returns throughout the book. It is really in the second chapter, entitled "Falsifying History," that he deploys his first set of points. He actually starts off on sort of the right foot: he attempts to distinguish between conservatism and right-wing politics. However, in doing so, he begins some terminological sleight of hand that lays the groundwork for the rest of his book.
It's important to distinguish between the right wing and conservatism. Rightly, D'Souza recognizes that what distinguishes one as conservative will depend on time and place. Whereas Edmund Burke, as the ur-conservative, was a monarchist, American conservatives are not. D'Souza's claim that American conservatives "want to conserve the principles of the American Revolution," which included "capitalism, political freedom or constitutional democracy, and freedom of speech and religion."[1] He adds a few pages later that "American conservatives also seek to conserve the transcendent moral order that is not specified in the Constitution but clearly underlies the American founding."[2]
There is much with which I could take issue so far, but these points of disagreement are largely beside the point. The key point here is that, while he does not explicitly state it, he identifies conservatism with the political right without acknowledging the distinctions that exist between the two or defining the right wing to any appreciable extent. As a result, D'Souza's treatment of these key terms end up being drastically underdefined, allowing for their later abuse.
We can agree with D'Souza that conservatism has to do with maintaining a set of putatively objective values; similarly, in so far as we can stipulate that we might disagree on particulars, conservatives in the United States believe themselves to be true to the Constitution of the United States as a document that establishes limited government power and expansive rights. The problem with these definitions is not only their aforementioned shallowness but also their lack of relevance to the specific time and place of interwar Europe, in which fascism and National Socialism emerged.
As we will see, both conservatives and reactionaries during this period flourished who were not particularly wedded to the rule of law. However, they did ascribe broadly to traditional ideas about right and wrong, good and evil. In this regard, we can say that these parties were conservative to some extent, although clearly D'Souza's specifically American designation doesn't fit. Part of the problem that emerges with D'Souza's text is that he does not recognize distinct social and economic barometers of "left" and "right" or "conservative" and "progressive."
Determining Political Orientation
Briefly, if we adopt a political model that acknowledges distinct social and economic dimensions, we can possibly taxonomize people and groups a bit more constructively. We might agree, e.g., the economically the gamut would run from socialism to capitalism. On the left, socialism would include communism and democratic socialism, and on the right, capitalism would encompass varying levels of laissez-faire. We might just as easily label the left end of this continuum "equality" and the right end "freedom"; socialism assumes that the role of government is provide equal opportunity, if not equal outcome, while capitalism assumes that the role of government economically is to mind its own business, thereby maximizing economic freedom. We should note there that it seems D'Souza is comfortable with labeling socialism as left wing and capitalism as right wing.
The other axis, the social one, would also range from permissive on one end to repressive on the other. This axis measures the extent to which government plays a role in social conditions. The permissive end assumes that government should not intervene unless a dispute arises, and the extent to which this intervention takes place could vary along that end of the scale. Conversely, the repressive end assumes that government has a role in limiting personal freedoms to some extent for moral reasons or reasons not related to harm or damage caused to another person.
Without labeling the ends of this continuum just yet, we should that D'Souza's own concession that conservatism is concerned with objective morals would place it on the repressive end. This is not to say that all forms of objective morality are repressive; rather, it is important to bear in mind that repression is the far end of that scale. Tendency in that direction would indicate acceptance of government limiting or banning certain behaviors, e.g., gay marriage, drug use, prostitution, etc., which arguably are "victimless crimes" or matters of moral relativism. Thus, we might label the permissive end of this continuum "liberal" and the repressive end "conservative."
The following clarifications should be made before continuing. First, D'Souza, in a seeming attempt to avoid confusion, uses "progressive" rather than "liberal" to connote the left, and this is a position with which I agree and so am following. Second, it is important to concede that, as we will see, fascist economic policies tended not toward the freedom end of the economic continuum but rather toward state control. This fact is complicated because the "socialist" end of that continuum would not necessarily pertain to state socialism; certain forms of anarchism and syndicalism would fall on that end as well. Nevertheless, the presence of constraints means the absence of freedom. Therefore, should we accept D'Souza's argument thus far, fascism and National Socialism are political ideologies characterized by repressive social policies and statist economic policies. To the extent that the economic and social axes run from left to right, fascists are therefore socially right and economically left.
David Nolan's chart below is a good, although not perfect, visual approximation of what we're talking about. Fascists, per the argument here, would fall at the bottom. Notably, D'Souza would probably agree with locating them at this point on the Nolan chart. His disagreement would entail whether progressives belong there as well. However, this is a much longer debate and outside the scope of this series.
D'Souza Reviews the Literature
Returning to D'Souza's book, a perhaps minor point is his assertion that "the Left seeks government authority to enforce and institutionalize progressive values,"[3] including abortion and gay rights. Important, he asserts that support for such positions indicates rejection of a transcendent moral order; thus, such a viewpoint would position progressives in either the liberal or authoritarian quadrants of Nolan's chart – possibly the center. This point notwithstanding, D'Souza does not even acknowledge an anarchist left in this part of his argument.
Soon thereafter, D'Souza begins his attack on scholars he deems to be "progressive," beginning with Robert Paxton, author of Anatomy of Fascism. D'Souza claims that Paxton is aware of fascism's left-wing pedigree but that he consciously withholds this knowledge from the public, who naïvely consider fascism to be right wing. I guess as a kind of disparagement, D'Souza notes that Payne's principal area of expertise is neither Germany nor Italy but France. He then writes, "Anthony James Gregor is the greatest living authority on fascism, and Stanley Payne recently published a definitive book on the history of fascism."[4]
The choice of Gregor as D'Souza's go-to expert is obvious – Gregor has repeatedly argued for a left-wing origin of fascism. Payne, for his point, has not, although selective quoting of him by D'Souza would seem to suggest otherwise. What's perhaps most notable here are the experts D'Souza doesn't cite: e.g., Ernst Nolte or Roger Griffin. Nolte would seem to be a natural choice for D'Souza, arguing as he did, that fascism was inherently anti-conservative; moreover, Nolte was a staunch political conservative. However, Nolte also argued that fascism was at its core an anti-Marxist philosophy – this point would complicate D'Souza's argument too much. We'll see where some engagement of Griffin would have undermined D'Souza's presentation.
Hitler the Socialist
Following a passing assertion that Father Charles Coughlin was a leftist – suffice it to say that the National Union of Social Justice did not challenge Franklin Roosevelt from the left; if anything, it preached a "third position," like fascist corporatism – D'Souza begins his treatment of National Socialism.
To be continued
[1] Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: The Nazi Roots of the American Left (Washington: Regnery, 2017), Loc 576.
[2] Ibid, Loc. 597.
[3] Ibid, Loc. 620.
[4] Ibid, Loc. 681.
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