Click here for the first part of this series.
Hitler the Revolutionary Socialist
When D'Souza broaches the person of Hitler and the topic of National Socialism directly in his book, he does so by focusing on by what he considers to be the key characteristics of Nazism. Because Trump is the focus on D'Souza's treatment of these characteristics, the first he discusses is insanity, which is not a characteristic of Nazism. To his credit, D'Souza points out that Hitler was likely not insane.
The next characteristic D'Souza addresses is the supposedly reactionary nature of National Socialism. Here some clarification is likely necessary. We are typically taught to think of reactionary as a term to refer to a position that seeks to establish a society resembling one from the past; thus, unlike conservatism, which would theoretically seek to maintain the status quo, reactionary politics would seek to turn the clock back (and progressivism to move it forward more).
Citing Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind, D'Souza alleges that the term reactionary "identifies the American right with the 'fighting nostalgia' that Hitler and Mussolini appealed to."[1] Importantly, Robin cites Hitler and Mussolini in his book but only in passing and not to make fundamental points about conservatism, which he does see as a fundamentally reactive philosophy contingent on the threat or reality of revolution for its very justification.
Here, D'Souza seems to realize the peril of this association of both conservatives and fascists with reactionary viewpoints. If they are both concerned with restoring the past, then they must both be reactionary. Putting aside for a moment that conservatism, as noted earlier, is a relatively dynamic philosophy in terms of conserving the present, depending on what that present happens to be, D'Souza gets around this issue with claims about the past that Trump is attempting to restore being about jobs and small government and, most importantly, the ideals of the Founding Fathers. "So the Right," he writes, "seeks to apply old principles – which it considers enduring or permanent truths – in our situation today to create a better future."[2] This is not reactionary, he notes.
We could debate the specifics about whether Trump is conservative or reactionary and the extent to which these ideologies overlap. The key point is that D'Souza tries to establish a definition of reactionary that would not include turning the clock back – a definition that is inherently problematic. He recovers somewhat in then pointing out that neither Hitler nor Mussolini were reactionary. He quotes here from Stanley Payne, and Payne's work here is indeed important.
Payne, in History of Fascism, divided the interwar European right into three categories: fascist, reactionary right, and conservative right. For instance, he characterizes President Paul von Hindenburg and Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, two of the men who held these positions in the year or two before Hitler did, as conservative right, but he characterizes men like Franz von Papen and Alfred Hugenberg – members of conservative parties who threw their lot with Hitler, as radical right. Hitler and the Nazis are classified by Payne as fascist.[3]
The "radicals" of Payne's taxonomy would be the reactionaries – those parties seeking to turn back the clock to an earlier (in the case of Germany, before World War I) time. In contrast, fascists are revolutionary in their approach. This is a distinction both in goal and in tactics. The former regards the creation of something new, rather than a return to something old, although it bears mention that this new thing that fascism seeks to create is often imbued with some aspect (often mythic) of an earlier time, e.g., Italy's echoes of the Roman Empire. The latter specifically pertains to violence.
Where D'Souza really seems to go wrong in this regard is in assuming that, because a philosophy or political movement is revolutionary, it must be left wing. It should be obvious that this notion is incorrect. As a counterexample, one need only look at Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979. There is no question that revolutionary ideas and tactics have been employed in Iran; there is also no question that the mullahs that have run Iran since 1979 are quite conservative – in fact, reactionary, proving it's possible to be both reactionary and revolutionary (not that the Nazis or fascists generally were).
Moving on to authoritarianism, D'Souza concedes this characteristic is specific to neither left nor right and that there is no correlation between being authoritarian and being fascist (although obviously, the relationship does exist in the opposite direction). Of course, he also concludes that there's nothing authoritarian about Trump. Then, he moves onto nationalism, and this is really where the rubber meets the road.
I noted in the last post that it's odd that D'Souza doesn't reference Roger Griffin anywhere in The Big Lie, given Griffin's importance to the study of fascism. Frankly, to identify Anthony Gregor as the most important figure in the academic study of fascism and to omit Griffin entirely says far more about D'Souza's heuristic than it does about either man. The key point that Griffin made about fascism was what he termed "palingenetic ultranationalism" as being the ideology's core concept. Palingenetic refers to the idea of national rebirth through the reclamation of myth.
With nationalism, D'Souza appears to want to hedge his bets, particularly Trump's rhetoric is identifiably nationalist. "Yes is nationalism or even ultra-nationalism sufficient to make one a fascist?" D'Souza asks. "Was Mussolini more of a nationalist than, say, Churchill or de Gaulle?"[4] Well, yes, he was. Other examples of nationalists, according to D'Souza, include Washington, Lincoln, Mandela, Castro, Guevara, Pol Pot, and Gandhi. Applying the term to such a broad group of people with such varying ideologies obviously does little to clarify what nationalism is.
What D'Souza either doesn't know or refuses to admit is that a discussion of nationalism vis-à-vis fascism necessitates a focus on a particular type of nationalism, i.e., ethnic nationalism. The "nation" as the ethnic nationalist defines it is the collectivity of people who ascribe to the same "imaginary community," as Benedict Anderson famously called it, united by language, culture, (sometimes) religion, and a shared history.
Thus, when D'Souza finally specifies the form of nationalism that unites (in his mind) fascism and the American left, he loses the plot: "This type of nationalism – let's call it statist or collectivist nationalism – more closely resembles the American Left than the American Right, since the American Right holds, with Reagan, that 'government is not the solution. Government is the problem.'"[5]
What D'Souza crucially misses here is how the fascist defines the collective and, thus, the state. In contradistinction to social contract theorists like Locke, who posited that the state was a necessary evil needed to exercise a monopoly of force to prevent violence from foreign states and between neighbors over property and thus should be kept small, the fascist notion of the state is quite different.
The state is the embodiment of the nation, according to the fascist. It is the expressed will of the nation, defined most commonly by ethnicity. It is not government of, by, and for the people – it is government that both overarches and transcends the people. As we will see, D'Souza goes to the original theorist of fascism – Giovanni Gentile – later in this chapter, but he seems to miss this key point. I humbly suggest that to read Gentile and not have absorbed the fundamental notion of the state as the organic collectivity of the nation as defined ethnically, linguistically, and culturally is equivalent to not having read Gentile at all.
The state is the embodiment of the nation, according to the fascist. It is the expressed will of the nation, defined most commonly by ethnicity. It is not government of, by, and for the people – it is government that both overarches and transcends the people. Unlike Locke and his intellectual disciple Jefferson, the government/state was therefore not something that could be done away with, lest the nation (i.e., people) itself cease to exist. As we will see, D'Souza goes to the original theorist of fascism – Giovanni Gentile – later in this chapter, but he seems to miss this key point.
There's no question that this nationalism at the center of fascism and the strong government economic control at the center of certain left-wing movements and governments are both statist, but as I hope I've already demonstrated, a lack of economic freedom is not necessarily left or right wing politically, nor does it bear a necessary relationship with how permissive or repressive a society might be. Lest the objection be raised that statism requires economic control and thus a lack of economic control, we need only consider the People's Republic of China, which since the death of Mao Tse-tung has pursued a course of heavily centralized state power with increasingly free capitalism.
But again, there is no clear and necessary relationship between statism and progressivism, as the anarchist and syndicalist tendencies on the left would clearly indicate. D'Souza is merely employing a straw man of big government progressivism to construct a logical fallacy. If: (premise) progressivism seeks big government, i.e., statism; and (premise) statism is a mark of fascism; then (conclusion) progressivism must be fascist. Not only is this conclusion false, but so are both premises.
To be continued.
[1] Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (Washington: Regnery, 2017), 783.
[2] Ibid, 793.
[3] Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-45 (London, Routledge, 1995), 15.0
[4] D'Souza, ibid, 852.
[5] D'Souza, ibid, 874.
No comments:
Post a Comment