Real liberals fight fascism

FDR and various senior new dealers spoke often and admiringly of Mussolini’s Italy. Real liberals, it seems, only fight fascism when they aren’t busy emulating it.

http://www.amazon.com/Three-New-Deals-Reflections-Roosevelts/dp/0312427433

I was so desperately hoping the final two sentences of this piece were a rebuke to the facile remarks on the Hebdo murders in yesterday’s post by Corey Robin.

Maybe the HTML in your link was mis-attributed?

All right, I see the footnote, at which I did not at first notice the link (old eyes, small screen), refers to Goldberg’s book. So delete my previous comment if you wish.

Until Kurt Schuler’s comment, I hadn’t known that Jonah Goldberg was alluding to a 1932 speech by H.G. Wells. My impression, based on a few things I’ve read about his book, is that Jonah Goldberg doesn’t understand much of anything, and that would include, presumably, H.G. Wells’s politics and the context in which Wells’s speech was made.

As for Ted Cruz, I found almost indescribably repulsive his announcement-of-candidacy speech delivered at Liberty University (parts of which I heard rebroadcast on CSpan radio). Unlike, e.g., Reagan, who actually believed much of the nonsense he spouted from, say, his 1964 speech for Goldwater through his own pronouncements as President, it’s hard to believe that Ted Cruz actually believes the public words coming out of his own mouth.

That James Whitman article, btw, for those who haven’t followed the link, is replete with the very long footnotes characteristic of law journals, in this case decked out with a lot of citations to works in German and Italian (as well as English).

Coincidentally, I’ve just read Kenneth Burke’s “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle.'” It appeared in “Southern Review” in 1939, I think. Upon reading it, I want to reconsider my glib appreciation of Mike Godwin’s “law.” Seems to me it makes some sense to resort to Hitler talk even today, even when we’re just arguing in good faith against crazy extremists. It’s hard to distinguish Burke’s Hitler from certain asshole politicians of 2015.

@Harold
Corporatism was a German and Italian invention, so naturally books about it would have been written in German and Italian.

My remark was intended as complimentary, actually, and I’m aware that it was “a German and Italian invention” (though in this context appears to be more Italian). I was not surprised that there are Italian and German refs in the piece, though I suppose one cd imagine a law prof, without the history PhD that I’m guessing Whitman also may have and perhaps in a different journal, writing something about the subject that did not display the same linguistic facility and the same range of research.

I just can’t get behind this kind of cheerleading. It’s not that FDR was wrong anywhere in that process. But it still doesn’t merit jingoistic playground taunts. Maybe real liberals fight fascism, but they do so reluctantly, fully aware of the costs.

Ted Cruz’s remarks in the link provided by Eric: “Today’s Democratic Party has decided there is no room for Christians in today’s Democratic Party,” Cruz said at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition summit, according to The Hill. “There is a liberal fascism that is going after Christian believers.”

The Republican party is filled with fascists who have been flaming the fans of racism since the Reagan era. They want to trash the 1st amendment rights and expand the 2nd amendment – and they use inflammatory rhetoric like that used by Cruz to justify both.

Democracy in America could/should be used to support tolerance and all religions. Apparently the GOP wants intolerance and Christianity to rule the nation. In my own state, the NCGOP floated the idea of a state religion, until they realized the challenges involved with such a thing (a bigger discussion needed than to determine the state flower…)

On second thought, I might as well mention what I’ve been reading along the same lines: a book on Dr. Seuss’ political cartoons for PM Magazine, “Dr. Seuss Goes To War”. You can see a lot of the cartoons via google:

https://www.google.com.sg/search?q=dr+seuss+political+cartoons+1941&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=5Jc_VfDvHc-fugT4x4GwBQ&ved=0CBwQsAQ&biw=1508&bih=1025

I don’t think the book is any great shakes on the history, but I happened to be reading this bit, about Lend Lease, which gives some sense of the rather screwy politics in the run up to war:

“For the years 1941 and 1942, Dr. Seuss drew editorial cartoons for PM. PM was on the left in American politics, but what defined the spectrum? What were the issues? Who were the players? Fifty-two percent of those Americans eligible to vote went to the polls in November 1940 to vote in the presidential election pitting President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat elected first in 1932 and reelected in 1936, against Wendell Willkie, a Democrat-turned-Republican. The war in Europe and Asia was a major issue. Should the United States oppose the Germans and aid the British? How? To what extent? At what risk? Willkie supported Roosevelt’s foreign policy— aid for Britain— but attacked New Deal social programs. The result was Roosevelt’s third victory and an unprecedented third term, although Roosevelt’s margin of victory was much narrower than in either 1932 or 1936: Willkie won 22,000,000 votes to Roosevelt’s 27,000,000 and eighty-two votes in the electoral college (in 1936, the Republican candidate had won eight). What is more, Republicans held on to most of their striking gains of 1938 in the House. Roosevelt won the election in part by promising not to take the United States into the war.

However, in his State of the Union address (January 6, 1941) President Roosevelt called for “full support of all those resolute peoples everywhere, who are resisting aggression and are thereby keeping war away from our hemisphere,” and he spoke disparagingly of the noninterventionists: “We must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement. We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.” Four days later he submitted to Congress a bill to allow shipments on credit to Britain and other nations fighting Germany. This was the Lend-Lease Act, which, somewhat amended, passed Congress late in March. The House vote was 260-165, with 135 of 159 Republicans voting no; and the Senate vote was sixty to thirty-one, with seventeen of twenty-seven Republicans voting no.

The rhetoric was heated, in part because this was a significant step away from neutrality, in part because the bill as submitted gave the President great power. Senator Clark of Missouri, a Democrat like the President, stated: “It is simply a bill to authorize the President to declare war… and to establish a totalitarian government.” Senator LaFollette of Wisconsin, a Progressive, called the bill “a bill for Congress to abdicate.” Socialist leader Norman Thomas derided it as “dictatorship in the name of defending democracy.” Roosevelt’s long-time antagonist Republican Representative Hamilton Fish of New York said: “It looks as if we are bringing Nazism, fascism, and dictatorship to America and setting up a Führer here.” Roosevelt did have the support of Wendell Willkie, who as defeated Presidential nominee could claim to speak for the Republican Party. Where was the American public on the issue of war and peace? Public opinion polls show that from the start of the fighting in September 1939 the American public preferred a British to a German victory by an overwhelming margin, but by the same overwhelming margin the public opposed American entry into the war. Particularly after the fall of France in June 1940, a majority of the American public was willing to help the British cause by any means short of fighting. Germany’s military victories had increased public distaste for Hitler, but the public was not ready yet for war. Still, by 1941, when Dr. Seuss began drawing his editorial cartoons, the “isolationist” coalition had begun to fray badly.”

Minear, Richard H.; Seuss, Dr. (2013-09-10). Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel. The New Press. Kindle Edition.

A large segment of the American right and of the GOP are fascist in their rhetoric and probably in their goals. What I wonder is, why is it thought impermissible to call them what they are, fascists? How is it possible that in today’s political landscape, a homophobic politician can get away with calling equal rights for gays “fascism”?

Regarding Cruz’s “religious liberty” meme: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/apr/23/pope-who-tried/

Before reading this, I hadn’t known quite how much Italian fascism relied on the support of the religious.

And that’s why we should fight the TPP.
~

Obviously I’m not seriously suggesting your correction is wrong because of something I half-remember from high school history. I trust that you are more likely to be right.

Also, it doesn’t really matter that “Judge” had a very healthy circulation and a good reputation. But Harold Ross started there, damnit! Does that count for nothing! Zim! Outcault! These are names to conjure with!

Wow: “supported their hates and ridiculed their tolerances”–that packs a punch.

Political language that actually has thought behind it can be so powerful. Why do we hear so little of it?

As it’s too late to add this to the discussion of the Goldberg book when it came out, you may be interested to know it got a negative review from one fairly intelligent conservative:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/goldbergs-trivial-pursuit/

In the quotes above Cruz is drawing on a libertarian idea that’s being supported by big business non-libertarian corporatists on the right because it doesn’t challenge them and they can persuade even themselves that they’re really libertarians, and not corporatists, themselves. People who think like that are frequently small business owners and small scale bosses, not persecuted pious believers who just want to live quiet lives, following age old traditions or doing what they’re told by people who rightly have more power. (Any time someone tells them what to do, they shriek “LIBERAL!” and run, like Goldberg does.)

On the larger picture, it’s really too bad that a whole bunch of ideas in different areas, which a lot of different kinds of people found variously appealing to some extent in different ways, got mashed down into “fascism” and “Communism” and then (with the “end of ideology”) swept under the carpet altogether.

Just as Hoover watched uncomprehendingly

I doubt it. Just finishing Adam Tooze’s The Deluge, and of course the scholars can correct me, but there was a strategy of indirect and cheap hegemony, and Hoover had been one of it’s architects from the beginning.

1) Europe would be a mess, and would be a distraction from Asia. Wait until the fools had destroyed themselves before stepping in to gain power and prestige over the ruins.

2) The two empires (US and Russia) were a undisputed fact by the mid-twenties. It was also a fact that aggressive imperialism, including European commie revolutions, would fail and was over. They would control the world not with settler colonialism or garrisons but with ideological hegemony, naval and eventually air supremacy, and economic, financial, and monetary power.

3) Everybody else, especially Germany, Italy and Japan but including Britain and France, were really trying to come to grips with what kind of subservient client states they would become. There were the delusional, who thought they might be regionally competitive, but at least the Japanese understood it was only a question of how much, however little, sovereignty and independence they could retain. Answer: none.

4) Like I said, this global strategy started with Wilson, if not before. Hoover was an important player, food relief, during and immediately after WWI. It was no secret, rather common knowledge and has lasted to this day.

5) I have no doubt FDR understood and played this Great game from the very beginning. Empire are us.

LFC @ 30: FDR would have liked to bring the U.S. formally into the war before Dec. 1941

FDR, to his credit, combined his management of public opinion, with a remarkably clear grasp of the need to prepare the country for war in organizational and material terms. The great problem of public opinion from 1938 on was never which side to take — it was to raise sufficient alarm about the immediacy of the threat that measures of military preparation and — especially — industrial mobilization could go forward with sufficient scale and scope. FDR was always struggling both against the possibility of a political reaction forming among isolationists and the far right that would prevent preparation, and against the deep complacency and longing for a relief from crisis that seemed to sink much of the country into a quiet denial. The latter was as much or more of an obstacle as the mostly feeble efforts of the isolationists.

The deep strategic reality of industrial war was that it was not possible to win a war, until an industrial mobilization was largely complete, and that was a process that would require both time and a mass mobilization of the population. And, it proved very difficult to execute industrial mobilization on the scale necessary, without the mass mobilization of the population, and mass mobilization of the population required a degree of alarm, that Americans resisted. Isolationism was a possible valence for political expression of that resistance, and FDR worked hard to disable it, even while he attempted to open the space for both military and naval preparations and industrial mobilization in advance of the outset of war.

One initial problem was moving the U.S. naval defense perimeter forward in the Atlantic and warding off the possibility of a fascist ally of the European dictators emerging in South America to flank the U.S. As the war in Europe ignited, with the surprise that the Soviet Union had taken a neutral position, collapse of France and Britain became a real possibility, and France actually did collapse, and any frank assessment had to doubt the ability or will of Britain to persist.

In mid-1940, before the Presidential election, FDR brought in Stimson, Hoover’s Secretary of State as Secretary of War and Alf Landon’s Vice-Presidential candidate, Frank Knox, as Secretary of the Navy, and the two of them went around making alarming speeches calling for American entry into the War. The need to raise alarm had much to do with the difficulty of motivating the industrial mobilization then underway, but stymied by businessmen, who simply did not understand either the urgency or the scale of effort required.

The psychological or philosophical question of whether FDR “wanted” early entry into the war is almost eclipsed by the reality that the U.S. was not sufficiently prepared for war to back a nominal entry into the war with actual war-fighting. The possible collapse of Britain loomed over the American strategic position, and the possible collapse of the Soviet Union was simply added to the mix, when Hitler attacked Stalin.

FDR was threading a needle of strategic planning and preparation, behind the stage where he was managing his brilliant and far-sighted articulation of war aims.

I question the tropes of isolationism and under-industrialisation, although there was certainly unused capacity.

One example I could use would be steel and scrap metal, industries in America gaining great profits 1937-1940 from shipping to Japan for use against China.

The problems these industrialists might have been facing would be retooling for European and US military sales, and getting paid in War Bonds (? ) and British/Russian debt instruments (with lessons remembered from just 20 years ago).

They weren’t necessarily “isolationist”, just making great money from the int’l trade to fools killing each other, and wondering why they had to take a side. Bad business.

39: You want quotes from the Tooze? Actually he provides quotes from the players, Lloyd George, Poincare, Stresemann.. I am taking notes.

The useful myth has been created that Germany and Japan were real threats to the US and the world. We might be speaking German in Texas if it weren’t for Audie Murphy. They never ever had the resources, or could ever control the resources, to be a threat.

It wasn’t trivial, but as far as existential war making goes, the US handled the upstarts fairly easily. 30-40% of the population, GDP halved for a generation…the losers had a difficult war.

42: “the losers had a difficult war”, as opposed to the “undisputed empire” Russia, right?

In McManus’s defense, with regard at least to Japan, I think I’ve read that Japan did anticipate being subjugated to the West (probably with support from statements by Americans) and that fascism and empire were a kind of last ditch effort to escape subjugation by doing the subjugation themselves. W/r/t Germany, I doubt that was the case. Earlier they had perceived themselves as a bulwark against Enlightenment and liberal values, but arguably the West had decided by the end of WWI to leave them alone, and perhaps that’s even why they felt a need to turn to internal enemies as persecutors. (Though this argument seems to run orthogonal to any argument that might take account of Communism.) Arguably it was France that assumed the inevitably of subjugation, I’d have thought.

Things about this thread that bother me….

1) Bruce Wilder’s story of how history evolves is admirably complete and subtle enough for any sophisticate, but seems nevertheless to rely on a deus ex machina, namely that of competence in high places. The story as I hear it goes something like this: by the time the people actually knew what they wanted, the means of securing it would have been beyond their reach. Therefore, and most fortunately, FDR….. (So why FDR? Divine intervention, a fortuitous, but paradoxically inevitable extrusion of governing institutions in their prime, or what? Methinks the institutionalist needs to clarify.)

2) In retrospect, bob mcmanus can explain everything as forces and vectors — no need for great man theory, or the contingency of mortal decision-making, or the luck of the draw. In retrospect. So what about us poor schlubs who have to stumble through events like this in real time? Are we merely the deluded useful idiots of historical-forces-beyond-our-control? And who elected such a dyspeptic as the arbiter of retrospective historical elegance? (Put smiley-face here.)

Believe it or not, these are affectionate questions. No one in his right mind, or possessed of an IQ above room temperature, would ever ask cassander a question — at least not when anything significant was dependent on the answer.

mcmanus @42

The useful myth has been created that Germany and Japan were real threats to the US and the world. … They never ever had the resources, or could ever control the resources, to be a threat.

Germany and Japan were (obviously) threats to Europe and Asia; whether they were existential threats to the U.S. is doubtful. However, there was a moral dimension to the argument for fighting vs. Nazi Germany (and imperial Japan), and the moral argument did not depend on geopolitical (or economic) considerations. (Note that the way the Allies conducted the war is not relevant to the question whether there was a moral case for the U.S. entering the war: those are two separate issues.)

On the geopolitics, Perry Anderson’s discussion of Spykman and Art in ‘Imperium’, New Left Review, Sept/Oct 2013, pp.13ff., is interesting.

48: I looked really hard, but can’t find the radical feminist article I read, I thought at New Inquiry in Bady’s Sunday Reading, about coffeepots and rocks having agency. It has to do with taking agency as being a dynamic space-time social/material field rather than a individualized singularity. Or, in other words, historical materialism.

Anyway, before Eric bans me, I’m outahere. Gotta finish the Tooze, and I really do have a sad about the Japanese pre-war corporatism. Too much social history and not enough Mitsui.

William Timberman @ 48

Incompetence in high places may be the more powerful explanator, but remains less pleasant to recount. Still, great men are made great in the sequence of history by the foregoing failures of fools. (Notice how I seamlessly introduce alliteration even when it serves no purpose.)

Charles I made Cromwell; James II made the Glorious Revolution; Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan (and Jefferson Davis) made Lincoln. Chamberlain made Churchill. Heinrich Brüning went a long way toward making he who will not be named.

Hoover’s stubborn adherence to the gold standard made possible FDR’s 100 days. Even more, Woodrow Wilson’s bollixed attempts to centrally manage the industrial war effort in WWI and his ill-fated attempts to teach Europe’s statesmen a new game, informed FDR’s management of industrial mobilization in WWII and his articulation of war aims that featured the United Nations.

No one really knows what they are doing in this life, and political leaders who are always acting in the push-pull of contested environments may be as uncertain of intentions as of consequences. It is Whiggish of me, I suppose, but I admire those, who see the emergent systems imperfectly coordinating human activity failing and look to redesign or repair them instead of just playing harder at a game with manifest bad consequences, because they are willing to acknowledge human responsibility for the consequences of how those systems are working. The alternatives are 1.) reactionary persistence without guilt or reflection, perhaps combined with greedy disregard of consequences for others, 2.) a laissez faire nullity that trusts god (however you may conceive Her) to choose, combined with some notion of an appeasing virtue or sacrifice, (and hypocrisy about a greedy selfishness) 3.) . . . [probably there are a bunch of others, who has time for a catalog anyway?]

I was serious in my reply to cassander to the effect that a sense of responsibility matters.

FDR’s genius was not in knowing what to do in most cases, but in knowing that something must be tried, something must be prepared, combined with a willingness to move forward with a combination of high principle and improvisation. FDR is often accused of lying to the American People about his intentions with regard to the war, but I think mostly what he did was obfuscate with creative ambiguity with regard to how the high principles with which he led in his rhetoric would eventually connect with policy and cases concretely down the road.

He didn’t allow pure speculation about contexts and cases that had not come to pass become a basis for political attack, nor did he commit himself unnecessarily to specific programs. Even after programs were put into place, he regarded them as experimental and tentative and subject to termination or further evolution, which they were. Politically, this approach, combined with attention to dividing responsibility among subordinates in a way that brought critical decisions back to him, allowed him to retain flexibility.

In the great sweep of history, the First World World marked the collapse of the ancien regime across a great swath of Europe, but also marked the slightly less abject failure of a liberalism too much tied up with a corrupt and ignorant spirit of laissez faire to do an adequate job of building a new world and domestic order. Considering what the 1920s vomited out in response, FDR does seem a miraculous exception. Slender threads . . .

@bruce

>I was serious in my reply to cassander to the effect that a sense of responsibility matters.

“first do no harm” as a principle is not an abdication of responsibility, but the opposite. the NRA, in particular, did enormous damage and undid the good effects of other new deal programs, like going off the gold standard, the WPA, and the FDIC. “they had good intentions” is not an excuse for bad results.

>but I think mostly what he did was obfuscate with creative ambiguity with regard to how the high principles with which he led in his rhetoric would eventually connect with policy and cases concretely down the road.

this is true, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t incredibly dishonest. Obfuscation was FDR’s standard method of operating, and he was a master at keeping balls in the air so that all the power would remain in his hands. that he kept up the act for 12 years is certainly impressive, but hardly admirable, and it had severe consequences after his death.

>, but also marked the slightly less abject failure of a liberalism too much tied up with a corrupt and ignorant spirit of laissez faire to do an adequate job of building a new world and domestic order

Liberalism did not fail, it was found politically unpopular and not tried.

cassander: “first do no harm” as a principle is not an abdication of responsibility

“Do that which is harmful and deny responsibility for the consequences” was the principle I was referring to as an abdication of responsibility.

As in your desire to eviscerate collective bargaining with “right to work” laws and call the resulting oppression of working people, “freedom”.

cassander: Liberalism did not fail, it was found politically unpopular and not tried.

Something was tried. Frequently with a vengeance, as in the grim determination to brave deflations to return to and maintain a gold(-exchange) standard. And, . . . surprise! . . . massive unemployment was unpopular.

And, why? Because “first do harm”? Hardly. The spirit was more along the lines of pretend no one is responsible for managing the currency, banking, finance or the payments system, so that a few enormously wealthy, greedy and irresponsible folks can fleece and defraud everyone else. And, if the whole world economy crashes — well, “oops!” and double-down. hoocoodenode, anyway?

>“Do that which is harmful and deny responsibility for the consequences” was the principle I was referring to as an abdication of responsibility.

Which is precisely what FDR and company did, the NRA is immensely harmful, terrible policy, and they denied responsibility and blamed others.

>As in your desire to eviscerate collective bargaining with “right to work” laws and call the resulting oppression of working people, “freedom”.

You consider forcing people into unions is now freedom? Is war now peace? Have we always been at war with eastasia?

>Something was tried. Frequently with a vengeance, as in the grim determination to brave deflations to return to and maintain a gold(-exchange) standard. And, . . . surprise! . . . massive unemployment was unpopular.

>The spirit was more along the lines of pretend no one is responsible for managing the currency, banking, finance or the payments system, so that a few enormously wealthy, greedy and irresponsible folks can fleece and defraud everyone else.

every major country in europe and the US had a central bank at that point. no one was pretending that they weren’t controlling and centrally managing finance. going back to the gold standard at pre-war rates was not “first do no harm” it was “worry about the harm later, but first let’s have some great power dick waving.” It was about prestige, not liberalism, at least in every country besides the US. And in the US, the policy wasn’t harmful domestically. First do no harm would have been resuming the gold standard at rates that bore some semblance of reality and admitting that the war had been paid for with a giant inflation tax.

>Rubbish. NRA did not last long enough to do any such thing.

the NRA torpedoed the nascent economic boost that going off the gold standard. two years was plenty of time, as scott sumner has rather thoroughly demonstrated.

>those blue signs served to allay the fear and social hostility that might well consume a society on the verge of breakdown

If the signs had been all there were, the program might have been a great success. unfortunately. the empirical evidence runs to the contrary. the massive rule making process stopped the industrial recovery that had occurred flat in its tracks, and when the wagner act re-imposed in the labor portions of the NRA in 37 (wagner was passed in 35, but largely ignored before the supreme court upheld it in 37) there was a similar drop off.

cassander: And in the US, the [gold standard] wasn’t harmful domestically.

?!

cassander @ 63

scott sumner is a certifiable idiot and your other assertions are crossing a line

This is where I stop and get off your thread hijack. You’ll get no more from me.

BW @ 55, bob mcm @ 53, 60

So…. We don’t, as individuals, know what we’re doing, but in the doing of it — and we should always be aware that not-doing is itself a form of doing — history unfolds. Before we realize it, it’s all over us like a cheap suit. This I get, as it accords far too well with my own limited experience. It’s also comfortingly Shakespearian, as in:

I’ll have grounds
More relative than this—the play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.

or, when things are turning out really rotten, maybe this:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

In the orderly processes of historical materialism, according to bob, even coffee pots and rocks have Buddha nature. It’s just that, according to BW, as very modern major generals political scientists measure such things, FDR had rather more of it, and GWB rather less. In which case, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be… is as good an excuse as any for the latter, but it hardly serves, I think, as a convincing explanation for the former.

I guess what I’m looking for here is some sort of mash-up of your two views of the interchange between collective interaction and individual will. If so, I should probably stop whining and come up with my own — you guys have already done your jobs, at least well enough to bedevil my own sense of hey-wait-a-minute.

Abortion has left the station? Where? Not in the US, where state by state, abortion rights are whittled to nothing. Cruz is playing to a hysterical group of voters who are buying what GOP’s serving up – hook, line and sinker.

To debunk the notion of “Liberal Fascism” or the idea that fascism is or was a creature of the left, one need only Google the phrase “premature antifascist” or “Night of the Long Knives.”

After making my comment (about the New Deal / WWII / Recovery) I recalled coming across some professor on some blog who may have argued otherwise (that the New Deal was more important to the recovery than what I would say) .

Apparently some guy named Eric Rauchway wrote a book called “The Great Depression and the New Deal”. Does anyone know who this fellow is?

Mcmanus:

although I try to avoid moralism with the affairs of nations

Moralism is a pejorative that stacks the decks of the issue before the discussion begins. It’s not “moralism” that’s in question, it’s moral considerations. If you rule them out at the front door, they’ll just come in through the back.

I had originally written another paragraph here about 20th-century ‘realism’ but, well, fu*k it.

@peter T

>Fascism and Nazism were also tries at evading this conundrum (and contra cassander, neither tried to be “neutral” –

you can argue all you want about the effect of his policies, but let us not pretend that Mussolini was some stooge of capital. gw was a lifetime socialist advocate, a hero of the left, who was convinced by WW1 that socialism had to be had on a national basis, not international, not to abandon labor.

>Politics is always corporatist – what else is the US Chamber of Commerce?

My how far we’ve come, from “liberals fight fascism” to “all politics is fascist.” But I disagree. people grouping is not fascism or corporatism. what is fascist is forcing people into those groups.

>The NRA and the Wagner Act brought the unions into the circle, which greatly helped industrial mobilisation.

they prolonged the depression, which resulted in an overall lower level of industrial capacity with which to fight said war.

With regard to how the declining “great powers” saw their future in the inter-war period, an interesting source is “War Thoughts In Peace Time” (1931) by the Cambridge Philosopher C.D.Broad.

http://www.ditext.com/broad/war.html

“Now England is likely, for the next century at least, to be a declining power, whose legal claims and traditional status are much higher than its real position in the fellowship of nations warrants. It is therefore peculiarly liable to be placed in situations in which it will be threatened with what will seem to be gross acts of aggression and insolence. One of the hardest and most unpleasant duties of Englishmen in the immediate future will be to pocket their pride, to try to realize the growing disparity between the legal or traditional and the equitable position of their country in the world, and to adjust their actions to the latter rather than to the former. In this we need not expect to be helped by any excessive display of good manners or delicate consideration on the part of foreign nations; we must be prepared in the future for a continuance of that mixture of cant, truculence, and sharp practice, which is the traditional note of the United States in its diplomatic relations with the world in general and England in particular. Happily it has so far been the great political virtue of the English to know when they are beaten, though not to acknowledge it; and we have been masters at the art of erecting dignified fictions to cover our retreat from untenable positions. We are likely to need all our skill in this art if we are to avoid disaster during the difficult period of international readjustment which lies ahead of us. In future, when we are lectured by Mrs. Hominy, denounced by Mr Jefferson Brick, bullied by Colonel Chollop, and used as stepping stones in the political career of the Honourable Elijah Pogrom, it may be wholesome for us to recollect how we used to admonish continental nations for their own good in those Palmerstonian days when we were rich and they were poor. Forsan et haes olim meminisse juvabit.”

@Layman 82
I’ll agree that “always” was an overstatement on my part.

Wikipedia now has a separate entry for Fascism as an Insult somewhat divorced from its technical and historical meaning.

TM Why can’t this verdict be appealed? Or did I get this wrong?

Double Jeopardy

There’s a “technical” meaning? I suppose there are political scientists and historians, who have ventured a typology, but a technical meaning would require identifying some technical core, a core design principle or defining function if you will, and I think fascism conspicuously and typically lacks such.

The thing that ought to impress about historical fascism is what a chimera it was, a surreal hybrid mishmash, assembled from the collective unconscious, both embracing modernity with passionate idealism and rejecting modernity with fierce irrational resentments, and varying wildly from country to country, in its style, central concerns and constitutional projects.

None of this weirdness seems to filter down into common understanding of fascism as a term of insult, where it apparently denotes conservative authoritarianism, but it is interesting to me that it should be applied to figures like Ted Cruz, who are nothing if not surreal.

Technical meaning of fascism, at a first attempt: state support for conservative morality usually bypassing religion, non-rejection of capitalism, embrace of industrialism and modernism/technology, rejection of tradition and emphatic forward-thinkingness, rejection of humanistic scholarship except possibly if it supports state propaganda, simultaneous cult of the ordinary person as HE is imagined to have been in preindustrial times, need to recast modernism and urbanism in premodern terms, cult of the unitary cultural nation which is centered on the countryside and the embrace by urban elites of peasant culture, cult of the leader, broad franchise though limited choices on the ballot, embrace of modern propaganda methods.

Little of this applies to the actual policies of any Republican politician I can think of, though I suspect some of them of sneaking admiration for it as an ideal.

I have several books by the old fashioned political scientist Ernest Barker about difference between corporatism and its opposite: associationism (favored by liberals). Barker translated and wrote a long introduction to Otto Gierke’s Natural Law and the theory of society 1500 to 1800.

To simplify horribly, corporatists (like Gierke) saw groups of people as forming organic wholes (like the church), they referred to liberal theories of individual rights as “atomism”and saw it as mistaken. I don’t have time to go into this and I’m sure all the political scientists and historians on this board know all about this and are much more up on it than I am. But for those who don’t …

In any case until 1945 the norm or touchstone that people looked to in politics was not today’s new experiment of democratic republicanism, but monarchism. Even after ww2 the US and Britain tried to install monarchies, or less desirably, authoritarian regimes wherever they could, considering them more stable. So if in 1932 when economies were breaking down it did not seem as weird as now to look to non-democratic regimes for some kind of answers. I remember reading an excerpt from an article from the 1930s NYT which articulated the then mainstream view that Germany “was not ready for parliamentary government” (only superior, anglophone nations like the USA and Britain were evolved enough for that apparently).

R.O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism (2004, pb 2005), which I’d read but hadn’t remembered well, is worth looking at (or, as the case may be, looking at again, as I was doing briefly just now).

Paxton’s pithy definition of fascism, presented after thoroughly assaying its historical unfolding:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood 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 constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

By nontechnical the Wiki seems to mean primarily the left identification of fascism with victorious late capitalism; in other circles is meant the right-religious identification of fascism with right-wing attempts to do without traditional religion (conceived as the only true support for conservatism and right wing attitudes).

If people insist on talking about fascism, then they should also talk about fascism as a strategy for seizing empire or recovering lost empire, which in extremis means domestic empire, that is, counterrevolution. The various permutations of fascism focus on recovering national strength through a classless unity, defined against an other, mobilized by a leadership that eschews the debilitation of self-interested democratic struggle. Fascist aesthetic is salesmanship for war.

Paxton makes the point that historical fascism owed a great deal to political possibilities opened, and closed, by the experience of the First World War.

Traditional conservatism had lost many of its props and critical constituencies with the collapse of empires. Liberalism had lost its ability to appeal to an optimistic faith in progress, because optimism had been discredited.

The experience of having struggled in patriotic solidarity for the nation was widely shared, given the common experience of having served in mass conscription armies or otherwise in the war effort. I can well imagine that many would miss the sense of meaning, shared purpose and great achievements, once the horror and deprivation had faded a bit. A seeking after a feeling, as in the Packer OP, unmoored to specific ideas or programs, and supplied by uniforms, occasional violence in the streets, strutting on the world stage, and so on.

whole passage should have been blockquoted — oops!

Harold,

Yes, though taken too far Stern’s kind of argument is misleading, I think, same with some of TM’s points, like pastoralism, which may have been taken up in extreme form by fascists but were also embraced by non fascists and for a long time before fascism appeared. Some pessimism, I think, was driven by a wish for a world that was more like fascism, but not all. Taken too far, it’s easy to start condemning Nietzsche and Wagner for making Hitler possible.

Seconding bianca steele at 107; it seems like Fascism draws on several roots that aren’t part of Fascism; a definition of Fascism that includes Morris and Ruskin is (IMO) overbroad.

(Similarly one that includes Nazi-ism; in my strongly held opinion, Hitler’s Germany was more like Stalin’s USSR than like Mussolini’s Italy or Franco’s Spain.)

BS 107: Of course anti-urban pastoralism isn’t characteristic *only* of fascism. Also, that there is a huge difference between nostalgia for the countryside and virulent hatred for the city as an alleged breeding-ground of vice and degeneration. The latter clearly is an essential ingredient of fascist thinking – although, as always, you will find exceptions to the rule – fascists that liked urban life, as well as non-fascist thinkers who hated the city.

In any case, it is impossible to come up with any definition of fascism that actually applies to the historical phenomenon in all its complexity while not also partially applying to any non-fascist or proto-fascist precursors or to ideologically close but not “technically” fascist movements. These areas of overlap between “real fascism” and “not quite fascism” are very relevant to the present debate and to demand that they be excluded from our understanding of fascism would be grotesque.

This is too vague and fails to really clarify what distinguishes fascism from non-fascism. The Nazi party started as a non-elite splinter party but only became relevant when they attracted significant elite support. Mussolini started out anti-catholic but was kept in power only through a pact with the Vatican, who fervently supported him after initial hesitation (see the reference at 25). Fascism does have both populist and elite elements, there’s no way around it.

Collectivism seems the wrong word with its association of farm or industry collectivization (which the fascists never tried). The better word would be the untranslatable voelkisch. The Nazis spoke not just of Volksgemeinschaft but Volkskoerper and identified those who didn’t belong as parasites to be eliminated.

Modernism again is ambivalent. There was embrace of technocratic modernity together with rejection of cultural modernity. Yes some currents of the artistic avantgarde had an affinity with fascism early on but traditionalism prevailed.

I’d argue that the Nazi party only became relevant when it attracted significant popular support. It was that support that made it essential for the German elites (who disliked the Nazis) to find a way of dealing with them, it was not that the elites themselves became converted to Nazi ideas. They chose to invite them into government where they could be neutralized and controlled. We all make mistakes. I think the confusion about elitism is related to the fact that the Nazis thought in terms of elite races and elite individuals, but these were elites resulting from biological struggles, not traditional social-political elites. Obviously Nazi policy was in no sense made by ordinary people. On collectivism it was indeed the untranslatable word “volkish” that I was trying to translate. Any offers? And I did talk about scientific and technical modernity – one of fascisms strengths was its ability to project an image of modernity which was reassuring to traditionalists. (if that sounds like a contradiction in terms it is, as so often with fascism).
Fascism seems to me not so much a reaction to the introduction of mass politics (since the electoral system was only one tool among many) as a consequence of an age where what was then called “the masses” became a factor in politics, not necessarily through the democratic process. The Action Française, on the other hand, was avowedly elitist, and uninterested in having a mass membership. It worked from within, to capture the French military and political establishment for its Catholic/Monarchist ideas, and had had considerable success by 1940. But interestingly, some who started with the AF wound up in the Resistance or with De Gaulle.

TM @ 94: I would say that what you’re describing is just reactionaryism, which as our pal Corey Robin has reminded us, has kind of been an ongoing theme on the right since the French Revolution.

Engels @ 116

I think I’d say US conservatism has (still) a Whiggish view of itself as mostly elitist, especially the centrist or moderate branch. So at one time this allowed it to use this as a distinguishing factor between itself and fascism.

I don’t like Ted Cruz but I don’t feel the worst thing about him is his populism or non-urbanism.

Bruce,

I had in mind Hofstsadter’s, in particular the W.J. Bryan campaign, though if I’ve misremembered I’d be happy to go back and reread.

Actually my memory of the book is that Hofstadter did lean on the idea that the Progressives and Populists were equally driven by nativism and were equally undemocratic and, well, not sufficiently Whiggish. Not that either were Nazis, of course.

Bianca, all I meant was that they’re both answers to the problem of how to advance elite interests in an age of mass politics (and of course there are lots of more specific similarities).

We all know as far as its theory fascism is eclectic and intellectually incoherent. Fritz Stern observed that the three figures he identified as precursors of German Fascism were in the lower tiers of academia and wrote and spoke in the emotional register of prophecy rather than rational thought.

F. L. Carsten in his Rise of Fascism maintains that Fascism arose only after WW 1 , partly in reaction the the prevailing postwar mood pacifism and revulsion against war. For him one of its defining factors of Fascism was its enlistment of mass followers.

As far as elites, when you look closely what you see is a bunch of interest groups.

As far as defining concepts or anything else in language, what you can identify are multiple factors which make up the concept (I guess I am an atomist) and you have to decide on just which and how many factors you have to have before you can describe something as “fascism” or “reaction”, etc. Seven out of ten? Four out of five, etc. out of f (naturally, there is going to be some overlap).

It’s clear that “elites” is a difficult and in some ways unhelpful concept, but “ruling class” or some other similar formulation is worse. It’s a term I always employ in the plural, to stress that we’re talking about overlapping groups, rather than a single entity.
That said, it’s clear that there is a real phenomenon here, even if we argue about what to call it. In Germany in the early 30s, as in some other countries, there was an Establishment (to use the British term) which included large parts of the Church, the Army, the Civil Service and the Banking and Industrial sectors, as well as many politicians, who knew each other, had much the same social origins and often intermarried or were even directly related. They were an elite group, or groups, but they also spoke for a sizable part of the population which was tired of the political chaos, street violence and economic disasters of the Weimar years, and looked back with nostalgia to the ordered, hierarchical society of pre-1914. This group despised the Nazis as individuals, but shared their objectives of restoring order, putting the economy back on its feet, undoing the humiliation of Versailles and most of all defeating the Communists. They thought they could use the Nazis to overthrow Weimar, and then dispose of them and lead the country back to something like its pre-1914 state. But they failed to realise that the Nazis were a mass organisation with their own army, the SA, and it was the SA, not the third of the vote they won in 1933, that enabled them to take over the country.
I don’t see that this mass appeal is falsified by the tiny percentage of the vote that the Nazis won before 1933. It doesn’t mean they were elitists, it just means they weren’t a serious political force, just another volkisch political party whose members liked dressing up. What changed the situation, of course, and has hardly been mentioned here, is the terrible consequences of the economic depression that began in 1929, and the total incapacity of the established political parties to deal with it. As often, it was the weakness of there system, not the strengths of the interlopers, that was critical.
The attraction of the Nazis in 1933 was precisely that they were not reactionary in the classic sense. There were plenty of such parties already. the Nazis were radicals in the etymological sense – back to the roots, sweeping away the corrupt and non-functioning Republic, and building a modern state that would, paradoxically, restore Germany’s status in the world as well as bringing back social order.

TM, I don’t think I made myself clear. Anything over five out of five should be taken seriously, obviously. Seven out of ten is hardly “only”. The opposite is the case. But defining a concept for the purposes of discussion is not at all the same as identifying a danger.

@Ronan. I haven’t read Riley’s book, and I don’t want to be unfair to it, but the argument in the extract seems to me a rather complicated way of making a simple point: that when orthodox political parties fail to respond to peoples’ needs, other forces step in. I and others have made similar points in this discussion already.
But if this were generally true, then one would expect to see fascist parties appearing quite frequently, whenever this process of uneven development was taking place. This is clearly not so, and in the three countries mentioned fascist parties appeared at very particular moments of political and economic crisis, when it’s not clear that civil society was developing any more rapidly than it had before. They then went away again. Indeed, many experts would not accept that Spain (if by that is meant Franco’s regime) was a fascist state. They would argue that it was an authoritarian conservative state installed after a civil war. And in Italy, the Socialists had polled over 30% in the last elections before Mussolini took power, with new newly-formed Communists picking up about 5%. It’s hard to see that the desire for democracy by civil society was being ignored; But you’ve read the book and I haven’t…..