I read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism a few months ago, and the whole time I read the book, one problem with Goldberg’s position plagued me: his insistence on classical liberalism (the English version, I think, in fairness to him) as being contrary to fascism. To many, this contrast appears eminently sensible and even necessary. Yet it is a fact of history that fascism and communism grew to power out of societies consumed by liberalism, that the liberalism of the West has been the seedbed of those evil philosophies. How is this to be reconciled? My answer is that liberalism is the father (grandfather perhaps) of those two ideologies, as well as of their incestuous cousin, woke leftism.

This is Part One of a series (I, II).

This conviction rises from my belief that philosophies are generated out of their predecessors. Philosophies and religions develop in a context, after all. They are responses to the philosophies and religions which precede them. The modes of their responses can be categorized into three relationships: And Therefore, Almost There, and On the Contrary.

An ‘And Therefore’ relationship is one in which a position develops as a furthering of the conclusions and ideas of its predecessor. As we shall see, fascism is in part an And Therefore of Rousseau. An ‘Almost There’ relationship is one in which the second philosophy seeks to maintain the distinctives of the first but alters and adds in order to strengthen what were, in the later philosopher’s opinion, weak points in the initial position. Such is Berkeley to Locke, maintaining empiricism but seeking a more sensical set of subtleties. An ‘On the Contrary’ position is one which observes real or pretended failures in the birthing philosophy and constructs a philosophy as a contradiction of that philosophy, one which seeks to deal with the failures of the father. Such is the relationship of Stoicism, with its ethical code, to the burgeoning ethical relativism of the ancient Skeptic.

Further, in any given relationship there is inevitably a combination of these three in different proportions and emphases. Hume is thus both an And Therefore and an On the Contrary to Locke and Berkeley. He both carries forward their empiricism and denies its workability as a metaphysic, leading to his broad condemnation of all metaphysical philosophy to the flame. Marx bears a similar relationship to Hegel, duplicating Hegel’s dialectical process but viciously assaulting Hegel’s religious-spiritual bent, preferring full materialism, denying also Hegel’s desire for an absolute truth (generated through dialectic) in favor of a pragmatic truth, where utility to the revolution was the desired.

The problem of how liberalism and liberalism birthed fascism and communism is a difficult one. It is complicated at the first by the doubling to which I have enigmatically alluded, that liberalism and liberalism differ from each other. To be clearer, there are two Liberal traditions. There is the tradition of Rousseau, the French, and the Continent; there is the tradition of Locke, the English, and America.¹ In the second, too, there is the strain of Utilitarianism.

Before we proceed, also, I ought to define those two ideologies, fascism and communism, whose lineage I investigate. These are the totalitarian twins of the 20^th century, of much debated relation and apparently bitter rivalry (for two false absolutes will hate each other only a little less than each hates the true God). Communism seems simply defined as totalitarian socialism, for the first. This is a workable, if incomplete, definition for most uses, but today I intend by Communism the whole milieu of Marx, barring fascism. This includes anarchosocialists, Leninists and Maoists (what we call communists), cultural Marxism, and Marx himself (who believed in democratic coopting of government, redistribution of wealth through government welfare, and eventual fade-away of all government into a peaceful state of technically anarchic socialism). The commonality here is a belief that the entire structure of Western or traditional society must be eradicated and replaced by a new order, accompanied in some conceptions by a gradual or forceful (government-achieved) change in human nature. Totalitarianism, wherein government is given control over all parts of life, is a natural though not universal component of this.

Fascism, on the other hand, is a word almost without meaning, though generally it is understood as referring to tyranny of some sort (such as, if the media is to be believed, the use and allowance of free speech). I have a more specific, meaningful definition, one not actually that dissimilar to Godlberg’s.² I base this in part on the definition given by Fascist theorist Giovanni Gentile as part of the original Italian Fascist movement: “Everything for the state; nothing against the state; nothing outside the state.” Now, this alone is a definition of totalitarianism; it does not distinguished fascism from communism’s governmental expression (which is congruent with Fascism’s origin as a son of Italian socialism).

The difference between the two, as I see it, is that while Communism seeks to eradicate the structure and systems of society, including all its traditions, Fascism seeks to coopt them, as seen with the Nazi endorsement of the nuclear family and Mussolini’s interest in the legend of Rome. We must not mistake this for anything but aesthetic conservatism, though (which is why a ‘right-wing’ label based on this tendency is mistaken). The Fascist does not want to preserve or conserve his society’s traditions, the structure of the family, or any sort of traditional religion (let alone Christianity). He simply recognizes that people love these things, and that by adopting them, he becomes beloved. As Goldberg shows, fascism is pragmatic, concerned with power above all (a trait it shares with woke leftism).³

In the end, the fascist will bring all these traditions completely into the state’s control and mechanism, more or less overtly, and this will utterly alter their character, will destroy them. Nazi Germany pushed the nuclear family as an ideal, but the ideal it pushed was of a family which was a cog to the state, whose children spied on their parents, whose parents sacrificed (metaphorically but also religiously) their children to the state’s educational and other mechanisms, whose sexual mores were in service to the state’s good.

Judging by this definition, which fits the phenotype usually called ‘Fascist,’ the most prominent fascist country in the modern day is Communist China. China is fascist, rather than communist, insofar as it uses and alters the institution of the market rather than directly abolishing it (as well as the institution of the Christian church). It is communist insofar as it destroys other institutions. The two, however, are opposite faces of the same coin, and they converge, in the end, on the total subsummation of all things into a unity- in most cases the state, man’s most unitary institution, though once the state has reached this point, it is religion (church and deity both) as well, besides attempting to be family. The alternative is the ideal of an anarchistic unity, Rousseau’s General Will without Rousseau’s governmental system, but this delusion has yet to eventuate, yet to outcompete the totalitarian state, which is much more congenial to the lusts of the men leading the revolution.

This connection is, we must recognize, only a part of the immense complexity of the origins of fascism and communism, of leftism which bears the mark of both (being totalitarianism born of their union with French and (to a much lesser extent) English liberalism). Economic, political, social, agricultural, technological, biological, and individual reasons all play a large role in the development, the rise, the decline, the cannibalization of any philosophy and every religion. Nevertheless, by seeing where the philosophies of the past went, we can learn both to evade their errors (by foreseeing where they lead) and to turn from them, it being obviously foolish to try and move back up the made of grease in hopes of avoiding forever the bottom.

God bless.

(Header pictures based on images sourced from Wikimedia Commons)

Footnotes

1. Such geographical demarcation is obviously vague. H.G. Wells was more in the French than the English tradition, for instance, and Montesquieu more amenable to the English than the French, despite their respective nationalities. ↩︎
2. “Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the “problem” and therefore defined as the enemy.” ~ Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, end of the introduction (I’m citing an e-book). I recommend the book, albeit Goldberg is terribly wrong in thinking classical liberalism an effective answer to progressive liberalism/ liberal fascism. ↩︎
3. “None of this is to say that Mussolini was a deeply consistent ideologue or political theorist. As a pragmatist, he was constantly willing to throw off dogma, theory, and alliances whenever convenient.” ~ ditto, Ch. 1, Section ‘War: What Is It Good For?’ ↩︎