"To tell the truth", or will the real fascist please stand up?
How your tweedy academic colleague down the hall suddenly morphed into the "brown shirt" he routinely accuses your Roto-Rooter guy of becoming
Back during the American neolithic era (1956-1967) – that overly romanticized time span stalked by the real and not-so-romantic dread of immanent nuclear apocalypse that is otherwise remembered as peak Cold War - there was an extremely popular television game show known as To Tell the Truth.
The show featured three characters from the public at large with the same interesting narrative about their lives, two of whom were impostors and one of whom happened to be genuine. A panel of celebrities would interrogate three characters to figure out who was lying and who might be telling the truth.
After the grilling the celebrities would vote on whom they thought was the authentic character to match the story. Then the emcee would say dramatically “will the real XXX please stand up”, and the person actually telling the truth would be disclosed.
As a culture we play that game nowadays – and almost every day.
We routinely use words that once had a fairly precise range of meanings and were used in a way that most people could understand, even if they were misused as over-the-top slurs or insults.
Take, for instance, that notorious ” f-word” – fascism.
Fascism was a very real, and destructive phenomenon, that reached its global apogee during the 1930s and led to two cataclysmic world wars.
Merriam Webster defines fascism as follows: “a political philosophy, movement, or regime…that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”
Popular opinion almost instinctively identifies fascism with Nazi Germany, but we need to be aware that the term was invented by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini during the 1930s, who sought to re-create in a twentieth-century context the power and prestige of ancient Rome.
The word “fascism” itself derives from the Latin word fasces, referring to the bundle of rods and protruding axe handle that served as the ubiquitous emblem of the magistrate’s authority during the Roman republic and empire.
Certain scholars point out that much of Hitler’s design for the National Socialist state came from Mussolini, who served as his tutor, if not his mentor, when it came to the fascist regimentation of both business and labor.
Mussolini, in turn, gleaned many of his ideas from the more radical faction of the Socialist International, the Marxist labor movement that morphed after the Russian Revolution into world communism.
That particular faction was known as “syndicalism”, a movement directed by the French social revolutionary Georges Sorel who favored a strong state over worker collectives. Sorel was also the one who persuaded both Mussolini and Hitler that “socialism” must be installed by the nation-state rather than the workers themselves.
Hence the phrase “national socialism”.
Trump and his MAGA minions are daily excoriated in the progressive neoliberal press as the stalking horse for American fascism.
So it comes as a surprise perhaps that philosophers Daniel Burnfin and Oiiver Schlaudt, writing in the cross-ideological British opinion rag Compact, argue that the real fascists are the progressive neoliberal administration of Joe Biden.
Entitled “Biden’s fascist economy” and citing the late German Marxist economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel Burnfin’s and Schlaudt’s essay makes the case that we should reconsider “fascism in the political-economic context in which historical fascist movements arose and were embraced by those seeking to preserve the status quo of developed capitalism amid dizzying social turbulence.”
The 1930s context, they maintain, has very much re-emerged today.
Your garden variety, political cartoon version of fascism plays tiresomely on the trope of the NASCAR-loving, Bible-toting, white Southerner or rural Midwesterner inflamed with racial resentment as the brown-shirted icon of the yet-to-come national fascist revocation of democracy once Trump is elected.
Throw in a menagerie of both mega-ministries and small-town church congregations who fly American flags right beside their minimalist configuration of a titanium cross just above where they hold the altar calls (the much feared and politically predatory “Christian nationalist”), and you’ve got the latest, Darth-Vadish sort of boogie monster to get with all that fantasized goose-stepping.
The progressive neoliberal imaginary is unfortunately incapable of imagining anything otherwise.
But Trumpism (pardon me, the MAGA menace), a fraught phenomenon that increasingly has become multiracial and multicultural, is not all, according to our authors, where the virus of fascism can be found quietly incubating.
Because fascism in its real rather than celluloid guises has historically never made much headway in countries with ingrained and sustained democratic traditions (Germany, Italy, and Franco’s Spain were all recently dismantled monarchies), the ruling elites regularly strive to discredit emerging populist movements by “f-bombing” them.
What earmarks fascism most of all, so Burnfin and Schlaudt tell us, is the “permanent war economy”, Eisenhower’s notorious “military-industrial complex”. The financialization of wealth that defines American global neoliberal hegemony depends ineluctably on “deficit spending on armaments paid to weapons manufacturers by the US government all over the world”.
This dual process of militarization and financialization – or “virtualization” – that has transformed industrial capitalism into what has come to be known as the “knowledge economy”, commandeered by the very same cultural and intellectual elites who, in order to hide their own “fascist” methods of control (think “cancel culture”), obsessively project their own darker instincts on to the very working classes whose livelihoods they rob from daily with inflationary fiscal policies that inflate the power of both the military and the administrative state.
As highlighted in this space before, the trademark of fascist political indoctrination is the rhetoric of antisemitism. As New York Times columnist David Brooks notes, it is hardly accidental that the most vicious displays of antisemitism in the recent anti-Israel protests of college campuses occurred at elite institutions.
Brooks attributes this pathology to the burgeoning “false consciousness” of elite colleges and universities.
To be progressive is to be against privilege. But today progressives dominate elite institutions like the exclusive universities, the big foundations and the top cultural institutions. American adults who identify as very progressive skew white, well educated and urban and hail from relatively advantaged backgrounds. This is the contradiction of the educated class.
Although Brooks does not venture into the sort of analysis advanced by Sohn-Rethel (and implicitly by Max Weber for that matter), he does sing along with them in tying the “leftward drift of the haute bourgeoisie” to their increasingly hyperprivileged and isolated economic and cultural status vis-à-vis the displaced working classes of all races and ethnicities.
Sohn-Rethel’s argument, while fitting the familiar mold of twentieth-century Marxist materialism, is not unique.
Many social historians of recent generations have harped on how fascism germinates from seemingly eccentric and nominally “egalitarian” ideological spores that are sown by the intellectual classes in order to mobilize the disaffected mass of proletarians around something to which they are already loyal and familiar with - the mythology of the nation-state.
That was precisely Mussolini’s – and by extension Hitler’s and Franco’s – secret sauce.
But genuine fascism specifically demands the seduction of the working classes, which today’s progressive neoliberal crypto-fascists have failed miserably to do.
Instead of rallying the power of labor, which has rapidly evaporated in an age when digitization (most recently as the romance of artificial intelligence), financialization, and offshoring has replaced the hiring of even skilled material labor, our so-called intelligentsia has turned in on itself and foisted a purely performative style of faux progressivism that serves as camouflage for its covert fascist agenda.
Brooks, citing the work of social scientist Peter Turchin, terms this devolution of social influence and political authority “elite overproduction”.
Elite overproduction was especially powerful during the period after the financial crisis. In the early 2010s, highly educated white liberals increasingly experienced a disproportionate rise in depression, anxiety and negative emotions. This was accompanied by a sharp shift to the left in their political views. The spread of cancel culture and support for decriminalizing illegal immigration and “defunding the police” were among the quintessential luxury beliefs that seemed out of touch to people in less privileged parts of society. Those people often responded by making a sharp countershift in the populist direction, contributing to the election of Donald Trump and to his continued political viability today.
I myself made this very same argument five years ago.
Having alienated rather than captivated the working classes, therefore, the most desperate among our progressive neoliberal elites have turned instead for their street muscle and polemical firepower to radical Islamism, especially the militant, antisemitic vitriol that distinguishes the rhetoric of Hamas.
Such desperation is almost unintelligible to those on the American left who have historically supported women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. As Nick Cohen comments acidly, “you cannot be a progressive and campaign for a state that executes gay men”.
Yet per contra that is what an elite politics, which has become more and more angry as it becomes more and more irrelevant, in fact does.
Perhaps the American progressive neoliberal left is bewitched by article 10 of the Hamas charter, which promises to “spare no effort to bring about justice and defeat injustice, in word and deed, in this place and everywhere it can reach and have influence therein”.
Whereas the charter goes on proclaim in article 11 that only Muslims can occupy the land that has historically been known as Israel and Judea as well as Palestine, while any effort to find a modus vivendi between other faiths living on the land must be resisted all costs.
For example, the charter states:
Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the [Palestinian] question. Some accept, others reject the idea, for this or other reason, with one stipulation or more for consent to convening the conference and participating in it. Knowing the parties constituting the conference, their past and present attitudes towards Muslim problems, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not consider these conferences capable of realizing the demands, restoring the rights or doing justice to the oppressed. These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Muslims as arbitrators. When did the infidels do justice to the believers?
With an eye to world Muslim supremacy, article 15 adds, the fight is not really over the historical title to the land, but “the Jews' usurpation of Palestine.”
As a variety of distinguished historians such as Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz have thoroughly documented, radical Islamism and National Socialism were joined historically at the hip from birth onward.
Even the radical and internationalist Socialist Workers Party through its publication The Militant has traced in precise detail the incestuous, “fellow traveler” kinship between true believers in the Third Reich and Hamas itself.
So if we are really “to tell the truth” and ask for the real fascists to stand up, it would turn out unsurprisingly to be perhaps one’s lily white, Ivy-educated, tweedy and chatty academic colleague down the hall with his faded Che Guevara poster, a rainbow flag, and a banner unfurling to read “free Palestine”.
Once upon a time he was even fiercely against antisemitism until (after October 7) he wasn’t.