by Stephen Soukup
One might say that the current editors of that journal are projecting when they call Donald Trump an American fascist. And one would be right.
This past week, The New Republic, the venerable flagship journal of the American left, published a “special report” edition, the purpose of which was to alert the world—heretofore in the dark—that it has decided that Donald Trump is literally a fascist. No kidding. According to the editors, they chose the cover image for this “American Fascism” issue, which features Trump’s face imposed “on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster” for “a precise reason”:
The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.”
Oh.
This is interesting, but more than that, it’s telling. And what it tells us is that the good folks at The New Republic—and, by extension, the American Left more generally—know almost nothing about American politics, fascism, history, and, we’d guess, most other topics.The cover image and the contemptuous tone of the entire undertaking remind us that this is hardly the first time that an American version of fascism has been discussed. Indeed, some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century addressed the issue, often with open and bemused contempt but occasionally with great sincerity and commitment.
The first such author whose musings spring to mind is the inimitable Tom Wolfe, whose commentary on America’s self-created delusions and neuroses are among the most biting and incisive of the genre. In “The Intelligent Coed’s Guide to America,” Wolfe famously recounted a panel discussion at Princeton in 1965. Discussing the German novelist and poet Gunter Grass, Wolfe noted that he had a habit of mocking those who screeched incessantly about fascism coming to America. He wrote: “He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.”
With the anti-Semitic far right and the anti-Semitic far left both resurgent throughout Europe—and the latter likely taking control of France—one might think that The New Republic editors and staff would have better things to worry about than a guy who wants to cut taxes and regulation. But one would be wrong. Actual, real-life fascism doesn’t faze them anywhere near as much as the fascism of their fever dreams.
A second “writer” whose musings on American fascism were called to mind again by The New Republic’s “special issue” is actually a group of writers, each of whom wrote in the latter half of the last century and each of whom addressed, in subtly different ways, the left’s obsession with calling its opponents Nazis. The moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, for one, bemoaned the state of moral reasoning in the modern world and noted that morality had devolved to a state of emotive expression, a condition in which feelings and sensations are elevated above objective reality and traditional conceptions of right and wrong, good and evil, etc. He wrote that emotivism is the “doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically, all moral judgments, are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.” Or to put it more simply: modern morality is based on subjective feelings more than anything else, and terms like “evil,” “fascist,” and “Nazi” are used by the morally stunted emotivists merely to describe things that they don’t like.Similarly, the political philosopher Leo Strauss coined the term “reductio ad Hitlerum” to denote the logical fallacy by which contemporary leftists avoided difficult discussions by resorting to ad hominem attacks, calling anyone with whom they disagreed a “Nazi.” This is a phenomenon that political philosopher Eric Voegelin noted as well a couple of years earlier in his Charles Walgreen lectures (published as The New Science of Politics). Anyone who challenged or even pointed out the contemporary left’s predisposition to Gnosticism, Voegelin noted, was dismissed out of hand and, inevitably, called a “fascist.”
Finally, The New Republic’s concern about and adamant opposition to “American Fascism” should remind readers of one of the most influential yet least acclaimed writers of the early twentieth century, a writer whose philosophy profoundly and directly affected two American presidents and helped form the ideological foundation of one of the nation’s two major political parties.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, this writer was not a Christian and, in fact, rebelled against the pietist Christian morality of his era. That is not, however, to say that he wasn’t religious. He was. He simply believed in a “civic religion,” a faith based on the omnipotence of the state, the (Marxian) infallibility of science, and the necessity of state-dominated scientific administration. This writer was an aggressive advocate of “reform,” which is to say that he was an ardent opponent of the constitutional order as it existed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He rejected the Founders’ views, railed against their Constitution, and viewed devotion to the nation’s founding principles in the same way that his Enlightenment predecessors railed against religion—insisting that it was nothing more than superstitious nonsense.
This writer also believed that the law should be more or less irrelevant, while faith—faith in the state—should be the sole arbiter of acceptable behavior.
“A democracy,” he wrote, “becomes courageous, progressive, ascendant just in so far as it dares to have faith, and just in so far as it can be faithful without ceasing to be inquisitive. Faith in things unseen and unknowable is as indispensable to a progressive democracy as it is to an individual Christian. In the absence of faith, a democracy must lean, as the American democracy has leaned in the past, on some specific formulation of a supposedly or temporarily righteous law; but just in proportion as it has attained faith it can dispense with any such support.” Or, in other words: if everyone would buy into the faith of the state, the official civic religion, then society would no longer need to be governed by the archaic laws of men.
To this end, the most important thing political and social leaders could do was to abandon the stultifying ideas of the past, especially the ideas of the Founders and their hokey obsession with virtue. “At the present time there is a strong, almost a dominant, tendency to regard the existing Constitution with superstitious awe,” he wrote in his book The Promise of American Life, “and to shrink with horror from modifying it even in the smallest detail; and it is this superstitious fear of changing the most trivial parts of the fundamental legal fabric which brings to pass the great bondage of the American spirit.” He believed that only a strong and powerfully led central government could accomplish any of this, and thus he argued in favor of an all-powerful national state with vastly increased powers of taxation.
In many ways, this writer was very much a proto-fascist and the two presidents he inspired were among the most aggressively authoritarian in the nation’s history. In short, if the folks at The New Republic are looking for American fascists, they could do far worse than to start their search with this writer.
For the record, the name of this proto-fascist writer was Herbert Croly. The presidents he influenced were Teddy Roosevelt and the execrable Woodrow Wilson. The ideology he helped create was Progressivism. And best of all, the political journal he co-founded and edited was called The New Republic.
One might say that the current editors of that journal are projecting when they call Donald Trump an American fascist. And one would be right.
Stephen Soukup
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/13/american-fascism-and-the-new-republic/
No comments:
Post a Comment