…the modernists of the Right have been, almost without exception, fascists and totalitarians, for they know that when things fall apart and the center does not hold, the only recourse is to an invented and imposed order. (Tonsor, 1986)
There’s been a long discussion among the Pythagorean Brotherhood about whether fascism is “on the right.” Jamie Kirchick wold take it a step farther; he suggests that “Pat Buchanan simply has a place in his heart for ethnic nationalists and brown shirts. Sympathy for racists and authoritarians runs in his family, after all…” The implicit accusation of anti-Semitism, though not unusual for Kirchick, is disgraceful, and does a disservice to the real question. What is the relationship between fascism and conservatism? It’s less sinister than the Left might like to believe — and closer than the Right wants to admit.
We cannot afford to ignore the racism and xenophobia of fascist regimes,[1] but defining fascism purely in terms of those characteristics is rather like saying “conservatives don’t like welfare” — it ignores the reasons.
Fascism is, at its core, intimately tied to a Herderian conception of nationalism,[2] in response to the alienating influence of modernity. Human beings need something to give meaning to their lives. Usually, this comes from our communities and traditions. However, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, liberal states began to define community in terms of citizenship. The nationalist goal, on the other hand, was to make the state the instrument of community — and community meant the nation.
When Woodrow Wilson’s goal of national self-determination came to fruition after the First World War, multiethnic empires were replaced by states defined in terms of ethnic majorities. Unfortunately, in Eastern Europe, ethnic groups are so scattered that you can’t draw a border around the Germans or the Serbs without including lots of other people.
Many residents were not citizens (because citizenship was defined by ethnicity), and thus not members of the community. This entire class of stateless — and thus isolated and atomized — minorities were then joined by the industrial proletariat. The rise of capitalism and mass production led to huge workforces in growing commercial centers: the anonymity of cities, where no one knows your face, and the alienation of the labor process, where a worker is reduced to his work rather than his individuality as a human being, combined to create apathetic masses bereft of any sense of community.
Without meaningful connection to other people, we grasp about for anything that can provide answers. Among the heirs to the European Enlightenment tradition, any system that claims to explain the world in a logical way extremely appealing. If a man is drowning in nihilism, he’ll cling to ideology as though his life depends on it. the ideology drags the man towards its inevitable conclusion, but he won’t let go: to reject the conclusion would be to reject the idea that brought him to it, and that would leave him floating again in the abyss.
There is no solution once you’ve both accepted the premise and committed to a rational structure. Hannah Arendt describes the problem:
…an argument of which Hitler like Stalin was very fond is: You can’t say A without saying B and C and so on, down to the end of the murderous alphabet. Here, the coercive force of logicality seems to have its source; it springs from our fear of contradicting ourselves.
The ideologies which arose were in essence teleological faiths that “pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process — the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, the uncertainties of the future — because of the logic inherent in their respective ideas.” Their “ultimate goal is not the welfare of men or the interest of one man but the fabrication of mankind, eliminates individuals for the sake of the species, sacrifices the ‘parts’ for the sake of the ‘whole’ and fits each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim.”
The distinction between right totalitarianism and left totalitarianism — Nazism and Bolshevism — is not in the degree to which they reduce individuals to interchangeable cogs: there is always clear determinism — the world is moving towards a particular point and if you’re in the way, intentionally or otherwise, you’ve got to go. Rather, they differ in their premises.
The Bolsheviks talked about “history,” while the Nazis talked about “nature.” Bolshevism focuses on the fundamental universality of human beings, where Nazism posits particularism. Bolshevism was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment; Nazism owes far more to Romanticism.
Insofar as we consider conservatism to be an outgrowth of Romanticism, then, fascism is “on the right.”[3] This boils down to a question of the intellectual heritage of conservatism. I would argue (and have) that the defining feature of conservatism is its recognition of the destruction modernity works on culture. (The difference between the Kirkian traditionalists and paleoconservatives is whether we think it’s possible to return.) This recognition is also a vital part of fascist ideology: the difference is the totalitarianism. Modern conservatives, whether Kirkian or postmodern, are marked by a far more libertarian attitude towards the state.
Can you tell whether this is a description of conservatism or fascism?
[...] sees in the world not only those superficial, material aspects in which man appears as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law, which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.
(The full text is here.)
Fascists, deconstructionists, and other modernists or postmodernists, like Adam Wolfson’s description of paleoconservatives, “contend that we have become irrevocably cut off from a living, sustainable tradition. In their view, the acids of modernity have left us entirely disinherited from old customs and ways, and conservatism’s project of conservation is but a glittering illusion.”
The paleoconservative realization should have been possible without the experience of fascism, but it is inescapable since: virtue cannot be commanded. Sacrifice is only important if it is chosen. And only a free man can create meaning.
[1]I’ve never been sure whether those features are necessary or only incidental. The Italian fascist intellectuals were no more anti-Semitic than any other early 20th century European elite. Still, no one would want to risk testing it; I leave this as an exercise for the reader.
[2]This is nationalism often defined in opposition to the state, especially if the state is a multiethnic polity (Russia under the tsars, Austria-Hungary, Yugoslavia). The United States, and to a lesser extent France, provide an interesting example of a different sort of nationalism. There is clearly something French about France, but there is also an idea which makes one French, beyond the inheritance of a particular tradition. (Or, perhaps more accurately, France has both a Volkgeist and an ideology. The US has only the latter, which makes American nationalism rather different.) As a whole, we have none of the identity that comes from ties of blood and soil. Our identity is intricately bound up with our political institutions and the ideology behind them: our heritage is about the state. If our government fell, there would rapidly cease to be any such thing as American identity. Instead, as it was in the beginning, we would define ourselves by shared culture in our closer geographic regions.
[3] This is itself an interesting problem, because the Romantics, like Enlightenment thinkers, put an enormous emphasis on the freedom of the individual from traditional restraints (Byron seduced his sister, and we all know about Rousseau). On the other hand, conservatism recognizes the importance of community and traditional institutions for the creation and maintenance of individual identity, which the Romantics didn’t.
“…the self is the State, the State is the self.” –Michael Oakeshott
Not that we’d want to claim him.
I like this post. But how much work is “create” doing in your last sentence? (As vs e.g. “discern.”)
Was it Mussolini who said that fascism is an essentially aesthetic project? I can’t remember now.
More in a bit–
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