From VDARE: Donald Trump is “how fascism comes to America,” says Robert Kagan. The New Yorker warns fascism “can happen here” [Going There With Donald Trump, by Adam Gopnik, May 11, 2016]. Martin O’ Malley complains about Trump’s “fascist appeal” [O’Malley talks Trump’s ‘fascist appeal’ and Baltimore crime in television interview, by Erica Green, Baltimore Sun, May 14, 2016]. And Salon enlists a “historian of fascism” to claim Trump is a fascist like Mussolini [Trump’s not Hitler, he’s Mussolini: How GOP anti-intellectualism created a modern fascist movement in America, by Fedja Buric, Salon, March 11, 2016].
With the meteoric rise of Donald Trump, the only other word we hear more than “fascism” is “racism.”
But what exactly is “fascism?”
Paul Gottfried attempts to answer that question with an exhaustively researched study, Fascism: The Career of a Concept. It’s an antidote to the clumsy polemics surrounding the topic. Gottfried alludes to Jonah Goldberg’s 2008 Conservatism, Inc bestseller Liberal Fascism as an illustration of how serious scholarship has been subordinated to crass partisan political purposes.
Gottfried says of Goldberg’s efforts:
“After hundreds of pages of…often strained comparisons between fascist and Democratic orators, it is hard to miss the point: if Democratic partisans in Hollywood have gone after Republicans as fascists, then the other party should be allowed to play the same game.”
“After hundreds of pages of…often strained comparisons between fascist and Democratic orators, it is hard to miss the point: if Democratic partisans in Hollywood have gone after Republicans as fascists, then the other party should be allowed to play the same game.”Goldberg’s charging his political opponents with the “f” word is just “intermural politics.” And this “game” of two parties casting aspersions back and forth is hard to take seriously.
As Gottfried writes:
“If we wish to condemn one of the two institutionalized parties as ‘fascist’ for building and sustaining a large administrative state, then why not make the same judgment about the other?”
In other words, if Goldberg [Email him] really believed both that fascism is horrible and (“liberal”) Democrats were fascists, then why doesn’t he suggest “he would rescind the ‘fascist’ handiwork” in the event Republicans assume power? Gottfried’s unanswerable reply: “By now that handiwork belongs as much to his party as it does to the opposition.”
In contrast to Goldberg, Gottfried provides an objective historical examination of fascism. And he shows the targets of virtually every accusation of “fascism” are nothing of the kind.
“As a historic phenomenon,” he writes, “fascism has nothing to do with advocating an isolationist foreign policy, trying to restrict Third World immigration, or favoring significant income redistribution in order to achieve greater social equality”—as today’s “antifascists” would have us think.
Nor should we be misled by opponents of “Islamo-fascism” and the European “far right” into thinking their enemies are actually the ideological heirs to the cultural/ideological phenomenon which emerged in interwar Europe.
But just because Gottfried says certain people aren’t fascist, that doesn’t mean he’s endorsing them. Instead, these clumsy associations “are characteristic of recent, divergent attempts to identify fascism with whatever the speaker happens to dislike .”
Yet there’s a method to the “antifascist’s” madness: Upon blasting his opponent’s view as “fascist,” the “antifascist” invariably begins “belaboring his or her target with the accusation of sympathizing with Nazi atrocities.”
Gottfried is having none of it. He goes so far as to argue that Nazism, while containing elements of fascism, is not entitled to be regarded—as it always is regarded—as a species of fascism proper, much less as the quintessential expression of fascism. “The Nazis ran a highly eclectic operation,” Gottfried explains. They borrowed not only from fascism, but from “Stalinism and, perhaps most of all, from Hitler’s feverish imagination.”
Nazism, in other words, isn’t a species of fascism at all. Read on.
