Part 2 – Fascism and Totalitarianism
Part 3 – Fascism as the Unconquered Past
Part 4 – Fascism as a Movement of the Left
Part 5 – The Failure of Fascist Internationalism
Part 6 – The Search for a Fascist Utopia
Part 7 – A Vanished Revolutionary Right and Addendum – Fascism and Modernization
Part 8 - Discussion and Conclusion (You are here)
Making sense of Gottfried
When I started this series, I said that I wanted to understand what fascism actually means beyond shallow political jabs at one’s enemies. I was concerned that Gottfried might be another Jonah Goldberg, a conservative trying to throw the charge back at the people who originally levied it.
To my surprise, however, Gottfried was not that shallow, and seemed to be earnest in discussing the topic at hand. This is obvious just from the topics he selected. While it’s true that he ultimately rejects many of the claims more mainstream and often silly takes public intellectuals, even some historians, give, he isn’t interested in just saying “no u” at every stage. Well, he kind of is, but he’s not being annoying about it.
In every chapter of this book, there’s an argument being made that is typically historically contextualized and with multiple believers in those viewpoints being cited. Gottfried doesn’t appear to be citing random people or those who aren’t even engaging with the subject seriously, he’s bringing up people who intentionally chose to speak about these things from their standpoint as public thinkers and intellectuals.
The contextualization is inherently necessary, Gottfried needs it when he’s trying to explain how the meaning of the term has changed and how its use has evolved. That he also wants to refute these people is a different thread running through this book.
Accuracy
We need to consider how correct Gottfried is. He’s gone over a seemingly-disconnected list of debates regarding fascism as an idea, citing many people while not being necessarily kinder/harsher to people on/against his side. But he might still be incorrect in one or more areas, perhaps even his whole thesis.
A good place to start might be chapter 3, which covers the Frankfurt School. As Gottfried tells it, the Frankfurt School was supported by the OSS in WW2 and post-WW2 so that the US government could understand what led the Nazis to power. The FS members all being Marxist, they argued that many seemingly normal (or within the Overton Window) behaviors were symptoms of being fascist/authoritarian/right-wing. Their influence is said to have created the modern understanding of what is or is not fascist, with Germany bearing the brunt of their attempts to assert their ideology as reality.
But there is some reason to be skeptical here. For one thing, understanding how the Nazis came to power was a broad project involving countless WW2 and post-WW2 researchers, political scientists, psychologists, and others. This chapter has been discussed prior to my own posts on themotte, with some pointing out that people of different ideologies all tried to understand the Nazi and totalitarian phenomenon and Gottfried doesn’t really demonstrate that an enduring legacy of the FS was its work on fascism. Consider, for example, this article from 2016 by Vox.
This study of authoritarianism began shortly after World War II, as political scientists and psychologists in the US and Europe tried to figure out how the Nazis had managed to win such wide public support for such an extreme and hateful ideology.
That was a worthy field of study, but the early work wasn't particularly rigorous by today's standards. The critical theorist Theodor Adorno, for instance, developed what he called the "F-scale," which sought to measure "fascist" tendencies. The test wasn't accurate. Sophisticated respondents would quickly discover what the "right" answers were and game the test. And there was no proof that the personality type it purportedly measured actually supported fascism.
More than that, this early research seemed to assume that a certain subset of people were inherently evil or dangerous — an idea that Hetherington and Weiler say is simplistic and wrong, and that they resist in their work. (They acknowledge the label "authoritarians" doesn't do much to dispel this, but their efforts to replace it with a less pejorative-sounding term were unsuccessful.)
If, as Gottfried seems to argue, it was the FS that created the modern academic view of fascism as a lurking threat, then Vox’s description of the F-scale and Adorno is evidence against this field’s mainstream position being part of the FS legacy. To be clear, there are still problems with how these researchers are doing what they do, but that’s irrelevant to whether Gottfried accurately depicted the influence of the FS.
A defense of the book despite possible inaccuracies about the FS is that Gottfried might be like Wikipedia – excellent at history that isn’t highly salient to modern politics. Maybe he’s entirely correct in how he describes the inevitable failure of fascist internationalism or the various types of fascist utopias. But I had a moment where I seriously pondered if this was correct. In chapter 7, Gottfried writes the following.
Ever since the defeat of Nazi Germany, and even during the struggle against Soviet communism, what were once deemed leftist ideas have been in the ascendant, and Americans and western Europeans have constructed parliamentary polarities on the basis of this given. Only the German government has been totally honest about this process. Chancellor Merkel’s chief advisor, Volker Kauder has indicated that after the horrors of the Nazi experience, Germany refuses to have a Right.5 Its parties must all come out of the Left or else out of a center that presumably tends in a leftist direction. To whatever extent the present Christian Democrats are “Christian,” Kauder explains, they are committed to social change of a non-rightist type.
When you go to the citation, it links to this article. Maybe Gottfried just has a better understanding of Kauder, the CDU, and Germany than I do (very likely), but I don’t see how you can interpret what Kauder said in the way Gottfried does. Kauder doesn’t seem to reference the Nazis at all, nor does he argue that all parties should only come out of the left. He does argue that “Bible faithful Christians” should not fragment the party and should work within it instead, but that’s about it.
I’m hesitant to argue that my reading is correct (I’m using Google Translate to read it and I have a superficial understanding of Germany), but if I am, then Gottfried at best is not always citing what he means to, and at worse, is using his own beliefs to convince himself of the strength of a citation.
Lingering points of confusion
Perhaps I’ll fully realize what all the points are that I found confusing in this book, but for now, I have just two.
The first is about the odd placement of Gottfried’s grappling with Roger Griffin. Griffin is a famed historian of fascism, having written several books and articles on the topic. I’m not entirely sure what his position on this is, but I’d hazard a guess and say that he doesn’t agree with Gottfried that it is something uniquely confined to the interwar era or WW2. But even if he did, it’s really odd that you don’t really see him cite or reference the man in the main book at all, only in an appendix and on the topic of modernism of all things.
The second has to do with why Gottfried exactly rejects Stanley Payne. Payne assigns the fascists to the revolutionary right, says that they cobbled together their ideology, and says they aren’t like the traditional right or even authoritarian nationalist parties. As far as I can tell, Gottfried would broadly agree with most of these. But he says the following about one of Payne’s books.
Payne reconstructs a fascist world view that looks like a grab bag of ideas borrowed from different sources. In Fascism: Comparison and Definition, the readers are given characteristics that Payne deemed common to fascist movements everywhere: they are all marked by a “permanent nationalistic one-party authoritarianism,” “the search for a synthetic ethnicist ideology,” a charismatic leader, a corporatist political economy, and “a philosophical principle of voluntarist activism unbounded by any philosophical determinism.
I can see why he would call it a grab bag, but what I don’t grasp is what the more serious distinctions between Payne and Gottfried’s positions are because this book doesn’t seem to explain it more explicitly. To the extent that Stanley Payne is more mainstream, it seems like a depiction of fascism that is mostly accurate and not confined to a specific period as Gottfried would argue. But he barely gets much attention, only a bit more than Griffin.
Final Thoughts
I had a great deal of fun reading this book. Gottfried writes in a way designed to illustrate what he thinks are the differences in views of fascism, which makes for a more engaging reading than simply stating his case without consideration for what other scholars think. At least, it does if you’re interested in getting some kind of map of the field/topic itself.
I lack the ability, of course, to critically look at depth into the sources he’s citing. I have neither time nor intellectual framework to really even do that. If you want to see someone more scholarly tackle the subject, I’ve found a startlingly barren field of reviews for this book. There’s only one that I can find, but it’s a short one.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested. At the very least, it does provide a more coherent argument for why you might be skeptical of the Frankfurt School and Marxist ideologies in general (read chapter 3 if you just want this). At least two people (1, 2) seem to agree with me that it’s much more convincing than hearing someone rant about Jewish Marxists more angrily.
As for me, I don’t think I’m going to jump into further books just yet, or perhaps never again. My interest in this subject has waned a bit, and I plan to start reading and eventually reviewing another book, one that should be more proverbial red meat for some of you.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed!
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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Happy New Year!
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
The nootropics spaces online (notably /r/nootropics, among others) contain references to compounds like semax or noopept which seem to have unclear support from the literature, or in the case of semax have hundreds of studies from russian labs, and only a single one from a western lab (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acschemneuro.1c00707).
After having little success with the headache meds my doctors have been prescribing me, I was thinking of trying some of these compounds. I was curious what your guys' thoughts are on these compounds. Is there a good reason they haven't been studied much in the west yet, or is it just inertia?
Open to any thoughts.
Thanks.
This is the first intermission of 👯, listed as season 1 episode 7 for filing purposes. In this episode, TracingWoodgrains, MasterThief, The Sultan Of Swing, XantosCell, and Unsaying discuss religious community.
This discussion was originally slated to be released as an episode of the The Bailey podcast, but eventually it was decided that it should be published elsewhere instead, and so it finds its home here, at 👯.
The image used in the video is Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld's Pentecost woodcut for "Die Bibel in Bildern", 1860:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schnorr_von_Carolsfeld_Bibel_in_Bildern_1860_226.png
Show notes:
36:00 Unsaying's superintelligence of deity post: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/a54d99/the_compression_problem/
39:47 Despite instructions made in the moment, this tangent was not cut out, as it turned out to be relevant. Normally, any requests to cut something out would be honored, but everyone involved assented to this edit of the episode.
47:03 Xantos's snake-handling video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2dlnqRDmmds
Extended show notes:
(Discussing unsuitability for marriage and the path of monasticism) https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hkesjh/comment/fwy8ofv/
https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/watching-spotlight-young-priest
https://babylonbee.com/news/dozens-of-bible-verses-come-forward-to-accuse-joel-osteen-of-abuse
(If people want more BG on heresies, i dunno) https://old.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/4ihgog/extra_history_on_early_christian_schisms_pt_2/
This is just a quick-and-dirty thought I had while browsing the roundup thread tonight, and I figured I'd just dash it out here since I want to post something else in the big thread and not clutter it up.
Part of what spurred this was a recent video by Rimmy Downunder, who you might recognize as the Australian guy who uploads a lot of edited videos about Arma 3 and other kinds of simulationist-type games. It's an hour-long video, so to quickly summarize: if you are a big creator on YouTube, you should never ask Team YouTube for help on Twitter whenever one of your videos gets demonetized or age-restricted, because in the name of consistency, they will just go through your channel and do the same thing to all of your videos, making your algorithm performance and monetization drop even further. Contained within this video is discussion of new rules for advertiser-friendliness--specifically, the guidelines around profanity and the severity, frequency, and latency with which it is uttered in a video--changes that weren't exactly announced by YouTube, along with new policies for how YouTube reviews creators' appeals against the dings they get.
This post isn't about recent drama on a social media platform so big that it should really be regulated as a common carrier, or even about the constant frustration with inconsistent enforcement of rules, but instead, it's about the degree to which our modern society seems to be drilling down on making things all sanitized and offense-free.
Just to talk about YouTube a little more, I've been aware for a while that the entire design of YouTube--what is allowed, what is punished, and what is incentivized, whether that be through the algorithm or the automated content-policing systems they almost certainly have deployed--is set up to push creators into making the absolute safest content possible. I don't feel like digging up all the videos that talk about this phenomenon, but as an example: if you want to maximize your potential ad revenue on YouTube as a gaming channel, you need to play kid-friendly games (like Minecraft and Fortnite), say absolutely no swear words (at most, you might get away with TV-friendly minced oaths), and basically treat any copyrighted material (or even anything that could plausibly get claimed by some anonymous third party) like the plague. Add on sponsorships and upsells of patronage sites, and it makes for content you or I might consider...banal.
But again, this is about the direction we're all being pushed in. I could ramble here about how excellence and hard work aren't rewarded on a particular website, but this goes beyond YouTube and all social media platforms. Why is it that we've moved from a culture that was permissive with expression (to put it a certain way) to one where something even slightly outre is left to wither on the vine? (Okay, sure, you can find weird and shocking modern art, but probably a lot of said modern art is made to help sell people on the idea of Marxism or whatever, as opposed to something like Dilbert 3 [NSFW] which presumably isn't trying to push any message and just exists, well, because.)
Likely, you're already aware of how the modern Culture War has had its effects on pop culture and media, where any work that gets advertised on TV or pushed to the front shelves of your local bookstore or recommended online often has to fit in with modern sensibilities, so I won't rehash the history of that here. Creators often subscribe to various versions and formulations of progressive ideals, people will judge past works through the lens of today, and what was perfectly acceptable within the tits-n'-beer liberalism milieu of old is often scrutinized today.
There's also the other cultural aspects of this coddling/infantilization/whatever-you-want-to-call-it memeplex. Many Americans are becoming more and more like the hikikomori of Japan, one of the less-inflammatory ways of describing the current state of the battle of the sexes is that the male gender role has been razed and not rebuilt (this was the post that spurred this one, but this topic has come up before), and we may have accidentally re-invented segregation because it's easier to not interact with those outside our specific demographics rather than trying to interact with them and risk reputational homicide.
So, the question I have is: where did all this come from, and why? Is it what some call "safetyism," the impulse to prevent harm at all costs and take no risks whatsoever? Relatedly, is it because legal liability is treated as a mortal risk, because lawsuits can be a punishment in themselves? Is it because of the unkillable zombie Boomers who, even in their old age, and with all of the pains they've suffered in their long lives, keenly remember the trauma of troubled childhoods the most, and have used their power as the current generation of power-holders to make sure that no child ever grows up feeling hardship?* Is it some combination of all three things, where nobody really complains about the effect it has on the broader culture so long as some politician's (grand)kids are doing okay?
I'm not necessarily advocating for edginess for edginess' sake (though I think that could have value), but I think American society has somehow forgotten how to masterfully blend novelty, maturity, and creativity, and right now, it seems like the only people who take risks are the same people who can't handle them (or, at least, they tend to make a poor showing once they start doing whatever it is they do).
*Granted, some of the people responsible might be Gen Xers instead, such as YT's current CEO and possibly their content moderation team, too.
Welcome to the final regular thread of 2022!
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Part 2 – Fascism and Totalitarianism
Part 3 – Fascism as the Unconquered Past
Part 4 – Fascism as a Movement of the Left
Part 5 – The Failure of Fascist Internationalism
Part 6 – The Search for a Fascist Utopia
Part 7 – A Vanished Revolutionary Right and Addendum – Fascism and Modernization (You are here)
Part 8 - Discussion and Conclusion
Chapter 7
The final chapter of this book is short. It starts with a summation of his views, but dedicates a great deal of words to criticizing a whole host of people who Gottfried seems to dislike.
We’ll start with mainstream US Republicans. In particular, Gottfried argues that Republicans claim to be on the right, but they “privilege in their discourse” things like human rights and equality. There’s no move to destroy the welfare state from Republicans, who are more than willing to preserve/expand these programs for themselves. It’s not even necessarily right-wing to dismantle the welfare state, Gottfried argues. As for talk about “traditional values”, Gottfried credits the fascists as at the very least honest about how they were constantly redefining their movement compared to American Republicans.
Gottfried details similar circumstances in Canada and Western Europe, but he describes Germany as unique being honest about a refusal to allow a genuine right-wing movement. Some, like sociologist Niklas Luhmann, have argued that insofar as there is a “right”, it should be Burkean in nature and defend the status quo, while the “left” should pursue emancipation even for those that don’t necessarily want it.
As for the left, Gottfried accuses them of trying to pigeonhole anti-Enligtenment thinkers into being the logical forefathers of the fascist and Nazi movements. He points to Zeev Sternhell, a historian of fascism as clear example of this. Sternhell’s book Les anti-Lumières du XVllle siècle à la guerre froide supposedly makes many errors, like trying to associate all Enlightenment critics into the same house or doing the same with Nazism and far less destructive forms like Mussolini’s Italy or Salazars’ Portugal.
But Gottfried isn’t content to leave it at this, and instead accuses Sternhell of hypocrisy. Why? Because Sternhell is a Jew and self-described “super-Zionist”. When it comes to Israel, he believes that Jews have the right to control their own fates and future. But he gets angry at people like Joseph de Maistre for saying the following.
There is no man as such; I have only encountered Frenchmen, Italians and Russians and from reading Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, I now know that Persians exist. As for mankind, I have yet to find such a thing.
Sternhell, Gottfried argues, essentially proves the truth in the Enlightenment’s critics’ philosophy – that things which are concrete, particularistic, and communal are what shape human identities.
Addendum
There’s one additional part to this book, which is about fascism and how it relates to modernization.
For Roger Griffin (a famous historian of fascism), modernity is the “localized emergence in…Europe of the reflexive mode of historical consciousness” that started in the late 18th century that ultimately legitimated the French revolutionaries and their fundamentalist war against tradition to replace it with something new. He notes here that there are two different definitions of modernism: one is about the artistic/philosophical movement, the other about “pedestrian” modernity that its critics (called modernists) would complain about. The latter are the people being discussed.
In any case, there was not really an alternative society modernists could point to, and they weren’t eager to retreat to the past either. Griffin argued that these people arose to combat the threat of nihilism as Western myths of progress lost credibility and modernity entered a period of liminality. The most prominent modernists were on the far left, but Gottfried argues that this is natural – modernism was overall optimistic about the future. That said, you could find a strain of modernism that led inexorably to the right – the literary modernists.
That said, Gottfried criticizes Griffin for trying to attempt, among other things, to convince the reader that right-wing sensibilities in reactionary modernism might jump out from 1945 into the present. For Gottfried, this is silly and assumes that fascism came to power due to no small influence by reactionary modernist artists and others like them.
There is more to this section, namely about to whether the Nazis were really traditionalists following their forefathers, but it’s largely uninteresting. Briefly, Gottfried reviews the work of historian Rainer Zitelmann. Gottfried commends him for his accurate depiction of the Nazis as “radically antitraditional” and trying to jump to the future but criticizes him over some arguments where he’s at pain to explain reality away.
To summarize, modern US Republicans are not as right-wing in the historical sense, having adopted important left-wing ideas and words into their minds. The left is politically motivated to inaccurately cast thinkers who rejected the Enlightenment as straight-line ancestors of the fascists and Nazis, with some people hypocritical as they reserve exceptions for particular groups to decide their own fates at the group level. There was absolutely a strain of modernist thinking that led to the right, found particularly among literary modernists, but the idea that their influence in the past or even in the present leads to fascism is entirely misguided.
That’s all for this book. I’ll have a follow-up post where I discuss my own thoughts, as I need time to reflect on everything as a whole.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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Note: I could not find any studies that estimate how many heavy metal bands are atheistic, so "most" is nothing more than a personal observation.
Chances are good that if you go to church, you sing. Most churches around the world; be it Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant; have singing as a part of worship. Every Sunday they meet, greet, sing, preach, share personal stories, and some then sing some more. Why?
The first time that I sang was in college in voice class. It was the single most enjoyable and fulfilling experience that I have ever had. I was awful, but there was this intense sense of unity, this sense of belonging that I had never experienced before. There we were, a group of just 20 or so students, and together we all made a work of art for the sake of of making art. It was beautiful. I had never felt so connected to people that I did not know before then, and ever since I stopped going to that college I have not felt that sense of connection to others so intensely. I do not go to church. I have not gone since I was a little kid. Yet, almost every day I am consciously envious of the people who can believe in God because of how beautiful that singing, that sense of community, was.
I believe the reason why so many churches have singing is because of this sense of community. Singing is a readily accessible and simple way to bring people together. Churches that don't sing don't build a sense of unity with singing, and people will go to the closest church that they feel the most belonging in. If churches that don't sing don't have other ways to supplement this sense of unity, then Darwinism happens: Churches that are less able to create a community are less fit to survive.
What if you don't believe in God? What if you're a kid, a teenager, and it's Sunday and your friends are out playing and having fun and going to the arcade or playing football and your parents instead make you go to church? The Sabbath takes your day of rest and turns it into a day of work. Instead of getting to relax you get to be angry. Angry at your parents for keeping you from your friends and for not loving you if they were to ever find out that you do not see the world the same way they do. Angry at the church and the people within it for hating the nonbelievers and gays and anyone who just doesn't belong. Angry at God for being a convenient weapon for this community, that you do not feel a part of, to use against you. And you sing.
You get good at singing, as you sing every Sunday and have every Sunday for as long as you can remember. Your puberty goes by filled with stress, as all puberties do, and yours gets to be filled with an extra dose of anger and alienation. And you sing some more. But what do you actually want to sing about? What emotion do you have that has gone unexpressed that you want people to hear? How do you want to be heard?
And you get mad.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
I just run into https://www.themotte.org/volunteer asking me to rate some overly long mythology/fanfiction/pagan themed post.
Really long.
And there was no option to indicate that I am unwilling to spend time on reading it.
Maybe in such case I should close the tab and do not fill feedback?
Just some thoughts on the Gorgias dialogue, the distinction between rhetoric and dialectic, the platonic soul, etc.
Part 2 – Fascism and Totalitarianism
Part 3 – Fascism as the Unconquered Past
Part 4 – Fascism as a Movement of the Left
Part 5 – The Failure of Fascist Internationalism
Part 6 – The Search for a Fascist Utopia (You are here)
Part 7 – A Vanished Revolutionary Right and Addendum – Fascism and Modernization
Part 8 - Discussion and Conclusion
Chapter 6
This chapter begins with Gottfried introducing us to Karl Mannheim, writer of Ideology and Utopia. The work looks at distinguishing between the two terms in the title. To do this, Mannheim looks at the visions given in the latter half of the second millennium by various European groups.
…Mannheim explores are the apocalyptic expectations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant radicals, the hope for an Age of Reason embraced by the eighteenth-century liberal bourgeois, the harmonious hierarchical society evoked by German and French conservatives in the early nineteenth century and thought to be “realizable” in a postrevolutionary future, and the Marxist view of a socialist world order.
Of particular interest to Mannheim was a vision he called the “romantic-conservative counterutopia”. This was a defensive vision to be used as an intellectual/theoretical counter by conservatives who thought their order was under attack. In this vision, the present was a utopia and the past was where it came from. Thus, liberals were fools for trying to create false realities, history was the supreme teacher, and governments that relied on artificial constitutions were to be mocked.
The key concept to be taken from this “counterutopia” is the focus on “becoming”. Mannheim describes it as such.
“There is a wonderful sense we have,” says [Friedrich] Stahl, “that something truly exists. This is your father, your friend, through whom you have arrived at this position in life. Why am I this? Why am I exactly what I am? And the apparently incomprehensible nature of this situation can only be grasped by recognizing that our being cannot be reduced to thought, that it is not logically necessary but has its source in a higher, free power.”
The tie-in to fascism should be obvious to an attentive reader, since Gottfried has spent many words now describing it as a force created in response to socialism/communism. For Ernst Nolte, there is a direct line from German thinkers in the 1840s who were reacting to the Left Hegelians and the fascists of the 20th century, as both glorified irrationality and authority’s mystical sense in response to their opponents who used reason as the basis for political reform.
Where the fascists and conservative differed is the temporal circumstances they were in. The fascists were acting in a world where bourgeois societies were well-established. They were revolting against the status quo, not defending it. Even their conception of a “people” was one used by the leftists in Mannheim’s studies. The old right did not believe in the population being a “mystical source of spiritual energy that informed the nation.” Instead, the people were those subjects who obeyed authority.
Is there anything there?
That said, we do need to ask if fascism actually had a vision of the future. Was there some vision that radically departed from both the past and the contemporary left?
Gottfried points to people like Jose Antonio and Ledesma Ramos as people who did just that. They looked towards Catholic social teachings, indicating corporatist organization and communal participation. How this would come about wasn’t ever fully worked out, but for these and other Falangist architectural heroes, national syndicalism was the solution.
Gottfried gives three alternatives the fascists may have embraced. The first is the about biological struggle between races and ethnicities, known by its association with the Nazis. There is a non-violent form found in the 19th-century writings of Count Gobineau and Heinrich Gumplowicz which just asserts that history never ends but amounted to ethnic struggle with transient victories providing interruptions.
The second comes from Gentile’s work. History in this view is an unending process in which every individual’s ethical will is part of a multitude that is “actuated by the state as the ‘means’ through which individuals could rise above their particularities and become part of a spiritual whole.” World history, in this sense, is a world court.
The third is about selectively reclaiming the past. All fascist movements did this, Gottfried explains, but some more than others. The Latin manifestations were bigger on this, attempting to update history for counterrevolutionary purposes. In all movement, however, you would find themes of decadence and renewal. History never tended towards a universal society of equals, but arresting deterioration was entirely possible.
Why studying fascism matter
This section is an abrupt turn because it feels out of place with the parts about fascist utopias, but Gottfried turns to the question of why studying fascism (and not “fascism” as any particular side might define it) matters.
Put simply, studying fascism would indicate how far most modern political parties are from the term. Fascism belongs to the right, but most definitely not the same way that the GOP or Germany’s Christian Democrats do. Fascism wasn’t the only “Right” of its time, nor did all fascists fight for Hitler (some understandably fought against him when he invaded their countries).
Gottfried doesn’t believe you could make Nazi ideology ever workable in the West – there’s simply too much ethnic mixing. Insofar as you could call this an “ideology of diversity”, an alternative to that ideology may not exist.
Then there’s an pivot, one that goes after people who might argue that fascism is left-wing because the modern US right uses anti-state and individual rights rhetoric.
This brings the reader back to the question of how fascists could be on the Right, and even on the far Right, if the Right is now identified, at least in the United States, with individual self-fulfillment.
I don’t think “individual self-fulfillment” is how we identify the right in the US or even how some might self-identify that way, there’s a substantial religious population who would not agree with such a term. But assuming this is an accurate definition, Gottfried answers this question with the following.
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The right and left are contextually defined, so just because the fascists fought one enemy with one set of ideals doesn’t mean the current American right has to fight that same enemy. To the modern US right, the state must be opposed because it doesn’t support right-wing policies.
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There’s nothing inherently right-wing about individual rights. European conservatives typically identify individualism as a left-wing idea. In America, the left has used the language of individual rights as a weapon found in the Bill of Rights and that traditionalists don’t want used against them. Thus, they defend what they don’t believe.
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Appealing to constitutionally guaranteed individual rights is not something that belongs to the historic right. Rather, this may indicate the limited range of options for critics of the modern administrative state.
Fascism, Gottfried argues, never had a chance for being an overpowering historical force. It simply did not build mass movements large enough except in unevenly modernized countries (excluding the Nazi regime). They might have survived a bit longer than most if all things went well, but their failure indicates how difficult a right-wing movement would find it to oppose the “ascendancy of the modern left”.
To summarize, Fascism offered distinct utopian visions even if it did not believe in a universal one. This was in reaction to and used the terminology of those offered by the socialists and Marxists. A few alternative visions existed, with a major one being national syndicalism. Fascism is an undoubtedly right-wing phenomenon which modern right-wingers cannot wholly break association from. That said, Nazism would never work in the modern West, and fascism stood very little chance of winning to the extent that socialism/communism/Marxism did.
I hope you enjoyed! Next time, we’ll go over Chapter 7 – A Vanished Revolutionary Right.
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An in depth proposal for how Elon can brute force the Problem of Identity to make 10s of billions off of Twitter Verifications.
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Since the Great Recession, the Fed has transformed itself into an entity more and more responsible for asset prices. This was the stated goal since 2009 as the Fed adopted a new philosophy called the "Wealth Effect." The thinking behind it was simple: growth in asset prices would translate to an increase in consumer spending and hence demand itself. It was a 'trickle down' economic philosophy an increasingly financialized economy.
This backdrop has defined our post-2009 era which stirred certain pathologies that were reflected in the greater culture and politics. It was the time when 'finance became a culture' and actual-productivity plummeted across most developed economies, especially the United States. But somehow in spite of the accumulating dysfunction across most key areas, everything kept trudging along, partly thanks to investors being satiated with record returns.
While the near-zero interest rate regime may now be ending, it is worth considering how much of the water we were all swimming in excused poor state capacity, distorted economic fundamentals, and how it even kept a lid on the dysfunction potentially blowing up in our faces. Now that we have to reckon with these realities, it may be wise to ask how many worldviews were simply products of the the cheap money regime - which is now, in a shock to many, coming to a close. Whether or not it will easily be let go, however, is another matter.