The Left-cult of actionism

Jürgen Habermas is certainly more worthy of citation that Jonah Goldberg. Russell Berman writes an interesting article from a conservative position in the latest Democratiya, "From ‘Left-Fascism’ to Campus Anti-Semitism: Radicalism as Reaction," in which he cites Habermas and others. Berman, of the right-wing Hoover Institute, might be aiming to mainstream Goldberg/Horowitz, but I think he accomplishes something anyway. I distrust his attacks on "a growing illiberalism in the academic world" as poorly targeted. But many of his comments indeed seem to be critiques from the left of an ornate and insubstantial Left that is more liberal -in the sense which Leftists use as a rejoinder- than liberals.

Neither fascism nor antisemitism are exclusively right-wing affairs. No prejudice has ever failed to find a home on the Left while it pervades society, despite the Left's insistence that it is above and apart from the society of which it is the Left, but beyond that there have always been left roots of antisemitism. Almost as soon as Marx wrote "On the Jewish Question," antisemitism took form as Bebel's "socialism of fools."

And, despite attempts to describe fascism as Bush's style of corporate cronyism (a critique that misses the point of the fascist's favored analogy to the corporation, which focused on hierarchy and leaders and deplored the ability of corporate heads to bully a weak leader), fascism developed as a third-way critique of both Capitalism and Communism. Under the same circumstances as Social Democracy.

What Russell Berman (no relation to Sheri, I'm sure) says of Habermas is that:

...he expressed concern about the movement's tendency [in the 60s] to combine an indifference toward consequences with an oblivious actionism, as if the decision to act at all were always more important than any consideration of consequences.

This might fail as a complete description of fascism, but it is, I think, a key aspect of fascism's appeal. To do something. The urge to do something will make people do anything.

This is a key argument of the Boycott Israel movement, and while it may not be fascistic as such (the parallel to the UCU's disclaimer that criticism of Israel is not antisemitic "as such" is entirely intended) I find it troubling for exactly the same reasons I would under other circumstances. Something, we are repeatedly told, must be done - and that something is apparently not the One Voice movement, the Seeds of Peace program, or any other cooperative project for peace. Nothing that would require engaging with people who disagree, diluting the boycotters purity.

Those who disagree, even just a little, may be cast out of the Left. (Can we understand "the Left" here as some post-national replacement for the nation?) Anyone who claims that the situation is complicated and requires a measured response is denounced in terms I doubt we could distinguish from fascistic anti-intellectualism.

So everything productive, and there are productive things to be done, is illegitimated as by an overdetermined anti-theory. What "must be done," instead, is to make Israel a "pariah state." And, following immediately, pariahs of all the Jews who support the existence of Israel, whether or not they support the supposed crimes (I say supposed, because the crime that motivates this anti-theory seems always to be an alibi to cirticize Israel's mere existence) that the boycotters claim to be their motivation.

In other words, Baker levels the charge that Jews cannot be, or have difficulties being, reliable and trustworthy anti-Zionists. Noam Chomsky has faced similar accusations: his career argument against Israel as an agent of Washington now faces denunciations from more radical anti-Zionists as a white-washing camouflage for the reverse hypothesis, the hypothetical Israeli domination of Washington, which is nothing more than the colorful antisemitic fantasy of conspiratorial Jewish world control. [13]

Indeed, there is something fascistic about denouncing the Jewish "internal Other" so, creating a standard of assimilation that is ultimately impossible. The Différance remains. More importantly, when we recognize that many boycotters are not as antisemitic as Baker, defining Différance remains in the control of gentiles.

Dogs and Cats! Sleeping together!

David Duke not quite an Obamaniac

To me via ThreeWayFight. Add it to the stories of the BNP trying to downplay its antisemitism (an idiotic article from Tony G.) and what picture comes into view? I find it interesting how such far-right racists try to disguise their views, sometimes arguing amongst themselves over who is more threatening -- Woody Allen or Tony Shalhoub -- but it's really just trying to be politic.

Also, via TWF, a video on Russian fascism serves as a good reminder of what it is:

An interesting post over at Judeosphere. If you read closely, it provides good descriptions of both Islamism and fascism sorely missing in a fair bit of the popular discussion.

reading fascism

If you're looking for new stuff for the reading list, here's a review of three books (.pdf) on fascism from Sheri Berman. She writes:

Recognizing fascism’s tripartite nature is crucial for assessing not only its historical significance but also its continuing relevance.

To Berman, that tripartite structure includes political, social, and ideological factors - so that even people like Jean-Marie Le Pen aren't rightly considered fascist since they don't command the same social movements. Today then, only radical Islamism, then, is fascist. I think she fails to consider that individual components of fascism might still be worth highlighting with comparisons to fascism, so that Le Pen can be described as a fascist without enough other fascists around him. But it's also important to consider that fascism consists of each dimension. There are social and ideological elements to fascism that are different from the mere political. With fascism having been so abused in the popular discourse, I think some left-leaning people have attempted to reapply a more rigorous definition that includes Bush but doesn't include radical Islamists. Berman's description of fascism help me to understand why I see things differently than they do. (In part - part of it is that they're just inane.) I'm more focused - and I need to think about whether this is excessively so - on some of the social dynamics and ideological components than on the political.

Bush's black-and-white/with-us-or-against-us thinking and disrespect for limits on his power certainly should be compared to fascism, but there is a limited social movement supportive of his fascist tendencies. And while his folsky charm (at least people once thought he had that) appeals to a broad, popular impulse, his ideology doesn't appeal to those who see themselves as losing their jobs to foreign workers. On the other hand, some of his nastiest detractors show the same black-and-white/with-us-or-against-us thinking and a coalition-populism together with a willingness to scapegoat neocons (sometimes read as Zionists or Jews) that I find far more disturbing. This is the social dynamic of a fascist movement. What they lack is the power to really challenge Bush, much like Le Pen lacks the power to challenge the governing French powers at the moment. Instead, they plan to vote for Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich, one of whom shows all the same signs of absolutist thinking as Bush.

You can read a bit more about Berman's views on fascism here.

I don't want to be a football

Being a left-wing or progressive Zionist (phrases describing most Jews) can a bit awkward these days. Neither the anti-Zionist left nor the pro-Israel right like to remember that you exist, both prefering to lump you in somewhere around Vladomir Jabotinsky, and it's easy to become a political football in the culture wars. Even, so it strangely seems at the moment, when the principles aren't thinking about Israel, Zionism, or Jews. Probably something to do with the structure of antisemitism, which posits powerful Jews and therefore paints antisemitism as counterhegemonic, that it's right-wingers taking antisemitism more seriously these days. Well, seriously may not be the right word..

Today, Crooked Timber has two posts by Kieran Healy mocking Jonah Goldberg's new book Liberal Fascism. It is, by all appearances a book that uses the history of fascism to criticize everything from Whole Foods to Hillary Clinton. I've never thought much about the debates over whether the "Soup Nazi" episode of Seinfeld "trivializes" the Holocaust. It never bothered me much, but I couldn't say that I understood the views of those who were offended well enough to pass judgment on their feelings. Well, this book kind of bugs me. I don't know if it's because it appropriates the moral weight of the memory of the Holocaust, which tends to come as a package deal with the word "Fascism" for partisan effect, or just because the book looks to be an insult to the intelligence of all sentient beings.

But, at the same time, I do think Healy could do a lot better than to punt the football back to the other side. There are serious arguments that Goldberg's book probably almost touches upon, and I think it would be better to draw a distinction in that same post to provide a bit of perspective. (I don't know quite to what extent, but it appears that CT has addressed these more serious ideas at least to an extent. I read the site sporadically, first drawn by the wit and wisdom of Michael Bérubé, who hasn't put up much in a while. As near as I can tell, Healy doesn't consider that Goldberg's book may have aspects relevant to another debate than the one with which he is concerned.) Let me put forth this post as a warning for people tempted to reject out of hand every idea superficially similar to Goldberg's - using Goldberg as a strawman.

The first such argument that ought not to be ridiculed is that people didn't take Hitler seriously when they should have. In his article "Did Hitlerism Die with Hitler?" historian Omer Bartov writes:

When Hitler wrote it, no one could tell whether his plans and fantasies would ever be transformed into reality. Much of what Hitler put together in this book could already be found in Mein Kampf, if anyone had bothered to read it, and other ideas were expressed unambiguously in his speeches. Yet it was difficult to believe that anyone in his right mind would try to translate such rhetoric into policy. It was generally thought that in power Hitler would be constrained by the realities of diplomacy, the limits of Germany's power, the national interests of the Reich, and the military, economic, and political partners with whom he had to make policy.

That refusal to discuss the actual threats being made against Jews is the same sort of non-argument, jumping the gun to discuss whether military action is the right response, many leftists and "realists" are making today about Ahmadinejad (and, to a lesser extent for the simple reason that Ahmadinejad is so much more public, the rest of the Iranian regime). It's the same sort of argument plenty of people seem to be making about the genocidal aims of Hezbollah and Hamas. Here, even, Healy derides Norman Podhoretz in a post titled "Hitler Hitler Hitler," (echoed by today's "Fascism, Fascism, Fascism"). Granting that Podhoretz is generally deserving of ridicule, in the video clip he made the perfectly reasonable argument, the same that Bartov does, that we shouldn't dismiss Ahmadinejad's rhetoric for the simplistic reason that it's so difficult for us to accept that someone could believe such things. The uses in my experience online of such "sophisticated" derision of those who are naive enough to take hateful rhetoric as sincere, are too often to paint Israelis and Jews worldwide as paranoiacs screaming "Fascism, Fascism, Fascism" or "Hitler Hitler Hitler" for political gain to manipulate and control American foreign policy.

Secondly, and perhaps more significant here because it seems closer to the point of Goldberg's book, is that the politics of fascist and Nazi antisemitism was indeed a bit more complicated than is connoted by the modern use of the word fascist, which has come to mean little more than "right-wing evil."

According to Shulamit Volkov's Germans, Jews, and Antisemites (reviewed here), the birth of modern, German antisemitism was not a strictly right-wing affair, but a time of political turmoil where political lines became confused and antisemitism came to dominate as a cultural code even before it became a more widely held political position. (I wrote a bit about that here on Newsvine.) Wilhelm Marr, who wrote the influential pamphlets "The Victory of Jewishness over German-ness" and "The Way to Victory of German-ness over Jewishness," and also formed The League of Antisemites, all in 1879, began his political career as a left-liberal. Heinrich von Treitschke was also known as a liberal. Paul de la Garde, though conservative, was notably opposed to racism. In Britain at about the same time, the left character of the antisemitism in the movement opposing the Boer War was even clearer. There were good reasons August Bebel famously called antisemitism the "Socialism of Fools."

As time went on and German antisemitism grew in response to the loss of WWI, the Nazi's rise to power was not based on a strictly right-wing platform in the way that Bush is right-wing but as a right-populist movement. The Nazis undertook great public works programs, opposed capitalism, and spoke publicly about socialism in ways that are forgotten. The point is often made these days that fascism was corporatist, but as is rarely acknowledged by those who make that argument, corporatist fascism was in opposition to "Jewish capitalism" and "International Bankers." The corporate analogy fascists loved was distinct from Capitalism guided by the invisible hand, and the corporate giants the Nazis allied with were those who could be subordinated under Hitler's direction. Fascists argued that, as every corporation had a head, so did the overall economy need to be under the direction of the nation's strong leader.

And even today, fascist movements are often to the left of mainstream-liberal, political parties when considering only economic issues. While the Political Compass website places Hitler as center-right on its economic dimension, it puts the British National Front to the economic left of both New Labour and the Liberal Dems. And, of course, there's plenty of indications from Chavez that he doesn't know the difference between socialism and fascism. And why are most Trotskyists these days repeating Stalinist anti-Zionism that was never more than thinly veiled antisemitism?

However you want to put it, as a deluded socialism or anti-imperialism of fools, or as a right-wing tendency presenting itself as leftist (as David Duke appears repeatedly at Palestinian Solidarity events), there are serious reasons to make analogies between segments of the contemporary left and fascist history. Just not, as Goldberg has done, between Hillary Clinton and fascism. Goldberg has certainly done a disservice to the discourse with what's certainly a ham-fisted book, but that doesn't mean the rest of us should respond any less seriously. If we are to learn from the Holocaust, as so many people would like us to do, perhaps Godwin's Law needs an escape clause?