Godwin’s Heroes

Anyone choosing to identify himself or herself as a conservative nowadays can expect, within a relatively brief amount of time, to be called a "fascist" by someone whose views fall to the left-of-center. The insult has become so de rigueur on leftist blogs and such like-minded televised dolt-fests as Real Time with Bill Maher that it now generates little more than yawns from conservatives.

But one conservative who isn't yawning is Jonah Goldberg, who has kicked a left-wing hornet's nest with the publication of his book, Liberal Fascism. Therein, Goldberg explains that the ideological origins of fascism are not on the political right, as many think, but are actually on the political left. This may sound strange to the ears of many an American, having become used to leftists linking every conservative or Republican politician from Joseph McCarthy to George W. Bush with such infamous figures as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. But Goldberg is right – there is nothing conservative about Italian Fascism or its German variant (National Socialism).

As I explained in an earlier entry reviewing Oriana Fallaci's The Force of Reason, there is nothing truly conservative about Fascism or National Socialism. Like Communism, National Socialism and Fascism are revolutionary ideologies that operate from a set of shared assumptions concerning traditional European culture:

1. said culture (religious and secular) is unjust and unresponsive to the needs of the masses,
   
2. traditional cultural institutions (the monarchy and the church) are the chief barriers to needed social change, and
   
3. the state must be used to break down said repressive cultural mores and institutions, paving the way for the establishment of a truly revolutionary society.
   

English-language Nazi propaganda published by the German government during World War II characterized the conflict between the Axis powers and the liberal democracies as one between the masses and the plutocrats – hardly a characterization that conservatives would use.

Benito Mussolini, the original Fascist, grew up in an ardently socialist household. Benito's father, Alessandro Mussolini, named his son after the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez – a man admired by revolutionary socialists the world over for having overthrown and executed Mexico's Hapsburg emperor, Maximilian I, in 1867. In 1900, at the age of seventeen, Mussolini formally joined the Socialist Party and by 1912 he had joined its most radical wing. Mussolini's act of "heresy" against mainline socialism came in 1914, when he chose to endorse Italian intervention in the Great War that was spreading across the continent. Italian Socialists (unlike socialists in Britain, France, Germany, and later America) characterized the war as being one for imperialism and capitalism; Mussolini's about-face stung. Goldberg writes:

From the beginning, fascism was dubbed as right-wing not because it necessarily was right-wing but because the communist left thought this was the best way to punish apostasy (and, even if it was right-wing in some long forgotten doctrinal sense, fascism was still right-wing socialism). It has ever been thus. After all, if support for the war made one objectively right-wing, then Mother Jones was a rabid right-winger, too. This should be a familiar dynamic today, as support for the war in Iraq is all it takes to be a "right-winger" in many circles.

It was not long thereafter that that Mussolini was forced to quit the Socialists and join up with a group of radicals known as the Fascio Autonomo d'Azione Rivoluzionaria, or as they came to be more commonly known, the Fascists.

The Fascists were without question a leftist, statist organization, as this translation of "The Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle" (by Vox Day) shows. Among the items the allegedly "right-wing" Fascists were calling for:

1. minimum wage
   
2. eight-hour workday
   
3. recognition of the political authority of labor unions (similar to syndicalism)
   
4. systemization of railways
   
5. lowering of the mandatory retirement age
   
6. "The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics, which constitute an enormous liability on the Nation and on the privileges of the poor."
   

What was part-and-parcel of Fascism was the recognition of the ultimate authority of the state – no individual, corporation, or church could be put above it. Naturally, this did not sit well with one of Italy's traditionally influential organizations: the Catholic Church. After years of strife between the Catholic Church and the Fascist government that had taken control of Italy in 1922, the Lateran Pacts of 1929 were agreed to – formalizing the relationship between the Church and the Italian state. The relationship between the two parties was hardly an alliance, as many disingenuous leftists have tried to portray it.

In addition to outlining Mussolini's Fascism and Adolf Hitler's variant thereof, Goldberg spends much of the remainder of the book showing how the political left in America – beginning with Woodrow Wilson's version of war socialism – has actually reflected more of an operational fascist influence than the American right. As outrageous as that is to so many on the left, Goldberg's central assertion is true. Since the Wilson presidency, it has been the American left which has shown more of a penchant for using the state to try to shape society. From Wilson's use of the American Protective League to silence anti-war dissenters, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, to Johnson's Great Society, and to Hillary Clinton's bungled effort at socializing American health care during the 1990s, it has consistently been the left which has tried to use the state to create its ever-elusive earthly utopia – repeatedly trampling over individual freedom in the process.

Despite the decades-long insistence of the left that evil conservatives wish to transform the United States of America into a police state, their own history proves otherwise. When faced with the question of choosing the state or freedom, real conservatives respond as Vice President John C. Calhoun once declared: "The union, next to our liberty most dear."