Again, as I try to show in my book, the reason we call fascism and National Socialism “right wing” is because these were forms of “right-wing socialism,” or, as both the Marxist theoretician Karl Radek and Leon Trotsky argued, “middle class socialism.” And while the academic literature is on my side of the argument that the Nazis appealed to the lower classes just as much as the Communists did (if not more so), I have no problem conceding that the nature of Nazi socialism was in some significant respects different from Soviet socialism. So call it right-wing socialism if you like. But don’t saw off the right-wing part and then bludgeon American conservatives with it.
The point here is that these were all
different kinds of socialism. And in the Anglo-American tradition, socialism is a phenomenon of the Left. Period. And many, many more historians who would no doubt take issue with my book — Michael Mann and the Germans Götz Aly and Wolfgang Schivelbusch come to mind — nonetheless have written at length about the fundamental and indisputable antipathy the National
Socialists had for capitalism.
This point about race that Neiwert brings up is an important one — and one that I anticipate and discuss in my book. Because he believes that racism is inherently right-wing, the fact that the Nazis were racists means they had to be right-wingers. I concede, and talk at length, about the fact that the Nazis were racists. But racism, I’m sorry to say, is not definitively right-wing in my book (literally and figuratively). Stalin’s Russia was replete with anti-Semitism. The American Progressives were astoundingly racist (as I show). The Communists in Germany competed with the National Socialists by trying to out-Jew-bait them. Are the American Progressives, Stalin, or the German Reds now all right-wingers? Moreover, are American conservatives somehow racists because a bunch of socialists in Europe were racists? These dots do not connect.
One last point on this. The issue isn’t racism-as-bigotry. The point is racial essentialism, the idea that race matters (the title of a book by Cornel West, if memory serves). In America,
conservatives argue for colorblindness; the Left does not. The Left believes in the iron cage of racial identity, the Right does not. The Left believes in a racial spoils system, the Right does not. And yet, we
conservatives are kith and kin of the most intense racial essentialists of the 20th century? These dots, too, do not connect. (Note: As I say countless times in my book, today’s liberals are not Nazi-like bigots, but they
are racial essentialists).
Okay, this is running very long and I have other things to do. So I will try to be more succinct. He then writes:
But it was present all along; “the Left” were the people who were beaten and murdered in the 1920s by the squadristi and the Brownshirts; and the first Germans sent off to Nazi concentration camps like Dachau were not Jews but socialists, communists, and other left-wing political prisoners, including “liberal” priests and clerics.
Very quickly: As I write in my book, the Nazis were determined to destroy their competition. That is why they hated the Communists. The propaganda that says the Nazis were the opposites of the Communists because they hated each other is idiotic. Hamas and Fatah hate each other deeply, Trotsky and Stalin battled for power, and left-wing academics get their panties in a bunch over where some fellow left-winger puts a comma in a sentence. In none of these cases does mutual hatred translate to ideological divergence. Please: Stalin was a genocidal dictator. Hitler was a genocidal dictator. They both ran totalitarian, militarized regimes of total war. But yes, Nazism and Communism are opposites. Riiiight.
Much of the rest of his review hinges on the same game of desperately trying to re-affix the labels I’m trying to peel off and return to their rightful place. Yes, populism has been called “right wing” by lots of people. And there are variants of what could rightly be called “right-wing populism.” But this is a variation on the same theme. These are right-wing populisms in the same sense that fascism was right-wing socialism. I’m willing to concede the point because, well, it’s my point!
Then there’s a lot of stuff about how I don’t address the “anti-intellectualism” of fascism. This is just wrong if you read my book with care. I go on at length about the influence of pragmatism — both the Nietzschean pragmatism lamented by Julien Benda and the Pragmatism of William James and later John Dewey. Pragmatism was an intellectual enterprise, to be sure, but it was aimed at intellectualism itself. The cult of the deed, the need for action, the disdain for books and history: I show at great length how these themes informed both fascism and progressivism. Mussolini, recall, hailed James as one of his greatest influences. The pragmatic progressives lived in a universe with “the lid off,” as James put it, and the dull past no longer had relevance. History itself had become “bunk.” “I speak in dispraise of dusty learning, and in disparagement of the historical technique,” boasted Stuart Chase, the man widely credited with inventing the phrase “the new deal.” “Are our plans wrong? Who knows? Can we tell from reading history? Hardly.”
I’ve also written at great length how this spirit defines much of our age today as well. See here, here or here for starters.
Now I admit that I didn’t want to get into the weeds on a lot of political theory. Actually, I did. But my editor wanted to keep this accessible for a general audience, so I opted to show, not tell, on this point. But I show it — a lot. In fact, Neiwert quotes my book in an attempt to prove that I don’t understand the point I was in fact making. Smooth:
Probably the essential fascist statement is one that Goldberg in fact cites unreflectingly — Mussolini’s famous reply to those who wanted policy specifics from him: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” This remark’s noteworthy anti-liberalism also seems to elude Goldberg. And the notion that liberal humanism — with its long history of rationalism and reliance on logic and science — has anything whatsoever to do with the fascist approach is, once again, an almost comical upending of reality.
No, what’s comical is Neiwert’s attempt to cling to the myths upon which he relies for his daily bread. And that brings us to the close of his review which is really just a recitation of the same usual talking-points about how if you scratch an American conservative you find a Nazi underneath. And since one of the primary goals of my book is put that slander to rest, it’s no wonder he wants to protect his gravy train by attacking it so shabbily.
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