Antifascism, True and False: A Review of Paul Gottfried’s “Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade”
Paul Gottfried, Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021.
In 1944, George Orwell asked :”Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition” of fascism? Pointing to the growing misuse of the F-word on the Left and the Right, he offered this advice: “All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”[1]
In the present age, the lack of clarity surrounding fascism has only got worse. In his new book, Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade, the distinguished historian of ideas Paul Gottfried brings much needed light to this darkness. He persuasively shows that current opposition to “fascism” misses the mark, not least because there is so little understanding of what fascism is today. “The term ‘fascism’ functions as a resource that the speaker, whether a journalist, actor, comedian, educator, politician, or member of the clergy, can lay hold of to demonize an opponent.” (1-2) Like his earlier study Fascism: The Career of a Concept (2016), this book disentangles the original meaning and historical context of fascism from various contemporary attempts to reinvent or distort its message. In the process, Gottfried meticulously documents how “antifascism” has become just as obscure in meaning as its alleged enemy. Drawing from his vast expertise on the history of political ideas, he provides a high quality discussion that never descends into jargon or empty assertions. Gottfried always writes with care, never missing an opportunity to draw important connections between the past and the present while incisively showing that the politics of the present do not literally repeat the past.
Yet this study is no mere survey of the changeable meaning of antifascism throughout history. What sets apart this study from his earlier work on fascism is the greater emphasis that Gottfried places on how power operates in today’s liberal democracies. Specifically, he provides a compelling and disturbing critique of the way that liberal democracies wield power, especially the control of language and historical memory for purposes that have nothing to do with fighting fascism. “However else it may operate, arousing a fear of fascism serves the interests of the powerful.” (1) The near absence of a popular and accurate comprehension of fascism is the result of a deliberate ignorance that powerful elites on the Left and the Right actively encourage. People living in the 1920s, 1930s, and even the 1940s (pace Orwell) “who spoke about fascism had a specific phenomenon in mind. Those who read or listened to them knew what the phenomenon was, and perhaps most importantly, fascists or Nazis identified themselves as such. This is not the process of identification that is currently taking place.” (77) How did we get to a place where Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can confidently claim that “fascism” defines American society (in the Trump era), without being required to provide a clear definition of the F-word?
In order to answer this question, Gottfried takes a linear approach, beginning with a discussion of the origins of traditional antifascism, continuing with an interpretation of various post-World War II attempts to redefine fascism, and concluding with an extensive analysis of how political elites on the Left and Right have reinvented the meaning of antifascism for utterly partisan purposes. Gottfried’s historical survey begins with a chapter devoted to the fact that the Antifa of today has almost nothing to do with the Antifa of yesteryear. The original Antifa came into being as a far left movement that violently opposed the regime of Benito Mussolini that was established in 1922, amidst the political chaos and economic dislocation that engulfed Italy after World War One. Up to this point, socialists and fascists had already violently clashed in the streets, grimly demonstrating the radical differences between the Left and the Right. Whereas supporters of Antifa sought to paralyze Italy with labor strikes and the occupation of factories, Mussolini’s fascist movement was mainly made up of nationalistic veterans who resented Italy’s failure to acquire new territory at the end of the Great War as well as the economic instability that the communist Left had aggravated.
Contrary to Marxist interpretations, Mussolini’s regime was not a mere “front for corporate capitalists and monopolistic landowners.” (33) In fact, as Gottfried shows, defenders of Antifa and fascism sounded at times remarkably similar in their denunciations of capitalism. Until Mussolini fatefully moved into the orbit of Nazi Germany, many observers inside and outside of Italy saw Il Duce as a man of the Left who despised Hitler and his regime.
The anti-capitalist ideology of the Italian Antifa was inspired by Marxist-Leninism, whose globalist or internationalist revolutionary ambitions utterly antagonized Mussolini’s Blackshirts (squadristi). Although it is tempting to argue that today’s Antifa faithfully follows in the footsteps of its Italian precursor, Gottfried utterly rejects this parallel. Neither the old Antifa nor the Marxian left in general has anything in common with the faux Antifa of the early 21st century. Unlike the Communists of old, “the present antifascist Left has advocates at all levels of government and throughout the media and educational system.” (27) Notwithstanding the anti-capitalist rhetoric evident in both the old and new manifestations, the new Antifa exhibits a hatred of Western civilization that would have been unthinkable to Marx and his heirs. Just as inconceivable to traditional Marxists would be the current Left’s forming of alliances with big business. Yet Antifa’s equation of the West with “fascism” does not discourage major media powers from supporting its ideological aims. In his chapter on the “mainstreaming of fascism,” Gottfried shows how the media’s embrace of Antifa’s “cancel culture” imperative has no precedent in the history of the radical Left:
Antifa not only represents the militant anti-capitalist Left but, more significantly, also constitutes the opposition to Western civilization. In the vanguard of these revolutionary forces, the corporate sector, as noted earlier, is playing a critical role. PayPal, Pepsi, Adobe, and other corporations have been working to get Facebook, and related electronic media to de-platform dissenting voices on the Right. (27)
Even the Frankfurt School of “critical theory,” from which Antifa draws many of its ideas, differs significantly from its young admirers. To be sure, Gottfried is no reluctant critic of the so-called “Cultural Marxism” that this school inspired. In his book The Strange Death of Marxism (2003), he explains how the Frankfurters’ call for cultural and sexual revolution ended up providing the ideology for the modern therapeutic state that monitors and exposes citizens in liberal democracies for “prejudiced” or “authoritarian” (that is, conservative and bourgeois) attitudes. Like Antifa, some Frankfurt theorists, particularly Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, saw nothing wrong with using the power of the democratic state to suppress allegedly fascist ideas. These figures did not retain the classical Marxist suspicion of the state as the compromised instrument of the ruling class, a retreat from leftist elite theory that Gottfried discusses elsewhere.[2] Nevertheless, despite the strained attempts of Eric Fromm, Adorno, and Wilhelm Reich to associate sexual repression with the appeal of fascism and Nazism (47, 60), nowhere do these “first-generation critical theorists demand the obliteration of gender distinctions, which like others of their generation they assumed were real and valid, as opposed to a social construct.” (139) The fact that Antifa violently demonstrates against citizens who oppose trans-genderism reveals just how far it has migrated beyond the traditional radical Left.[3]
It is tempting to argue that Antifa’s preoccupation with rooting out suspected fascist sympathies is the culmination of the de-Nazification of occupied West Germany after World War II. What Gottfried describes as the “revisionist” attempts of historian Fritz Fischer and others to insist that Germans atone for their “uniformly evil past” (68) certainly bears a striking resemblance to the current attempts of liberal democracies to condemn “genocides” that allegedly occurred in their own histories. Although de-Nazification is an important precedent here, it does not entirely explain why its underlying ideology has spread to other western nations that have no experience with fascism and Nazism, except to fight and defeat them militarily during World War II.
Gottfried’s explanation for the ideological spread of antifascism across the West will trouble readers who still see America as a bourgeois conservative nation. Without the support of American elite power, antifascism would not have become a global force. “It is hard to believe that our present antifascist movements would have sprung up in Canada or Western Europe without an increasing American presence.” (7) One obvious reason for the rise of antifascism, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was the need for a new enemy. Following the friend-enemy distinction of Carl Schmitt, Gottfried notes that American liberal democracy is like any other regime in that it “has an aim at least partly determined by what it does not want to be.” (125) With the death of the USSR, it was time to find a new foe. Unlike defenders of liberal democracy who are reluctant to raise questions about the use of power within this regime, Gottfried shows his Augustinian side here. The fact that fascism is in decline as a political force should not suggest that human nature is morally progressing under liberal democracy. “Governments still act rapaciously in much of the world, and individual and group violence remain a social problem.” (5) The last thing that Gottfried would embrace is the fascist call “for allowing human nature to reassert itself” in violent forms. (136)
True to his suspicion of democratic motivations, Gottfried contends that western democracies that take their cue from America play some power politics of their own. They embrace antifascism today because it sends out the message that anyone (fascist or not) who questions democracy and equality is “beyond the parameters of polite discussion.” (150) Of course, this propagandistic move ignores the fact that one can question democratic egalitarianism without being a fascist. With a nod to Eric Voegelin’s analysis of “intoxicant” communication fostered by mass media, the current elite’s focus on fighting fascism may provide a divertissement (diversion) that discourages the “peaceful struggle of opinions” within a pluralistic society.[4]
It should not be surprising that the Left would enthusiastically support the cause of antifascism, which enables it to weaken and destroy its enemies on the Right. What requires more explanation is the fact that forces on the Right have also embraced the ideology of antifascism: conservative political parties and corporate capitalists. Why does the “American conservative establishment” kowtow to “the antifascist Left” while purging its ranks “as soon as they are accused of harboring right-wing extremists”? (148-9) In a stinging series of indictments, Gottfried faults the non-fascist Right for never truly understanding what fascism is. Unlike Marxist studies of fascism, which manifest serious scholarship and coherence, the Right in liberal democracies has often mistakenly identified fascism with “statism” or support for welfare-state liberalism. It is not only respectable libertarian economists, most famously Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who have advanced this questionable thesis. Prominent conservative media personalities such as Jonah Goldberg and Dinesh D’Souza have reaped significant commercial success and popularity in targeting the Democratic Party (especially Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) as “fascist,” even though there is zero evidence that the expansion of state power is necessarily undemocratic and fascistic. Although Gottfried is duly respectful of the scholarship of Voegelin on Nazism and other political religions, he notes that these studies have not “affected politics in any significant way” (48), especially the popular conservative critique of fascism that has all the quality of polemics on social media sites.
Critical as he is of Antifa, Gottfried pours even more scorn on the “conservative movement” for exceeding the Left “in the recklessness of its antifascist condemnations.” (113) The reason for this scorn reflects Gottfried’s distinct attitudes towards the Left and the Right. Although he is a critic of Marxism, he does concede that its practitioners have often taken principled and scholarly stances against fascism. By contrast, the “center-Right” today is weak, opportunistic, and unprincipled, generally accepting “most of what the social Left has accomplished since the 1960s while being eager to defend corporate capitalism and what they interpret as ‘human rights.’” (133)
Given the anti-capitalist rhetoric of Antifa, why would corporate capitalism also go along with its ideological program? In sharp contrast to the irrational hatred that Antifa displays towards Western civilization, there is rational self-interest evident in the behavior of large corporations towards the Left. Words like “diversity,” “tolerance,” and “inclusivism” nicely fit the agenda of corporations in search of exploitable labor. Gottfried almost sounds like a classical Marxist when he contends that the Left’s embrace of multiculturalism, open borders, and unrestricted immigration from the Third World provides a wondrous rationale for the old capitalist aim of driving down the wages of the working classes. In a chapter on the growing conflict between populists and antifascists, Gottfried writes:
The establishment eagerly promotes leftist identity politics, as well as Third World immigration, which has created a reservoir of cheap labor. It also seeks to break free of national attachments that an older, traditional Left in varying degrees affirmed…(S)ocial conflict no longer rages, as in an earlier era, between the owners of the means of production and their workers. This inveterate conflict has been replaced by a new one—between antifascists and those accused of fascist sentiments. And behind these labels is a new class conflict, in which economic and media elites are allied to Third World immigrants and the underclass against both the traditional working class and surviving critics of leftist identity politics. (96)
In this context, corporations at least are acting like rational economic actors who can spot useful propaganda when they see it. The populist Right’s opposition to these globalist policies is also rational and even a throwback to the attitudes of the Marxian working class during the Great Depression. Yet Antifa’s support for this capitalist program not only reveals a contemptuous indifference towards the proletarian “deplorables” in their own nations, it also demonstrates that the ranks of Antifa have undertaken no serious reading of traditional Marxist works that drew a clear connection between corporate support for mass immigration and business’s desire for a reserve army of the unemployed that would keep wages down. Gottfried’s analysis poses a disturbing question: is Antifa made up of “useful idiots” (to use Lenin’s term) that ignorantly shore up capitalism or are they just semiliterate protesters who don’t know how to read with care?
Corporate and media support for Antifa also clearly parallels the visceral hostility that these interests displayed towards the presidency of Donald Trump (2017-2021). As Gottfried shows, this hatred is more reflective of historical amnesia than a legitimate fear of a fascist revival. Trump’s critics have apparently not noticed that his attempt to restore a more protectionist capitalism falls far short of the fascist and Nazi subordination of the economic sphere to the state’s imperatives. Other critics, including Timothy Snyder, have decried as ‘fascist” the 45th president’s disdain for the press, Gottfried has a ready answer to this absurd claim. “It is difficult to see how Trump has been more fascist in this respect than FDR, who denounced and tried to ban abrasive Republican journalists from press conferences.” (79) Snyder, Mark Bray, and other historians have also spied the malignant return of fascism within Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration at the US-Mexico border, his measures to restrict travel from countries struggling with terrorism, and his support for trade agreements that benefit native-born workers. Unbeknownst to these critics, Trump is recycling “positions that the Democrats took in preceding decades.” (103) If we follow the logic of these commentators, then every president from FDR onwards has been a fascist!
Still, didn’t the Trump era exhibit in other ways an American version of fascism, one that Huey Long famously described as “wrapped up in an American flag?” Don’t the events at Charlottesville in August 2017 and the “insurrection” at the US Capitol in January 2021 show the unmistakable signs of a resurgent fascism that threatens to take over the republic? Although Gottfried completed this study before the Capitol riots, I suspect that his reflections on Charlottesville would be identical to where he stands on the disturbances in DC. While he condemns the violence that occurred in Charlottesville, he also takes particular aim at the media’s relative inattention to the violence wreaked by Antifa. To believe most media reports, one would have to conclude that the clash at Charlottesville was a “showdown between neo-Nazis and valiant crusaders for human rights.” (21) Yet Antifa does not deserve this positive image. In response to the “indefensible killing of George Floyd” (10), Antifa and Black Lives Matter promptly weaponized this tragedy. The violence and property damage wreaked by supporters of Antifa and BLM in the long, hot summer of 2020 arguably received far less attention and condemnation than the Alt-Right’s violence at Charlottesville or the mayhem during the Capitol “insurrection”. This selective attention of the media is troubling, in light of the fact that the thuggish violence of Antifa is comparable to that of the storm troopers in Nazi Germany. It is imperative, as Gottfried suggests, to condemn the violence on all sides while at the same time deploring the selective focus of the media on the culpability of just one side. Yet this focus is unsurprising, given the widespread fear of “fascism” among the chattering classes.
Although the primary purpose of this study is to explain the changeable meaning of antifascism, Gottfried offers some important thoughts about the future of the Right within a context that is extremely unfavorable to its growth. Readers who are familiar with Gottfried’s scholarship already know that he has written several books on the dubious survival of conservatism as a whole.[5] In Antifascism, however, his pessimism appears to have deepened, in the face of the liberal establishment’s fateful embrace of Antifa’s ideology. It is bad enough that anyone who raises questions about immigration policy or border controls is denounced as a fascist. To make matters worse, anyone who defends the survival of Western civilization and the nation-state now incurs the accusation of “white supremacy,” fascism’s country cousin. Although populist victories at the polls in America, the United Kingdom, and Eastern Europe should not be dismissed, Gottfried warns that this success may be short-lived. Despite the recurrent fears of a fascist resurgence, the future looks bright for the Left as a whole. “If the current Democratic administration encourages massive immigration while giving a path to citizenship to illegal residents, it may have enough votes to crush a populist challenge from the Right.” (104) In short, “there is no reason to believe that the establishment is collapsing before a populist adversary.” (107)
It is hard to understate the political and demographic challenges that the populist Right faces today. However, I am not sure that the present political scene is quite as rosy for the Left as Gottfried sometimes suggests. The Democratic Party’s opposition to “white supremacy” and vilification of its enemies on the Right may please its radical left wing for the time being. Yet the anti-capitalism of the radical left is already triggering a civil war with the party’s corporate donors, who balk at the socialistic desires of the Left. Anti-racist rhetoric may not be enough to divert attention indefinitely from this ideological divide within the party. On a broader scale, politicians and corporate executives who indulge in “woke” rhetoric about fighting inequality may be in for a shock when their radical allies demand substance over style (e.g., higher taxes on the wealthy).
There are two other related problems that may weaken the hegemonic control of the liberal establishment. First, even before the Trump era, it was evident that a high number of Americans both Left and Right “see their government as the enemy to be struggled against.”[6] This suspicion, which is not always rooted in paranoia, is likely to make the political system even more ungovernable than it already is, given the fact that prominent voices across the political spectrum increasingly perceive both political parties as agents of big business. Second, the establishment Left has not been noticeably successful in combating the “proletarianization” of the middle class. As Gottfried has shown, the corporate interests aligned with the Left have gone out of their way to ignore the impoverishment of the American working class. Yet the impacts of automation, wage stagnation, job insecurity, and outsourcing are taking a bite out of the middle class as well.[7] It is likely that the Left’s dalliance with identity politics and denunciations of “white supremacy” will only pit economically vulnerable groups against each other,[8] contributing to the political polarization that dominates Washington at present. As Voegelin warned in his critique of Marx, the alienating feeling of powerlessness that an unstable capitalist system encourages “is a fate which is engulfing practically our whole society.”[9] Although none of this necessarily adds up to a victory for the populist Right, the establishment Left’s scapegoating of “fascists” may not be enough to mollify the restless masses.
Of course, it is just as possible that what Voegelin aptly describes as “intoxicant” communication will continue to divert attention away from glaring problems that liberal democracies struggle to address. Still, Gottfried’s study will help serious readers find a sobering alternative to this political narrative.
NOTES:
[1] George Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune, March 24, 1944. Available in George Orwell, Essays, selected and introduced by John Carey (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2002), 573.
[2] Paul Edward Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 139.
[3] Edward Welsch, “Children of the Revolution,” Chronicles (August, 2021). Available at: https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/children-of-the-revolution_1/
[4] Eric Voegelin, “Necessary Moral Bases for Communication in a Democracy,” in The Eric Voegelin Reader, Charles R. Embry and Glenn Hughes, eds. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2017), 69-70.
[5] Paul Edward Gottfried, ed. The Vanishing Tradition: Perspectives on American Conservatism (DeKalb, Il: Northern Illinois University Press, 2020).
[6] Kai Nielsen, “Is Global Justice Impossible?” in Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will: The Political Philosophy of Kai Nielsen, David Rondel and Alex Sager, eds. (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2012), 295.
[7] Clyde W. Barrow, The Dangerous Class: The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020), 103-04. See also Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (New York: Encounter, 2020), 147-48; Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (Penguin, 2020), 142.
[8] Raju Das, “Identity Politics: A Marxist View,” Class, Race, and Corporate Power,” 8, no. 1 (2020). Available at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower
[9] Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, edited by John H. Hallowell (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975), 299.
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