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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.
When I was coming of age, there was a rule, concerning analysis and argument: Never compare anything to the Nazis. The Nazis are, literally, incomparable. Any comparison to them is disrespectful of their victims, and trivializing.
I have great sympathy for this point of view. Comparisons to the Nazis are often cheap and, indeed, insulting. I would rather have too few comparisons—or even none—than too many.
But, you know? Genocide and savagery are constants of human behavior. Ask the Cambodians, among others.
In 2017, Jerome A. Cohen, the American scholar of China, sounded the alarm about Beijing’s persecution of the Uyghurs. He told me he thought of his distant relatives—some 40 of them—murdered in the Holocaust.
Then we have the word “fascist” (and its companion noun “fascism”). As early as 1946, Orwell was saying that “fascism” had come to have no meaning “except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” Many, many times, I have been called a “fascist,” for my conservative views (which are “Reaganite” or “classical liberal,” if you like). I could entertain you, or appall you, with stories.
My views are the opposite of fascist. I favor limited government, separation of powers, individual rights, a free economy, and so on and so forth. And fascism? I call on Mussolini, who said, “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
That is a far cry from Tocquevillean democracy.
But, you know? There are fascists in this world, and communists, and other authoritarian and totalitarian types. That which is fascist and that which is communist have often blended. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was a pact made in heaven, or hell. But Hitler double-crossed his partner, Stalin.
Fidel Castro was an interesting blend. As a young man, he was a fascist, educated to admire Primo de Rivera, Mussolini, and Hitler. But this was a little awkward after 1945. So he hitched his wagon to the reds. This did not require much change in thought or character.
How would you define “fascism”? George F. Will has had a go at it in a column or two. In 2020, he wrote, “Communism had a revolutionary doctrine; fascism was more a mood than a doctrine. It was a stance of undifferentiated truculence toward the institutions and manners of liberal democracy.”
Will quoted Mussolini, who said, “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program?” (Il Mondo, or “The World,” was a newspaper, short-lived.) “It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo.”
We are getting to our current environment, as you thought we might.
In the summer of 2016, I wrote a longish article titled “The F-Word.” That word, of course, was “fascist.” A lot of people had concerns about Donald Trump, soon to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. Was he or wasn’t he?
I said that I was loath to toss around the F-word, in part because I myself had been on the receiving end of that word. But I agreed that there were “grounds for concern: concern that Trump is something other than an exponent of liberal democracy.” I detailed those grounds. For instance, Trump constantly invoked, and exalted, “strength.”
Let me give you an aside, possibly amusing. Two future MAGA stars—mega-stars—praised my article and found it important. Today, they have about 12 million followers, combined, on X.
Just before the 2016 election, James Kirchick wrote a fascinating and candid essay, modeled on an essay by Dorothy Thompson, published in 1941. “More than any book I’ve read or lecture I’ve attended,” said Kirchick, “the Trump phenomenon has explained the 1930s for me.”
Many of us knew just what he meant.
By February 2021, another conservative writer had seen enough. “Donald Trump’s promise of American strength has involved the betrayal of American identity,” wrote Michael Gerson. “This is a reality that I have resisted naming. The 45th president and a significant portion of his supporters have embraced American fascism.”
Today, there are many people—many young people, in particular—who are ... let’s say, fascism-curious. What did Carl Schmitt believe, anyway? What about the economic theories of Friedrich List? Has the Holocaust been exaggerated? Hasn’t an emphasis on individual rights torn the fabric of our society?
Just asking questions!
During the 2024 presidential-election cycle, a fascist symbol—the Sonnenrad (sun wheel)—made its way into an ad supporting Florida governor Ron DeSantis. How the heck did that get in there?
From Trump himself, we could cite countless things. Maybe I could choose just one. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” the president tweeted early in his second term. Does that sound American?
About two weeks ago, Stephen Miller, the presidential aide, spoke to CNN’s Jake Tapper. They discussed, among other things, the administration’s designs on Greenland. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” said Miller. But ours is a world “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
Adding a Spenglerian touch, Miller said, “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Iron laws aside, the word “niceties” rang a bell for me. In October 2016, Trump was refusing to say whether he would accept the result of the presidential election. Patrick J. Buchanan had a comment—duly Buchananite: The “populist-nationalist Right” was “moving beyond the niceties of liberal democracy to save the America they love.”
As I remarked in an article last November, “one man’s niceties are another man’s preconditions for a decent national and political life.”
When it comes to fascism—accusations of and concerns about—I would not go overboard. But may I say that I would not go underboard either? I believe in “American exceptionalism,” to a degree. But I also know that we Americans aren’t so exceptional as not to be human beings. We are not superhuman creatures, immune from the ills that haunt mankind.
In recent years, several people of my acquaintance have read or re-read William L. Shirer’s classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. They find some things familiar. Are they hysterics? Are they guilty of reductio ad Hitlerum?
I know others who have read or re-read Stefan Zweig’s classic memoirs, The World of Yesterday. I myself read them (for the first time). They are about Europe and World War I. And Europe and the next world war. Zweig inspired an essay from me, here.
Maybe you know a line from Goebbels: “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction.” As Adam Gopnik noted in an article last year, this is “one of those quotes that sound apocryphal but are not.”
In 2014, the Salzburg Festival staged a new opera, Charlotte Salomon, by Marc-André Dalbavie. It tells a Holocaust story. The stage director was Luc Bondy, son of the liberal anti-communist writer François Bondy.
Here are the concluding lines of my review:
The Nazis were depicted with distorted, grotesque faces. The singers and actors portraying the Nazis were wearing masks of some sort. One can appreciate this decision: the outer is reflecting the inner. Part of the evil of totalitarians, however, is that they look like everyone else.
Yes. A jolting thing about the monsters among us is that they are not just monstrous but human. And other human beings, less monstrous, go along ...
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Fascism is the abandonment or perversion of one’s ideals in order to achieve their idealistic end through nationalism and militarization. When you abandon ideals in practice, they atrophy and don’t come back. The key phrase here is “in practice.” Ideology isn’t measured by rhetoric, it’s measured by action.
It’s got nothing to do with left and right. History has proven both extremes are capable of fascism. The definition falls apart when you only apply it to the far right.
Mussolini abandoned Marxism as ineffective. He gradually felt that nationalism and militarization were the only way to achieve his ideals. When those ideals fail to be achieved, nationalism and militarization consume them and their rule depends on it.
Without question, Trump and most of the GOP are fascist. Use the proper word please. Don’t reinforce a falsehood that they are employing conservative ideology. They are not. This is not what conservative ideology looks like. It’s fascism. Don’t overcomplicate something so simple.
gary k. I have a masters degree so am informed. your columns have most often been bewildering but your latest post has been informing, I now understand your underpinnings. you are a wealthy intelligentsia conservative and are of no help to the undoing of our country. jill solomon marland