Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

10

The New Age: We're All Fascists Now

It is generally thought that National Socialism stands only for brutishness and terror. But this is not true. National Socialism — more broadly, fascism — also stands for an ideal or rather ideals that are persistent today under other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community, the repudiation of the intellect, the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders). These ideals are vivid and moving to many people...because their content is a romantic ideal to which many continue to be attached and which is expressed in such diverse modes of cultural dissidence and propaganda for new forms of community as the youth/rock culture, primal therapy, anti-psychiatry, Third-World camp-following, and belief in the occult.

— Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism"

LIBERALS CONSTANTLY COMPLAIN that conservatives are trying to impose their cultural vision on the rest of the country. In contrast, they themselves only care about the "real" issues of class and economics. Thomas Frank, author of the best-selling What's the Matter With Kansas?, leads a whole school of liberals who argue that middle-class GOP voters have been hoodwinked by Republican strategists pushing manufactured "values" issues. Frank's argument boils down to the old Marxist doctrine of false consciousness, which says that to disagree with the left about the nature of political and economic self-interest is a form of brainwashing or dementia.

But are liberals and leftists really dedicated to economic justice rather than divisive issues like gay marriage or partial-birth abortion? If you look closely, you'll see that liberals object to "values issues" in politics only when they expose liberal weaknesses. When liberals are on the defensive, they use Marxist or, if you prefer, socialistic arguments to delegitimize the opposition's cultural agenda. When conservatives have the upper hand on a cultural issue, liberalism is all about "solving problems" for the average Joe, about paychecks and health care. But on offense, it's about racial quotas, mainstreaming gay culture, scrubbing the public square of Christianity, and a host of explicitly cultural ambitions.

This socialist-parry, cultural-thrust tactic mirrors Nazi maneuvers in interesting ways. When the Nazis were debating traditionalists, monarchists, and the few classical liberals left in Germany, they sounded much like generic socialists lamenting how "big capitalism" was screwing the little guy. Hitler charged that other parties were dividing Germans along sectarian and class lines, while he wanted to focus like a laser on the economy. It was only when the National Socialists had the upper hand that they dropped their economic arguments in favor of imposing a new cultural order.

This economics-on-defense, culture-on-offense approach remained an important tactic for Hitler even after his consolidation of power. For example, in 1938, when he realized that the Nazi cultural agenda was starting to alienate significant segments of the population, he explained in a speech, "National Socialism is a cool, reality-based doctrine, based upon the sharpest scientific knowledge and its mental expression. As we have opened the people's heart to this doctrine, and as we continue to do so at the present, we have no desire to instill in the people a mysticism that lies outside the purpose and goals of our doctrine." Such language should be familiar to liberals who like to call themselves members of the "reality-based community."¹

There is simply no denying that liberalism is deeply committed to the creation and imposition of culture. Indeed, it's transparently obvious that liberals care primarily about culture. During the 1990s, for example, liberalism dove headlong into the culture-formation business, from Hillary Clinton's politics of meaning to the gender norming of college sports, to gays in the military, to the war on smoking. In 2007, to pick an offbeat recent example, a progressive child-care center in Seattle banned LEGOs because "the children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive." In response, they created a playtime that reflected the morally superior standards of "collectivity."²

The simple fact of the matter is this: liberals are the aggressors in the culture wars. Why this should seem a controversial point is somewhat baffling. It is manifestly clear that traditionalists are defending their way of life against the so-called forces of progress. When feminist groups finally persuaded the courts to force the Virginia Military Institute to accept women, who was the aggressor? Whose values were being imposed? Which side's activists boast of being "agents of change"? My point is not that the forces of change are always wrong. Far from it. My point is that the left is dishonest when it pretends that it is not in the business of imposing its values on others.

We've discussed how, in the 1950s, the left updated the traditional Marxist critique of capitalism by arguing that fascist reaction was really a psychological response to progress. Whereas once the left argued that fascism was the political reaction of economic ruling classes against the revolutionary workers, now fascism is expressed as one of many "phobias," or simply "rage," aimed at the advancement of certain groups and causes. These rages and phobias are felt almost exclusively by white male heterosexuals (and the women who love them), the scions of those evil "Dead White European Males." In the 1930s the left claimed that fascists wanted to protect their factories and titles of nobility; now we are told that the fascists — a.k.a. "angry white males" — want to preserve their unfair "privilege." Homophobia, racism, nativism, and, in a neat moral equivalence, both Islamic extremism and Islamophobia are the white male power structure's instinctive fascistic response to the shock of the new.

These kinds of arguments, to borrow a phrase from Carl von Clausewitz, represent the continuation of war by cultural means. And indeed, nowhere is this logic more visibly on display than in popular culture.

Take the movie Pleasantville. An imaginary Mayberry of a town seemingly frozen in the repressive, white-male-dominated 1950s is shaken up by the introduction of freedom-loving, sexually liberated young people from the 1990s. It's the 1960s all over again. The town elders can't handle the challenge — their liberated wives no longer have martinis and slippers waiting for them at the end of the day. In response, the white male elite — led by the Chamber of Commerce, of course — becomes increasingly fascistic. One of the film's clever conceits is that the tradition-bound people of Pleasantville are filmed in black and white while the fully realized human beings are portrayed in living color. This prompts the monochromatic fascists to start treating the "coloreds" as second-class citizens.

A similar theme can be found in the playfully fascistic film Falling Down, in which a white middle-class defense contractor played by Michael Douglas becomes violent when he is downsized and thrown out of work. In American Beauty, Kevin Spacey's sexually confused ex-marine neighbor snaps and becomes a murderer when he can't handle the idea that his son might be gay. It isn't surprising that Hollywood keeps churning out these chestnuts, but it is amazing that each time it does, so many critics hail them as novel and pathbreaking interpretations, when they are really just a series of recycled cliches.

But there's a larger point behind the effort to cast opponents of change as fascists: to make change itself the natural order by ridiculing the very notion of a natural order. The underlying dogma of these movies is that social and gender roles are not fixed, that tradition, religion, and natural law have no binding power or authority over the individual's will to power, and that the day we made the mistake of thinking otherwise was the day we took a tragic Wrong Turn.

THE KULTURKAMPF, THEN AND NOW

The phrase "culture war" is traceable to two very different thinkers. The more recent is the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who argued that the only way to throw off the old order was to launch a "long march" through elite cultural institutions. This was the strategy taken by the New Left insurgents of the 1960s, who in short order conquered English departments, editorial boards, movie studios, and the like. But the earlier and more relevant wellspring was Otto von Bismarck's Kulturkampf.

It is common among educated liberals to use the term "Kulturkampf" in referring to the supposed efforts of the right to impose its values on the rest of the country by demonizing liberals. The Germanic overtones are obviously meant to evoke a Hitlerian parallel. Quite the contrary, however, the original Kulturkampf was not a right-wing crackdown on liberal dissenters or imperiled minorities but an onslaught from the left against the forces of traditionalism and conservatism. Ostensibly, the Kulturkampf was a war against German Catholics, absorbed for the first time into greater Germany. Bismarck feared that they might not be sufficiently loyal to a Germany led by Prussia, and even more pragmatically, he wanted to avoid the formation of a German Catholic political party.

Bismarck's intentions were grounded in realpolitik and political triangulation. It was the progressive forces in the Reichstag who were the true believers. Catholicism was seen by progressive Germans as foreign, antiquated, backward, and un-German. It stood in the way of nationalism, scientism, and progress. The word "Kulturkampf" itself was coined by the influential scientist Rudolf Virchow, a renowned liberal who hoped the Kulturkampf would liberate men from the clutches of Christian superstition and wed them to progressive principles. Behind that impulse, however, lay a desire to impose a new religion, a progressive religion of the Volk-state.

The first Kulturkampf laws, passed with great fanfare in 1873, were hailed as enormous progressive strides in the separation of church and state. Emil Friedberg, a liberal architect of the anti-Catholic "May Laws," explained the state's obligations toward the Catholic Church: "to suppress it, to destroy it, to crush it with violence." In a riot of neo-Jacobinism, liberals harassed and shut down Catholic schools. Mandatory civil marriages weakened the power and influence of the Church. The state claimed the right to appoint, promote, discipline, and even deport Church officials. Most of Germany's Catholic bishops were either thrown in jail, hounded from office, or chased into exile. Eventually the Kulturkampf exhausted itself; but the idea that traditional Christianity was a threat to national progress took permanent root.³

In the 1870s the acid predictably worked its way through the body politic and transformed itself into anti-Semitism. Indeed, the word "anti-Semitism" was coined in 1879 by the atheist and radical leftist Wilhelm Marr in his tract The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism. Marr's contribution was to transform hatred of Jews from a theological passion into a "modern" racial and cultural one (he hated assimilated Jews more than orthodox ones, for example). "Anti-Semitism" — as opposed to the more theological Judenhass — was intended to ground hatred of Jews in the progressive language of scientific eugenics.

During his rise to power Hitler — in many respects the heir of the Bismarckian progressives — could hardly launch an all-out attack on Christianity. National Socialism, after all, was supposed to unite all Germans. It's "not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death," Hitler explained to his aides. "A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that's left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic."⁴

In 1937 the German Social Democratic Party, operating in exile in Prague, enlisted a spy to report from Germany on Nazi progress. The reporter, working in secret, offered a crucial insight into what the Nazis were really up to. The National Socialist German Workers' Party was constructing a new religion, a "counter-church," complete with its own priests, dogmas, holidays, rituals, and rites. The agent used a brilliant metaphor to explain the Nazi effort. The counter-church was being built like a new railway bridge. When you build a new bridge, you can't just tear down the old one willy-nilly. Traffic and commerce will be snarled. The public will protest. Instead, you need to slowly but surely replace the bridge over time. Swap out an old bolt for a new one. Quietly switch the ancient beams for fresh ones, and one day you will have a completely different structure and barely anyone will have noticed.

Like the engineers of that proverbial railway bridge, the Nazis worked relentlessly to replace the nuts and bolts of traditional Christianity with a new political religion. The shrewdest way to accomplish this was to co-opt Christianity via the Gleichschaltung while at the same time shrinking traditional religion's role in civil society. To this end, Hitler was downright Bismarckian. The German historian Gotz Aly explains how Hitler purchased popularity with lavish social welfare programs and middle-class perks, often paid for with stolen Jewish wealth and high taxes on the rich. Hitler banned religious charity, crippling the churches' role as a counterweight to the state. Clergy were put on government salary, hence subjected to state authority. "The parsons will be made to dig their own graves," Hitler cackled. "They will betray their God to us. They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes."⁵

Following the Jacobin example, the Nazis replaced the traditional Christian calendar. The new year began on January 30 with the Day of the Seizure of Power.⁶ Each November the streets of central Munich were dedicated to a Nazi Passion play depicting Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch. The martyrdom of Horst Wessel and his "old fighters" replaced Jesus and the apostles. Plays and official histories were rewritten to glorify pagan Aryans bravely fighting against Christianizing foreign armies. Anticipating some feminist pseudo history, witches became martyrs to the bloodthirsty oppression of Christianity.

Under the progressives, the Christian God had been transformed into the God of lower food prices. Under the Nazis, the Christian God would be transformed into an Aryan SS officer with Hitler his right hand. The so-called German Christian pastors preached that "just as Jesus liberated mankind from sin and hell, so Hitler saves the German Volk from decay." In April 1933 the Nazi Congress of German Christians pronounced that all churches should catechize that "God has created me a German; Germanism is a gift of God. God wills that I fight for Germany. War service in no way injures the Christian conscience, but is obedience to God."⁷

When some Protestant bishops visited the Fuhrer to register complaints, Hitler's rage got the better of him. "Christianity will disappear from Germany just as it has done in Russia...The German race has existed without Christianity for thousands of years...and will continue after Christianity has disappeared...We must get used to the teachings of blood and race." When the bishops objected that they supported Nazism's secular aims, just not its religious innovations, Hitler exploded: "You are traitors to the Volk. Enemies of the Vaterland and destroyers of Germany."⁸

In 1935 mandatory prayer in school was abolished, and in 1938 carols and Nativity plays were banned entirely. By 1941 religious instruction for children fourteen years and up had been abolished altogether, and Jacobinism reigned supreme. A Hitler Youth song rang out from the campfires:

We are the happy Hitler Youth;

We have no need for Christian virtue;

For Adolf Hitler is our intercessor

And our redeemer.

No priest, no evil one

Can keep us

From feeling like Hitler's children.

No Christ do we follow, but Horst Wessel!

Away with incense and holy water pots.⁹

Meanwhile, the orphans were given new lyrics to "Silent Night":

Silent night! Holy night! All is calm, all is bright,

Only the Chancellor steadfast in fight,

Watches o'er Germany by day and night,

Always caring for us.

In like manner, the American Kulturkampf of the 1960s begins not with the hippies, the Vietnam War, or even civil rights. As befits an attempt to clear the way for a new political religion, it starts with the effort to eliminate prayer in school. As Jeremy Rabkin has argued, the school prayer decisions of the 1960s should be seen as the beginning of the Supreme Court's role as the primary engine of the American Kulturkampf.

Consider abortion. The fundamental logic of the Supreme Court cases legalizing abortion hinges not on the "right to choose" but on the idea that religion and religiously informed morality have no place in public affairs. Roe v. Wade and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, stemmed directly from the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the Court invalidated a ban on birth control (almost never enforced) on the grounds that the right to privacy can be found in the emanation of a penumbra to the Constitution. But the Court's underlying motivation stemmed from a conviction that religiously inspired laws (Connecticut has a large Catholic population) are suspect. Just two years before Roe, in a Pennsylvania case, the Court quashed state aid to Catholic parochial schools on the grounds that it would divide the public along sectarian lines. Moreover, the Court held, religious concerns "tend to confuse and obscure other issues of great urgency." When Roe v. Wade finally appeared before the Court, the justices had already concluded that traditional religious concerns can have little weight in public affairs. Laurence Tribe, America's leading liberal constitutional lawyer, argued in the Harvard Law Review in 1978 that religious views were inherently superstitious and hence less legitimate than "secular" ones.

In 1987 the Supreme Court ruled that moments of silence at the beginning of the school day constituted a government endorsement of prayer. In 1992 it held that a nonsectarian prayer at a school graduation (offered by a Reform rabbi) was an impermissible endorsement of religion. In 1995 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the "right to die" could not be hindered simply "in order to satisfy the moral or religious precepts of a portion of the population." Never mind that laws against murder, theft, and perjury can be traced directly back to the same "religious precepts."

More recently, we've seen courts rule that the Pledge of Allegiance, displays of the Ten Commandments, and Christmas creches are unconstitutional anywhere near a public facility. Justice Antonin Scalia had it right in 1996 in the Romer v. Evans case (dealing with the public accommodation of homosexuality in Colorado). "The Court has mistaken a Kulturkampf for a fit of spite," he declared. He went on to castigate his colleagues for "taking sides" in the "culture wars."

Why belabor this point about religion? Because it is impossible to understand liberalism's cultural agenda without understanding that modern liberalism is building its own railway bridge, replacing the bricks and beams of traditional American culture with something else. I do not claim that everything in the new liberal structure is bad or wrong. But I reject the clever argumentation of liberals who claim that their effort is merely "pragmatic" or piecemeal. "Oh, just this one brick. What's wrong with this brick?" is how liberals argue about every stage of their project. But it's not just one brick. Nor should conservatives believe it is merely a slippery slope. That image suggests forces outside of our control pulling us in a direction not of our choosing. If society is moving in a direction not of its choosing, it is often because it is being pushed by the self-appointed forces of progress.

Tom Wolfe, in his essay "The Great Relearning," details how the counterculture, inspired by the German Bauhaus, wanted to start over, to declare a new Year Zero (much as the Jacobins and Nazis did), to go back to the fork in the road where Western civilization allegedly took the wrong path. The counterculture author Ken Kesey even organized a pilgrimage to the pagan mecca of Stonehenge, believing that this was the last place Western man was on the right track and, presumably, took a wrong turn by leaving his paganism behind. In the remainder of this chapter we will look at how this overarching vision informed the movements and ideas both of classical fascism and of today's cultural left in a few discrete areas of culture: identity, morality, sex, and nature.

THE LIBERAL FASCIST KULTURKAMPF

Isaiah Berlin summarized the neo-Romantic outlook that gave rise to Nazism: "If I am German I seek German virtues, I write German music, I rediscover ancient German laws, I cultivate everything within me which makes me as rich, as expressive, as many-sided, as full a German as it is possible for me to be...That is the romantic ideal at its fullest." Such thinking led inexorably to the Nazi conception of right and wrong. "Justice," explained Alfred Rosenberg, "is what the Aryan man deems just. Unjust is what he so deems."¹⁰

This vision most concretely manifested itself in the effort to purge the influence of the Jewish mind from Nazi Germany. The Jew symbolized everything that kept the German people back. Even "conscience," according to Hitler, "is a Jewish invention" to be discarded in an act of self-liberation. As a result, the Nazis played the same games against the Jews that today's left plays against "Eurocentrism," "whiteness," and "logocentrism." When you hear a campus radical denounce "white logic" or "male logic," she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced "Jewish logic" and the "Hebrew disease." While still a Nazi collaborator, Paul de Man — the revered postmodern theorist who eventually taught at Yale and Cornell — wrote of the Jews, "Their cerebralness, their capacity to assimilate doctrines while maintaining a cold detachment from them," is one of "the specific characteristics of the Jewish mind."¹¹

The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism. The "key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race," writes the whiteness studies scholar and historian Noel Ignatiev. Whiteness studies is a cutting-edge academic discipline sweeping American higher education. Some thirty universities have WS departments, but many more schools teach the essentials of whiteness studies in other courses. The executive director of the Center for the Study of White American Culture explains, "There is no crime that whiteness has not committed against people of color...We must blame whiteness for the continuing patterns today...which damage and prevent the humanity of those of us within it."¹² The journal Race Traitor (ironically, a Nazi term) is dedicated "to serve as an intellectual center for those seeking to abolish the white race." Now, this is not a genocidal movement; no one is suggesting that white people be rounded up and put in camps. But the principles, passions, and argumentation have troubling echoes.

First, there is the left's shocking defense of black riot ideology and gangsterism. The glorification of violence, the romance of the street, the denunciations of "the system," the conspiratorialism, the exaltation of racial solidarity, the misogyny of hip-hop culture: all of these things offer a disturbing sense of deja vu. Hip-hop culture has incorporated a shocking number of fascist themes. On college campuses, administrators routinely look the other way at classically fascist behavior, from newspaper burnings to the physical intimidation of dissident speakers. These attitudes ultimately stem from the view that the white man, like the Jew, represents every facet of what is wrong and oppressive to humanity. As Susan Sontag proclaimed in 1967, "The white race is the cancer of human history." Meanwhile, Enlightenment notions of universal humanity are routinely mocked on the academic left as a con used to disguise entrenched white male privilege.

Just as the Nazi attack on Christianity was part of a larger war on the idea of universal truth, whole postmodern cosmologies have been created to prove that traditional religious morality is a scam, that there are no fixed truths or "natural" categories, and that all knowledge is socially constructed. Or as the line goes in The Da Vinci Code, "So Dark, the Con of Man."

The "con" in question is, in effect, a conspiracy by the Catholic Church to deceive the world about Jesus' true nature and his marriage to Mary Magdalene. The book has sold some sixty million copies worldwide. The novel, and movie, have generated debates, documentaries, companion books, and the like. But few have called attention to the ominous roots and parallels with Nazi thought.

Dan Brown should have dedicated his book to "Madame" Helena Blavatsky, the theosophist guru who is widely considered the "mother" of New Age spirituality as well as a touchstone in the development of Nazi paganism and the chief popularizer of the swastika as a mystical symbol. Her theosophy included a grab bag of cultish notions, from astrology to the belief that Christianity was a grand conspiracy designed to conceal the true meaning and history of the supernatural. Her 1888 book, The Secret Doctrine, attempted to prove the full extent of the grotesque Western conspiracy that The Da Vinci Code only partially illuminates. Christianity was to blame for all the modern horrors of capitalism and inauthentic living, not to mention the destruction of Atlantis.

Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century, the second most important book in the Nazi canon, borrowed ideas wholesale from Blavatsky. Rosenberg lays out one Christian conspiracy after another. "Before it could fully blossom, the joyous message of German mysticism was strangled by the anti-European church with all the means in its power," he insists. Like Blavatsky and Brown, he suggests the existence of secret Gospels, which, had they not been concealed by the Church, would debunk the "counterfeit of the great image of Christ" found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. "Christianity," writes Hitler in Mein Kampf, "was not content with erecting an altar of its own. It had first to destroy the pagan altars." It was "the advent of Christianity" that first unleashed the "spiritual terror" upon "the much freer ancient world."¹³

Large segments of the cultural left today subscribe to similar notions. For example, Wicca and paganism constitute the fastest-growing religion and religious category in America, with adherents numbering anywhere from 500,000 to 5 million depending on whose numbers you accept. If you add "New Age spirituality," the number of Americans involved in such avocations reaches 20 million and growing. Feminists in particular have co-opted Wicca as a religion perfectly suited to their politics. Gloria Steinem is rhapsodic about the superior political and spiritual qualities of "pre-Christian" and "matriarchal" paganism. In Revolution from Within she laments in all earnestness the "killing of nine million women healers and other pagan or nonconforming women during the centuries of change-over to Christianity."¹⁴

The SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, was convinced that the anti-witch craze was an anti-German plot concocted in large part by the Catholic Church: "The witch-hunting cost the German people hundreds of thousands of mothers and women, cruelly tortured and executed."¹⁵ He dedicated considerable resources for the SS to investigate the witch hunts and prove they were attempts to crush Aryan civilization and the true German faith. The SS put together what amounted to their own X-Files unit — dubbed Special Unit H (for Hexen, or "witches") — to ferret out the truth of over thirty-three thousand cases of witch burning, in countries as far away as India and Mexico.

Indeed, most of the founders of National Socialism would be far more comfortable talking witchcraft and astrology with a bunch of crystal-worshipping vegans than attending a church social. Consider the Thule Society, named after a supposed lost race of northern peoples hinted at in ancient Greek texts. The society was founded as the Munich chapter of the German Order, and while its occult and theosophical doctrines were nominally central to its charter, the glue that held it together was racist anti-Semitism. Anton Drexler was encouraged by his mentor Dr. Paul Tafel, a leader of the Thule Society, to found the German Workers' Party, which would soon become the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Its membership was a veritable Who's Who of founding Nazis, according to Hitler's biographer Ian Kershaw.

Dietrich Eckart, a poet, painter, occultist, morphine addict, playwright, fancier of magic, and devotee of the racial mysticism of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was a major force in this bohemian circle. Eckart was a father figure and mentor to Hitler, teaching him about public speaking, giving him his first trench coat, and introducing him to leading members of Munich society. As an editor, Eckart transformed the Thule Society's newspaper into the official Nazi Party paper and wrote the anthem "Germany, Awake!" Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf to him, writing in the epilogue that he was "a man who devoted his life to reawakening his and our people."

The myth of the Wrong Turn at the heart of liberal fascist ideology doesn't merely generate exotic conspiracy theories and pseudo history, but, as suggested above, it promotes a profound moral relativism. Indeed, feminism's embrace of Wicca is a perfect illustration of the pagan narcissism mentioned earlier. Many Wicca ceremonies conclude with the invocation "Thou Art Goddess." There are no explicit rules to Wicca, merely exhortations to cultivate "the Goddess within," to create the spirituality that best conforms to your already-formed prejudices, desires, and instincts.

Heidegger, the Nazi philosopher, and Thomas Mann, the literary giant — who became a passionate and perceptive anti-fascist but was an early dabbler in fascism's themes — represented the philosophical and literary sides of the push to throw off the chains of bourgeois morality and custom. Heidegger (echoing Nietzsche) argued that a truly authentic individual chooses his own path, whether it conforms with conventional morality or with some individually manufactured morality. Even the right choice is wrong if it is made under the influence of others. To "forgo normal choice and to adopt those offered me by the world or other people," writes Heidegger, is the essence of "inauthenticity." Mann located fascism's appeal to the artist in its invitation to the "self-abandonment to the instincts." Hitler's favorite sculptor explained that his nude works display "the pure air of instinctive drives" and show the "revolutionary youth of today, which tears the veil from the body hidden in shame."¹⁶

HOLLYWOOD FASCISTS

These once-radical notions now saturate mainstream popular culture. A brief survey serves to illustrate how pervasive their influence has become among the scriptwriters and producers of films coming out of Hollywood, the most powerful de facto propaganda agency in human history.

In the five-Oscar-winning film American Beauty, as mentioned above, Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham, a bourgeois professional with a bourgeois-professional wife and a conventionally alienated daughter. Lester suddenly realizes that he hates his conventional life when he becomes sexually obsessed with a friend of his teenage daughter. "I feel like I've been in a coma for the past twenty years. And I'm just now waking up," he declares. He then commences a campaign of "self-improvement" that involves a narcissistic obsession with his own body, flipping off all social conventions, and indulging every desire in defiance of reason.

"Janie, today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go fuck himself, and then I blackmailed him for almost sixty thousand dollars. Pass the asparagus," Lester tells his daughter at the dinner table.

"Your father seems to think this type of behavior is something to be proud of," Lester's controlling, materialistic wife explains.

"And your mother seems to prefer I go through life like a fucking prisoner while she keeps my dick in a mason jar under the sink," he replies.

This sort of thing, where the "real" person is to be found not in the head or the heart but in the crotch, seems to pass for high wisdom in Hollywood.

Of course, sometimes it is not a psychosexual breakthrough that redeems the white man but a physical abnormality or injury usually resulting in the suppression of his ability to reason. In Forrest Gump a retarded white man is the only reliably moral force during the chaos of the 1960s and 1970s. In Regarding Henry, Harrison Ford plays a career-minded, philandering corporate lawyer with no time for his family who is redeemed with the help of a bullet in his frontal lobe and the sagacity of a black physical therapist who helps the lobotomized Ford discover that it's morally preferable to be a child. In As Good as It Gets, Jack Nicholson is a vicious bigot until he starts taking powerful psychotropic drugs, which in effect cure him of his whiteness (Adorno might call it the "anti-fascism pill") and make him tolerant of gays and blacks and able to love. In the Sean Penn vehicle I Am Sam, we are told that intelligence, knowledge, and basic coping skills are all irrelevant to good parenting so long as even a severely retarded parent loves his child. Talk to people with severely retarded children or siblings, and they will tell you how pernicious this message can be.

The recurring theme is that men must be awakened from the comfortable nightmare we call life, or what Hillary Clinton in her youth described as "the sleeping sickness of our soul." We are all "slaves" to the "IKEA nesting instinct," according to the protagonist of Fight Club, a film whose fascist pretensions have been so well discussed there's no need to revisit them here. The idea that the slumbering masses must be roused from their doldrums is central to Fascism. Marinetti's first Futurist manifesto begins, "Up to now, literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap."¹⁷ The pamphlet that first attracted a young Adolf Hitler to National Socialism was titled "My Political Awakening." Pro-Nazi and pre-fascist films and novels often shared a common premise of somnolent young men roused from their passive acceptance of the machine of Western bourgeois democracy.

Is there any doubt that a young Hitler would have given Dead Poets Society a standing ovation? The film begins with the students learning poetry by formula, plotting its "perfection along the horizontal of a graph" and its "importance" on the vertical in order to find the "measure of its greatness." You can almost hear Hitler denouncing such a "Jewish" way of gauging art. Along comes Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams, who tells his students simply to rip those pages from the book! Mr. Keating encourages the students to do even more violence to convention, exhorting them to stand on the teacher's desk in a simultaneous display of superiority and contempt for traditional roles.

One boy in particular, Todd, is afraid of Mr. Keating's new approach. But Mr. Keating browbeats the lad to release his "barbaric yawp." Holding his eyes shut, he forces the lad to craft a poem from the bowels of his soul. Todd conjures the image of a "sweaty-toothed madman," and with Mr. Keating's encouragement he gives him form and function. "His hands reach out and choke me...Truth...Truth is like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold."

Keating encourages his yawping barbarians to live by the maxim "Seize the day!" in a glorious cult of action. Following his example, the truly "free" students join a secret society where they adopt pagan names and meet in an old Indian cave to "suck the marrow out of life," make new gods, and read Romantic poetry.

Neil, another student, is awakened by Mr. Keating and rebels against his bourgeois father's pressure to become a doctor. He wants to live a life of passion as an actor. "For the first time in my life, I know what I want to do!" he shouts. "And for the first time, I'm going to do it! Whether my father wants me to or not! Carpe diem!" The boy finds his true calling playing the pagan fairy of the forest Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. When his father forbids him to indulge his passions any further, Neil chooses suicide over compromise — a similar ending to Hitler's favorite play, Der Konig (as mentioned earlier, Hitler saw the play seventeen times in three years). Neil is depicted as Christlike, despite his selfishness.

The tragedy of Neil's suicide shatters the school, and Mr. Keating is fired. The surviving members of the Dead Poets Society risk expulsion if they even look at Mr. Keating; yet they cannot resist his charisma. One by one, they stand on their desks, defiant of their new teacher. These beautiful young overmen, united in their will, look to their "captain" and away from traditional authority. All that was missing were the Nazi salutes.

In The Matrix, a thoroughly fascistic allegory (with some Marxist notes as well), Keanu Reeves plays a trapped, bourgeois cubicle dweller. His "handle" as a computer hacker, Neo, not only represents his truer party name, as it were, but also encapsulates his status as a New Man, an Ubermensch who can bend the world to his will and eventually even fly. The falseness of his worker-drone lifestyle is revealed to him when he awakes, as if from a dream, and realizes that what he thought was his real life was a prison, a cage, where parasitic and manipulative forces literally fed on him. Instead of bloodsucking Jews, the enemy is what nineteenth-and twentieth-century New Agers called the Machine, or das System. What awakes him from his nightmare is his authentic choice, which he makes solely so he can be true to himself. Afterward, he joins a pagan secret society, Zion, where the only authentic vestiges of mankind live in Dionysian glory in the warm bowels of Mother Earth, wholly dedicated to awakening the worthy few among their slumbering brethren. The parasitic, puppet-string-pulling "agents" of the system may look human, but are anything but. Colorless, austere white men dressed in dark business suits, they reject the authenticity of human life for cold logic and mechanistic priorities. They are literally rootless, not merely prone to abstraction but actual abstractions. There seem to be few of them, but they're everywhere, can take human form, and run everything. In short, they are comic-book versions of everything the Nazis said about the Jews.

It's important to recognize that we are talking not so much about left-wing culture or liberal culture as about American culture. In many respects, Hollywood's addiction to fascist aesthetics is nonideological. Gladiator used fascistic imagery because that was the best way to tell the story. In other cases, Hollywood exhibits a deeper fascination with fascism. In films like V for Vendetta, the envy for the cool aesthetics of well-dressed cruelty and violence is palpable. The villains and the hero alike are all fascists.

Conservatives are hardly immune to the allure of fascism. Left-wing cultural critics were not wrong to spot fascistic themes in the vigilante films of the 1970s. In the Death Wish and Dirty Harry movies, for example, unlawful violence was glorified on the grounds that "the system" was irredeemably corrupt, swamped by the usually dark-skinned criminal classes and the clever lawyers who protected them. Pauline Kael of the New Yorker dubbed Dirty Harry a brand of "fascist medievalism."¹⁸ And if you look at the evolving themes in Clint Eastwood's work, you can tease out a thread of nihilism culminating in the bleakness of Unforgiven and his ode to euthanasia in Million Dollar Baby (both Academy Award-winning films).

Just because I am noting the fascistic themes in these films doesn't necessarily mean they are bad. Triumph of the Will was a masterpiece (so the critics tell us). Similarly, I am a fan of the Dirty Harry films (as well as many others discussed in this chapter). I would even argue that as a form of artistic protest, those vigilante films had many redeeming qualities. But there's no denying that conservatives are just as willing to embrace fascistic films if they come from the right. Consider such popular films as Braveheart, The Last Samurai, and 300. Many conservatives loved them because they depicted resistance to tyranny and celebrated "freedom." But the "liberty" of these films was not individual liberty per se so much as the freedom of the tribe to behave according to its own relativistic values. The clans of the Scottish Highlands were hardly constitutional republics. Tom Cruise portrays the proto-fascist culture of the Meiji-era samurai as morally superior to that of the decadent West, echoing the German fascination with the Orient. And the Spartans of 300 are a eugenic (and vaguely homoerotic) warrior caste that would have had Hitler applauding in the aisle, despite valiant efforts to Americanize them.

There are defenses to be made of all these films, in that they represent forward progress in the unfolding Western tradition of liberty — and are also good fun. But the simple fact is that fascism is good box office and conservatives, with a few exceptions, are powerless to combat it because they don't even know what they are seeing. Liberals, for their part, are quick to label any "glorification" of war or battle as fascistic, but they cheer nihilism and relativism in the name of individual freedom and rebellion at every turn. This is where conservatives should mount their counterattack, on the prevalent notion that we are all our own priests, and so long as we are faithful to our inner gods, we are authentic and good. Nonetheless, there's no avoiding the fact that in terms of what we like on both big screens and small, we are all fascists now.

THE POLITICS OF SEX

Almost inexplicably, the popular perception these days is that Nazism was a kind of prudery run amok. Ken Starr, John Ashcroft, Laura Schlessinger, and Rick Santorum are just the latest symbols of a supposedly fascistic judgmentalism and hypocritical piety on the American right. In order to make these arguments stick, the debate is skewed so as to paint the champions of traditional morality as crypto-fascists, incapable of thinking maturely about sex.

Arthur Miller's propagandistic play The Crucible has become a classic statement of the left's obsession with the "sex panic" of the right. Originally a thinly veiled indictment of McCarthyism, the story is now seen as one of puritanical Comstockery leading to an outbreak of murderous political paranoia. Powerful men who can't handle sexually autonomous women use the tools of the state to launch a witch hunt. This tiresome meme has conquered the liberal imagination. J. Edgar Hoover is now universally depicted as a drag queen despite the flimsiest of evidence. Sidney Blumenthal has argued that anti-communism in the United States was little more than an example of homophobic panic by closeted gay right-wingers. Tim Robbins echoes a similar idea in his film The Cradle Will Rock, in which anti-communists and New Deal opponents are little more than sexually repressed fascists. Advocates of family values are now associated with fascism across the international left. "To favor the traditional family over here is to open oneself to the charge of being a Nazi," explains a member of the Swedish parliament.

There's only one problem: none of this has anything to do with Nazism or fascism.

The idea that "family values" are philosophically linked to fascism actually has a long pedigree, going back, again, to the Frankfurt School. Max Horkheimer argued that the root of Nazi totalitarianism was the family. But the truth is as close to the opposite as one can get. While Nazi rhetoric often paid homage to the family, the actual practice of Nazism was consonant with the progressive effort to invade the family, to breach its walls and shatter its autonomy. The traditional family is the enemy of all political totalitarianisms because it is a bastion of loyalties separate from and prior to the state, which is why progressives are constantly trying to crack its outer shell.

Let us start with the obvious. It would be funny were it not tragically necessary to note that the Nazis were not "pro-life." Long before the Final Solution, the Nazis cast the aged, the infirm, and the handicapped onto the proverbial Spartan hillside. It is true that women were second-class citizens in the Nazi worldview, relegated to the status of breeders of the master race. But prudery and Judeo-Christian morality were hardly the justification for these policies.

Nazi attitudes toward sexuality were grounded in unremitting hostility to Christianity and Judaism, both of which rejected the pagan view of sex as gratification, imbuing it instead with deep moral significance. Indeed, if you read Hitler's Table Talk, it is almost impossible not to see him as an open-minded freethinker. "Marriage, as it is practiced in bourgeois society, is generally a thing against nature. But a meeting between two beings who complete one another, who are made for one another, borders already, in my conception, upon a miracle." "Religion," Hitler explains, "is in perpetual conflict with the spirit of free research." "The catastrophe, for us, is that of being tied to a religion that rebels against all the joys of the senses." Der Fuhrer talks at length about his contempt for the social prejudices that look down on out-of-wedlock birth. "I love to see this display of health around me."¹⁹

Recall that Hitler dreamed of transforming Germany into a warrior nation led by cadres of black-garbed Aryan Spartans loyal to him alone. Heinrich Himmler created the SS in the hope of making Hitler's dream come true. He ordered his men "to father as many children as possible without marrying." To this end Himmler created Lebensborn (Wellspring of Life) homes in Germany and occupied Scandinavia, where children sired by SS men and racially pure women would be raised by the state, fulfilling a dream (minus the racial angle) of Robespierre's. After a racial background check, a baby was admitted through a ceremony where an SS dagger was held over the child while the mother took an oath of loyalty to the Nazi cause.

Nazi attitudes toward homosexuality are also a source of confusion. While it is true that some homosexuals were sent to concentration camps, it is also the case that the early Nazi Party and the constellation of Pan-German organizations in its orbit were rife with homosexuals. It's well-known, for example, that Ernst Rohm, the head of the SA, and his coterie were homosexuals, and openly so. When jealous members of the SA tried to use this fact against him in 1931, Hitler had to remonstrate that Rohm's homosexuality was "purely in the private sphere." Some try to suggest that Rohm was murdered on the Night of the Long Knives because he was gay. But the Rohm faction posed the greatest threat to Hitler's consolidation of power because they were, in important respects, the most ardent and "revolutionary" Nazis. Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams write in The Pink Swastika that "the National Socialist revolution and the Nazi Party were animated and dominated by militaristic homosexuals, pederasts, pornographers, and sadomasochists." This is surely an overstatement. But it is nonetheless true that the artistic and literary movements that provided the oxygen for Nazism before 1933 were chockablock with homosexual liberationist tracts, clubs, and journals.²⁰

The journal Der Eigene (meaning "self-aware" or "self-owner") had some 150,000 subscribers — more than twice the New Republic's readership today in a population roughly a fifth the size of that in the United States. The journal was dedicated to men who "thirst for a revival of Greek times and Hellenic standards of beauty after centuries of Christian barbarism." Der Eigene — virulently anti-Semitic and nationalistic — grew into an actual movement for homosexual rights demanding the repeal of laws and social taboos against pederasty. The Viennese journal Ostara — which surely influenced a young Adolf Hitler — extolled a Spartan male ethic where women and Christianity alike were shackles on the Teutonic male warrior's will to power.

What ties these threads together was the idea of the Wrong Turn. Men were freer before they were caged by bourgeois norms, traditional morality, and logocentrism. Keep this in mind the next time you watch Brokeback Mountain, one of the most critically acclaimed and celebrated films of the last decade. Two perfect male specimens are at home only in the pastoral wild, away from the bourgeois conventions of modern life. At home in nature, they are finally free to give themselves over to their instinctual desires. But they cannot live in the hills, indulging their instincts. So they spend the rest of their lives trapped in soul-crippling traditional marriages, their only joy their annual "fishing trips," where they try to re-create the ecstasy of their authentic encounter, the only thing that can liberate them from bourgeois domesticity.

According to a secular liberal analysis, if traditional morality was ever necessary at all (a dubious proposition for many), it has outgrown its utility. In a premodern age when venereal disease was a death sentence and out-of-wedlock birth a calamity, rules and norms for governing personal behavior had their place. But today, conventional morality is merely a means by which the ruling classes oppress women, homosexuals, and other sexually nonconforming rebels. Tom Wolfe's essay "The Great Relearning" begins by recounting how, in 1968, doctors at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic discovered diseases "no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot."²¹ Why were these maladies springing up? The hippie communards, much like the bohemians of Weimar Germany, believed that traditional morality was an antiquated husk with as much relevance as the divine right of kings. They discovered otherwise; we have rules and customs for a reason.

Liberals dismiss abstract arguments involving universal moral principles almost as cavalierly as hippies did in the 1960s. One can argue that abortion might have a downside because it can lead to higher rates of breast cancer, but complaints that it takes a human life or displeases God, we are told, have no place in reasonable discourse. This poses a dilemma for conservatives. For some this means only arguing about what the data show. The problem is that resorting to regression analysis is another way of conceding that notions of right and wrong have no place in public debate. Meanwhile, conservatives of a religious bent hurl charges and epithets that do nothing to persuade the opposition.

Moreover, the culture is so shot through with narcissism and populism that even progressive arguments are denied to the conservative. Thus we are told it is elitist to argue that celebrities and rich people can afford to indulge loose morals in ways the poor cannot. If you're a millionaire, you can handle divorce, out-of-wedlock birth, or drug abuse with little risk to your quality of life and social status. If you are working-class, the same behaviors can be destructive. But to point these things out violates today's egalitarian-populist ethos: What's good enough for Paris Hilton must be good enough for us all.

Fascism was a human response to a rapidly unfolding series of technological, theological, and social revolutions. Those revolutions are still playing themselves out, and since the left has defined fascism as conservative opposition to change, it's unlikely we'll ever stop being fascists by that definition. But conservatives aren't reactionaries. Few conservatives today would — or should — try to put the entire sexual revolution back in the bottle. Women's suffrage, birth control, civil rights, these are now part of the classically liberal order, and that's a good thing. Homosexuality is a fresher, and therefore tougher, issue for conservatives. But at least at the elite level, there are few conservatives who want to criminalize homosexuality. My guess is that gay marriage in some form is inevitable, and that may well be for the best. Indeed, the demand for gay marriage is in some respects a hopeful sign. In the 1980s and 1990s gay radicals sounded far more fascistic than the "radicals" of the early twenty-first century who ostensibly want to subject themselves to the iron cage of bourgeois matrimony.

The relevant question for conservatives hinges on the sincerity of the left, which is impossible to gauge because they have internalized an incremental approach to their Kulturkampf. Is gay marriage an attempt to blend homosexuals into a conservative — and conservatizing — institution? Or is it merely a trophy in their campaign for acceptance? In the 1990s "queer theorists" declared war on marriage as an oppressive force. The ACLU has already taken up polygamy as a civil rights issue. Al and Tipper Gore wrote a book arguing that families should be viewed as any group of individuals who love each other. These are echoes of ideas found in the fascist past, and conservatives can hardly be blamed for distrusting many on the left when they say they just want marriage and nothing more.

GREEN FASCISM

Nowhere is the idea of the Wrong Turn more starkly expressed in both National Socialist and contemporary liberal thought than in environmentalism. As many have observed, modern environmentalism is suffused with dark Rousseauian visions about the sickness of Western civilization. Man has lost his harmony with nature, his way of life is inauthentic, corrupting, unnatural.

Perhaps the most prominent exponent of this vision is the ubiquitous Al Gore, arguably the most popular liberal in America. As he writes in his thoroughly postmodern manifesto, Earth in the Balance, "We retreat into the seductive tools and technologies of industrial civilization, but that only creates new problems as we become increasingly isolated from one another and disconnected from our roots." Gore relentlessly sanctifies nature, arguing that we have been "cut off" from our authentic selves. "The froth and frenzy of industrial civilization mask our deep loneliness for that communion with the world that can lift our spirits and fill our senses with the richness and immediacy of life itself."²² Of course, one can find similar statements from all sorts of Romantics, including Henry David Thoreau. But let us remember that German fascism was born out of a Romantic revolt against industrialization that philosophically mirrored aspects of transcendentalism. The difference is that while Thoreau sought to separate himself from modernity, Gore seeks to translate his Romantic animosity to modernity into a governing program.

The idea that environmentalism is itself a religion has been much discussed elsewhere. But it is telling how many of these New Age faiths define themselves as nature cults. As the National Public Radio correspondent (and committed witch) Margot Adler explains, "This is a religion that says the world, the earth, is where holiness resides." Joseph Sax, a giant in the field of environmental law and a pioneering activist, describes his fellow environmentalists as "secular prophets, preaching a message of secular salvation." Representative Ed Markey hailed Gore as a "prophet" during his congressional testimony on climate change in early 2007.²³ An environmentally themed hotel in California has replaced the Bible in all its rooms with Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Anyone with kids certainly understands how the invocations to "reduce, reuse, recycle" are taught like catechisms in schoolrooms across the country.

Ultimately, however, environmentalism is fascistic not because of its airy and obscure metaphysical assumptions about the existential plight of man. Rather, its most tangible fascistic ingredient is that it is an invaluable "crisis mechanism." Al Gore constantly insists that global warming is the defining crisis of our time. Skeptics are called traitors, Holocaust deniers, tools of the "carbon interests." Alternately, progressive environmentalists cast themselves in the role of nurturing caregivers. When Gore appeared before Congress in early 2007, he proclaimed that the world has a "fever" and explained that when your baby has a fever, you "take action." You do whatever your doctor says. No time to debate, no room for argument. We must get "beyond politics." In practical terms this means we must surrender to the global nanny state and create the sort of "economic dictatorship" progressives yearn for.

The beauty of global warming is that it touches everything we do — what we eat, what we wear, where we go. Our "carbon footprint" is the measure of man. And it is environmentalism's ability to provide meaning that should interest us here. Almost all committed environmentalists subscribe to some variant of the Wrong Turn thesis. Gore is more eloquent than most in this regard. He rhapsodizes about the need for authenticity and meaning through collective action; he uses an endless series of violent metaphors in which people must be "resistance fighters" against the putatively Nazi regime responsible for the new Holocaust of global warming (again, on the left, the enemy is always a Nazi). Gore alternately blames Plato, Descartes, and Francis Bacon as the white male serpents who tempted mankind to take the wrong turn out of an Edenic past. What is required is to reunite our intellects, our spiritual impulses, and our animalistic instincts into a new holistic balance. Nothing could be more fascistic.

Of course, the greener you get, the more the argument shifts from the white man to mankind in general as the source of the problem. A perverse and bizarre form of self-hatred has infected certain segments of the eco-left. The old critique of the Hebrew disease has metastasized into an indictment of what could be called the human disease. When Charles Wurster, the chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, was told that banning DDT would probably result in millions of deaths, he replied, "This is as good a way to get rid of them as any." The Finnish environmental guru Pentti Linkola argues that the earth is a sinking ship, and a chosen remnant must head to the lifeboats. "Those who hate life try to pull more people on board and drown everybody. Those who love and respect life use axes to chop off the extra hands hanging on the gunwale."²⁴

These nominally "fringe" ideas have saturated the mainstream. "Us Homo sapiens are turning out to be as destructive a force as any asteroid," proclaimed the Today Show's Matt Lauer in a TV special. "The stark reality is that there are simply too many of us. And we consume way too much...The solutions are not a secret: control population, recycle, reduce consumption." Lauer's emphasis on population control should remind us that the progressive eugenic obsession with controlling the population has never disappeared and still lurks behind many environmental arguments.²⁵

One reason there is so much overlap between Nazi environmental thought and contemporary liberalism is that the environmental movement predates Nazism and was used to expand its base of support. The Nazis were among the first to make fighting air pollution, creating nature preserves, and pushing for sustainable forestry central planks in their platform. Ludwig Klages's Man and Earth was a manifesto for the idea that man had chosen the wrong path. Klages, a wild-eyed anti-Semite, decried the loss of species, the killing of whales, the clearing of forests, disappearing indigenous peoples, and other familiar concerns as symptoms of cultural rot. In 1980, to celebrate the founding of the German Green Party, the Greens reissued the essay.

Even though free-market conservatives have a great deal to offer when it comes to the environment, they are permanently on the defensive. Americans, like the rest of the Western world, have simply decided that the environment is an area where markets and even democracy should have little sway. To approach environmental questions as if they were economic questions — which they ultimately are — seems sacrilegious. Much as liberals have painted themselves as "pro-child" and their opponents as "anti-child," to disagree with liberals on statist remedies to environmental issues makes you "against" the environment and a craven lickspittle of robber barons and industrial fat cats.

Everyone cares about "the environment," just as everyone cares about "the children." For ideological environmentalists that means buying into a holistic vision of the earth and of humans as just another species. For conservatives, we are stewards of the earth, and that means making informed choices between competing goods. Many so-called environmentalists are in fact conservationists, using property rights and market mechanisms to conserve natural resources for posterity. Many on the left believe we must romanticize nature in order to create the political will to save it. But when such romanticism becomes a substitute religion and dissenters heretics, conservatives need to make it clear that environmental utopianism is as impossible as any other attempt to create a heaven on earth.

THE NAZI CULT OF THE ORGANIC

Unlike Marxism, which declared much of culture and humanity irrelevant to the revolution, National Socialism was holistic. Indeed, "organic" and "holistic" were the Nazi terms of art for totalitarianism. The Mussolinian vision of everything inside the state, nothing outside the state, was organicized by the Nazis. In this sense the Bavarian cabinet minister Hans Schemm was deadly serious when he said, "National Socialism is applied biology."²⁶

Nazi ideologues believed that the Aryans were the "Native Americans" of Europe, colonized by Romans and Christians and hence deprived of their "natural" symbiosis with the land. Hitler himself was a devoted fan of the novels of Karl May, who romanticized the Indians of the American West. The Nazi ideologue Richard Darre summarized much of Nazi Volk ideology when he said, "To remove the German from the natural landscape is to kill him." Ernst Lehmann, a leading Nazi biologist, sounded much like Mr. Gore: "We recognise that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations."²⁷

The Nazi cult of the organic was not some fringe view; it lay at the cutting edge of "enlightened" thought. German historicism had pioneered the organic conception of society and state tied together. The state, wrote Johann Droysen, is "the sum, the united organism, of all the moral partnerships, their common home and harbor, and so far their end." Nor were these ideas uniquely German. Droysen was Herbert Baxter Adams's mentor, and Adams in turn was Woodrow Wilson's. Droysen's work is cited throughout Wilson's writings. The law that established our national park system was dubbed the "Organic Act" of 1916.

Consider two spheres of concern that dominate vast swaths of our culture today: food and health. The Nazis took food very, very seriously. Hitler claimed to be a dedicated vegetarian. Indeed, he could talk for hours about the advantages of a meatless diet and the imperative to eat whole grains. Himmler, Rudolf Hess, Martin Bormann, and — maybe — Goebbels were vegetarians or health food fetishists of one kind or another. Nor was this mere sucking up to the boss (a real problem, one might imagine, in Nazi Germany). According to Robert Proctor, Hess would bring his own vegetarian concoctions to meetings at the Chancellery and heat them up like the office vegan with some macrobiotic couscous. This annoyed Hitler to no end. Hitler told Hess, "I have an excellent dietician/cook here. If your doctor has prescribed something special for you, she could certainly prepare it. You cannot bring your own food in here." Hess responded that his food had special biodynamic ingredients. Hitler suggested to Hess in return that maybe he might rather stay home for lunch from now on.²⁸

Hitler often claimed his vegetarianism was inspired by Richard Wagner, who, in an 1891 essay, argued that meat eating and race mixing were the twin causes of man's alienation from the natural world. Therefore he called for a "true and hearty fellowship with the vegetarians, the protectors of animals, and the friends of temperance." He would also wax eloquent on the vegetarian diets of Japanese sumo wrestlers, Roman legionnaires, Vikings, and African elephants. Hitler believed that man had mistakenly acquired the habit of eating meat out of desperation during the Ice Age and that vegetarianism was the more authentic human practice. Indeed, he often sounded like an early spokesperson for the raw food movement, which is becoming ever more fashionable. "The fly feeds on fresh leaves, the frog swallows the fly as it is and the stork eats the living frog. Nature thus teaches us that a rational diet should be based on eating things in their raw state."²⁹

Many leading Nazi ideologues also shared today's deep-seated commitment to animal rights as opposed to animal welfare. "How can you find pleasure in shooting from behind cover at poor creatures browsing on the edge of a wood, innocent, defenseless, and unsuspecting?" asked Heinrich Himmler. "It's really pure murder." A top priority of the Nazis upon attaining power was to implement a sweeping animal rights law. In August 1933 Hermann Goring barred the "unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments," threatening to commit to concentration camps "those who still think they can treat animals as inanimate property."

For anyone with a functioning moral compass, this can only seem like barbaric cognitive dissonance. But for the Nazis it all made sense. The German needed to reconnect with nature, restore his organic purity, find holistic balance. Animals have exactly such a balance because they are immune to reason. Hence, the ideologues believed they were virtuous and deserving of respect. Jews, on the other hand, were alien and deracinating. They were the reason the "biotic community" of Germany was out of balance.

Animal rights advocates correctly note that animal rights activism was a major concern in pre-Nazi Germany and that the animal rights movement shouldn't be associated with Nazism. But as with environmentalism, this is less of a defense than it sounds. It is fine to say that many of Nazism's concerns were held by people who were not Nazis. But the fact that these conventionally leftist views were held by Nazis suggests that Nazism isn't as alien to mainstream progressive thought as some would have us believe.

Ingrid Newkirk, the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, famously declared, "When it comes to feelings, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. There is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights."³⁰ Few sentiments could be more fascist. First there is the emphasis on "feelings" — not thought or reason — as the defining characteristic of life. Second is the assumption that the higher "feelings" — those associated with conscience — are of such little consequence that they don't enter into the equation. When Newkirk says there's no "rational" basis for distinguishing between vermin and humans, what she really means is that there is no legitimate distinction between them, which is why PETA felt no compunction in comparing the slaughter of pigs, cows, and chickens to the slaughter of Jews in their infamous "Holocaust on your plate" campaign.

We joke a lot about "health fascists" these days. The government — partly driven by creeping national-socialist health-care costs — is increasingly fixated on our health. Children's shows on state-run television have been instructed to propagandize for healthier living, so much so that Cookie Monster's "C is for Cookie" has been demoted by the new jingle "Cookies Are a Sometimes Food." This of course is nothing new. Herbert Hoover, Woodrow Wilson's food administrator, required children to sign a loyalty pledge to the state that they wouldn't eat between meals. What we do not understand is that the citizen hectored and hounded by the state to quit smoking has as much right to complain about fascism as an author would if his book was banned. As Robert Proctor was the first to fully catalog in his magisterial work The Nazi War on Cancer, obsession with personal and public health lay at the core of the Nazi Weltanschauung. The Nazis, according to Proctor, were convinced that "aggressive measures in the field of public health would usher in a new era of healthy, happy Germans, united by race and common outlook, cleansed of alien environmental toxins, freed from the previous era's plague of cancers, both literal and figurative." Hitler loathed cigarettes, believing they were the "wrath of the Red Man against the White Man, vengeance for having been given hard liquor."

The Nazis used the slogan "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz" — "the common good supersedes the private good" — to justify policing individual health for the sake of the body politic. This is the same rationale used today. As one public health advocate wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine, "Both health care providers and the commonweal now have a vested interest in certain forms of behavior, previously considered a person's private business, if the behavior impairs a person's 'health.' Certain failures of self-care have become, in a sense, crimes against society, because society has to pay for their consequences...In effect, we have said that people owe it to society to stop misbehaving."³¹

In 2004 Hillary Clinton insisted that we look at children's entertainment "from a public health perspective." Subjecting "our children to so much of this unchecked media is a kind of contagion," a "silent epidemic" threatening "long-term public health damage to many, many children and therefore to society." Richard Carmona, Bush's surgeon general in 2003, led a long list of public figures who believed "obesity has reached epidemic proportions." His "simple prescription" for ending America's obesity epidemic? "Every American needs to eat healthy food in healthy portions and be physically active every day." This sort of thing changes the meaning of an epidemic from a public health threat that puts people in danger against their will — typhoid, poisoned food, bear attacks — and replaces it with the danger of people doing things they want to do. Just look at how the war on smoking has institutionalized hysteria. Free speech for anything even remotely "pro-tobacco" has been culturally banned and almost totally abolished by law. Tobacco companies themselves have been forced to ritualistically — and expensively — denounce their own products. Free association of smokers has been outlawed in much of America. In addition, the fixation with children allows social planners to intervene to stop "child abusers" who might smoke near children, even outdoors.

Compare all this with a typical admonition found in a Hitler Youth health manual: "Food is not a private matter!" Or, "You have the duty to be healthy!" Or as another uniformed health official put it: "The government has a perfect right to influence personal behavior to the best of its ability if it is for the welfare of the individual and the community as a whole." That last official was C. Everett Koop.³²

Vegetarianism, public health, and animal rights were merely different facets of the obsession with the organic order that pervaded the German fascist mind then, and the liberal fascist mind today. Again and again Hitler insisted that there "is no gap between the organic and inorganic worlds." Oddly, this fueled the Nazis' view of the Jew as the "other." As I mentioned earlier, in a widely read book on nutrition, Hugo Kleine blamed "capitalist special interests" and "masculinized Jewish half-women" for the decline in the quality of German foods, which contributed to the rise in cancer. Himmler hoped to switch the SS entirely to organic food and was dedicated to making the transition for all of Germany after the war. Organic food was seamlessly linked to the larger Nazi conception of the organic nation living in harmony with a pre-or non-Christian ecosystem.

Many Americans today are obsessed with the organic. Whole Foods has become a franchise of cathedrals to this cult, and even Wal-Mart has succumbed to it. The essence of Whole Foods — where I shop frequently, by the way — is, in the words of the New York Times, to provide "premodern authenticity," or the "appearance of premodern authenticity," in order to provide people with "meaning." Walk the aisles of Whole Foods and you'll be amazed by what you find. "In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations." So sayeth the great law of the Iroquois Confederacy — and the label on every roll of Seventh Generation-brand toilet paper. The company promises "affordable, high quality, safe and environmentally responsible" toilet tissue that helps "keep you, your home and our planet healthy." But fear not, Seventh Generation also promises to "get the job done."

Then there's EnviroKidz cereal. Read the box and you learn that "EnviroKidz chooz organic food. Organic agriculture respects the land and the wild creatures who live on it." It concludes, "So if you want the kind of planet where bio-diversity is protected and human beings tread more softly upon the Earth, then chooz certified organic cereals from EnviroKidz. Wouldn't it be nice if all the food we ate was certified organic?" The company Gaiam sells a wide array of products at Whole Foods and similar stores. Their literature explains that "Gaia, mother Earth, was honored on the Isle of Crete in ancient Greece 4,000 years ago by the Minoan civilization...The concept of Gaia stems from the ancient philosophy that the Earth is a living entity. At Gaiam, we believe that all of the Earth's living matter, air, oceans and land form an interconnected system that can be seen as a single entity."³³

None of this is evil, and it is certainly well-meaning. But what's fascinating about Whole Foods and the culture it represents is how dependent it is on concocting what amounts to a new pan-human ethnicity. Over thirty years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer wrote in Beyond the Melting Pot, "To name an occupational group or a class is very much the same thing as naming an ethnic group." That's no longer true, and in response the left and the market are creating faux ethnicities grounded in imagined or romantic pasts from the Rousseauian noble savages of pre-Columbian North America to the fanciful imagined societies of pre-Christian Europe or ancient Greece. I await the release of Thule Society Sugar Pops.