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

5

The 1960s: Fascism Takes to the Streets

THE SELF-STYLED revolutionaries had grown increasingly brazen in their campaign to force concessions from the university. Students and professors who were labeled race traitors received death threats. Enemies of the racial nation were savagely beaten by roaming thugs. Guns were brought onto the campus, and the students dressed up in military uniforms. Professors were held hostage, badgered, intimidated, and threatened whenever their teaching contradicted racial orthodoxy. But the university administration, out of a mixture of cowardice and sympathy for the rebels, refused to punish the revolutionaries, even when the president was manhandled by a fascist goon in front of an audience made up of the campus community.

The radicals and their student sympathizers believed themselves to be revolutionaries of the left — the opposite of fascists in their minds — yet when one of their professors read them the speeches of Benito Mussolini, the students reacted with enthusiasm. Events came to a climax when students took over the student union and the local radio station. Armed with rifles and shotguns, they demanded an ethnically pure educational institution staffed and run by members of their own race. At first the faculty and administration were understandably reluctant; but when it was suggested that those who opposed their agenda might be killed, most of the "moderates" quickly reversed course and supported the militants. In a mass rally reminiscent of Nuremberg, the professors recanted their reactionary ways and swore fidelity to the new revolutionary order. One professor later recalled how easily "pompous teachers who catechized about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears."¹

Eventually, the fascist thugs got everything they wanted. The authorities caved in to their demands. The few who remained opposed quietly left the university and, in some cases, the country, once it was clear that their safety could not be guaranteed.

The University of Berlin in 1932? Milan in 1922? Good guesses. But this all happened at Cornell in the spring of 1969. Paramilitary Black Nationalists under the banner of the Afro-American Society seized control of the university after waging an increasingly aggressive campaign of intimidation and violence.

The public excuse for the armed seizure of the Cornell student union was a cross burning outside a black dorm. This was later revealed to be a hoax orchestrated by the black radicals themselves in order to provide a pretext for their violence — and to overshadow the administration's fainthearted and toothless "reprimands" of six black radicals who'd broken campus rules and state laws. This Reichstag-fire-style tactic worked perfectly, as the gun-toting fascist squadristi stormed Straight Hall in the predawn hours, rousting bleary-eyed parents who were staying there for Parents Weekend. These bewildered souls who had the misfortune to bankroll the educations of the very gun-toting scholarship students now calling them "pigs" were forced to jump from a three-foot-high cargo deck into the freezing Ithaca rain. "This is Nazism in its worst form," declared a mother with breathless, if understandable, exaggeration.² The university president, James A. Perkins, was required to cancel his morning convocation address, sublimely titled "The Stability of the University."

In popular myth the 1960s was a gentle utopian movement that opposed the colonialist Vietnam War abroad and sought greater social equality and harmony at home. And it is true that the vast majority of those young people who were drawn to what they called the movement were starry-eyed idealists who thought they were ushering in the Age of Aquarius. Still, in its strictly political dimension, there is no denying that the movement's activist core was little more than a fascist youth cult. Indeed the "movement" of the 1960s may be considered the third great fascist moment of the twentieth century. The radicals of the New Left may have spoken about "power to the people" and the "authentic voice of a new generation," but they really favored neither. They were an avant-garde movement that sought to redefine not only politics but human nature itself.

Historically, fascism is of necessity and by design a form of youth movement, and all youth movements have more than a whiff of fascism about them. The exaltation of passion over reason, action over deliberation, is a naturally youthful impulse. Treating young people as equals, "privileging" their opinions precisely because they lack experience and knowledge, is an inherently fascist tendency, because at its heart lies the urge to throw off "old ways" and "old dogmas" in favor of what the Nazis called the "idealism of the deed." Youth politics — like populism generally — is the politics of the tantrum and the hissy fit. The indulgence of so-called youth politics is one face of the sort of cowardice and insecurity that leads to the triumph of barbarism.

While there's no disputing that Nazism's success was deeply connected to the privations of the great German Depression, that should not lead one to think that Nazism itself was a product of poverty. Even before World War I, Germany was undergoing a revolution of youth. The war merely accelerated these trends, heightening both idealism and alienation. Klaus Mann, the secular Jew and homosexual novelist, spoke for much of his generation when he wrote in 1927, "We are a generation that is united, so to speak, only by perplexity. As yet, we have not found the goal that might be able to dedicate us to common effort, although we all share the search for such a goal."³ Mann understated the case. While young Germans were divided about what should replace the old order, they were united by more than mere perplexity. A sort of youthful identity politics had swept through Germany, fired by the notion that the new generation was different and better because it had been liberated from the politics of corrupt and cowardly old men and was determined to create an "authentic" new order.

German youth culture in the 1920s and early 1930s was ripe with rebelliousness, environmental mysticism, idealism, and no small amount of paganism, expressing attitudes that should be familiar to anyone who lived through the 1960s. "They regarded family life as repressive and insincere," writes one historian. They believed sexuality, in and out of marriage, was "shot through with hypocrisy," writes another. They, too, believed you couldn't trust anyone over thirty and despised the old materialistic order in all its manifestations. To them, "parental religion was largely a sham, politics boastful and trivial, economics unscrupulous and deceitful, education stereotyped and lifeless, art trashy and sentimental, literature spurious and commercialized, drama tawdry and mechanical." Born of the middle class, the youth movement rejected, even loathed, middle-class liberalism. "Their goal," writes John Toland, "was to establish a youth culture for fighting the bourgeois trinity of school, home and church."⁴

In cafes they howled at the decadence of German society in cadences reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg. In the woods they'd commune with nature, awaiting "messages from the forest." A fuhrer — or popularly acclaimed "leader" — might read passages from Nietzsche or the poet Stefan George, who wrote: "The people and supreme wisdom yearn for the Man! — The Deed!...Perhaps someone who sat for years among your murderers and slept in your prisons will stand up and do the deed!" "These young people," Toland writes, "thriving on mysticism and impelled by idealism, yearned for action — any kind of action."⁵

Even before the Nazis seized power, student radicals were eager to challenge the stodgy conservatism of German higher education, which cherished classically liberal academic freedom and the authority of scholars and teachers. A wave of Nietzschean pragmatism (Julien Benda's phrase) had swept across Europe, bringing with it a wind that blew away the stale dogmas of their parents' generation, revealing a new world to be seen with fresh eyes. The Nazis told young people that their enthusiasm shouldn't be restrained through academic study — rather, it should be indulged through political action. The tradition of study for its own sake was thrown aside in the name of "relevance." Let us read no more of Jewish science and foreign abstractions, they cried. Let us learn of Germans and war and what we can do for the nation! Intuition — which young people have in abundance — was more important than knowledge and experience, insisted the radicals. The youth loved how Hitler denounced the theorists — "ink knights," he spat. What was required, according to Hitler, was a "revolt against reason" itself, for "[i]ntellect has poisoned our people!"⁶ Hitler rejoiced that he stole the hearts and minds of youth, transforming universities into incubators of activism for the Fatherland.

The Nazis succeeded with stunning speed. In 1927, during a time of general prosperity, 77 percent of Prussian students insisted that the "Aryan paragraph" — barring Jews from employment — be incorporated into the charters of German universities. As a halfway measure, they fought for racial quotas that would limit the number of racially inappropriate students. In 1931, 60 percent of all German undergraduates supported the Nazi Student Organization. Regional studies of Nazi participation found that students generally outpaced any other group in their support for National Socialism.⁷

A key selling point for German youth was the Nazi emphasis on the need for increased student participation in university governance. Nazis believed that the voice of the students needed to be heard and the importance of "activism" recognized as an essential part of higher education. Foreshadowing a refrain common to American student radicals of the 1960s, like Columbia's Mark Rudd, who declared that the only legitimate job of the university was "the creation and expansion of a revolutionary movement," the Nazis believed that the university should be an empowering incubator of revolutionaries first and peddlers of abstraction a very, very distant second.⁸

The Nazis' tolerance for dissident views sharply declined, of course, once they attained and solidified power. But the themes remained fairly constant. Indeed, the Nazis fulfilled their promise to increase student participation in university governance as part of a broader redefinition of the university itself. Walter Schultze, the director of the National Socialist Association of University Lecturers, laid out the new official doctrine in an address to the first gathering of the organization, wherein he explained that "academic freedom" must be redefined so that students and professors alike could work together toward the larger cause. "Never has the German idea of freedom been conceived with greater life and vigor than in our day...Ultimately freedom is nothing else but responsible service on behalf of the basic values of our being as a Volk."⁹

Professors who deviated from the new orthodoxy faced all of the familiar tactics of the campus left in the 1960s. Their classrooms were barricaded or occupied, threats were put in their mail, denunciations were posted on campus bulletin boards and published in student newspapers, lecturers were heckled. When administrators tried to block or punish these antics, the students mounted massive protests, and the students naturally won, often forcing the resignation of the administrator.

What cannot be overstated is that German students were first and foremost rebelling against the conservatism of both German higher education and the older generation's "bourgeois materialism." The churches, too, were suspect because they had become so closely associated with the old, corrupt World War I regime. The students wanted to run the universities, which to traditional academics was akin to inmates running the asylum. Meanwhile, most of the progressive professors, at least those who weren't Jews or Bolsheviks, gamely went along. Indeed, many such academics — like Hans-Georg Gadamer — who in later years would exploit their victim status under the Nazis, were quite happy to take a better office vacated by a Jewish colleague. Martin Heidegger, the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, took to the Nazi revolution instantly.

The Cornell takeover echoed these and other fascist themes. Black student radicals, convinced of their racial superiority and the inherent corruption of liberalism, mounted a sustained campaign of intimidation and violence against the very institution that afforded them the luxury of an education. President Perkins himself was a quintessentially progressive educator. With degrees from Swarthmore and Princeton, he cut his teeth as a New Dealer in the Office of Price Administration. Intellectually, Perkins was a product of the progressive-pragmatic tradition of William James and John Dewey, rejecting the idea that universities should be dedicated to the pursuit of eternal truths or enduring questions. He ridiculed the "intellectual chastity" of traditional scholarship and mocked non-pragmatic scholars — modern-day ink knights — who spent their time devoted to "barren discussions of medieval scholasticism." Like so many of the New Deal intellectuals, Perkins was hostile to the idea that the past had much to say about the present. For him, the watchword was "relevance," which in the 1960s quickly led to "empowerment."¹⁰

Perkins believed that universities should be laboratories for social change, training grounds for "experts" who would parachute into the real world and fix society, like the progressives of Wilson's and FDR's day. For these reasons — plus a decided lack of courage — Perkins prostrated himself to fascist goons while he ruthlessly turned his back on those whose educations, jobs, and even lives were threatened by Black Power radicals. German students insisted that they be taught "German science" and "German logic." The black radicals wanted to be taught "black science" and "black logic" by black professors. They demanded a separate school tasked to "create the tools necessary for the formation of a black nation." They backed up these demands not with arguments but with violence and passionate assertion. "In the past it has been all the black people who have done all the dying," shouted the leader of the black radicals. "Now the time has come when the pigs are going to die." Perkins supinely obliged after only token opposition. After all, he explained, "there is nothing I have ever said or will ever say that is forever fixed or will not be modified by changed circumstances." The first course offered in the new program was Black Ideology.¹¹

Since then, what we now call identity politics has become the norm in academia. Whole departments are given over to the exploration and celebration of race and gender differences. Diversity is now code for the immutable nature of racial identity. This idea, too, traces itself back to the neo-Romanticism of the Nazis. What was once the hallmark of Nazi thinking, forced on higher education at gunpoint, is now the height of intellectual sophistication. Andrew Hacker, then a young professor at Cornell, today perhaps the preeminent white liberal writer on racial issues, has written that "historically white" colleges "are white...in logic and learning, in their conceptions of scholarly knowledge and demeanor."¹²

Readers of a certain age probably know next to nothing about the Cornell uprising, and an even larger number probably have a hard time reconciling this spectacle with the image of the 1960s conjured by the popular culture. They believe in the Sorelian myth of the 1960s as an age when the "good guys" overturned a corrupt system, rebelled against their "square" parents, and ushered in an age of enlightenment and decency, now under threat from oppressive conservatives who want to roll back its utopian gains. Liberal baby boomers have smeared the lens of memory with Vaseline, depicting the would-be revolutionaries as champions of peace and love — free love at that! Communes, hand-holding, marching arm in arm for peace and justice, and singing "Kumbaya" around the campfire: these are the images the New Left wants to put at the front of our collective memory. Some on the left still argue that the 1960s was a period of revolutionary politics, though they are split over the extent of the revolution's failures and triumphs. More mainstream liberals want us to remember John F. Kennedy uniting the nation with his call to "ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country." Others emphasize the antiwar or civil rights movements.

Speaking as a presidential candidate in 2003, Howard Dean offered the consensus view when he told the Washington Post that the 1960s was "a time of great hope." "Medicare had passed. Head Start had passed. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the first African American justice [appointed to] the United States Supreme Court. We felt like we were all in it together, that we all had responsibility for this country...That [strong schools and communities were] everybody's responsibility. That if one person was left behind, then America wasn't as strong or as good as it could be or as it should be. That's the kind of country that I want back."¹³

There's no reason not to take Dean at his word. Indeed, unlike many liberal Democrats who were products of that time, Dean is admirably willing to admit that he was decisively shaped by the decade — while the Clintons and John Kerry, who were vastly more influenced by radical politics, insist on pretending that the 1960s was little more than a movie playing in the background. In a sense, however, one could say that Dean is the bigger liar. For almost everything about this gauzy rendition of the 1960s is a distortion.

First of all, young people were not uniformly "progressive." Public opinion surveys found that young Americans were often the most pro-military while people over fifty were the most likely to oppose war. Numerous studies also show that radical children were not rebelling against their parents' values. The single best predictor of whether a college student would become a campus radical was the ideology of his or her own parents. Left-leaning parents produced left-leaning children who grew up to be radical revolutionaries. The most significant divide among young people was between those attending college and those not. But even among campus youth, attitudes on Vietnam didn't turn negative until the 1960s were almost over, and even then there was much less consensus than the PBS documentaries would suggest.

Moreover, the student radicals themselves were not quite the anti-war pacifists that John Lennon nostalgists might think. They did not want to give peace a chance when the peace wasn't favorable to their agenda. The Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, did not start out as an antiwar organization. Indeed, its leader, Tom Hayden, considered the early antiwar activism a distraction from its core mission in the streets. Even after the New Left became chiefly defined by its stance against the war, it was never pacifistic, at least at its most glorified fringes. The Black Panthers, who assassinated police in ambushes and plotted terrorist bombings, were revered by New Left radicals — Hayden called them "our Vietcong." The Weathermen, an offshoot of the SDS, conducted a campaign of domestic terrorism and preached the cleansing value of violence. Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the group John Kerry spoke for and led, internally debated whether or not it should assassinate politicians who supported the war.¹⁴ Gandhis they were not.

This raises an even more fundamentally dishonest aspect of the 1960s myth. Dean, speaking for many, paints the 1960s as a time of great unity. "People my age really felt that way."¹⁵ But this is patent nonsense. "People" didn't feel that way. The people Howard Dean knew felt that way — or at least their nostalgia causes them to think they did. It's bizarre how many people remember the 1960s as a time of "unity" and "hope" when it was in reality a time of rampant domestic terrorism, campus tumult, assassinations, and riots. Nostalgia for their own youth can't explain this myopia, since liberals also pine for the 1930s as a time when "we were all in it together." This, too, is a gross distortion. The United States was not unified in the 1930s; it was torn by political unrest, intense labor violence, and the fear that one totalitarianism or another lay just around the corner. If unity alone was the issue, the left would pine for the 1950s or even the 1920s. But the left didn't thrive in these decades, so any unity enjoyed by Americans was illegitimate.

In other words, it is not unity the left longs for but victory; unity on terms not their own (such as the "staid conformity" of the 1950s) is false and misleading. In the 1930s and 1960s, the left's popular-front approach yielded real power — and that is the true object of liberal nostalgia; nothing more, nothing less.

THE NEW LEFT'S FASCIST MOMENT

The elevation of unity as the highest social value is a core tenet of fascism and all leftist ideologies. Mussolini adopted the socialist symbol of the fasces to convey that his movement valued unity over the liberal democratic fetish of debate and discussion. That clanking, unrhymed chant we hear at protest rallies today — "The people united will never be defeated!" — is a perfectly fascist refrain. Perhaps it is true that "the people united will never be defeated," but that doesn't mean the people are right (as Calvin Coolidge liked to say, "One with the law on his side is a majority"). We tend to forget that unity is, at best, morally neutral and often a source of irrationality and groupthink. Rampaging mobs are unified. The Mafia is unified. Marauding barbarians bent on rape and pillage are unified. Meanwhile, civilized people have disagreements, and small-d democrats have arguments. Classical liberalism is based on this fundamental insight, which is why fascism was always antiliberal. Liberalism rejected the idea that unity is more valuable than individuality. For fascists and other leftists, meaning and authenticity are found in collective enterprises — of class, nation, or race — and the state is there to enforce that meaning on everyone without the hindrance of debate.

The first task of any fascist reformation is to discredit the authority of the past, and this was the top priority of the New Left. The Old Left was "suffocating under a blanket of slogans, euphemisms and empty jargon," while the New Left's mission lay in "getting people to think." Received wisdom, dogma, and "ritualistic language," Tom Hayden wrote in his 1961 "Letter to the New (Young) Left," would be swept aside by a revolutionary spirit that "finds no rest in conclusions [and in which] answers are seen as provisional, to be discarded in the face of new evidence or changed conditions." Hayden, like Mussolini, Woodrow Wilson, and the New Dealers, placed his hopes in a pragmatism that would yield a Third Way between the "authoritarian movements both of Communism and the domestic Right." Hayden, of course, also promised that his new movement would transcend labels and take "action."¹⁶

In academia a parallel revolt was under way. In 1966, at a conference at Johns Hopkins University, the French literary critic Jacques Derrida introduced the word "deconstruction" — a term coined by Nazi ideologues — into the American intellectual bloodstream. Deconstruction — a literary theory which holds that there is no single meaning to any text — caught fire in the minds of academics and students alike who hoped to be liberated from the dead weight of history and accumulated knowledge. If all texts were diversely interpretable with no "true" meaning at their core, then the important thing — the only thing really — was the meaning the reader imposed upon the text. In other words, meaning is created through power and will. The right interpretation is the one held by the interpreter who "wins" the academic power struggle. According to Derrida and his acolytes, reason was a tool of oppression. Beneath every seemingly rational decision was pure Nietzschean will to power. Derrida hoped to snatch the veil from the Enlightenment and reveal the tyranny of "logocentrism" beneath (another word with fascist roots).

This, too, was a replay of the pragmatic spirit that had sought to liberate society from the cage of inherited dogma. Pragmatism inspired Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Benito Mussolini, as well as their court intellectuals, to discard the "putrefying corpse" of classical liberalism and parliamentary democracy in order to empower "men of action" to solve society's problems through bold experimentation and the unfettered power of the state. As one progressive reformer put it, "We were all Deweyites before we read Dewey."¹⁷ Similarly, many in the academy were deconstructionists before they read Derrida.

The literary critic Paul de Man was one such sleeper deconstructionist. De Man, who first met Derrida at the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference, became the foremost champion of deconstruction in the United States and a huge influence on Derrida himself. De Man taught at Cornell in the first half of the 1960s, and then moved to Johns Hopkins and Yale. Derrida's and de Man's writings served as an intellectual warrant for the radicalization of faculty who wanted to find common cause with the marchers in the streets by "speaking truth to power."¹⁸ At Cornell, in the years preceding the takeover, de Man championed the defenestration of the "core curriculum," arguing that nothing worthwhile would be lost if the university turned its back on the traditional benchmarks of a liberal education. How could it be otherwise if all those ancient texts were in effect meaningless?

Such ideas contributed to the implosion of the American university in much the same way that they accelerated the Nazi takeover of German universities. Polite liberals were forced to choose between doing their jobs and siding with the radicals. For the more politicized professors this was no choice at all, since they already agreed with the aims of the revolution. But for individuals like Clinton Rossiter, a decent liberal centrist and one of America's most distinguished historians, the choice was destructive. A professor at Cornell during the uprising, Rossiter at first fought for the ideal of academic freedom along with other threatened faculty, but eventually he threw in his lot with the black fascists. Just two days before he made his decision, he'd told the New York Times, "If the ship goes down, I'll go down with it — as long as it represents reason and order. But if it's converted to threats and fear, I'll leave it and take a job as a night watchman at a local bakery." Fine words. But when truly forced to choose between working at a bakery and giving in to threats and intimidation, he turned his back on his friends and his principles.¹⁹

The parallel between the reformation of American universities in the 1960s and what occurred in Nazi Germany runs even deeper. Deconstruction is a direct and unapologetic offshoot of Heidegger's brand of existentialism, which not only was receptive to Nazism but helped foster it. Heidegger was the great inheritor of Nietzsche's assault on truth and morality, which held that we make our own truth and decide our own morality. For Heidegger and Nietzsche alike, good and evil were childish notions. What matters is will and choice. Self-assertion was the highest value. Choices were worthwhile only if they were authentic choices, heedless of conventional morality. This was the ethos of Nazism that Heidegger wholeheartedly embraced and never forthrightly renounced, even decades after the extent of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes were known. The Nazi critique of Western civilization was total. In his infamous rectorial address, Heidegger looked forward to the time — hastened by Hitler's efforts — "when the spiritual strength of the West fails and its joints crack, when the moribund semblance of culture caves in and drags all forces into confusion and lets them suffocate in madness."²⁰

Deconstruction's indebtedness to the fascist avant-garde remains one of the most controversial subjects in academia today, precisely because that debt is so obvious and profound. Paul de Man, for example, was a Nazi collaborator in Belgium who wrote seething pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic articles for a fascist newspaper during the occupation. Herbert Marcuse, a protege of Heidegger's, became the leader of the New Left's academic brain trust. He attacked Western society mercilessly, arguing that "liberal tolerance" was "serving the cause of oppression" — an argument that echoed the fascist assault of the 1930s almost perfectly. Frantz Fanon, who preached about the "redemptive" power of violence, was widely seen as a direct heir of Georges Sorel, the pre-fascist theorist admired and emulated by Italian Fascists and Bolsheviks alike. The Nietzschean pragmatist Michel Foucault — revered by postmodernists and feminist theorists — set as his North Star the "sovereign enterprise of Unreason."²¹ Foucault's hatred for Enlightenment reason was so profound that he celebrated the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the dictatorship of the mullahs precisely because it was a premodern assault on Enlightenment principles. Carl Schmitt, a grotesque Nazi philosopher, is among the most chic intellectuals on the left today. His writings were passed around as samizdat by New Left radicals in Europe, including Joschka Fischer, who spent the 1970s beating up policemen in West German streets and later became foreign minister and vice-chancellor in the government of Gerhard Schroder from 1998 to 2005.

For more than sixty years, liberals have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream of the political right. And yet with the notable and complicated exceptions of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, no top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger. All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment — John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke — and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism.²² Meanwhile, the ranks of left-wing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition. And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word "Marxist" to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents. The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values — even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments.

In a seminar there may be important distinctions to be made between, say, Foucault's "enterprise of Unreason," Derrida's tyrannical logocentrism, and Hitler's "revolt against reason." But such distinctions rarely translate beyond ivy-covered walls — and they are particularly meaningless to a movement that believes action is more important than ideas. Deconstruction, existentialism, postmodernism, Pragmatism, relativism: all of these ideas had the same purpose — to erode the iron chains of tradition, dissolve the concrete foundations of truth, and firebomb the bunkers where the defenders of the ancien regime still fought and persevered. These were ideologies of the "movement." The late Richard Rorty admitted as much, conflating Nietzsche and Heidegger with James and Dewey as part of the same grand project.

Few were more adept at using the jargon of the "movement" than fascists and pre-fascists. Hitler uses the phrase "the Movement" over two hundred times in Mein Kampf. A Nazi Party journal was called Die Bewegung (The Movement). The word "movement" itself is instructive. Movement, unlike progress, doesn't imply a fixed destination. Rather, it takes it as a given that any change is better. As Allan Bloom and others have noted, the core passion of fascism was self-assertion. The Nazis may have been striving for a utopian Thousand-Year Reich, but their first instincts were radical: Destroy what exists. Tear it down. Eradicate "das System" — another term shared by the New Left and fascists alike. "I have a barbaric concept of socialism," a young Mussolini once said. "I understand it as the greatest act of negation and destruction...Onward, you new barbarians!...Like all barbarians you are the harbingers of a new civilization."²³ Hitler's instincts were even more destructive. Even before he ordered the obliteration of Paris and issued his scorched-earth policy on German soil, his agenda was to rip apart everything the bourgeoisie had created, to destroy the reactionaries, to create new art and architecture, new culture, new religion, and, most of all, new Germans. This project could only commence upon the ashes of das System. And if he couldn't create, he could take solace in destroying.

How exactly is this different from the "Burn, baby, burn!" ethos of the late 1960s?

THE ACTION CULT

Five months after the Cornell takeover, the Weathermen gathered in Chicago's Lincoln Park. Armed with baseball bats, helmets, and, in the words of the historian Jim Miller, "apparently bottomless reserves of arrogance and self-loathing," they prepared to "smash through their bourgeois inhibitions and 'tear pig city apart' in a 'national action' they called 'The Days of Rage.'" Like Brownshirts and fascist squadristi, they smashed windows, destroyed property, and terrorized the bourgeoisie. They'd already bloodied themselves the previous year at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where, the Weathermen claimed, their violence had done "more damage to the ruling class...than any mass, peaceful gathering this country has ever seen."²⁴

The desire to destroy is a natural outgrowth of the cult of action. After all, if you are totally committed to revolutionary change, any boundaries you run into — the courts, the police, the rule of law — must be either converted, co-opted, or destroyed. All fascists are members of the cult of action. Fascism's appeal was that it would get things done. Make the trains run on time, put people to work, get the nation on the move: these are sentiments sewn into the fiber of every fascist movement. The fascist state of mind can best be described as "Enough talk, more action!" Close the books, get out of the library, get moving. Take action! What kind of action? Direct action! Social action! Mass action! Revolutionary action! Action, action, action.

Communists loved action, too. That's not surprising considering the family bonds between communism and fascism. But fascists valued action more. Communism had a playbook. Fascism had a hurry-up offense, calling its plays on the field. Sure, fascism had its theorists, but in the streets, fascists cared about victory more than doctrine. "In a way utterly unlike the classical 'isms,'" writes Robert O. Paxton, "the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is 'true' insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood." Or as Mussolini himself put it in his "Postulates of the Fascist Program," fascists "do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form."²⁵

The word "activist" enters the English language at the turn of the century with the rise of pragmatic Progressivism. The early fascist intellectuals fancied themselves "activist philosophers." Mussolini, while still a socialist in good standing, wrote in 1908, "The plebs, who are excessively Christianized and humanitarian, will never understand that a higher degree of evil is necessary so that the Superman might thrive...The Superman knows revolt alone. Everything that exists must be destroyed." This represented an early marriage of Leninism and Nietzsche. Instead of the individual superman, the vanguard of the revolution would be the new breed of supermen. The Nazis were likewise inspired by Nietzsche but also by the Romantics, who believed that the spirit of the act is more important than the idea behind it. This was the Nazi "Cult of the Deed." The French fascists even dubbed their movement the Action Francaise, putting action on an equal footing with nation. Mussolini defined both socialism and fascism as "movement, struggle, and action." One of his favorite slogans was "To live is not to calculate, but to act!" Hitler mocked those who believed that arguments and reason should trump the naked power of the people. When four renowned economists sent Hitler a letter disputing his socialist schemes, Hitler responded, "Where are your storm troopers? Go on the street, go into folk meetings and try to see your standpoint through. Then we'll see who is right — we or you."²⁶

Sixties radicalism was suffused with an identical spirit. The early intellectuals of the SDS — centered on the Institute for Policy Studies (a think tank today closely affiliated with the left wing of the Democratic Party) — were adherents of what they called "existential pragmatism," a blend in equal parts of Jean-Paul Sartre and John Dewey. "I'm a nihilist! I'm proud of it, proud of it!" shrieked a delegate to a 1967 meeting of the Princeton SDS. "Tactics? It's too late...Let's break what we can. Make as many answer as we can. Tear them apart."²⁷

Mark Rudd, the chairman of the SDS at Columbia University and the leader of the takeover there in 1968, represented the ascendancy of what SDS "moderates" called the "action freaks" or the "action faction." A voluptuary of violence, Rudd subscribed to the Sorelian view that "direct action" would "raise consciousness" (then a freshly minted phrase). When the "moderates" told him the movement needed more organization and outreach, he responded, "Organizing is just another word for going slow."²⁸ Mussolini, who divided his squadristi into "action squads," could certainly sympathize.

As the reader may recall from our earlier discussion, it was Georges Sorel, the French engineer turned intellectual, who pioneered the idea that the masses needed myths to be moved to action. Recognizing that Marxism, like all social science, rarely panned out in real life, Sorel married William James's will to believe to Nietzsche's will to power and applied them to mass psychology. Revolutionaries didn't need to understand the reality of Marxism; they needed to believe in the myth of Marxism (or nationalism, syndicalism, fascism, and so on). "[T]o concern oneself with social science is one thing and to mold consciousness is another," he wrote.²⁹ Passion, not facts, was the fuel for action. "It is faith that moves mountains, not reason," Mussolini explained in a 1932 interview (echoing Woodrow Wilson's Leaders of Men). "Reason is a tool, but it can never be the motive force of the crowd."

As the cross-burning incident at Cornell demonstrated, this preference for arousing passions at the expense of truth and reason defined the agenda of those fighting in the trenches. The practice of "lying for justice" — always acceptable on the communist left — was infused into the American New Left with new potency. The catchphrase at the Columbia uprising was "the issue is not the issue." No wonder, since the actual "issue" — building a gym in adjacent Harlem — was such small beer. For most of the activists, deceit wasn't the point. The point was passion, mobilization, action. As one SDS member proclaimed after he and his colleagues seized a building and kidnapped a dean, "We've got something going on here and now we've just got to find out what it is."³⁰

BUILDING A POLITICS OF MEANING

The movement of the 1960s didn't start out destructive. In fact it started out brimming with high-minded idealism and hope. The Port Huron Statement, the signature document of the New Left, was for all its overwrought verbiage a well-intentioned statement of democratic optimism and admirable honesty. The authors — chief among them Tom Hayden — conceded that they were in fact bourgeois radicals, "bred in at least modest comfort." Driven by a sense of alienation from the American way of life, the young radicals craved a sense of unity and belonging, a rediscovery of personal meaning through collective political endeavors. Life seemed out of balance. "It is difficult today to give human meaning to the welter of facts that surrounds us," the authors proclaimed. Their aim was to create a political system that would restore "human meaning" (whatever that is). "The goal of man and society," they insisted, "should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic." This urge for self-assertion should be translated into a politics that could unleash the "unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity."³¹

At the time, youth activists found a willing ear in mainstream liberalism, which was preaching more and more about "national service," "sacrifice," and "action." John F. Kennedy — the youngest president ever elected, replacing the oldest president ever elected — simultaneously fed and appealed to this atmosphere at every turn. "Let the word go forth," he declared in his inaugural address with an almost authoritarian tempo, "that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace." His most famous line, "Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country," resonated with a generation desperate to find collective redemption in peace the way their parents had in war.

A subconscious current ran through the entire society, a quest for community and galvanizing leadership. As Tom Hayden noted in March 1962, "Three out of every four students believe 'that what the nation needs is a strong fearless leader in whom we can have faith.'" The embryonic youth movement hoped that Kennedy might prove to be that leader. The Peace Corps, and later VISTA, drew volunteers from the same wellspring of youthful activism. The University of California at Berkeley — the home of the first campus revolt of the 1960s — provided "the single most important source of volunteers for the Peace Corps in the early 1960s." When the Student Peace Union, or SPU, protested in front of the White House in February 1962, Kennedy ordered his kitchen to send the picketers coffee while the SPU proudly distributed copies of a New York Times article which claimed that the president was "listening" to them.³²

And then there was the quest for community. The Red Diaper Babies of the 1960s inherited from their parents the same drive to create a new community organized around political aspirations. According to Todd Gitlin, the former president of the SDS, "There was a longing to 'unite the fragmented parts of personal history,' as The Port Huron Statement put it — to transcend the multiplicity and confusion of roles that become normal in a rationalized society: the rifts between work and family, between public and private, between strategic, calculating reason and spontaneous, expressive emotion." Gitlin continues, "At least for some of us, the circle evoked a more primitive fantasy of fusion with a symbolic, all-enfolding mother: the movement, the beloved community itself, where we might be able to find in Yale psychologist Kenneth Keniston's words, 'the qualities of warmth, communion, acceptedness, dependence and intimacy which existed in childhood.'" Mark Rudd likewise reminisced about the glories of the "communes" set up at Columbia: "For many it was the first communal experience of their lives — a far cry from the traditional lifestyle of Morningside Heights [at Columbia], that of individuals retiring into their rooms or apartments. One brother remarked to me, 'The communes are a better high than grass.'"³³

The SDS's original mission wasn't radical; it was humane: community outreach. The first significant project the group undertook was the Economic Research and Action Project, begun in 1963. SDS members fanned out like knights from the roundtable in search of the grail of self-fulfillment by moving into inner-city ghettos in an earnest effort to politicize the poor, the oppressed, and the criminal underclass. It should tell us something that the most compelling catchphrase for liberals and leftists alike in the 1960s was "community": "community action," "community outreach," "communities of mutual respect."

As Alan Brinkley has noted, most of the protests and conflagrations of the 1960s had their roots in a desire to preserve or create communities. The ostensible issue that launched the takeover of Columbia University in 1968 was the encroachment of the campus into the black community. The administration's appeasement of Black Nationalists was done in the name of welcoming blacks to the Cornell community, and the Black Nationalists took up arms because they felt that assimilation into the Cornell community, or the white community generally, amounted to a negation of their own community — that is, "cultural genocide."

The Berkeley uprising was sparked in large part by the school's expansion into a tiny park that, at the end of the day, was just a place for hippies to hang out and feel comfortable in their own little community. Hippies may call themselves nonconformists, but as anyone who's spent time with them understands, they prize conformity above most things. The clothes and hair are ways of fitting in, of expressing shared values. Peace signs may symbolize something very different from the swastika, but both are a kind of insignia instantly recognizable to friend and foe alike. Regardless, the Berkeley protesters felt that their world, their folk community, was being destroyed by a cold, impersonal institution in the form of the university and, perhaps, modernity itself. "You've pushed us to the end of your civilization here, against the sea in Berkeley," shouted one of the leaders of the People's Park uprising. "Then you pushed us into a square-block area called People's Park. It was the last thing we had to defend, this square block of sanity amid all your madness...We are now homeless in your civilized world. We have become the great American gypsies, with only our mythology for a culture."³⁴ This is precisely the sort of diatribe one might have heard from a bohemian Berliner in the 1920s.

There is no disputing that Nazism was an evil ideology from the first spark of its inception. But that does not mean that every adherent of Nazism was motivated by evil intent. Germans did not collectively decide to be Hollywood villains for all eternity. For millions of Germans the Nazis seemed to offer hope for community and meaning and authenticity, too. As Walter Laqueur wrote in Commentary shortly after the Cornell uprising:

Most of the basic beliefs and even the outward fashions of the present world-youth movements can be traced back to the period in Europe just before and after the First World War. The German Neue Schar of 1919 were the original hippies: long-haired, sandaled, unwashed, they castigated urban civilization, read Hermann Hesse and Indian philosophy, practiced free-love, and distributed in their meetings thousands of asters and chrysanthemums. They danced, sang to the music of the guitar, and attended lectures on the "Revolution of the Soul." The modern happening was born in 1910 in Trieste, Parma, Milan, and other Italian cities where the Futurists arranged public meetings to recite their poems, read their manifestos, and exhibit their ultra-modern paintings. No one over thirty, they demanded, should in future be active in politics...

For the historian of ideas, the back issues of the periodicals of the youth movements, turned yellow with age, make fascinating reading...It is indeed uncanny how despite all the historical differences, the German movement preempted so many of the issues agitating the American movement of today, as well as its literary fashions.³⁵

Let us return to the example of Horst Wessel, the most famous "youth leader" of the early Nazi movement, "martyred" in his battle against the "Red Front and reactionaries" as immortalized in the Nazi "Horst Wessel Lied" ("Horst Wessel Song"). Wessel fit the 1960s ideal of a youth leader "from the streets" fighting for social justice. The son of a Lutheran pastor, he rebelled against his middle-class upbringing by dropping out of law school at twenty-one and enlisting in the Nazi storm troopers. He moved into a shady working-class part of town and, with his comrades, joined in bloody street battles against the communists. But Wessel also earned a reputation as an idealistic and sensitive proselytizer for the "revolution from below," which would usher in a united racial community transcending class differences. He walked the walk, living among criminals and the struggling proletariat:

Whoever is convinced that the Germany of today is not worthy of guarding the gates of true German culture must leave the theatre...the salons...the studies...their parents' houses...literature...the concert halls. He must take to the streets, he must really go to the people...in their tenements of desperation and woe, of criminality...where the SA is protecting German culture...Every beer hall brawl is a step forward for German culture, the head of every SA man bashed in by the communists is another victory for the people, for the Reich, for the house of German culture.³⁶

An amateur poet, Wessel wrote a small tribute to the cause, "Die Fahne hoch" ("Raise High the Flag"), which promised, "The day breaks for freedom and for bread" and "Slavery will last only a short time longer." Around the same time, he fell in love with Erna Jaenicke, a prostitute whom he first met when she was being beaten up by pimps at a neighborhood bar. The two soon moved into a rundown boardinghouse together, over the protests of his mother. There's some evidence that Wessel grew increasingly disenchanted with the Nazis, realizing that the communists shared many of the same aspirations. He certainly became less active in the ranks of the Brownshirts. But whether he would have broken with them is unknowable because he died at the hands of the communists in 1930.

And that was all that really mattered to Joseph Goebbels, who translated Wessel's death into a propaganda coup. Overnight, Wessel was transfigured into a martyr to the Nazi cause, a Sorelian religious myth aimed at the idealistic and perplexed youth of the interwar years. Goebbels described him as a "Socialist Christ" and unleashed a relentless torrent of hagiography about Wessel's work with the poor. By the beginning of World War II, the places of his life and death in Berlin had been made into stations of the cross, and shrines had been erected at his birthplace in Vienna as well as his various homes in Berlin. His little poem was set to music and became the official Nazi anthem.

In the German feature film Hans Westmar: One of Many, the young protagonist, based on Wessel, peers from his fraternity window and declares to his privileged comrades: "The real battle is out there, not here with us. The enemy is on the march...I tell you, all of Germany will be won down there, on the street. And that's where we must be — with our people. We can no longer live in our ivory towers. We must join our hands in battle with the workers. There can't be classes anymore. We are workers too, workers of the mind, and our place now is next to those who work with their hands."³⁷

Even if the propagandized Wessel were a complete fabrication — though it was not — the mythologized version illustrates the more interesting, and important, truth. Germany was filled with millions of young men who were receptive to the shining ideal that Wessel represented. Of course, the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis makes it difficult to see (and impossible to forgive), but the dream of a unified, classless Germany was deeply heartfelt by many Nazi joiners; and if reduced to that alone, it was not an evil dream at all.

But just as the line between "good" totalitarianism and bad is easily crossed, dreams can quickly become nightmares. Indeed, some dreams, given their nature, must eventually become nightmares. And for the Horst Wessels of the American New Left, whatever admirable idealism they might have had quickly and unavoidably degenerated into fascist thuggery.

The most famous of these figures was Tom Hayden. The son of middle-class parents in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park (near Father Coughlin's parish) and the chief author of The Port Huron Statement, Hayden played an admirable role in the early civil rights struggle in the South. He certainly believed himself to be a young democrat, but the seeds of a totalitarian bent were evident from his earliest days at the University of Michigan. In a speech delivered to the Michigan Union in 1962 — which became a manifesto titled Student Social Action — Hayden proclaimed that the youth must wrest control of society from their elders. To this end the universities had to become incubators of revolutionary "social action." Richard Flacks, a young academic who would join Hayden in the new crusade along with his wife, Mickey, was thunderstruck. He went home and told his wife (an activist in a group called Women Strike for Peace), "Mickey, I've just seen the next Lenin!"³⁸

By the end of the decade, Hayden had indeed become a forthright advocate of "Leninist" violence and mayhem, glorifying crime as political rebellion and openly supporting Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and, of course, the murderous Black Panthers. He helped write the "Berkeley Liberation Program." Among the highlights: "destroy the university unless it serves the people" "all oppressed people in jail are political prisoners and must be set free" "create a soulful socialism" "students must destroy the senile dictatorship of adult teachers." His "community outreach" in the slums of Newark preceded and in part fomented the horrific race riots there. "I had been fascinated by the simplicity and power of the Molotov cocktail during those days in Newark," he writes in his autobiography. Hayden hoped that with the use of violence, the New Left could create "liberated territories" in the ghettos and campus enclaves and use them to export revolution to the rest of the United States. At a 1967 panel discussion with leading New York intellectuals, Hannah Arendt lectured Hayden about his defense of bloody insurrection. He snapped in response, "You may put me in the position of a leper, but I say a case can be made for violence in the peace movement." At the Columbia occupation, Hayden explained that the protests were just the start of "bringing the war home." Echoing Che Guevara's chant of "two, three, many Vietnams," Hayden called for "two, three, many Columbias."³⁹

One of the most illuminating symptoms of left-wing revolutionary movements is their tendency to blur the difference between common crime and political rebellion. The Brownshirts beat up storekeepers, shook down businessmen, and vandalized property, rationalizing all of it in the name of the "movement." Left-wing activists still refer to the L.A. riots as an "uprising" or "rebellion." A similar moral obtuseness plagued the movement in the 1960s. "The future of our struggle is the future of crime in the streets," declared Hayden. The only way to "revolutionize youth," he explained, was to have "a series of sharp and dangerous conflicts, life and death conflicts" in the streets. Hayden was no doubt inspired by (and inspiring to) the Black Panthers, who regularly staged ambushes of police in the streets. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention demonstrations in Chicago his co-organizer Rennie Davis implored the crowd, "Don't vote...join us in the streets of America...Build a National Liberation Front for America." Hayden was put on trial for his incitement of violence in Chicago. In June 1969 he pronounced on the "need to expand our struggle to include a total attack on the courts."⁴⁰

Hayden was a moderate, according to Mark Rudd, the leader of the so-called action faction of the SDS. Rudd, who organized the Columbia "rebellion," was born to a middle-class Jewish family in New Jersey, and his parents hardly encouraged his behavior. When he called his father to explain that he "took a building" from the president of Columbia University, his father replied, "Then give it back to him." Rudd's preferred rallying cry at the time was "Up against the wall, motherfucker!" which he used on teachers and administrators with abandon. "Perhaps nothing upsets our enemies more than this slogan," he explained. "To them it seemed to show the extent to which we had broken with their norms, how far we had sunk to brutality, hatred and obscenity. Great!" The term, he explained, clarified that the administrators, faculty, and police who opposed the radicals were "our enemies." "Liberal solutions, restructuring, partial understandings, compromise are not allowed anymore. The essence of the matter is that we are out for social and political revolution, nothing less."⁴¹

Rudd eventually joined the Weathermen, who, out of deference to the female terrorists in the group, soon changed their name to the Weather Underground (though they sometimes went by the moniker "The Revolutionary Youth Movement"). In 1970 the group declared a "state of war" against the United States of America and commenced a campaign of terrorist attacks. Rudd took the position that the best way to foment revolution was to target military installations, banks, and policemen. One of their first bombings was intended to target a dance for noncommissioned officers at Fort Dix, New Jersey (though another version says that the bomb, wrapped in roofing nails, was intended for Columbia). In any event, the inexperienced bomb makers famously blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village town house, killing three members and leaving the survivors fugitives for life. The explosion was one of the reasons Rudd had to go underground. He did not surface again for several years, eventually turning himself in after technical violations of wiretapping laws made the federal case against him difficult to prosecute. Today he is a math teacher at a community college in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rudd has expressed remorse for his violent youthful activities, but he is still a passionate opponent of American (and Israeli) foreign policy.

Many of us forget that the Weather Underground bombing campaign was not a matter of a few isolated incidents. From September 1969 to May 1970, Rudd and his co-revolutionaries on the white radical left committed about 250 attacks, or almost one terrorist bombing a day (government estimates put that number much higher). During the summer of 1970, there were twenty bombings a week in California. The bombings were the backbeat to the symphony of violence, much of it rhetorical, that set the score for the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rudd captured the tone perfectly: "It's a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building." "The real division is not between people who support bombings and people who don't," explained a secret member of a "bombing collective," but "between people who will do them and people who are too hung up on their own privileges and security to take those risks."⁴²

Bourgeois self-loathing lay at the very heart of the New Left's hatred of liberalism, its love affair with violence, and its willingness to take a sledgehammer to Western civilization. "We're against everything that's 'good and decent' in honky America," declared one rebel. "We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's worst nightmare." The Weathermen became the storm troopers of the New Left, horrifying even those who agreed with their cause. Convinced that all whites were born tainted with the original sin of "skin privilege," the fighting brigade of the New Left internalized racialist thinking as hatred of their own whiteness. "All white babies are pigs," declared one Weatherman. On one occasion the feminist poet Robin Morgan was breast-feeding her son at the offices of the radical journal Rat. A Weatherwoman saw this and told her, "You have no right to have that pig male baby." "How can you say that?" Morgan asked. "What should I do?" "Put it in the garbage," the Weatherwoman answered.⁴³

Bernardine Dohrn, an acid-loving University of Chicago law student turned revolutionary, reflected the widespread New Left fascination with the serial-killing hippie Ubermensch Charles Manson. "Dig It! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" In appreciation, her Weather Underground cell made a three-fingered "fork" gesture its official salute.⁴⁴

Of course, there was a great deal of playacting among the revolutionaries as well. Abbie Hoffman, the co-founder of the yippies (the Youth International Party) along with Jerry Rubin, was the son of prosperous Jewish parents in Worcester, Massachusetts. The product of private schools — where he was a troublemaker from the start, no doubt due in part to his bipolar disorder — Hoffman attended Brandeis University, where he studied under the New Left intellectual icon Herbert Marcuse. Hoffman bought into Marcuse's view that bourgeois America was "radically evil" and that it had to be radically challenged as a result. But Hoffman had something over Marcuse, Rudd, Hayden, and the rest: he could be legitimately funny about his mission (though not nearly as funny as he thought he was). His was a funny fascism, a naughty nihilism. His book titles alone give a good flavor of his approach: Steal This Book, Fuck the System, and Revolution for the Hell of It. "Personally, I always held my flower in a clenched fist," he wrote in his autobiography. He mastered the art of calling anybody he disliked or opposed a "fascist," dubbing Ronald Reagan "the fascist gun in the West." Hoffman, another member of the Chicago Seven, was a fugitive from justice for most of the 1970s, eluding charges that he was a cocaine dealer.

His antics were less an echo of the Nazis — a generally humorless bunch — and more an updating of the Italian Futurists, the artistic auxiliary to Italian Fascism.⁴⁵ The Futurists were actors, poets, writers, and other artists determined to bring all of the qualities of youth and revolution into the streets and cafes of Italy. Their fascism was theatrically violent, glorying in shock and disruption. The Futurists embraced the rush of speed and technology, the yippies glorified the rush of drugs. But it was really the same shtick. Hoffman and Rubin, for example, proposed a "Theater of Disruption" during the Chicago convention that would blend "pot and politics into a political grass-leaves movement." Updating Sorel's doctrines of myth and violence — no doubt without credit — Hoffman set out to create a "vast myth" of bloodshed and shock. "We will burn Chicago to the ground!" "We will fuck on the beaches!" "We demand the Politics of Ecstasy!" It may sound funny now, but the intent was to force a confrontation that would spill blood in the streets. In August a yippie underground newspaper, Seed, announced it had withdrawn its request for a permit for a youth rock festival. The editorial explained, "Chicago may host a Festival of Blood...Don't come to Chicago if you expect a five-day Festival of Life, music and love."⁴⁶

For those willing to look past a lot of meaningless rhetoric about Marxism, the fascist nature of all this was glaringly obvious. Indeed, one could simply take countless radicals at their word when they said they were "beyond ideology" and all about action. One of the most obvious giveaways was the New Left's obsession with the "street." The radicals talked incessantly about "taking it to the streets," of the need for "street theater," street protest, street activism, even "dancing in the street," as the song went. Many of the best books during and about the period use "street" in their titles, James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, Jim Miller's Democracy Is in the Streets, and Milton Viorst's Fire in the Streets being just a few examples.

Fascists were always fixated with the street. Horst Wessel, the martyred street fighter, captured the spirit of the street in the poem that became the Nazi anthem: "Clear the streets for the brown battalions...Soon will fly Hitler-flags over every street." The Futurists considered the street the only authentic stage. "The raging broom of madness swept us out of ourselves and drove us through streets as rough and deep as the beds of torrents," declared F. T. Marinetti, the founder of the Futurist movement. The Futurists, according to Marinetti's famous phrase, glorified "the beautiful ideas which kill." "For anyone who has a sense of historical connections, the ideological origins of Fascism can be found in Futurism," wrote Benedetto Croce in 1924, "in the determination to go down into the streets, to impose their own opinions, to stop the mouths of those who disagree, not to fear riots or fights, in this eagerness to break with all tradition, in this exaltation of youth which was characteristic of Futurism."⁴⁷

That violence was central to fascism is often an exaggerated point. Violence has been essential to nearly all revolutionary movements, save the few explicitly nonviolent ones. But the avant-garde fascists idealized violence as an end in itself, seeing it as "redemptive" and "transformative." Mussolini talked about the power and importance of violence but committed far less of it than you might expect. Yes, his goons beat people up and there were a handful of killings, but mostly Mussolini liked the aesthetics of violence, the sound of brutal rhetoric, the poetry of revolutionary bloodshed. "For revolutions are insane, violent, idiotic, bestial," he explained. "They are like war. They set fire to the Louvre and throw the naked bodies of princesses on the street. They kill, plunder, destroy. They are a man-made Biblical flood. Precisely therein consists their great beauty."⁴⁸

Here again, the similarities to the New Left are striking. Violence suffused their political talk; physical violence merely punctuated it. Violence for the New Left and Fascists alike worked on numerous symbolic levels. It elevated the sense of crisis that revolutionaries crave in order to polarize society. Indeed, polarization was an identical strategic objective for the New Left and the Nazis. Forcing mainstream liberals to choose sides on the assumption that most would follow their sympathies to the left was the only way Hayden and others could usher in their revolution. That was what they meant by "bringing the war home." (One of Rudd's comrades who was killed in the Greenwich Village blast, Ted Gold, argued that the only way to radicalize liberals was to "turn New York into Saigon."⁴⁹) The Nazis similarly assumed that Germans who favored socialist economic policies but who rejected the idea of thralldom to Moscow would ultimately side with the National Socialists over the International ones. German Communists made a similar gamble, believing that Nazism would accelerate the historical march toward Communism. Hence, again, the German socialist mantra "First Brown, then Red."

Somewhat paradoxically, support for violence — even violent rhetoric, as in Rudd's fondness for expletives — helped radicals differentiate themselves from liberals, whom the hard left saw as too concerned with politeness, procedure, and conventional politics. When "moderates" at the Columbia takeover tried to dissuade a member of the "defense committee" at the Math Hall (where the most radical students were holed up), he responded, "You fucking liberals don't understand what the scene's about. It's about power and disruption. The more blood the better." At the march on the Washington Monument to end the war in 1965, Phil Ochs sang his contemptuous "Love Me, I'm a Liberal."⁵⁰ Saul Alinsky, whose Rules for Radicals served as a bible for the New Left (and who later became one of Hillary Clinton's mentors), shared the fascist contempt for liberals as corrupted bourgeois prattlers: "Liberals in their meetings utter bold words; they strut, grimace belligerently, and then issue a weasel-worded statement 'which has tremendous implications, if read between the lines.' They sit calmly, dispassionately, studying the issue; judging both sides; they sit and still sit."⁵¹

Substitute the word "fascist" for "radical" in many of Alinsky's statements and it's sometimes difficult to tell the difference: "Society has good reason to fear the Radical...He hits, he hurts, he is dangerous. Conservative interests know that while Liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, Radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of Conservatives." And: "The Radical may resort to the sword but when he does he is not filled with hatred against those individuals whom he attacks. He hates these individuals not as persons but as symbols representing ideas or interests which he believes to be inimical to the welfare of the people." In other words, they're not people but dehumanized symbols. "Change means movement," Alinsky tells us. "Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict."⁵²

New Left violence also supported numerous other fascist themes, from the cult of unreason, the lust for action, the craving for authenticity — talk was cheap — to a sense of shame about the martial accomplishments of the older generation. Just as many Nazi youth missed the Great War and were desperate to prove their mettle to their parents and themselves, many in the New Left had "issues" with their parents' participation in World War II (and for many Jews, their parents' Holocaust ordeal). In addition, many radicals were desperate to prove they weren't cowards for refusing to fight in Vietnam.

Lastly, violence served as an homage to the true radicals and revolutionaries at home and abroad. Black Panther envy is a recurring theme in the history of New Left radicalism. The blacks were the "real thing," and the whites were desperate to gain their approval and support. French intellectuals and Upper West Side liberals achieved new heights of sycophancy in their desire to prove their radical bona fides. They cheered when black athletes at the 1968 Olympics raised their fists in defiance at the American national anthem, not caring (or knowing) that the imagery was entirely derivative of fascist aesthetics. "The fist," an Italian Fascist proclaimed in 1920, "is the synthesis of our theory."⁵³ And when George Foreman paraded an American flag at the same Olympics, the Norman Mailer crowd called him an Uncle Tom.

You can tell a lot about a movement by its heroes, and here, too, the record reflects very poorly on the New Left. For all their prattle about "participatory democracy" it's shocking how few democrats ranked as heroes to even the "peaceful" members of the movement. At Columbia, Berkeley, and campuses across America, the student activists plastered up posters of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, and Ho Chi Minh. Under Rudd's leadership, the SDS formed quasi-official ties with Castro's government. In Chicago and elsewhere, they chanted, "Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh!" Mao Tse-tung's Little Red Book of revolutionary maxims became a huge best seller.

Rather than call these regimes fascist — which I firmly believe they were — we'll merely note the similarities between these Third World movements and regimes and the conventional fascist ones. Mao, Ho, Castro, and even the Panthers were all ethnocentric movements of "national liberation." This is precisely how Mussolini and Hitler depicted their causes. Hitler promised to get Germany out from under the thumb of Versailles and "international finance capitalism." Mussolini argued that Italy was a "proletarian nation" deserving, like Germany, its "moment in the sun." Mao's Cultural Revolution, his mixture of socialism and folk Chinese custom, fits perfectly in the fascist wheelhouse. What is Castro but a military dictator (note the constant uniform) who has burnished his leadership cult with socialist economics, nationalist rhetoric, and unending Nuremberg Rally populism?

That Che Guevara has become a chic branding tool is a disgusting indictment of both American consumer culture and the know-nothing liberalism that constitutes the filthy residue of the 1960s New Left. Ubiquitous Che shirts top the list of mass-marketed revolutionary swag available for sale at the nearest bobo chic retailer — including a popular line of children's wear. Here's the text for one ad promoting this stuff: "Featured in Time magazine's holiday web shopping guide, 'Viva la revolution!' Now even the smallest rebel can express himself in these awesome baby onesies. This classic Che Guevara icon is also available on a long-sleeve tee in kids' sizes...Long live the rebel in all of us...there's no cooler iconic image than Che!"⁵⁴

The Argentine henchman of the Cuban revolution was a murderer and goon. He penned classically fascist apothegms in his journals: "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine." Guevara was a better writer, but the same muse helped to produce Mein Kampf. Guevara reveled in executing prisoners. While fomenting revolution in Guatemala, he wrote home to his mother, "It was all a lot of fun, what with the bombs, speeches and other distractions to break the monotony I was living in." His motto was "If in doubt, kill him," and he killed a great many. The Cuban-American writer Humberto Fontova described Guevara as "a combination of Beria and Himmler."⁵⁵ Guevara certainly killed more dissidents and lovers of democracy than Mussolini ever did, and Mussolini's Italy was undoubtedly more "free" than any society Guevara the "freedom fighter" was seeking. Would you put a Mussolini onesie on your baby? Would you let your daughter drink from a Himmler sippy cup?

One can have a Jesuitical argument about the precise political labels these men deserve, but the fact remains that what made these "liberationist" movements so popular were precisely those attributes Guevara, Castro, Mao, and the rest shared with the heroes of fascism. And if you scrub the names Marx and Lenin from their speeches, what remains is the stuff of any diatribe Mussolini delivered from a balcony (indeed, sometimes with Mussolini you don't even need to scrub the Marx and Lenin away). These were all nationalists committed to national socialism promising to enact a "truer" and more "organic" democracy, one that rejected the "formulaic," "superficial," and "decadent" "sham democracy" of the bourgeois West. Figures like the Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba were heroes for no other reason than that they opposed the United States and claimed to represent a racially pure revolutionary cause.⁵⁶ The United Nations and affiliated elites adopted the racist stance that when blacks or other oppressed peoples killed each other or killed whites, it was a legitimate expression of Third World will to power. Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, the Chinese way, and anticolonialism generally were recast versions of Hitler's Pan-Germanism and Mussolini's effort to be the ruler of "Latin civilization" and "Italians everywhere." Third Worlders needed lebensraum, too.

Under doctrines of black liberation, "revolutionary" violence was always justified so long as you insisted that the bloodied corpse had somehow been an accomplice to oppression. Whites became the new Jews. "[T]o shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time," observed Jean-Paul Sartre in his preface to one of Frantz Fanon's books. All of this blood chic was retailed in Norman Mailer's White Negro, which fetishized black crime as hip, cool, and revolutionary. The New Left not only bought this line; they sold it. A poll found 20 percent of American students identified with Che Guevara — beating out Nixon (19 percent), Humphrey (16 percent), and Wallace (7 percent).⁵⁷

Madness, cruelty, and totalitarianism were "in." Thugs and criminals were heroes, while champions of the rule of law were suddenly "fascists." Almost from the outset, this logic poisoned the civil rights movement's early triumphs. At Cornell most of the black students were admitted on what we'd today call affirmative action, with lower-than-average SAT scores. Particularly revealing is the fact that many of the gun-toting revolutionaries were recruited to the school precisely because they fit Mailer's stereotype of the noble "ghetto youth," the authentic Negro, and as such were given preference over other blacks with higher scores and better qualifications — because more qualified blacks were too "white."⁵⁸

By the end of the decade, the civil rights movement had for all intents and purposes become a Black Power movement. And Black Power, with its clenched fists, Afro-pagan mythology, celebration of violence, emphasis on racial pride, and disdain for liberalism, was arguably America's most authentic indigenous fascism. Stokely Carmichael — at one time the "prime minister" of the Black Panther Party — himself defined Black Power (a term he originated) as "a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created."⁵⁹ Carmichael shared Hitler's dream of building a folkish racial state upon the ashes of the old order.

Indeed, when one reads the racial indoctrination taught to the children of Nazi Germany, it's difficult to see the difference between Carmichael's black pride and Hitler's German pride. "What is the first Commandment of every National Socialist?" asked a Nazi catechism. "Love Germany above all else and your ethnic comrade as your self!" The connections between Black Nationalism and Nazism, Fascism, and other supposedly right-wing racist groups aren't merely theoretical — or recent. Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Back to Africa movement, admitted in 1922 that his ideology was perfectly simpatico with Mussolini's. "We were the first fascists," he declared. Indeed, his rhetoric was often eerily consonant with German fascism: "Up You Mighty Race, Accomplish What You Will," "Africa for the Africans...at Home and Abroad!" and so forth. In the 1960s Elijah Muhammad, the head of the Nation of Islam, formed a cordial relationship with George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell was even invited to speak at the Nation of Islam National Convention in 1962, at which he praised Elijah Muhammad as the black Adolf Hitler. On January 28, 1961, Muhammad sent Malcolm X to Atlanta to negotiate an agreement with the Ku Klux Klan whereby the Klan would support a separate black state.⁶⁰

More generally, the Black Power movement became addicted to violence, setting the tone for the white left. H. Rap Brown had exhorted his followers to "do what John Brown did, pick up a gun and go out and shoot our enemy." Malcolm X repeatedly exhorted blacks to employ "any means necessary." James Forman, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, declared that if he were assassinated, he'd want in retaliation "10 war factories destroyed...one Southern governor, two mayors and 500 racist white cops dead." Good thing he belonged to an avowedly nonviolent group! Benjamin Chavis, the future head of the NAACP, first attained national recognition when he was arrested and convicted as a member of the Wilmington Ten, a group that allegedly conspired to firebomb a grocery store and then shoot the police when they responded to the scene.⁶¹ And always and everywhere there were the Panthers, in their paramilitary garb and black shirts sporting fascistic or militaristic ranks and titles (minister of defense, minister of information), robbing banks, calling for the slaughter of "pigs" and honkies, staging ambushes for police, kidnapping judges and children, and calling for a separate black state.

Meanwhile, what of the supposedly fascistic American right? While the New Left relentlessly denounced the founding fathers as racist white males and even mainstream liberals ridiculed the idea that the text of the Constitution had any relevance for modern society, conservatives were launching an extensive project to restore the proper place of the Constitution in American life. No leading conservative scholar or intellectual celebrated fascist themes or ideas. No leading conservative denigrated the inherent classical liberalism of the United States' political system. To the contrary, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, Jr., and the conservatives around National Review dedicated themselves to restoring the classically liberal vision of the founders.

What confused the left then and now about American conservatism is that love and support for one's country do not necessarily put one on the road to fascism. Patriotism is not the same thing as extreme nationalism or fascism. The Nazis killed a great many German patriots whose love of their homeland was deep and profound. In a sense, one of the Jews' greatest offenses was that they were patriotic Germans. It was in the 1960s that the left convinced itself that there is something fascistic about patriotism and something perversely "patriotic" about running down America. Anti-Americanism — a stand-in for hatred of Western civilization — became the stuff of sophisticates and intellectuals as never before. Flag burners became the truest "patriots" because dissent — not just from partisan politics, but from the American project itself — became the highest virtue. In 2003 the professor at Columbia who hoped America would face "a million Mogadishus" is a patriot in the eyes of the left. But Americans eager to maintain limited government — of all things! — are somehow creeping fascists.

Witnessing how the brutality and wanton destruction of the Nazis had swept Hitler to power, the novelist Thomas Mann wrote in his diary that this was a new kind of revolution, "without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice." The "common scum" had won the day, "accompanied by vast rejoicing on the part of the masses."⁶² Liberals in the 1960s who lived through a similar degradation of decency by the same intellectual rot began to rebel. Confronted with an ideology that always assumed America was the problem and never the solution, they chose to mount a counterassault. These patriots in both parties became in large part that band of intellectuals known as neoconservatives. They were given that name by leftists who thought the prefix "neo" would conjure associations with neo-Nazis.

But since the testimony of neoconservatives counts for nothing in most corners of liberal thought, it's worth noting that even some titans of the left still had the clarity of vision to understand what they were dealing with. Irving Louis Horowitz, a revered leftist intellectual (he was the literary executor of C. Wright Mills) specializing in revolutionary thought, saw in 1960s radicalism a "fanatic attempt to impose a new social order upon the world, rather than await the verdict of consensus-building formulas among disparate individuals as well as the historical muses." And he saw this fanaticism for what it was: "Fascism returns to the United States not as a right-wing ideology, but almost as a quasi-leftist ideology."⁶³

Peter Berger, a Jewish refugee from Austria and a respected peace activist and left-wing sociologist (he helped popularize the phrase "social construction of reality"), saw much the same thing. When "observing the [American] radicals in action, I was repeatedly reminded of the storm troopers that marched through my childhood in Europe." He explored a long list of themes common to 1960s radicalism and European fascism and concluded they formed a "constellation that strikingly resembles the common core of Italian and German fascism." In 1974 A. James Gregor wrote The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics, which synthesized and cataloged these trends with sweeping detail and intellectual rigor. "In the recent past," he observed, "student radicals and the 'new left' have legitimized a political style calculated to be maximally serviceable to an American variant of fascism."

Even some in the SDS recognized that the more extreme members were degenerating into fascism. An editorial in the Campaigner (published by the New York and Philadelphia Regional Labor Committee of the Students for a Democratic Society) observed of the SDS faction that spawned the Weathermen, "There is a near identity between the arguments of anarchists (around the Columbia strike movement, e.g.) and Mussolini's polemics for action against theory, against program."⁶⁴

The "youth movement" theorizing sparked by Charles Reich's Greening of America, the indictment of reason, the populist appeals to defeating "the system," the table thumping for a new Volk-centric community that would replace capitalism with a more organic and totalitarian approach, was too much for some leftists with a clear understanding of the historical roots of fascism. The fascistic "overtones," Stewart Alsop wrote of The Greening of America, "are obvious to anyone who has seen those forests of arms raised in unison by the revolutionary young, or heard their mindless shouted chants. Professor Reich is certainly a good and kindly man, without a fascist bone in his body," Alsop continued, "and most of the 'liberated' young he worships are good and kindly too. But surely anyone with a sense of the political realities can smell the danger that these silly, kind, irrational people, in their cushioned isolation from reality, are bringing upon us all. The danger starts with the universities, but it does not end there. That is what makes the mush so scary." No less a socialist icon than Michael Harrington declared Reich's sweeping indictment of modernity — he called it "elite existentialism" — to have much in common with the Romantic roots of Nazism.

Today the liberal left's version of the 1960s makes about as much sense as it does to remember Hitler as the "man of peace" described by Neville Chamberlain. In its passions and pursuits, the New Left was little more than an Americanized updating of what we've come to call the European Old Right. From Easy Rider to JFK, Hollywood has been telling us that if only the forces of reaction hadn't killed their Horst Wessels, we would today be living in a better, more just, and more open-minded country. And if only we could rekindle the hope and ambition of those early radicals, "what might have been" will turn into "what could still be." This is the vital lie of the left. Western civilization was saved when the barbarians were defeated, at least temporarily, in the early 1970s. We should be not only grateful for our slender victory but vigilant in securing it for posterity.

Such vigilance is impossible without understanding the foundations on which contemporary liberalism stands, and that in turn requires a second look at the 1960s — this time from the top down. For while the radicals in the streets were demanding more power, the progressives already in power were playing their parts as well.

It is understandable that the 1960s is viewed as an abrupt change or turning point in our history, because in many respects the changes were so sudden (and in some cases for the better). But there was also a profound continuity underlying the events of the decade. When Kennedy said that the torch had been passed to a new generation, he was referring in no small part to a new generation of progressives. These men (and a few women) were dedicated to continuing the projects of Wilson and Roosevelt. When the torch is passed, the runner changes, but the race remains the same.

In the chapter that follows, we will show that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson represented the continuation of the liberal quest begun by Woodrow Wilson and his fellow progressives — the quest to create an all-caring, all-powerful, all-encompassing state, a state that assumes responsibility for every desirable outcome and takes the blame for every setback on the road to utopia, a state that finally replaces God.