On Ideas in Fascism, etc....

I'm writing a lengthy response as part of our discussion on ideas in Fascism. During my writing, I came across this lengthy passage from my secondary bible (by which I mean of course, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism). While I originally planned on including it in my response, I thought I'd post it in full on its own as it seems relevent to a number of points made, while hinting I think at why the discussion is relevent today.

(Any typos are from my transcription):

This raises the first of many common features among New Deal liberalism, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialism, all of which shared many of the same historical and intellectual forebears. Fascist and Nazi intellectuals constantly touted a “middle” or “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism. Mussolini zigzagged every which way, from free trade and low taxes to a totalitarian state apparatus. Even before he attained power, his stock response when asked to outline his program was to say he had none. “Our program is to govern,” the Fascists liked to say.


Hitler showed even less interest in political or economic theory, fascist or otherwise. He never read Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century or many of the other “classic” fascist texts. And the inability of numerous Nazis and fascists to plow through the Nazi bible Mein Kampf is legendary.

The “Middle Way” sounds moderate and un-radical. Its appeal is that it sounds unideological and free-thinking. But philosophically the Third Way is not mere difference splitting; it is utopian and authoritarian. Its utopian aspect becomes manifest in its antagonism to the idea that politics is about trade-offs. The Third Wayer says that there are no false choices-“I refuse to accept that X should come at the expense of Y.” The Third Way holds that we can have capitalism and socialism, individual liberty and absolute unity. Fascist movements are implicitly utopian because they—like communist and heretical Christian movements—assume that with just the right arrangement of policies, all contradictions can be rectified. This is a political siren song; life can never be made perfect, because man is imperfect. This is why the Third Way is also authoritarian. It assumes that the right man—or in the case of Leninists, the right party—can resolve all of these contradictions through sheer will. The populist demagogue takes on the role of the parent telling the childlike masses that he can make everything “all better” if they just trust him.

FDR’s “middle way” had a very specific resonance, seemingly contradictory to its philosophical assumptions. As many communists were keen to note, it was born of a Bismarckian attempt to forestall greater radicalism. The elites, including business leaders, were for the most part reconciled to the fact that “socialism” of some kind was going to be a permanent feature of the political economy. Middle-way politics was a carefully crafted appeal to the middle class’s entirely justifiable fear of the Red menace. Hitler and Mussolini exploited this anxiety at every turn; indeed it was probably the key to their success. The fascist appeal was homegrown socialism, orderly socialism, socialism with a German or Italian face as opposed to nasty “foreign” socialism in much the same way that 100 percent Americanism had been progressive America’s counteroffer to Bolshevism.

Time and again, FDR’s New Dealers made the very same threat—that if the New Deal failed, what would come next would be far more radical. As we’ll see, a great many of FDR’s Old Right opponents were actually former progressives convinced that the New Deal was moving towards the wrong kind of socialism. That the Third Way could be cast as an appeal to both utopians and anti-utopians may sound implausible, but political agendas need not be logically coherent, merely popularly seductive. And seductiveness has always been the Third Way’s defining characteristic.

The German and American New Deals may have been merely whatever Hitler and FDR felt they could get away with. But therein lies a common principle: the state should be allowed to get away with anything, so long as it is for “good reasons.” This is common principle among fascism, Nazism, Progressivism, and what we today call liberalism. It represents the triumph of Pragmatism in politics in that it recognizes no dogmatic boundaries to the scope of government power. The leader and his anointed cadres are decision makers above and beyond political or democratic imperatives. They invoke with divine reverence “science” and the laws of economics the way temple priests once read the entrails of goats, but because they have blinded themselves to their own leap of faith, they cannot see that morals and values cannot be derived from science. Morals and values are determined by the priests, whether they wear black robes are white lab smocks.

(Liberal Fascism, pp. 130-1)