The Proper Role Of Ideology

In our last exchange on fascism, Esquire commented that the Founding Fathers were on his side (of course) because they spent much time thinking about the "proper role of government (a philosophical idea)," thereby showing the importance of Big Ideas in politics.

Well, let's clear things up. Obviously, when it comes to the biggest idea of them all -- power by consent -- I'm with the ol' Fathers on this one. I may quibble about natural rights here and there, but I won't argue with their foundation. That is, I wouldn't support a dictatorship even if it were proven it could better promote its subjects' welfare (see my position in the India v. China debates, for example).

But that's the not the issue, really. Because the Founders also had to pay a lot of attention to the nitty-gritty specifics of setting up the government (more Montesquieu's separation of powers than Locke's Second Treatise). Read accounts of the Philadelphia convention, and you're struck by the amount of time paid to things like how votes should be counted, the setup of the Senate and so on. Once you get past the big, abstract idea, you have to deal with concrete policy proposals, and that's what I'm more interested in. (Not fascism versus representative democracy, which I think we all agree on.)

Now, of course, there's a proper role for pragmatism. I suspect Esquire dislikes pragmatism because its wishy-washiness does not enact enough strict safeguards against government abuse (which is why I believe he linked to Tom Friedman's ever-glowing reviews of the Chinese state). I get it. There are powerful moral foundations in favor of limited government. But pragmatists can still believe in democratic freedoms and not believe in, say, natural rights or first principles. (As Richard Rorty said, take care of freedom, and truth will take care of itself.)

And herein lies our debate: I think certain measures (raising the marginal tax rate by a few points, for instance, or providing for seniors' health care) don't augur the end of democracy. I believe that because I think the Founders left us with a very good system of checks and balances and institutional safeguards and the vote, and other concrete measures beside their powerful texts on representative democracy.

So where does Fascism fit in here? Esquire thinks I think it's a nothing-ideology, only synonymous with suffering and terror. That's not really fair, because people use the F-word precisely because of its historical power and meaning. (A duck is a duck is a duck, just as fascism is the Holocaust.)

But let's get past that, because Esquire earnestly thinks Fascism contains an articulate set of beliefs (or rather, Jonah Goldberg does, therefore Esquire does). We disagree about that, as well. Plain and simple, we disagree here. I think it's a hodge-podge, a weird mix of racial Darwinism, a belief in a God-like head of state, historical revisionism and scientific rationalism. Marxists can point to some seminal texts and ideas -- the fetishism of commodities, the surplus value, class consciousness, and so on -- but Fascists can't (other than, say, Jews aren't human). Try reading Mein Kampf -- it's not Das Kapital, by any means.

That's one disagreement. The other is that we have different ideas about why Fascism was so evil. It wasn't because it built the Autobahn or its head had some "progressive" ideas about vegetarianism and animal rights, but because it believed in the annihilation of an entire group of people as well as rule by dictatorship. Evil isn't a highway or national health insurance, it's the Holocaust (and an unchecked executive).

Third -- and finally -- we disagree because the Fascism did not rise to power merely on the merits of its "ideas." As I've said before, there were on-the-ground conditions that facilitated the rise of extremism and anti-democratic movements (high unemployment, hyperinflation, a weak government hobbled by the Weimar constitution, a volatile geopolitical environment). Those things are equally as important as anything Carl Schmitt thought about the law.

That -- along with other historical disagreements, like the continued denigration of the Social Democratic Party and the German Communist Party, which fought the Fascists with praise-worthy courage -- is why we stand apart. Not because I have anything against constitutional freedoms.