Left-Wing Fascism and its War Against Conservatives
Lynne Cohen
January 5, 2022
Lynne Cohen mounts a spirited case that fascism doesn’t even belong on the right, but at the opposite end of the political spectrum.
c2cjournal.ca
What’s in a name – or a political label? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The standard view that fascism is a phenomenon of the far right has been immensely beneficial to the left, allowing it to conflate virtually any bad political beliefs, tactics or leaders with conservatism. Lynne Cohen, whose own political journey has included stopovers on the left, right and middle before returning to conservatism, has felt the wrath of leftists. This lends a personal dimension to her account of the damage done to conservatism through its linkage to fascism. Cohen mounts a spirited case that fascism doesn’t even belong on the right, but at the opposite end of the political spectrum.
QUOTE:
Should Fascism Sit on the Right…or Left?
There is a solid conceptual argument backed by a body of evidence that Naziism, fascism and even white supremacy aren’t “right wing” at all, that they are creatures of the left and have been from the beginning. While they weren’t expunged as right-wing extremist symbols with the publication of Jonah Goldberg’s first book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change, they should have been. Its release in 2007 opened many eyes and minds to the truth.
While Liberal Fascism wasn’t enough to sway the public debate, prior to the book’s appearance just about every writer and thinker since 1945 assumed fascism and Naziism were manifestations of extremism on the right. It seemed plausible and fair. After all, counterbalancing fascism we had communism, the left’s own form of extremism. One really nasty political outlook was thus placed at the far end of each side, an evident symmetry that rendered Western societies’ political factions essentially even and discouraged further complaint or introspection about one’s assigned shade on the political spectrum. This orthodoxy was strengthened by the Cold War-era tendency of many non-Communist authoritarian regimes, often displaying the trappings of fascism and typically described as right-wing, to align themselves with the West. If fascists were anything but right-wing, why would such regimes make common cause with the capitalist democracies instead of the Soviet Union?
As my own views evolved and crystallized over the years I used to feel intimidated by name-calling leftist friends, who warned me I was morphing into a Nazi. Even my brilliant liberal mother jokingly called me a budding fascist back in the mid-1970s when I stated that Ayn Rand had intriguing ideas.
But there were always cracks in this cognitive armour. In truth, as my Grade 13 economics teacher pounded into the heads of his 1976 class, communism and fascism are at root virtually identical – however much they might differ in appearance, rhetoric, tactics or other superficial elements. As far back as 1951 Hannah Arendt, the German-born political philosopher who was once arrested by the Gestapo for studying anti-Semitism, and who later became world-famous for her analysis of the Nazi mind, made observations in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism that were similar to my smart high school teacher’s.
Goldberg’s thesis is plainly and intelligently argued in his almost 500-page book: “[F]ascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact – an inconvenient truth if ever there was one – is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate and control the same social space.”
Conservatives such as I have often felt the effects of the common misapprehension. As my own views evolved and crystallized over the years I used to feel intimidated by name-calling leftist friends, who warned me I was morphing into a Nazi. Even my brilliant liberal mother jokingly called me a budding fascist back in the mid-1970s when I stated that Ayn Rand had intriguing ideas.
Such insults from my mom – whom I deeply respected and who issued them as lovingly as possible – helped morph me into a bleeding-heart liberal during my early university years. Then she scorned that too, correctly labelling my school a hotbed of left-wing radicals, which helped steer me back onto the right path.
While my mom never shed her view that communism and fascism were opposites, it is critical that we correct this ubiquitous misplacement of fascism, and not only because it is an error in definition being misapplied constantly and everywhere. Calling a person or a policy fascist is not a harmless mistake, as when a radio announcer uses “duplicitous” when he means duplicate, a minister of the federal Crown says “irregardless,” or a person’s name is mispronounced or misspelled.
The horrendous slaughter between fascists and communists during the Second World War had led hundreds of millions of people to assume the two bloodthirsty opponents stood for opposite political philosophies as well.
Calling a conservative person a fascist is an accusation. It stops an argument in its tracks, ends the conversation and often results in the belittled target slinking away hurt and wondering how such well-reasoned ideas as those they offered could be subsumed under such a hideous ideology. That hurt person was me until I read Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. Nowadays, conservatives have it even worse, for accusations of fascism are usually coupled with cries of racism, a package that can deliver swift career destruction, deplatforming and vicious social shaming.