11/27/00 10:15 a.m.
Fascism in Florida
No stay-at-home conservatism.

Michael Ledeen holds the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book is Tocqueville on American Character.

t's funny how the Left cries "fascism" whenever conservatives finally bestir themselves. The leftists have been raised with the conviction that only they speak for the people, thus only they are entitled to take to the streets. Conservatives are supposed to stay at home, or sit in their country clubs. If conservatives start demonstrating, it's "a whiff of fascism" (in Jerry Nadler's words) or a threat to the constitutional order (to paraphrase Joe Lieberman).

As far as the Left is concerned, the only good conservative is a supine conservative.

On the other hand, when racists like Al Sharpton organize caravans from New York to Florida, that's ok. Lieberman was all for reconciliation with the likes of Louis Farrakhan, and he fell into a warm embrace with Maxine Waters — two famous masters of hate-filled mass demonstrations — but he evinces alarm when we protest the theft of a presidential election.

It's not hypocrisy, it's the nature of the beast. Ever since the Second World War, the Left has proclaimed itself the sole arbiter of political legitimacy, and has used "fascism" as the ultimate stigma. There is a vast intellectual industry perpetrating the hoax that the only real anti-fascists were members of a left-wing "resistance," and, by extension, the only legitimate alternative to fascism is socialism (if this subject interests you, have a look at Francois Furet's masterpiece, The Past of an Illusion, recently published by the University of Chicago Press).

The truth is that the anti-fascist "resistance" was minuscule to the point of triviality. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini, nor even the puppet regime of Marshall Petain in France, trembled at the threat of their national resistance movements. The one effective instrument of anti-fascism was the United States, and there is democracy in Europe (and Japan) today because the American army installed it by force of arms.

Lieberman and Nadler most likely don't know anything about this massive disinformation campaign, but it is part of their misguided political culture. It is grotesque to see the Lieberman/Nadler crowd screaming "fascists" at people who insist that our soldiers' votes be fully counted.

Worse still, the leftists still don't understand what fascism was all about, because they think that Hitler was the paradigm. Actually, it was Mussolini, who came to power more than a decade before Hitler, and who was widely admired, even in the Western democracies. Mussolini did indeed seize power, first in the streets and then in Rome, but they took to the streets in response to years of violent demonstration by the Left. Many moderate people, first in Italy and then in Germany, welcomed the anti-Leftist mobs because they hoped it would teach the Left that street fighting was no way to conduct the nation's business. Mussolini knew all about this sort of thing, having been a leader of the Socialist Party before the Great War.

Finally, Lieberman and Nadler are quite wrong about the competing factions in the streets. The Left is demanding the sort of all-encompassing state that Mussolini tried (with a considerable lack of success) to install in Italy. It is the Left that wants us to accept endless recounts in Florida but asks us to accept their blatantly illegal voting in St. Louis. The conservative demonstrators want a less-intrusive government, greater individual freedom, and acceptance of the rules by which we all thought we were governed, rather than searching for some judge, somewhere, who wants to become a king-maker. If we are engaged in anything like a struggle between fascists and anti-fascists (and, thank heavens, we are not, at least not yet), it is the conservative demonstrators who are closest to anti-fascism, while Nadler and Lieberman are the useful idiots of the other side.