Jonah and Ramesh have already noted the fascinating dispute between Alan Wolfe and Peter Berkowitz. Has Alan Wolfe tarred contemporary Republicans and conservatives by comparing them to fascists? Is Wolfe hypocritically condemning Dinesh D’Souza for making the same sort of inflammatory comparisons that he himself has offered? Here is Berkowitz’s “Excommunication for Thee…” And here’s Wolfe’s response in “Zeitfeisty.”

What’s missing here is the text that allows us to decide who’s right. The link in Alan Wolfe’s “Zeitfeisty” to his original Chronicle of Higher Education essay, “A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us Understand Contemporary Politics,” is subscriber protected. But here is a free link to the piece. Read this and decide for yourself whether Berkowitz’s criticisms of Wolfe are fair, and whether Wolfe’s characterization of his original argument is honest and accurate. On first reading of Wolfe’s original essay, Berkowitz’s criticisms strike me as fair and Wolfe’s defense seems weak. But I’ll want to read it all over again carefully.

Here are some other important texts in the Wolfe-Berkowitz dispute. The Chronicle of Higher Education received a number of letters in response to Wolfe’s original essay, including one from Berkowitz. We already know that Berkowitz thought Wolfe was unfairly tarring contemporary Republicans and conservatives by comparing them to a famous fascist. Wolfe claims that, even on the right, no one but Berkowitz has had such a response to his original essay. Yet it seems that some other letter writers did in fact respond like Berkowitz Here are two of those letters, published by CHE under the headline, “The Shadow of Fascist Philosophy on Today’s Conservative Politics:” (What does that headline tell you about what the editors of the Chronicle of Higher Education thought Wolfe’s point was?)

To the Editor:
Alan Wolfe’s polemical account of Carl Schmitt’s supposed influence on contemporary American conservatism suggests that the friend/enemy distinction is not entirely foreign to at least his own version of liberalism. Wolfe rightly deplores the influence of Schmitt’s fascist critique of liberal democracy on a radical left demoralized by the failure of Marxism. This influence is manifest not only in the decline of Telos, but in the translation and promulgation of a number of Schmitt’s writings through the MIT Press series “Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought.” (In fairness, I should note that this series also publishes the work of Jürgen Habermas, one of Schmitt’s most trenchant critics on the left.)
Wolfe’s case for the influence of Schmitt’s thought on contemporary American conservatism is less persuasive, however. It rests not on any evidence of direct intellectual affiliation, but on a one-sided portrayal of the current political scene. …
To claim that the fate of the liberal tradition hangs on the outcome of the 2004 election is alarmist. To connect the policies of the Bush administration and conservatives generally with the fascist political thought of Carl Schmitt on the basis of nothing more than a supposed analogy smacks of something worse. It is a regrettable example of the tactic of smearing one’s opponent through guilt by association — a tactic more suitable to an enemy than to a friend of the liberal tradition.
Louis Hunt
Associate Professor of Political Theory and Constitutional Democracy
Michigan State University
East Lansing, Mich.
***
To the Editor:
Perhaps it is worthwhile to draw distinctions between liberalism and conservatism using Carl Schmitt as a focal point. But the conservatism Alan Wolfe offers is one that would surprise many in that camp. …
And his prime premise of conservative thought isn’t something like patriotism, small government, or Western intellectual traditions. It’s “for conservatives, politics never stops.” This is a principle closer to the left than to the right. … Let’s not confuse Republican (or Democrat) campaign tactics with philosophy.
Mark Bauerlein
Professor of English
Emory University
Atlanta