Rather than play whack-a-mole, smashing down every weird distortion of my argument and each desperate attempt to turn the subject to areas where his knowledge of obscure militias becomes the central issue of the debate, I think looking at his magnum opus on fascism would be more fruitful.

Here Neiwert offers one endless cliché on fascism. It’s got nearly every single myth and hackneyed observation my book dispels. Rush Limbaugh and Father Coughlin are even paired alongside each other at the top of page one (talk about guilt by association!).

On the next page we get a fairly commonplace fascist checklist – borrowed, and heavily distorted, from Umberto Eco. The italicized bits are his key ingredients of fascism. The parts in brackets are Neiwert’s attempt to illustrate how these things are on display on the American right. I’ve added my own comments in red in an attempt to show how sophomoric Neiwert’s understanding of these things is.

The cult of tradition.

[Who are the folks who beat their breasts (and ours) incessantly over the primacy of ‘traditional Judaeo-Christian culture’?]

Uh huh. First, Judeo-Christian culture isn’t a “cult” it’s like, you know, our culture. Second, as I demonstrate at length in my book, the Nazis despised Judeo-Christian culture. They sought to purge this evil, foreign, dogma from German soil and embrace instead a new pagan faith. The Italians were less harsh in this regard, extolling more modern Italian culture. But even so, the Vatican recognized Fascism for what it was. As I write in the book: In its 1931 encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno (We Don’t Need It), the Vatican accused the Fascists of “Statolatry” and denounced their effort “to monopolize completely the young, from their tenderest years up to manhood and womanhood, for the exclusive advantage of a party and of a regime based on an ideology which clearly resolves itself into a true, a real pagan worship of the State.”

Now, it is possible that an authentic American fascism could result from a twisted misunderstanding of the Judeo-Christian culture (indeed, I argue as much when it comes to the progressive social gospel movement). But that’s not what Neiwert’s talking about. And, more important, the actual content of the Judeo-Christian culture is dogmatically anti-fascist because they provide the crucial dogma that separates Church and State, City of God and City of Man, what gets rendered to Caesar and what gets rendered to God. These are distinctions fascists try to demolish.

The rejection of modernism.

[Think ‘feminazis.’ Think attacks on the NEA. Think attacks on multiculturalism.]

Personally, I think this is a poorly worded criteria (and if you read Eco directly, you get the sense he’d agree). The Futurists in Italy hardly rejected modernism and there was much to Nazism that was cast as cutting-edge and modern. Indeed, what appealed to American and British liberals about both Nazism and Italian Fascism was the sense that it was the wave of the future, in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s phrase. WEB Du Bois considered Nazi economics to be cutting edge, as did John Maynard Keynes to a certain extent. But okay, I know what Eco means by anti-modern. Now take a look at, say, the Gaia fetishists, Wicca, Deep Ecology, Neo-Luddites and the rest. All of these folks reject modernity root and branch. And it’s not just the extremists. Al Gore insists in his book, Earth in the Balance, that the West is in “crisis” because it took a wrong turn when we embraced “the Cartesian model of the disembodied intellect.” He even denounces “Plato’s conception of a disembodied spiritual intellect hovering above the material world.” He rails against the techno-philia inflicted on us by Francis Bacon and laments that “Our seemingly compulsive need to control the natural world . . . has driven us to the edge of disaster, for we have become so successful at controlling nature than we have lost our connection to it.” Yes, Al Gore just loves modernity.

Meanwhile, Neiwert thinks that anti-feminist barbs and criticisms of calcified teachers’ unions represents a rejection of modernity! My goodness. And as for multiculturalism, there’s a great argument to be made that multiculturalism is anti-modern because it throws us back to a Romantic, anti-enlightenment vision of racial essentialism. I seem to recall that Nazis believed in racial essentialism too.

Irrationalism.

[G.W. Bush’s anti-intellectualism and illogical, skewed speech are positively celebrated by the right.]

Right. Bush is a fascist because he’s stupid. Great argument. Meanwhile, there are whole departments in academia dedicated to overthrowing the sovereignty of reason. Books are written on it. Prominent leftwing academics openly deride the enlightenment, lampoon “white logic” and logocentrism. The Social Text crowd believed that the laws of physics were a mere social construction of reality. But, yes, Bush is a fascist because he talks funny.

Action for action’s sake.

[Exactly why are we making war on Iraq, anyway?]

Huh?

Disagreement is treason.

[“Liberals are anti-American.”]

Right. Liberals are all open-minded lovers of free inquiry and free expression, who never question anyone’s patriotism or decency. I could go on about the shoot-the-messenger attacks on me, or political correctness, campus speech codes, etc. I could also go on about how McCarthyism has its roots in progressivism. For example, here’s passage from the book on Clarence Darrow defending government censorship during WWI:

“When I hear a man advising the American people to state the terms of peace,” Darrow wrote in a government-backed book, “I know he is working for Germany.” In a speech at Madison Square Garden he said that Wilson would have been a traitor not to defy Germany, and added, “Any man who refuses to back the President in this crisis is worse than a traitor.”

But my favorite quote from the last few weeks comes from a liberal reader complaining about Bill Kristol’s addition to the New York Times op-ed page:

“That rotten, traiterous [sic] piece of filth should be hung by the ankles from a lamp post and beaten by the mob rather than gaining a pulpit at ANY self-respecting news organization,” said one message. “You should be ashamed. Apparently you are only out for money and therefore an equally traiterous [sic] whore deserving the same treatment.”

Fear of difference.

[Again, think of the attacks on multiculturalism, as well as the attacks on Muslims and Islam generically.]

Uh huh. See above. Also: Who killed Pym Fortuyn?

Appeal to a frustrated middle class.

[See the Red states — you know, the ones who voted for Bush. The ones where Limbaugh is on the air incessantly.]

Has Neiwert been watching the campaign? Here are some snippets from John Edwards in the New Hampshire debate:

What’s at stake here is a fight for the future of the middle class…. The point is this. I think there are differences between us about how we fight for the future of the middle class. And I believe you have to be willing to take on these entrenched special interests. And I think if you’re not willing to do it, it is impossible to bring about the change that the country needs. And this is a very personal cause for me, because I come from a family — my father’s in the audience tonight — where my father worked for 37 years in the mills. He didn’t get a chance, like I did, to have a college education. And this is a fight for the middle class and families just like the one I grew up with. My grandmother, who helped raise me, had a fifth- or sixth-grade education, came from a family of sharecroppers…. But these entrenched, moneyed interests that have a stranglehold on the middle class, that are doing — incredibly destructive to American jobs and health care system, energy, all taxes, trade, they’re in everything. Absolutely everything. You cannot nice these people to death. It doesn’t work. I have been in the trenches fighting them for my whole adult life. And it takes strength, backbone, fight, and you have to take them on…. It’s time for us to say and it’s time for the president to say enough is enough. This is a battle for the future of our children. This is a battle for the middle class.

Obsession with a plot.

[Limbaugh and conservatives have been obsessed with various “plots” by liberals for the past decade — see, e.g., the Clinton impeachment, and current claims of a “fifth column” among liberals.]

This is getting really old. Much of establishment liberalism and nearly all of the left have been obsessed with neocon plots, Halliburton’s schemes, shadowy theories about how “Big Oil” runs everything and so on. Turn on C-Span and try not to hear about PNAC and JINDA and other absurd theories of (mostly Jewish) string pullers ruining the country. It stretches back through the Kennedy Assassination (as I argue in my book) all the way back to the Nye Commission hearings on the munitions industry.

Meanwhile, whole academic disciplines — Critical Legal Studies, Whiteness Studies, Womens Studies etc – are predicated on the idea that “the system” was set up to protect white male privilege and rig it so various minorities can’t get a fair shake.

Yes, the Right has a paranoid style too. But it is hardly as deeply institutionalized as it is on the left.

Humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.

[Think Blue states vs. Red states.]

Wha? Again: see John Edwards in 2008, John Kerry in 2004, Al Gore in 2000, Bill Clinton 1992-2000, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson, Thomas Frank, Paul Krugman, The Nation magazine et al every single day.

Rantings about income inequality and the need for populist economics is a staple of every liberal and leftist organ in America.

What does “Think Blue states vs. Red States” even mean? The Red States are voting for the party that doesn’t consider income inequality the most pressing moral issue of our age. The Red State party doesn’t get its knickers in a twist over the successes of the wealthy. Jeez.

Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy.

[The very essence of the attacks led by talk-radio hosts against antiwar protesters.]

Well, there’s something to this one. It’s certainly true that such arguments were made by classical fascists in Italy and Germany. And there was too much of that here during the lead up to the Iraq war. But it’s worth noting that, again, all of these bullet points apply to the Progressives. So if Neiwert really believes in their salience, he needs to explain how they don’t apply to the progressives. Second, this groupthink mindset is certainly on display on the left, it’s just often inverted when it comes to the war. Witness the treatment of Joe Lieberman. Or witness the common refrain on the left that “if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem.” That is as fascistic as any of the Nazis slogans — Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz etc.

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems to me the left and the Democrats elevate unity for its own sake far, far, far more than conservatives do.

Life is eternal warfare.

[This perfectly describes the War on Terror.]

It does? Is that why President Bush told everyone to go shopping after 9/11?

Again, this was certainly part of classial fascist thought. It was also central to progressive thought. Oliver Wendell Holmes believed war was the source of all morals. TR had a similar view. The entire progressive movement — as well as Italian Fascists and the New Dealers — were deeply influenced by William James’ doctrine of the Moral Equivalents of War. That sentiment still exists today whenever you hear liberals lamenting how we can be unified in war but not in a war on poverty or some such.

Indeed, life is eternal warfare should better be understood today in the tradition of Saul Alinsky and others who constantly intone that life is all about the struggle for the movement and the pursuit of progress. The totalitarianism of “life is eternal warfare” is today found in those who believe the personal is political.

Contempt for the weak.

[Think both of conservatives’ characterization of liberals as “weak spined,” as well as the verbal attacks on Muslims and immigrants from the likes of Limbaugh and Michael Savage.]

Again, as with many of these, Neiwert is distorting Eco’s point for his own purposes. I agree that there’s a lot of manly bravado on the right. Make of it what you will, though I find it amusing that the left has gotten to the point of declaring masculinity itself “fascist” – i.e. “bad.” But Eco’s point is more about elitism and “contempt for the masses” and on this score the left is leaps and bounds more elitist than the right is (Indeed, I wish the right was more elitist in many respects). The anti-democratic bureaucratic managerial overclass that liberals seek to install at home and abroad is grotesquely elitist. The divinization of a Supreme Court that is allowed to sift through foreign laws to discover new meanings in our own constitution; the arrogance of the transnational elites at Davos and the Clinton Global initiative, the constant desire to outsource our sovereignty to the UN; all of these come very close to the World Brain HG Wells hoped to establish in his vision of Liberal Fascism.

Against ‘rotten’ parliamentary governments.

[Remember all those rants against ‘big government’?]

I love this one! L-o-v-e it! This claim alone disqualifies Neiwert from serious consideration. Those “rants” against big government are in no way analogous to Fascists’ rants against parliamentary government. Shame on Neiwert for even trying this nonsense. The Nazis wanted MUCH BIGGER GOVERNMENT than that provided by liberal parliamentary governments. Their objection to parliamentary government stemmed from their opposition to democracy and classical liberalism, which kept government small. Meanwhile, the intellectual tradition of “ranting” about big government stretches back through Gingrich, Reagan, Goldwater, Hayek, Nock and others has always been grounded in a distaste for the undemocratic “Caesarism” of uncontrolled government. Also, the rhetoric we hear all of these “change agents” in the race directly echoes the complaints about the “rotten” and corrupt Weimar republic. I don’t think that means we live in a similar time, but if we’re going to play this game, we might as well do it at a higher level.

Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.

[Perhaps the most noticeable trait in the current environment. The destruction of meaning by creating “empty phrases” combining opposite ideas has, as we have seen, become a prominent strategy deployed by the conservative movement.]

Yawn. I could have sworn I read something about how Democrats have become obsessed with “framing” Moreover, as I argue in my book, the whole schtick of combining opposite ideas was perfected to an art form by the Leftwing guru Herbert Marcuse. He’d spin out one nonsense phrase after another about “oppressive freedom,” “repressive tolerance,” “defensive violence” and so on, and the left to this day plays this game.

Anyhow I’m done with this now. But I will just put it out there one more time. This fascist check list is pretty bad one. But it is also a bill of indictment against the progressives. Every single thing on it applies to the progressives whom today’s liberals worship. That is the argument in my book. That is the argument Neiwert willfully ignores. And that says quite a bit about him.