Part 2 – Fascism and Totalitarianism
Part 3 – Fascism as the Unconquered Past
Part 4 – Fascism as a Movement of the Left
Part 5 – The Failure of Fascist Internationalism
Part 6 – The Search for a Fascist Utopia
Part 7 – A Vanished Revolutionary Right and Addendum – Fascism and Modernization (You are here)
Part 8 - Discussion and Conclusion
Chapter 7
The final chapter of this book is short. It starts with a summation of his views, but dedicates a great deal of words to criticizing a whole host of people who Gottfried seems to dislike.
We’ll start with mainstream US Republicans. In particular, Gottfried argues that Republicans claim to be on the right, but they “privilege in their discourse” things like human rights and equality. There’s no move to destroy the welfare state from Republicans, who are more than willing to preserve/expand these programs for themselves. It’s not even necessarily right-wing to dismantle the welfare state, Gottfried argues. As for talk about “traditional values”, Gottfried credits the fascists as at the very least honest about how they were constantly redefining their movement compared to American Republicans.
Gottfried details similar circumstances in Canada and Western Europe, but he describes Germany as unique being honest about a refusal to allow a genuine right-wing movement. Some, like sociologist Niklas Luhmann, have argued that insofar as there is a “right”, it should be Burkean in nature and defend the status quo, while the “left” should pursue emancipation even for those that don’t necessarily want it.
As for the left, Gottfried accuses them of trying to pigeonhole anti-Enligtenment thinkers into being the logical forefathers of the fascist and Nazi movements. He points to Zeev Sternhell, a historian of fascism as clear example of this. Sternhell’s book Les anti-Lumières du XVllle siècle à la guerre froide supposedly makes many errors, like trying to associate all Enlightenment critics into the same house or doing the same with Nazism and far less destructive forms like Mussolini’s Italy or Salazars’ Portugal.
But Gottfried isn’t content to leave it at this, and instead accuses Sternhell of hypocrisy. Why? Because Sternhell is a Jew and self-described “super-Zionist”. When it comes to Israel, he believes that Jews have the right to control their own fates and future. But he gets angry at people like Joseph de Maistre for saying the following.
There is no man as such; I have only encountered Frenchmen, Italians and Russians and from reading Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, I now know that Persians exist. As for mankind, I have yet to find such a thing.
Sternhell, Gottfried argues, essentially proves the truth in the Enlightenment’s critics’ philosophy – that things which are concrete, particularistic, and communal are what shape human identities.
Addendum
There’s one additional part to this book, which is about fascism and how it relates to modernization.
For Roger Griffin (a famous historian of fascism), modernity is the “localized emergence in…Europe of the reflexive mode of historical consciousness” that started in the late 18th century that ultimately legitimated the French revolutionaries and their fundamentalist war against tradition to replace it with something new. He notes here that there are two different definitions of modernism: one is about the artistic/philosophical movement, the other about “pedestrian” modernity that its critics (called modernists) would complain about. The latter are the people being discussed.
In any case, there was not really an alternative society modernists could point to, and they weren’t eager to retreat to the past either. Griffin argued that these people arose to combat the threat of nihilism as Western myths of progress lost credibility and modernity entered a period of liminality. The most prominent modernists were on the far left, but Gottfried argues that this is natural – modernism was overall optimistic about the future. That said, you could find a strain of modernism that led inexorably to the right – the literary modernists.
That said, Gottfried criticizes Griffin for trying to attempt, among other things, to convince the reader that right-wing sensibilities in reactionary modernism might jump out from 1945 into the present. For Gottfried, this is silly and assumes that fascism came to power due to no small influence by reactionary modernist artists and others like them.
There is more to this section, namely about to whether the Nazis were really traditionalists following their forefathers, but it’s largely uninteresting. Briefly, Gottfried reviews the work of historian Rainer Zitelmann. Gottfried commends him for his accurate depiction of the Nazis as “radically antitraditional” and trying to jump to the future but criticizes him over some arguments where he’s at pain to explain reality away.
To summarize, modern US Republicans are not as right-wing in the historical sense, having adopted important left-wing ideas and words into their minds. The left is politically motivated to inaccurately cast thinkers who rejected the Enlightenment as straight-line ancestors of the fascists and Nazis, with some people hypocritical as they reserve exceptions for particular groups to decide their own fates at the group level. There was absolutely a strain of modernist thinking that led to the right, found particularly among literary modernists, but the idea that their influence in the past or even in the present leads to fascism is entirely misguided.
That’s all for this book. I’ll have a follow-up post where I discuss my own thoughts, as I need time to reflect on everything as a whole.
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Notes -
For what it is, the book seems good. But as far as historical analyses of 'movements' and 'ideologies' go, I always find the topic somewhat silly. Tracing history back to its roots in this sense just seems pointless. Why care if something is marxist or fascist?
A few reasons. Firstly, if you think an ideology is good or bad, you would probably want to know what policies, ideas, themes, etc. are associated with it so you can avoid them. This means knowing the history of those ideologies.
Secondly, you may want to be able to quickly categorize where other people or ideas stand in the grand space of things. Is it X-ist to believe Y? Well, history might be able to tell you what's going on and if that's accurate.
Thirdly, and this is the one Gottfried is concerned with, people might be trying to lie about what something is, and you should be able to answer with an acknowledgment that they're not speaking correctly or even in good faith.
If someone thinks an ideology is bad but doesn't know the policies, they are just chasing labels and looking for an excuse after the fact to support their fashion statement. I find that silly.
For the second part, if I want to quickly categorize anything, this book isn't going to help. I don't live in the past, and neither do the people who control the meaning of labels and words. Gottfried, despite everything, can be 'quickly categorized' as alt-right.
As for the third part, I agree, but ultimately would also have to concede that I'm not the modern non-fascist republican conservative that Gottfried manages to cover for in this book. And I don't know how many people who aren't David French, Paul Ryan or Rod Dreher would manage to fit into that description of non-fascist.
Think about it from the perspective of someone who has no exposure or knowledge at all. Say, a student coming into it for the first time. They might grasp that the ideology is contested, but they wouldn't be able to make an independent judgment.
Gottfried, hilariously enough, both coined the term "alt-right" and rejects it entirely as describing himself. But even if you think he's alt-right there is some amount of history that is going to inform what definitions of alt-right are more accurate than not.
Really? I would think most modern Republican conservatives aren't fascists. Seems like that would be a large group.
That's why I said the book is good for what it is. Doesn't change the point being made, that liking or disliking something because it's fascist or marxist is silly.
I know who Gottfried is. You should focus less on point scoring and more on what is actually being said. To reiterate for you: Despite everything, Paul Gottfried can be quickly categorized as alt-right. This is true, regardless of what Gottfried is or wants. And this matters because, as I wrote in that paragraph, the people who control the meaning of labels and words can throw all of his work out the window by association. You can't be Gottfried and do what amounts to apologetics for fascism. Even if it's true.
It's really surprising me why this is like pulling teeth when you hit on similar notes yourself in the intro for Gottfried.
Most republican conservatives are not like French, Ryan or Dreher. Most republican conservatives are much farther to the right of the people they elect to office. The go to examples for this being immigration and general distrust of institutions, government or otherwise. If we take Gottfried's distinction of fascist and non-fascist, how many actually fit the bill of not being fascist when most people don't trust the government apparatus. I'd call it more along the lines of 50/50.
I wasn't trying to score points. I just thought it was funny. I have no way of knowing you know much about Gottfried (maybe you just read this one post, who knows?). Secondly, I think there may be some misunderstanding between us. I would agree that the people who currently get to define what fascism is to the people who are indifferent to the topic would just call him alt-right or something similar.
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