against the fascist creep
alexander reid ross
Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: The Original Fascist Creep 21
Chapter 2: Spirit and Subculture 75
Chapter 3: A Brief History of Fascist Intrigue 89
Chapter 4: The Radical Right 109
Chapter 5: The Third Position 133
Chapter 6: National Bolsheviks 165
Chapter 7: Fascists of the Third Milennium 187
Chapter 8: Autonomous Nationalism and Fascist Geopolitics 217
Chapter 9: From the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street 237
Chapter 10: The New Synthesis 281
Conclusion: Swords into Plowshares 329
Works Cited 333
Index 373
Introduction
Creeping Coup
In the years before the Nazi invasion, as fascism pulled activists from the ranks of the left, Popular Front leader Léon Blum spoke of a “contagion” gripping France.1 Some fifty years later, scholar Philippe Burrin would refer to the “fascist drift” that attracted the left to the causes of the right.2 More recently, warnings of a “creeping fascism” have returned.
If we consider the left’s embrace of equality as its defining characteristic, fascism remains decisively on the right.3 However, fascism also embraces aspects of social and ecological movements usually attributed to the left. The shared ideological space cannot be tidily blamed on co-optation, although many fascists embrace co-optation and “entryism.” Instead, fascism emerges as a unique response to the same material conditions. It lies at the extremes of ideology, courting the public through a rejection of conventional conservatism and a call for the return of a golden era. Against the Fascist Creep will focus on those messy crossovers on the margins of left and right, the ways fascism cultivates a movement, and the ways that the left often unwittingly cedes the space for fascism to creep into the mainstream and radical subcultures.4
Perhaps the most important strategy of fascism is what scholar Stephen D. Shenfield calls “a gradual or creeping coup, accomplished by means of the steady penetration of state and social structures and the accumulation of military and economic potential.”5 Such an analysis can also be applied to the insinuation of fascism into and out of the US conservative movement by propagandists such as Willis Carto, Jared Taylor, and Richard Spencer.6 Similarly, the increasing power of the radical right’s populist parties in Europe indicates a drift of socialists, liberals, and conservatives toward a counterhegemonic alternative. Many of these parties, like the Brothers of Italy, the French Front National, the Austrian Freedom Party, the Ukrainian Svoboda, the Sweden Democrats, and the Flemish Vlaams Belang have clear roots in the fascist movement. Yet the more power and influence they gain, the less they seem to cling to the hard core of their original ultranationalist ideology, focusing instead on pragmatic policy issues and the complex geopolitical questions pertaining to the European Union and Russia. Concern remains that, on achieving singular power, these parties would revert to fascist positions or at least provide enhanced material support to fascist groups.
The relationship between the fascist movement and the populist radical right, though at times supportive, is fundamentally dynamic, divided, and complex. Openly fascist groups tend to be much smaller, and they tend to argue for a “national revolution” more antiparliamentary than their radical-right counterparts.7 Hardcore fascism tends to be far more mass-based and revolutionary, radically traditionalist and elitist than most radical-right configurations. Nevertheless, fascist ideology is not always transparent, and left-right crossover along with misleading rhetoric surrounding the State of Israel, Islam, and multiculturalism tends to obscure the extent of racism. This space of relative autonomy between the radical, right-wing populist parties and smaller, dedicated fascist groups is important. It brings a conservative appeal to the radical right, who are also able to attract left-leaning members of the public with social welfare promises. Meanwhile, it enables smaller groups to attract members of the public who desire a more anti-institutional transformation—even if those smaller groups often overlap considerably with larger, radical and conventional right groups through unofficial or mediated channels.
The “fascist creep,” as I am using the term in this text, refers to the porous borders between fascism and the radical right, through which fascism is able to “creep” into mainstream discourse. However, the “fascist creep” is also a double-edged term, because it refers more specifically to the crossover space between right and left that engenders fascism in the first place. Hence, fascism creeps in two ways: (1) it draws left-wing notions of solidarity and liberation into ultranationalist, right-wing ideology; and (2), at least in its early stages, fascists often utilize “broad front” strategies, proposing a mass-based, nationalist platform to gain access to mainstream political audiences and key administrative positions. Against the Fascist Creep will reveal how these processes of fascism have worked in the past and how they manifest today, as well as ways in which radical movements have organized to stop them in their tracks.
So What is Fascism?
Is fascism a kind of attitude, personality, or a manifestation of unconscious drives based on patriarchal repression? Is it simply a mode of political formation present in Italy between 1919 and 1945?8 Or is it a more broad phenomenon—a political ideology with distinct networks that appeared not only in interwar Italy but also in France, Nazi Germany, with the British Union of Fascists, the Spanish Falange, and a myriad of other groups?9 In the postwar period, early academic descriptions of fascism emerged from the Frankfurt School and a psychoanalytic milieu that identified fascism with a personality type (Theodor Adorno), a “basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man of our authoritarian machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life” (Wilhelm Reich), and a reflexive, patriarchal fear of freedom (Erich Fromm).10
More recent analysts like George Mosse and Stanley Payne ascribe a checklist with boxes for antiliberal, anticonservative, anti-Marxist, sacralization of politics, leader cult, single party, integral corporatism, media censorship, organic theory of the state, ultranationalism, focus on the youth, and extreme political violence.11 Following the Cold War and shifts in fascist organizing techniques, a number of scholars have moved toward the minimalist “new consensus” refined by Roger Griffin: “the mythic core” of fascism is “a populist form of palingenetic ultranationalism.”12 That means that fascism is an ideology that draws on old, ancient, and even arcane myths of racial, cultural, ethnic, and national origins to develop a plan for the “new man.”
Dissenters from the Marxist camp like David Renton favor an evolution of Leon Trotsky’s analysis, viewing fascism as a cross-class alliance between the petite bourgeoisie and the ruling class, which were intent on destroying the vanguard of the proletariat.13 Post-structuralists like Michel Foucault present fascism, instead, as a product of the accumulation of power and a psychological temptation to be resisted by developing an “art of living.”14 Still other leftist dissidents focus greater attention on the war waged by fascism against modern notions of state and capital, highlighting fascism’s character as a revolutionary ideology that poses an intellectual conundrum for the left.15
In my opinion, there is no contradiction between palingenetic ultranationalism and a cross-class alliance. Ultranationalism assumes a cross-class “national community.” However, fascism’s syncretic form of fringe fusion takes place as a result of extreme responses to modern conditions, and it attacks only those members of the left designated as competition for political power. The leading three fascist political figures of the interwar period in France were all former leftists: a former member of the inner committee of the Communist Party, a former anarcho-syndicalist, and the leader of the “neo-socialist”