31 Hatewatch Staff, “Update: More Than 400 Incidents of Hateful Harassment and Intimidation Since the Election,” SPLC Hatewatch, November 15, 2016, http://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/11/15/update-more-400-incidents-hateful-harassment-and-intimidation-election.
32 See Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1, The Spell of Plato (London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1947).
33 Cas Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
34 Roger Griffin’s “Preface,” in António Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis, eds., Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), viii-xix.
35 Strauss himself listed fascism with authoritarianism and imperialism as the three essential characteristics of the right in a letter to fellow philosopher Karl Löwith as late as 1933, but he ceased writing in such terms after the discovery of Nazi concentration camps. See Nicholas Xenos, Cloaked in Virtue: Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy (New York: Routledge, 2008), 21.
36 Constantin Iordachi, “Hybrid Totalitarian Experiments in Romania,” in Costa Pinto and Kallis, eds., Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe, 234.
37 Julie Thorpe, Pan-Germanism and the Austrofascist State (New York: Manchester University Press, 2011).
38 Robert O. Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism,” in Griffin and Feldman, eds., Fascism, 1:311–12.
39 Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties, 225. I interpret “prodigal sons of the left” to mean those who emerge from the left only to adopt nativist and/or authoritarian positions.
Chapter 1: The Original Fascist Creep
The Imperial Origins of Fascism: Colonialism, Conservationism, and Eugenics
The first so-called “national socialist” ever to walk the earth was a Frenchman named Marquis de Morès who spent the 1880s attempting to make a fortune in the cattle industry of the US Badlands. With a sharply pointed mustache that hinted to his status as the most infamous duelist in France, Antoine de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Morès et de Montemaggiore, had a flair for adventure and was moved by the storied Wild West. Thirty miles upstream from his plot lived another adventurer and would-be politician named Theodore Roosevelt, a Progressive who sold his cattle to the Marquis for slaughter, packing, and shipment. The two became friendly and visited each other’s houses. They both believed in eugenics, the perseverance of the white race, and the dominion of white civilization over the world. They both hoped to fit the character of the Wild West, gun-slinging cowboys of the rugged interior, but both faced failing businesses and a brutal climate. Their relationship cooled substantially when Morès tried to prop up his failing meatpacking plant by overcharging Roosevelt for his cattle.40
The Marquis rapidly made himself unpopular in town. As the first rancher to put up barbed wire in the Badlands, the Marquis faced the animosity of local cowboys. When he responded by ambushing three drunken cowboys, fatally shooting one Riley Luffsey, the Marquis found himself in jail. Incarcerated, Morès wrote to Roosevelt, blaming him and challenging him to a duel. Roosevelt responded, “I am not your enemy; if I were you would know it, for I would be an open one[.]”41 Not long after their falling out came the brutal winter of 1886–1887, after which both the Marquis and Roosevelt abandoned their respective projects. The latter won appointment to the Civil Services Commission after campaigning for Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and just over five years later, won the election for the police commissioner of New York City. The Marquis returned to France in time to participate in the anti-Semitic riots of the Dreyfus Affair, equipping a gang of “butcher boys” from Paris with cowboy hats and boots and rallying them to the chant of Mort aux Juifs! (“Death to the Jews!”). It must have been a ghastly sight during a period credited for prefiguring the fascism that would emerge in Italy within a couple decades.
Back in the big cities of the United States, ideas of national socialism flowed through intellectual and political circles—particularly through the publication of articles written by and about Morès’s friend Maurice Barrès. Coining the term “national socialism” in 1898 to define an ideology that incorporated the working class into national solidarity, Barrès spread his ideas through political campaigns, French periodicals, and US journals like Scribners and the Atlantic. His work appeared uncontroversial alongside ecology, the spirit, athletics, and the ever-present reality of business, science, and industry. Indeed, this life of vigorous exercise, adventure, and even mysticism would characterize Roosevelt as he rose through the ranks to become president of the United States. Carried out by conservationist Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt’s philosophy of outdoors recreation intertwined inextricably with his imperialist sense of the supremacy of the white race. The conquest of the West and the Pacific marked a crucial turn in the spread of the white race, the perfection of which became a social responsibility, as well as a science. Roosevelt wrote to a prominent eugenicist named Charles Davenport that “society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding.”42 Whether or not his betters would force the price of his stock down and then sell the steaks dear was, perhaps, a different question for the failed rancher of the Badlands.
Roosevelt’s friend and fellow conservationist-cum-eugenicist Madison Grant would write the important book The Passing of the Great Race not about the hundred million Natives slaughtered in the centuries-long genocide that paved the way for the “conservationist ethic” of pure, unpeopled wilderness, but rather about the “racial suicide” of the noble classes by their acceptance of immigrants and “sub-species.” Addressing his subject with the gravity of scientific objectivity, Grant declared that those seeking “social uplift” do not respond to the realities of “racial limits.” Inferior classes reject the principle of heredity, because they have not inherited noble qualities, while the nationalism of the Global South merely represents the revolt of the “servile classes rising up against the master race”: “[I]f the valuable elements in the Nordic race mix with inferior strains or die out through race suicide, then the citadel of civilization will fall for mere lack of defenders.”43 In time, Adolf Hitler would write to Grant, commending the author for what he called his “bible.”
Later, when Hitler’s armies invaded Poland and then Russia, the Führer would impose on his generals to follow a battle strategy gleaned from the pages of Karl May’s Wild West stories that thrilled him as a child, along with tales of the Boer Wars.44 For Hitler, the conquest of Slavic lands represented the same kind of internal colonization as Manifest Destiny. His desire to create “Lebensraum,” derived from a muddled understanding of geopolitical large spaces (Grossraum) theory and biological racism, presented the Germanic peoples as a colonizing force. Poland and Ukraine were his frontier, Russia his Wild West. As the Waffen-SS systematically exterminated Poles, Slavs, and Jews, German farmers would accompany the push east, effectively colonizing Eastern soil and, in time, transforming the racial and territorial composition into a suitable terrain for the “master race.”
The eugenic concerns that motivated Nazis toward the designation of Jews and “inferior races” as “life unworthy of being lived” were nested in the same framework of homo sacer used to justify the United States’ westward expansion.45 Representing “bare life,” a “sacred man” excluded from the political body who can be killed with impunity, the notion of homo sacer comes from esoteric Roman law, but its modern use originated in a Supreme Court judicial