Why did our governing classes treat last summer’s antifa rioters with so much more indulgence than they did the rioters of Jan. 6? Paul Gottfried’s latest book, Antifascism, offers an explanation that goes beyond mere political enmity. Anti-fascism, Gottfried argues, is the ideological foundation of our society. Our regime legitimizes itself by claiming that fascism is a permanently lurking evil that can remerge at any moment, even as it constantly expands the definition of “fascism” to include any political opposition. The black-clad thugs from last summer are not the enemies of power but its unwitting shock troops.
Gottfried is a historian and political philosopher who occupies a strange space in the intellectual scene. On the one hand, he is a giant on the Right who has written numerous books since the ‘70s. He edits Chronicles magazine and was a longtime humanities professor at Elizabethtown College. He studied with Herbert Marcuse at Yale, and in some sense, his work is a form of right-wing critical theory. His book After Liberalism is a classic that predicted every major political trend of the past 20 years.
Gottfried is more marginal and obscure, however, than his résumé might predict. He has often associated with unsavory elements on the Right. He had a long friendship with Samuel Francis, a brilliant essayist who late in his career embraced white racialism, and he coined the term “alternative right” in collaboration with Richard Spencer, who would later shorten it to the “alt-right.” But Gottfried himself is a Jew whose family fled Nazi persecution, and he has repeatedly condemned white nationalism. Regardless, Antifascism is a sober and clear-eyed book that anyone would benefit from reading.
Antifascism examines the antifa (for “anti-fascist”) movement in America, the critical responses to the emergence of fascism in Europe, the way fascism was reframed as a therapeutic problem, and finally how all of this changed the nature of the Left. Gottfried argues that anti-fascism is the ideological bedrock of today’s post-Marxist Left. “It is impossible to understand today’s Left unless we also grasp what it claims to be resisting. A perpetual adversary shapes its mission; whatever its objections to capitalism, its main enemy is not the corporation or the bank but ‘fascism.’” Gottfried puts fascism in scare quotes because his other primary contention is that this word has been so abused that it is close to meaningless. “Fascism is no longer considered something firmly anchored in time and place but as a ubiquitous, continuing danger to democratic societies.” The word “fascism” operates on an almost theological plane, where it is a synonym for absolute evil or simply just a curse word.
Antifascism is a sequel to Gottfried’s last book, Fascism: The Career of a Concept, which was an attempt to analyze fascism as a historically grounded phenomenon. Fascism emerged in interwar Europe as a reaction to the spread of communism. In that book, and again in this one, Gottfried makes the once uncontroversial point that fascism was originally seen as something distinct from German National Socialism. Generic fascism, exemplified by Mussolini’s Italy, was something more like a traditional dictatorship, and it often rose in traditionally Catholic nations as a response to revolutionary communism. The Nazis were inspired by the fascists but were considered more revolutionary, with Nazism sometimes labeled “radical fascism.” For Gottfried, the blurring between generic fascism and Nazism isn’t just a category mistake, it’s an attempt to link all modern right-wing movements to the horrors of the Third Reich. “What is being challenged here is the widespread tendency, particularly among academic, media, and political elites, to dismiss dissenters as ‘fascists.’” For Gottfried, the abuse of this word is tied to the growing irrelevance of both fascism and Marxism.
The history of the anti-fascist movement is the history of the Left’s abandonment of Marxism. “Although the political model under consideration is a subgenus of the Left, it is not directly derived from Marxism or Communism. It is leftist because of its egalitarian, globalist vision and because, especially in Europe, it targets fascism as a rightist enemy. Although this kind of regime seeks to expand its economic control, it is also working steadily toward cultural and social transformation.”
Like many conservatives, Gottfried argues that the Frankfurt School was key to the development of this new Left because its leading figures, including Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, helped reframe fascism as the result of a personality disorder. Gottfried’s critique is more nuanced than other conservative discussions of the Frankfurt School theorists because he recognizes the development and spread of their ideas as an American phenomenon. “Critical theory became profoundly and perhaps distinctively American and developed a long-lasting relationship to American political culture. Many of its core ideas about combating prejudice and the ‘authoritarian personality’ became so profoundly Americanized that they informed American concepts of democracy and were used to reeducate the German people after World War II.” The connection between America’s Left and the de-Nazification efforts is incredibly disconcerting because it highlights how similar the Left’s cultural push is to a reeducation program.
While academics who abuse the term “fascism” should be chastised, there are limits to Gottfried’s approach when considering the general public. Ordinary people may be unsophisticated when they casually compare modern politicians to Hitler, but their concern isn’t necessarily invalid. They’re not concerned about fascism per se. They’re concerned about tyranny. The organizations that rule us are so vast, and the techniques used are so sophisticated, that there is a constant and acute fear that it will morph into something tyrannical. Gottfried’s book is a remedy to the Trump years, when neurotic liberals used the phony threat of “fascism” to create a state of exception where almost all norms were jettisoned. But now, Americans have to show medical records just to buy a beer. It may be prudent to listen to the legitimate concerns beneath popular accusations of “fascism,” even if we recognize the inaccuracy of the term.
Before the 2016 election, Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet urged liberals to treat their culture war enemies like Germany treated Nazis after 1945. Antifascism is an important book for understanding that every time our rulers claim to be fighting old fascism, they are really proposing new tyranny.
James McElroy is a novelist and essayist based in New York.
