Why The Left Doesn't Know How to Stop Fascism
To effectively stop fascism would require giving up far-left cultural radicalism
Recently, there has been a lot of talk about fascism being a re-emergent problem in many Western countries, to differing degrees. In this context, the left has been offering a lot of ideas and thoughts about how to oppose fascism. The problem is, these ideas don't appear to be effective. For example, the anti-free speech, and at times violent, tactics of antifa isn't doing the 'anti-fascism' brand any favors. The various critical theory based views of what fascism is and what fuels it also miss the point entirely. Thus, while the left has been talking about fascism a lot lately, they have not been able to stop the re-emergence of fascism in any way.
The problem with leftist analyses of fascism is that they are always biased in a certain way. The Western left has always had an anti-traditional, anarchistic streak to it, and this tendency was further enhanced during the post-war period. In the 1950s, the West was generally conservative, and workers generally didn't embrace the left. Looking to Eastern Europe, Western leftists also increasingly didn't like what they saw. Western leftists gradually saw both kinds of society as 'oppressive', and sought to create a new, 'non-oppressive' form of society, an ideal particularly seen in the works of Herbert Marcuse. This was how the Western left became highly anti-traditional and anarchistic in its sentiment.
Given that the trauma of World War II was still very recent, fear of the return of fascism very real, post-war Western leftists also theorized a lot about fascism. The trouble is, this theorizing was heavily colored by their aforementioned anti-traditional and anarchistic sentiment. In their minds, the cause of fascism had to be that people were too easily submitting to unreasonable authority, thus the focus on what was known as the 'authoritarian personality'. They had to be this way because they were conditioned by traditional society to be this way. Thus their solution to fascism was essentially to deconstruct traditional society so that the people could be liberated from its authoritarianism. I think this core idea actually explained a lot of the social radicalism found in Marcuse and other post-war leftist thinkers. Their ideas ultimately led to the social upheaval of the 1960s-70, but did not do anything to dent the appeal of fascism to future generations. It appears that dismantling tradition does not lead to any meaningful reduction in the ability of fascism to survive and spread, and might even have the opposite effect. It didn't work in the 1970s, and it is not working today either.
Given the failures of the post-war Western leftist model in accurately explaining the appeal of fascism, and hence effectively stopping its spread, I believe we need to put those false insights aside, and start from scratch. As I analyzed a few weeks ago, the idea at the root of fascism is that society is in decline because the wrong people are in control. The first part of this worldview, that society is in decline, is justified in part by observing the crumbling of traditions, and their flow-on social effects. The appeal of fascism, then, is that it effectively promises to reverse all this. The second part of this worldview, that the wrong people are in control, is often justified using conspiracy theories, often with antisemitic ideas embedded within them.
Therefore, to stop fascism, we would need to effectively deal with both parts of the aforementioned worldview. The first part can be effectively dealt with by strengthening the social fabric, and the respect and maintenance of traditional culture, at least to a healthy extent. This is something reformist liberals have always been OK with, but far-left cultural radicals have always had a problem with (see liberal feminism vs radical feminism, or mainstream LGBT rights vs queer radicalism for some examples). The second part can effectively be dealt with by encouraging a commitment to objectivity and truth, something that liberals have upheld but far-left postmodernists have attacked in recent years. Thus, the most effective way to stop the rise of fascism appears to be to oppose far-left cultural radicalism, and return to the reformist liberal tradition. This, of course, isn't an easy answer for the radicals on the far-left to accept. But it is something we need to urgently get people to understand, because pre-fascist thinking is already gaining a foothold on the right, and we can't afford to let left-wing radicals waste precious time that could be used to build the case against fascism.
This is why I have been taking quite a hard line, arguing against counter-productive postmodern critical theory thinking in recent years. Many progressive-minded people could have similar views to mine, but they remain reluctant to go hard against the far-left, because they don't want to split what they see as the liberal-progressive side of politics (which in reality doesn't exist anymore given how the radicals attack liberalism all the time). They think it is some kind of 'progressive unity' that would stop the rise of Trumpism, right-wing populism and fascism, when the opposite is true: failure to challenge far-left radicalism, and insist on a return to the liberal reformist tradition, is what fuels the rise of these authoritarian-right movements.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).