Fascism in America

This is not a Jonah Goldberg or a Noam Chomsky rant - both of whom I consider to be clowns. Chomsky is at best a marginally more plausible clown, but only marginally. But this post is not a rehashing of those arguments...

...I am, once again, collecting and reading more about Lovecraft's views on political economy. Fascism plays a major role in his thinking on the economy - and he explicitly calls it "fascism". There are a lot of people, like Keynes for example, that people try to accuse of being fascist with little success. Lovecraft self-identified as one, and he was by no means the only person to self-identify as one during the interwar period.

So I'm reading about American fascist thought in the interwar period, and I had a thought - I am guessing that not even World War II, but the Holocaust specifically, more than anything else, prevented the spread of fascism in the Western world. Really, the fascism that Lovecraft and others advocated was different from Nazism from the beginning. It was an advocacy for a strong-man polity and a planned economy to be sure, but it was fundamentally different. These sorts of "fascism-lite" boosters in America, as well as elsewhere, were able to romanticize German and Italian fascism through the twenties, thirties, and even into the forties because of their fundamental ignorance. The Holocaust, however, put a decided end to anything like that, and these days you couldn't have a guy like Lovecraft self-identify as a fascist.

Interwar American fascists were able to romanticize Germany and Italy because they:

1. "Made the trains run on time"

2. Beat back the Bolsheviks (von Mises calls the fascists the "saviors of Europe" for this feat in the 1920s).

3. Provide a sense of order and pride after the disarray of first the Great War, and then the Great Depression.

None of this made a bit of difference after the Holocaust. Invading sovereign states was forgivable - democracies, monarchies, dictatorships, tribes, and socialist collectives had been doing that for eons. But wholesale slaughter and genocide was a different matter entirely. This is not to say the human beings aren't capable of sweeping genocide under the rug - they are. But when systematic genocide is thrust upon them, when they are not allowed to ignore it, we humans will not waver on the verdict.

Without the Holocaust, I think things would be very different. We would see a lot more Hitler apologists out there. Racism and anti-semitism would be considerably worse, because it would not be so closely tied in with the image of actual extermination. The pseudo-scientific veneer might even be maintained. Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger even might have self-identified as fascists (of course denouncing the excesses of those first generation of German and Italian fascists). With that sort of base, any number of modern politicians: Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, etc. might have taken up the fascist banner. The neo-conservative movement, with its roots in Trotskyism and the New Left, perhaps might have avoided drifting into the fascist fold, but then again - perhaps not. Neo-conservatism has taken quite a fall since its early days.

All these developments are reasonably plausible. Why didn't that happen? Because the Holocaust made fascism and Nazi apologetics absolutely untenable. I'm guessing that tragedy alone explains why fascism fizzled in the West. I still think it's possible we could see fascism in America, but I think we need a major, major jolt for it to happen. The Tea Party definitely won't cut it, despite Chomsky's hand-wringing over them. If the 60s or even simply 1968 didn't catapult us into fascism, it will take quite a bit to. A nuclear attack. A prolonged depression (!!!). A pivotal assassination. I could see it happening, but not without a major, major trigger.

So anyway, that's just a speculative thought on how the Holocaust ultimately did in the prospects of fascism. None of this is directly related to Lovecraft's economics - which is going to be delicate in this area. Planning and interwar American fascism are more nuanced issues than a lot of disparaging modern retrospectives give credit for. It's not something a rational person can embrace, to be sure - but it's not Nazism either. Making that distinction is very tricky. It's very much like Orwell's socialism, in that sense. The difference being, of course, that we have a long record of Trotskyism and anti-Stalinist socialism (and before that, anti-Marxist socialism) to highlight that kind of distinction. In contrast, the life of this brand of fascism was cut short. For the sake of humanity, that is a very good thing - but it makes researching it much harder.