President Trump’s July 4 speech at Mount Rushmore celebrated American history, with invocations of the Founders, the Revolution, and 1776 in Philadelphia. The monument provided an appropriate backdrop to review the legacies of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Panegyrics to past leaders and expressions of faith in the American spirit are standard fare for Independence Day oratory, as much to be expected as are fireworks displays. But this year was different. July 4 occurred amid a wave of protests in the wake of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, public efforts to raise awareness of anti-Black racism, and a renewed push to remove public symbols of the Confederacy. As protesters tore down historical monuments of Southern generals, George Washington too was attacked, as well as figures on the Northern side of the epic battle around slavery: Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco, the Saint-Gaudens memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment in Boston, the abolitionist Hans Christian Heg in Madison, Wisconsin, and even monuments to Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. At this moment of widespread vandalism, the presidential choice to speak at the perhaps grandest of monuments was destined to elicit controversy.
Amid his expected patriotic appeals, Trump also called out the “merciless campaign to wipe out our history” being carried out by an ideological movement that he described in attention-getting terms as “a new far-left fascism.” That designation is more historically specific and pointed than one associates with standard political attacks and should therefore give us pause. It provides an opportunity to think through some of the complex historical connotations of the accusation of “left fascism,” just as it challenges us to consider the applicability of the term to the current developments in the country.
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Trump’s accusation of left fascism stings because it contradicts the standard political map. Fascism is typically treated as an exclusively far-right phenomenon, a conservatism on steroids, as distant as possible from the left end of the scale. However, there is also a long-standing discourse around “left fascism” that originates in the early 20th century, not as an insult from the right but with critiques made by prominent leftists directed at their own movement. Two Jewish women, both associated with the left, though different parts of it—Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg—each played a crucial role in developing the intellectual framework necessary to describe and criticize left fascism. The concept has taken on other meanings as well over the course of its history, at times coming from fascists themselves. Examining these various strands of left fascist meaning and political tradition can shed some light on our current predicament. Since historic fascism was largely a European phenomenon, it is important to start in Italy and Germany, the crucibles of historic fascism, before coming back to our American predicament.
And then there was early “Progressive” H.G. Wells:
By 1932, a frustrated Wells found his superior wisdom bypassed time and again by the superior mass appeal of fascism and Communism. In a talk at Oxford provocatively titled “Liberal Fascism,” he called for liberalism to be “born again.” After his customary denunciation of parliamentary politics as an anachronism, he let out his frustrations, calling for fascist means to serve liberal ends by way of a liberal elite as “conceited” and as power-hungry as its rivals. “I suggest that you study the reinvigoration of Catholicism by Loyola,” Wells said. “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti.”
The intertwining ideologies of the international socialists and National Socialists sounds like it would make a great topic for a book.