JONAH GOLDBERG: “They told me that if America elected Donald Trump, the president would pardon fascists—and they were right. I’m referring to Joe Biden and his pardon of Marcus Garvey.”
In the 1920s, when Italian fascism was new, and German Nazism was an obscure fringe political cult almost no one had heard of, fascism was very popular in America. In 1923, the New York Times declared that Benito Mussolini “has many points in common with that of the men who inspired our own constitution – John Adams, Hamilton and Washington.” Legendary progressive economist Charles Beard had similar, albeit more pointed views. Sure, Mussolini was hostile to democracy, but so what? The “fathers of the American Republic, notably Hamilton, Madison, and John Adams, were as voluminous and vehement [in opposing democracy] as any Fascist could desire.”
Fact check: Untrue.
When someone asked how anyone could consider Mussolini’s brutality a “good thing,” Herbert Croly, the godfather of American progressivism and the cofounder of The New Republic, wrote that it was not “any more than it was a ‘good thing’ for the United States, let us say, to cement their Union by waging a civil war which resulted in the extermination of slavery. But sometimes a nation drifts into a predicament from which it can be rescued only by the adoption of a violent remedy.” That might explain some of his support for eugenics.
Fascism remained popular in some quarters well into the 1930s. Indeed, in 1937, Garvey, the founding father of black nationalism, insisted to the famous black historian J.A. Rogers that, “We were the first fascists.” He continued: “We had disciplined men, women, and children in training for the liberation of Africa. Mussolini copied fascism from me, but the Negro reactionaries sabotaged it.” (This quote is often truncated or slightly modified as it appears—and disappears—in different editions of Rogers’ work.)
The influential historian C.L.R. James—a Trinidadian Trotskyist (say that 10 times fast!)—wrote in 1938, that “All the things that Hitler was to do so well later, Marcus Garvey was doing in 1920 and 1921. He organized storm troopers, who marched, uniformed, in his parades and kept order and gave color to his meetings.”
James later recanted this assessment as the full scope of Hitlerism made the comparison unfair.
I’m no expert on Garvey, and things do get sufficiently confusing that I’m open to correction on some of this, but that Garvey passed the fascist duck test seems pretty defensible. He marched like a fascist, dressed like a fascist, and sounded like a fascist —particularly when he said he was a fascist! If you translated a lot of his rhetoric into German—“up, you mighty race!” and all that—you’d assume it was from a Nazi.
Biden was always going to pardon Hunter and James Biden. Until someone else takes credit for them, I’m going to assume that removing the Churchill bust was Obama’s first in-joke upon beginning his de facto third term in office, and posthumously pardoning Garvey was his last.