Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade

Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade by Paul Gottfried

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This is a powerful book of scholarship written by a professor of History. I read this during the 2022 Canadian Trucker Protest when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used what I would describe as “fascist” tactics to break the protest. For example, Trudeau sent RCMP to beat truckers, had the police take fuel from truckers in subzero temperatures, froze the bank accounts of people who had sent money to support the truckers, froze donations sent via GiveSendGo, and invoked Canada's Emergency Powers Act. Trudeau justified these actions on the grounds that the truckers were “fascists, racists and Nazis” when, in truth, they were simply working-class Canadians fed up with government overreach.

What's going on?

One thing that's going on, according to Gottfried, is that the term “fascist” has been overused to the point where it is an empty pejorative. Both the left and the right abuse the term. “Fascism” is a historical term referring to a particular view of the State at a particular time. Fascists were Nazis and vice versa. People use the term to load upon an enemy the full panoply of opprobrium that we can imagine from the historical experience of the 1930s and 1940s.

Another thing is that “Antifascism” (“AF”) is an essentially empty ideology waiting to be given content by anyone who can point at something they don't like and shout “FASCIST!” We can see this at this particular moment in Putin's declaration that he is invading Ukraine to “denazify” Ukraine. Everyone needs their own Hitler.

Gottfried points out that AF developed as an ideology in Germany in the late 1960s. Intellectual leaders in Germany decided that the essence of “fascism” was an “authoritarian personality” linked to bourgeoisie values such as patriotism, patriarchy, etc. and other indicia of “the authoritarian personality.” Germany proceeded to beat these values out of its citizens. At the present time, there are no conservative parties. The Alternatives fur Deutschland (AFD) is an anathema, although its “far right” position would be moderately Republican in the United States:

“After reunification in 1991, Germans moved ever more directly toward antifascism as a state ideology. The remark by a former foreign affairs minister and violent socialist revolutionary Josef Fischer that Auschwitz is the founding myth of the German Federal Republic has become more, not less, true since German unification. The vital center of German parliamentary politics is found today on the multicultural Left, and the boast of Chancellor Angela Merkel that in Germany no right-of-center party will be allowed to govern may, for better or worse, be true. The only German party that is openly patriotic, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), polls between 11 and 13 percent nationwide, and no German coalition will consider allowing this deviationist party into a government. The AfD is made up mostly of disaffected Christian Democrats who challenge Angela Merkel's immigration policy. The self-image of Germans as antifascist cosmopolites is now embedded; this is an image that their conquerors labored mightily to instill in the conquered country.

Gottfried, Paul; Gottfried, Paul. Antifascism (p. 55). Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition.

Many have commented on the apparent absurdity of a pro-Socialist Canadian Prime Minister crushing an authentic movement of working-class truckers. Gottfried provides evidence of the ambivalent relationship between AF and the working class. After all, the working class can be mobilized by the “fascist du jour,” e.g.:

“Clericalist and Liberal Opposition Not all of fascism's early enemies were on the Left; in the 1920s and even thereafter, Mussolini had to contend with traditional liberal and Catholic clericalist opposition. One of his longest and most relentless opponents was Luigi Sturzo (1871–1959), the priest who organized the Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI; a distant predecessor of the Christian Democrats) in 1919. Sturzo was known (probably incorrectly) as a “clerical socialist” who tried to fashion a party that would ally the church to the Italian working class and impoverished peasants, particularly in his Sicilian homeland. His creation of the PPI caused the papacy to remove “non expedit” instructions for Italian Catholics, who had previously been prohibited from voting in Italian elections. The instructions against voting for Catholics had been in force since the period of Italian unification. Thereafter clerical authorities allowed Catholics to vote, presumably to support Sturzo's party. Much to the Vatican's displeasure, however, the priest became a pesky adversary of Mussolini. In 1924, as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, Sturzo voted against the Acerbo Law, which allowed the Fascist Party to gain two-thirds of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Thereupon the Vatican, through its emissary to the Italian state Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, in an effort to stabilize relations with Mussolini's government, agreed to send Sturzo out of the country. The unruly priest was assigned to an Italian monastery and from there to several residences in London, before he moved on to the United States, where he remained in exile until the end of World War II. Sturzo did not return to his native land until 1946 when he was received as a hero by the Republican, postfascist government. The president, Luigi Einaudi, and the premier, Alcide De Gasperi, claimed to be aligned with Sturzo's political thought. In 1953 this apparent spiritual progenitor of the postwar government was raised with papal permission to the post of Senator for Life.

Gottfried, Paul; Gottfried, Paul. Antifascism (pp. 37-38). Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition.

This would have been an uncomfortable detail for the late Christopher Hitchens who regularly linked Fascism to Catholicism. Under the AF ideology, he may have been in his rights to do so since “fascism” is whatever an “anti-fascist” points to and call “fascism.”

This tendency was canonized among Marxist scholars:

“An obvious connection between Lipset's politics and the Frankfurt School in exile, and one extensively discussed by Lasch, was a shared distrust for the working class. Ironically or problematically, this was the class the Left claimed to be serving. But Lipset and the contributors to TAP were looking elsewhere for support—to an administrative class that enlisted social scientists to address emotional disorders in the general population.39 Of course, the critical theorists pursued other goals than just spreading their variation of Freudian depth psychology. They also hoped to reduce economic inequality while combating the fascist personality and other evils of late capitalist repression. Significantly the Far Left politics espoused by Adorno and other contributors, who may have been less anti-Soviet than they were opposed to the Western alliance, eventually faded from mainstream interpretations. For a while this allowed their findings to fit into the struggle against an undemocratic Communism just as it had earlier provided ammunition against a fascist enemy. Another development brought about by the Frankfurt School and its epigones was the theoretical and rhetorical fusion of fascism with “right-wing extremism.” Because the Frankfurt School equated right-wing extremism with a susceptibility to or espousal of fascism, labeling someone an extremist of the Right implied that this targeted individual might indeed be an undetected fascist.

Gottfried, Paul; Gottfried, Paul. Antifascism (pp. 63-64). Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition.

It has been popularly put into place by the unflagging tendency to link things that are not fascist in any technical sense to the dreaded F-word:

“This linkage may also be observed in how some admirers of Mussolini's regime were grouped in the same category as American nativists and anti-Black racists. In a study of right-wing extremists and fascists in Pennsylvania between 1925 and 1950, religious historian Philip Jenkins includes both the Ku Klux Klan and Italian Americans who felt pride in Mussolini's restoration of honor to their ancestral land.40 The more Jenkins delved into this time period in his book, the less likely it seemed that all his subjects belonged in the same ideological camp. It is not even clear that Mussolini's admirers in the United States were all right-wing extremists; they could have been just southern Italian immigrants living in South Philadelphia who were cheering something of significance back home in Italy.

Gottfried, Paul; Gottfried, Paul. Antifascism (p. 64). Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition.

Gottfried concludes with an examination of the AF State. Canada is an example of this phenomenon and the USA is heading in that direction. The AF State takes it core value as being the suppression of any return to fascism. Since fascism is such a bad thing, all things are permitted to the AF State in its pursuit of anti-fascism, such as stealing gas from freezing truckers, invoking emergency powers, and freezing the accounts of single mothers who donated $50 to the truckers' protest. (Likewise, if “fascists” trespass on the Capitol, it is permitted to shoot down unarmed women.)

A problem with the AF State's agenda is that there aren't any fascists anymore. This presents a difficulty for an ideology in power that defines itself by what it is not. This unfortunate fact – a crusade with no real enemy - has required ardent antifascists to expand the term to include any number of incoherent and contradictory concepts under the rubric of fascism. As we saw in the early weeks of March 2020, the word “freedom” was castigated as a fascist concept.

So, what should aspiring adherents to AF do? Gottfried provides a nice answer to a question that has puzzled me, namely the Schrodinger Marxist. Although we might call AF “woke” or “Marxist,” its adherents have never read Marx and, probably, could never read Marx if you spotted them everything but the “x.” They have no interest in dialectical materialism or other Marxist tropes, and, yet, they have deeply inculcated Bolshevik attitudes, organization, and esprit de corp. Calling them “Marxist” just leaves the AF with a puzzled expression. Gottfried explains:

“The only perspective that may reveal shared interests is a Marxist one that treats both the continental European and Anglo-American “Rights” within the context of an advanced capitalist economy. The coming together of Right and Left predicted by Christopher Lasch and other scholars decades ago may indeed have occurred, although consumer capitalism may not be the main glue, as Lasch contended, that holds this front together.26 Although today's antifascists are not unambiguously Marxist, in other ways they remain leftists. They are waging a war for equality against particularity, in any traditional Western sense. The coercion and suppression that will be required in the meantime to reach this goal may be compared to the dictatorship of the vanguard of the proletariat that was supposedly needed to achieve Marx's socialist vision.27

Gottfried, Paul; Gottfried, Paul. Antifascism (p. 134). Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition.

Since AF defines itself by what it opposes, and it has to figure out what it opposes, it has to go back to the original “antifascists,” namely, the Communists (certainly not Sturzo's anti-fascists who the Communists told us were fascists.) Thus, AF retains its Marxist core in a degraded and corrupt way.

The AF victory is nearly complete. Even conservatives are beholden to it:

Although interwar fascism is no longer a real adversary for the antifascist Left, it nonetheless stands for what antifascists are seeking to transform. Antifascists insist they are resisting fascism in the name of “human rights” when they oppose the populist Right. This war for “tolerance” and humanity has also attracted considerable support from would-be moderates and upholders of the political status quo in Western countries. Recently deceased former French president Jacques Chirac worked energetically to separate his right-center Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) party from the National Front.28 During Chirac's presidential race in 2012, he loudly proclaimed his support for the culturally and socially leftist establishmentarian candidate Francois Hollande against the Front's candidate, Marine Le Pen. In Germany, the enemy on the “Far Right” remains the only major political enemy. Germany's centrist Christian Democrats would be ready to form a coalition with any party on the Left but condemns the AfD, which is now the country's only significant right-of-center party, as fascistic. In both cases the ruling center has accepted the rules provided by antifascist activists about acceptable political associates and discourse.

Gottfried, Paul; Gottfried, Paul. Antifascism (pp. 134-135). Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition.

Thus, in the long twilight struggle between liberalism and totalitarianism, the totalitarians may have won the victory.