Can we talk about the role of anarchist rhetoric in American fascism again this week? I find it quite interesting and I suppose an innovation of American fascism, designed to tailor its appeal to the local political context. Swaggering blowhards in militaristic uniforms may have appeared attractive to many poor, bedraggled, fearful, angry Europeans in the 1930s. However, that sort of thing doesn’t really appeal to typical American sensibilities. You know what does? Fake anarchism.
I was watching a program on the history of the early twentieth century and it noted the early communists professed to be interested in creating a stateless society, while conservative European fascists harbored no such aspirations, clearly saw the need for a state. The program noted that during the period of the Russian Revolution, the fledgling communist state authorities had some conflict with other communist / anarchist groups who wondered their progress, maybe even their real intentions, relating to this stateless society. I suppose this must be the period in which anarchism came to be associated with leftism, which was still certainly the case in my own youth, when counterculture hippies of an anarchist persuasion were popularly grouped with liberals, leftists, socialists, communists, that sort. Meanwhile, the traditional European establishment conservatism that would later inform fascism was very much opposed to anarchism and stressed the need for a state, which the fascists later famously opined must be an authoritarian rather than a democratic state. And, again, that corresponds I think to the popular political categorizations of my youth, in which conservatives, right wingers, fascists, Nazis were meant to be all about the state, laws, government, the establishment, that sort, despite the Nazis’ lawless revolutionary phase.
However, an interesting thing seems to have happened in the USA when American conservatives and right wingers set out to co-opt the energy and enthusiasm of popular social discontent of the 1960s, primarily liberal and leftist in orientation, and redirect it to their own ends. American conservatives, apparently riffing off the absurdity of the famously heavy handed authoritarian communists proposing to pursue a stateless society, seem to have determined right wing conservatives could play that same fake anarchist game just as well. Using creative misinterpretations of neoclassical welfare economics, they developed their own form of fake anarchism in which a state expressing conservative views on economics, even an undemocratic state, might yet be associated with the absence of a state and anarchy. In that way, they pulled anarchism in the form of fake anarchism, long popular in the USA because of the significance placed on theories focusing on personal freedom and liberty, from the world of left wing communism and to the world of right wing fascism. True anarchism, involving no state, no law, is really neither right nor left but a risibly utopian bit of nonsense that devolves always into violence, chaos, failure in short order. In contrast, fake anarchism, with laws, police, can be very powerful in a rhetorical sense. The transference of fake anarchism from left wing communism to right wing fascism, and the resulting confusion among many about not only real and fake anarchism, but whether they’re fascists or opposed to fascism, is really the story of our times as far as political ideology.
Currently in the USA, we have many conservatives, Republicans who explicitly support terminating the US Constitution, ending democracy, fomenting fascism. However, arguably even more important for the modern fascist movement in the USA are the fake anarchists / crypto-fascists. The fake anarchists / crypto-fascists are dangerous because not only are they susceptible to manipulation via anarchist rhetoric, but because they suppose by opposing the democratic state they’re the opposite of fascists, indeed are fighting fascism in the form of democracy. In that sense, twenty-first century American fascism is not a simple aping or repetition of twentieth century European fascism. At least as far ideology and rhetoric, it’s an innovative mix of traditional fascism and certain elements of old communist and leftist ideology. The number one thing one can do to combat fascism in the USA is to understand the rhetoric of anti-democracy bad economics in the conservative style and its sequelae as “Austrian” economics and “libertarianism" and be able to aggressively speak against them.
