It is, nevertheless, simply not true that either fascism, national socialism, international socialism, or communism had “very different” visions of desired outcomes.

Maybe we're looking at the ideologies in different time frames: The Communist utopia was the withering away of the state after the transitional stage of socialism (under Stalin mediated further by the establishment of socialism in one country) and the happy resolution of capitalism's contradictions. As you partly acknowledge elsewhere, yet oddly ignore at this stage of the argument, the various fascist utopias typically involved various mythopoetic agglomerations of pre- and post-modern super-state visions.

Even prior to the "outcomes" - which operate on multiple motivational and practical levels well ahead of actual realization - Communists idealized material equality, and accepted the physical annihilation of dissenters and opponents as a necessary instrumentality. Fascists idealized glory and power, and sought the annihilation and displacement of enemies as virtually an end in itself (after the establishment of a Teutonic agricultural slave paradise, the vision gets a little airy).

When you compare Musso equality with what you call "soft socialist" equality, you again acknowledge the differences only to elide or re-elide them. It's actually similar to the Goldbergian legerdemain in which A is approximated with AB so that B can later be revealed as frighteningly A-like. It's similar to Goldberg's approach also in that it tactically suppresses the fact that putatively anti-statist American republicanism also idealizes a version of equality (please don't bother to rehearse the outcomes vs opportunity distinction). It still remains the same obscenity - the same rhetorical and theoretical violence - to claim that "soft socialist" progressivism must share the ill repute, and more so than other candidate ideologies, of "hard equalitarian" fascism.

Every one of fascism, international or national socialism, and communism sees it as appropriate for the central government to control the use of economic resources, dictate how capital is used, and dictate the conditions and pay of labor.

The fascists were not known for excluding any means to hand. Along with some communists (especially the ones with access to state power, dubbed "state capitalists" by their (surviving) former comrades), the fascists saw the augmentation of the state in all dimensions as the most likely effective means to their ends. In addition - it gets hazy because intellectual consistency over time and across political contexts was not a great hallmark of fascist ideology - many fascists saw a powerful state as desirable in itself: Whether it read the citizen's mail or set production goals or wages was incidental. If you could have provided a libertarian means to Hitler for annihilating the Jews and de-populating Poland, he'd have given it careful consideration.

Hitlerism was distinct from Mussolinism, and both from Stalinism, but it's an oversimplification and a distortion to suggest that the distinctions are quantifiable and of the same type. Stalin eventually adopted elements of fascism, and might even be said to possess a fascist personality. What it all usefully has to do with "progressivism" may or may not go beyond historical association, supported by evidence of borrowings and cross-mimesis. They all mostly put their pants on one leg at a time, and so did whoever in your imagination would have stood in for "anti-statist" during the world-historical rise of industrialized nation-states. You think a guy in founder's garb and a heightened intellectual suspicion of majority factions would stand for long against massed divisions and flotillas carving out empires worldwide? How far does your anti-statism go? If not that far, then you're a progressive statist, too.

chaswv on May 12, 2010 at 9:50 AM

Noted - will reply - and greatly appreciate JG's typically congenial and respectful response to criticism/disagreement.

J.E. Dyer on May 11, 2010 at 4:29 PM

It would take us far afield to try to re-define fascism, on the way to a theory of fascism that that the fascists themselves might not recognize.

As you may know, the term itself in different ways refers to politics - power - not to a theory of the good life in some Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment, utilitarian or materialistic way. It's certainly true that both fascists and communists sought to use the state "to secure desirable outcomes," but they defined "desirable outcomes" along different lines, they had very different visions of ultimate goals, and they saw themselves and the world very differently.

In short, their differences were much more fundamental, in the eyes of members of both camps, than a policy disagreement over ways to achieve full employment or a more equitable distribution of economic surpluses.

The other problem is empirical: Whatever fascism may represent or have once represented in theory, the fascists amassed a track record that included the wars they fought and lost, and that also included the vast piles of corpses that they left behind. In other words, Fascism refers simultaneously to an historical phenomenon as well as to a theory. For us, Fascism stands for "enemy" in a very real and unambiguous way, in a way that the Communism doesn't quite. After all, we took the Communists as allies, we accepted "peaceful co-existence" and mere containment with them, we negotiated with them, etc. From the Fascist powers we accepted and could accept nothing less than unconditional surrender.

The alignments and forms of competition that actually arose may have been historical happenstance, but, returning to theory, they may also suggest that dialectical materialism, even in its Stalinist version, is closer to constitutional democracy, a fellow child of the Enlightenment, in a way that fascism wasn't (and explicitly claimed not to be).

Are you going to complain if 50-100 years from now, people call Al Gore a fascist for trying to use the state to control people via the argument of global warming?

Probably not, because I probably won't be around. If I happen to be, I would likely tell people that "using the state to control people" isn't fascism, but statism. They tend to overlap, but you can conceive of statisms that aren't fascisms. Contemporary Euro-socialism is highly statist, for instance, but not very fascistic. Divorcing fascism from militarism, nationalism, racism, the glorification of violence and war, and the ideology of the exceptional leader is to divorce fascism from what sets it apart historically.

You assert that "it was different then" is a canard. I assert that "it was different then" is the beginning point of history, and that "it was the same then" is an absurdity. If "then" is the same as "now," then then isn't then anymore. Finding where "it was different, but the same," to close the distance between "now" and "then," doesn't erase the distance.

And just because something is rebellious doesn't make it "right" either. Some rebels anticipate or create the changes that history records, but acknowledging those changes presumes the difference between "now" and "then."

I'll take the Burkean position that circumstances determine whether a particular political scheme - carbon restrictions or dictatorship or government aid to the poor or majority rule or representative republican democracy - is "noxious or beneficial." For instance, most of us accept that dictatorship is perfectly acceptable in, say, a military operation. You don't have the soldiers voting on whether or not to follow their orders, not if you're interested in winning.

If you believed the global warming alarmist case in full - if you thought Al Gore was guilty of soft-selling it - then you might conclude that the worldwide emergency required suspension of democracy, as the equivalent of a military emergency.

Normally, you would consider it morally unjustifiable for the government to send armed men to your house to drag you away for "insufficient patriotism," and putting you under the command of people empowered to determine where and when and how you would conduct yourself up to and including your violent death. If the barbarian hordes were assembling outside Madison and the authorities were struggling to mount a defense, you might feel different - you might even be one of the armed men dragging shirkers and malcontents off to do their required service.

I don't know you personally. For all I know you're a radical libertarian or a pacifist anarchist who believes that organized warfare is always wrong - and would rather die than kill. Regardless of your personal creed, we generally have accepted a state powerful enough to make those decisions, if necessary to suspend virtually every one of the Bill of Rights, for the sake of its own survival. Lincoln pretty much established that one, and we've built monuments to him. Most participants at HotAir are quite ready to entertain all sorts of suspensions of comforting moral and even constitutional standards to win whatever war. Most (not all) ardent anti-statists on the conservative side seem comfortable with a standing army and all of its massive domestic and foreign support structure - state within the state and potentially beyond the state that many of the Founders and Framers would have been appalled by.

Circumstances and events.

Instead of seeking out confirming similarities between Wilson and Hitler — guaranteed to fail and confuse — stick to the essential danger: what is the essential animating principle of fascism? What does it look like? Can it be detected today? I know that Beck and Jonah believe they took that approach, but I’m telling you, my eyes glazed over. They’re both stuck on that flimsy sort of guilt by similarity as argument.

Any book that took a more rigorous approach would make my Amazon wish list.

jeff_from_mpls on May 11, 2010 at 7:22 AM

That investigation has been undertaken quite intensively, and even passionately, but mostly by thinkers associated - mistakenly in some important cases - with the Marxist left. In brief, anti-authoritarian approaches to history and political philosophy whose main purposes, where they originated, included resistance to Marxism without preparing a descent into fascism were turned to opposite purposes and effects when transplanted to American soil, where intellectual authority was constituted differently and had a different genealogy.

In the piece on Liberal Fascism that I linked in the main post, I try to suggest that Goldberg's error is clear from the beginning in the forced definition of fascism that he announces early on. He explicitly defines fascism in a way that suppresses what makes fascism fascistic. He doesn't need to offer a definition of "liberal" because his definition of fascism has already been liberalized. Once he's defined fascism down in that way, he's able to locate it wherever it suits his purposes, which seem to turn into "doing to liberals what liberals have been doing to conservatives." Some see that as fair play, but it still rests on distortions and over-simplifications, and inevitably leads to bad results.

CK, please explain what you mean by “moral relativism.” Are you denying that objective moral standards exist?

OhioCoastie on May 11, 2010 at 11:54 AM

Of course I am, but I'd ask you to withhold judgment pending the publication of my forthcoming 1200-page treatise "On the Denial of Objectivity, Morality, and Standards."

Seriously, I was replying to what I understood to be Abby's criticism and what she meant by "moral relativism." The crust of bread example may or may not say something about the universality of an objective moral standard on theft. I tend to think it says there isn't one - Dagget's objection notwithstanding - but whatever I happen to think about that in the abstract, as a theoretical or philosophical question, shouldn't affect your ability to reach a fair judgment regarding Wilson's actions.

If we judge Wilson harshly, by whatever standard, for attitudes and actions that were in fact normal and typical for his era, in some respects for all of American history up to and beyond his era, then eventually we're left in an untenable position regarding our history and ourselves.

AshleyTKing on May 10, 2010 at 11:22 PM

The comment makes me wonder whether the commenter has any idea why the legislation, the Federal Reserve System in particular, was passed - the problems it addressed, the purposes it was meant to serve, its functions up to the present day.

There were plenty of abolitionists, etc. who vehemently opposed racism.

Plenty? If you mean "opposed notions of inherent white superiority" or "accepted intermarriage," I don't know about that.

Others would say, and I think rightly, that presuming to judge also can lead in a very ugly direction.

MadisonConservative on May 10, 2010 at 4:55 PM

Seeking offense is in my opinion as destructive to dialogue as, Idunno, civility boundary-testing.

You're calling me wrong. I'm calling you wrong. That's a given. There's an implicit "my understandings are superior to your understandings, hah!" in any such discussion. Back and forth condescension is in that sense inevitable, so can always be detected if you're of a mind to look for it.

Haven't you and I been both agreeing and disagreeing with each other long enough to afford a touch of sarcasm here and there?

In the standard work on Wilson's era that I mentioned, the author happens to address this issue directly. I hesitated to quote it because 1) I didn't want to bore the Nick-Kids already falling asleep, 2) because the author was mainly anticipating leftist critics who make a sport of denouncing our forebears for their racism/classism/sexism/etc-ism, and 3) because his language is a bit odd (it's one of the few places in the book that Hays injects his own opinions). He describes "historical nonresponses" to a range of issues, then says:

We often find that Americans of the past did not share our interest in such matters and were unaware of their implications. One is then tempted to believe that those in the past "ought" to have been as alert as we to the problems identified in later years, and, therefore, to raise questions as to why they were not. Or again, one may be tempted to exaggerate whatever concern there was in such affairs when it was actually quite limited. Here we view these "nonresponses" ... as simply "the way things were," part of the "meaning of the times," and take the view that to give too much stress to them distorts the meaning of the past.

Relativism is the scourge that civilized people find themselves struggling with.

Without relativism in the broad sense civilization is impossible. It's not a "scourge" - it's a necessary condition, virtually definitional.

The key is overcoming it by sticking to principles in the face of unpopularity.

MadisonConservative on May 10, 2010 at 4:26 PM

"Failing to anticipate MadisonConservative's principles" is rather a different charge from "American Hitler!"

Abby Adams on May 10, 2010 at 4:19 PM

I think we're talking about two different things. We might all agree that stealing is wrong, but we judge a professional thief much more harshly than a starving man stealing a crust of bread - or a man brought up in a society without private property. Clearly, we apply different standards to different situations. We could go on listing examples all day long - from the slaving pederasts who gave birth to Western philosophy and culture to the water-boarders who may have saved hundreds or thousands of lives.

B. That remark is going to haunt you forever, my friend.

MadisonConservative on May 10, 2010 at 3:49 PM

IMO, relativism is inevitable and thoroughly justifiable - morally essential - in day-to-day life among all imperfect people dealing with other imperfect people, but especially whenever we're tempted to impose our standards and sensitivities on another time and place.

Judgment ain't thine.

Though maybe we define the terms differently.

even after Gregory had already created controversy by authoring the Espionage and Sedition Acts.

There certainly was criticism of the E&S acts, but, as stated, they were overwhelmingly popular, and there was constant and significant pressure to go much further - to yield more prosecutions and arrests, to curtail more anti-war agitation, etc. In that sense, referring to "controversy" as though it was one-sided against seems to distort the tenor of the times. Even without Gregory on the Court, the Acts overcame constitutional challenges, twice - though Wilson's appointee Brandeis strongly dissented at one point.

Abby Adams on May 10, 2010 at 3:22 PM

Absolutely there's moral relativism in the post. You can't function in the real world without it, as far as I can tell.

Specifically, I absolutely consider a wide acceptance of something like forced sterilization of the mentally ill to be somewhat mitigating for Wilson - just as I don't think it's helpful to condemn the Founders for acquiescing in the South's maintenance of its peculiar institution, to condemn Lincoln for his racist views and statements, or to reject morally all of American history because it happened to entail what you might call some unwanted inconveniences for the natives.

MadisonConservative on May 10, 2010 at 3:00 PM

Aside from covering the war fever and hyper-patriotism discussed in the post, and the very different general attitudes of the day toward dissent and law enforcement (e.g., 50 years pre-Miranda), Cooper faults Wilson specifically for a general lack of involvement with domestic affairs and for over-delegation of responsibility during the war - partly an aspect of Wilson's governing philosophy and style; partly a result of exhaustion and possibly symptomatic of his eventual physical and mental breakdown; partly a result of his being overseas for months during peace negotiations, the longest span outside the country by far of any American president.

As for Wilson's supposed "blessing" of the American Protective League, and the specifics of the APL's actions, what are you basing the charge on - and how does it apply to Wilson specifically and uniquely? To me, the APL may suggest the existence of a fascist or crypto-fascist strain in American politics and culture of that time (and not only that time).