Ideological Weapons, Part 2: Two Kinds Of “Fascism”

We saw in the first part how people tend to put all their enemies, opponents and rivals in the same box because that way it is easier to rally support against them. That means, if you let Christians define who is an Atheist, everybody will be called an Atheist who is not sufficiently Christian. If you let the Allied leadership and their descendants (New Dealers, Liberals, practically) define who is a Fascist, everybody who opposes them will be called a Fascist. Which is precise how it worked from the forties on. Which means “Fascist” is likely a useless category as of now. It is just equivalent to “public enemy”.

The goal of this series is to try to unpack “Fascism”, to figure out the differences between the vastly different ideas and people who at some point were called “Fascist” by their enemies, opponents, rivals.

First of all, why are Fascism and Nazism seen as “Far Right” ?  Everybody noticed the “horseshoe effect” that the “far left” and “far right” tend to be similar, right?

The simple answer is that the Allied leadership i.e. the coalition of New Dealer Washington and Communist Moscow largely defined itself as “Left”, hence the Enemy had to be defined to be on the “Right”. This was useful for keeping the actual “Right” on their toes, as they could always be accused of being “Far Right” i.e. the Enemy.

“Left” and “Right” being nearly useless terms on the Far ends of the horseshoe, due to their similarity, we need a better categorization. We need a system that tells us why Far X and Far Y are so similar. Is it “Farness” ? But what makes something “Far”?

Historian John Lukacs proposed in “Democracy and Populism” that you could see Conservatism and Liberalism as essentially aristocratic ideologies of the essentially aristocratic 19th century and Nationalism and Socialism as the essentially populist-democratic ideologies of the essentially populist-democratic-mass-movement-based 20th century. So in Lukacs’s eyes the moderate side of the horseshoe i.e. Center Left and Center Right, Liberals and Conservatives,  would be still at some level aristocratic and both the Far Left and Far Right are populist-democratic, hence their similarity.

So for Lukacs “Farness” is being populist-democrat, a rabble-rouser, Far Right, Far Left, and “Moderateness” means a lingering aristocratism.

Not a bad model, but a bit too limited. We need three players to paint an accurate picture, not just two. Lukacs ignores who leads the “masses”.

So expand the model to three players.

We have the democratic, populist, nationalist, socialist, essentially 20th century mass movements, yes. Let’s call them Demos. Which is Greek for Volk. (This a linguistic trick I learned from Moldbug.) The Demos, or Volk, can easily go “Far Left” or “Far Right” but typically they go “Far” on their own because they have little sense for the nuances of complicated constitutionalist, checks-and-balances politics.

We have the old 19th century elites, aristocrats, capitalists, whose power was largely coming from their property, so let’s call them Property.

Aaaand we have an intellectual elite, whose power largely came from education. Call them Intelligentsia.

Demos, Property, Intelligentsia. A three-way game.

The Demos rarely moves on its own, this is what Lukacs missed. It is typically Intelligentsia being engaged in a fight for power with Property, and the Intelligentsia  whips up the movements of Demos basically as their tool.

Now one element that muddles the picture is that Intelligentsia often comes from Property. After all who are the kind of people who go to Cambridge or Harvard? Typically the well-to-do.

In fact by the 19th century or even by the 16th being rich and ignorant was socially unacceptable, practically all members of Property were so well educated that they could pass as Intelligentsia as well. This complicates matters. What mattered is where their loyalties lied. Who were the Fabians loyal to, Property or Intelligentsia? My bet is the later.

This gives us the following setup.

20th century Center Left and Center Right, Liberals, Conservatives were indeed the heirs of 19th century aristocratic views, in the sense that Property, being educated and being something like a half-Intelligentsia, liked civilized rules to the game. So they were very much into constitutionalism, rule of law, checks and balances, orderly elections, a sense of ordered liberty and hating violent revolutions and so on.  Typically this moderation tends to protect Property against a Demos whipped up by Intelligentsia. The Conservative side was being adamant at protecting it, while the Liberal side more giving in and sort of “getting the wind out of the sails of the revolution” by e.g. accepting higher taxes and social welfare policies to appease the Far Left.

The Far Left, Communists and the like, were Intelligentsia whipping up the Demos. They typically ignored civilized rules to the game and typically went for power the most direct ways possible, largely because the uneducated Demos does not care about the nuances of checks and balances, they tend to have a far more simpler, top-down, dictatorial view about power. The Far Left Intelligentsia simply generated radical ideologies that called constitutionalism and suchlike the trick of capitalists, in orer to justify a very direct kind of power grab.

It is strange to have an alliance between Intelligentsia and Demos. Their whole outlook and perspectives are so different. Normally they don’t hang out. This is what made many Communist movements, especially in the third world, so weird, you have a Demotic movement that on the inside works like the Demos likes to work: it is tribal, nationalist and religious-superstitious, but outwardly it looks like how the Marxist Intelligentsia likes things: officially atheist, officially internationalist and manifestos full of long complicated words. Castro or Ho Chi Min had to balance telling the peasants one thing and telling the Western educated elites another thing.

One way you can see this is that there was something sort of an alliance forged between the Far Left, who ignored the 19th century liberal rules of the game and the Moderate Left (New Dealers, Social Democrats and suchlike) who tolerated the Conservative desire to preserve at least the basic outline of 19th century society. Basically they told to Conservatives give in to our demands in a nice 19th century civilized way, this tax bill here, this regulation there, all nicely with with votes, laws, checks and balances, or you get the lawless revolutionary terror of the Far Left.

Now, there were also people who figured the Demos does not care about all that intellectual stuff. The Demos at the core are socialist in the sense of really wanting to have the stuff Property has, but the peasants also tended to be tribal, nationalist and religious-superstitious. So these leaders figured so you might as well just accept the Demos as they are and play to what they like.

The best example of this was Codreanu’s Legionary movement in Romania. It was an incredibly envy based movement, Codreanu wearing peasant clothing in the city, openly promising that rich elites will be forced to eat peasant food and earn less than a worker. It was more superstitious than religious but definitely mystical, national, socialist and of course highly Anti-Semitic. In short something ideally fitting the worldview of the uneducated peasant Demos.

The non-intellectual Demos leaders were obviously in direct competition with the Intelligentsia-leading-Demos crowd. Since the later were “Far Left”, these populist leaders were called “Far Right”. And this is one half of the modern i.e. Allied narrative of “Fascists”: “Fascists” are those populist, democratic-demotic, socialist, mass-movement leaders who don’t give a damn about the Intelligentsia. Who accept that the peasants want some kind national-religious superstitious mysticism. They are still socialist and envy-based to the core, they are just far more willing to look stupid and uneducated than Communists are. They don’t want to look Lenin-style smart and intellectual. They  were basically saying they don’t need the Intelligentsia in order to whip up the Demos, they can do it without them.

It’s a small wonder Intelligentsia hated these guys first and foremost, far more than anyone else. They could deal with everybody else, they could ally with the Moderate Left and whip up the Demos to attack the Moderate Right, but these guys were taking their Demos tools from them!

So this is how these populist-socialist, anti-intellectual-socialist movements were constructed “Far Right” and “fascist”. In reality they were largely Anti-Intellectual Far Left, i.e. raw envy without the smart sounding stuff and with a lot of bullshit mysticism.

This is the root of the Left Wing Anti Fascism,  Antifa, all the way down to the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Republican Left could have defeated the Carlists, the Monarchists. If you pit the Left against Monarchists, the Left wins because they can recruit the peasants better – see the Russian Civil War. But the damn Falange! They were recruiting the peasants with similar anti-elitist, anti-capitalist, social-reform rhetoric as the Left. Unlike Conservatives, “Fascists” can recruit the Demos. By promising the same envy-based stuff as the Left does. So of course the Left hated the Fascist Falange first and foremost – they were directly in competition! Hence the Antifa identity with all the “They will not pass!” (They passed.)

Meanwhile, Property, old elites were not fully dead yet. There were little pockets of history where an old-fashioned, hierarchical, elitist, “rule of quality, not quantity” could be preserved. Opposed to all mass movements, opposed to the democratic spirit, opposed to socialism, more or less openly saying the well-born elite is more fit to rule than the elect of the people, they managed to have some successes.

Salazar and Horthy are two examples of this category. Horthy was “hopelessly” old-fashioned, was an aide to the Kaiser whom he highly respected and was nostalgic after those times ever after, he was so much of the old school that he even created something like a chivalrous order of knights in 1900 friggin’ 20, with land grants and all that. And of course he openly despised any kind of mass movement, he promised will shoot at all street rioters, the only difference being that he will shoot at left-wing rioters gladly and right-wing rioters sadly.

Salazar was basically a meritocrat. A professor of economics, who was invited into an unelected conservative government by merit, who proved to be excellent at his job and thus was invited to lead the government. There was no mass movement behind him before he got into power (he of course engineered support afterwards) nor an election. It was all selection from the above.

What was common in the meritocratic Salazar and aristocratic Horthy that they were generally not erected by the Demos. Neither a revolution nor an election.

Of course they are called “Fascist”, too. But they were almost the opposite kind than Codreanu: instead of anti-intellectual populism, they were basically anti-populist and anti-democratic.

So now we can see that the Allied narrative of “Fascists” means two entirely different group of people: one who whips up the support of the Demos in an anti-intellectual way that excluded the Intelligentsia, and the other who simply ignores the Demos and thus can afford to ignore the Intelligentsia as well.

The basic rule is, then: you are a “Fascist” if you are opposed to the Intelligentsia. If you steal their Demos tools from them and engineer your own kind of socialism-democracy-populism i.e. your own kind of envy politics, in an anti-intellectual, nationalist-religious-superstitious way because that is what peasants like, you are a Fascist, see Codreanu. If you simply ignore the Demos and therefore the Intelligentsia and set up an aristocratic, hierarchical, or meritocratic rule, like Salazar and Horthy, you are “Fascist” too.

Now of course Salazar, like Franco, had the good sense to stay out of the war and Horthy join the Axis largely because of a very strong German pressure and promises of ethnically just borders. He always considered Hitler a “Brownshirt Marxist” i.e. a Demos-rouser, rabble-rouser, opposed to his more elitist and aristocratic kind of politics. He certainly did not join for ideological sympathy and the Allies even respect that: Horthy was never tried for war crimes in Nuremberg and the Allies left him in peace to live in Salazar’s Portugal undisturbed. So the Allies did not even see Horthy fully as an enemy.

So why were Salazar and Horthy constructed as “Fascists”? Because the Allied ideology was, and is, the ideology of the Left, i.e. Intelligentsia whipping up the Demos against Property. Communist Moscow did it in a very direct, rough, violent way, New Deal Washington in a more moderate, nicer, civilized, more 19th century style way.

Allied elites were and are the Intelligentsia. Everybody who would either ignore them and their Demos tools or tried to steal their Demos tools from them was constructed a “Fascist”.

This is really how this narrative works.