March 24, 2005

Bush's America: Not Fascist, but National Socialist

By Walter C. Uhler

Having enthusiastically embraced a grad school seminar on the "Origins of World War II," I've long since assumed that I understood the distinction between Italian "Fascism" and German "National Socialism." Unfortunately, having just read John Lukacs' provocative new book, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, it appears that my assumption was incorrect.

No, I'm not referring to my occasional exaggerated use of "Fascist" as an epithet, as in "Every free country is entitled to one Fascist TV network, talk show and newspaper. And, God help us, America already has Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the Washington Times." Such usage simply stoops to the level of those three fonts of right-wing propaganda.

Instead, I'm talking about the serious warnings I commenced sending to editors of a few newspapers in late 2002, in which I mistakenly conflated fears about America (under President George W. Bush) becoming Fascist with comparisons of Bush and Adolf Hitler. Of special concern was Bush's propaganda about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda (both of which proved to be false). Like Hitler's equally false propaganda about Polish mistreatment of Germans living in Danzig, it was used to justify an immoral, illegal invasion of another sovereign state—the highest of war crimes. As with Hitler then, much of the world now wonders whether the Bush administration's naked aggression will ever end.

Rather than disabuse me of my mistaken conflation, however, I received either no response or answers such as this one (on January 13, 2004) from The Philadelphia Inquirer's Commentary Page Editor, John Timpane: "The use of Hitler in rhetoric is jejune, shallow, facile, inaccurate, and self-undermining." One might imagine how Mr. Timpane would respond today, given that two prominent and highly respected historians, John Lukacs and Fritz Stern, have issued harsher and more informed warnings than mine.

In fact, if Professor Lukacs is correct, I should drop the references to Fascism and focus, instead, on the similarities to be found when comparing America's National Socialism under Bush with Germany's National Socialism under Hitler (never forgetting, of course, that Bush's naked aggression comes nowhere near Hitler's psychopathic willingness to exterminate or enslave entire populations).

As an epithet, "Fascist," probably has its origins in the Soviet Union, where Stalin sought to distance his highly nationalistic socialism (remember his emphasis on building "socialism in one country?") from Hitler's National Socialism. But, according to Lukacs, there are two reasons why Fascism doesn't apply to Bush's America.

First, Fascists believed in the "primary importance of the state." [p.119] Thus, "in the Fascist Manifesto of 1932, Mussolini proclaimed: 'It is not the people who make the state but the state that makes the people.'" [pp.119-120] Few of America's conservatives or Republicans would make such a statement today. Second, after 1938, "Fascism had become absorbed by and subservient to National Socialism, nearly everywhere." [p. 124]

Unlike Mussolini, Hitler asserted that the "Volk" preceded the "Reich," and "religions are more stable than forms of states." [p. 120] Hitler's populism propelled him to power. And, as Lukacs notes, with the eventual expansion of democracy (and, thus, the welfare state) to the working classes, "we are, at least in one sense, all national socialists now." [p.41] But with Hitler's National Socialism, as with George Bush's today, "nationalism was a more important factor of his people's loyalty to him than were the various social improvements and institutions [of the Third Reich]." [p.131]

In fact, according to Lukacs, President Bush has depended on nationalism more than Hitler: "President Bush and his advisers chose to provoke a war in Iraq well before the election of 2004, for the main purpose of being popular. This was something new in American history… Not even Hitler chose war in 1939 to enhance or reaffirm his popularity with the German people, not at all." [p. 211]

But, perhaps most ominous is the similar role that religion formerly played in Hitler's National Socialist regime and currently plays in Bush's. According to Lukacs, "what is more significant—and worrisome—is how nationalism, including Hitlerian nationalism, coexisted with religion in the minds of many people; and in that coexistence their nationalism was, ever so often, stronger and deeper than was their religion." [p. 131]

Fritz Stern's recent speech about Nazism (at the 10th Annual Dinner of the Leo Baeck Institute) contains passages that eerily capture recent American right-wing political behavior. He notes, for example, "a group of intellectuals known as conservative revolutionaries demanded a new volkish authoritarianism, a Third Reich. Richly financed by corporate interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture." Sound familiar?

And although he didn't have the likes of Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh to assist him, Hitler was "a brilliant populist manipulator who insisted and probably believed that Providence had chosen him as Germany's savior, that he was the instrument of Providence, a leader charged with executing a divine mission." [Nov. 14, 2004 Speech at Leo Baeck Institute] Do not our president and many of his supporters believe the very same thing?

And like Bush's supporters today, Stern notes, "people were enthralled by the Nazis' cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared: 'The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.'" [Nov. 14, 2004 Speech at Leo Baeck Institute]

According to Lukacs, "the predominance of nationalism and socialism has governed American politics during the entire [twentieth] century." [p. 139]. The Republican Party is more nationalist than socialist, the Democrats are more socialist than nationalist.

Nationalism, however, is distinct from patriotism. Patriotism is defensive, associated with love of one's land and traditions. Nationalism is aggressive and associated with the myth of the people, the Volk. A populist "is always a nationalist of sorts." Liberals can be patriots, but almost never nationalists. Which explains why, in Lukacs' view, liberals are losing their electoral appeal.

What's worse, in Lukacs' view, is the recent tendency of Republican electoral majorities to weaken American democracy and strengthen populism by simply ignoring the legal assurances of minority rights. "Majority rule is tempered by the legal assurance of the rights of minorities, and of individual men and women. And when this temperance is weak, or unenforced, or unpopular, then democracy is nothing more (or else) than populism." [p.5]

Thus as America's republic devolved into a democracy now threatened by populism, officials who formerly gained office due to their popularity now gain office by publicity. The Republican's post-World War II anti-Communism and McCarthyism, whatever their actual merits, were conscious publicity campaigns designed to manipulate and capture the xenophobic hate of populist nationalists.

And notwithstanding his electoral success in 2004, Bush may have reached a new moral low in presidential politics when he started a war in Iraq to ensure his reelection. After all, to generate the hatred and evil accompanying a war of choice is a moral weakness that ill becomes a truly great nation. Moreover, as Lukas notes, hatred was Hitler's "main characteristic." [p. 208]

After considering how many Americans infuse their nationalism with religion, xenophobic hatred, and Abraham Lincoln's belief the we are "the last best hope of mankind," Lukacs fears that "the fate of mankind indeed seems catastrophic if Americans do not free themselves from the hope that they are THE last hope on earth." [p. 145] Yet, his argument here would have been stronger and more ominous, had Lukacs paid greater attention to what Andrew Bacevich calls "the new American militarism."

Nevertheless, Lukacs refuses to predict that the "new barbarism all around us…will inevitably overwhelm us." [p. 242] When in despair, he recalls Edmund Burke, who said: "He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one." [pp. 242-243] Thus, he concludes, "Hitler and Stalin are gone, and George W. Bush will soon be gone, too; but then so are their German National Socialism and their Communism and so will be his 'conservatism.'" [p. 243]

Yet, the question remains: "How much more damage will Bush's National Socialism inflict on America and the world before it is tossed on the trash heap of history?"


Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The San Francisco Chronicle and Philadelphia Inquirer, among numerous other periodicals. His article, "Democracy or dominion?" will be republished in Annual Editions: World Politics 05/06 (McGraw Hill) scheduled for publication in April. He is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association.

waltuhler@aol.com