Against Dumb Antiliberal Leftist Antifascism

A friend shared a social media post to me:

Liberalism is not anti-fascist as it is coupled with an economic system (capitalism) that leads to fascism. Dems are certainly not anti-fascist as they are half of the corporate government. Liberals can become anti-fascist if they are willing to ideologically develop beyond liberalism.

For a stronger and more thorough version of that argument, I like Liberalism and Fascism: Partners in Crime, which points to some chilling real history of capitalist “liberals” aligning with fascists which has unhappy parallels in our present moment. (Though I will eventually get to a key critique of its telling of history.)

To summarize the Dumb Antiliberal Leftist Antifascism thesis — DALA for short —

• The core of liberalism is capitalism, private ownership of the means of production. The high-minded claims of liberalism are ultimately rationalizations, evasions, or supports for the injustices emergent from capitalism.
• Fascism is also capitalism, stripped of the mitigations offered by liberalism.
• Liberalism faced with the crises inherent in the capitalist order — loss of popular support, which tends to produce a leftist challenge to the political & economic order — cultivates fascist movements as a way to secure the place of capitalism with theatre and violence.
• In those moments of crisis, liberals reliably align with fascist than leftists.

I reject that analysis as dangerously confused about liberalism, about fascism, about capitalism, and about the relation between the three. This post originated as a capture & refinement of my rant-y text conversation with the friend who offered me that post, and it has grown and evolved since, because this keeps coming up.

Liberalism ≠ capitalism

To understand the problems of DALA, we have to face how broad American political discourse understands neither liberalism nor the Left.

Anyone serious about political ideas recognizes how slippery the term “left” and “liberal” get. They have a few distinct meanings, and each of those meanings are hard to describe crisply.

Most Americans use the term “left” and “liberal” interchangibly in a simple reduction of politics to a spectrum of positions on a single spectrum from very “liberal” on the left to very “conservative” on the right. While anyone with any sophistication registers the inadequacy of trying to describe all possible political positions by placing them on a single linear scale, the left-right spectrum is the best simple model available, a very powerful instrument if used carefully. Here’s a summary diagram from the post I just linked:

Thus unsophisticated Americans tend to think of the Democratic Party as “the left”, but less left than the “radical” left. On that diagram, Dems occupy the positions between the “hard” and “moderate” left. And to a first cut, there is value in placing different political ideologies on one side or the other; when necessary I will roll everything into two huge categories of the “broad left” and “broad right”.

But that diagram also registers a phase shift in relationships with institutional politics, which in the US includes a presumptive commitment to capitalism. The Democratic Party is institutional and therefore capitalist; the radical and far left want profound institutional change including the overthrow of capitalism.

That portion of the broad left which rejects capitalism is confusingly called … the Left. The capitalization is common but not universal; I like it as a signal that one is not talking about the broad left, and sometimes further emphasize it with the ideosyncratic expression “the proper Left”. So people referring to “the left” may referring to the broad left or the proper Left, which is very confusing.

It is differently confusing that — unless one is on the right and either ignorant or deceitful — “leftists” never refers to people anywhere on the broad left, it only people on the proper Left. Leftists use the term “liberals” to describe people on the broad left who are not leftists — the “hard” to “moderate” range reflected in the Democratic Party, and political science types generally accept that as a legitimate usage. So:

• liberals want policy victories toward greater equality, but do not want institutional change at the level that would overthrow capitalism
• leftists of the Left see such a profound need for institutional change — including the overthrow of capitalism — that they consider liberals’ attention to policy within existing institutions as practically pointless

That political spectrum post I linked above has a lengthy section further exploring the liberal-leftist distinction. So in this sense, DALA is correct to say that liberalism is committed to capitalism, though it should already be apparent that liberalism is defined by a lot more than just capitalism.

One can also see that the things we talk about when we talk about positions on that spectrum are mostly policy questions. F’rinstance, in the US considering healthcare policy:

• the moderate left favors retaining of the existing system of private insurance, hospitals, et cetera, with government regulation and a bouquet of government programs funding some people’s medical insurance, though they may want a number of particular refinements to the system
• the left wing does not want to completely change the existing system, but does want much stronger government interventions in regulating and funding healthcare in order to deliver better care to more people
• the hard left wants significant change to the existing system, with government provisioning health insurance for everyone — perhaps by simply making everyone eligible for the existing funding system of Medicare — but not transforming everything, such that there might still be privately-owned hospitals and pharmaceutical companies et cetera
• the radical and far left rejects any privately-held healthcare institutions — hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, et cetera — though that does not necessarily direct state control, it could mean things like hospitals owned by the workers there, or other arrangements

Notice that this exemplifies how moving further left can imply stronger state control, but contrary to the claims of the right it is the vigor of efforts to ensure equity rather than state power which defines how far to the left one stands.

(For what it’s worth, on those terms I am pretty much a radical leftist … though I find I cannot completely let go of progressive engagement with the cut-and-thrust of politics within existing institutions.)

We must contrast “liberal” as a cluster of policy positions from a very different sense of “liberal”, naming an ideology of society & governance, summarized in a familiar way in the Declaration Of Independence:

all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

That is not the policy agenda of the Democratic Party! It is a complex vision of universal rights, democratic institutions, rule of law, reason, et cetera. For clarity I often refer to “liberalism” in this sense as “liberalism as in Isaiah Berlin” or “liberalism as in liberal democracy” or just “libdem” for convenience. Libdem does not contrast with ideologies addressing policy like movement conservatism, it contrasts with ideologies addressing the social & political order like feudalism; movement conservatives are (or at least pretend to be) committed to libdem.

Looking at the history of libdem raises hard questions about how well it delivers justice & equity in practice. The Declaration articulating libdem principles was hypocritically an instrument of people securing an order of brutal racist colonial exploitation. Libdem’s emergence as a challenge to monarchism in the West was deeply entangled with capitalism’s emergence as a challenge to feudalism & mercantilism in the West. The “liberal democracies” — nation-states grounded in libdem principles — have capitalist economic orders.

Leftists commonly assert that in light of that history, capitalism is at least integral to “liberalism”, if not liberalism’s true singular defining characteristic, as we see integral to the DALA analysis; that often implicitly conflates the two different senses of “liberal”, as if the cluster of policy positions and the governance ideology were just the same thing. This is just plain wrong. When the Declaration was written, industrial capitalism had not yet been invented. Not only can we distinguish liberalism from capitalism, we must in order to understand either one.

Fascism ≠ capitalism

When DALA takes fascism as what we get when the capitalist core of “liberalism” sheds its false pretenses, worse than misunderstanding liberalism, that misunderstands fascism. I have given the nature of fascism a lot of thought and study, and DALA is dangerously confused about the relationship between the two, offering misleading half-truths.

• Yeah, capitalism can lead to fascism … but as a stupid reaction to capitalism’s failings. Fascism is an anti-capitalism of fools with right-leaning sensibilities, not-coïncidentally paralleling how “antisemitism is the socialism of fools”.
• Yeah, democracy can lead to fascism … but as authoritarian opposition to democracy.
• Yeah, libdem can lead to fascism … but as opposition to liberal values, out of disgust at equality, rights, even reason.

Fascism is emphatically opposed to libdem. 20^th century fascists said so explicitly. This gets slippery in the US, because libdem rhetoric is so integral to our political discourse, and fascists lay claim to representing the essence of the nation. But one can easily see how American fascists pervert libdem rhetoric with a mix of irrationalist confusion about what words like “freedom” mean together with deliberate bad faith lies.

DALA also misunderstands the relationship between fascism & capitalism. Even if one misunderstands libdem as nothing other than capitalism with a thin candy coating, fascism is not capitalism’s true nature stripped of deception because fascism is not capitalist. Yes, historically fascism has found its way to power in an alliance with the owners of the means of production. But the agents of capitalism do not create fascist movements, they emerge as organic popular movements discontented with libdem and the consequences of capitalism. Fascists are confused about the “elites” that animate their rage, not pretending. The rich see fascists’ popular support and disdain for libdem institutions, then arrogantly assume that they can support fascist movements to use them as pawns who will destroy the libdem institutions which act as a brake on the rich exercising power. But history shows that fascists bloodily betray many of their rich sponsors whenever they actually seize power.

People who claim that Mussolini defined fascism as support for capitalist corporations are wrong about Mussolini and the nature of fascism. Actual fascist regimes produce weirdly mismanaged mixed economies because fascists have no investment in capitalism and no loyalty to their rich sponsors. Fascism is defined by a fantasy of violently purging the nation of corruption; fascists assume that boring nerd stuff like economics will just sort itself out once they do.

Antifascism

Understanding fascism and liberalism clearly demonstrates that both libdem and liberalism-as-in-the-Dems are fundamentally anti-fascist … and at the same time we must recognize liberals at both levels are very bad at antifascism in the US right now. That’s how fascism happens — it gains traction when liberal policy and libdem ideology and the institutions supporting both are weak. That’s why we are having the moment of reälignment in American politics in which MAGA fascism the opportunity to seize power. The institutionalism of the Democratic Party makes them fundamentally opposed to the revolutionary transformation of society which fascism pursues; the problem is how actual Dems are bad at both kinds of liberalism, which makes them bad at anti-fascism. Libdem outside of the Democratic Party in the US is also bad at anti-fascism because it is simply weak: the long-windedness of this post emerges from how few Americans understand what libdem is at all, much less know how to fight for it. That weakness of libdem in the US is part of why DALA cannot recognize libdem antifascism when it does appear.

DALA assumes that leftism is inherently effective antifascism and that antifascism is necessarily leftist. I would love to believe that, since I am a leftist antifascist. Leftism & antifascism are entwined in my heart. But I do not share DALA’s confidence.

To explain the Left’s current weaknesses in combatting fascism I have to put my hand in the lion’s mouth and point something which merits a much more sophisticated analysis than I can fit into this already-rambling post. We need to distinguish two elements of the contemporary Left: opposition to capitalism and advocacy for social justice.

Anti-capitalism ≠ antifascism

DALA casts the anti-capitalist aspect of the Left as the only legitimate ground for opposing fascism by a sort of transitive property math:

1. fascism = capitalism
therefore Left opposition to capitalism = opposition to capitalism
2. liberalism = capitalism
3. therefore liberalism = fascism
4. therefore Left opposition to liberalism = opposition to fascism
5. therefore leftism is the only legitimate antifascist position

But points 1 & 3 are wrong.

I hope that the anti-capitalist aspect of leftism proves antifascist in the long view because people living in fully automated gay space communism would be too happy to turn to fascism. But we don’t have that to work with. There is no reason to think that a movement which has failed to overthrow capitalism has compelling power over fascism. Indeed, since fascists have no investment in capitalism, take protean policy positions in pursuit of power, and love to take a pseudo-populist stance for the (real) people against corrupt “elites”, leftist anti-capitalism is vulnerable to fascist appropriation and entryism.

Anti-liberalism ≠ antifascism

At the most fundamental level, social justice is inherently antifascist, since fascism finds egalitarianism disgusting. But the dominance of the identity politics school of social justice in contemporary leftist culture complicates navigating the contest between fascism and liberalism (in both senses). Identity politics rightly faults libdem as unable to deliver true equity — “the law in its majestic equality” — and a “soft” identity politics which understands libdem rights et cetera as good but incomplete is resilient against fascism. But a “hard” identity politics says that libdem is not merely inadequate to fully address social injustice, it is nothing other than an instrument which sustains injustice, so we must reject libdem, reject its toolkit of rights, institutionalism, proceeduralism, and perhaps even its methods of reasoned argument. This “hard” rejection of libdem as nothing other than a defense of social injustice parallels leftist misunderstanding of libdem as nothing other than a defense of capitalist injustice; both deter leftists from forming a popular front with libdem folks in opposing fascists.

A popular front

That presents a bitter irony. Up at the top of this essay, I registered how leftist antifascists argue that history shows that when the chips are down, liberals refuse to join a popular front with leftists against fascists, siding instead with the fascists against leftists. We know from the 20^th century that this can happen … and we also know from the 20^th century that it can cut the other way. The Counterpunch article I linked at the top of this post as a good articulation of the DALA argument inverts the story of how the Nazis seized power in Germany, claiming that “Social Democrat leaders [⋯] refused to form an eleventh-hour coalition with the communists against Nazism”, when even many leftists recognize in fact the leftist KPD called liberals of the SPD “social fascists” and refused to work with them. When leftists tried to take on both fascists and liberals in the Spanish Civil War, they lost catastrophically, resulting in generations of authoritarian rule.

So no, liberals (in either sense) do not need to “develop beyond” liberalism to be antifascist. Leftists who insist that they must are the ones refusing solidarity, making the exact mistake history teaches us to avoid. This is a three way fight and the Left must always prioritize opposing fascism as the greater threat.

In this moment in the US, what do DALAs expect to gain from refusing to admit the possibility of liberal antifascism? Leftists are weak in the US. Do they plan to convert all of the liberals into leftists first, and then defeat fascism? The wolf is at the door.

I’m a leftist on the merits. And to fight fascism, I think the Left is the best place to stand. But I sure do want to stand with gormless Democrats in antifascism. I even want to stand with conservative antifascists.

One more question

And fascism aside, I ask leftists who reject not just liberal policy, not just capitalism, but also the whole libdem governance ideology of rights, rule of law, et cetera — what do you propose instead? The 20^th century does not just teach us to dread authoritarianism from the right.