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 governemtn. Liberals can become anti-fascist if they are willing to ideologically develop beyond liberalism.

This is a good summary of what one might call Dumb Antiliberal Leftist Antifascism. I have been meaning to write up something proper about DALA for quite some time, and have not gotten around to it. So as a goad to myself, I’m going to capture my rough, rant-y text conversation with my friend, which I hope will inspire me to refine this into a better version.

Two liberalisms

The broad American political discourse understands neither liberalism nor the Left.

When leftists contrast leftism with liberalism, they are usually talking about liberalism in the sense of a position on the left-right spectrum. I take that post as belonging to that species, since it uses “liberalism” to mean “the ideology of the Democratic Party in the US”.

Yes, anyone with any sophistication registers the inadequacy of trying to describe the range of political positions by placing them on a single linear scale … but the spectrum is the best simple model available, a very powerful instrument if used carefully, with an understanding of its limitations.

Check out the summary diagram from the post I just linked:

One can see the basic nomenclature exercised in that post:

• Liberals want policy victories toward greater equality, but do not want institutional change at the level that would overthrow capitalism
• Leftists 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

On those terms I am pretty much a leftist, given our multifaceted institutional crisis, (though I suffer a skull-splitting hangover of progressive engagement with the cut-and-thrust of politics within existing institutions).

Capitalism is indeed definitional to liberalism in the Place On The Political Spectrum sense. But DALA conflates liberalism in that sense with liberalism in a deeper sense, which I often refer to as “liberalism as in Isaiah Berlin” or “liberalism as in liberal democracy” or “libdem” for short. That liberalism is a constellation of praxis for society & governance — reason, rights, institutionalism, et cetera.

Consider libdem reflected in the Declaration Of Independence. That’s not the policy agenda of the Democratic Party, it’s something far deeper. It not only provides a manifesto for libdem conceptions of rights, government by consent of the governed, et cetera — its existence as a document reflects the libdem sensibility that to do something profound in politics one bears an obligation to articulate reasons … and has an opportunity to persuade people. “A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them”. We must ask pointed questions about the paradoxes of the history of libdem — the Declaration was an instrument of people securing an order of brutal racist colonial exploitation! — but its libdem liberalism does not include capitalism because industrial capitalism had not yet been invented. Capitalism emerges together with the libdem order emergent in the wake of the American Revolution and the various Revolutions Of 1848 in Europe, but they are not the same thing. Claiming that capitalism is definitional to liberalism is just plain wrong.

DALA does not just miss the distinction between those different senses of “liberal”, it implicitly claims that they are simply the same thing, that there is no distinction to make, that this singular “liberalism” is principally defined by commitment to capitalism. It dismisses all of the libdem stuff about rights, reason, institutionalism, et cetera as nothing other than deceit in service to capitalism. Even the Democratic Party’s liberalism reflects more than that.

Understanding fascism

Assuming that liberalism = capitalism is not just bad for understanding liberalism, it leaks into a misunderstanding of fascism, which we cannot afford. DALA takes fascism as what you get when the capitalist core of liberalism sheds its false pretenses of rights, democracy, et cetera.

That’s wrong about both liberalism and fascism. I have given the nature of fascism a lot of thought and study, and DALA fumbles even its own good insights about the relationship between libdem and fascism.

• 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, republican democracy (small r!) does lead to fascism … but in opposition to it, both reacting to republican democracy’s real failings (it is a PITA to do!) and to republican democracy’s tensions with the sensibilities of the right (it is too egalitarian!).
• Yeah, libdem can lead to fascism … but in opposition to democracy — authoritarian rejection of rights & institutionalism, irrationalist rejection of reason, et cetera.
• Yeah, fascism finds its way to power through the support of the owners of the means of production — but that is popular fascist movements exploiting an ally with resources (an ally they betray if they actually seize power!) rather than the agents of capitalism creating fascist movements as their instrument.

And DALA is entirely wrong about the nature of fascism:

• Capitalism is no more definitional to fascism than it is to libdem. Actual fascist regimes produced weirdly mixed economies. People who claim that Mussolini defined fascism as support for capitalist corporations are wrong. Fascism cares about entirely different stuff from economic policy: it imagines that once it violently purges the nation of corruption, boring nerd stuff like economics will just sort itself out.
• Fascism is directly opposed to libdem. 20^th century fascists said so very directly. In the US, libdem rhetoric is so integral to our political discourse that our fascists use it, but that reflects a mix of irrationalist confusion about what libdem rhetoric means together with deliberate bad faith lies.

Antifascism

Understanding fascism and liberalism clearly demonstrates that libdem and liberalism-as-in-the-Dems are both fundamentally anti-fascist. They just are not good at it in the US right now, as demonstrated by MAGA fascism seizing this moment of reälignment in American politics. The actual Dems are bad at anti-fascism because they are bad at both kinds of liberalism, but their institutionalism is firmly opposed to the revolutionary transformation of society which fascism pursues. Deep libdem in the US is also bad at anti-fascism because it is simply weak; few people understand it, and fewer are good at fighting for it. The strong fascist movement we have in the US emerges from an opportunity created by these weaknesses!

DALA assumes that leftism is inherently effective antifascism and that antifascism is necessarily leftist. I am a leftist antifascist, and the two projects are entwined in my heart, but I do not share DALA’s confidence.

Someday I need to write another long-overdue post, on understanding the the contemporary Left as having two elements: opposition to capitalism and advocacy for social justice. I’m going to try to use that distinction without getting completely sucked into it.

The anti-capitalist aspect of leftism may be anti-fascist in the long view because people living in fully automated gay space communism would be too happy to turn to fascism. Hope springs, but in the meantime there is no reason to think that a movement which has failed to overthrow capitalism has a compelling power over fascism. Again, fascism does not really give a damm about the question of capitalism. So not only does that not make fascism vulnerable to leftist anti-capitalism, it makes leftist anti-capitalism vulnerable to fascist appropriation in bad faith.

The social justice aspect of leftism is fundamentally anti-fascist, because fascism is fundamentally opposed to egalitarianism. But the dominance of the identity politics school of social justice in contemporary leftist culture presents its own challenges in navigating the contest with fascism with liberalism in both senses on the board, when we consider the relationship between what I would call “soft” vs “hard” identity politics.

I am an advocate for soft identity politics, which embraces the libdem framework of rights et cetera as a useful but incomplete instrument of social justice. “The law in its majestic equality” et cetera means that yes, we need rights protections but also need other proactive measures to correct the system dynamics which reproduce inequities.

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 — its toolkit of rights, institutionalism, proceeduralism, and perhaps even reasoned argument. Leftists committed to hard identity politics present an obstacle to working with liberals in a popular front against fascism.

Leftist antifascists often argue that when the chips are down, liberals will side with fascists against leftists, rather than join with leftists in a popular front against fascism. We know from the 20^th century that this can happen. But in the current crisis in the US, more and more liberals are stepping up against fascism … and for leftists to refuse to stand with liberals against fascism now would be a bitter irony.

Liberals in either sense do not need to “develop beyond” liberalism to be antifascist. Leftists who insist that they must are committing the exact failure of coalition solidarity they claim liberals will commit. Opposing fascism takes priority.

Yes, liberals have failed to meet the moment before, and too many are failing now, but there are plenty of examples of liberals fighting fascists. The left likes to claim to be mighty anti-fascists because the Soviets did the heavy lifting to beat the Nazis … but only after bargaining with the Nazis failed … and liberals did showed up for the fight. When leftists tried to take on both the fascists and the liberals in the Spanish Civil War, they lost catastrophically.

What do DALAs expect to gain from refusing to admit the possibility of liberal antifascism? Leftists are weak in the US. What, is their 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 I do think it is the best place to stand fighting fascism. But sure do want to stand with liberals in antifascism. I even want to stand with conservative antifascists.

One more question

And 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? Because the 20^th century does not just teach us to dread authoritarianism from the right; it shows the dangers of authoritarianism by the left, too.