Sos Your Father - Road to the Middle Class

CONSERVATIVES have long understood that socialism and fascism are two sides of the same coin. They are both reactionary movements attempting to roll back the modern era to a simpler, less corrupt age driven by something higher than money, money, money.

As Marx put it in The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie... has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’”

The educated middle class read their Marx and understood what had to be done. They must lead the people back from moneymaking to the spirit of true community and soften the cruel oppression of the cash nexus.

“It takes a village” to realize full human potential, they realized, a global village led by people of good will like themselves.

And anyone that disagreed with them was a fascist.

For conservatives this gets old after a while. So Jonah Goldberg decided to write a bestseller about fascism and call it Liberal Fascism.

You might call this a good idea. But they used to call it lÃƒÂ¨se-majestÃƒÂ© in the old days of Majesty this and Majesty that. In our day it means you are not allowed to call liberals by naughty names. Some of them get quite upset. Here’s one email reported by Jonah:

You are a liar. Your book is a lie. Your life is a lie. Your magazine is a nest of liars. What you are trying to do is a crime. Get out of the closet, faggot.

And so’s your father.

How this lie connects with Touchstone’s “lie seven times removed—bear your body seeming, Audrey” in As You Like It Jonah’s correspondent does not make clear. Is Liberal Fascism the Counter-cheque Quarrelsome, the Lie Circumstantial, or the Lie Direct?

This much is certain. At the turn of the twentieth century there were two ideas competing to be the main bulwark against the bourgeoisie and its globalization program.

One was the idea of the nation state, the notion of a people united politically by a common language and culture. The other was socialism, the idea of a cooperative village economy scaled up to whatever dimension took your fancy: municipal, national, or international.

Socialism in one country: Five political geniuses of the early twentieth century figured out how to combine the two ideas. Their names, in order of rising to power, were Lenin, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mao.

Unfortunately national socialism is a terrible idea. Nationalism works pretty well, provided it is mitigated by Anglo-Saxon ideas of limited government. It successfully replaces the age-old community of the kindred with the abstract idea of the community of language.

But the face-to-face economic cooperation of the village community just doesn’t scale up. Every attempt to make it work requires compulsion. Every effort to correct its inevitable failures ratchets up the level of compulsion. In economic affairs there really is no alternative to the cash nexus.

And when you combine nationalism with socialism you better get out the body bags, tens of millions of them.

We all know that now. Anyone with half a brain knew it a century ago. But most people, they tell us, only use ten percent of their brain capacity.

The Germans, inhabiting the most advanced country in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century, succeeded in implementing the most complete combination of nationalism and socialism attempted anywhere in the world. At the time, everyone was impressed.

The Americans, lacking an efficient Prussian bureaucratic tradition and inhibited by their Anglo-Saxon political culture, screwed up their attempt at a directed national economy when they tried it in the 1930s. God, it is said, takes care of children, drunks, and the good old USA.

The Germans were not so lucky. In their efficient way, they demonstrated to the world in graphic detail just how bad national socialism could be if pursued to its logical conclusion.

It was a close shave for America’s progressives. So after World War II everyone who was anyone knew at once that the New Deal had nothing to do with fascism. So they all wrote in their diaries: “Dear Diary: I have always known that fascism stinks. I have always fought against right-wing ideas like racism, nationalism, anti-Semitism, and militarism.”

But how could they prove it? They couldn’t abandon their socialistic government programs; they couldn’t abandon the “moral equivalent of war;” they couldn’t let go of the national political power they had acquired. But they could fight endlessly against racism. They could schedule endless documentaries about the Holocaust on PBS.

And they could run away from the armed forces that had defeated fascism and repeat endlessly President Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex.

Today’s anti-fascist can prove it by posting angry denunciations in Amazon’s Customer Discussion on Liberal Fascism.

Surely that answers the question: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a Fascist?”

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

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