Linda is 57 years old, married, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in East Asian studies. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in religious demonstrations.
Which is more probable?
Linda is a law professor.
Linda is a law professor and is active in the fascist movement.
Paul Campos expresses irritation at Adrian Vermeule, the fascist-supporting Harvard professor. I feel that irritation; indeed, I share it (see also here).
But I also want to draw an analogy, to the communist academics of the mid-twentieth century. Last year I wrote a post, Props to the liberal anticommunists of the 1930s-1950s, arguing that those people don’t get the credit they deserve for putting in the political effort to marginalize the communists who were trying to infiltrate American organizations. This all became clearer to me in retrospect, seeing the successful far-right takeover of the Republican party in recent years.
Anyway, back to the academics. It may seem wrong for prominent academics to hold fascist positions–but we’re used to prominent academics holding communist positions in the past. The main difference is that, nowadays, supporting fascism can be a path to power and influence, whereas back in the middle of the twentieth century, supporting communism in this country might give you connections through backroom channels but it wouldn’t be something you’d want to do in public.
I’ve never heard of any of these people, but in the past have been interested in your Campos posts because they seem to come from a kind of DNC-propaganda alternate reality.
Here, I couldn’t find where this professor professed his support for fascism quoted in the post. This is suspect, what did he actually say?
Anon:
I don’t remember the details because I wrote this post awhile ago. In his post, Campos links to a post by Vermeule that seems to have been taken down. I’ve never met or corresponded with Vermeule; from what I’ve read, my take is that his political views are comparable to academic communists of the mid-twentieth century, in the sense that he takes some very extreme positions, perhaps secure in the feeling that it’s all talk and it won’t really happen. Just like the American Maoists who kinda liked the idea of the Cultural Revolution but didn’t think that they would themselves be sent to work on the farms or whatever.
You use the term “alternate reality,” and I agree there’s some of that (for example in Vermeule’s election denial), but I think it’s more that law students and law professors are often pushed to take extreme, boundary-pushing positions (for example, “Should Trees Have Standing?”) as that gets them attention. I’m bothered when law professors are promoting election denial and disturbing when they are promoting fascist ideas–I’m also bothered by the promotion of communism by some influential Americans in the twentieth century–and I think part of this is alternate reality, but to me it seems more like political extremism leading to a willed ignorance. Just as those communists didn’t want to hear about the bad things going on in the Soviet Union, Vermeule may be working very hard to maintain a state of ignorance so that he can promote election denial and dubious constitutional theories. I don’t think this has anything to do with “DNC-propaganda” except for the extent that Vermeule might want to use the DNC as some sort of boogeyman that would justify his extremism as a response to that.
Anon is saying that Campos is in an alternate reality of DNC propaganda.
The fact that Campos lives in a different, quintessentially humanist reality opposite from Anoneuoid is not even worth noting. Same goes for the others who will post here to sanewash Vermeule.
From such a lofty perch, anyone who disagrees is obviously a foolish victim of propaganda. What else could explain it?
Why the slight about “Should Trees Have Standing?” While it was a boundary-pushing position, I found it worthy and with substance. The “slight” was your saying “as that gets them attention” which sounds like it was an absurd position only designed to get attention. I found it an attempt to get attention on a genuinely important issue.
Dale:
My take is that law students and law professors are often pushed to take extreme, boundary-pushing positions (for example, “Should Trees Have Standing?”) as that gets them attention. I think it’s fair to describe “Should Trees Have Standing?” as extreme and boundary-pushing. I’m not saying that “Should Trees Have Standing?” was written to get attention; rather, I’m saying that law students and law professors are incentivized to come up with creative extreme ideas of their own.
So the entire evidence this guy is a “fascist academic” is a single tweet that has been deleted. One that wasn’t worth quoting at the time, and maybe no one remembers what it said anyway.
I highly recommend https://old.reddit.com/r/MantisEncounters/
That isn’t a joke, try to apply the same heuristics to that and these Campos claims, then explain why one passes and the other does not.
His writings are really not hard to find, though it would take a bit of work to go through all the verbiage. Here’s one I just clicked on:
https://www.compactmag.com/article/liberalism-s-good-and-faithful-servants/
“The political Catholic wants to order the nation and its state to the natural and divine law, the tranquility of order, precisely because doing so is the best way to protect and shelter the localities in which genuinely human community, imbued with grace, can flourish.”
Maybe “fascist” is not quite the correct word for someone who wants to “order the nation” according to “divine law”, but it’s not too far either.
I make no connection to fascism from that quote. However, the DNC and RNC are both obviously fascist. Ie, support merging of industry and state (corporatism), so power is concentrated in one place for a strongman and his gang to take over.
Likewise, it seems like Palko is unaware that the “far-right” DOES NOT like Trump. Eg, check unz.com to see why. These posts really do come from an entirely different reality.
I, too, would like to know why this gentleman is considered fascist.
I followed him on Twitter/X for years, stopping only couple years ago as I had a major scaleback, and as hhe we getting too intellectually rarified for me.
But he was anything but fascist (then!). His philosophy goes by “integralist.” While there are different flavors of this, his definitely wasn’t fascist.
Maybe he turned recently? I’d like to see receipts though. In common, and recent, parlance, that word is often used to mean “someone I disagree with”, so perhaps you picked up that usage from someone like that?
Clicking through, it appears that Vermeule endorsed the opinions of a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier.
Thinkling:
Yeah, I’m not sure, I’m no expert on Vermeule. Perhaps Campos could supply more details. Just speaking more generally, the concept of fascism in 2025 is trickier than the concept of communism in the mid-twentieth-century: back then there was the template of the Soviet Union, and then Maoist China, so being a communist pretty much meant being a supporter of one of those regimes. There is no single template fascist regime in that way today, so I think it’s always going to be more of a judgment call where to draw the boundary between fascism and other far-right political views.
Andrew,
I don’t know much Vermeule and, based on my read of Campos’ post, it doesn’t sound like I’d agree with and maybe even respect most of his views. But when you call someone out for being a fascist – or anything really – and then when being asked for evidence to back up that claim, you can’t just reply “I’m not sure.” You must have had reasons for writing what you did. Your response will only give fuel to those who want to raise up someone like Vermuele by showing how the other side can’t even argue against them.
The term fascist seems to have different meanings among different people.
Turn:
I just don’t remember. I wrote the post awhile ago, and when I read Campos’s post and clicked through the links, the description of Vermeule as fascist seemed accurate to me. As discussed in my comment above, the term “fascist” can be hard to pin down because it’s not associated with a specific current regime in the way that “communist” in the mid-twentieth-century was associated with the Soviet Union.
The purpose of the my post was not to “argue against” Vermeule–I have in the past written about election deniers, I find it kind of exhausting to argue against them, and I admire those political scientists who have gone to the trouble to refute various stupid election-denialist positions. Vermeule seems particularly sleazy on that issue, lending support to dumbass conspiracy theories without going to the trouble of trying to defend them.
There are several different flavors of fascism. The Franco flavor is pretty close to integralism. The Hitler and Mussolini flavors, not so much.
Clicking on the “also here” link, I noticed in the title of the linked post the bit “cool dudes in the 60s . . . thinking Chairman Mao was cool”. It reminded me of some liberal anticommunists of the 1960s, Lennon-McCartney, who wrote in the song Revolution, “But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain’t gone make it with anyone anyhow.” Fide Wikipedia, Lennon later said that was the most important line in the song.
Incidentally, I think the “fallacy” in the example stems from the fact that people read the description and think (accepting the terms of the example) “it’s likely that Linda is a fascist.” They don’t have a strong opinion as to whether she’s a law professor, which warps how they respond to “law professor OR fascist law professor?” That’s kind of how language and ordinary conversation work. It’s not so much that they formed a wrong opinion about probability, but that what’s salient in their mind is politics and not occupation.
Also, and also incidentally, I learned a lot about the history of racism in the parts of the US that never had a lot of Black people from Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War.
Andrew, could you please define the terms “fascist” and “far-right”?
Without having to define every contour of the map, I’ll say the set of opinions that I would label “far-right” includes “ending American liberal democracy to establish a religious government following Catholic integrationist thought.”
Oh, sorry, he’s a “post-liberal” who advocates “common good constitutionalism.”
The “post” being to dismantle the liberal part of democracy, and the “common good” for our society, of course, defined by extremist Catholics.
Side note: why are the Catholic crazies overwhelmingly adult converts?
Adrian:
See my comment above. I’m not an expert on political ideology and I won’t try to give my own definitions here; I guess you could start with Wikipedia or some place like that for an overview.
I try not to use terms I can’t define. If I can’t explain what a word means, I’m probably not communicating clearly. Words aren’t infinitely flexible; they have real boundaries. Communication works best when both speaker and listener are using terms in roughly the same way.
Take “fascism.” Standard definitions (e.g., Mussolini’s Italy) emphasize centralized, authoritarian leadership, suppression of opposition, and extensive state control over society. That’s a specific historical and political model.
So when I hear people on the left use “fascist” to describe people or ideas on the right, it often doesn’t seem to fit. Modern conservatism, at least in its mainstream forms, is grounded in limiting government power—something that runs counter to classical fascism, as well as to socialism or communism (which also expand state control, though in different ways). Disagreeing with a policy doesn’t make it “fascist.” There’s an important difference between “this is oppressive” and “I prefer a different policy outcome.”
More broadly, I tend to think of the political spectrum in terms of how much government intervention someone supports: more on the left, less on the right, with plenty of variation in between. That’s not a perfect model, but it’s at least a consistent one. Using that framework, terms like “far-right” become hard to pin down. In practice, it’s often used loosely, sometimes as a catch-all for views people strongly disagree with, rather than as a clearly defined category.
To be fair, there are fringe groups on the right—just as there are on the left—that most people would reject. But labeling mainstream right-leaning positions as “fascist” or “far-right” tends to blur important distinctions rather than clarify them. It risks turning substantive disagreements into caricatures.
If we want more productive conversations, it helps to use terms carefully and to describe positions in ways that the people holding them would recognize. Otherwise, we end up talking past each other instead of actually engaging.
Lol. Define “mainstream”
Isn’t it funny that Donald Trump‘s Party and movement are still regerred to as conservative in mainstream media.
I think fascists shouldn’t be called conservative, but when everybody who Self Identifikation as conservative supports fascism, it’s difficult to keep terminology straight.
Piglet:
I’d characterize the faction that is currently running the Republican party as conservative in the usual sense of supporting low taxes, less regulation of business, maintenance of traditional economic and social hierarchies. Indeed, the slogan “make America great again” it itself conservative in harking back to the past.
Adrian and Somebody:
I don’t really see “limiting government power” as central to political conservatism–or, for that matter, to political liberalism. Both sides want to use the government, just for different purposes. By this, I don’t mean that both parties want to shoot protesters on the street, or that both parties want to raise your taxes, or that both parties want to tell you what to do with your uterus, or whatever; I just don’t see total “government power” as a good discriminator here.
Adrian,
I don’t disagree with your characterization of “modern conservatism” but it doesn’t seem very relevant now that “modern conservatives” don’t really have a place in the political discussion… a huge change from just a dozen or so years ago. Nowadays a conservative would be called a RINO by the MAGA crowd that is running the current GOP. Many of us hope this will swing back the other way and ‘modern’ conservatives like John McCain and Mitt Romney become mainstream in the GOP again, but although I hope that’s the case I don’t expect it within the next dozen years or so.
I’m sure there were people who called McCain and Romney fascists, but I didn’t and indeed I would have called that ridiculous. But I do think MAGA is a fascist movement in many important respects. I wonder if you disagree.
While I’m here, I’ll mention a few fascist characteristics of Trumpism/MAGA:
1. Trump frames immigrants and dissidents as “internal enemies”, “traitors”, and similar words. This applies to broad groups but also to individuals he doesn’t like, such as James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, etc.
2. Trump is seen by his supporters as a “strongman”-type leader, and they like that.
3. Trump/MAGA use a narrative around national decline, which Trump alone can reverse. There’s a general message that the country must become strength (again) through unity against the betrayers, i.e. liberals and gays and immigrants.
4. Political violence in support of Trump is encouraged. The mob that assaulted the Capitol to try to keep Trump in power was “beautiful”, the prosecutors who pursued them are themselves dangerous to the country, and the mob deserves pardons. Also, shooting a protestor in the back after disarming him is totally acceptable. And so on.
I could go on, indeed when I started making this list I intended to go on, but it’s just too depressing.
In short, I do not think the current US political system can be described as “fascist” without some exaggeration, but I don’t think it’s at all unfair or exaggerated to say that the single most powerful political movement here at the moment is a fascist one.
Adrian –
Rather than arguing about the applicability of particlar terms, which seems hopelessly subjective to me, it might make more sense to argue about the applicability of the characteristics.
Along those lines, and somebody’s comment, when you say this:
“Modern conservatism, at least in its mainstream forms, is grounded in limiting government power—something that runs counter to classical fascism.”
Who are you thinking of who fits that description of “conservative?” I honestly can’t think of any. What I see are people who self-identify as conservatives, where there is a particular set of governmental powers that they certainly don’t advocate limiting, and in fact seek to expand. Maybe the “conservatives” on SCOTUS who want to expand the power of the executive branch would an instructive example.
Phil: “Nowadays a conservative would be called a RINO by the MAGA crowd that is running the current GOP”
What defines post-liberalism among Vermeule and others is that they’re not opposed to liberalism in the American sense. They’re opposed to liberalism in a sense where it means “modern”, more or less. They see “modern conservatism” as a form of “liberalism.” Where a large part of the Republican
Party has been making strenuous efforts to say they are not reactionaries, the MAGA right says “yes we are, and we’re proud to be reactionaries.” Along with being proud to believe only some people should have political rights, and to believe they have the right to break the rules if the rules keep them out of power.
This axis of left and right is not even close to the original or political theory meaning. It is however strongly aligned with rhetorical sleights created by people promoting control. That is, it’s aligned with conservative propaganda.
The axis of left and right refers to the organization of political control into egalitarian and distributed control (on the left) and hierarchical and dominance control (on the right). The farthest right you can go wants a single “strong man” or “king” at the top, with all of his vassals administering to his wishes in a hierarchy below. Within the group broadly called “liberal” (ie. people who support liberal democracy) in general the lefter portions of this (democratic socialism) prefer government intervention to redistribute economic control more broadly, and the rightmost groups (Reagan conservatives etc) prefer government intervention to concentrate power into big business interests, enforce patents and copyrights, and sell off public assets to private control by the rich. The entire spectrum of broadly liberals wants very similar levels of government control and intervention but in very different ways. Moving farther left are people who actually want to reduce the hierarchy of governence broadly. Including the governance of capital as well as traditional state governance. That’d be for example the anti-federalists in the american founders, various indigenous tribes, and various anarchists.
When people describe a group as “fascist” they refer to a group that believes dominance over others is good and right, that there are strict hierarchies of importance imposed by some category such as religious or racial or ethnic membership, that to preserve this hierarchy it is not only ok, but actually a good and proper thing to use violence, that the aesthetics of power, violence, and dominance are to be promoted in society, and generally that anything the “strong man” says goes whether it violates logic, the laws of physics, or other aspects of the reality of how the world works. As such it is also strongly anti-intellectual as knowledge of how the world works would prevent the ultimate exercise of power.
Andrew: „Indeed, the slogan “make America great again” it itself conservative in harking back to the past.“
Nostalgia for an imaginary golden age is a standard characteristic of *every fascist movement in history*. Umberto Eco lists a “cult of tradition” as his first of 14 characteristics of fascism, and Paxton points out the central role that perceived “decline” plays for fascist ideology. The upshot is always that modern society is rejected as an aberration that needs to be corrected by turning the clock back.
Of course there is some overlap here with conservatism (in its reactionary form), but the notion that aggressive MAGA nostalgia is somehow incompatible with fascism is dead wrong and, respectfully, quite ignorant.
Piglet:
You write, “the notion that aggressive MAGA nostalgia is somehow incompatible with fascism is dead wrong and, respectfully, quite ignorant.”
Fair enough. Just to be clear: I was never claiming that aggressive MAGA nostalgia was incompatible with fascism. If anyone was saying that, it was someone else in the thread.
Andrew: I understood your comment to imply that the nostalgia of the MAGA movement was evidence that MAGA is conservative rather than fascist, to which I objected that to the contrary it’s a typical fascist cliche. To which I could add that the radicalism of the Trump regime and its war against long established political, scientific, cultural institutions are incompatible with mainstream conservatism (which is above all suspicious of radical change).
If I misunderstood you, what then was your intention?
Piglet,
I did say that the nostalgia of the MAGA movement was evidence that MAGA is conservative, but not that it was “conservative rather than fascist.” Certain aspects of political conservatism, and certain aspects of political radicalism, are part of fascism.
Can’t reply to your later reply because of nesting limitations.
Andrew, if you don’t know how important the principle of limited government is to conservatism, then I suggest that, while you’re obviously a very smart and intelligent person in general, you don’t know what conservatism is at all. I would recommend you read some of the truly great minds of conservatism: Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, and Sir Roger Scruton: get it from the horse’s mouth.
In a nutshell, though:
1. Conservatism argues that there are many old things worth preserving (hence the name).
2. Change is required to preserve those old valuable things (Burke wrote that an institution without the ability to change is without the ability to preserve itself), but not all change is good. Change needs to be poked at and evaluated (especially long-term) to see if it is a good change or a bad one. Change per se is never automatically good, but some change is good and required.
3. Conservatism assumes that people are basically bad, not basically good.
4. Because people are basically bad and not good, no one is to be trusted with lots of power. Hence, limited government with checks and balances. Plus, (see 5 below), individuals are better at solving most problems than government, so government solutions to most problems should be avoided. Government exists to solve a few VERY specific problems.
5. In Kirk’s words, there is an “Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems …” – The Conservative Mind, 7th Ed., p. 8. All individuals, despite being basically bad, still have inherent dignity and deserve respect.
6. Truth is that which corresponds to reality, and we can use logic and carefully-and-correctly-done statistics to get at it. Truth should inform policy, not emotions.
From this, you can see, I hope, that conservatism differs mightily from modern liberalism, progressivism, and especially any radicalism or inherently revolutionary ideologies like socialism or communism. Conservatism is inherently anti-revolutionary, in general. The principles I have outlined above are also diametrically opposed to fascism. So I still maintain that fascism and conservatism have virtually nothing in common.
Something else worth noting: conservatism is not a monolith, hence the penchant for lots of squabbling in the Republican Party (I don’t know that there are any true conservatives in the Democratic Party, though there are certainly folks in the Republican Party who are not conservatives). There are conservatives, worthy of the name, who wouldn’t hold to all the points I listed above. But they would almost certainly hold to most of them.
Adrian —
You’re describing *philosophical conservatism* (Burke, Kirk, Scruton), without referencing *political conservatism* as it actually exists in practice. Without that distinction, it’s hard to evaluate claims about what “conservatism” does or doesn’t support in the real world.
Your description of conservatism is internally coherent as a philosophical tradition. But when you say that “modern conservatism… is grounded in limiting government power,” that’s no longer a philosophical claim — it’s a normative or empirical one. And empirically, what we see is selective limitation: reducing government power in some domains while expanding it in others.
This is where the No True Scotsman problem seems to apply. If “conservatism” is defined as a belief in universally limited government, then any political actor who expands government power in areas they prefer can be dismissed as “not a true conservative.” But that move makes the definition unfalsifiable and sidesteps any test against observable evidence.
Maybe I’m wrong, though. If you have examples of political conservatives who actually put your philosophical conservatism into practice, limiting government power across the board rather than selectively, please explain who you’re thinking of.
Otherwise, it seems like what you’re describing is a purely philosophical construct, not something that corresponds to the real-world characteristics or patterns of governance associated with political conservatism. Maybe that’s all you intended.
The GIANT hole in all that philosophy is the question of who is going to evaluate “good” vs “bad” change, and who is going to stop the bad change and slow the good change to be evaluated on timelines acceptable to the conservative philosophy. The answer to all of that is powerful people at the top of hierarchies wielding cops and guns and militaries. And those are all giant government powers the conservatives wield to impose their value system on everyone else for their personal benefit. Conservative philosophy isn’t a philosophy of encouraging others to voluntarily go slow and preserve aspects of the past, there are anarchists who think voluntarily preserving aspects of the past is a giant benefit, they’re called librarians, conservativism is a philosophy of imposing those things on others by the threat of violence through govts.
Wow, the comment thread has gotten hung up on labels and definitions. The principal point, a comparison between communist academics of the Pop Front era and fascist academics of the Trump era is what we should be talking about. I see some similarity, but also differences. Perhaps the biggest one is that the far right today is bankrolled by huge piles of money, mingling ideological and pecuniary motives. The Moscow Gold of olden days ways a myth.
Another difference is that communist academics diminished themselves as academics by what they didn’t study and incorporate; it was a selective reading of their discipline, if the discipline was history or social science. What I see from the far right today is, in general, a willingness to deny accepted evidence in their own specializations. Both are ends-justify-the-means orientations, but the means aren’t quite the same. I suppose my claim could be inundated with demands for examples. I would have no trouble combing Heritage Foundation economics reports for this sort of thing, but my knowledge of other disciplines is more impressionistic.
My picture of where-did-all-the-communists-go is just McCarthy and pals, which Andrew mentions in the original post, though maybe he’s arguing that the liberal democracy component was more important? Or it came first?
Anyway, the McCarthy stuff seems like a better explanation to me, which also provides a bit more of an explanation for why the right wing stuff hangs around (and grows) today. If your purge-happy right wing purged your left wing, then presumably the reason your right wing hasn’t been purged is you don’t have any purge-happy people on the left.
It seems like Andrew is taking the stance that there are purgers, and is taking a purge-happy stance in the original post (or like, as far as you think it’s fair to say “I disagree with this criticism. There was a cold war going on, and communists really were doing their best to infiltrate left parties. I’m cool with Orwell passing these names along” is purge-happy). But empirically our particular lefty purgers are only capable of purging other lefties, or something? I think at that point I’d question if it’s fair to call our empirical purgers liberal democracy types, but that doesn’t feel like a super productive argument either.
In related topics, I always get a bit of whiplash when I see Steve Sailer posting here. I think it’s pretty fair to characterize him as a far right intellectual type, and I don’t really have any expectation that anyone is going to stop his posts (though I would like it).
Just in general historical analogies though I like thinking about the politics of today in terms of U.S. civil war stuff — I think with all the WW2 stuff everyone keeps running off to Europe in a way that isn’t so helpful. We have a confederacy at home, etc. etc.
Dinosaur:
Yes, the point of my original post is that exclusion of extremists can be a good thing. I wouldn’t use the word “purge,” as I associate that with violent Stalin-era Soviet practices.
Regarding the history, the Americans for Democratic Action, which was one of the main organizations set up to keep communists out of the Democratic party, was founded in 1947, and it wasn’t until 1950 that Joe McCarthy made the speech that kicked off his anti-communist crusade.
Regarding Steve Sailer: I welcome all commenters, regardless of their political positions. I’d be ok with Vermeule commenting here too.
“Linda” is famous in the world of statistics. And, today is Saint Patrick’s Day, but then I got lost in the dustup and the minutia. I was a student in the 1950s and there was a lot of chatter about communist professors, and at Madison, a supposed stronghold, I did have friends to the left of me. But it wasn’t until I lived in London in the mid1960s that I met (very) active Trotskyites whose worst enemy was? were? the Stalinist Communists. Coinciding with all the politics, it was the Mary Quant/Twiggy era.
It’s not widely understood that Stalinists AKA “Marxist-Leninists” are generally not considered leftists by other leftists (like Trotskyites or Democratic Socialists or Anarchists). This is because there’s really no sense in which they are leftists. What they are is a right wing movement which uses/used the rhetoric of anti-capitalism and worker control to gain power, but then immediately crushed all democratic or worker control and instituted a state-capitalist system in which a small number of bureaucrats under the “great man” controlled everything about what everyday people were allowed to do and industrialized the country for their own primary benefit, no different from the way that Nazis or Franco or other dictators did.
A derogatory word was coined by other leftists (Trotskyites etc) to describe UK “communists” who were apologists for Stalin… The word was “Tankies”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
The point of Stalin and Mao was to coopt the ideas of equality and freedom from control of the ultra rich that made communism popular in order to gain power and then crush all opposition creating a hierarchy controlled by the few who essentially “owned” all of the assets of the country including the population as slaves.
It’s unsurprising that this distinction hasn’t been widely recognized outside of the activism in the field. But people like say David Bohm, the physicist, who was blackballed from American physics for being a “Communist” were never in favor of Stalin or Mao, they were in favor of the ideas of socialism in terms of workplaces controlled by workers and an end to policies promoting big business profits etc.
I’m not gonna say much about specific academics in the mid-century since it’s far from my expertise, but I do think the idea that there were tons of honest to goodness Tankies in US Academia seems unlikely to me and more likely to be the product of fever dreams from Joseph McCarthy. Most of McCarthy’s claims disappeared under scrutiny if I’m not mistaken.
“What they are is a right wing movement…”
Hey, it’s that same thing Freddie deBoer does where everything and everyone from the left that does something stupid or nasty is *actually* on the right.
One might argue that the fallacy really should have been updated from Scotsman to Leftist.
The left vs right axis is defined by willingness to create hierarchies of command (no hierarchies on the left, deep and powerful hierarchies on the right), That’s what it means to be on the right, to support hierarchy. The original “right” was the literal pro-royalists in post-revolution France who wanted a return to the king.
Now, let’s examine Lenin and Stalin. Did they eliminate the actual “soviets” (ie. regionally elected government councils) in favor of top down control by people appointed by them? Did they direct the actions of the everyday people by force? Did they send people to gulags in siberia for their political dissidence? Did they engineer famines in Ukraine to kill off people they didn’t like? Did they roll tanks into other countries to suppress dissent? Are all of those things imposition of decision making by a hierarchical authority? All yes. So yeah, they’re on the right: deeply hierarchical imposition of decision making by powerful people on others. This isn’t “name calling” it’s using the term in its technical meaning to describe the actions they took.
> The left vs right axis is defined by willingness to create hierarchies of command
Everyone has the right to their own definitions but “social hierarchy” is not the same as “hierarchies of command” (comrade Stalin was just another citizen) and people often use a second axis for the “authoritarian” aspect (which is independent of the left/right divide).
Thanks, that’s an important correction to what I think is a rather poorly informed historical take by Gelman.
I did have a professor in the 80s who told us she was a Communist. Now somewhat famous in her field but her contract wasn’t renewed and she didn’t get tenure until she’d moved on.
Vermeule, in his enthusiasm for setting up the Catholic faith as the state, and disposing with democracy, has his out-group that he wants to discriminate against:
‘In defense of state laws that forbid atheists from holding public office or serving on juries, he tweeted that they are “sensible” because atheists “can’t be trusted to keep an oath.”’
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/3/3/silver-end-bigotry-against-atheists-at-harvard/
and that puts him a long way towards fascism – against democracy, for a “unifying” ideology, and selecting groups of “others” for discrimination and hatred. I’m not sure what his position these days on war for glory or gain is, but that’s the remaining characteristic.
Barney:
I expect that when Vermeule said this, he didn’t really think that such a law would be enforced, he just thinks that he’s being a charming imp by expressing support for it. Ha ha, those people disagree with us on political and religious doctrines so we should reduce their citizenship . . . how could that possibly go wrong, yuk yuk yuk.
This relates to my post from a few years ago about what happens to edgelords when the real crazies take over.
That’s charitable of you, Andrew. And in this one case, I am inclined to think you might be right.*
But in most of these cases, I think it’s more just classic motte-and-bailey, or—to use terminology more associated with LGM than your blog—kidding on the square.
*Or perhaps I just _want_ to be charitable here, because he has done interesting work on other topics… which should be irrelevant.
“he didn’t really think that such a law would be enforced”
Why would you think that. Why do you think we needn’t take seriously the fascist ideas of fascist thinkers in a time when a fascist regime is busy implementing those fascist ideas. If Vermeule really thinks “oops I didn’t really mean to support what trump is doing, I thought it was just a game”, he needs to come clean. As long as he doesn’t, he needs to be held responsible for the atrocities he supports.
Piglet:
I agree that Vermeule should be held responsible for his views. In some ways, he is, in the sense that he’s recognized as an extremist, so he’s paying in reputational terms for supporting election denial, discrimination against atheists, and whatever other edgelord positions he wants to promote. We have free speech in this country so he’s free to say stupid and obnoxious things on the daily, and we’re free not to take anything he says seriously.
One thing that bothers me is that it seems that Vermeule’s extremism is in some ways a professional asset. If he were just a reasonable conservative (e.g., recognizing that Biden won the 2020 election but opposing Biden’s policies, saying that he’s personally religious without saying stupid things about atheists, etc.), then I’m guessing he wouldn’t have attained his current level of fame. I wouldn’t be writing about him, for one thing! Similarly, if Vermeule’s edgelord colleague Cass Sunstein were just a reasonable technocratic liberal and not a prolific streamer of bullshit, he wouldn’t be so famous either. Lots of Ivy League professors write vapid airport nonfiction; Sunstein gets our attention via his over-the-top stupidity.
I suspect that for Vermeule, Sunstein, and other edgelords of their ilk, it is kind of a game–make extreme statements, get publicity–but then they start to believe their own hype. Also, remember, the reasonable positions have already been staked out so there’s a special reward for saying something so stupid that no reasonable person would say it.
I think the difference between the communists and the fascists is actually pretty clear. Communists wanted to extend democracy to all parts of human life so that we could stop being enthralled by our creations (the “market” especially) and get ourselves together. The way to do that was by placing rationality and science first. The implication was to get rid of discriminations – ethnic, gender, race, ect. – and see all people as equal. Fascists, then and now, want to exalt action, dismiss rationality and science, look to “race and blood” as identifiers in life, embrace leadership and “victory” (however defined), reinforce “traditional” hierarchies in human life, and enforce all this by unrestrained violence against all enemies (again however defined). The program of the communists is still embraced by most rational, secular people. The “actually existing socialism” regimes the communists put in place in did little to advance the basic program and has been rightly rejected by history. (I know that sounds out of date, but I couldn’t think of a better phrase.) Unfortunately, while the outright fascist regimes failed completely as well, the basic ideas still have staying power and continue to fuel many, still minority, movements around the world. Here history hasn’t done us many favors.
So how do folks like Vermeule fit? The way to see them, I think, is to go back some. They would fit very nicely as staff for Primo de Rivera. They aren’t Nazis or even fascisti. They don’t want a society that isn’t at least facially democratic. What they do want is to remove gay people, racial minorities, and, especially, Jews from their place in society. What they want is to remove democratic and legal controls on government action. What they want is to favor Christianity (especially Roman Catholicism, but don’t tell the rubes) and enforce legal regimes to put “Christian values” (yet again however defined) at the center of the legal system. Get rid of the Catholic angle and you have Mike Johnson and company. Add in the last days and you have Hegseth and friends.
Sooooo … should academics like Vermeule be removed? No. Should they get the treatment they would like to shell out to the rest of us applied to them? Yes. The ideals of the communist movement, however defiled, are the ideals that rational people should embrace. The ideals of the fascists should be rejected by rational people and fought wherever they appear.
Here endeth the lesson.
Tracy:
Setting aside details of implementation, communism is sometimes thought of as better than fascism (because communism appeals to social ideals of cooperation and equality) or as worse than fascism (because communism’s misplaced idealism makes it such a seductive ideology). Liberal anti-communists such as Karl Popper have argued that rational people should not embrace communistic ideals because they offer such an appealing rationale to restrict people’s freedom. I agree with you that the ideals of fascists are horrible, although I guess the Vermeules of the world would argue that sectarianism is the way of the world and that non-fascist societies are just denying their true nature.
That would fit. There’s a lot of Carl Schmidt in what little of Vermeule’s writings I’ve read. What you say – I bet you’ve read more of his stuff than I have – is right with that sorta quasi-RealPolitik stuff in The Concept of the Political. All of which leads me to think that his arguments are just as deeply flawed as Schmidt’s. There’s nothing inherently sectarian (in the religious sense and that’s the way Schmidt meant it) about societies; the steady expansion of “in-groups” and the permeability of their borders seen in modern times proves nothing, if not that. That we still have divisions based on group identities doesn’t prove that they are either inevitable or impossible to overcome.
As for Popper, I’ve always thought he was, quite simply, wrong about his fear of communist ideals. Sure, the siren is always there and driving positive liberty to excess is seductive. But that isn’t an excuse. I think George Orwell, a writer who both saw the faults with Stalinism and continued to embrace socialist ideals, was a lot closer to the mark. You can be a foe of dictatorship without giving up on the ideals the dictatorship’s abandoned. Sir Karl should have stuck to philosophy of science, imho. That’s where his lasting contributions lie.
Again, here endeth the lesson.
The guy’s name is Carl Schmitt.
I only know Carl Schmitt through Jacob Taubes. This is strange stuff:
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/to-carl-schmitt/9780231154123/
In my view, Catholic integralism no longer exists in Europe and was never particularly relevant, at least in Germany.
Unlike Carl Schmitt, the Catholic Church was generally opposed to the Nazis.
(in Spain, the Catholic Church was closer to the state and more susceptible to fascism; France managed to change course in time (Secularism))
“The main difference is that, nowadays, supporting fascism can be a path to power and influence”
What Gelman I think overlooks is that in the post war period, the memory of both fascism (defeated) and Stalinism (ongoing) was still fresh and there was a sufficiently broad consensus in the US and Western Europe that we don’t want either of those ever again (the Global South is a different matter – they suffered not from Stalin or Hitler but from Western imperialism). That consensus held for about 80 years and then faded into history, with a new generation of fascists rising to electoral power in several countries. I think the temporal distance from the historical memory is key to understand why fascism is again on the rise after 80 years have passed and all the witnesses have died.
I think Gelman widely overstates the Communist “threat” of those years. Nowhere in the West did a Stalinist party come close to power by democratic means, not because McCarthy did the right thing but because there was no popular appetite for that kind of system. People in the West could see what it did in the East bloc, and while there were heavyhanded anti-communist propaganda efforts, it has to be said that the propagandists didn’t have to make much up because reality was the best propaganda. I grew up in Germany on the Western side of the inner-German border. There were very few Communist sympathizers I assure you.
I don’t think fascism ever really went away any more than Marxism did. What I think did happen is that the Second World War discredited fascism, along with associated ideas like admiration for a specifically “Teutonic” culture in the English-speaking countries, eugenics, right-wing populist mass politics, government-led but right-wing organization of the economy, and so on. The same thing happened with Communism, over the years, between the purges (in Moscow and also the CPUSA), the famine in Ukraine, the show trials, Hungary, etc. But Communism didn’t go away and neither did fascism. They just became too disrespectable to be displayed in public. In the US, which is all I know about, Communism had given voice to a large variety of people who didn’t know anything about what was really going on in Eastern Europe and were more interest in the ideals it allowed them to espouse than in the details of theory or geoglobal politics. And anyone who values open debate should be suspicious of their “with us or against us” attitude (necessary if you never knew what might get you purged and you had no say in policy debates). The accepted theory that the great world rivals were the US and the USSR made the situation here somewhat different from what it was in Europe, right next door.
It used to be the accepted consensus that FDR’s New Deal (that is, social democracy) found a third way that allowed the problems of a modern economy to be dealt with, without verging into totalitarianism. But Americans who opposed the New Deal never really stopped considering it Communism, just as Americans who opposed racial integration accused anti-racists of being “Communists.” I suspect all the admiration for fascism that went underground in the 1940s and 1950s was just . . . underground. Not gone. And for various reasons it feels more able to show its face in public.
(Incidentally, I don’t know about Germany, but Marxism itself was really in the US ignored much longer than it was in some European countries. The idea of a non-Communism Marxism really wasn’t taken seriously. It would have been considered simply “Communism” by many.)
“What I think did happen is that the Second World War discredited fascism”
Yes, that’s what I was trying to say. Of course fascism didn’t go away completely, but it was discredited and no mainstream public figure would want to be seen espousing fascist views. Mainstream media outlet copnsidered fascism taboo and wouldn’t platform open fascists by interviewing them or inviting them on talkshows. And explicit racism or antisemitism was career-ending, therefore dog-whistling became popular on the Right.
All of these taboos are now passé. Fascism is considered a totally normal legitimate political view by the mainstream political and media discourse, and Trump’s fascist regime is – still – treated like a normal government.
Yes. “Racism as taboo” was less the case in the US unfortunately, and the system in the South (one-party rule with a racial caste system) had to be described as “democracy” (at the risk, again, of being called a Communist). There were still informal and formal restrictions on Jewish participation in certain areas of, especially, professional and middle-class social life, and in the latter also against many Catholics. (Not denominational restrictions, but secular ones, as any nominal Protestant could be included in most cases.) But there was strict policing of the road leading to totalitarianism, which led eventually to a more liberal acceptance of differences.
What is new is the idea that everything has gone to the dogs and the only way to fix it is to go back to an imagined past, and the fantasy that the only thing standing in the way of that is the postwar taboos against fascism. Along with the revival of fascist theorists like Schmitt.
FYI, Vermeule seems to be very active on Substack: https://thenewdigest.substack.com/notes