Appendix L: The Sophistry and Fallacies of Playing the Name Game
The Sophistry and Fallacies of Playing the Name Game
“Instead of throwing up our hands in despair at fascism’s radical disparities, let us make a virtue of this necessity. For variety invites comparison.”
--Paxton, in “Anatomy of Fascism,” p. 20.
One of my favorite political internet programs is “Left Reckoning” because of the high-level understanding of classic Marxism that the hosts, Matt Lech & David Griscom, demonstrate with their careful readings of Marx's writings. Professor Dr. Daniel Bessner of International Studies at the University of Washington, and a fellow at the Quincy Institute was a guest for the video interview, "Is 'Fascism' Happening Here?” to discussing his recently published essay "The Name Game: Does American Fascism Exist?" I think this is an excellent title for his essay on whether fascism exists in America today, because there is no question that fascist political movements have existed in America's recent past.
I believe the strongest point of Dr. Bessner's essay is the title because he begins with an analysis of ordinary language—a very promising approach--and directs our attention toward three keys words: “fascism,” “name,” and “game.” Introducing the term “game” is brilliant, although, I do not think he was fully aware of it. Does American Fascism exist, or is this term, as Bessner argues, only used in an insincere semantic game to manipulate the reader's opinions and judgment? (I will refer to Bessner's critique of fascism as “the opposing position,” or the OP.) The word “game” has a connotation of insincerity, making it an even better example. I want to further the linguistic analysis of “game” because it shares the same characteristics as other abstract terms like the name “fascist” --both names have no essence as a definition. An essence meant in ancient Greek, “the what it was to be," or the indispensable (essential) quality that characterizes an object for identification by a name. Without going into too great of detail (that would be torture) reviewing logicians Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein's theory of language, I instead want to show how elusive an ordinarily meaningful terms like “game,” or “number” are actually difficult to define. Improving on St. Augustine's obsolete word/object theory of language, Frege formulated his Sense and Reference Theory of Meaning where reference is the object a word indicates, and sense is all the other meanings evoked by a name. Improving on Frege, Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions better shows that names may have no referent at all (The 'Witch' of 'Narnia'), but still have sense from descriptions, for example, that author C.S. Lewis assigned to his fictional characters and places. Improving on Russell, Wittgenstein added the concept of “language-game,” characterized as “the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven (Philosophical Investigations, para. 7)(pdf.).” Wittgenstein chose “game” as a paradigmatic example of a name without an essence.
What is a “game”? A game such as chess involves rules, two players, a chess board with colored squares and pieces; however, some games like solitaire require only one player, and no board, while both games have rules. This problem of definition is best illustrated by the person asking a game shopkeeper to provide the rules to all games, i.e., to provide the universal essence of all games. But there is no such universal rulebook for all games because the scope of what one knows as a game is not fixed, unless one is drawing a boundary for some methodological purpose. Or one could simply be both a self-absorbed solipsist and a sophist and not explore fixed meanings. A “game” can even consist of making up names for a doll as children do sometimes (PI, para. 27). Are we stupid because we cannot give a universal definition of “game”? And yet, most persons will say they know what “game” means since the concept has empirical examples such as Chess, Go, Checkers, or war games—the list of examples is endless and easy to identify. Wittgenstein wrote, “...do we know any more about it ourselves? Is it only other people whom we cannot tell exactly what a game is? —But this is not ignorance. We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn. To repeat, we can draw a boundary— for a special purpose. Does it take that to make the concept usable? Not at all! (PI, para. 69).” Although we have difficulty defining the essence of game, we all know from experience to understand pragmatically what a game is when asked. And similarly, this is the case for the abstract term “fascism.”
But what is the empirical content of fascism? I could offer Dr. L.W. Britt's fourteen empirical characteristics of fascism, or writer Umberto Eco's list of fourteen very similar characteristics of Ur-Fascism (Eternal Fascism) as the definition of fascism. In “The Anatomy of Fascism,” (2004)(pdf.) Robert O. Paxton's argues the existing fascist minimum definitions as too static; although, searching for a static essence is a good heuristic principle (Paxton p. 206). Rather than seek a static essence of fascism, Paxton instead tracks the historical phenomena of fascism that succeed and fail in development so at the end of his historical survey fascism reduces itself to a radical minimum for a more dynamic formal definition. Paxton also rejects an “intentionalist” interpretation of fascist dictatorship that focuses on the dictator’s will and personality and instead accepts the "structuralist" view that focuses on historic, economic, and cultural forces that forms a fascist movement. Paxton does not even consider Imperial Japan as fascist and instead calls it “an expansionist military dictatorship” (Paxton, p. 200). I prefer the structuralist analysis of fascism. Paxton even rejects Spain’s General Francisco Franco as fascist and calls it a traditional form of dictatorship lacking the emotional commitment to fascism (Paxton, p. 157). I would say Spain and Japan were “close enough,” as fascist states, but Paxton is extremely cautious and strict applying his criteria for identifying a fascist government.
As the boundaries of our concept of game expands with experience, so too the definitional boundaries of fascism broaden with historical experience and knowledge. Paxton offers his formal definition of fascism as the following: "Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion (Paxton, p. 218; italics added )."
Dr. Paxton's definition of fascism is the best around today, but it seems still not to have an essence just like the term “game.” The terms “game” and “fascism” share the same problem with the ancient term “virtue.” What is virtue? It is easy to find empirical examples such as the virtue of the leader, of the child, of the mother, of the soldier, and so on. But Socrates asked in Plato's dialogue Meno for the whole of virtue, and not just the parts of virtue so that the discouraged Socrates wanted to start the conversation with Meno all over again (Meno, 79c). The problem with the static terms “game,” “fascism,” and “virtue” is that they are names attempting to define dynamic processes of movement or action: not things, or objects, but pure abstractions (hyper-objects). I discuss further abstract objects and contradiction in the essay, “Bertrand Russell's Critique of Fregean Logico-Mathematical Objects” and in the subheading near the end of the essay, “Marcusean Dialectics on the Ontology of a False Condition,” see “The Metalogic of Contradiction.” Wittgenstein's answer to this question of meaning is the meaning of a term is its use: “For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word 'meaning' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language...(PI, para. 43).”
“But in reality, we understand each other only through whole areas of misunderstanding and contradiction. The real universe of ordinary language is that of the struggle for existence. It is indeed an ambiguous, vague, obscure universe, and is certainly in need of clarification. Moreover, such clarification may well fulfill a therapeutic function, and if philosophy would become therapeutic, it would really come into its own. “
--Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 203.
From here on, I want to reply to some specific points made by the OP's criticism of the usefulness of the word, “fascism.”
"Historians begin by looking backward. They often end by thinking backward."
—Nietzsche
The OP further argues that...
“Since the election of Donald Trump, a specter has haunted the United States—the specter of fascism. From The New York Times to The Atlantic, from CNN to The New York Review of Books, liberals and socialists alike have asked the same question: Is it happening here?"
Later on, the OP wrote that President W. Bush was labeled as a fascist before Trump: Bush came before Trump as president. The concept of fascism can be traced to Roman times, which the OP noted, so it would be reasonable to expect the term would be in more common use during and after the experience of war. And of course, there are always undocumented conspiracy theories espoused by some regarded as agnostics of the term fascism.
”Into this fray enters the intellectual historian Bruce Kuklick, whose Fascism Comes to America provides an entirely new perspective on a debate that’s become a bit exhausting. Unlike other pundits and thinkers, Kuklick is not interested in whether 'fascism' as such has arrived in the United States. Rather, he’s concerned with how the term itself has been used in the last century of American discourse."
Kuklick's approach is flawed since if fascism appears in all its stages as a fully developed powerful State, it would then be too late to resist! This is why the academy sucks at cultural critique.
” 'Fascism,' Kuklick’s exhaustive survey of U.S. politics and culture shows, has generally functioned as a so-called floating signifier. In the words of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who originated the phrase, a floating signifier is a term 'void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning.' At one point or another, every political perspective in the United States has been identified as fascist. In the last two decades alone, Jonah Goldberg railed against 'liberal fascism' as Chris Hedges dubbed the 'Christian Right' 'American fascists.' Dinesh D’Souza claimed that Hillary Clinton was fascist; Paul Krugman said the same about Trump. And even fringe ideologies weren’t safe: Sebastian Gorka linked socialism with fascism, while Nouriel Roubini made similar claims about libertarianism.”
Terms like the definite article “the” and indefinite article “a” are also devoid of meaning, but these signifiers also serve a useful function that makes communication easier. Do numbers function as floating signifiers? Could the number “ten” signify both “ten houses,” and “ten planets” without using a different numerical signifier? In some ancient cultures this is not the case, such as the Klamath Indians, who had a variety of "numeral classifiers" for the specific character of the object to be counted. In other words, a different numerical signifier is used to count a row of fish, than a heap of grain, or layers of flat bread depending on the specific character of the objects to be counted. (See, Ernst Cassirer, “The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Vol. 1, Language,” 1953, p. 230) (pdf.). Over time, numerals lose their empirical concreteness and become purely abstract. The OP's epistemology of language is gradually revealing itself: the erroneous presupposition that language has an essence leads to the belief that there can be a final analysis of language and words. Kuklick's linguistic and historical critique of fascism is embarrassingly inadequate.
The OP attempts to defend his Kuklickian agnosticism by drawing a false equivalence between Jonah Goldberg and Chris Hedges. For an in-depth rebuttal to Jonah Goldberg's disingenuous book, “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning,” (2008 ) see journalist David Neiwert's six-essay rebuttal at Orcinus titled, “The Not-So-Secret Desire of the American Right to Project Its Own Worst Propensities Onto Everyone Else.” Goldberg's thesis that fascism is left-wing is very easy to counter with the example of only one right-wing businessman--Henry Ford, who was a fanatical right-wing admirer of Hitler. Projectionism is the right-wing's most important strategy since it requires no effort for critical thinking—they just accuse antifascists of the very actions fascists themselves are doing, or as one commentator said, “Every accusation is a confession.” Projectionism is the right-wing's propensity to see in its enemies its own dark side, so much so that they cannot utter the word "fascist," and instead use the propagandistic euphemism "antifa" cleansed of all historical content and even sounds like the foreign Arabic word “intifada,” meaning “shaking off.” Goldberg's book is an example of “meme mimicking.” Goldberg's purpose is to impede and debase political discourse as irrational. Some on the Left identified W. Bush's government as fascist early in the administration, and the response of the right-wing was to argue that fascism is a leftist phenomenon. Jonah Jacob Goldberg wrote "Liberal Fascism" (2008 ) in which he tried to define fascism as leftist liberalism: he avoids any critique of the term “neoliberalism,” which is a stage of fascism (see Paxton, Five Stages of Fascism). Of course, Glenn Beck picked up Goldberg's meme. The mainstream media never mentions the histories of Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, William Randolph Hearst, or Henry Luce and their support for fascism and the Nazis. Lacking historical knowledge, fascism is a muddled term and is reduced to an insult rather than understood as a specific historical political pattern. Don't forget The Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church Shooting on July 27, 2008, by Jim David Adkisson killing two members and wounding seven. Adkission admitted in a confession that Bernard Goldberg's book on "liberal fascism" inspired the shooting. The church allowed gay members, about who Adkission wrote "This [church] is a collection of sickos, weirdos, and homos." The OP stated the following:
“Kuklick has demonstrated that there is no fascist object 'out there' to discover.”
“Fascism’s power in American discourse comes from the fact that it has no stable meaning—it’s mostly an all-purpose curse word, a highfalutin 'fuck this'—which means that the fascism debate, as currently constructed, can never end.”
“...in general, for much of the 1960s onward, innumerable people deployed the term in innumerable ways. Everyone, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, from Barack Obama to George W. Bush, has at one point or another been deemed a 'fascist.' “
“When anti-war activists identified George W. Bush with Hitler in the 2000s, they were not so much making a careful historical analogy as signaling their hatred of Republican warmongers and, in most cases, their allegiance to the Democratic Party.”
“The one consistent quality the term “fascism” has retained since the 1930s is its negative valence. Almost no one uses it positively; instead, to borrow Kuklick’s acid description, the term is the verbal equivalent of “throwing a tomato at a speaker at a public event.”
“Anti-war baby boomers, who had not fought fascism firsthand, but who had grown up in its dark shadow, once again started to apply the term to politicians across the political spectrum, from Lyndon Baines Johnson to Richard Nixon. Fascism thus retained its exceedingly negative valence, but was, Kuklick shows, 'untethered … from the right' and even 'uncoupled from any perceptive characteristics.' “
“If you really didn’t like someone or something, you called them fascist.”
That fascism's power emanates from linguistic ambiguity is true, but this can also be said of other terms used for propaganda. The subject-predicate sentence structure inherently implies an “essence” as subject of a sentence--such are the tyrannical limits of language, and yet ambiguity also empowers language. Natural-scientific positivistic materialism is built on the same theory of language that implies the derivative metaphysical view that everything is an object—no object, no meaning. This worldview is so burned into modern thinking that it has led to aspect blindness of processes.
A limited language requires other methodologies to understand all its dimensions such as historical research, sociological statistical studies, phenomenological description, critical theory, and dialectical reasoning. The OP repeatedly notes that fascism is used as a slanderous epithet, except for a contrived meaning invented by Leftist. I found at least ten definitions for fascism in a single dictionary entry, with at least one being pejorative, which is a perfectly legitimate definition. No one should be surprised multiple meanings would include a “negative valence,” but multiplicity of definitions is not an excuse to claim that all other meanings are invalid—meaning is use (Wittgenstein). However, in scientific analysis--to use the eighteen-century meaning of scientific as “systematic” -- requires boundaries be drawn as a methodological strategy for building knowledge. To claim fascism is a meaningless term is an Orwellian effort for narrative control to render political discourse meaningless, since we cannot think clearly without words. I remember the Nixon, and Reagan administrations had fascists in their administration (search for details in Yeadon/Hawkins' “The Nazi Hydra”).
“But this radical acceptance of the empirical violates the empirical, for in it speaks the mutilated, "abstract" individual who experiences (and expresses) only that which is given to him (given in a literal sense), who has only the facts and not the factors, whose behavior is one-dimensional and manipulated. By virtue of the factual repression, the experienced world is the result of a restricted experience, and the positivist cleaning of the mind brings the mind in line with the restricted experience. In this expurgated form, the empirical world becomes the object of positive thinking. With all its exploring, exposing, and clarifying of ambiguities and obscurities, neo-positivism is not concerned with the great and general ambiguity and obscurity which is the established universe of experience.”
--Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 187.
“Tautologies can be exceedingly useful in the clarification of conceptualization. If they are used intelligently, they can also be effective rhetorical devices. But they ought not to be confused with heuristic, open-ended questions of the sort which can be resolved by empirical research.”
--Historian David Hackett Fischer in “Historians' Fallacies,” p.34 (pdf.).
The OP wrote:
"Initially, some American intellectuals were intrigued by the romance of Italian fascism. One prominent example was Herbert Croly—a founder of The New Republic—who saw in fascism a potential means to rescue a Progressivism that by the 1920s was in steep decline. Croly insisted that Mussolini’s vibrant movement rhymed with American-style Progressivism: Both fascism and Progressivism emphasized “supraindividual obligations” to people and nation over parochial individualistic ones and fetishized pragmatic politics. Mussolini, in fact, even listed the pragmatist philosopher William James, a lodestone for Progressives, as a primary influence. To thinkers like Croly, these similarities suggested that fascists might have something to teach Americans.”
An interesting piece of history, but unfortunately it is misleading. Writing historical commentary is extremely easy to distort, and takes a tremendous amount of research. For example, let's examine that same snippet of American history the OP reported regarding Mr. Herbert Croly:
In 1914, [Willard] Straight [a partner of the banker J.P. Morgan] and his wife Dorothy (maiden name, Dorothy Payne Whitney) invited Herbert Croly to edit the first edition of the New Republic, a new magazine funded by Straight. During WWI, J.P. Morgan was obsessed with the media and endeavored to control it. Providing backing for the New Republic had a threefold purpose for Morgan. Firstly, it would keep him abreast of the thinking in left-wing circles. He even had an inside man in the communist press. Secondly, Morgan believed a magazine such as the New Republic allowed the left to blow off steam, thus acting as a safety valve. Finally, he also believed it would give him a power of veto on any actions originated by the left, in case they ever went radical. Funding the New Republic was not the only effort funded by Morgan to gain control of the press. In 1915, he got together 12 leading men within the newspaper business and commissioned them to determine how one could control the national press. They agreed that, to control the national press, all that was needed was to control 25 of the most influential papers. Morgan immediately sent emissaries to purchase the editorial policy of the 25 selected papers. Morgan also used his money to form the American Legion and to craft it into a union busting and red-baiting group of hired thugs that ran amok during the 1919 Red Scare terrorizing and murdering countless union leaders and leftists (“The Nazi Hydra,” Yeadon and Hawkins, p. 393).”
I doubt the Italian Fascist leader understood William James any better than he understood Hegel. In America, German Fascism dazzled many American leaders of capitalist industry. At first, both Churchill and FDR were highly impressed by Mussolini. Other supporters of fascism were William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s father), Charles Lindbergh, John Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon (head of Alcoa, banker, and Secretary of Treasury), DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil, Henry Ford, ITT, Allen Dulles (later head of the CIA), Prescott Bush (don’t forget him), National City Bank, Henry Luce (owner of Time-Life publication put Mussolini's picture on the cover of Time Magazine five times) and General Electric. And don't forget Report: Koch Brothers' Father Helped Nazis Build Oil Refinery. These industrialists were not socialist sympathizers, but iconic capitalists of corporate America, yet some would have us believe they were Leftist, or socialists.
The OP makes historical claims throughout his essay with no, or little historical evidence that begs the question, appeals to unknown facts, and formulates hasty generalizations that together trivializes the study of fascism. I would strongly recommend to writers and readers of history a book on fallacies authored by historian David Hackett Fischer, “The Historians’ Fallacies,” 1970, that list eleven categories of historical fallacies with one hundred and twelve specific fallacies such as “Fallacies of Narration” that includes the “fallacy of anachronism” which is to make an analysis of an event that occurred other than when it actually happened (chronos). There are two kinds of anachronisms: either predating (pro-chronism), or postdating events (meta-chronism)(See, Fischer, p. 132). For another example, the “fallacy of presentism” (also named, “nunc pro tunc” meaning “now for then”) is done by “pruning away the dead branches of the past” to preserve contemporary bias and prejudices (Ibid., p. 135). Fischer teaches how to detect the “fallacy of tunnel history“(Ibid., p. 142), “false periodization” (Ibid. p. 144), and the “static fallacy” committed by attempting to account for dynamic processes in static terms (Ibid., p.153).
For comparison of alternative theories and histories of American Fascism, see my short sixteen-hundred-word summary essays on Christian Socialist Paul Tillich's book "The Socialist Decision," (1933) which is about the complex inter-conflicts between socialism, religious socialism, capitalist class domination, the cults of origin such as Blood and Soil Cults Post #718 and an essay on Tillich's view of the “Socialist Inner-Conflict with Free Enterprise Economics,” post #719. For my short summaries of Yeadon/Hawkins' history of American Fascism see, “The Un-American Congress,” post #736; “The Parallelism of American Fascism and Christian Fundamentalism,” post #738; “Ministries of Hate,” post #740. (I will reuse excerpts from these posts).
“To write history, or even to read it, is to be endlessly engaged in a process of selection.”
-- D. H. Fischer (HF, p. 64).
The OP argues the following:
"In a sense, before the 1940s, the United States had an immoderate left but no 'immoderate right.'....The welfare liberals changed this by strategically utilizing the European political spectrum to define themselves as the moderate center. To do so, they needed an extreme right wing, and they found one in fascism. By developing and promoting an American political spectrum that placed fascism on the extreme right and communism on the extreme left, liberals were able to present themselves and their platform—limited government intervention at home, support for “democracy” abroad—as the embodiment of a rational, 'vital center.' Put another way, during and after World War II, fascism became a useful foil against which centrist liberals defined themselves and justified the creation of an expanded welfare state and U.S. empire that, for the first time in history, spanned much of the globe."
The American Left-wing was devastated after the immoderate Palmer Raids during 1919 and 1920 during which 10,000 socialists were arrested, and 552 deported. I would label the OP's narrative “disaster socialism” that claims a homunculus “welfare liberal” fabricated a vast fascist conspiracy with the intent to advance a powerful socialist welfare state. Obviously, this passage is an unoriginal underhanded ad hominin directed at anti-fascists. I should note that the Department of Homeland Security agent, Brian Murphy and FBI Director Chris Wray reported there is no Antifa organization, only a general distaste for authoritarianism by some in the population.
A more “stable” meaning of fascism resulted from historical experience of WWII that shifted the definitional boundaries of fascism. After the Pearl Harbor attack, isolationism was rejected and “fascism,” became a more common term for the enemy. “National Socialism” is fascist, but not all fascism is Nazism, i.e., Italian Fascism. And notice a built-in ambiguity here with the term “socialism”: the right-wing National Socialists (Nazis) adopted the party name “socialist” which had a left-wing association and was popular during this period in Europe. In my opinion, this misrepresentation of left-wing socialism by the right-wing Nazis adds to the ambiguity of the meaning of fascism still today. Fascists engaged in sabotage against America before, during, and even after WWII. FDR's critics were not just ordinary citizens, but powerful industrial oligarchs and Wall Street lawyers: see, US CEOs Provide Nazi Germany War Production and Sabotage America. The OP wrote:
"Nevertheless, one must be careful not to overstate the term’s import; for most of this period, it was communism, not fascism, that preoccupied the American mind. In fact, it was primarily German exiles like Albert Einstein, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse who kept the term in circulation.”
The neo-Marxist, Herbert Marcuse, worked under intelligence analyst William L. Langer (1896 –1977) in the Research and Analysis (R&A) at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and denazification program to be promoted to Acting Chief of the Division of Research for Europe (DRE) in the Central European Branch during 1943; however, on September 20, 1945, President Truman disbanded the antifascist OSS to be replaced by the CIA composed of fanatical anti-communists. Marcuse wrote a 532-page analysis in 1958 of the Soviet Union for the Division of International and Functional Intelligence titled, “The Potentials of World Communism,” later declassified in May 1978. Marcuse concluded the Soviet Union’s “bureaucratic communism” was merely a corrupt third-rate welfare state that would collapse in forty years: the fall of the Soviet Union is usually dated around 1988. The American military-congressional industrial complex eager to profit from the Cold War military build-up wanted instead to hear a scarier Soviet narrative and ignored Marcuse's report.
Adorno, and Marcuse avoided the word “fascist” in their writing, and instead used an Aesopian language of euphemisms to describe fascism as “totalitarianism,” after all, they wanted to safely research the “authoritarian personality” while in the United States (see, “Marcuse and the Art of Liberation,” Kātz, Barry (1982) Verso press, p. 139).
“Narrative history is still consistent with Kuhn's paradigms, but it becomes a more profound and more intricate narrative, in which the story consists not in a progressive unfolding of the present, but rather a series of structural reformations (in a literal sense. “
--Historian David Hackett Fischer (HF, p. 162).
The OP further wrote:
“Fascism, in other words, has not generally functioned as a term of analysis—as Kuklick demonstrates, it doesn’t have 'much empirical content.' It is instead 'a part of language that is more evaluative than factual.' "
Nonsense, the concept of fascism has much empirical content; see Dr. Britt and Umberto Eco's lists of the fourteen minimum characteristics of fascism.
“There are manifold homegrown American phenomena that shaped the past for the worse. We hardly need to import a term with a foreign valence to explain (and thus implicitly detach ourselves from) that history. Kuklick is especially critical of attempts to read fascism into the American past, which many scholars have done since the late 1960s. Finding fascism in U.S. history, he warns, 'distances U.S. citizens from their own past” by insisting that “dangerous challenges … must have migrated from overseas.' There are manifold homegrown American phenomena that shaped the past for the worse—genocidal racism, rapacious militarism, and a violent obsession with incarcerating minorities were not fascist inventions—and we hardly need to import a term with a foreign valence to explain (and thus implicitly detach ourselves from) that history.”
Is this an example of xenophobia pitting homegrown fascists against “foreign valence” like the imported term “democracy” (δημοκρατία) from ancient Greece? Or maybe that foreign name “Amerigo Vespucci – Wikipedia” is too much of a foreign valence for America. Unfortunately, America was not an importer, but an exporter of fascism. Nazis officials came to America to learn from the segregationist South how to politically repress African Americans, and in a ceremony in Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford was awarded with the “Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle” on his 75th birthday. Henry Ford was the first American recipient to received this award created by Adolf Hitler himself. Ford had a strong influence on Hitler since the early 1920s and even provided financial support. Yeadon reports that “The U. S. ambassador to Germany, William Dodd was quoted saying 'certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy' (NH. p. 22).” Ford was not alone, just the most fanatical: “But like Germany, it was the rich industrialists that funded these groups. Hearst ordered his newspapers to print pro-Nazi articles in fact he had them print the Nazi propaganda directly from Gobbels. Irenee du Pont funded several pro-fascist groups. Henry Ford was well known for his praise of Hitler and funded many pro-Nazis in the 30s. Andrew Mellon and John D. Rockefeller were supporters of Hitler as well. No one is foolish enough to argue that these men were not part of the ruling elite or rich industrialist in America at the time. In fact, support for Hitler among the rich industrialists was rampant (NH, p. 43).” The historical evidence of Ford's material and ideological support of the Nazis is overwhelming. The OP continues:
"Why has “fascism” been able to serve such a protean function? According to Kuklick, it’s because fascism hasn’t been, and never was, a real threat in the United States. As he usefully reminds us, “living, breathing Nazis—the German-American Bundists and William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Legion of the 1930s; George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party of the 1960s; or the neo-Nazis of the 21st century”—were all minuscule groups that never came close to wielding political power. The conditions that enabled fascism’s rise—a broad experience of total war and a powerful left on the verge of seizing power—were just never present here. It was precisely this lack of threat that allowed fascism to become a generalized term of vilification. If there were actual fascists running around, you wouldn’t go around calling everyone fascist.”
The OP used the term “protean function” to describe fascism, meaning having a varied nature, or the ability to assume different shapes. I wish I thought of it, but “Hydra” also captures fascism's historical polymorphic character. In July of 1933 U.S. Marine Major General Smeadly Butler believed the danger of a fascist coup existed before FDR was to begin his first administration on March 4, 1933. Notice the coup was planned for the time period between when FDR won the election of 1933, and when the president actually takes office in March, not unlike the January 6th, 2021, failed coup.
A conditional premise (if,then) is sometimes an incognito False Dilemma Fallacy by excluding other alternate recorded histories. I will show more precisely that premise 1 commits the fallacy of false dilemma by deducting its logical equivalent premise 2.
Premise: If there were Actual fascists running around, you wouldn’t go around Calling everyone fascist.
Premise: Either there are no Actual fascist running around, or you wouldn't go around Calling everyone fascist. (Implication to Disjunction, premise 1.)
My question: “How does the OP know that disjunctive (either, or) premise 2 is true?”
Disjunctive premise 2 has the same truth-value as the conditional (If, then) premise 1 by applying the logical rule of equivalence (≡) called Implication to disjunction to premise 1 so that both have the same truth-value by definition.
Another example of applying the implication to disjunction rule of equivalence is the conditional statement, “If it rains, then there will be clouds,” has the same truth-value as the disjunction, “Either it does not rain, or there will be clouds.” Applied to the OP's proposition:
A ⊃ ~C ≡ ~A v ~C
(“If A, then no C” is equivalent to “Either no A, or no C”)
My Answer:
The phrase “calling everyone a fascist” is a strawman exaggeration since everyone does not meet, for example, Paxton's definition of fascism. Premise 1 has been shown by historians to be false by identifying an actual fascist figure such as Irenee du Pont in the historical narrative recounted below. Deducing premise 2 is a logical translation that better uncovers premise 1 as a false dilemma fallacy. The source of the OP's fallacy lies not in an invalid inference, but in a false premise. The “actual fascist” hypothetical encounter described is a false analogy telescoping space and time into an oversimplified arena of fascists while the historical record shows its emergence as much more complex with persons working for decades through government, business, media, and social institutions like the American churches.
“Communism” replaced fascism as the primary threat to the world after WWII according to US Government propaganda which shaped public opinion through media manipulation during the Cold War Era from 1945 to about 1988. There was really no post war national discussion of what Nazi fascism was or its causes following the Allies' victory; but instead, fascism became reduced in the public understanding to personalities, battle dates, wins, and defeats cleansed of meaningful ideological analysis. Wall Street lawyers, American CEOs, and some politicians did not want Americans to know of their history of profiting from building the Nazi war machine and delaying its defeat. In fact, US intelligence agencies worked with 1,600 Nazis against the new communist nemesis, and American citizen themselves in Operation Paperclip from 1945 to 1959. Beginning in 1946 extremists Republicans and some Democratic politicians began a blacklisting purge of antifascist Americans that culminated in US Senator McCarthy, and Roy Cohn's witch-hunts during 1954.
“The disbanding of the OSS had an express purpose. The leftists within the OSS would serve as the sacrificial lambs to atone [Irenee] du Pont’s new feckless goddess on the altar of free enterprise. Those that had served their country gallantly during war and who were dedicated to stomping out the last vestige of fascism would now become victims to the fascists within the United States. The American industrialists who willingly supported Hitler during the war had to be protected. The political climate by the war’s end had undergone a tremendous shift to the right. This change was not abrupt.... In 1946, the Republicans gained control of both chambers of congress. The stage was now set for a wholesale purging of the government of leftists who were dedicated to wiping out fascism. The new CIA was a mixture of old OSS agents and military officers. The old OSS veterans soon became the dominating force within the new agency.... Allen Dulles headed up the OPC branch [Office of Policy Coordination] .... The CIA had but one agenda anti-communism. The fourth director of the CIA ...was General Walter Bettle Smith. Smith in all seriousness once warned President Eisenhower that Nelson Rockefeller was a communist. The CIA was led by three individuals who harbored no qualms about working with Nazi war criminals. [James] Angleton, [Allen] Dulles and [Frank] Wisner all worked with and helped Nazi war criminals to escape from Europe. Many immigrated to the US after having their records sanitized by Dulles and others within the intelligence community (Hydra, p. 310: bold text added).”
After awarding CIA Director Allen Dulles the National Security Medal on November 28, 1961, John F. Kennedy fired Dulles the very next day for his covert and overt activities in Cuba. However, Dulles simply moved his CIA office to his home and continued intelligence work according to Dulles biographer Stephen Kinzer in an interview.
“History cannot be calculated, for it contains within itself the possibility of the new. But neither is it dependent on the whim of free human action. History has within itself a directionality, an impetus.... But it moves on this way through human action. If it were to bypass human action, there could be no fulfillment, for apart from human action, being is neither fulfilled nor unfulfilled; it lies beneath that contrast. The fulfillment of being is fulfilled human action that corresponds to the demand. No miracle nor any natural process can produce the fulfillment of being if human action is bypassed.”
--Paul Tillich, (Socialist Decision, p. 121) (pdf.)
The OP continues:
"Moreover, in eras like our own, in which rampant polarization co-exists with a political structure in which most citizens have no influence, it’s only natural for people to construct struggles that give their lives political meaning. Identifying “fascists” allows Americans living today to imagine themselves as part of a consequential world-historical fight between good and evil. It’s an ahistorical framing that gives meaning through romantic nostalgia and provides psychic succor to all of us who have no influence in the corridors of power.”
This looks like a projection again. The key concepts of Marxism are human alienation and freedom otherwise what would be the point of Marx writing a critical analysis of capitalism? Today, the meaning crisis is an important concern, especially for young people. Destructiveness is the outcome of life unlived (Eric Fromm). Despair is suffering without meaning (Victor Frankl). The OP presents the modern-day meaning crisis as another ad hominin argument against progressive leftists and their sympathizers claiming “fascism” is an illusory threat, an escape from reality, and a careerist grift. Certain critiques of postmodernism blame all historical change on a particular contemporary leftist group (See essay introduction, “Postmodern Socrates on Virtue”). The OP presents a similar argument by blaming the use and abuse of the term fascism on a particular contemporary political group as a fraudulent concept and term.
Every person is born into a society trustingly accepting government institutions we could not possibly know anything about except through experience. Capitalist economic production requires a mobile workforce that often separates families, and fractures communities resulting in a lost sense of community. A theory provides a unifying worldview for understanding society for those living in the same socio-political class situation in the hope of bringing change for the better, but this requires personal maturity. Aristotle wrote in the first sentence of the Metaphysics (350 B.C.), “All men naturally desire knowledge.” The German Christian Theologian, Immanuel Kant, wrote over twenty-one centuries later in the first sentence of “What is Enlightenment?" (1784 A.D.):
“This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! [Dare To Know!] Have courage to use your own understanding!”
The term “dollar-a-year-men” was coined in 1915 referring to the salary of one dollar a year paid to volunteers selected to manage corporate interest projects such as forming lobbying groups, or a non-profit organization. Progressive volunteers also seek dopamine reward in the form of pecuniary reward but are often motivated by other goals by embracing a life philosophy, a political ideology, or a religious paradigm. Such personal dedication alone is not a sound reason to reject a worldview whether it's neo-classical economics, neo-Marxism, or religious existentialism.
Take for example the socialist and Christian theologian Paul Tillich who was the first non-Jewish professor to be forced out of the University of Frankfurt in 1933 by the Nazis. Tillich was a Professor of Theology at the University of Marburg (1924-1929), Dresden University of Technology, and of the University of Leipzig (1925-1929), and the University of Frankfurt (1929- 1933) where he was also the university's Dean. Tillich expelled a disruptive Nazi student which angered Nazi officials. The troublesome Professor published “Ten Theses: The Church and the Third Reich” (1933). In Thesis Seven he wrote, “Protestantism set the cross against the paganism of the swastika…the cross was against the ’holiness’ of nation, race, blood and power (“Against The Third Reich,” Paul Tillich’s Wartime Addresses to Nazi Germany 1942 to D-Day 1944; p. 6) (pdf.).” That statement nearly got him arrested, but an alert Reinhold Niebuhr quickly urged Tillich to join the faculty at the New York City’s Union Theological Seminary where he was accepted. Many highly educated German refugees including physicist Albert Einstein emigrated to America, and the social sciences also benefited by a rich collection of world-class philosophers many of whom were Jewish. Paul Tillich was among of these philosophers, but it took time for him to learn a new language and construct a new paradigm-shifting Christian Systematic Theology. He is best known for his work, “The Courage to Be,” (1952) which is a synthesis of Kierkegaardian Christian Existentialism and Heideggerian Phenomenological Existentialism.
“It is a dreadful saying that the gods blind those whom they want to ruin…But who are these gods? They are the evil instincts that are in every nation with whose help the Nazis came to power…God opens the eyes of those whom he wants to save, however terrible this awakening may be.”
--Paul Tillich, “Against The Third Reich,” p.153.
As Nazism took power over the German government in 1933, Tillich finished his book “The Socialist Decision." The Nazis promptly burned his book; and as Tillich was leaving for America, they offered him a prestigious Chair of Philosophy at the University of Berlin if he would denounce his critique of fascism. Tillich laughed in their face. The Nazis officials would have never kept their offer. Tillich knew the Nazi paramilitary was investigating him for a comment he made in private to an old friend that the Nazi Field Marshal, Goebbels, was a drug addict (which was true). “The Socialist Decision” is well written and easy to read, but the interplay between the dialectical elements is complex and dynamically changing over time. His understanding of these forces is from historical research, experiences as a military Chaplin at the Battle of Verdun (1916) and witnessing the rise of the Nazi cults of Blood and Soil in Germany before WWII.
Tillich described proto-fascism as “Political Romanticism.” In his critique of socialism, Tillich gives his reasons for embracing socialist principles and how they are compatible with religious socialism and incompatible with other political movements in Europe. Tillich presents a historical dialectical analysis of two primary political movements that are derived from the mythic Cults of Origin. There are two cults of origin: first is the vegetative soil form of the myth of origin for its life-sustaining power. The second derivative cult of origin is the animal form of origin, or “the origin of blood that develops out of the vegetative form.” The animal form of origin focuses on the struggle for survival, breeding, a noble race, divine origin, brute strength, and conformity to the group. Out of these two mythic cults of origin political romanticism emerge during certain epochs in an attempt to rescue the broken myth of origin from modernism.
Political romanticism views the Enlightenment as the enemy: “It is thereby compelled to fight under presuppositions that it denies and with methods that it attacks in its opponents. It is forced to use the ethical categories of prophetism and to portray itself as a higher ethos (for example, as a higher justice), even though the myth of origin as such excludes ethics. And it is forced to use rational analysis as a means of establishing itself (for example, historical, sociological, and psychological investigations), and thus to appeal to the very thing it distrusts in principle as alien to the origin. In this way the theories of political romanticism arise; despite the frequently brilliant way in which they are developed, they cannot escape the contradiction of having to establish the irrational by rational means (SD, p. 26)." This explains, in my opinion, why the theories of political romanticism are unable to hold up under a sustained rational critical dialogue of their political philosophy: they reject rationality but must use it as a weapon.
Tillich also argues that Marxist debates concerning dialectical materialism (the philosophical arm of Historical Materialism of Marx) are a waste of time attempting to turn Marx's dynamic materialism into a static scientific positivist calculator. (Marx never used the term “dialectical materialism” in his writings). Instead, Tillich was involved in creating a new philosophy journal and appointing the editors who shortly thereafter published in 1932 the newly discovered humanist-existentialist work by Marx, “The 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (The Paris Manuscripts) (pdf.)." These manuscripts were not published in English until 1956 when Cold War propaganda had already stereotyped Marxist scholarship as lacking human subjectivity, and morally nihilistic.
“...existentialism is a natural ally of Christianity. Immanuel Kant once said that mathematics is the good luck of human reason. In the same way, one could say that existentialism is the good luck of Christian Theology.”
--Paul Tillich, SD, p. 27.
Life-Forms of Transcendental Homelessness
“The proletariat is no Savior.”-Marcuse, in “Letters on Surrealism.”
Herbert Marcuse's phenomenological existentialism is compatible on many points with Tillich's existentialist theology. Tillich and The Frankfurt School of social theory rejected the worldview of teleological historical progress. Tillich mentions Martin Heidegger five times in his famous three-volume “Systematic Theology,”(pdf.). Marcuse was a student of Heidegger while studying modern German literature at the University of Freiburg (1920-1923) and completed his doctoral dissertation “Der deutsche Kunstlerroman” on the German literary concept of the fictional novel known as, "Kunstlerroman” (artist-novel) and approved by Edmund Husserl granting a Ph.D., October 1922. (see details; "Marcuse and the Art of Liberation," Kātz, Barry (1982) Verso press, p. 37). Both of these scholars of Marxism, Tillich and Marcuse, held to the classical view of Reason, and the existentialist approach to questions of human existence. Tillich begins his existential analysis not unlike Heidegger's Dasein Analytic of ontological anxiety of Being and finitude; “Finitude in awareness is anxiety (ST, Vol. 2, p. 189).” The meaninglessness of human existence is the “destruction of the structure of being (ST, Vol. 2, p. 189).” Marcuse and Tillich were highly impressed with the newly discovered Paris Manuscripts of 1844 which reaffirmed their view that Marx was a humanist and not the crude deterministic materialist that Marx was portrayed by his critics. Tillich wrote a positive review of Marcuse's most important book on political philosophy, “Reason and Revolution,” commenting that ‘Even a critical social theory cannot avoid an ‘ultimate’ in which its criticism is rooted because reason itself is rooted therein’ (Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. IX, no. 3 (1941); pp. 476-8 ).”
“And if you want biographies, do not look for those with the legend: 'Mr. So-and-So and his times,' but for those whose title page might be inscribed, 'A fighter against his times.” --Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History
The Kunstlerroman story plot reflects the Hegelian triadic dialectical progression of human society that begins with a primordial state of relative unity, followed by disunity, and reunification. Marcuse's earliest existential analysis began with the literary theme of the alienated artist living in a violent, impoverished, and meaningless reality. The aesthetic dimension of the artist is inherently antagonistic to the “modes of life” in a world that does not acknowledge artistic sensibility or experience for “...this life is beauty, but the life-form is alienation and the impossibility of integration (Katz, p. 41).” The originary unity of the self experiences diremption, or separation, creating inner and outer conflict, a beautiful world becomes an estranged world of repression from the “opposing forces of pietism and enlightenment rationalism.” The artist-novel is written out of the artist's struggle for “transcendent ideals against a deficient reality” to achieve the resolution of a spiritual schism, or “transcendental homelessness” between “subject and object, Idea and reality, art and life.” Goethe's writing about this contradiction between the artistic-aesthetic mode of existence and a devalued world began the German artist-novel form; however, Marcuse developed it further by combining it with Georg Lukacs's Neo-Hegelian Marxism (see details, Katz, p. 47). The early Marxist scholar Lukacs wrote, “Theory of the Novel”(1920) and published by Marcuse's former Berlin professor Max Dessor. Marcuse understood that classical Marxism lacked subjectivity and viewed the artist-novel theme of the existentialist struggle against a false social reality as a theoretical corrective.
Marcuse focused on the existential analysis of “modes of being” in his proto-critique of capitalism as early as 1922 while Heidegger's phenomenological analysis of the modes of Dasein presented in Being and Time such as dread (Angst), abandonment (Geworfenheit), fallenness (Verfallenheit) was not published until 1927. Also, Marcuse's critical study of the Life-forms of alienation was philosophically reinforced by the discovery of Marx's existentialist-humanistic Paris Manuscripts ten years later.
“...the artist grasps at the 'separate reality'... within the finite and human world.”
--(Katz, p. 45)
Later, Marcuse injects Freudian psychoanalytic psychology into his critique of capitalism by authoring the book, “Eros and Civilization” (1955) to further develop human subjectivity which easily falls victim to Wall Street's Edward Bernay's modern media propaganda methods. However, the United States academies were steeped in anti-Freudian B.F. Skinnerian operant behaviorism opened Marcuse to ridicule for formulating a 1960s “Pop Marxism.” Marcuse studied under Heidegger to develop his phenomenological analysis of modern life but broke off the relationship because Heidegger did not publicly denounce the Nazis and instead became Rector of the University in 1933 only to resign in one year. I should mention that some members of the “Confessing Church” that publicly spoke out against the Nazis interfering with the Protestant churches were jailed, murdered, hung, and sent to concentration camps including theologians Martin Niemöller, Heinrich Gruber, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In another case, famous European Opera Singer Marianne Golz-Goldlust was guillotined for anti-Nazi activities. The price was high for anyone (and their families) publicly embarrassing the Nazis. Nazi Germany used the guillotine between 1933 and 1945 to execute 16,500 prisoners with 10,000 of them in 1944 and 1945 alone.[27][28]
Tillich and Marcuse are just two examples of individuals who were influenced by existentialist literature and understood the extreme dangers ahead of them as fascism emerged in Europe in the 1920's. They were not attracted to the concept of alienation by caprice but by recognition of the real forces encountered in their daily lives. Marcuse realized that he did not need Heidegger's existential analytic but could instead develop his critique of capitalism from Marx's humanist-existentialist 1844 Paris Manuscripts. Bressner's criticism of political activists searching for meaning in a pseudo world-historical struggle against authoritarianism has the relationship backward. Rather, the artist-novel literary theme emerges from real forces that alienate persons distorting one's self-identity, and relationships with others in society. “Kunstlertum” is the artistic-aesthetic mode of existence that resists the status quo reality as given. They are infinite-game players who eliminate boundaries and keep on going.
Far Rider
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