A Gothic Horror: The Picture of Democrats’ Self-regard

Thumbnail Sketches of Fascism, Bolshevism and Naziism

This essay was motivated by the fact that the Democrats have centered their campaign against Donald Trump and the rest of the country on the sophomoric proposition that anyone who doesn’t go along with their all-encompassing program is a Nazi.  Readers don’t need other observers to tell them how ridiculous that has always been, and, indeed, there is a puzzle about how the Democrats’ campaign would degenerate into such nonsense.  But, there was Jack Tapper of CNN trying over the weekend to get J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, to admit that Trump is a Nazi sympathizer … or something.

The hook was the fact that a former Trump adviser, General John Kelly, had purportedly claimed that Trump had wished that he had “generals like Hitler’s”.

I would like to do a few things in this short essay: Identify some points of compatibility between Fascism and Bolshevism before saying something about how the nationalist bit in the German flavor of Fascism is what really makes the Nazi program incompatible with the Bolshevik program.  Why, after all, did the Nazis and Soviets have it in for each other when, in fact, they operated out of similar concepts of how to organize and govern society?

Then I want to revisit some interesting facts about two of Hitler’s generals, Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian.  These two fellows demonstrated their great value to Hitler by … disobeying orders and brilliantly extemporizing on their own.  But, Hitler surely would have not been happy when, a few years later, suspicion fell on Rommel over his prospective participation in a plot to assassinate him.  With generals like these …

I close by discussing what we already know: The real Fascists are the ones running around calling everyone else Fascists.  And the reason is that they adopted “Corporatist” or “Fascist” policies and modes of implementation dressed up in language the Fascists of the 1920’s and 1930’s would appreciate: “Stakeholders,” “stakeholder capitalism,” the primacy of “collaborative rulemaking” administrative processes situated in “administrative agencies.”  These are people who disdain the concept of the separation of powers, which is why they got so upset with the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024).  This was the opinion that put the final stake in the heart of “Chevron deference.”

Chevron deference derived from Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984).  It basically afforded administration agencies a layer of insulation from the processes of judicial review contemplated by the Administrative Procedures Act of 1949.  Loper removes that layer of insulation, and the proponents of an unrestricted administrative state complain that the Loper decision—get this delusional take—undermines the separation of power by reinvigorating judicial review of administrative agencies.  They worked to undermine judicial review of administrative agencies and now oppose the restoration of judicial review by claiming that judicial review itself undermines the separation of powers.  Bizarre.

Scratch & Sniff: Fascism, Bolshevism and Naziism

The idea that centralized government can concentrate the energies of society on the pursuit of the common good is surely an ancient one.  Among other things, harnessing the coercive power of centralized government can enable society to resolve collective actions problems, the principal kinds of problems that can frustrate the pursuit of the common good.  Absent strong leadership from government, individuals may get caught up in their own idiosyncratic pursuits driven by private, selfish motivations to serve their private, selfish interests.  Surely society can do better than submitting itself to the anarchy of a decentralized society that looks more like a lawless Wild West than an orderly Confucian or Platonic or Rousseauian ideal of how society should be (and can be) made to function.  Cue Woodrow Wilson: In The State (1889) Wilson declared that it was “through the instrumentality of government” that “society may be perfected.”   The government would perfect society by bringing “the individual with his special interests, personal to himself, in complete harmony with society with its general interests, common to all.” 

It all sounds so good, dun’nit?  Or, really, it only sounds good to people to whom “individualism” is a thing to be wary of and to whom the “common good” is an unambiguous quantity.  As Friedrich Engels explained in Principles of Communism (1847), society should be organized around the pursuit of “the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society.”  Communism would, “in other words, abolish competition and replace it with association.”

Wait.  What is this business about Communism?  Isn’t this essay about Fascism?  Yes, it is.

Fascism is just communism with a lesser stress on top-down hierarchy.  Both feature strong top-down hierarchy, but Fascism would afford some scope for interest groups further down the hierarchy to bargain with each other, albeit with the central government operating as the ultimate arbiter of all agreements.  One industrial group (or “syndicate” formally recognized by the government), for example, might bargain with a particular workers’ union (also a government-sanctioned “syndicate”).  The communist ideal, meanwhile, did not afford any scope for bargaining anywhere in the hierarchy.  It contemplated strict, top-down command-and-control.

The original Fascist project was formalized with the constitutional reform of 1927 in Italy.  Mussolini and his people had already consolidated power.  Their constitutional reforms required everyone to join a syndicate, and it would be up to the syndicates to report to a Ministry of Corporations.  The syndicates constituted different “bodies” or corpi, hence “Corporatism” or “Corporatismo.”  It would be up to the central government, largely through the Ministry of Corporations staffed with the Best-and-Brightest, to impose guardrails around the activities of the syndicates.  Everyone would thus be rounded up into the project of channeling their collective energies into the pursuit of the common good.  What could go wrong?

Most obviously, the Self-anointed Best-and-Brightest might not be very good.  They might channel the people’s energies into affirmatively destructive projects.  World War and failed global conquest, for example? Great Leaps Forward? In this day and age, would it only be the Pharmaceuticals Syndicate or Healthcare Syndicate that would favor government mandates to subsidize and celebrate the ritual of the genital mutilation of children in the name “gender-affirming care”? 

Indeed, one can imagine that some members of the syndicates might perceive that the Ministry’s concept of the common good might deviate from these individuals’ own concepts of the common good.  Is the “common good” really a well-defined thing, or is it just something obvious to the dull minds of those who maintain their own idiosyncratic notion of the common good?

Various observers around the world looked approvingly on the Fascist project in Italy.  Other observers looked more approvingly on the Bolshevik project in Russia that amounted to the Soviet’s First Five-Year Plan (launched in 1928).

The Soviet initiative garnered more attention and support from Western elites than had the Fascist project.  The Nazi party in Germany, however, modeled itself more after Mussolini’s initiatives, and some observers credited Hitler and his lieutenants with brokering agreements between industrial cartels and workers’ unions, and perhaps Hitler and the Nazis were tapping into a proto-Fascism that had been there all along.  In his memoir, Out of My Life (1921), Marshall von Hindenburg had this to say after the settlement of the First World War:

Think of the men who gave us a new Fatherland more than a hundred years ago [after the era of the Napoleonic Wars].  Their religion was their faith in themselves and in the sacredness of their cause.  They built up a new Fatherland, not on the foundation of doctrines strange to them, but on those of the free development of the individual within the framework of the whole body politic, and on his sense of responsibility to the state.  Germany will tread that path once more as soon as she is permitted to do so. (emphasis mine)

You heard the man: Everyone is free so long as his pursuits don’t offend “the framework of the whole body politic.”  That’s up there with “We believe in free speech, but” anything the establishment arbitrarily determines is “hate speech” is not free.

Proposition: The “European values” that globalists extol really just amount to a flavor of this proto-Fascism.

In any case, why were Hitler and the Nazis so hostile to the Bolshevik project when Fascism and Communism seemed to share compatible concepts of governance?  The best I can do is to suggest that Communism really was a more evangelical and supranational project in that it endeavored to exploit conflict across perceived (or purported) class divides.  Lenin would carry on quite a lot about the “oppressors” who happened to be the “capitalists,” and it was the job of the Bolsheviks to globalize the Revolution.  It was up to them to export the Revolution everywhere and overthrow the entire oppressor class.  Hence the Polish-Soviet War of 1918-1921.  The Bolsheviks endeavored to help their communist comrades who had set up the Soviet Republic of Bavaria—see Ernst Toller’s account in I Was a German (1933)—but they would have to get through the just-reconstituted Poland.  They ended up getting routed outside Warsaw.  A younger Stalin was there to witness the collapse of their initiative.

In his beautiful contribution to The God That Failed (Richard Crossman, ed. 1949), the committed Italian communist Ignazio Silone could observe that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were not really interested in collaborating with other communists.  They were committed to controlling the global revolution and in merely recruiting communists around the world to go along with their program.  And once the Revolution has sorted out the program (as it already had in Russia) there really would be no room for renegotiating it.  Lenin and his people demanded to exercise strict, top-down control.

The Nazi program may have been “National Socialism,” but the National bit really did distinguish the program from the Bolshevik program.  It was not organized around the idea of exporting a revolution.  It was about securing Nationalist objectives through a program of Socialist-governance-with-Teutonic-characteristics.  See, again, Marshall von Hidenburg.

And I will pose this idea: One can reconstruct the Nazi program by working backwards from its principal, nationalist objective, the business of securing Lebensraum (“Living Space”) in Central and Eastern Europe.  The main objective was to knock out the Soviets and seize land in what is now Ukraine, Belarus and adjacent parts of Russia reaching all the way up to the Volga.  But, pursuing this objective would first involve some preliminaries: knock out France and Britain as threats in the West before concentrating all of the Reich’s energies on vanquishing the Soviets.

Is it any wonder, then, that the Fascist program in Germany was not compatible with the Bolshevik program in Russia?  The one exploited Fascist organization to achieve a hyper-nationalist, racialized objective.  The latter was motivated by the desire to internationalize the effort to impose strict, top-down, hyper-centralization on all the countries of the world.

The Nazi program shared some features with the German program of the First World War.  Some observers note that German leadership had become very concerned with industrialization in Czarist Russia.  (Copeland develops this idea in The Origins of Major War, 2000.)  Russia and Germany shared a border at the time—a border that ran through much of what would yet become a reconstituted Poland.  One can wonder that, had Poland existed, the Germans would have found an interest in maintaining Poland’s integrity as a buffer zone, but, as it was, the Germans started scheming over how to knock-out the Czarist regime (and replace it with what?).  The ultimate plan involved knocking out the French first in the West, assuming that the British would stay out of it, and then turning around to vanquish the Russians. 

As we all know, the plan got turned on its head.  It started out well and very nearly worked, but the French took away the Germans’ momentum at the First Battle of the Marne outside Paris (1914), and a highly mobile war degenerated into the static and stultifying trench warfare for which we all recall the Great War.  The British did fight it out in the West, and the Germans ended up vanquishing the Russians in the East without having prevailed in the West.

Hitler’s Generals

I direct readers to an illuminating book with a remarkably unoriginal title: The Battle of Britain (James Holland 2010).  I would even suggest that the most interesting content in the book is concentrated in the first half—which is dedicated to unraveling the Battle of France.  The third installment in the William Manchester biography of Winston Churchill also illuminates much the same content.

The main thing that comes out of the Battle of France is that the German initiative was an insane undertaking that could have failed for any number of reasons.  But, crazy things fell into place, and the Germans overwhelmed the French and the British in much the same way that they had nearly overwhelmed the French and the British in the opening months of the First World War.  The big difference was that the Germans were ready the second time around to launch their new concept of mobile war.  When we imagine German units during the war, we always picture mechanized units.  (Do we not?)  The reality is the Germans never really came to battle with more mechanized units than the other side.  But, the Germans did a good job of using their limited number of mechanized units to punch holes in the line, initiate encirclements, force withdrawals, and confuse the enemy’s leadership. 

Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian managed to do all of that with their mechanized units in the opening days of the Battle of France.  They came through the Ardennes Forest and burst into open, French territory around Sedan, just as the Germans had in the opening months of the First World War and the opening weeks of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.  The German leadership was worried (quite reasonably) that Rommel and Guderian would outrun their supplies, get bogged down, and make themselves vulnerable to counterattack and annihilation.  The German leadership kept sending out instructions to hold up, consolidate their positions, and wait for supplies (coming mostly on horse-drawn wagons) to catch up.  But Rommel and Guderian often found ways to pretend that such instructions had caught up with them just as they were engaged in new strikes and maneuvers.  Too late!

Famously, the German mechanized units finally held up and consolidated their positions all around Dunkirk.  The German hold-up enabled the miracle of Operation Dynamo, the British operation to abscond with most of the British Expeditionary force from the beaches of Dunkirk along with some tens-of-thousands of other allied personnel.

Did the Germans make a mistake, or had they really, finally found themselves too strung out and isolated from their supplies to justify an immediate assault on Dunkirk?

I don’t know the answer, but it seems obvious that one can perceive advantages to having certain “generals like Hitler’s” on one’s team.  Rommel and Guderian were pivotal in securing a decisive victory at relatively low cost to all parties.  They did it by bucking orthodoxy, being creative, and taking risks, which is all the more striking since failure could have turned out very, very badly for them.  They could have been lined up against a wall and shot.

Now, there is some question of whether Rommel participated in a plot in July 1944 to assassinate Hitler.  A bomb nearly took Hitler out in a conference room.  There are some number of films about the plot including Valkyrie (2008) with Tom Cruise.

Post-war Neo-Fascism

In The New Industrial State (1967), John Kenneth Galbraith suggested that the antitrust enterprise should cease examining “vertical” mergers.  These would be mergers of entities that do not necessarily compete with each other but rather bring complementary assets and capabilities together.  For example, a biotech firm, Human Genome Sciences collaborated for years with a pharmaceuticals company, SmithKline Beecham.  These two firms did not compete with each other but rather collaborated in the development of new therapies.  They were eventually merged into the firm that is now Glaxo SmithKline.

Galbraith argued that big, vertically-integrated entities were kind of like government in that they organized complex affairs by administrative process.  Administrative process, he suggested, constituted a proven and effective alternative to markets.  During the Second World War, the central government had swept in and took control of whole industries, subjecting them to administrative processes instituted within that same central government.  The result, he averred, was a prodigious stream of production and employment and wealth.

By 1967, big vertically-integrated entities—entities that Galbraith labeled “technostructures”—had assumed much the role of government.  And, that was a good thing.  The antitrust authorities should not frustrate the rise of technostructures, for it was through a cluster of technostructures that innovation and economic growth would proceed.

“Technostructures,” the Big Tech of the time?

Granted, at any given time there will be entities that are bigger and more powerful than other entities.  And note that being big and powerful does not offend the antitrust laws.  Doing anticompetitive things offends the antitrust laws.  A difficulty is that reasonable people can disagree over what constitutes anticompetitive conduct.

The New Industrial State was really just an installment in literature extolling the purported virtues of centralized, administrative process over the anarchy of market-mediated exchange.  Galbraith had been a veteran of the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, and it had been another Roosevelt alumnus, James Landis who really wrote the holy scriptures of administrative process, The Administrative Process (1938).  One point of the book was that administrative agencies should be free from judicial review and from electoral politics.  Practically, that meant two things.  First, that the regulations coming out of administrative agencies would constitute unassailable law.  “Administrative law.”  Parties subject to those laws would have no recourse to the courts.  They would not be able to appeal to court-ordered processes to assess the constitutionality of administrative law.  Second, administrative agencies would be staffed with a cadre of industry experts.  Ideally, the executive would have no role in appointing those experts or in removing those experts.  Those experts and their agencies would operate autonomously, and it is through pure autonomy that administrative agencies would finally be situated to dictate the repair of the world and make it the best of all possible worlds.

Another Roosevelt alumnus, Hugh Johnson, found himself heading up the Roosevelt administration’s answer to Fascist Italy’s Ministry of Corporations.  The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) established the National Recovery Administration (NRA).  The NRA would proceed to promote the cartelization of industry and to mediate relationships between industry cartels and laborers.  Sound familiar to the Italian experience?

Johnson’s explained his enthusiasm for the NRA’s mission by illuminating the experience of the War Industries Board (WIB) in taking over industry after the belated entry of the United States into the First World War.  In Johnson’s estimation, the WIB was pivotal in generating a prodigious stream of production and employment and wealth.  Again, who needs freedom and markets when the Self-anointed Best-and-Brightest in administrative agencies can repair the world and make it a better place?

Ironically, the NIRA itself became the subject of judicial review, and the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in Schecter Poultry v. United States (1935).  That opinion blew up the NRA.  After that, however, the Roosevelt administration threatened to “pack the Supreme Court” by adding as many as five justices to the existing nine justices.  The Supreme Court got the message and started to advance opinions that were more congenial to the Roosevelt administration’s program.

The Progressives of today are no different than the Progressives of yesterday.  They believe in the primacy of administrative process and that the separation of powers threatens that primacy.  They are again threatening to “pack the Court.”  They believe in the role of experts to repair the world, and they dismiss markets as the arenas in which egoistic individuals do nothing productive in merely pursuing their own self interests.  Freedom and free markets are obstacles to the effort of the Best-and-Brightest in the administrative agencies to secure the common good.

What could go wrong?

They are the Fascists.  They have always been the Fascists.  And now most of us it recognize it.

The face of Hope & Change?

Who thought this unwitting Hitler impression was a good idea?

Feel the joy! The Sock Puppet is talking now, Bee-atch!