I think besides the handwaving, nutpicking, and vacuous bothsidesism, the central problem in Hochman's piece is that (as you gently implied) he's wholly clueless about the history of fascism, so his entire "argument" amounts to "I don't believe conservatism is like this thing I know nothing about."
I teach AP World History in a public high school and it’s worth checking out what the guidelines for that course say should be taught about the holocaust -
“The rise of extremist groups in power led to the attempted destruction of specific populations, notably the Nazi killing of the Jews in the Holocaust during World War II, and to other atrocities, acts of genocide, or ethnic violence“
Obviously this is vague, though that’s typical for these kinds of guidelines. What’s interesting is that while this is supposed to be a causation argument, there is no actual cause recognized. It’s like, “well these bad people got to be in charge and then they did the holocaust.” Notable that they don’t even include the concept of anti-semitism.
Compare this with a previous guideline where they call the peace established after World War I “unsustainable”. On some level, they are conceding this point to the fascists!
They also previously reference fascist economies as being “corporatist” which as Ganz has pointed out before is prone to anachronistic interpretation.
Anyway, obviously the implementation of these guidelines is going to vary widely between teachers and schools. But I think the way the course is set up it’s not surprising that students are coming out of it without a real understanding of the holocaust specifically. Overall, I think the course tends to portray genocide as a phenomenon that has many examples of which the holocaust is only one. I think this is distinct from how genocide was taught to generation x and millennial high schoolers, where the holocaust was much more centered and I have mixed feelings about that. It’s not a bad thing for students to know a wider range of examples, and appreciate how genocide has occurred in many places to many people. But it’s hard to build the same deeply felt visceral connection and horror.
If people are curious about looking at the guidelines in detail you can find them here -
Hochman is not even close to being a good faith interlocutor, but if one is going to engage with him at all, you’re going about it in the right way (specificity, examples, historical literacy). It’s clear he hasn’t even engaged with the introductory literature (Paxton, Payne, even Arendt, let alone country-specific studies).
As you suggest, willful historical illiteracy, American culture war parochialism, and an “Urban Dictionary” approach to historical understanding are their secret weapons - “what decontextualized -isms can I toss around today?” A crystalline charlatan, if anybody still uses that word.
Another important piece of what he's doing here beyond giving people on the right permission to embrace fascism while dismissing the charge as ever present and always spurious but also gives self-styled moderates permission not to care. Visiting home and watching "The View" with my grandparents really drove home how important simply generating an open question allows far right ideas get laundered into mainstream discourse as "common sense."
1 - Sorry, Immanuel, but the difference between good judgment and bad judgment is purely emotional. Your piece is a well-argued appeal to our higher faculties. It uses verified truths, connected with logic, to make its point. Hell, that's what is called an argument!
If Nate H can't see the point it's because there are emotional blocks (more precisely: fears) that prevent him from connecting the dots. If he seems intellectually dishonest to us, it's because he's intellectually dishonest *with himself*.
2 - I used to say that conservatives use a word like "socialism" with their constituents exactly the same way as parents use the word "caca" with a toddler. But things have changed, and present-day conservatives are not parents anymore, but the toddler's 5 year-old big brother.
what is fascism if not "tactics"? okay, so fascists and conservatives believe in a similar social hierarchy. fascists' tactics to enact and enforce that hierarchy is through the violence of the state. the "tactics" here are kind of crucial to the whole point!
It feels like an obvious distinction to make between conservatism and fascism is that while they share cultural values and policy preferences fascism is inherently authoritarian and conservatism can exist as an affiliation independent of a particular political system. You can be a conservative and a good participant in a democracy, if you choose to. (A fascist could too I suppose, but it would be absurd.)
So to the extent that accusations of fascism have increased lately it would be because conservatives have been embracing authoritarian politics. In various ways and to varying degrees, of course, but the trend is strong and clear.
And while there are other forms of authoritarianism (eg marxist dictatorship), would Hochman really argue that the left should be accusing the right of a different kind of authoritarianism than fascism? That seems to me like too pointless an obfuscation even for him! Fascism is a more than in the ballpark characterization of today's conservative authoritarian leanings and that's good justification for its current presence in the discourse.
The most striking thing about Hochman's recent musings to me is the simple fact that he puts the onus on "smart left-wing thinkers" to explain the difference between fascism and standard right-wing politics. Say what you will about the oft-exaggerated efforts of Buckley and the National Review set to separate the wheat of conservative thought from the chaff of rank conspiracism and proto-fascism, but the myth of that whole project demonstrates at the very least that previous generations of right-wing intellectuals understood the distinction between conservatism and fascism and had aspirations of excluding the latter from their movement. The fact that today's conservatives no longer have these conversations with one another but instead pose the problem of excluding fascism from their political project as a gotcha against left-leaning thinkers neatly demonstrates the "groyperification" problem that John describes in this post. In the aftermath of the party's takeover by a proto-fascist leader, Reagan's 11th Commandment of “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican" has led leaders and thinkers who fall closer to the conservative side of the spectrum to bite their tongues and mute their criticisms, even as fundamental distinctions between the two tendencies vying for control for the party are largely settled in favor of the proto-fascist camp.
(To be clear: I wouldn't count Hochman as one of those thinkers who falls closer to classical conservatism as such, which is almost certainly part of the problem behind his lazy thinking on this question.)
> BAP rejects the Darwinian claim that the fundamental imperative of life is reproduction.
As far as I know, Darwinian evolution makes no claim as to 'fundamental imperative's; it provides explanations for what sorts of life tend to've been and are around, and predictions as to which will more likely be. Along the way, multiple reproductive strategies are pursued successfully in the sense of their keeping enough members of a species around to be noticed, but it is not normative, neither does it suggest that individual members of species feel any sort of imperative. For example, of all the animals, only one (to my knowledge) reproduces intentionally….
Constructing mysticisms for reified generalities ('life'), as opposed to understanding actual particulars (organisms) doesn't surprise me from this corner, with which I'm mostly unfamiliar—does he drag quantum mechanics into it at any point, because he seems ripe for such….
85 years ago American economist and social theorist Stuart Chase wrote "The Tyranny of Words" which examined the exact same question dealt with in this recent series of exchanges posted here at Unpopular Front: namely, what exactly is "fascism" (or "socialism," "patriotism," "Americanism")? The book was written in 1938 in the lead-up to WW2, when these words (which filled the news and discussion media) had become "short cut tags" infused with so much emotional baggage that they shut down critical thinking and prevented clear communication and meaningful dialogue.
I'm writing this to share a prescient and prophetic “semantic experiment" that Chase conducted for his book: he asked one hundred people (of widely varying backgrounds) an open-ended question: what does the word "fascism" mean to you? Here are some of the responses:
-Hitler and Mussolini
-Coercive capitalist state
-A government where you can live comfortably if you never disagree with it
-Quackery
-Same thing as communism
-Exaggerated nationalism
-Creation of artificial hatreds
-The state against women and workers
-Government in the interest of the majority for the purpose of accomplishing things democracy cannot do
-All businesses not making money taken over by the state
-An all-powerful police force to hold up a decaying society
-Dictatorship. President Roosevelt is a dictator
-A group that does not believe in government interference and will overthrow the government if necessary
-A left-wing group prepared to use force
-A Florida rattlesnake in summer.
“Multiply the sample by ten million,” Chase wrote, “and picture if you can the aggregate mental chaos. Yet this is the word which is soberly treated as a definite thing by newspapers, authors, orators, statesmen, and talkers the world around.”
My point here is simply to note how this question (the meaning of "fascism") has continued for the last century to be a central issue in understanding American political history.
Chase's solution was the need to "find the referent" upon which opposing parties can agree, but I fear we are no closer (as a society) to finding that point of agreement today than we were in the years leading up to WW2.
And I applaud John's laborious and on-going efforts to define and clarify and characterize "fascism," because the need to create a bridge of common understanding upon which civil discourse can move toward solutions, the need to find the referent, is more urgent than ever.
(I have a review of Chase's "Tyranny of Words" on my newsletter for anyone interested in a closer look at that book.)
I'd say the Claremont quotes above show they've crossed the ideological rubicon from conservatism to Griffin's palingenetic ultranationalism. But that's always been my critique of Griffin's one-sidely ideological definition of fascism. Paligenetic ultranationalism is definitely far right, ideologically speaking, but fascism is a matter of politics as well as ideology (confusing the two is one of liberalism's greatest blindnesses). Fascism is the fist the squaddristi quoted above talked about. It is the combination of an ideological goal of national rebirth with a strategy of counterpower to attain it. And while the left views counterpower through the class lens of the economic power of labour (strikes, sabotage, mutiny, etc), the far right can only view it through the lens of political violence (fists, boots and guns).
I do feel, despite himself, Hochman stumbled onto the broader question here about how to deal rhetorically, in a liberal democracy, with a political party, or a political figure whose views are beyond the pale, but who still received 70+ million votes. There's the rhetorical question of what a liberal democracy should tolerate, and then the practical question of what views are de facto represented and tolerated in *our* liberal democracy.
For me, I think the whole fascism discourse was primarily a useful analytical tool post-Trump, who seemed to arrive in this cloud of mystification, i.e. "how could he win? how could anyone vote for him?" The history of fascism actually produced useful, illuminating answers to this question, like John's own argument that modern conservatism was an alliance of capital big and small. What kind of coalition is this guy holding together? What are its cracks? I think, past that, when the designation starts to get a moral emphasis, we risk getting into full Timothy Snyder territory, and I think it's very much to John's credit that he doesn't do that.
these guys analysis never goes beyond
fascism = bad
we = not bad
therefore
we != fascism
everything else they write on the subject is just backfill and padding
I think besides the handwaving, nutpicking, and vacuous bothsidesism, the central problem in Hochman's piece is that (as you gently implied) he's wholly clueless about the history of fascism, so his entire "argument" amounts to "I don't believe conservatism is like this thing I know nothing about."
I teach AP World History in a public high school and it’s worth checking out what the guidelines for that course say should be taught about the holocaust -
“The rise of extremist groups in power led to the attempted destruction of specific populations, notably the Nazi killing of the Jews in the Holocaust during World War II, and to other atrocities, acts of genocide, or ethnic violence“
Obviously this is vague, though that’s typical for these kinds of guidelines. What’s interesting is that while this is supposed to be a causation argument, there is no actual cause recognized. It’s like, “well these bad people got to be in charge and then they did the holocaust.” Notable that they don’t even include the concept of anti-semitism.
Compare this with a previous guideline where they call the peace established after World War I “unsustainable”. On some level, they are conceding this point to the fascists!
They also previously reference fascist economies as being “corporatist” which as Ganz has pointed out before is prone to anachronistic interpretation.
Anyway, obviously the implementation of these guidelines is going to vary widely between teachers and schools. But I think the way the course is set up it’s not surprising that students are coming out of it without a real understanding of the holocaust specifically. Overall, I think the course tends to portray genocide as a phenomenon that has many examples of which the holocaust is only one. I think this is distinct from how genocide was taught to generation x and millennial high schoolers, where the holocaust was much more centered and I have mixed feelings about that. It’s not a bad thing for students to know a wider range of examples, and appreciate how genocide has occurred in many places to many people. But it’s hard to build the same deeply felt visceral connection and horror.
If people are curious about looking at the guidelines in detail you can find them here -
https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap-world-history-modern-course-and-exam-description.pdf
Hochman is not even close to being a good faith interlocutor, but if one is going to engage with him at all, you’re going about it in the right way (specificity, examples, historical literacy). It’s clear he hasn’t even engaged with the introductory literature (Paxton, Payne, even Arendt, let alone country-specific studies).
As you suggest, willful historical illiteracy, American culture war parochialism, and an “Urban Dictionary” approach to historical understanding are their secret weapons - “what decontextualized -isms can I toss around today?” A crystalline charlatan, if anybody still uses that word.
Another important piece of what he's doing here beyond giving people on the right permission to embrace fascism while dismissing the charge as ever present and always spurious but also gives self-styled moderates permission not to care. Visiting home and watching "The View" with my grandparents really drove home how important simply generating an open question allows far right ideas get laundered into mainstream discourse as "common sense."
Tucker to his relative credit is not an apple-polishing Smart Kid caping to be credited as serious by leftist intellectuals.
Two footnotes to your post
1 - Sorry, Immanuel, but the difference between good judgment and bad judgment is purely emotional. Your piece is a well-argued appeal to our higher faculties. It uses verified truths, connected with logic, to make its point. Hell, that's what is called an argument!
If Nate H can't see the point it's because there are emotional blocks (more precisely: fears) that prevent him from connecting the dots. If he seems intellectually dishonest to us, it's because he's intellectually dishonest *with himself*.
2 - I used to say that conservatives use a word like "socialism" with their constituents exactly the same way as parents use the word "caca" with a toddler. But things have changed, and present-day conservatives are not parents anymore, but the toddler's 5 year-old big brother.
what is fascism if not "tactics"? okay, so fascists and conservatives believe in a similar social hierarchy. fascists' tactics to enact and enforce that hierarchy is through the violence of the state. the "tactics" here are kind of crucial to the whole point!
It feels like an obvious distinction to make between conservatism and fascism is that while they share cultural values and policy preferences fascism is inherently authoritarian and conservatism can exist as an affiliation independent of a particular political system. You can be a conservative and a good participant in a democracy, if you choose to. (A fascist could too I suppose, but it would be absurd.)
So to the extent that accusations of fascism have increased lately it would be because conservatives have been embracing authoritarian politics. In various ways and to varying degrees, of course, but the trend is strong and clear.
And while there are other forms of authoritarianism (eg marxist dictatorship), would Hochman really argue that the left should be accusing the right of a different kind of authoritarianism than fascism? That seems to me like too pointless an obfuscation even for him! Fascism is a more than in the ballpark characterization of today's conservative authoritarian leanings and that's good justification for its current presence in the discourse.
The most striking thing about Hochman's recent musings to me is the simple fact that he puts the onus on "smart left-wing thinkers" to explain the difference between fascism and standard right-wing politics. Say what you will about the oft-exaggerated efforts of Buckley and the National Review set to separate the wheat of conservative thought from the chaff of rank conspiracism and proto-fascism, but the myth of that whole project demonstrates at the very least that previous generations of right-wing intellectuals understood the distinction between conservatism and fascism and had aspirations of excluding the latter from their movement. The fact that today's conservatives no longer have these conversations with one another but instead pose the problem of excluding fascism from their political project as a gotcha against left-leaning thinkers neatly demonstrates the "groyperification" problem that John describes in this post. In the aftermath of the party's takeover by a proto-fascist leader, Reagan's 11th Commandment of “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican" has led leaders and thinkers who fall closer to the conservative side of the spectrum to bite their tongues and mute their criticisms, even as fundamental distinctions between the two tendencies vying for control for the party are largely settled in favor of the proto-fascist camp.
(To be clear: I wouldn't count Hochman as one of those thinkers who falls closer to classical conservatism as such, which is almost certainly part of the problem behind his lazy thinking on this question.)
> BAP rejects the Darwinian claim that the fundamental imperative of life is reproduction.
As far as I know, Darwinian evolution makes no claim as to 'fundamental imperative's; it provides explanations for what sorts of life tend to've been and are around, and predictions as to which will more likely be. Along the way, multiple reproductive strategies are pursued successfully in the sense of their keeping enough members of a species around to be noticed, but it is not normative, neither does it suggest that individual members of species feel any sort of imperative. For example, of all the animals, only one (to my knowledge) reproduces intentionally….
Constructing mysticisms for reified generalities ('life'), as opposed to understanding actual particulars (organisms) doesn't surprise me from this corner, with which I'm mostly unfamiliar—does he drag quantum mechanics into it at any point, because he seems ripe for such….
85 years ago American economist and social theorist Stuart Chase wrote "The Tyranny of Words" which examined the exact same question dealt with in this recent series of exchanges posted here at Unpopular Front: namely, what exactly is "fascism" (or "socialism," "patriotism," "Americanism")? The book was written in 1938 in the lead-up to WW2, when these words (which filled the news and discussion media) had become "short cut tags" infused with so much emotional baggage that they shut down critical thinking and prevented clear communication and meaningful dialogue.
I'm writing this to share a prescient and prophetic “semantic experiment" that Chase conducted for his book: he asked one hundred people (of widely varying backgrounds) an open-ended question: what does the word "fascism" mean to you? Here are some of the responses:
-Hitler and Mussolini
-Coercive capitalist state
-A government where you can live comfortably if you never disagree with it
-Quackery
-Same thing as communism
-Exaggerated nationalism
-Creation of artificial hatreds
-The state against women and workers
-Government in the interest of the majority for the purpose of accomplishing things democracy cannot do
-All businesses not making money taken over by the state
-An all-powerful police force to hold up a decaying society
-Dictatorship. President Roosevelt is a dictator
-A group that does not believe in government interference and will overthrow the government if necessary
-A left-wing group prepared to use force
-A Florida rattlesnake in summer.
“Multiply the sample by ten million,” Chase wrote, “and picture if you can the aggregate mental chaos. Yet this is the word which is soberly treated as a definite thing by newspapers, authors, orators, statesmen, and talkers the world around.”
My point here is simply to note how this question (the meaning of "fascism") has continued for the last century to be a central issue in understanding American political history.
Chase's solution was the need to "find the referent" upon which opposing parties can agree, but I fear we are no closer (as a society) to finding that point of agreement today than we were in the years leading up to WW2.
And I applaud John's laborious and on-going efforts to define and clarify and characterize "fascism," because the need to create a bridge of common understanding upon which civil discourse can move toward solutions, the need to find the referent, is more urgent than ever.
(I have a review of Chase's "Tyranny of Words" on my newsletter for anyone interested in a closer look at that book.)
Nice piece.
The Darwin thing is pretty funny. He of course famously studied finches in the Galapagos, not people in England. Social Darwinism is the worst.
I'd say the Claremont quotes above show they've crossed the ideological rubicon from conservatism to Griffin's palingenetic ultranationalism. But that's always been my critique of Griffin's one-sidely ideological definition of fascism. Paligenetic ultranationalism is definitely far right, ideologically speaking, but fascism is a matter of politics as well as ideology (confusing the two is one of liberalism's greatest blindnesses). Fascism is the fist the squaddristi quoted above talked about. It is the combination of an ideological goal of national rebirth with a strategy of counterpower to attain it. And while the left views counterpower through the class lens of the economic power of labour (strikes, sabotage, mutiny, etc), the far right can only view it through the lens of political violence (fists, boots and guns).
I do feel, despite himself, Hochman stumbled onto the broader question here about how to deal rhetorically, in a liberal democracy, with a political party, or a political figure whose views are beyond the pale, but who still received 70+ million votes. There's the rhetorical question of what a liberal democracy should tolerate, and then the practical question of what views are de facto represented and tolerated in *our* liberal democracy.
For me, I think the whole fascism discourse was primarily a useful analytical tool post-Trump, who seemed to arrive in this cloud of mystification, i.e. "how could he win? how could anyone vote for him?" The history of fascism actually produced useful, illuminating answers to this question, like John's own argument that modern conservatism was an alliance of capital big and small. What kind of coalition is this guy holding together? What are its cracks? I think, past that, when the designation starts to get a moral emphasis, we risk getting into full Timothy Snyder territory, and I think it's very much to John's credit that he doesn't do that.
(Nate punches me in the face)
Me: Hey, you punched me in the face!
Nate: No, I used my fist to hit you in the head.