Joseph W. Bendersky of Telos has an article up on Frankfurt School luminary Max Horkheimer and his defense of militant democracy against enemies of the fascist and communist variety, in that order. He documents Horkheimer’s history as staunch advocate of state power to expunge from society the remnants of (even potential) fascist thought and behavior during WW2, to the 1960s, when he similarly saw such a threat from the generically fascist tendencies of the student movement, and likewise supported the state in efforts to suppress its influence.
In the words of Horkheimer, which Bendersky also highlights:
Fighting Anti-Semitism requires a militant policy opposed to fascism in all its forms within and without, and in all ways of life. We know that the defense of France collapsed because its democratic government had not succeeded in extirpating the fascist sympathies within the army and civil service, not to speak of the press and other important branches of public life. One of the means for preparing public opinion to demand such measures [emphasis mine] is to teach them that a strong central government able and willing to take effective action against fascism is not incompatible with democracy.
An interesting (and honest) way of putting it, “preparing public opinion.” Bendersky makes a good point further on:
The political as well as practical implications of the demanded “militant policy” are naturally quite extensive and complex. Among other things, it assumes an ability to identify “fascist sympathies” among citizens in civil society and government.
Philip Jenkins, writing at The American Conservative, details just how one may go about identifying such “fascist sympathies”: Seek the advice of professional anti-fascists. Critical of the alarmism surrounding the militia movement in the 90s, he fears such alarmism may be making a comeback with the new Democratic administration. The “expertise” of non-government affiliated organizations will be sought:
Private organizations also provide an institutional foundation for a war on domestic terror. Plenty of liberal pressure groups are only too willing to offer their services in identifying far-Right activists and painting them in the most damaging and alarming colors. Some of the most successful through the years have been the Anti-Defamation League, the Feminist Majority Foundation, and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), with its affiliated Intelligence Project (formerly Klanwatch). While there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of their convictions, such groups would gain immensely from a new political emphasis on militias or rightist groups[…]If a full-fledged right-wing terror network is not available, such pressure groups have every interest in hyping one into existence.
About as reliable as referring to the NRA for statistics on homicides involving legally obtained firearms.
It’s not particularly compelling evidence to rely on the activities of past Democratic administrations, and the voting record on H.R. 1955, or “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007,” reveals Republicans just as eager (given their share of the House) to employ the state in such a “politically correct” way. But it’s a reasonable assertion for a popular political magazine.
He cites some of the books written in the 90s that attest to the climate of fear surrounding right-wing militias, obviously encouraged by the Oklahoma City bombing. One is Harvest of Rage, which Keith Preston has actually recommended due to its sympathetic tone. If any of the other books are like HOR, it may be misleading to use these writings as evidence of an irrational and exuberant “antifa” zeitgeist.
Getting back to Horkheimer; ironically, according to Paul Berman in Power and the Idealists, it was the student movement of the 1960s that can probably claim more allegiance to the anti-fascist cause than someone of Horkheimer’s ilk. In Phillip Hammond’s review of PATI, he writes:
Part of the fascination with the Nazi era was that, as Berman notes, the 1960s students were trying to live up to the generation who had fought the historic anti-fascist battles of the 1930s and 40s. Compared with the wartime résistant generation, the student radicals suspected that they might be ‘the generation of the second-rate… résistants with nothing to resist’.
Seen in this light, Horkheimer is more of an anti-totalitarian social democrat of the Hannah Arendt variety than a staunch anti-fascist, however much he may remain a “militant” devotee of democracy. Indeed, the biggest anti-fascists per se are die-hard (non-anarchist, perhaps?) communists, who rather inevitably end up taking on the generic fascist inclination toward authoritarianism, and the eradication of the bourgeois “civil liberties” which only serve to allow fascists to peddle their nonsense.
Unfortunately, as Bendersky makes clear, Horkheimer was all too willing to indulge in the sort of measures that attract the wrath of genuine liberals, i.e. those with no tolerance for the intolerance of surveilling police-states (or the threat thereof). Not that said genuine liberals believe there can never be such dreadful consequentialist calculations involving liberty vs. security, but that in every historical narrative of the necessity of such tradeoffs it’s been mostly or completely bullshit.
March 23, 2009 at 11:36 pm
I remember hearing that one of the Frankfurt schoolers who stayed in Europe hated the student radicals (many of whom idolized his fellow Frankfurt Schooler, Marcuse). Reading the link, I think that was Adorno.
As I pointed out, Jenkins was also incorrect in identifying McVeigh as a neo-Nazi. But I guess since he’s a Bad Dude we can feel free to conflate him with other Bad Dudes.
March 24, 2009 at 12:43 am
I reckon if you ran an anti-fascist competition between Trotskyists and Anarchists it’s be pretty close.
The Trots have a (not entirely unreasonable) doctrine that the best way to deal with a fascist is to beat the crap out of him. That’s literally their position – I’ll never forget a student demo against a white power bookshop where members of one of the nuttier fringe trot groups (yes, the nutty fringe of the nutty fringe…) turned up in bike leathers, headstomping boots and with steel bars, I kid you not. Sadly, most advertised demonstrations are heavily policed down here so nothing exciting went down.
OTOH most anarchists have their own cobbled together doctrine (not a bad way to go – rolling your own is more fun than following a recipie), but are usually not as gutless as many Trots when it comes to policy implementation.
It’s a pity the word is so overused, but its so easy to do that who can blame?
March 24, 2009 at 10:21 am
It’s been seven years since the first (and last) reading of HoR, but it seems that Dyer was one of those rare, genuine liberals who seek a rational, economic explanation for every atrocity by developing sympathy for or at least a tentative understanding of, the alleged perpetrators and their notions.
His analysis was, of course, completely wrongheaded.
Oklahoma City was only the beginning…of the end, that is.
Militia movement collapsed two years later.
Portrayal of 1990s middle and southern America as out of a Drive-By Truckers album is ridiculous and the whole book can only be described as remotely coherent because of the context of hysteria created by third-generation true believers…call them true believers…one book you’ll probably never see is “The Mind of Morris Dees.”
Far down intellectual food-chain from Horkheimer, of course, an actual instrument of fulfillment of the theory.
In any case, today fascism doesn’t actually exist except as a dialectical nomenclature for the biological preferences or whatever.
March 24, 2009 at 1:28 pm
I think this depiction by Paul Gottfried of Adorno’s encounter with 60s radicals was amusing:
In the late ’60s, in a crisis that might have caused his physical deterioration and led to his death, Adorno was targeted by the student Left at the University of Frankfurt, who broke into and disrupted his classes. Like other revolutionaries before and since, this aging academic was accused of harboring reactionary impulses and of not sincerely opposing sexism. In an orgy of confused symbolism, female protesters bared their breasts in Adorno’s sight while waving pages torn from his tract Negative Dialectics.
March 24, 2009 at 11:28 pm
My sense of the Frankfurt school is derived from Haneke films and from snips like this one. I can never seem to wrap my mind around what it’s all about except as a vague intellectual trend defined by personalities and passing academic culture. I end up short-handing the entire movement under the heading “Freudian sociology” and I have no doubt that I’m missing a lot.
With that in mind, here’s a dumb question: Does the Frankfurt school (or is it “School”?) provide a working definition of “fascism,” one that reconciles with the concept of “militant democracy”? Horkheimer seems to contend that anti-Semitism is extra-rational and that fascism is ideological poison to be rooted by force (if the former is to be eradicated). He also sides with Arendt in describing Stalin as fascist. Why? Is it simply a matter of electoral civility? Does it matter that Hitler had a constituency? What the hell is he talking about, really? I’m not asking rhetorically.
As to the business of “preparing public opinion,” Hofstra University held a symposium a couple of decades ago that seemed to have this in mind. Contributors sought to construct model statutes proscribing group-defamatory speech while passing Constitutional muster. The papers were published in a book called “Group Defamation and Freedom of Speech.” Here’s a Questia link:
http://www.questia.com/library/book/group-defamation-and-freedom-of-speech-the-relationship-between-language-and-violence-by-eric-m-freedman-monroe-h-freedman.jsp
March 28, 2009 at 6:15 pm
[…] The Intellectual Origins of “Militant Democracy” by Dain Fitzgerald […]
March 29, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Off-topic – TGGP – did you see this?
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2009/03/binge-drinking-and-intelligence.html
March 29, 2009 at 2:15 pm
BGC,
thanks for unintentional permission for me to drink like I’ve been lately… :)
March 30, 2009 at 10:36 am
The fascist, totalitarian society of “1984” arose from Socialist organizations.
In other words: trying to fight governance-by-force by purging your society through force begins and ends in only one way: by shooting yourself in the head.
March 30, 2009 at 7:31 pm
melendwyr, I think a lot of the inner party members that created IngSoc did all right. Animal Farm did a better job of showing how people creating the revolution (such as Snowball) got screwed over. There was an interesting critique of Orwell published in a British libertarian journal that I pointed out here before, but because Scott Sumner’s post is better I’ll just link to my comment linking to it from there.
BGC, I had actually seen that post before but thanks to you decided to examine it more closely and leave a comment.
April 26, 2009 at 10:17 am
Everyone here knows Orwell was a social democrat, right? He wanted to save socialism from communism. Really.
The quote you cited interests me more in the sense of people’s desire to believe themselves important than anything else. Yeah, the collapse of France happened because intellectuals didn’t police thought well enough, not because the Wehrmacht was bigger and tougher than the French army. LOL.