A Virtuous Critique of Fascism
The nature of fascism from a virtue ethics perspective.
In a previous essay, I argued that modern philosophy basically invalidates value-rationality (judging ends) and relies solely on instrumental rationality (judging means). Moderns no longer have the tools to tell us what we should desire, only how to obtain whatever we happen to desire. That essay pointed out the value subjectivism I found pervasive even among anti-modern political groups. It’s funny then that in Firstness Journal, one of the best Dissident Right journals I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading, the article “Fascism as Meme” frames the talks of liberalism, mass-democracy, socialism, and fascism in a way that neatly complements my earlier thesis.
I argued in my previous essay that postmodern politics mainly fall into one of two modes – the managerial and the subjectivist. Managerial politics posits a group of experts whose understanding of facts gives them penetrating insight into self-interest. For example, neoliberal managers believe that self-interest is best understood as the drive to maximize individual utility. Managerial systems tend to justify themselves according to the “expertise” of their leaders. We see this mode in action whenever politicians talk about the GDP or when media influencers order their followers to “listen to the experts.”
Opposed to the managerial is the subjectivist. Whereas managerial politics see self-interest as generalizable across all humans regardless of context, subjectivist politics sees self-interest as diversified to the extreme. Each individual’s self-interest is unique, and no two can be satisfied in the same manner. Thus, any political organization that fails to recognize this diversity is bound to alienate vast swathes of the population. The best system is thus one wherein these individuals can freely pursue their desires to the best of their ability. Subjectivist systems tend to justify themselves according to the options available to the people living under them. Partisans of this view speak exclusively in terms of human rights, freedom, and equality.
Compare this to Owen Gilbride’s description of liberalism and mass democracy. Owen summarizes classical liberalism as the assertion that “a fecund social order is one in which each is free to do as he sees fit,” such that the role of authority “is not to put forth commands, but to ensure the liberty of every individual.” This is the subjectivist worldview of Adam Smith and David Hume in a nutshell.
However, Owen notes that the liberal system was forced to evolve as it grew larger. According to Alasdair MacIntyre, liberalism grew out of Northern European culture, Scotland in particular, and only spread from that origin to other parts of Europe over several centuries. The eighteenth-century liberal was thus an inhabitant of a particular, homogenous culture. He describes this stage of liberalism as follows:
The Liberal Subject inhabited a homogenous cultural milieu. Two men might disagree on a subject, but they shared an understanding of how to disagree. Individual differences, insofar as they existed, suggested continuity at a higher level. At most, points of distinction would inspire lively debate, and more nuanced understanding. Idiosyncratic tendencies were of no great concern. On the fundamental questions of life, every well-bred man was sure to harmonize. This was the pièce de résistance of Liberal Ideology: a social fiction known as Universal Rationality.
However, when liberalism entered its globalist phase, “Universal Rationality” became untenable. No longer would the “common sense of educated men” be sufficient to unite the liberal community. To accommodate such a reality, Liberalism evolved into Mass-Democracy, and the subjectivist mode gave way to the managerial mode:
Liberalism now spans the entire globe, and comprises every living human being. The bourgeoisie challenged tradition on the grounds of being an arbitrary imposition. In so doing they managed only to dismantle authority, power however remained as a brutal reality which seems to have come from nowhere. Liberalism does not tolerate authority, it calls into question every rationalization of social organization. The very culture of the bourgeoisie was challenged. Every individual becomes equated, and every lifestyle validated. Freedom always needs new scapegoat oppressors to negate. The Liberalism of today is world away from the French Revolution. Following philosopher Panagiotis Kondylis, we will use the term Mass-Democracy for the contemporary arche meta-meme.
The qualities that Liberal Subject was supposedly endowed with are viewed increasingly with suspicion and must be emptied out. The empty participant in Mass-Democracy becomes increasingly abstract, a theoretical space where authority is negated. Thus, scientific rationale comes to replace custom as the primary organizer of society. These abstract models, divested of particularities, become the essence of culture. Every particular quality of a person or people becomes non-essential. Every point of distinction is arbitrary, and replaceable.
Mass-Democracy functions as a global self-stabilizing monoculture. In earlier stages of Liberalism, the founding myth of a universal common sense was easier to maintain. A community was of one mind, more or less, and rarely exposed to different modes of thought. Today, this is no longer the case. An extreme diversity of lifestyles and historical considerations exist within the global community. This myriad of differences must become secondary to abstract systematic logic. Depersonalized rationality must form the basis for all decisions affecting the whole.
As Owen describes it, Mass-Democracy embodies both the managerial and subjectivist tendencies of post-Enlightenment politics while favoring the former. On the one hand, Mass-Democracy is maintained by experts who use scientific, abstract models to generalize the desires of the masses. On the other hand, it also offers a plurality of choices to those unsatisfied with their lot in life. You have endless consumer choices and the freedom to move anywhere and associate with anyone you like. However, this plurality is illusory. You can purchase any flavor of soy protein you like, but it never becomes real meat.
It seems then that Mass-Democracy favors the managerial over the subjectivist mode and only considers the latter to be a fig leaf. However, I think this would be misleading. Though there are tensions between the managerial and the subjectivist, the two complement each other in many ways. Subjectivists might claim that all desires can be fulfilled by the system in question, but they can only do that by making them all equal. If “freedom” induced behavioral randomness, then society wouldn’t be possible. Instead, norms are constructed from non-aggression pacts between countervailing forces, and they are what unites us. All of this is then given the “scientific” veneer of the rulers. At times, the tension is palpable – managers will give “scientific” mandates to individuals that violate their “rights.” However, one can also see the compatibility of the two modes of politics. Managers have to give the individuals the freedom to do whatever gets their rocks off, and individuals have to follow what managers mandate for there to be some semblance of a society.
Socialism is nothing more than the perfection of this system. In theory, the socialist wants to take these countervailing forces, smash them, and unify everyone together. Once all categories are abolished, society can become fully rational. The desires individuals happen to have will, at last, align with what the experts say they should be – a shared desire for human prosperity, free from the influence of biological imperatives and frivolous desires. The socialists want everyone to become a member of the bourgeoisie. “Socialism,” Owen says matter-of-factly, “is nothing more than an amplified desire for comfort.” Don Colacho was right all along.
To the liberal, such a system sounds perfect. Mass-Democracy sees socialism as a far-off ideal, perhaps an impossible one. Some might see it as a future to be strived for, and the socialists who want revolution now have their hearts in the right place, even if they’re a bit zealous. If you are more inclined toward classical liberalism, however, then socialism is a dangerous temptation, the temptation to cook the capitalist goose laying all the golden eggs. Wouldn’t it be more rational to settle for what we have and not let the perfect become the enemy of the good? After all, isn’t Mass-Democracy already catering to all our desires?
But what if there were desires Mass-Democracy couldn’t meet? Could such things exist? It’s certainly plausible. Mass-Democracy relies on certain norms to exist as Mass-Democracy. No system can cater to impulses that attack its very roots. Of course, most of these anti-liberal impulses can be explained away by a lack of education, material deprivation, or mental illness. Blacks get in trouble with the law only because they lacked educational opportunities. Middle Eastern terrorists only engage in suicide bombings because they’re poor. School shooters only go on rampages because of bad brain chemistry. Mass-Democracy can solve or explain away these issues without moving outside its standard operating procedure.
But what of the desire to remain distinct and reject liberalism’s imperative to homogenize? What if an individual desires an end to liberalism itself? While Mass-Democracy can tolerate giving minority groups harmless outlets for their idiosyncrasies, they can only do so as long as those groups stay on message. Black pride is acceptable, celebrated even, but black separatism? That’s a no-go. Any group that rejects the global community in favor of their exclusive club is an existential threat to the system itself. Mass-Democracy sums up this threat with one word: fascism.
When militants detonate a bomb in the name of their creed, this is Fascism. When cops target under-privileged minorities, this is Fascism. When the designated oppressor takes pride in his own group, this is Fascism. There's no rational reason why the Fascist refuses to be part of the team. He's a bully. He doesn't want to play fair. For the Liberal, his logic makes no sense. For the Socialist, his logic presents a vile distortion of Marx's teachings. For the Capitalist, Fascism is the desire for which one can supply no commodity. Fascist inclinations are those to which society can afford no role. The fascist impulse represents pure content without form.
That's Fascism in the colloquial sense. What about historical Fascism? Historical Fascism is the Original Sin of the 20th Century. It is definitive, eternal proof of humanity's potential for irrational evil. It's the madness that ensues when individuals rally around antiquated notions like Authority and Race. It's what happens when you place one man above the law. Historical Fascism justifies Mass-Democracy's liquidation of the particular into the generic. We need to abolish differences between peoples, or this ghoul will keep returning. Fascist impulses become equated with the perpetuation of the Holocaust. One meditates upon the horrors of the World Wars to find peace with sterile modernity. Better a monad than a monster.
Fascism is, to Mass-Democracy, “a demon in need of exorcism”, a “one-dimensional evil for which no rational explanation exists,” “the reason why there’s pain and suffering in the world,” and the reason “why people don’t get along.” It’s the last enemy remaining after Mass-Democracy has vanquished all others. Yet fascism is, in many ways, a photonegative of liberalism. It is a reflection of Mass-Democracy’s failure to fulfill the desires of the masses. So long as there are yawning chasms in the heart that liberalism cannot fill, fascism remains a tantalizing option.
But on what ground can the liberal criticize these desires as inherently irrational? The Enlightenment banished value-rationality from rational discourse, making all desires equal to each other. To the modern, each passion, taken by itself, is no less reasonable than any other. Reasonability is found only in our means of fulfilling these desires. From this perspective, fascist desire is no less rational than liberal desire or socialist desire. It is not until we decide how to achieve these ends that instrumental reason comes in and measures rationality.
Liberals and socialists view their system as the pinnacle of rationality because they see their idealized system as the fulfillment of all desires, but some desires cannot be fulfilled by it. The desire for family, the desire for the tribe, and the desire for social connection, and the desire for a particular culture to belong – these things cannot be realized unless the individual is insulated from rationalized dissolution. These are the passions that fascists have historically acted on. The liberal might protest that such passions are inherently irrational somehow, but based on what standard? If it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger, then neither is it contrary to reason to prefer fascism to liberalism or socialism.
Viewed this way, fascism is not so far off from the liberal or socialist ideal. It is merely trying to fulfill the desires of the masses, desires that Mass-Democracy cannot fulfill – the desires of a particular people in a particular time and place to realize a distinct dream. “Fascism attempted to be the practical realization of the socialist ideal,” says Owen. That is to say, fascism, like socialism, wanted to smash the countervailing forces that held back our collective desires –the General Will, if you prefer. Socialists and fascists differ in their desired aims, but the means they achieve their aims are strikingly similar. This is the grain of truth found in the horseshoe theory.
If this analysis of fascism is correct, then fascism is not without its flaws, to say the least. Its flaws are so glaring that even the Frankfurt School – the geniuses that gave us the ridiculous F scale – were able to see its flaws. As odd it might be to begin a virtuous critique of fascism with the works of Marxist-Freudians, much of what they say aligns with classical virtue ethics, at least when it comes to their critique of modernity.
The Frankfurt School theorists were leftists, yes, but they saw the problems with the Marxist theory. Marx got so much wrong, they said, because Marx’s lack of understanding of human psychology blinded him to particular social realities. What prevented the class consciousness of the proletariat was instrumental rationality, which formed the basis of all Enlightenment philosophies – including Marxism itself.
The Frankfurt School philosophers criticized the modern dependence on instrumental rationality because rational means could always lead to irrational ends. For example, fast-food restaurants wanting to turn a profit use completely rational means to make their burger production as efficient as possible. Their customers, in turn, buy burgers for completely rational reasons – given that they are busy with work, they have neither the time nor money to purchase something better. However, despite the procedures used by all parties to achieve their desired ends being rational, the result is decidedly irrational – the mass consumption of low-quality food resulting in society-wide health problems.
Now, in the past, people did not have this problem. They could use value-rationality to judge ends. The teleological, essentialist metaphysics that grounded traditionalist worldviews allowed the great thinkers of the past to see what was good and what was evil. However, with the advent of Enlightenment and the rejection of teleology, reason became a slave of the passions. For a while, liberals carried on as normal, believing they could ground traditional ethics in “intuitive” or “self-evident” truths based on “universal reason.” This could not last, however. In postmodernity, there is no objective right or wrong, only subjective values. Reason can no longer determine ends, so it cannot give anything more than a means to obtain a certain desired end. Self-interest became the basis of all decision-making.
And the self-interested are all-too-easily manipulated, both by the culture industry of liberal democracy and by the mass propaganda of authoritarian regimes. Instrumental reason sees nothing wrong with tyranny and oppression, so long as these things do not get in the way of whatever we happen to desire. Max Horkheimer pointed out that, even “if a group of enlightened people were about to fight even the greatest evil imaginable,” instrumental rationality would inevitably blind them to the nature of the evil and its threat to humanity (The Eclipse of Reason, p. 21). For this reason, he claimed, the Western proletariat had not achieved class consciousness. The Enlightenment had spiritually lobotomized them.
The problem of fascism in this light is clear: whether fascism is good for the particular people who desire it is an open question. While it certainly aims to give them what they want, so does liberalism. A fascist might protest that the nation’s General Will is more than simply the hedonistic desires of the individuals that make up a nation, but so what? Fascistic desire may not be hedonistic like liberal desire, but that doesn’t necessarily make it right either. We’d need something outside of the General Will to judge whether the General Will is correct or not, an objective standard to measure all desires, fascistic or otherwise, and rank them accordingly.
The question we ought to be asking is not “what do we want?” or even “what does the General Will want?”, but rather “what is good for us?” This was the question at the heart of classical ethics, the question of human flourishing. We’ve returned to Aristotle and the Aristotelian pursuit of eudaimonia. Desires can be judged and ranked accordingly. In light of this tradition, we can rediscover human nature and its ends and measure our desires according to the standards of natural law. We can then discover the virtues, the habits of a flourishing life, and pursue them earnestly.
In light of these things, fascism has some virtues. For example, it encourages heroism in the face of danger and fortitude in the face of marketized hedonism. It aims to empower the family and the nation against the malign forces that are arrayed against it. And against those that would divide society into different classes, it preaches class collaboration. However, we can also see that it fell short in other areas. For example, the National Socialists held ordinary notions of justice and rights with contempt, substituting the social virtue with an austere ethos of self-sacrifice for the German Volk. The good of the Volk, the good of the nation, is to be ever-pursued, no matter what injustices you have to enact to get to that end state. Deutschland über alles is inherently nihilistic.
The problem here is that fascism is not a radical enough break from modern ways of thinking. It’s still trying to be socialism that works – a form of Mass-Democracy that can cater to even more desires than just hedonistic ones. It still conceptualizes politics as a wish-granting mechanism to get us closer to what we want, albeit for the nation rather than the individual. However, what we need isn’t a political genie but a political teacher. We don’t need leaders to give us what we want. We need leaders to teach us to want what is good for us, what will lead to eudaimonia.
St. Thomas demonstrated that eudaimonia cannot be achieved by historical fascism’s pursuit of national glory, but neither can it be achieved by Herbert Marcuse’s erotic utopia or anything else cooked up by liberalism. The hole in our hearts that liberalism, socialism, and fascism try to fill can only be filled by God – infinite goodness beyond any created good. And God is found in neither the bustling of the marketplace nor the roaring of the political rally, but in “the sheer silence” that exists beyond the noise. Only there will our hearts find rest.