Everything but the Goose Step

Postmodern progressivism is postmodern fascism

Just swap out the flags and add a few brown shirts…

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In a recent note I used the term postmodern fascism in connection with the current push to ban or demonetize Substack writers whose political views place them on the radical Right. These Nazis (as some of them most certainly are) are deemed unfit to share an online space occupied by so many virtuous and enlightened progressives.

My own view is that freedom of expression is indivisible. As Mr. Orwell put it, if the term means anything at all, it means the freedom to tell people what they don’t want to hear. If freedom of expression is granted only to those who exhibit good political manners, it doesn’t deserve the title and should be called something else—approved expression, perhaps.

Now as far as I can tell, most of the people pestering Substack to assume the mantle of censorship are progressive in their political views. They claim to be “fighting fascism” and defending “our democracy.” In short, they flatter themselves. But their self-righteous posturing is a tell. Any political movement or ideology that treats politics as a morality play is neither liberal nor progressive in the literal meanings of those terms. It is, on the contrary, fascistic.

Take a good long look at postmodern progressivism and what do you see? Rampant antisemitism, an obsession with racial and gender categories, groupthink, intolerance, anti-intellectualism, the corruption of language, a rejection of social and institutional norms, a political narrative framing politics as a war pitting good versus evil—all that and more—fascism in postmodern garb.

The way in which postmodern progressivism treats race is unambiguously fascistic. Just like the Nazis, contemporary progressives have constructed a hierarchy of racial categories that sorts humanity into two groups: oppressors and victims. The former of course, are “White people,” deemed guilty of racist oppression and violence, representing the focus of evil in the modern world. Everybody else goes into the second group under the BIPOC acronym (black, indigenous, people of color), the victims of “White, supremacy,” “colonialism,” etc.

The White/BIPOC formulation is crude, indeed laughable, but as the horrific flareup of campus antisemitism demonstrates, it has power to wreak considerable havoc. Postmodern fascists first assigned Jews to the White oppressor class, then proceeded to persecute them in the name of the BIPOC Palestinian Arabs. Nazi racist ideology took much the same approach, assigning the role of oppressor to the Jews and the role of victim to the German people and broadly to the “Aryan race.”

Another prominent feature of postmodern progressivism that it shares with earlier iterations of fascism is anti-intellectualism. Objective standards of scholarship and intellectual integrity are fundamentally incompatible with things like critical race theory and DEI: You cannot be allowed to follow the evidence where it leads if it threatens to refute some dogma or illuminate some systemic contradiction. The case of Claudine Gay is instructive in that regard. Those who defended her argued (1) that no, she was not a “diversity hire,” but (2) that to criticize DEI or draw attention to her patent lack of qualifications was evidence of racism, and (3) that the critics were “weaponizing plagiarism” against her. Another and more honest way of putting this would be to say: Shut up! The facts don’t matter!

And shutting people up is indeed a major project of postmodern progressivism, just as it’s always been with fascism. The list of things that must never be said grows longer by the day, and their inability to police speech at all times, everywhere, is one of progressives’ great frustrations. For a time it seemed that the power of the mob, amplified by social media, could get that job done. But when you’ve been called a racist, a homophobe, a misogynist, a Nazi several dozen or a hundred times, you tend to consider the source and stop caring. You might even start pushing back. The power of postmodern fascism is social and cultural, not political. So far at least there are no truncheon-wielding thugs in black uniforms, no Ministry of Love, to enforce the rules. But if the comrades had such resources available, they’d use them.

This brings us to po-mo progressivism’s embrace of redemptive violence: perhaps the most telling evidence of its fascist character. Recall the “mostly peaceful,” i.e. frequently violent, protests of the summer of 2020. How many justifications did the comrades offer for the scenes we all saw on TV or personally witnessed? They made out that the killing of George Floyd valorized looting and vandalism as a form of slavery reparations. They cheered on the rioters who assaulted police officers with bricks, frozen water bottles, and fireworks. They thrilled to the sight of burning buildings, statues being toppled, American flags being burned.

And since October 7, 2023, we’ve been regaled with justifications for the violent “anti-Zionist,” i.e. antisemitic, demonstrations on university campuses and in the streets of our cities. We’ve heard Hamas, a genocidal death cult, praised as valiant corps of liberators, raping and murdering from the river to the sea. All this has come from academics, graduate students, journalists, members of Congress—representatives, supposedly, of the American elite. The professor out in California who proclaimed himself “exhilarated” by the Hamas pogrom spoke for them all. The desire to destroy all existing institutions, to overthrow all existing values, and to build anew on the rubble, is a characteristic of postmodern progressivism, just as it was of German National Socialism.

In Germany at the time of Hitler’s rise to power and the establishment of the National Socialist regime, his earliest and most fervent supporters were to be found in the universities. Distinguished intellectuals like Martin Heidegger, Rector of the University of Freiburg, joined the Nazi Party and, like him, signed the “Vow of Allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State.” It should surprise no one, therefore, that the American university campus is the nexus of postmodern fascism. It’s paradoxical, but appears to be true, that intellectuals of a certain type are profoundly drawn to the irrational.

Anyhow, that’s what I mean by the term, postmodern fascism.