Radical Right Reaction in Europe and the US in Comparative Perspective
Radical Right Reaction in Europe and the US in Comparative Perspective
By
J. Otto Pohl
I agree with the argument by Adam Tooze that the US is immune from developing any type of fascist movement as understood in Noltean terms. However, the US could have its own type of radical right reaction. This would have some parallels with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. But, it would be distinctly American and a result of conditions that have developed in the US since 1945.
These conditions are one, the US domination of world geopolitics especially since 1991. Two, the domination of the US by ethnic elements that are neither Anglo or Germanic like the majority of Americans. And three, the granting of legal and social privileges to racial and sexual minorities. I think one is self explanatory. Number two would include Jews, Italians, and Irish as well as more recent groups like Asian Indians. I think three is also self evident in Bioleninsim which is a merger of early Soviet korenizatsiia and Marcusean insanity. For the most part, the new elite that developed in the US during recent decades has excluded the core White working and former middle classes composed of the descendants of Protestant Europeans of any real political or social power.
But, radicalizing poor White people has problems. The same reasons that prevented a strong socialist movement in the US and confined it largely to groups like the Finns, Jews, and other more recent immigrants also have been an obstacle for the right wing mobilization of White Americans. Indeed given the history of Italy and Germany in the 20th century it could be argued that fascism was only possible because strong socialist movements with wide spread native support had existed in those countries. In the US the CPUSA at its height was heavily immigrant. While it is politically incorrect to say so outside of certain circles, communist and Jewish historians themselves note. “CP historians estimate, moreover, that almost half of the party’s membership was Jewish in the 1930s and 1940s.” (https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/communism-in-united-states) This meant that unlike Italy where many socialists and communists became Fascists or Germany where the NSDAP had a similar experience the US had no mass left radical core Anglo-German population. Its leftists were overwhelmingly from minority ethnic groups different from the majority of the White population. Hence there was not and can not be a radical right reaction of White Americans against leftism fueled by ex-leftists. The radicalization and mobilization into right wing politics of Americans will have to come from people previously politically moderate or apolitical. This is what Francis called the radical middle.
But, the pro-worker nationalist strains of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism (think Kraft durch Freude) have no history or social basis in the US. Instead official US patriotism since the end of World War II has sought to ignore or even deny the issue of class. Both Italian Fascists and German National Socialists attempted to use nationalism and in the latter case race as a way of integrating the lower middle and working classes into the overall state imposed system. In the US the co-opting of the "right" by large capitalists has instead meant opposition to addressing the interests of workers. At the same time the capture of the "left" by the coalition of the fringes proposed by Herbert Marcuse in the late 1960s has excluded the interests of White workers. This peculiar intersection of ethno-racial and class interests and identities defines modern America. As can be seen this is very different than Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.
So what might a radical reaction by the White working class look like in the US today? We have some clues, but it will not care about things like Lebensraum, Slavs being Untermenschen, or Freemasons.The problems it will confront will be US ones. These include a refocus of US priorities from abroad to home or isolationism, stopping mass immigration, some sort of solution to the race problem, a rejection of the celebration of sexual deviancy, and economic security.