Modernist Architecture: The Spirit of the Age as Rebellion Against God

This an incredibly interesting article linking 20th century modernist architecture to the will to power. It is by Nikos Salingaros and James Kalb and is at the Witherspoon Institute's Public Discourse blog. It entitled: "Against the Architects of Empire: Contemporary Architecture is Profoundly Anti-Natural." Here is the first section:

Architecture is the setting for how we live and the expression of how we think. It reflects our shaping of the world in order to inhabit it, and the geometry of what we build is far from neutral. The built environment, like the biological and other natural systems that it engages, needs to function reliably in complex and adaptive ways on many different levels. Such adaptive and sustainable systems have similar characteristics that, despite distinct origins, develop in a broadly similar manner.

The need to provide shelter from the elements and serve everyday needs led to the construction of roofs and walls that defined spaces adapted to human use. Traditional buildings and cities were assemblies of such basic components, put together in ways that had been found to promote particular and overall functioning. The New York row house, the New England village green, and the Mediterranean arcade and plaza all suit the setting and way of life in which they grew up.

More importantly, going beyond mere function, those structures combined ornament and other details that somehow seemed necessary. Even when structures were designed as a whole, their form and organization followed the evolved principles that had led to successful construction in the past. The results included the great historical styles of architecture, and the most-loved and most functional buildings and cities East and West.

Times change, and not always for the better. The advent of architectural modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century suppressed traditional styles and complex evolved forms in favor of simple concepts and striking images. The result was an approach to the built environment that lent itself to public relations and propaganda—it played well in manifestos and glossy architecture magazines—but was less functional, less adaptive, and less human and engaging.

What happened, why did it happen, and why do people stick with an approach to building and design that evidently does not work to engage our complex faculties? The answer goes to the nature of science and of freedom: whether they have to do with understanding reality and living in accordance with it, or with the imposition of arbitrary will.

Modernity is about imposing human will on nature in such a way that nature is regarded as mere "raw material" for the human will instead of being understood as reality and respected as our home, the world in which we play a part. The imposed utopian vision that characterized American Progressivism as much as European Fascism and Communism was essential to modernity.

Modernist architects just drew forms on paper that looked like machines and those in power built them.

The motivation was essentially political and oriented toward domination. The revolutionary movements that followed World War I wanted a break with the past, and especially the look of the past. The world revolution would rebuild humanity through industrialization, so these movements embraced buildings that looked like the machines of the time: sleek, white, and metallic. States, both on the left and on the right, loved this depersonalized approach to building, where the individual no longer matters and everything is sacrificed to an imposed utopian vision. Aspects of architectural modernism are prominent in Nazi and Soviet architecture, and the capitalist state also turned the machine into an icon. When Le Corbusier died both Lyndon Johnson and the Soviets expressed their sense of profound loss.

For years I have been calling the ugly, imposing, anti-human Robarts Research Library on the campus of the University of Toronto a good example of "Stalinist architecture." This article justifies and explains the truth of that judgment.

This modernism is not only anti-natural, it is also anti-God.

The outcome of these developments is something resembling a totalitarian system that unites immense financial and industrial interests with a pseudo-religious fanaticism. There are governments and corporations that wish to flaunt their power through monstrous and arrogant building schemes, industries that produce very expensive high-tech materials, developers who want to make their money work but have no moral constraints, and architects who are willing to do anything to obtain a commission. Politicians get pulled into supporting the ideology by the chance to gain media coverage and campaign contributions. And the gullible public naively believes all it reads in the conformist media.

There is something profoundly anti-natural about the results. By contradicting traditional evolved geometries, modernist and contemporary architecture and urban planning go against the natural order of things. When an architect or planner ignores the need for adaptation and imposes his or her will, the result is an absurd form—an act of defiance toward any higher sense of natural order. There is no room for God in totalitarian design. What religious believer is helped to greater devotion by a modernist Church? Who can love materials hostile to our touch and sight, surfaces and oppressive spaces that sometimes suggest violation and death? Architectural modernism implies a sort of cosmic rebellion against order and life.

It is anti-nature, anti-human and anti-God. To fight geometry is to fight God. If there is a class of professionals in the contemporary world whose work causes them to rank lower than lawyers, it must be architects. But what does it say about the spirituality of a society that would accept these ugly monstrosities? What does it say about the morality of such a society? What does it say about the politics of our society?

Whatever it says, it is shameful.

It Can't Happen Here - The Mystery Deepens

This story keeps getting more and more weird. Now the Education Department is (sort of) denying responsibility for sending in the SWAT team.

Wright told the station that the Education Department was after unpaid federal loans owed by his ex-wife. "They busted my door for this," Wright says. The claim has been repeated by numerous news outlets who picked up the story, including Fox News, The Huffington Post, and Gawker. (UPDATE: The station has replaced the story with a newer version that does not make the claim the raid was for late loan payments.)

But Education Department Press Secretary Justin Hamilton said in a statement to The Lookout that the department "does not execute search warrants for late loan payments." He said the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) "conducts about 30-35 search warrants a year on issues such as bribery, fraud, and embezzlement of federal student aid funds." Hamilton said the department cannot comment on this particular case until the investigation is over, but did add that the claim the warrant was executed for late loan payment is untrue. The raid was related to a criminal investigation of Wright's wife.

The OIG lists some of its recent investigations on its website, including the case of a Boston man who was sent to prison last month for lying on a federal student aid form.

About 8.9 percent of all federal loan recipients (about 330,000 people) defaulted between 2008 and 2010, the highest percentage in more than a decade. Unlike students who have some types of private student loans, borrowers with federal loans can't declare bankruptcy as a way to get out of repayment, no matter how dire their financial situation.

Still, Wright was not the subject of the agency's investigation, and he is demanding an apology for being treated like a criminal in his own home. He animatedly explains in this video that he was handcuffed while still in his underwear and was made to wait in a police car for several hours with his three young children while the 15 law enforcement officers searched his house.

The Stockton police said the raid was not initiated by them, but by the Department of Education. The Department of Education says it did not execute the search warrant, but it might have been another government department, the Office of the Inspector General. The OIG website says it does investigate cases of "lying on a student aid form." The Education Department, which does not deny any of Kenneth Wright's story, says the raid was related to a criminal investigation of Wright's wife.

All I can say is "Wow!" That woman must be a serial murderer and terrorist who has blown up multiple buildings killing dozens - in between having 3 children that is.

The burning question though, is where was the SWAT team when a congressman lied aggressively and impudently to reporter after reporter last week denying that he has an internet sex problem? Probably out raiding the former homes of people who falsified a student loan application and treating innocent family members like criminals, I guess.

But still, why do you get handcuffed in your underwear for six hours just because your estranged wife lied on her student aid application? And then let go? I don't suppose any government agency would care to comment on that?

A True Liberal Rejects Romantic Utopianism

Here is one more final quote from Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. After the fascist revolution in which Buzz Windrip comes to absolute power, the hero Doremus Jessup is engaging some introspective musing about revolution.

"In this acid mood Doremus doubted the efficacy of all revolutions; dared even a little to doubt our two American revolutions - against England in 1776, and the Civil War.

For a New England editor to contemplate even the smallest criticism of these wars was what it would have been for a Southern Baptist fundamentalist preacher to question Immortality, the Inspiration of the Bible, and the ethical value of shouting Halelujah. Yet had it, Doremus queried nervously, been necessary to have four years of inconceivably murderous Civil War, followed by twenty years of commercial oppression of the South, in order to preserve the Union, free the slaves, and establish the equality of Industry with Agriculture? Had it been just to the Negroes themselves to throw them so suddenly, with so little preparation, into full citizenship, that the Southern states, in what they considered self-defense, disqualified them at the polls and lynched them and lashed them? Could they not, as Lincoln at first desired and planned, have been freed without the vote, then gradually and competently educated, under federal guardianship, so that by 1890 they might, without too much enmity, have been able to enter fully into all the activities of the land? . . .

No questioning of the eventual wisdom of the 'radicals' who had first advocated these American revolutions, Doremus warned himself, should be allowed to give any comfort to that eternal enemy: the conservative manipulators of privilege who damn as 'dangerous agitators' any man who menaces their fortunes; who jump in their chairs at the sting of a gnat like Debs, and blandly swallow a camel like Windrip.

Between the rabble rousers - chiefly to be detected by desire for their own personal power and noteriety - and the un-self-seeking fighters against tyranny, between William Walker or Danton, and John Howard or William Lloyd Garrison, Doremus saw, there was the difference between a noisy gang of thieves and an honest man noisily defending himself against thieves. He had been brought up to revere the Abolitionists: Lovejoy, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe - although his father had considered John Brown insane and a menace, and had thrown sly mud at the marble statues of Henry Ward Beecher, the apostle in the fancy vest. And Doremus could not do otherwise than revere the Abolitionists now, though he wondered a little if Stephen Douglas and Thaddeus Stephens and Lincoln, more cautious and less romantic men, might not have done the job better.

Is it just possible, he sighed, that the most vigorous and boldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators? Possible that plain men with the humble trait of minding their own business will rank higher in the heavenly hierarchy than all the plumed souls have shoved their way in among the masses and insisted on starving them?" (pp. 113-118, bolding is mine)

Lewis understood that there is nothing that stands so staunchly in the way of progress as "Progressivism." A true liberal is one who rejects romantic Utopianism. Who could doubt that he was a true liberal and not a leftist disguised as a liberal? Would he even be able to find a home in today's Democratic Party? And who could doubt that in a choice between Barack Obama and Paul Ryan, he would vote Ryan?

Alas, they don't make liberals like that anymore. Nowadays they are labelled "neocons."

University Education Under Fascism

In the Corporatist State of Sinclair Lewis's depiction of fascist America in It Can't Happen Here, it is interesting to see his take on what university education would look like under Fascism. All American universities are closed and entirely new Corporatist ones are created:

"Dr. Macgoblin pointed out that this founding of entirely new universities showed the enormous cultural superiority of the new Corpo state to the Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Fascists. Where these amateurs in recivilization had merely kicked out all treacherous so-called 'intellectual' teachers who mulishly declined to teach physics, cookery, and geography according to the principles and facts laid down by the political bureaus, and the Nazis had merely added the sound measure of discharging Jews who dared attempt to teach medicine, the Americans were the first to start new and completely orthodox institutions, free from the very first of any taint of 'intellectualism.'

All Corpo universities were to have the same curriculum, entirely practical and modern, free of all snobbish tradition.

Entirely omitted were Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Biblical study, archeology, philolophy; all history before 1500 - except for one course which showed that, through the centuries, the key to civilization had been the defense of Anglo-Saxon purity against barbarianians. Philosophy and its history, psychology, economics, anthropology were retained,but, to avoid the superstitious errors inordinary textbooks, they were to be conned only in new books prepared by able young scholars under the direction of Dr. Macgoblin.

Students were encouraged to read, speak, and try to write modern languages, but they were not to wast time on the so-called 'literature'; reprints from recent newspapers were used instead of antiquated fiction and sentimental poetry. As regards English, some study of literature was permitted, to supply quotations for political speeches, but the chief choruses were in advertising, party journalism, and business correspondence, and no authors before 1800 might be mentioned except Shakespeare and Milton.

In the realm of so-called 'pure science,' it was realized that only too much and too confusing research had already been done, but no pre-Corpo university had ever shown such a wealth of courses in mining engineering, lakeshore-cottage architecture, modern foremanship and production methods, exhibition gymnastics, the higher accountancy, therapeutics of athlete's foot, canning and fruit dehydration, kindergarten training, organization of chess, checkers, and bridge tournaments, cultivation of will power, band music for mass meetings, schnauzer-breeding, stainless-steel formulae, cement-road construction, and all other useful subjects for the formation of he new-world mind and character. And no scholastic institution, even West Point, had ever so richly recognized sport as not a subsidiary but a primary department of scholarship. All the more familiar games were earnestly taught, and to them were added the most absorbing speed contests in infantry drill, aviation, bombing, and operations of tanks, armored cars, and machine guns. All of these carried academic credits, thought students were urged not to elect sports for more than one third of their credits.

What really showed the difference from old-foggy inefficiency was that with the educational speed-up of the Corpo universities, any bright lad could graduate in two years." (pp. 207-8)

I'm afraid to comment on this vision very extensively; suffice it to say that I fight a mild, incremental and respectable version of it every day.

It Can't Happen Here

The 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here, is a depiction of an America taken over by Fascism. Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the Democratic nomination in 1936 to Senator Buzz Windrip, a charismatic leader who promptly imposes a Facist regime on America. His Minute Men are like the Nazi Brownshirts, his political philosophy is Corporatist and his homespun rhetoric is pure, vintage American.

The hero is Doremus Jessup, a small town New England newspaper editor, who is a liberal. Jessup fears the rise of Windrip but his worse fears are exceeded by the brutality, lawlessness and stupidity of Windrip's regime. Jessup is no saint; he is engaged in an extra-marital affair and he seems perpetually perplexed by ideological uncertainty. He is often tempted by fanatical clarity exhibited by his communist friend Karl, but he is capable of rejecting Communism as merely the ideology of Stalin's totalitarian state. He has no illusions about Hitler or Fascism, but he finds it incredible and world-shattering to watch America fall under the rule of ignorant thugs and men lacking any principles or conscience whatsoever.

The novel is interesting for several reasons. One is that it was written prior to World War II and the revelation of the extreme anti-Semitism of Hitlerism in the Final Solution. So it can calmly consider the true nature of Fascism without having the whole question preempted by one of the most horrendus evils of history. There is anti-Semitism in Lewis's American Fascism, but it is much milder and less principled. For example, while the Fascist leaders rail against the Jews, they don't go so far as to give up revenue by refusing to do business with those Jews who own important businesses. It never crosses anyone's mind to simply kill them and expropriate everything. Instead there are categories for "good Jews" and "bad Jews," with the latter of course being Communist agitators and poor Jews. The anti-Semitism issue is background not foreground, which means that we get a chance to evaluate Fascism separately from the question of how it treats the Jews.

The problem with the Fascism portrayed in this book is that it is brutal, stupid and ugly. It is the triumph of man's lower nature over civilization, religion and all higher virtues. It is a glorification of brute strength and unscrupulousness in which those who stand on principles - whether Christian or humanistic - are squashed. The liberal humanist is the ally of the Christian in that both take their stand on the necessity of getting both the ends and the means right, whereas the Fascist is the one who believes that the ends justify any means. In fact, the Fascist is impatient with debates over the morality of means and despises those who hold back from achieving a desired end because of moral scruples over things like judicial murder, the suspension of legal rights and the trampling of the Constitution. The essence of Fascism for Lewis is that might makes right - applied Nietzscheanism.

I think that this definition of Fascism is right and the strength of Lewis's argument is seen in the way he defines Communism as essentially identical with Fascism. Both are forms of Totalitarianism and the fact that they offer different Utopian dreams as their goal and justification cannot disguise the more important fact that their methods are identical: arbitrariness, brutality and disregard for the laws and traditions that protect human rights.

The novel is also interesting for another reason. Since it is set in the US, it is able to grapple with the question of whether Fascism is separable from racism. The US is not a racially based nation and the attempt to see "White Power" as the essence of US Fascism is not a replacement for the doctrine of the organic unity of the people of the nation that is seen in Italy or Germany. Some would say that Fascism is not possible in the melting pot that is the US, but Lewis shows that it is because the essence of Fascism is Nationalism but not Racial Superiority.

American patriotism is clearly something that Windrip and his gang of thugs pay lip service to but do not really believe in. American nationalism is rooted in the Declaration and the Constitution, the Founders and the division of powers. To believe in these ideals is the opposite of Fascism, for Lewis, and so Windrip's nationalist rhetoric is both dishonest and superficial. He has the American folksy charm and self-deprecating humor designed to appeal to the common man, but he no more believes in natural rights than he believes in Martians.

I find this way of portraying Fascism to be very enlightening. Stripped of the mystic nationalism and race unity doctrines of European Fascism, Fascism American style appears so much more obviously mere brutality applied to all of society. No one who read this book would come away worrying that contemporary Conservatives are proto-fascists. To the extent that conservative conservatives embody respect for the Constitution, originalism, state's rights, individual liberty, free speech, freedom of religion, the division of powers and limited government, they embody the opposite of what we see portrayed in this novel.

In fact, it is modern Progressivism, with its hurry-up approach to social engineering and its naive conviction that human nature is malleable that is much closer to sinking into the fascist swamp. The only thing that stands between a liberal democracy and a fascist dictatorship is a belief in principles, law and the dignity of the individual which cannot be compromised even for evidently good goals. Where does respect for such moral restraint and limits on government actions come from? This novel does not say. In fact, in the portrayal of the hero Doremus Jessup, we see a dark ambiguity between his temptation to hate and resort to the same level of brutality as the enemy and yet he constant awareness that he must resist becoming a carbon copy of what he despises. This ambiguity is a permanent feature of liberal democracy.

It is clear to me that the source of moral restraint and respect for the dignity of the individual does not come from any of the springs that feed contemporary Progressivism: Malthusianism, Darwinism, Scientism, Pragmatism, Marxism, and the Enlightenment Doctrine of Progress. None of these philosophical influences provide a basis for saying "No" to certain means no matter how many good results they appear to lead to and no matter how tempting they are to employ.

Doremus Jessup is a good man and a real hero. He opposes the great evil of his time with courage and moral clarity. But he does not know why he must do so. And so he is incapable of passing on his faith to his children. One of his children becomes a member of the underground resistance, while the other becomes a Fascist government official. But their choices appear to originate more in their contrasting temperaments than any sort of coherent moral philosophy that they are able consciously to accept or reject. The moral vagueness of the opposition to Fascism is the most troubling element of the novel.

Jonah Goldberg's thesis in his book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the America Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, is largely vindicated in this novel. What I mean by this is that Fascism really has more in common with Marxism, Progressivism and Communism than with classical, nineteenth century liberalism and its contemporary version known as conservativism. Conservativism is basically political liberalism joined to a metaphysical doctrine of law rooted in a belief in God. Not all Conservatives are Christians, though most are, but all non-Christian Conservatives nevertheless believe in natural law, the reality of right and wrong and that human rights derive from a Higher Power and not from the State.

Liberalism detached from a metaphysics of law rooted in a belief in God inevitably withers and fades into some sort of shrunken, hollowed-out version of itself that is incapable of resisting Fascism. Goldberg's book makes an eloquent argument for the thesis that secularized liberalism is not only susceptible to fascism, but in fact has been colonized by fascism during the twentieth century. This is what he means by the "secret history" of the American Left. Liberalism without God becomes fascist over time. Sinclair Lewis's novel is an artistic portrayal of that process happening suddenly and dramatically. Goldberg's book is an historical portrayal of that process happening gradually and unobtrusively.

The real message of It Can't Happen Here is that it actually can happen here. The message of Liberal Fascism is that it already is happening right now. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, when asked for his explanation of how Stalinism could have happened, replied that it happened "because men forgot God." If we will not listen to the prophets among us, we will destroy ourselves and it will be on our own heads.

Dependence Day: Mark Steyn Proposes a National Holiday for Broken Britain

Mark Steyn is one of the most talented writers living today. His essays are witty, articulate and interesting enough to read for the pure entertainment value whether you agree with him or not. His recent essay, "Dependence Day," in The New Criterion, is hilarious, sad, informative, and thought-provoking all at the same time. Here is his theme:

If I am pessimistic about the future of liberty, it is because I am pessimistic about the strength of the English-speaking nations, which have, in profound ways, surrendered to forces at odds with their inheritance. “Declinism” is in the air, but some of us apocalyptic types are way beyond that. The United States is facing nothing so amiable and genteel as Continental-style “decline,” but something more like sliding off a cliff.

His concern is to warn Americans of the consequences of pursuing the Obama-led agenda of turning the US into a European-style social democracy. The fact that the US is facing a temptation to turn the welfare state model that FDR started and LBJ expanded into a full-fledged European-style social democracy is indicative of the cultural decline of the Angl0-Saxon people and the resulting decline of Anglo-Saxon influence in the world. This influence is vast and hugely positive on balance.

Insofar as the world functions at all, it’s due to the Britannic inheritance. Three-sevenths of the G7 economies are nations of British descent. Two-fifths of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are—and, by the way, it should be three-fifths: The rap against the Security Council is that it’s the Second World War victory parade preserved in aspic, but, if it were, Canada would have a greater claim to be there than either France or China. The reason Canada isn’t is because a third Anglosphere nation and a second realm of King George VI would have made too obvious a truth usually left unstated—that the Anglosphere was the all but lone defender of civilization and of liberty. In broader geopolitical terms, the key regional powers in almost every corner of the globe are British-derived—from Australia to South Africa to India—and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you’re better off for having been exposed to British rule than not: Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados?

And of course the pre-eminent power of the age derives its political character from eighteenth-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go. In his sequel to Churchill’s great work, The History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Andrew Roberts writes:

Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no-one will bother to make a distinction between the British Empire–led and the American Republic–led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognized that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common—and enough that separated them from everyone else—that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity, which only scholars and pedants will try to describe separately.

If you step back for a moment, this seems obvious. There is a distinction between the “English-speaking peoples” and the rest of “the West,” and at key moments in human history that distinction has proved critical.

The British Empire was, of course, conservative. It stood for old-fashioned virtues and for tradition. It also stood for the rule of law and objective morality. So, naturally, it is attacked by today's Left with the old, tired, worn-out accusation of "fascism." Steyn isn't buying that for a moment.

It’s interesting to learn that “anti-fascism” now means attacking the British Empire, which stood alone against fascism in that critical year between the fall of France and Germany’s invasion of Russia. And it’s even sadder to have to point out the most obvious fatuity in those “anti-fascist groups” litany of evil—“the British Empire’s association with slavery.” The British Empire’s principal association with slavery is that it abolished it. Before William Wilberforce, the British Parliament, and the brave men of the Royal Navy took up the issue, slavery was an institution regarded by all cultures around the planet as as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky. Britain expunged it from most of the globe.

Ever since the early 20th century socialists and communists have been calling the conservatives, the Right and actual liberals "fascists." The association of "right-wing" and "fascist" in the public mind is a masterpiece of propaganda with absolutely no basis in history whatsoever.

Fascism is a form of Statism, as is Communism. To accuse those on the Right of "Fascism" while building a statist society is the tactic of today's Left. And the statist society under construction is destructive of human dignity:

What happens when, as a matter of state policy, you debauch your human capital? The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers; marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what lbj’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population. One-fifth of British children are raised in homes in which no adult works. Just under 900,000 people have been off sick for over a decade, claiming “sick benefits,” week in, week out, for ten years and counting. “Indolence,” as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a free society, but rarely has any state embraced this oldest temptation as literally as Britain. There is almost nothing you can’t get the government to pay for.

This kind of Statism is deadly to human dignity, individual liberty and a vital civil society. And like Fascism, it is a kind of political religion:

For its worshippers, Big Government becomes a kind of religion: the state as church. After the London Tube bombings, Gordon Brown began mulling over the creation of what he called a “British equivalent of the U.S. Fourth of July,” a new national holiday to bolster British identity. The Labour Party think-tank, the Fabian Society, proposed that the new “British Day” should be July 5th, the day the National Health Service was created. Because the essence of contemporary British identity is waiting two years for a hip operation. A national holiday every July 5th: They can call it Dependence Day.

I laughed so hard when I read this that I thought I was going to cry. In this case it is not laugh or cry; both are in order.

Attacks on Glenn Beck Don't Make Sense

I am frankly still making up my mind about what to think about Glenn Beck. I don't watch TV except a few excerpts from shows that appear on blogs so I have barely heard him speak more than a few times. But I do admire anybody who uses a chalkboard on TV and I especially admire anybody who riles up liberal elititists so effortlessly. I think he is in Jim Wallis' head and I think he alternates with Sarah Palin in Barack Obama's nightmares. But the flimsiness and totally off base attacks on him from the liberal media make me suspect that he is more than a mere entertainer. Whatever he is or is not, they don't seem to understand him.

A case in point is this hit piece by Al Hunt at Bloomberg News. Hunt tries to tie him to Father Coughlin and Fascism and in the process demonstrates his gob-smacking ignorance of history, Father Coughlin and Fascism all at once. If this is the best they have to use on Beck, they haven't got anything. Hunt writes:

Glenn Beck, at his successful “Restoring America” rally in Washington, wrapped himself in the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. He fits much better with another religious-political figure, the late Charles E. Coughlin, the Catholic priest who led a populist-right crusade against President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.

Beck and King, the erudite civil-rights legend, share little in common. Beck and Coughlin share a great deal: as mesmerizing broadcasters able to articulate the anger and frustration of a flock frightened by economic hard times. . . .

Beck has brilliantly parlayed his pitch to fame and fortune. More than the other right-wing talk show provocateurs, Beck’s devotees see him as a teacher. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican congressman from Utah, calls him a “great educator.” He’s likely to energize some of his following to help Republicans in the November congressional elections.

Yet the Coughlin parallel remains instructive. The priest was brought down when it became apparent his gospel was based less on faith and hope than on fear and prejudice. This also is why the Glenn Beck gospel won’t appeal to most Americans or endure politically.

Notice the Marxist analysis: Beck's whole appeal can be explained away by reference to economic factors. One wonders if Hunt even knows that he is utilizing a Marxist theory based on materialism and economic determinism. Robert Wargas at NewsReal Blog has little difficulty showing the complete failure of the Beck-Coughlin comparison.

Even a superficial knowledge of Charles Coughlin is enough to dispel Hunt’s theory straight away. Coughlin was essentially an American spokesman for European fascism, an anti-Semitic, anti-capitalist firebreather who believed, as did Hitler, that Jewish bankers were behind everything from the Russian Revolution to the crust you find in the corner of your eyes when you wake up.

False comparisons between fascists and conservatives usually arise from a tendency to regard both as “right wing.” Since the term “right wing” has, historically, been the victim of far more imprecise usage than “left wing,” it remains an amorphous grab-bag into which leftists dump whatever views they don’t like so they can bask in their inability to make distinctions.

Coughlin represented a peculiar political breed that is largely dead nowadays but that was burgeoning noticeably in the interwar period. His views combined extreme racist nationalism with anti-capitalist economics. Such a combination of views is indicative of, to a greater or lesser degree, fascism. There is much more to fascism than this, but one can tell a lot by these two views alone.

Beck is a classical 19th century liberal (i.e. a believer in economic freedom or capitalism) and a big supporter of Israel and opponent of anti-semitism. Sounds just like Coughlin and Hitler, right? Wrong. Classical Liberalism is what both Fascism and Communism must destroy in order to take over. Wargas elaborates on Coughlin:

Though he initially supported Franklin Delando Roosevelt, Coughlin grew tired of what he believed was FDR’s subordination to business interests. An acid-tongued populist, Coughlin pushed for welfare benefits for the poor that far exceeded Roosevelt’s New Deal. He even started a newspaper that focused on this fight for national restructuring.

He called his paper “Social Justice.”

Oh, there is a delicious little irony - can anyone imagine Beck entitling his newspaper "Social Justice?" Well, maybe Al Hunt can; he seems to have a fertile imagination that he uses to bash conservatives instead of historical facts and a basic understanding of political theory. But when you are out to play to the liberal gallery, this sort of rot apparently will do just fine. Wargas again:

Today, we have been fooled into thinking that racism equals right-wing and therefore capitalism, and that tolerance equals leftism and therefore socialism. This distinction has never been true. Racists throughout history have been both socialist and capitalist and everything in between. Socialism’s sordid history regarding racial matters can even be seen in the writings of its secular high priest, Karl Marx.

Moreover, what is consistently left out of any discussion of fascism is that it was originally culled from the body of socialist thought. Mussolini was, in his younger years, a leftist who imbibed the work of Georges Sorel and Vilfredo Pareto. Hitler spends the entire first section of Mein Kampf railing against the plight of the Viennese worker and constructing a worldview based on fighting “Jewish” economic hegemony.

In reality, Fascism is a dead ideology today. To the extent that anything resembling it exists today, one would need to look at contemporary liberalism, or as Jonah Goldberg terms it, liberal fascism. And if there is anything Beck is against, it would be that.

Diagnosing the "True Believers" of the Left

Jamie Glazov is editor of the online FrontPage Magazine and a Canadian historian and the son of Soviet dissident parents during the Brezhnev era who made his way to Canada in 1972. He has published Canadian Policy Toward Krushchev's Soviet Union (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002). Now he has written a book, United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror (WorldNetDaily, 2009), in which he explores the fascinating question of what motivates people to embrace sociopathic murders such as Stalin, Mao, Castro etc. as secular messiahs or demi-gods. As Glazov puts it:

what exactly inspires a person, and an entire mass movement, to deify a monstrous tyrant as a father-god who transcends the singular and emcompasses, as Satre puts it, all the people and the land? The answer to this question helps illuminate the contemporary Left's romance with the Islamist jihadists, just as it helps crystallize the Left's alliance with the most vicious totalitarians of the twentieth century. (p. 6)

I read this book with interest because I was puzzled as to how it was possible for the left to support Hamas so diligently over the past few years and in particular with regard to the Gaza flotilla stunt. How do people who profess to stand for "peace and justice" support a 7th century death cult which has genocide as its official goal and which is supported by a revolutionary Islamic state that is close to going nuclear, namely Iran?

I am now reading Paul Berman's The Flight of the Intellectuals, which is a very well-researched work on the refusal of Western intellectuals to face up to the true nature of Islamism. Hamas comes out of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was greatly influenced by Nazi ideology, including anti-Semitism, during the second world war. Berman shows that, whereas fascist ideology was discredited pretty much everywhere in the world after the war, the Muslim Middle East constituted a significant exception. From then to now, fascist ideas have influenced the rise of militant Islamist movements from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas and Hizbullah. Al-Queda is just one of a number of smaller movements in this general stream. As a concrete example of what this means, the Hamas Charter quotes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Russian secret police forgery based on a French document from the 1860s. The whole civilized world knows the Protocols, so beloved of Nazis everywhere, is a fake and a slander. But in the Muslim Middle East, this document is taken seriously as historically true. When the president of Iran denies the reality and extent of the Holocaust, we see how pervasive the fascist ideology is today in the Middle East.

So the question is why is the Left in bed with fascists and the answer is a bit surprising. Glazov argues that the true believer's journey begins with a sense of alienation from his own society and his fantasies about building a perfect society in which he will finally fit in. The type of person attracted to the Leftist fantasy world is one who has not internalized the kind of values that enable him to find meaning in life, who is spiritually empty and who has failed to develop lasting interpersonal relationships. This person then seeks material solutions to what is essentially his spiritual emptiness. Glazov elaborates:

Convinced that it is incumbent upon society, and not him, to imbue his life with purpose, the believer becomes indignant; he scapegoats his society - and ends up despising and rejecting it. (p. 6)

This person becomes a believer in the secular, progressive faith and seeks the redemption not of himself, but of society. As I wrote in an earlier post, Marxism is essentially a heresy of Christianity, and Glazov sees this as being true of modern, progressive religions in general:

Tortured by his personal alienation, which is accompanied by feelings of self-loathing, the believer craves a fairy tale world where no individuality exists, and where human estrangement is thus impossible. The believer fantasizes about how his own individuality and self will be submerged within the collective mass of the whole. (p. 7)

It is especially ironic that people in the grip of this kind of escapist fantasy actually criticize Christians for being "irrelevant" and "too heavenly minded." Of course, it all has to end in tears. Utopian fantasies lead to hell on earth. Why?

The political faith rejects the basic reality of the human condition - that human beings are flawed and driven by self-interest - and rests on the erroneous assumption that humanity is malleable and can be reshaped into a more perfect form. This premise spawned the nightmarish repressions and genocidal campaigns of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other communist dictators in the twentieth century. Under their rule, more than one hundred million human beings were sacrificed on the altar where a new man would ostensibly be created. (pp. 7-8)

Note the essence of this argument: Leftist politics fails because it denies the truth about reality. This is a deeply Christian insight and it is a metaphysical one, not merely an ethical one. Marxism is bad not because it has led to excesses by zealots, but rather because it distorts and denies the metaphysical truth about the world.

So it is not possible to combine Marxist analysis of what is wrong with the world with a Christian solution. Why not? Because Christianity and Marxism do not view the world in compatible ways: one has to choose which vision of reality is true, but they cannot both be true. And these two visions of reality lead to radically different solutions.

Glazov stresses that the political faith is not a search for truth (p. 9), but rather a sacrifice of the intellect to a movement that promises to bring about Utopia. The true believer is ready to lose his own life for the cause because he does not believe that the individual is as important as the cause. This also hardens him to the suffering of the masses who are being reshaped by dictators in the name of the cause. Glazov writes:

Beneath the believer's veneration of the despotic enemy lies one of his most powerful yearnings: to submit his whole being to a totalist entity. (p. 11)

Support for the Stalinist regime actually peaked during the 30s when the show trials, gulags, and famines were in full force. Although he would never admit it in public, the true believer does not believe in spite of the murders and violence, he believes precisely in the murders and violence as the summit of what attracts him to this secular, political faith in the first place.

The psychology of the true believer in death cults like Hamas is alas all too familiar; we have seen it all before in the prostration before murderous regimes like that of Stalin by Western Leftists. Strictly speaking it is a form of madness, but it is a high-functioning form of madness in which the believer is ready with propaganda, highly argumentative and full of passion and feeling. But it is irrational and, in the end, destructive.