Going Nucular Page 12
The New York Times Week in Review, August 17, 2003
Leftist was not a word to be used lightly, even by the right. In a 1954 editorial, the Wall Street Journal worried that McCarthy’s “slam-bang denunciations of . . . ‘leftist’ influence” were making him a “depreciating asset” to the Republican Party, with the quotation marks around “leftist” holding the word at arm’s length.
By all linguistic rights, the leftist label should have disappeared from the lexicon as McCarthyism faded, and as labels like communistic, fellow traveler, and Communist sympathizer (or comsymp for short) were going the way of the poodle skirt. But leftist lingered, shifting its reference to antiwar demonstrators. Only after the Vietnam War did the word begin to decline as an epithet, though it was still routinely used in foreign news reports.
Then, in the late 1990s, leftist underwent a sudden revival. The word is 50 percent more frequent in major newspapers and magazines now than it was five years ago, with almost all the increase a result of its use as a label for domestic groups and individuals. Apart from the odd reference to Angela Davis or the Spartacist League, leftist nowadays is almost never used for old-style radicals or Marxists. In fact it was the eclipse of the movement left and the fall of Communism that freed the word to serve as a phantom finger that the right could wave in the culture wars.
In 1954, the Girl Scouts of America was labeled a leftist organization when the American Legion and the House Committee on Un-American Activities accused it of permitting an ex-Communist to serve as a troop leader and of using a handbook that preached “U.N. and World Government propaganda.” When the leftist charge is repeated now, it’s because the scouts permit lesbians to be troop leaders and support programs like Title IX.
A few years ago, a contributor to National Review urged Republicans to purge “leftist influences” from the party, citing the support of Governor Jane Swift of Massachusetts for legal abortion. An opinion piece in the Morning Call of Allentown, Pennsylvania, called Senator Arlen Specter a leftist for his support of cloning research and gay rights, and other commentators have applied the word to senators like Lincoln Chafee, Byron L. Dorgan, and James M. Jeffords, not to mention liberal evergreens like Senators Charles E. Schumer and Edward M. Kennedy. On the Web, Martin Sheen and Susan Sarandon are more likely to be labeled leftists than Fidel Castro is. And Jerry Falwell’s National Liberty Journal has attached the word to the Dixie Chicks—an odd choice to inherit the mantle of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.
It’s getting hard to tell leftists and liberals apart without an agenda. Hence the increasing popularity of liberal-leftist, which merges categories on the model of compounds like toaster-oven and owner-occupier. (Linguists call those compounds “dvandvas,” a term invented by the Sanskrit grammarians.) Peggy Noonan has used the double-l word to describe abortion-rights groups, and during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate race, the conservative commentator John Podhoretz described her as “running as an unapologetic liberal-leftist.”
But liberal Democrats never describe themselves as leftists, not even apologetically. (For that matter, there aren’t many who are willing to describe themselves as liberals, either.) That’s the fundamental asymmetry of the left-right distinction in American politics. Historically, the left commences where liberalism ends. But conservatives have never demurred from placing themselves on the right, letting qualifiers like mainstream and extremist do the work of sorting out the bow-tied Alsopians from the fatigues-wearing abolish-the-I.R.S. crowd. True, many conservatives are uneasy about the label right wing, and though a few call themselves rightists, the word sounds too exotic for most to put it on their business cards. But no one feels the need for a compound like conservative-rightist—there’s no distinction to blur in the first place.
The new uses of leftist exploit that asymmetry. They’re aimed at nudging the political center to the right, by portraying social liberals as radicals outside the mainstream. That’s a risky semantic maneuver. In any tug of war between a label and the things it’s attached to, the label ultimately loses. Sometimes it’s simply diluted to the point of meaninglessness. That happened with the fascist label after the American left began to throw it around indiscriminately in the 1970s, and it may very well be the fate of imperialist now. But the leftist label is less likely to be superannuated than drawn back into the center. Describing the Girl Scouts or Arlen Specter as leftist doesn’t demonize them so much as make the epithet itself sound less alarming.
You can already sense a weakening in the meaning of leftist in the way some conservatives use the “liberal-leftist” combination, treating liberal as a modifying adjective. The Republican minority leader of the South Carolina Senate described a Democratic legislator as “one of the most liberal leftists that we have in the House,” and a letter-writer to the Palm Beach Post decried the influence of “extremely liberal leftists” in academia. Fifty years ago, those phrases would have sounded dyslexic—don’t you mean “extremely leftist liberals”? Now they suggest that liberal outflanks leftist in many people’s minds.
Some will be unhappy about seeing leftist become a mainstream category, not least people who still wear the label defiantly. But there’s this to say for it: The center divider would line up with the middle of the road.
A Fascist in Every Garage
When I lived in Rome many years ago, one of the best late-night gelato bars was a place in the upscale Parioli district that was frequented by the jeunesse dorée of the neighborhood, most of whom were partisans of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement. “Passiamo per i fascisti strada facendo,” people would say when they came out of a movie—“Let’s stop by the fascists on the way home.”
You wouldn’t hear that sort of familiar reference from Americans. Fascism has never really figured as an indigenous category of our political life, the way it has in Italy and other European nations. Not that we haven’t had our own right-wing fringe groups, but we usually call them by other names, like kooks or extremists, and we don’t generally expect to run into them dressed in Armani when we go to the ice-cream parlor. But that point might not be immediately obvious just by looking at newspapers or the Web, particularly now that fascist is back in fashion. It’s a word we throw around as easily as bastard, and with no more heed to its literal meaning.
Until the 1960s, the American press always spelled Fascism with a capital F, and used the word exclusively to describe the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and the like. It was only the international left that made fascist a vague indictment of capitalism and the right. Already in 1937, George Orwell was complaining that the communists had reduced the word to meaninglessness: “I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.” Yet even so, Orwell suggested that the word retained a certain core of emotional significance—to most people on the left, he said, it referred to “something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class.”
San Jose Mercury News, October 05, 2003
That was the small-f use of fascist that was picked up by American radicals of the sixties, at a moment when “polarizations were the common syntax [and] extremities were ordinary,” as Todd Gitlin has put it. The charge of “fascism” became a way of distancing yourself from the tired civilities of liberalism—the word could stand in for any form of social control that might disincline someone to work on Maggie’s farm no more. When William F. Buckley brought a defamation suit against the author of a 1969 book for calling him a fascist, the court ruled that the word was too vague to be actionable.
The collapse of the revolutionary movements of the sixties temporarily bleached fascist of its tone of rage. Over the following decades it was mostly a jocular description for anyone who was trying to impose rigid patterns of behavior. People talked about fas
hion fascists and wine fascists, and pinned fascistic on everything from anti-smoking ordinances to those annoying seat belts that lock you in automatically when you close the car door.
Now, though, “fascist” has been revived as a political epithet. The anger stirred up by the Iraq war and the Administration’s domestic anti-terrorism programs has many leftists pulling the word out of the closet, along with tie-dye t-shirts and chants of “hey hey ho ho.” An AltaVista search turns up more than 7,500 pages where “fascist” or “fascism” appears within ten words of “Ashcroft” or “Bush.”
True, not everything is the same as it was in the sixties. Antiwar demonstrators may call Bush and Ashcroft fascists, but you rarely hear them yelling “fascist pigs” at the police—a sign of the restraint that both protesters and cops have learned since the bloody confrontations in Chicago in 1968.
This time around, the right has taken up the epithet as well. Sometimes that’s appropriate, as when supporters of the Iraq war use “fascist” to describe Saddam Hussein’s regime. Saddam’s Iraq may not have been the kind of corporatist state that Mussolini and Hitler were trying to build, but it had a lot of the same substance and style as classical fascism: the militaristic nationalism, a secular religion of the state, and a government by secret police terror—not to mention grandiose public monuments and those silly high-peaked caps like the ones that German and Italian officers sported.
The only person who found anything to object to in that comparison was the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who complained to British journalists that Mussolini’s regime was far more benign than Saddam’s. “Mussolini never killed anyone,” he said—not entirely accurately. “Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile.” (Berlusconi later said that he had been tricked by the journalists into making the remarks while drinking a bottle of champagne “at the end of a long day, when I was very tired.” He didn’t withdraw the remarks, however.)
Still, it’s striking that few people were calling Saddam a fascist at the time of the first Gulf War thirteen years ago. In 1990, there were only eleven stories in major newspapers and magazines where someone described Saddam’s regime as fascist; over the past year there have been more than 150.
And it’s more of a stretch when people, generally on the right, use phrases like “Islamo-fascist” to describe Islamic fundamentalists. The Taliban government may have been a repressive theocracy, but it wasn’t particularly reminiscent of Hitler or Mussolini’s regimes, which tried to make religion subordinate to the cult of the state and the leader and which made a fetish of material progress. It’s as if the evils of the Taliban and bin Laden aren’t sufficient to the day—we can’t go after anyone now without comparing the campaign to the “good war” against Hitler, the embodiment of inexplicable evil, and everybody’s favorite argument in favor of preventive war. It’s part and parcel of the way appeaser was tacked on to anyone who had reservations about the Iraq war, in another strategic invocation of historical memory.
In fact the right has taken to using fascist with the reckless brio that we used to associate with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Rush Limbaugh has described Dick Gephardt’s health care program as fascist, and a few months ago the director of the American Conservative Union called Tim Robbins a fascist for complaining that the right-wing media are stifling dissent. When Jerry Springer was considering a run for the Senate in Ohio in July, the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg likened his rhetoric to that of a fascist demagogue.
The right’s new enthusiasm for the fascist label may be the result of the fall of Communism, which left old epithets like pinko and communistic sounding quaint and retro. (In recent years, in fact, Communism has grown a capital letter, even as fascism was losing its own—people think of Communism as a closed chapter in world history, bracketed by Lenin’s arrival at Finland Station on one end and the fall of the Berlin Wall on the other.)
There was a time when the right would routinely refer to the ACLU as communist sympathizers or a communist front. That association was implicit when the elder George Bush described Michael Dukakis as “a card-carrying member of the ACLU,” a phrase that echoed the way Senator McCarthy referred to members of the Communist Party. Nowadays, though, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly describes the group as a “fascist organization,” which “uses their legal clout to terrorize various school districts and individuals.” That’s as silly as the earlier charges that the group was communist. Real fascists don’t try to litigate their way to power—if they did, they wouldn’t have been fascists.
But then few of the Americans who use fascist nowadays have much interest in dotting their historical i’s. Like Big Brother or Orwellian, it’s a spandex specter that you can stretch over anything that smacks of excessive control and surveillance, whether it comes from the left, the right, or the seat-belt makers.
The loose use of fascist comes particularly easy to Americans. For most of the peoples of Europe, the word still conjures up a shameful episode that has to be lived down—or, in Berlusconi’s case, excused away. But we can toss the fascist label around with easy abandon, secure in the conviction that really “it can’t happen here,” as Sinclair Lewis ironically titled his 1935 novel about a fascist takeover of the United States. Americans may not have a vivid sense of history, but you can count on them to reject anything if you can persuade them to picture it in a high-peaked cap.
Class Dismissed
“Class warfare” is on a roll right now. The phrase has appeared in the press more often in the month of January 2003 than it did in the whole second half of 2002, and it’s on track to blow right by its previous two seasonal peaks. Those were in the summer of 2000, when Republicans were accusing Al Gore of waging class warfare in his presidential campaign, and back in 1995, when they were making the same charge about the Democratic critics of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America.
That conservatives keep coming back to the charge of “class warfare” is a sign of how well it works. Some liberals are willing to throw the phrase back at Bush—as New York Congressman Charles Rangel put it, “If this is class warfare, who started it?” But to most Americans, “class warfare” echoes too much of cloth caps and barricades. It’s like something out of Les Miz, not Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
What makes “class warfare” so alien? According to conservatives, it’s because Americans reject “the politics of envy,” another favorite phrase with a long pedigree—back in 1896, Theodore Roosevelt was accusing William Jennings Bryan of having “invoked the aid of mean and somber vices of envy, of hatred for the well-to-do.” As David Brooks put it in a New York Times op-ed piece, “[In America], people vote their aspirations. . . . [We] have always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon. . . . None of us is really poor; we’re just pre-rich.”
Fresh Air Commentary, January 28, 2003
Well, that’s one theory—that working Americans will welcome the Bush tax proposals in hopeful anticipation of the day when they’ll be living off their own stock dividends. But I suspect that the discomfort that Americans have with the notion of “class warfare” owes a lot to the way we use the word class itself—or rather to the way we don’t use it.
It’s notable that the conservatives who decry the politics of class warfare never go on to finish the thought—you never hear them talk about the virtues of “class cooperation.” In fact the phrases “class warfare” and “class envy” are pretty much the only place where the word “class” occurs at all in the American conservative lexicon—I mean, when it’s not preceded by “middle.” If you search on the speeches and statements at the whitehouse.gov Web site you’ll find fifty hits for “middle class,” but none at all for “working class.” You get a few more hits if you expand the search to “working families,” but that’s not the same thing—it’s the difference between the Bunkers and the Huxtables.
Needless to say, the phrase “upper-class” doesn’t appear at the whitehouse.gov site either. That phras
e has pretty much disappeared from American political discourse. People may still talk about upper-class neighborhoods or the upper-class character in a movie, but you very rarely see a phrase like “upper-class voters” or “upper-class taxpayers.”
The connection between “upper class” and income and power was already getting cloudy when Jay Gatsby moved to West Egg, and by now it’s almost too vague to define. You could see that in the exit polls conducted by the Voter News Service after the 2000 presidential elections. Not surprisingly, the 29 percent of voters who described themselves as “upper middle class” went for Bush over Gore by about a five-to-four margin. But the 4 percent of voters who described themselves as “upper class” actually voted three-to-two for Gore.
Just who were those voters, anyway? They clearly weren’t just the 4 percent at the top of the income scale—in fact, the same exit polls showed that voters with incomes over $100,000 went decisively for Bush. And it isn’t likely they were old-style patricians like the Bushes, the Auchinclosses, or the Rockefellers. That crowd certainly didn’t go three-to-two for Gore, and anyway they don’t make up anything like 4 percent of the population, which would come to around 6 million households—a figure a lot bigger than the circulation of Town and Country.
In fact, those self-styled upper-class voters were probably no different in income or social status from the ones who described themselves as upper-middle-class. They were simply the ones who were willing to say that an income of $100,000 a year put them in a privileged group—something that Democrats are more likely to own up to than Republicans are.
Conservatives like to say that class is an illusion in American life. As David Brooks puts it, “Americans do not see society as a layer cake, with the rich on top, the middle class beneath them and the working class and underclass at the bottom.” It makes you wonder why people use those phrases at all. But it’s significant that Brooks started that list with “the rich,” rather than “the upper class.” Americans have no qualms about acknowledging a distinction between the middle class and the working class—if they didn’t, where would that leave Roseanne or Bruce Springsteen? And we recognize the existence of an underclass, too, even if we usually describe it in racial or ethnic terms.