By the end of the decade, the civil rights movement had for all intents and purposes become a Black Power movement. And Black Power, with its clenched fists, Afro-pagan mythology, celebration of violence, emphasis on racial pride, and disdain for liberalism, was arguably America's most authentic indigenous fascism. Stokely Carmichael — at one time the "prime minister" of the Black Panther Party — himself defined Black Power (a term he originated) as "a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created."59 Carmichael shared Hitler's dream of building a folkish racial state upon the ashes of the old order.
Indeed, when one reads the racial indoctrination taught to the children of Nazi Germany, it's difficult to see the difference between Carmichael's black pride and Hitler's German pride. "What is the first Commandment of every National Socialist?" asked a Nazi catechism. "Love Germany above all else and your ethnic comrade as your self!" The connections between Black Nationalism and Nazism, Fascism, and other supposedly right-wing racist groups aren't merely theoretical — or recent. Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Back to Africa movement, admitted in 1922 that his ideology was perfectly simpatico with Mussolini's. "We were the first fascists," he declared. Indeed, his rhetoric was often eerily consonant with German fascism: "Up You Mighty Race, Accomplish What You Will," "Africa for the Africans...at Home and Abroad!" and so forth. In the 1960s Elijah Muhammad, the head of the Nation of Islam, formed a cordial relationship with George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell was even invited to speak at the Nation of Islam National Convention in 1962, at which he praised Elijah Muhammad as the black Adolf Hitler. On January 28, 1961, Muhammad sent Malcolm X to Atlanta to negotiate an agreement with the Ku Klux Klan whereby the Klan would support a separate black state.60
More generally, the Black Power movement became addicted to violence, setting the tone for the white left. H. Rap Brown had exhorted his followers to "do what John Brown did, pick up a gun and go out and shoot our enemy." Malcolm X repeatedly exhorted blacks to employ "any means necessary." James Forman, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, declared that if he were assassinated, he'd want in retaliation "10 war factories destroyed...one Southern governor, two mayors and 500 racist white cops dead." Good thing he belonged to an avowedly nonviolent group! Benjamin Chavis, the future head of the NAACP, first attained national recognition when he was arrested and convicted as a member of the Wilmington Ten, a group that allegedly conspired to firebomb a grocery store and then shoot the police when they responded to the scene.61 And always and everywhere there were the Panthers, in their paramilitary garb and black shirts sporting fascistic or militaristic ranks and titles (minister of defense, minister of information), robbing banks, calling for the slaughter of "pigs" and honkies, staging ambushes for police, kidnapping judges and children, and calling for a separate black state.
Meanwhile, what of the supposedly fascistic American right? While the New Left relentlessly denounced the founding fathers as racist white males and even mainstream liberals ridiculed the idea that the text of the Constitution had any relevance for modern society, conservatives were launching an extensive project to restore the proper place of the Constitution in American life. No leading conservative scholar or intellectual celebrated fascist themes or ideas. No leading conservative denigrated the inherent classical liberalism of the United States' political system. To the contrary, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, Jr., and the conservatives around National Review dedicated themselves to restoring the classically liberal vision of the founders.
What confused the left then and now about American conservatism is that love and support for one's country do not necessarily put one on the road to fascism. Patriotism is not the same thing as extreme nationalism or fascism. The Nazis killed a great many German patriots whose love of their homeland was deep and profound. In a sense, one of the Jews' greatest offenses was that they were patriotic Germans. It was in the 1960s that the left convinced itself that there is something fascistic about patriotism and something perversely "patriotic" about running down America. Anti-Americanism — a stand-in for hatred of Western civilization — became the stuff of sophisticates and intellectuals as never before. Flag burners became the truest "patriots" because dissent — not just from partisan politics, but from the American project itself — became the highest virtue. In 2003 the professor at Columbia who hoped America would face "a million Mogadishus" is a patriot in the eyes of the left. But Americans eager to maintain limited government — of all things! — are somehow creeping fascists.
Witnessing how the brutality and wanton destruction of the Nazis had swept Hitler to power, the novelist Thomas Mann wrote in his diary that this was a new kind of revolution, "without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice." The "common scum" had won the day, "accompanied by vast rejoicing on the part of the masses."62 Liberals in the 1960s who lived through a similar degradation of decency by the same intellectual rot began to rebel. Confronted with an ideology that always assumed America was the problem and never the solution, they chose to mount a counterassault. These patriots in both parties became in large part that band of intellectuals known as neoconservatives. They were given that name by leftists who thought the prefix "neo" would conjure associations with neo-Nazis.
But since the testimony of neoconservatives counts for nothing in most corners of liberal thought, it's worth noting that even some titans of the left still had the clarity of vision to understand what they were dealing with. Irving Louis Horowitz, a revered leftist intellectual (he was the literary executor of C. Wright Mills) specializing in revolutionary thought, saw in 1960s radicalism a "fanatic attempt to impose a new social order upon the world, rather than await the verdict of consensus-building formulas among disparate individuals as well as the historical muses." And he saw this fanaticism for what it was: "Fascism returns to the United States not as a right-wing ideology, but almost as a quasi-leftist ideology."63
Peter Berger, a Jewish refugee from Austria and a respected peace activist and left-wing sociologist (he helped popularize the phrase "social construction of reality"), saw much the same thing. When "observing the [American] radicals in action, I was repeatedly reminded of the storm troopers that marched through my childhood in Europe." He explored a long list of themes common to 1960s radicalism and European fascism and concluded they formed a "constellation that strikingly resembles the common core of Italian and German fascism." In 1974 A. James Gregor wrote The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics, which synthesized and cataloged these trends with sweeping detail and intellectual rigor. "In the recent past," he observed, "student radicals and the 'new left' have legitimized a political style calculated to be maximally serviceable to an American variant of fascism."
Even some in the SDS recognized that the more extreme members were degenerating into fascism. An editorial in the Campaigner (published by the New York and Philadelphia Regional Labor Committee of the Students for a Democratic Society) observed of the SDS faction that spawned the Weathermen, "There is a near identity between the arguments of anarchists (around the Columbia strike movement, e.g.) and Mussolini's polemics for action against theory, against program."64