Ever since the 1930s, there has been a tendency to see big business — "industrialists," "economic royalists," or "financial ruling classes" — as the real wizards behind the fascist Oz. Today's liberals are just the latest inheritors of this tradition. On the conspiratorial left, for example, it is de rigueur to call George W. Bush and Republicans in general Nazis. The case is supposedly bolstered by the widely peddled smear that Bush's grandfather was one of the industrialists who "funded" Hitler.1 But even outside the fever swamps, the notion that liberals must keep a weather eye on big business for signs of creeping fascism is an article of faith. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recycles this theme when he writes, "The rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930s offers many lessons on how corporate power can undermine a democracy. Mussolini complained that 'fascism should really be called corporatism.' Today, George Bush and his court are treating our country as a grab bag for the robber barons." Countless others have echoed these sentiments, arguing, in the words of Norman Mailer, that America is already a "pre-fascist" society run by corporations and their lickspittles in the Republican Party. The political scientist Theodore Lowi has said that the Republicans are "friendly fascists, a dominant effort to combine government and corporations." The Canadian novelist John Ralston Saul argues in his book The Unconscious Civilization that we live in a corporatist-fascist society but we are unwilling to see it. Corporate CEOs, Saul laments, are "the true descendants of Benito Mussolini."2
There is much unintentional truth to this collective diagnosis, but these would-be physicians have misread both the symptoms and the disease. In the left's eternal vigilance to fend off fascism, they have in fact created it, albeit with a friendly face. Like a medieval doctor who believes that mercury will cure madness, they foster precisely the sickness they hope to remedy. Good medicine, like good economics, depends on discarding unproven mythology. Yet for nearly a century the left and liberals have been using textbooks brimming with superstition. These myths are entwined with one another in a magnificent knot of confusion. Among the strands of this knot are the palpably false notions that big business is inherently right-wing or conservative (in the American sense); that European fascism was a tool of big business; and that the way to keep business from corrupting government is for government to regulate business to within an inch of its life.
In reality, if you define "right-wing" or "conservative" in the American sense of supporting the rule of law and the free market, then the more right-wing a business is, the less fascist it becomes. Meanwhile, in terms of economic policy, the more you move to the political center, as defined in American politics today, the closer you get to true fascism. If the far left is defined by socialism and the far right by laissez-faire, then it is the mealymouthed centrists of the Democratic Leadership Council and the Brookings Institution who are the true fascists, for it is they who subscribe to the notion of the Third Way, that quintessentially fascistic formulation that claims to be neither left nor right.3 More important, these myths are often deliberately perpetuated in order to hasten the transformation of American society into precisely the kind of fascist — or corporatist — nation liberals claim to oppose. To a certain extent we do live in a fascistic "unconscious civilization," but we've gotten here through the conscious effort of liberals who want it that way.4
CUI BONO?
The notion that fascism was a tool of big business is one of the most persistent and enduring myths of the past century. It has been parroted by Hollywood, countless journalists, and generations of academics (though not necessarily by historians who specialize in the subject). But as Chesterton said, fallacies do not cease to be fallacies simply because they become fashions.
Doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism defined fascism as "the most reactionary and openly terroristic form of the dictatorship of finance capital, established by the imperialistic bourgeoisie to break the resistance of the working class and all the progressive elements of society." Trotsky, an admirer of Mussolini's, conceded that fascism was a "plebeian movement in origin" but that it was always "directed and financed by big capitalist powers."5 This interpretation was fore-ordained because by the 1920s communists were convinced that they were witnessing capitalism's long overdue collapse. Marxist prophecy held that the capitalists would fight back to protect their interests rather than face extinction in the new socialist era. When fascism succeeded in Italy, communist seers simply declared, "This is it!" At the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922, less than a month after the March on Rome — long before Mussolini consolidated power — the assembled communists settled on this interpretation with little debate over the actual facts on the ground.
That the defeated Italian Reds had already spread the rumor that their former comrade had betrayed the movement for his thirty pieces of silver only made this self-serving myth easier to swallow. Convinced that they alone were on the side of the people, the Reds responded to every political defeat by asking, "Cui bono?" — "Who benefits?" The answer had to be the ruling capitalists. "Fascism" thus became a convenient label for "desperate capitalists."
Ever since, whenever the left has met with political defeat, it has cried, "Fascism!" and insisted the fat cats were secretly pulling the strings. Max Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School Freudian Marxist, declared that no anticapitalist theories of fascism could even be entertained. "Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism." "Central to all socialist theories of fascism," writes the historian Martin Kitchen, "is the insistence on the close relationship between fascism and industry." Yale's Henry Ashby Turner calls this an "ideological straightjacket" that constrains virtually all Marxist-influenced scholarship. "Almost without exception...these writings suffer, as do those of 'orthodox' Marxists, from over-reliance on questionable, if not fraudulent scholarship, and from egregious misrepresentation of factual information."6 In point of fact, there is zero evidence that Mussolini was the pawn of monolithic "big capitalism." Far from being uniformly supportive of fascism, big business was bitterly divided right up until Mussolini seized power. Fascist intellectuals, moreover, were openly contemptuous of capitalism and laissez-faire economics.
This socialist mythology became even cruder in response to Nazism. Hitler's success horrified the communists, though not because the communists were delicate little flowers. Nazi tactics in the 1920s were no more barbaric than communist tactics. What terrified the Reds was the fact that the Browns were beating them at their own game. Like Macy's bad-mouthing Gimbels, the Bolsheviks and their sympathizers mounted a desperate campaign to discredit Nazism. Marxist prophecy, it turned out, also made for good propaganda. Stalin personally issued orders never to use the word "socialist" when referring to fascists — even when fascists routinely identified themselves as socialists — and later, under the doctrine of social fascism, instructed followers to dub all competing progressive and socialist ideologies "fascist." Meanwhile, the left-wing press in Germany and throughout the West became a transmission belt for one bogus rumor after another that German industrialists were bankrolling the mad corporal and his Brownshirts. The success of this propaganda effort remains the chief reason liberals continue to link capitalism and Nazism, big business and fascism.
This is all nonsense, as we've seen. The National Socialist German Workers' Party was in every respect a grassroots populist party. Party leaders spouted all sorts of socialist prattle about seizing the wealth of the rich. Mein Kampf is replete with attacks on "dividend-hungry businessmen" whose "greed," "ruthlessness," and "short-sighted narrow-mindedness" were ruining the country. Hitler adamantly took the side of the trade union movement over "dishonorable employers." In 1941 he was still calling big-business men "rogues" and "cold-blooded money-grubbers" who were constantly complaining about not getting their way. When the left charged that Hitler was being funded by the capitalists, he responded that these were nothing but "filthy lies." In particular, German leftists claimed that the capitalist icon Hugo Stinnes was Hitler's secret patron — a charge for which there is still no evidence. Hitler exploded in rage at the suggestion. After all, he'd demonized Stinnes in speeches and articles for quite some time. Stinnes believed that economic improvement and not political revolution would solve Germany's woes, a view that Hitler considered sacrilegious.7