On Crypto-fascism and Brown Scares: A Reply to J. Arthur Bloom

I. Unmasking Crypto-Fascism

Happily, we live in a time when white supremacism, fascism,and other fringe-right ideas are excluded from mainstream political debate. Toopenly express sympathy for Nazism or the Confederacy is to be relegated to the margins of the public sphere—to be not only barred from any respectable public forum, but also denied standing in day-to-day political discussions, having forfeited all credibility simply by virtue of one’s stated views.

While some on the fringe right happily accept exile (with the highest-profile members getting a TakiMag column as a consolation prize), others are less willing to give up their mainstream influence. Indeed, to do so would be to give up any real chance of advancing the basic tenets of their ideology.

So what’s a neo-fascist missionary to do? The answer, of course, is to go undercover. Speak in dog whistles and lean heavily on implication; repackage old ideas to make them both attractive and not-so-easily-recognized; and hide behind obfuscation and esotericism. Thus, citations of David Duke are replaced by allusions to Evola, classic varieties of white supremacism are rebranded under the heading “tradition,” and scientific racism is passed off as “race realism”[1] or “human biological diversity.”

The role of the anti-fascist/anti-racist, then, is to identify closeted extremists such that their influence might be curbed. By situating their ideas within the broader constellation of fascist views that have rightly been judged intolerable, one can bring into stark relief the particular flaws of the views being advanced. At the same time, one can make clear that many of the views are being put forward in bad faith so as to cynically advance a fringe-right political agenda.

This is, unfortunately, a thankless task: absent an explicit admission of Nazi/Confederate/white supremacist sympathy—which, of course, will never be given—there will always be plausible deniability for those clever enough to hide their true views. The best the antifascist/antiracist can do is provide enough circumstantial evidence to justify the inference that a person’s stated views are really just proxies for a set of actually-held views too extreme for contemporary, fascist-hostile public discourse. Thus, in building the case against crypto-fascists, one must make do with guilt-by-association, subtle displays of apparent sympathy for the fringe right, and endorsements of views congruent with—though not necessarily constitutive of—white supremacy/neo-Nazism/etc.[2]

II. Bloom, Dampier, and Nazi-Soviet Comparisons

All this is a prelude to why I recently seized upon a tweet by J. Arthur Bloom, an editor at both the Daily Caller and Front Porch Republic (formerly The American Conservative) and a rising figure in the right wing intellectual scene. I had been keeping tabs on Bloom for a while due to his steady and favorable retweeting of a number of far right individuals—though, of course, only their most innocuous comments.

However, in the tweet in question, Bloom goes one step further.  He approvingly links to an essay by a writer who goes by “Henry Dampier,” a fringe-right figure whose declares himself to be “for hierarchy, against equality” in his Twitter bio. A bit of cursory research on Dampier find the author critiquing white nationalism from the right; endorsing the view that “Ideally we would today only allow male landowners to vote… as was intended [by the Founding Fathers];” and associating with a number of recognized white nationalists. For example, a bit of slightly-less-cursory research reveals that Dampier’s 83 friends on Facebook include American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor; “the neo-Nazi movement’s favorite academic,” Kevin MacDonald; white nationalist, Holocaust denier, and artist Charles Krafft;[3] The Bell Curve author, Charles Murray; Colin Liddell, who runs the white nationalist online mag Alternative Right—and Bloom.

Given these views and associations, one might reasonably wonder what Bloom is doing regularly reading and sharing Dampier’s work. But setting those details to the side, the particular essay shared by Bloom in the seized-upon tweet should raise red flags. Cheekily titled “Better Dead Than Red”—perhaps in homage to all those killed by Nazis in Soviet territories—one passage of the essay stands out, in particular:

Imagining that the Nazis won World War II is a popular jumping-off point for a lot of speculative fiction. The reader is supposed to feel glad that the Nazis did not in fact, win.
Unfortunately, a more brutal, cruel, and anti-human government won World War II — the Soviet Union.

Now, there is a lot going on in this passage, so it is worth taking some time to dissect it. First, there is the assertion that the Nazis were less “brutal, cruel, and anti-human” than the Soviet Union. This is already a tendentious claim that only people of a certain ideology are interested in advancing. By practically any metric, whether body count or evilness of motivation, the Nazis come out worse than the admittedly genocidal Soviets. The most up-to-date and accurate estimates maintain that approximately 6 million people were deliberately killed under Stalinism—a horrifically high figure that, nonetheless, falls far short of the 11 million non-combatants killed by Hitler. Things look even worse for the Nazis once one notes that this comparison fails to factor in the fact that Stalin had a significantly longer time period to carry out his murderous plans. And the comparison becomes more lopsided, still, once one factors in the significant extent to which Germany’s militaristic aggression responsible for WWII and the mass killing that resulted. 

So much for body count. But what about motive? As Timothy Snyder notes, although Hitler is generally the dictator who gets associated with genocide, Stalin, too, often had ethnic motivations lurking behind his extermination of certain populations (e.g., when he starved to death millions of Ukrainians during the 1930-1933 famine). However, Snyder nonetheless concludes that: 

Most of the Soviet killing took place in times of peace, and was related more or less distantly to an ideologically informed vision of modernization. Germany bears the chief responsibility for the war, and killed civilians almost exclusively in connection with the practice of racial imperialism.

Which motive one finds most reprehensible will have much to do with one’s political views. I will admit there is something about the racially-motivated systematic extermination of the Holocaust that strikes me as more horrific. The logic of racist mass killing seems built into Nazi ideology in such a way as to make the Holocaust seem more planned and deliberate—and, thus, more evil—than the Soviets’ butchery. But this is perhaps just the political temperament that separates me from Dampier and Bloom.

At the very least—and this is the key point—even if one cannot bring oneself to label either party the “real villain” given the villainy of both, it seems clear that there is no basis—whether one looks to body count or motive—for declaring the Nazis to be better than the Soviets. No basis, that is, except for hidden ideological sympathy for the Nazis.

However, Dampier does not rest content with the patently false—and, thus, likely ideologically-motivated—assertion that the Soviets were more brutal than the Nazis. No, he contends that it would have been better had the Nazis won the war. In stating that the reader of speculative fiction “is supposed to feel glad that the Nazis did not in fact, win,” Dampier is implying that this view is naïvely mistaken; but if it is mistaken to think “It’s good that the Nazi’s didn’t win,” then it logically follows that it would have been good had the Nazis won.

Let that sink in for a moment. Indeed, imagine what would have followed from a Nazi victory in WWII. For one thing, the Holocaust would have carried on, uninterrupted, until it reached its logical conclusion, namely the total extermination of Europe’s Jews, Gypsies, leftists, people with disabilities, and any other group that ran afoul of the Nazis’ racial vision. And this simply assumes that the Nazis had been somehow stopped in their tracks. However, given the seemingly zero-sum nature of the conflict between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, any Nazi victory would seemingly entail either full occupation of the USSR, or, at the very least, significant incursions into the latter’s territory. This would have increased the number murdered by the Nazis dramatically. As Snyder writes:

Germany invaded the Soviet Union with elaborate colonization plans. Thirty million Soviet citizens were to starve, and tens of millions more were to be shot, deported, enslaved, or assimilated.

The suggestion then, that it would have been better had the Nazis won, goes far beyond the Nazi apologia of the strict assertion that Stalin was worse than Hitler. Indeed, it is so implausible an assertion that it is hard to see how anyone who did not have tacit Nazi sympathies would put it into print.

Of course, it is not particularly surprising that someone whose online associates include a large number of infamous anti-Semites and white nationalists would hold such a view. What is significant, however, is that an editor for a number of prominent conservative publications would approvingly share this sentiment on Twitter. This is what I sought to emphasize when I pointed out Bloom’s tweet linking to the essay.

III. Neocons and “Brown Scares”

Now, however, Bloom has taken me to task for reading too much into things. In a blog post that obsessively combs through my Twitter archive and publically-available personal details—one can almost hear Bloom quietly snickering “You want to keep tabs on my activity? Well, two can play at that game!”—Bloom accuses me of being a “consummate brown scarer” who is not to be taken seriously.

First, he defends himself by arguing that, while the quoted passage of Dampier’s article is perhaps “a heterodox version of the story,” it is not particularly controversial, as “‘Yalta could have gone better’ is a fairly well-accepted point of view.”

One notices right away the non sequitur: the particular outcome of the negotiations following the defeat of Nazi Germany has nothing to do with claims comparing the Nazi and Soviet brutality or the assertion that things would have been had Germany won the war. It is unclear whether Bloom really believes that Dampier’s quoted paragraph asserts merely that “the post-World War II peace conceded far too much to the Soviet Union,” or if this is just the best spin he could come up with to obscure the actual content of the essay he shared. Either way, it seems clear that his characterization is a convenient misinterpretation of plainly-stated text.

Having effectively sidestepped the charges leveled against him, Bloom goes on the offensive, attacking me for “making common cause with neoconservatives” by cc’ing Michael Goldfarb, a “registered foreign agent and chairman of the Free Beacon, a neoconservative website that publishes unverified, fake propaganda from Senate offices intended to gin up the case for war in Ukraine.” This aggressive strategy, however, proves ill-advised: like a person struggling to escape quicksand, Bloom manages to only dig himself in deeper.

First, Bloom conveniently declines to elaborate on why I might have reached out to Goldfarb—so let me take this opportunity to fill in the gaps. Last summer, Goldfarb wrote a blistering takedown of Bloom, “whose pompous byline is outshined only by his paranoia about Jews—on both the left and right—and their plot to marginalize, using charges of anti-Semitism, young prodigies like him,” to use Goldfarb’s words.

Seizing upon a Fourth of July tweet where Bloom cheekily documented his visit to Jefferson Davis’ grave—a joke that really only makes sense if you assume Bloom has Confederate sympathies—Goldfarb angrily declares Bloom’s views to be “neo-Confederate, League-of-the-South bullshit.” Goldfarb also lays into Bloom for “good old-fashioned Jew-baiting,” accusing Bloom of using “neoconservative” as a dog whistle for “Jews,” focusing in particular on a passage by Bloom describing how neocons will “use their money machine” to defeat the populist aspirations of “the hayseeds in flyover country [who fill] their bodybags” and “the rowdy rednecks [who] start getting the impression they’re citizens instead of subjects.”

As Bloom notes, Goldfarb and I have pretty serious political disagreements—indeed, we probably disagree on most substantive political questions. And yet, we both seem to have independently arrived at the exact same conclusion about the exact same guy. Curious.

Notably, Bloom tries to explain away my accusations by painting me as a hysterical witch-hunter, hopelessly stabbing at brown shadows. Per his account, it is not his objective views that have given rise to my beliefs, but, rather, I have projected my oversensitive subjectivity onto him. However, this inference becomes much less plausible when one takes into consideration the fact that very differently-situated people have come to hold identical beliefs. You can only dismiss so many people as feverishly projecting before it starts to become apparent that maybe the problem lies not with them but with you.

IV. The Devil’s in the Details

That said, it is worth engaging with the substance of Bloom’s charges that I am a “consummate brown scarer.” Bloom seeks to sweep my concerns under the rug by undermining my credibility, so it is worth pushing back a bit against his particular arguments. Specifically, in order to support this contention, Bloom appears to have spent a not-insubstantial amount of time digging through my old tweets and favorites to find those most ripe for cherry-picking. So what was he able come up with?

Bloom’s Exhibit A is my assertions that “Ukraine and Russia are both full of fascists, and Cathy Young and David Frum are ‘apologists’ for the former.” Let’s consider these two points separately. First, it is curious that Bloom sneers at the suggestion that the Ukrainian revolution had significant fascist elements, as that fact is a fairly well-documented phenomenon. Indeed, in this video, one finds a Right Sector militia member declaring that what he wants for the Ukraine is “national socialism… Not like under Hitler, but in our own way, a little bit like that.” So it is unclear why Bloom thinks that documentation of this fact is supposed to undermine my credibility.

Next, consider the bit about David Frum and Cathy Young. With respect to whether or not they are, in fact, “apologists,” I will simply point to this tweet by Frum and let the reader decide whether my characterization is accurate in light of the evidence presented in the previous paragraph. More significant, though, is the fact that, only two paragraphs earlier, Bloom viciously denounced Goldfarb’s publication for publishing “fake propaganda… intended to gin up the case for war in Ukraine.” Yet, this is the exact criticism that I level at Frum and Young—and that Bloom casually dismisses as frivolous. It seems, then, that Bloom’s sharp criticisms of neoconservatives’ pushing for war in the Ukraine evaporate as soon the neocons start running interference for neo-fascist groups.

Bloom next accuses me of asserting that the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation “are ‘ideologically proximate’ to Nazis” based upon my claim that ideological proximity should be considered when deciding whether or not to attribute significance to a person following a neo-Nazi Twitter account. This accusation is deceptive for a number of reasons.

First, the point was not specific to either Heritage or Cato, but was a more general comment that ideological proximity has to be factored into inferences about who someone associates with on Twitter. This seems obvious: if you are a leftist following a fringe-right person, you are likely doing so to keep tabs on them; if you are a far right person following a slightly-further-right person, you are likely doing so because you are sympathetic to their views.

Even if one takes my tweet to be a comment on the specific fact that Cato and Heritage followed the Nazi party on Twitter, given the ideological distance between the Cato libertarians—at least the ones with whom I’m familiar—and the Nazis, I don’t consider the association telling. With respect to the Heritage Foundation, I will concede that I believe their views are more aligned with the Nazi party than those of anti-fascist groups, as per the tweet. I consider this to be obviously true. Indeed, the fact that Heritage at one point followed the Nazis on Twitter seems perhaps a bit more significant given that one of its staffers was forced to resign after it was revealed that his doctoral dissertation argued that Hispanics are genetically inferior to white Americans with respect to IQ.

(Subsequently it came out that the staffer had also contributed to Alternative Right—which, readers will recall, is run by one of Dampier’s many white supremacist Facebook friends—a white nationalist website founded by Richard Spencer, the chairman of the white supremacist National Policy Institute… and former editor of the American Conservative, the publication where Bloom got his start. The staffer also identified Charles Murray—who, readers will recall, is also friends with Dampier on Facebook—as a “childhood hero.” Another interesting connection: it appears that Bloom is a familiar reader of Alternative Right.)

So here, again, we have another totally benign tweet that Bloom tries to characterize as hysterical “brown baiting.” That said, given Bloom’s regular friendly interactions with various fringe-right figures on Twitter, it is understandable why he would want to discourage people from reading into such things.

Bloom’s final “damning” piece of evidence to support his claim that I see Nazi phantasms everywhere is a Twitter exchange I had with Reason writer Elizabeth Brown wherein I supposedly “brown-bait” her. Some brief context: Malcolm Harris wrote an article arguing that the state shouldn’t intervene when private individuals use force to deny neo-fascists the opportunity to speak. Brown then wrote a blog post attacking Harris, arguing that the state shouldn’t regulate speech. This rebuttal was obviously non-responsive, I pointed this out to Brown on Twitter, and she eventually issued a correction. Is there “brown-baiting” going on here? If so, I can’t see it. Indeed, one begins to wonder if it isn’t Bloom who is the hypersensitive one when it comes to charges of fascist sympathy.

If Bloom’s touchiness weren’t telling enough, there’s also the sense of desperation that pervades his post. Why go through the effort of scrounging through my digital history/writing out an entire blog post dedicated to character assassination if I were totally off base? Vindictiveness, perhaps? But that hardly seems worth the hassle. At one point in the essay, Bloom writes that “it’s only natural for the intellectual class to act like a cornered animal.” However, by the close of the essay, the metaphor seems more suggestive of Bloom, himself, backed into a corner, desperately lashing out to try to fend off what he knows to be the now-inevitable conclusion.

Footnotes

[1] If you follow the link, you’ll find an explicit admission by a white supremacist that novel terms like “race realism” are deliberately introduced so as to garner mainstream support:

Granted, any label “we” take on will be attacked, ignored, and called racist – however, the term “race realist” seems to have been developed in an attempt to gain mainstream traction, which has not happened. It has a propagandistic sound to it that is quickly detected by egalitarians, who are annoyed by what they perceive as a poor attempt at repackaging old and vile ideas. 

[2] I say a bit more about this methodology and possible accusations of “McCarthyism” and “brown scaring” in this post – see, in particular, my responses to questions two and three.

I should also note that I self-consciously use the labels “white supremacist,” “neo-fascist,” “white nationalist,” “neo-Confederate,” “neo-Nazi,” “fascist,” interchangeably. This imprecision admittedly blurs real distinctions in ideology, but also helps to highlight the common threads of racial hierarchy and anti-Semitism that unify these otherwise-distinct groups. Further, given the difficulties inherent in identifying a crypto-“fascist,” it is practically impossible to identify the specific subset of the far right with which the person in question covertly identifies. By using these terms interchangeably, I intend to convey that, while the evidence underdetermines which particular term is the accurate description, at least one the terms used likely characterizes the person’s views.

[3] While not necessarily an endorsement, one might be interested to note that Bloom has featured Krafft’s art on his Tumblr, right-wing art.