The great Eric Hoffer wrote The True Believer, a classic meditation on the fanatic. Hoffer is a bit of a mystery as there seems to be some dispute about his early life. What we know is the fascist and communist movements were in full bloom during the first half of his life. He would have been 15 when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar. He was in his twenties when Fascism got going in Italy and Germany. He was in his 30’s when Hitler reigned over Europe.
In 1952, when he wrote the book, that was the frame of reference from which he worked. He was a longshoreman, so he would have been very familiar with the union movement in America and the men who were attracted to it. Some would argue that Jacobinism was the first secular religion, but it is fair to say that communism and fascism were the first to sink roots outside their native lands. They are certainly the only ones to have real staying power.
There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then. Marxism and communism have lost all credibility because of mathematics. The claims to science by the early promoters of those religions seem laughable today. That’s true even if you are skeptical of global capitalism. The piles of corpses make it impossible to accept the premises of these great secular religions from the last century.
Fascism suffered a similar fate for obvious reasons. Like a virus, however, it had mutated several times prior to the denouement of German fascism. In Spain and Portugal, it took on a distinctly Catholic nature. In America, it attached itself to Progressivism, like an ideological parasite, influencing the Left in minor ways. Despite what Jonah Goldberg claims in his book, Liberal Fascism, the American Left is not fascist.
Fascism had another problem for Americans. In Europe, you have relatively small states with people conditioned to living under the rule of an elite. They are fairly homogenous and all white. America through the 19th century was a hodgepodge of voluntary associations. The national government was limited to managing trade and foreign affairs. State government was limited to public works. Everything else was hashed out by individuals and their neighbors as they saw fit.
That changed with the waves of immigration, but that old ethos was still strong among the ruling elite into the 20th century. It was very strong in the heartland among normal Americans. Throw in the ethnic, racial and cultural divisions and a unifying religion like fascism could never work the same wit worked in Europe. Then you have to throw in the fact that America was always a very Christian nation. Secular religions cannot coexist with Christianity.
The virus mutated, however, from what we think of as fascism, and attached itself to the ruling ideology of the American empire. There was a subset of fascism that preached an internationalism, which was more like a federation of fascist nations, bound together by a common interest among the fascist elites. That seems to be what survived and is now flourishing in American and Europe.
Today’s American Progressive is as much a true believer as the Nazis though. They sign onto the cause out of a desire to belong to something they see as superior to themselves. Joining a movement is an act of self-abnegation. The adherent swaps their identity for that of the group. In the case of the modern Progressive, they seek salvation. Taking on the identity of the group allows the adherent to be saved from his sinful self. Rigorously enforcing the internal codes of conduct is the proof. The Calvinist element of Progressivism remains.
Over the last half century scholars have described the Nazi, the Bolshevik and the fascist fairly well. We really don’t have a similar taxonomy for the modern Progressives. Like pornography, you immediately know one when you mean them, but they are hard to describe. Everyone knows that person who was a little flaky and little lefty, but then they went full-on crazy with some form of radical politics. It’s like a form of mental illness than gets progressively worse.
Mental illness is not a bad metaphor. When you run across posts in mainstream publications titled “Taking Carbon Personally” you have to assume the author and audience are struggling to keep it together. These bare the people with “COEXIST” stickers on their car, but they live in the whitest neighborhoods on earth. That worry about racism, but would not be caught dead on a street named after Malcom X. It’s as if they can’t see themselves or hear what they are saying.