The last time I had any reason to “care” about Naomi Wolf, she was trying to explain bukaki to teenagers during the Clinton years. I put “care” in quotes because I was really just laughing at her and the rest of the feminist trolls for becoming living, breathing contradictions to everything feminism had asserted for fifty years.
Here you had Bill Clinton carrying on like the male chauvinist pig of feminist lore and everyone of these broads was not just excusing him, they wanted to be in his bukaki pit. There’s hypocrisy and then there is American feminism. They talk like Susan B. Anthony, but fantasize about being a naughty June Cleaver.
Anyway, this crossed my path the other day. I’ve noted that the Left seems to be entering the paranoid stage as this wave ebbs. Given that fascism and American liberalism have so much in common and their origins are so tightly intertwined, it seems odd that the Cult would be so fearful of their brother. There’s two theories for the American Left’s obsession with fascism. One ties back to the old schism in socialism that happened in the early 20th century in Europe. The other ties back to the FDR years when every good Progressive in the English speaking world thought Mussolini was the future. I’ll get back to this in a minute.
First, this from the biographical blurb deserves attention:
Naomi Wolf played a leading role in so-called “third-wave” feminism and as an advocate of “power feminism,” which holds that women must assert themselves politically in order to achieve their goals. She advised the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
Western feminism has made some memorable theoretical mistakes; a major one is the frequent assumption that, if women held the decision-making power in society, they would be “kinder and gentler” (a phrase devised for George H.W. Bush in 1988 to appeal to the female vote). Indeed, so-called “second-wave” feminist theory abounds in assertions that war, racism, love of hierarchy, and general repressiveness belong to “patriarchy”; women’s leadership, by contrast, would naturally create a more inclusive, collaborative world.
The problem is that it has never worked out that way, as the rise of women to leadership positions in Western Europe’s far-right parties should remind us. Leaders such as Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front, Pia Kjaersgaard of Denmark’s People’s Party, and Siv Jensen of Norway’s Progress Party reflect the enduring appeal of neofascist movements to many modern women in egalitarian, inclusive liberal democracies.
The past is prologue: Wendy Lower’s recent book Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields adds more data to the long record of women embracing violent right-wing movements. And the rise of far-right movements in Europe – often with women in charge – confronts us with the fact that the heirs to the fascism of the 1930’s have their own gender-based appeal.
One obvious reason for the success of women like Le Pen, Kjaersgaard, and Jensen is their value for packaging and marketing their parties. Just as Bush sought to revamp the Republican Party’s “brand’ of cold-hearted elitism and hostility to women, so Europe’s far-right parties today must appeal to citizens by not seeming dangerously extreme and marginal. How dangerous can the movement be, after all, if women are speaking for it? Such parties come to be seen as more mainstream, and their appeal to traditionally harder-to-win women supporters receives a boost.
In the last couple of years as the Obama clown show staggers to a dismal conclusion, Progressive cranks like Wolf have been wringing their hands over the rise of fascism again. It is a familiar game. The 1950′s were allegedly a revival of fascism, according to the Left, because Americans were happy, prosperous and being fruitful. For death cults like American Liberalism, everything is upside down. They spent the sixties allegedly fighting fascism, which was just an excuse to swing a wrecking ball through the traditional American life of their parents.
Fascism took a holiday in the 1970′s, but it came back in the 1980′s only to go back on holiday in the 1990′s. But, the fear of Hitler was back in full for the Bush years. I still chuckle thinking about some of my liberal friends fretting over “BusHitler” trampling the Constitution. The core of what these people believe starts with the end of the Constitution, yet they expected thinking people to take seriously their concerns for liberty. Listening to my friend Jim (a foaming at the mouth lefty) was like hearing a guard at Auschwitz fret over the plight of the Jews. But, that’s how cults work. They lack any capacity to self-examine.
Now here we are with the folks who want the state snuffing out the unfit in order to save on health care claiming to be worried about the rise of fascism on the “right.” This I think gets to the real origins of Progressive fear of fascism. Their total lack of self-awareness blinds them to the similarities between their cult and their ideological relative on the Continent. Fascism is a uniquely Continental phenomenon until it was imported into America. Malcolm Cowley, the founder of The New Republic, was an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini and fascism before you know who came along.
This deranged lack of self-awareness is tough to grasp at times, because it is so unlike what normal people experience. All of us are self-conscious to some degree. The last bit of the quoted passage I bolded is a good example. The Cult of Modern Liberalism is thoroughly and completely elitist. It is the religion of the ruling elite. You sure as hell are not going to hear a debate about third wave feminism in the ghetto or on the job site. You are not going to hear Rotary Club Republicans advocating euthanasia or forced sterilization of the unfit. Those are topics discussed by Progressive in the faculty lounge.
That’s a big reason why Progressives have made fascism their eternal bogeyman. It’s a form of projection. They hate this truth about themselves, but cannot face up to it without blowing the whole religion up in the process. It gets deeply internalized to the point they can no longer recognize it in themselves. The fear and hatred are still there so when they go looking for a scapegoat or a bogeyman, they inevitably call it a fascist.
That’s the other half of this. As this Progressive wave ebbs and the people notice the garbage left behind from the flood, the Cult seeks to cast the spotlight on some other. It has already started, for example, with health care. The law passed by the Left is a disaster.Instead of defending it, they are out attacking various bogeymen for failing to fix it.
That sounds insane – and it is -but it is not intended to convince. It is intended to distract. Inevitably, the Cult will be out bellowing about the growing threat of fascism in an effort to distract everyone from the mess they have left behind during this wave of Liberalism.
Their faulty education has left them deracinated: they know not what they do.