Introduction

On August 11–12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, hundreds of mostly young men gathered in the center of the town once frequented by Thomas Jefferson. They were carrying torches, waving Nazi and white supremacist flags, and issuing genocidal threats to whole groups. They were there ostensibly to protest the removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee, as voted on by the city council.

But according to organizers, the purpose of the “Unite the Right” rally was broader. It was to be an unveiling of a new movement. The use of the term “right” here is fascinating because the organizers considered this term inclusive of the Ku Klux Klan and self-described Nazis. The presentation they made was something of a trauma for many people—even all over the world—because few had fully understood the violent and destructive social forces that had been simmering beneath the surface of American life until that day.

What is this thing we have encountered, this strange movement that is alive and growing in Europe and the United States? What do these people want? What is their ideological origin? Can it really be considered “right wing,” and, if so, in what respect? This book seeks to answer these questions.

The rise of the so-called alt-right is the most unexpected ideological development of our time. Most people of the current generation lack a sense of the historical sweep of the intellectual side of the right-wing collectivist position. It represents the revival of a tradition of interwar collectivist thought that might at first seem like a hybrid but was distinctly mainstream between the two world wars. It is anti-communist but not for the reasons that were conventional during the Cold War, that is, because communism opposed freedom in the liberal tradition. Right-collectivism also opposes traditional liberalism. It opposes free trade, freedom of association, free migration, and capitalism understood as a laissez-faire free market. It rallies around nation and state as the organizing principles of the social order—and trends in the direction of favoring one-man rule—but positions itself as opposed to leftism traditionally understood.

We know about certain fascist leaders from the mid-20th century, but not the ideological orientation that led to them or the ideas they left on the table to be picked up generations later. For the most part, and until recently, it seemed to have dropped from history. Meanwhile, the prospects for social democratic ideology are fading, and something else is coming to fill that vacuum. What is it? Where does it come from? Where is it leading?

This book seeks to fill the knowledge gap, to explain what this movement is about and why anyone who genuinely loves and longs for liberty classically understood needs to develop a nose and instinct for spotting the opposite when it comes in an unfamiliar form. We need to learn to recognize the language, the thinkers, the themes, the goals of a political ethos that is properly identified as fascist.

Why the designation “right wing”? It’s a fair question, because the history of right and left is enormously complicated and the definitions are always changing. If by left, you mean anything trending toward despotism, and, if by right, you mean anything trending toward freedom, my use of the term “right wing” here will make no sense to you. But that leaves us with a problem. It doesn’t make much sense to describe, for example, both Karl Marx and Carl Schmitt as “left wing” when Schmitt’s entire ideological apparatus was constructed in overt opposition to Marx. And it doesn’t account for why some of the most successful tyrannies of the 20th century rose in opposition to communism and turned out to be just as dangerous as the thing they opposed.

I will argue for the designation of “right wing” on grounds that these movements appropriate certain rightist themes for despotic ends. They denounce the decadent and “degenerate” left and speak about family, faith, nation, and even property. But this rhetoric is not deployed in the interest of bourgeois freedom but rather as political rhetoric designed to rally a specific middle-class demographic to their side. They can rail against the leftist takeover of media and academy with the best of them, but their interest is not in allowing maximum personal and economic liberty but rather constraining both in the service of nation, state, blood, soil, throne, and altar. Most often these people are granted motive force by the perception that leftism is on the rise and needs to be combated; indeed, that is the origin of the fascist movements of the last 100 years. But what they want instead is something other than freedom; it is a new form of comprehensive social and economic control.

A distinct trait of right-wing collectivism is its obsession with demographics. This fits with the overall ideology, which is focused not on class but deep identity issues that frequently default to race and ethnicity. Ludwig von Mises wrote of Nazism in 1947 that “It aimed at abolishing laissez-faire not only in the production of material goods, but no less in the production of men.” This is true of most forms of fascism: it goes after hard targets, through a variety of means from migration controls to eugenics to birth planning and procreation control. Anarchy in the production of people is not tolerated. In a strange way, this makes sense. If you seek to control the social order, really control it, you have to start with controlling population demographics.

Our generation has little real-world experience to deal with reactionary movements and their effects. What I will try to show is that such rightist thought has deep roots tracing to the early 19th century, when the followers of Hegel split into right and left branches, depending on whether one believed that the Prussian state and church did or did not provide the end point of cultural evolution. The rightists went one way and the left went another. They both pushed a revolt against the liberal upheaval that fundamentally changed the social and demographic structure of Western society. Right and left, in many different national experiences, proposed different ways to deal with what they regarded as a disaster in the making. Each had its own version of revanchism, that is, an agenda focused on reclaiming previously conquered territory they believe was taken away, a demand to put back under control what has been lost to freedom. To put it another way, these are the people who wanted to dig up the body of Adam Smith and hang him in effigy.

What I’m calling right-wing collectivism really does represent a semi-coherent tradition of thought: the language, themes, resentments, answers, and visions are consistent for some two hundred years, intensifying by the decade. I trace this tradition in the course of this book.

I do want to add a caveat on the matter of Donald Trump, mostly because some chapters herein address his outlook and administration. I have been outspoken in explaining the quasi-fascist origins of some features of his policies. The book republishes an essay I wrote July 2015, just as the campaign for president opened. I had just finished re-reading Mises’s Omnipotent Government from 1944, his most focused and extended discussion of fascist/Nazi ideology. The parallels in thematics and policy were remarkably similar. It was this day that I realized that much more needed to be said on this. However, it would be too easy to characterize this book as an oppositional tract. It is not. Not everything he favors is bad and not everything that the administration pushes should be opposed. Indeed, to the extent that any leader or regime favors any degree of deregulation or tax cuts (ideas tossed out much later in the campaign), or more peaceful foreign relations, that is something that any adherent of traditional liberalism should favor, regardless of partisan issues. But what is at the core of the governing philosophy and what is a superficial add on to make the rest palpable to as many people as possible? This is the more profound question.

What I’m urging is a greater awareness of the ideology we are dealing with here, and a greater consciousness on the part of supporters of freedom that they are not actually part of the left/right spectrum, with a particular focus on the most neglected part of that spectrum. Once you understand this, books like F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) make much more sense. His warning concerned the symbiotic relationship between left and right forms of totalitarianism, and the failure dynamic between them.

In 1956 (the date is significant), FEE’s founder Leonard Read wrote the following:

“Left” and “right” are each descriptive of authoritarian positions. Liberty has no horizontal relationship to authoritarianism. Libertarianism’s relationship to authoritarianism is vertical; it is up from the muck of men enslaving man…. What, actually, is the difference between communism and fascism? Both are forms of statism, authoritarianism. The only difference between Stalin’s communism and Mussolini’s fascism is an insignificant detail in organizational structure. But one is “left” and the other is “right”! Where does this leave the libertarian in a world of Moscow word-making? The libertarian is, in reality, the opposite of the communist. Yet, if the libertarian employs the terms “left” and “right,” he is falling into the semantic trap of being a “rightist” (fascist) by virtue of not being a “leftist” (communist). This is a semantic graveyard for libertarians, a word device that excludes their existence. While those with Moscow relations will continue this theme, there is every reason why libertarians should avoid it.

What Read most likely could not have imagined is that this terminology would survive the Cold War and come roaring back in the 21st century. What’s more, he would be shocked to see so many libertarians of our time thoroughly confused about where we fit within the left/right structure. The answer is that we do not. But to see that requires that we know more.

And keep in mind, this is not just an intellectual parlor game. We are at a turning point in the history of freedom. We have the technology today to enable unprecedented freedom and empowerment for all. We have legacy states that are holding us back. We have power structures looking for a rationale for their rule. As I argue in this book, the social democratic welfare/planning state is tired, spent, and increasingly unpopular. The question is: what will replace it? Will it be freedom or some differently branded form of social and economic control? This is why right-wing collectivism matters right now. It is vying for the position of becoming a ruling ideological structure that can delay and reverse the progress we are making (mostly through technology rather than political change) toward universal freedom. It seems inconceivable that we could repeat the history of the interwar years in a slightly different form but nothing is impossible when bad ideas win out over good ones.

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During the last two years, the pages of FEE.org (of which I’m the editor) have covered this topic in detail. Most of the essays in this book first appeared in some form at FEE as part of its daily content. I can speak for all the contributors of FEE in offering a special note of thanks to the board, donors, staff, and readers of FEE for the support for this great institution, which has maintained its principled stand for liberty since its founding in 1946.

In addition, many people have contributed mightily to my own understanding of this topic, through ongoing suggestions for reading. There are too many to name but I would like to make special mention of intellectual assistance from Danny Sanchez, Lawrence Reed, Wayne Olson, Richard Lorenc, Tom Palmer, Stephan Kinsella, Laurie Rice, Steve Horwitz, Jonah Goldberg, Thomas Leonard, Deirdre McCloskey, and countless numbers of commentators on social media who have provided continual feedback.

We are living in hard times for liberal philosophy. We can overcome them only through greater understanding of our past struggles and future challenges. True lovers of human ennoblement through freedom need a greater consciousness of who we are, what we’ve achieved in the past, and what it is going to take to make a rational and persuasive case against both left and right, and for something beautiful and true that can renew the face of the earth.

—Jeffrey A. Tucker