Anti-demons.

In my little suburb not long ago, some local leftists organized an “anti-fascist” demonstration. Or, as the flyers put it:

ANTI-FASCIST AND ANTI-RACIST
DEMONSTRATION

The flyers were decorated with a cartoon of a masked thug stomping on a giant swastika. The demonstration must have gone down without any actual Nazi-stomping, because I didn’t hear anything further about it. Later the posters disappeared, except for one near my apartment which had been affixed to a transformer box with some kind of glue. The city worker assigned to remove it had only managed to peel off a vertical strip, leaving:

ANTI-
DEMONS

***

In the wake of the white nationalist Richard Spencer getting punched in the face by a demonstrator on the day of President Trump’s inauguration, I noticed a bunch of articles in the popular press more or less openly celebrating physical attacks on Nazis. Here for instance is the AV Club describing a Nazi-punching video game as “constructively violent”, and here is Comics Alliance approvingly quoting the left-wing comics writer Warren Ellis on one’s moral obligation to punch not only Nazis but those who support Nazis’ right to go out in public without being punched. (If I’m understanding the purport of the comic excerpted at the bottom of the page, Comics Alliance endorses the tossing of Nazis off balconies, too.)

Many articles of this type were illustrated with the famous cover of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Captain America #1, with Cap braving a hail of bullets to sock Hitler in the jaw – a tad more glorious than the reality of a thug in a mask sucker-punching an unprotected private citizen then darting off into the crowd. My own apparently quaint view is that physical assault is a crime for very good and very obvious reasons, and that people who commit that crime ought to be prosecuted, and their actions condemned, however outrageous the speech they claim to have provoked them. I guess this makes me a reactionary nowadays.

***

Toward the end of his recent, widely-shared review of the book Days of Rage, about left-wing anti-government terrorism in the 1970s, David Z. Hines speculates about whether the current glamorization of anti-fascist street brawlers might mark the start of a new cycle of leftist violence:

Lefties said Ted Cruz was a Nazi, Mitt Romney was a Nazi, George W. Bush was a Nazi. I’ve done human rights work that had me working in proximity to the U.S. military, so at a professional meeting a Lefty called me a Nazi.

So if you tell me that I’m a Nazi, and tell me people I respect are Nazis, and tell me you’re in favor of going out and beating up Nazis, guess what? I am suddenly very interested in the physical safety of Nazis.

That was posted (originally to Twitter) a week before Spencer was assaulted. About two weeks later came the outbreak of hooliganism at UC Berkeley over an appearance by the alt-right-orbiting provocateur Milo Yiannopolous. Another month passed between the Milo riot and the mobbing of Charles Murray at Middlebury College, Vermont, where a female faculty member who’d had the temerity to interact respectfully with the visiting speaker wound up in a neck brace. It took the anti-fascists less than a month and a half to expand the circle of Nazidom from the white identitarian fringe to a libertarian who’d endorsed Hillary Clinton in the last election – and to those unlucky enough to be in his vicinity.

Maybe the anti-fascists will stop there. Maybe they won’t. Maybe it’s time for the rest of us to start worrying about the physical safety of Nazis.

***

My repulsion over incidents like these has made me take a fresh look at a Nazi-punching scene in a favourite movie of mine. In William Wyler’s post-World War II homecoming drama The Best Years Of Our Lives we find Homer, the armless ex-Navy man, dropping by the workplace of his buddy Fred, a former Air Force captain reduced to pushing sundaes at a drugstore soda counter.

Another customer notices Homer’s prosthetics and extends his sympathy: “It’s terrible when you see a guy like you that had to sacrifice himself. And for what?” Homer, good natured but none too bright, doesn’t grasp what the stranger is driving at. “We let ourselves get sold down the river,” the guy elaborates. “We were pushed into war.”

The only people pushing for war, says Homer, were the Japs and Nazis. But the stranger tells him no, the Axis powers had no quarrel with America: “They just wanted to fight the limeys and the Reds. And they woulda whipped ’em, too, if we didn’t get deceived into it by a bunch of radicals in Washington. Just read the facts, my friend,” he says, thumping his newspaper for emphasis. “Find out for yourself why you had to lose your hands.”

Homer takes issue with this guy’s interpretation of the “facts”, leading to the fight. Now, in my recollection of the scene, it was the stranger who struck the first blow. But watching it again, I observe that the guy grudgingly complies when Fred, overhearing their conversation, leans in to tell him to take a hike. It’s Homer who escalates things by tearing off the stranger’s American flag lapel pin. Then Fred leaps over the counter and floors the man with one punch, knocking him into a glass display case. When the manager scurries over to attend to his customer moaning in a pile of broken glass, Fred preemptively hands over his apron. “Don’t say it, chum. The customer’s always right, so I’m fired. But this customer wasn’t right.”

I’ve only seen this movie on home video, never in a theatre, but I suspect in the current climate the punch would draw a round of applause. Serves ‘im right, that loudmouth so-and-so, riling up the good citizens with his anti-American B.S.!

But rewatching it, it occurs to me how the loudmouth with his anti-government paranoia sounds an awful lot like the left-wingers I used to hear spieling in coffeeshops around the time of the invasion of Iraq. Radicals in Washington. Pushed into war. Just read the facts.

And it occurs to me how an older Fred could easily be the right-wing galoot who gets into a scuffle with disillusioned Vietnam vet Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July.

Why, that lousy hippie, undermining our patriotic resolve with his anti-American B.S.!

Of course, Ron Kovic was a good guy, while that America Firster in the drugstore was a bad guy, so the situations are totally unrelated.

***

As the Days of Rage review indicates, we’re still a long way from the kind of chaos that emanated from American campuses a half-century ago.

In his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind Allan Bloom, a professor at Cornell during the last outbreak, describes how his colleagues were beaten, held hostage, and intimidated into compliance with the demands of student radicals aroused by a moralistic fervor:

But what was meant by morality has to be made clear. There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one’s debts, respecting one’s parents and doing no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do; they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world. … This was not the morality that came into vogue in the sixties, which was an altogether more histrionic version of moral conduct, the kind that characterizes heroes in extreme situations. Thomas More’s resistance to a tyrant’s commands was the daily fare of students’ imagination. … It was not, of course, the complexity of such cases that was attractive but their brilliance, the noble pose. Somehow it was never the everyday business of obeying the law that was interesting; moreso was breaking it in the name of the higher law.

Bloom’s thesis – which I can’t claim to fully understand, but indulge me for a moment while I pretend – is that the root of this anarchy was a “cheapened interpretation” of Nietzche’s critique of Enlightenment values, transmitted and distorted via Heidegger’s acolytes on the European left. This critique had earlier been associated mainly with the right, until Heidegger had embarrassed himself by embracing Nazism in a period of German campus disorder not unlike the later American one:

The fact that in Germany the politics were of the Right and in the United States of the Left should not mislead us. In both places the universities gave way under the pressure of mass movements, and did so in large measure because they thought those movements possessed a moral truth superior to any the university could provide. … The unthinking hatred of “bourgeois society” was exactly the same in both places. A distinguished professor of political science proved this when he read to his radical students some speeches about what was to be done. They were enthusiastic until he informed them that the speeches were by Mussolini.

I linked above to Rod Dreher’s discussion of the Middlebury College uprising because along with Charles Murray’s first-person account it includes a link to this op-ed in the campus newspaper articulating the anti-speech position:

Indeed, when I first arrived at Middlebury I was clueless to the systems of power constructed around race, gender, sexuality, class or ability, and found that when I talked about these issues as I understood them – or rather, as I didn’t – I was met with blank stares and stigma rather than substantial debate. As a young bigot, I can recall thinking: “I thought at Middlebury I would get to have intellectual discussions, but instead it feels as though my views are being censored.” However, as a first-year I had failed to consider a simple, yet powerful component of debate: not all opinions are valid opinions. I had fallen into the trap of false equivalence.

False equivalence is simple: just because two sides are opposed does not mean they are equally logically valid.

Having embraced the Truth, you see, this student can’t risk repolluting his mind by engaging with what he now knows to be falsehoods. Furthermore, it’s his responsibility as a possessor of the Truth to shout down those falsehoods to protect other, weaker-minded people from being influenced by them.

As it happens, the Truth the student has newly embraced is the truth of what we currently call Progressivism, or Social Justice, or the Right Side of History. It might as easily have been Mussolini’s truth, or Mao’s, or Mullah Omar’s. One more quote from Allan Bloom:

Rousseau noted that in his time many men were liberals who a century earlier would have been religious fanatics. He concluded that they were not really reasonable, but, rather, conformists.

But the student would no doubt say that Rousseau and Bloom were themselves only conforming to the “systems of power” designed to keep women and minorities in their places, so why should anyone listen to them?

Now, it’s possible this kid with his Middlebury education really has sussed out the eternal, immovable, logically unanswerable truth about race, class, and the heritability of IQ. But the moment he steps off campus he runs the risk of finding himself in a crowd of less enlightened souls, equally committed to suppressing what they see as falsehoods, who might mistake his empyrean proclamations for the blitherings of an anti-democratic kook.

I can picture him now, thumping his student newspaper like that drugstore noodge in The Best Years Of Our Lives – “Just read the facts, my friend” – while the good citizens watch him through narrowing eyes.

M.

PS. In naming this post I had in mind Dostoevsky’s Demons – translated previously (and better known to old-timers like me) under the titles The Possessed or The Devils – which I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never read. I was going to delay publishing this until I’d finished the novel, but I thought I’d better stay ahead of events. How many others might get punched between now and then?

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I haven’t read Dostoevsky’s The Devils but in 2010 I was confused by a remark in Tolstoy’s The Devil. In 2012 I blogged about Allan Bloom as remembered by Saul Bellow as related by Martin Amis. It appears I’ve name-checked Charles Murray once before, in this 2015 post about Bertrand Russell’s prescriptions for overcoming conformism.

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Update, July 28, 2020: Added The Closing of the American Mind cover pic and linked to Bibliography page.