Mick Hartley

The perfectly legitimate phrase "anti-communist" came to acquire a negative resonance after it was cheapened by the demagoguery of Joe McCarthy. It would be unfortunate, argues Russell Berman in Tablet, if the phrase "far-left fascism" was similarly discarded simply because Trump used it. From Rosa Luxemburg to Hannah Arendt onwards, writers have warned of the dangers of the moment when the left abandons its proclaimed agenda of emancipation and adopts repressive measures that resemble the practices of the fascist far right. Bolshevism was indeed "left fascism", and though the term wasn't yet in use – Mussolini was some years off – the phrase is still worth preserving. Far left and far right – Communists and Nazis, Molotov and Ribbentrop – have often ploughed the same grim furrow.

Well, it's a long piece, but here's Berman's conclusion:

In the end, does the left-fascist shoe fit our current culture moment? Consider the list: programmatic silencing of dissenters, purging of editorial pages, growing fear of transgressing murky viewpoint prohibitions, while university leaders generally refuse (there are some exceptions) to offer a full-throated defense of academic freedom, but instead embrace the stereotypical language of the social justice movement in its opposition to “the system.” They sound more like Heidegger promoting the Nazi revolution in the universities in 1934 than Edward R. Murrow in 1954 pushing back against Joe McCarthy. A lot of that is just cowardice. Equally reminiscent of fascism is the de facto coordination between the crowds in the streets and the pronouncements from corporate boardrooms, as well as the monitoring of political opinion by powerful social media. This imposed conformism, this Gleichschaltung, is playing out against the backdrop of attacks on the rule of law and across-the-board denunciations of all law enforcement. […]

National history has all but disappeared from our curricula, and when it is still taught, it is poisoned with adversarial revisionism, an education for ressentiment and guilt. The failings alone matter: We are always only at 1619 and never at 1865 or 1945 or 1989, a distorted perspective that leads to tearing down, never building up, and embarrassing public rituals of pledging disallegiance. Describing these events as “left fascism,” Trump names the constellation of verbal progressivism mixed with a moralistic vitriol to harass dissenters and indulge in irrational violence, but the worst of our crisis is the contemptuous ignorance of the accomplishments of the nation. It is time to reclaim the history.