Ebony and ivory fascists.

The American left is a funny place. I recently attended a Labor Party Advocates chapter meeting where a gaggle of left sectarians interminably vented their disagreement with the executive committee's position that the party should be a non-electoral entity. They seemed not to realize that whether or not we engage in the 1996 elections is meaningless. The left is so weak that we can't hope to have any impact on national politics in the electoral arena. In fact, the only thing we could accomplish would be to set ourselves up as scapegoats for a possible Clinton defeat.

Nothing underscores the left's irrelevance in the big picture of American politics more boldly than Pat Buchanan's strong showing in the Republican primaries, just as Louis Farrakhan's bounce from the Million Man March indicated the left's irrelevance in black politics. The success these salt-and-pepper twins of religious-tinged fascism have enjoyed stems partly from a spate of media coverage. But it is also testament to the left's failure to connect with the lives of people outside our ranks.

Buchanan and Farrakhan thrive--as demagogues always do--by tapping people's anxieties and offering a cathartic identification with themselves as the cure. They cultivate a nostalgic wish for an organic order, and they offer simplistic solutions that focus on demonizing stereotyped enemies. Their world views similarly rest on the staples of fascist ideology: racism (including anti-Semitism), misogyny, homophobia, and populist authoritarianism. Each presents himself as the crystallized essence of Popular Will. Each spouts belligerent, borderline violent rhetoric while complaining that he is the beleaguered, overmatched victim of vastly powerful conspiracies. The complaints grow louder with each success.

Buchanan may or may not survive in the race until the Republican convention. He's not likely to win the nomination. If he does win, he could be an easy opponent for President Piggly Wiggly. On that basis, some liberals and progressives are secretly cheering him on, seeing him as partly source, partly reflection of the GOP's disarray. And some progressives may want him to stick around in the race because his success seems to validate the power of an anti-corporate, anti-NAFTA appeal. But I'd be cautious about either of these views.

While Buchanan looks like an extremist and a loser who will rally both the GOP elite and the establishment media around some other candidate, the possibility remains that the popular groundswell he got going could take on a life of its own. That's certainly what Buchanan himself is hoping. And he could secure the nomination. Reagan looked like an extremist loser in 1980, and the right is a lot stronger now than then, both ideologically and organizationally.

Except for his vocal opposition to NAFTA, Buchanan's views aren't that out of step with the Republican mainstream; he's just more pugnacious than the other national figures when he expresses them.

Sure, "fiscal conservatives" like Governor William Weld of Massachusetts and former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp tend not to be especially concerned with restricting abortion or civil rights for well-off women, gays, and nonwhites. And "social conservatives" aren't particularly concerned with getting rid of government on principle. They unite naturally, however, around expanding government's punitive functions when directed at people who are poor or different.

Republican "libertarians" like Weld are among the quickest to go in for prison-building. And they should be--they understand that their program of gutting government's positive functions creates misery and hardship that in turn increase crime. By criminalizing poverty, a punitive state also helps discipline workers, a useful thing in a political environment encouraging capital flight, "downsizing," and reduction of the social wage.

"Social conservatives" not only want to use the state to enforce their notions of moral propriety; they also want to dismantle the positive state functions that intervene in the domestic sphere, make it easier for women to live alone, support the morally defective poor, and guarantee equal rights for gays and nonwhites.

A basis exists, therefore, for an alliance around cutting government's social welfare functions and increasing its punitive functions. An authoritarian like Buchanan--like his role model, Hitler--could appeal to both. And it's not inconceivable that, like Hitler, he could jettison or tone down his already paper-thin anti-corporate rhetoric to allay the concerns of his party's leadership. It's only an electoral ploy and front for his nativist racism, anyway.

Just to tease out this hypothetical nightmare scenario a little more: A Buchanan nomination doesn't necessarily mean a cakewalk for Clinton. It all depends on how Piggly Wiggly responds. What if Clinton were to run in the way that seems most natural to him--that is, if he tried to occupy both positions simultaneously, playing to Buchanan's punitive, racist rhetoric of moral rearmament, making ambivalent gestures to labor and blacks while hyping "free trade," a qualified commitment to abortion, and platitudes about civil rights for those who "play by the rules"? He could very well be vulnerable to the charges that he's a shifty character who is trying to put something over on the electorate--charges that have dogged his Presidency so far.

If he were to maintain his current, weak commitment to registering voters--which stems from his Republicrat fear of being tainted by identification with poor people and blacks--the effect would be to skew the electorate in Buchanan's favor. A Buchanan victory would be possible.

Keep in mind that the rightward shift in national politics means a campaign strategy frankly attacking Buchanan as a dangerous fascist would be roundly criticized as being in scandalously poor taste. A recent network television magazine feature on dirty campaigning characterized Lyndon Johnson's famous count-to-three-and-blow-up-the-world ad against Goldwater as an abomination: never mind that Goldwater actively ran on his willingness to use nuclear weapons.

Buchanan's "populist" appeal ought to be more sobering than uplifting for the left for another reason as well. As has been noted repeatedly, he appeals particularly to Republican voters who earn less than $35,000 a year. Think about that for a second: Republican voters who earn less than $35,000 a year. In simple economic terms that would have to be the stupidest fraction of the American electorate. Why do they register Republican in the first place? I'll bet the answers have less to do with cutting capital gains taxes or "tort reform" than with asserting racial, gender, and nativist privilege.

What we may want to interpret as economic populism could just as easily be resonance with a Herrenvolk democracy--a political assertion of white, male, nativist entitlement as the only truly legitimate citizenship--that has a long history in American politics.

This is the "anti-corporate" populism of George Wallace, the Ku Klux Klan, Tom Watson, Civil War anti-draft rioters, and anti-abolitionist mobs in the antebellum era and Jacksonian Democracy. The Dorr War rebellion that sought to eliminate Rhode Island's property qualification for suffrage in the early 1840s was equally militant in seeking to establish a white racial qualification. A strain of this ideological orientation was significant in shaping the American labor movement.

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Through its tendencies to romanticize popular insurgency, New Left-inspired labor and social-history scholarship ironically helped put a sanitizing gloss on this Herrenvolk strain, either by ignoring it or by explaining it away as an unfortunate appendage to authentically radical and democratic politics.

But ideologies of "ascriptive inegalitarianism," as political scientist Rogers Smith has characterized them, aren't merely quirky growths on otherwise laudably egalitarian populism. They are durable, self-sustaining perspectives in their own right, perspectives that presume that designated classes of people are not worthy of equal citizenship by virtue of who they are.

This shines a different light on the working-class Buchanan voters and their Reagan Democrat precursors. Although they seem like dupes or hopeless idiots from a crudely drawn standpoint of class, they, like most people, don't see the world in neat economic terms. Herrenvolk ideology forms its notions of economic justice in ways that typically are already racist and sexist.

That's why economically marginal whites voted for Reagan despite his promises to cut the social safety net, and why white welfare recipients voted for David Duke in Louisiana. When they hear the right's racially coded rhetoric, they infer that promises to reduce government services would somehow apply only to minorities.

From this mindset, Buchanan's anti-NAFTA stance may appeal to people as a response to economic hardship precisely because for him it is a coded way to project his nativist commitments. He makes economic insecurity a politically meaningful category by explaining it within the worldview his audience already embraces. The move is something like this: "Worried about your job and future? Feel threatened by forces you don't understand? Well, I'll tell you who's responsible--anonymous, abstract, disloyal multinational corporations, Jews, blacks, gays, liberals, feminists, immigrants, and the like. We need to take the country back for real Americans."

Many leftists are dangerously deluded by Herrenvolk populism. The anti-corporate language raises hopes that we might be able to connect with a real social base. The desire to reach this base leads to an opportunistic willingness to accentuate the positive: "If you look beyond the racism, sexism, homophobia, and nativism...."

This disposition combines with a hoary wish on the left that the "race issue" would somehow go away. This wish isn't unique to leftists. It takes many different forms in the society as a whole. On the left it tends to show up as a high-minded class-first view that's not unlike Clintonistas' calls to "look for what unites us" as a code for evading--and thus tolerating--white racism. The objective is to find a way to build a political coalition that incorporates the supposedly progressive elements of Herrenvolk populist sensibility.

"It's the economy, stupid" was the liberals' version of class-first politics in 1992. (Which, by the way, wasn't all that effective: Clinton got about the same percentage of the vote as Dukakis in 1988. "Thank you, Ross Perot" is a slogan that more accurately explains Piggly Wiggly's victory.)

The left, of course, has a long history of economic reductionism that has been able to conciliate and rationalize all sorts of ideologies of inequality, simply by declaring them artifacts of capitalism that will magically wither away with its defeat down the road.

It's unlikely that anyone seriously identified with left politics will go so far as to cozy up to Buchanan. But that may be only because he's already too tainted as a "fascist psychopath," in Christopher Hitchen's wonderfully succinct description. I certainly was taken aback to encounter as much sympathy among lefties as I did in 1992 for the welfare-billionaire demagogue Perot, and we already can see signs of a classic softening on the Herrenvolk front.

In casual conversation and in the left media, the outlines of the familiar narrative are falling into place: Buchanan has tapped into working people's real concerns that no one else is addressing in national politics. We need to separate his appeal to justified anger and anxiety from the obnoxious directions in which he wants to direct them--and so on. Some may well go further still. Alexander Cockburn is a good illustration.

Cockburn has been drawn steadily into the rightwing populist orbit. He came away from the militias' Michigan gun carnival last year singing their praises as working-class Joes "who aren't all racists" and who share the left's basic critique of the world, militantly defending their anti-statism. He has since allied himself with the rightwing jury-nullification movement, also in the name of a romantic notion of populist democracy. In his February 26 column in The Nation, he made the ultimate Herrenvolk move in adducing the Confederate secession as an exemplary assertion of popular sovereignty.

It's not surprising, therefore, that two weeks later Cockburn seemed to open the door for Buchanan's rehabilitation, in effect calling on him to "deepen his message of populist economic nationalism."

Cockburn's view of Buchanan reveals the limitations of a simplistic economic understanding of class as a political force, the confusion of militancy and radicalism, and the related confusion of populism and democracy. Stir in a suspicion that struggling for ideals of equality by race, gender, and sexual preference divides "us," and the desperate craving for access to some popular constituency, and we have a recipe for dangerous opportunism.

This is exactly parallel to the situation with black leftists and Farrakhan. Substitute a simplistic racial understanding of black politics for the simplistic economic understanding of national politics, and everything else stays the same. The one difference is that respectable black "leftists" have rushed into Farrakhan's orbit, concocting shamelessly fatuous and opportunistic rationalizations along the way.

Manning Marable most clearly reveals the bankruptcy of this idea of politics. He has argued that I am irresponsible to describe Farrakhan as a fascist--sidestepping the issue of my description's accuracy--because we "must talk with Farrakhan." Why must we talk with him? Because he has black supporters and calling him a fascist "will not facilitate any dialogue." This is stunningly unprincipled, and all Marable's empty qualifications about expressing profound disagreements with Farrakhan, blah, blah, blah, are no mitigation.

My first thought on reading Marable's line was of identical arguments in Germany during the early 1930s about appeasing Hitler: that he spoke to legitimate concerns, that he had a genuine popular base. Farrakhan's base represents a black version of Herrenvolk populism, which overlaps with its white counterpart. Both emerge from the same cauldron of authoritarian, patriarchal, and racialist American political discourse. Farrakhan is a fascist, and, if he had the power, he'd bulldoze every black leftist in the country.

The Nation of Islam has a history, after all, and Farrakhan is deeply implicated in it. And his recent defenses of the Abacha regime in Nigeria, the brutal theocracy in the Sudan, and the Mobutu dictatorship in Zaire should dispel any doubts about his model of politics.

Not only is the position Marable takes immoral; it's idiotic strategically. Farrakhan has no reason to listen to Marable's tepid bromides, even if they were genuinely offered. Marable and his faux leftist pals, Cornel West and Michael Dyson, don't represent anything that he needs. They have nothing they can withhold from him, no political or resource base to which they can deny him access or mobilize against him. Marable, West, and Dyson are pimping their association with him to legitimize their claims to be in touch with a nonexistent popular black politics. Even association with scoundrels can fill the bill because this politics isn't about organizing anything real. It's all a pose. It's a politics that depends on having someone invite you to a meeting. You can't afford to take any sharp positions because doing so might keep you off the guest list.

There are two important things for us to remember about the Ebony & Ivory of American fascism. First, it's not unusual for fascists to propound left-sounding critiques of bourgeois institutions, including capitalism. Mussolini came out of the Socialist Party in Italy, and the Nazis were, after all, the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Second, it certainly is true that Farrakhan and Buchanan tap into a reservoir of concerns about corporate power (and in Farrakhan's case, resurgent white supremacy).

But people are not inert vessels ready to be loaded up with whatever strategic program gets to them first. They are inclined to interpret those concerns according to their distinct predispositions. For much of both fascists' constituencies, the radical-sounding issues--corporate or white domination--resonate as symbols of what is blocking their dreams of an organic world in which heterosexual male authority (white in the one case, black in the other) holds sway. The fascist ideas are not peripheral to the more radical-sounding stuff; if anything, it's the reverse.

Many people are fundamentally committed to that fascist vision. We'll never win them over, no matter what their place in the system of production.

Others aren't so committed, but the only way to win them over is to confront the ugly underbelly of fascist ideas, directly exposing them for what they are, and to provide a clear and uncompromising alternative vision.