It's happening here

This is the back cover for a paperback reprint of Sinclair Lewis's novel It Can't Happen Here.

Lewis did not foresee that fascism's rise would be abetted by the "progressive" left. My insistence on making that point won't make me popular, but I don't care. Someone has to say it.

While researching this left/right nexus, I came across a particularly enlightening volume: A 2002 book titled Prophets Facing Backwards by Meera Nanda (available for free online). Much of the book focuses on India, but don't let that fact scare you off. Nanda lives in the United States, and many parts of her book prophesy current events in this country. This work offers insight into the international fascist resurgence.

She focuses on the links between postmodernism -- which is hugely influential in Indian intellectual circles -- and  Hindu nationalism. In that nation as elsewhere, the far left aided the rise of the far right. (Nanda might insist on drawing a distinction between hyper-nationalism and fascism, but I don't see much point in doing so.)

A few passages:

This book will tell the story of how these intellectuals, in their despair over the world they found themselves in, have helped deliver the people they profess to love --the non-Western masses, the presumed victims of “Western science” and modernity --to the growing forces of hatred, fascism and religious fanaticism. We will look at how the Hindu nationalist dreams of a “Hindu modernity” have found a respectable home in the theories of “alternative epistemology” and “local knowledge” popular in the social constructivist, feminist and Third-Wordlist trends in the academia. How the vanguard of radical postmodernist thought in the later half of the twentieth century has served as a bridge to reactionary modernist movements darkening the horizons in the twenty-first century is the theme of this book.

Following Jeffrey Herf’s well-known study of a similar phenomenon in Nazi Germany, I will refer to this kind of modernity without liberalism as “reactionary modernism.” Reactionary modernism, is very simply, “embrace of modern technology by those who reject Enlightenment reason” (Herf 1984, 1). I believe that the social conditions that led to this phenomenon in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich --namely, “capitalist industrialization without a successful bourgeois revolution [and] weak traditions of political liberalism and the Enlightenment” (6) -- obtain in many parts of the developing world, including India. In these conditions, the dangers of fascistic nightmares can not be ignored.

The ultimate goal of the Nazis was not “just” to liquidate the Jewish people, but to purge Christianity of the Judaic conception of God. What is often forgotten is that Nazism was a response, among other things, to rapid industrialization, urbanization and a consequent feeling of alienation from nature. In a manner chillingly reminiscent of our own deep ecologists and Hindu nationalists, well-known Nazi ideologues, including Alfred Rosenberg, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler himself, and lesser lights like Savitri Devi and the theosophist, Helena Blavatsky, ascribed the alienation from nature to the Judaic dualism between a transcendent god and life-less nature (see Pois, 1985, Mosse, 1964, 20 Goodrick-Clarke, 1998 for these issues). The Nazis sought a genuine religion of nature that will allow Germans to live in harmony with nature.

In their quest for a non-dualist, immanent conception of God, the Nazis turned to the Vedic monism of ancient India, the supposed home of the “Nordic Aryans” before they got corrupted by “racial pollution” caused by interbreeding with the non-Aryan natives (the “swarthy Sudras,” Alfred Rosenberg calls them). Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, which was considered the manifesto of National Socialist ideology, turns to Varna (the four-fold division of society, the basis of the caste system) and atman doctrines of the Vedic Hindus to find a new myth “suitable for the twentieth century” that can replace the distant, law-giver Judaic God.

Over the last three decades, starting around the 1960s in the West and a decade or so later in many parts of the Third World, influential secular and progressive intellectuals have pointed the finger at one common enemy of human emancipation --the modern age itself. Bringing a radical conservative sensibility to traditional left-wing concerns with alienation, patriarchy, imperialism and ecology, self-described postmodernists have criticized the modern world of industrial capitalism and liberal humanism not for failing to live up to its own ideals, but for upholding and cherishing these ideals as ideals in the first place.

...I will broadly include as postmodernists those intellectuals who have lost faith in the promise of modernity and the (European) Enlightenment. They argue that modern science and modern secular cultures/institutions have lost their liberatory potential, and have turned into sources of subjugation and mental-colonialism of non-Western people, women, cultural minorities. This sentiment gets translated into an opposition to the project of development and modernization in what used to be called the Third World. To varying degrees, postmodernist intellectuals attribute renewed relevance to all that modernity has set aside. Thus, one of their major preoccupations is the preservation and cultivation of “local knowledges” embedded in traditional cosmologies, religions and traditional practices of agriculture; medicine etc. These local knowledges, postmodernists insist, are legitimate sciences in their own right. They cannot and should not be judged the standards of rationality set by modern science. To do that amounts to Western hubris.

Postmodernism challenges the very possibility of knowledge that is not, in the final instance, authenticated by a local cultural tradition. As modern science is the very paradigm of universal knowledge that claims to transcend cultural differences and local traditions, it has become the ultimate target for deconstruction. Postmodernist critics challenge the core assumptions that constitute the self-understanding of modern science as an epistemologically progressive and universal enterprise

The same debauched thinking has overtaken our campuses, where intersectional "feminists" and other postmodern fanatics have worked tirelessly to undermine the values of the Enlightenment. In my eyes, Richard Spencer and bell hooks are brother and sister. Both are devoted to the same project: Undoing science, decrying reason, torching tolerance, unraveling democracy and -- ultimately -- disuniting the United States.

Various feminist, postcolonial and standpoint epistemologists embraced the social constructivist agenda in order to argue for different logics and different background assumptions that would, presumably, lead to “feminist” or “Indian” or “Islamic” sciences. The idea of modern science as the lingua franca of the modern world has been abandoned.

I now define myself as an antifeminist devoted to the concept of sexual equality. I will remain antifeminist as long as feminism remains yoked to the philosophy of postmodernism. Postmodernism and fascism are both beyond redemption; neither the postmodernist nor the fascist are worthy debating partners. One must not engage in dialogue with such people; one must simply oppose them.

One day, someone will write a book about how the postmodern "left" helped pave the way for Trumpism. Right now, the world is not yet ready for such a volume.