The Last True Fascist

Michael Ledeen and the "left-hand path" to American Fascism

I will give my critics this: One blind spot in my writing on American fascism is an excessive focus on the paleoconservatives. On the one hand, it makes a lot of sense to focus on the paleocon faction: they represent a tradition that self-consciously goes back to the Nazi-sympathizing America First movment, in their ranks include notorious antisemites and others who gravitated to the farther reaches of the right as they grew alienated from the conservative mainstream, they had an open disdain for mass democracy and a highly reactionary and restrictive idea of American society. Some even openly called themselves fascists or ended up as white nationalists and Holocaust deniers. Pat Buchanan, the godfather of the Trumpist right, as Trump, in a very different moment, once said, is a “Hitler Lover.” (Well, maybe not a Hitler lover exactly, but certainly not a Hitler hater—a Hitler-not-minder.) But, on the other hand, as many critics of the fascism discourse on the anti-imperialist left and the “isolationist” right have complained, don’t the warmongering neoconservatives deserve that analogy more? After all, these people led America down a path of frenzied militarism and a war based on a lie. Didn’t they lead some of the most severe attacks on civil liberties? Aren’t we taking their rhetoric about “democracy” too much at face value when we leave them out of the conversation about fascism? (And then there’s the small matter of reflexive support for that angry little genocidal apartheid state in the Middle East.) Some neocons have rediscovered their social democratic roots and exited the Trumpified GOP, but many others find the Republican party a still-friendly home for their belligerency and bloody-mindedness.

In my defense, I haven’t entirely left them out. I think the War on Terror is a very important part of the story I’m trying to construct about the trajectory of the American right, in terms of militarism, xenophobia, and the development of an uncontrolled security state. In the past, I’ve hinted at a synthesis that roughly goes "paleocon nativism and racism plus neocon domestic surveillance and foreign adventurism = American fascism.” And, as a person who received his political education post 9/11 and in the run-up to the debacle in Iraq, I have very few illusions about the virtues of these people. But the recent death of neoconservative shady operator Michael Ledeen has made me think more deeply about the “left-hand path” to American fascism.

If you aren’t familiar with Michael Ledeen, he was truly an extraordinary character. To get a full picture, you can check out his Times obituary or read my friend Jeet Heer’s piece in The Nation, memorably entitled “Michael Ledeen Was the Forrest Gump of American Fascism.” I would also check out “Death of a Master Manipulator” on the SpyTalk substack. This guy had a hand in everything: he was a key instigator of Iran-Contra, who got away scott-free, he spread false information that contributed to the justification of the Iraq war, rumors abound of his connections to the CIA, SISMI—the Italian intelligence service—and Propaganda Due, the almost comically sinister Masonic lodge in Rome that functioned as central directorate of neo-fascist activities during the Years of Lead. He once concocted a disgraceful smear against White House advisor Sidney Blumenthal. More recently, he was the brains behind the not-so-brainy General Mike Flynn and one of the chief Iran hawks in DC, pushing for intervention against the Islamic Republic at every opportunity. His most famous remark, attributed to him by Jonah Goldberg, captures the id of the War on Terror: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” I think you get the picture.

Ledeen started on the liberal left, a McGovern man, became a Scoop Jackson Democrat, and then moved ever rightward into the partisan Republican sicarius. This is something like the conventional cursus dishonorum of the neoconservatives. But what fascinates me about Ledeen, though, is that he began not as a Machiavellian man of action, but as a scholar of fascism, and a very fine and promising one at that. Like many Jews, present company included, he wanted to understand the great European catastrophe. He studied with University of Wisconsin professor George Mosse, a legend in the field of fascism studies. In Italy, he worked with Renzo de Felice, the author of a painstakingly researched, 6000 page biography of Mussolini. Ledeen was de Felice’s interlocutor in the 1975 book Intervista sul fascismo, “an interview on fascism,” which provided a kind of summary of Felice’s findings in abbreviated form and was translated by Ledeen into English with the provocative title “Fascism: An Informal Introduction to Its Theory and Practice.”

The Intervista was enormously controversial in Italy: it shook up historiographical consensus and also the post-war antifascist political consensus. Perhaps unfairly, de Felice was tarred as a historical revisionist and an apologist for Mussolinism. Particularly inflammatory were remarks from Felice like, “Fascism did great damage, but one of its most terrible achievements was to leave an inheritance of a fascist mentality to nonfascists, to the generation that followed fascism, to those people who, both in word and in action, are truly and decisively antifascist.” The historical substance was more controversial still: he insisted fascism had a real popular consensus behind it and that Mussolini wasn’t just mini-Hitler but had his own views and aims before the disastrous alliance with Germany. But the key claim that I believe would fascinate and influence Ledeen was de Felice’s stipulation that fascism was not a reactionary regime of a fearful, declining petty bourgeoisie, but represented the modernizing, progressive force of a rising and revolutionary middle class.

De Felice distinguished the fascist movement, which was dynamic, idealistic, youthful, and energetic, from the eventual fascist regime, which was sclerotic, opportunistic, and compromised by conservative forces in Italian society. De Felice emphasized the “left-wing” roots of fascism and compared it to the Italian Jacobinism of the Risorgimento that he had studied. Somewhat as an aside, I think this remark of De Felice is revealing about Ledeen’s later development: “I have always had…a psychological and human interest in a particular kind of personality that is both coherently cold-blooded and Luciferian. There is something in common between my Jacobins and a certain kind of fascism-in particular the fascists of the first years.” In his introduction to the English edition of the Intervista, Ledeen writes:

…De Felice claims that the Fascist movement was linked, albeit spuriously, to a Western radical tradition going back to the days of the Terror in the French Revolution. Fascism, he argues, contains both a well-defined theory of human progress and a concep- tion of the popular will that ties it to the extremist Rousseauian themes of the Terror and the totalitarian democracy" that it spawned.

Ledeen developed de Felice’s themes in his work, Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International 1928-1936. Ledeen’s topic was the period in which fascist intellectuals tried to develop a “fascist international,” where the modernizing ideals of fascism could be exported to a European youth yearning to break free of dying regimes and ideologies. This conflicted with the extreme nationalism of fascism, and as Ledeen argues along with his mentor de Felice, the foreign policy moves of Mussolini, which brought Italy into the orbit of Nazi Germany. According to Ledeen, the dream of “The Fascist International” foundered on the rock of antisemitism. The book concludes on a note of admiration and regret for the “failed revolution” of Italian fascism. The same excitement for the revolutionary side of fascism can be found in Ledeen’s book on Gabriele D’Annunzio, the proto-fascist Duce who attempted an operatic coup in Fiume:

The revolt D'Annunzio led was directed against the old order of Western Europe and was carried out in the name of youthful creativity and virility, which would hopefully create a new world in the image of its creators. The essence of this revolt was the liberation of the human personality, what we might call the radicalization of the masses of people who had been systematically exploited for so many centuries. The symbol of this transformation of mankind was D ’Annunzio himself, and the uniqueness of his own personality was taken as living proof that such a revolution could succeed. Those who came into contact with him were invariably inspired and intoxicated by the experience, and the men who participated in the Fiume adventure were deeply moved by it, and wrote of it as if it were a spiritual catharsis. This spiritual element was of enormous importance in D’Annunzio's success, for he incorporated it into his political practice as well as his political theories.

In a 2003 piece for the American Conservative, John Laughland perceptively connected Ledeen’s studies of fascist ideology with Ledeen’s own pro-war rhetoric, particularly this paragraph from Ledeen’s book The War against the Terror Masters:

Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.

For Ledeen here, America is almost literally D’Annunzian in its modernism and dynamism.

Informed readers will protest that the rhetoric of worldwide democratic revolution comes more from Trotskyist origins of neoconservatism: it’s simply Trotsky’s idea of “permanent revolution” applied to America instead of the Soviet Union. And it’s hard to argue that Ledeen’s book Freedom Betrayed is not meant to recall Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed. But this bolsters the connection. One must recall the origins of the fascist movement here: Mussolini was once a leader of the socialist left who became an interventionist hawk; he replaced the cataclysmic dream of international revolution with that of war; a revolutionary war that would unify the nation, mobilize the masses, and shake the Italian people out of decadence where they could become great again. This is not unlike many neoconservatives’ hopes for the War on Terror. And the side Mussolini wanted to intervene on was that of democracies. So, one could say that fascism was a form of anti-democratic ideology that grew out of a radical pro-democratic interventionism.

Ledeen might appear like a mere callous political opportunist, a dirty trickster, and he was, but it seems to me he was also a secret idealist, holding on to a dream of a non- or even anti-Nazi fascismo vero, something he took very seriously as an ideological project as he strenuously rejected the “opera buffa” interpretation of Italian fascism. His books in effect say, “Alas, if only Mussolini hadn’t allied with Hitler, what might have been!” This is the perverse other side of the sentimental counterfactualism of Jewish intellectuals who dream about the possibility of a victorious France in 1940 or a successful Popular Front in Germany. (Sounds familiar, no?) It provided Ledeen with an image of strength and ruthless political effectiveness. In a pathetic irony that we can perhaps recognize elsewhere today, in his desire to understand or even undo the Holocaust, fascism became not the enemy to revile but an ideal to emulate. But, in this, he ignored his mentor De Felice’s key lesson on fascism: War abroad is the prelude to disaster at home.