On October 25 and 26, the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the
Study of Western Civilization (AHI) sponsored Dr. Paul Gottfried, Horace
Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus, Elizabethtown College, for a
series of talks, two on the Hamilton College campus. On Wednesday
morning, October 25, he discussed conservatism in the United States in a
seminar “Modern Conservative Politics,” taught by AHI Resident Fellow Dr. David
Frisk. In the afternoon, Dr. Gottfried was invited to speak on his recent
book Fascism: The Career of a Concept (2016) in a course,
“Nazi Germany,” taught by Hamilton College professor Alfred Kelly. On
Thursday evening, October 26, AHI hosted a Leadership Dinner during which
undergraduates, faculty, and local citizens, using a prescribed chapter from
Gottfried’s book Fascism, conversed on the meaning of totalitarianism and on the
similarities and differences between Nazism, fascism, and communism. Disruptive
protests greeted Gottfried at his two appearances at Hamilton College.
In the morning seminar, Gottfried passed through a gauntlet of
about twenty protesters. They regarded his appearance on campus as
“unacceptable” and charged him with “hate speech” and being a “white
nationalist.” Dr. Frisk provided them, to the extent that space in the
classroom would allow, an opportunity to enter and hear what Gottfried had to
say on conservatism as well as to devote the majority of time to questions
about his positions on various subjects, including race, Herbert Marcuse and
the Frankfurt School, and the election of Donald Trump. On the subject of
modern conservative politics, Gottfried brings unquestioned expertise as a
participant in many key events and as an intellectual force on the right.
He knew personally many of the heavy-hitters who joined with William F. Buckley
to form National Review. Gottfried kept company with President Richard Nixon,
served in the Reagan administration, and as an éminence grise of the so-called
paleoconservative movement, has garnered attention as a prominent critic of
neoconservatism. Gottfried coined the term “alternative right” and has
shed light on how this complicated phenomenon developed and on the various
elements of which it is composed. In a scholarly career that spans
more than a half century, Gottfried has published more than a dozen scholarly
books and hundreds of articles.
In the afternoon
class, Gottfried once again passed through a gauntlet of protesters to speak on
the history of twentieth-century fascism, its origins in Mussolini’s Italy, and
the characteristics that distinguish fascism from Nazism and communism. In
accord with the German scholar Ernst Nolte, Gottfried called fascist movements
“counterrevolutionary imitations of leftist revolution.” He also spent
time deciphering the promiscuous application of the word “fascism,” by both the
right and the left, in the postmodern culture wars. As was the case in the
morning class, Gottfried spent much of the time answering questions, no matter
how pointed or off-topic, civilly and thoughtfully, from students not enrolled
in the class.
In the morning
class on modern conservative politics, Dr. Gottfried described the evolution of
the term “conservative” in the United States. Few intellectuals before 1950, he
explained, would have identified themselves as “conservative;” those who appeared
conservative tended to see themselves instead as “classical liberals.” William
F. Buckley, Gottfried agreed, stands as the primary “architect” of the modern
conservative movement. Buckley transformed it by holding disparate
tendencies together and by purging isolationists, members of the John Birch
Society, and others elements he deemed too extreme. What united various
strains of right-of-center thinkers during the Cold War was the ideological and
political threat of communism.
Conservative groups
attached to the Republican Party eventually attained its own media outlets via
Fox News, talk radio, and syndicated columnists. These forces have helped shape
the establishment right or what Gottfried calls “Conservatism Inc.” In
Gottfried’s opinion, Ronald Reagan was an “establishment Republican” who did
little to change the “deep state.” “No Republican, said Gottfried, “talked as
boldly as 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater did. Republicans learned
their lesson after [the disastrous Republican defeat in] 1964.” In last
year’s presidential election, however, Donald Trump emerged representing a
“populist insurgent movement” that replaced the “Old Guard” of Republicans like
the Bush family.
During the expanded
question-and-answer part of the class, Gottfried expressed his agreement that
radical Islam had replaced communism as a central unifying concern, but
expressed dismay with the capitulation of conservatives on many social
issues. “Their ‘values game’ is a fraud,” he said, noting the
adoption by allegedly right-wing pundits and politicians of left-liberal
positions on immigration, confederate monuments, and any number of other
issues. Gottfried contended that the real reason William F. Buckley had purged
the John Birch Society was because they did not support the Vietnam War. The
purported reason was their anti-semitism and racism, which in truth, Gottfried
maintained, were largely “baseless smears.” A descendant of a Hungarian Jewish
family that fled the twin terrors of Hitler and Stalin, Gottfried also remarked
on the fact that only Western countries, the product of the most self-critical
civilization in history, have felt the need to express guilt for past racism.
It does not happen in Muslim or Eastern European societies. But targets are
selective. Victims of communism are rarely even acknowledged. Racial
injustices, he noted, are committed everywhere, but “we are the only ones who
try to rectify them.” Expanding on a thesis that he has developed in his
scholarship, Gottfried argued that the guilt comes from Protestant Christianity
and is transmuted in a post-Christian society from “Christian guilt” to “social
guilt.” Designated victim groups are being used as weapons by liberal whites in
a “civil war” with other, conservative, whites.
Gottfried is often
credited with inventing the term “alt-right.” Its coinage actually began with a
speech he gave, entitled “The Alternative Right.” The term was then shortened
by others to “alt-right.” Over the years new characteristics, such as
racialism, have been attached to it. The number of those who identify
themselves with the alt-right in its current manifestation, said Gottfried, is
minuscule. Gottfried dismissed many of the leading alt-right figures as
clowns and buffoons and worried more about how groups like the Southern Poverty
Law Center inflate the alt-right to raise gobs of money and smear good people
who as traditionalists are legitimately concerned about the loss of their
heritage. For Gottfried, the “non-aligned right” or “dissenting right”
identifies those who have criticized “Conservatism Inc” for its abandonment of
defensible traditions and foreign-policy adventurism in trying to remake the
world in the image of the United States.
In the afternoon class on Hitler’s Germany, Gottfried began by chatting
with several students in German (one of several languages in which he is
fluent). He shared what he learned in his 40 years of experience in gathering
material for the book, underscoring the important methodological point that in
the practice of history, studies closest in time to the event may actually be
far better in revealing what happened than those works published by scholars
decades or generations later. Gottfried delved into the historiography of
fascism. He described the strengths and weaknesses of those he considered
to be the leading scholars and thinkers on the subject, including Stanley Payne
and Ernst Nolte. In contrast, he called Jonah Goldberg’s 2008
bestseller, Liberal Fascism, a “horrible book.” He condemned Goldberg’s deliberate confusion
of fascism with Nazism as a form of name-calling. For Gottfried, fascism arose
in the special circumstances of interwar Europe in Latin countries with strong
Catholic traditions. Nazism possessed a violent, totalitarian bent that
Mussolini’s fascism did not. While Franco’s Spain had a “family resemblance,”
Nazism was “a highly eclectic” movement that had little in common with Italian
fascism. While the Italian system was statist and authoritarian, the German was
totalitarian, anti-Semitic, and party-based.
Topics discussed
during the question-and-answer period included concern about the current growth
of the administrative state, the use made by the state of political correctness
to silence debate, Hitler’s hatred of Jews and Slavs, Communist Yugoslavian
leader Josef Tito’s extermination of 100,000 Yugoslavians (on a proportional
scale worse than that of Stalin’s crimes), and the dangerous use of
international tribunals for war crimes because of their tendency to become
politicized. In response to a question about Richard Spencer and the
alt-right, Gottfried explained that Spencer had changed over the years and has
adopted repellant views and tactics. He described Spencer as an advocate of
state power and “a socialist,” contrary to the portrayals of him in the media.
At the Leadership
Dinner, AHI Executive Director Robert Paquette introduced Gottfried as an
impressively erudite, “first-rate European intellectual historian” whom the
great historian Eugene Genovese, an AHI academic adviser before his death in
2012, had attempted to hire when building the graduate program at the
University of Rochester in the 1960s and 1970s into one of the best in the
country. “There are colleagues at Hamilton College,” Paquette observed,
“from whom I have learned absolutely nothing over the course of decades. I
have never entered into an intensive conversation with Paul without finding it
stimulating and challenging.” During his stay, Gottfried announced that
he will be donating to AHI his extensive correspondence with Genovese.
At the Leadership
Dinner, Gottfried elaborated further on his understanding of fascism and
engaged in a lively give-and-take with students and other guests. Students
learned that Gottfried’s mentor at Yale University was the left-wing icon Herbert
Marcuse, one of the doyen’s of the Frankfurt School of cultural Marxists. Gottfried
described Marcuse as a learned professor, demanding teacher, and fair-minded
mentor—in sharp contrast to the kind of left-wing scholars who today politicize
their classrooms and suppress debate on controversial issues. Gottfried
revealed that his favorite historian was the ancient Greek general, Thucydides.
“Sometimes the best histories are by eyewitnesses,” he remarked. AHI
is currently sponsoring for the entire academic year a reading cluster on
Thucydides at Colgate University
When Gottfried was
asked if he thought fascism could make a comeback as a serious political
movement, Gottfried replied probably not, for fascism was “a historical
phenomenon limited to a time and place.” It was not internationalist, like
communism. When asked by a student if his Jewish background had an impact on
his views, Gottfried replied “not particularly,” although his parents had been
driven out of Germany by the Nazis, and then went to Italy and Spain. Hitler
was a “nihilist revolutionary,” who claimed that the Marxists didn’t go far
enough; Nazism actually attracted leftists. In terms of what led to the rise of
Nazism, Gottfried pointed to President Wilson’s disastrous attempt at democratic
nation-building. Because Germany was forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles,
the Weimar Republic was seen as a regime imposed on the German people. In
Gottfried’s opinion, a constitutional monarchy would have worked better.
In contrast,
post-war Italy was neo-fascist and “no one cared.” In fact, neo-fascist regimes
were supported by the CIA. Anti-fascist ideology came about in the late 1960s
as a result of the rise of the New Left. Critics who call the present
Trump administration “fascist” are employing the techniques of the communists
who called all anti-communists fascists, including Trotsky and social
democrats. Today, “’fascist’ means ‘we don’t like you,’” said Gottfried. Such
name-calling is “opportunist, dishonest mudslinging.”
On today’s college
campuses, the “totemic” phrase is “social justice,” a term waved like a flag by
every totalitarian movement that has sought state power. Demands for
tolerance, a word that once meant the capacity to endure suffering, have
shifted to demands not only for accommodation to one or another group’s
alternative lifestyles, but to their acceptance and active celebration. Those
who disagree or criticize with what is being promoted, no matter how unhealthy
the “lifestyle” or detrimental to public morality or a social good, risks being
labeled as a purveyor of “hate speech.” Invariably, conservatives
are the ones tagged as “haters,” and the expansion of the category by
progressives to any group with whom they have political disagreement in
practicing identity politics seems to have no end. Asked if President
Trump was having any effect, Gottfried replied that he was “indirectly because
he offends leftist elites.” He would have more impact, though, if he could show
more restraint and express himself more articulately.
Gottfried’s appearance elicited from Hamilton College’s government
department an all-campus announcement condemning “racist remarks allegedly made
by Gottfried,” although, as the signatories candidly admitted, without having
all the facts at their disposal, for they were “still learning about what
transpired.” In response to the government department’s
communication, AHI Executive Director Robert Paquette wrote department chairman
Philip Klinkner saying, “I am the one–and I alone–who is responsible for
bringing Paul [Gottfried] here and setting up his classroom visitations.”
Paquette then recited to Klinkner Gottfried’s impressive credentials in making
him a fit visitor in both classes. Noting that Paul Gottfried and
Angela Davis shared the same mentor, Herbert Marcuse, Paquette wondered
why there was no “breast-beating and self-righteous indignation in your
department when Angela Davis came to Hamilton College for what was likely a
five-figure fee? Can you find for me one statement–just one–in her long
career during which she denounced the millions of bodies, the majority
non-white, piled up in the name of Communism? Indeed, quite the
opposite. Hamilton College rolled out the red carpet for this
Communist stooge, winner of the Lenin Peace [sic!] prize (1979), complicit in
the murder of a sitting judge, and feted here like a queen. [See here and here]
I need not go into all the other loony rent-a-radicals who have marched through
this place with big paydays saying outrageous, deeply offensive things [without
complaint from the government or any other Hamilton College department].”
Should any of your
colleagues want an explanation as to why I brought Paul Gottfried here, I
eagerly await. My office is 320 library, and I am typically there in the
morning seven days a week.”
