In Leo Strauss’ 1941 lecture on German Nihilism, he argues Nazism arose from a nihilism he defines as ultimately in opposition to modern civilization.  This was provoked by progressive educators who, instead of taking seriously the worries about the immorality and debasement of tradition that progressivism wrought, and reminding their pupils of the strengths of the past, merely chided them for insufficient appreciation of modernity.  But this was counter-productive.  It only reinforced their anxiety over loss of moral rootedness and the spiritual comfort found in transcending the individual for the glory of the state.  Instead of turning to the modern, “open society”, they saw only two paths – either the “closed society” of communism, or nihilistic destruction and war against civilization.
 
For the Open Society meant a state of disintegration, a denial of human nature (covered over by sly fictions), and moral respectability only to the extent society remained closed.  Closed Society on the other hand meant a flag to whom one might pledge an oath, the constant awareness of sacrifice and self-denial, known facts about human nature, and connection to the sublime.  Yet since the only path to the latter form of society they could see ended in communism (which they despised) they felt their only option was destruction.
 
Strauss finds much to fault these young Nazis.  He views them as naïve and errant in their thinking, failing to see beyond their current provincial predicament.  Writing in 1941, he had yet to witness just how devastating their plan would come to be.  With historical hindsight, he delivers one of maybe the most absurdly wrong statements written in the 20th century.  Of Hitler, “He will soon be forgotten.”  A better scholar than I might know better what provoked this grave miscalculation.  A Jew born in 1899, who lived in Germany until 1932, he no doubt grasped their virulent antisemitism (although one wonders why he mentions it only in passing “Their anti-Jewish policy does seem to be taken seriously by the Nazis.”), and may have had good reason to avoid grappling with its enormity.
 
But a better explanation might instead be that Strauss himself has strong reactionary sympathies.  He spends a good deal of the lecture laying out just how right the Nazis were about the moral depravity of progressivism.  While it is not mentioned, one hardly need to imagine what Strauss has in mind when he cites approvingly the Nazi critiques of modern civilization.  He argues that civilization is defined by science and reason, and dismisses non-western cultures:
“The term civilization designates at once the process of making man a citizen, and not a slave; an inhabitant of cities, and not a rustic; a lover of peace, and not of war; a polite being, and not a ruffian. A tribal community may possess a culture, i.e. produce, and enjoy, hymns, songs, ornament of their clothes, of their weapons and pottery, dances, fairy tales and what not; it cannot however be civilized.”
Strauss seems to be in agreement that progressivism is decadent and immoral, with its “planetary societies” devoted only to production and consumption, and above all else, an almost narcissistic devotion to individual rights and personal satisfactions.  While not mentioned in the lecture, Weimar Germany was known for its liberalism.  While maybe not quite tolerant, it at least seemed to look the other way at expanding views of traditional hierarchies of race, gender and class.  This fact could not have been lost on Strauss.
 
The basic claim of the piece is not that the Nazis were nihilist reactionaries, but that they were the wrong kind of reactionaries.  He suggests at the end that the British, being of a different temperament than the French who gave in to their progressive passions, and the Germans, who clung to a fanciful pre-modern ideal, were able to weather this predicament of modern civilization and its discontentedness.  He ends with the line, “it is the English, and not the Germans, who deserve to be, and to remain, an imperial nation.”  In evoking imperialism as something to be deserved, Strauss reminds us just where his real allegiances lie. 

The bump-stock ruling occasioned me a brief social media dialogue with a gun pedant today.
 
This is a weird sort of guy with a weird sort of rhetoric.  I get the fetishization of hobbies.  You have the crafters, the motorheads, the bicyclists, the videogame dorks, the foodies, etc., etc.  They all get really into something and know all its ins and outs.
 
But guns are different because they are lethal - literally designed to kill.  Their ultimate purpose is war, or to stop personal violent crime.  Or to commit crime. 
 
Many books have been written about the messy psychological valley that has grown over the past century between sport and war.  The NRA’s transformation in that time from an enthusiast organization to one emphasizing violent threats not only from crime but from some future totalitarian government.  (In a bizarre twist, their zealousness has molded literally any gun regulations as primo fascia evidence of totalitarianism – for which more and more powerful guns are needed to defend from the state.
 
Fear is loaded right into the clip.  As a string of progressive civil rights triumphs on race, gender equality and sexuality played out over the years, gun culture shifted further and further from hunting and target practice and towards personal protection.  It’s hard not to draw parallel tracts between the legal and social deconstruction of white male, Christian, heterosexual patriarchy and it’s declining assumed superiority, and the rise of a gun culture in which there are more guns than people in the United States
 
The gun is the ultimate fascist signifier.  It is the monopoly on violence allowed to the state by democracy placed in an individual’s hands.  When empathy has failed, when communication has broken down, when you feel your enemy has you and your family in the crosshairs, violence becomes reasonable.  After decades of losing the “culture wars” (aka respect for pluralism and human rights), the gun has become a totem of this New Lost Cause.  In the 1970’s, mostly weirdos with vigilante fantasies subscribed to guns and ammo and studied diagrams of how to booby trap your front porch.  I recently watched Taxi Driver, and the Travis Bickle character couldn’t portray better the peculiar lump of roiling insecurities that is the modern gun fetishist.  Yet his character was a lonely Taxi driver living in the slums of NYC, eating popcorn at pornos and crafting DIY concealed gun contraptions before arguing with ghosts in the mirror. 
 
The modern 2nd amendment warrior is the face of the GOP, gathers by the thousands in megachurches, votes for a speaker of the house who flies the Appeal to Heaven flag outside his office and wears the face of an ex-con grifter conspiracist ex-president on his T-shirt while watching a slew of right-wing news porn peddling lies about violent immigrants, vaccine denialism, election-rigging, and trans-groomers hunting down children.
 
But there is something deep in that psychology.  When an appeal to tradition supplants academic, scientific, and a simple, empathetic listening to other people’s stories about their real lives, your epistemology is severely neutered.  A complicated re-routing system gets built that is designed to alleviate the cognitive dissonance between reality and your ancient assumptions.  When biblical inerrancy faces the staggering evidence of evolution, or the fact that when you meet gay people they are perfectly normal, the machine must go into overdrive.  When nearly every last scientific expert on the planet describes how climate change works and predicts massive storms, and your city floods.  When they describe how germ theory works and that you should wear a mask and you see the bodies piling up in make-shift morgues outside hospitals, doctors breaking down in tears, and a million of your countrymen dead.  When all crime statistics show the illegal aliens you fear so much actually have dramatically lower rates than US citizens and when you meet them they are normal, hard-working people whose first thought is their family.  When 60 cases of election interference are brought before the courts and all are thrown out.  When cities are not flaming hellholes but generally pleasant places most Americans live in happily.  It goes on and on. 
 
What is it like to live with a constant media and cultural diet of fear and paranoia, but then to have to always be working against the tide of reality to make everything align.  It’s got to be exhausting.
 
And now you’ve got some egg-head leftie who wouldn’t know a Coltrane X950 from a Weenus-Corrector 600.  This is YOUR turf.  You’ve trained for this.  You’ve got him in your sights. Dead to rights.  Let him try and take it.
 
Oh, he has arguments.  The senseless urban violence.  (Well, we all know who those people are).  The suicide rates.  (Not my fault if you’re a weak-willed nervous-nelly).  The endless stream of mass shootings.  (Not if everyone was armed).  The dead little kids, limbs blown off at Sandy Hook.  (The sanctity of life is… wait, did you say little kids?)
 
OK, tactical retreat.  Code red.  Does not compute.
 
A guy kills scores from a window over-looking a Las Vegas country concert.
 
The Pedant finds his stride.  See, what these pinko types don’t understand about guns is, well, everything.  They’ve come to my house.  Oh, it’s on.
 
I never finished a Tom Clancy novel, although I’ve enjoyed the silly action movies they spawned.  But I remember opening a copy of one once and was intrigued by the way in which Clancy went into great military detail.  If I remember correctly, there would be a chunk of dialogue between two characters, and then one would start to describe – in minute detail – the various types of tanks, their combat suitability, their equipment, their make and model numbers.
 
Now, I realize the Clancy audience is really into this stuff.  There’s a whole thing with war history buffs and almost cosplay devotion to the genre.  Maps and lists and coffee table panzers.  Miniature models meticulously painted and placed in little dioramas of sand and faux-scrub brush.
 
And these were real weapons of war, used by real soldiers who fought and died and did unspeakable things to one another.
 
Is there not some thread here, some deep sinew in the male psyche that weaves together notions of God, country, family and the implements of war?  When empathy is gone, when communication has broken down, you have your oily lists that only you and your kind really understand.  Really appreciate.  Because this isn’t just a hobby anymore but an identity.  You, Pedant, are naked here in this place of machinery and technical details.  Like the Ur man standing before his cave, the big bear before you behind the flames, your woman and child hiding behind you.  Your loincloth is the pages of True Crime and Handgun Magazine, tied together with tank treads only used on Dewy-Nukem half-tracks from 52’-53’ and the frames of Aviator glasses that remind you of being up in the clouds somewhere drinking beer in a Cessna-Sable B92.  Your club is a large bundle of Rush Limbaugh’s Signature Series cigars.  And the bear is, well, everyone who isn’t just like you.  Everyone who isn’t a real American.  Who isn’t real.

I once came across an argument on social media that the historians of fascism had all gotten wrong due to their liberal biases.  Today I came across an interesting post that basically lays out this case, and argues for a view of fascism that find more in common with left wing thought.

The thesis of this brief paper is that postmodernism, an attitude and a way of seeing reality which thoroughly permeates our western culture, is a direct descendant of fascism, and still contains many of its key elements. As an ideology or world view, fascism is an important ancestor of postmodernism that should not be ignored. That there is a strong family resemblance one barely dares suggest, though more and more brave souls are speaking out.

Originally written in 2005, it doesn't seem to have aged well in 2023, with the ascendancy of the global right as being profoundly and often explicitly illiberal, as Victor Orban, a darling of the MAGA intelligentsia, proudly proclaims.  The threats to democracy across the world come not from the left, but from Traditionalist Nationalists in Europe, Russia, India and of course the US.  These movements are incredibly reactionary, finding the modern instantiation of progressive values so triumphant that the only possible course of action is anti-majoritarian illiberalism: voter suppression, executive supremacy, gerrymandering and authoritarian legal maneuvering designed to dictate K-university education.
 
Conspiracies of course, fundamental to fascist movements, provide epistemological means to design a world in which academia, science, the media, and government are all corrupt and to be distrusted.  Post-modernism and relativism - and this article is a good example - have long been straw-manned and misunderstood as being about the non-existence of truth and morality by defenders of a hegemonic conception of Traditionalist truth and knowledge. 
 
However, they missed its core critique - that knowledge and truth, by empirical fact, are relative to social and institutional thought.  In other words, we choose our morality.  To religionists who would view their dogma as the ultimate authority, this is seen as turning man into God.  But when one makes God the ultimate authority, one is literally doing exactly this: all religious dogma is a matter of interpretation, no matter how stubbornly one clings to the narcissistic notion that one's own interpretation is correct and all others are incorrect. 
 
This is an obvious logical fallacy.  The only way to claim yours is the only correct authority is by *making yourself the ultimate authority*, i.e. putting yourself in the place of God.  This is the basic logical flaw in all fundamentalisms.  Post-modernism and relativism merely point out this error.  OK, then, if there is no ultimate authority, won't we all determine our own morality?  Exactly.  We cannot but do any differently.  So, its anything goes then, right - everything is OK, even murder?
 
 This is evidence of the perils of fundamentalist thinking, as it projects its own critical deficits onto others.  If one takes as a given that all is relative to historical place, time and society, the onus is on the individual to do the difficult work of radically examining one's prior assumptions.  Why is murder wrong?  Why is stealing wrong?  It's not actually that hard to develop very solid arguments that end up aligning quite well with most traditional moral claims.  The difference is that these claims are based not on a blind obedience and historically decontextualized fancy one chooses out of ignorance and uncritical social inertia, but rather of introspection, analysis, reading listening, learning, and above all humility that no, I am not a God.
 
Fascism is about the imposition of power over dialogue.  It is the making of man as his own ultimate authority, as his own God, and thus all debate and subservience to democracy as a form of collective understanding are shunned in favor of imposition of one's beliefs over others by brute force.  And so, we return to Religious Nationalism, in which subjugation of others to its own authority is the paramount agenda.  It is anti-pluralism, anti-multi-cultural, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-intellectual because all of these require the humility to live and let others live according to their own moral interpretations.  This is not to say that everything is true and moral - democracy is messy!  It is rather a basic recognition that other people have ways of seeing the world that are different than I, and I am not in a position to impose my specific interpretations, assumed authorities on them carte blanche.  Rather, we all work together to establish *minimum* moral rights that we can at least live with together, with the caveat that our civic duty is one of assessment, analysis, dialogue and argument with our fellow citizens as democratic equals.