By Paul Gottfried, Chronicles

As a historian who has written books on both fascism and the European left, I am struck by how different the present age is from the interwar period. In the 1930s, there was what historian of fascism Ernst Nolte described as the “European civil war.” Following the Bolshevik Revolution, Communist and Communist-allied parties and left-wing activist groups surfaced throughout Europe, and this development produced a proportionately militant response in the form of fascist and other right-wing authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian movements.

The Spanish Civil War, which Stanley Payne has written about perceptively and exhaustively, illustrates the savage struggle this antagonism produced. In this contest between Communists, radical socialists, and anarchists on one side and monarchists, clericalists, and the Falange’s Spanish fascists on the other, more than 200,000 Spaniards fell in combat. This internecine Spanish war, which lasted two and a half years, epitomized the ferocity with which right and left fought each other in the 1930s.

This stands in striking contrast to the ideological struggle happening now in Western countries and, quite noticeably, in the U.S. as the world’s leading power and the most culturally influential Western country. Ideological polarization did not stop in 1945, nor was Daniel Bell right when, in 1960, he declared that the U.S. was witnessing the “end of ideology.” The gulf between deeply divided political and moral camps is as great now as it has been at any point in the last hundred years.

Moreover, if we are looking at what divides right and left, it is at least as significant as anything that divided the warring camps in the 1930s. One side believes that white Christian society is inherently evil and predatory, that gender identity is entirely fluid, that borders should be kept open to allow this country to be repopulated by Third World migrants, that government benefits and employment should be distributed based on of government-approved victim claims, and that imprisoned criminals are often or mostly victims of social inequality and unjust living circumstances. America and other Western countries must allow government administrators to determine living conditions and earnings in our inherently wicked and bigoted society. Those who oppose such plans should be treated as “fascists,” “racists,” “homophobes,” or “sexists” and be subjected to both government harassment and social ostracism.

The other side, which opposes this leftist agenda, supports at least implicitly the way Americans lived when I grew up in the 1950s. They value gender roles and the inherited nuclear family, want to keep dangerous criminals in jail, and insist on strong national borders. These Americans come overwhelmingly from the traditional working class and the less affluent. These are those Hillary Clinton deemed as belonging to the “basket of deplorables,” and whom Joe Biden called “human garbage”; those who continue to resist with varying degrees of intensity the cultural Marxist takeover of the country and the continuing war against the “normies.”

The two sides, however, wage combat in distinctly different ways. Leftists have no compunctions about unleashing riots, inciting racial tensions, and calling for the assassination of political opponents. They are almost indistinguishable from the anarchist and socialist leftists who brought about the armed reaction of the Spanish right in July 1936. Like our left, the Spanish left in the 1930s abetted tumultuous strikes and happily incited the killing of right-wing figures. The recent discovery that one third of self-identified Democrats would feel “very positive” if the president were assassinated indicates the violent direction in which the American left has now moved. For years, this left has contributed to bloody riots by taking the side of rioters. Further, the havoc wrought by Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa after the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, was unleashed with Democratic and general leftist support. The aides to former president Biden worked to release criminal rioters from custody, and the Democratic nominee for vice president, with the approval of our media, expressed sympathy for the hellraisers tearing down our cities.

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