Alt-Modernism: Fascism and Conservative Revolution in America

• In Event: Democracy in Peril?

Abstract

This paper sketches a research agenda about a distinctively American conservative revolutionary ideology: what I shall call alt-modernism. There has been much debate about whether fascism in America has existed as a social movement historically and in the present. The concept of alt-modernism is part of a distinct though related inquiry: identifying fascism’s intellectual history and political theory. Alt-modernism especially concerns fascism’s “genetic question,” that is, “how did a particular set of views come about?” I use the term alt-modernism to describe a set of ideological coalitions that tend to travel together, and constitute part of fascism’s intellectual genealogy in the American context. Alt-modernism is a particular kind of conservative revolution that combines (i) conservative alternatives to socialism, (ii) a fusion of pastoral nostalgia with capitalist modes of accumulation, and (iii) techniques of colonial government. Alt-modernism is a short-hand for the term “alternative modernity,” and the specific features I ascribe to alt-modernism are drawn from the features scholars—especially Zeev Sternhell and Jeffrey Herf—see as defining the normative vision of European fascism. Moreover, to extend their analysis to the U.S. context, I focus on a black radical tradition—especially W.E.B. Du Bois and Cedric Robinson—and how they trace fascist ideology to a global colonial context.

My basic aim with the concept of alt-modernism is to show how the categories scholars used to describe radical reactionary ideology in Europe—especially fascism and reactionary modernism—can be extended to the U.S. when appropriately adapted. There are also a host of debates about European fascist ideology—especially fascism’s relationship to technology, industrial capitalism, and its ideological origins—and perspectives within such debates can shed light on the nature of radical reactionary thought in America. Scholars contest whether categories such as fascism possesses counterparts in the United States, and some have denied that there could be an American ideology of radical conservatism. Focusing on George Fitzhugh, I argue that what Louis Hartz called the Reactionary Enlightenment espoused a counterpart to the alternative modernity scholars see as defining European fascism. I focus on how certain proslavery theorists defended slave society as third way between liberal capitalism and socialism, on the one hand, and appealed to techniques of colonial government, on the other, to fantasize a harmonious and technologically advanced society absent class conflict. This paper suggests we can trace a persistent tradition of conservative alternatives to socialism inflected with settler colonial ideals. The article sketches a research program and remains exploratory. My purpose is to state a view and number of theses; a full defense will be provided elsewhere.

The political theories animating the Confederacy or the Ku Klux Klan are malign though important. There is probably some temptation to view figures such as Fitzhugh as peripheral historical curiosities. But this attitude should be resisted. Charles Mills once wrote that “White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory.” As self-conscious theorists of a normative ideal based on intertwined racial, class and gender domination, proslavery intellectuals theorized the limiting cases of universal power systems that are certainly not historical curiosities. At the very least, absent histories of malign political theories, we would have great difficulty recognizing the nightmares in our present.

Author

• Tristan Hughes, Princeton University