Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the author’s debut article on his Substack, Ideology Detective, shared here with permission.
The 20th century was driven by revolutionary ideologies. Sure, there were social and military reasons for the ugly birth of communism in Russia, as there were for the repulsive rise of fascism in Italy. These regimes had their causes in politics, war, economic crisis, and nation-specific historical development. But they were brought into being, in addition, by more-or-less coherent conglomerations of ideas, ones with little previous precedent. Though opposed to each other in practice, the new ideologies of the time had much in common, not least their totalitarianism. Their loyal followers—the ideologues—disdained the received world, seeing it as unheroic and bland, degrading and repressive, or alienating and unjust, and sought its radical remaking. They sought reconstructed societies to be populated by new and better men, pending the elimination of the reactionaries who stood in the way.
We are so accustomed to viewing the world in received ideological categories that we have not recognized the rise of new, world-altering doctrines in our own time. My contention in forthcoming posts is that we are seeing the rise of new revolutionary doctrines, but they are still incipient, still coming into being. Some are barely compatible. Their bearers struggle to put the ideas together into coherent conglomerations, because they lack a single Marx. Radical intellectuals vie with each other for credit in steering disparate tendencies toward a new revolutionary doctrine. It’s not there yet, but its outlines are becoming visible.
In an article now ten years old, I call it the ideology of purity, or—though it’s a mouthful—purificationism. Though it is largely an ideology of the left, it incorporates features reminiscent of fascism: mass street mobilization, rejection of bourgeois values, identitarianism or idolization of community, volkish trust in the indigene, disregard for freedom as a fundamental value, distrust in republican institutions, cultic dedication to the destructive deed with little heed to the viability of outcomes, and reliance on “structural” explanations so vague that they become etherealized conspiracy theories.
Image by pengedarseni — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 741705462
The mistake is in not realizing that Italy, Germany, Spain and the Soviet Union were all fascist. Textbook fascism.
Remember that the Nazis considered themselves to be socialists — their party’s name (in German) was the National Socialist Party.
They disagreed with each other because fascism involves ideological purity and hence they would inherently disagree with each other — that doesn’t mean that they weren’t fascist.