Judging Nazism and Communism

For that specter brings with it all the passion of the Left-Right polarity introduced into history by 1789. In the 19th century this polarity focused on the universal-suffrage republic versus monarchy and aristocracy, and in the 20th it graduated to the antithesis socialism versus capitalism antithesis. Yet, though the 19th-century political republic could be achieved, the 20th-century social republic proved to be a far more elusive goal. Most modern societies have therefore been governed in an alternation of Left-center reformism and Right-center prudence, and so rarely faced the stark choice: either capitalism or socialism. In the great crises of 1914--45, however, this centrist equilibrium broke down, and both "fascism" and Communism attempted the impossible millenarian leap. Ever since, in the modern political dynamic Communism has functioned as the absolute Left and Nazism as the absolute Right.

This absolutizing of extremes clearly favors the former--and at the expense of the center. In the 19th century the outer limit of the Right had been the Bourbons, and the first principle of progressive politics was "no enemies to the Left." In the 20th century the outer limit of the Right became Hitler, and the Golden Rule received the ironclad corollary of "no friends to the Right." In consequence, the thesis that Hitler was incomparably evil places moderate conservatives on permanent warning against all "unsavory" allies to their right, and indeed against their own dark demons. Their comparing Stalin to Hitler only "plays into the hands of the Right"; for is not the real target of the comparison the Social Democratic Left?

It is because of this dynamic that The Black Book met with the chilly reception it did--beginning with France's most prestigious newspaper, Le Monde. For did it not deflect attention from the far Right racist, Le Pen? And of course, in the light of 20th-century experience, racism must always be denounced and combated. Yet in strict logic, it hardly follows that this means refraining from honest (if belated) recognition of Soviet crime, any more than the scholarly "historicizing" of Nazism entails its moral "trivialization."

Clearly, such passionate reactions cannot be explained by the economic and institutional differences between "capitalism" and "socialism"; only the moral and philosophical values grounding those differences provide an answer. At this most basic level, what the Left is about is equality and universality, or the fraternal unity of the human species; the Right, on the other hand, is about hierarchy and particularity, or the functional differentiation indispensable to making any society work--and this inevitably means inequality. By extension, moreover, the Right, which in the 19th century defended the Old Regime cause of "altar and throne", in the democratic 20th century came to defend both capitalism and the various national particularities defining competing societies. (27) In American usage, the shorthand contrast for the Left-Right difference is "compassionate" versus mean-spirited." (In France, it is the presence versus the lack of "generosite.") In modern political rhetoric, therefore, it has always been e asier to make a vibrant plea for equality and fraternity than for hierarchy, distinction and privilege, or even for individual liberty. So the moral economy of modern politics gives the Left a permanent, built-in advantage.