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STANLEY DIAMOND
Stanley Diamond
In our present age, the twentieth century, cultural conserva–
tism is, in its ambivalent way, gaining momentum.
It
is the salient
mood of both the counterculture and its most' principled antagonists,
the critical cultural conservatives on the near side of the establish–
ment. It is precisely this split between the two types of conservatism
that needs to be understood, if we are to grasp the present dilemma.
Some of the best intentioned critics are terrified by that "countercul–
ture" which is a pandemic reaction to our society - both as a life
style, and as a rather amorphous set of institutions. The people I refer
to are not reactionaries; they are trying to protect the sacred spaces
in which they live against the sometimes br.utal demystification of the
counterculture. Simultaneously, they are busy negotiating their survival
in one or another bureaucratic hierarchy - the universities, the com–
munications industry and so on. And their selective strategy for survival
clashes with the all-out assault maintained by the counterculture in
the name of its survival.
What the critics fear, of course, is that fascism could be catalyzed
by provocative countercultural behavior leadincr to the increasing rigidi–
ty and repressiveness of the establishment, in the ambience of which
they would, therefore, no longer prosper, even to the modest degree
that they do at present. That fear, however, implies a seriously inade–
quate definition of fascism, for the danger is greater, more immediate
and more complex than many political liberals, or, for that matter,
radicals, appear to believe. Fascism is more than state capitalism, and
much more than opportunistic demagoguery finding its moment.
It
is
the seismic, almost unconscious social movement that occurs when a
population regimented in the bureaucracies that define its living space
finds distorted affective release, in turn tolerated by the establishment
which in the first instance created the need for such expression. The
emotions, being captive, become dissociated, and the system in which
they function becomes tautological. Fascism is the modern fragmented
individual finding a random place in the disciplined mob, prepared to
behave under command at one moment and permitted to explode in
nihilistic fury the next. The goose step, the time clock, the inhuman
precisions of Nazi Germany are the converse of the orgiastic behavior
of the Nazi mobs roaming the streets for prey. They were also the
converse of the clinically definable habits of the Nazi leadership (the
quasi-bohemian aspects of the Nazi movement are well known ) . One
phenomenon reinforced the other - that dialectic and unresolved ten–
sion characterizes fascism. In this sense, all modern state structures
rooted in the Western experience - including the Soviet Union - all
such totalizing structures are chronically fascist, and there is, always
and everywhere, the danger of a flare-up of nuclear dimension, obli–
terating everything.
But the conventional cultural conservative does not realize that
just as he negotiates his survival with the establishment, and thus
commits political suicide, the countercultural conservative may well do
the same thing and for the same apparent reason, namely, to find a
