THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Fascism shared the same furious hatred of the bourgeoisie, the same loathing for bourgeois civility and order and profit and prudence, the same intoxication with political violence and ideological extremism. Furet treats communism as fascism's brother- enemy. He observes that Hitler never stinted in his respect for Bolshevik fanaticism. As he told Herman Rauschning in 1934, "there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it... The petit bourgeois Social Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the communist always will." But whereas communism saw itself as the self-conscious bearer of the universal values of 1789, fascism explicitly rejected the universal in favor of the nation and the individual. If communism was, in Furet's phrase, "the pathology of the universal," fascism was "the pathology of the national." Both ideologies hated each other, in Furet's words, "not only for what separated them but also for what made them alike."

They also shared a similar eschatology. Both conceived the public sphere as a place deserted by religion, "as a pure creation of human will." Fascism filled the public square with a ranting demagogue, communism with the tramping feet of the workers. Both wanted to turn the public sphere from the realm of politics into the realm of spectacle, from the deliberative sphere of citizens into the circus of true belonging. Both fascism and communism loathed mere democracy as much as they loathed mere accumulation. Both hated moral and political individualism: the idea that a nation's destiny should depend on the sovereign judgment of separate individuals.

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