NOTHING TO OFFER BUT HATE ITSELF:

[A]ustria had two opposing political factions: rabid Austrian Nazis foaming at the mouth in favor of annexation to Nazi Germany, and noble Austrian patriots who found subservience to brutish Nazi Germany abhorrent to their proud sense of refinement. And Catholicism, so the story goes, served as a bulwark of morality against Nazi browbeating.

To be sure, Austrian patriots who opposed Nazism were ardently Catholic. But they were no liberal democrats. Instead, they weaponized Catholicism for authoritarian purposes. The Austrian state before the Anschluss (the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938) was often referred to as the Ständestaat, or Corporatist State, a reference to the fascist economic policy pioneered in none other than Mussolini's Italy. The guiding political philosophy of this Ständestaat was an Austrian strain of fascism, often known as Austrofascism. This ideology relied on a veritable grab bag of things they detested: from Marxism to socialism to liberalism. Essentially, the Austrofascist "movement" was a negative politics, fixated on tearing others down without really offering its own concrete policies for society.

What they did do was boast. Much like the Nazis, these Austrofascists were German-speaking, antisemitic ethno-nationalists with delusions of imperial grandeur. They proudly and repeatedly bragged of their "German-ness" in natalist terms, all to express a desire for greater German glory. But Austrofascists were also explicitly and violently anti-Nazi, and their disdain for Nazism hinged on their Catholicism.

The Catholic Church in Austria went all in on this authoritarian, fascist endeavor.

In contrast to the likes of U.S. radio stalwart Father Coughlin--who wielded Catholicism to muster sympathy and support for Nazism and American neutrality in World War II--Austrofascists used Catholicism to define themselves in opposition to Nazism. They pathologized Nazism as a vulgar, thuggish outgrowth of north German (i.e., Prussian) militarism and Protestantism, and they saw Nazism as a nearly pagan cult. In Austrofascist calculations, Catholicism made Austrians the "best type" of German and Christian--the most authentic creators, bearers, and defenders of Kultur and Geist. By this logic, their anti-Nazi stance was fulfilling Austria's historical mission to hold the line of "the West" against nondescript hordes from "the East," be they Mongols, Ottomans, Soviets, or, in the 1930s, Prussians in Nazi uniforms. Indeed, some Austrofascists disparaged Prussians as east European Slavs masquerading as Germans.

The Catholic Church in Austria went all in on this authoritarian, fascist endeavor. Such eager collaboration has also earned the Austrofascist regime the label of "clerical fascist" among some historians, a modern ideological spin on older notions of theocracy. Ignaz Seipel, the revered leader of the Christian Social Party that later spearheaded the Ständestaat, was himself a Catholic priest. Political rallies featured massive statues of Jesus on the cross, before which Church leaders said Mass. Such iconography and clerical agency would have been unheard of at Nazi rallies, where sacrality was held by the Führer alone. Austrofascists adored their own Führer, Engelbert Dollfuss, as the Austrian David to the German Goliath. When Nazis assassinated him in a 1934 Putsch-attempt, the country saw an outpouring of memorials that framed him as Austria's messianic leader. [...]

Likewise, we see the Right of today offering us nothing but the braggadocious rhetoric of a negative politics, in which "owning the libs" has become both the means and ends. Indeed, Deneen attacks liberalism again and again as destructive of a healthy civilization and insists that its replacement through "a raw assertion of power" would allow the right kind of society to come into being. This vision is negative in two senses of the word: it mobilizes populism's worst impulses, and it's really just a cathartic tantrum aimed at tearing down the current establishment. All the while, it offers very little of substance that is actually new.

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