LIBERAL FASCISM
The Secret History of the AMERICAN LEFT from MUSSOLINI to the POLITICS OF MEANING
JONAH GOLDBERG
DOUBLEDAY
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Copyright © 2007 by Jonah Goldberg
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goldberg. Jonah.
Liberal fascism : the secret history of the American left from Mussolini to the politics of meaning / Jonah Goldberg. - 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Fascism. 2. Liberalism. 3. World politics - 20th century. I. Title.
JC481.G55 2007
320.53’3 - dc22
2007010668
eISBN: 978-0-385-51769-0
v1.0
For Sidney Goldberg, Hop Bird
CONTENTS
Introduction: Everything You Know About Fascism Is Wrong
1. Mussolini: The Father of Fascism
2. Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left
3. Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism
4. Franklin Roosevelt’s Fascist New Deal
5. The 1960s: Fascism Takes to the Streets
6. From Kennedy’s Myth to Johnson’s Dream: Liberal Fascism and the Cult of the State
7. Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine
8. Liberal Fascist Economics
9. Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism
10. The New Age: We’re All Fascists Now
Afterword: The Tempting of Conservatism
Acknowledgments
Appendix: The Nazi Party Platform
INTRODUCTION
Everything You Know About Fascism Is Wrong
George Carlin:...and the poor have been systematically looted in this country. The rich have been made richer under this criminal, fascist president and his government. [Applause.] [Cheers.]
Bill Maher: Okay, okay.
James Glassman: You know, George—George, I think you know—do you know what fascism is?
Carlin: Fascism, when it comes to America -
Glassman: Do you know what Nazis are?
Carlin: When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts. Smiley-smiley. Fascism—Germany lost the Second World War. Fascism won it. Believe me, my friend.
Maher: And actually, fascism is when corporations become the government.
Carlin: Yes.
Outside of a few academic seminars, this is about as intelligent as discussions about fascism get in America. Angry left-wingers shout that all those to their right, particularly corporate fat cats and the politicians who love them, are fascists. Meanwhile, besieged conservatives sit dumbfounded by the nastiness of the slander. Bill Maher to the contrary, fascism is not “when corporations become the government,” Ironically, however, George Carlin’s conclusion is right, though not his reasoning. If fascism does come to America, it will indeed take the form of “smiley-face fascism”—nice fascism. In fact, in many respects fascism not only is here but has been here for nearly a century. For what we call liberalism—the refurbished edifice of American Progressivism—is in fact a descendant and manifestation of fascism. This doesn’t mean it’s the same thing as Nazism. Nor is it the twin of Italian Fascism, But Progressivism was a sister movement of fascism, and today’s liberalism is the daughter of Progressivism. One could strain the comparison and say that today’s liberalism is the well-intentioned niece of European fascism. She is hardly identical to her uglier relations, but she nonetheless carries an embarrassing family resemblance that few will admit to recognizing.
There is no word in the English language that gets thrown around more freely by people who don’t know what it means than “fascism.” Indeed, the more someone uses the word “fascist” in everyday conversation, the less likely it is that he knows what he’s talking about.
You might think that the exception to this rule would be scholars of fascism. But what really distinguishes the scholarly community is its honesty. Not even the professionals have figured out what exactly fascism is. Countless scholarly investigations begin with this pro forma acknowledgment, “Such is the welter of divergent opinion surrounding the term,” writes Roger Griffin in his introduction to The Nature of Fascism, “that it is almost de rigueur to open contributions to the debate on fascism with some such observation,” The few scholars who have ventured their own definitions provide a glimmer of insight as to why consensus is so elusive. Griffin, a contemporary leading light in the field, defines fascism as “a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.” Roger Eatwell claims that fascism’s “essence” is a “form of thought that preaches the need for social rebirth in order to forge a holistic-national radical Third Way.” Emilio Gentile suggests, “A mass movement, that combines different classes but is prevalently of the middle classes, which sees itself as having a mission of national regeneration, is in a state of war with its adversaries and seeks a monopoly of power by using terror, parliamentary tactics and compromise to create a new regime, destroying democracy.”
While these are perfectly serviceable definitions, what most recommends them over others is that they are short enough to reprint here. For example, the social scientist Ernst Nolte, a key figure in the German “historians’ dispute” (Histonkerstreir) of the 1980s, has a six-point definition called the “Fascist minimum” that tries to define fascism by what it opposes—that is. fascism is both “anti-liberalism” and “anti-conservatism.” Other definitional constructs are even more convoluted, requiring that contrary evidence be counted as exceptions that prove the rule.
It’s an academic version of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: the more closely you study the subject, the less clearly defined it becomes. The historian R. A. H. Robinson wrote twenty years ago, “Although enormous amounts of research time and mental energy have been put into the study of it...fascism has remained the great conundrum for students of the twentieth century.” Meanwhile, the authors of the Dictionnaire histonque des fascismes et du nazisme flatly assert, “No universally accepted definition of the fascist phenomenon exists, no consensus, however slight, as to its range, its ideological origins, or the modalities of action which characterize it.” Stanley G. Payne, considered by many to be the leading living scholar of fascism, wrote in 1995, “At the end of the twentieth century fascism remains probably the vaguest of the major political terms.” There are even serious scholars who argue that Nazism wasn’t fascist, that fascism doesn’t exist at all, or that it is primarily a secular religion (this is my own view). “[P]ut simply,” writes Gilbert Allardyce, “we have agreed to use the word without agreeing on how to define it.”
And yet even though scholars admit that the nature of fascism is vague, complicated, and open to wildly divergent interpretations, many modern liberals and leftists act as if they know exactly what fascism is. What’s more,
they see it everywhere—except when they look in the mirror. Indeed, the left wields the term like a cudgel to beat opponents from the public square like seditious pamphleteers. After all, no one has to take a fascist seriously. You’re under no obligation to listen to a fascist’s arguments or concern yourself with his feelings or rights. It’s why Al Gore and many other environmentalists are so quick to compare global-warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers. Once such an association takes hold, there’s no reason to give such people the time of day.
In short, “fascist” is a modern word for “heretic,” branding an individual worthy of excommunication from the body politic. The left uses other words—”racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe.” “christianist”—for similar purposes, but these words have less elastic meanings. Fascism, however, is the gift that keeps on giving. George Orwell noted this tendency as early as 1946 in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language”: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ ”
Hollywood writers use the words “fascist.” “Brownshirt.” and “Nazi” as if they mean no more and no less than “anything liberals don’t like.” On NBC’s West Wing support for school choice was deemed “fascist” (even though school choice is arguably the most un-fascist public policy ever conceived, after homeschooling). Crash Davis. Kevin Costner’s character in the movie Bull Durham, explains to his protege, “Quit trying to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring and besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls. They’re more democratic” A rude cook on Seinfeld is the “Soup Nazi.”
The real world is only marginally less absurd. Representative Charlie Rangel claimed that the OOP’s 1994 Contract with America was more extreme than Nazism. “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things” (this is technically accurate in that Hitler wasn’t, in fact, pushing term limits for committee chairs and “zero-based” budgeting). In 2000 Bill Clinton called the Texas GOP platform a “fascist tract.” The New York Times leads a long roster of mainstream publications eager to promote leading academics who raise the possibility that the GOP is a fascist party and that Christian conservatives are the new Nazis.
More recently, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges penned a book called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, which is just one of many current polemics asserting that conservative or fundamentalist Christians are fascists (Rick Perlstein’s otherwise quite negative New York Times review begins with the declaration: “Of course there are Christian fascists in America”). The Reverend Jesse Jackson ascribes every form of opposition to his race-based agenda as fascist. During the 2000 Florida recount, he proclaimed that survivors of the Holocaust had been targeted “again” because the Florida ballot was too complicated for a few thousand elderly voters. On Larry King Live, Jackson absurdly proclaimed, “The Christian Coalition was a strong force in Germany.” He continued: “It laid down a suitable, scientific, theological rationale for the tragedy in Germany. The Christian Coalition was very much in evidence there.”
Ask the average, reasonably educated person what comes to mind when she hears the word “fascism” and the immediate responses are “dictatorship,” “genocide,” “anti-Semitism,” “racism” and (of course) “right wing.” Delve a bit deeper—and move a bit further to the left—and you’ll hear a lot about “eugenics,” “social Darwinism.” “state capitalism,” or the sinister rule of big business. War, militarism, and nationalism will also come up a lot. Some of these attributes were indisputably central to what we might call “classical” fascism—the Fascism of Benito Mussolini and the Nazism of Adolf Hitler. Others—like the widely misunderstood term “social Darwinism”—have little to do with fascism. But very few of these things are unique to fascism, and almost none of them are distinctly right-wing or conservative—at least in the American sense.
To begin with, one must be able to distinguish between the symptoms and the disease. Consider militarism, which will come up again and again in the course of this book. Militarism was indisputably central to fascism (and communism) in countless countries. But it has a more nuanced relationship with fascism than one might suppose. For some thinkers in Germany and the United States (such as Teddy Roosevelt and Oliver Wendell Holmes), war was truly the source of important moral values. This was militarism as a social philosophy pure and simple. But for far more people, militarism was a pragmatic expedient: the highest, best means for organizing society in productive ways. Inspired by ideas like those in William James’s famous essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” militarism seemed to provide a workable and sensible model for achieving desirable ends. Mussolini, who openly admired and invoked James, used this logic for his famous “Battle of the Grains” and other sweeping social initiatives. Such ideas had an immense following in the United States, with many leading progressives championing the use of “industrial armies” to create the ideal workers’ democracy. Later, Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps—as militaristic a social program as one can imagine—borrowed from these ideas, as did JFK’s Peace Corps.
This trope has hardly been purged from contemporary liberalism. Every day we hear about the “war on cancer.” the “war on drugs.” the “War on Poverty,” and exhortations to make this or that social challenge the “moral equivalent of war.” From health care to gun control to global warming, liberals insist that we need to “get beyond politics” and “put ideological differences behind us” in order to “do the people’s business.” The experts and scientists know what to do, we are told; therefore the time for debate is over. This, albeit in a nicer and more benign form, is the logic of fascism—and it was on ample display in the administrations of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and yes, even John F Kennedy-Then, of course, there’s racism. Racism was indisputably central to Nazi ideology. Today we are perfectly comfortable equating racism and Nazism. And in important respects that’s absolutely appropriate. But why not equate Nazism and, say. Afrocentrism? Many early Afrocentrists, like Marcus Garvey. were pro-fascist or openly identified themselves as fascists. The Nation of Islam has surprising ties to Nazism, and its theology is Himmleresque. The Black Panthers—a militaristic cadre of young men dedicated to violence, separatism, and racial superiority—are as quintessentially fascist as Hitler’s Brownshirts or Mussolini’s action squads. The Afrocentrist writer Leonard Jeffries (blacks are “sun people,” and whites are “ice people”) could easily be mistaken for a Nazi theorist.
Certain quarters of the left assert that “Zionism equals racism” and that Israelis are equivalent to Nazis. As invidious and problematic as those comparisons are, why aren’t we hearing similar denunciations of groups ranging from the National Council of La Raza—that is, “The Race”—to the radical Hispanic group MEChA, whose motto—”Par La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada”—means “Everything for the race, nothing outside the race”? Why is it that when a white man spouts such sentiments it’s “objectively” fascist, but when a person of color says the same thing it’s merely an expression of fashionable multiculturalism?
The most important priority for the left is not to offer any answer at all to such questions. They would much prefer to maintain Orwell’s definition of fascism as anything not desirable, thus excluding their own fascistic proclivities from inquiring eyes. When they are forced to answer, however, the response is usually more instinctive, visceral or dismissively mocking than rational or principled. Their logic seems to be that multiculturalism, the Peace Corps, and such are good things—things that liberals approve of—and good things can’t be fascist by simple virtue of the fact that liberals approve of them. Indeed, this seems to be the irreducible argument of countless writers who glibly use the word “fascist” to describe the “bad guys” based on no other criteria than that liberals think they are bad. Fidel Castro, one could argue, is a textbook fascist. But because the left approves of his resistance to U.S. “imperialism”—and because h
e uses the abracadabra words of Marxism—it’s not just wrong but objectively stupid to call him a fascist. Meanwhile, calling Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani, and other conservatives fascists is simply what right-thinking, sophisticated people do.
The major flaw in all of this is that fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact—an inconvenient truth if there ever was one—is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate and control the same social space. The fact that they appear as polar opposites is a trick of intellectual history and (more to the point) the result of a concerted propaganda effort on the part of the “Reds” to make the “Browns” appear objectively evil and “other” (ironically, demonization of the “other” is counted as a definitional trait of fascism). But in terms of their theory and practice, the differences are minimal.
It is difficult now, in the light of their massive crimes and failures, to remember that both fascism and communism were, in their time, Utopian visions and the bearers of great hopes. What’s more, fascism, like communism, was an international movement that attracted adherents in every Western society. Particularly in the aftermath of World War I—but beginning much earlier—a fascist moment arose on the ashes of the old European order. It drew together the various strands of European politics and culture—the rise of ethnic nationalism, the Bismarckian welfare state, and the collapse of Christianity as a source of social and political orthodoxy and universal aspirations. In place of Christianity, it offered a new religion of the divinized state and the nation as an organic community.
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