LIBERAL FASCISM: The Secret History of the AMERICAN LEFT from MUSSOLINI to the POLITICS OF MEANING

by Jonah Goldberg

  From cash payments to the poor to building new bridges and community redevelopment, the payout was prodigious even by New Deal standards. The civil rights movement, which had captured the public’s sympathies through King’s message of equality and color blindness, quickly degenerated into a riot of racially loaded entitlements. George Wiley, the president of the National Welfare Rights Organization, insisted that welfare was “a right, not a privilege.” Some even argued that welfare was a form of reparations for slavery. Meanwhile, any opposition to such programs was stigmatized as evidence of bigotry.

  The War on Poverty, affirmative action, community redevelopment, and the vast panoply of subsidies that fall under the rubric of welfare—Aid to Families with Dependent Children, housing grants, Medicare. Women, Infants, and Children benefits, food stamps—were churned out by a massively increased administrative state on a scale undreamed of by FDR. But most on the left were not satisfied, in part because these programs proved remarkably ineffective at creating the Great Society or defeating poverty. While even FDR had recognized that the dole could be a “narcotic...of the human spirit.” in the 1960s such concerns were widely dismissed as rubbish. The New Republic argued that Johnson’s antipoverty program was fine “as a start” but insisted that there was “no alternative to really large-scale, ameliorative federal social welfare action and payments.” Michael Harrington, whose The Other America laid the moral groundwork for the War on Poverty, led a group of thirty-two left-wing intellectuals, grandiosely dubbed the “Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution,” which proclaimed that the state should provide “every individual and every family with an adequate income as a matter of right.” The committee lamented that Americans were “all too confused and frightened by a bogey we call the ‘welfare state.’ [a] term of pride in most parts of the world.”

  Recipients weren’t the only ones hooked on the narcotic of “relief”; the pushers were. too. Like a man determined to pound a square peg into a round hole, establishment liberals kept insisting that just a little more money, a little more effort, would produce the social euphoria of the elusive Great Society. As Mickey Kaus argues in The End of Equality, the liberal response to every setback could be summarized in one word: “more.” When welfare seemed to cause fathers to abandon their families, liberals responded that payments should be extended to families where the father remains at home. But this in turn encouraged recipients to stay or become unemployed. The answer to that? Give money to employed poor fathers, too. But this in turn created an incentive for families to split up the moment the father moved out of poverty, so they wouldn’t lose their benefits. Meanwhile, if you criticized any of this, you were a fascist.

  The unintended but inevitable consequences of liberal utopianism spilled forth. From 1964 onward, crime in America grew at about 20 percent per year. Liberal court rulings, particularly the Supreme Court’s Miranda decision, caused clearance rates to plummet in major cities. Welfare had the tendency to encourage family breakdown, illegitimate births, and other pathologies it was designed to cure. The original civil rights revolution—which was largely based on a classically liberal conception of equality before the law—failed to produce the level of integration liberals had hoped for. In 1964 Hubert Humphrey—”Mr. Liberal”—swore up and down in the well of the Senate that the Civil Rights Act could in no way lead to quotas and if anyone could prove otherwise. “I will start eating the pages one after the other, because it is not there.” By 1972 the Democratic Party—under the guise of the “McGovern rules”—embraced hard quotas (for blacks, women, and youth) as its defining organizational principle. And it should be no surprise that a Democratic Party determined to do anything it could to make itself “look like America” would in turn be committed to making America look like the Democratic Party. And if you criticized any of this, you also were a fascist.

  Indeed, even as quintessentially fascist street violence erupted in American cities, white liberals responded by basking in guilt and blaming the right. The Watts riots in 1965 were the real turning point. Not only was the collective liberal intelligentsia determined to blame white America—”the system”—for the violence, but the violence itself became morally admirable “rebellion.” Johnson commented that such behavior was to be expected when “people feel they don’t get a fair shake.” Hubert Humphrey said that if he’d been born poor, he might have rioted also. An entire “riot ideology” unfolded that, in the words of the urban historian Fred Siegel, became a new form of “collective bargaining.” Destroy your neighborhood and the government will buy you a better one.

  The extent of liberal denial was put on full display when Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an adviser to Richard Nixon, advocated a policy of “benign neglect” on racial issues. The subject of race, Moynihan had told Nixon in confidence, “has been too much talked about...We may need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades.” To this end Moynihan urged the president to avoid confrontations with black extremists and instead invest his energies in an aggressive class-based approach to social policy. To this, liberal editorialists, activists, and academics responded in horror, calling the memo “shameful.” “outrageous,” and “cruel” on its face. The reaction was instructive. Liberals had so thoroughly imbibed the assumptions of the God-state that to suggest the state could, never mind should, turn its back on the chosen people—for who could be more anointed than the poor black victims of slavery and segregation?—was tantamount to saying that God had ceased being God. When it comes to the state, neglect could not be benign, only malign. The state is love.

  A more practical irony of the transformation of American liberalism is that it had fallen into the pre-fascist logic of the Bismarckian welfare state. Bismarck had pioneered the concept of liberalism without liberty. In exchange for lavish trinkets from an all-powerful state. Bismarck bought off the forces of democratic revolution. Reform without democracy empowered the bureaucratic state while keeping the public satisfied. Blacks in particular married their interests to the state and its righteous representatives, the Democratic Party. Blacks and the Democrats meet each other service for service, and so ingrained is this relationship that many liberal black intellectuals consider opposition to the Democratic Party to be, quite literally, a form of racism. Liberals also entered a Bismarckian bargain with the courts. Facing mounting disappointments in the democratic arena, liberals made peace with top-down liberalism from activist judges. Today liberalism depends almost entirely on “enlightened” judges who use Wilson’s living Constitution to defy popular will in the name of progress.

  All of this is traceable back to the Kennedy assassination, in which a deranged communist martyred a progressive icon. In 1983, on the twentieth anniversary of the murder, Gary Hart told Esquire, “If you rounded us [Democratic politicians] all up and asked, ‘Why did you get into politics?’ nine out of ten would say John Kennedy.” In 1988 Michael Dukakis was convinced (absurdly enough) that he was the reincarnation of Kennedy, even tapping Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate to re-create the “made” of the Boston-Austin axis. In 1992 the high-water mark of the Clinton campaign was the Reifenstahlesque film of a teenage Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy. John Kerry affected a Kennedy accent in school, went by the initials JFK, and tried to model his political career on Kennedy’s. In 2004 Howard Dean and John Edwards also claimed to be the true heirs of the Kennedy mantle. As did past candidates, including Bob Kerrey, Gary Hart, and, of course, Ted and Robert Kennedy. In 2007 Hillary Clinton said she was the JFK in the race.

  A true indication of how thoroughly the Kennedy myth seeped into the grain of American life can be seen in how Americans greeted the death of his son John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1999. “John-John,” as he was endearingly and condescendingly dubbed, was by all accounts a good and decent man. He was certainly very handsome. And he was the son of a beloved president. Yet beyond that, his career and contributions were lackluster at best. He took the New York Bar exam three times. He was
an unremarkable prosecutor. He founded a childish magazine, George, which intentionally blurred the lines between the personal and the political substance and celebrity, the trivial and the important. And yet when John Junior died in a tragic plane crash, his death was greeted in abjectly religious terms by a political class entirely convinced that the Son, like the Father, had been imbued with the Kennedy Holy Ghost. The historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in the New York Times that JFK Jr. was his generation’s “photogenic redeemer.” Wall-to-wall coverage portrayed the younger Kennedy as a lost “national savior.” Bernard Kalb summarized the tenor of the coverage: JFK Jr. was being depicted as “a kind of a secular messiah who would, had he lived, [have] rescued civilization from all its terrible problems.”

  Today, to deny JFK’s status as the martyr to what might have been is to deny the hope of liberalism itself. For more than a generation, liberal politics in America has been premised on the politics of a ghost. The Jack Kennedy whom liberals remember never existed But the Kennedy myth represents not a man but a moment—a moment when liberals hoped to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth. The times were not as propitious as liberals remember—after all it was only Kennedy’s death, not his life, that truly rallied Americans around “Kennedyism” in huge numbers. But that’s not the point. What matters is that the people believe the myth and therefore pursue it. Liberals believed for a “brief shining moment” that they could bring about their kingdom of heaven, their Camelot. Ever since, they have yearned to re-create that moment. Looked at from outside, the myth appears to be little more than power worship. But from within, it is gospel. Meanwhile, it’s telling that Democrats wish to preserve the substance of the Great Society while maintaining the mythology of Camelot. Every Democrat says he wants to be JFK while insisting that he will do more or less what LBJ did. No Democrat would dream of saying he wanted to emulate Lyndon Johnson, because the myth is what matters most.

  7

  Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine

  THERE IS NO issue on which modern liberals consider themselves more thoroughly enlightened than that of race. And there is no contentious topic where they are quicker to insist that dissent from liberal orthodoxy is a sign of creeping fascism. In virtually every major racially charged debate over the last forty years, at least some self-righteous liberals have invoked the record of the Holocaust to warn, darkly, that if opponents of racial preferences of one kind or another get their way; we just may find ourselves on the slippery slope to Nazi Germany.

  White liberals learned this trick from black liberals. Black civil rights figures love playing the Nazi card. When Newt Gingrich tried to reach out to liberal Democrats by inviting them to social functions, New York representative Major Owens was outraged. “These are people who are practicing genocide with a smile; they’re worse than Hitler,” Owen said. “Gingrich smiles...[and] says they’re going to be our friend. We’re going to have cocktail-party genocide,” The NAACP chairman Julian Bond is supposed to be a moderate in racial politics, but he, too, has a weakness for Nazi analogies. “Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side by side,” he recently declared. Harry Belafonte smeared conservative blacks—Condoleezza Rice. Colin Powell, and others—in the Bush administration by snorting that Hitler also “had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich” (this is untrue, by the way). Jesse Jackson has never met a reducilo ad Hitlerum he didn’t like. Over the course of his career he has compared Republicans to genocidal Nazis countless times, from decrying the Hitlerian roots of the religious right to denouncing George W. Bush’s “Nazi tactics”

  The American right is constantly required to own the darkest chapters in the country’s history: the accommodation of segregationists, McCarthyite excesses, isolationism prior to World War II, and so on. Rarely mentioned is the liberal side of these stories, in which the Democratic Party was the home to Jim Crow for a century; in which American liberalism was at least as isolationist as American conservatism; in which the progressive Red Scare made McCarthy ism look like an Oxford Union debate; in which successive Democratic presidents ordered such things as the detention of Japanese-Americans, sweeping domestic surveillance of political enemies, and the (justified) use of horrific weapons on Japan; and in which Mo scow-loyal communists “named names” of heretical Trotskyites.

  Perhaps most damning of all is the liberal infatuation with eugenics, which has simply been whitewashed out of existence. Like the editors of the old Soviet encyclopedias who would send out updates to instruct which pages should be torn out, American liberalism has repeatedly censored and rewritten its own history so that the “bad guys” were always conservatives and the good guys always liberals. This revisionism plays a role in our bioethical debates today: liberals still have a soft spot for certain types of eugenics, but they are as blind to their current attraction as they are to their historical one.

  In fact, they have blind spots on blind spots. Ignorant of their own history and only vaguely aware of the nature of Nazi eugenics, they work on the assumption that eugenics is something bad that only bad people want to pursue. Like the “liberal” who wants to ban negative political ads and campus hate speech but believes he is a fierce opponent of censorship, the modern liberal retains an attraction for eugenic ideas, but it never dawns on him that what he wants to do might be called by that name.

  Meanwhile, in current debates it is typically assumed that conservatives don’t mean what they say. Conservative opposition to racial preferences may be defended with high-flying rhetoric about colorblind equality; but beneath the surface, liberals assert, the lofty rhetoric amounts to “coded” appeals to the racism of southern whites and a desire to “turn back the clock” on racial progress.

  The controversy over Charles Murray’s Bell Curve is the most notorious example of this phenomenon in the last twenty years. Upon its release virtually every progressive voice in the country denounced Murray as a “social Darwinist” bent on promoting every reactionary measure from rounding up racial defectives to forced sterilization. America’s largest Jewish organization proclaimed, “To take Charles Murray seriously is to endanger more than sixty years of progress towards racial justice by adopting the long disproved and discredited theories of social Darwinism and eugenics.” The black scholar Adolph Reed called Murray and his co-author, Richard J. Herrnstein, “intellectual brownshirts” and declared that endorsements of Nazi-like “extermination, mass sterilization and selective breeding” were implicit in the work. But whatever the merits or demerits of The Bell Curve may be, the simple fact is that Murray and Herrnstein were making a deeply libertarian case for state nonintervention. Yes, they focused on issues of classic concern to eugenicists—the heritability of intelligence and its distribution among races—but their argument was ISO degrees opposite from real eugenics, which means using state power to improve the racial, genetic, or biological health of the community.

  Liberals constantly expect conservatives to atone for the racism, real and alleged, of various dead conservatives. Meanwhile, in large part because liberals were right about the moral imperative of desegregation, they see no need to explore their own intellectual history. They’re the good guys, and that’s all they need to know. Left unasked is why Progressivism—not conservatism—was so favorably inclined to eugenics. Is there something inherent to a “pragmatic” ideology of do-goodery that makes it susceptible to eugenic ideas? Or is liberalism’s ignorance of its own history to blame? I’m not claiming that the editors at the New Republic today sympathize with eugenicists simply because previous editors did. But modern liberalism does provide a hospitable, nurturing environment for all sorts of “nice” eugenic and racist notions precisely because liberals haven’t taken the sort of intellectual and historical inventory conservatives have. It’s high time someone did.

  When reading the literature on the subjects of eugenics and race, one commonly finds academics blaming eugenics on “conservati
ve” tendencies within the scientific, economic, or larger progressive communities. Why? Because according to liberals, racism is objectively conservative. Anti-Semitism is conservative. Hostility to the poor (that is, social Darwinism) is conservative. Therefore, whenever a liberal is racist or fond of eugenics, he is magically transformed into a conservative. In short, liberalism is never morally wrong, and so when liberals are morally flawed, it’s because they’re really conservatives!

  In an otherwise thoughtful essay in the New Republic, the Yale historian and professor of surgery Sherwin Nuland writes:

  Eugenics was a creed that appealed to social conservatives, who were pleased to blame poverty and crime on heredity. Liberals—or progressives, as they were then usually called—were among its most vigorous opponents, considering the inequities of society to be due to circumstantial factors amenable to social and economic reform. And yet some progressive thinkers agreed with the eugenicists that the lot of every citizen would be improved by actions that benefited the entire group. Thus were the intellectual battle lines drawn.

  Alan Wolfe, also in the New Republic, writes: “Racial conservatism has its roots in biological and eugenicist thought. Liberal theories of racial damage, by contrast, grew out of a twentieth-century concern with the impact of social environments on individuals.”

  How convenient. Alas, this is simply untrue. In order to see how this conventional wisdom is built upon a series of useful liberal myths, and therefore understand the real lineage of American liberalism, we need to unlearn a lot of false history and categories we take on faith. In particular, we need to understand that American Progressivism shares important roots with European fascism. No clearer or more sinister proof of this exists than the passion with which American and European progressives greeted eugenics—widely seen as the answer to the “social question.”