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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Let’s review our story so far. The fascist moment at the beginning of the twentieth century was a transatlantic phenomenon.

  Intellectuals across the West embraced the idea that nations were organic entities in need of direction by an avant-garde of scientific experts and social planners. Contemptuous of nineteenth-century dogma, this self-anointed progressive elite understood what needed to be done in order to bring humanity to the sunny uplands of Utopia. Wan nationalism, the quest for state-directed community, economic planning, exaltation of the public, derogation of the private: these are what defined all of the various and competing new isms of the West.

  Eugenics fit snugly within this new worldview, for if nations are like bodies, their problems are in some sense akin to diseases, and politics becomes in effect a branch of medicine: the science of maintaining social health. By lending scientific credibility to the Hegelian and Romantic view of nations as organic beings. Darwinism bequeathed to scientists a license to treat social problems like biological puzzles. All the ills of modern mass society—urban crowding, a rising population among the lower classes, poor public hygiene, even the dumbing down of mainstream bourgeois culture—now seemed curable through conscientious application of biological principles.

  Indeed, the population explosion, and in particular the explosion of the “wrong” populations, were of a piece with Darwinian thought from the outset. Darwin himself admitted that his ideas were merely an extension of Malthusianism to the natural world. (Thomas Malthus was the economic philosopher who predicted that a natural human tendency to overbreed, coupled with finite natural resources, would yield persistent misery.) Intellectuals feared that modern technology had removed the natural constraints on population growth among the “unfit,” raising the possibility that the “higher elements” would be “swamped” by the black and brown hordes below.

  Not only was America no exception to this widespread panic among the intellectual and aristocratic classes; it often led the way. American progressives were obsessed with the “racial health” of the nation, supposedly endangered by mounting waves of immigration as well as overpopulation by native-born Americans. Many of the outstanding progressive projects, from Prohibition to the birth control movement, were grounded in this quest to tame the demographic beast. Leading progressive intellectuals saw eugenics as an important, and often indispensable, tool in the quest for the holy grail of “social control.”

  Scholarly exchanges between eugenicists, “raceologists,” race hygienists, and birth controllers in Germany and the United States were unremarkable and regular occurrences. Hitler “studied” American eugenics while in prison, and sections of Mein Kampf certainly reflect that immersion. Indeed, some of his arguments seem to be lifted straight out of various progressive tracts on “race suicide .” Hitler wrote to the president of the American Eugenics Society to ask for a copy of his Case for Sterilization—which called for the forcible sterilization of some ten million Americans—and later sent him another note thanking him for his work. Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race also made a huge impression on Hitler, who called the book his “bible” In 1934, when the National Socialist government had sterilized over fifty thousand “unfit” Germans, a frustrated American eugenicist exclaimed, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”

  Of course American progressives are not culpable for the Holocaust. But it is a well-documented fact that eugenics lay at the heart of the progressive enterprise. The eugenic crusade, writes the historian Edwin Black, was “created in the publications and academic research rooms of the Carnegie Institution, verified by the research grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, validated by leading scholars from the best Ivy League universities, and financed by the special efforts of the Harriman railroad fortune.” German race science stood on American shoulders.

  It would be nice to say that liberals’ efforts to airbrush eugenics from their own history and fob it off on conservatives are unacceptable. But of course they have been accepted. Most intellectuals, never mind liberal journalists and commentators, don’t know much about either conservatism or the history of eugenics, but they take it on faith that the two are deeply entwined. One can only hope that this wrong can be made right with a dose of the truth. A brief review of the progressive pantheon—the intellectual heroes of the left, then and now—reveals how deeply imbued the early socialists were with eugenic thinking.

  Just as socialist economics was a specialization within the larger progressive avocation, eugenics was a closely related specialty. Eugenic arguments and economic arguments tracked each other, complemented each other, and, at times, melted into each other.

  Sidney Webb, the father of Fabian socialism and still among the most revered British intellectuals, laid it out fairly clearly. “No consistent eugenicist,” he explained, “can be a ‘Laissez Faire’ individualist [that is, a conservative] unless he throws up the game in despair. He must interfere, interfere, interfere!” The fact that the “wrong” people were outbreeding the “right” ones would put Britain on the path of “national deterioration” or, “as an alternative,” result “in this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews.”

  Indeed, British socialism, the intellectual lodestar of American Progressivism, was saturated with eugenics. The Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, and H. G. Wells were devoted to the cause. John Maynard Keynes, Karl Pearson, Havelock Ellis, Julian and Aldous Huxley, Eden Paul, and such progressive publications as the New Statesman (founded by Webb) and the Manchester Guardian were also supporters of eugenics to one extent or another.

  As discussed earlier, Wells was probably the most influential literary figure among pre-World War Il American progressives. Despite his calls for a new “liberal fascism” and an “enlightened Nazism,” Wells more than anyone else lent romance to the progressive vision of the future. He was also a keen eugenicist and particularly supportive of the extermination of unfit and darker races. He explained that if his “New Republic” was to be achieved, “swarms of black and brown, and dirty-white and yellow people” would “have to go.” “It is in the sterilisation of failures,” he added, “and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.” In The New Machiavelli, he asserts that eugenics must be the central tenet of any true and successful socialism: “Every improvement is provisional except the improvement of the race.” While Wells could be squeamish about how far the state should go in translating this conclusion into policy, he remained a forceful advocate for the state to defend aggressively its interest in discouraging parasitic classes.

  George Bernard Shaw—no doubt because of his pacifist opposition to World War I—has acquired the reputation of an outspoken individualist and freethinker suspicious of state power and its abuses. Nothing could be further from the truth. Shaw was not only an ardent socialist but totally committed to eugenics as an integral part of the socialist project. “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man,” he declared. Shaw advocated the abolition of traditional marriage in favor of more eugenically acceptable polygamy under the auspices of a State Department of Evolution and a new “eugenic religion.” He particularly lamented the chaotic nature of a laissez-faire approach to mate selection in which people “select their wives and husbands less carefully than they select their cashiers and cooks.” Besides, he explained, a smart woman would be more content with a 10 percent share in a man of good genetic stock than a 100 percent share in a man of undesirable lineage. What was therefore required was a “human stud farm” in order to “eliminate the Yahoo whose vote will wreck the commonwealth.” According to Shaw, the state should be firm in its policy toward criminal and genetically undesirable elements. “[W]ith many apologies and expressions of sympathy, and some generosity in complying with their last wishes,” he wrote with ghoulish glee, we “should place them in the lethal chamber and get rid of them.”
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br />   Other liberal heroes shared Shaw’s enthusiasm. John Maynard Keynes, the founding father of liberal economics, served on the British Eugenics Society’s board of directors in 1945—at a time when the popularity of eugenics was rapidly imploding thanks to the revelation of Nazi concentration camp experiments. Nonetheless, Keynes declared eugenics “the most important, significant and. I would add. genuine branch of sociology which exists.” Julian Huxley, the founder of the World Wildlife Fund, first director of UNESCO, and revered science popularizer, co-wrote The Science of Life with Wells and Wells’s son. Huxley, too. was a sincere believer in eugenics. Havelock Ellis, the pioneering sex theorist and early architect of the birth control movement, spoke for many when he proposed a eugenic registry of all citizens, so as to provide “a real guide as to those persons who are most lit, or most unfit to carry on the race.” Ellis did not oppose Nazi sterilization programs, believing that good science “need not become mixed up in the Nordic and anti-Semitic aspects of Nazi aspiration.” J. B. S. Haldane, the British geneticist, wrote in the Daily Worker, “The dogma of human equality is no part of Communism...the formula of Communism: ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,’ would be nonsense, if abilities were equal.”

  Harold Laski, to some the most respected British political scientist of the twentieth century (he was Joseph Kennedy Jr.’s tutor and JFK’s professor), echoed the panic over “race suicide” (an American term): “The different rates of fertility in the sound and pathological stocks point to a future swamping of the better by the worse.” Indeed, eugenics was Laski’s first great intellectual passion. His first published article, “The Scope of Eugenics,” written while he was still a teenager, impressed Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. At Oxford, Laski studied under the eugenicist Karl Pearson, who wrote, “Socialists have to inculcate that spirit which would give offenders against the State short shrift and the nearest lamp-post.”

  Laski, of course, had an enormous impact on American liberalism. He was a regular contributor to the New Republic—which in its early years published scores of leading British intellectuals, including Wells. He also taught at Harvard and became friends with Felix Frankfurter, an adviser to FDR and, later. Supreme Court justice. Frankfurter introduced Laski to FDR, and he became one of Roosevelt’s most ardent British supporters, despite his strong communist ties. More famously, he became one of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s closest friends, despite an age difference of more than five decades. The two maintained a storied correspondence that lasted nearly twenty years.

  EUGENICS, AMERICAN-STYLE

  American progressives, who took their lead in many ways from their British cousins, shared a similar ardor for racial hygiene. Take Justice Holmes, the most admired jurist of the progressive period and one of the most revered liberal icons in American legal history. It seems that no praise of Holmes can go too far. Felix Frankfurter called him “truly the impersonal voice of the Constitution .” “No Justice thought more deeply about the nature of a free society or was more zealous to safeguard its conditions by the most abundant regard for civil liberty than Mr. Justice Holmes .” Another observer commented, “Like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, he is the summit of hundreds of years of civilization, the inspiration of ages yet to come” Others have declared that “for the American lawyer he is the beau ideal, and the lawyer quotes his aphorisms as the literate layman quotes Hamlet.”

  What explains Holmes’s popularity with liberals? It’s a complicated question. Holmes was hailed by many civil libertarians for his support of free speech during the war. Progressives loved him for holding that their nation-building social welfare programs were constitutional. “If my fellow citizens want to go to hell I will help them. It’s my job,” Holmes famously declared. This has caused some conservatives to admire his “judicial restraint” But the truth is he practiced “restraint” mostly because he agreed with the direction the progressives were taking.

  In 1927 Holmes wrote a letter to Harold Laski in which he proudly told his friend, “I...delivered an opinion upholding the constitutionality of a state law for sterilizing imbeciles the other day—and felt that I was getting near the first principle of real reform.” He went on to tell Laski how amused he was when his colleagues took exception to his “rather brutal words...that made them mad.”

  Holmes was referring to his decision in the notorious case of Buck v. Bell, in which progressive lawyers on both sides hoped to get the Supreme Court to write eugenics into the Constitution. Holmes was eager to oblige. The state of Virginia deemed a young woman, Carrie Buck, “unfit” to reproduce (though she was not, as it turned out. retarded, as the state had contended). She was consigned to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, where she was cajoled into consenting to a salpingectomy, a form of tubal ligation. The case depended in part on a report by America’s leading eugenicist, Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor. New York—the RAND Corporation of eugenics research, funded by various leading progressive philanthropists. Without having ever met Buck, Laughlin credited the assessment of a nurse who observed of the Buck family, “These people belong to the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” Hence, Laughlin concluded that eugenic sterilization would be “a force for the mitigation of race degeneracy.”

  Writing for the majority—Holmes issued a terse opinion barely over a single page long. The decision now ranks as one of the most vilified and criticized examples of legal reasoning in American history. Yet of all his many opinions, it is perhaps the most revealing. Citing only one precedent, a Massachusetts law mandating vaccinations for public school children, Holmes wrote that “the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes...It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” He concluded by declaring, famously: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” As we will see, this reasoning endures in the often unspoken rationale for abortion.

  The opinion tied together many of the major strains in progressive thought at the time. Holmes, a bloody-minded veteran of the Civil Wan saw war as a source of moral values in a world without meaning. Given the sacrifice of so many noble characters on the battlefield, requiring degenerates like Carrie Buck to sacrifice their ability to breed—or even their lives—for the greater good seemed entirely reasonable and fair. By citing a public health measure as an adequate precedent, Holmes further underscored how the health of the organic body politic trumped individual liberty. Whether through the prism of mobilization or public health, the project was the same. As Holmes put it in a 1915 Illinois Law Review article, his “starting point for an ideal for the law” would be the “co-ordinated human effort...to build a race.”

  Given such rhetoric, it is impossible not to see Progressivism as a fascistic endeavor—at least by the standards we use today.

  There’s a general consensus among liberal historians that Progressivism defies easy definition. Perhaps that’s because to identify Progressivism properly would be too inconvenient to liberalism, for doing so would expose the eugenic project at its core. The most obvious reply—that progressives were merely representing the age they lived in—fails on several levels. For one thing, the progressive eugenicists had non-progressive, anti-eugenic adversaries—premature conservatives, radical libertarians, and orthodox Catholics—whom the progressives considered to be backward and reactionary.

  For another, arguing that progressives were a product of their time simply reinforces my larger argument: Progressivism was born of the fascist moment and has never faced up to its inheritance. Today’s liberals have inherited progressive prejudice wholesale, believing that traditionalists and religious conservatives are dangerous threats to progress. But this assumption means that liberals are blind to fascistic threat
s from their own ranks.

  Meanwhile, conservative religious and political dogma—under relentless attack from the left—may be the single greatest bulwark against eugenic schemes. Who rejects cloning most forcefully? Who is most troubled by euthanasia, abortion, and playing God in the laboratory? Good dogma is the most powerful inhibiting influence against bad ideas and the only guarantor that men will act on good ones. A conservative nation that seriously wondered if destroying a blastocyst is murder would not wonder at all whether it is murder to kill an eight-and-a-half-month-old fetus, let alone a “defective” infant.

  Mainstream liberalism is joined at the hip with racial and sexual-identity groups of one kind or another. A basic premise shared by all these groups is that their members should be rewarded simply by virtue of their racial, gender, or sexual status. In short, the state should pick winners and losers based upon the accidents of birth. Liberals champion this perspective in the name of antiracism. Unlike conservatives who advocate a color-blind state, liberals still believe that the state should organize society on racial lines. We are accustomed to talking about this sort of social engineering as a product of the post-civil-rights era. But the color-blind doctrine championed by progressives in the 1960s was a very brief parenthesis in a very long progressive tradition. In short, there is more continuity between early Progressivism and today’s multiculturalism than we think.

  Here again, Woodrow Wilson was the pioneer. Wilson’s vision of “self-determination” has been retroactively gussied up as a purely democratic vision. It wasn’t. It was in important respects an organic, Darwinian-Hegelian vision of the need for peoples to organize themselves into collective spiritual and biological units—that is, identity politics. Wilson was a progressive both at home and abroad. He believed in building up nations, peoples, races into single entities. His racial vision was distinct from Hitler’s—and obviously less destructive—but just as inseparable from his worldview.