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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Look, for example, at which agricultural sectors lobby the government most and which tend to leave it alone. Big sugar growers in the Midwest and Florida have spent millions to protect their industry from foreign—and domestic—competition precisely because they are so uncompetitive. And the return on their investment has been huge. In 1992 a handful of sugar refiners gave then-New York Senator Al D’Amato a mere $8,500 in campaign contributions. In return D’Amato successfully supported a tariff rebate to the sugar industry worth $365 million—a return of about 4 million percent. The sugar industry accounts for 17 percent of all agricultural lobbying in the United States. Meanwhile, apple growers—like most fruit and vegetable farmers—spend relatively little lobbying for subsidies because their industry is competitive. But they do have to lobby the government to keep it from subsidizing uncompetitive farmers who might try to move into the fruit and vegetable market.

  There’s no sector of the American economy more suffused with corporatism than agriculture. Indeed, both Democrats and Republicans are decidedly fascistic when it comes to the “family farmer,” pretending that their policies are preserving some traditional volkisch lifestyle while in reality they’re subsidizing enormous corporations.

  But corporatism is only part of the story. Just as corporations were enmeshed in the larger Nazi Gleichschaltimg, supposedly right-wing big business is central to the progressive coordination of contemporary society. If big business is so right-wing, why do huge banks fund liberal and left-wing charities, activists, and advocacy groups, then brag about it in commercials and publicity campaigns? How to explain that there’s virtually no major issue in the culture wars—from abortion to gay marriage to affirmative action—where big business has played a major role on the American right while there are dozens of examples of corporations supporting the liberal side?

  Indeed, the myth of the right-wing corporation allows the media to tighten liberalism’s grip on both corporations and the culture. John McCain perfectly symbolizes this catch-22 of modern liberalism. McCain despises the corrupting effect of “big money” in politics, but he is also a major advocate of increased government regulation of business. Apparently he cannot see that the more government regulates business, the more business is going to take an interest in “regulating” government. Instead, he has concluded that he should try to regulate political speech, which is like decrying the size of the garbage dump and deciding the best thing to do is regulate the flies.

  These speech regulations in turn give an unfair advantage to some very big businesses—media conglomerates, movie studios, and such—to express their political views in ways exempt from government censorship. It’s no surprise that some of these outlets tend to celebrate McCain’s genius and courage and use their megaphones to expand on the need for him to go even further and for other politicians to follow his lead. Of course, this dynamic is much larger than mere regulation. The New York Times is pro-choice and supports pro-choice candidates—openly on its editorial pages, more subtly in its news pages. Pro-life groups need to pay to get their views across, but such paid advertising is heavily regulated, thanks to McCain, at exactly the moment it might influence people—that is. near Election Day. One can replace abortion with gun control, gay marriage, environmentalism, affirmative action, immigration, and other issues, and the dynamic remains the same.

  This is how the liberal Gleichschaltiaig works; contrary voices are regulated, barred, banned when possible, mocked and marginalized when not. Progressive voices are encouraged, lionized, amplified—in the name of “diversity,” or “liberation,” or “unity,” and, most of all, “progress.”

  Go into a Starbucks sometime and pick up one of their brochures highlighting their Corporate Social Responsibility Report The report covers all the progressive concerns—the environment, trade, sustainable development, and so on. It devotes a whole section to “embracing diversity” in which the huge multinational boasts that it is “striving to increase our diversity in our U.S. workforce.” Thirty-two percent of its vice presidents are women and 9 percent people of color. They spend $80 million a year with minority- and women-owned suppliers and provide “extensive diversity training courses to address our partners’ relevant business needs. Diversity content is also woven through our general training practices.” “Partners,” by the way, is the Orwellian term they use for “employees.” In the new corporatism, we are all “partners” after all.

  Environmentalist!) in particular offers a number of eerie parallels to fascist practices, including as an overarching rationale for corporatist policies. According to generic fascism, an atmosphere of crisis must he maintained in order to circumvent conventional rules. Today, while Hollywood and the press relentlessly hype the threat of global warming, big business works assiduously to form alliances and partnerships with government as if the light against global warming were the moral equivalent of war. Indeed. Al Gore—who makes much of such public-private partnerships—claims that global warming is equivalent to the Holocaust and anybody who denies it is the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier. Meanwhile, one oil company after another markets itself as a vital ally against global warming. British Petroleum runs creepily propagandistic ads in which it assures the viewer that it has enlisted in the environmental crusade and is moving “beyond petroleum.” When the late libertarian crusader Julian Simon visited an oil installation in Alaska, he got so sick of hearing managers boast about the “environmental benefits” of their work that he finally asked. “What do you produce here? Oil or environmental benefits?”

  GE. the birthplace of Swopism, today spends millions of dollars promoting its “Ecomagination” program, through which it hopes to prove that GE is a progressive company. GE’s CEO declared at the launch of his green initiative, “It’s no longer a zero-sum game—things that are good for the environment are also good for business.” The audience, eating organic hors d’oeuvres and drinking wine from a solar-powered winery, listened enthusiastically as the head of the biggest industrial manufacturer in America explained, “Industry cannot solve the problems of the world alone. We need to work in concert with government” No surprise, then, that GE’s launch party was held at its Washington office. Indeed, the agenda behind “ecomagination” is to invest in “clean” and “green” technologies, and then lobby government to subsidize them through tax cuts or outright grants.

  Corporations’ power to “switch on” their workers to larger political agendas is a vastly underappreciated aspect of modern American civilization. Diversity is a perfect case in point. Big corporations have a vested interest in supporting diversity for a host of legitimate reasons. No firm wants to appear hostile to potential customers, for example. Nor is it smart to turn away qualified applicants out of racial animus. Moreover, the legal regime requires firms to be diverse whenever possible. And just as laws like the ADA help big businesses over small ones, affirmative action has the same effect. According to the Yale Law School professor Peter Sehuck, affirmative action programs “also tend to advantage large companies by imposing onerous reporting, staffing, and other compliance costs on smaller competitors who cannot bear them as easily” Survey data confirm that CEOs of large firms are more likely to support mandatory affirmative action programs than the CEOs of small firms.

  Such progressive leadership doesn’t come without a heavy investment in reeducation. Almost all mid-level and senior executives in corporate America have been through “diversity training” and/or “sexual harassment training,” and often they’re sent back for further reeducation—usually because the definition of “tolerance” has been ratcheted up. Corporations have accepted the logic of diversity gurus who insist that if you aren’t actively promoting diversity—with goals, timetables, and the like—you are actively opposing it. The totalitarian nature of this training has not gotten nearly the attention it deserves—partly because journalists themselves have been so thoroughly reprogrammed by the giant corporations they work for.

  Ask yourself this
: What would happen to the businessman who simply refused to employ the acceptable number of black—or, one day soon, gay—applicants? Let’s assume that this businessman is an evil person, racist, mean, miserly. But there was once a notion that freedom involved the right to be bad. So let’s say this businessman refuses to hire blacks, gays. Jews, or members of other “oppressed” groups. What happens next? First he gets a letter from the government saying he has to have a workforce that looks like America. Then he’ll get another letter. Perhaps he’ll also get a letter from some disappointed job applicant threatening to sue. Eventually, he will be brought before a judge and told he must hire people he doesn’t want to hire. If he still refuses, he may lose a lot of money in a civil suit. Or he might have his company taken away from him and put into receivership. If he persists in his stubborn independence, the state will, one way or another, take away his company. No doubt the Robert Reichs of the world will say that you have the right to employ the people you want, so long as your rights don’t intrude on the “common good.”

  We might even agree with Reich because we think discrimination is evil. But is it really any less fascistic than telling a businessman that he must fire the Jews in his employ? Or if that’s too dark a rumination, consider this: the restaurant chain Hooters came within a hairbreadth of being forced to hire men as “Hooters girls “ It sounds funny, but just because something is done in the name of diversity doesn’t make it un-fascist. It just makes it a nicer form of fascism.

  9

  Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism

  LIBERALISM IS A culture and a dogma, much as conservatism is. Individual liberals may think they’ve reached their conclusions through careful deliberation—and no doubt many have—but there is no escaping the undertow of history and culture. Ideas and ideology are transmitted in more ways than we can count, and ignorance about where our ideas come from doesn’t mean they don’t come from somewhere.

  Now, of course, this doesn’t mean that the past has an iron grip on the present. For example, I am a strong supporter of states’ rights. Racists once used support for states’ rights as a cover for perpetuating Jim Crow. That does not mean that I am in favor of Jim Crow. But, as discussed earlier, conservatives have had to work very, very hard to explain why states’ rights is no longer an argument about preserving Jim Crow. When someone asks me why my support for federalism won’t lead to Jim Crow, I have answers at the ready. No such similar intellectual effort exists, or is required, on the left. Liberals are confident they’ve always been on the right side of history. George Clooney expresses a common sentiment among liberals when he says, “Yes, I’m a liberal, and I’m sick of it being a bad word. I don’t know at what time in history liberals have stood on the wrong side of social issues.”

  This is one of the main reasons I’ve written this book: to puncture the smug self-confidence that simply by virtue of being liberal one is also virtuous. At the same time, I need to repeat that I am not playing the movie backward. Today’s liberals aren’t the authors of past generations’ mistakes any more than I’m responsible for the callousness of some conservative who championed states’ rights for the wrong reason well before I was born. No, the problems with liberalism today reside in liberalism today. The relevance of the past is that unlike the conservative who has wrestled with his history to make sure he does not repeat it, liberals see no need to do anything of the sort. And so, armed with complete confidence in their own good intentions, they happily go marching past boundaries we should stay well clear of. They reinvent ideological constructs we’ve seen before in earlier times, unaware of their pitfalls, blithely confident that the good guys could never say or do anything “fascist” because fascism is by definition anything not desirable. And liberalism is nothing if not the organized pursuit of the desirable.

  Hillary Clinton is a fascinating person, not because of her dull and unremarkable personality, but because she is a looking glass through which we can see liberal continuity with the past and glimpse at least one possible direction of its future. She and her husband have been like Zeligs of the liberal left, appearing everywhere, interacting with everyone who has influenced liberalism over the decades. Because she is smart and ambitious, she has balanced idealism with cynicism, ideology with calculation. This, of course, is true of a great many politicians. But to the extent Hillary Clinton deserves the fame and attention, it is because observers believe she has the insight, advisers, and institutional power to pick the winning combinations.

  If Waldo Frank and J. T. Flynn were right that American fascism would be distinct from its European counterparts by virtue of its gentility and respectability, then Hillary Clinton is the fulfillment of their prophecy. But more than that, she is a representative figure, the leading member of a generational cohort of elite liberals who (unconsciously of course) brought fascist themes into mainstream liberalism. Specifically, she and her cohort embody the maternal side of fascism—which is one reason why it is not more clearly recognized as such.

  What follows, then, is a group portrait of Hillary and her friends—the leading proponents and exemplars of liberal fascism in our time.

  THE POLITICS OF HUMAN RECONSTRUCTION

  Hillary Clinton is conventionally viewed by her supporters as a liberal—or by conservative opponents as a radical leftist in liberal sheep’s clothing; but it is more accurate to view her as an old-style progressive and a direct descendant of the Social Gospel movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

  Nothing makes this clearer than the avowedly religious roots of her political vocation. Born to a Methodist family in Park Ridge, Illinois, she always had a special attachment to the Social Gospel. She was an active member in her church youth group as a teenager and the only one of the Rodham kids to regularly attend Sunday services. “She’s really a self-churched woman,” the Reverend Donald Jones, her former youth minister and mentor, told Newsweek.

  Jones was being humble. The truth is that he was a major influence, the most important person in her life outside of her parents, according to many biographers. A disciple of the existential German emigre theologian Paul Tillich, Jones was a radical pastor who eventually lost his ministry for being too political. Hillary wrote to Jones regularly while in college. When she moved to Arkansas, Clinton taught Sunday school and often spoke as a lay preacher on the topic “Why I Am a United Methodist” at Sunday services. Even today, Jones told Newsweek, “when Hillary talks it sounds like it comes out of a Methodist Sunday-school lesson.”

  Jones bought Hillary a subscription to the Methodist magazine motive as a graduation present just before she went off to Wellesley. Spelled with a lowercase m for reasons no one but the editors probably ever cared about, motive in the late 1960s and early 1970s (when it folded) was an indisputably radical left-wing organ, as mentioned earlier.

  Three decades later Clinton recalled for Newsweek that her thinking about the Vietnam War really changed when she read an essay in motive by Carl Oglesby. Newsweek chose to portray this as an endearing remembrance by a spiritual liberal, describing Oglesby as a “Methodist theologian.” But this description is highly misleading. Oglesby, elected president of the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, in 1965, was a leading antiwar activist. His argument against Vietnam was theological only in the sense that liberal fascism is a political religion. Communist countries were good, according to Oglesby, because they were pragmatically trying to “feed, clothe, house and cure their people” in the face of persecution by a “virulent strain” of American imperialism and capitalism. Violence by oppressed peoples in the Third World or in the American ghetto was entirely rational and even commendable.

  Hillary Clinton saw such radical politics as cut from the same cloth as her religious mission. After all, she was reading this material in an official Methodist publication given to her by her minister. “I still have every issue they sent me,” she told Newsweek.

  In 1969 Hillary was the first student in Wellesley’s histor
y to give a commencement address at her own graduation. Whether she began to see herself as a feminist leader at this time or whether the experience simply reinforced such aspirations is unknowable. But from that point on, Hillary increasingly draped herself in the rhetoric of the movement—the youth movement, the women’s movement, the antiwar movement—and gravitated toward others who believed that both her generation and her gender had a rendezvous with destiny. The speech had such an impact that her photo made it into Life magazine, which picked her as one of the new generation’s leaders (Ira Magaziner, a student at Brown University and Hillary’s future health-care guru, was also highlighted by Life).

  Trimmed of its New Age hokum, Hillary Clinton’s Wellesley commencement address was an impassioned search for meaning, dripping with what by now should be familiar sentiments. “We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for a more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.” She continued: “We’re not interested in social reconstruction; it’s human reconstruction” they were interested in. College life, she explained, had briefly lifted the “burden of inauthentic reality.” It gave the students an opportunity to search for authenticity. “Every protest, every dissent, whether it’s an individual academic paper, Founder’s parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age.” A deep current of longing runs through her relatively short remarks: a longing for unity, for connectedness, for the resolution of “inauthentic-tic” feelings and institutions in a holistic marriage that “transform[s] the future into the present” so that “limitations no longer exist” and “hollow men” are made whole. It’s fitting that Wellesley’s motto is “Non ministran sed mhustmre” (”Not to be ministered unto but to minister”).