As for racism, there is a great deal of racism, or perhaps a more fair word would be “racialism,” in liberalism today. The state counts “people of color” in different ways from how it counts white people. Further to the left, racial essentialism lies at the core of countless ideological projects. Anti-Semitism, too, is more prominent on the left today than at any time in recent memory. Obviously, this is not the same kind of racism or anti-Semitism that Nazis subscribed to. But again, Nazi racism does not define fascism. Moreover, Nazi racism—quite in sync with progressive racism, let us remember—was an expression of a deeper impulse to define the individual by his relationship to the collective.
Let me anticipate one last criticism. Some will say that Hillary Clinton’s politics of meaning is old hat. Clinton hasn’t mentioned the phrase in years, swept under the rug by political expediency like the memory of her disastrous health-care plan. This would be a more salient critique if my aim was to offer anti-Clinton talking points for the 200S presidential campaign. But that’s not my concern. What I find interesting about Clinton is her ability to illuminate the continuity of liberal thought. If what liberals thought and did in the 1920s is relevant today—as I believe it is—then surely what liberals thought and did in the 1990s is relevant as well. Moreover, there is no evidence that she’s been chastened ideologically. In her 1996 book, It-Takes a Village, Clinton hardly backed off her radical views on children, even though those views were a political liability in 1992. She did, however, repackage her message in more palatable ways, thanks to the help of a ghostwriter.
Lastly, Clinton’s politics of meaning was arguably the most interesting and serious expression of liberalism in the 1990s, delivered at the apex of liberal optimism. Since Bush’s election and the 9/11 attacks, liberalism has been largely reactive, defined by its anti-Bush passions more than anything else. Hence, it seems worthwhile to investigate what liberals were saying when they were dancing to their own tune.
In April 1993 Clinton delivered a commencement address to the University of Texas at Austin in which she declared. “We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”
The phrase “fills us up again” is particularly telling—in 1969 she had talked of how we needed a politics to make “hollow men” whole. She seems to be suggesting that without a social cause or mission to “fill” then Hillary’s life (and ours) is empty and purposeless. Hillary has seemingly put pragmatic concerns ahead of everything else her whole life, but whenever she’s given a chance to express herself honestly, the same urges come to the fore: meaning, authenticity, action, transformation.
The politics of meaning is in many respects the most thoroughly totalitarian conception of politics offered by a leading American political figure in the last half century. Hillary’s views have more in common with the totalizing Christian ideologies of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell than they do with the “secular atheism” such Christian conservatives ascribe to her. But they have even more in common with the God-state Progressivism of John Dewey, Richard Ely, Herbert Croly. and Woodrow Wilson and other left-wing Hegelians. Hillary’s vision holds that America suffers from a profound “spiritual crisis” requiring the construction of a new man as part of a society-wide restoration and reconstruction effort leading to a new national community that will provide meaning and authenticity to every individual. Hers is a Third Way approach that promises to be neither left nor right, but a synthesis of both, under which the state and big business will work hand in hand. It is a fundamentally religious vision hiding in the Trojan horse of social justice that seeks to imbue social policy with spiritual imperatives.
To better understand the politics of meaning, we should consider the career of Clinton’s self-anointed guru, the progressive activist and rabbi Michael Lerner. Lerner was born to nonobservant Jews in New Jersey—his mother was the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party. A graduate of Columbia University in 1964, he received his Ph.D. from Berkeley, where he served as a teaching assistant to Herbert Marcuse and led the SDS. A fan of LSD, a “progressive drug.” he believed that taking the hallucinogen was the only way to truly understand socialism (the irony clearly escaped him). When his sister married a successful attorney, a number of prominent politicians attended the wedding. Lerner could not let such an opportunity slip by. He interrupted the festivities with a speech denouncing the guests as “murderers” with “blood on your hands” for not doing more to stop the war in Vietnam.
When Cupid aimed his arrow at him, he told his paramour, “If you want to be my girlfriend, you’ll have to organize a guerrilla foco first.” (A foco is a form of paramilitary cadre pioneered by Che Guevara—much cherished in Marxist-Leninist theory—designed for lightning-fast insurrectionary strikes.) When the two were married in Berkeley, they exchanged rings extracted from the fuselage of an American aircraft downed over Vietnam. The wedding cake was inscribed with the Weathermen motto “Smash Monogamy.” (The marriage lasted less than a year.) Lerner claims to have been a leader in the nonviolent wing of the New Left. While a professor at the University of Washington, he founded the Seattle Liberation Front, which he later claimed was a nonviolent alternative to the Weathermen. Nonetheless, he was arrested on charges of incitement to riot as one of the members of the “Seattle Seven.” The charges were eventually dropped, but not before J. Edgar Hoover dubbed him—no doubt hyperbolically—”one of the most dangerous criminals in America.”
In 1973 Lerner wrote The New Socialist Revolution, a clichéd ode to the glories of the coming socialist takeover. The rhetoric was quintessentially Mussolinian: “The first task of the revolutionary movement...is to destroy bourgeois hegemony and develop a radical consciousness among each of the potential constituencies for revolutionary action.”
Over the years, Lerner’s thinking evolved. First, he became deeply interested in mass psychology (he’s a licensed psychotherapist), imbibing all the Frankfurt School nonsense about fascist personalities (conservatism is a treatable illness in Lerner’s view). Second, he became a rabbi. And while his commitment to progressive politics never waned, he increasingly became obsessed with the “spiritual” aspect of politics. Finally, he cast aside dialectical materialism in favor of attacking consumer materialism and the psychic pain it causes. In 1986 he launched Tikkun, an odd magazine dedicated in large part to creating a new Social Gospel with heavily Jewish and ecumenical biases.
After Hillary Clinton’s politics of meaning speech, which was partly inspired by Lerner (who’d ingratiated himself with then-Governor Clinton), the radical rabbi psychotherapist went into overdrive, promoting himself as the house seer of the Clinton administration. He was to be the Herbert Croly of the new Progressive Era. Though many in the press recognized a hustler when they saw one, he nonetheless got the attention he wanted. The New York Times hailed him as “This Year’s Prophet” When it became clear, however, that the politics of meaning sounded too much like New Age hokum, the press and the Clintons turned a cold shoulder. In response, Lerner released his opus, The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism.
The book strikes one fascist chord after another. Lerner cites a long, familiar litany of progressive ideas and causes. He speaks about making the powerless more powerful, about throwing off the baggage of the past, about eschewing dogma and embracing national community, about rejecting the overly rational expertise of doctors and scientists. He waxes eloquent about the various crises—spiritual ecological, moral, and social—afflicting Western bourgeois democracies that must be remedied through a politics of redemption. He also talks about creating new men and women—rejecting the false dichotomies between work and family, business and government, private and public. Above all, he insist
s that his new politics of meaning must saturate every nook and cranny of our lives by smashing the compartmentalism of American life. Morality, politics, economics, ethics: none of these things can be separated from anything else. We must have our metaphysics confirmed in every human interaction and encounter.
In this he unwittingly echoes Hitler’s belief that “economics is secondary” to the revolution of the spirit. Lerner writes, “If there were a different ethical and spiritual connection between people, there would be a different economic reality...And that is why meaning cannot be given lower priority than economics.” Needless to say, this is something of a departure from the Marxist materialism of his youth. Lerner’s preferred agenda would, of course, echo many of the guarantees from the Nazi Party platform of 1920, including equal rights, guaranteed health care, excessive taxes on the undeserving wealthy, and clampdowns on big corporations. A few relevant items from a 1993 article in Tikkun:
The Department of Labor should mandate that...every workplace should provide paid leave for a worker to attend 12 two-hour sessions on stress...
The Department of Labor should sponsor “Honor Labor” campaigns designed to highlight the honor due to people for their contributions to the common good...
The Department of Labor should create a program to train a corps of union personnel, worker representatives, and psychotherapists in the relevant skills to assist developing a new spirit of cooperation, mutual caring, and dedication to work.
This is precisely the sort of thing that Robert Ley’s German Labor Front pioneered. The comparison is more than superficial. The National Socialist state, like the progressive and fascist ones, was based on the Hegelian idea that freedom could only be realized by living in harmony with the state, and it was the state’s duty to ensure said harmony. There were no private individuals. (Ley famously said that the only private individual in the Nazi state is a person asleep.) Lerner argues in The Politics of Meaning that “the workplace needs to be reconceptualized as a primary locus for human development.” In another book. Spirit Matters, he writes (in one gargantuan sentence) that under his new “movement for Emancipatory Spirituality” the “government needs to be reconceptualized as the public mechanism through which we all show that we care about everyone else, and government employees should be evaluated, rewarded, and promoted only to the extent that they are able to make the public come away from those interactions with a renewed sense of hope and a deepened conviction that other people really do care, and have shown that by creating such a sensitive and caring government.”
Lerner’s ideal is the Israeli kibbutz, where even plucking chickens has transcendent meaning for the laborer. He pines for a way to recreate the sense of shared purpose people feel during a crisis like a flood or other natural disaster. Freedom, for Lernen is reconceived in a Deweyan sense toward communal social “construction.” Or, as the Nazis said more pithily, “Work makes you free.”
Under the politics of meaning, all of society’s institutions are wrapped around the state like sticks around the fascist blade. Every individual is responsible for maintaining not only his own ideological purity but that of his fellow man. Lerner is, in effect, the ideologist of the liberal Gle’tchschaltung, the Nazi idea of coordinating every institution in society. This becomes apparent when he shifts to a discussion of how these reforms are to be implemented. Lerner writes that all government agencies and private businesses should issue “annual ethical-impact reports.” which would assess “their effect on the ethical spiritual, and psychological well-being of our society and on the people who work in and with these institutions.” His intent is arguably nicer, but is this really so different from the bureaucratization of ideological loyalty that required German businesses and institutions to constantly provide documentation showing their assertive loyalty to the spirit of the new era? Spiritual slackers in twenty-first-century America would no doubt find such scrutiny fascistic—albeit in a very caring and nurturing way.
Lerner believes it is the job of every profession—coordinating with the state, of course—to “reflect” on its own contribution to the spiritual and psychic health of the national Volksgemeinschaft. “Such reflection, for example, has led some lawyers associated with a politics-of-meaning perspective to envision a second stage of trials, in which the adversary system is suspended and the focus is shifted to healing the problems and pain that the initial trial has uncovered in the community.” That may sound a little silly to some ears, and it hardly seems to threaten a fascist coup. But if there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Oddly enough, Lerner vaguely comprehends his own ideology’s relationship to fascism. In an ironic twist, he admits that he once “could not understand why the European Left had been unable to stem the popularity of the fascists.” Fascist “hatred of others was based on the degree to which they had come to believe (usually mistakenly) that the demeaned Others had actually caused the breakdown of their communities of shared meaning and purpose.” Lerner notes that many former liberals “have now turned to the Right to find the sense of community and meaning that liberals, social democrats, and the Left always thought was irrelevant or necessarily reactionary” He writes that the 1990s are witnessing the rise of “fascistic” right-wing movements and that they can only be countered by his politics of meaning.
Lerner’s analysis breaks down in several parts, largely because of his thumbless grasp of the true nature of fascism. But far more important, he largely concedes that the politics of meaning is in effect an attempt to provide an alternative to an imagined right-wing politics of meaning that he considers fascistic. He sees a fascistic straw man on the right and in response feels justified in creating an actual—nice—fascism of the left. He grounds all of it in vast departures into religious exhortation, arguing that his is a “politics in the image of God,” a point he also hammers home relentlessly in his recent books The Left Hand of God and Spirit Matters.
Defenders of the politics of meaning, such as Cornel West, Jonathan Kozol, and even such mainstream historians as John Milton Cooper, reject or ignore the radical statism of Lerner’s project. Still, they defend their political religion with a lot of classical Third Way verbiage about rejecting both free-market anarchy and statism in favor of a new synthesis balancing the community and the individual. “To put it in crude terms,” writes Lerner, “neither capitalism nor socialism in the forms that they have developed in the twentieth century seem particularly appealing to me.” Rather, what appeals to him are pragmatic approaches “that differ from the typical Left/Right divisions, which must be transcended as we develop a politics for the twenty-first century” It’s all so unoriginal. The French Fascist slogan was much catchier: Ni droite ni gauche!
As we’ve seen, ideologically fascist and progressive totalitarianism was never a mere doctrine of statism. Rather, it claimed that the state was the natural brain of the organic body politic. Statism was the route to collectivism. Government was merely the place where the spiritual will of the people would be translated into action (Marxists liked to use the word “praxis” to describe this unity of theory and action). One consequence of this view is that institutions and individuals that stand apart from the state or the progressive tide are inherently suspect and labeled selfish, social Darwinist, conservative, or. most ironically, fascist. The state’s role is not so much to make every decision as to be the metronome for the Gleichschaltung, ensuring that the decision makers are all in perfect agreement about the direction society needs to take. In a properly ordered progressive society, the state wouldn’t take over Harvard or McDonald’s, but it would certainly ensure that the Harvards and McDonald’s had their priorities straight. The politics of meaning is ultimately a theocratic doctrine because it seeks to answer the fundamental questions about existence, argues that they can only be answered collectively, and in
sists that the state put those answers into practice.
This liberal fascist thinking was nicely exposed in an exchange between the television producer Norman Lear and the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer in 1993. Krauthammer called Hillary Clinton’s politics of meaning address a “cross between Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech and a term paper on Siddhartha” delivered with “the knowing self-assurance, the superior air of a college student manifesto.”
Norman Lear leaped into the breach to defend Hillary. The creator of the television shows All in the Family, Maude, Sanford and Son, and Good Tunes, Lear was also the founder of People for the American Way, or PFAW. an organization with an ironically conservative sound to it. He launched PFAW in an effort to beat back the religious right, which was allegedly trying to destroy the fabled “wall of separation” between church and state. But in the late 1980s Lear started to show a slight change of heart. In 1989, in an address to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Anaheim, California, he lamented “the spiritual emptiness in our culture.” “Among secularists,” he noted, “the aversion toward discussing moral values, let alone religion, can reach absurd extremes.”
It’s understandable that a left-wing civil libertarian like Lear would greet the arrival of a politics of meaning as nigh on providential. Lear wrote a bitter response in the Washington Post denouncing Krauthammer’s cynicism in the face of Clinton’s brilliant summation of America’s spiritual crisis. “The sophisticates of our politics, our culture and the media,” Lear opined, “are embarrassed to talk seriously about the life of the spirit.” “Our obsession with numbers, the quantifiable, the immediate, has cost us our connection with that place in each of us that honors the unquantifiable and eternal—our capacity for awe. wonder and mystery; that place where acts of faith in a process larger than ourselves, prove ultimately satisfying in the fullness of time.”
LIBERAL FASCISM: The Secret History of the AMERICAN LEFT from MUSSOLINI to the POLITICS OF MEANING Page 41
