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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Lear’s cri de coeur is an almost pitch-perfect restatement of the neo-Romantic objections to modern society that inspired fascist movements across Europe and the search for “a cause larger than ourselves” of the American Progressives. He might receive an appreciative hearing from the early Paul de Man, Ezra Pound, and countless other fascist theorists and ideologues who denounced the Western—particularly Jewish—obsession with numbers and technical abstraction. But even more telling is the fact that Lear’s People for the American Way is second perhaps only to the ACLU as an enforcer of the liberal Gleichschaltung. In lawsuits, campaign contributions, amicus briefs, advertising, and righteous news conferences, People for the American Way serves as a tireless mason in the construction of the wall between church and state, shrinking the public space for traditional religion and building the foundation of a secular counter-church of liberalism.

  In other words, Lear is an adamant proponent of spiritualizing politics; but there’s no room for traditional religion in his ideal political system, for it is the progressive priesthood—not churches or synagogues—that must sanctify the quest for meaning and spirituality. Independent sources of moral faith are “divisive” and need to be undermined, walled off, excluded from our “common project.” This means that liberal churches are fine because they are perceived—rightly or wrongly—to have subordinated religious doctrine to political doctrine. As John Dewey put it in his brief for a secular religion of the state: “If our nominally religious institutions learn how to use their symbols and rites to express and enhance such a faith, they may become useful allies of a conception of life that is in harmony with knowledge and social needs.” Hitler was more succinct: “Against a Church that identifies itself with the State...I have nothing to say.”

  Conservatives are fond of scoring liberals for their cafeteria Christianity, picking those things they like from the religious menu and eschewing the hard stuff. But there’s more than mere hypocrisy at work. What appears to be inconsistency is in fact the continued unfolding of the Social Gospel tapestry to reveal a religion without God. Cafeteria liberals aren’t so much inconsistent Christians as consistent progressives.

  EVERYTHING WITHIN THE VILLAGE...

  No more thorough explication of the liberal fascist agenda can be found than in Hillary Clinton’s best-selling book, It Takes a Village. All the hallmarks of the fascist enterprise reside within its pages. Again, the language isn’t hostile, nationalistic, racist, or aggressive. To the contrary, it brims with expressions of love and democratic fellow feeling. But this only detracts from its fascist nature if fascism itself means nothing more than hostile or aggressive (or racist and nationalistic). The fascistic nature of It Takes a Village begins with the very title. It draws from a mythic and mythical communal past. “It takes a village to raise a child” is supposedly an African proverb whose authorship is lost in the mists of time—from “the ancient African kingdom of Hallmarkcardia,” according to P. J. O’Rourke. Clinton invokes this premodern image as a source of authority in order to reorganize modern society. It may not be as powerful as all that Teutonic imagery the National Socialists threw around. But is it any more rational? Any less Romantic? More important, the metaphor of the village is used in precisely the same way that the symbol of the fasces was. The difference is that the fasces were a symbol for a martial age; the village is a symbol for a maternal one. In Mrs. Clinton’s telling, villages are wonderful, supportive, nurturing places where everyone is looking out for one another: from “everything in the State, nothing outside the State” to “everything in the village, nothing outside the village.” The village, she writes, “can no longer be defined as a place on a map, or a list of people or organizations, but its essence remains the same: it is the network of values and relationships that support and affect our lives.” In Hillary’s village, the concept of civil society is grotesquely deformed. Traditionally, civil society is that free and open space occupied by what Burke called “little platoons”—independent associations of citizens who pursue their own interests and ambitions free from state interference or coercion.

  That is not Hillary’s civil society. In a book festooned with encomiums to every imaginable social work interest group in America, Mrs. Clinton mentions “civil society” just once. In a single paragraph she dispatches the concept as basically another way of describing the village. “[C]ivil society,” she writes, is just a “term social scientists use to describe the way we work together for common purposes. “No, no, no. “Civil society” is the term social scientists use to describe the way various groups, individuals, and families work for their own purposes, the result of which is to make the society healthily democratic. Civil society is the rich ecosystem of independent entities—churches, businesses, volunteer and neighborhood associations, labor unions, and such—that helps regulate life outside of state control. Bowling leagues, thanks to the Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam, are the archetypal institution of civil society. Bowling leagues are not mechanisms for working together for “common purposes.” The late Seymour Martin Lipset even demonstrated that although many labor unions were corrupt and illiberal, so long as they remained independent of the state—and the state independent of them—they enriched democracy.

  In Clinton’s village, however, there is no public square where free men and women and their voluntary associations deal with each other on their own terms free from the mommying of the state. There are no private transactions, just a single “spiritual community that links us to a higher purpose” managed by the state. This is the Volksgemeinschaft reborn as a Social Gospel day-care center.

  Think again of the image of a fasces, its many weak reeds or sticks bundled together to show strength in numbers. The first chapter of Mrs. Clinton’s book begins with a quotation from the poet Verna Kelly: “Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things, but just look what they can do when they stick together.” It’s a cute image, but is the message any different? Over and over again, Clinton uses a velvet hammer to beat it into the reader’s head that togetherness, partnership, and unity are the only means of America’s salvation.

  The point where theory and practice most obviously merge is in the area of economic policy. Corporations were among the most important reeds in the fascist bundle. So it is in Hillary Clinton’s village. “Community-minded companies are already doing a number of things that citizens should applaud and government should encourage, when possible, with legislative changes to make them more attractive.” These include the usual wish list from “no-layoff” policies to employer-provided day care. Again and again, Clinton beams sunshine wherever the lines between corporations, universities, churches, and government are already thin, hoping that the illumination of her gaze will cause even the shadows dividing them to disappear. Defense contractors are working with government to make peaceful products. Hooray. Automobile companies are working with the EPA to build green cars. Huzzah. Such “[s]ocially minded corporate philosophies are the avenue to future prosperity and social stability.” Everyone will be secure and happy, nestled in the cozy confines of the village.

  This all sounds peachy in the abstract. But when Clinton tried to impose precisely this sort of vision with her health-care plan, she had a harder edge. Recall Hillary’s response when it was pointed out to her that her plan would destroy countless small businesses: “I can’t save ever}’ undercapitalized entrepreneur in America.” If they can’t be part of the solution, who cares if they have problems?

  ETERNAL CORPORATISM

  I suppose one cannot talk about Hillary Clinton without mentioning her health-care plan. So much ink has been spilled in that cause it hardly seems worth wading into the details of Clinton’s effort to control one-seventh of the U.S. economy. What may be more worthwhile is to see how her health-care plan was the inevitable consequence of liberal empowerment. There was an Aesopian nature to the Clintonites. For example, once Hillary tapped her old friend—and Bill’s Rhodes scholar pal—Ira Magaziner to head
up her Health Reform Task Force, it was inevitable that a large, government-run, corporatist product would come out of the sausage maker. Why? Because that’s what Magaziner does. The scorpion must sting the frog, and Magaziner must propose sweeping new public-private partnerships where experts make all the big decisions.

  Magaziner, Hillary’s co-leader in Life magazine in 1969, was a true phenomenon at Brown University (his senior thesis, he told Newsweek, was nothing less than a Comtian “search for a new metaphysics, a new answer to the question, ‘Why be good?’”). As a junior, he took it upon himself to study the school’s curriculum and propose an alternative that was more “relevant” and pragmatic, leaving it up to the young to design their own educations. He created his own major, “Human Studies.” and he produced a nearly five-hundred-page report. The shocking part is that he succeeded in getting his Deweyan curriculum (few grades, lots of self-discovery) accepted. For traditionalists, the curriculum has made Brown the joke of the Ivy League ever since; for progressives, it has made the school its crown jewel.

  At Oxford, Magaziner led anti-Vietnam protests and allied himself with a smitten Vanessa Redgrave. James Fallows, a fellow Rhodes scholar and future Carter speechwriter and industrial planning publicist, explained that the main difference between Clinton and Magaziner was “the difference between somebody who planned to run for office and somebody who didn’t.” When Magaziner moved to Boston, he launched an Alinsky-Hayden-style community organization effort in Brockton, Massachusetts. Later, he went to work for the Boston Consulting Group, or BCG, where he acquired a knack for telling companies how to invest in the technologies of the future. Soon he was taking jobs from foreign governments to give them the same advice. In 1977 he got a gig consulting to Sweden. The final result of his efforts was dubbed “A Framework for Swedish Industrial Policy,” in which he called for Sweden to redesign its economy from the top down, discarding old industries and investing heavily in the winners of tomorrow. Even the Swedes (!) rejected it as naive and heavy-handed. The Boston Consulting Group was so embarrassed it tried to make the report disappear.

  Told by a red-faced BCG he shouldn’t do any more governmental planning. Magaziner decided to start his own firm. In 1979 he founded Telesis. which means “intelligently planned progress”—a nice summation of an attitude described throughout this book. In 1980 Magaziner wrote a book titled Japanese Industrial Policy. In 1982 he co-wrote a book on industrial policy with Robert Reich—a Yale Law School classmate of the Clintons as well as a fellow Rhodes scholar. In 1984, at the age of thirty-six, he penned a giant plan for the state of Rhode Island, the most ambitious state-level industrial planning effort in memory. Dubbed the Greenhouse Compact, the plan envisioned the state as a “greenhouse” for the right technologies—that is. technologies the government was smart enough to pick even though the market wasn’t. The voters of Rhode Island rejected the measure handily. One could go on, but you get the point.

  Now, does it seem likely that the Clintons, who’d known Magaziner for twenty years, expected that he’d come up with anything other than a corporatist strategy for American health care the moment they picked him? All of the studying, the meetings, the towers of briefing books, and the forests of file folders: these were all props in a Kabuki dance that had been scripted and blocked out well in advance.

  Or consider fellow Yalie Robert Reich. We’ve already touched on his views on industrial policy and the Third Way. But it’s worth looking at Reich as a true acolyte of the religion of government. I have been openly disdainful of psychological theorizing in earlier chapters, but how can we see Robert Reich as anything but a walking Sorelian myth, a one-man band belting out noble lies for the cause?

  In his Clinton administration memoirs, Locked in the Cabinet, Reich describes a Thomas Nast cartoon world where he is in constant battle with greedy fat cats, Social Darwinists, and Mr. Monopoly. In one scene he recounts how he told some hard truths to the National Association of Manufacturers, describing a room as billowing with cigar smoke and filled with hostile men whose boos and hisses were punctuated with curses. Jonathan Rauch, one of Washington’s best journalists and thinkers, checked the videotape. The audience was polite, even warm. They didn’t smoke at all. Plus, the room was one-third female. In another episode Reich reported that a congressman jumped up and down shouting, “Evidence! Evidence!” at Reich during a hostile hearing. Rauch again checked the tape. Instead of an inquisition, it was a typically “dull, earnestly wonkish hearing,” and most of the statements Reich attributed to his tormentor were simply “fabricated” by him. Indeed, vast swaths of the book are pure fantasy—but in a very familiar sort of way. At every turn people say things that confirm Reich’s cartoon version of reality. Representative Robert Michel, the former House Republican leader, supposedly tells Reich that Newt Gingrich and company “talk as if they’re interested in ideas, in what’s good for America. But don’t be fooled. They’re out to destroy. They’ll try to destroy anything that gets in their way, using whatever tactics are available.” Michel never said any such thing.

  When Slate asked him about the controversy. Reich said. “Look, the book is a memoir. It’s not investigative journalism.” When Rauch asked him about his tall tales, “Did you just make them up?” Reich responded, “They’re in my journal.” Finally, Reich simply fell back on pure relativism. “I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions.” In other words, his defense is that this is really the way he sees the world. So again, if Reich is capable of bending reality to fit his political-morality tale, if he is programmed to see the world as a series of vital lies and useful myths, how exactly could the Clintons have expected him to do anything but stay true to form? It’s not like the Clintons didn’t know what their two old friends believed. Bill Clinton’s policy manifesto, Putting People First, was essentially a Magaziner-Reich Festschrift.

  What seems to motivate people like Reich is an abiding conviction that they are on the right side of history. Their aim is to help the people, and therefore they are not required to play by the rules. Moreover, just as they claim to be secularists, they also claim to be pragmatists. unconstrained by dogma, unlike those hidebound conservatives. Circumstances change, so, too. must our ideas. Or as Jonathan Chait of the New Republic puts it, “[Incoherence is simply the natural byproduct of a philosophy rooted in experimentation and the rejection of ideological certainty.” This is a bit reminiscent of a line from Mussolini, quoted in the same magazine by Charles Beard. “The fascisti.” Il Duce announced, “are the gypsies of Italian politics; not being tied down to any fixed principles, they proceed unceasingly toward one goal, the future well-being of the Italian people.”

  THINK OF THE CHILDREN

  Such self-confide nee cannot operate in a vacuum. It needs a mechanism to convince or force others to surrender their interests to the greater good. The New Republic’s former editor George Soule. the author of A Planned Society (which popularized the phrase “we planned in war”), explained it well. The greatest of “the lessons from our war planning” was that “we must have an objective which can arouse general loyalty and enthusiasm.” In It Takes a Village, Clinton cheers the way crises erase the wall between business and government but laments that the social benefits of natural disasters and wars are temporary. “Why does it take a crisis to open our eyes and hearts to our common humanity?” In response to this problem, liberals have manufactured one “crisis” after another in their quest to find a new moral equivalent to war. from the war on cancer, to global warming, to countless alleged economic crises. Indeed, a brief perusal of the last hundred years of economic journalism from the left would have you believe that the most prosperous century in human history was one long, extended economic crisis.

  But we should return to Hillary Clinton’s crisis of choice: the children. The very concept of “the children” was designed to circumvent traditional political processes. The giveaway is the prefatory article, which denotes an entire category of human beings for whom all violatio
ns of the principle of limited government may be justified.

  Constitutionally ordered liberal societies tend to view citizens as adults who are responsible for their own actions. But children are the Achilles’ heel of every society (if libertarianism could account for children and foreign policy, it would be the ideal political philosophy). We make allowances for children. We have different rules for them—as well we should—and tend not to hold them accountable for their decisions. The “child savers” of the Progressive Era were brilliant at exploiting this weakness. In the modern era it was Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, or CDF, and Hillary Clinton’s longtime friend and mentor, who relaunched this tradition.

  Edelman is perhaps America’s leading liberal scold. Harper’s Bazaar named her “America’s universal mother.” Her CV is festooned with honorifics with awards like a Christmas tree bending from the weight of too many ornaments—the presidential Medal of Freedom, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, a Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award, and so on. Her organization is showered with contributions from enormous corporations eager to buy grace on the cheap. Edelman got her start working for the NAACP and eventually found her way to Yale Law School and to Washington, D.C., as the policy-entrepreneur founder of the CDF. She is undoubtedly a kind and selfless woman, deeply religious and steeped in the traditions of the Social Gospel. Inspiring quotations from Edelman are so omnipresent in the welfare, civil rights, and feminist industries—”industries” being the best word for these self-esteem-building, logrolling, black-tie fund-raiser networks—that they could be combined into a liberal Maoist Little Red Book for earnest social crusaders. “Service is the rent we pay to be living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time,” she proclaims. “Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?” she asks. “No person has the right to rain on your dreams,” she avers.