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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Among these “treatments”—another word for propaganda—are books that try to put distance between mothers and children, such as Mommy Go Away! and Why Are You So Mean to Me? In It Takes a Village, Clinton cites the Washington-Beech Community Preschool in Roslindale, Massachusetts, where “director Ellen Wolpert has children play games like Go Fish and Concentration with a deck of cards adorned with images—men holding babies, women pounding nails, elderly men on ladders, gray-haired women on skateboards—that counter the predictable images.”6 This sort of thing is carried into progressive grade schools where gender norms are often attacked, as documented in Christina Hoff Sommers’s War Against Boys.

  In short, day care is not bad for children. Rather, the traditional bourgeois standards by which we judge what is good for children are bad. This trick is a genteel replay of the Nazi effort to steal the young away from the hidebound traditions of their parents. The Nazis brilliantly replaced traditional stories and fairy tales with yarns of Aryan bravery, the divinity of Hitler, and the like. Math problems became mechanisms for subliminal indoctrination: kids would still learn math, but the word problems were now about artillery trajectories and the amount of food being wasted on defectives and other minorities. Christian morality was slowly purged from the schools, and teachers were instructed to base their moral teaching on “secular” patriotic ideas. “The idea of loyalty was very important to the Germanic Volk, as it is for us today,” teachers told their students. Indeed, loyalty to Hitler and the state was drilled into children, while loyalty to one’s own parents was discouraged in myriad ways. The children were going to become new men and new women for the new age.

  Obviously, the content of the saccharine liberalism children are indoctrinated into today is very different. But there are disturbing similarities, too. Good children will be those who are less attached to their parents and more attached to the “community.” The fascist quest for the new man, living in a new, totalitarian society in which every individual feels the warm and loving embrace of the state, once again begins in the crib.

  The last step toward the Huxleyan future for Hillary Clinton is philosophical, perhaps even metaphysical. Clinton’s views of children are more universal than she seems to realize. Mrs. Clinton says, “I have never met a stupid child,” and attests that “some of the best theologians I have ever met were five-year-olds.” Don’t let the namby-pamby sentiment blind you to what is being said here. By defining the intellectual status of children up, she is simultaneously defining down the authority and autonomy of adults. In a world where children are indistinguishable from grown-ups, how distinct can grown-ups be from children?

  The liberal cult of the child is instructive in its similarities to fascist thought. Children, like youth, are driven by passion, feelings, emotion, will. These are among the fascist virtues as well. Youth represents the glories of “unreason.” These sentiments, in turn, are deeply tied to the narcissistic populism that celebrates the instincts of the masses. “I want it now7 and I don’t care if it’s against the rules” is the quintessentially childlike populist passion. Fascism is a form of populism because the leader forges a parental bond with his “children.” Without the emotional bond between the leader and “the people,” Fuhrer and Volk, fascism is impossible. “I’m on your side,” “I’m one of you,” “we’re in this together,” “I know what it’s like to be you.” constitutes the sales pitch of every fascist and populist demagogue. Or as Willie Stark says to the nurturing crowd in All the King’s Men: “Your will is my strength. Your need is my justice.” Arguments, facts, reason: these are secondary. “The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver,” proclaimed William Jennings Bryan, America’s most beloved populist. “I will look up the arguments later.”

  Bill Clinton campaigned relentlessly on his ability to “feel our pain.” Countless observers marveled at his ability to “feed” off the crowd, to draw energy from the masses. Journalists often called him an “empath” for his ability to intuit what an audience wanted to hear.

  This is a great skill in a politician, but one should never forget that demagogues are first and foremost masterful politicians.

  Of course, Clinton’s demagoguery was of a decidedly feminine nature. He promised hugs, to feel your pain, and to protect you from those mean boys (Republicans and “angry white males”). His watchword was “security”—economic security, social security, security from globalization, crime, job losses, whatever. He was the “first female president,” according to the feminist novelist Mary Gordon. When he was accused of failure or error, his reflexive response was that of an overwhelmed single mother: “I’ve been working so hard,” as if that were an adequate substitute for being right or effective. His defenders essentially claimed that he was above the law because he was, as Stanford’s Kathleen Sullivan put it, the only person who works for all of us twenty-four hours a day. In other words, he wasn’t a person; he was the state in its maternal incarnation. Sure, many Americans liked his policies—or thought they did because the economy was doing well—but they liked him because of his oddly maternal concern. The political aesthetics here were nothing new. As Goebbels noted of his Fuhrer’s popularity, “The entire people loves him, because it feels safe in his hands like a child in the arms of its mother.”

  Was Bill Clinton a fascist president? Well, he certainly believed in the primacy of emotion and the supremacy of his own intellect. He spun noble lies with reckless abandon. An admirer of Huey Long’s, he shared the cornpone dictator’s contempt for the rules and had the same knack for demagogic appeals. He was a committed Third Wayer if ever there was one, and he devoutly shared JFK’s new politics. But I think if we are going to call him a fascist, it must be in the sense that he was a sponge for the ideas and emotions of liberalism. To say that he was a fascist himself is to credit him with more ideology and principle than justified. He was the sort of president liberal fascism could only produce during unexciting times. But most important, if he was fascist, it was because that’s what we as Americans wanted. We craved empathy, because we felt we deserved someone who cared about Me.

  Hillary Clinton learned that lesson well when she decided to run for office for the first time. Mrs. Clinton will never have her husband’s raw political talent. She’s too cold, too cerebral for his style of backslapping, lip-biting politics. Instead, she translated Bill Clinton’s political instincts into an ideological appeal. In 2000, when she ran as a carpetbagger for Senate in New York, Mrs. Clinton’s track record was a problem. She essentially had none—at least not as a New Yorker. So she crafted a brilliant campaign slogan and rationale: she was the candidate who was “more concerned about the issues that concern New Yorkers.” Her discipline in sticking to this message awed veteran political observers. The issues weren’t the issue, as they said in the 1960s. The issue of who was more concerned about the Issues was the issue. “I think that the real issue ought to be who cares about the children of New York City,” she said in a typical utterance.

  One might ask. since when did “concern” count as the greatest of qualifications? A plumber might well be more concerned about how to successfully remove your spleen than a surgeon would. Does that mean a sane man would prefer a plumber to a doctor? Do banks give loans to the applicants most concerned with running a successful business or to those most likely to pay back the loan? Should the student most concerned with getting good grades get straight As?

  The response to all this is simple: concern is what children (and the rest of us) look for in parents. In the liberal fascist view, children are citizens and citizens are children (a chapter of Hillary’s book is titled “Children Are Citizens Too”), so it follows that leaders should behave like parents. “I think my job is to lead,” Bill Clinton remarked while in office, “and take care of the country. And I suppose the older I get. the more it becomes the role of a father figure instead of an older brother.”

  Under this vision, even your own money is not yours. It’s an allowa
nce. When asked what his problem was with letting local school districts spend tax dollars the way they saw fit. Bill Clinton snapped back: “Because it’s not their money.” In 1997 he ridiculed Virginia voters who wanted tax cuts as “selfish,” and then chided them like children: “And think how you felt every time in your life you were tempted to do something that was selfish and you didn’t do it, and the next day you felt wonderful.” In 1999, when the government was running a surplus, many taxpayers felt that getting back some of their money was a reasonable policy. When asked about this, President Clinton responded, “We could give it all back to you and hope you spend it right.” Senator Clinton was more straightforward. Talking about George W. Bush’s tax cuts, which did return that surplus to the people who created it, Mrs. Clinton—speaking in the classic argot of the Social Gospel—said that those cuts had to be done away with. “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

  Hillary is no fuhrer, and her notion of the “common good” doesn’t involve racial purity or concentration camps. But she indisputably draws her vision from the same eternal instinct to impose order on society, to create an all-encompassing community, to get past endless squabbles and ensconce each individual in the security blanket of the state. Hers is a political religion, an updated Social Gospel—light on the Gospel, heavy on the Social—spoken in soothing tones and conjuring a reassuring vision of cooperation and community. But it remains a singular vision, and there’s no room in it for those still suffering from the “stupidity of habit-bound minds.” to borrow Dewey’s phrase. The village may have replaced “the state,” and it in turn may have replaced the fist with the hug, but an unwanted embrace from which you cannot escape is just a nicer form of tyranny.

  10

  The New Age: We’re All Fascists Now

  IT IS GENERALLY thought that National Socialism stands only for brutishness and terror. But this is not true. National Socialism—more broadly, fascism—also stands for an ideal or rather ideals that are persistent today under other banners: the ideal of life as art. the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community, the repudiation of the intellect, the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders). These ideals are vivid and moving to many people...because their content is a romantic ideal to which many continue to be attached and which is expressed in such diverse modes of cultural dissidence and propaganda for new forms of community as the youth/rock culture, primal therapy, anti-psychiatry. Third-World camp-following, and belief in the occult.

  — Susan Sontag. “Fascinating Fascism”

  LIBERALS CONSTANTLY COMPLAIN that conservatives are trying to impose their cultural vision on the rest of the country. In contrast, they themselves only care about the “real” issues of class and economics. Thomas Frank, author of the best-selling What’s the Matter With Kansas?, leads a whole school of liberals who argue that middle-class GOP voters have been hoodwinked by Republican strategists pushing manufactured “values” issues. Frank’s argument boils down to the old Marxist doctrine of false consciousness, which says that to disagree with the left about the nature of political and economic self-interest is a form of brainwashing or dementia.

  But are liberals and leftists really dedicated to economic justice rather than divisive issues like gay marriage or partial-birth abortion? If you look closely, you’ll see that liberals object to “values issues” in politics only when they expose liberal weaknesses. When liberals are on the defensive, they use Marxist or, if you prefer, socialistic arguments to delegitimize the opposition’s cultural agenda. When conservatives have the upper hand on a cultural issue, liberalism is all about “solving problems” for the average Joe, about paychecks and health care. But on offense, it’s about racial quotas, mainstreaming gay culture, scrubbing the public square of Christianity, and a host of explicitly cultural ambitions.

  This socialist-parry, cultural-thrust tactic mirrors Nazi maneuvers in interesting ways. When the Nazis were debating traditionalists, monarchists, and the few classical liberals left in Germany, they sounded much like generic socialists lamenting how “big capitalism” was screwing the little guy. Hitler charged that other parties were dividing Germans along sectarian and class lines, while he wanted to focus like a laser on the economy. It was only when the National Socialists had the upper hand that they dropped their economic arguments in favor of imposing a new cultural order.

  This economics-on-defense, culture-on-offense approach remained an important tactic for Hitler even after his consolidation of power. For example, in 1938, when he realized that the Nazi cultural agenda was starting to alienate significant segments of the population, he explained in a speech, “National Socialism is a cool, reality-based doctrine, based upon the sharpest scientific knowledge and its mental expression. As we have opened the people’s heart to this doctrine, and as we continue to do so at the present, we have no desire to instill in the people a mysticism that lies outside the purpose and goals of our doctrine.” Such language should be familiar to liberals who like to call themselves members of the “reality-based community.”

  There is simply no denying that liberalism is deeply committed to the creation and imposition of culture. Indeed, it’s transparently obvious that liberals care primarily about culture. During the 1990s, for example, liberalism dove headlong into the culture-formation business, from Hillary Clinton’s politics of meaning to the gender norm-ing of college sports, to gays in the military, to the war on smoking. In 2007, to pick an offbeat recent example, a progressive child-care center in Seattle banned LEGOs because “the children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys—assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society—a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.” In response, they created a playtime that reflected the morally superior standards of “collectivity.”

  The simple fact of the matter is this: liberals are the aggressors in the culture wars. Why this should seem a controversial point is somewhat baffling. It is manifestly clear that traditionalists are defending their way of life against the so-called forces of progress. When feminist groups finally persuaded the courts to force the Virginia Military Institute to accept women, who was the aggressor? Whose values were being imposed? Which side’s activists boast of being “agents of change”? My point is not that the forces of change are always wrong. Far from it. My point is that the left is dishonest when it pretends that it is not in the business of imposing its values on others.

  We’ve discussed how. in the 1950s, the left updated the traditional Marxist critique of capitalism by arguing that fascist reaction was really a psychological response to progress. Whereas once the left argued that fascism was the political reaction of economic ruling classes against the revolutionary workers, now fascism is expressed as one of many “phobias.” or simply “rage,” aimed at the advancement of certain groups and causes. These rages and phobias are felt almost exclusively by white male heterosexuals (and the women who love them), the scions of those evil “Dead White European Males.” In the 1930s the left claimed that fascists wanted to protect their factories and titles of nobility; now we are told that the fascists—a.k.a. “angry white males”—want to preserve their unfair “privilege.” Homophobia, racism, nativism, and, in a neat moral equivalence, both Islamic extremism and Islamophobia are the white male power structure’s instinctive fascistic response to the shock of the new.

  These kinds of arguments, to borrow a phrase from Carl von Clausewitz, represent the continuation of war by cultural means. And indeed, nowhere is this logic more visibly on display than in popular culture.

  Take the movie Pleasantville. An imaginary May berry of a town seemingly frozen in the repressive, white-male-dominated 1950s is shaken up by the introduction of freedom-loving, sexually liberated young people from the 1990s. It’s the 1960s all over again. The town elders can’t handle the challenge—their liberated wives no lo
nger have martinis and slippers waiting for them at the end of the day. In response, the white male elite—led by the Chamber of Commerce, of course—becomes increasingly fascistic. One of the film’s clever conceits is that the tradition-bound people of Pleasantville are filmed in black and white while the fully realized human beings are portrayed in living color. This prompts the monochromatic fascists to start treating the “coloreds” as second-class citizens.

  A similar theme can be found in the playfully fascistic film Falling Down, in which a white middle-class defense contractor played by Michael Douglas becomes violent when he is downsized and thrown out of work. In American Beauty, Kevin Spacey’s sexually confused ex-marine neighbor snaps and becomes a murderer when he can’t handle the idea that his son might be gay. It isn’t surprising that Hollywood keeps churning out these chestnuts, but it is amazing that each time it does, so many critics hail them as novel and pathbreaking interpretations, when they are really just a series of recycled clichés.

  But there’s a larger point behind the effort to cast opponents of change as fascists: to make change itself the natural order by ridiculing the very notion of a natural order. The underlying dogma of these movies is that social and gender roles are not fixed, that tradition, religion, and natural law have no binding power or authority over the individual’s will to power, and that the day we made the mistake of thinking otherwise was the day we took a tragic Wrong Turn.