Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

by Jonah Goldberg

  Let me anticipate an objection. The argument goes something like this: Communism and fascism are opposites; therefore, since fascism is fundamentally anti-Semitic, communism must not be. Another version simply reverses the equation: Fascism (or Nazism) was all about anti-Semitism, but communism wasn't; therefore, they are not similar. Other versions fool around with the word "rightwing": anti-Semitism is right-wing; Nazis were anti-Semites; therefore, Nazism was right-wing. You can play these games all day.

  Yes, the Nazis were anti-Semites of the first order, but anti-Semitism is by no means a right-wing phenomenon. It is also widely recognized, for example, that Stalin was an anti-Semite and that the Soviet Union was, in effect, officially anti-Semitic (though far less genocidal than Nazi Germany--when it came to the Jews). Karl Marx himself--despite his Jewish heritage--was a committed Jew hater, railing in his letters against "dirty Jews" and denouncing his enemies with phrases like "niggerlike Jew." Perhaps more revealing, the German Communists often resorted to nationalistic and anti-Semitic appeals when they found it useful. Leo Schlageter, the young Nazi who was executed by the French in 1923 and subsequently made into a martyr to the German nationalist cause, was also lionized by the communists. The communist ideologue Karl Radek delivered a speech to the Comintern celebrating Schlageter as precisely the sort of man the communists needed. The communist (and half-Jewish) radical Ruth Fischer tried to win over the German proletariat with some Marxist anti-Semitic verbiage: "Whoever cries out against Jewish capitalists is already a class warrior, even when he does not know it...Kick down the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lampposts, and stamp upon them." Fischer later became a high-ranking official in the East German Communist government.21

  In the early 1920s, noting the similarities between Italian Fascism and Russian Bolshevism was not particularly controversial. Nor was it insulting to communists or fascists. Mussolini's Italy was among the first to recognize Lenin's Russia. And as we've seen, the similarities between the two men were hardly superficial. Radek noted as early as 1923 that "Fascism is middle-class Socialism and we cannot persuade the middle classes to abandon it until we can prove to them that it only makes their condition worse."22

  But most communist theorists rejected or were ignorant of Radek's fairly accurate understanding of fascism. Leon Trotsky's version was far more influential. According to Trotsky, fascism was the last gasp of capitalism long prophesied in Marxist scripture. Millions of communists and fellow travelers in Europe and America sincerely believed that fascism was a capitalist backlash against the forces of truth and light. As Michael Gold of the New Masses put it in response to the poet Ezra Pound's support for fascism: "When a cheese goes putrid, it becomes limburger, and some people like it, smell and all. When the capitalist state starts to decay, it goes fascist."23

  Many communists probably didn't buy the Trotskyite claim that committed socialists like Norman Thomas were no different from Adolf Hitler, but they were soon under orders to act like they did. In 1928, at Stalin's direction, the Third International advanced the doctrine of "social fascism," which held that there was really no difference between a Social Democrat and a Fascist or a Nazi. Fascism was "a fighting organization of the bourgeoisie, an organization that rests on the active support of social democracy [which] is the moderate wing of fascism." According to the theory of social fascism, a liberal democrat and a Nazi "do not contradict each other," but, in Stalin's words, "complete each other. They are not antipodes but twins."24 The strategy behind the doctrine of social fascism was as horribly misguided as the theory behind it. The thinking was that the center would not hold in Western democracies, and in a conflict between fascists and communists the communists would win. This was one reason--aside from a common outlook on most issues--that communists and Nazis tended to vote together in the Reichstag. The German Communists were operating under the Moscow-provided motto "Nach Hitler, kommen wir" ("After Hitler, we take over"). Or, "First Brown, then Red."

  The doctrine of social fascism had two consequences that are directly relevant to our discussion. The first is that forever afterward, anyone who was against the far left was seen as being in league with the fascist far right. For decades, even after the launch of the Popular Front, if you were against the Soviet Union, you were open to the charge of being a fascist. Even Leon Trotsky--the co-founder of the Soviet state--was labeled a "Nazi agent" and the leader of a failed "fascist coup" the moment Stalin decided to get rid of him. Indeed, charges of rightism, fascism, and Nazism were leveled at countless victims of Stalin's purges. Eventually, the international left simply reserved for itself the absolute right to declare whomever it desired to delegitimize a Nazi or fascist without appeal to reason or fact. In time, as Nazism became synonymous with "ultimate evil," this became an incredibly useful cudgel, which is still wielded today.

  The second consequence of the doctrine of social fascism was that it caused Hitler to win.

  3

  Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism

  IT CAN'T HAPPEN here."

  Any discussion of American fascism must get around this mossiest of political cliches. Most often used by leftists, it is typically also used sarcastically, as in: "George Bush is a crypto-Nazi racist stooge of the big corporations pursuing imperialist wars on the Third World to please his oil-soaked paymasters, but--yeah, right--'it can't happen here'" (though Joe Conason in typically humorless fashion has titled his latest book It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush).

  The phrase, of course, comes from Sinclair Lewis's propagandistic novel of 1935. It Can't Happen Here tells the story of a fascist takeover of America, and it is, by general agreement, a terrible read, full of cartoonish characters, purple prose, and long canned speeches reminiscent of Soviet theater. But it wasn't seen that way when it was released. The New Yorker, for example, hailed it as "one of the most important books ever produced in this country...It is so crucial, so passionate, so honest, so vital that only dogmatists, schismatics, and reactionaries will care to pick flaws in it."1

  The hero of the dystopian tale is the Vermont newspaperman Doremus Jessup, who describes himself as an "indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal."2 The villain, Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, is a charismatic blowhard--modeled on Senator Huey Long--who is elected president in 1936. The plot is complicated, with fascist factions staging coups against an already fascist government, but the basic gist should be very appealing to liberals. A good Vermont liberal (a very different thing, however, from a Howard Dean liberal today), Jessup stages an underground insurrection, loses, flees to Canada, and is about to launch a big counterattack when the book ends.

  The title derives from a prediction made by Jessup shortly before the fateful election. Jessup warns a friend that a Windrip victory will bring a "real Fascist dictatorship."

  "Nonsense! Nonsense!" replies his friend. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We're a country of freemen...[I]t just can't happen here in America."

  "The hell it can't," Jessup replies. And he is soon proven right.

  The phrase and the phobia captured by It Can't Happen Here have been with us ever since. Most recently, Philip Roth's Plot Against America offered a better-written version of a similar scenario in which Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. But Roth's was just the latest in a long line of books and films that have played on this theme. Hollywood has been particularly keen on the idea that we must be eternally vigilant about the fascist beast lurking in the swamps of the political right.

  The irony, of course, is that it did happen here, and Lewis virtually admits as much. In the same scene Jessup unleashes a gassy tirade about how America is ripe for a fascist takeover. His argument hinges on what happened in America during and immediately after World War I:

  Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical--yes, or more obsequious!--than America...Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut "Liberty cabbage" and somebody actually proposed
calling German measles "Liberty measles"? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia!...Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares...Prohibition--shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor--no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!3

  Lewis undersold his case. The period of liberty cabbage, wartime censorship, and propaganda wasn't an example of how America might someday be ripe for fascism. It was an example of how America had actually endured a fascistic dictatorship. If the events that transpired during and immediately after World War I occurred today in any Western nation, few educated people would fail to recognize it for what it was. Indeed, a great many educated people have convinced themselves that America under George W. Bush has nearly become "a thinly veiled military dictatorship," in the words of the writer Andrew Sullivan. The liberty cabbage, the state-sanctioned brutality, the stifling of dissent, the loyalty oaths and enemies lists--all of these things not only happened in America but happened at the hands of liberals. Self-described progressives--as well as the majority of American socialists--were at the forefront of the push for a truly totalitarian state. They applauded every crackdown and questioned the patriotism, intelligence, and decency of every pacifist and classically liberal dissenter.

  Fascism, at its core, is the view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union toward the same goals overseen by the state. "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State," is how Mussolini defined it. Mussolini coined the word "totalitarian" to describe not a tyrannical society but a humane one in which everyone is taken care of and contributes equally. It was an organic concept where every class, every individual, was part of the larger whole. The militarization of society and politics was considered simply the best available means toward this end. Call it what you like--progressivism, fascism, communism, or totalitarianism--the first true enterprise of this kind was established not in Russia or Italy or Germany but in the United States, and Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century's first fascist dictator.

  This claim may sound outrageous on its face, but consider the evidence. More dissidents were arrested or jailed in a few years under Wilson than under Mussolini during the entire 1920s. Wilson arguably did as much if not more violence to civil liberties in his last three years in office than Mussolini did in his first twelve. Wilson created a better and more effective propaganda ministry than Mussolini ever had. In the 1920s Mussolini's critics harangued him--rightly--for using his semiofficial Fascisti to bully the opposition and for his harassment of the press. Just a few years earlier, Wilson had unleashed literally hundreds of thousands of badge-carrying goons on the American people and prosecuted a vicious campaign against the press that would have made Mussolini envious.

  Wilson didn't act alone. Like Mussolini and Hitler, he had an activist ideological movement at his disposal. In Italy they were called Fascists. In Germany they were called National Socialists. In America we called them progressives.

  The progressives were the real social Darwinists as we think of the term today--though they reserved the term for their enemies (see Chapter 7). They believed in eugenics. They were imperialists. They were convinced that the state could, through planning and pressure, create a pure race, a society of new men. They were openly and proudly hostile to individualism. Religion was a political tool, while politics was the true religion. The progressives viewed the traditional system of constitutional checks and balances as an outdated impediment to progress because such horse-and-buggy institutions were a barrier to their own ambitions. Dogmatic attachment to constitutions, democratic practices, and antiquated laws was the enemy of progress for fascists and progressives alike. Indeed, fascists and progressives shared the same intellectual heroes and quoted the same philosophers.

  Today, liberals remember the progressives as do-gooders who cleaned up the food supply and agitated for a more generous social welfare state and better working conditions. Fine, the progressives did that. But so did the Nazis and the Italian Fascists. And they did it for the same reasons and in loyalty to roughly the same principles.

  Historically, fascism is the product of democracy gone mad. In America we've chosen not to discuss the madness our Republic endured at Wilson's hands--even though we live with the consequences of it to this day. Like a family that pretends the father never drank too much and the mother never had a nervous breakdown, we've moved on as if it were all a bad dream we don't really remember, even as we carry around the baggage of that dysfunction to this day. The motivation for this selective amnesia is equal parts shame, laziness, and ideology. In a society where Joe McCarthy must be the greatest devil of American history, it would not be convenient to mention that the George Washington of modern liberalism was the far greater inquisitor and that the other founding fathers of American liberalism were far crueler jingoists and warmongers than modern conservatives have ever been.

  THE IDEALISM OF POWER WORSHIP

  Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in 1856, and his first memory was of hearing the terrible news that Abraham Lincoln had been elected president and that war was inevitable. The Wilsons were northern transplants from Ohio who lived in Georgia and South Carolina, but they quickly acclimated to southern ways. Joseph Wilson, a Presbyterian minister, served as a chaplain to Confederate troops and volunteered his church as a military hospital. Young Woodrow was a frail boy with terrible dyslexia who was mostly homeschooled and didn't learn how to read until the age of ten. Even after, study always required intense concentration. That he made a career as a prominent academic, let alone president of the United States, is a testament to his extraordinary patience, willpower, and ambition. But it all came at a terrible cost. He had virtually no close friends for most of his adult life, and he suffered from terrible stomach problems, including persistent constipation, nausea, and heartburn.

  There's no disputing that a big part of Wilson's appeal, then and now, stemmed from the fact that he was the first Ph.D. to serve in the Oval Office. Of course, the White House was no stranger to great minds and great scholars. But Wilson was the first professional academic at a time when the professionalization of social science was considered a cornerstone of human progress. He was both a practitioner and a priest of the cult of expertise--the notion that human society was just another facet of the natural world and could be mastered by the application of the scientific method. A onetime president of the American Political Science Association, Wilson himself is widely credited with having launched the academic study of public administration, a fancy term for how to modernize and professionalize the state according to one's own personal biases.

  Wilson started his academic career at Davidson College, but he was homesick and left before the end of his first year. In 1875, after another year of homeschooling from his father, he tried again. This time he enrolled at the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton, to study politics and history. Wilson liked his new environment, in part because of the high number of southern Presbyterians, and he excelled there. He launched the Liberal Debating Society and served as editor of the school newspaper and secretary of the football association. Not surprisingly, the young Wilson got a taste for politics as he gained self-confidence and learned to like the sound of his own voice.

  After graduating from Princeton, he enrolled at the University of Virginia to study law in hopes of one day entering politics. Homesickness and a lifelong difficulty making friends plagued him once again. He left UVA on Christmas Day of his first year, claiming he had a cold, and never returned. He finished his studies at home. After passing the Georgia bar, he spent a short time as a lawyer but found he didn't have the knack for it and concluded that it was too arduous a course for him to take into politics. Frustrated in his desire to become a statesman, Wilson enrolled at the recently established Johns Hopkins University, where he pursued his Ph.D. After graduating, he landed several teaching posts while he worked on his academic wr
iting, specifically his widely acclaimed eight-hundred-page tome The State. Wilson eventually returned to the one institution where he had known some social happiness, Princeton University, where he rose to president.

  Wilson's choice to head down an academic path should not be seen as an alternative to a political career. Rather, it was an alternative path to the career he always wanted. The Sage of New Jersey was never a reluctant statesman. Not long after finishing The State, Wilson began moving beyond narrow academic writing in favor of more popular commentary, generally geared toward enhancing his political profile. High among his regular themes was the advocacy of progressive imperialism in order to subjugate, and thereby elevate, lesser races. He applauded the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines--"they are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice"--and regularly denounced what he called "the anti-imperialist weepings and wailings that came out of Boston."4 It's a sign of how carefully he cultivated his political profile that four years before he "reluctantly" accepted the "unsolicited" gubernatorial nomination in New Jersey, Harper's Weekly had begun running the slogan "For President--Woodrow Wilson" on the cover of every issue.