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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Huey Long famously said--or allegedly famously said--that if fascism ever came to America it would be called "Americanism." It's interesting, then, that this is the name Teddy Roosevelt gave to his new ideology. Not everyone was blind to this distressing side of Roosevelt's personality. The America "that Roosevelt dreamed of was always a sort of swollen Prussia, truculent without and regimented within," declared H. L. Mencken. Deriding Roosevelt as a "Tammany Nietzsche" who'd converted to the "religion of militarists," Mencken scored him for stressing "the duty of the citizen to the state, with the soft pedal upon the duty of the state to the citizen."19

  In this context, Wilson was perceived as the somewhat more conservative candidate--because, again, he was closer to nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism. He promised to limit government's ability to centralize power by corralling industry into the same bed as the state. In a famous campaign speech at the New York Press Club he proclaimed, "The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government power." Alas, it is difficult to take his liberty-loving rhetoric too seriously. Just two weeks after his Press Club speech, Wilson returned to his progressive antipathy toward individualism: "While we are followers of Jefferson, there is one principle of Jefferson's which no longer can obtain in the practical politics of America. You know that it was Jefferson who said that the best government is that which does as little governing as possible ...But that time is passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise."20

  Since Wilson ended up governing largely as a New Nationalist, the subtler distinctions between his and Roosevelt's platforms do not matter very much for our purposes. America was going to get a progressive president no matter what in 1912. And while those of us with soft spots for Teddy might like to think things would have turned out very differently had he won, we are probably deluding ourselves.

  HOW IT HAPPENED HERE

  The prevailing assumption today is that the rise of fascism in Europe transpired on a completely independent track--that due to numerous national and cultural differences between America and Europe, it couldn't happen here. But this makes no sense whatsoever. Progressivism and, later, fascism were international movements--and, in their origin, expressions of great hopes--that assumed different forms in different countries but drew on the same intellectual wellsprings. Many of the ideas and thinkers the Fascists and Nazis admired were as influential here as they were in Italy and Germany, and vice versa. For example, Henry George, the radical populist guru of American reform, was more revered in Europe than he was in America. His ideas gave shape to the volkisch economic theories on which the Nazi Party was initially founded. Among British Socialists, his Progress and Poverty was a sensation. When Marx's son-in-law came to America to proselytize for scientific socialism, he was so enamored of George that he returned to Europe preaching the gospel of American populism.

  From the 1890s to World War I, it was simply understood that progressives in America were fighting the same fight as the various socialist and "new liberal" movements of Europe.21 William Allen White, the famed Kansas progressive, declared in 1911, "We were parts, one of another, in the United States and Europe. Something was welding us into one social and economic whole with local political variations. It was Stubbs in Kansas, Jaures in Paris, the Social Democrats [that is, the Socialists] in Germany, the Socialists in Belgium, and I should say the whole people in Holland, fighting a common cause." When Jane Addams seconded Teddy Roosevelt's nomination at the Progressive Party Convention in 1912, she declared, "The new party has become the American exponent of a world-wide movement toward juster social conditions, a movement which the United States, lagging behind other great nations, has been unaccountably slow to embody in political action."22

  Ultimately, however, America was the sorcerer's apprentice to Europe's master. American writers and activists drank from European intellectual wells like men dying of thirst. "Nietzsche is in the air," declared a reviewer in the New York Times in 1910. "Whatever one reads of a speculative kind one is sure to come across the name of Nietzsche sooner or later." Indeed, he went on, "[m]uch of the Pragmatism of Prof. [William] James bears auspicious resemblance to doctrines of Nietzsche." Noticing that Roosevelt was always reading German books and "borrowing" from Nietzsche's philosophy, Mencken (a serious, if imperfect, Nietzsche scholar himself) concluded, "Theodore had swallowed Friedrich as a peasant swallows Peruna--bottle, cork, label and testimonials."23 William James, America's preeminent philosopher, looked to the southern corners of the continent as well. As discussed earlier, James was a close student of the Italian pragmatists who were busy laying the groundwork for Mussolini's Fascism, and Mussolini would regularly acknowledge his debt to James and American Pragmatism.

  But no nation influenced American thinking more profoundly than Germany. W. E. B. DuBois, Charles Beard, Walter Weyl, Richard Ely, Nicholas Murray Butler, and countless other founders of modern American liberalism were among the nine thousand Americans who studied in German universities during the nineteenth century. When the American Economic Association was formed, five of the six first officers had studied in Germany. At least twenty of its first twenty-six presidents had as well. In 1906 a professor at Yale polled the top 116 economists and social scientists in America; more than half had studied in Germany for at least a year. By their own testimony, these intellectuals felt "liberated" by the experience of studying in an intellectual environment predicated on the assumption that experts could mold society like clay.24

  No European statesman loomed larger in the minds and hearts of American progressives than Otto von Bismarck. As inconvenient as it may be for those who have been taught "the continuity between Bismarck and Hitler," writes Eric Goldman, Bismarck's Germany was "a catalytic of American progressive thought." Bismarck's "top-down socialism," which delivered the eight-hour workday, health care, social insurance, and the like, was the gold standard for enlightened social policy. "Give the working-man the right to work as long as he is healthy; assure him care when he is sick; assure him maintenance when he is old," he famously told the Reichstag in 1862. Bismarck was the original "Third Way" figure who triangulated between both ends of the ideological spectrum. "A government must not waver once it has chosen its course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward," he proclaimed. Teddy Roosevelt's 1912 national Progressive Party platform conspicuously borrowed from the Prussian model. Twenty-five years earlier, the political scientist Woodrow Wilson wrote that Bismarck's welfare state was an "admirable system...the most studied and most nearly perfected" in the world.25

  Indeed, few figures represent the foreign, particularly German influence on Progressivism better than Wilson himself. Wilson's faith that society could be bent to the will of social planners was formed at Johns Hopkins, the first American university to be founded on the German model. Virtually all of Wilson's professors had studied in Germany--as had almost every one of the school's fifty-three faculty members. But his most prominent and influential teacher was Richard Ely, the "dean of American economics," who in his day was more vital to Progressivism than Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek have been to modern conservatism. Despite his open hostility to private property, and his fondness for what would today be called McCarthyite politics, Ely was not a top-down socialist like Bismarck. Rather, he taught his students to imagine a socialism of spirit that would replace laissez-faire from within men's hearts. Ely eventually moved to the University of Wisconsin, where he helped found the "Wisconsin model"--a system still admired by leftist intellectuals whereby college faculties help run the state. Ely also served as a mentor to Teddy Roosevelt, who said that Ely "first introduced me to radicalism in economics and then made me sane in my radicalism."26

  Wilson revered Bismarck as much as Teddy Roosevelt or any of the other Progressives did. In college he wrote a fawning essay in which he lavished praise on this "commanding genius" who united the "moral force of Cromwell and the political shrewdness of Richelieu; the com
prehensive intellect of Burke...the diplomatic ability of Talleyrand, without his coldness." Wilson goes on about the Iron Chancellor's "keenness of insight, clearness of judgement, and promptness of decision," and ends wistfully, "Prussia will not soon find another Bismarck."27

  Bismarck's motive was to forestall demands for more democracy by giving the people the sort of thing they might ask for at the polls. His top-down socialism was a Machiavellian masterstroke because it made the middle class dependent upon the state. The middle class took away from this the lesson that enlightened government was not the product of democracy but an alternative to it. Such logic proved disastrous little more than a generation later. But it was precisely this logic that appealed to the progressives. As Wilson put it, the essence of Progressivism was that the individual "marry his interests to the state."28

  The most influential thinker along these lines--and another great admirer of Bismarck's--was the man who served as the intellectual bridge between Roosevelt and Wilson: Herbert Croly, the author of The Promise of American Life, the founding editor of the New Republic, and the guru behind Roosevelt's New Nationalism.

  After Taft was elected president in 1908, Roosevelt tried to give his protege a wide berth, first going on a famous African safari, followed by a fact-finding tour of Europe. At some point he picked up a copy of The Promise of American Life, which his friend Judge Learned Hand had sent him. The book was a revelation. "I do not know when I have read a book which profited me as much," he wrote to Croly. "All I wish is that I were better able to get my advice to my fellow-countrymen in practical shape according to the principles you set forth."29 Many people at the time credited Croly's book with convincing Roosevelt to run for president again; more likely, the book provided a marketable intellectual rationale for his return to politics.

  Even if Croly's contribution to American liberalism had begun and ended with The Promise of American Life, he would rank as one of the most important voices in American intellectual history. When the book came out in 1909, Felix Frankfurter hailed it as "the most powerful single contribution to progressive thinking."30 The book was praised by dozens of reviewers. More than any other writer, Croly was credited with giving a coherent voice to the progressive movement and, by extension, modern liberalism. It has been celebrated ever since by liberals, even though most of them have probably never read this long, bizarre, often tedious, tortuous tome. Indeed, the fact that it is such a badly written book may be the sign that its appeal rested on something more important than its prose: it gave form to an idea whose time had come.

  Croly was a quiet man who'd grown up with noisy parents. His mother was one of America's first female syndicated columnists and a dedicated "feminist." His father was a successful journalist and editor whose friends dubbed him "The Great Suggester." Their home was something of a "European island in New York," according to one historian.31 The most interesting thing about the senior Croly--if by "interesting" you mean really loopy--was his obsession with Auguste Comte, a semimystical French philosopher whose biggest claim to fame was his coinage of the word "sociology." Comte argued that humanity progressed in three stages and that in the final stage mankind would throw off Christianity and replace it with a new "religion of humanity," which married religious fervor to science and reason--even to the extent of making "saints" out of such figures as Shakespeare, Dante, and Frederick the Great.32 Comte believed that the age of mass industrialization and technocracy would pluck the human mind from the metaphysical realm for good, ushering in an age where pragmatic managers would improve the plight of all based upon man-made morality. He anointed himself the high priest of this atheistic, secular faith, which he called positivism. The elder Croly made his Greenwich Village home into a positivist temple where he held religious ceremonies for select guests, whom he would try to convert. In 1869 young Herbert became the first and probably last American to be christened in Comte's religion.

  Croly attended Harvard University, though due to family and personal problems he was absent for long stints. While there he studied closely under William James as well as Josiah Royce and George Santayana. From James, he learned to think pragmatically. Thanks to Royce he converted from positivism to progressive Christianity. Santayana persuaded him of the need for a "national regeneration" and a new "socialistic aristocracy." The result of all these influences was a brilliant young man who was capable of remarkable hardheadedness while never losing his mystical zeal. He was also a fascist. Or at least he was an exponent of a pre-fascist worldview that would seem prescient just a few years later.

  When reading about Herbert Croly, one often finds phrases such as "Croly was no fascist, but..." Yet few make the effort to explain why he was not a fascist. Most seem to think it is simply self-evident that the founder of the New Republic could not have been a disciple of Mussolini's. In reality, however, almost every single item on a standard checklist of fascist characteristics can be found in The Promise of American Life. The need to mobilize society like an army? Check! Call for spiritual rebirth? Check! Need for "great" revolutionary leaders? Check! Reliance on manufactured, unifying, national "myths"? Check! Contempt for parliamentary democracy? Check! Non-Marxist Socialism? Check! Nationalism? Check! A spiritual calling for military expansion? Check! The need to make politics into a religion? Hostility to individualism? Check! Check! Check! To paraphrase Whittaker Chambers: from almost any page of The Promise of American Life, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding, "To fascism go!"

  Croly was an unabashed nationalist who craved a "national reformer...in the guise of St. Michael, armed with a flaming sword and winged for flight," to redeem a decadent America. This secular "imitator of Christ" would bring an end to "devil-take-the-hindmost" individualism in precisely the same manner that the real Jesus closed the Old Testament chapter of human history. "An individual," Croly wrote, sounding very much like Wilson, "has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed." Echoing both Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, Croly argued that "national life" should be like a "school," and good schooling frequently demands "severe coercive measures."33

  Croly's ideas garnered the attention of Willard Straight, an investment banker with J. P. Morgan and a diplomat, and his wife, Dorothy, a member of the Whitney family. The Straights were prominent philanthropists and reformers, and they saw in Croly's ideas a map for the transformation of America into a "progressive democracy" (the title of another of Croly's books). They agreed to support Croly in his effort to start the New Republic, a journal whose mission was "to explore and develop and apply the ideas which had been advertised by Theodore Roosevelt when he was the leader of the Progressive party."34 Joining Croly as editors were the self-described socialist-nationalists Walter Weyl and the future pundit extraordinaire Walter Lippmann.

  Like Roosevelt, Croly and his colleagues looked forward to many more wars because war was the midwife of progress. Indeed, Croly believed that the Spanish-American War's greatest significance lay in the fact that it gave birth to Progressivism. In Europe wars would force more national unification, while in Asia wars were necessary for imperial expansion and for the powerful nations to let off a little steam. Croly constructed this worldview out of what he deemed vital necessity. Industrialization, economic upheaval, social "disintegration," materialistic decadence, and worship of money were tearing America apart, or so he--and the vast majority of progressives--believed. The remedy for the "chaotic individualism of our political and economic organization" was a "regeneration" led by a hero-saint who could overthrow the tired doctrines of liberal democracy in favor of a restored and heroic nation. The similarities with conventional fascist theory should be obvious.35

  One might defend Croly by noting that such ideas were simply "in the air" at the end of the nineteenth century, a common set of responses to a common atmosphere of social, economic, and political change. And indeed, this is part of my argument. There were of course significant differences between fascism and Progressivism,
but these are mainly attributable to the cultural differences between Europe and America, and between national cultures in general. (When Mussolini invited the leader of the Falange Espanola--the Spanish fascists--to the first Fascist congress, he adamantly refused. The Falange, he insisted, was not fascist, it was Spanish!)

  Fascism was one name given to one form of "experimentation" in the 1920s. These experiments were part of the great utopian aspirations of the "world-wide movement" Jane Addams spoke of at the Progressive Party Convention. There was a religious awakening afoot in the West as progressives of all stripes saw man snatching the reins of history from God's hands. Science--or what they believed to be science--was the new scripture, and one could only perform science by "experimenting." And, just as important, only scientists know how to conduct a proper experiment. "Who will be the prophets and pilots of the Good Society?" Herbert Croly asked in 1925. He noted that for a generation progressive liberals believed that a "better future would derive from the beneficent activities of expert social engineers who would bring to the service of social ideals all the technical resources which research could discover and ingenuity could devise." Five years earlier, Croly noted in the New Republic that the practitioners of the "scientific method" would need to join with the "ideologists" of Christ, in order to "plan and effect a redeeming transformation" of society whereby men would look for "deliverance from choice between unredeemed capitalism and revolutionary salvation."36