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

by Jonah Goldberg

  By this time FDR was attending law school at Columbia University. He never received his degree but passed the bar and became a fairly unremarkable lawyer. In 1910 he was invited to run for the New York State Senate from Dutchess County, largely because of his wealth, name, and connections. The county Democratic chairman, Edward E. Perkins, consented to have what he considered to be a young fop on the ticket largely because he expected Roosevelt to contribute to the party treasury and to pay for his own campaign. When FDR met with Perkins and other party bosses, he arrived dressed in his riding clothes. Perkins disliked the young aristocrat but acquiesced, saying, "You'll have to take off those yellow shoes" and "put on some regular pants."7 FDR eagerly accepted and won the race. Much as at Groton and Harvard, however, he didn't make many friends in the state legislature and was considered a second-rate intelligence. His colleagues often made fun of him, using his initials to call him "Feather Duster" Roosevelt.

  Still, Roosevelt performed serviceably as a progressive state senator and won reelection fairly easily in 1912 thanks to his relationship with Louis Howe, a brilliant political fixer who taught him how to appeal to otherwise hostile constituencies. But he never finished his second term. Instead, he was tapped by Woodrow Wilson to serve as assistant secretary of the navy. Franklin was ecstatic about taking the same job "Uncle Teddy" (by marriage) had used to jump-start his own political prospects fifteen years earlier.

  Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in on March 17, 1913, his eighth wedding anniversary, at the age of thirty-one. And he immediately dedicated himself to emulating Teddy. His immediate boss, patron, and mentor was the famed progressive newspaperman Josephus Daniels. As both secretary of the navy and a journalist, Daniels represented all of the bizarre contradictions--from today's perspective--of the progressive movement. He was a thoroughgoing racist whose North Carolina newspapers regularly published horrendously offensive cartoons and editorials about blacks. But he was also deeply committed to a host of progressive reforms, from public education to public health to women's suffrage. A longtime political ally of William Jennings Bryan, Daniels could sound both pacifist and belligerent notes, though once ensconced in the Wilson administration, he was a dutiful advocate for "preparedness," expansion of the navy, and, ultimately, war.

  Daniels was constantly outflanked by his young assistant secretary's belligerence. FDR proved to be a very capable and astoundingly political assistant secretary. "I get my fingers into everything," he liked to say, "and there's no law against it."8 He particularly relished the fact that when his boss was away, he was the acting secretary. He loved the martial pomp, gushing with pride over the seventeen-gun salutes he received in his honor and taking an enormous amount of interest in designing a military flag for his office. Indeed from day one FDR was one of the "Big Navy Boys"--and he was constantly frustrated with what he perceived to be his boss's slow-footedness when it came to rearmament.

  From his first days as assistant secretary, FDR formed a powerful alliance with constituencies deeply invested in the development of a large naval war machine, particularly the Navy League, which was seen by many as little more than a mouthpiece for steel and financial interests. Just a month after his appointment, FDR gave a pro-big-navy speech at the league's annual convention. He even hosted a league planning meeting in his own office. During the months when the United States was officially neutral, FDR opened a channel with Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and other Republican hawks critical of the Wilson administration. He even leaked naval intelligence to the Republicans so they could attack the administration, and Daniels in particular, for "unpreparedness."9 Today he might be called part of the neocon cabal inside the Wilson administration.

  FDR witnessed, approved, and, on occasion, participated in all of the excesses of World War I. There's no record anywhere that he disapproved of George Creel's propaganda ministry or that he had any larger misgivings about the war abroad or at home. He watched as Creel's acolytes actively promoted what they dubbed "the Wilson cult." He approved of the oppression of dissidents and heartily celebrated the passage of the Sedition and Espionage acts. He sent a letter congratulating a U.S. district attorney who'd successfully won a case against four socialists who'd distributed antiwar publications. In speeches he inveighed against slackers who failed to buy Liberty Bonds or fully support the war.10

  After the Great War, the country slowly regained its sanity. But many liberals remained enamored of war socialism, believing that a peacetime militarization of the society was still necessary. Daniels--partly out of a desire to scare the country into ratifying the Treaty of Versailles--warned that America might need to "become a super-Prussia." The administration--with Daniels and Roosevelt at the forefront--pushed aggressively but unsuccessfully for a peacetime draft. The administration also failed to pass a new peacetime sedition law like the one it imposed on the nation during the war (in 1919-20, Congress considered some seventy such bills). And once Wilson was out of office, the government released its political prisoners, including Eugene V. Debs, who was pardoned by Wilson's Republican successor, Warren Harding. Nonetheless, the nation emerged from "the war to make the world safe for democracy" less free at home and less safe in the world. No wonder Harding's campaign slogan had been "A Return to Normalcy."

  In 1920 FDR's backers tried to orchestrate a Democratic presidential ticket with the revered progressive Herbert Hoover at the top and FDR as vice president. Hoover was open to the idea, but the plan fell apart when he threw his hat in with the Republicans. Roosevelt successfully maneuvered himself onto the Democratic ticket nonetheless as the running mate of James M. Cox of Ohio. FDR ran as a loyal Wilsonian, even if Wilson himself--now bitter and twisted, physically and psychologically--was less than gracious in his support.

  Other Wilsonians, however, were ecstatic. Now back at the New Republic, Walter Lippmann, who had worked with Roosevelt on the Wage Scale Committee in 1917, sent him a congratulatory note calling his nomination "the best news in many a long day." But the campaign was doomed from the outset due to the deep resentment many Americans felt toward the Wilson administration and Progressives in general.

  After a crushing defeat at the polls, FDR went into business. Then, in 1921, he contracted polio. He spent much of the next decade struggling to overcome his disability and planning a political comeback.

  Indeed, FDR faced two existential crises that were really one: how to fight the disease and stay politically viable. He bravely fought his condition, most famously at the spa he purchased for that effort at Warm Springs. This kept him out of the limelight most of the time. But he did attend the ill-fated 1924 Democratic National Convention, where he painstakingly walked on crutches to center stage to nominate Al Smith for president. He didn't make another public appearance until 1928, when he gave another convention speech for Smith. In a perverse sense, Roosevelt was lucky. By keeping out of the public eye while working the political angles behind the scenes, he managed to stay untainted, biding his time, during a moment when the services of a progressive party were blessedly unwelcome.

  While no intellectual, FDR possessed a certain genius for gauging the political temper of the times. He read people very well and picked up tidbits of information through extensive conversations with a vast range of intellectuals, activists, politicians, and the like. He was a sponge, biographers tell us, absorbing the zeitgeist while almost never concerning himself with larger philosophical conclusions. He was, in the words of the historian Richard Hofstadter, "content in large measure to follow public opinion." In many ways Roosevelt saw himself as a popularizer of intellectual currents. He spoke in generalities that everyone found agreeable at first and meaningless upon reflection. He could be--or at least sound--Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian, internationalist and isolationist, this and that as well as the other thing. He was like a "chameleon on plaid," groused Herbert Hoover.11

  Roosevelt's slipperiness stemmed from more than people pleasing. Until late in his presidency, his overriding imperative was t
o split differences, to claim the "middle way." "I think that you will agree," he wrote a friend about one speech, "that it is sufficiently far to the left to prevent any further suggestion that I am leaning to the right."12 Once, when he was given two completely opposing policy proposals, he simply ordered his aide and postmaster general, James Farley, to reconcile them. His favorite form of management was to pit two individuals or departments against each other with the same task.

  The problem with this sort of triangulation is that you end up moving to whatever you believe is the epicenter between two ever-shifting and hard-to-define horizons. Worse still, Roosevelt translated this approach into a de facto Third Way governing philosophy. This in effect meant that nothing was fixed. No question about the role of government or its powers was truly settled. And it is for this reason that both conservatives and radicals have always harbored feelings ranging from frustration to contempt for FDR. For the radicals FDR wasn't principled enough to commit to lasting change, while for conservatives he wasn't principled enough to stand his ground. He planted his flag atop a buoy at sea, permanently bobbing with the currents. Unfortunately, the currents tended to push him in only one direction: statism, for that was the intellectual tide of the time.

  Today many liberals subscribe to the myth that the New Deal was a coherent, enlightened, unified endeavor encapsulated in the largely meaningless phrase "the Roosevelt legacy." This is poppycock. "To look upon these programs as the result of a unified plan," wrote Raymond Moley, FDR's right-hand man during much of the New Deal, "was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter's tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy's bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator." When Alvin Hansen, an influential economic adviser to the president, was asked--in 1940!--whether "the basic principle of the New Deal" was "economically sound," he responded, "I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is."13

  This raises the first of many common features among New Deal liberalism, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialism, all of which shared many of the same historical and intellectual forebears. Fascist and Nazi intellectuals constantly touted a "middle" or "Third Way" between capitalism and socialism. Mussolini zigzagged every which way, from free trade and low taxes to a totalitarian state apparatus. Even before he attained power, his stock response when asked to outline his program was to say he had none. "Our program is to govern," the Fascists liked to say.

  Hitler showed even less interest in political or economic theory, fascist or otherwise. He never read Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century or many of the other "classic" fascist texts. And the inability of numerous Nazis and fascists to plow through the Nazi bible Mein Kampf is legendary.

  The "middle way" sounds moderate and un-radical. Its appeal is that it sounds unideological and freethinking. But philosophically the Third Way is not mere difference splitting; it is utopian and authoritarian. Its utopian aspect becomes manifest in its antagonism to the idea that politics is about trade-offs. The Third Wayer says that there are no false choices--"I refuse to accept that X should come at the expense of Y." The Third Way holds that we can have capitalism and socialism, individual liberty and absolute unity. Fascist movements are implicitly utopian because they--like communist and heretical Christian movements--assume that with just the right arrangement of policies, all contradictions can be rectified. This is a political siren song; life can never be made perfect, because man is imperfect. This is why the Third Way is also authoritarian. It assumes that the right man--or, in the case of Leninists, the right party--can resolve all of these contradictions through sheer will. The populist demagogue takes on the role of the parent telling the childlike masses that he can make everything "all better" if they just trust him.

  FDR's "middle way" had a very specific resonance, seemingly contradictory to its philosophical assumptions. As many communists were keen to note, it was born of a Bismarckian attempt to forestall greater radicalism. The elites, including business leaders, were for the most part reconciled to the fact that "socialism" of some kind was going to be a permanent feature of the political economy. Middle-way politics was a carefully crafted appeal to the middle class's entirely justifiable fear of the Red menace. Hitler and Mussolini exploited this anxiety at every turn; indeed it was probably the key to their success. The fascist appeal was homegrown socialism, orderly socialism, socialism with a German or Italian face as opposed to nasty "foreign" socialism in much the same way that 100 percent Americanism had been progressive America's counteroffer to Bolshevism.

  Time and again, FDR's New Dealers made the very same threat--that if the New Deal failed, what would come next would be far more radical. As we'll see, a great many of FDR's Old Right opponents were actually former progressives convinced that the New Deal was moving toward the wrong kind of socialism. That the Third Way could be cast as an appeal to both utopians and anti-utopians may sound implausible, but political agendas need not be logically coherent, merely popularly seductive. And seductiveness has always been the Third Way's defining characteristic.

  The German and American New Deals may have been merely whatever Hitler and FDR felt they could get away with. But therein lies a common principle: the state should be allowed to get away with anything, so long as it is for "good reasons." This is the common principle among fascism, Nazism, Progressivism, and what we today call liberalism. It represents the triumph of Pragmatism in politics in that it recognizes no dogmatic boundaries to the scope of government power. The leader and his anointed cadres are decision makers above and beyond political or democratic imperatives. They invoke with divine reverence "science" and the laws of economics the way temple priests once read the entrails of goats, but because they have blinded themselves to their own leaps of faith, they cannot see that morals and values cannot be derived from science. Morals and values are determined by the priests, whether they wear black robes or white lab smocks.

  AN "EXPERIMENTAL" AGE

  Ever since FDR's presidency--when "liberalism" replaced "progressivism" as the preferred label for center-left political ideas and activism--liberals have had trouble articulating what liberalism is, beyond the conviction that the federal government should use its power to do nice things wherever and whenever it can. Herbert Croly said it well when he defended the New Republic against critics who said the magazine's qualified support for Mussolini violated its liberal principles: "If there are any abstract liberal principles, we do not know how to formulate them. Nor if they are formulated by others do we recognize their authority. Liberalism, as we understand it, is an activity."14 In other words, liberalism is what liberals do or decide is worth doing, period. Faith without deeds is dead, according to the Bible. Pragmatic liberals internalized this while protesting they have no faith. This was at the core of what the German historian Peter Vogt called the progressives' "elective affinity" for fascism. Or as John Patrick Diggins says, "Fascism appealed, first of all, to the pragmatic ethos of experimentation."15

  As president, Roosevelt bragged that he was married to no preconceived notions. He measured an idea's worth by the results it achieved. "Take a method and try it," he famously declared at Oglethorpe University in May 1932. "If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." The only coherent policy Roosevelt subscribed to was "bold, persistent experimentation." Conservatives were cast by FDR and his allies as opponents of all change, selfish slaves to the status quo. But stasis is not the American conservative position. Rather, conservatives believe that change for change's sake is folly. What kind of change? At what cost? For the liberals and progressives, everything was expendable, from tradition to individualism to "outdated" conceptions of freedom. These were all tired dogmas to be burned on the altars of the new age.

  When FDR was elected president in 1932, three events were viewed as admirable experiments: the Bolshevik Revolution, the Fascist takeover in Italy, and the American "experimen
t" in war socialism under Wilson. By 1932 admiration for the Russian "social experiment" had become a definitive component of American liberalism--in much the same way that admiration for Prussian top-down socialism had been two decades earlier. Simply, the Soviet Union was the future, and "it worked."

  Intermingled in these encomiums to what Lincoln Steffens called the "Russian-Italian method"--signifying that, as far as he was concerned, Bolshevism and Fascism were not opposites but kindred movements--were lusty expressions of nostalgia for the short-lived American "experiment" with war socialism under Woodrow Wilson. "We planned in war!" was the omnipresent refrain from progressives eager to re-create the kind of economic and social control they had under Wilson. The Italians and the Russians were beating America at its own game, by continuing their experiments in war socialism while America cut short its project, choosing instead to wallow in the selfish crapulence of the Roaring Twenties. In 1927 Stuart Chase said it would take five years to see if the "courageous and unprecedented experiment" in the Soviet Union was "destined to be a landmark for economic guidance" of the whole world. Half a decade later he concluded that the evidence was in: Russia was the new gold standard in economic and social policy. So "why," he asked in his 1932 book, A New Deal, "should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?"16

  Chase's comment is indicative of an important aspect of the progressive mind-set. Anybody who has ever met a student activist, a muckraking journalist, or a reformist politician will notice the important role that boredom and impatience play in the impulse to "remake the world." One can easily see how boredom--sheer, unrelenting ennui with the status quo--served as the oxygen for the fire of progressivism because tedium is the tinder for the flames of mischievousness.17 In much the same way that Romanticism laid many of the intellectual predicates for Nazism, the impatience and disaffection of progressives during the 1920s drove them to see the world as clay to be sculpted by human will. Sickened by what they saw as the spiritual languor of the age, members of the avant-garde convinced themselves that the status quo could be easily ripped down like an aging curtain and just as easily replaced with a vibrant new tapestry. This conviction often slid of its own logic into anarchism and radicalism, related worldviews which assumed that anything would be better than what we have now.