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

by Jonah Goldberg

  A deep aversion to boredom and a consequent, indiscriminate love for novelty among the intellectual classes translated into a routinized iconoclasm and a thoroughgoing contempt for democracy, traditional morality, the masses, and the bourgeoisie, and a love for "action, action, action!" that still plagues the left today. (How much of the practiced radicalism of the contemporary left is driven by the childish pranksterism they call being subversive?) Many of George Bernard Shaw's bons mots seem like shots in the dark against the monster of boredom--which could only be conquered by a Nietzschean superman. At one time or another Shaw idolized Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini as the world's great "progressive" leaders because they "did things," unlike the leaders of those "putrefying corpses" called parliamentary democracies. In like terms, Gertrude Stein praised Huey Long by declaring that he was "not boring."18

  Or consider H. G. Wells. More than any other figure, his literary escapism and faith in science as the salvation of man were seen as the preeminent antidotes to the disease of Western malaise. In the summer of 1932, Wells delivered a major speech at Oxford University to Britain's Young Liberals organization, in which he called for a "'Phoenix Rebirth' of Liberalism" under the banner of "Liberal Fascism."19 Fabian socialism had failed, he explained, because it hadn't grasped the need for a truly "revolutionary" effort aimed at the total transformation of society. His fellow Socialists understood the need for socialism, but they were just too nice about it. Their advocacy of piecemeal "Gas, Water and School-Board socialization" was simply too boring. Conventional democratic governments, meanwhile, were decadent, feeble, and dull. If the liberals in the 1930s were going to succeed where the Fabians had failed--abolishing private property, achieving a fully planned economy, violently crushing the forces of reaction--they'd have to learn that lesson.

  Wells confessed that he'd spent some thirty years--since the dawn of the Progressive Era--reworking the idea of liberal fascism. "I have never been able to escape altogether from its relentless logic," he explained. "We have seen the Fascisti in Italy and a number of clumsy imitations elsewhere, and we have seen the Russian Communist Party coming into existence to reinforce this idea." And now he was done waiting. "I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis."

  "And do not let me leave you in the slightest doubt as to the scope and ambition of what I am putting before you," he continued:

  These new organizations are not merely organizations for the spread of defined opinions...the days of that sort of amateurism are over--they are organizations to replace the dilatory indecisiveness of [democracy]. The world is sick of parliamentary politics...The Fascist Party, to the best of its ability, is Italy now. The Communist Party, to the best of its ability, is Russia. Obviously the Fascists of Liberalism must carry out a parallel ambition on a still vaster scale...They must begin as a disciplined sect, but they must end as the sustaining organization of a reconstituted mankind.20

  Wells's fiction was so thinly veiled in its praise for fascism that the attentive reader can only squirm. In The War in the Air, German airships liquidate New York City's "black and sinister polyglot population." In The Shape of Things to Come, veterans of a great world war--mostly airmen and technicians--in black shirts and uniforms fight to impose one-world government on the beaten and undisciplined masses. In Wells's far-flung future, a historian looks back on the twentieth century and finds that the roots of the new, enlightened "Air Dictatorship" lay in Mussolini's Fascism--a "bad good thing," the historian calls it--as well as Nazism and Soviet Communism. In 1927 Wells couldn't help but notice "the good there is in these Fascists. There is something brave and well-meaning about them." By 1941 no less a figure than George Orwell couldn't help but conclude, "Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany."21

  Wells was an enormous fan of FDR's, and the two met often at the White House, particularly during 1934. Wells pronounced Roosevelt "the most effective transmitting instrument possible for the coming of the new world order." In 1935 and 1936 he briefly switched to Huey Long's and Father Coughlin's more exciting brand of fascism. (He described the bayou dictator as "a Winston Churchill who has never been at Harrow.")22 By 1939, however, he was again firmly back in the Roosevelt camp, seeing FDR's brand of "personal government" as indispensable.

  Wells's vision neatly captures the sense of excitement that infused the Western left in the 1930s. It should be no surprise that an avant-garde of self-described supermen would welcome an age where supermen would run the world. To be sure, these were on the whole dark and pessimistic times. But the spirit of "the worse the better" served as a wind behind liberals eager to remake the world, to end the days of drift and inaugurate the era of progressive mastery.

  STEALING FASCIST THUNDER

  Herbert Hoover won the presidential contest of 1928 in no small part on the strength of the international craze for economic planning and collectivization. He was a self-made millionaire, but his chief appeal was his experience as an engineer. In the 1920s and 1930s it was widely believed that engineering was the highest calling, and it was hoped that engineers could clear political mountains the same way they moved real ones.23

  Hoover failed to deliver as the Great Engineer, ironically because he gave the people too much of what they wanted. Indeed, many economic historians concede that the New Deal was, in significant respects, an accelerated continuation of Hoover's policies rather than a sharp break from them. The lines are even blurrier when one notes that FDR went into office as a budget balancer who cut government pay. Of course, the New Deal was an even greater failure when it came to curing the Great Depression--but Roosevelt had something going for him that Hoover did not: an appreciation of the fascist moment.

  Just as progressivism constituted a definite international moment during the second decade of the twentieth century, so in the 1930s the Western world was riding through a storm of collectivist sentiments, ideas, and trends. In Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, and Finland, quasi-fascist parties received their highest share of the votes. Until 1934 it seemed possible that Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists (who, like Mussolini, always considered himself a man of the left), might occupy 10 Downing Street. Meanwhile, in the United States, national socialists or populist progressives such as Huey Long and Father Coughlin were hugely popular, and they, more than any other group, moved the political center of gravity in America to the left.

  This is as good a place as any to tackle the enduring myth that Long and Coughlin were conservatives. It is a bedrock dogma of all enlightened liberals that Father Charles Coughlin was an execrable right-winger (Long is a more complicated case, but whenever his legacy is portrayed negatively, he is characterized as right-wing; whenever he is a friend of the people, he's a left-winger). Again and again, Coughlin is referred to as "the right-wing Radio Priest" whom supposedly insightful essayists describe as the ideological grandfather of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, and other putative extremists.24 But Coughlin was in no meaningful way a conservative or even a right-winger. He was a man of the left in nearly all significant respects.

  Born in 1891 in Hamilton, Ontario, Coughlin was ordained as a priest in 1916. He taught at Catholic schools in Canada for seven years, and then moved to Michigan. He eventually found a spot as a parish priest in the town of Royal Oak, a suburb of Detroit. He named the church the Shrine of the Little Flower after Saint Therese. Coughlin's first taste of publicity came when he battled the local Ku Klux Klan, which was at the time harassing Catholics, many of them immigrants. He talked a local radio station into permitting him to deliver sermons over the air. He was a success almost from the outset.

  From 1926 until 1929 Coughlin confined himself almost entirely to religious topics, denunciations of the Klan, sermons for children, and diatribes against Prohibition--all for an audience that didn't extend very far outside the Detroit area. His big breakthrough came with the stock market collapse, when he took up populist economics. He shrewdly tapped into popul
ar anxiety and economic discontent, and his broadcasts were picked up by more and more stations as a result. In 1930 he signed a deal with CBS to deliver six months of sermons on sixteen stations across the country on his Golden Hour of the Little Flower.

  Almost instantly Coughlin became the most successful political commentator of the fledgling mass-media age. With over forty million listeners and a reported million letters a week, he became one of the most powerful voices in American politics.

  His first victim was that ostensible conservative, Herbert Hoover. In October 1931, in a fiery speech against laissez-faire economics, Coughlin declared that America's problems couldn't be solved "by waiting for things to adjust themselves and by eating the airy platitudes of those hundreds of so-called leaders who have been busy assuring us that the bottom has been reached and that prosperity and justice and charity are waiting 'just around the corner.'"25 His favorite villains were "international bankers" and their ilk. Donations and letters poured in.

  In November, denouncing Hoover's belief that economic relief was a local matter, Coughlin made an impassioned case for government activism at the national level. He railed against a federal government that could help the starving of Belgium and even pigs in Arkansas but wouldn't feed Americans because of its antagonism to welfare. As the presidential election loomed, Coughlin threw all his weight behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The left-wing theocrat swore that the New Deal was "Christ's Deal" and that the choice Americans faced was "Roosevelt or Ruin." Meanwhile, he wrote the Democratic candidate, Roosevelt, grotesquely sycophantic letters explaining that he would change his own positions if that's what the campaign needed.

  FDR didn't like Coughlin much, but, true to form, he was glad to let the priest think he did. When FDR won, thanks in part to a successful strategy of going after urban Catholic voters, Coughlin concluded that he had been instrumental in getting him elected. When FDR invited the Radio Priest to attend the inauguration, Coughlin assumed that the president-elect saw things the same way. Over time, he became increasingly convinced that he was an official White House spokesman, often creating serious headaches for the White House even as he celebrated this "Protestant President who has more courage than 90 per cent of the Catholic priests in the country." "Capitalism is doomed and is not worth trying to save," Coughlin pronounced. At other times he advocated "state capitalism"--a phrase rich in both fascist and Marxist associations.26

  Indeed, Coughlin's economic populism usefully illustrates how ideological categories from the 1930s have been systematically misapplied ever since. As mentioned before, Richard Pipes described Bolshevism and Fascism as twinned heresies of Marxism. Both sought to impose socialism of one sort or another, erase class differences, and repudiate the decadent democratic-capitalist systems of the West. In a sense, Pipes's description doesn't go far enough. While Fascism and Bolshevism were surely heresies of Marxism, virtually all collectivist visions at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries were heresies of Marxism in the sense that Marxism itself was heretical. All of these isms, as the philosopher Eric Voegelin argued, were premised on the idea that men could create utopias through the rearrangement of economic forces and political will. Marxism, or really Leninism, was the most influential and powerful of these heresies and came to define the left. But just as Leninism was a kind of applied Marxism, so, too, was Fascism (as well as technocracy, Fabian socialism, corporatism, war socialism, German social democracy, and so on). Collectivism was the "wave of the future," according to the title and argument of a book by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and it would be known by different names in different places. The fascist moment that gave birth to the "Russian-Italian method" was in reality a religious awakening in which Christianity was to be either sloughed off and replaced or "updated" by the new progressive faith in man's ability to perfect the world.27

  From the dawn of the Progressive Era through the 1930s, the intellectual and ideological landscape was fractured within this larger camp. The fight between left and right was for the most part between left-wing and right-wing socialists. But virtually all camps subscribed to some hybridized version of Marxism, some bastardization of the Rousseauian dream of a society governed by a general will. It was not until the late 1940s, with the revival of classical liberalism led by Friedrich Hayek, that collectivism of all stripes was once again fought from a right that did not share the core assumptions of the left. What is aggravating is that vestigial carbuncles like Coughlin are still counted as figures of the right--because of their anti-Semitism or opposition to FDR, or because they are simply too embarrassing to the left--even though on the fundamental philosophical and political questions Coughlinites were part of the liberal-progressive coalition.

  Coughlin himself was a darling among Capitol Hill Democrats, particularly the progressive bloc--the liberals to the left of FDR who pushed him for ever more aggressive reforms. In 1933 the administration was under considerable pressure to include Coughlin in the U.S. delegation to a major economic conference in London. Ten senators and seventy-five congressmen sent a petition declaring that Coughlin had "the confidence of millions of Americans." The vast majority of the signatories were Democrats. There was even a groundswell among progressives for FDR to appoint Coughlin treasury secretary.

  This was no joke. Indeed, Coughlin was perhaps the foremost American advocate of what had become an international push toward economic nationalism. An heir to the Free Silver movement, he was a classic left-wing populist. The more "dignified" forces of liberalism embraced him in much the same way today's Democratic Party embraces Michael Moore. Raymond Moley ran an article on inflation by Coughlin in the journal he edited. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace collaborated with Coughlin in an effort to sway the administration's monetary policy further to the left. Recall that Wallace (who was Alger Hiss's boss at Agriculture) went on to become Roosevelt's penultimate vice president, the leading Soviet "useful idiot" in the United States, the editor of the New Republic, and the Progressive Party's 1948 presidential nominee. In 1933 the League for Independent Political Action, a far-left group of intellectuals chaired by John Dewey, invited Coughlin to participate in its summer institute. When William Aberhart, the "radical premier" of Alberta, Canada, visited Coughlin in Detroit in 1935 to discuss his own left-wing economic program, Aberhart explained he wanted to get "the most expert advice on the continent."28

  Coughlin was more than willing to roll up his sleeves for the role of attack dog for the Democratic Party. The centrist Democrat Al Smith, the first Catholic to win a major party's presidential nomination, had become an increasingly bitter foe of the New Deal and FDR. This was all the provocation Coughlin needed. After tipping off FDR in a telegram, Coughlin took to the air to flay his fellow Catholic as a bought-and-paid-for tool of Wall Street.

  Liberals often debated among themselves whether Coughlin's contribution was worth the price of his unflinching demagoguery. Until late in 1934 the answer was invariably yes. Chief among his defenders was Monsignor John Ryan, the most respected liberal Catholic intellectual and theologian in America at the time. When Coughlin unfairly and cruelly ripped Al Smith to shreds, many wondered whether it was time to distance themselves from the Radio Priest. Ryan intervened and declared the rabble-rouser was "on the side of the angels." This was the standard liberal defense of the supposedly right-wing Coughlin. He was fighting the good fight, so who cared about his excesses?

  At a congressional hearing on FDR's monetary policy, Coughlin offered a two-hour peroration that held the committee transfixed. "If Congress fails to back up the President in his monetary program," he blustered, "I predict a revolution in this country which will make the French Revolution look silly!" "I know the pulse of the Nation," he further declared. "And I know Congress will do nothing but say: 'Mr. Roosevelt, we follow.'" "God is directing President Roosevelt," he added. "He is the answer to our prayers." In his sermons the leader of America's religious left sounded like he'd borrowed Mussolini's talking points: "
Our Government still upholds one of the worst evils of decadent capitalism, namely, that production must be only at the profit for the owners, for the capitalist, and not for the laborer."29

  So how did Coughlin suddenly become a right-winger? When did he become persona non grata in the eyes of liberal intellectuals? On this the historical record is abundantly clear: liberals started to call Coughlin a right-winger when he moved further to the left.

  This isn't nearly as contradictory as it sounds. Coughlin became a villain in late 1934 almost solely because he had decided that FDR wasn't radical enough. FDR's less than fully national-socialist policies sapped Coughlin's patience--as did his reluctance to make the priest his personal Rasputin. Still, Coughlin managed for most of the year to qualify his support, saying things like "More than ever, I am in favor of a New Deal." Finally, on November 11, 1934, he announced he was forming a new "lobby of the people," the National Union for Social Justice, or NUSJ. He issued sixteen principles of social justice as the platform for the new super-lobby. Among its articles of faith:

  * that every citizen willing to work and capable of working shall receive a just and living annual wage which will enable him to maintain and educate his family...

  * I believe in nationalizing those public necessities which by their very nature are too important to be held in the control of private individuals.