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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Today, particularly under Bush, it is precisely this attitude that liberals call fascist. But that yardstick is too short to get the full measure of what made the New Deal fascistic. We render fascism and Nazism into cartoons when we simply say that they were evil. The seduction of Nazism was its appeal to community, its attempt to restore via an all-powerful state a sense of belonging to those lost in modern society. Modernization, industrialization, and secularization sowed doubt and alienation among the masses. The Nazis promised to make people feel they belonged to something larger than themselves. The spirit of "all for one, one for all" suffused every Nazi pageant and parade.

  This was the fundamental public philosophy shared by all of FDR's Brain Trust, and they inherited it wholesale from Herbert Croly and his comrades. "At the heart of the New Deal," writes William Schambra, "was the resurrection of the national idea, the renewal of the vision of national community. Roosevelt sought to pull America together in the face of its divisions by an appeal to national duty, discipline, and brotherhood; he aimed to restore the sense of local community, at the national level." Roosevelt himself observed that "we have been extending to our national life the old principle of the local community" in response to the "drastic changes" working their way through American life.57 Militarism in America, as in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, was a means to this end, not the end itself.

  This has been the liberal enterprise ever since: to transform a democratic republic into an enormous tribal community, to give every member of society from Key West, Florida, to Fairbanks, Alaska, that same sense of belonging--"we're all in it together!"--that we allegedly feel in a close-knit community. The yearning for community is deep and human and decent. But these yearnings are often misplaced when channeled through the federal government and imposed across a diverse nation with a republican constitution. This was the debate at the heart of the Constitutional Convention and one that the progressives sought to settle permanently in their favor. The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good. And yet ever since the New Deal, liberals have been unable to shake this fundamental dogma that the state can be the instrument for a politics of meaning that transforms the entire nation into a village.

  We should close this discussion by once again reiterating that whatever the similarities between the three New Deals, the differences between America, Germany, and Italy are more important. FDR's sins were nowhere near those of Hitler or Mussolini. Some of this has to do with the man. FDR believed in America and the American way of life--or at least he firmly believed that he believed in them. He still stood for election, though he did violate the tradition that presidents only serve two terms. He respected the system, though he did try to castrate the Supreme Court. He was not a tyrant, though he did put over a hundred thousand citizens into camps on the theory that their race could not be trusted. There are good arguments to be had on all sides of these and other events. But one thing is clear: the American people could never be expected to countenance tyranny for too long. During wartime this country has historically done whatever it takes to see things through. But in peacetime the American character is not inclined to look to the state for meaning and direction. Liberals have responded to this by constantly searching for new crises, new moral equivalents of war.

  The former New Republic journalist J. T. Flynn was perhaps the most famous anti-Roosevelt muckraker of the 1930s. He loathed Roosevelt and was convinced that the New Deal was a fascist enterprise. He predicted that proponents of the New Deal and its successors would become addicted to crises to maintain power and implement their agendas. He wrote of the New Deal: "It is born in crisis, lives on crises, and cannot survive the era of crisis. By the very law of its nature it must create for itself, if it is to continue, fresh crises from year to year. Mussolini came to power in the postwar crisis and became himself a crisis in Italian life...Hitler's story is the same. And our future is charted out upon the same turbulent road of a permanent crisis."58

  But Flynn understood that while America might go down a similar road, it needn't be as bumpy a ride. He predicted that American fascism might manifest itself as "a very genteel and dainty and pleasant form of fascism which cannot be called fascism at all because it will be so virtuous and polite." Waldo Frank made a similar observation in 1934:

  The NRA is the beginning of American Fascism. But unlike Italy and Germany, democratic parliamentarianism has for generations been strong in the Anglo-Saxon world; it is a tribal institution. Therefore, a Fascism that disposes of it, rather than sharpens and exploits it, is not to be expected in North America or Britain. Fascism may be so gradual in the United States that most voters will not be aware of its existence. The true Fascist leaders will not be present imitators of German Fuhrer and Italian condottieri, prancing in silver shirts. They will be judicious, black-frocked gentlemen; graduates of the best universities; disciples of Nicholas Murray Butler and Walter Lippmann.59

  I think it is clear that to the extent there's any validity to my argument at all--that fascism, shorn of the word, endures in the liberal mind--this analysis is true. We have been on the road to serfdom, we may still be on that road, but it doesn't feel that way.

  The question is why. Why "nice" fascism here and not the nastier variety? My own answer is: American exceptionalism. This is what Frank is referring to when he says democracy in America is a "tribal institution." American culture supersedes our legal and constitutional framework. It is our greatest bulwark against fascism.

  Werner Sombart famously asked: "Why is there no socialism in the United States?" The answer for historians and political theorists has always been: because America has no feudal past, no class problems of the European sort. This, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues, is also largely the answer to the question: "Why is there no Fascism in the United States?" But this is the case only if we mean the oppression, cruelty, and tyranny of classical fascism. Nationalism and fascism can only bring out traits that are already in a society's genetic code. In Germany the blackest parts of the German soul were unleashed, in Italy the insecurities of a faded star of Western civilization. In America, fascism hit at the beginning of the American century, which meant, among other things, that it was not nearly so dark a vision. We had no bitter resentments to vindicate, no grievances to avenge. Instead, fascism in America was a more hopeful affair (though let us recall that fascism succeeded at first in Italy and Germany because it offered hope as well).

  That doesn't mean we didn't have bleak moments. But these moments could not be sustained. The progressives and liberals had two shots at maintaining real fascistic war crises--during World War I and again during the New Deal and World War II. They couldn't keep it going, because the American system, the American character, and the American experience made such "experiments" unsustainable. As for the genteel fascism Flynn referred to, that's a different story--one that begins in the chapters that follow.

  While the cultural left has long seen the outlines of fascism in the alleged conformity of the 1950s, the third fascist moment in the United States actually began in the 1960s. It differed dramatically from the first two fascist moments--those that followed the Progressive Era and the New Deal--largely by virtue of the fact it came after the hard collectivist era in Western civilization. But as with the previous eras, the 1960s represented an international movement. Students launched radical uprisings around the world, in France, Indonesia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Senegal, South Korea, Mexico, and the United States. Meanwhile, working from within the establishment, a new cohort of liberal activists sought to re-create the social and political dynamics of their parents' generation, to further the legacies and fulfill the promises of the Progressive Era. This two-pronged assault, from above and below, ultimately succeeded in seizing the commanding heights of the government and the culture. The next two chapters will consider each in turn.

  5

  The 1960s: Fascism Takes to the Streets

  THE SELF-STYLE
D revolutionaries had grown increasingly brazen in their campaign to force concessions from the university. Students and professors who were labeled race traitors received death threats. Enemies of the racial nation were savagely beaten by roaming thugs. Guns were brought onto the campus, and the students dressed up in military uniforms. Professors were held hostage, badgered, intimidated, and threatened whenever their teaching contradicted racial orthodoxy. But the university administration, out of a mixture of cowardice and sympathy for the rebels, refused to punish the revolutionaries, even when the president was manhandled by a fascist goon in front of an audience made up of the campus community.

  The radicals and their student sympathizers believed themselves to be revolutionaries of the left--the opposite of fascists in their minds--yet when one of their professors read them the speeches of Benito Mussolini, the students reacted with enthusiasm. Events came to a climax when students took over the student union and the local radio station. Armed with rifles and shotguns, they demanded an ethnically pure educational institution staffed and run by members of their own race. At first the faculty and administration were understandably reluctant; but when it was suggested that those who opposed their agenda might be killed, most of the "moderates" quickly reversed course and supported the militants. In a mass rally reminiscent of Nuremberg, the professors recanted their reactionary ways and swore fidelity to the new revolutionary order. One professor later recalled how easily "pompous teachers who catechized about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears."1

  Eventually, the fascist thugs got everything they wanted. The authorities caved in to their demands. The few who remained opposed quietly left the university and, in some cases, the country, once it was clear that their safety could not be guaranteed.

  The University of Berlin in 1932? Milan in 1922? Good guesses. But this all happened at Cornell in the spring of 1969. Paramilitary Black Nationalists under the banner of the Afro-American Society seized control of the university after waging an increasingly aggressive campaign of intimidation and violence.

  The public excuse for the armed seizure of the Cornell student union was a cross burning outside a black dorm. This was later revealed to be a hoax orchestrated by the black radicals themselves in order to provide a pretext for their violence--and to overshadow the administration's fainthearted and toothless "reprimands" of six black radicals who'd broken campus rules and state laws. This Reichstag-fire-style tactic worked perfectly, as the gun-toting fascist squadristi stormed Straight Hall in the predawn hours, rousting bleary-eyed parents who were staying there for Parents Weekend. These bewildered souls who had the misfortune to bankroll the educations of the very gun-toting scholarship students now calling them "pigs" were forced to jump from a three-foot-high cargo deck into the freezing Ithaca rain. "This is Nazism in its worst form," declared a mother with breathless, if understandable, exaggeration.2 The university president, James A. Perkins, was required to cancel his morning convocation address, sublimely titled "The Stability of the University."

  In popular myth the 1960s was a gentle utopian movement that opposed the colonialist Vietnam War abroad and sought greater social equality and harmony at home. And it is true that the vast majority of those young people who were drawn to what they called the movement were starry-eyed idealists who thought they were ushering in the Age of Aquarius. Still, in its strictly political dimension, there is no denying that the movement's activist core was little more than a fascist youth cult. Indeed the "movement" of the 1960s may be considered the third great fascist moment of the twentieth century. The radicals of the New Left may have spoken about "power to the people" and the "authentic voice of a new generation," but they really favored neither. They were an avant-garde movement that sought to redefine not only politics but human nature itself.

  Historically, fascism is of necessity and by design a form of youth movement, and all youth movements have more than a whiff of fascism about them. The exaltation of passion over reason, action over deliberation, is a naturally youthful impulse. Treating young people as equals, "privileging" their opinions precisely because they lack experience and knowledge, is an inherently fascist tendency, because at its heart lies the urge to throw off "old ways" and "old dogmas" in favor of what the Nazis called the "idealism of the deed." Youth politics--like populism generally--is the politics of the tantrum and the hissy fit. The indulgence of so-called youth politics is one face of the sort of cowardice and insecurity that leads to the triumph of barbarism.

  While there's no disputing that Nazism's success was deeply connected to the privations of the great German Depression, that should not lead one to think that Nazism itself was a product of poverty. Even before World War I, Germany was undergoing a revolution of youth. The war merely accelerated these trends, heightening both idealism and alienation. Klaus Mann, the secular Jew and homosexual novelist, spoke for much of his generation when he wrote in 1927, "We are a generation that is united, so to speak, only by perplexity. As yet, we have not found the goal that might be able to dedicate us to common effort, although we all share the search for such a goal."3 Mann understated the case. While young Germans were divided about what should replace the old order, they were united by more than mere perplexity. A sort of youthful identity politics had swept through Germany, fired by the notion that the new generation was different and better because it had been liberated from the politics of corrupt and cowardly old men and was determined to create an "authentic" new order.

  German youth culture in the 1920s and early 1930s was ripe with rebelliousness, environmental mysticism, idealism, and no small amount of paganism, expressing attitudes that should be familiar to anyone who lived through the 1960s. "They regarded family life as repressive and insincere," writes one historian. They believed sexuality, in and out of marriage, was "shot through with hypocrisy," writes another. They, too, believed you couldn't trust anyone over thirty and despised the old materialistic order in all its manifestations. To them, "parental religion was largely a sham, politics boastful and trivial, economics unscrupulous and deceitful, education stereotyped and lifeless, art trashy and sentimental, literature spurious and commercialized, drama tawdry and mechanical." Born of the middle class, the youth movement rejected, even loathed, middle-class liberalism. "Their goal," writes John Toland, "was to establish a youth culture for fighting the bourgeois trinity of school, home and church."4

  In cafes they howled at the decadence of German society in cadences reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg. In the woods they'd commune with nature, awaiting "messages from the forest." A fuhrer--or popularly acclaimed "leader"--might read passages from Nietzsche or the poet Stefan George, who wrote: "The people and supreme wisdom yearn for the Man!--The Deed!...Perhaps someone who sat for years among your murderers and slept in your prisons will stand up and do the deed!" "These young people," Toland writes, "thriving on mysticism and impelled by idealism, yearned for action--any kind of action."5

  Even before the Nazis seized power, student radicals were eager to challenge the stodgy conservatism of German higher education, which cherished classically liberal academic freedom and the authority of scholars and teachers. A wave of Nietzschean pragmatism (Julien Benda's phrase) had swept across Europe, bringing with it a wind that blew away the stale dogmas of their parents' generation, revealing a new world to be seen with fresh eyes. The Nazis told young people that their enthusiasm shouldn't be restrained through academic study--rather, it should be indulged through political action. The tradition of study for its own sake was thrown aside in the name of "relevance." Let us read no more of Jewish science and foreign abstractions, they cried. Let us learn of Germans and war and what we can do for the nation! Intuition--which young people have in abundance--was more important than knowledge and experience, insisted the radicals. The youth loved how Hitler denounced the theorists--"ink knights," he spat. What was required, according to Hitler, was a "revolt against reason" itself, for "[i]ntellect has poisoned our people!
"6 Hitler rejoiced that he stole the hearts and minds of youth, transforming universities into incubators of activism for the Fatherland.

  The Nazis succeeded with stunning speed. In 1927, during a time of general prosperity, 77 percent of Prussian students insisted that the "Aryan paragraph"--barring Jews from employment--be incorporated into the charters of German universities. As a halfway measure, they fought for racial quotas that would limit the number of racially inappropriate students. In 1931, 60 percent of all German undergraduates supported the Nazi Student Organization. Regional studies of Nazi participation found that students generally outpaced any other group in their support for National Socialism.7

  A key selling point for German youth was the Nazi emphasis on the need for increased student participation in university governance. Nazis believed that the voice of the students needed to be heard and the importance of "activism" recognized as an essential part of higher education. Foreshadowing a refrain common to American student radicals of the 1960s, like Columbia's Mark Rudd, who declared that the only legitimate job of the university was "the creation and expansion of a revolutionary movement," the Nazis believed that the university should be an empowering incubator of revolutionaries first and peddlers of abstraction a very, very distant second.8