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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Kennedy, like FDR, believed he was a true democrat, and it would be unfair to label him a fascist. But his obsession with fostering crises in order to whip up popular sentiments in his favor demonstrates the perils of infatuation with fascist aesthetics in democratic politics. Ted Sorensen's memoirs count sixteen crises in Kennedy's first eight months in office. Kennedy created "crisis teams" that could short-circuit the traditional bureaucracy, the democratic process, and even the law. David Halberstam writes that Johnson inherited from Kennedy "crisis-mentality men, men who delighted in the great international crisis because it centered the action right there in the White House--the meetings, the decisions, the tensions, the power, they were movers and activists, and this was what they had come to Washington for, to meet these challenges." Garry Wills and Henry Fairlie--hardly right-wing critics--dubbed the Kennedy administration a "guerilla government" for its abuse of and contempt for the traditional governmental system. In an interview in 1963 Otto Strasser, the left-wing Nazi who helped found the movement, told the scholar David Schoenbaum that Kennedy's abuse of authority and crisis-mongering certainly made him look like a fascist.15

  Everything about Kennedy's politics conveyed a sense of urgency. He ran on a "missile gap" that never existed and governed based on a heightened state of tension with the Soviets that he labored to create. He constantly spoke the language of "danger" and "sacrifice," "courage" and "crusade." He installed the first "situation room" in the White House. His first State of the Union address, delivered eleven days after his inaugural, was a "wartime speech without a war." Kennedy warned that freedom itself was at its "hour of maximum danger." "Before my term has ended we shall have to test again whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure. The outcome is by no means certain."16

  Kennedy's adrenaline-soaked presidency was infectious, and deliberately so. His administration launched a massive campaign to encourage the construction of fallout shelters, with various agencies competing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the conversion of schools and hospitals into nuclear bunkers. We think of those duck-and-cover drills as icons of the 1950s, but it was under Kennedy that they reached the climate of extreme paranoia so often parodied today. The administration distributed fifty-five million wallet-sized cards with instructions on what to do when the nukes started raining from the sky. If, as the New Left so often claimed, the mobilization of "youth" in the 1960s was spurred by the anxiety of living under the shadow of "the bomb," then they have JFK to thank for it.

  Even Kennedy's nondefense policies were sold as the moral analogue of war. He justified more education spending--as Johnson would after him--on the explicit grounds that we needed to stay competitive with the Soviets. Kennedy's tax cuts--aimed to counteract the worst stock market crash since the Depression--were implemented not in the spirit of supply-side economics (as some conservatives are wont to insinuate) but as a form of Keynesianism, justified in the language of Cold War competition. Indeed, Kennedy was the first president to explicitly claim that the White House had a mandate to ensure economic growth--because America couldn't ignore Khrushchev's boastful threat that the Soviet Union would soon "bury" the United States economically.17 His intimidation of the steel industry was a rip-off of Truman's similar effort during the Korean War, itself a maneuver from the playbooks of FDR and Wilson. Likewise, the Peace Corps and its various domestic equivalents were throwbacks to FDR's martial CCC. Even Kennedy's most ambitious idea, putting a man on the moon, was sold to the public as a response to the fact that the Soviet Union was overtaking America in science.

  Particularly in response to Kennedy's crackdown on the steel industry, some observers charged that he was making himself into a strongman. The Wall Street Journal and the Chamber of Commerce likened him to a dictator. Ayn Rand explicitly called him a fascist in a 1962 speech, "The Fascist New Frontier."

  It is not a joyful thing to impugn an American hero and icon with the label fascist. And if by fascist you mean evil, cruel, and bigoted, then Kennedy was no fascist. But we must ask, what made his administration so popular? What made it so effective? What has given it its lasting appeal? On almost every front, the answers are those very elements that fit the fascist playbook: the creation of crises, nationalistic appeals to unity, the celebration of martial values, the blurring of lines between public and private sectors, the utilization of mass media to glamorize the state and its programs, invocations of a new "post-partisan" spirit that places the important decisions in the hands of experts and intellectual supermen, and a cult of personality for the national leader.

  Kennedy promised to transcend ideology in the name of what would later be described as cool pragmatism. Like the pragmatists who came before him, he eschewed labels, believing that he was beyond right and left. Instead, he shared Robert McNamara's confidence that "every problem could be solved" by technocratic means. Once again the Third Way defined ideological sophistication. In his 1962 Yale commencement address, President Kennedy explained that "political labels and ideological approaches are irrelevant to the solution" of today's challenges. "Most of the problems...that we now face, are technical problems, are administrative problems," he insisted at a press conference in May 1962. These problems "deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men" and should therefore be left to the experts to settle without subjecting them to divisive democratic debate.18

  Once again, Kennedy's famous declaration "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country" is seen today as a fine patriotic turn of phrase. Liberals in particular see it as an admirable call to service. And it is both of these things. But what is often missed is the historical context and motivation. Kennedy was trying to re-create the unity of World War II in the same way FDR had tried to revive the unity of World War I. His declaration that we should put a man on the moon was not the result of Kennedy's profound farsightedness, nor even of his desire to wallop the Russians. Rather, it was his best option for finding a moral equivalent of war.

  HE DIED FOR LIBERALISM

  All of this went down the memory hole after Kennedy's murder. Kennedy the nationalistic Third Wayer was replaced by Kennedy the fighting liberal. The JFK of Camelot eclipsed the one who tried to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro.

  Woodrow Wilson's grandson Dean Francis Sayre delivered a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral in homage to the fallen leader. "We have been present at a new crucifixion," he told the assembled dignitaries. "All of us," he explained, "have had a part in the slaying of our President. It was the good people who crucified our Lord, and not merely those who acted as executioners." Chief Justice Earl Warren declared that the president had an organic and mystical bond with the people. He is "chosen to embody the ideals of our people, the faith we have in our institutions, and our belief in the father-hood of God and the brotherhood of man." Five days after Kennedy's death, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, capped his address to a joint session of Congress by asking that Americans "put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence" and turn away from "the apostles of bitterness and bigotry."19

  Even after the nature of the assassination was more clear, the notion that "hate" and America's collective sin killed Kennedy endured. Washington's Methodist bishop, John Wesley Lord, declared that the nation needed to "atone" for Kennedy's death. Rather than naming monuments after Kennedy, the nation could more appropriately "thank a martyr for his death and sacrifice" by redoubling its commitment to liberal politics.20

  Most historians view Kennedy and Johnson as representing the last gasp of traditional progressive politics, ending the era that began with Wilson and ran through the New Deal and the Fair Deal to the New Frontier and the Great Society. Programmatically, that's largely right (though it lets the very liberal Nixon off the hook). But the Kennedy presidency represented something more profound. It marked the final evolution of Progressivism into a full-blown religion and a national cul
t of the state.

  From the beginning, Kennedy's presidency had tapped into a nationalistic and religious leitmotif increasingly central to American liberalism and consonant with the themes of both Progressivism and fascism. The Kennedy "action-intellectuals" yearned to be supermen, a Gnostic priesthood imbued with the special knowledge of how to fix society's problems. JFK's inaugural opened the decade with the proclamation that America was the agent of God and the possessor of godlike powers: "For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life." The sociologist Robert Bellah found proof in this address that America already had a civil religion, defined by "the obligation, both collective and individual, to carry out God's will on earth." The New York Times's C. L. Sulzberger wrote that the inaugural appealed to anybody who believed there was "still room on this earth for the kingdom of heaven."21

  John F. Kennedy represented the cult of personality tradition of American liberalism. He wanted to be a great man in the mold of Wilson and the Roosevelts. He was more concerned with guns than butter. Lyndon Baines Johnson, a southern populist ward heeler born and bred in the New Deal tradition, was, on the other hand, all about the butter. Johnson could neither be a warrior nor a priest. If he couldn't be the liberal lion his predecessor wanted to be, he could embody the maternal aspect of Progressivism as the caring and protective shepherd overseeing his flock. He would transform the Kennedy personality cult into a cult of government. To this end, LBJ, a crafty and clever politician, made shameless use of JFK's assassination, converting it into precisely the sort of transformative national crisis that had always eluded Kennedy himself. His legacy, the modern welfare state, represents the ultimate fruition of a progressive statist tradition going back to Woodrow Wilson.

  As we've seen, Wilson and the progressives laid the intellectual foundations for the divinized liberal state. The progressives, it should be remembered, did not argue for totalitarianism because the war demanded it; they argued for totalitarianism and were delighted that the war made it possible. But World War I also proved to be the undoing of the progressive dream of American collectivism. The total mobilization of the war--and the stupidity of the war in the first place--reawakened in its aftermath the traditional American resistance to such tyranny. In the 1920s the progressives sulked while Americans enjoyed remarkable prosperity and the Russians and Italians (in their view) had "all the fun of remaking a world." The Great Depression came along just in time: it put the progressives back in the driver's seat. As we have seen, FDR brought no new ideas to government; he merely dusted off the ideas he had absorbed as a member of the Wilson administration. But he left the state immeasurably strengthened and expanded. Indeed, it is worth recalling that the origins of the modern conservative movement stem from an instinctive desire to shrink the state back down to a manageable size after the war. But the Cold War changed that, forcing many conservatives to support a large national security state in order to defeat communism. This decision on the part of foreign policy hawks created a permanent schism on the American right. Nonetheless, even though Cold War conservatives believed in a limited government, their support for anti-communism prevented any conceivable attempt to actually get one.

  Kennedy's contribution to the permanent welfare state was for the most part stylistic, as we've seen. But his "martyrdom" provided a profound psychological crisis that proved useful for the promotion of liberal goals and ideas. Johnson used it not just to hijack the national political agenda but to transform Progressivism itself into a full-blown mass political religion. For the first time, the progressive dream could be pursued without reservation during a time of prosperity and relative peace. No longer dependent on war or economic crisis, Progressivism finally got a clean shot at creating the sort of society it had long preached about. The psychological angst and anomie that progressives believed lay at the core of capitalist society could be healed by the ministrations of the state. The moment to create a politics of meaning on its own merits had finally arrived.

  In his first speech as president, Johnson signaled his intention to build a new liberal church upon the rock of Kennedy's memory. That church, that sacralized community, would be called the Great Society.

  THE BIRTH OF THE LIBERAL GOD-STATE

  We have already discussed at some length the personalities driving American liberalism. It is now necessary to take what may seem like a sharp detour to address the cult of the state itself in American liberalism. Without this historical detour, it is difficult to see modern liberalism for what it is: a religion of state worship whose sacrificial Christ was JFK and whose Pauline architect was LBJ.

  It's hard to fix a specific starting date for the progressive race for the Great Society, but a good guess might be 1888, the year Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward burst on the American scene. One of the most influential works of progressive propaganda ever conceived, the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was hailed as the biggest publishing sensation since Uncle Tom's Cabin. The narrator of the book, which is set in the faraway year 2000, lives in a utopian, militarized society. Workers belong to a unified "industrial army," and the economy is run by all-powerful central planners partly inspired by the successes of German military planning. Citizens are drafted into their occupations, for "every able-bodied citizen [is] bound to work for the nation, whether with mind or muscle." The story's preacher informs us that America has finally created the kingdom of heaven on earth. Indeed, everyone looks back on the "age of individualism" with bemused contempt.22

  The umbrella in particular is remembered as the symbol of the nineteenth century's disturbing obsession with individualism. In Bellamy's utopia, umbrellas have been replaced with retractable canopies so that everyone is protected from the rain equally. "[I]n the nineteenth century," explains a character, "when it rained, the people of Boston put up three hundred thousand umbrellas over as many heads, and in the twentieth century they put up one umbrella over all the heads."23

  Bellamy's vision of a militarized, nationalistic, socialist utopia captivated the imagination of young progressives everywhere. Overnight, Bellamite "Nationalist Clubs" appeared across the country dedicated to "the nationalization of industry and the promotion of the brotherhood of humanity." Nationalism in America, as in most of Europe, meant both nationalism and socialism. Thus Bellamy predicted that individual U.S. states would have to be abolished because "state governments would have interfered with the control and discipline of the industrial army."24

  Religion was the glue that held this American national socialism together. Bellamy believed that his brand of socialist nationalism was the true application of Jesus' teachings. His cousin Francis Bellamy, the author of the Pledge of Allegiance, was similarly devoted. A founding member of the First Nationalist Club of Boston and co-founder of the Society of Christian Socialists, Francis wrote a sermon, "Jesus, the Socialist," that electrified parishes across the country. In an expression of his "military socialism," the Pledge of Allegiance was accompanied by a fascist or "Roman" salute to the flag in American public schools. Indeed, some contend that the Nazis got the idea for their salute from America.25

  Everywhere one looked, "scientific" utopianism, nationalism, socialism, and Christianity blended into one another. Consider the 1912 Progressive Party convention. The New York Times described it as a "convention of fanatics," at which political speeches were punctuated by the singing of hymns and shouts of "Amen!" "It was not a convention at all. It was an assemblage of religious enthusiasts," the Times reported. "It was such a convention as Peter the Hermit held. It was a Methodist camp meeting done over into political terms." The "expression on every face" in the audience, including that of Jane Addams, who rose to nominate Teddy Roosevelt for his quixotic last bid for the presidency, was one "of fanatical and religious enthusiasm." The delegates, who "believed--obviously and certainly believed--that they were enlisted in a contest with the Powers of Darkness," sang "We Will Follow Jesus," but with the name "Rooseve
lt" replacing the now-outdated savior. Among them were representatives of every branch of Progressivism, including the Social Gospeller Washington Gladden, happily replacing the old Christian savior with the new "Americanist" one. Roosevelt told the rapturous audience, "Our cause is based on the eternal principles of righteousness...We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord."26

  The American Social Gospel and Christian sociology movements essentially sought to bend Christianity to the progressive social agenda. Senator Albert Beveridge, the progressive Republican from Indiana who chaired the 1912 convention, summed up the progressive attitude well when he declared, "God has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world."27

  Walter Rauschenbusch offers the best short explanation of the Social Gospel for our purposes. A professor at the Rochester Theological Seminary and a onetime preacher on the outskirts of New York's Hell's Kitchen, the slender clergyman with a thin goatee had become the informal leader of the movement when he published Christianity and the Social Crisis in 1907. "[U]nless the ideal social order can supply men with food, warmth and comfort more efficiently than our present economic order," he warned, "back we shall go to Capitalism...'The God that answereth by low food prices,'" he boomed, "'let him be God.'" Left-wing clergy like Rauschenbusch were convinced that the state was the instrument of God and that collectivism was the new order sanctioned by Jesus.28

  Progressive clergy like Rauschenbusch laid the philosophical and theological foundation for statism in ways that the new crop of social scientists never could. They argued from pulpits and political gatherings and in the intellectual press for a total and complete reconception of scripture in which redemption could only be achieved collectively. Conservative theologians argued that only the individual could be born again. The progressive Christians claimed that individuals no longer mattered and that only the state could serve as divine intercessor. The Baptist Social Gospel preacher argued that the state must become "the medium through which the people shall co-operate in their search for the kingdom of God and its righteousness."29