Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
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Inspiration for such ideas came from an improbable source: Bismarck's Prussia. Bismarck inspired American progressives in myriad ways, some of which have been touched on already. First, he was a centralizer, a uniter, a European Lincoln who brought disparate regions and factions under the yoke of the state, heedless of dissent. Second, he was the innovator of top-down socialism, which pioneered many of the welfare state programs the progressives yearned for: pensions, health insurance, worker safety measures, eight-hour workdays, and so on. Bismarck's efficiency at delivering programs without the messiness of "excessive" democracy set the precedent for the idea that "great men," modernizers, and "men of action" could do what the leaders of decadent and decaying democracies could not.
Moreover, Bismarck's socialism from above gelded classical liberalism in Germany and helped to hobble it around the globe. This was precisely his purpose. Bismarck wanted to forestall greater socialist or democratic radicalism by giving the people what they wanted without having them vote for it. To this end he bought off the left-leaning reformers who didn't particularly care about limited government or liberal constitutionalism. At the same time, he methodically marginalized, and in many cases crushed, the classical or limited-state liberals (a similar dynamic transpired in the United States during World War I). Hence, in Germany, both left and right became in effect statist ideologies, and the two sides fought over who would get to impose its vision on society. Liberalism, defined as an ideology of individual freedom and democratic government, slowly atrophied and died in Germany because Bismarck denied it a popular constituency. In its place was the statist liberalism of Dewey and DuBois, Wilson and FDR, a liberalism defined by economic entitlements and the alleviation of poverty.
Then there was the Kulturkampf--a subject to be discussed at greater length in a later chapter. The important point about the Kulturkampf, lost on so many contemporary commentators, is that it was a liberal phenomenon. German progressives declared war on backward Catholicism, believing that their blending of science and a form of nationalistic Social Gospel was the ideology of the future. It was a model the progressives adapted to American soil.
The godfathers of the liberal God-state were the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and the scientist Charles Darwin. Hegel had argued that history was an unfolding evolutionary process, and the engine driving that process was the state. The "State is the actually existing, realized moral life...The divine idea as it exists on earth," Hegel declared in The Philosophy of History. "[A]ll worth which the human being possesses--all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State."30 The movement of the state through time was the "march of God on earth." Darwin's theory of evolution seemed to confirm that man was part of a larger organism, governed and directed by the state as the mind guides the body. For the "modern" clergy this meant that politics was a religious calling; after all, politics is nothing less than the effort to define the mission of the state, and the state was the hand of God.
Virtually all of the leading progressive intellectuals shared this "organic" and spiritual understanding of politics--perhaps none more than Richard Ely. "God works through the State in carrying out His purposes more universally than through any other institution," proclaimed the founder of the American Economic Association and the so-called Wisconsin School of progressivism. The state, he insisted, "is religious in its essence," and there is no corner of human existence beyond the scope of its authority. A mentor to Wilson and a great influence on Teddy Roosevelt, Ely was a postmillennialist Christian who defined the state as "a mighty force in furthering God's kingdom and establishing righteous relations."31 Many of Ely's famous colleagues at the University of Wisconsin saw their advocacy for economic reform, eugenics, war, socialism, Prohibition, and the rest of the progressive agenda as part of a united effort to bring about the "New Jerusalem."
It made little sense to talk about progressives as a group distinct from the theocratic zealots trying to create a new God-state. The American Economic Association, its mission statement dedicated to uniting church, state, and science to secure America's redemption, served as both the intellectual engine of progressive social policy and a de facto organ of the Social Gospel movement. More than sixty clergymen--roughly half the group's roster--counted themselves as members. Later, during World War I, Ely was the most rabid of jingoists, organizing loyalty oaths, hurling accusations of treason, and arguing that opponents of the war should be shot.
With Woodrow Wilson, it is impossible to separate the priest from the professor. From early essays with such titles as "Christ's Army" and "Christian Progress" to his later addresses as president, Wilson made it clear that he was a divine instrument, and the state the holy sword of God's crusade, while at the same time insisting that he represented the triumph of science and reason in politics. Speaking to the Young Men's Christian Association, he told the audience that public servants should be guided solely by the question: What would Christ do in your situation? He then proceeded to explain, "There is a mighty task before us, and it welds us together. It is to make the United States a mighty Christian Nation, and to Christianize the world."32
The war only served to intensify these impulses. "The Past and the Present are in deadly grapple," he declared. His goal was the complete "destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere...that can disturb the peace of the world" and the "settlement of every question" facing mankind. Wilson advocated "Force! Force to the utmost! Force without stint or limit! The righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust." America was "an instrument in the hands of God," he proclaimed, while his propaganda ministry called World War I a war "to re-win the tomb of Christ."33
Wilson shared with other fascist leaders a firm conviction that his organic connection with "the people" was absolute and transcended the mere mechanics of democracy. "So sincerely do I believe these things that I am sure that I speak the mind and wish of the people of America." Many Europeans recognized him as an avatar of the rising socialist World Spirit. In 1919 a young Italian socialist proclaimed, "Wilson's empire has no borders because He [sic] does not govern territories. Rather He interprets the needs, the hopes, the faith of the human spirit, which has no spatial or temporal limits."34 The young man's name was Benito Mussolini.
That Wilson's government intruded deeply into the private sector in unprecedented ways is indisputable. It launched the effort, carried forward by FDR, of turning the economy into a "cooperative" enterprise where labor, business, and government sat around a table and hashed things out on their own. Such a system--they called it syndicalism, corporatism, and fascism in Europe--sounds attractive on paper, but inevitably it serves to benefit the people inside the room and few others. When Wilson's dollar-a-year men weren't rewarding their respective industries, they were subjecting more of the private sector to government control. Wilson's planners set prices on almost every commodity, fixed wages, commandeered the private railroads, created a vast machinery for the policing of thought crimes, and even tried to dictate the menu of every family meal.35
Wilson's war socialism was temporary, but its legacy was permanent. The War Industries Board and cartels closed shop after the war, but the precedent they set would prove too attractive for progressives to abandon.
While America was the victor in World War I, Wilson and the progressives lost their war at home. The government's deep penetration into civil society seemed forgivable during a war but was unacceptable during peace. Likewise, the artificial economic boom came to an end. Moreover, the Treaty of Versailles, which was supposed to justify every imposition and sacrifice, proved a disappointing riot of hypocrisies and false promises.
But the progressive faith endured. Liberal intellectuals and activists insisted during the 1920s that Wilson's war socialism had been a smashing success and its failures a result of insufficient zeal. "We planned in war" became their slogan. Alas, they couldn't convince the yokels in the voting booths. As a result, they came more
and more to admire the Bismarckian approach of top-down socialism. They also looked to Russia and Italy, where "men of action" were creating utopias with the bulldozer and the slide rule. The Marxist emphasis on scientific socialism and social engineering infected American Progressivism. And since science isn't open to democratic debate, an arrogant literal-mindedness took over Progressivism.
It was also around this time that through a dexterous sleight of hand, Progressivism came to be renamed "liberalism." In the past, liberalism had referred to political and economic liberty as understood by Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith. For them, the ultimate desideratum was maximum individual freedom under the benign protection of a minimalist state. The progressives, led by Dewey, subtly changed the meaning of this term, importing the Prussian vision of liberalism as the alleviation of material and educational poverty, and liberation from old dogmas and old faiths. For progressives liberty no longer meant freedom from tyranny, but freedom from want, freedom to be a "constructive" citizen, the Rousseauian and Hegelian "freedom" of living in accord with the state and the general will. Classical liberals were now routinely called conservatives, while devotees of social control were dubbed liberals. Thus in 1935 John Dewey would write in Liberalism and Social Action that activist government in the name of the economically disadvantaged and social reconstruction had "virtually come to define the meaning of liberal faith."36
Given this worldview, it shouldn't be surprising that so many liberals believed the Soviet Union was the freest place on earth. In a series of articles on the Soviet Union for the New Republic, Dewey hailed the grand "experiment" as the "liberation of a people to consciousness of themselves as a determining power in the shaping of their ultimate fate." The Soviet revolution had brought "a release of human powers on such an unprecedented scale that it is of incalculable significance not only for that country, but for the world." Jane Addams also called the Soviets "the greatest social experiment in history."37 Freed from the dogmas of the past, and adhering to evolutionary imperatives, Pragmatists believed that even states must "learn by doing"--even if that meant, once again, that the new Jacobins had to unleash terror on those who would not comply with the general will.
For a generation progressives had complained that America lacked, in effect, a Volksgeist, a singular general will that could fuel this conception of a God-state. When the stock market crashed in 1929, they believed their shining moment had returned.
"[T]he United States in the 1920s," writes William Leuchtenburg, "had almost no institutional structure to which Europeans would accord the term 'the State.'" Beyond the post office, most people had very little interaction with or dependence on "the government in Washington."38 The New Deal changed all that. It represented the last stage in the transformation of American liberalism, whereby the U.S. government became a European "state" and liberalism a political religion.
As economic policy, the New Deal was a failure. If anything, it likely prolonged the Depression. And yet we are constantly told that the New Deal remains the greatest domestic accomplishment of the United States in the twentieth century and a model liberals constantly wish to emulate, preserve, and restore. In 2007 Nancy Pelosi reportedly said that three words prove the Democrats aren't out of ideas: "Franklin Delano Roosevelt."39 Why such devotion? The answer most often offered is that the New Deal gave Americans "hope" and "faith" in a "cause larger than themselves." Hope for what? Faith in what? What "cause"? The answer: the liberal God-state or, if you prefer, the Great Society--which is merely that society governed by the God-state in accordance with the general will.
The New Deal amounted to a religious breakthrough for American liberalism. Not only had faith in the liberal ideal become thoroughly religious in nature--irrational, dogmatic, mythological--but many smart liberals recognized this fact and welcomed it. In 1934 Dewey had defined the battle for the liberal ideal as a "religious quality" in and of itself. Thurman Arnold, one of the New Deal's most influential intellectuals, proposed that Americans be taught a new "religion of government," which would finally liberate the public from its superstitions about individualism and free markets.40 It was as Robespierre insisted: the "religious instinct" must be cultivated to protect the revolution.
The apotheosis of liberal aspirations under FDR took place not during the New Deal but during World War II. Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address proposed what he called a "second Bill of Rights." But this was really an argument for a new Bill of Rights, turning the original on its head. "Necessitous men are not free men," he declared. Therefore the state must provide a "new basis of security and prosperity." Among the new rights on offer were "a useful and remunerative job," "a decent home," "adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health," "adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment," and "a good education." This second Bill of Rights remains the spiritual lodestar of liberal aspirations to this day.41
PURGING THE DEMONS WITHIN
The war against Hitler was as pristine an example of good versus evil as we've seen in the history of warfare. But that doesn't mean the war (and the New Deal mobilization) had only salutary effects. People grew accustomed to following the exhortations of elites--in the press, at leading institutions, and in government--without much reflection or skepticism. These elites told the American public that the war and state planning had "saved" Western civilization and that it was now America's job to keep it safe.
The postwar environment saw the fusion of any number of progressive strains into a coherent agenda. Government was now truly run by experts. The public consensus was favorable to liberal ambitions. Classical liberalism seemed permanently discredited. Even the utopian dream of a new world order and, perhaps, a world government envisioned by Wilson, H. G. Wells, and many others was given new life by the creation of the United Nations. The problem for liberalism was that the new enemy on the horizon wasn't from the right but from the left. For liberals in the late 1920s and early 1930s the Soviet Union was like Bismarck's Prussia a generation earlier--a model to be emulated. During the 1930s the Soviets were on the front line fighting the fascist threat. In the 1940s the Soviets were our allies. But after the war it soon became clear that Soviet intentions weren't that honorable and that Soviet methods were embarrassingly difficult to distinguish from Nazi methods.
There is a modern notion that liberals didn't disapprove of or oppose anti-communism; they just opposed McCarthyite excesses. The problem is that communists and liberals have always made allowances for McCarthyite tactics when it is one of their enemies getting grilled. The House Un-American Activities Committee, after all, was founded by a progressive Democrat, Samuel Dickstein, to investigate German sympathizers. During the barely remembered "Brown scare" of the 1940s, everyone from real Nazi supporters--the German-American Bund, for example--to misguided isolationists was targeted and harassed. Much like Wilson, FDR believed that any domestic dissent was treachery and insisted that his Department of Justice persecute his opponents. At the height of the madness, Walter Winchell read the names of isolationists on the radio, calling them "Americans we can do without."42 American communists in this period readily named names and compiled lists of "German sympathizers."
One might excuse such tactics as a necessary evil in the fight against Nazism. But the more poignant hypocrisy is that American communists did the same thing to other American communists. The Smith Act, which made it illegal to belong to an organization that advocated the overthrow of the United States, was a linchpin of American fascism, according to many leftists. But American communists themselves used the Smith Act to get American Trotskyites arrested during the war.
But that was a sideshow far from public eyes. After the war, liberals could not tolerate such tactics when aimed at their own ranks. Their denial that their own ideas and history had any link with totalitarianism was so total that anybody who suggested otherwise had to be destroyed. Whittaker Chambers demonstrated this
when he accurately identified Alger Hiss, a scion of American liberalism, as a communist. The establishment rallied around Hiss while it demonized Chambers as a liar, a psychopath, a fascist.43
Joseph McCarthy could not be so easily dismissed, largely because he was a U.S. senator. Despite his flaws and unforgivable excesses, he accurately called attention to the fact that much of the liberal establishment had been infested with communists and communist sympathizers. For that crime he, too, was dubbed a fascist.
Ask a liberal today why McCarthy was a fascist, and the answers you usually get are that he was a "bully" and a "liar." Bullies and liars are bad, but there's nothing inherently right-wing about them. You will also hear that McCarthyism represents a grotesque distortion of patriotism, jingoism, and the like. This is a more complicated complaint, though it's worth remembering that many on the left think nearly any exhortation to patriotism is fascist. Still, it is true that McCarthyism represented a certain ugly nationalist strain in the American character. But far from being right-wing, this sentiment was in fact a throwback to traditional left-wing populist politics. Red baiting, witch hunts, censorship, and the like were a tradition in good standing among Wisconsin progressives and populists.
Today few remember that McCarthy's political roots lay firmly in the Progressive Era. McCarthy was, after all, a populist progressive from quite arguably the most progressive state in the Union, Richard Ely's and Robert La Follette's Wisconsin. Joe McCarthy was a product of Wisconsin and its traditions. Indeed, the primary reason he ran for the Senate as a Republican is that he'd learned in his first campaign for public office--when he ran as a Democrat--that Wisconsin under La Follette had essentially become a one-party Republican state. In his 1936 bid for district attorney of Shawano County, McCarthy railed against the Republican presidential candidate as a "puppet" of right-wing business interests and fat cats like William Randolph Hearst. When he finally challenged La Follette for his Senate seat, he ran not as a bona fide right-winger but as a populist more in tune with the needs of Wisconsin.