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

by Jonah Goldberg

  There was much about McCarthy that was fascistic, including his conspiratorialism, his paranoid rhetoric, his bullying, and his opportunism; but those tendencies did not come from the conservative or classical liberal traditions. Rather, McCarthy and McCarthyism came out of the progressive and populist traditions. His followers were mostly middle-class, very often progressive or populist in their assumptions about the role of the state, and in many respects heirs to the Coughlinism of the early New Deal. The most effective such McCarthyite was the four-term Nevada Democratic senator Pat McCarran, author of the Internal Security Act, which required communist-front organizations to register with the attorney general, barred communists from working in defense-related industries, banned immigration of communists, and provided for the internment of communists in case of national emergency.

  The point is not that McCarthy was simply a La Follette Progressive. Both La Follettes were honorable and serious men, in many ways among the most courageous politicians of the twentieth century. Nor am I saying that McCarthy was just another liberal, though he continued to use the word positively until as late as 1951. What I am saying is that what it meant to be a liberal was changing very rapidly after World War II. And once again, the losers in a liberal civil war--the right wing of the left--were demonized. Liberalism was in effect shedding its unrefined elements, throwing off the husk of the Social Gospel and all of that God talk. Had not the Holocaust proved that God was dead? The old liberals increasingly seemed like the William Jennings Bryan character in Inherit the Wind--superstitious, angry, backward. Through the benefit of hindsight one can see how liberals would have invented the cool pragmatist JFK had he not existed. Then again, as we've seen, they largely did invent him.

  At the dawn of the 1950s American liberals needed a unified field theory that not only sustained their unimpeachable status as Olympians but also took account of the Holocaust as well as the populist firebrands who'd dared to question the wisdom, authority, and patriotism of the liberal elite. The backward and unsatisfying language of religion increasingly cut off to them, their own legacy of eugenics discredited, and the orthodox Marxist narrative largely unpersuasive to the masses, liberals needed something that could unite and revive this trinity. They found the glue they needed in psychology.

  A handful of immensely influential Marxist theorists, mostly Germans from the so-called Frankfurt School (transplanted to Columbia University beginning in the 1930s), married psychology and Marxism to provide a new vocabulary for liberalism. These theorists--led by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse--tried to explain why fascism had been more popular than communism in much of Europe. Borrowing from Freud and Jung, the Frankfurt School described Nazism and Fascism as forms of mass psychosis. That was plausible enough, but their analysis also held that since Marxism was objectively superior to its alternatives, the masses, the bourgeoisie, and anyone else who disagreed with them had to be, quite literally, mad.

  Adorno was the lead author of The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950. The book presented evidence that people holding "conservative" views scored higher on the so-called F-Scale (F for "Fascism") and were hence in dire need of therapy. The political scientist Herbert McClosky likewise diagnosed conservatives as a pre-fascist "personality type" comprising mostly "the uninformed, the poorly educated, and...the less intelligent." (Lionel Trilling famously reduced conservatism to a series of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.")44 For McClosky, Adorno, and establishment liberals generally, conservatism was at best the human face of the madness of Nazi-style fascism.

  It's tempting to say these theorists merely threw a patina of pseudoscientific psychobabble over the propaganda leaflets of Stalin's Third International. But the tactic was more sophisticated than that. The essential argument was brilliant in its simplicity. The original Marxist explanation of fascism was that it was the capitalist ruling classes' reaction to the threat of the ascendancy of the working classes. The Frankfurt School deftly psychologized this argument. Instead of rich white men and middle-class dupes protecting their economic interests, fascism became a psychological defense mechanism against change generally. Men who cannot handle "progress" respond violently because they have "authoritarian personalities." So, in effect, anyone who disagrees with the aims, scope, and methods of liberalism is suffering from a mental defect, commonly known as fascism.

  The Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter was the Frankfurt School's most successful publicist. For Hofstadter, American history was a tale of liberals decapitating fascist Hydra heads in every chapter. His work dripped with the language of The Authoritarian Personality. In "Pseudo-Conservative Revolt"--which later became part of The Paranoid Style in American Politics--Hofstadter used psychological scare words to describe the crypto-fascist menace within: "clinical," "disorder," "complexes," "thematic apperception." As Christopher Lasch writes, "The Authoritarian Personality had a tremendous impact on Hofstadter and other liberal intellectuals, because it showed them how to conduct political criticism in psychiatric categories, to make those categories bear the weight of political criticism. This procedure excused them from the difficult work of judgment and argumentation. Instead of arguing with opponents, they simply dismissed them on psychiatric grounds."45

  It didn't take long for such psychological theorizing to break its banks and become an all-purpose solution to the "social question," as progressives used to put it. Indeed, modern psychology was a perfect substitute for the Social Gospel, militarism, Thurman Arnold's "religion of government," "social control," and even eugenics. Whereas progressives were once determined to weed out the biologically unfit, they now directed the same energies to the psychologically unfit. Some liberal psychiatrists even began describing a new "religion of psychiatry" that would cure society of its "extremist," traditional, backward, conservative elements. Adorno and his colleagues had laid the groundwork for this transition by identifying the "authoritarian family" as the locus of evil in the modern world.

  A wave of liberal theologians met the psychiatrists halfway, arguing that various neuroses were the product of social alienation and that traditional religion should reorient itself toward healing them. Psychiatry--and "relevance"--became the new standards for clergy everywhere. For Paul Tillich, the source of salvation would be a redefining and recombining of the secular and the sacred, rendering politics, psychiatry, and religion all parts of the same seamless web.

  Stripped of its jargon, this project was an almost perfect replay of the liberal pattern. Liberals love populism, when it comes from the left. But whenever the people's populist desires are at cross-purposes with the agenda of the left, suddenly "reaction," "extremism," and of course "fascism" are loosed upon the land. Bill Clinton titled his "blueprint" for America Putting People First, but when the people rejected his agenda, we were informed that "angry white men" (read white "authoritarian personalities") were a threat to the Republic. Similarly, when the people supported New Deal social planners, one could barely find an inch of daylight between Progressivism and populism. But when the same people had become fed up with socialism from above, they became "paranoid" and dangerous, susceptible to diseases of the mind and fascistic manipulation. Hence, liberal social planners were all the more justified in their efforts to "fix" the people, to reorient their dysfunctional inner lives, to give them "meaning." It was all reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht's famous quip: "Would it not be easier...for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?"46

  THE GREAT SOCIETY: LBJ'S FASCIST UTOPIA

  Much like the Nazi movement, liberal fascism had two faces: the street radicals and the establishment radicals. In Germany the two groups worked in tandem to weaken middle-class resistance to the Nazis' agenda. In the previous chapter we saw how the liberal fascists of the SDS and Black Panther movements rose up to terrorize the American middle class. In the remainder of this chapter--and the next--we will explain how the "suit-and-tie radicals" of the 1960s
, people like Hillary Clinton and her friends, used this terror to expand the power and scope of the state and above all to change the public attitude toward the state as the agent of social progress and universal caring and compassion.

  Lyndon Johnson seems an odd choice for liberalism's deliverer. Then again, he was no one's choice. An assassin's bullet anointed him to the job. Still, it's not as if he hadn't prepared for it.

  Amazingly, Johnson was the only full-fledged New Dealer to serve as president save FDR himself. Indeed, in many respects LBJ was the ultimate company man of the modern welfare state, the personification of everything the New Deal represented. Despite his large personality, he was in reality the personification of the system he helped to create.

  From the beginning, FDR took a shine to LBJ. He told Harold Ickes that Johnson might well be the first southern president of the postwar generation. Johnson was a fanatically loyal FDR man. As a congressional aide, he threatened to resign more than once when his boss contemplated voting contrary to Roosevelt. In 1935 he was the head of the Texas branch of the National Youth Administration, winning the attention of the future Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and singling himself out as a star among the young New Dealers. In 1937, at the age of twenty-eight, he was elected to represent Texas's Tenth District. He caught FDR's attention while the president was in Texas, where they met and spent considerable time together. When FDR returned to Washington, he called his aide Thomas Corcoran and informed him, "I've just met the most remarkable young man. Now I like this boy, and you're going to help him with anything you can." FDR became Johnson's "political Daddy," in Johnson's own words, and more than any other elected official LBJ mastered the art of working the New Deal. Johnson brought a staggering amount of pork to his constituents in his first year alone. "He got more projects, and more money for his district, than anybody else," Corcoran recalled. He was "the best Congressman for a district that ever was."47

  However, once elected, Johnson didn't brag about his support for the New Deal. He learned from the defeat of the Texas congressman Maury Maverick that getting praise from East Coast liberals didn't help you much in Texas. When he heard that the New Republic was going to profile him along with other influential New Deal congressmen, LBJ panicked. He called a friend at the International Labor Organization and implored her: "You must have some friend in the labor movement. Can't you call him and have him denounce me? [If] they put out that...I'm a liberal hero up here, I'll get killed. You've got to find somebody to denounce me!"48

  When he became president in his own right, he no longer had to keep his true feelings secret. He could finally and unabashedly come out of the closet as a liberal. JFK's death, meanwhile, was the perfect psychological crisis for liberalism's new phase. Woodrow Wilson used war to achieve his social ends. FDR used economic depression and war. JFK used the threat of war and Soviet domination. Johnson's crisis mechanism came in the form of spiritual anguish and alienation. And he exploited it to the hilt.

  When Johnson picked up the fallen flag of liberalism, he did so with the succinct, almost biblical phrase "let us continue." But continue what? Surely not mere whiz-kid wonkery or touch football games at Hyannis Port. Johnson was tasked with building the church of liberalism on the rock of Kennedy's memory, only he needed to do so in the psychological buzz phrases of "meaning" and "healing." He cast himself--or allowed himself to be cast--as the secular Saint Paul to the fallen liberal Messiah. LBJ's Great Society would be the church built upon the imagined "word" of Camelot.

  On May 22, 1964, Johnson offered his first description of the Great Society: "The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning...The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community."49

  It was an ambitious project, to put it mildly. In the Great Society all wants would be fulfilled, all needs satisfied. No good thing would come at the cost of another good thing. The state would foster, nurture, and guarantee every legitimate happiness. Even leisure would be maximized so that every citizen would find "meaning" in life.

  Johnson conceded that such a subsidized nirvana couldn't materialize overnight. It would require the single-minded loyalty and effort of every American citizen and the talents of a new wave of experts. "I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems," he admitted. "But I do promise this: We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America."50 Johnson established some fifteen committees to answer the question, what is the Great Society?

  The renaissance in liberal ambition transpired even as America's intrinsic antistatist antibodies were reaching a critical mass. In 1955 National Review was born, giving an intellectual home to a heterodox collection of thinkers who would form modern conservatism. It's revealing that while William F. Buckley had always been a classical liberal and Catholic traditionalist, nearly all of the intellectual co-founders of National Review were former socialists and communists who'd soured on the god that failed.

  In 1964 Senator Barry Goldwater was National Review's candidate of choice rather than of compromise. Goldwater was the first Republican presidential candidate since Coolidge to break with the core assumptions of Progressivism, including what Goldwater called "me-too Republicanism." As a result, Goldwater was demonized as the candidate of "hate" and nascent fascism. LBJ accused him of "preach[ing] hate" and consistently tried to tie him to terrorist "hate groups" like the Klan (whose constituency was, of course, traditionally Democratic). In a speech before steelworkers in September 1964, Johnson denounced Goldwater's philosophy of the "soup line"--as if free-market capitalism's ideal is to send men to the poorhouse--and scorned the "prejudice and bigotry and hatred and division" represented by the affable Arizonan.51 Needless to say, this was a gross distortion. Goldwater was a champion of limited government who put his faith in the decency of the American people rather than in a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington. His one great mistake, which he later admitted and apologized for, was to vote against the Civil Rights Act.

  Few liberals, then or now, would dispute that the Great Society was premised on love and unity. "We will do all these things because we love people instead of hate them...because you know it takes a man who loves his country to build a house instead of a raving, ranting demagogue who wants to tear down one. Beware of those who fear and doubt and those who rave and rant about the dangers of progress," Johnson railed. Meanwhile, the establishment worked overtime to insinuate that Goldwater was an architect of the "climate of hate" that had claimed Kennedy's life. As befitted the newly psychologized zeitgeist, Goldwater was denounced as, quite literally, insane. An ad in the New York Times reported that 1,189 psychiatrists had diagnosed him as not "psychologically fit" to be president. The charge was then recycled in excessive "free media" coverage. Dan Rather's colleague Daniel Schorr (now a senior correspondent with National Public Radio) reported on the CBS Evening News, with no factual basis whatsoever, that candidate Goldwater's vacation to Germany was "a move by Senator Goldwater to link up" with neo-Nazi elements.52

  Goldwater lost in a landslide. And given LBJ's monumental ego as well as the hubris of his intellectual coterie, it's no wonder that the election results were greeted as an overwhelming endorsement of the Great Society project.

  Again, Johnson was in many ways a perfect incarnation of liberalism's passions and contradictions. His first job (tellingly enough) was as a schoolteacher during the rising tide of the Deweyan revolution in education. Indeed, as some observed during the debates over the Great Society, the roots of the phrase stretched back to Dewey himself. The phra
se appears over and over in Dewey's 1927 The Public and Its Problems.53 Ultimate credit, however, should properly go to the co-founder of Fabian socialism, Graham Wallas, who in 1914 published The Great Society, a book familiar to the two Johnson aides who claimed credit for coining Johnson's "the Great Society."

  One of those aides was Richard Goodwin, a golden boy of the Kennedy administration (he graduated first in his class at Harvard Law) who came to JFK's attention for his work as a congressional investigator probing the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. LBJ inherited Goodwin as a speechwriter. In the summer of 1965 Goodwin offered what the New York Times called "the most sophisticated and revealing commentary to date" on the question, what is the Great Society? His answer lay in the need for the state to give "meaning" to individuals and "make the world a more enjoyable and above all enriching place to live in." "The Great Society," Goodwin explained, "is concerned not with the quantity of our goods but the quality of our lives." Though he didn't say so directly, it was clear that the Great Society would offer the opposite of the "hate" that killed Kennedy: love.54

  But it was also to be a tough love. Goodwin made it clear that if the citizenry didn't want to find meaning through state action or measure the quality of their lives on a bureaucratic slide rule, such reluctance would be overcome. But not necessarily via persuasion. Rather, it was the government's task "to spur them into action or the support of action." Here again Dewey's ghost was hard at work. Goodwin declared that the Great Society must "ensure our people the environment, the capacities, and the social structures which will give them a meaningful chance to pursue their individual happiness." This differed very little from Dewey's version of state-directed democracy. Dewey held that "[n]atural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology" and that "organized social control" via a "socialized economy" was the only means to create "free" individuals.55