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

by Jonah Goldberg

  The religious character of modern liberalism was never far from the surface. Indeed, the 1960s should be seen as another in a series of "great awakenings" in American history--a widespread yearning for new meaning that gave rise to a tumultuous social and political movement. The only difference was that this awakening largely left God behind. Paul Goodman, whose 1960 Growing Up Absurd helped launch the politics of hope in the first part of the decade, came to recognize in the second half how insufficient his original diagnosis had been: "I...imagined that the world-wide student protest had to do with changing political and moral institutions, to which I was sympathetic, but I now saw [in 1969] that we had to do with a religious crisis of the magnitude of the Reformation in the fifteen hundreds, when not only all institutions but all learning had been corrupted by the Whore of Babylon."56

  This view of the 1960s as essentially a religious phenomenon has gained a good deal of respectability in recent years, and scholars now debate the finer points of its trajectory. The deeply perceptive journalist John Judis, for example, argues that the 1960s revolt had two phases, a postmillennial politics of hope followed by a premillennial politics of despair, the latter ushered in by the escalation of the war, race riots at home, and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. "Postmillennialism" and "premillennialism" are theologically freighted terms for two related religious visions. Postmillennialists believe that man can create a kingdom of God on earth. The Social Gospellers were mostly postmillennialists in their aspirations; they believed the Hegelian God-state was the kingdom of heaven on earth. Premillennialists believe that the world is coming to an end and can't get better before it gets worse.57

  Judis's chronological scheme has its merits, but ultimately it makes more sense to see these visions not as distinct phases of liberalism but as contending strains within liberalism itself. The left has always had an apocalyptic streak. Lenin argued "the worse the better." Georges Sorel's writings make no sense unless you understand that he saw politics as an essentially religious enterprise. The revolutionary vanguard has always demanded that destruction come before creation. The Futurists, anarchists, vorticists, Maoists, and various other modernist and left-wing avant-gardes believed that hammers were for smashing first, building second. Hitler was, of course, a great believer in the social benefits of destruction (though, as he often explained, he understood that real power came not from destroying but from corrupting institutions).

  We should also note the apocalyptic logic of Progressivism generally. If the wheel of history, the state, is moving us forward to the kingdom of heaven, then anytime the "enemy" takes over, we are moving in a metaphysically wrong direction. This is never more transparent than when the mainstream media describe socialistic reforms as a "step forward" and free-market ones as "going backward" or "turning back the clock." And when non-progressives are in charge too long, the demands from the left to "tear the whole thing down" grow louder and louder.

  In other words, the apocalyptic fervor Judis identifies in the late 1960s had its roots not just in the disillusion of the Kennedy assassination and the failures of Great Society liberalism but in the pent-up religious impulses inherent to Progressivism generally. The patient reformists had their chance; now it was time to "burn, baby, burn!"

  The 1960s wasn't all about "fire in the streets," though--just as the French Revolution wasn't all about the Terror. Complex bureaucracies designed to "rationalize" the economy employed more Jacobins than the guillotine ever did. The born-again spirit of reform provided the drumbeat for the "long march through the institutions." Ralph Nader's consumerist crusade was launched in the 1960s, as was the modern environmental movement. Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique was published in 1963.58 The Stonewall riots, which gave birth to the gay pride movement, took place in the summer of 1969. Once again, the line between formal religion and Progressive politics was blurred beyond recognition. Once again, religious leaders in the "mainline" churches were seduced by radical politics.59 The Methodist youth magazine motive--a major influence on the young Hillary Clinton--featured a birthday card to Ho Chi Minh in one issue and advice on how to dodge the draft in others. All of these political crusades were grounded in a moralizing fervor and a spiritual yearning for something more than bread alone. Most of the radicals of the New Left later explained that theirs was really a spiritual quest more than a political one. Indeed, that's why so many of them disappeared into the communes and EST seminars, searching for "meaning," "authenticity," "community," and, most of all, "themselves." For the 1960s generation "self-actualization" became the new secular grace.60

  In 1965 Harvey Cox, an obscure Baptist minister and former Oberlin College chaplain, wrote The Secular City, which turned him into an overnight prophet. Selling more than one million copies, The Secular City argued for a kind of desacralization of Christianity in favor of a new transcendence found in the "technopolis," which was "the place of human control, of rational planning, of bureaucratic organization." Modern religion and spirituality required "the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols." Instead, we must spiritualize the material culture to perfect man and society through technology and social planning. In The Secular City "politics replaces metaphysics as the language of theology." Authentic worship was done not by kneeling in a church but by "standing in a picket line." The Secular City was an important intellectual hinge to the transition of the 1960s (though we should note that Cox recanted much of its argument twenty years later).61

  Evidence of liberalism's divided nature can be found in the enduring love-hate relationship between "hopeful" liberals and "apocalyptic" leftists. Throughout the 1960s, centrist liberals made allowances and apologies for the radicals to their left. And when push came to shove--as it did at Cornell--they capitulated to the radicals. Even today, mainstream liberals are far more inclined to romanticize the "revolutionaries" of the 1960s, in part because so many of them played that role in their youth. On college campuses today, administrators--often living fossils from the 1960s--applaud the Kabuki dance of left-wing protest as a central part of higher education. The only time they get worried is when the protest comes from the right.

  But the most important legacy of the 1960s has to be liberal guilt. Guilt over their inability to create the Great Society. Guilt over leaving children, blacks, and the rest of the Coalition of the Oppressed "behind." Guilt is among the most religious of emotions and has a way of rapidly devolving into a narcissistic God complex. Liberals were proud of how guilty they felt. Why? Because it confirmed liberal omnipotence. Kennedy and Johnson represented the belief that an enlightened affluent society could solve every problem, redress every wrong. Normally you don't feel guilty when forces outside your control do evil. But when you have the power to control everything, you feel guilty about everything. Lyndon Johnson not only accelerated Kennedy's politics of expectation when he declared, "We can do it all; we're the richest country in the world," but rendered any shortcomings, anywhere, evidence of sagging commitment, racism, insensitivity, or just plain "hate." Feeling guilty was a sign of grace, for it proved your heart was in the right place.

  Conservatives were caught in a trap. If you rejected the concept of the omnipotent state, it was proof that you hated those whom government sought to help. And the only way to prove you didn't hate them--whoever "they" were--was to support government intervention (or "affirmative action," in Kennedy's phrase) on their behalf. The idea of a "good conservative" was oxymoronic. Conservatism by definition "holds us back"--leaves some "behind"--when we all know that the solution to every problem lies just around the corner.

  The result was a cleavage in the American political landscape. On one side were the radicals and rioters, who metaphorically--and sometimes literally--got away with murder. On the other were conservatives--hateful, sick, pre-fascist--who deserved no benefit of the doubt whatsoever. Liberals were caught in the middle, and most, when forced to choose, sided with the radicals ("they're too impatient, but at least they ca
re!"). The fact that the radicals despised liberals for not going far enough fast enough only confirmed their moral status in the minds of guilt-ridden liberals.62

  In this climate, a liberal spending spree was inevitable. Like noblemen of yore purchasing indulgences from the Church, establishment liberals sought to expiate their guilt by providing the "oppressed" with as much swag as possible. Fear, of course, played an important role as well. Pragmatic liberals--while understandably reluctant to admit it publicly--undoubtedly bought into the Bismarckian logic of placating the radicals with legislative reforms and government largesse. For others, the very real threat of radicalism provided precisely the sort of "crisis mechanism" liberals are always in search of. The "race crisis" panic sweeping through liberalism was often cited as a justification to dust off every statist scheme sitting on a progressive shelf.

  From cash payments to the poor to building new bridges and community redevelopment, the payout was prodigious even by New Deal standards. The civil rights movement, which had captured the public's sympathies through King's message of equality and color blindness, quickly degenerated into a riot of racially loaded entitlements. George Wiley, the president of the National Welfare Rights Organization, insisted that welfare was "a right, not a privilege." Some even argued that welfare was a form of reparations for slavery. Meanwhile, any opposition to such programs was stigmatized as evidence of bigotry.

  The War on Poverty, affirmative action, community redevelopment, and the vast panoply of subsidies that fall under the rubric of welfare--Aid to Families with Dependent Children, housing grants, Medicare, Women, Infants, and Children benefits, food stamps--were churned out by a massively increased administrative state on a scale undreamed of by FDR. But most on the left were not satisfied, in part because these programs proved remarkably ineffective at creating the Great Society or defeating poverty. While even FDR had recognized that the dole could be a "narcotic...of the human spirit," in the 1960s such concerns were widely dismissed as rubbish.63 The New Republic argued that Johnson's antipoverty program was fine "as a start" but insisted that there was "no alternative to really large-scale, ameliorative federal social welfare action and payments." Michael Harrington, whose The Other America laid the moral groundwork for the War on Poverty, led a group of thirty-two left-wing intellectuals, grandiosely dubbed the "Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution," which proclaimed that the state should provide "every individual and every family with an adequate income as a matter of right." The committee lamented that Americans were "all too confused and frightened by a bogey we call the 'welfare state,' [a] term of pride in most parts of the world."64

  Recipients weren't the only ones hooked on the narcotic of "relief" the pushers were, too. Like a man determined to pound a square peg into a round hole, establishment liberals kept insisting that just a little more money, a little more effort, would produce the social euphoria of the elusive Great Society. As Mickey Kaus argues in The End of Equality, the liberal response to every setback could be summarized in one word: "more."65 When welfare seemed to cause fathers to abandon their families, liberals responded that payments should be extended to families where the father remains at home. But this in turn encouraged recipients to stay or become unemployed. The answer to that? Give money to employed poor fathers, too. But this in turn created an incentive for families to split up the moment the father moved out of poverty, so they wouldn't lose their benefits. Meanwhile, if you criticized any of this, you were a fascist.

  The unintended but inevitable consequences of liberal utopianism spilled forth. From 1964 onward, crime in America grew at about 20 percent per year.66 Liberal court rulings, particularly the Supreme Court's Miranda decision, caused clearance rates to plummet in major cities. Welfare had the tendency to encourage family breakdown, illegitimate births, and other pathologies it was designed to cure. The original civil rights revolution--which was largely based on a classically liberal conception of equality before the law--failed to produce the level of integration liberals had hoped for. In 1964 Hubert Humphrey--"Mr. Liberal"--swore up and down in the well of the Senate that the Civil Rights Act could in no way lead to quotas and if anyone could prove otherwise, "I will start eating the pages one after the other, because it is not there." By 1972 the Democratic Party--under the guise of the "McGovern rules"--embraced hard quotas (for blacks, women, and youth) as its defining organizational principle.67 And it should be no surprise that a Democratic Party determined to do anything it could to make itself "look like America" would in turn be committed to making America look like the Democratic Party. And if you criticized any of this, you also were a fascist.

  Indeed, even as quintessentially fascist street violence erupted in American cities, white liberals responded by basking in guilt and blaming the right. The Watts riots in 1965 were the real turning point. Not only was the collective liberal intelligentsia determined to blame white America--"the system"--for the violence, but the violence itself became morally admirable "rebellion." Johnson commented that such behavior was to be expected when "people feel they don't get a fair shake." Hubert Humphrey said that if he'd been born poor, he might have rioted also. An entire "riot ideology" unfolded that, in the words of the urban historian Fred Siegel, became a new form of "collective bargaining." Destroy your neighborhood and the government will buy you a better one.68

  The extent of liberal denial was put on full display when Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an adviser to Richard Nixon, advocated a policy of "benign neglect" on racial issues. The subject of race, Moynihan had told Nixon in confidence, "has been too much talked about...We may need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades."69 To this end Moynihan urged the president to avoid confrontations with black extremists and instead invest his energies in an aggressive class-based approach to social policy. To this, liberal editorialists, activists, and academics responded in horror, calling the memo "shameful," "outrageous," and "cruel" on its face. The reaction was instructive. Liberals had so thoroughly imbibed the assumptions of the God-state that to suggest the state could, never mind should, turn its back on the chosen people--for who could be more anointed than the poor black victims of slavery and segregation?--was tantamount to saying that God had ceased being God. When it comes to the state, neglect could not be benign, only malign. The state is love.

  A more practical irony of the transformation of American liberalism is that it had fallen into the pre-fascist logic of the Bismarckian welfare state. Bismarck had pioneered the concept of liberalism without liberty. In exchange for lavish trinkets from an all-powerful state, Bismarck bought off the forces of democratic revolution. Reform without democracy empowered the bureaucratic state while keeping the public satisfied. Blacks in particular married their interests to the state and its righteous representatives, the Democratic Party. Blacks and the Democrats meet each other service for service, and so ingrained is this relationship that many liberal black intellectuals consider opposition to the Democratic Party to be, quite literally, a form of racism. Liberals also entered a Bismarckian bargain with the courts. Facing mounting disappointments in the democratic arena, liberals made peace with top-down liberalism from activist judges. Today liberalism depends almost entirely on "enlightened" judges who use Wilson's living Constitution to defy popular will in the name of progress.

  All of this is traceable back to the Kennedy assassination, in which a deranged communist martyred a progressive icon. In 1983, on the twentieth anniversary of the murder, Gary Hart told Esquire, "If you rounded us [Democratic politicians] all up and asked, 'Why did you get into politics?' nine out of ten would say John Kennedy."70 In 1988 Michael Dukakis was convinced (absurdly enough) that he was the reincarnation of Kennedy, even tapping Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate to re-create the "magic" of the Boston-Austin axis. In 1992 the high-water mark of the Clinton campaign was the Reifenstahlesque film of a teenage Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy. John Kerry affected a Kennedy accent in school, went by the init
ials JFK, and tried to model his political career on Kennedy's. In 2004 Howard Dean and John Edwards also claimed to be the true heirs of the Kennedy mantle. As did past candidates, including Bob Kerrey, Gary Hart, and, of course, Ted and Robert Kennedy. In 2007 Hillary Clinton said she was the JFK in the race.

  A true indication of how thoroughly the Kennedy myth seeped into the grain of American life can be seen in how Americans greeted the death of his son John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1999. "John-John," as he was endearingly and condescendingly dubbed, was by all accounts a good and decent man. He was certainly very handsome. And he was the son of a beloved president. Yet beyond that, his career and contributions were lackluster at best. He took the New York Bar exam three times. He was an unremarkable prosecutor. He founded a childish magazine, George, which intentionally blurred the lines between the personal and the political, substance and celebrity, the trivial and the important. And yet when John Junior died in a tragic plane crash, his death was greeted in abjectly religious terms by a political class entirely convinced that the Son, like the Father, had been imbued with the Kennedy Holy Ghost. The historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in the New York Times that JFK Jr. was his generation's "photogenic redeemer." Wall-to-wall coverage portrayed the younger Kennedy as a lost "national savior." Bernard Kalb summarized the tenor of the coverage: JFK Jr. was being depicted as "a kind of a secular messiah who would, had he lived, [have] rescued civilization from all its terrible problems."71