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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Today, to deny JFK's status as the martyr to what might have been is to deny the hope of liberalism itself. For more than a generation, liberal politics in America has been premised on the politics of a ghost. The Jack Kennedy whom liberals remember never existed. But the Kennedy myth represents not a man but a moment--a moment when liberals hoped to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth. The times were not as propitious as liberals remember--after all it was only Kennedy's death, not his life, that truly rallied Americans around "Kennedyism" in huge numbers. But that's not the point. What matters is that the people believe the myth and therefore pursue it. Liberals believed for a "brief shining moment" that they could bring about their kingdom of heaven, their Camelot. Ever since, they have yearned to re-create that moment. Looked at from outside, the myth appears to be little more than power worship. But from within, it is gospel. Meanwhile, it's telling that Democrats wish to preserve the substance of the Great Society while maintaining the mythology of Camelot. Every Democrat says he wants to be JFK while insisting that he will do more or less what LBJ did. No Democrat would dream of saying he wanted to emulate Lyndon Johnson, because the myth is what matters most.

  7

  Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine

  THERE IS NO issue on which modern liberals consider themselves more thoroughly enlightened than that of race. And there is no contentious topic where they are quicker to insist that dissent from liberal orthodoxy is a sign of creeping fascism. In virtually every major racially charged debate over the last forty years, at least some self-righteous liberals have invoked the record of the Holocaust to warn, darkly, that if opponents of racial preferences of one kind or another get their way, we just may find ourselves on the slippery slope to Nazi Germany.

  White liberals learned this trick from black liberals. Black civil rights figures love playing the Nazi card. When Newt Gingrich tried to reach out to liberal Democrats by inviting them to social functions, New York representative Major Owens was outraged. "These are people who are practicing genocide with a smile; they're worse than Hitler," Owen said. "Gingrich smiles...[and] says they're going to be our friend. We're going to have cocktail-party genocide." The NAACP chairman Julian Bond is supposed to be a moderate in racial politics, but he, too, has a weakness for Nazi analogies. "Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side by side," he recently declared. Harry Belafonte smeared conservative blacks--Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and others--in the Bush administration by snorting that Hitler also "had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich" (this is untrue, by the way). Jesse Jackson has never met a reductio ad Hitlerum he didn't like. Over the course of his career he has compared Republicans to genocidal Nazis countless times, from decrying the Hitlerian roots of the religious right to denouncing George W. Bush's "Nazi tactics."1

  The American right is constantly required to own the darkest chapters in the country's history: the accommodation of segregationists, McCarthyite excesses, isolationism prior to World War II, and so on. Rarely mentioned is the liberal side of these stories, in which the Democratic Party was the home to Jim Crow for a century; in which American liberalism was at least as isolationist as American conservatism; in which the progressive Red Scare made McCarthyism look like an Oxford Union debate; in which successive Democratic presidents ordered such things as the detention of Japanese-Americans, sweeping domestic surveillance of political enemies, and the (justified) use of horrific weapons on Japan; and in which Moscow-loyal communists "named names" of heretical Trotskyites.2

  Perhaps most damning of all is the liberal infatuation with eugenics, which has simply been whitewashed out of existence. Like the editors of the old Soviet encyclopedias who would send out updates to instruct which pages should be torn out, American liberalism has repeatedly censored and rewritten its own history so that the "bad guys" were always conservatives and the good guys always liberals. This revisionism plays a role in our bioethical debates today: liberals still have a soft spot for certain types of eugenics, but they are as blind to their current attraction as they are to their historical one.

  In fact, they have blind spots on blind spots. Ignorant of their own history and only vaguely aware of the nature of Nazi eugenics, they work on the assumption that eugenics is something bad that only bad people want to pursue. Like the "liberal" who wants to ban negative political ads and campus hate speech but believes he is a fierce opponent of censorship, the modern liberal retains an attraction for eugenic ideas, but it never dawns on him that what he wants to do might be called by that name.

  Meanwhile, in current debates it is typically assumed that conservatives don't mean what they say. Conservative opposition to racial preferences may be defended with high-flying rhetoric about color-blind equality, but beneath the surface, liberals assert, the lofty rhetoric amounts to "coded" appeals to the racism of southern whites and a desire to "turn back the clock" on racial progress.

  The controversy over Charles Murray's Bell Curve is the most notorious example of this phenomenon in the last twenty years. Upon its release virtually every progressive voice in the country denounced Murray as a "social Darwinist" bent on promoting every reactionary measure from rounding up racial defectives to forced sterilization. America's largest Jewish organization proclaimed, "To take Charles Murray seriously is to endanger more than sixty years of progress towards racial justice by adopting the long disproved and discredited theories of social Darwinism and eugenics." The black scholar Adolph Reed called Murray and his co-author, Richard J. Herrnstein, "intellectual brownshirts" and declared that endorsements of Nazi-like "extermination, mass sterilization and selective breeding" were implicit in the work.3 But whatever the merits or demerits of The Bell Curve may be, the simple fact is that Murray and Herrnstein were making a deeply libertarian case for state nonintervention. Yes, they focused on issues of classic concern to eugenicists--the heritability of intelligence and its distribution among races--but their argument was 180 degrees opposite from real eugenics, which means using state power to improve the racial, genetic, or biological health of the community.

  Liberals constantly expect conservatives to atone for the racism, real and alleged, of various dead conservatives. Meanwhile, in large part because liberals were right about the moral imperative of desegregation, they see no need to explore their own intellectual history. They're the good guys, and that's all they need to know. Left unasked is why Progressivism--not conservatism--was so favorably inclined to eugenics. Is there something inherent to a "pragmatic" ideology of do-goodery that makes it susceptible to eugenic ideas? Or is liberalism's ignorance of its own history to blame? I'm not claiming that the editors at the New Republic today sympathize with eugenicists simply because previous editors did. But modern liberalism does provide a hospitable, nurturing environment for all sorts of "nice" eugenic and racist notions precisely because liberals haven't taken the sort of intellectual and historical inventory conservatives have. It's high time someone did.

  When reading the literature on the subjects of eugenics and race, one commonly finds academics blaming eugenics on "conservative" tendencies within the scientific, economic, or larger progressive communities. Why? Because according to liberals, racism is objectively conservative. Anti-Semitism is conservative. Hostility to the poor (that is, social Darwinism) is conservative. Therefore, whenever a liberal is racist or fond of eugenics, he is magically transformed into a conservative. In short, liberalism is never morally wrong, and so when liberals are morally flawed, it's because they're really conservatives!

  In an otherwise thoughtful essay in the New Republic, the Yale historian and professor of surgery Sherwin Nuland writes:

  Eugenics was a creed that appealed to social conservatives, who were pleased to blame poverty and crime on heredity. Liberals--or progressives, as they were then usually called--were among its most vigorous opponents, considering the inequities of society to be due to circumstantial factors am
enable to social and economic reform. And yet some progressive thinkers agreed with the eugenicists that the lot of every citizen would be improved by actions that benefited the entire group. Thus were the intellectual battle lines drawn.4

  Alan Wolfe, also in the New Republic, writes: "Racial conservatism has its roots in biological and eugenicist thought. Liberal theories of racial damage, by contrast, grew out of a twentieth-century concern with the impact of social environments on individuals."5

  How convenient. Alas, this is simply untrue. In order to see how this conventional wisdom is built upon a series of useful liberal myths, and therefore understand the real lineage of American liberalism, we need to unlearn a lot of false history and categories we take on faith. In particular, we need to understand that American Progressivism shares important roots with European fascism. No clearer or more sinister proof of this exists than the passion with which American and European progressives greeted eugenics--widely seen as the answer to the "social question."

  Let's review our story so far. The fascist moment at the beginning of the twentieth century was a transatlantic phenomenon. Intellectuals across the West embraced the idea that nations were organic entities in need of direction by an avant-garde of scientific experts and social planners. Contemptuous of nineteenth-century dogma, this self-anointed progressive elite understood what needed to be done in order to bring humanity to the sunny uplands of utopia. War, nationalism, the quest for state-directed community, economic planning, exaltation of the public, derogation of the private: these are what defined all of the various and competing new isms of the West.

  Eugenics fit snugly within this new worldview, for if nations are like bodies, their problems are in some sense akin to diseases, and politics becomes in effect a branch of medicine: the science of maintaining social health. By lending scientific credibility to the Hegelian and Romantic view of nations as organic beings, Darwinism bequeathed to scientists a license to treat social problems like biological puzzles. All the ills of modern mass society--urban crowding, a rising population among the lower classes, poor public hygiene, even the dumbing down of mainstream bourgeois culture--now seemed curable through conscientious application of biological principles.

  Indeed, the population explosion, and in particular the explosion of the "wrong" populations, were of a piece with Darwinian thought from the outset. Darwin himself admitted that his ideas were merely an extension of Malthusianism to the natural world. (Thomas Malthus was the economic philosopher who predicted that a natural human tendency to overbreed, coupled with finite natural resources, would yield persistent misery.) Intellectuals feared that modern technology had removed the natural constraints on population growth among the "unfit," raising the possibility that the "higher elements" would be "swamped" by the black and brown hordes below.

  Not only was America no exception to this widespread panic among the intellectual and aristocratic classes; it often led the way. American progressives were obsessed with the "racial health" of the nation, supposedly endangered by mounting waves of immigration as well as overpopulation by native-born Americans. Many of the outstanding progressive projects, from Prohibition to the birth control movement, were grounded in this quest to tame the demographic beast. Leading progressive intellectuals saw eugenics as an important, and often indispensable, tool in the quest for the holy grail of "social control."

  Scholarly exchanges between eugenicists, "raceologists," race hygienists, and birth controllers in Germany and the United States were unremarkable and regular occurrences. Hitler "studied" American eugenics while in prison, and sections of Mein Kampf certainly reflect that immersion. Indeed, some of his arguments seem to be lifted straight out of various progressive tracts on "race suicide." Hitler wrote to the president of the American Eugenics Society to ask for a copy of his Case for Sterilization--which called for the forcible sterilization of some ten million Americans--and later sent him another note thanking him for his work. Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race also made a huge impression on Hitler, who called the book his "bible." In 1934, when the National Socialist government had sterilized over fifty thousand "unfit" Germans, a frustrated American eugenicist exclaimed, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."6

  Of course American progressives are not culpable for the Holocaust. But it is a well-documented fact that eugenics lay at the heart of the progressive enterprise. The eugenic crusade, writes the historian Edwin Black, was "created in the publications and academic research rooms of the Carnegie Institution, verified by the research grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, validated by leading scholars from the best Ivy League universities, and financed by the special efforts of the Harriman railroad fortune."7 German race science stood on American shoulders.

  It would be nice to say that liberals' efforts to airbrush eugenics from their own history and fob it off on conservatives are unacceptable. But of course they have been accepted. Most intellectuals, never mind liberal journalists and commentators, don't know much about either conservatism or the history of eugenics, but they take it on faith that the two are deeply entwined. One can only hope that this wrong can be made right with a dose of the truth. A brief review of the progressive pantheon--the intellectual heroes of the left, then and now--reveals how deeply imbued the early socialists were with eugenic thinking.

  Just as socialist economics was a specialization within the larger progressive avocation, eugenics was a closely related specialty. Eugenic arguments and economic arguments tracked each other, complemented each other, and, at times, melted into each other. Sidney Webb, the father of Fabian socialism and still among the most revered British intellectuals, laid it out fairly clearly. "No consistent eugenicist," he explained, "can be a 'Laissez Faire' individualist [that is, a conservative] unless he throws up the game in despair. He must interfere, interfere, interfere!" The fact that the "wrong" people were outbreeding the "right" ones would put Britain on the path of "national deterioration" or, "as an alternative," result "in this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews."8

  Indeed, British socialism, the intellectual lodestar of American Progressivism, was saturated with eugenics. The Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, and H. G. Wells were devoted to the cause. John Maynard Keynes, Karl Pearson, Havelock Ellis, Julian and Aldous Huxley, Eden Paul, and such progressive publications as the New Statesman (founded by Webb) and the Manchester Guardian were also supporters of eugenics to one extent or another.

  As discussed earlier, Wells was probably the most influential literary figure among pre-World War II American progressives. Despite his calls for a new "liberal fascism" and an "enlightened Nazism," Wells more than anyone else lent romance to the progressive vision of the future. He was also a keen eugenicist and particularly supportive of the extermination of unfit and darker races. He explained that if his "New Republic" was to be achieved, "swarms of black and brown, and dirty-white and yellow people" would "have to go." "It is in the sterilisation of failures," he added, "and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies." In The New Machiavelli, he asserts that eugenics must be the central tenet of any true and successful socialism: "Every improvement is provisional except the improvement of the race." While Wells could be squeamish about how far the state should go in translating this conclusion into policy, he remained a forceful advocate for the state to defend aggressively its interest in discouraging parasitic classes.9

  George Bernard Shaw--no doubt because of his pacifist opposition to World War I--has acquired the reputation of an outspoken individualist and freethinker suspicious of state power and its abuses. Nothing could be further from the truth. Shaw was not only an ardent socialist but totally committed to eugenics as an integral part of the socialist project. "The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man," he declared. Shaw advocated the abolition of traditional marriage in favor of more eugenically acc
eptable polygamy under the auspices of a State Department of Evolution and a new "eugenic religion." He particularly lamented the chaotic nature of a laissez-faire approach to mate selection in which people "select their wives and husbands less carefully than they select their cashiers and cooks." Besides, he explained, a smart woman would be more content with a 10 percent share in a man of good genetic stock than a 100 percent share in a man of undesirable lineage. What was therefore required was a "human stud farm" in order to "eliminate the Yahoo whose vote will wreck the commonwealth." According to Shaw, the state should be firm in its policy toward criminal and genetically undesirable elements. "[W]ith many apologies and expressions of sympathy, and some generosity in complying with their last wishes," he wrote with ghoulish glee, we "should place them in the lethal chamber and get rid of them."10

  Other liberal heroes shared Shaw's enthusiasm. John Maynard Keynes, the founding father of liberal economics, served on the British Eugenics Society's board of directors in 1945--at a time when the popularity of eugenics was rapidly imploding thanks to the revelation of Nazi concentration camp experiments. Nonetheless, Keynes declared eugenics "the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists." Julian Huxley, the founder of the World Wildlife Fund, first director of UNESCO, and revered science popularizer, co-wrote The Science of Life with Wells and Wells's son. Huxley, too, was a sincere believer in eugenics. Havelock Ellis, the pioneering sex theorist and early architect of the birth control movement, spoke for many when he proposed a eugenic registry of all citizens, so as to provide "a real guide as to those persons who are most fit, or most unfit to carry on the race." Ellis did not oppose Nazi sterilization programs, believing that good science "need not become mixed up in the Nordic and anti-Semitic aspects of Nazi aspiration." J. B. S. Haldane, the British geneticist, wrote in the Daily Worker, "The dogma of human equality is no part of Communism...the formula of Communism: 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,' would be nonsense, if abilities were equal."11