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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Harold Laski, to some the most respected British political scientist of the twentieth century (he was Joseph Kennedy Jr.'s tutor and JFK's professor), echoed the panic over "race suicide" (an American term): "The different rates of fertility in the sound and pathological stocks point to a future swamping of the better by the worse." Indeed, eugenics was Laski's first great intellectual passion. His first published article, "The Scope of Eugenics," written while he was still a teenager, impressed Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. At Oxford, Laski studied under the eugenicist Karl Pearson, who wrote, "Socialists have to inculcate that spirit which would give offenders against the State short shrift and the nearest lamp-post."12

  Laski, of course, had an enormous impact on American liberalism. He was a regular contributor to the New Republic--which in its early years published scores of leading British intellectuals, including Wells.13 He also taught at Harvard and became friends with Felix Frankfurter, an adviser to FDR and, later, Supreme Court justice. Frankfurter introduced Laski to FDR, and he became one of Roosevelt's most ardent British supporters, despite his strong communist ties. More famously, he became one of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's closest friends, despite an age difference of more than five decades. The two maintained a storied correspondence that lasted nearly twenty years.

  EUGENICS, AMERICAN-STYLE

  American progressives, who took their lead in many ways from their British cousins, shared a similar ardor for racial hygiene. Take Justice Holmes, the most admired jurist of the progressive period and one of the most revered liberal icons in American legal history. It seems that no praise of Holmes can go too far. Felix Frankfurter called him "truly the impersonal voice of the Constitution." "No Justice thought more deeply about the nature of a free society or was more zealous to safeguard its conditions by the most abundant regard for civil liberty than Mr. Justice Holmes." Another observer commented, "Like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, he is the summit of hundreds of years of civilization, the inspiration of ages yet to come." Others have declared that "for the American lawyer he is the beau ideal, and the lawyer quotes his aphorisms as the literate layman quotes Hamlet."14

  What explains Holmes's popularity with liberals? It's a complicated question. Holmes was hailed by many civil libertarians for his support of free speech during the war. Progressives loved him for holding that their nation-building social welfare programs were constitutional. "If my fellow citizens want to go to hell, I will help them. It's my job," Holmes famously declared. This has caused some conservatives to admire his "judicial restraint." But the truth is he practiced "restraint" mostly because he agreed with the direction the progressives were taking.

  In 1927 Holmes wrote a letter to Harold Laski in which he proudly told his friend, "I...delivered an opinion upholding the constitutionality of a state law for sterilizing imbeciles the other day--and felt that I was getting near the first principle of real reform." He went on to tell Laski how amused he was when his colleagues took exception to his "rather brutal words...that made them mad."15

  Holmes was referring to his decision in the notorious case of Buckv. Bell, in which progressive lawyers on both sides hoped to get the Supreme Court to write eugenics into the Constitution. Holmes was eager to oblige. The state of Virginia deemed a young woman, Carrie Buck, "unfit" to reproduce (though she was not, as it turned out, retarded, as the state had contended). She was consigned to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, where she was cajoled into consenting to a salpingectomy, a form of tubal ligation. The case depended in part on a report by America's leading eugenicist, Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York--the RAND Corporation of eugenics research, funded by various leading progressive philanthropists. Without having ever met Buck, Laughlin credited the assessment of a nurse who observed of the Buck family, "These people belong to the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South." Hence, Laughlin concluded that eugenic sterilization would be "a force for the mitigation of race degeneracy."

  Writing for the majority, Holmes issued a terse opinion barely over a single page long. The decision now ranks as one of the most vilified and criticized examples of legal reasoning in American history. Yet of all his many opinions, it is perhaps the most revealing. Citing only one precedent, a Massachusetts law mandating vaccinations for public school children, Holmes wrote that "the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes...It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind." He concluded by declaring, famously: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." As we will see, this reasoning endures in the often unspoken rationale for abortion.

  The opinion tied together many of the major strains in progressive thought at the time. Holmes, a bloody-minded veteran of the Civil War, saw war as a source of moral values in a world without meaning. Given the sacrifice of so many noble characters on the battlefield, requiring degenerates like Carrie Buck to sacrifice their ability to breed--or even their lives--for the greater good seemed entirely reasonable and fair. By citing a public health measure as an adequate precedent, Holmes further underscored how the health of the organic body politic trumped individual liberty. Whether through the prism of mobilization or public health, the project was the same. As Holmes put it in a 1915 Illinois Law Review article, his "starting point for an ideal for the law" would be the "co-ordinated human effort...to build a race."16

  Given such rhetoric, it is impossible not to see Progressivism as a fascistic endeavor--at least by the standards we use today.

  There's a general consensus among liberal historians that Progressivism defies easy definition. Perhaps that's because to identify Progressivism properly would be too inconvenient to liberalism, for doing so would expose the eugenic project at its core. The most obvious reply--that progressives were merely representing the age they lived in--fails on several levels. For one thing, the progressive eugenicists had non-progressive, anti-eugenic adversaries--premature conservatives, radical libertarians, and orthodox Catholics--whom the progressives considered to be backward and reactionary. For another, arguing that progressives were a product of their time simply reinforces my larger argument: Progressivism was born of the fascist moment and has never faced up to its inheritance. Today's liberals have inherited progressive prejudice wholesale, believing that traditionalists and religious conservatives are dangerous threats to progress. But this assumption means that liberals are blind to fascistic threats from their own ranks.

  Meanwhile, conservative religious and political dogma--under relentless attack from the left--may be the single greatest bulwark against eugenic schemes. Who rejects cloning most forcefully? Who is most troubled by euthanasia, abortion, and playing God in the laboratory? Good dogma is the most powerful inhibiting influence against bad ideas and the only guarantor that men will act on good ones. A conservative nation that seriously wondered if destroying a blastocyst is murder would not wonder at all whether it is murder to kill an eight-and-a-half-month-old fetus, let alone a "defective" infant.

  Mainstream liberalism is joined at the hip with racial and sexual-identity groups of one kind or another. A basic premise shared by all these groups is that their members should be rewarded simply by virtue of their racial, gender, or sexual status. In short, the state should pick winners and losers based upon the accidents of birth. Liberals champion this perspective in the name of antiracism. Unlike conservatives who advocate a color-blind state, liberals still believe that the state should organize society on racial lines. We are accustomed to talking about this sort of social engineering as a product of the post-civil-rights era. But the color-blind doctrine championed by progressives in the 1960s was a very brief parenthesis in a very long progressive tradition. In short, there is more continuity between early Progressivism and today's mu
lticulturalism than we think.

  Here again, Woodrow Wilson was the pioneer. Wilson's vision of "self-determination" has been retroactively gussied up as a purely democratic vision. It wasn't. It was in important respects an organic, Darwinian-Hegelian vision of the need for peoples to organize themselves into collective spiritual and biological units--that is, identity politics. Wilson was a progressive both at home and abroad. He believed in building up nations, peoples, races into single entities. His racial vision was distinct from Hitler's--and obviously less destructive--but just as inseparable from his worldview.

  Wilson's status as the most racist president of the twentieth century is usually attributed to the fact that he was a southerner, indeed the first southern president since Reconstruction. And it is true that he harbored many Dixiecrat attitudes. His resegregation of the federal government, his support for antimiscegenation laws, his antagonism toward black civil rights leaders as well as antilynching laws, and his notorious fondness for D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation all testify to that. But in fact Wilson's heritage was incidental to his racism. After all, he was in no way a traditional defender of the South. He embraced Lincoln as a great leader--hardly a typical southern attitude. Moreover, as a believer in consolidating federal power, Wilson, in his opinion on states' rights, ran counter to those who complained about the "War of Northern Aggression." No, Wilson's racism was "modern" and consistent both with the Darwinism of the age and with the Hegelianism of his decidedly Germanic education. In The State and elsewhere, Wilson can sound downright Hitlerian. He informs us, for example, that some races are simply more advanced than others. These "progressive races" deserve progressive systems of government, while backward races or "stagnant nationalities," lacking the necessary progressive "spirit," may need an authoritarian form of government (a resurgence of this vision can be found among newly minted "realists" in the wake of the Iraq war). This is what offended him so mightily about the post-Civil War Reconstruction. He would never forgive the attempt to install an "inferior race" in a position superior to southern "Aryans."

  Wilson was also a forthright defender of eugenics. As governor of New Jersey--a year before he was sworn in as President--he signed legislation that created, among other things, the Board of Examiners of Feebleminded, Epileptics, and Other Defectives. Under the law, the state could determine when "procreation is inadvisable" for criminals, prisoners, and children living in poorhouses. "Other Defectives" was a fairly open category.17 But Wilson was merely picking up where Teddy Roosevelt left off. The Bull Moose--recently rediscovered by liberal Republicans and "centrist" liberals--regularly decried "race suicide" and supported those "brave" souls who were battling to beat back the tide of mongrelization (although on a personal level Roosevelt was far less of a racist than Wilson).

  Roosevelt, like Wilson, was merely demonstrating the attitudes that made him so popular among "modern" progressive intellectuals. In The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly speculated that a "really regenerated state government" would take steps to prevent "crime and insanity" by regulating who could marry and procreate. Such an empowered state, he wrote archly, "might conceivably reach the conclusion that the enforced celibacy of hereditary criminals and incipient lunatics would make for individual and social improvement even more than would a maximum passenger fare on the railroads of two cents a mile." The state, he insisted, must "interfere on behalf of the really fittest."18

  Still, these thoughts qualified Croly as something of a "dove" on the issue of eugenics. Charles Van Hise, Roosevelt's close adviser, was more emphatic. "He who thinks not of himself primarily, but of his race, and of its future, is the new patriot," explained Van Hise, a founder of the American conservation movement and president of the University of Wisconsin during its glory days as the premier training ground for American progressives.19 Van Hise summarized the American progressive attitude toward eugenics well when he explained: "We know enough about agriculture so that the agricultural production of the country could be doubled if the knowledge were applied; we know enough about disease so that if the knowledge were utilized, infectious and contagious diseases would be substantially destroyed in the United States within a score of years; we know enough about eugenics so that if the knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation."20

  The key divide among progressives was not between eugenicists and non-eugenicists or between racists and non-racists. It was between advocates of "positive eugenics" and advocates of "negative eugenics," between those who called themselves humanists and those who subscribed to theories of race suicide, between environmentalists and genetic determinists. The positive eugenicists argued for merely encouraging, cajoling, and subsidizing the fit to breed more and the unfit to breed less. The negative eugenicists operated along a spectrum that went from forced sterilization to imprisonment (at least during the reproductive years). Environmentalists stressed that improving the material conditions of the degenerate classes would improve their plight (many progressives were really Lamarckians when it came to human evolution). Race suicide theorists believed that whole lines and classes of people were beyond salvation.

  For a variety of reasons, those we would today call conservatives often opposed eugenic schemes. The lone dissenter in Buck v. Bell, for example, wasn't the liberal justice Louis Brandeis or Harlan Fiske Stone but the "archconservative" Pierce Butler.21 The Catholic conservative G. K. Chesterton was subjected to relentless ridicule and scorn for his opposition to eugenics. In various writings, most notably Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized Society, Chesterton opposed what was held to be the sophisticated position by nearly all "thinking people" in Britain and the United States. Indeed, the foremost institution combating eugenics around the world was the Catholic Church. It was the Catholic influence in Italy--along with the fact that Italians were a genetically polyglot bunch--that made Italian Fascism less obsessed with eugenics than either the American progressives or the Nazis (though Mussolini did believe that over time Fascist government would have a positive eugenic effect on the Italians).

  Nonetheless, progressives did come up with a term for conservative opponents of eugenics. They called them social Darwinists. Progressives invented the term "social Darwinism" to describe anyone who opposed Sidney Webb's notion that the state must aggressively "interfere" in the reproductive order of society. In the hothouse logic of the left, those who opposed forced sterilization of the "unfit" and the poor were the villains for letting a "state of nature" rule among the lower classes.

  Herbert Spencer, the supposed founder of social Darwinism, was singled out as the poster boy for all that was wrong in classical liberalism. Spencer was indeed a Darwinist--he coined the phrase "survival of the fittest"--but his interpretation of evolutionary theory reinforced his view that people should be left alone. In almost every sense, Spencer was a good--albeit classical--liberal: he championed charity, women's suffrage, and civil liberties. But he was the incarnation of all that was backward, reactionary, and wrong according to the progressive worldview, not because he supported Hitlerian schemes of forced race hygiene but because he adamantly opposed them. To this day it is de rigueur among liberal intellectuals and historians to take potshots at Spencer as the philosophical wellspring of racism, right-wing "greed," and even the Holocaust.22

  Thanks to some deeply flawed scholarship by the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter, nearly all of the so-called robber barons of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were dubbed social Darwinists, too, even though subsequent historians have demonstrated that Gilded Age industrialists were barely influenced by Darwinism, if at all. Darwinism was a fixation of intellectuals and academics. The so-called robber barons generally lacked formal education. To the extent they grounded their worldview in anything, it was in Christian ethics and the writings of Adam Smith. Moreover, they believed that capitalism was good for the poor. Yet selective quotations and sweeping generalizations--usually infused with
Marxist cliches--rendered the robber barons ersatz fascists.23

  A few historians have dealt with these conundrums by labeling the progressives "reform Darwinists." Reform Darwinists were the only real Darwinians as we understand the term today. Almost all the leading progressive intellectuals interpreted Darwinian theory as a writ to "interfere" with human natural selection. Even progressives with no ostensible ties to eugenics worked closely with champions of the cause. There was simply no significant stigma against racist eugenics in progressive circles.24

  Before we continue, it is important to dispel a misperception that may be building in some readers' minds. While progressive eugenicists were often repugnantly racist, eugenics as a field was not necessarily so. Obviously, intermarriage with blacks would be greeted with horror by people already terrified by "Aryans" marrying Slavs or Italians. But W. E. B. DuBois shared many of the eugenic views held by white progressives. His "Talented Tenth" was itself a eugenically weighted term. He defined members of the Talented Tenth as "exceptional men" and the "best of the race." He complained that "the negro has not been breeding for an object" and that he must begin to "train and breed for brains, for efficiency, for beauty." Over his long career he time and again returned to his concern that the worst blacks were overbreeding while the best were underbreeding. Indeed, he supported Margaret Sanger's "Negro Project," which sought to sharply curtail reproduction among "inferior" stocks of the black population.25