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

by Jonah Goldberg

  As we'll see, the Nazis co-opted independent religious and other charities under the auspices of the state. During their rise to power they constructed an alternative charitable infrastructure, offering social services the state couldn't provide. When the Nazis finally took over, they methodically replaced the traditional infrastructure of the state and churches with a Nazi monopoly on charity.

  But the more relevant aspect of the Nazi welfare state was how it geared itself entirely toward building a racially defined national community. While it used the standard leftist rhetoric of guilt and obligation typically invoked to justify government aid for the needy and unfortunate, it excluded anyone who wasn't a "national comrade." This points to the unique evil of Nazism. Unlike Italian Fascism, which had less use for eugenics than America or Germany, Nazism was defined as racial socialism. Everything for the race, nothing for those outside it, was the central ethos of Nazism's mission and appeal.

  One last point about the interplay of eugenics and the welfare state. In both Germany and America, eugenics gained currency because of the larger faith in "public health." World War I and the great influenza epidemic drafted the medical profession into the ranks of social planners as much as any other. For doctors promoted to the rank of physicians to the body politic, the Hippocratic oath lost influence. The American medical journal Military Surgeon stated matter-of-factly, "The consideration of human life often becomes quite secondary...The medical officer has become more absorbed in the general than the particular, and the life and limb of the individual, while of great importance, are secondary to measures pro bono publico [for the public good]."37

  The Germans called this sort of thinking "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz," the common good supersedes the private good. And it was under this banner that Germany took the logic of public health to totalitarian extremes. Prohibition was the premier illustration of how closely American progressives linked moral and physical health, and many Nazis looked favorably upon the American effort. The appreciation was mutual. In 1933 the American Scientific Temperance Journal celebrated the election of Hitler, a famous teetotaler. And while the racist undercurrent to Prohibition was always there--alcohol fueled the licentiousness of the mongrel races--in Germany the concern was more that alcohol and the even more despised cigarette would lead to the degeneracy of Germany's Aryan purity. Tobacco was credited with every evil imaginable, including fostering homosexuality.

  The Nazis were particularly fixated on cancer--the Germans were the first to spot the link between smoking and the disease, and the word "cancer" soon became an omnipresent metaphor. Nazi leaders routinely called Jews "cancers" and "tumors" on German society. But this was a practice formed from a broader and deeper habit. On both sides of the Atlantic, it was commonplace to call "defectives" and other groups who took more than they gave "cancers on the body politic." The American Eugenics Society was dubbed "The Society for the Control of Social Cancer." In Germany, before the Jews were rounded up, hundreds of thousands of disabled, elderly, and mentally ill "pure" Germans were eliminated on the grounds that they were "useless bread gobblers" or "life unworthy of life" (lebensunwertes Leben), a term that first appeared in Germany in 1920. The application of these techniques and ideas to the "Jewish problem" seemed like a rational continuation of eugenic theory in general.

  But the Holocaust should not blind us to less significant but more directly relevant repercussions of Progressive Era ideas that have escaped the light of scrutiny. The architects of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society all inherited and built upon the progressive welfare state. And they did this in explicit terms, citing such prominent race builders as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as their inspirations. Obviously, the deliberate racist intent in many of these policies was not shared by subsequent generations of liberals. But that didn't erase the racial content of the policies themselves. The Davis-Bacon Act still hurts low-wage blacks, for example. FDR's labor and agricultural policies threw millions of blacks out of work and off their land. The great migration of African-Americans to northern cities was in no small part a result of the success of progressive policies. Black leaders didn't call the National Recovery Administration, or NRA, the "Negro Run Around" for nothing.

  In the previous chapter I noted that liberals cling to the myth of the New Deal out of religious devotion to the idea of the all-caring God-state. Something similar is at work in the liberal devotion to the Great Society. The rationales for the Great Society are almost always suffused with racial guilt and what could only be described as a religious faith in the state's redemptive power. In his book White Guilt, Shelby Steele tells of an encounter with a self-described "architect" of the Great Society. "Damn it, we saved this country!" the man barked. "This country was about to blow up. There were riots everywhere. You can stand there now in hindsight and criticize, but we had to keep the country together, my friend."38 Moreover, added the LBJer, you should have seen how grateful blacks were when these programs were rolled out.

  Well, the first claim is a falsehood, and the second is damning. While the civil rights acts were obviously great successes, liberals hardly stopped at equality before the law. The Great Society's racial meddling--often under various other guises--yielded one setback after another. Crime soared because of the Great Society and the attitudes of which it partook. In 1960 the total number of murders was lower than it had been in 1930, 1940, and 1950 despite a population explosion. In the decade after the Great Society, the murder rate effectively doubled. Black-on-black crime soared in particular. Riots exploded on LBJ's watch, often with the subtle encouragement of Great Society liberals who rewarded such behavior. Out-of-wedlock births among blacks skyrocketed. Economically, as Thomas Sowell has cataloged, the biggest drop in black poverty took place during the two decades before the Great Society.39 In the 1970s, when the impact of Great Society programs was fully realized, the trend of black economic improvement stopped almost entirely.

  One could go on like this for pages. But the facts are of secondary importance. Liberals have fallen in love with the idea behind the racial welfare state. They've absorbed the Marxist and fascist conception of "the system" as racist and corrupt and therefore in constant need of state intervention. In particular, as Steele notes, they've convinced themselves that support for such programs is proof of their own moral worth. Blacks were "grateful" to white liberals; therefore, white liberals aren't racist. We return once again to the use of politics to demonize those who fall outside the consensus--that is, conservatives--and to anoint those within it. Whites who oppose the racial spoils system are racists. Blacks who oppose it are self-hating race traitors.

  Usually white liberals will simply opt to support black liberals who make such charges, rather than make them themselves. But occasionally they will step up and do so. Maureen Dowd, for example, writes that it is "impossible not to be disgusted" with blacks such as Clarence Thomas. According to Dowd, the Supreme Court justice hates himself for "his own great historic ingratitude" to white liberals or has been "driven barking mad" by it. Take your pick. Steele summarizes the racism of this sort of thinking: "[W]e'll throw you a bone like affirmative action if you'll just let us reduce you to your race so we can take moral authority for 'helping' you. When they called you a nigger back in the days of segregation, at least they didn't ask you to be grateful."40

  ABORTION

  Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, was the founding mother of the birth control movement. She is today considered a liberal saint, a founder of modern feminism, and one of the leading lights of the progressive pantheon. Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood proclaims, "I stand by Margaret Sanger's side," leading "the organization that carries on Sanger's legacy." Planned Parenthood's first black president, Faye Wattleton--Ms. magazine's Woman of the Year in 1989--said that she was "proud" to be "walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger."41 Planned Parenthood gives out annual Maggie Awards to individuals and organizations who advance Sa
nger's cause. Recipients are a Who's Who of liberal icons, from the novelist John Irving to the producers of NBC's West Wing. What Sanger's liberal admirers are eager to downplay is that she was a thoroughgoing racist who subscribed completely to the views of E. A. Ross and other "raceologists." Indeed, she made many of them seem tame.

  Sanger was born into a poor family of eleven children in Corning, New York, in 1879. In 1902 she received her degree as a registered nurse. In 1911 she moved to New York City, where she fell in with the transatlantic bohemian avant-garde of the burgeoning fascist moment. "Our living-room," she wrote in her autobiography, "became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists and I.W.W.'s could meet."42 A member of the Women's Committee of the New York Socialist Party, she participated in all the usual protests and demonstrations. In 1912 she started writing what amounted to a sex-advice column for the New York Call, dubbed "What Every Girl Should Know." The overriding theme of her columns was the importance of contraception.

  A disciple of the anarchist Emma Goldman--another eugenicist--Sanger became the nation's first "birth control martyr" when she was arrested for handing out condoms in 1917. In order to escape a subsequent arrest for violating obscenity laws, she went to England, where she fell under the thrall of Havelock Ellis, a sex theorist and ardent advocate of forced sterilization. She also had an affair with H. G. Wells, the self-avowed champion of "liberal fascism." Her marriage fell apart early, and one of her children--whom she admitted to neglecting--died of pneumonia at age four. Indeed, she always acknowledged that she wasn't right for family life, admitting she was not a "fit person for love or home or children or anything which needs attention or consideration."43

  Under the banner of "reproductive freedom," Sanger subscribed to nearly all of the eugenic views discussed above. She sought to ban reproduction of the unfit and regulate reproduction for everybody else. She scoffed at the soft approach of the "positive" eugenicists, deriding it as mere "cradle competition" between the fit and the unfit. "More children from the fit, less from the unfit--that is the chief issue of birth control," she frankly wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization. (The book featured an introduction by Wells, in which he proclaimed, "We want fewer and better children...and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us." Two civilizations were at war: that of progress and that which sought a world "swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny.")44

  A fair-minded person cannot read Sanger's books, articles, and pamphlets today without finding similarities not only to Nazi eugenics but to the dark dystopias of the feminist imagination found in such allegories as Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale.45 As editor of the Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racism we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler. Indeed, after she resigned as editor, the Birth Control Review ran articles by people who worked for Goebbels and Himmler. For example, when the Nazi eugenics program was first getting wide attention, the Birth Control Review was quick to cast the Nazis in a positive light, giving over its pages for an article titled "Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need," by Ernst Rudin, Hitler's director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1926 Sanger proudly gave a speech to a KKK rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

  One of Sanger's closest friends and influential colleagues was the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. In the book he offered his solution for the threat posed by the darker races: "Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat."46 When the book came out, Sanger was sufficiently impressed to invite him to join the board of directors of the American Birth Control League.

  Sanger's genius was to advance Ross's campaign for social control by hitching the racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and female liberation. In her "Code to Stop Overproduction of Children," published in 1934, she decreed that "no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit...no permit shall be valid for more than one child."47 But Sanger couched this fascistic agenda in the argument that "liberated" women wouldn't mind such measures because they don't really want large families in the first place. In a trope that would be echoed by later feminists such as Betty Friedan, she argued that motherhood itself was a socially imposed constraint on the liberty of women. It was a form of what Marxists called false consciousness to want a large family.

  Sanger believed--prophetically enough--that if women conceived of sex as first and foremost a pleasurable experience rather than a procreative act, they would embrace birth control as a necessary tool for their own personal gratification. She brilliantly used the language of liberation to convince women they weren't going along with a collectivist scheme but were in fact "speaking truth to power," as it were.48 This was the identical trick the Nazis pulled off. They took a radical Nietzschean doctrine of individual will and made it into a trendy dogma of middle-class conformity. This trick remains the core of much faddish "individualism" among rebellious conformists on the American cultural left today. Nonetheless, Sanger's analysis was surely correct, and led directly to the widespread feminist association of sex with political rebellion. Sanger in effect "bought off" women (and grateful men) by offering tolerance for promiscuity in return for compliance with her eugenic schemes.

  In 1939 Sanger created the previously mentioned "Negro Project," which aimed to get blacks to adopt birth control. Through the Birth Control Federation, she hired black ministers (including the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.), doctors, and other leaders to help pare down the supposedly surplus black population. The project's racist intent is beyond doubt. "The mass of significant Negroes," read the project's report, "still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes...is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit." Sanger's intent is shocking today, but she recognized its extreme radicalism even then. "We do not want word to go out," she wrote to a colleague, "that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."49

  It is possible that Sanger didn't really want to "exterminate" the Negro population so much as merely limit its growth. Still, many in the black community saw it that way and remained rightly suspicious of the progressives' motives. It wasn't difficult to see that middle-class whites who consistently spoke of "race suicide" at the hands of dark, subhuman savages might not have the best interests of blacks in mind. This skepticism persisted within the black community for decades. Someone who saw the relationship between, for example, abortion and race from a less trusting perspective telegrammed Congress in 1977 to tell them that abortion amounted to "genocide against the black race." And he added, in block letters, "AS A MATTER OF CONSCIENCE I MUST OPPOSE THE USE OF FEDERAL FUNDS FOR A POLICY OF KILLING INFANTS."50 This was Jesse Jackson, who changed his position when he decided to seek the Democratic nomination.

  Just a few years ago, the racial eugenic "bonus" of abortion rights was something one could only admit among those fully committed to the cause, and even then in politically correct whispers. No more. Increasingly, this argument is acceptable on the left, as are arguments in favor of eugenics generally.

  In 2005 the acclaimed University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt broke the taboo with his critical and commercial hit Freakonomics (co-written with Stephen Dubner). The most sensational chapter in the book updated a paper Levitt had written in 1999 which argued that abortion cuts crime. "Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime."51Freakonomics excised all references to race and never connected the facts that because the aborted fetuses were disproportionately black and blacks disproportionately contribute to the
crime rate, reducing the size of the black population reduces crime. Yet the press coverage acknowledged this reality and didn't seem to mind.

  In 2005 William Bennett, a committed pro-lifer, invoked the Levitt argument in order to denounce eugenic thinking. "I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could--if that were your sole purpose--you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down." What seemed to offend liberals most was that Bennett had accidentally borrowed some conventional liberal logic to make a conservative point, and, as with the social Darwinists of yore, that makes liberals quite cross. According to the New York Times's Bob Herbert, Bennett believed "exterminating blacks would be a most effective crime-fighting tool." Various liberal spokesmen, including Terry McAuliffe, the former head of the Democratic National Committee, said Bennett wanted to exterminate "black babies." Juan Williams proclaimed that Bennett's remarks speak "to a deeply racist mindset."52

  In one sense, this is a pretty amazing turnaround. After all, when liberals advocate them, we are usually told that abortions do not kill "babies." Rather, they remove mere agglomerations of cells and tissue or "uterine contents." If hypothetical abortions committed for allegedly conservative ends are infanticide, how can actual abortions performed for liberal ends not be?

  Some liberals are honest about this. In 1992 Nicholas Von Hoffman argued in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

  Free cheap abortion is a policy of social defense. To save ourselves from being murdered in our beds and raped on the streets, we should do everything possible to encourage pregnant women who don't want the baby and will not take care of it to get rid of the thing before it turns into a monster...At their demonstration, the anti-abortionists parade around with pictures of dead and dismembered fetuses. The pro-abortionists should meet these displays with some of their own: pictures of the victims of the unaborted--murder victims, rape victims, mutilation victims--pictures to remind us that the fight for abortion is but part of the larger struggle for safe homes and safe streets.53