Progressive education has two parents, Prussia and John Dewey. The kindergarten was transplanted into the United States from Prussia in the nineteenth century because American reformers were so enamored of the order and patriotic indoctrination young children received outside the home (the better to weed out the un-American traits of immigrants).21 One of the core tenets of the early kindergartens was the dogma that "the government is the true parent of the children, the state is sovereign over the family." The progressive followers of John Dewey expanded this program to make public schools incubators of a national religion. They discarded the militaristic rigidity of the Prussian model, but retained the aim of indoctrinating children. The methods were informal, couched in the sincere desire to make learning "fun," "relevant," and "empowering." The self-esteem obsession that saturates our schools today harks back to the Deweyan reforms from before World War II. But beneath the individualist rhetoric lies a mission for democratic social justice, a mission Dewey himself defined as a religion. For other progressives, capturing children in schools was part of the larger effort to break the backbone of the nuclear family, the institution most resistant to political indoctrination.
National Socialist educators had a similar mission in mind. And as odd as it might seem, they also discarded the Prussian discipline of the past and embraced self-esteem and empowerment in the name of social justice. In the early days of the Third Reich, grade-schoolers burned their multicolored caps in a protest against class distinctions. Parents complained, "We no longer have rights over our children." According to the historian Michael Burleigh, "Their children became strangers, contemptuous of monarchy or religion, and perpetually barking and shouting like pint-sized Prussian sergeant-majors...Denunciation of parents by children was encouraged, not least by schoolteachers who set essays entitled 'What does your family talk about at home?'"22
Now, the liberal project Hillary Clinton represents is in no way a Nazi project. The last thing she would want is to promote ethnic nationalism, anti-Semitism, or aggressive wars of conquest. But it must be kept in mind that while these things were of enormous importance to Hitler and his ideologues, they were in an important sense secondary to the underlying mission and appeal of Nazism, which was to create a new politics and a new nation committed to social justice, radical egalitarianism (albeit for "true Germans"), and the destruction of the traditions of the old order. So while there are light-years of distance between the programs of liberals and those of Nazis or Italian Fascists or even the nationalist progressives of yore, the underlying impulse, the totalitarian temptation, is present in both.
The Chinese Communists under Mao pursued the Chinese way, the Russians under Stalin followed their own version of communism in one state. But we are still comfortable observing that they were both communist nations. Hitler wanted to wipe out the Jews; Mussolini wanted no such thing. And yet we are comfortable calling them both fascists. Liberal fascists don't want to mimic generic fascists or communists in myriad ways, but they share a sweeping vision of social justice and community and the need for the state to realize that vision. In short, collectivists of all stripes share the same totalitarian temptation to create a politics of meaning; what differs between them--and this is the most crucial difference of all--is how they act upon that temptation.
THE FIRST LADY OF LIBERAL FASCISM
When Bill Clinton was elected president, his wife arrived in Washington as arguably the most powerful unelected--and un-appointed--social reformer since Eleanor Roosevelt. She admitted to the Washington Post that she'd always had a "burning desire" to "make the world...better for everybody." She had had this desire ever since the days when Don Jones showed her that the poor and oppressed didn't have it as good as she did. And for Hillary, healing this social discord required power. "My sense of Hillary is that she realizes absolutely the truth of the human condition, which is that you cannot depend on the basic nature of man to be good and you cannot depend entirely on moral suasion to make it good," Jones told Michael Kelly. "You have to use power. And there is nothing wrong with wielding power in the pursuit of policies that will add to the human good. I think Hillary knows this. She is very much the sort of Christian who understands that the use of power to achieve social good is legitimate."23 The echoes of Alinsky are obvious. Less obvious are the questions of who determines what the social good should be and by what means it should be achieved.
But Hillary didn't frame her mission in overtly Christian terms save, perhaps, when speaking to avowedly Christian audiences. Instead, she fashioned the quintessential expression of liberal fascism in modern times: "the politics of meaning."
Now, when I say that the politics of meaning, and Hillary Clinton's ideas in general, are fascist, I must again be clear that they are not evil. Nor do they sound fascist to modern ears--indeed, that is the whole point. Today we equate fascism with militaristic language and racism, but war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided a great many of the metaphors for political discourse and for everyday conversation in general. So many of these words and phrases are part of the vernacular today that we don't even realize their roots in battle and blood ("entrenched positions," "storm fronts," "hot shot," and so on). Liberal fascism isn't militaristic, but the same passions that prompted progressives to talk in terms of "industrial armies" and "going over the top" for the Blue Eagle lurk beneath today's liberal rhetoric. War was seen as a communal, unifying experience that focused the public's mind on the common good and whose passions and discipline could be harnessed to socially "useful" ends. Today the modern left is in many ways openly antiwar and avowedly pacifist. But liberals still yearn nostalgically for the unifying experiences of the labor and civil rights movements. The language is obviously nicer, and the intent is objectively "nicer," too. But at the most substantive level, the politics of meaning stands on Mussolini's shoulders.
As for racism, there is a great deal of racism, or perhaps a more fair word would be "racialism," in liberalism today. The state counts "people of color" in different ways from how it counts white people. Further to the left, racial essentialism lies at the core of countless ideological projects. Anti-Semitism, too, is more prominent on the left today than at any time in recent memory. Obviously, this is not the same kind of racism or anti-Semitism that Nazis subscribed to. But again, Nazi racism does not define fascism. Moreover, Nazi racism--quite in sync with progressive racism, let us remember--was an expression of a deeper impulse to define the individual by his relationship to the collective.
Let me anticipate one last criticism. Some will say that Hillary Clinton's politics of meaning is old hat. Clinton hasn't mentioned the phrase in years, swept under the rug by political expediency like the memory of her disastrous health-care plan. This would be a more salient critique if my aim was to offer anti-Clinton talking points for the 2008 presidential campaign. But that's not my concern. What I find interesting about Clinton is her ability to illuminate the continuity of liberal thought. If what liberals thought and did in the 1920s is relevant today--as I believe it is--then surely what liberals thought and did in the 1990s is relevant as well. Moreover, there is no evidence that she's been chastened ideologically. In her 1996 book, It Takes a Village, Clinton hardly backed off her radical views on children, even though those views were a political liability in 1992. She did, however, repackage her message in more palatable ways, thanks to the help of a ghostwriter.
Lastly, Clinton's politics of meaning was arguably the most interesting and serious expression of liberalism in the 1990s, delivered at the apex of liberal optimism. Since Bush's election and the 9/11 attacks, liberalism has been largely reactive, defined by its anti-Bush passions more than anything else. Hence, it seems worthwhile to investigate what liberals were saying when they were dancing to their own tune.
In April 1993 Clinton delivered a commencement address to the University of Texas at Austin in which she declared, "We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibil
ity and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves."24
The phrase "fills us up again" is particularly telling--in 1969 she had talked of how we needed a politics to make "hollow men" whole. She seems to be suggesting that without a social cause or mission to "fill" her, Hillary's life (and ours) is empty and purposeless. Hillary has seemingly put pragmatic concerns ahead of everything else her whole life, but whenever she's given a chance to express herself honestly, the same urges come to the fore: meaning, authenticity, action, transformation.
The politics of meaning is in many respects the most thoroughly totalitarian conception of politics offered by a leading American political figure in the last half century. Hillary's views have more in common with the totalizing Christian ideologies of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell than they do with the "secular atheism" such Christian conservatives ascribe to her. But they have even more in common with the God-state Progressivism of John Dewey, Richard Ely, Herbert Croly, and Woodrow Wilson and other left-wing Hegelians. Hillary's vision holds that America suffers from a profound "spiritual crisis" requiring the construction of a new man as part of a society-wide restoration and reconstruction effort leading to a new national community that will provide meaning and authenticity to every individual. Hers is a Third Way approach that promises to be neither left nor right, but a synthesis of both, under which the state and big business will work hand in hand. It is a fundamentally religious vision hiding in the Trojan horse of social justice that seeks to imbue social policy with spiritual imperatives.
To better understand the politics of meaning, we should consider the career of Clinton's self-anointed guru, the progressive activist and rabbi Michael Lerner. Lerner was born to nonobservant Jews in New Jersey--his mother was the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party. A graduate of Columbia University in 1964, he received his Ph.D. from Berkeley, where he served as a teaching assistant to Herbert Marcuse and led the SDS. A fan of LSD, a "progressive drug," he believed that taking the hallucinogen was the only way to truly understand socialism (the irony clearly escaped him). When his sister married a successful attorney, a number of prominent politicians attended the wedding. Lerner could not let such an opportunity slip by. He interrupted the festivities with a speech denouncing the guests as "murderers" with "blood on your hands" for not doing more to stop the war in Vietnam.25
When Cupid aimed his arrow at him, he told his paramour, "If you want to be my girlfriend, you'll have to organize a guerrilla foco first." (A foco is a form of paramilitary cadre pioneered by Che Guevara--much cherished in Marxist-Leninist theory--designed for lightning-fast insurrectionary strikes.) When the two were married in Berkeley, they exchanged rings extracted from the fuselage of an American aircraft downed over Vietnam. The wedding cake was inscribed with the Weathermen motto "Smash Monogamy." (The marriage lasted less than a year.) Lerner claims to have been a leader in the nonviolent wing of the New Left. While a professor at the University of Washington, he founded the Seattle Liberation Front, which he later claimed was a nonviolent alternative to the Weathermen. Nonetheless, he was arrested on charges of incitement to riot as one of the members of the "Seattle Seven." The charges were eventually dropped, but not before J. Edgar Hoover dubbed him--no doubt hyperbolically--"one of the most dangerous criminals in America."26
In 1973 Lerner wrote The New Socialist Revolution, a cliched ode to the glories of the coming socialist takeover. The rhetoric was quintessentially Mussolinian: "The first task of the revolutionary movement...is to destroy bourgeois hegemony and develop a radical consciousness among each of the potential constituencies for revolutionary action."27
Over the years, Lerner's thinking evolved. First, he became deeply interested in mass psychology (he's a licensed psychotherapist), imbibing all the Frankfurt School nonsense about fascist personalities (conservatism is a treatable illness in Lerner's view). Second, he became a rabbi. And while his commitment to progressive politics never waned, he increasingly became obsessed with the "spiritual" aspect of politics. Finally, he cast aside dialectical materialism in favor of attacking consumer materialism and the psychic pain it causes. In 1986 he launched Tikkun, an odd magazine dedicated in large part to creating a new Social Gospel with heavily Jewish and ecumenical biases.
After Hillary Clinton's politics of meaning speech, which was partly inspired by Lerner (who'd ingratiated himself with then-Governor Clinton), the radical rabbi psychotherapist went into overdrive, promoting himself as the house seer of the Clinton administration. He was to be the Herbert Croly of the new Progressive Era. Though many in the press recognized a hustler when they saw one, he nonetheless got the attention he wanted. The New York Times hailed him as "This Year's Prophet." When it became clear, however, that the politics of meaning sounded too much like New Age hokum, the press and the Clintons turned a cold shoulder. In response, Lerner released his opus, The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism.
The book strikes one fascist chord after another. Lerner cites a long, familiar litany of progressive ideas and causes. He speaks about making the powerless more powerful, about throwing off the baggage of the past, about eschewing dogma and embracing national community, about rejecting the overly rational expertise of doctors and scientists. He waxes eloquent about the various crises--spiritual, ecological, moral, and social--afflicting Western bourgeois democracies that must be remedied through a politics of redemption. He also talks about creating new men and women--rejecting the false dichotomies between work and family, business and government, private and public. Above all, he insists that his new politics of meaning must saturate every nook and cranny of our lives by smashing the compartmentalism of American life. Morality, politics, economics, ethics: none of these things can be separated from anything else. We must have our metaphysics confirmed in every human interaction and encounter.
In this he unwittingly echoes Hitler's belief that "economics is secondary" to the revolution of the spirit. Lerner writes, "If there were a different ethical and spiritual connection between people, there would be a different economic reality...And that is why meaning cannot be given lower priority than economics."28 Needless to say, this is something of a departure from the Marxist materialism of his youth. Lerner's preferred agenda would, of course, echo many of the guarantees from the Nazi Party platform of 1920, including equal rights, guaranteed health care, excessive taxes on the undeserving wealthy, and clampdowns on big corporations. A few relevant items from a 1993 article in Tikkun:
The Department of Labor should mandate that...every workplace should provide paid leave for a worker to attend 12 two-hour sessions on stress...
The Department of Labor should sponsor "Honor Labor" campaigns designed to highlight the honor due to people for their contributions to the common good...
The Department of Labor should create a program to train a corps of union personnel, worker representatives, and psychotherapists in the relevant skills to assist developing a new spirit of cooperation, mutual caring, and dedication to work.29
This is precisely the sort of thing that Robert Ley's German Labor Front pioneered. The comparison is more than superficial. The National Socialist state, like the progressive and fascist ones, was based on the Hegelian idea that freedom could only be realized by living in harmony with the state, and it was the state's duty to ensure said harmony. There were no private individuals. (Ley famously said that the only private individual in the Nazi state is a person asleep.) Lerner argues in The Politics of Meaning that "the workplace needs to be reconceptualized as a primary locus for human development." In another book, Spirit Matters, he writes (in one gargantuan sentence) that under his new "movement for Emancipatory Spirituality" the "government needs to be reconceptualized as the public mechanism through which we all show that we car
e about everyone else, and government employees should be evaluated, rewarded, and promoted only to the extent that they are able to make the public come away from those interactions with a renewed sense of hope and a deepened conviction that other people really do care, and have shown that by creating such a sensitive and caring government."
Lerner's ideal is the Israeli kibbutz, where even plucking chickens has transcendent meaning for the laborer. He pines for a way to re-create the sense of shared purpose people feel during a crisis like a flood or other natural disaster. Freedom, for Lerner, is reconceived in a Deweyan sense toward communal social "construction." Or, as the Nazis said more pithily, "Work makes you free."30
Under the politics of meaning, all of society's institutions are wrapped around the state like sticks around the fascist blade. Every individual is responsible for maintaining not only his own ideological purity but that of his fellow man. Lerner is, in effect, the ideologist of the liberal Gleichschaltung, the Nazi idea of coordinating every institution in society. This becomes apparent when he shifts to a discussion of how these reforms are to be implemented. Lerner writes that all government agencies and private businesses should issue "annual ethical-impact reports," which would assess "their effect on the ethical, spiritual, and psychological well-being of our society and on the people who work in and with these institutions."31 His intent is arguably nicer, but is this really so different from the bureaucratization of ideological loyalty that required German businesses and institutions to constantly provide documentation showing their assertive loyalty to the spirit of the new era? Spiritual slackers in twenty-first-century America would no doubt find such scrutiny fascistic--albeit in a very caring and nurturing way.
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning Page 40
