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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Lerner believes it is the job of every profession--coordinating with the state, of course--to "reflect" on its own contribution to the spiritual and psychic health of the national Volksgemeinschaft. "Such reflection, for example, has led some lawyers associated with a politics-of-meaning perspective to envision a second stage of trials, in which the adversary system is suspended and the focus is shifted to healing the problems and pain that the initial trial has uncovered in the community."32 That may sound a little silly to some ears, and it hardly seems to threaten a fascist coup. But if there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

  Oddly enough, Lerner vaguely comprehends his own ideology's relationship to fascism. In an ironic twist, he admits that he once "could not understand why the European Left had been unable to stem the popularity of the fascists." Fascist "hatred of others was based on the degree to which they had come to believe (usually mistakenly) that the demeaned Others had actually caused the breakdown of their communities of shared meaning and purpose." Lerner notes that many former liberals "have now turned to the Right to find the sense of community and meaning that liberals, social democrats, and the Left always thought was irrelevant or necessarily reactionary."33 He writes that the 1990s are witnessing the rise of "fascistic" right-wing movements and that they can only be countered by his politics of meaning.

  Lerner's analysis breaks down in several parts, largely because of his thumbless grasp of the true nature of fascism.34 But far more important, he largely concedes that the politics of meaning is in effect an attempt to provide an alternative to an imagined right-wing politics of meaning that he considers fascistic. He sees a fascistic straw man on the right and in response feels justified in creating an actual--nice--fascism of the left. He grounds all of it in vast departures into religious exhortation, arguing that his is a "politics in the image of God," a point he also hammers home relentlessly in his recent books The Left Hand of God and Spirit Matters.35

  Defenders of the politics of meaning, such as Cornel West, Jonathan Kozol, and even such mainstream historians as John Milton Cooper, reject or ignore the radical statism of Lerner's project. Still, they defend their political religion with a lot of classical Third Way verbiage about rejecting both free-market anarchy and statism in favor of a new synthesis balancing the community and the individual. "To put it in crude terms," writes Lerner, "neither capitalism nor socialism in the forms that they have developed in the twentieth century seem particularly appealing to me." Rather, what appeals to him are pragmatic approaches "that differ from the typical Left/Right divisions, which must be transcended as we develop a politics for the twenty-first century."36 It's all so unoriginal. The French Fascist slogan was much catchier: Ni droite ni gauche!

  As we've seen, ideologically fascist and progressive totalitarianism was never a mere doctrine of statism. Rather, it claimed that the state was the natural brain of the organic body politic. Statism was the route to collectivism. Government was merely the place where the spiritual will of the people would be translated into action (Marxists liked to use the word "praxis" to describe this unity of theory and action). One consequence of this view is that institutions and individuals that stand apart from the state or the progressive tide are inherently suspect and labeled selfish, social Darwinist, conservative, or, most ironically, fascist. The state's role is not so much to make every decision as to be the metronome for the Gleichschaltung, ensuring that the decision makers are all in perfect agreement about the direction society needs to take. In a properly ordered progressive society, the state wouldn't take over Harvard or McDonald's, but it would certainly ensure that the Harvards and McDonald's had their priorities straight. The politics of meaning is ultimately a theocratic doctrine because it seeks to answer the fundamental questions about existence, argues that they can only be answered collectively, and insists that the state put those answers into practice.

  This liberal fascist thinking was nicely exposed in an exchange between the television producer Norman Lear and the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer in 1993. Krauthammer called Hillary Clinton's politics of meaning address a "cross between Jimmy Carter's malaise speech and a term paper on Siddhartha" delivered with "the knowing self-assurance, the superior air of a college student manifesto."37

  Norman Lear leaped into the breach to defend Hillary. The creator of the television shows All in the Family, Maude, Sanford and Son, and Good Times, Lear was also the founder of People for the American Way, or PFAW, an organization with an ironically conservative sound to it. He launched PFAW in an effort to beat back the religious right, which was allegedly trying to destroy the fabled "wall of separation" between church and state. But in the late 1980s Lear started to show a slight change of heart. In 1989, in an address to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Anaheim, California, he lamented "the spiritual emptiness in our culture." "Among secularists," he noted, "the aversion toward discussing moral values, let alone religion, can reach absurd extremes."38

  It's understandable that a left-wing civil libertarian like Lear would greet the arrival of a politics of meaning as nigh on providential. Lear wrote a bitter response in the Washington Post denouncing Krauthammer's cynicism in the face of Clinton's brilliant summation of America's spiritual crisis. "The sophisticates of our politics, our culture and the media," Lear opined, "are embarrassed to talk seriously about the life of the spirit." "Our obsession with numbers, the quantifiable, the immediate, has cost us our connection with that place in each of us that honors the unquantifiable and eternal--our capacity for awe, wonder and mystery; that place where acts of faith in a process larger than ourselves, prove ultimately satisfying in the fullness of time."39

  Lear's cri de coeur is an almost pitch-perfect restatement of the neo-Romantic objections to modern society that inspired fascist movements across Europe and the search for "a cause larger than ourselves" of the American Progressives. He might receive an appreciative hearing from the early Paul de Man, Ezra Pound, and countless other fascist theorists and ideologues who denounced the Western--particularly Jewish--obsession with numbers and technical abstraction. But even more telling is the fact that Lear's People for the American Way is second perhaps only to the ACLU as an enforcer of the liberal Gleichschaltung. In lawsuits, campaign contributions, amicus briefs, advertising, and righteous news conferences, People for the American Way serves as a tireless mason in the construction of the wall between church and state, shrinking the public space for traditional religion and building the foundation of a secular counter-church of liberalism.

  In other words, Lear is an adamant proponent of spiritualizing politics; but there's no room for traditional religion in his ideal political system, for it is the progressive priesthood--not churches or synagogues--that must sanctify the quest for meaning and spirituality. Independent sources of moral faith are "divisive" and need to be undermined, walled off, excluded from our "common project." This means that liberal churches are fine because they are perceived--rightly or wrongly--to have subordinated religious doctrine to political doctrine. As John Dewey put it in his brief for a secular religion of the state: "If our nominally religious institutions learn how to use their symbols and rites to express and enhance such a faith, they may become useful allies of a conception of life that is in harmony with knowledge and social needs." Hitler was more succinct: "Against a Church that identifies itself with the State...I have nothing to say."40

  Conservatives are fond of scoring liberals for their cafeteria Christianity, picking those things they like from the religious menu and eschewing the hard stuff. But there's more than mere hypocrisy at work. What appears to be inconsistency is in fact the continued unfolding of the Social Gospel tapestry to reveal a religion without God. Cafeteria liberals aren't so much inconsistent Christians as consistent progressives.

  EVERYTHING WITHIN THE VILL
AGE...

  No more thorough explication of the liberal fascist agenda can be found than in Hillary Clinton's best-selling book, It Takes a Village. All the hallmarks of the fascist enterprise reside within its pages. Again, the language isn't hostile, nationalistic, racist, or aggressive. To the contrary, it brims with expressions of love and democratic fellow feeling. But this only detracts from its fascist nature if fascism itself means nothing more than hostile or aggressive (or racist and nationalistic). The fascistic nature of It Takes a Village begins with the very title. It draws from a mythic and mythical communal past. "It takes a village to raise a child" is supposedly an African proverb whose authorship is lost in the mists of time--from "the ancient African kingdom of Hallmarkcardia," according to P. J. O'Rourke.41 Clinton invokes this premodern image as a source of authority in order to reorganize modern society. It may not be as powerful as all that Teutonic imagery the National Socialists threw around. But is it any more rational? Any less Romantic? More important, the metaphor of the village is used in precisely the same way that the symbol of the fasces was. The difference is that the fasces were a symbol for a martial age; the village is a symbol for a maternal one.

  In Mrs. Clinton's telling, villages are wonderful, supportive, nurturing places where everyone is looking out for one another: from "everything in the State, nothing outside the State" to "everything in the village, nothing outside the village." The village, she writes, "can no longer be defined as a place on a map, or a list of people or organizations, but its essence remains the same: it is the network of values and relationships that support and affect our lives."42 In Hillary's village, the concept of civil society is grotesquely deformed. Traditionally, civil society is that free and open space occupied by what Burke called "little platoons"--independent associations of citizens who pursue their own interests and ambitions free from state interference or coercion.

  That is not Hillary's civil society. In a book festooned with encomiums to every imaginable social work interest group in America, Mrs. Clinton mentions "civil society" just once. In a single paragraph she dispatches the concept as basically another way of describing the village. "[C]ivil society," she writes, is just a "term social scientists use to describe the way we work together for common purposes."43No, no, no. "Civil society" is the term social scientists use to describe the way various groups, individuals, and families work for their own purposes, the result of which is to make the society healthily democratic. Civil society is the rich ecosystem of independent entities--churches, businesses, volunteer and neighborhood associations, labor unions, and such--that helps regulate life outside of state control. Bowling leagues, thanks to the Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam, are the archetypal institution of civil society. Bowling leagues are not mechanisms for working together for "common purposes." The late Seymour Martin Lipset even demonstrated that although many labor unions were corrupt and illiberal, so long as they remained independent of the state--and the state independent of them--they enriched democracy.

  In Clinton's village, however, there is no public square where free men and women and their voluntary associations deal with each other on their own terms free from the mommying of the state. There are no private transactions, just a single "spiritual community that links us to a higher purpose" managed by the state.44 This is the Volksgemeinschaft reborn as a Social Gospel day-care center.

  Think again of the image of a fasces, its many weak reeds or sticks bundled together to show strength in numbers. The first chapter of Mrs. Clinton's book begins with a quotation from the poet Verna Kelly: "Snowflakes are one of nature's most fragile things, but just look what they can do when they stick together."45 It's a cute image, but is the message any different? Over and over again, Clinton uses a velvet hammer to beat it into the reader's head that togetherness, partnership, and unity are the only means of America's salvation.

  The point where theory and practice most obviously merge is in the area of economic policy. Corporations were among the most important reeds in the fascist bundle. So it is in Hillary Clinton's village. "Community-minded companies are already doing a number of things that citizens should applaud and government should encourage, when possible, with legislative changes to make them more attractive." These include the usual wish list from "no-layoff" policies to employer-provided day care. Again and again, Clinton beams sunshine wherever the lines between corporations, universities, churches, and government are already thin, hoping that the illumination of her gaze will cause even the shadows dividing them to disappear. Defense contractors are working with government to make peaceful products. Hooray. Automobile companies are working with the EPA to build green cars. Huzzah. Such "[s]ocially minded corporate philosophies are the avenue to future prosperity and social stability."46 Everyone will be secure and happy, nestled in the cozy confines of the village.

  This all sounds peachy in the abstract. But when Clinton tried to impose precisely this sort of vision with her health-care plan, she had a harder edge. Recall Hillary's response when it was pointed out to her that her plan would destroy countless small businesses: "I can't save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America."47 If they can't be part of the solution, who cares if they have problems?

  ETERNAL CORPORATISM

  I suppose one cannot talk about Hillary Clinton without mentioning her health-care plan. So much ink has been spilled in that cause it hardly seems worth wading into the details of Clinton's effort to control one-seventh of the U.S. economy. What may be more worthwhile is to see how her health-care plan was the inevitable consequence of liberal empowerment. There was an Aesopian nature to the Clintonites. For example, once Hillary tapped her old friend--and Bill's Rhodes scholar pal--Ira Magaziner to head up her Health Reform Task Force, it was inevitable that a large, government-run, corporatist product would come out of the sausage maker. Why? Because that's what Magaziner does. The scorpion must sting the frog, and Magaziner must propose sweeping new public-private partnerships where experts make all the big decisions.

  Magaziner, Hillary's co-leader in Life magazine in 1969, was a true phenomenon at Brown University (his senior thesis, he told Newsweek, was nothing less than a Comtian "search for a new metaphysics, a new answer to the question, 'Why be good?'"). As a junior, he took it upon himself to study the school's curriculum and propose an alternative that was more "relevant" and pragmatic, leaving it up to the young to design their own educations. He created his own major, "Human Studies," and he produced a nearly five-hundred-page report. The shocking part is that he succeeded in getting his Deweyan curriculum (few grades, lots of self-discovery) accepted. For traditionalists, the curriculum has made Brown the joke of the Ivy League ever since; for progressives, it has made the school its crown jewel.48

  At Oxford, Magaziner led anti-Vietnam protests and allied himself with a smitten Vanessa Redgrave. James Fallows, a fellow Rhodes scholar and future Carter speechwriter and industrial planning publicist, explained that the main difference between Clinton and Magaziner was "the difference between somebody who planned to run for office and somebody who didn't." When Magaziner moved to Boston, he launched an Alinsky-Hayden-style community organization effort in Brockton, Massachusetts. Later, he went to work for the Boston Consulting Group, or BCG, where he acquired a knack for telling companies how to invest in the technologies of the future. Soon he was taking jobs from foreign governments to give them the same advice. In 1977 he got a gig consulting to Sweden. The final result of his efforts was dubbed "A Framework for Swedish Industrial Policy," in which he called for Sweden to redesign its economy from the top down, discarding old industries and investing heavily in the winners of tomorrow. Even the Swedes (!) rejected it as naive and heavy-handed. The Boston Consulting Group was so embarrassed it tried to make the report disappear.49

  Told by a red-faced BCG he shouldn't do any more governmental planning, Magaziner decided to start his own firm. In 1979 he founded Telesis, which means "intelligently planned progress"--a nice summation of an attitud
e described throughout this book. In 1980 Magaziner wrote a book titled Japanese Industrial Policy. In 1982 he co-wrote a book on industrial policy with Robert Reich--a Yale Law School classmate of the Clintons as well as a fellow Rhodes scholar. In 1984, at the age of thirty-six, he penned a giant plan for the state of Rhode Island, the most ambitious state-level industrial planning effort in memory. Dubbed the Greenhouse Compact, the plan envisioned the state as a "greenhouse" for the right technologies--that is, technologies the government was smart enough to pick even though the market wasn't. The voters of Rhode Island rejected the measure handily. One could go on, but you get the point.

  Now, does it seem likely that the Clintons, who'd known Magaziner for twenty years, expected that he'd come up with anything other than a corporatist strategy for American health care the moment they picked him? All of the studying, the meetings, the towers of briefing books, and the forests of file folders: these were all props in a Kabuki dance that had been scripted and blocked out well in advance.

  Or consider fellow Yalie Robert Reich. We've already touched on his views on industrial policy and the Third Way. But it's worth looking at Reich as a true acolyte of the religion of government. I have been openly disdainful of psychological theorizing in earlier chapters, but how can we see Robert Reich as anything but a walking Sorelian myth, a one-man band belting out noble lies for the cause?

  In his Clinton administration memoirs, Locked in the Cabinet, Reich describes a Thomas Nast cartoon world where he is in constant battle with greedy fat cats, Social Darwinists, and Mr. Monopoly. In one scene he recounts how he told some hard truths to the National Association of Manufacturers, describing a room as billowing with cigar smoke and filled with hostile men whose boos and hisses were punctuated with curses. Jonathan Rauch, one of Washington's best journalists and thinkers, checked the videotape. The audience was polite, even warm. They didn't smoke at all. Plus, the room was one-third female. In another episode Reich reported that a congressman jumped up and down shouting, "Evidence! Evidence!" at Reich during a hostile hearing. Rauch again checked the tape. Instead of an inquisition, it was a typically "dull, earnestly wonkish hearing," and most of the statements Reich attributed to his tormentor were simply "fabricated" by him. Indeed, vast swaths of the book are pure fantasy--but in a very familiar sort of way. At every turn people say things that confirm Reich's cartoon version of reality. Representative Robert Michel, the former House Republican leader, supposedly tells Reich that Newt Gingrich and company "talk as if they're interested in ideas, in what's good for America. But don't be fooled. They're out to destroy. They'll try to destroy anything that gets in their way, using whatever tactics are available." Michel never said any such thing.50