Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
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When Slate asked him about the controversy, Reich said, "Look, the book is a memoir. It's not investigative journalism." When Rauch asked him about his tall tales, "Did you just make them up?" Reich responded, "They're in my journal." Finally, Reich simply fell back on pure relativism. "I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions."51 In other words, his defense is that this is really the way he sees the world. So again, if Reich is capable of bending reality to fit his political-morality tale, if he is programmed to see the world as a series of vital lies and useful myths, how exactly could the Clintons have expected him to do anything but stay true to form? It's not like the Clintons didn't know what their two old friends believed. Bill Clinton's policy manifesto, Putting People First, was essentially a Magaziner-Reich Festschrift.
What seems to motivate people like Reich is an abiding conviction that they are on the right side of history. Their aim is to help the people, and therefore they are not required to play by the rules. Moreover, just as they claim to be secularists, they also claim to be pragmatists, unconstrained by dogma, unlike those hidebound conservatives. Circumstances change, so, too, must our ideas. Or as Jonathan Chait of the New Republic puts it, "[I]ncoherence is simply the natural byproduct of a philosophy rooted in experimentation and the rejection of ideological certainty." This is a bit reminiscent of a line from Mussolini, quoted in the same magazine by Charles Beard. "The fascisti," Il Duce announced, "are the gypsies of Italian politics; not being tied down to any fixed principles, they proceed unceasingly toward one goal, the future well-being of the Italian people."52
THINK OF THE CHILDREN
Such self-confidence cannot operate in a vacuum. It needs a mechanism to convince or force others to surrender their interests to the greater good. The New Republic's former editor George Soule, the author of A Planned Society (which popularized the phrase "we planned in war"), explained it well. The greatest of "the lessons from our war planning" was that "we must have an objective which can arouse general loyalty and enthusiasm." In It Takes a Village, Clinton cheers the way crises erase the wall between business and government but laments that the social benefits of natural disasters and wars are temporary. "Why does it take a crisis to open our eyes and hearts to our common humanity?"53 In response to this problem, liberals have manufactured one "crisis" after another in their quest to find a new moral equivalent to war, from the war on cancer, to global warming, to countless alleged economic crises. Indeed, a brief perusal of the last hundred years of economic journalism from the left would have you believe that the most prosperous century in human history was one long, extended economic crisis.
But we should return to Hillary Clinton's crisis of choice: the children. The very concept of "the children" was designed to circumvent traditional political processes. The giveaway is the prefatory article, which denotes an entire category of human beings for whom all violations of the principle of limited government may be justified.
Constitutionally ordered liberal societies tend to view citizens as adults who are responsible for their own actions. But children are the Achilles' heel of every society (if libertarianism could account for children and foreign policy, it would be the ideal political philosophy). We make allowances for children. We have different rules for them--as well we should--and tend not to hold them accountable for their decisions. The "child savers" of the Progressive Era were brilliant at exploiting this weakness. In the modern era it was Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children's Defense Fund, or CDF, and Hillary Clinton's longtime friend and mentor, who relaunched this tradition.
Edelman is perhaps America's leading liberal scold. Harper's Bazaar named her "America's universal mother." Her CV is festooned with honorifics and awards like a Christmas tree bending from the weight of too many ornaments--the presidential Medal of Freedom, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, a Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award, and so on. Her organization is showered with contributions from enormous corporations eager to buy grace on the cheap. Edelman got her start working for the NAACP and eventually found her way to Yale Law School and to Washington, D.C., as the policy-entrepreneur founder of the CDF. She is undoubtedly a kind and selfless woman, deeply religious and steeped in the traditions of the Social Gospel. Inspiring quotations from Edelman are so omnipresent in the welfare, civil rights, and feminist industries--"industries" being the best word for these self-esteem-building, logrolling, black-tie fund-raiser networks--that they could be combined into a liberal Maoist Little Red Book for earnest social crusaders. "Service is the rent we pay to be living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time," she proclaims. "Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?" she asks. "No person has the right to rain on your dreams," she avers.
While few would question the rectitude of her campaigns for black equality and desegregation, Edelman's greatest influence has been in welfare policy, and there her ideas about how to organize society and American politics have proven to be spectacularly wrong. In many respects Edelman was a basic welfare state liberal, believing no entitlement or transfer payment was too big. Her great innovation was to defend the welfare system from empirical criticism--that is, it doesn't work--by hiding behind the image of poor children. "When you talked about poor people or black people you faced a shrinking audience," she has said. "I got the idea that children might be a very effective way to broaden the base for change." Indeed, Edelman more than anyone else can be blamed for the saccharine omnipresence of "the children" in American political rhetoric.54
The problem is that while this tactic was brilliant strategically, the net effect was to make responsible reform impossible. After all, the reason the "audience" was "shrinking" for exhortations to expand the welfare state was that it was becoming increasingly obvious that the welfare state was causing dependency among black women and alienation among black men. As a result, defenders of the status quo became ever more shrill in their attacks on opponents. Hence the use and abuse of "the children."
Traditional objections to welfare as a violation of constitutional principles and a corrupter of civic virtue--which only gained respectability in the late 1970s--were suddenly beside the point. Edelman, Clinton, and others transformed the debate to one about children. Who cares if--as FDR also believed--"relief" was ultimately detrimental to adults, sapping their initiative? The effects on adults were irrelevant. Children were the beneficiaries of aid checks, not their parents (even though their parents still cashed them). Indeed, one tragic consequence of this strategy was that the government used child poverty to crush individualism and pride among inner-city blacks. James Bovard notes that when Congress mandated food stamps, welfare "recruiters"--a hundred thousand of them created by the War on Poverty--went into the cities to convince poor people to enroll. An Agriculture Department magazine reported that food stamp workers could often overcome people's pride by telling parents, "This is for your children." It continued: thanks to "intensive outreach efforts, resistance of the 'too prouds' is bending."55
Perhaps just as important, this provided vital propaganda value for liberals. Ronald Reagan got traction for attacking "welfare queens." But no one would dare attack the unfortunate offspring of these women. Suddenly to criticize welfare policy made you "anti-child," thus spawning all of those liberal talking points about balancing the budget on the "backs of the children." This fed nicely into the psychological propaganda that conservatives are just bad people and that any break with the welfare state is motivated by "hate." Even Bill Clinton wasn't immune. When he signed the welfare reform bill, Peter Edelman resigned as assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, and Marian Edelman called Clinton's action a "moment of shame." "Never let us confuse what is legal with what is right," she proclaimed, pointedly adding, "Everything Hitler did in Nazi Germany was legal, but it was not right." The CDF denounced the move as an act of "national child abandonment," while Ted Kennedy called it "legislative child abuse." The New York Times c
olumnist Anna Quindlen dubbed it "the politics of meanness."56
But the CDF and other remoras of the Great Society practiced the true politics of meanness, because at the end of the day their welfare state--based though it may have been on love, concern, and niceness--resulted in more damage to the black family and specifically to black children than much that can be laid at the feet of racist neglect. Today black children are less likely to be raised by two parents than they were during the era of slavery.
While Hillary Clinton may have learned from Edelman how to use children as propaganda tools for her ideological agenda, she far surpassed her teacher in the scope of her ambition. For Clinton, welfare policy was simply one front in a wider war. The crisis facing children wasn't merely an issue for poor denizens of the inner city. For Hillary, childhood is a crisis, and the government must come to the rescue. On this she has remained remarkably consistent. In her 1973 article "Children Under the Law" in Harvard Educational Review, she criticized the "pretense" that "children's issues are somehow beyond politics" and scorned the idea that "families are private, non-political units whose interests subsume those of children." Fast-forward twenty-three years, to her April 24, 1996, address to the United Methodist General Conference: "As adults we have to start thinking and believing that there isn't really any such thing as someone else's child... For that reason, we cannot permit discussions of children and families to be subverted by political or ideological debate."57
These two quotations sound at odds, but the intent is exactly the same. It's just that Hillary Clinton in 1996 is a politician, whereas in 1973 she's a radical lawyer. What Clinton means when she says we cannot permit ideologues to "subvert" the discussion on children is that there can be no debate about what to do about children. And what must be done is to break the unchecked tyranny of the private home, as the progressive icon Charlotte Perkins Gilman put it.
This "brilliant hope"--as Gilman described it--is only realizable if children are cast as a class in perpetual crisis. Much as the proletariat were portrayed by Marxists as being in a constant state of war, with the nation under deadly siege by classical fascists, Hillary's children are in unimaginable existential peril. Thus she approvingly quotes the Cornell psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner: "The present state of children and families in the United States represents the greatest domestic problem our nation has faced since the founding of the Republic. It is sapping our very roots." She concludes, "At a time when the well-being of children is under unprecedented threat, the balance of power is weighted heavily against them." The government must do everything it can to "reverse the crisis affecting our children," she declares. "Children, after all, are citizens too."58
Here at last is a "moral equivalent of war" that modern liberals can rally around, a "crisis mechanism" no one would identify as fascistic because when you say "the children" the last thing you think of are storm troopers. Nobody wants to be seen as anti-child. The "child crisis" needed no definition because it had no boundaries. Even people without children should care about other people's children. Fast foods were targeted because they make children fat--and nutritional decisions can't be left to the parent. "More than the much-reviled products of Big Tobacco, big helpings and Big Food constitute the number-one threat to America's children," the Nation warned. The Clinton administration and affiliated activists justified its gun control policies based on the threat to children. "No longer will we be silent as the gun lobby refuses to put our children's health and safety first," Hillary Clinton barked in a senatorial debate in 2000.59
It's forgotten now, but the early Clinton administration was saturated with such thinking. Janet Reno, appointed the nation's top law enforcement official as part of a gender quota, defined her primary mission as a protector of children. "I would like to use the law of this land to do everything I possibly can," she declared when nominated, "to give to each of them the opportunity to grow to be strong, healthy and self-sufficient citizens of this country." Reno, it may be forgotten, had come to national attention as a crusading prosecutor who won a number of convictions in a series of high-profile child sex-abuse cases. Many of them, it was later revealed, were fraudulent, and Reno's zealous tactics do not look admirable in hindsight. When she came to Washington, the first woman in one of the big four cabinet positions, she was determined to cast herself as primarily a children's advocate, launching her "national children's agenda." "The children of America, 20 percent of whom live in poverty, have no one to advocate for them," Reno said.60 Reno's zeal as a protector of children no doubt played a role in her disastrous handling of the Branch Davidian raid in Waco, Texas.
But Janet Reno was precisely the sort of attorney general that, at least in theory, the author of It Takes a Village would want. Clinton describes an enormous network of activists, advocates, organizations, associations, busybodies, bureaucrats, and meddlers who make up the army of "qualified citizens" whose task it is to protect the village's interests in our children. "I cannot say enough in support of home visits," she gushes. "[The] village needs a town crier--and a town prodder."61 Again, scrape the saccharine from the sentiment and look underneath. Imagine if, say, the former attorney general John Ashcroft had said, "I cannot say enough in support of home visits." The shrieks of "fascism" would be deafening.
For Hillary Clinton, the most important front in the "war" to protect children is the first three years of life. These precious moments are so critical that we cannot leave parents to cope with them on their own. Hence a vast array of programs are necessary to plug parents into a social network that alleviates their responsibilities. As Christopher Lasch noted well before she ever wrote It Takes a Village, Clinton "puts her faith in 'programs.' The proliferation of children's programs--Head Start, day care, prenatal care, maternal care, baby clinics, programs for assessing standards in public schools, immunization programs, child-development programs--serves her as an infallible index of progress."62
The twentieth century gave us two visions of a dystopian future, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. For many years it was assumed that 1984 was the more prophetic tale. But no more. The totalitarianism of 1984 was a product of the age of Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini, the dictators of a continent with a grand tradition of political and religious absolutism. Brave New World was a dystopia based on an American future, where Henry Ford is remembered as a messiah (it's set in the year "632 A.F.," after Ford) and the cult of youth that Huxley so despised defines society. Everything is easy under the World State. Everyone is happy. Indeed, the great dilemma for the reader of Brave New World is to answer the question, what's wrong with it?
There's a second important difference between the two dystopias: 1984 is a masculine vision of totalitarianism. Or rather, it is a vision of a masculine totalitarianism. Huxley's totalitarianism isn't a "boot stamping on a human face--for ever," as described in 1984. It's one of smiling, happy, bioengineered people chewing hormonal gum and blithely doing what they're told. Democracy is a forgotten fad because things are so much easier when the state makes all your decisions. In short, Huxley's totalitarianism is essentially feminine. Orwell's was a daddy-dystopia, where the state is abusive and bullying, maintaining its authority through a permanent climate of war and the manufacture of convenient enemies. Huxley's is a maternal misery, where man is smothered with care, not cruelty. But for all our talk these days about manliness, individualism, and even the "nanny state," we still don't have the vocabulary to fight off nice totalitarianism, liberal fascism.
With that distinction in mind, let us revisit It Takes a Village. On page after page, Clinton extols the idea that just about everything is a health issue. Divorce should be treated like a "public health issue" because it creates stress in children. The very basics of parenting are health issues because "how infants are held, touched, fed, spoken to, and gazed at" determines whether our brains can be "hijacked" by our emotions, potentially making us murderously violent. Mrs. Clinton tells us that Janet Reno issued a repor
t which found that gang violence and gun use are the products of people with badly imprinted brains who become "emotionally hijacked" with little provocation. Quoting doctors, friendly activists, social workers, and random real Americans, in chapter after chapter she argues for interventions on behalf of children from literally the moment they are born. Children need "[g]entle, intimate, consistent contact" to reduce stress, which can "create feelings of helplessness that lead to later developmental problems." Even well-to-do parents need help because after all everyone feels stress, and "we know that babies sense the stress."63
It's fair to say that a state empowered to eliminate parental stress is a state with a Huxleyan mandate. And a state with an extreme mandate must logically go to extremes. Hence Clinton argues for the diffusion of parental training into every nook and cranny of public life. Here's one such suggestion: "Videos with scenes of common-sense baby care--how to burp an infant, what to do when soap gets in his eyes, how to make a baby with an earache comfortable--could be running continuously in doctors' offices, clinics, hospitals, motor vehicle offices, or any place where people gather and have to wait."64 Imagine if these sorts of ideas were fully implemented at the Department of Motor Vehicles, the passport office, and other places "where people gather and have to wait." Giant flat screens at the airport pumping breast-feeding advice? The JumboTron at football games? At what point would the Brave New World seem to be heading down the pike?