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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Then there are the home inspectors, the advisers, the teachers, the social workers. Clinton relies on her loyal army of experts to dispense advice about every jot and tittle of child rearing; no detail is too small, no nudge too condescending. "The Child Care Action Campaign...advises that 'jigsaw puzzles and crayons may be fine for preschoolers but are inappropriate for infants.'" The Consumer Product Safety Commission, Clinton helpfully passes on, has concluded that "baby showers with a safety theme are a great way to help new and expectant mothers childproof every room in their homes."65

  Rousseau wanted to take children away from parents and raise them in state-owned boarding schools. Clinton doesn't go that far, but then again, she believes by the time kids are old enough to go to boarding school, it's too late. Hence her passion for day care. Of course, there is a second agenda here. Day care is also the holy grail for baby-boomer feminists who believe not that children should be liberated from the family but that mothers should be liberated from children.

  In order to crack the spine of patriarchy, feminists have had to rely on Sorelian myths, noble lies, and crisis mechanisms to win their battles. For example, in 1998 President Clinton proposed a $22 billion federal day-care scheme to cure what Hillary was calling "the silent crisis" of day care. Clinton also used the "silent crisis" formulation in It Takes a Village to describe the plight of children generally. These crises were silent for the same reason unicorns are silent--they don't exist. Except, that is, in the hearts and minds of progressive "reformers." Even though eight out of ten children were cared for by family members, only 13 percent of parents polled said finding child care was a "major problem." Shortly before the White House held its crisis-mongering Conference on Child Care, which was intended to lay the groundwork for Hillary's plan, a mere 1 percent of Americans named child care one of the two or three most pressing problems government should fix. And surveys of women conducted since 1974 have shown that growing majorities of married women want to stay home with their children if they can.

  Perhaps one reason women would prefer to raise their own children is that they intuitively understand that, all things being equal, day care is, in fact, not great for children. Dr. Benjamin Spock knew this as early as the 1950s, when he wrote that day-care centers were "no good for infants." But when he reissued his Baby and Child Care guide in the 1990s, he removed that advice, caving in to feminist pressures and concerns. "It's a cowardly thing that I did," he admits. "I just tossed it in subsequent editions." If, as liberals often suggest, the suppression of science for political ends is fascistic, then the campaign to cover up the dark side of child care certainly counts as fascism. For example, in 1991 Dr. Louise Silverstein wrote in American Psychologist that "psychologists must refuse to undertake any more research that looks for the negative consequences of other-than-mother-care." The traditional conception of motherhood is nothing more than an "idealized myth" concocted by the patriarchy to "glorify motherhood in an attempt to encourage white, middle class women to have more children."66

  It's not that Clinton and others advocate policies they believe are bad for children. That would make them cartoon villains. Rather, they believe in good faith that society would be much improved if we all looked at everybody's children as our own. They sincerely hold, in the words of the feminist philosopher Linda Hirshman, that women cannot be "fully realized human beings" if they don't make work a bigger priority than mothering. In a sense, Hirshman is a feminist version of Michael Lerner, who sees work as a "locus" of meaning. Her contempt for women who don't completely dedicate themselves to work is palpable.67 And as other feminists note, if women are made to feel "judged" or shamed by their choice of day care, this negativity will be paid forward in the form of brain-warping stress.

  Some couch their progressive utopianism in pragmatic language. Sandra Scarr is possibly the most quoted expert on "other-than-mother" care in America and a past president of the American Psychological Society. "However desirable or undesirable the ideal of fulltime maternal care may be," she says, "it is completely unrealistic in the world of the late 20th century." That sounds defensible enough. But her larger agenda lurks beneath the surface. We need to create the "new century's ideal children." Uh-oh. Beware of social engineers who want to "create" a new type of human being. These new children will need to learn how to love everybody like a family member. "Multiple attachments to others will become the ideal. Shyness and exclusive maternal attachment will seem dysfunctional. New treatments will be developed for children with exclusive maternal attachments."68 Can you see the Brave New World over the horizon yet?

  Among these "treatments"--another word for propaganda--are books that try to put distance between mothers and children, such as Mommy Go Away! and Why Are You So Mean to Me? In It Takes a Village, Clinton cites the Washington-Beech Community Preschool in Roslindale, Massachusetts, where "director Ellen Wolpert has children play games like Go Fish and Concentration with a deck of cards adorned with images--men holding babies, women pounding nails, elderly men on ladders, gray-haired women on skateboards--that counter the predictable images."69 This sort of thing is carried into progressive grade schools where gender norms are often attacked, as documented in Christina Hoff Sommers's War Against Boys.

  In short, day care is not bad for children. Rather, the traditional bourgeois standards by which we judge what is good for children are bad. This trick is a genteel replay of the Nazi effort to steal the young away from the hidebound traditions of their parents. The Nazis brilliantly replaced traditional stories and fairy tales with yarns of Aryan bravery, the divinity of Hitler, and the like. Math problems became mechanisms for subliminal indoctrination; kids would still learn math, but the word problems were now about artillery trajectories and the amount of food being wasted on defectives and other minorities. Christian morality was slowly purged from the schools, and teachers were instructed to base their moral teaching on "secular" patriotic ideas. "The idea of loyalty was very important to the Germanic Volk, as it is for us today," teachers told their students. Indeed, loyalty to Hitler and the state was drilled into children, while loyalty to one's own parents was discouraged in myriad ways. The children were going to become new men and new women for the new age.

  Obviously, the content of the saccharine liberalism children are indoctrinated into today is very different. But there are disturbing similarities, too. Good children will be those who are less attached to their parents and more attached to the "community." The fascist quest for the new man, living in a new, totalitarian society in which every individual feels the warm and loving embrace of the state, once again begins in the crib.

  The last step toward the Huxleyan future for Hillary Clinton is philosophical, perhaps even metaphysical. Clinton's views of children are more universal than she seems to realize. Mrs. Clinton says, "I have never met a stupid child," and attests that "some of the best theologians I have ever met were five-year-olds."70 Don't let the namby-pamby sentiment blind you to what is being said here. By defining the intellectual status of children up, she is simultaneously defining down the authority and autonomy of adults. In a world where children are indistinguishable from grown-ups, how distinct can grown-ups be from children?

  The liberal cult of the child is instructive in its similarities to fascist thought. Children, like youth, are driven by passion, feelings, emotion, will. These are among the fascist virtues as well. Youth represents the glories of "unreason." These sentiments, in turn, are deeply tied to the narcissistic populism that celebrates the instincts of the masses. "I want it now and I don't care if it's against the rules" is the quintessentially childlike populist passion. Fascism is a form of populism because the leader forges a parental bond with his "children." Without the emotional bond between the leader and "the people," Fuhrer and Volk, fascism is impossible. "I'm on your side," "I'm one of you," "we're in this together," "I know what it's like to be you," constitutes the sales pitch of every fascist and populist demagogue. Or as Willie Stark says to the nurturing
crowd in All the King's Men: "Your will is my strength. Your need is my justice." Arguments, facts, reason: these are secondary. "The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver," proclaimed William Jennings Bryan, America's most beloved populist. "I will look up the arguments later."71

  Bill Clinton campaigned relentlessly on his ability to "feel our pain." Countless observers marveled at his ability to "feed" off the crowd, to draw energy from the masses. Journalists often called him an "empath" for his ability to intuit what an audience wanted to hear. This is a great skill in a politician, but one should never forget that demagogues are first and foremost masterful politicians.

  Of course, Clinton's demagoguery was of a decidedly feminine nature. He promised hugs, to feel your pain, and to protect you from those mean boys (Republicans and "angry white males"). His watchword was "security"--economic security, social security, security from globalization, crime, job losses, whatever. He was the "first female president," according to the feminist novelist Mary Gordon. When he was accused of failure or error, his reflexive response was that of an overwhelmed single mother: "I've been working so hard," as if that were an adequate substitute for being right or effective. His defenders essentially claimed that he was above the law because he was, as Stanford's Kathleen Sullivan put it, the only person who works for all of us twenty-four hours a day. In other words, he wasn't a person; he was the state in its maternal incarnation. Sure, many Americans liked his policies--or thought they did because the economy was doing well--but they liked him because of his oddly maternal concern. The political aesthetics here were nothing new. As Goebbels noted of his Fuhrer's popularity, "The entire people loves him, because it feels safe in his hands like a child in the arms of its mother."72

  Was Bill Clinton a fascist president? Well, he certainly believed in the primacy of emotion and the supremacy of his own intellect. He spun noble lies with reckless abandon. An admirer of Huey Long's, he shared the cornpone dictator's contempt for the rules and had the same knack for demagogic appeals. He was a committed Third Wayer if ever there was one, and he devoutly shared JFK's new politics. But I think if we are going to call him a fascist, it must be in the sense that he was a sponge for the ideas and emotions of liberalism. To say that he was a fascist himself is to credit him with more ideology and principle than justified. He was the sort of president liberal fascism could only produce during unexciting times. But most important, if he was fascist, it was because that's what we as Americans wanted. We craved empathy, because we felt we deserved someone who cared about Me.

  Hillary Clinton learned that lesson well when she decided to run for office for the first time. Mrs. Clinton will never have her husband's raw political talent. She's too cold, too cerebral for his style of backslapping, lip-biting politics. Instead, she translated Bill Clinton's political instincts into an ideological appeal. In 2000, when she ran as a carpetbagger for Senate in New York, Mrs. Clinton's track record was a problem. She essentially had none--at least not as a New Yorker. So she crafted a brilliant campaign slogan and rationale: she was the candidate who was "more concerned about the issues that concern New Yorkers." Her discipline in sticking to this message awed veteran political observers. The issues weren't the issue, as they said in the 1960s. The issue of who was more concerned about the issues was the issue. "I think that the real issue ought to be who cares about the children of New York City," she said in a typical utterance.73

  One might ask, since when did "concern" count as the greatest of qualifications? A plumber might well be more concerned about how to successfully remove your spleen than a surgeon would. Does that mean a sane man would prefer a plumber to a doctor? Do banks give loans to the applicants most concerned with running a successful business or to those most likely to pay back the loan? Should the student most concerned with getting good grades get straight As?

  The response to all this is simple: concern is what children (and the rest of us) look for in parents. In the liberal fascist view, children are citizens and citizens are children (a chapter of Hillary's book is titled "Children Are Citizens Too"), so it follows that leaders should behave like parents. "I think my job is to lead," Bill Clinton remarked while in office, "and take care of the country. And I suppose the older I get, the more it becomes the role of a father figure instead of an older brother."74

  Under this vision, even your own money is not yours. It's an allowance. When asked what his problem was with letting local school districts spend tax dollars the way they saw fit, Bill Clinton snapped back: "Because it's not their money." In 1997 he ridiculed Virginia voters who wanted tax cuts as "selfish," and then chided them like children: "And think how you felt every time in your life you were tempted to do something that was selfish and you didn't do it, and the next day you felt wonderful." In 1999, when the government was running a surplus, many taxpayers felt that getting back some of their money was a reasonable policy. When asked about this, President Clinton responded, "We could give it all back to you and hope you spend it right." Senator Clinton was more straightforward. Talking about George W. Bush's tax cuts, which did return that surplus to the people who created it, Mrs. Clinton--speaking in the classic argot of the Social Gospel--said that those cuts had to be done away with. "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."75

  Hillary is no fuhrer, and her notion of the "common good" doesn't involve racial purity or concentration camps. But she indisputably draws her vision from the same eternal instinct to impose order on society, to create an all-encompassing community, to get past endless squabbles and ensconce each individual in the security blanket of the state. Hers is a political religion, an updated Social Gospel--light on the Gospel, heavy on the Social--spoken in soothing tones and conjuring a reassuring vision of cooperation and community. But it remains a singular vision, and there's no room in it for those still suffering from the "stupidity of habit-bound minds," to borrow Dewey's phrase. The village may have replaced "the state," and it in turn may have replaced the fist with the hug, but an unwanted embrace from which you cannot escape is just a nicer form of tyranny.

  10

  The New Age: We're All Fascists Now

  It is generally thought that National Socialism stands only for brutishness and terror. But this is not true. National Socialism--more broadly, fascism--also stands for an ideal or rather ideals that are persistent today under other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community, the repudiation of the intellect, the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders). These ideals are vivid and moving to many people...because their content is a romantic ideal to which many continue to be attached and which is expressed in such diverse modes of cultural dissidence and propaganda for new forms of community as the youth/rock culture, primal therapy, anti-psychiatry, Third-World camp-following, and belief in the occult.

  --Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism"

  LIBERALS CONSTANTLY COMPLAIN that conservatives are trying to impose their cultural vision on the rest of the country. In contrast, they themselves only care about the "real" issues of class and economics. Thomas Frank, author of the best-selling What's the Matter With Kansas?, leads a whole school of liberals who argue that middle-class GOP voters have been hoodwinked by Republican strategists pushing manufactured "values" issues. Frank's argument boils down to the old Marxist doctrine of false consciousness, which says that to disagree with the left about the nature of political and economic self-interest is a form of brainwashing or dementia.

  But are liberals and leftists really dedicated to economic justice rather than divisive issues like gay marriage or partial-birth abortion? If you look closely, you'll see that liberals object to "values issues" in politics only when they expose liberal weaknesses. When liberals are on the defensive, they use Marxist or, if you prefer, socialistic arguments to delegitimize the opposition's cultural agenda. When conservatives have the upper hand on a cult
ural issue, liberalism is all about "solving problems" for the average Joe, about paychecks and health care. But on offense, it's about racial quotas, mainstreaming gay culture, scrubbing the public square of Christianity, and a host of explicitly cultural ambitions.

  This socialist-parry, cultural-thrust tactic mirrors Nazi maneuvers in interesting ways. When the Nazis were debating traditionalists, monarchists, and the few classical liberals left in Germany, they sounded much like generic socialists lamenting how "big capitalism" was screwing the little guy. Hitler charged that other parties were dividing Germans along sectarian and class lines, while he wanted to focus like a laser on the economy. It was only when the National Socialists had the upper hand that they dropped their economic arguments in favor of imposing a new cultural order.

  This economics-on-defense, culture-on-offense approach remained an important tactic for Hitler even after his consolidation of power. For example, in 1938, when he realized that the Nazi cultural agenda was starting to alienate significant segments of the population, he explained in a speech, "National Socialism is a cool, reality-based doctrine, based upon the sharpest scientific knowledge and its mental expression. As we have opened the people's heart to this doctrine, and as we continue to do so at the present, we have no desire to instill in the people a mysticism that lies outside the purpose and goals of our doctrine." Such language should be familiar to liberals who like to call themselves members of the "reality-based community."1