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

by Jonah Goldberg

  THE POLITICS OF SEX

  Almost inexplicably, the popular perception these days is that Nazism was a kind of prudery run amok. Ken Starr, John Ashcroft, Laura Schlessinger, and Rick Santorum are just the latest symbols of a supposedly fascistic judgmentalism and hypocritical piety on the American right. In order to make these arguments stick, the debate is skewed so as to paint the champions of traditional morality as crypto-fascists, incapable of thinking maturely about sex.

  Arthur Miller's propagandistic play The Crucible has become a classic statement of the left's obsession with the "sex panic" of the right. Originally a thinly veiled indictment of McCarthyism, the story is now seen as one of puritanical Comstockery leading to an outbreak of murderous political paranoia. Powerful men who can't handle sexually autonomous women use the tools of the state to launch a witch hunt. This tiresome meme has conquered the liberal imagination. J. Edgar Hoover is now universally depicted as a drag queen despite the flimsiest of evidence. Sidney Blumenthal has argued that anti-communism in the United States was little more than an example of homophobic panic by closeted gay right-wingers. Tim Robbins echoes a similar idea in his film The Cradle Will Rock, in which anti-communists and New Deal opponents are little more than sexually repressed fascists. Advocates of family values are now associated with fascism across the international left. "To favor the traditional family over here is to open oneself to the charge of being a Nazi," explains a member of the Swedish parliament.

  There's only one problem: none of this has anything to do with Nazism or fascism.

  The idea that "family values" are philosophically linked to fascism actually has a long pedigree, going back, again, to the Frankfurt School. Max Horkheimer argued that the root of Nazi totalitarianism was the family. But the truth is as close to the opposite as one can get. While Nazi rhetoric often paid homage to the family, the actual practice of Nazism was consonant with the progressive effort to invade the family, to breach its walls and shatter its autonomy. The traditional family is the enemy of all political totalitarianisms because it is a bastion of loyalties separate from and prior to the state, which is why progressives are constantly trying to crack its outer shell.

  Let us start with the obvious. It would be funny were it not tragically necessary to note that the Nazis were not "pro-life." Long before the Final Solution, the Nazis cast the aged, the infirm, and the handicapped onto the proverbial Spartan hillside. It is true that women were second-class citizens in the Nazi worldview, relegated to the status of breeders of the master race. But prudery and Judeo-Christian morality were hardly the justification for these policies.

  Nazi attitudes toward sexuality were grounded in unremitting hostility to Christianity and Judaism, both of which rejected the pagan view of sex as gratification, imbuing it instead with deep moral significance. Indeed, if you read Hitler's Table Talk, it is almost impossible not to see him as an open-minded freethinker. "Marriage, as it is practiced in bourgeois society, is generally a thing against nature. But a meeting between two beings who complete one another, who are made for one another, borders already, in my conception, upon a miracle." "Religion," Hitler explains, "is in perpetual conflict with the spirit of free research." "The catastrophe, for us, is that of being tied to a religion that rebels against all the joys of the senses." Der Fuhrer talks at length about his contempt for the social prejudices that look down on out-of-wedlock birth. "I love to see this display of health around me."19

  Recall that Hitler dreamed of transforming Germany into a warrior nation led by cadres of black-garbed Aryan Spartans loyal to him alone. Heinrich Himmler created the SS in the hope of making Hitler's dream come true. He ordered his men "to father as many children as possible without marrying." To this end Himmler created Lebensborn (Wellspring of Life) homes in Germany and occupied Scandinavia, where children sired by SS men and racially pure women would be raised by the state, fulfilling a dream (minus the racial angle) of Robespierre's. After a racial background check, a baby was admitted through a ceremony where an SS dagger was held over the child while the mother took an oath of loyalty to the Nazi cause.

  Nazi attitudes toward homosexuality are also a source of confusion. While it is true that some homosexuals were sent to concentration camps, it is also the case that the early Nazi Party and the constellation of Pan-German organizations in its orbit were rife with homosexuals. It's well-known, for example, that Ernst Rohm, the head of the SA, and his coterie were homosexuals, and openly so. When jealous members of the SA tried to use this fact against him in 1931, Hitler had to remonstrate that Rohm's homosexuality was "purely in the private sphere." Some try to suggest that Rohm was murdered on the Night of the Long Knives because he was gay. But the Rohm faction posed the greatest threat to Hitler's consolidation of power because they were, in important respects, the most ardent and "revolutionary" Nazis. Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams write in The Pink Swastika that "the National Socialist revolution and the Nazi Party were animated and dominated by militaristic homosexuals, pederasts, pornographers, and sadomasochists." This is surely an overstatement. But it is nonetheless true that the artistic and literary movements that provided the oxygen for Nazism before 1933 were chockablock with homosexual liberationist tracts, clubs, and journals.20

  The journal Der Eigene (meaning "self-aware" or "self-owner") had some 150,000 subscribers--more than twice the New Republic's readership today in a population roughly a fifth the size of that in the United States. The journal was dedicated to men who "thirst for a revival of Greek times and Hellenic standards of beauty after centuries of Christian barbarism." Der Eigene--virulently anti-Semitic and nationalistic--grew into an actual movement for homosexual rights demanding the repeal of laws and social taboos against pederasty. The Viennese journal Ostara--which surely influenced a young Adolf Hitler--extolled a Spartan male ethic where women and Christianity alike were shackles on the Teutonic male warrior's will to power.

  What ties these threads together was the idea of the Wrong Turn. Men were freer before they were caged by bourgeois norms, traditional morality, and logocentrism. Keep this in mind the next time you watch Brokeback Mountain, one of the most critically acclaimed and celebrated films of the last decade. Two perfect male specimens are at home only in the pastoral wild, away from the bourgeois conventions of modern life. At home in nature, they are finally free to give themselves over to their instinctual desires. But they cannot live in the hills, indulging their instincts. So they spend the rest of their lives trapped in soul-crippling traditional marriages, their only joy their annual "fishing trips," where they try to re-create the ecstasy of their authentic encounter, the only thing that can liberate them from bourgeois domesticity.

  According to a secular liberal analysis, if traditional morality was ever necessary at all (a dubious proposition for many), it has outgrown its utility. In a premodern age when venereal disease was a death sentence and out-of-wedlock birth a calamity, rules and norms for governing personal behavior had their place. But today, conventional morality is merely a means by which the ruling classes oppress women, homosexuals, and other sexually nonconforming rebels. Tom Wolfe's essay "The Great Relearning" begins by recounting how, in 1968, doctors at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic discovered diseases "no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot."21 Why were these maladies springing up? The hippie communards, much like the bohemians of Weimar Germany, believed that traditional morality was an antiquated husk with as much relevance as the divine right of kings. They discovered otherwise; we have rules and customs for a reason.

  Liberals dismiss abstract arguments involving universal moral principles almost as cavalierly as hippies did in the 1960s. One can argue that abortion might have a downside because it can lead to higher rates of breast cancer, but complaints that it takes a human life or displeases God, we are told, have no place in r
easonable discourse. This poses a dilemma for conservatives. For some this means only arguing about what the data show. The problem is that resorting to regression analysis is another way of conceding that notions of right and wrong have no place in public debate. Meanwhile, conservatives of a religious bent hurl charges and epithets that do nothing to persuade the opposition.

  Moreover, the culture is so shot through with narcissism and populism that even progressive arguments are denied to the conservative. Thus we are told it is elitist to argue that celebrities and rich people can afford to indulge loose morals in ways the poor cannot. If you're a millionaire, you can handle divorce, out-of-wedlock birth, or drug abuse with little risk to your quality of life and social status. If you are working-class, the same behaviors can be destructive. But to point these things out violates today's egalitarian-populist ethos: What's good enough for Paris Hilton must be good enough for us all.

  Fascism was a human response to a rapidly unfolding series of technological, theological, and social revolutions. Those revolutions are still playing themselves out, and since the left has defined fascism as conservative opposition to change, it's unlikely we'll ever stop being fascists by that definition. But conservatives aren't reactionaries. Few conservatives today would--or should--try to put the entire sexual revolution back in the bottle. Women's suffrage, birth control, civil rights, these are now part of the classically liberal order, and that's a good thing. Homosexuality is a fresher, and therefore tougher, issue for conservatives. But at least at the elite level, there are few conservatives who want to criminalize homosexuality. My guess is that gay marriage in some form is inevitable, and that may well be for the best. Indeed, the demand for gay marriage is in some respects a hopeful sign. In the 1980s and 1990s gay radicals sounded far more fascistic than the "radicals" of the early twenty-first century who ostensibly want to subject themselves to the iron cage of bourgeois matrimony.

  The relevant question for conservatives hinges on the sincerity of the left, which is impossible to gauge because they have internalized an incremental approach to their Kulturkampf. Is gay marriage an attempt to blend homosexuals into a conservative--and conservatizing--institution? Or is it merely a trophy in their campaign for acceptance? In the 1990s "queer theorists" declared war on marriage as an oppressive force. The ACLU has already taken up polygamy as a civil rights issue. Al and Tipper Gore wrote a book arguing that families should be viewed as any group of individuals who love each other. These are echoes of ideas found in the fascist past, and conservatives can hardly be blamed for distrusting many on the left when they say they just want marriage and nothing more.

  GREEN FASCISM

  Nowhere is the idea of the Wrong Turn more starkly expressed in both National Socialist and contemporary liberal thought than in environmentalism. As many have observed, modern environmentalism is suffused with dark Rousseauian visions about the sickness of Western civilization. Man has lost his harmony with nature, his way of life is inauthentic, corrupting, unnatural.

  Perhaps the most prominent exponent of this vision is the ubiquitous Al Gore, arguably the most popular liberal in America. As he writes in his thoroughly postmodern manifesto, Earth in the Balance, "We retreat into the seductive tools and technologies of industrial civilization, but that only creates new problems as we become increasingly isolated from one another and disconnected from our roots." Gore relentlessly sanctifies nature, arguing that we have been "cut off" from our authentic selves. "The froth and frenzy of industrial civilization mask our deep loneliness for that communion with the world that can lift our spirits and fill our senses with the richness and immediacy of life itself."22 Of course, one can find similar statements from all sorts of Romantics, including Henry David Thoreau. But let us remember that German fascism was born out of a Romantic revolt against industrialization that philosophically mirrored aspects of transcendentalism. The difference is that while Thoreau sought to separate himself from modernity, Gore seeks to translate his Romantic animosity to modernity into a governing program.

  The idea that environmentalism is itself a religion has been much discussed elsewhere. But it is telling how many of these New Age faiths define themselves as nature cults. As the National Public Radio correspondent (and committed witch) Margot Adler explains, "This is a religion that says the world, the earth, is where holiness resides." Joseph Sax, a giant in the field of environmental law and a pioneering activist, describes his fellow environmentalists as "secular prophets, preaching a message of secular salvation." Representative Ed Markey hailed Gore as a "prophet" during his congressional testimony on climate change in early 2007.23 An environmentally themed hotel in California has replaced the Bible in all its rooms with Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Anyone with kids certainly understands how the invocations to "reduce, reuse, recycle" are taught like catechisms in schoolrooms across the country.

  Ultimately, however, environmentalism is fascistic not because of its airy and obscure metaphysical assumptions about the existential plight of man. Rather, its most tangible fascistic ingredient is that it is an invaluable "crisis mechanism." Al Gore constantly insists that global warming is the defining crisis of our time. Skeptics are called traitors, Holocaust deniers, tools of the "carbon interests." Alternately, progressive environmentalists cast themselves in the role of nurturing caregivers. When Gore appeared before Congress in early 2007, he proclaimed that the world has a "fever" and explained that when your baby has a fever, you "take action." You do whatever your doctor says. No time to debate, no room for argument. We must get "beyond politics." In practical terms this means we must surrender to the global nanny state and create the sort of "economic dictatorship" progressives yearn for.

  The beauty of global warming is that it touches everything we do--what we eat, what we wear, where we go. Our "carbon footprint" is the measure of man. And it is environmentalism's ability to provide meaning that should interest us here. Almost all committed environmentalists subscribe to some variant of the Wrong Turn thesis. Gore is more eloquent than most in this regard. He rhapsodizes about the need for authenticity and meaning through collective action; he uses an endless series of violent metaphors in which people must be "resistance fighters" against the putatively Nazi regime responsible for the new Holocaust of global warming (again, on the left, the enemy is always a Nazi). Gore alternately blames Plato, Descartes, and Francis Bacon as the white male serpents who tempted mankind to take the wrong turn out of an Edenic past. What is required is to reunite our intellects, our spiritual impulses, and our animalistic instincts into a new holistic balance. Nothing could be more fascistic.

  Of course, the greener you get, the more the argument shifts from the white man to mankind in general as the source of the problem. A perverse and bizarre form of self-hatred has infected certain segments of the eco-left. The old critique of the Hebrew disease has metastasized into an indictment of what could be called the human disease. When Charles Wurster, the chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, was told that banning DDT would probably result in millions of deaths, he replied, "This is as good a way to get rid of them as any." The Finnish environmental guru Pentti Linkola argues that the earth is a sinking ship, and a chosen remnant must head to the lifeboats. "Those who hate life try to pull more people on board and drown everybody. Those who love and respect life use axes to chop off the extra hands hanging on the gunwale."24

  These nominally "fringe" ideas have saturated the mainstream. "Us Homo sapiens are turning out to be as destructive a force as any asteroid," proclaimed the Today Show's Matt Lauer in a TV special. "The stark reality is that there are simply too many of us. And we consume way too much...The solutions are not a secret: control population, recycle, reduce consumption." Lauer's emphasis on population control should remind us that the progressive eugenic obsession with controlling the population has never disappeared and still lurks behind many environmental arguments.25

  One reason there is so much overlap between Nazi environmental though
t and contemporary liberalism is that the environmental movement predates Nazism and was used to expand its base of support. The Nazis were among the first to make fighting air pollution, creating nature preserves, and pushing for sustainable forestry central planks in their platform. Ludwig Klages's Man and Earth was a manifesto for the idea that man had chosen the wrong path. Klages, a wild-eyed anti-Semite, decried the loss of species, the killing of whales, the clearing of forests, disappearing indigenous peoples, and other familiar concerns as symptoms of cultural rot. In 1980, to celebrate the founding of the German Green Party, the Greens reissued the essay.

  Even though free-market conservatives have a great deal to offer when it comes to the environment, they are permanently on the defensive. Americans, like the rest of the Western world, have simply decided that the environment is an area where markets and even democracy should have little sway. To approach environmental questions as if they were economic questions--which they ultimately are--seems sacrilegious. Much as liberals have painted themselves as "pro-child" and their opponents as "anti-child," to disagree with liberals on statist remedies to environmental issues makes you "against" the environment and a craven lickspittle of robber barons and industrial fat cats.