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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Everyone cares about "the environment," just as everyone cares about "the children." For ideological environmentalists that means buying into a holistic vision of the earth and of humans as just another species. For conservatives, we are stewards of the earth, and that means making informed choices between competing goods. Many so-called environmentalists are in fact conservationists, using property rights and market mechanisms to conserve natural resources for posterity. Many on the left believe we must romanticize nature in order to create the political will to save it. But when such romanticism becomes a substitute religion and dissenters heretics, conservatives need to make it clear that environmental utopianism is as impossible as any other attempt to create a heaven on earth.

  THE NAZI CULT OF THE ORGANIC

  Unlike Marxism, which declared much of culture and humanity irrelevant to the revolution, National Socialism was holistic. Indeed, "organic" and "holistic" were the Nazi terms of art for totalitarianism. The Mussolinian vision of everything inside the state, nothing outside the state, was organicized by the Nazis. In this sense the Bavarian cabinet minister Hans Schemm was deadly serious when he said, "National Socialism is applied biology."26

  Nazi ideologues believed that the Aryans were the "Native Americans" of Europe, colonized by Romans and Christians and hence deprived of their "natural" symbiosis with the land. Hitler himself was a devoted fan of the novels of Karl May, who romanticized the Indians of the American West. The Nazi ideologue Richard Darre summarized much of Nazi Volk ideology when he said, "To remove the German from the natural landscape is to kill him." Ernst Lehmann, a leading Nazi biologist, sounded much like Mr. Gore: "We recognise that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations."27

  The Nazi cult of the organic was not some fringe view; it lay at the cutting edge of "enlightened" thought. German historicism had pioneered the organic conception of society and state tied together. The state, wrote Johann Droysen, is "the sum, the united organism, of all the moral partnerships, their common home and harbor, and so far their end." Nor were these ideas uniquely German. Droysen was Herbert Baxter Adams's mentor, and Adams in turn was Woodrow Wilson's. Droysen's work is cited throughout Wilson's writings. The law that established our national park system was dubbed the "Organic Act" of 1916.

  Consider two spheres of concern that dominate vast swaths of our culture today: food and health. The Nazis took food very, very seriously. Hitler claimed to be a dedicated vegetarian. Indeed, he could talk for hours about the advantages of a meatless diet and the imperative to eat whole grains. Himmler, Rudolf Hess, Martin Bormann, and--maybe--Goebbels were vegetarians or health food fetishists of one kind or another. Nor was this mere sucking up to the boss (a real problem, one might imagine, in Nazi Germany). According to Robert Proctor, Hess would bring his own vegetarian concoctions to meetings at the Chancellery and heat them up like the office vegan with some macrobiotic couscous. This annoyed Hitler to no end. Hitler told Hess, "I have an excellent dietician/cook here. If your doctor has prescribed something special for you, she could certainly prepare it. You cannot bring your own food in here." Hess responded that his food had special biodynamic ingredients. Hitler suggested to Hess in return that maybe he might rather stay home for lunch from now on.28

  Hitler often claimed his vegetarianism was inspired by Richard Wagner, who, in an 1891 essay, argued that meat eating and race mixing were the twin causes of man's alienation from the natural world. Therefore he called for a "true and hearty fellowship with the vegetarians, the protectors of animals, and the friends of temperance." He would also wax eloquent on the vegetarian diets of Japanese sumo wrestlers, Roman legionnaires, Vikings, and African elephants. Hitler believed that man had mistakenly acquired the habit of eating meat out of desperation during the Ice Age and that vegetarianism was the more authentic human practice. Indeed, he often sounded like an early spokesperson for the raw food movement, which is becoming ever more fashionable. "The fly feeds on fresh leaves, the frog swallows the fly as it is and the stork eats the living frog. Nature thus teaches us that a rational diet should be based on eating things in their raw state."29

  Many leading Nazi ideologues also shared today's deep-seated commitment to animal rights as opposed to animal welfare. "How can you find pleasure in shooting from behind cover at poor creatures browsing on the edge of a wood, innocent, defenseless, and unsuspecting?" asked Heinrich Himmler. "It's really pure murder." A top priority of the Nazis upon attaining power was to implement a sweeping animal rights law. In August 1933 Hermann Goring barred the "unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments," threatening to commit to concentration camps "those who still think they can treat animals as inanimate property."

  For anyone with a functioning moral compass, this can only seem like barbaric cognitive dissonance. But for the Nazis it all made sense. The German needed to reconnect with nature, restore his organic purity, find holistic balance. Animals have exactly such a balance because they are immune to reason. Hence, the ideologues believed they were virtuous and deserving of respect. Jews, on the other hand, were alien and deracinating. They were the reason the "biotic community" of Germany was out of balance.

  Animal rights advocates correctly note that animal rights activism was a major concern in pre-Nazi Germany and that the animal rights movement shouldn't be associated with Nazism. But as with environmentalism, this is less of a defense than it sounds. It is fine to say that many of Nazism's concerns were held by people who were not Nazis. But the fact that these conventionally leftist views were held by Nazis suggests that Nazism isn't as alien to mainstream progressive thought as some would have us believe.

  Ingrid Newkirk, the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, famously declared, "When it comes to feelings, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. There is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights."30 Few sentiments could be more fascist. First there is the emphasis on "feelings"--not thought or reason--as the defining characteristic of life. Second is the assumption that the higher "feelings"--those associated with conscience--are of such little consequence that they don't enter into the equation. When Newkirk says there's no "rational" basis for distinguishing between vermin and humans, what she really means is that there is no legitimate distinction between them, which is why PETA felt no compunction in comparing the slaughter of pigs, cows, and chickens to the slaughter of Jews in their infamous "Holocaust on your plate" campaign.

  We joke a lot about "health fascists" these days. The government--partly driven by creeping national-socialist health-care costs--is increasingly fixated on our health. Children's shows on state-run television have been instructed to propagandize for healthier living, so much so that Cookie Monster's "C is for Cookie" has been demoted by the new jingle "Cookies Are a Sometimes Food." This of course is nothing new. Herbert Hoover, Woodrow Wilson's food administrator, required children to sign a loyalty pledge to the state that they wouldn't eat between meals. What we do not understand is that the citizen hectored and hounded by the state to quit smoking has as much right to complain about fascism as an author would if his book was banned. As Robert Proctor was the first to fully catalog in his magisterial work The Nazi War on Cancer, obsession with personal and public health lay at the core of the Nazi Weltanschauung. The Nazis, according to Proctor, were convinced that "aggressive measures in the field of public health would usher in a new era of healthy, happy Germans, united by race and common outlook, cleansed of alien environmental toxins, freed from the previous era's plague of cancers, both literal and figurative." Hitler loathed cigarettes, believing they were the "wrath of the Red Man against the White Man, vengeance for having been given hard liquor."

  The Nazis used the slogan "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz"--"the common good supersedes the private good"--to justify policing individual health for the sake of the body politic. This is the same rationale used today. As one public health advocate wrote i
n the New England Journal of Medicine, "Both health care providers and the commonweal now have a vested interest in certain forms of behavior, previously considered a person's private business, if the behavior impairs a person's 'health.' Certain failures of self-care have become, in a sense, crimes against society, because society has to pay for their consequences...In effect, we have said that people owe it to society to stop misbehaving."31

  In 2004 Hillary Clinton insisted that we look at children's entertainment "from a public health perspective." Subjecting "our children to so much of this unchecked media is a kind of contagion," a "silent epidemic" threatening "long-term public health damage to many, many children and therefore to society." Richard Carmona, Bush's surgeon general in 2003, led a long list of public figures who believed "obesity has reached epidemic proportions." His "simple prescription" for ending America's obesity epidemic? "Every American needs to eat healthy food in healthy portions and be physically active every day." This sort of thing changes the meaning of an epidemic from a public health threat that puts people in danger against their will--typhoid, poisoned food, bear attacks--and replaces it with the danger of people doing things they want to do. Just look at how the war on smoking has institutionalized hysteria. Free speech for anything even remotely "pro-tobacco" has been culturally banned and almost totally abolished by law. Tobacco companies themselves have been forced to ritualistically--and expensively--denounce their own products. Free association of smokers has been outlawed in much of America. In addition, the fixation with children allows social planners to intervene to stop "child abusers" who might smoke near children, even outdoors.

  Compare all this with a typical admonition found in a Hitler Youth health manual: "Food is not a private matter!" Or, "You have the duty to be healthy!" Or as another uniformed health official put it: "The government has a perfect right to influence personal behavior to the best of its ability if it is for the welfare of the individual and the community as a whole." That last official was C. Everett Koop.32

  Vegetarianism, public health, and animal rights were merely different facets of the obsession with the organic order that pervaded the German fascist mind then, and the liberal fascist mind today. Again and again Hitler insisted that there "is no gap between the organic and inorganic worlds." Oddly, this fueled the Nazis' view of the Jew as the "other." As I mentioned earlier, in a widely read book on nutrition, Hugo Kleine blamed "capitalist special interests" and "masculinized Jewish half-women" for the decline in the quality of German foods, which contributed to the rise in cancer. Himmler hoped to switch the SS entirely to organic food and was dedicated to making the transition for all of Germany after the war. Organic food was seamlessly linked to the larger Nazi conception of the organic nation living in harmony with a pre-or non-Christian ecosystem.

  Many Americans today are obsessed with the organic. Whole Foods has become a franchise of cathedrals to this cult, and even Wal-Mart has succumbed to it. The essence of Whole Foods--where I shop frequently, by the way--is, in the words of the New York Times, to provide "premodern authenticity," or the "appearance of premodern authenticity," in order to provide people with "meaning." Walk the aisles of Whole Foods and you'll be amazed by what you find. "In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations." So sayeth the great law of the Iroquois Confederacy--and the label on every roll of Seventh Generation-brand toilet paper. The company promises "affordable, high quality, safe and environmentally responsible" toilet tissue that helps "keep you, your home and our planet healthy." But fear not, Seventh Generation also promises to "get the job done."

  Then there's EnviroKidz cereal. Read the box and you learn that "EnviroKidz chooz organic food. Organic agriculture respects the land and the wild creatures who live on it." It concludes, "So if you want the kind of planet where bio-diversity is protected and human beings tread more softly upon the Earth, then chooz certified organic cereals from EnviroKidz. Wouldn't it be nice if all the food we ate was certified organic?" The company Gaiam sells a wide array of products at Whole Foods and similar stores. Their literature explains that "Gaia, mother Earth, was honored on the Isle of Crete in ancient Greece 4,000 years ago by the Minoan civilization...The concept of Gaia stems from the ancient philosophy that the Earth is a living entity. At Gaiam, we believe that all of the Earth's living matter, air, oceans and land form an interconnected system that can be seen as a single entity."33

  None of this is evil, and it is certainly well-meaning. But what's fascinating about Whole Foods and the culture it represents is how dependent it is on concocting what amounts to a new pan-human ethnicity. Over thirty years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer wrote in Beyond the Melting Pot, "To name an occupational group or a class is very much the same thing as naming an ethnic group." That's no longer true, and in response the left and the market are creating faux ethnicities grounded in imagined or romantic pasts from the Rousseauian noble savages of pre-Columbian North America to the fanciful imagined societies of pre-Christian Europe or ancient Greece. I await the release of Thule Society Sugar Pops.

  AFTERWORD

  The Tempting of Conservatism

  The past shows unvaryingly that when a people's freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all.

  --Richard Weaver, 1962

  IN THIS BOOK I have argued that modern liberalism is the offspring of twentieth-century progressivism, which in turn shares intellectual roots with European fascism. I have further argued that fascism was an international movement, or happening, expressing itself differently in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture. In Europe this communitarian impulse expressed itself in political movements that were nationalist, racist, militarist, and expansionist. In the United States the movement known elsewhere as fascism or Nazism took the form of progressivism--a softer form of totalitarianism that, while still nationalistic, and militarist in its crusading forms and outlook, was more in keeping with American culture. It was, in short, a kind of liberal fascism.

  After the Holocaust, and in haste after the Kennedy assassination, nationalistic passions were inverted. A "punitive liberalism" emerged (in James Piereson's words), in which Herbert Croly's "promise" of American life became the curse of American life. Progressivism's age-old yearning to fix America became a religious crusade to cleanse it, often through self-flagellation, of the nation's myriad sins. In short, liberalism in this country succumbed to the totalitarian temptation: the belief that there is a priesthood of experts capable of redesigning society in a "progressive" manner. That progressive priesthood brooks no opposition, and it is in the ascendant today on many fronts.

  So far, so good. However, insofar as this has been a long book that insistently hammers on the danger of allowing these liberal fascist themes and tendencies to percolate unopposed through our politics, economics, and culture, it is perhaps incumbent on me to anticipate a few of the objections that might be raised by even the most well-disposed and open-minded reader. To wit: Aren't you overstating the problem--trying to pin the brown shirt on your opponents in the same way you claim they have done to you? Besides, who cares about the origin of these ideas if the way they are being applied is benign and even beneficial? What's so bad about a little progress and pragmatism, taken in moderation? And if, as you repeatedly state, there is no real prospect of a fascist coup today, why sound the alarm? More to the point, perhaps, why make so much of the Clintons, Kennedy, FDR, and Wilson but so little of, say, Nixon and George W. Bush? If one is looking for evidence of incipient fascism in the United States, shouldn't you be more concerned with the Bush administration's fearmongering, jingoism, and arrogation of executive privilege? Isn't that the real fascist threat today, and not Wh
ole Foods' promotion of organic toilet paper and Hillary Clinton's campaign on behalf of children?

  Let's begin at the beginning. Ever since I joined the public conversation as a conservative writer, I've been called a fascist and a Nazi by smug, liberal know-nothings, sublimely confident of the truth of their ill-informed prejudices. Responding to this slander is, as a point of personal privilege alone, a worthwhile endeavor. More important, as a conservative I actually believe that conservative policies will be better for America. From school choice to free markets to advancing democracy around the world, I believe that conservatives are, for the most part, correct. When conservative proposals are rebuffed with insinuations of fascist motives, it not only cheapens public discourse but also helps beat back much-needed reforms, and it does so not through argument but through intimidation. Surely, it is no small matter that our public discourse is corrupted in this way, and I have written this book largely to set the record straight and to educate myself--and others--about the real meaning and nature of fascism.

  As to whether I am overstating the problem: I have repeatedly made it clear that modern liberals are not cartoonish Nazi villains. These people aren't storm troopers or commissars; they're campus student-life directors and diversity managers, child psychologists and antismoking crusaders. The danger they pose isn't existential or Orwellian, save perhaps in the sense that they might inure Americans to social control from above. The real threat is that the promise of American life will be frittered away for a bag of magic beans called security. No, I don't mean that as an indictment of the Bush administration or the war on terror. There is a difference between literal security--defending the public against external or illegal violence--and the figurative, quasi-religious security promised by the Third Way. Many progressives seem to think we can transform America into a vast college campus where food, shelter, and recreation are all provided for us and the only crime is to be mean to somebody else, particularly a minority.