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

by Jonah Goldberg

  So of course you will find me guilty of overstatement if you take me to be claiming that liberalism is a Trojan horse for Nazism. And while I have no doubt some hostile critics will assert I am making that case, I am not. But they will have to say so, because to do otherwise is to concede that Hillary Clinton's brave new village is bad enough. Of course, you can live a happy life in a medicalized, psychologized society where the state is your mommy. But only if you have been conditioned to find joy in such a society, and that is the aim of many liberal institutions: to rewrite the habits of our hearts. But of course, while I would view it as tragic to lose the America of individualism and freedom, I can certainly imagine worse horrors. Living in some vast North American Belgium, after all, surely has its pleasures.

  I did not set out to write a modern version of The Road to Serfdom (would that I could). Nor do I have any desire to be a right-wing Joe Conason, obsessively pecking away at the keyboard in an attempt to translate every partisan objection into some frightening omen of lost liberties. But if you are still vexed by the question "So what?" there is a larger danger to keep in mind. The cliche that the road to hell is paved with good intentions has more than its fair share of truth. I do not dispute that liberals have what they believe are the best of intentions as they push for a "modern" European welfare state. But it's worth keeping in mind that a Europeanized America would not only stop being America; there's also no reason to believe it would stop at merely being Europeanized. To paraphrase Chesterton: the danger of an America which stops believing in itself isn't that it will believe in nothing but that it can believe in anything. And that's where the darker dystopian visions start becoming plausible. Like useful idiots of yore, today's liberals want nothing but the best, but by pushing open the door to get it, they may well let in something far worse.

  As for why I didn't spend a lot of time on the fascinating case of Richard Nixon, or (say) Truman and Eisenhower, the answer is simple: I told the story I thought needed to be told. These presidents were, in some respects, like LBJ, caretakers of the welfare state, extending the assumptions of the New Deal and the Great Society rather than questioning them. As for Ronald Reagan, he is enjoying what may be the most remarkable rehabilitation in modern American history--as is Barry Goldwater, who all of a sudden has become a hero to the liberal establishment. It seems that American liberals can appreciate dead conservatives when they become useful cudgels to beat up on living ones. Regardless, the story of Ronald Reagan seemed too fresh and too repetitive of the discussion of Goldwater--champions of liberty get called fascists by champions of statism--so it seemed best to leave the Gipper out.

  But the current president is a special case, isn't he? George W. Bush has probably been called a fascist more than any other U.S. president. Leading politicians from around the world have compared him to Hitler. A cottage industry of cranks has tried to blame the Bush family for helping to create Hitler in the first place. Bush's democracy agenda--which I support--has become synonymous with a kind of neo-fascism around the globe and in many quarters at home. It's a curious irony that the most Wilsonian president in a generation is seen as a fascist by many people who would bristle at the suggestion that Wilson himself was a fascist.

  When I said in the previous chapter, "We're all fascists now," I meant that it is impossible to drain entirely the fascist toxins from our culture. Truth be told, that's not so worrisome. The lethality of a poison depends on the dosage, and a little fascism, like a little nationalism or a little paternalism, is something we can live with--indeed, it may even be considered normal. But there is a yeastiness to such things, a potential for growth that can quickly become deadly. So in response to the reader who asks, "What about Bush? What about the conservatives?" let me close by examining the fascist tendencies that exist today on the American right.

  COMPASSIONATE FASCISM

  Throughout this book I have focused on the totalitarian tendencies of the left. This was important because of the hardened dogma that fascism is a right-wing phenomenon. But because the longing for community is written in the human heart, the totalitarian temptation can also be found on the right.

  People across the ideological spectrum have a tendency to romanticize tribalism under different names, and hence yearn to re-create it. This is, by definition, a reactionary tendency because it attempts to restore an imagined past or satisfy an ancient yearning. Communism was reactionary because it tried to make a tribe of the working class. Italian Fascism tried to make a tribe of the nation. Nazism tried to make a tribe of the German race. Multicultural identity politics is reactionary because it sees life as a contest between different racial or sexual tribes. Similarly, Hillary Clinton's village is reactionary because it tries to restore the tribal comforts of small-town life on a national and even universal level (her American village eventually melts into the global village). But conservatives are just as prone to this human yearning, and while it manifests itself in different ways, I'll concentrate on three.

  The first is nostalgia, a dangerous emotion in politics. American conservatives have long cast themselves as champions of hearth and home, traditional virtues, and, of course, family values. I have no objection when conservatives champion these virtues and values in the cultural sphere. Nor do I object when such concerns translate themselves into political efforts to beat back the liberal statist Kulturkampf. But conservatives get into trouble when we try to translate these sentiments into political programs at the national level. The beauty of American conservatism has been that it is an alloy of two very different metals, cultural conservatism and (classical) political liberalism. Whenever it is willing to sacrifice its political liberalism in the name of implementing its cultural conservatism, it flirts with a right-wing socialism all its own.

  The second area where conservatism can run off the rails is when, out of a certain desperation to seem relevant, modern, or even progressive, it ventures into me-too conservatism, which is no kind of conservatism at all. American civilization is fundamentally liberal in the classical sense, and the ever-broadening reach of its principles of equality and liberty is both inevitable and desirable. Most conservatives share these underlying liberal values. What they reject are the totalitarian assumptions imported into American liberalism by twentieth-century progressives. The problem is, we now live in a world conditioned by the progressive outlook. People understand things in progressive terms. Even if you are skeptical about such notions, you cannot convince others of the rightness of your own positions if you do not speak the lingua franca. If you believe that abortion is evil, you will not convince someone who rejects moral categories like good and evil.

  Lastly, there is the siren song of identity politics. White people are not above tribalism. It is right and good to oppose racial quotas and the balkanizing logic of multiculturalism. It is also worthwhile to defend the broad outlines of American culture, which multiculturalists deride as "white culture" in order to delegitimize and, ultimately, destroy it. But it is dangerously corrupting to fight fire with fire. It is not that "white Christian America" is a bad or oppressive thing. Far from it. Rather, it is the desire to impose a vision of white Christian America that is dangerous, for in the effort to translate such a vision into a government program, an open society must become a closed one. Rousseau was right about one thing: censorship is useful for preserving morals but useless for restoring them. A Department of Judeo-Christian Culture would only succeed in creating a parody of real culture. In Europe the churches are subsidized by the state, and the pews are empty as a result. The problem with values relativism--the notion that all cultures are equal--is that important questions get decided via a contest of political power rather than a contest of ideas, and every subculture in our balkanized society becomes a constituency for some government functionary. The result is a state-sanctioned multicultural ethos where Aztecs and Athenians are equal--at least in the eyes of public school teachers and multicultural gurus. In an open society, best practices win. And the conservative c
ase is that best practices are best not because they are white or Christian but because they are plainly best.

  Of course, the danger posed by the multicultural welfare state is that by subscribing to values relativism it creates a climate where white Christians would be fools not to compete for control. For example, if the public schools are going to indoctrinate children to a moral vision, parents cannot be blamed for wanting that vision to be theirs. Much as with state interference in business or other realms of life, once the classical liberal vision of the state as a dispassionate arbiter and adjudicator is discarded in favor of a mommy state that plays favorites, it is only reasonable for people, groups, and businesses to compete for Mother's love.

  All three of these impulses have been on ample display among conservatives over the last two decades. There is perhaps no better illustration of this than Patrick J. Buchanan--the leading living exemplar of what liberals mean when they speak of an incipient American fascism.

  Born into an Irish Catholic household in Washington, D.C., Buchanan began his career as an editorialist for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. In the 1960s he signed on with Richard Nixon to help with the former vice president's political comeback. A nominal Goldwaterite, Buchanan served as Nixon's ambassador to the conservative movement and vice versa, defending the all-too-progressive Nixon to the conservatives and defending the conservatives to Nixon. After the 1968 election Buchanan served as an adviser and speechwriter for both Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew.

  Even before he was dubbed "Pitchfork Pat," Buchanan had earned a reputation as a populist. He helped coin the phrase "silent majority" for Nixon and pushed his boss to attack East Coast elites and, often in code, Jews. In a series of memos in 1972 he advised Nixon that the president "should move to re-capture the anti-Establishment tradition or theme in American politics." Nixon should paint George McGovern "as the Candidate of the New York Times, the Ford Foundation, elitist left-wing professors, snot-nosed demonstrators, black radicals and the whole elitist gang," Buchanan advised, while Nixon should assume the mantle of "the Candidate of the Common Man, the working man." Liberal commentators repeatedly compare Buchanan to Father Coughlin.1 And while it is true that Buchanan seems to have a dismaying problem with Jews, this attitude stems not so much from his relationship with conservatism as from his vestigial 1930s-style populism. Buchanan has written glowingly about the America First Committee, and, like Charles Lindbergh, he suggests that America was orchestrated into World War II by groups that did not have America's interests at heart.

  In the 1990s liberal anger about Buchanan's "right-wing" fascism reached a fever pitch. As Molly Ivins wrote in response to Buchanan's 1992 Republican National Convention speech: "It probably sounded better in the original German."2 The irony here is that Buchanan was actually moving to the left. For years Buchanan's opponents called him a crypto-Nazi for his defense of Ronald Reagan and the GOP. In reality, the only thing that kept his fascist instincts in check was his loyalty to the GOP and the conservative movement. After Reagan and the Cold War, Buchanan abandoned both in a leftward search for his true principles.

  Buchanan calls himself a "paleoconservative," but in truth he's a neo-progressive. During the 2000 election he denounced free marketeers and flat taxers, saying that they spent too much time with "the boys down at the yacht basin."3 He came out in favor of capping executive pay, in support of higher unemployment benefits, and against any kind of free-market Medicare reform and backed a "Third Way" approach to government activism. Buchanan's neo-Progressivism has even caused the onetime Reagan aide to rail against the social Darwinism of the free market.

  Culturally, Buchanan's "lock-and-load" populism was a throwback to William Jennings Bryan and Joe McCarthy. He also represents a resurgence of Progressive Era theories of "race suicide." In The Death of the West, Buchanan argues that the white race is becoming an "endangered species" about to be swallowed up by Third World hordes. He suggests that the Russian ultranationalist demagogue Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky may have been onto something when he proposed a Russian Lebensborn program whereby Russians would accept polygamy. A proud Irish brawler, Buchanan always took ethnic pride very seriously. Thus rather than opposing left-wing multiculturalism, he embraced it, arguing that elite colleges should take steps to "look more like America" by enforcing quotas for "non-Jewish whites" or "Euro-Americans."4

  The marriage of statism and eugenic racism motivated Progressive Era thinkers like Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, E. A. Ross, and Richard Ely. Conservatives should ask themselves how such sentiments are any different coming from Buchanan. Meanwhile, liberals who think such ideas earn Buchananites the fascist label need to explain why progressives are absolved from that charge when they believed precisely the same things.

  Foreign policy considerations have made it seem like Buchanan and George W. Bush are light-years apart. Indeed, Buchanan's isolationism and harsh views on Israel have earned him a strange new respect from some on both the left and the right. But it should be remembered that Buchanan was the first "compassionate conservative." "I may charge him with plagiarism," Buchanan complained when asked his opinion of George W. Bush's slogan.5

  Now, Bush's compassionate conservatism differs dramatically in key respects. Buchanan is an immigration restrictionist horrified by the influx of Hispanics into the United States. Bush is famously pro-immigration, arguing that "family values don't end at the Rio Grande." Bush is a free trader, a tax cutter, and a moderate on affirmative action. He is eager to bring minorities into the GOP fold. Also unlike Buchanan, he is an internationalist foreign policy hawk with deep sympathy for Israel.

  But there is real commonality between them. First, Bush's politics likewise represents a kind of capitulation to a social base. Bush is a representative of "red state" America in much the way Bill Clinton and, more acutely, John Kerry represent "blue state" America. In many respects, Bushism is merely a concession to reality. In a polarized political culture, presidents must choose sides to get elected. But such pragmatic concessions do not erase the fact that a politics based on taking care of a constituency with trinkets from the public fisc does profound violence to conservative principles.

  Second, both men are products of a new progressive spirit in American politics. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, liberals believed that the demise of national security as a defining issue would allow them to revive the progressive agenda. They hoped to invest the "peace dividend" in all manner of Third Way schemes, including neo-corporatist public-private partnerships, emulating the more enlightened industrial policies of Europe and Japan. Bill Clinton borrowed liberally from Kennedy and FDR, melding populist rhetoric ("putting people first") with the new-politics themes of the Kennedy era. The climax of all this was Hillary Clinton's attempt to take over American health care, which in turn released largely libertarian antibodies in the form of the Contract with America and the, alas short-lived, Gingrich revolution. Some very welcome policies and even more encouraging rhetoric--such as welfare reform and Bill Clinton's January 1996 declaration that "the era of big government is over"--emerged from this tension. But soon enough, the libertarian fever broke when the public sided with President Clinton over the ill-fated government shutdown launched by Newt Gingrich.

  Gingrich himself, who'd tried to scuttle various cabinet agencies, was at the same time proclaiming that his speakership represented the dawn of a new Progressive Era, and he has always spoken fondly of earlier generations of liberals. Indeed, throughout the 1990s, Republicans and conservative writers became enthralled with Progressivism. A veritable personality cult developed around Teddy Roosevelt, with one politician after another claiming his mantle--chief among them John McCain, whose fondness for Roosevelt-style regulation borders on legendary.

  In the 1990s the Weekly Standard launched a crusade for "National Greatness" in the tradition of the Rough Rider. David Brooks quoted approvingly Roosevelt's warning that Americans risk getting "sunk in a scrambling commercialism, heedless of the higher life
, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk." What was needed to fight off such decay? Roosevelt's "muscular Progressivism," of course. If Americans "think of nothing but their narrow self-interest, of their commercial activities," Brooks warned, "they lose a sense of grand aspiration and noble purpose." Translation: Americans need a politics of meaning. Meanwhile, the Standard's editor, William Kristol, took to denouncing reflexive antigovernment conservatism as immature and counterproductive while his magazine rattled sabers at China and Iraq.6

  It was from this milieu that "compassionate conservatism" emerged. Bush's adviser Karl Rove, an ardent fan of Teddy Roosevelt's, offered compassionate conservatism not as an alternative to Clinton's Third Way politics but as a Republican version of the same thing. In 2000 George W. Bush proudly ran as a different kind of conservative, claiming education, single motherhood, and national unity as his themes. Borrowing from Marvin Olasky, the adroit Christian intellectual who coined the phrase "compassionate conservative," the Bush team set out to make it clear that they saw the government as an instrument of love, Christian love in particular.

  The very adjective "compassionate" echoes progressive and liberal denunciations of limited government as cruel, selfish, or social Darwinist. In other words, as a marketing slogan alone, it represented a repudiation of the classical liberalism at the core of modern American conservatism because it assumed that limited government, free markets, and personal initiative were somehow "uncompassionate."

  Nonetheless, conservatives who complain about Bush's "big-government conservatism" as if it were some great betrayal ignore the fact that they were warned. When Bush responded in a presidential debate in 2000 that his favorite political philosopher was "Jesus Christ," small-government conservatives should have sensed the ghost of the Social Gospel. Michael Gerson, Bush's longtime speechwriter and adviser, is unapologetic about his belief that the federal government should be suffused with the spirit of Christian charity. After he left the White House, he wrote a piece for Newsweek, "A New Social Gospel," in which he describes the new evangelicals as "pro-life and pro-poor." In another Newsweek essay he railed against small-government conservatism, wrung his hands about "unfettered individualism," and concluded that "any political movement that elevates abstract antigovernment ideology above human needs is hardly conservative, and unlikely to win."7