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

by Jonah Goldberg

  24. We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral sense of the Germanic race. The Party as such advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the framework: common utility precedes individual utility.

  25. For the execution of all of this we demand the formation of a strong central power in the Reich. Unlimited authority of the central parliament over the whole Reich and its organizations in general. The forming of state and profession chambers for the execution of the laws made by the Reich within the various states of the confederation. The leaders of the Party promise, if necessary by sacrificing their own lives, to support by the execution of the points set forth above without consideration.

  * * *

  Source: Document as translated at the Nuremberg Trials: Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Volume IV, Office of the United States Chief Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1946), found at Yale University Avalon Project: www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/document/nca_vol4/1708-ps.htm (accessed March 13, 2007).

  * * *

  Note: This translation differs in significant respects from other translations. For example, it uses the word "warehouses" where most other translations use "department stores" or "big department stores." But since the Nuremberg translation probably has more credibility with skeptical readers than one more convenient to my thesis, I chose to use this one. Any Internet search engine will yield other translations.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT FASCISM IS WRONG

  1. Real Time with Bill Maher, HBO, Sept. 9, 2005.

  2. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St. Martin's, 1991), p. 26; Roger Eatwell, "On Defining the 'Fascist Minimum': The Centrality of Ideology," Journal of Political Ideologies 1, no. 3 (1996), p. 313; Gentile is quoted in Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 5 n. 6.

  3. Griffin, Nature of Fascism, p. 1, quoting R. A. H. Robinson, Fascism in Europe (London: Historical Association, 1981), p. 1; the dictionary definition is quoted in Richard Griffiths, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Fascism (London: Duckworth, 2000), p. 4; Payne, History of Fascism, p. 3; Gilbert Allardyce, "What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept," American Historical Review 84, no. 2 (April 1979), p. 367.

  4. George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," Horizon, April 1946, in Essays (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 959.

  5. Michele Parente, "Rangel Ties GOP Agenda to Hitler," Newsday, Feb. 19, 1995, p. A38; Bill Clinton, Remarks to the Association of State Democratic Chairs in Los Angeles, June 24, 2000, Public Papers of the Presidents, 36 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 1491; for a typical Times article, see Alexander Stille, "The Latest Obscenity Has Seven Letters," New York Times, Sept. 13, 2003.

  6. Rick Perlstein, "Christian Empire," New York Times, Jan. 7, 2007, sec. 7, p. 15; Jesse Jackson, interview, "Expediency Was Winner Over Right," Chicago Sun-Times, Dec. 3, 1994, p. 18.

  7. In America "social Darwinism" means "survival of the fittest" in an anarchic free-for-all of capitalist predation. This is the tradition of Herbert Spencer, a radical freethinker and individualist. By that definition, Nazism is the opposite of social Darwinism. As we shall see, the Nazis were Darwinists, but they were reform Darwinists, believing that the state should actively pick winners and losers and lavish the winners with social benefits, welfare, and other forms of government largesse--exactly the opposite position of those we call social Darwinists.

  8. John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 215.

  9. One correspondent for the New York Times was an enthusiastic supporter of Italian Fascism for many years, writing that fascism was both good for Italy and good for the Abyssinians Mussolini tried to conquer. That reporter, Herbert Matthews, later recanted his support for fascism when it came into conflict with his support for the communists in the Spanish civil war. But years later he found another revolutionary "man of action" he could support with gusto: Fidel Castro.

  10. DuBois eventually condemned Nazi anti-Semitism, but often through clenched teeth as he was more than a little resentful of the special attention the plight of Jews was receiving in America. In September 1933 he editorialized in Crisis: "Nothing has filled us with such unholy glee as Hitler and the Nordics. When the only 'inferior' peoples were 'niggers,' it was hard to get the attention of the New York Times for little matters of race, lynchings and mobs. But now that the damned include the owner of the Times, moral indignation is perking up." Harold David Brackman, "'Calamity Almost Beyond Comprehension': Nazi Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in the Thought of W. E. B. DuBois," American Jewish History 88, no. 1 (March 2000), citing W. E. B. DuBois, "As the Crow Flies," Crisis 40 (Sept. 1933), p. 97.

  11. See John Garraty, James Q. Wilson, David Schoenbaum, Alonzo Hamby, Niall Ferguson, and, most powerfully, the German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch.

  12. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), pp. 32, 29.

  13. Ironically, the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter made a similar, if dramatically more understated, argument about the progressives and populists in The Age of Reform and elsewhere. But he intimated that progressives and populists were essentially right-wing forces, an argument I don't believe can be sustained.

  14. The national leaders would be "pure and sensitive souls," according to Robespierre, imbued with the ability to do what destiny demanded in "the people's name" and blessed with the "enlightenment" to determine which "enemies within" required execution. See J. M. Thompson, Robespierre (New York: Appleton-Century, 1936), p. 247. As Robespierre put it, "The people is sublime, but individuals are weak" or expendable. Gertrude Himmelfarb, "The Idea of Compassion: The British vs. the French Enlightenment," Public Interest, no. 145 (Fall 2001), p. 20. See also Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 836; John Kekes, "Why Robespierre Chose Terror," City Journal (Spring 2006). Robespierre explained the need for terror: "If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs."

  15. Thomas R. DeGregori, "Muck and Magic or Change and Progress: Vitalism Versus Hamiltonian Matter-of-Fact Knowledge," Journal of Economic Issues 37, no. 1 (March 2003), pp. 17-33.

  16. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 95, citing New York Sun, July 23, 1896, p. 2, as reported in Edward Flower, "Anti-Semitism in the Free Silver and Populist Movements and the Election of 1896" (master's thesis, Columbia University, 1952), pp. 27-28.

  17. As Robert Proctor writes, "Public health initiatives were pursued not just in spite of fascism, but also in consequence of fascism." The National Socialist "campaign against tobacco and the 'whole-grain bread operation' are, in some sense, as fascist as the yellow stars and the death camps." Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 124, 249, 278.

  18. Here is a list of the things the New York City Council tried to ban--not all successfully--in 2006 alone: pit bulls; trans fats; aluminum baseball bats; the purchase of tobacco by eighteen-to twenty-year-olds; foie gras; pedicabs in parks; new fast-food r
estaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods); lobbyists from the floor of council chambers; lobbying city agencies after working at the same agency; vehicles in Central and Prospect parks; cell phones in upscale restaurants; the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, because of a unionization dispute; mail-order pharmaceutical plans; candy-flavored cigarettes; gas-station operators adjusting prices more than once daily; Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus; Wal-Mart. "Whatever It Is, They're Against It," New York Post, Dec. 29, 2006, p. 36.

  19. Greenpeace International, "Getting It On for the Good of the Planet: The Greenpeace Guide to Environmentally-Friendly Sex," Sept. 10, 2002, www.greenpeace.org/international/news/eco-sex-guide (accessed March 15, 2007).

  20. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Knopf, 1994), vol. 2, p. 320.

  21. Philip Coupland, "H. G. Wells's 'Liberal Fascism,'" Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 4 (Oct. 2000), p. 549.

  22. Wells's theology was, to put it mildly, heretical. He argued that God was not all-powerful but rather an ally of man "struggling and taking a part against evil." H. G. Wells, God, the Invisible King (New York: Macmillan, 1917), p. xiv. His was also a God of imperialism and conquest.

  1. MUSSOLINI: THE FATHER OF FASCISM

  1. Many authors have referenced these lyrics to demonstrate Mussolini's widespread popularity, but it is a common mistake to ascribe these lyrics to Cole Porter, the original author of the musical Anything Goes. Porter almost certainly did not write these lyrics. Rather, they were probably added by P. G. Wodehouse when he helped adapt the musical for the British stage. It also appears that there were multiple versions of the song with the Mussolini lyric, which hopscotched back and forth across the Atlantic.

  2. Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1998) won Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor and was nominated for Best Director. The title of the film, ironically enough, derives from Leon Trotsky. According to Benigni, shortly before the exiled Bolshevik was to be assassinated in Mexico, he supposedly looked at his wife in their garden and said, "Life is beautiful anyway."

  3. John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 245; Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), p. 295.

  4. "Calls Mussolini Latin Roosevelt," New York Times, Oct. 7, 1923, p. E10.

  5. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, p. 206; Norman Hapgood, Professional Patriots (New York: Boni, 1927), p. 62.

  6. "Hughes a Humorist, Will Rogers Says," New York Times, Sept. 28, 1926, p. 29; Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, p. 27, citing Will Rogers, "Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President," Saturday Evening Post, July 31, 1926, pp. 8-9, 82-84.

  7. Toscanini's relationship with the Mussolini regime was turbulent. For reasons probably more artistic than political, he refused to perform the fascist national anthem, "Giovinezza."

  8. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, Volume II: Muckraking/Revolution/ Seeing America at Last (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1931), p. 799; McClure's view can be found in Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, pp. 28-29.

  9. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, pp. 255, 257.

  10. Those numbers evened out a bit as Americans became increasingly interested in the Soviets' five-year plan. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 51.

  11. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, p. 244.

  12. La Follette's son, Philip, the famously progressive governor of Wisconsin, kept a picture of Mussolini in his office as late as 1938. Ibid., pp. 220-21.

  13. Benito Mussolini, My Rise and Fall (New York: Da Capo, 1998), p. 3.

  14. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: Perennial, 1991), p. 96. Here's how Mussolini describes one incident in his autobiography: "I caught her on the stairs, throwing her into a corner behind a door, and made her mine. When she got up weeping and humiliated she insulted me by saying that I had robbed her of her honor and it is not impossible that she spoke the truth. But I ask you, what kind of honor could she have meant?"

  15. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 43.

  16. Found in ibid., p. 224, n. 61.

  17. The historian Hugh Gallagher writes of Roosevelt, he "was no Thomas Jefferson, and neither a scholar nor an intellectual in the usual sense of the word. He had a magpie mind, and many interests, but he was not deep." William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 27, quoting Hugh Gregory Gallagher, FDR's Splendid Deception: The Moving Story of Roosevelt's Massive Disability--and the Intense Efforts to Conceal It from the Public (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985), p. 160.

  18. Ivone Kirkpatrick, Mussolini (London: Odhams, 1964), p. 47.

  19. Ibid., p. 49.

  20. Mussolini wrote in a review of Sorel's Reflections on Violence, "That which I am...I owe to Sorel...He is an accomplished Master who, with his sharp theories on revolutionary formations, contributed to the molding of the discipline, the collective energy, the power of the masses, of the Fascist cohorts." A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free Press, 1969), p. 116. In 1913 Sorel said, "Mussolini is no ordinary Socialist. One day you will see him at the head of a consecrated battalion, greeting the Italian banner with his dagger. He is an Italian of the 15th century, a condottiere. You do not know it yet. But he is the one energetic man who has the capacity to correct the weaknesses of the government." Kirkpatrick, Mussolini, p. 159.

  21. Joshua Muravchik, Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), p. 146; Joseph Husslein, The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912, p. 386; Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 11.

  22. If all the workers were already dedicated socialists, there would be no need for a general strike because the society would have already made the transition to socialism. Neil McInnes, Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1973). For the Mussolini interview, see Kirkpatrick, Mussolini, p. 159. For the quotation from Sharpton, see John Cassidy, "Racial Tension Boils Over as Rape Case Is Branded a Hoax," Times (London), June 19, 1988.

  23. Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 56.

  24. Gregor, Ideology of Fascism, p. 116.

  25. Gertrude Himmelfarb, "The Idea of Compassion: The British vs. the French Enlightenment," Public Interest, no. 145 (Fall 2001).

  26. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (New York: Dutton, 1950), p. 297.

  27. For example, in 1924 the Italian Fascist theorist Giuseppe Bottai declared in a lecture, "Fascism as Intellectual Revolution": "If by democracy one understands the possibility granted all citizens of actively participating in the life of the state, then nobody will deny democracy's immortality. The French Revolution rendered this possibility historically and ethically concrete, so much so that an ineradicable right was born that exercises a tenacious hold on individual consciousness, independent of abstract invocations of immortal principles or developments in modern philosophy." Reprinted in: Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ed., A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p. 82.

  28. See George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich (New York: Fertig, 2001); George L. Mosse, "Fascism and the French Revolution," Journal of Contemporary History 24, no. 1 (Jan. 1989), pp. 5-26.

  29. The observation that Rousseau's state is the most "powerful to be found anywhere in political philosophy" is Robert Nisbet's. Robert Nisbert, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 52.

  30. Fascism, according to the fascist theor
ist Giuseppe Bottai, "was, for my comrades or myself, nothing more than a way of continuing the war, of transforming its values into a civic religion." "Fascism as Intellectual Revolution," p. 20. Augusto Turati, a party secretary and self-proclaimed "new apostle of the Fatherland's religion," explained to massive rallies of Italian Youth that the new "fascist religion" demanded "the need to believe absolutely; to believe in Fascism, in the Duce, in the Revolution. Just as one believes in God...we accept the Revolution with pride, just as we accept these principles--even if we realize they are mistaken, and we accept them without discussion."

  31. "Pope in Encyclical Denounces Fascisti and Defends Clubs," New York Times, July 4, 1931; "Everything Is Promised," Time, July 13, 1931. See also Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 95.

  32. David Nicholls, God and Government in an "Age of Reason" (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 80.

  33. The law was passed by the Convention but was never fully implemented. Himmelfarb, "Idea of Compassion." The Tocqueville quotation is from The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York: Anchor, 1955), p. 156, found in ibid.