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

by Jonah Goldberg

  34. Robespierre, speech of Feb. 5, 1794, in Modern History Sourcebook, www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/robespierre-terror.html.

  35. Marisa Linton, "Robespierre and the Terror," History Today, Aug. 1, 2006.

  36. R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998), p. 104.

  37. David Ramsay Steele, "The Mystery of Fascism," Liberty, www.laarticles.org.uk/fascism.htm (accessed March 13, 2007).

  38. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, p. 148, citing Margherita G. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, trans. Frederic Whyte (New York: Stokes, 1925), p. 263.

  39. Mussolini, My Rise and Fall, p. 36.

  40. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, p. 149, citing Jasper Ridley, Mussolini: A Biography (New York: St. Martin's, 1997), p. 71.

  41. Jeffrey T. Schnapp, pp. 3-6; Charles F. Delzell, Mediterranean Fascism, 1919-1945 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 12-13.

  42. Robert O. Paxton, "The Five Stages of Fascism," Journal of Modern History 70, no. 1 (March 1998), p. 15.

  43. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2004), p. 17; Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship, p. 39. According to Hannah Arendt, Mussolini "was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone." Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1966), p. 325 n. 39.

  44. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 72.

  45. Arnaldo Cortesi, "Mussolini, on Radio, Gives Peace Pledge," New York Times, Jan. 2, 1931; W. Y. Elliott, "Mussolini, Prophet of the Pragmatic Era in Politics," Political Science Quarterly 41, no. 2 (June 1926), pp. 161-92.

  46. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, pp. 170, 171.

  2. ADOLF HITLER: MAN OF THE LEFT

  1. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 533.

  2. According to Robert O. Paxton, the first example of "national socialism" as an ideological label and political precursor to fascism was the Cercle Proudhon in France in 1911, a club of intellectuals who aimed to "unite nationalists and left-wing anti-democrats" to mount an attack on "Jewish capitalism." Its founder, Georges Valois, worked tirelessly to convert the working class away from Marxist internationalism to a nation-based socialism. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2004), p. 48.

  3. Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 185; Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 232; Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: Perennial, 1991), p. 319; Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival (repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), p. 30.

  4. Joachim Fest, Hitler (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 205.

  5. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 18.

  6. This might be a little unfair to Chamberlain in that his appeasement was based in no small part on realpolitik while Western pacifists were often Hitler's useful idiots.

  7. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Touchstone, 1990), p. 205.

  8. John Lukacs, The Hitler of History (New York: Vintage, 1997), p. 84.

  9. David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 19; Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), p. 245.

  10. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 406.

  11. Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (New York: Random House, 1998), p. xii; Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New York: Da Capo, 1993), p. 20; Eugene H. Methvin, "20th Century Superkillers," National Review, May 31, 1985, pp. 22-29.

  12. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 195.

  13. Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution, p. 62.

  14. Roger Griffin, ed., Fascism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 123.

  15. Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 484, 496-97.

  16. Ibid., p. 484.

  17. Burleigh, Third Reich, pp. 132-33.

  18. Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution, p. 59; Burleigh, Third Reich, p. 105.

  19. Theodore Abel, Why Hitler Came Into Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), pp. 135-39; Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism: Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth Century (Malabar, Fla.: Kriegler, 1982), p. 55, quoting Abel, Why Hitler Came Into Power, pp. 203-301.

  20. Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924 (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 253.

  21. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1974), p. 136; Burleigh, Third Reich, p. 55.

  22. John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 217 n. 19.

  23. Ibid., p. 215.

  24. Sidney Hook, "The Fallacy of the Theory of Social Fascism," in American Anxieties: A Collective Portrait of the 1930s, ed. Louis Filler (Somerset, N.J.: Transaction, 1993), p. 320.

  3. WOODROW WILSON AND THE BIRTH OF LIBERAL FASCISM

  1. Fred Siegel, "'It Can't Happen Here,'" Weekly Standard, Aug. 14, 2006, p. 40. Amusingly, one of the most devastating critics of the book was in fact Lewis himself. At a left-wing event held to honor the book and its author, Lewis said, "Boys, I love you all. And a writer loves to have his latest book praised. But let me tell you, it isn't a very good book."

  2. Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here (New York: New American Library, 2005), p. 46.

  3. Ibid., pp. 16, 17.

  4. Woodrow Wilson, "The Ideals of America," The Atlantic Monthly, December 1902. See also Tony Smith, America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 63; Jan Willem, Woodrow Wilson: A Life for World Peace, trans. Herbert H. Rowen (Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press 1991), p. 37.

  5. Walter McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 128.

  6. George Orwell, "Review of Power: A New Social Analysis," Adelphi, Jan. 1939, in Essays (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 107.

  7. Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908, 1961).

  8. Ronald J. Pestritto, "Why Progressivism Is Not, and Never Was, a Source of Conservative Values," Claremont Review of Books, Aug. 25, 2005, www.claremont.org/publications/pubid.439/pub_detail.asp (accessed March 14, 2007). Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1913).

  9. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), pp. 66, 59.

  10. Ibid., p. 111.

  11. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, p. 127.

  12. John G. West, Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest (Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2006), p. 61.

  13. Woodrow Wilson, Leaders of Men, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952), pp. 20, 25-26.

  14. Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), p. 165.

  15. John Milton Cooper Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 150-51.

  16. Beveridge boasted that the Meat Inspection Act constituted "THE MOST PRONOUNCED EXTENSION OF FEDERAL POWER IN EVERY DI RECTION EVER ENACTED." McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 163. For the quotation, see William E. Leuchtenburg, "Progressivism and Imperialism: The Progressive Movement and American Foreign Policy, 1898-1916," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39, no. 3 (Dec. 1952), p. 484.

  17. Walter McDougall's Promised Land, Crus
ader State is invaluable for understanding this point. McDougall writes:

  Historians stress the dynamic crosscurrents in turn-of-the-century American society. Foster Rhea Dulles thought the era "marked by many contradictions." Richard Hofstadter identified "two different moods" one tending toward protest and reform, the other toward national expansion. Frederick Merk wrote of Manifest Destiny contesting with mission, and Ernest May of "cascades of imperialistic and moralistic oratory." But the contradictions are only a product of our wish to cleanse the Progressive movement of its taint of imperialism abroad. For at bottom, the belief that American power, guided by a secular and religious spirit of service, could remake foreign societies came as easily to the Progressives as trust-busting, prohibition of child labor, and regulation of interstate commerce, meatpacking, and drugs. Leading imperialists like Roosevelt, Beveridge, and Willard Straight were all Progressives; leading Progressives like Jacob Riis, Gifford Pinchot, and Robert La Follette all supported the Spanish war and the insular acquisitions. (p. 120)

  And in a famous 1952 essay, the historian William Leuchtenburg wrote that "imperialism and progressivism flourished together because they were both expressions of the same philosophy of government, a tendency to judge any action not by the means employed but by the results achieved, a worship of definitive action for action's sake, as John Dewey has pointed out, and an almost religious faith in the democratic mission of America." Leuchtenburg, "Progressivism and Imperialism," p. 500.

  18. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 209; Arthur A. Ekrich Jr., The Decline of American Liberalism (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. 193.

  19. Long also said that it would come to America as "anti-Fascism," a fairly prophetic analysis since the left has long considered itself the fighting wedge of "anti-Fascism." For the Mencken quotations, see H. L. Mencken, "Roosevelt: An Autopsy," in Prejudices: Second Series (New York: Knopf, 1920), pp. 112, 114.

  20. Ronald J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), p. 255. Emphasis mine.

  21. Progressives didn't start widely using the word "progressive" to describe themselves until 1909. In England progressives might be called "Tory democrats," "Labour imperialists," "new liberals," "Fabians," or "collectivists." In America progressives might go by "reformer" or even "radical" and, of course, Republican or Democrat (the widespread use of the word "liberal" to describe progressives didn't fully catch on until the 1920s). In France and Germany many of these labels were in play, too, as were such monikers as interventionnistes. Some cited Nietzsche, others Marx, others William James. Many--as Mussolini and Georges Sorel would--claimed all three as influences. Indeed, there's little doubt that some Italian socialist bands called fascios in Italy at the time fell squarely in the "progressive" camp. And we know that the nationalist intellectuals who laid the groundwork for fascism in Italy were heavily influenced by William James's pragmatism, just as James was influenced by them.

  22. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 57, 74.

  23. Joseph Jacobs, "Works of Friedrich Nietzsche," New York Times, May 7, 1910; Mencken, "Roosevelt: An Autopsy," p. 111. Indeed, Richard Hofstadter, the iconic liberal historian, saw Teddy Roosevelt as a thinly veiled fascist. In the words of David Brown, Hofstadter's biographer, Roosevelt's defining characteristic was a "Mussolini lite" and his politics, marked by a "stern dedication to nationalism, martial values, and a common spirit of racial identity and destiny" were "a slight variation of the fascist politics that poisoned Europe following Roosevelt's death." David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. xvi, 60.

  24. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, pp. 86-87.

  25. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 102; Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson, The Development of Modern Europe: An Introduction to the Study of Current History, vol. 2 (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1907), p. 141; Frederic C. Howe, Socialized Germany (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1915), p. 166; Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 66.

  26. Murray N. Rothbard, "World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals," Journal of Libertarian Studies 9, no. 1 (Winter 1989), p. 103.

  27. Woodrow Wilson, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 1 (New York: Harper, 1927), pp. 6-10.

  28. James Bovard, Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), p. 8.

  29. Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era, 1900-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 124-25.

  30. Wilfred M. McClay, "Croly's Progressive America," Public Interest, no. 137 (Fall 1999).

  31. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 192.

  32. Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism, p. 15; Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 191.

  33. Bovard, Freedom in Chains, p. 8.

  34. Leuchtenburg, "Progressivism and Imperialism," p. 490.

  35. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), p. 14.

  36. Herbert Croly, "Regeneration," New Republic (June 9, 1920), pp. 40-44; originally found in Sydney Kaplan, "Social Engineers as Saviors: Effects of World War I on Some American Liberals," Journal of the History of Ideas (June 1956), pp. 347-69.

  37. John Patrick Diggins, "Flirtation with Fascism: American Pragmatic Liberals and Mussolini's Italy," American Historical Review 71, no. 2 (Jan. 1966), p. 494.

  38. "No doubt there were single hours in the world war," Ross wrote in The Russian Soviet Republic, "when more Russian lives were consumed than the Red Terror ever took...it accomplished its purpose in that the bourgeoisie suddenly ceased to plot." Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, "The Early American Observers of the Russian Revolution, 1917-1921," Russian Review 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1943), p. 67. Razstrellyat misspelled in original.

  39. Ibid., p. 69.

  40. Lewis S. Feuer, "American Travelers to the Soviet Union, 1917-32: The Formation of a Component of New Deal Ideology," American Quarterly 14, no. 2, pt. 1 (Summer 1962), p. 125; Stuart Chase, Robert Dunn, and Rexford Guy Tugwell, eds., Soviet Russia in the Second Decade (New York: John Day, 1928), pp. 49-50, 54.

  41. Feuer, "American Travelers to the Soviet Union," pp. 102, 128, 126, 119-49.

  42. Ibid., p. 132.

  43. The March 2, 1927, issue of the New Republic informed readers that "the more liberal attitude is to regard Fascism in Italy, like Communism in Russia, as a political and social experiment which has a function in Italian political development and which cannot be understood and appraised from the formulas either of its friends or enemies."

  44. Diggins, "Flirtation with Fascism," p. 494, citing Charles A. Beard, "Making the Fascist State," New Republic, Jan. 23, 1929, pp. 277-78.

  45. West, Darwin's Conservatives, p. 60.

  46. It was around this time that the New Republic became akin to an intellectual PR firm for the Wilson administration. Teddy Roosevelt was so frustrated that his former cheering section had switched loyalties he proclaimed the New Republic a "negligible sheet run by two anemic Gentiles and two uncircumcised Jews." Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 194.

  47. Woodrow Wilson, Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Trusts and Monopolies, Jan. 20, 1914, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=65374 (accessed March 14, 2007).

  48. Wilson's conviction that he was the messianic incarnation of world-historical forces was total. Time and again he argued that he was the instrument of God or history or both. He concluded a famous speech to the League to Enforce Peace:

  But I did not come here, let me repeat, to discuss a program. I came only to avow a creed and give expression to the confidence I feel that the world is even now upon the eve of a great consummation, when some common force will be brought into existence which shall safeguard right as the first and most fundamental inte
rest of all peoples and all governments, when coercion shall be summoned not to the service of political ambition or selfish hostility, but to the service of a common order, a common justice, and a common peace. God grant that the dawn of that day of frank dealing and of settled peace, concord, and cooperation may be near at hand!

  Full text can be found at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=65391. Woodrow Wilson, The Messages and Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 1, ed. Albert Shaw (New York: Review of Reviews Corporation, 1924), p. 275. See also "Text of the President's Speech Discussing Peace and Our Part in a Future League to Prevent War," New York Times, May 28, 1916, p. 1.

  49. William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 39.

  50. For the Dewey quotation, see www.fff.org/freedom/fd0203c.asp; for the Blatch, see McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 282, and John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 127; for the Ely, see Murray N. Rothbard, "Richard T. Ely: Paladin of the Welfare-Warfare State," Independent Review 6, no. 4 (Spring 2002), p. 587; for the Wilson, see "Gov. Wilson Stirs Spanish Veterans," New York Times, Sept. 11, 1912, p. 3; for the Hitler, see The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943, ed. Louis P. Lochner (New York: Doubleday, 1948), p. 314.

  51. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 282.

  52. For the Croly quotations, see "The End of American Isolation," editorial, New Republic, Nov. 7, 1914, quoted in John B. Judis, "Homeward Bound," New Republic, March 3, 2003, p. 16; and Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, p. 202. For the Lippmann quotations, see Ronald Steel, "The Missionary," New York Review of Books, Nov. 20, 2003; and Heinz Eulau, "From Public Opinion to Public Philosophy: Walter Lippmann's Classic Reexamined," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 15, no. 4 (July 1956), p. 441.

  53. Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, p. 39; David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 52.