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

by Jonah Goldberg

  7. It's widely believed that the character of Superman was inspired by Nietzsche's doctrine of the Ubermensch, which can be translated as both "overman" and "superman." But it's worth noting that the actual character was an inversion of the Nietzschean idea--and the Nazified concept. Nietzsche's superman owes no loyalty to conventional morality and legalisms because he is above such petty concerns. The comic Superman bound himself to such customs even more than normal men. There is a certain nationalistic conceit to the character in that he was born in the American heartland and imbibed all that was good of Americanism. But this manifested itself in benign or beneficial patriotism more than anything else.

  At the end of the issue on physical fitness, Superman and Supergirl lead a parade of Americans waving flags and holding signs supporting the president. One marcher carries a placard that reads, "OBSERVE THE PRESIDENT'S PHYSICAL FITNESS PROGRAM AND THE 'WEAKLING' AMERICANS WILL BE THE STRONG AMERICANS!" The comic was supposed to appear in early 1964, but the assassination postponed it. LBJ eventually asked DC Comics to run the issue as a tribute. Kennedy remained a recurring character after his death. In one comic Jimmy Olsen travels to the future and identifies alien villains because they are the only people who didn't observe a moment of silence for the slain president. See http://www.dialbforblog.com/archives/166/ for images from the comic and commentary (accessed July 10, 2007).

  8. The election would decide, Mailer wrote, "if the desire of America was for drama or stability, for adventure or monotony." Mailer hoped Americans would choose Kennedy "for his mystery, for his promise that the country would grow or disintegrate by the unwilling charge he gave to the intensity of the myth." Norman Mailer, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," Esquire, Nov. 1960, in Pols: Great Writers on American Politicians from Bryan to Reagan, ed. Jack Beatty (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), p. 292.

  9. Herbert S. Parmet, "The Kennedy Myth and American Politics," History Teacher 24, no. 1 (Nov. 1990), p. 32, citing "What JFK Meant to Us," Newsweek, Nov. 28, 1983, p. 72; Jonah Goldberg, "'Isolationism!' They Cried," National Review, April 10, 2006, p. 35; Alan McConnaughey, "America First: Attitude Emerged Before World War II," Washington Times, Dec. 12, 1991, p. A3.

  10. Louis Menand, "Ask Not, Tell Not: Anatomy of an Inaugural" New Yorker, Nov. 8, 2004, p. 110.

  11. John W. Jeffries, "The 'Quest for National Purpose' of 1960," American Quarterly 30, no. 4 (Autumn 1978), p. 451, citing John K. Jessup et al., The National Purpose (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. v. Newsweek had noted the previous year that "thoughtful men" were worried America had lost its "boldness and imagination, the sense of mission and dedication." Chief among these was Walter Lippmann, an elder statesman of liberalism who had led the march to war in 1917 in the hope that it would bring about a "transvaluation of values." Once again, Lippmann hoped Americans would embrace a collective mission, this time in the face of the Soviet challenge. Jeffries, "'Quest for National Purpose' of 1960," p. 454, citing "An Unwitting Paul Revere?" Newsweek, Sept. 28, 1959, pp. 33-34.

  12. Adlai E. Stevenson, "National Purpose: Stevenson's View," New York Times, May 26, 1960, p. 30; Charles F. Darlington, "Not the Goal, Only the Means," New York Times, July 3, 1960, p. 25; Charles F. Darlington, letter, New York Times, May 27, 1960, p. 30.

  13. Jeffries, "'Quest for National Purpose' of 1960," p. 462, citing William Attwood, "How America Feels as We Enter the Soaring Sixties," Look, Jan. 5, 1960, pp. 11-15; Leebaert, Fifty-Year Wound, p. 261.

  14. William F. Buckley, "Mr. Goodwin's Great Society," National Review (September 7, 1965), p. 760.

  15. Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), pp. 170, 171; David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Norton, 1980), p. xv n. 4.

  16. Leebaert, Fifty-Year Wound, p. 263; Wills, Kennedy Imprisonment, p. 171.

  17. H. W. Brands, The Strange Death of American Liberalism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 87-88.

  18. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Norton, 1995), p. 218 n. 55, citing David Eakins, "Policy-Planning for the Establishment," in A New History of Leviathan, ed. Ronald Radosh and Murray Rothbard (New York: Dutton, 1972), p. 198.

  19. James Reston, "A Portion of Guilt for All," New York Times, Nov. 25, 1963; Tom Wicker, "Johnson Bids Congress Enact Civil Rights Bill with Speed; Asks End of Hate and Violence," New York Times, Nov. 28, 1963.

  20. "When JFK's Ideals Are Realized, Expiation of Death Begins, Bishop Says," Washington Post, Dec. 9, 1963, p. B7.

  21. Robert N. Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967), pp. 1-21; C. L. Sulzberger, "A New Frontier and an Old Dream," New York Times, Jan. 23, 1961, p. 22.

  22. Bill Kauffman, "The Bellamy Boys Pledge Allegiance," American Enterprise 13, no. 7 (Oct./Nov. 2002), p. 50.

  23. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (New York: New American Library, 1960), p. 111.

  24. Nicholas P. Gilman, "'Nationalism' in the United States," Quarterly Journal of Economics 4, no. 1 (Oct. 1889), pp. 50-76; Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 143.

  25. The story of the Pledge of Allegiance and its National Socialist roots is a fascinating one. Rex Curry, a passionate libertarian, has made the issue his white whale. See rexcurry.net/pledgesalute.html.

  26. "Hail New Party in Fervent Song," New York Times, Aug. 6, 1912, p. 1.

  27. Senator Albert Beveridge, Congressional Record, Senate, Jan. 9, 1900, pp. 704-11, quoted in The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance, ed. Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom (Boston: South End Press, 1987), p. 23.

  28. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1912), p. 330. The Social Gospel journal Dawn, founded in 1890, was intended "to show that the aim of socialism is embraced in the aims of Christianity and to awaken members of Christian churches to the fact that the teachings of Jesus Christ lead directly to some specific form or forms of socialism." William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 175.

  29. Charles Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865-1915 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1940), p. 253.

  30. James Bovard, Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), p. 4, quoting G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Collier & Son, 1902), p. 87.

  31. Murray N. Rothbard, "Richard T. Ely: Paladin of the Welfare-Warfare State," Independent Review 6, no. 4 (Spring 2002), p. 586, citing Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865-1901 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), pp. 180-81; John R. Commons, "The Christian Minister and Sociology" (1892), in John R. Commons: Selected Essays, ed. Malcolm Rutherford and Warren J. Samuels (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 20; Eldon J. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), p. 60 n. 21.

  32. John Lukacs, Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2005), p. 305.

  33. Woodrow Wilson, "Force to the Utmost," speech at the opening of the Third Liberty Loan Campaign, delivered in the Fifth Regiment Armory, Baltimore, April 6, 1918, in The Messages and Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Albert Shaw (New York: Review of Reviews Corporation, 1924), vol. 1, p. 484; Woodrow Wilson, Address to Confederate Veterans, Washington, D.C., June 5, 1917, in ibid., p. 410; Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 10.

  34. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 97.

  35. An ad in a newspaper at the time gives a sense of how far the government intruded.

&n
bsp; Here is your schedule for eating for the next 4 weeks which must be rigidly observed, says F. C. Findley, County Food Commissioner:

  Monday: Wheatless every meal.

  Tuesday: Meatless every meal.

  Wednesday: Wheatless every meal.

  Thursday: Breakfast, meatless; supper wheatless.

  Friday: Breakfast, meatless; supper wheatless.

  Saturday: Porkless every meal, meatless breakfast.

  Sunday: Meatless breakfast; wheatless supper.

  Sugar must be used very sparingly at all times. Do not put sugar in your coffee unless this is a long habit, and in that case use only one spoonful. (Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], p. 137)

  36. John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2000), p. 30. See also Alex Viskovatoff, "A Deweyan Economic Methodology," in Dewey, Pragmatism, and Economic Methodology, ed. Elias L. Khalil (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 293; Virgil Michel, "Liberalism Yesterday and Tomorrow," Ethics 49, no. 4 (July 1939), pp. 417-34; Jonah Goldberg, "The New-Time Religion: Liberalism and Its Problems," National Review, May 23, 2005.

  37. 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), pp. 122, 126.

  38. William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 284. A. J. P. Taylor made a similar observation about people's interaction with the federal government:

  Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman...He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter a foreigner could spend his life in the country without permit and without informing the police...All this was changed by the impact of the Great War...The state established a hold over its citizens which though relaxed in peace time, was never to be removed and which the Second World War was again to increase. The history of the English people and the English State merged for the first time. (A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1965], p. 1)

  39. Quoted in Scott Yenor, "A New Deal for Roosevelt," Claremont Review of Books (Winter 2006).

  40. Thurman Arnold, The Folklore of Capitalism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937), p. 389.

  41. Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, p. 20.

  42. Walter Winchell, "Americans We Can Do Without," Liberty, Aug. 1, 1942, p. 10.

  43. See Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997), pp. 179, 561.

  44. Herbert McClosky, "Conservatism and Personality," American Political Science Review 52, no. 1 (March 1958), p. 35; Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking, 1950), p. ix.

  45. David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 90; Casey Blake and Christopher Phelps, "History as Social Criticism: Conversations with Christopher Lasch," Journal of American History 80, no. 4 (March 1994), pp. 1310-32.

  46. Bertolt Brecht, "The Solution," in Poems, 1913-1956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (New York: Routledge, 1987), p. 440.

  47. Robert Dallek, Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 29; Jordan A. Schwarz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 276.

  48. Schwarz, The New Dealers, p. 267.

  49. Lyndon B. Johnson, "Commencement Address--the Great Society," University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, May 22, 1964, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963-64 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1965), pp. 704-7; America in the Sixties--Right, Left, and Center: A Documentary History, ed. Peter B. Levy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998), pp. 106-7. See also Hayward, Age of Reagan, p. 21.

  50. Johnson, "Commencement Address--the Great Society," p. 108.

  51. Charles Mohr, "Johnson, in South, Decries 'Radical' Goldwater Ideas," New York Times, Oct. 27, 1964; Cabell Phillips, "Johnson Decries Terrorist Foes of Negro Rights," New York Times, July 19, 1964; "Transcript of President's News Conference on Foreign and Domestic Affairs," New York Times, July 19, 1964.

  52. Charles Mohr, "Johnson Exhorts Voters to Reject Demagogic Pleas," New York Times, Sept. 23, 1964; advertisement, New York Times, Sept. 12, 1964, p. 26; Ralph D. Barney and John C. Merrill, eds., Ethics and the Press: Readings in Mass Media Morality (New York: Hastings House, 1975), p. 229. See also Jack Shafer, "The Varieties of Media Bias, Part 1," Slate, Feb. 5, 2003, www.slate.com/id/2078200/ (accessed March 19, 2007); Jonah Goldberg, "Hold the Self-Congratulation," National Review, Oct. 24, 2005; Jeffrey Lord, "From God to Godless: The Real Liberal Terror," American Spectator, June 12, 2006, www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=9943 (accessed Jan. 16, 2007).

  53. However, in this work Dewey called the existing society the Great Society. He hoped that the state could transform the Great Society into what he called the "Great Community." But Dewey's Great Community sounds much closer to what Johnson had in mind with his Great Society.

  54. Robert R. Semple Jr., "Nation Seeks Way to Better Society," New York Times, July 25, 1965.

  55. Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, pp. 15, 76. The lineage of the War on Poverty was similarly transparent. Just as the New Deal was sold in the language of war, the War on Poverty was another chapter in the Progressive effort to invoke the "moral equivalent of war." Indeed, most of the Great Society programs were merely greatly expanded versions of New Deal programs, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which started as an insurance plan for the widows of coal miners. Those programs, in turn, were born out of a desire to re-create the "successes" of Wilson's war socialism. See also the chapter on John Dewey by Robert Horwitz, in The History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

  56. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, p. 207.

  57. John B. Judis, "The Spirit of '68: What Really Caused the Sixties," New Republic, Aug. 31, 1998.

  58. The Feminine Mystique is an excellent example of how powerfully the Holocaust had distorted the liberal mind. A longtime communist journalist and activist, Friedan cast herself in The Feminine Mystique as a conventional housewife completely ignorant of politics. In a disturbing extended metaphor she argued that housewives were victims of Nazi-like oppression. The "women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps," she wrote. The home, Friedan wrote in direct echoes of Horkheimer, was a "comfortable concentration camp." The analogy is sufficiently grotesque, intellectually and morally, to merit further dissection.

  59. This in turn led to another front of the great awakening: a fight to religious orthodoxy among Christian conservatives and others who rejected the politicization of their faiths.

  60. For many, drugs became the new sacrament. After the New Left imploded, Tom Hayden went into hiding "among the psychedelic daredevils of the counterculture," believing that drugs were a way of "deepening self awareness" and helping him to find spiritual meaning and authenticity. Even the most ardent exponents of the drug culture grounded their defense of drugs in explicitly religious terms. Self-proclaimed gurus such as Timothy Leary, a Harvard professor who became a "spiritual guide" with tabs of acid as his Communion wafers, spoke incessantly about how drugs lead to a "religious experience." William Braden, a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God, one of countless books and tracts that tried to update the new counter
culture with the "New Theology," as it was called.

  61. William Braden, "The Seduction of the Spirit," Washington Post, Sept. 9, 1973, pp. BW1, BW13.

  62. The Reverend Martin Marty, an academic theologian and editor at the Christian Century, proclaimed in a series of speeches in 1965 that the radicals were "moral agents" and described writers such as James Baldwin as "charismatic prophets." Marty made these remarks at a speech at Columbia University. In response, a student radical challenged him: "What you say is meaningless because the Great Society is basically immoral and rotten." Marty responded that such comments were typical of those who chose to be "morally pure" instead of politically relevant. In other words, moral purity lay at the radicals' end of the political spectrum. "Radicals Called 'Moral Agents,'" New York Times, July 26, 1965, p. 19.

  63. The famous passage is from FDR's 1935 State of the Union address: "The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of a sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America. Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers."

  64. Hayward, Age of Reagan, p. 20, citing "T.R.B. from Washington," New Republic, March 14, 1964, p. 3, and citing Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), p. 48.

  65. Mickey Kaus, The End of Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

  66. Hayward, Age of Reagan, p. 124. A demographic surge in male baby boomers is partly to blame for the rise in crime, but the cultural, legal, and political climate was undoubtedly the chief culprit. In the 1960s policy intellectuals believed that "the system" itself caused crime, and virtually all of the legal reforms of the day pushed in the direction of giving criminals more rights and making the job of police more difficult. Culturally, a wide array of activists and intellectuals had proclaimed that crime--especially black crime--was morally warranted political "rebellion."