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

by Jonah Goldberg

  67. Ibid., p. 26, citing Richard Epstein, Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 186-88; Penn Kemble and Josh Muravchik, "The New Politics & the Democrats" Commentary, Dec. 1972, pp. 78-84. McGovern later joked that his rules opened the doors to the Democratic Party and "twenty million people walked out."

  68. Hayward, Age of Reagan, pp. 90-92.

  69. "Text of the Moynihan Memorandum on the Status of Negroes," New York Times, March 1, 1970. See also Peter Kihss, "'Benign Neglect' on Race Is Proposed by Moynihan," New York Times, March 1, 1970, p. 1.

  70. Parmet, "Kennedy Myth and American Politics," p. 35, citing Randall Rothenberg, "The Neoliberal Club," Esquire, Feb. 1982, p. 42.

  71. Douglas Brinkley, "Farewell to a Friend," New York Times, July 19, 1999, p. A17; Reliable Sources, CNN, July 24, 1999. See also Tim Cuprisin, "Few Shows, Cost Blurring Appeal of Digital TV," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 27, 1999, p. 8.

  7. LIBERAL RACISM: THE EUGENIC GHOST IN THE FASCIST MACHINE

  1. Michele Parente, "Rangel Ties GOP Agenda to Hitler," Newsday, Feb. 19, 1995, p. A38; Bond is quoted in "Washington Whispers," U.S. News & World Report, July 28, 2003, p. 12; Marc Morano, "Harry Belafonte Calls Black Republicans 'Tyrants,'" Cybercast News Service, Aug. 8, 2005; Steve Dunleavy, "There's Nothing Fascist About a Final Verdict," New York Post, Dec. 13, 2000, p. 6.

  2. And to the extent these various dark chapters of liberalism are ever mentioned, they are mentioned by hard-left critics of America itself. The net effect is that whenever conservatives commit an alleged evil, it is the result of conservatism. Whenever liberals commit an alleged evil, it is the result either of liberals' insufficiently severe liberalism or of America itself. In short, liberalism is never to blame and conservatives always are.

  3. Adolph Reed Jr., "Intellectual Brownshirts," Progressive, Dec. 1994.

  4. Sherwin B. Nuland, "The Death of Hippocrates," New Republic, Sept. 13, 2004, p. 31.

  5. Alan Wolfe, "Hidden Injuries," New Republic, July 7, 1997.

  6. A former adviser to Teddy Roosevelt, and an extremist even by the standards of many eugenicists, Grant wrote, "Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race." Quoted in Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 10. See also Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 24; Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), p. 291.

  7. Black, War Against the Weak, p. xviii.

  8. Charles Murray, "Deeper into the Brain," National Review, Jan. 24, 2000, p. 49; Thomas C. Leonard, "'More Merciful and Not Less Effective': Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era," History of Political Economy 35, no. 4 (Winter 2003), p. 707.

  9. Diane Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," Journal of the History of Ideas 45, no. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1984), p. 586 n. 56, citing H. G. Wells, Sociological Papers (London, 1905), p. 60; William J. Hyde, "The Socialism of H. G. Wells in the Early Twentieth Century," Journal of the History of Ideas 17, no. 2 (April 1956), p. 220; H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli (New York: Duffield, 1910), p. 379. In A Modern Utopia (1905), Wells wrote:

  The State is justified in saying, before you may add children to the community for the community to educate and in part to support, you must be above a certain minimum of personal efficiency...and a certain minimum of physical development, and free of any transmissible disease...Failing these simple qualifications, if you and some person conspire [note the use of the criminal "conspire"] and add to the population of the State, we will, for the sake of humanity, take over the innocent victim of your passions, but we shall insist that you are under a debt to the State of a peculiarly urgent sort, and one you will certainly pay, even if it is necessary to use restraint to get the payment out of you. (H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia [London, 1905], pp. 183-84, quoted in Michael Freeden, "Eugenics and Progressive Thought: A Study in Ideological Affinity," Historical Journal 22, no. 3 [Sept. 1979], p. 656)

  10. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, 1903), p. 43; Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," p. 568, citing George Bernard Shaw, Sociological Papers (London, 1905), pp. 74-75; Shaw, Man and Superman, pp. 45, 43; George Bernard Shaw, preface to Major Barbara (New York: Penguin, 1917), p. 47.

  11. Freeden, "Eugenics and Progressive Thought," p. 671; Chris Nottingham, The Pursuit of Serenity: Havelock Ellis and the New Politics (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), pp. 185, 213; Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," p. 567, citing J. B. S. Haldane, "Darwin on Slavery," Daily Worker (London), Nov. 14, 1949.

  12. Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," pp. 568, 573.

  13. In its first year of publication, a full quarter of the magazine's contributions came from the British Isles. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 276.

  14. For more of such encomiums, see Yosal Rogat, "Mr. Justice Holmes: A Dissenting Opinion," Stanford Law Review 15, no. 1 (Dec. 1962), pp. 3-44.

  15. William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 19. Emphasis mine.

  16. Robert J. Cynkar, "Buck v. Bell: 'Felt Necessities' v. Fundamental Values?" Columbia Law Review 81, no. 7 (Nov. 1981), p. 1451.

  17. In 1911 Wilson asked Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen, the state's leading eugenicist and an expert on epilepsy, to draft the law. A Polish Catholic of Jewish extraction and American citizenship, Katzen-Ellenbogen has a story too lengthy to recount here. But it is worth noting that this profoundly evil man later found himself a doctor to the SS in France and ultimately a "prisoner" who ended up working with the butchers of Buchenwald. He personally murdered thousands--often in the name of eugenic theories he developed in American psychiatric hospitals--and tortured countless more. The "science" he learned in America was quite warmly received by the SS. In a grotesque miscarriage of justice, he escaped execution at Nuremberg. See Edwin Black, "Buchenwald's American-Trained Nazi," Jerusalem Report, Sept. 22, 2003.

  18. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 345, 191.

  19. Charles Richard Van Hise, The Conservation of Natural Resources in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1910), p. 378.

  20. Scott Gordon, The History and Philosophy of Social Science (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 521; Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 68.

  21. Justice Butler did not offer a written opinion, but there are two (compatible) possible explanations for his dissent. One, Butler was a social Darwinist in the sense that he didn't believe the state should "interfere, interfere, interfere!" as Sidney Webb had put it. Two, he was the Court's only Catholic at the time, and the Church was resolute in its teachings against anything that smacked of eugenics.

  22. Edward Pearce, writing in the British Guardian, calls Spencer "a downright evil man...whose passion for eugenics and elimination made him the daydreamer of things to come." Edward Pearce, "Nietzsche Is Radically Unsound," Guardian, July 8, 1992, p. 20. Edwin Black, author of War Against the Weak, claims that eugenics was born of Spencer's ideas and that Spencer "completely denounced charity" in Social Statics. Black clearly has not read the book; neither of these things is true. See Roderick T. Long, "Herbert Spencer: The Defamation Continues," Aug. 28, 2003, www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/long3.html (accessed March 13, 2007).


  23. Part of the problem is that Hofstadter simply got much of the history wrong (a point even the left-wing historian Eric Foner is forced to concede in his introduction to the 1992 edition of Social Darwinism in American Thought). Fifteen years after the publication of Hofstadter's book, Irvin Wyllie of the University of Wisconsin demonstrated that almost none of the Gilded Age industrialists expressed themselves in Darwinian terms or took much notice of the Darwin fad among the intellectual classes. Even the phrase "social Darwinism" was almost unknown during the so-called age of the robber barons. In one egregious example, Hofstadter erroneously attributed a statement about the "survival of the fittest" to John D. Rockefeller. Rather, it was Rockefeller's college-educated son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., who offered the throwaway line in 1902 in an address at Brown University. Irvin G. Wyllie, "Social Darwinism and the Businessman," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Oct. 15, 1959, p. 632, citing Raymond B. Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait (New York: Harper, 1956), pp. 130-31.

  24. The progressive Jane Addams worked closely with the Chicago judge Harry Olson, the founder of the American Eugenics Society and onetime president of the Eugenics Research Association. As a pioneer of juvenile courts in America, Olson was dedicated to weeding out "the cheaper races." He advocated sterilization when necessary, but his preferred remedy was to set up a psychiatric gulag where the unfit could live out their lives segregated from the better human stocks. In 1916 the New Republic demonstrated the spirit of compromise among progressives in an editorial (almost surely written by Croly):

  Laissez-faire as a policy of population leads straight to perdition ...Imbecility breeds imbecility as certainly as white hens breed white chickens; and under laissez-faire imbecility is given full chance to breed, and does so in fact at a rate far superior to that of able stocks... We may suggest that a socialized policy of population cannot be built upon a laissez-faire economic policy. So long as the state neglects its good blood, it will let its bad blood alone...When the state assumes the duty of giving a fair opportunity for development to every child, it will find unanimous support for a policy of extinction of stocks incapable of profiting from their privileges. (New Republic, March 18, 1916; emphasis mine)

  Translation: Cast the social safety net as far and as wide as possible, and all good progressives will agree that whoever's left out of the net will be a candidate for "extinction."

  25. Daylanne English, "W. E. B. DuBois's Family Crisis," American Literature 72, no. 2 (June 2000), pp. 297, 293; Charles Valenza, "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?" Family Planning Perspectives 17, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1985), pp. 44-46.

  26. Jesse Walker, "Hooded Progressivism," Reason, Dec. 2, 2005.

  27. Rexford Tugwell, FDR's Brain Truster, claims, to the contrary, that it was his mentor Simon Patten who deserves the honor of coining the phrase. Leonard, "'More Merciful and Not Less Effective,'" pp. 693-94, 696 n. 13.

  28. David M. Kennedy, "Can We Still Afford to Be a Nation of Immigrants?" Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1996, pp. 52-68.

  29. Edward Alsworth Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (New York: Macmillan, 1901), p. 418.

  30. Sidney Webb, "The Economic Theory of a Legal Minimum Wage," Journal of Political Economy 20, no. 10 (Dec. 1912), p. 992, quoted in Leonard, "'More Merciful and Not Less Effective,'" p. 703.

  31. Edward Alsworth Ross, Seventy Years of It (New York: Appleton-Century, 1936), p. 70, quoted in Leonard, "'More Merciful and Not Less Effective,'" p. 699; Royal Meeker, "Review of Cours d'economie politique," Political Science Quarterly 25, no. 3 (1910), p. 544, quoted in Leonard, "'More Merciful and Not Less Effective,'" p. 703.

  32. Commons is rightly a member of the "Labor Hall of Fame." For a glowing summary of his accomplishments, see Jack Barbash, "John R. Commons: Pioneer of Labor Economics," Monthly Labor Review 112, no. 5 (May 1989), pp. 44-49, available at

  www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1989/05/art4full.pdf (accessed March 16, 2007). The historian Joseph Dorfman writes, "More than any other economist [Commons] was responsible for the conversion into public policy of reform proposals designed to alleviate defects in the industrial system." Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in America, 1918-1933 (New York: Viking, 1959), vols. 4-5, p. 377, quoted in Barbash, "John R. Commons," p. 44.

  A onetime president of the American Economic Association, Commons complained in his influential Races and Immigrants in America that "competition has no respect for superior races," which was why "the race with lowest necessities displaces others." Hence, "the Jewish sweat-shop is the tragic penalty paid by that ambitious race." John R. Commons, Races and Immigrants in America (New York: Macmillan, 1907), pp. 151, 148.

  33. "The negro could not possibly have found a place in American industry had he come as a free man...[I]f such races are to adopt that industrious life which is a second nature to races of the temperate zones, it is only through some form of compulsion." Leonard, "'More Merciful and Not Less Effective,'" p. 701.

  34. Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 47. The Swedes--long the model of humane Third Way economics--had passed eugenics laws around the same time as the Nazis. Even more disturbing, the Swedes continued the practice well into the mid-1970s. Over sixty thousand Swedes were forcibly sterilized. Or, to be more fair, some were given the option of being locked up until their child-bearing years were over instead of going under the knife. Among those who received "treatment" were children of racially mixed parents, Swedes with "gypsy features," unwed mothers with "too many" children, habitual criminals, and even a boy deemed "sexually precocious." The Danes passed similar eugenics laws in 1929, even before the Nazis. They sterilized eleven thousand and kept their laws on the books until the late 1960s. In Finland eleven thousand people were sterilized, and four thousand involuntary abortions were performed between 1945 and 1970. Similar revelations came from Norway, France, Belgium, and other quarters of enlightened Europe. A year earlier, Alberta, Canada, went through a similar controversy when it was revealed that nearly three thousand people were sterilized for all the usual reasons. Some were told they were being admitted for appendectomies and left the hospital barren. Adrian Wooldridge, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Sept. 15, 1997.

  35. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 34, 35.

  36. As Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann note, after 1935 Nazi "social policy was indivisible from the 'selection' of 'alien' races and those of 'lesser racial value.'" Ibid., p. 48

  37. John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 144.

  38. Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 124.

  39. Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? (New York: William Morrow, 1984), p. 84.

  40. Maureen Dowd, "Could Thomas Be Right?" New York Times, June 25, 2003, p. A25; Steele, White Guilt, p. 174.

  41. David Tell, "Planned Un-parenthood: Roe v. Wade at Thirty," Weekly Standard, Jan. 27, 2003, pp. 35-41; Gloria Feldt, Behind Every Choice Is a Story (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2002), pp. xix, xvi; Faye Wattleton, "Humanist of the Year Acceptance Speech," Humanist, July-Aug. 1986.

  42. Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (New York: Norton, 1938), p. 70.

  43. Daniel J. Kevles, "Sex Without Fear," New York Times, June 28, 1992.

  44. Valenza, "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?" p. 45, citing David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 115; H. G. Wells, introduction to The Pivot of Civilization, by Margaret Sanger (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2003), p. 42.

  45. While Sanger cast herself as a champion of female liberation, her arguments nonetheless elevated the private realm of procreation to the public agenda. In Sanger's v
ision women would be "freed" from the reproductive tyranny of the family, but in order for this to happen, women--particularly certain women--would be subjected to a new tyranny of the eugenic planner. Marie Stopes, the British Margaret Sanger (that is, the mother of the British birth control movement), was of similar temperament. "Utopia," she explained, "could be reached in my life time had I the power to issue inviolable edicts." Quoted in Mukti Jain Campion, Who's Fit to Be a Parent? (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 131.

  46. Quoted in Black, War Against the Weak, p. 133. Also quoted in Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, p. 216.

  47. Steven W. Mosher, "The Repackaging of Margaret Sanger," Wall Street Journal, May 5, 1997, p. A18.

  48. "Birth control is no negative philosophy concerned solely with the number of children brought into this world," she writes. "It is not merely a question of population. Primarily it is the instrument of liberation and of human development." Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, p. 224.

  49. Valenza, "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?" p. 45, citing Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right (New York: Grossman, 1976), p. 332; Margaret Sanger to C. J. Gamble, Dec. 10, 1939, quoted in Valenza, "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?" p. 46.

  50. Colman McCarthy, "Jackson's Reversal on Abortion," Washington Post, May 21, 1988, p. A27.

  51. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 139.

  52. Bill Bennett, Morning in America, Sept. 28, 2005; for transcript, see mediamatters.org/items/200509280006 (accessed March 16, 2007); see also Brian Faler, "Bennett Under Fire for Remark on Crime and Black Abortions," Washington Post, Sept. 30, 2005, p. A05. Bob Herbert, "Impossible, Ridiculous, Repugnant," New York Times, Oct. 6, 2005, p. A37; The Big Story with John Gibson, Fox News Channel, Sept. 30, 2005; see also Jonah Goldberg, "'Ridiculous,'" National Review Online, Oct. 7, 2005; Fox News Sunday, Fox News Channel, Oct. 2, 2005; "Talk-Back Live," editorial, Washington Times, Oct. 5, 2005, p. A16.