53. Ramesh Ponnuru, The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2006), p. 65.
54. "The Clinton RU-486 Files: The Clinton Administration's Radical Drive to Force an Abortion Drug on America," Judicial Watch Special Report, 2006, available at www.judicialwatch.org/archive/2006/jw-ru486-report.pdf (accessed March 16, 2007).
55. Steven W. Mosher, "The Repackaging of Margaret Sanger," Wall Street Journal, May 5, 1997.
56. Tell, "Planned Un-parenthood," p. 40.
57. Sheryl Blunt, "Saving Black Babies," Christianity Today, Feb. 1, 2003.
58. Peter Singer, "Killing Babies Isn't Always Wrong," Spectator, Sept. 16, 1995, pp. 20-22.
59. Lyndon Johnson laid out the rationale in his 1965 speech introducing affirmative action when he proclaimed, "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." Rhetorically, this was very Wilsonian in that it translated an entire people into a single collective "person." Lyndon B. Johnson, "To Fulfill These Rights," remarks at the Howard University commencement, June 4, 1965. For full text, see www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/650604.asp (accessed May 8, 2007).
60. Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. xxiii.
61. Gene Edward Veith Jr., Modern Fascism: The Threat to the Judeo-Christian Worldview (St. Louis: Concordia, 1993), p. 134.
62. Andrew J. Coulson, "Planning Ahead Is Considered Racist?" Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 1, 2006; Debera Carlton Harrell, "School District Pulls Web Site After Examples of Racism Spark Controversy," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 2, 2006. The guideline was withdrawn in response to protests. But one can be sure the attitudes that spawned it are intact. Richard Delgado, "Rodrigo's Seventh Chronicle: Race, Democracy, and the State," 41 UCLA Law Review 720, 734 (1994), cited in Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry, Beyond All Reason: The Radical Assault on Truth in American Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 29.
63. The law professor Luther Wright Jr. suggests that America adopt more rigid racial classifications for all of its citizens and that racial impostors be subjected to "fines and immediate job or benefit termination." Luther Wright Jr., "Who's Black, Who's White, and Who Cares: Reconceptualizing the United States's Definition of Race and Racial Classifications," Vanderbilt Law Review, March 1995, p. 513. A similar phenomenon is at work with American Indians. The Native American population in the United States has been growing enormously over the last two decades, far in excess of what is mathematically possible given their fertility rate and death rates. And since, by definition, it's impossible for Native Americans to immigrate to America, the only possible explanation is that more people find it advantageous to call themselves Indians, thanks to our spoils system.
64. Yolanda Woodlee, "Williams Aide Resigns in Language Dispute," Washington Post, Jan. 27, 1999, p. B1.
8. LIBERAL FASCIST ECONOMICS
1. Kevin Phillips, a former aide to Richard Nixon, has turned himself into a cottage industry as the voice of "real" conservatism and the "real" Republican Party. He is in fact the voice of the old socially meddling Progressivism that used to mark the bipartisan consensus between the Democrats and the Republicans. As for the charge that George W. Bush's grandfather was a Nazi collaborator of some sort, put forward in Phillips's book American Dynasty, Peter Schweizer demonstrates why this is such a bad-faith slander:
One of Phillips's most attention-grabbing chapters posits the theory that the Bushes were involved in the rise of Adolf Hitler. While he correctly notes that Brown Brothers Harriman, an investment-banking firm employing Prescott Bush and George H. Walker (George W.'s great-grandfather), invested in Nazi-era German companies, Phillips fails to note that it was Averell Harriman, later FDR's ambassador to Moscow and Truman's commerce secretary, who initiated these investments (and some in Soviet Russia) before either of the Bushes joined the firm. Prescott Bush did not oversee these investments; the reality is that he was involved almost exclusively in managing the firm's domestic portfolio. It was Harriman who largely managed the foreign investments and, accordingly, it was he who met German and Soviet leaders. (Peter Schweizer, "Kevin Phillips's Politics of Deceit," National Review Online, March 30, 2004, www.nationalreview.com/comment/schweizer200403300907.asp [accessed Jan. 23, 2007])
2. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., "Crimes Against Nature," Rolling Stone, Dec. 11, 2003; Rebecca Shoval, "Al Franken Airs Show at Ithaca College," Cornell Daily Sun, April 26, 2006, www.cornellsun.com/node/17563 (accessed Jan. 23, 2007); John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), p. 120.
3. Jeffrey T. Schnapp writes, "The notion that fascism represented a 'third way' with respect to capitalist and communist development was a key feature of the movement's self-definition. In contrast to the democratic leveling and standardization of life attributed to capitalism, and to the collectivism and materialism attributed to bolshevism, fascism claimed to be able to provide all of the advantages of accelerated modernization, without the disadvantages such as the loss of individuality and nationality, or of higher values such as the pursuit of heroism, art, tradition, and spiritual transcendence." Jeffrey T. Schnapp, "Fascinating Fascism," in "The Aesthetics of Fascism," special issue, Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (April 1996), p. 240.
4. Over and over again, in popular articles about fascism, serious authors routinely assert that fascism constitutes "the rejection of both liberalism and socialism," as Alexander Stille wrote in the New York Times. Now, it is true that fascists opposed both socialism and liberalism. But these words had specific connotations during the era of classical fascism. Socialism in this context means Bolshevism, an internationalist ideology that called for the complete abrogation of private property and decried other socialist ideologies as "fascist." Liberalism in the 1920s and 1930s was defined as free-market laissez-faire. Translated into contemporary categories, fascism was a rejection of both free-market capitalism and totalitarian communism. That means something slightly different from "the rejection of both liberalism and socialism." Alexander Stille, "The Latest Obscenity Has Seven Letters," New York Times, Sept. 13, 2003, sec. B, p. 9.
5. A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free Press, 1969), p. 12; Robert S. Wistrich, "Leon Trotsky's Theory of Fascism," in "Theories of Fascism," special issue, Journal of Contemporary History 11, no. 4 (Oct. 1976), p. 161, citing Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (New York: Pathfinder, 1972), p. 5.
6. Peter Davies and Derek Lynch, eds., The Routledge Companion to Fascism and the Far Right (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 52; Palmiro Togliatti, Lectures on Fascism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), pp. 1-10; Martin Kitchen, Fascism (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 46; Henry Ashby Turner Jr., ed., Reappraisals of Fascism (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), p. xi.
7. Henry Ashby Turner Jr., German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 75.
8. Ibid., p. 347.
9. In the European tradition, one could quite easily make the case that these arrangements are right-wing, historically speaking, though that is not an open-and-shut case, since even in Europe today free-market economics is described as an ideology of the right. In mid-century Germany, things get even more confusing because, thanks to Bismarck, classical liberalism was extinguished in the 1870s, and what was called liberalism there was in fact statism. In other words, both left and right were left-wing as we understand the terms in America.
10. "Packers Face Report Music," Washington Post, June 7, 1906, p. 4; Timothy P. Carney, The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley & Sons, 2006), pp. 37-38. See also Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conserva
tism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963), pp. 103, 107.
11. Carney, Big Ripoff, p. 40; Kolko, Triumph of Conservatism, pp. 39, 174.
12. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 202, 359.
13. Carney, Big Ripoff, p. 42, citing Murray Rothbard, "War Collectivism in World War I," in A New History of Leviathan, ed. Ronald Radosh and Murray Rothbard (New York: Dutton, 1972), p. 70; Paul A. C. Kostinen, "The 'Industrial-Military Complex' in Historical Perspective: World War I," Business History Review (Winter 1967), p. 381.
14. Grosvenor Clarkson, Industrial America in the World War: The Strategy Behind the Line, 1917-1918 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), p. 63; Robert Higgs, "Crisis and Quasi-Corporatist Policy-Making: The U.S. Case in Historical Perspective," The World & I, Nov. 1988, reprinted by the Independent Institute, www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=312 (accessed Jan. 24, 2007).
15. While in the 1920s, particularly under Calvin Coolidge, the state unraveled some--but by no means all--of the corporatist excess of Wilson's war socialism, many in the government continued to advance the cause. One of them was the secretary of commerce from 1921 to 1928, Herbert Hoover. Contrary to the absurd propaganda that Hoover was some starry-eyed free marketeer, the director of the Food Administration in Woodrow Wilson's cabinet was committed to "organizing" American business to cooperate with government hand in hand. Most economic historians see more continuity than "revolution" in FDR's 1932 economic policies. It was FDR's politics that constituted the real break with the past. He militarized corporatism--just as his overseas counterparts had done--making the New Deal the "moral equivalent of war." The segue to real war was nearly as seamless for Americans as it was for Germans, though the economy was permanently transformed, much to the liking of liberals and business, even before the war began. William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 41.
16. Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), pp. 347, 348, 349; William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 87.
17. Carney, Big Ripoff, p. 46; Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 37.
18. John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 164; William G. Welk, "Fascist Economic Policy and the N.R.A.," Foreign Affairs, Oct. 1933, pp. 98-109. I have refrained from recounting the literally numberless similar comments from communists and hard socialists in the United States because the view that New Dealism was fascist was so widespread. Also, thanks to the Stalinist doctrine of social fascism, it was official policy among Reds and other socialists in America to say it was so, even if they didn't think it was. But suffice it to say everyone from Norman Thomas on down repeatedly and cavalierly referred to Hoover and FDR as fascists at one point or another.
19. When Brockway visited the United States, he became even more convinced that Rooseveltism was fascism. He was particularly horrified by the Civilian Conservation Corps work camps, which "remind one immediately of the Labour Service Camps in Fascist Germany. One has an uneasy feeling that the American camps, no less than the German, would be transferred from civilian to military purposes immediately war or a social uprising threatened, and that behind the mind of the military authorities in charge of them their potential military value is dominant." Barbara C. Malament, "British Labour and Roosevelt's New Deal: The Response of the Left and the Unions," Journal of British Studies 17, no. 2 (Spring 1978), pp. 137, 144. See also Giuseppe Bottai, "Corporate State and the N.R.A.," Foreign Affairs, July 1935, pp. 612-24.
20. Anne O'Hare McCormick, "Hitler Seeks Jobs for All Germans," New York Times, July 10, 1933, pp. 1, 6.
21. In his 1929 "state of the nation" address, Mussolini boasted of his success in implementing the corporate state:
The employed are integrated within the institutions of the regime: syndicalism and corporatism enable the whole nation to be organized. The system is based on the legal recognition of professional unions, on collective contracts, on the prohibition of strikes and lock-outs...[This approach] has already borne fruit. Labour and capital have ceased to consider their antagonism an inexorable fact of history: the conflicts which inevitably arise are solved peacefully thanks to an increasing degree of conscious class collaboration. The social legislation of Italy is the most advanced in the world: it ranges from the law on the eight-hour day to compulsory insurance against tuberculosis. (Benito Mussolini, "The Achievements of the Fascist Revolution," in Fascism, ed. Roger Griffin [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], pp. 63-64)
22. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 311.
23. Frank Kingdon, That Man in the White House: You and Your President (New York: Arco, 1944), p. 120; Helen M. Burns, The American Banking Community and New Deal Banking Reforms, 1933-1935 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1974), p. 100; David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Norton, 1980), pp. 25-26.
24. William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty That Armed Germany at War (New York: Back Bay Books, 2003), p. 152.
25. Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 38.
26. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 73.
27. Jay W. Baird, "From Berlin to Neubabelsberg: Nazi Film Propaganda and Hitler Youth Quex," in "Historians and Movies: The State of the Art: Part 1," special issue, Journal of Contemporary History 18, no. 3 (July 1983), p. 495; Peter Goddard, "The Subtle Side of Nazi Propaganda Machine," Toronto Star, Jan. 19, 1996, p. D4.
28. Proctor, Nazi War on Cancer, p. 138.
29. Stuart Chase, The Economy of Abundance (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 313. The progressive economist John Commons said that the new system of pressure groups and trade associations created by the New Deal amounted to "an occupational parliament of the American people, more truly representative than the Congress elected by territorial divisions. They are the informal American counterparts of Mussolini's 'corporate state,' the Italian occupational state." Abram L. Harris, "John R. Commons and the Welfare State," Southern Economic Journal 19, no. 2 (Oct. 1952), pp. 222-33; Higgs, "Crisis and Quasi-Corporatist Policy-Making."
30. Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 185.
31. When it was still unclear whether the Nazis would attain power in Germany, Gustav Krupp, the patron of the enormous and infamous arms manufacturer, gave specific instructions to his chauffeur. When leaving meetings with various political leaders, he explained, he told his driver to pay careful attention to which hand he carried his gloves in. If Krupp emerged with his gloves in his right hand, the driver was to give him the traditional Prussian greeting (clicked heels and a tap of the hat). If Krupp had his gloves in his left hand, the chauffeur was instructed to give him the full "Heil Hitler" salute, which Gustav would return with equal gusto. Krupp, like most of Germany's leading businessmen and industrialists, did not like Hitler or the Nazis. Indeed, Krupp--who was rightly tried for war crimes at Nuremberg--had joined other business leaders in trying to prevent Hitler's appointment to the chancellorship. But when it was clear that history was on the side of Nazism, German business started to fall in line.
32. Lizette Alvarez, "An 'Icon of Technology' Encounters Some Rude Political Realities," New York Times, March 4, 1998, p. D4.
33. For the Nazi Party platform, see www.hitler.org/writings/programme. Alan Brinkley's Voices of Protest has an outstanding discussion of the sources of anti-department-store rage. The chief problem was that the big chains put local general stores out of busi
ness. These stores were important cultural and financial institutions in rural America, providing, among other things, credit to farmers during bad seasons. See Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 198.
34. Neil Steinberg, New York Daily News, Feb. 13, 2005.
35. Roughly 40 percent (or slightly over forty million) of American households own at least one dog, and roughly 35 percent of households contain a cat (and half of them have more than one). The vast majority of pet owners pay for veterinary services in cash with almost no paperwork and no long waits and with a high quality of service. Competition to get into veterinary school is tougher than it is to get into medical school. Why? Because Congress stays out of it (and because they haven't allowed the trial lawyers to get into it). And because government leaves the vets alone, the vets leave government alone.
36. As state governments get involved in more regulatory issues, the numbers of lobbyists at the state level have exploded as well. New York State, for example, has nearly four thousand registered lobbyists.
37. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "A Tale of Tobacco, Pleasure, Profits and Death," New York Times, April 15, 1996.
38. Christine Hall, "Unholy Alliance," National Review Online, April 12, 2006.
39. The New York Times reported, "Business leaders applauded yesterday, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the sweeping proposals announced by President Nixon Sunday night." Robert D. Hershey Jr., "Psychological Lift Seen," New York Times, Aug. 17, 1971, p. 1.
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