What Hillary’s proposal amounts to, objectively considered, is a transfer of income from the future to the present. She is reaching into the back pockets of young people, taking out their own future earnings, and using those earnings to pay for young people’s education today. This isn’t robbing Peter to pay Paul; it’s robbing Paul to pay Paul. This entitlement isn’t free at all.
The genius of Hillary’s idea is that she gives young people the false impression that she is providing free education when, as we just saw, young people end up paying their own freight plus interest. With some innovative financing, they could have themselves arranged to borrow against their future earnings. Hillary is not “giving” them anything.
But she is counting on suckers to believe that she is. The real beneficiary in this whole deal is Hillary herself. If she pulls it off, she is viewed as the person who made higher education free, in the same way that Obama is viewed as the person who provided health care for all Americans. Isn’t it wonderful to gain a reputation for such magnanimity without putting out a penny? This is the basic scam of progressive politics.
Hillary’s real objective isn’t to help students; it is to establish government control—which is to say progressive control—over higher education. The progressives already dominate elementary and secondary education, because public schools are an arm of the state. If Hillary succeeds, she will have brought another major arm of the private sector into the federal orbit that will turn out Democratic voters for decades to come.
COLONIZING THE PRIVATE SECTOR
This continues a trend under Obama in which major industries have, one by one, been colonized by the federal government. The process began in 2009 with banks and investment houses being taken over in the aftermath of the 2008 market crash. Next, the government established control over the automobile sector through bailouts, paying the unions, and stiffing the bondholders.
Next came health care. Through Obamacare, the federal government became the boss of every insurance company, every hospital—that amounts to one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Next stop is the energy sector. Through EPA regulations, the government can control what type of energy Americans are allowed to use and how much can be used per day. Higher education would be the next prize in this ongoing usurpation of the private sector, further tightening federal control which is already exercised through regulations and grants.
Three features of his progressive expansion of power stand out. The first is entitlements: progressives advance by declaring that people are entitled to something without having to work for it or earn it. Second, there is typically an element of fear. Progressive control over banking and investment firms came about in the aftermath of the 2008 panic. Obamacare played on fears that people who got sick would not have access to hospitals and doctors. Third, the progressive move is not to actually take over and manage the private sector but to direct and regulate it from the outside; in other words, state-run capitalism.
Where do these ideas come from? We are accustomed to linking progressivism with socialism but none of the three features of modern progressivism come from socialism per se. Socialism doesn’t involve “entitlements.” Marx never appealed to fear. He did predict that class conflicts would generate a socialist revolution in which the workers overthrow the capitalists, but that prophecy has long been discredited.
Finally, state-run capitalism is not socialism. Socialism is not about the state relying on private industry to create resources and then staking its claim to steer and direct those resources. Rather, socialism is about nationalization, which means the government actually takes over an industry like oil drilling or health care and manages it. We have seen nationalization in Russia, China, India, Venezuela, Cuba, and other socialist regimes.
Obama and Hillary are not socialists in that sense. In fact, they are too lazy to be socialists. They have no interest in actually running companies or factories. They don’t intend to build automobiles or computers or figure out how to extract oil from the ground. Neither do the vast majority of American progressives. They don’t know how to do any of this, nor do they want to. Rather, they want the private sector to produce resources, and then they want to direct the use of those resources. This isn’t socialism; it’s something else.
Perhaps Hillary and Obama’s approach can be understood in terms of another version of socialism—socialism in the classic sense. Socialism in the classic sense means that workers control the means of production. An automobile company, for instance, would be owned and controlled by its workers. Apple would be owned and governed not by shareholders or management but by the people who work at Apple. Clearly classic socialism is not what Obama and Hillary are about. They haven’t even proposed that workers in American companies own or run those companies. Again, socialism per se isn’t going on here.
So what’s going on? In the previous chapter I showed the association of progressivism with racism. But people who know history may feel that I am leaving something out. How can you say, they might protest, that progressivism derived all its central themes from racism? Here the critics are right. I never meant to suggest that modern progressivism was solely based on racism. As I intend to show, it also drew its inspiration from another important twentieth-century movement: fascism.
LEARNING FROM FASCISM
Most people today have no idea what fascism means. They think it means the Holocaust. Actually, that’s not correct. Fascism preceded the Holocaust. While the German fascists hated Jews and perpetrated the Holocaust, fascists in Italy and other countries did not do this and opposed it. As Jonah Goldberg reminds us, fascism by itself has nothing to do with anti-Semitism or gas chambers.4
Fascism actually means putting the resources of the individual and of industry at the service of the state. This means that the state defines what individual aspirations are about, and the state controls the resources of private industry. Fascism also confers entitlements on citizens and uses these to justify state power and state control. Finally, fascism draws on an atmosphere of perpetual fear—sometimes accompanied by perpetual conflict—to keep citizens apprehensive and make them look to the state for protection and care.
This is how fascism is defined and this is how fascism has been implemented in the countries that have implemented it. The actual definition is not obscure, notwithstanding postwar progressive efforts to obscure it. So given what fascism means and how it is actually put into practice, who can deny that Obama and Hillary’s vision for the federal government most closely resembles fascism? It is, I suggest, a new fascism for the twenty-first century.
If this is so, however, it’s hardly a new departure for the Democratic Party. The progressive Democrats have shown an affinity for fascism—both of the German and Italian type—since at least the early 1930s. Moreover, Italian and German fascists drew on the ideas of American progressives going back to the 1910s and 1920s. European fascism and American progressivism are old friends, even if progressive intellectuals have worked hard to disavow the association.
At this point I can almost hear progressives erupt with outrage. Fascism! Nazism! The Holocaust! How dare you associate our movement and our party and our iconic leaders with thuggery and mass murder?
Well, let’s see. John F. Kennedy is an icon of the Democratic Party. He was a progressive but a relatively moderate one; even some conservatives today admire JFK. In 1937 as a young man, JFK toured Germany in the early years of Adolf Hitler. What he saw greatly impressed him. “Fascism?” JFK wrote in his diary. “The right thing for Nazi Germany.”
JFK visited Hitler’s Bavarian holiday home as well as a teahouse that Hitler had constructed on a mountaintop. “Who has visited these two places,” JFK observed, “can easily imagine how Hitler in a few years will emerge from the hatred currently surrounding him as one of the most important personalities that ever lived.” In a later journal entry, JFK continued in the same mode, remarking that Hitler “had something mysterious about him. He was the stuff of legends.”
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nbsp; Touring the Rhineland, JFK echoed Nazi propaganda at the time. “The Nordic races certainly seem to be superior to the Romans.” Hostility to Nazi Germany, JFK added, stems largely from jealousy and fear of German superiority. “The Germans really are too good—therefore people have ganged up on them to protect themselves.”5
JFK went on to serve as a Navy Lieutenant in World War II. He had no illusions about Hitler after the war. Even so, JFK’s pre-war fascination with Hitler is revealing because he was not alone. Other noted progressives at the time admired Hitler and the Nazis. The feeling was reciprocal; Hitler and the Nazis admired them.
In 1933, for example, the main Nazi paper Volkischer Beobachter confessed that the Nazi movement had a lot to learn from the New Deal. “We National Socialists are looking toward America.” The publication found FDR’s policies “thoroughly inflected by a strong national socialism” and noted that “many passages in his book Looking Forward could have been written by a National Socialist.”6
Many more progressives admired fascism—not so much Nazi-style fascism as the fascism of Italian strongman Benito Mussolini. New Deal progressives lionized Mussolini, and left-leaning journals like The New Republic praised his policies. As the quotation at the beginning of this chapter suggests, FDR was quite a fan of Mussolini. Mussolini, for his part, was also a fan of FDR.
A SECRET PACT
The secret pact between American progressivism and European fascism is perhaps the most closely guarded secret in politics today. Fascism showed progressives how to use “entitlements” to create dependent classes not just of blacks but of Americans of all colors. Fascism also provided a model for how to organize the progressive state: basically as a quarterback directing the wealth and resources of private industry. How, then, have progressives gotten away with hiding their deep connection with the twentieth century’s most odious political movement?
The reason is as follows. During the 1930s, FDR and American progressives drew heavily from multiple strands of European fascism. They borrowed from the fascist style of charismatic leadership, from fascist monumentalist architecture, and from fascist techniques of political propaganda. Progressives especially loved the forward-looking emphasis of fascism, encapsulated in the slogan of the Hitler youth song featured in the movie Cabaret, “Tomorrow belongs to me.”
Progressives did far more than emulate the style of fascism; they also adopted its ideas. Progressivism was in line with fascist social policy, which mainly involved killing off undesirables and excluding immigrants. Progressives also embraced fascist economic policy—instituting citizen entitlements and then using those to justify state control over the private sector—which shaped the contours of the New Deal.
After World War II, fascism—to put it mildly—fell into bad repute. It became politically impossible in decent company to profess an ideology that took on the odor of the Holocaust. So progressives dumped many of the social and political features of fascism—no more compulsory sterilization or racist immigration policies—while retaining fascist economic policy.
Progressives quickly got rid of the fascist label and, in a creative move, they publicly pretended that fascism was the very antithesis of what they had always been about. Now they portrayed fascism as somehow a conservative, right-of-center phenomenon. To this day, without bothering to define what they mean, progressives routinely accuse conservatives of being “fascists.”
The prime progressive candidate to be a fascist is, of course, Donald Trump. The online magazine Slate even interviewed a supposed expert on fascism to explore how closely Trump fits the fascist label. The expert, Robert Paxton, found “some echoes of fascism” by noting that Trump is a nationalist, Trump appeals to people of low education, and he “even looks like Mussolini in the way he sticks his lower jaw out.”7
But if progressives consider Republicans to be fascist because fascism is “right wing,” this is not how the fascists themselves saw it. The fascists themselves always knew they were left-wingers. We are blinded to this today because we think of socialism and fascism as opposed to each other, and we tend to liken progressivism to socialism. In reality, socialism and fascism are closely linked. That’s why, at least in one stage of World War II, it was natural for Hitler and Stalin to ally with each other; both believed they were fighting on the same side.
The link between fascism and socialism can also be seen in the way the Nazis described themselves. They called themselves National Socialists. The Nazi program involved nationalization of trusts, government control of industry, confiscations of amassed wealth, shared profits with labor, a whole range of entitlements. Fascism, in other words, was a branch of socialism and was recognized as such by its champions and adherents.
Progressivism, Communism, and Fascism are today considered to be the three alternative systems of government that emerged in the twentieth century. But in fact all three are expressions of collectivism—of a powerful centralized state. Collectivism is the big idea of the twentieth century. It gained power as a consequence of the Great Depression, which many saw as proof of the collapse of capitalism. As a result of this erosion of confidence, people proved willing to put their faith in collectivist solutions.
Progressives today insist that progressivism—as manifest in FDR’s New Deal—“saved” capitalism. This is part of the progressive postwar story, and it’s pure bunkum: progressivism no more “saved” capitalism than fascism or communism did. These were from the outset systems to replace and subvert capitalism. The fact that capitalism survived and even thrived was not due to progressivism but due to the failure or inadequacy of progressive efforts to subvert capitalism.
To compare progressivism with fascism is not to equate FDR, Mussolini, and Hitler. All three were charismatic leaders, but there are obvious differences between them. Partly they reflected cultural differences between their three respective countries. They were also different people. FDR wasn’t a mass murderer, as Hitler was. Neither was FDR an outright dictator, like Mussolini became. Rather, FDR for the most part used the democratic process to achieve goals that reflected his version of fascism—fascism, one may say, American-style.
Yet if FDR was freely elected, so was Hitler. Both came to power through a democratic process. If FDR embodied the spirit of the American people, so did Mussolini and Hitler respectively embody the Italian and the German spirit. Hitler and Mussolini jettisoned democracy immediately upon taking power, but FDR too assumed virtually dictatorial wartime powers.
Even in peacetime, FDR sought to circumvent the constitutional system of checks and balances by packing the Supreme Court. Fortunately, this packing scheme didn’t work, but FDR achieved his greater purpose when the court changed its tune and became a pliant supporter of the New Deal.
Hitler was a racist in a way that Mussolini wasn’t, with FDR occupying a position somewhere between the two of them. FDR was not an anti-Semite, as Hitler was, but he did share Hitler’s low view of Asians and blacks. During World War II, FDR ordered that many Japanese Americans, under suspicion of disloyalty, be interned in camps. There is, of course, an argument in wartime for holding captive those who pose a security risk. My point, however, is that FDR made no similar arrangements for Italians and Germans in the United States.
So there was a clear racial element in FDR’s approach to security. FDR was culpable for doing exactly what progressive Democrats accuse Donald Trump of doing when he threatens to target violent Islamists. Yet Trump doesn’t single out radical Muslims while exonerating other groups who act like them. FDR, by contrast, treated Japanese Americans in a way he didn’t treat German Americans or Italian Americans.
That, I’m suggesting, is because FDR, even during World War II, retained a soft spot for German and Italian fascism. Also FDR wasn’t turned off by the fascist idea of a racial hierarchy; indeed, here was FDR implementing one himself. Incidentally Japanese internment is another crime that Democrats blame on “America” when their own hero, FDR, is the one who ordered it.
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nbsp; FDR, Mussolini, and Hitler all denounced the free market and blamed the problems of their society on private business. All vowed to use the state to combat the power of business, and offered themselves as the true manifestation of the collective good. If one ended as the enemy of the other two, it shouldn’t blind us to their earlier mutual admiration.
THE EUGENIC LINK
We may think that the progressive association with fascism begins with Mussolini and Hitler but actually it begins much earlier, in the eugenics movement championed by Margaret Sanger. In the previous chapter I focused on Sanger’s views of blacks, but Sanger, it turns out, had a much bigger list of undesirables that she wanted to see wiped off the earth.
Sanger was a eugenicist who saw birth control and sterilization as the means to create what she called “a race of thoroughbreds.” This required making women she termed “reckless breeders” stop producing “human weeds.” Sanger drew a sharp line not so much between black and white as between “fit” and “unfit.” By fit she admittedly meant whites, but only educated, upper-class whites. By “unfit” she meant pretty much everyone else. Sanger viewed birth control as a mechanism to multiply the numbers of the fit while reducing the numbers of the unfit.
As we saw earlier, she preferred to use social pressure and propaganda but, if those failed, she wholeheartedly supported compulsory sterilization. (Abortion was not an issue during that time; later Planned Parenthood would become a zealous promoter and performer of abortions.) If Sanger had lived longer I’m sure she would have become an abortion enthusiast—at least for “unfit” populations. For Sanger, what mattered was not the means but the result. As she put it on the cover of her magazine Birth Control Review, “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—this is the chief aim of birth control.”8
Sanger was also an early advocate of the Nazi sterilization laws as setting a global example in this area. Sanger corresponded with psychiatrist Ernst Rudin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and chief architect of Hitler’s sterilization program. In 1933, she also published Rudin’s article, “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need” in her Birth Control Review. The earliest of the Nazi sterilization laws were, by Rudin’s admission, modeled on American laws drafted by Sanger and her associates at the American Birth Control League.9
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