A simple fact remains: Progressives did many things that we would today call objectively fascist, and fascists did many things we would today call objectively progressive. Teasing apart this seeming contradiction, and showing why it is not in fact a contradiction, are major aims of this book. But that does not mean I am calling liberals Nazis.
Let me put it this way: no serious person can deny that Marxist ideas had a profound impact on what we call liberalism. To point this out doesn’t mean that one is calling, say, Barack Obama a Stalinist or a communist. One can go even further and note that many of the most prominent liberals and leftists of the twentieth century assiduously minimized the evils and dangers presented by Soviet Communism; but that doesn’t necessarily mean it would be fair to accuse them of actually favoring Stalin’s genocidal crimes. It’s cruel to call someone a Nazi because it unfairly suggests sympathy with the Holocaust. But it is no less inaccurate to assume that fascism was simply the ideology of Jewish genocide. If you need a label for that, call it Hitlerism, for Hitler would not be Hitler without genocidal racism. And while Hitler was a fascist, fascism need not be synonymous with Hitlerism.
For example, it’s illuminating to note that Jews were overrepresented in the Italian Fascist Party and remained so from the early 1920s until 1938. Fascist Italy had nothing like a death camp system. Not a single Jew of any national origin under Italian control anywhere in the world was handed over to Germany until 1943, when Italy was invaded by the Nazis. Jews in Italy survived the war at a higher rate than anywhere under Axis rule save Denmark, and Jews in Italian-controlled areas of Europe fared almost as well. Mussolini actually sent Italian troops into harm’s way to save Jewish lives. Francisco Franco, allegedly a quintessential fascist dictator, also refused Hitler’s demand to hand over Spanish Jews, saving tens of thousands of Jews from extermination. It was Franco who signed the document abrogating the 1492 Edict of Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Meanwhile, the supposedly “liberal” French and Dutch eagerly cooperated with the Nazi deportation program.
At this point I need to make a few statements of a kind that should be obvious, but are necessary in order to prevent any possibility of being misunderstood or having my argument distorted by hostile critics. I love this country and have tremendous faith in its goodness and decency; under no circumstances can I imagine a fascist regime like that of the Nazis corning to power here, let alone an event like the Holocaust. This is because Americans, all Americans—liberals, conservatives, and independents, blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians—are shaped by a liberal, democratic, and egalitarian culture strong enough to resist any such totalitarian temptations. So, no, I do not think liberals are evil, villainous, or bigoted in the sense that typical Nazi comparisons suggest. The right-wing shtick of calling Hillary Clinton Hitlery is no less sophomoric than the constant drumbeat of “Bushitler” nonsense one finds on the left. The Americans who cheered for Mussolini in the 1920s cannot be held to account for what Hitler did nearly two decades later. And liberals today are not responsible for what their intellectual forefathers believed, though they should account for it.
But at the same time. Hitler’s crimes do not erase the similarities and attitudes that brought Mussolini and Hitler to power.
For example, it has long been known that the Nazis were economic populists, heavily influenced by the same ideas that motivated American and British populists. And while too often downplayed by liberal historians. American populism had a strong anti-Semitic and conspiratorial streak. A typical cartoon in a populist publication depicted the world grasped in the tentacles of an octopus sitting atop the British Isles. The octopus was labeled “Rothschild” An Associated Press reporter noted of the 1896 Populist convention “the extraordinary hatred of the Jewish race” on display. Father Charles Coughlin, “the Radio Priest,” was a left-wing populist rabble-rouser and conspiracy theorist whose anti-Semitism was well-known among establishment liberals even when they defended the pro-Roosevelt demagogue as being “on the side of the angels.”
Today, populist conspiracy theories run amok across the left (and are hardly unknown on the right). A full third of Americans believe it is “very” or “somewhat” likely that the government was behind (or allowed) the 9/11 attacks. A particular paranoia about the influence of the “Jewish lobby” has infected significant swaths of the campus and European left—not to mention the poisonous and truly Hitlerian anti-Semitic populism of the Arab “street” under regimes most would recognize as fascist. My point isn’t that the left is embracing Hitlerite anti-Semitism. Rather, it is embracing populism and indulging anti-Semites to an extent that is alarming and dangerous. Moreover, it’s worth recalling that the success of Nazism in Weimar Germany partially stemmed from the unwillingness of decent men to take it seriously.
There are other similarities between German and Italian Fascist ideas and modern American liberalism. For example, the corporatism at the heart of liberal economics today is seen as a bulwark against right-wing and vaguely fascistic corporate ruling classes. And yet the economic ideas of Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry. Al Gore, and Robert Reich are deeply similar to the corporatist “Third Way” ideologies that spawned fascist economics in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, contemporary liberalism’s cargo cult over the New Deal is enough to place modern liberalism in the family tree of fascism.
Or consider the explosion of health and New Age crusades in recent years, from the war on smoking, to the obsession with animal rights, to the sanctification of organic foods. No one disputes that these fads are a product of the cultural and political left. But few are willing to grapple with the fact that we’ve seen this sort of thing before. Heinrich Himmler was a certified animal rights activist and an aggressive promoter of “natural healing.” Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, championed homeopathy and herbal remedies. Hitler and his advisers dedicated hours of their time to discussions of the need to move the entire nation to vegetarianism as a response to the un-healthiness promoted by capitalism. Dachau hosted the world’s largest alternative and organic medicine research lab and produced its own organic honey.
In profound ways, the Nazi antismoking and public health drives foreshadowed today’s crusades against junk food, trans fats, and the like. A Hitler Youth manual proclaimed, “Nutrition is not a private matter!”—a mantra substantially echoed by the public health establishment today. The Nazis’ fixation on organic foods and personal health neatly fit their larger understanding of how the world works. Many Nazis were convinced that Christianity, which held that men were intended to conquer nature rather than live in harmony with it, and capitalism, which alienated men from their natural state, conspired to undermine German health. In a widely read book on nutrition, Hugo Kleine blamed “capitalist special interests” (and “masculinized Jewish half-women”) for the decline in quality of German foods, which contributed in turn to the rise in cancer (another Nazi obsession). Organic food was inextricably linked to what the Nazis then described—as the left does today—as “social justice” issues.
Are you automatically a fascist if you care about health, nutrition, and the environment? Of course not. What is fascist is the notion that in an organic national community, the individual has no right not to be healthy; and the state therefore has the obligation to force us to be healthy for our own good. To the extent that these modern health movements seek to harness the power of the state to their agenda, they flirt with classical fascism. Even culturally, environmentalism gives license to the sort of moral bullying and intrusion that, were it couched in terms of traditional morality, liberals would immediately denounce as fascist.
As of this writing, a legislator in New York wants to ban using iPods when crossing the street. In many parts of the country it is illegal to smoke in your ear or even outdoors if other human beings could conceivably be near you. We hear much about how conservatives want to “invade our bedrooms,” but as this book went to press, Greenpeace and other groups were launching a major campaign to “educa
te” people on how they can have environmentally friendly sex. Greenpeace has a whole list of strategies for “getting it on for the good of the planet.” You may trust that environmentalists have no desire to translate these voluntary suggestions into law, but I have no such confidence given the track record of similar campaigns in the past. Free speech, too, is under relentless assault where it matters most—around elections—and it is being sanctified where it matters least, around strippers’ poles and on terrorist Web sites.
In Democracy hi America, Alexis de Tocqueville warned: “It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones.” This country seems to have inverted Tocqueville’s hierarchy. We must all lose our liberties on the little things so that a handful of people can enjoy their freedoms to the fullest.
For generations our primary vision of a dystopian future has been that of Orwell’s 1984. This was a fundamentally “masculine” nightmare of fascist brutality. But with the demise of the Soviet Union and the vanishing memory of the great twentieth-century fascist and communist dictatorships, the nightmare vision of 1984 is slowly fading away. In its place, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is emerging as the more prophetic book. As we unravel the human genome and master the ability to make people happy with televised entertainment and psychoactive drugs, politics is increasingly a vehicle for delivering prepackaged joy. America’s political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now more and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered. And though it has been the subject of high school English essay questions for generations, we have not gotten much closer to answering the question, what exactly was so bad about the Brave New World?
Simply this: it is fool’s gold. The idea that we can create a heaven on earth through pharmacology and neuroscience is as Utopian as the Marxist hope that we could create a perfect world by rearranging the means of production. The history of totalitarianism is the history of the quest to transcend the human condition and create a society where our deepest meaning and destiny are realized simply by virtue of the fact that we live in it. It cannot be done, and even if, as often in the case of liberal fascism, the effort is very careful to be humane and decent, it will still result in a kind of benign tyranny where some people get to impose their ideas of goodness and happiness on those who may not share them.
The introduction of a novel term like “liberal fascism” obviously requires an explanation. Many critics will undoubtedly regard it as a crass oxymoron. Actually, however. I am not the first to use the term. That honor falls to H. G. Wells, one of the greatest influences on the progressive mind in the twentieth century (and, it turns out, the inspiration for Huxley’s Brave New World). Nor did Wells coin the phrase as an indictment, but as a badge of honor. Progressives must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis,” he told the Young Liberals at Oxford in a speech in July 1932, Wells was a leading voice in what I have called the fascist moment, when many Western elites were eager to replace Church and Crown with slide rules and industrial armies. Throughout his work he championed the idea that special men—variously identified as scientists, priests, warriors, or “samurai”—must impose progress on the masses in order to create a “New Republic” or a “world theocracy.” Only through militant Progressivism—by whatever name—could mankind achieve the fulfillment of the kingdom of God. Wells, simply put, was enthralled by the totalitarian temptation. “I have never been able to escape altogether from its relentless logic,” he declared.
Fascism, like Progressivism and communism, is expansionist because it sees no natural boundary to its ambitions. For violent variants, like so-called Islamofascism. this is transparently obvious. But Progressivism, too, envisions a New World Order. World War I was a “crusade” to redeem the whole world, according to Woodrow Wilson. Even Wilson’s pacifist secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, could not shake off his vision of a Christian world order, complete with a global prohibition of alcohol.
One objection to all of this might be: So what? It’s interesting in a counterintuitive way to learn that a bunch of dead liberals and progressives thought this or that, but what does it have to do with liberals today? Two responses come to mind. The first is admittedly not fully responsive. Conservatives in America must carry their intellectual history—real and alleged—around their necks like an albatross. The ranks of elite liberal journalism and scholarship swell with intrepid scribblers who point to “hidden histories” and “disturbing echoes” in the conservative historical closet. Connections with dead right-wingers, no matter how tenuous and obscure, are trotted out as proof that today’s conservatives are continuing a nefarious project. Why, then, is it so trivial to point out that the liberal closet has its own skeletons, particularly when those skeletons are the architects of the modern welfare state?
Which raises the second response. Liberalism, unlike conservatism, is operationally uninterested in its own intellectual history. But that doesn’t make it any less indebted to it. Liberalism stands on the shoulders of its own giants and thinks its feet are planted firmly on the ground. Its assumptions and aspirations can be traced straight back to the Progressive Era, a fact illustrated by the liberal tendency to use the word “progressive” whenever talking about its core convictions and idea-generating institutions (the Progressive magazine, the Progressive Policy Institute, the Center for American Progress, and so on). I am simply lighting on a battleground of liberalism’s choosing. Liberals are the ones who’ve insisted that conservatism has connections with fascism. They are the ones who claim free-market economics are fascist and that therefore their own economic theories should be seen as the more virtuous, even though the truth is almost entirely the reverse.
Today’s liberalism doesn’t seek to conquer the world by force of arms. It is not a nationalist and genocidal project. To the contrary, it is an ideology of good intentions. But we all know where even the best of intentions can take us. I have not written a book about how all liberals are Nazis or fascists. Rather, I have tried to write a book warning that even the best of us are susceptible to the totalitarian temptation.
This includes some self-described conservatives. Compassionate conservatism, in many respects, is a form of Progressivism, a descendant of Christian socialism. Much of George W. Bush’s rhetoric about leaving no children behind and how “when somebody hurts, government has got to move” bespeaks a vision of the state that is indeed totalitarian in its aspirations and not particularly conservative in the American sense. Once again, it is a nice totalitarianism, motivated no doubt by sincere Christian love (thankfully tempered by poor implementation); but love, too, can be smothering. In fact, the rage that Bush’s tenure has elicited in many of his critics is illustrative. Bush’s intentions are decent, but those who don’t share his vision find them oppressive. The same works the other way around. Liberals agree with Hillary Clinton’s intentions; they just assert that anyone who finds them oppressive is a fascist.
Finally, since we must have a working definition of fascism, here is mine: Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the “problem” and therefore defined as the enemy. I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism.
Before we conclude, some housekeeping issues.
I will follow the standard practice among English-speaking historians of fascism. When referring to generic fasci
sm, I will spell the word with a lowercase f (unless at the beginning of a sentence). When referring to Italian Fascism. I will use the uppercase. I have also tried to be clear when I am talking about liberalism as we use the phrase today and classical liberalism, which means, more or less, the exact opposite.
Fascism is an enormous topic with thousands of books covering relevant themes. I have tried to be fair to the academic literature, though this is not an academic book. Indeed, the literature is so fraught with controversy that not only is there no accepted definition of fascism, but there isn’t even a consensus that Italian Fascism and Nazism were kindred phenomena. I have tried to steer clear of such debates whenever possible. But my own view is that despite the profound doctrinal differences between Italian and German fascism, they represent kindred sociological phenomena.
I have also tried to steer clear of the scores of other “fascisms” around the globe. Critics may claim that this is to my advantage, in that this or that fascism was clearly right-wing or conservative or un-progressive. I’ll take such criticisms on a case-by-case basis. But I should also note that this practice hurts my case as much as it helps. For example, by excluding Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, I have cut myself off from a wonderful supply of left-wing pro-fascist rhetoric and arguments.