This tactic was perhaps most infamously employed back in 1987, when progressives like Senator Edward Kennedy railed against Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. This fearmongering was the beginning of a consistent progressive attack against nearly all conservatives by likening them to authoritarians of yesteryear.
Kennedy ranted on the floor of the U.S. Senate:
Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.
THE TRUTH
* * *
The reality is that it’s progressives, not conservatives, who have been backers of authoritarians throughout history, from Hitler to Mussolini to Stalin. But they’ve realized that playing defense is not a fun place to be, so they go on offense, leveling these ridiculous charges against conservatives as though a love of individual liberty and constitutional principles were somehow related to the Third Reich.
Let’s take Hitler for starters. Progressives didn’t oppose Hitler in the 1930s; they mostly embraced him as a visionary.
Writer H. G. Wells, who was one of the most influential progressives of the twentieth century, said in 1932 that progressives must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis.” Regarding totalitarianism, he stated, “I have never been able to escape altogether from its relentless logic.”
W. E. B. Du Bois, cofounder of the NAACP, called the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany “absolutely necessary to get the state in order.”
Joseph P. Kennedy, father of Jack, Bobby, and Teddy, was a legendary apologist for the Nazis, a truth that the mainstream media glossed over for years. Kennedy had supported the disastrous Munich appeasement treaty with Hitler negotiated by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, and he shared a Hitler-like animus toward the Jews that led him to argue that they should be shipped to Africa. Kennedy also doubted the success of democracy as a long-term enterprise. “Democracy is finished in England,” the ambassador told the Boston Globe. “It may be here.” His views, for a time, even affected his young son, the future president. “Fascism?” the youthful president-to-be once wrote. “The right thing for Germany.”
Contrary to progressive revisionism and acclaimed Nazi chroniclers such as William Shirer, Hitler was not a man of the right who paid lip service to socialist causes. He was, in fact, as author Jonah Goldberg and others have pointed out, a “man of the left.” This wasn’t something Hitler tried to hide, given that the word Nazi is short for the National Socialist Party.
In 1998, historian George Watson wrote, “It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.” Hitler privately acknowledged to acquaintances his “profound debt” to Marxism. “I have learned a great deal from Marxism,” he remarked, “as I do not hesitate to admit.”
Hitler’s Nazi platform sounded a lot like Obama’s or Clinton’s does today: a planned centralized economy with strict gun control, separation of church and state, a ban on private schools, universal health care, and a demand that “the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood.” That’s not to mention sharing the eugenics vision of progressives such as Margaret Sanger, by attempting to exterminate an entire race of people in the most monstrous crime in history. Small wonder that today’s progressives like to overlook their support for the Nazi dream.
The Left’s love affair with Nazism was no random flight of fancy. Leftists had a similar ardor for another great visionary and noted humanitarian: Benito Mussolini. Historian Charles Beard was among those who praised Il Duce, a venomous thug and Hitler ally: “Beyond question, an amazing experiment is being made [in Italy], an experiment in reconciling individualism and socialism.”
Muckraking journalists almost universally admired Mussolini. Lincoln Steffens—a progressive writer who also hailed the Soviet Union as “the future”—said that Italian fascism made Western democracy, by comparison, look like a system run by “petty persons with petty purposes.” Mussolini, Steffens proclaimed reverently, had been “formed” by God “out of the rib of Italy.”
Edward M. House, a leading adviser to Woodrow Wilson, touted Mussolini as a “beneficent dictator,” proclaiming, “Italy has such a government now functioning under the able and courageous Mussolini.” And one of Franklin Roosevelt’s prized advisers, Rexford Guy Tugwell, praised Italian fascism as “the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen.”
Perhaps no vicious authoritarian received more elite progressive praise than “Uncle Joe” Stalin, the iron-fisted thug and accomplished con artist who charmed dim-witted Westerners while murdering his opponents in the Soviet Union and otherwise running the Russian economy into the ground.
Franklin Roosevelt’s own vice president, Henry Wallace, who would have moved into the Oval Office had he not been replaced on a whim by Harry S. Truman in 1944, was one of the most notorious Soviet apologists in American history. “Even at his most murderous, as with the purge trials of the 1930s,” one Wallace chronicler reported, “Stalin was defended by Wallace, who swallowed the party line that the dictator’s execution of hundreds of people was a necessary anti-fascist action against a Hitler-backed fifth column.”
There was also the infamous Walter Duranty, Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times, who won a Pulitzer Prize for parroting Stalinist propaganda. In one of his (many) notorious “reports” from the Soviet Union, Duranty denied the deaths of thousands of Soviet citizens resulting from Stalin-imposed starvations: “There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be,” he wrote in the Times on November 15, 1931. When other reporters began spreading the news of the famine, Duranty was asked what he’d write. He responded: “Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated.” Meanwhile, peasants in Ukraine, the Weekly Standard reported, “were dying at a rate of 25,000 a day.”
Malcolm Muggeridge, a correspondent and contemporary of Duranty’s, labeled him “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism.” Muggeridge went on to summarize the thinking of progressives of the day—the fools who were intent on romanticizing communism and ignoring obvious signs of its evil:
“Wise old [George Bernard] Shaw, high-minded old [Henri] Barbusse, the venerable [Sidney and Beatrice] Webbs, [André] Gide the pure in heart and [Pablo] Picasso the impure, down to poor little teachers, crazed clergymen and millionaires, driveling dons and very special correspondents like Duranty, all resolved, come what might, to believe anything, however preposterous, to overlook nothing, however villainous, to approve anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in order to be able to preserve intact the confident expectation that one of the most thorough-going, ruthless and bloody tyrannies ever to exist on earth could be relied on to champion human freedom, the brotherhood of man, and all the other good liberal causes to which they had dedicated their lives.
In 2003, the New York Times decided to “investigate” whether Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize should be revoked. Did it rescind the award and apologize to the country? Of course not. The Times did what progressives always do: let the lies stand.
PART III
FEAR THE FUTURE
STUART CHASE, THE PROGRESSIVE PROPHET
* * *
At the time of this writing, more than a hundred years since the progressive movement first took root in America (though, as we’ve seen, its roots elsewhere go far deeper), Barack Obama—the progressive heir to men such as Woodrow and T
eddy and Franklin and Lyndon—is preparing to leave office, having successfully presided over the “fundamental” transformation of America that he had long promised.
Fighting to replace Obama is Hillary Clinton, a self-proclaimed progressive, and the Republicans determined to stop her.
Or are they?
Ah, yes, the Republicans. The party that once stood for self-reliance and independence has been invaded and perverted by faux-conservatives—and even some legitimate progressives—who don’t mind expanding government as long as their own power and perks are preserved. It’s getting harder and harder (and, in some cases, impossible) to tell the political parties apart.
The Republican Party is, however, still home to a few staunch constitutionalists, such as Senator Ted Cruz, who understand that our founding documents serve as a road map. Throughout history, these documents have allowed us to course-correct ourselves and to be sure that despite the inevitable gyrations, we ultimately stand on the side of freedom.
It’s also home to a few staunch authoritarians, such as Donald Trump, who has used fear and anger to transfix legions of otherwise good and faithful conservatives. He has evinced this in the bullying tone of his rhetoric, the bullying nature of his “policies” (if they can be called that), and the bullying tactics employed by his campaign.
Trump’s goal is not to shrink government back to a more constitutionally appropriate size; he would much prefer to preside over a massive government as though he were an all-powerful CEO of a massive corporation. He doesn’t want to reduce government, he just wants to run it more efficiently.
Trump, a defender of the human-extinction platform of Planned Parenthood, a contributor to the Clintons, Jimmy Carter, and even Walter Mondale, is a Trojan horse from the progressive movement being rolled into the GOP.
How did it come to this? Who could have seen the day coming when America would be on the precipice of a complete progressive revolution?
At least one man did. He was a Harvard-educated economist who was active in progressive politics from the Wilson administration all the way to Johnson’s Great Society. He was one of the most important political thinkers most people have probably never heard of.
You’ve already heard his name earlier in this book: Stuart Chase.
Boston
Autumn 1911
A gust of wind sent a chill through the already-crisp fall air, rustling the almost barren trees in Copley Square. The piles of leaves that had already fallen were gathered up by the sharp winds and swirled around the feet of those who found themselves walking through this busy Boston hub—including one wiry young man who was striding across the Square toward the Boston Public Library.
Stuart Chase walked with his shoulders hunched, not only against the cold but seemingly weighed down by the problems that plagued his mind. On the surface, everything appeared to be going well for him. He was twenty-two, almost twenty-three, and had already achieved a lot for himself.
Chase had been educated at fine schools, including MIT (his father’s alma matter) and Harvard, from which he had graduated just a year before. He had a decent job working at his father’s accounting firm, but something inside Chase hungered for more than debits, credits, and dusty old ledgers.
Here was a man who was coming of age at a heady time. And he knew it. He felt a similar enthusiasm for this new era among his contemporaries at Harvard, such as progressive journalist Walter Lippmann and Communist writer John Reed.i The three schoolmates were all active in socialist groups at Harvard, such as the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS), which was founded in New York City in 1905 with the “influence and guidance” of Fabian socialists.
There was a movement growing that sought not just to solve the social problems of the age but also to advance society to ensure that these problems would never reoccur. Young Chase imbibed books like Progress and Poverty that had predicted a revolution. He worried deeply that the world would go down the wrong path during the coming change in the new twentieth century and that humanity would need a strong hand to push it onto the right path. Stirring in Chase was the feeling that he had to do something about it.
The winds of change, as much as the cold Boston breeze, propelled him as he crossed Dartmouth Street and scurried up the library steps. He paused before entering the library and looked at the inscription above the entrance: BUILT BY THE PEOPLE AND DEDICATED TO THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING.
Built by the people.
Chase remembered from Boston lore that architect Charles McKim had called his Renaissance Revival masterpiece a “palace of the people.” Did “the people” appreciate it? he wondered. Moreover, could “the people” to whom this great edifice was dedicated ever be trusted to take their society down the right path?
He entered the library and breathed a little easier. This was where he felt most at home, a place he went to get away from the drudgery of accounting work and to educate himself about the great problems of the age.
Chase’s footsteps echoed off the rounded ceiling of Bates Hall, whose high windows let in generous, bright sunlight for the readers at the long tables below, as he made his way to his inner sanctum: the economics section. There, among the tomes by men who sought to define the massive system of capital in which his father’s accounting business was a mere cog, Chase sat down at a secluded table, pulled out a pen and some paper, and began to write.
So many are the roads and lanes and byways that branch from this open portal. I look back and see the straight, calm thoroughfare that has led me here. I look forward and stand dazed and blinded before the myriad ways that lead to ultimate darkness or light. Now I must choose my own path . . . from among the many and follow it in all faith and trust until experience bids me seek another. The world always turns aside to let one pass who knows where they are going.
Chase knew exactly where he was going—and how the world would turn aside to let progressives like him lead it.
♣
The passage by Chase may read at first as if written by a young man who felt he was destined for great things, but upon closer inspection, it’s easy to see evidence of something deeper: fear, specifically fear of the unknown. Chase seemed positively overwhelmed by all “the roads and lanes and byways” before him, especially in contrast to the “straight, calm thoroughfare” that was his relatively privileged upbringing. Far from confident about the path he would take, he was “dazed and blinded” and feared making the wrong choice between the “ultimate darkness or light.” Chase realized that not only did he have to make the right choice between “ultimate darkness or light,” but all of mankind would have to make that choice as well.
This was a choice that could not be left up to chance. He realized that in order to conquer this fear of the unknown, to make sure that everyone was not “dazed and blinded,” he had to get involved. He had to help make the world turn aside.
As a result, Chase threw himself into progressive causes. By 1917, a profile in the journal of the Co-operative League of America noted that he was “active in various progressive movements,” including the Fabian Club of Boston and the Massachusetts Single Tax League. The profile also revealed that he was “connected as an officer with the Massachusetts Birth Control League.” (“Birth control” at that time was, of course, a thin veneer for eugenics.)
With the help of his father, Chase joined the administration of progressive hero Woodrow Wilson, serving as an investigator with the Federal Trade Commission. His beat was the Chicago meatpacking industry, a favorite target of progressives ever since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle had been published beginning in 1905. Chase was subsequently fired after members of the U.S. Senate discovered he had organized socialist activities while on government business investigating meatpackers in Chicago. They denounced him as a “Red accountant” who had “inflated” government data to make the industry look bad.
Chase was already learning that the ends justified the means, even when those means were illegal.
After losing his
position in the Wilson administration, Chase dabbled in progressive circles and wrote books on economics, but he was mostly adrift until the summer of 1927, when he took a trip along with other economists as part of the “First American Trade Union Delegation” to the Soviet Union. Chase, with his lifelong socialist sympathies, must have jumped at the chance to see the grand socialist experiment up close. By that time, Lenin and Trotsky were both gone and Stalin was in charge, but that hardly mattered.
Apparently, Stalin did not disappoint. Historian Amity Shlaes recounts that despite only meeting with the Soviet dictator for six hours, the American delegation was “bowled over.” It was part of a general fascination with totalitarian regimes among American progressive thinkers at the time. Shlaes explains that these scholars would travel abroad, and then “they come back and you see them . . . implementing things they learned from fascist Italy or from the world of Stalin.” Shlaes notes: “The influence of these European entities from Russia to Italy was not parenthetical.” As they advanced in their careers, “these people were not working for Moscow, but they were influenced by Moscow.”
In 1931, Chase made the acquaintance of a man whose destiny would intertwine with his own: Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the time they met, Roosevelt was serving as governor of New York, while Chase had yet another book coming out that argued for greater government intervention in the private sector and more central economic planning (to be supported, of course, by increased federal spending). It was a look toward the future, and the book ended with Chase putting a question to his readers: “Why should Russians have all the fun remaking a world?”