Liberal Fascism

“Liberal Fascism – The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” by Jonah Goldberg (2007)

Definition:
“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.” (p 23)

He argues that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism.

“How is it – considering that most liberals and leftists believe they were put on this earth to oppose fascism with every breath – that many if not most American liberals either admired Mussolini and his project or simply didn’t care much about it one way or the other?”

“The answer resides in the fact that Fascism was born of a ‘fascist moment’ in Western civilization, when a coalition of intellectuals going by various labels – progressive, communist, socialist, and so forth – believed the era of liberal democracy was drawing to a close. It was time for man to lay aside the anachronisms of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism, and the like and rise to the responsibility of remaking the world in his own image. … Mussolini, a lifelong socialist intellectual, was a warrior in this crusade, and his Fascism – a doctrine he created from the same intellectual material Lenin and Trotsky had built their movements with – was a grand leap into the ear of ‘experimentation’ that would sweep aside old dogmas and usher in a new age. This was in every significant way a project of the left as we understand the term today, a fact understood by Mussolini, his admirers, and his detractors.” (30-31, emphasis mine)

“Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. .Hence all fascistic movement s commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency.” (p 43)

“The Nazis rose to power exploiting anti-capitalistic rhetoric they indisputably believed. Even it Hitler was the nihilistic cipher many portray him as, it is impossible ot deny the sincerity of the Nazi rank an d file who saw themselves as mounting a revolutionary assault on the forces of capitalism. Moreover, Nazism also emphasized many of the themes of later New Lefts in other places and times: the primacy of race, the rejection of rationalism, an emphasis on the organic and holistic – including environmentalism, health food, and exercise – and most of all, the need to ‘transcend’ notions of class.” (p59)

“What is indisputable is that Hitler was in no way conservative – a point scholars careful with their words always underscore. Certainly , to suggest that Hitler was a conservative in any sense related to American conservatism is lunacy. American conservatives seek to preserve both traditional values and the classical liberal creed enshrined in the Constitution. American conservatism straddles these two distinct but overlapping libertarian and traditionalist strains, whereas Hitler despised both of them.” (p 61)

“What distinguished Nazism from other brands of socialism and communism was not so much that it included more aspects form the political right (though there were some). What distinguished Nazism was that it forthrightly included a worldview we now associate almost completely with the political left: identity politics.” (p 73)

“One of the great ironies of history is that the more similar two groups are, the greater the potential for them to hate each others. …But what Hitler hated about Marxism an communism had almost nothing to do with those aspects of communism that we would consider relevant, such as economic doctrine or the need to destroy the capitalists and bourgeoisie. In these areas Hitler largely saw eye to eye with socialists and communist. His hatred stemmed from his paranoid conviction that the the people calling themselves communists wser in fact in on a foreign , Jewish conspiracy. ..Hitler never cared much about economics anyway. He always considered it ‘secondary.’ What mattered to him was German identity politics.” (p 74-5)

“Fascism is middle-class Socialism and we cannot persuade the middle classes to abandon it until we can prove to them that it only makes their condition worse.” Karl Radek quote on p 76

“Call it what you like – progressivism, fascism, communism, or totalitarianism – the first true enterprise of this kind was established not in Russia or Italy or Germany but in the United States, and Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century’s first fascist dictator.” (p80) “…consider the evidence. More dissidents were arrested or jailed in a few years under Wilson than under Mussolini during the entire 1920s. Wilson arguably did as much if not more violence to civil liberties in this last three years in office than Mussolini did in his first twelve. Wilson created a better and more effective propaganda ministry than Mussolini ever had. In the 1920s Mussolini’s critics harangued him – rightly – for using his semiofficial Fascisti to bully the opposition and for his harassment of the press. Just a few years earlier, Wilson had unleashed literally hundreds of thousands of badge-carrying goons on the American people and prosecuted a vicious campaign against the press that would have made Mussolini envious.” (p81)

“The Progressives were the real social Darwinists as we think of them today. They believed in eugenics. They were imperialists. They were convinced hat the state could, through planning andn p;ressure, create a pure race, a society of new men. They were openly and proudly hostile to individualism. Religion was a political tool, while politics was the true religion.” (p81)

About the Wilson era:
“Then there were the inevitable progressive crackdown on individual civil liberties. Today’s liberals tend to complain about the McCarthy period as if it were the darkest moment in American history after slavery. It’s true: under McCarthyism a few Hollywood writers who’d supported Stalin and then lied about it lost their jobs in the 1950s. Others were unfairly intimidated. But nothing that happened under the mad reign of Joe McCarthy remotely compares with what Wilson and his fellow progressives foisted on America. Under the Espionage Act of June 1917 and the Sedition Act of May 1918, any criticism of the government, even in your own home, could earn you a prison sentence (a law Oliver Wendell Homes upheld years after the war, arguing that such speech could be banned if it posed a “clear and present danger”). In Wisconsin a state official got two and a half years for criticizing a Red Cross fund-raising drive. A Hollywood producer received a ten-year stint in jail for making a film that depicted British troops committing atrocities during the American Revolution. One man was brought to trial for explaining in his own home why he didn’t want to buy Liberty Bonds.” (p113-114)

“The Justice Department created its own quasi-official fascisti, know as the American Protective League or APL. …Members of the APL read their neighbors’ mail and listened in on their phones with government approval. In Rockford, Illinois, the army asked the APL to help extract confessions from black soldiers accused of assaulting white women. The APL’s American Vigilante Patrol cracked down on ‘seditions street oratory.’ One of its most important functions was to serve as hed crackers against ‘slackers’ who avoided conscription. (p 114)

“Roosevelt saw himself as a popularizer of intellectual currents. He spoke in generalities that everyone found agreeable at first and meaningless upon reflection. He could be – or at least sound – Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian, internationalist and isolationist, this and that as well as the other thing. … Too many liberals subscribe to the myth that the New Deal was a coherent, elightened, unified endeavor encapsulated in the largely meaningless phrase “the Roosevelt legacy.” This is poppycock. …When Alvin Hansen, an influential economic adviser to the president, was asked – in 1940 ! – whether ‘the basic principle of the New Deal’ was ‘economically sound,’ he responded, ‘I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is.” This raises the first of many common features among New Deal liberalism, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialis, all of which shared many of the same historical and intellectual forebears. Fascist and Nazi intellectuals constantly touted a ‘middle’ or ‘Third Way’ between capitalism and socialism. … FDR’s ‘middle way’ had a very specific resonance, seemingly contradictory to its philosophical assumptions. … That the Third Way could be cast as an appeal to both utopians and anti-utopians may sound implausible, but political agendas need not be logically coherent, merely popularly seductive. And seductiveness has always been the Third Way’s defining characteristic.” (p 130-131) (emphasis added)

Father Coughlin
“Coughlin was in no meaningful way a conservative or even a right-winger. He was a man of the left in nearly all significant respects.” … “He [Father Coughlin] railed against a federal government that could help the starving of Belgium and even pigs in Arkansas but wouldn’t feed Americans because of its antagonism to welfare. As the presidential election loomed, Coughlin threw all is weight behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The left-wing theocrat swore that the new Deal was “Christ’s Deal” and that the choice Americans faced was “Roosevelt or Ruin.” (p 138)

“From the dawnof the Progressive Era through the 1930s, the intellectual and ideological landscape was fractured within this larger camp. The fight between left and right was for the most part between left-wing and right wing socialists. But virtually all camps subscribed to some hybridized version of Marxism, some bastafdization of the Rousseauian dream of a society governed by a general will. It was not until the late 1940s, with the revival of classical liberalism led by Friedrich Hayek, that collectivism of all stripes was once again fought from a right that did not share the core assumptions of the left.” (p 139)

Quotes from Coughlin, Jan 17, 1934: “God is directing President Roosevelt,” and “he is the answer to our prayers.” “Our government still upholds one of the worst evils of decadent capitalism, namely that production must be only at the profit for the owners, for the capitalist, and not for the laborer.” (p 141)

“So how did Coughlin become a right-winger?. … On this the historical record is abundantly clear: liberals started to call Coughlin a right-winger when he moved further to the left.” “ … he decided FDR wasn’t radical enough.”(p 141)

“In the 1930’s what defined a ‘right-winger’ was almost excliusively opposition ot Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.” (p143)

“Senator Huey Long, the archetypical American fascist, is likewise often called a right-winger by his detractors – though his place in the liberal imagination is more complicated. Many Democrats, including Bill Clinton, still admire Long and invoke him very selectively.” “ … what cannot be denied is that Long attacked the New Deal from the left. His Share the Wealth plan was pure booboisie socialism.” (p143)

“The core value of original fascism, in the eyes of most observers, was its imposition of war values on society. The chief appeal of war to social planners isn’t conquest or death but mobilization. …During the campaign FDR promised to use his experience as an architect of the Great War to tackle the Depression. … Almost every program of the early New Deal was rooted in the politics of war; the economics of war, or the aesthetics of war emerging from WWI. … Many New Deal agencies, the famous ‘alphabet soup,’ were mostly continuation sof various boards and committees set up fifteen years earlier during the war. … Perhaps no program better represented the new governmental martial outlook than the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC. Arguably the most popular program of the New Deal, the CCC mobilized some 2.5 million young men into what ccould only be called paramilitary training…. After the CCC was approved by Congress, FDR reported, ‘it is a pretty god record, one which I think can be compared with the mobilization carried on in 1917.’” (pp 150-152)