Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

amounts of research time and mental energy have been put into the study of it...fascism has remained the great conundrum for students of the twentieth century.' Meanwhile, the authors of the Dictionnaire historique des fascismes et du nazisme flatly assert, 'No universally accepted definition of the fascist phenomenon exists, no consensus, however slight, as to its range, its ideological origins, or the modalities of action which characterize it.' Stanley G. Payne, considered by many to be the leading living scholar of fascism, wrote in 1995, 'At the end of the twentieth century fascism remains probably the vaguest of the major political terms.' There are even serious scholars who argue that Nazism wasn't fascist, that fascism doesn't exist at all, or that it is primarily a secular religion (this is my own view). '[P]ut simply,' writes Gilbert Allardyce, 'we have agreed to use the word without agreeing on how to define it.'³

And yet even though scholars admit that the nature of fascism is vague, complicated, and open to wildly divergent interpretations, many modern liberals and leftists act as if they know exactly what fascism is. What's more, they see it everywhere — except when they look in the mirror. Indeed, the left wields the term like a cudgel to beat opponents from the public square like seditious pamphleteers. After all, no one has to take a fascist seriously. You're under no obligation to listen to a fascist's arguments or concern yourself with his feelings or rights. It's why Al Gore and many other environmentalists are so quick to compare global-warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers. Once such an association takes hold, there's no reason to give such people the time of day.

In short, 'fascist' is a modern word for 'heretic,' branding an individual worthy of excommunication from the body politic. The left uses other words — 'racist,' 'sexist,' 'homophobe,' 'christianist' — for similar purposes, but these words have less elastic meanings. Fascism, however, is the gift that keeps on giving. George Orwell noted this tendency as early as 1946 in his famous essay 'Politics and the English Language': 'The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.''⁴

Hollywood writers use the words 'fascist,' 'Brownshirt,' and 'Nazi' as if they mean no more and no less than 'anything liberals don't like.' On NBC's West Wing support for school choice was deemed 'fascist' (even though school choice is arguably the most un-fascist public policy ever conceived, after homeschooling). Crash Davis, Kevin Costner's character in the movie Bull Durham, explains to his protege, 'Quit trying to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring and besides that, they're fascist. Throw some ground balls. They're more democratic.' A rude cook on Seinfeld is the 'Soup Nazi.'

The real world is only marginally less absurd. Representative Charlie Rangel claimed that the GOP's 1994 Contract with America was more extreme than Nazism. 'Hitler wasn't even talking about doing these things' (this is technically accurate in that Hitler wasn't, in fact, pushing term limits for committee chairs and 'zero-based' budgeting). In 2000 Bill Clinton called the Texas GOP platform a 'fascist tract.' The New York Times leads a long roster of mainstream publications eager to promote leading academics who raise the possibility that the GOP is a fascist party and that Christian conservatives are the new Nazis.⁵

More recently, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges penned a book called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, which is just one of many current polemics asserting that conservative or fundamentalist Christians are fascists (Rick Perlstein's otherwise quite negative New York Times review begins with the declaration: 'Of course there are Christian fascists in America'). The Reverend Jesse Jackson ascribes every form of opposition to his race-based agenda as fascist. During the 2000 Florida recount, he proclaimed that survivors of the Holocaust had been targeted 'again' because the Florida ballot was too complicated for a few thousand elderly voters. On Larry King Live, Jackson absurdly proclaimed, 'The Christian Coalition was a strong force in Germany.' He continued: 'It laid down a suitable, scientific, theological rationale for the tragedy in Germany. The Christian Coalition was very much in evidence there.'⁶

Ask the average, reasonably educated person what comes to mind when she hears the word 'fascism' and the immediate responses are 'dictatorship,' 'genocide,' 'anti-Semitism,' 'racism,' and (of course) 'right wing.' Delve a bit deeper — and move a bit further to the left — and you'll hear a lot about 'eugenics,' 'social Darwinism,' 'state capitalism,' or the sinister rule of big business. War, militarism, and nationalism will also come up a lot. Some of these attributes were indisputably central to what we might call 'classical' fascism — the Fascism of Benito Mussolini and the Nazism of Adolf Hitler. Others — like the widely misunderstood term 'social Darwinism' — have little to do with fascism.⁷ But very few of these things are unique to fascism, and almost none of them are distinctly right-wing or conservative — at least in the American sense.

To begin with, one must be able to distinguish between the symptoms and the disease. Consider militarism, which will come up again and again in the course of this book. Militarism was indisputably central to fascism (and communism) in countless countries. But it has a more nuanced relationship with fascism than one might suppose. For some thinkers in Germany and the United States (such as Teddy Roosevelt and Oliver Wendell Holmes), war was truly the source of important moral values. This was militarism as a social philosophy pure and simple. But for far more people, militarism was a pragmatic expedient: the highest, best means for organizing society in productive ways. Inspired by ideas like those in William James's famous essay 'The Moral Equivalent of War,' militarism seemed to provide a workable and sensible model for achieving desirable ends. Mussolini, who openly admired and invoked James, used this logic for his famous 'Battle of the Grains' and other sweeping social initiatives. Such ideas had an immense following in the United States, with many leading progressives championing the use of 'industrial armies' to create the ideal workers' democracy. Later, Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps — as militaristic a social program as one can imagine — borrowed from these ideas, as did JFK's Peace Corps.

This trope has hardly been purged from contemporary liberalism. Every day we hear about the 'war on cancer,' the 'war on drugs,' the 'War on Poverty,' and exhortations to make this or that social challenge the 'moral equivalent of war.' From health care to gun control to global warming, liberals insist that we need to 'get beyond politics' and 'put ideological differences behind us' in order to 'do the people's business.' The experts and scientists know what to do, we are told; therefore the time for debate is over. This, albeit in a nicer and more benign form, is the logic of fascism — and it was on ample display in the administrations of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and yes, even John F. Kennedy.

Then, of course, there's racism. Racism was indisputably central to Nazi ideology. Today we are perfectly comfortable equating racism and Nazism. And in important respects that's absolutely appropriate. But why not equate Nazism and, say, Afrocentrism? Many early Afrocentrists, like Marcus Garvey, were pro-fascist or openly identified themselves as fascists. The Nation of Islam has surprising ties to Nazism, and its theology is Himmleresque. The Black Panthers — a militaristic cadre of young men dedicated to violence, separatism, and racial superiority — are as quintessentially fascist as Hitler's Brownshirts or Mussolini's action squads. The Afrocentrist writer Leonard Jeffries (blacks are 'sun people,' and whites are 'ice people') could easily be mistaken for a Nazi theorist.

Certain quarters of the left assert that 'Zionism equals racism' and that Israelis are equivalent to Nazis. As invidious and problematic as those comparisons are, why aren't we hearing similar denunciations of groups ranging from the National Council of La Raza — that is, 'The Race' — to the radical Hispanic group MEChA, whose motto — 'Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada' — means 'Everything for the race, nothing outside the race'? Why is it that when a white man spouts such sentiments it's 'objectively' fascist, but when a person of color says the same thing it's merely an expression of fashionable multiculturalism?

The most important priority for the left is not to offer any answer at all to such questions. They would much prefer to maintain Orwell's definition of fascism as anything not desirable, thus excluding their own fascistic proclivities from inquiring eyes. When they are forced to answer, however, the response is usually more instinctive, visceral, or dismissively mocking than rational or principled. Their logic seems to be that multiculturalism, the Peace Corps, and such are good things — things that liberals approve of — and good things can't be fascist by simple virtue of the fact that liberals approve of them. Indeed, this seems to be the irreducible argument of countless writers who glibly use the word 'fascist' to describe the 'bad guys' based on no other criteria than that liberals think they are bad. Fidel Castro, one could argue, is a textbook fascist. But because the left approves of his resistance to U.S. 'imperialism' — and because he uses the abracadabra words of Marxism — it's not just wrong but objectively stupid to call him a fascist. Meanwhile, calling Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani, and other conservatives fascists is simply what right-thinking,