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

Christmas Day of his first year, claiming he had a cold, and never returned. He finished his studies at home. After passing the Georgia bar, he spent a short time as a lawyer but found he didn't have the knack for it and concluded that it was too arduous a course for him to take into politics. Frustrated in his desire to become a statesman, Wilson enrolled at the recently established Johns Hopkins University, where he pursued his Ph.D. After graduating, he landed several teaching posts while he worked on his academic writing, specifically his widely acclaimed eight- hundred-page tome The State. Wilson eventually returned to the one institution where he had known some social happiness, Princeton University, where he rose to president.

Wilson's choice to head down an academic path should not be seen as an alternative to a political career. Rather, it was an alternative path to the career he always wanted. The Sage of New Jersey was never a reluctant statesman. Not long after finishing The State, Wilson began moving beyond narrow academic writing in favor of more popular commentary, generally geared toward enhancing his political profile. High among his regular themes was the advocacy of progressive imperialism in order to subjugate, and thereby elevate, lesser races. He applauded the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines — 'they are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice' — and regularly denounced what he called 'the anti-imperialist weepings and wailings that came out of Boston.'⁴ It's a sign of how carefully he cultivated his political profile that four years before he 'reluctantly' accepted the 'unsolicited' gubernatorial nomination in New Jersey, Harper's Weekly had begun running the slogan 'For President — Woodrow Wilson' on the cover of every issue.

Indeed, from his earliest days as an undergraduate the meek, homeschooled Wilson was infatuated with political power. And as is so common to intellectuals, he let his power worship infect his analysis.

Lord Acton's famous observation that 'power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely' has long been misunderstood. Acton was not arguing that power causes powerful leaders to become corrupt (though he probably believed that, too). Rather, he was noting that historians tend to forgive the powerful for transgressions they would never condone by the weak. Wilson is guilty on both counts: he not only fawned over great men but, when he attained real power, was corrupted by it himself. Time and again, his sympathies came down on the side of great men who broke the traditional restraints on their power. Two of his biggest heroes were the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Abraham Lincoln. It might seem odd that someone who fervently believed that giving blacks the right to vote was 'the foundation of every evil in this country' would celebrate Lincoln. But what appealed to Wilson about the Great Emancipator was Lincoln's ability to impose his will on the entire country. Lincoln was a centralizer, a modernizer who used his power to forge a new, united nation. In other words, Wilson admired Lincoln's means — suspension of habeas corpus, the draft, and the campaigns of the radical Republicans after the war — far more than he liked his ends. 'If any trait bubbles up in all one reads about Wilson,' writes the historian Walter McDougall, 'it is this: he loved, craved, and in a sense glorified power.'⁵

Wilson's fascination with power is the leitmotif of his whole career. It informed his understanding of theology and politics, and their intersection. Power was God's instrument on earth and therefore was always to be revered. In Congressional Government he admitted, 'I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive.' Such love of power can be found in many systems and men outside the orbit of fascism, but few ideologies or aesthetics are more directly concerned with the glory of might, will, strength, and action. Some of this was on display in fascist art and architecture, which wallowed in the powerful physical form and the unconquerable might of the nation: strength in unity, the triumph of will, the domination of destiny over decadence and indecision. Doctrinaire fascism, much like communism, sold itself as an unstoppable force of divine or historical inevitability. Those who stood in the way — the bourgeoisie, the 'unfit,' the 'greedy,' the 'individualist,' the traitor, the kulak, the Jew — could be demonized as the 'other' because, at the end of the day, they were not merely expendable, nor were they merely reluctant to join the collective, they were by their very existence blocking the will to power that gave the mob and the avant-garde which claimed to speak for it their reason for existence. 'Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking,' wrote George Orwell. 'Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion.'⁶ For some, like Wilson, God gave a divine writ for bullying. For others the license for organized cruelty came from more impersonal historical forces. But the impulse was the same.

Wilson would later argue when president that he was the right hand of God and that to stand against him was to thwart divine will. Some thought this was simply proof of power corrupting Wilson, but this was his view from the outset. He always took the side of power, believing that power accrued to whoever was truly on God's side. As an undergraduate, Wilson was convinced that Congress was destined to wield the most power in the American system, and so he championed the idea of giving Congress unfettered control of governance. During his senior year, in his first published article, he even argued that America should switch to a parliamentary system, where there are fewer checks on the will of rulers. Wilson was a champion debater, so it's telling that he believed the best debaters should have the most power.

Wilson wrote his most famous and original work, Congressional Government, when he was a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student at Johns Hopkins. He set out to argue that America should switch to a centralized parliamentary system, but the work evolved into a sweeping indictment of the fragmentation and diffuseness of power in the American political system. Wilson fully abandoned his faith in congressional government when he witnessed Teddy Roosevelt's success at turning the Oval Office into a bully pulpit. The former advocate of congressional power became an unapologetic champion of the imperial presidency. 'The President,' he wrote in 1908 in Constitutional Government in the United States, 'is at liberty, both in law and in conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution,...but only because the President has the nation behind him and Congress has not.'⁷

Wilson's view of politics could be summarized by the word 'statolatry,' or state worship (the same sin with which the Vatican charged Mussolini). Wilson believed that the state was a natural, organic, and spiritual expression of the people themselves. From the outset, he believed that the government and people should have an organic bond that reflected the 'true spirit' of the people, or what the Germans called the Volksgeist. 'Government is not a machine, but a living thing,' he wrote in Congressional Government. 'It falls not under the [Newtonian] theory of the universe, but under the [Darwinian] theory of organic life.' From this perspective, the ever-expanding power of the state was entirely natural. Wilson, along with the vast majority of progressive intellectuals, believed that the increase in state power was akin to an inevitable evolutionary process. Governmental 'experimentation,' the watchword of pragmatic liberals from Dewey and Wilson to FDR, was the social analogue to evolutionary adaptation. Constitutional democracy, as the founders understood it, was a momentary phase in this progression. Now it was time for the state to ascend to the next plateau. 'Government,' Wilson wrote approvingly in The State, 'does now whatever experience permits or the times demand.'⁸ Wilson was the first president to speak disparagingly of the Constitution.

Wilson reinforced such attitudes by attacking the very idea of natural and individual rights. If the original, authentic state was a dictatorial family, Wilson argued in the spirit of Darwin, what historical basis was there to believe in individual rights? 'No doubt,' he wrote, taking dead aim at the Declaration of Independence, 'a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle.' If a law couldn't be executed, it wasn't a real law, according to Wilson, and 'abstract rights' were vexingly difficult to execute.

Wilson, of course, was merely one voice in the progressive chorus of the age. '[W]e must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many,' declared the progressive social activist Jane Addams. 'Now men are free,' explained Walter Rauschenbusch, a leading progressive theologian of the Social Gospel movement, in 1896, 'but it is often the freedom of grains of sand that are whirled up in a cloud and then dropped in a heap, but neither cloud nor sand-heap have any coherence.' The remedy was obvious: 'New forms of association must be created. Our disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative life.' Elsewhere Rauschenbusch put it more simply: 'Individualism means tyranny.'⁹ In a sense, the morally inverted nonsense made famous by Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s — 'oppressive freedom,' 'repressive tolerance,' 'defensive violence' — was launched by the progressives decades earlier. 'Work makes you free,' the phrase made famous by the Nazis, was anticipated by progressives who believed that collectivism was the new 'freedom.'

America is today in the midst of an obscene moral panic over the role of Christians in public life. There is a