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

profound irony in the fact that such protests issue most loudly from self-professed 'progressives' when the real progressives were dedicated in the most fundamental way to the Christianization of American life. Progressivism, as the title of Washington Gladden's book suggested, was 'applied Christianity.' The Social Gospel held that the state was the right arm of God and was the means by which the whole nation and world would be redeemed. But while Christianity was being made into a true state religion, its transcendent and theological elements became corrupted.

These two visions — Darwinian organicism and Christian messianism — seem contradictory today because they reside on different sides of the culture war. But in the Progressive Era, these visions complemented each other perfectly. And Wilson embodied this synthesis. The totalitarian flavor of such a worldview should be obvious. Unlike classical liberalism, which saw the government as a necessary evil, or simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, the belief that the entire society was one organic whole left no room for those who didn't want to behave, let alone 'evolve.' Your home, your private thoughts, everything was part of the organic body politic, which the state was charged with redeeming.

Hence a phalanx of progressive reformers saw the home as the front line in the war to transform men into compliant social organs. Often the answer was to get children out of the home as quickly as possible. An archipelago of agencies, commissions, and bureaus sprang up overnight to take the place of the anti-organic, contra-evolutionary influences of the family. The home could no longer be seen as an island, separate and sovereign from the rest of society. John Dewey helped create kindergartens in America for precisely this purpose — to shape the apples before they fell from the tree — while at the other end of the educational process stood reformers like Wilson, who summarized the progressive attitude perfectly when, as president of Princeton, he told an audience, 'Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life...[but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can.'¹⁰

If the age of parliamentary democracy was coming to an end — as progressives and fascists alike proclaimed — and the day of the organic redeemer state was dawning, then the Constitution must evolve or be thrown into the dustbin of history. Wilson's writings are chockablock with demands that the 'artificial' barriers established in our 'antiquated' eighteenth-century system of checks and balances be smashed. He mocked the 'Fourth of July sentiments' of those who still invoked the founding fathers as a source for constitutional guidance. He believed the system of governmental checks and balances had 'proven mischievous just to the extent to which they have succeeded in establishing themselves as realities.'¹¹ Indeed, the ink from Wilson's pen regularly exudes the odor of what we today call the living Constitution. On the campaign trail in 1912, Wilson explained that 'living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of Life...it must develop.' Hence 'all that progressives ask or desire is permission — in an era when 'development,' 'evolution,' is the scientific word — to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.'¹² As we've seen, this interpretation leads to a system where the Constitution means whatever the reigning interpreters of 'evolution' say it means.

A more authentic form of leadership was needed: a great man who could serve both as the natural expression of the people's will and as a guide and master checking their darker impulses. The leader needed to be like a brain, which both regulates the body and depends on it for protection. To this end, the masses had to be subservient to the will of the leader. In his unintentionally chilling 1890 essay, Leaders of Men, Wilson explained that the 'true leader' uses the masses like 'tools.' He must not traffic in subtleties and nuance, as literary men do. Rather, he must speak to stir their passions, not their intellects. In short, he must be a skillful demagogue.

'Only a very gross substance of concrete conception can make any impression on the minds of the masses,' Wilson wrote. 'They must get their ideas very absolutely put, and are much readier to receive a half truth which they can promptly understand than a whole truth which has too many sides to be seen all at once. The competent leader of men cares little for the internal niceties of other people's characters: he cares much — everything — for the external uses to which they may be put...He supplies the power; others supply only the materials upon which that power operates...It is the power which dictates, dominates; the materials yield. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.'¹³ A cynic might concede that there is much truth in Wilson's interpretation, but he would at least acknowledge his own cynicism. Wilson believed he was an idealist.

Many believed, including Wilson, that they had found just such a figure in Theodore Roosevelt. More than a popular leader, he was the designated idol of a true leadership cult. William Allen White, the famed progressive writer, recalled in 1934 that he'd been 'a young arrogant protagonist of the divine rule of the plutocracy' until Roosevelt 'shattered the foundations of my political ideals. As they crumbled then and there, politically, I put his heel on my neck and I became his man.'¹⁴ Roosevelt was the first to translate 'L'etat, c'est moi' into the American argot, often claiming that the nation's sovereignty was indistinguishable from his own august personage. As president, he regularly exceeded the bounds of his traditional and legal powers, doing his will first and waiting (or not) for the courts and the legislatures to catch up.

This captured in small relief the basic difference between Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, bitter rivals and the only two proudly progressive presidents of the Progressive Era. These were very different men with very similar ideas. Roosevelt was a great actor upon the world stage; Wilson saw himself more as a director. Roosevelt was the 'bull moose' who charged into any problem; Wilson was the 'schoolmaster' who first drew up a lesson plan. One wanted to lead a band of brothers, the other a graduate seminar. But if the roles they played were different, the moral of the story was the same. While Wilson wrote treatises explaining why Americans should abandon their 'blind devotion' to the Constitution, Teddy was rough-riding all over the document, doing what he pleased and giving bellicose speeches about how the courts had sided against 'popular rights' and were 'lagging behind' the new realities. Indeed, William Howard Taft — Roosevelt's honorable yet overwhelmed successor in the White House — might not have chosen to run for reelection, hence denying Roosevelt the Republican nomination, had he not been convinced that Roosevelt's 'impatience with the delay of the law' made him 'not unlike Napoleon.'¹⁵

There were many fault lines running through Progressivism. On one side, there were the likes of John Dewey and Jane Addams, who were more socialistic and academic in their approach to politics and policy. On the other were the nationalists who appealed more directly to patriotism and militarism. Wilson and Roosevelt more or less represented the two sides. In much the same way national socialists often split into two camps emphasizing either nationalism or socialism, some progressives concentrated on social reform while others were more concerned with American 'greatness.'

One might also put it that Roosevelt reflected the masculine side of Progressivism — the daddy party — while Wilson represented the movement's maternal side. Roosevelt certainly trumpeted the 'manly virtues' at every opportunity. He wanted a ruling elite drawn from a (metaphorical) warrior caste that embraced the 'strenuous life,' a meritocracy of vigor dedicated to defeating the decadence of 'soft living.' Wilson's ruling elite would be drawn from the ranks of 'disinterested' technocrats, bureaucrats, and social workers who understood the root causes of social decay.

Few progressives saw these as opposing values. There was no inherent trade-off between militant nationalism and progressive reform; rather, they complemented each other (a similar complementarity existed between the different branches of progressive eugenicists, as we'll see). Consider, for example, Senator Albert J. Beveridge, the most important progressive in the U.S. Senate during the first decade of the twentieth century. When Upton Sinclair's Jungle exposed the horrors of the meatpacking industry, it was Beveridge who led the fight for reform, sponsoring the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. He shepherded the fights against child labor and in favor of the eight-hour workday. He was perhaps Teddy Roosevelt's chief senatorial ally in the progressive insurgency against the 'conservative' wing of the Republican Party. He was the bane of special interests, railroad magnates, and trusts and the friend of reformers, conservationists, and moderns everywhere. And he was a thoroughly bloodthirsty imperialist. 'The opposition tells us we ought not to rule a people without their consent. I answer, the rule of liberty, that all just governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to those who are capable of self-government.'¹⁶ Indeed, the progressives in Congress actively supported or went along with virtually every major military excursion of the Roosevelt and Taft administrations. Under Wilson, they were decidedly more hawkish than the White House. All the while it fell to the conservatives in Congress to fight expenditures on such things as the 'big navy,' the cornerstone of the imperial project. Indeed, it must be understood that imperialism was as central to Progressivism as efforts to clean up the food supply or make factories safe.¹⁷