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

sophisticated people do.

The major flaw in all of this is that fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact — an inconvenient truth if there ever was one — is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate and control the same social space. The fact that they appear as polar opposites is a trick of intellectual history and (more to the point) the result of a concerted propaganda effort on the part of the 'Reds' to make the 'Browns' appear objectively evil and 'other' (ironically, demonization of the 'other' is counted as a definitional trait of fascism). But in terms of their theory and practice, the differences are minimal.

It is difficult now, in the light of their massive crimes and failures, to remember that both fascism and communism were, in their time, utopian visions and the bearers of great hopes. What's more, fascism, like communism, was an international movement that attracted adherents in every Western society. Particularly in the aftermath of World War I — but beginning much earlier — a fascist moment arose on the ashes of the old European order. It drew together the various strands of European politics and culture — the rise of ethnic nationalism, the Bismarckian welfare state, and the collapse of Christianity as a source of social and political orthodoxy and universal aspirations. In place of Christianity, it offered a new religion of the divinized state and the nation as an organic community.

This international movement had many variants and offshoots and went by different names in different countries. Its expression in different societies varied depending on national culture. This is one of the reasons it is so hard to define. But in reality, international fascism drew from the same intellectual wellsprings as American Progressivism. Indeed, American Progressivism — the moralistic social crusade from which modern liberals proudly claim descent — is in some respects the major source of the fascist ideas applied in Europe by Mussolini and Hitler.

Americans like to think of themselves as being immune to fascism while constantly feeling threatened by it. 'It can't happen here' is the common refrain. But fascism definitely has a history in this country, and that is what this book is about. The American fascist tradition is deeply bound up with the effort to 'Europeanize' America and give it a 'modern' state that can be harnessed to utopian ends. This American fascism seems — and is — very different from its European variants because it was moderated by many special factors — geographical size, ethnic diversity, Jeffersonian individualism, a strong liberal tradition, and so on. As a result, American fascism is milder, more friendly, more 'maternal' than its foreign counterparts; it is what George Carlin calls 'smiley-face fascism.' Nice fascism. The best term to describe it is 'liberal fascism.' And this liberal fascism was, and remains, fundamentally left-wing.

This book will present an alternative history of American liberalism that not only reveals its roots in, and commonalities with, classical fascism but also shows how the fascist label was projected onto the right by a complex sleight of hand. In fact, conservatives are the more authentic classical liberals, while many so-called liberals are 'friendly' fascists.

Now, I am not saying that all liberals are fascists. Nor am I saying that to believe in socialized medicine or smoking bans is evidence that you are a crypto-Nazi. What I am mainly trying to do is to dismantle the granitelike assumption in our political culture that American conservatism is an offshoot or cousin of fascism. Rather, as I will try to show, many of the ideas and impulses that inform what we call liberalism come to us through an intellectual tradition that led directly to fascism. These ideas were embraced by fascism, and remain in important respects fascistic.

We cannot easily recognize these similarities and continuities today, however, let alone speak about them, because this whole realm of historical analysis was foreclosed by the Holocaust. Before the war, fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States; the horror of the Holocaust completely changed our view of fascism as something uniquely evil and ineluctably bound up with extreme nationalism, paranoia, and genocidal racism. After the war, the American progressives who had praised Mussolini and even looked sympathetically at Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s had to distance themselves from the horrors of Nazism. Accordingly, leftist intellectuals redefined fascism as 'right-wing' and projected their own sins onto conservatives, even as they continued to borrow heavily from fascist and pre- fascist thought.

Much of this alternative history is quite easy to find, if you have eyes to see it. The problem is that the liberal-progressive narrative on which most of us were raised tends to shunt these incongruous and inconvenient facts aside, and to explain away as marginal what is actually central.

For starters, it is simply a fact that, in the 1920s, fascism and fascistic ideas were very popular on the American left. 'That Fascism stunk in the nostrils of the New Masses,' John Patrick Diggins writes of the legendary hard-left journal, 'may have been true after 1930. For the radicals of the twenties the whiff from Italy carried no foul ideological odor.'⁸ There was a reason for this. In many respects, the founding fathers of modern liberalism, the men and women who laid the intellectual groundwork of the New Deal and the welfare state, thought that fascism sounded like a pretty good idea. Or to be fair: many simply thought (in the spirit of Deweyan Pragmatism) that it sounded like a worthwhile 'experiment.' Moreover, while the odor of Italian Fascism eventually grew rancid in the nostrils of both the American left and the American right (considerably later than 1930, by the way), the reasons for their revulsion did not for the most part stem from profound ideological differences. Rather, the American left essentially picked a different team — the Red team — and as such swore fealty to communist talking points about fascism. As for the non-communist liberal left, while the word 'fascism' grew in disrepute, many fascistic ideas and impulses endured.

It was around this time that Stalin stumbled on a brilliant tactic of simply labeling all inconvenient ideas and movements fascist. Socialists and progressives aligned with Moscow were called socialists or progressives, while socialists disloyal or opposed to Moscow were called fascists. Stalin's theory of social fascism rendered even Franklin Roosevelt a fascist according to loyal communists everywhere. And let us recall that Leon Trotsky was marked for death for allegedly plotting a 'fascist coup.' While this tactic was later deplored by many sane American left-wingers, it is amazing how many useful idiots fell for it at the time, and how long its intellectual half-life has been.

Before the Holocaust and Stalin's doctrine of social fascism, liberals could be more honest about their fondness for fascism. During the 'pragmatic' era of the 1920s and early 1930s, a host of Western liberal intellectuals and journalists were quite impressed with Mussolini's 'experiment.'⁹ More than a few progressives were intrigued by Nazism as well. W. E. B. DuBois, for example, had very complex and mixed emotions about the rise of Hitler and the plight of the Jews, believing that National Socialism could be the model for economic organization. The formation of the Nazi dictatorship, he wrote, had been 'absolutely necessary to get the state in order.' Hewing to the progressive definition of 'democracy' as egalitarian statism, DuBois delivered a speech in Harlem in 1937 proclaiming that 'there is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.'¹⁰

For years, segments of the so-called Old Right argued that FDR's New Deal was fascistic and/or influenced by fascists. There is ample truth to this, as many mainstream and liberal historians have grudgingly admitted.¹¹ However, that the New Deal was fascist was hardly a uniquely right-wing criticism in the 1930s. Rather, those who offered this sort of critique, including the Democratic hero Al Smith and the Progressive Republican Herbert Hoover, were beaten back with the charge that they were crazy right-wingers and themselves the real fascists. Norman Thomas, the head of the American Socialist Party, frequently charged that the New Deal was fundamentally fascistic. Only Communists loyal to Moscow — or the useful idiots in Stalin's thrall — could say that Thomas was a right-winger or a fascist. But that is precisely what they did.

Even more telling, FDR's defenders openly admitted their admiration of fascism. Rexford Guy Tugwell, an influential member of FDR's Brain Trust, said of Italian Fascism, 'It's the cleanest, neatest most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious.' 'We are trying out the economics of Fascism without having suffered all its social or political ravages,' proclaimed the New Republic's editor George Soule, an enthusiastic supporter of the FDR administration.¹²

But this whole discussion misses a larger and frequently overlooked point. The New Deal did emulate a fascistic regime; but Italy and Germany were secondary models, post hoc confirmations that liberals were on the right track. The real inspiration for the New Deal was the Wilson administration during World War I. This is hardly a secret. FDR campaigned on his pledge to re-create the war