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

This is the elephant in the corner that the American left has never been able to admit, explain, or comprehend. Their inability and/or refusal to deal squarely with this fact has distorted our understanding of our politics, our history, and ourselves. Liberals keep saying 'it can't happen here' with a clever wink or an ironic smile to insinuate that the right is constantly plotting fascist schemes. Meanwhile, hiding in plain sight is this simple fact: it did happen here, and it might very well happen again. To see the threat, however, you must look over your left shoulder, not your right.

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Franklin Roosevelt's Fascist New Deal

THE NATION WAS caught up in a war fever, fomented by the government, even though there was no war. Striking union members were provoked into a riot by government forces. Sixty-seven workers were killed, some shot in the back. A young correspondent reported, 'I understood deep in my bones and blood what fascism was.' A leading intellectual who'd signed on with the government declared in a lecture to students, 'The ordeal of war brings out the magnificent resources of youth.'¹

The British ambassador cabled London to alert his superiors to the spreading hysteria fomented by the nation's new leader. The 'starved loyalties and repressed hero-worship of the country have found in him an outlet and a symbol.' Visiting the rural hinterlands, an aide reported back on the brewing cult of personality: 'Every house I visited — mill worker or unemployed — had a picture of the President...He is at once God and their intimate friend; he knows them all by name, knows their little town and mill, their little lives and problems. And though everything else fails, he is there, and will not let them down.'²

Though the crisis was economic in nature, the new national commander had promised to seek the 'power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe...I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.'

Presumably some readers already know that the country I'm talking about is America, and the leader FDR. The labor riots took place in Chicago. The wide-eyed young reporter was Eric Sevareid, one of the titans of CBS news. The intellectual who harangued Dartmouth students about the virtues of war was Rexford Tugwell, one of the most prominent of the New Deal's Brain Trusters. And of course the last quotations were from Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself in his first inaugural address.

As liberalism in recent years has fallen into ideological and intellectual disarray, American liberals have crouched into a fetal position around Franklin D. Roosevelt's 'legacy.' Liberal legal theorists have made the New Deal into a second American founding. Leading journalists have descended into abject idolatry. Indeed, it sometimes seems that all one needs to know about the merits of a policy is whether Roosevelt himself would have favored it. It is a given that Republicans are wrong, even fascistic, whenever they want to 'dismantle' FDR's policies.

One of the most poignant ironies here is that a modern-day Hitler or Mussolini would never dismantle the New Deal. To the contrary, he'd redouble the effort. This is not to say that the New Deal was evil or Hitlerian. But the New Deal was a product of the impulses and ideas of its era. And those ideas and impulses are impossible to separate from the fascist moment in Western civilization. According to Harold Ickes, FDR's interior secretary and one of the most important architects of the New Deal, Roosevelt himself privately acknowledged that 'what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we were doing them in an orderly way.' It's hard to see how orderliness absolves a policy from the charge of fascism or totalitarianism. Eventually, the similarities had become so transparent that Ickes had to warn Roosevelt that the public was increasingly inclined 'to unconsciously group four names, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Roosevelt.'³

The notion that FDR harbored fascist tendencies is vastly more controversial today than it was in the 1930s, primarily because fascism has come to mean Nazism and Nazism means simply evil. Saying, for example, that FDR had a Hitlerite fiscal policy just confuses people. But the fascist flavor of the New Deal was not only regularly discussed; it was often cited as evidence in Roosevelt's favor. There was an enormous bipartisan consensus that the Depression required dictatorial and fascistic policies to defeat it. Walter Lippmann, serving as an ambassador for America's liberal elite, told FDR in a private meeting at Warm Springs, 'The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.'⁴ Eleanor Roosevelt, too, believed that a 'benevolent dictator' might be the only answer for America. And it was hardly lost on the liberal intellectuals swirling around the Roosevelt administration that the enormously popular Benito Mussolini had used the same methods to whip the unruly Italians into shape. After all, the New Republic — the intellectual home of the New Deal — had covered the goings-on in Italy with fascination and, often, admiration.

Indeed, the New Deal was conceived at the climax of a worldwide fascist moment, a moment when socialists in many countries were increasingly becoming nationalists and nationalists could embrace nothing other than socialism. Franklin Roosevelt was no fascist, at least not in the sense that he thought of himself in this way. But many of his ideas and policies were indistinguishable from fascism. And today we live with the fruits of fascism, and we call them liberal. From economic policy, to populist politics, to a faith in the abiding power of brain trusts to chart our collective future — be they at Harvard or on the Supreme Court — fascistic assumptions about the role of the state have been encoded upon the American mind, often as a matter of bipartisan consensus.

This was not FDR's 'vision,' for he had none. He was the product of an age where collectivism, patriotic exhortations, and a pragmatic rejection of overreliance on principle simply seemed to be the 'way of the future.' He imbibed these attitudes and ideas from his experience during the Progressive Era and from his advisers who did likewise. If Wilson was an intentional totalitarian, Roosevelt became one by default — largely because he didn't have any better ideas.

PROGRESSIVE FROM THE BEGINNING

Born in 1882, a year before Mussolini, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was hardly raised to be a great man. Indeed, he wasn't raised to be much of anything. A sweet and gentle boy, he was sheltered from anything like what we would today call a normal childhood. Almost smothered with attention from his parents, James Roosevelt and the former Sara Delano, he was expected to emulate their lifestyle as aristocrats. Young FDR had few friends his own age. An only child, he was educated mostly by Swiss tutors at home (recall that Wilson, too, had been homeschooled). In 1891, while his parents visited a spa in Bismarck's Germany, young Franklin — 'Franz' to his classmates — attended a local Volksschule, where he studied map reading and military topography. He claimed to remember the experience fondly, particularly his study of German military maps.

Roosevelt's youth laid the foundations of his adult personality. When Franklin was only eight, his father suffered the first of several heart attacks. Franklin responded by resolving to conceal his sorrow and anxiety from his father. This is apparently where FDR first began the practice of masking his real feelings behind a permanently cheery demeanor. For the rest of his life, and particularly when he was president, his friends and enemies alike would complain that they could never trust that Roosevelt was telling them what he really thought. This was a polite way of saying that they could never be sure whether Roosevelt was lying to their face. 'When I talk to him, he says 'Fine! Fine! Fine!'' Huey Long lamented. 'But Joe Robinson [a political enemy of Long's] goes to see him the next day and again he says 'Fine! Fine! Fine!' Maybe he says 'fine' to everybody.'⁵

FDR left his parental cocoon in 1896 to attend Groton. The transition was difficult. Raised speaking German with his German-speaking governess and French with his French-language tutors, and to speak English haughtily in all other circumstances, Roosevelt grated on the other students. Eventually, though, his determination to fit in — almost an obsession with conformity — paid off, and he rose in social status. He was not a particularly gifted student. His highest scores were in punctuality and neatness. Indeed, the consensus is that FDR verged on being an intellectual lightweight. He rarely read books, and those he did read were far from weighty. The historian Hugh Gallagher writes, 'He had a magpie mind, and many interests, but he was not deep.'⁶

FDR suffered painfully from envy for his cousin Teddy Roosevelt. When Franklin enrolled at Harvard in 1904,