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

aide and postmaster general, James Farley, to reconcile them. His favorite form of management was to pit two individuals or departments against each other with the same task.

The problem with this sort of triangulation is that you end up moving to whatever you believe is the epicenter between two ever-shifting and hard-to-define horizons. Worse still, Roosevelt translated this approach into a de facto Third Way governing philosophy. This in effect meant that nothing was fixed. No question about the role of government or its powers was truly settled. And it is for this reason that both conservatives and radicals have always harbored feelings ranging from frustration to contempt for FDR. For the radicals FDR wasn't principled enough to commit to lasting change, while for conservatives he wasn't principled enough to stand his ground. He planted his flag atop a buoy at sea, permanently bobbing with the currents. Unfortunately, the currents tended to push him in only one direction: statism, for that was the intellectual tide of the time.

Today many liberals subscribe to the myth that the New Deal was a coherent, enlightened, unified endeavor encapsulated in the largely meaningless phrase 'the Roosevelt legacy.' This is poppycock. 'To look upon these programs as the result of a unified plan,' wrote Raymond Moley, FDR's right-hand man during much of the New Deal, 'was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter's tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy's bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.' When Alvin Hansen, an influential economic adviser to the president, was asked — in 1940! — whether 'the basic principle of the New Deal' was 'economically sound,' he responded, 'I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is.'¹³

This raises the first of many common features among New Deal liberalism, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialism, all of which shared many of the same historical and intellectual forebears. Fascist and Nazi intellectuals constantly touted a 'middle' or 'Third Way' between capitalism and socialism. Mussolini zigzagged every which way, from free trade and low taxes to a totalitarian state apparatus. Even before he attained power, his stock response when asked to outline his program was to say he had none. 'Our program is to govern,' the Fascists liked to say.

Hitler showed even less interest in political or economic theory, fascist or otherwise. He never read Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century or many of the other 'classic' fascist texts. And the inability of numerous Nazis and fascists to plow through the Nazi bible Mein Kampf is legendary.

The 'middle way' sounds moderate and un-radical. Its appeal is that it sounds unideological and freethinking. But philosophically the Third Way is not mere difference splitting; it is utopian and authoritarian. Its utopian aspect becomes manifest in its antagonism to the idea that politics is about trade-offs. The Third Wayer says that there are no false choices — 'I refuse to accept that X should come at the expense of Y.' The Third Way holds that we can have capitalism and socialism, individual liberty and absolute unity. Fascist movements are implicitly utopian because they — like communist and heretical Christian movements — assume that with just the right arrangement of policies, all contradictions can be rectified. This is a political siren song; life can never be made perfect, because man is imperfect. This is why the Third Way is also authoritarian. It assumes that the right man — or, in the case of Leninists, the right party — can resolve all of these contradictions through sheer will. The populist demagogue takes on the role of the parent telling the childlike masses that he can make everything 'all better' if they just trust him.

FDR's 'middle way' had a very specific resonance, seemingly contradictory to its philosophical assumptions. As many communists were keen to note, it was born of a Bismarckian attempt to forestall greater radicalism. The elites, including business leaders, were for the most part reconciled to the fact that 'socialism' of some kind was going to be a permanent feature of the political economy. Middle-way politics was a carefully crafted appeal to the middle class's entirely justifiable fear of the Red menace. Hitler and Mussolini exploited this anxiety at every turn; indeed it was probably the key to their success. The fascist appeal was homegrown socialism, orderly socialism, socialism with a German or Italian face as opposed to nasty 'foreign' socialism in much the same way that 100 percent Americanism had been progressive America's counteroffer to Bolshevism.

Time and again, FDR's New Dealers made the very same threat — that if the New Deal failed, what would come next would be far more radical. As we'll see, a great many of FDR's Old Right opponents were actually former progressives convinced that the New Deal was moving toward the wrong kind of socialism. That the Third Way could be cast as an appeal to both utopians and anti-utopians may sound implausible, but political agendas need not be logically coherent, merely popularly seductive. And seductiveness has always been the Third Way's defining characteristic.

The German and American New Deals may have been merely whatever Hitler and FDR felt they could get away with. But therein lies a common principle: the state should be allowed to get away with anything, so long as it is for 'good reasons.' This is the common principle among fascism, Nazism, Progressivism, and what we today call liberalism. It represents the triumph of Pragmatism in politics in that it recognizes no dogmatic boundaries to the scope of government power. The leader and his anointed cadres are decision makers above and beyond political or democratic imperatives. They invoke with divine reverence 'science' and the laws of economics the way temple priests once read the entrails of goats, but because they have blinded themselves to their own leaps of faith, they cannot see that morals and values cannot be derived from science. Morals and values are determined by the priests, whether they wear black robes or white lab smocks.

AN 'EXPERIMENTAL' AGE

Ever since FDR's presidency — when 'liberalism' replaced 'progressivism' as the preferred label for center-left political ideas and activism — liberals have had trouble articulating what liberalism is, beyond the conviction that the federal government should use its power to do nice things wherever and whenever it can. Herbert Croly said it well when he defended the New Republic against critics who said the magazine's qualified support for Mussolini violated its liberal principles: 'If there are any abstract liberal principles, we do not know how to formulate them. Nor if they are formulated by others do we recognize their authority. Liberalism, as we understand it, is an activity.'¹⁴ In other words, liberalism is what liberals do or decide is worth doing, period. Faith without deeds is dead, according to the Bible. Pragmatic liberals internalized this while protesting they have no faith. This was at the core of what the German historian Peter Vogt called the progressives' 'elective affinity' for fascism. Or as John Patrick Diggins says, 'Fascism appealed, first of all, to the pragmatic ethos of experimentation.'¹⁵

As president, Roosevelt bragged that he was married to no preconceived notions. He measured an idea's worth by the results it achieved. 'Take a method and try it,' he famously declared at Oglethorpe University in May 1932. 'If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.' The only coherent policy Roosevelt subscribed to was 'bold, persistent experimentation.' Conservatives were cast by FDR and his allies as opponents of all change, selfish slaves to the status quo. But stasis is not the American conservative position. Rather, conservatives believe that change for change's sake is folly. What kind of change? At what cost? For the liberals and progressives, everything was expendable, from tradition to individualism to 'outdated' conceptions of freedom. These were all tired dogmas to be burned on the altars of the new age.

When FDR was elected president in 1932, three events were viewed as admirable experiments: the Bolshevik Revolution, the Fascist takeover in Italy, and the American 'experiment' in war socialism under Wilson. By 1932 admiration for the Russian 'social experiment' had become a definitive component of American liberalism — in much the same way that admiration for Prussian top-down socialism had been two decades earlier. Simply, the Soviet Union was the future, and 'it worked.'

Intermingled in these encomiums to what Lincoln Steffens called the 'Russian-Italian method' — signifying that, as far as he was concerned, Bolshevism and Fascism were not opposites but kindred movements — were lusty expressions of nostalgia for the short-lived American 'experiment' with war socialism under Woodrow Wilson. 'We planned in war!' was the omnipresent refrain from progressives eager to re-create the kind of economic and social control they had under Wilson. The Italians and the Russians were beating America at its own game, by continuing their experiments in war socialism while America cut short its project, choosing instead to wallow in the selfish crapulence of the Roaring Twenties. In 1927 Stuart Chase said it would take five years to see if the 'courageous and unprecedented experiment' in the Soviet Union was 'destined to be a landmark for economic guidance' of the whole world. Half a decade later he concluded that the evidence was in: Russia was the new gold standard in economic and social policy. So 'why,' he asked in his 1932 book, A New Deal, 'should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?'¹⁶

Chase's comment is indicative of an important aspect of the progressive mind-set. Anybody who has ever