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

* I believe in nationalizing those public necessities which by their very nature are too important to be held in the control of private individuals.

* I believe in upholding the right of private property yet of controlling it for the public good.

* I believe not only in the right of the laboring man to organize in unions but also in the duty of the Government which that laboring man supports to protect these organizations against the vested interests of wealth and of intellect.

* I believe in the event of a war and for the defense of our nation and its liberties, if there shall be a conscription of men let there be a conscription of wealth.

* I believe in preferring the sanctity of human rights to the sanctity of property rights. I believe that the chief concern of government shall be for the poor, because, as is witnessed, the rich have ample means of their own to care for themselves.³⁰

The following month Coughlin issued another seven principles, to elaborate exactly how the NUSJ would combat the horrors of capitalism and modern commerce. These were even more explicitly anticapitalist. Thus it was the government's 'duty' to limit the 'profits acquired by any industry.' All workers must be guaranteed what we would today call a living wage. The government must guarantee the production of 'food, wearing apparel, homes, drugs, books and all modern conveniences.' 'This principle,' Coughlin rightly explained, 'is contrary to the theory of capitalism.'³¹

The program was largely derived from the prevailing views of the liberal wing of the Catholic Church, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor and Wisconsin Progressive labor parties, and Coughlin's own well-worn themes. That his economic doctrine should be influenced from the disparate branches of American populism shouldn't be a surprise. From the outset, Coughlin's ideological roots intermingled with those of many New Dealers and progressives and populists. At no time was he ever associated with classical liberalism or with the economic forces we normally connect with the right.

This returns us to one of the most infuriating distortions of American political debate. In the 1930s, what defined a 'right-winger' was almost exclusively opposition to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The muckraking journalist J. T. Flynn, for example, is often labeled a leading light of the Old Right for no other reason than that he was a relentless FDR critic and a member of America First (indeed, he was one of the most articulate voices decrying the incipient fascism of the New Deal). But Flynn was no classical liberal. He had been a left-leaning columnist for the New Republic for much of the 1930s, and he denounced Roosevelt for moving in what he considered a rightward direction. As for his isolationism, he considered himself a fellow traveler with Norman Thomas, head of the American Socialist Party, Charles Beard, and John Dewey.

Senator Huey Long, the archetypal American fascist, is likewise often called a right-winger by his detractors — though his place in the liberal imagination is more complicated. Many Democrats, including Bill Clinton, still admire Long and invoke him very selectively. Long inspired Sinclair's It Can't Happen Here as well as the far superior All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, and his larger- than-life persona elicits an ambivalent reaction from liberals who admire his economic populism but dislike his unrefined demagoguery. But leaving all that aside, what cannot be denied is that Long attacked the New Deal from the left. His Share the Wealth plan was pure booboisie socialism. His well-documented opposition to the actual Socialist Party was entirely cultural and pragmatic, not ideological. 'Will you please tell me what sense there is in running on a socialist ticket in America today?' Long quizzed a reporter from the Nation. 'What's the use of being right only to be defeated?' Meanwhile, Norman Thomas was regularly beseeched by his rank and file to show more sympathy to Coughlin and Long. 'Now I am a socialist,' an Alabama man wrote Thomas in 1935, 'have been for thirty five years...[Long] is telling the people the things we have been telling them for a generation. They listen to him...while they thought we were fools.'³²

What makes Long so recognizable as a fascist was his folksy contempt for the rules of democracy — 'the time has come for all good men to rise above principle' — and his absolute faith that he was the authentic voice of the people. His rule over Louisiana certainly transcended that of a mere political boss. He had an authentic organic connection with his constituents that seemed to exceed anything Americans had seen before. 'There is no dictatorship in Louisiana. There is a perfect democracy there, and when you have a perfect democracy it is pretty hard to tell it from a dictatorship.'³³ Oddly enough, what may have allowed so many liberals and socialists to recognize the fascism in Long's politics was their own elitism and cosmopolitanism. Long had no use for pointy-headed experts and elites. His was an undiluted populism of the sort that throws aside dogma and celebrates the wisdom of the mob above all else. He appealed to the narcissism of the masses, proclaiming that through his own will to power he could make 'every man a king.' He had a relationship with his folk more akin to Hitler's relationship to the Volk than FDR could ever manage. As such, many liberals saw it as threatening, and rightly so.

Within the White House, Long and Coughlin were seen, along with other populist and radical movements and leaders — including Upton Sinclair's 1934 campaign for the governorship of California and Dr. Francis Townsend's bizarre pension movement, which swept the country in the 1930s — as dangerous threats to the control and rule of New Deal planners.³⁴ But only the most sloppy and circular thinking — the sort that says right-wing equals bad, and bad equals right-wing — would label such radicals and collectivists as anything but creatures of the left.

In 1935 Roosevelt was sufficiently worried about these various threats from the left that he ordered a secret poll to be conducted. The results scared the dickens out of many of his strategists, who concluded that Long could cost FDR the election if he ran on a third-party ticket. Indeed, Roosevelt confessed to aides that he hoped to 'steal Long's thunder' by adopting at least some of his issues.

How did FDR hope to steal the thunder of incipient fascist and collectivist movements in the United States? Social Security, for starters. Although the extent of its influence is hotly debated, few dispute that the national- socialist push from below — represented by Long, Coughlin, and Townsend — contributed to the leftward tilt of Roosevelt's 'Second Hundred Days.' FDR the Third Wayer aped the Bismarckian tactic of splitting the difference with the radicals in order to maintain power. Indeed, just when Long's popularity was spiking, Roosevelt unexpectedly inserted a 'soak the rich' bill into his list of 'must pass' legislative proposals. How things would have played out over time is unknowable because Long was assassinated in September 1935. As for Coughlin, his problems accelerated as he became ever more of an economic radical and ever more sympathetic to the actual, name-brand, foreign fascism of Mussolini and Hitler. His anti-Semitism — evident even when Roosevelt and New Deal liberals welcomed his support — likewise became ever more pronounced. During the war FDR ordered his Justice Department to spy on Coughlin with the aim of silencing him.

How much electoral support Long, the Coughlinites, and the rest would have garnered had Long survived to challenge Roosevelt at the polls remains a matter of academic speculation, but it is somewhat irrelevant to the larger point. These populist leftists framed the public debate. That Coughlin garnered 40 million listeners in a nation of only 127 million and that his audience was largest when he was calling the New Deal 'Christ's Deal' should tell us something about the nature of FDR's appeal, and Coughlin's. Even those New Dealers who despised Long and Coughlin believed that if they didn't steal their thunder, 'Huey Long and Father Coughlin might take over.' What's more, there was precious little daylight between the substantive ideas and motivations of 'street' or 'country' fascists like Long and Coughlin and those of the more rarefied intellectuals who staffed the Roosevelt administration.

REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN MAN

One can easily make too much of the parallel chronology of Hitler's and Roosevelt's tenures. But it is not a complete coincidence that they both came to power in 1933. Though obviously very different men, they understood many of the same things about politics in the mass age. Both owed their elections to the perceived exhaustion of traditional liberal politics, and they were the two world leaders who most successfully exploited new political technologies. Roosevelt most famously utilized the radio — and the Nazis quickly aped the practice. FDR broke with all tradition to fly to the Democratic National Convention to accept his party's nomination. The imagery of him flying — a man of action! — rather than sitting on the porch and waiting for the news was electrifying, as was Hitler's brilliant use of planes, most famously in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Take away the text of New Deal, Soviet, and Nazi propaganda posters and other artwork, and it's almost impossible to tell whether the bulging-biceps laborers are the New Soviet Man, the New Nazi Man, or the New Deal Man. Max Lerner observed in 1934, 'The most damning blow that the dictatorships have struck at democracy has been the