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

compliment they have paid us in taking over (and perfecting) our most prized devices of persuasion and our underlying contempt for the credulity of the masses.'³⁵

Where FDR and Hitler overlapped most was in their fawning over 'the forgotten man.' Fascism's success almost always depends on the cooperation of the 'losers' during a time of economic and technological change. The lower-middle classes — the people who have just enough to fear losing it — are the electoral shock troops of fascism (Richard Hofstadter identified this 'status anxiety' as the source of Progressivism's quasi-fascist nature). Populist appeals to resentment against 'fat cats,' 'international bankers,' 'economic royalists,' and so on are the stock-in-trade of fascist demagogues. Hitler and Mussolini were surely more demagogic than FDR, but Roosevelt fully understood the 'magic' of such appeals. He saw nothing wrong with ascribing evil motives to those who didn't support him, and he certainly relished his role as the wellborn tribune of the little guy.

Obviously, this wasn't all a cynical act. FDR did care about the little guy, the worker, and the like. But so did Hitler. Indeed, there is a mounting body of scholarship showing that 'Hitler's New Deal' (David Schoenbaum's phrase) was not only similar to FDR's but in fact more generous and more successful. Germany prospered under Hitler according to the most basic indicators. The birthrate increased 50 percent from 1932 to 1936; marriages increased until Germany led Europe in 1938-39. Suicide plummeted by 80 percent from 1932 to 1939. A recent book by the German historian Gotz Aly calls Hitler the 'feel good dictator' because he was so successful in restoring German confidence.³⁶

When Hitler became chancellor he focused like a laser on the economy, ending unemployment far faster than FDR. When asked by the New York Times if his first priority was jobs, Hitler boisterously responded, 'Wholly! I am thinking first of those in Germany who are in despair and who have been in despair for three years...What does anything else matter?' Hitler said he was a great admirer of Henry Ford, though he didn't mention Ford's virulent anti-Semitism. What appealed to Hitler about Ford was that he 'produces for the masses. That little car of his had done more than anything else to destroy class differences.'³⁷

Mussolini and Hitler also felt that they were doing things along similar lines to FDR. Indeed, they celebrated the New Deal as a kindred effort. The German press was particularly lavish in its praise for FDR. In 1934 the Volkischer Beobachter — the Nazi Party's official newspaper — described Roosevelt as a man of 'irreproachable, extremely responsible character and immovable will' and a 'warmhearted leader of the people with a profound understanding of social needs.' The paper emphasized that Roosevelt, through his New Deal, had eliminated 'the uninhibited frenzy of market speculation' of the previous decade by adopting 'National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies.' After his first year in office, Hitler sent FDR a private letter congratulating 'his heroic efforts in the interests of the American people. The President's successful battle against economic distress is being followed by the entire German people with interest and admiration.' And he told the American ambassador, William Dodd, that he was 'in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan 'The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual.''³⁸

Mussolini was even more assiduous in claiming the New Deal as an incipient fascist phenomenon. He reviewed FDR's book Looking Forward, saying, in effect, 'This guy's one of us': 'The appeal to the decisiveness and masculine sobriety of the nation's youth, with which Roosevelt here calls his readers to battle, is reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people.' Mussolini wrote that FDR understood that the economy could not 'be left to its own devices' and saw the fascistic nature of how the American president put this understanding into practice. 'Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism,' he wrote. (He later reviewed a book by Henry Wallace, proclaiming, 'Where is America headed? This book leaves no doubt that it is on the road to corporatism, the economic system of the current century.') The Volkischer Beobachter also noted that 'many passages in his book Looking Forward could have been written by a National Socialist. In any case, one can assume that he feels considerable affinity with the National Socialist philosophy.'³⁹

In a famous interview with Emil Ludwig, Mussolini reiterated his view that 'America has a dictator' in FDR. In an essay written for American audiences, he marveled at how the forces of 'spiritual renewal' were destroying the outdated notion that democracy and liberalism were 'immortal principles.' 'America itself is abandoning them. Roosevelt is moving, acting, giving orders independently of the decisions or wishes of the Senate or Congress. There are no longer intermediaries between him and the nation. There is no longer a parliament but an 'etat majeur.' There are no longer parties, but a single party. A sole will silences dissenting voices. This has nothing to do with any demo-liberal conception of things.' In 1933 members of Mussolini's press office recognized that these statements were starting to hurt their putative comrade-in-arms. They issued an order: 'It is not to be emphasized that Roosevelt's policy is fascist because these comments are immediately cabled to the United States and are used by his foes to attack him.' Still, the admiration remained mutual for several years. FDR sent his ambassador to Italy, Breckinridge Long, a letter regarding 'that admirable Italian gentleman,' saying that Mussolini 'is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.'⁴⁰

Perhaps Norman Thomas, America's leading socialist, put the question best: 'To what extent may we expect to have the economics of fascism without its politics?'⁴¹

But the most glaring similarity between Nazi Germany, New Deal America, and Fascist Italy wasn't their economic policies. It was their common glorification of war.

THE FASCIST NEW DEALS

The core value of original fascism, in the eyes of most observers, was its imposition of war values on society. (This perception — or misperception, depending on how it is articulated — is so fundamental to the popular understanding of fascism that I must return to it several times in this book.) The chief appeal of war to social planners isn't conquest or death but mobilization. Free societies are disorganized. People do their own thing, more or less, and that can be downright inconvenient if you're trying to plan the entire economy from a boardroom somewhere. War brings conformity and unity of purpose. The ordinary rules of behavior are mothballed. You can get things done: build roads, hospitals, houses. Domestic populations and institutions were required to 'do their part.'

Many progressives probably would have preferred a different organizing principle, which is why William James spoke of the moral equivalent of war. He wanted all the benefits — Dewey's 'social possibilities' of war — without the costs. Hence, in more recent times, the left has looked to everything from environmentalism and global warming to public health and 'diversity' as war equivalents to cajole the public into expert-driven unity. But at the time the progressives just couldn't think of anything else that did the trick. 'Martial virtues,' James famously wrote, 'must be the enduring cement' of American society: 'intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built.'⁴²

In Italy many of the first Fascists were veterans who donned paramilitary garb. The fascist artistic movement Futurism glorified war in prose, poetry, and paint. Mussolini was a true voluptuary of battle, rhetorically and literally. 'War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it,' he declared in a Jamesian spirit in the Enciclopedia italiana's entry on Fascism. Meanwhile, from the movement's origin as the German Fighting League Against Interest Slavery, the Nazis were always a paramilitary organization, determined to recapture the esprit de corps of the Great War, the socialism of the trenches.

Still, not every Fascist pounding the table about war actually wanted one. Mussolini didn't launch a war until a full sixteen years into his reign. Even his Ethiopian adventure was motivated by a desire to revitalize Fascism's flagging domestic fortunes. Hitler did not commence his military buildup at once, either. Indeed, while solidifying power, he cultivated an image as a peacemaker (an image many Western pacifists were willing to indulge in good faith). But few dispute that he saw war as a means as much as an end.

With the election of Franklin Roosevelt, the progressives who'd sought to remake America through war socialism were back in power. While they professed to eschew dogma, they couldn't be more dogmatically convinced that World War I had been a successful 'experiment.' Had not the experiences of the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy in the 1920s proved that America had dropped the ball by relinquishing war socialism?

During the campaign FDR promised to use his experience as an architect of the Great War to tackle the