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

socialism of the Wilson years; his staff set out with that goal, and it was heartily applauded by the liberal establishment of the 1930s. Countless editorial boards, politicians, and pundits — including the revered Walter Lippmann — called on President Roosevelt to become a 'dictator,' which was not a dirty word in the early 1930s, and to tackle the Depression the same way Wilson and the progressives had fought World War I.

Indeed, it is my argument that during World War I, America became a fascist country, albeit temporarily. The first appearance of modern totalitarianism in the Western world wasn't in Italy or Germany but in the United States of America. How else would you describe a country where the world's first modern propaganda ministry was established; political prisoners by the thousands were harassed, beaten, spied upon, and thrown in jail simply for expressing private opinions; the national leader accused foreigners and immigrants of injecting treasonous 'poison' into the American bloodstream; newspapers and magazines were shut down for criticizing the government; nearly a hundred thousand government propaganda agents were sent out among the people to whip up support for the regime and its war; college professors imposed loyalty oaths on their colleagues; nearly a quarter-million goons were given legal authority to intimidate and beat 'slackers' and dissenters; and leading artists and writers dedicated their crafts to proselytizing for the government?

The reason so many progressives were intrigued by both Mussolini's and Lenin's 'experiments' is simple: they saw their reflection in the European looking glass. Philosophically, organizationally, and politically the progressives were as close to authentic, homegrown fascists as any movement America has ever produced.¹³ Militaristic, fanatically nationalist, imperialist, racist, deeply involved in the promotion of Darwinian eugenics, enamored of the Bismarckian welfare state, statist beyond modern reckoning, the progressives represented the American flowering of a transatlantic movement, a profound reorientation toward the Hegelian and Darwinian collectivism imported from Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.

In this sense, both the Wilson and the FDR administrations were descendants — albeit distant ones — of the first fascist movement: the French Revolution.

Given the benefit of hindsight, it's difficult to understand why anyone doubts the fascist nature of the French Revolution. Few dispute that it was totalitarian, terrorist, nationalist, conspiratorial, and populist. It produced the first modern dictators, Robespierre and Napoleon, and worked on the premise that the nation had to be ruled by an enlightened avant-garde who would serve as the authentic, organic voice of the 'general will.' The paranoid Jacobin mentality made the revolutionaries more savage and cruel than the king they replaced. Some fifty thousand people ultimately died in the Terror, many in political show trials that Simon Schama describes as the 'founding charter of totalitarian justice.' Robespierre summed up the totalitarian logic of the Revolution: 'There are only two parties in France: the people and its enemies. We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against the rights of man...[W]e must exterminate all our enemies.'¹⁴

But what truly makes the French Revolution the first fascist revolution was its effort to turn politics into a religion. (In this the revolutionaries were inspired by Rousseau, whose concept of the general will divinized the people while rendering the person an afterthought.) Accordingly, they declared war on Christianity, attempting to purge it from society and replace it with a 'secular' faith whose tenets were synonymous with the Jacobin agenda. Hundreds of pagan-themed festivals were launched across the country celebrating Nation, Reason, Brotherhood, Liberty, and other abstractions in order to bathe the state and the general will in an aura of sanctity. As we shall see, the Nazis emulated the Jacobins in minute detail.

It is no longer controversial to say that the French Revolution was disastrous and cruel. But it is deeply controversial to say that it was fascist, because the French Revolution is the fons et origo of the left and the 'revolutionary tradition.' The American right and classical liberals look fondly on the American Revolution, which was essentially conservative, while shuddering at the horrors and follies of Jacobinism. But if the French Revolution was fascist, then its heirs would have to be seen as the fruit of this poisoned tree, and fascism itself would finally and correctly be placed where it belongs in the story of the left. This would cause seismic disorder in the leftist worldview; so instead, leftists embrace cognitive dissonance and terminological sleight of hand.

At the same time, it must be noted that scholars have had so much difficulty explaining what fascism is because various fascisms have been so different from each other. For example, the Nazis were genocidal anti- Semites. The Italian Fascists were protectors of the Jews until the Nazis took over Italy. Fascists fought for the side of the Axis, but the Spanish stayed out of the war (and protected Jews as well). The Nazis hated Christianity, the Italians made peace with the Catholic Church (though Mussolini himself despised Christianity with an untrammeled passion), and members of the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael styled themselves as Christian crusaders. Some fascists championed 'state capitalism,' while others, such as the Blue Shirts of Kuomintang China, demanded the immediate seizure of the means of production. The Nazis were officially anti-Bolshevist, but there was a movement of 'National Bolshevism' within Nazi ranks, too.

The one thing that unites these movements is that they were all, in their own ways, totalitarian. But what do we mean when we say something is 'totalitarian'? The word has certainly taken on an understandably sinister connotation in the last half century. Thanks to work by Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others, it's become a catchall for brutal, soul-killing, Orwellian regimes. But that's not how the word was originally used or intended. Mussolini himself coined the term to describe a society where everybody belonged, where everyone was taken care of, where everything was inside the state and nothing was outside: where truly no child was left behind.

Again, it is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian — or 'holistic,' if you prefer — in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists. Liberals place their faith in priestly experts who know better, who plan, exhort, badger, and scold. They try to use science to discredit traditional notions of religion and faith, but they speak the language of pluralism and spirituality to defend 'nontraditional' beliefs. Just as with classical fascism, liberal fascists speak of a 'Third Way' between right and left where all good things go together and all hard choices are 'false choices.'

The idea that there are no hard choices — that is, choices between competing goods — is religious and totalitarian because it assumes that all good things are fundamentally compatible. The conservative or classical liberal vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real utopia, waits for us in the next life.

Liberal fascism differs from classical fascism in many ways. I don't deny this. Indeed, it is central to my point. Fascisms differ from each other because they grow out of different soil. What unites them are their emotional or instinctual impulses, such as the quest for community, the urge to 'get beyond' politics, a faith in the perfectibility of man and the authority of experts, and an obsession with the aesthetics of youth, the cult of action, and the need for an all-powerful state to coordinate society at the national or global level. Most of all, they share the belief — what I call the totalitarian temptation — that with the right amount of tinkering we can realize the utopian dream of 'creating a better world.'

But as with everything in history, time and place matter, and the differences between various fascisms can be profound. Nazism was the product of German culture, grown out of a German context. The Holocaust could not have occurred in Italy, because Italians are not Germans. And in America, where hostility to big government is central to the national character, the case for statism must be made in terms of 'pragmatism' and decency. In other words, our fascism must be nice and for your own good.

American Progressivism, from which today's liberalism descended, was a kind of Christian fascism (many called it 'Christian socialism'). This is a difficult concept for modern liberals to grasp because they are used to thinking of the progressives as the people who cleaned up the food supply, pushed through the eight-hour workday, and ended child labor. But liberals often forget that the progressives were also imperialists, at home and abroad. They were the authors of Prohibition, the Palmer Raids, eugenics, loyalty oaths, and, in its modern incarnation, what many call 'state capitalism.'

Many liberals also miss the religious dimension of Progressivism because they tend to view religion and progressive politics as diametrically opposed to each other; thus, while liberals who remember the civil rights movement acknowledge that the churches played a role, they don't see it on a continuum with other religiously inspired progressive crusades like abolition and temperance. Today's liberal fascism eschews talk of Christianity for the most part, except to roll back its influence wherever it can (although a right-wing version often called