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

in university governance. Nazis believed that the voice of the students needed to be heard and the importance of 'activism' recognized as an essential part of higher education. Foreshadowing a refrain common to American student radicals of the 1960s, like Columbia's Mark Rudd, who declared that the only legitimate job of the university was 'the creation and expansion of a revolutionary movement,' the Nazis believed that the university should be an empowering incubator of revolutionaries first and peddlers of abstraction a very, very distant second.⁸

The Nazis' tolerance for dissident views sharply declined, of course, once they attained and solidified power. But the themes remained fairly constant. Indeed, the Nazis fulfilled their promise to increase student participation in university governance as part of a broader redefinition of the university itself. Walter Schultze, the director of the National Socialist Association of University Lecturers, laid out the new official doctrine in an address to the first gathering of the organization, wherein he explained that 'academic freedom' must be redefined so that students and professors alike could work together toward the larger cause. 'Never has the German idea of freedom been conceived with greater life and vigor than in our day...Ultimately freedom is nothing else but responsible service on behalf of the basic values of our being as a Volk.'⁹

Professors who deviated from the new orthodoxy faced all of the familiar tactics of the campus left in the 1960s. Their classrooms were barricaded or occupied, threats were put in their mail, denunciations were posted on campus bulletin boards and published in student newspapers, lecturers were heckled. When administrators tried to block or punish these antics, the students mounted massive protests, and the students naturally won, often forcing the resignation of the administrator.

What cannot be overstated is that German students were first and foremost rebelling against the conservatism of both German higher education and the older generation's 'bourgeois materialism.' The churches, too, were suspect because they had become so closely associated with the old, corrupt World War I regime. The students wanted to run the universities, which to traditional academics was akin to inmates running the asylum. Meanwhile, most of the progressive professors, at least those who weren't Jews or Bolsheviks, gamely went along. Indeed, many such academics — like Hans-Georg Gadamer — who in later years would exploit their victim status under the Nazis, were quite happy to take a better office vacated by a Jewish colleague. Martin Heidegger, the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, took to the Nazi revolution instantly.

The Cornell takeover echoed these and other fascist themes. Black student radicals, convinced of their racial superiority and the inherent corruption of liberalism, mounted a sustained campaign of intimidation and violence against the very institution that afforded them the luxury of an education. President Perkins himself was a quintessentially progressive educator. With degrees from Swarthmore and Princeton, he cut his teeth as a New Dealer in the Office of Price Administration. Intellectually, Perkins was a product of the progressive-pragmatic tradition of William James and John Dewey, rejecting the idea that universities should be dedicated to the pursuit of eternal truths or enduring questions. He ridiculed the 'intellectual chastity' of traditional scholarship and mocked non-pragmatic scholars — modern-day ink knights — who spent their time devoted to 'barren discussions of medieval scholasticism.' Like so many of the New Deal intellectuals, Perkins was hostile to the idea that the past had much to say about the present. For him, the watchword was 'relevance,' which in the 1960s quickly led to 'empowerment.'¹⁰

Perkins believed that universities should be laboratories for social change, training grounds for 'experts' who would parachute into the real world and fix society, like the progressives of Wilson's and FDR's day. For these reasons — plus a decided lack of courage — Perkins prostrated himself to fascist goons while he ruthlessly turned his back on those whose educations, jobs, and even lives were threatened by Black Power radicals. German students insisted that they be taught 'German science' and 'German logic.' The black radicals wanted to be taught 'black science' and 'black logic' by black professors. They demanded a separate school tasked to 'create the tools necessary for the formation of a black nation.' They backed up these demands not with arguments but with violence and passionate assertion. 'In the past it has been all the black people who have done all the dying,' shouted the leader of the black radicals. 'Now the time has come when the pigs are going to die.' Perkins supinely obliged after only token opposition. After all, he explained, 'there is nothing I have ever said or will ever say that is forever fixed or will not be modified by changed circumstances.' The first course offered in the new program was Black Ideology.¹¹

Since then, what we now call identity politics has become the norm in academia. Whole departments are given over to the exploration and celebration of race and gender differences. Diversity is now code for the immutable nature of racial identity. This idea, too, traces itself back to the neo-Romanticism of the Nazis. What was once the hallmark of Nazi thinking, forced on higher education at gunpoint, is now the height of intellectual sophistication. Andrew Hacker, then a young professor at Cornell, today perhaps the preeminent white liberal writer on racial issues, has written that 'historically white' colleges 'are white...in logic and learning, in their conceptions of scholarly knowledge and demeanor.'¹²

Readers of a certain age probably know next to nothing about the Cornell uprising, and an even larger number probably have a hard time reconciling this spectacle with the image of the 1960s conjured by the popular culture. They believe in the Sorelian myth of the 1960s as an age when the 'good guys' overturned a corrupt system, rebelled against their 'square' parents, and ushered in an age of enlightenment and decency, now under threat from oppressive conservatives who want to roll back its utopian gains. Liberal baby boomers have smeared the lens of memory with Vaseline, depicting the would-be revolutionaries as champions of peace and love — free love at that! Communes, hand-holding, marching arm in arm for peace and justice, and singing 'Kumbaya' around the campfire: these are the images the New Left wants to put at the front of our collective memory. Some on the left still argue that the 1960s was a period of revolutionary politics, though they are split over the extent of the revolution's failures and triumphs. More mainstream liberals want us to remember John F. Kennedy uniting the nation with his call to 'ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.' Others emphasize the antiwar or civil rights movements.

Speaking as a presidential candidate in 2003, Howard Dean offered the consensus view when he told the Washington Post that the 1960s was 'a time of great hope.' 'Medicare had passed. Head Start had passed. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the first African American justice [appointed to] the United States Supreme Court. We felt like we were all in it together, that we all had responsibility for this country...That [strong schools and communities were] everybody's responsibility. That if one person was left behind, then America wasn't as strong or as good as it could be or as it should be. That's the kind of country that I want back.'¹³

There's no reason not to take Dean at his word. Indeed, unlike many liberal Democrats who were products of that time, Dean is admirably willing to admit that he was decisively shaped by the decade — while the Clintons and John Kerry, who were vastly more influenced by radical politics, insist on pretending that the 1960s was little more than a movie playing in the background. In a sense, however, one could say that Dean is the bigger liar. For almost everything about this gauzy rendition of the 1960s is a distortion.

First of all, young people were not uniformly 'progressive.' Public opinion surveys found that young Americans were often the most pro-military while people over fifty were the most likely to oppose war. Numerous studies also show that radical children were not rebelling against their parents' values. The single best predictor of whether a college student would become a campus radical was the ideology of his or her own parents. Left-leaning parents produced left-leaning children who grew up to be radical revolutionaries. The most significant divide among young people was between those attending college and those not. But even among campus youth, attitudes on Vietnam didn't turn negative until the 1960s were almost over, and even then there was much less consensus than the PBS documentaries would suggest.

Moreover, the student radicals themselves were not quite the anti-war pacifists that John Lennon nostalgists might think. They did not want to give peace a chance when the peace wasn't favorable to their agenda. The Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, did not start out as an antiwar organization. Indeed, its leader, Tom Hayden, considered the early antiwar activism a distraction from its core mission in the streets. Even after the New Left became chiefly defined by its stance against the war, it was never pacifistic, at least at its most glorified fringes. The Black Panthers, who assassinated police in ambushes and plotted terrorist bombings, were revered by New Left radicals — Hayden called them 'our Vietcong.' The Weathermen, an offshoot of the SDS, conducted a campaign of domestic terrorism and preached the cleansing value of violence. Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the group John Kerry spoke for and led, internally debated whether or not it should assassinate politicians who