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

The movement of the 1960s didn't start out destructive. In fact it started out brimming with high-minded idealism and hope. The Port Huron Statement, the signature document of the New Left, was for all its overwrought verbiage a well-intentioned statement of democratic optimism and admirable honesty. The authors — chief among them Tom Hayden — conceded that they were in fact bourgeois radicals, 'bred in at least modest comfort.' Driven by a sense of alienation from the American way of life, the young radicals craved a sense of unity and belonging, a rediscovery of personal meaning through collective political endeavors. Life seemed out of balance. 'It is difficult today to give human meaning to the welter of facts that surrounds us,' the authors proclaimed. Their aim was to create a political system that would restore 'human meaning' (whatever that is). 'The goal of man and society,' they insisted, 'should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic.' This urge for self-assertion should be translated into a politics that could unleash the 'unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.'³¹

At the time, youth activists found a willing ear in mainstream liberalism, which was preaching more and more about 'national service,' 'sacrifice,' and 'action.' John F. Kennedy — the youngest president ever elected, replacing the oldest president ever elected — simultaneously fed and appealed to this atmosphere at every turn. 'Let the word go forth,' he declared in his inaugural address with an almost authoritarian tempo, 'that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.' His most famous line, 'Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,' resonated with a generation desperate to find collective redemption in peace the way their parents had in war.

A subconscious current ran through the entire society, a quest for community and galvanizing leadership. As Tom Hayden noted in March 1962, 'Three out of every four students believe 'that what the nation needs is a strong fearless leader in whom we can have faith.'' The embryonic youth movement hoped that Kennedy might prove to be that leader. The Peace Corps, and later VISTA, drew volunteers from the same wellspring of youthful activism. The University of California at Berkeley — the home of the first campus revolt of the 1960s — provided 'the single most important source of volunteers for the Peace Corps in the early 1960s.' When the Student Peace Union, or SPU, protested in front of the White House in February 1962, Kennedy ordered his kitchen to send the picketers coffee while the SPU proudly distributed copies of a New York Times article which claimed that the president was 'listening' to them.³²

And then there was the quest for community. The Red Diaper Babies of the 1960s inherited from their parents the same drive to create a new community organized around political aspirations. According to Todd Gitlin, the former president of the SDS, 'There was a longing to 'unite the fragmented parts of personal history,' as The Port Huron Statement put it — to transcend the multiplicity and confusion of roles that become normal in a rationalized society: the rifts between work and family, between public and private, between strategic, calculating reason and spontaneous, expressive emotion.' Gitlin continues, 'At least for some of us, the circle evoked a more primitive fantasy of fusion with a symbolic, all-enfolding mother: the movement, the beloved community itself, where we might be able to find in Yale psychologist Kenneth Keniston's words, 'the qualities of warmth, communion, acceptedness, dependence and intimacy which existed in childhood.'' Mark Rudd likewise reminisced about the glories of the 'communes' set up at Columbia: 'For many it was the first communal experience of their lives — a far cry from the traditional lifestyle of Morningside Heights [at Columbia], that of individuals retiring into their rooms or apartments. One brother remarked to me, 'The communes are a better high than grass.''³³

The SDS's original mission wasn't radical; it was humane: community outreach. The first significant project the group undertook was the Economic Research and Action Project, begun in 1963. SDS members fanned out like knights from the roundtable in search of the grail of self-fulfillment by moving into inner-city ghettos in an earnest effort to politicize the poor, the oppressed, and the criminal underclass. It should tell us something that the most compelling catchphrase for liberals and leftists alike in the 1960s was 'community': 'community action,' 'community outreach,' 'communities of mutual respect.'

As Alan Brinkley has noted, most of the protests and conflagrations of the 1960s had their roots in a desire to preserve or create communities. The ostensible issue that launched the takeover of Columbia University in 1968 was the encroachment of the campus into the black community. The administration's appeasement of Black Nationalists was done in the name of welcoming blacks to the Cornell community, and the Black Nationalists took up arms because they felt that assimilation into the Cornell community, or the white community generally, amounted to a negation of their own community — that is, 'cultural genocide.'

The Berkeley uprising was sparked in large part by the school's expansion into a tiny park that, at the end of the day, was just a place for hippies to hang out and feel comfortable in their own little community. Hippies may call themselves nonconformists, but as anyone who's spent time with them understands, they prize conformity above most things. The clothes and hair are ways of fitting in, of expressing shared values. Peace signs may symbolize something very different from the swastika, but both are a kind of insignia instantly recognizable to friend and foe alike. Regardless, the Berkeley protesters felt that their world, their folk community, was being destroyed by a cold, impersonal institution in the form of the university and, perhaps, modernity itself. 'You've pushed us to the end of your civilization here, against the sea in Berkeley,' shouted one of the leaders of the People's Park uprising. 'Then you pushed us into a square-block area called People's Park. It was the last thing we had to defend, this square block of sanity amid all your madness...We are now homeless in your civilized world. We have become the great American gypsies, with only our mythology for a culture.'³⁴ This is precisely the sort of diatribe one might have heard from a bohemian Berliner in the 1920s.

There is no disputing that Nazism was an evil ideology from the first spark of its inception. But that does not mean that every adherent of Nazism was motivated by evil intent. Germans did not collectively decide to be Hollywood villains for all eternity. For millions of Germans the Nazis seemed to offer hope for community and meaning and authenticity, too. As Walter Laqueur wrote in Commentary shortly after the Cornell uprising:

Most of the basic beliefs and even the outward fashions of the present world-youth movements can be traced back to the period in Europe just before and after the First World War. The German Neue Schar of 1919 were the original hippies: long-haired, sandaled, unwashed, they castigated urban civilization, read Hermann Hesse and Indian philosophy, practiced free-love, and distributed in their meetings thousands of asters and chrysanthemums. They danced, sang to the music of the guitar, and attended lectures on the 'Revolution of the Soul.' The modern happening was born in 1910 in Trieste, Parma, Milan, and other Italian cities where the Futurists arranged public meetings to recite their poems, read their manifestos, and exhibit their ultra-modern paintings. No one over thirty, they demanded, should in future be active in politics...

For the historian of ideas, the back issues of the periodicals of the youth movements, turned yellow with age, make fascinating reading...It is indeed uncanny how despite all the historical differences, the German movement preempted so many of the issues agitating the American movement of today, as well as its literary fashions.³⁵

Let us return to the example of Horst Wessel, the most famous 'youth leader' of the early Nazi movement, 'martyred' in his battle against the 'Red Front and reactionaries' as immortalized in the Nazi 'Horst Wessel Lied' ('Horst Wessel Song'). Wessel fit the 1960s ideal of a youth leader 'from the streets' fighting for social justice. The son of a Lutheran pastor, he rebelled against his middle-class upbringing by dropping out of law school at twenty- one and enlisting in the Nazi storm troopers. He moved into a shady working-class part of town and, with his comrades, joined in bloody street battles against the communists. But Wessel also earned a reputation as an idealistic and sensitive proselytizer for the 'revolution from below,' which would usher in a united racial community transcending class differences. He walked the walk, living among criminals and the struggling proletariat:

Whoever is convinced that the Germany of today is not worthy of guarding the gates of true German culture must leave the theatre...the salons...the studies...their parents' houses...literature...the concert halls. He must take to the streets, he must really go to the people...in their tenements of desperation and woe, of criminality...where the SA is protecting German culture...Every beer hall brawl is a step forward for German culture, the head of every SA man bashed in by the communists is another victory for the people, for the Reich, for the house of German culture.³⁶

An amateur poet, Wessel wrote a small tribute to the cause, 'Die Fahne hoch' ('Raise High the Flag'), which promised, 'The day breaks for freedom and for bread' and 'Slavery will last only a short time longer.' Around the same time, he fell in love with Erna Jaenicke, a prostitute whom he first met when she was being beaten up by