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

shirts sporting fascistic or militaristic ranks and titles (minister of defense, minister of information), robbing banks, calling for the slaughter of 'pigs' and honkies, staging ambushes for police, kidnapping judges and children, and calling for a separate black state.

Meanwhile, what of the supposedly fascistic American right? While the New Left relentlessly denounced the founding fathers as racist white males and even mainstream liberals ridiculed the idea that the text of the Constitution had any relevance for modern society, conservatives were launching an extensive project to restore the proper place of the Constitution in American life. No leading conservative scholar or intellectual celebrated fascist themes or ideas. No leading conservative denigrated the inherent classical liberalism of the United States' political system. To the contrary, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, Jr., and the conservatives around National Review dedicated themselves to restoring the classically liberal vision of the founders.

What confused the left then and now about American conservatism is that love and support for one's country do not necessarily put one on the road to fascism. Patriotism is not the same thing as extreme nationalism or fascism. The Nazis killed a great many German patriots whose love of their homeland was deep and profound. In a sense, one of the Jews' greatest offenses was that they were patriotic Germans. It was in the 1960s that the left convinced itself that there is something fascistic about patriotism and something perversely 'patriotic' about running down America. Anti-Americanism — a stand-in for hatred of Western civilization — became the stuff of sophisticates and intellectuals as never before. Flag burners became the truest 'patriots' because dissent — not just from partisan politics, but from the American project itself — became the highest virtue. In 2003 the professor at Columbia who hoped America would face 'a million Mogadishus' is a patriot in the eyes of the left. But Americans eager to maintain limited government — of all things! — are somehow creeping fascists.

Witnessing how the brutality and wanton destruction of the Nazis had swept Hitler to power, the novelist Thomas Mann wrote in his diary that this was a new kind of revolution, 'without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice.' The 'common scum' had won the day, 'accompanied by vast rejoicing on the part of the masses.'⁶² Liberals in the 1960s who lived through a similar degradation of decency by the same intellectual rot began to rebel. Confronted with an ideology that always assumed America was the problem and never the solution, they chose to mount a counterassault. These patriots in both parties became in large part that band of intellectuals known as neoconservatives. They were given that name by leftists who thought the prefix 'neo' would conjure associations with neo-Nazis.

But since the testimony of neoconservatives counts for nothing in most corners of liberal thought, it's worth noting that even some titans of the left still had the clarity of vision to understand what they were dealing with. Irving Louis Horowitz, a revered leftist intellectual (he was the literary executor of C. Wright Mills) specializing in revolutionary thought, saw in 1960s radicalism a 'fanatic attempt to impose a new social order upon the world, rather than await the verdict of consensus-building formulas among disparate individuals as well as the historical muses.' And he saw this fanaticism for what it was: 'Fascism returns to the United States not as a right-wing ideology, but almost as a quasi-leftist ideology.'⁶³

Peter Berger, a Jewish refugee from Austria and a respected peace activist and left-wing sociologist (he helped popularize the phrase 'social construction of reality'), saw much the same thing. When 'observing the [American] radicals in action, I was repeatedly reminded of the storm troopers that marched through my childhood in Europe.' He explored a long list of themes common to 1960s radicalism and European fascism and concluded they formed a 'constellation that strikingly resembles the common core of Italian and German fascism.' In 1974 A. James Gregor wrote The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics, which synthesized and cataloged these trends with sweeping detail and intellectual rigor. 'In the recent past,' he observed, 'student radicals and the 'new left' have legitimized a political style calculated to be maximally serviceable to an American variant of fascism.'

Even some in the SDS recognized that the more extreme members were degenerating into fascism. An editorial in the Campaigner (published by the New York and Philadelphia Regional Labor Committee of the Students for a Democratic Society) observed of the SDS faction that spawned the Weathermen, 'There is a near identity between the arguments of anarchists (around the Columbia strike movement, e.g.) and Mussolini's polemics for action against theory, against program.'⁶⁴

The 'youth movement' theorizing sparked by Charles Reich's Greening of America, the indictment of reason, the populist appeals to defeating 'the system,' the table thumping for a new Volk-centric community that would replace capitalism with a more organic and totalitarian approach, was too much for some leftists with a clear understanding of the historical roots of fascism. The fascistic 'overtones,' Stewart Alsop wrote of The Greening of America, 'are obvious to anyone who has seen those forests of arms raised in unison by the revolutionary young, or heard their mindless shouted chants. Professor Reich is certainly a good and kindly man, without a fascist bone in his body,' Alsop continued, 'and most of the 'liberated' young he worships are good and kindly too. But surely anyone with a sense of the political realities can smell the danger that these silly, kind, irrational people, in their cushioned isolation from reality, are bringing upon us all. The danger starts with the universities, but it does not end there. That is what makes the mush so scary.' No less a socialist icon than Michael Harrington declared Reich's sweeping indictment of modernity — he called it 'elite existentialism' — to have much in common with the Romantic roots of Nazism.

Today the liberal left's version of the 1960s makes about as much sense as it does to remember Hitler as the 'man of peace' described by Neville Chamberlain. In its passions and pursuits, the New Left was little more than an Americanized updating of what we've come to call the European Old Right. From Easy Rider to JFK, Hollywood has been telling us that if only the forces of reaction hadn't killed their Horst Wessels, we would today be living in a better, more just, and more open-minded country. And if only we could rekindle the hope and ambition of those early radicals, 'what might have been' will turn into 'what could still be.' This is the vital lie of the left. Western civilization was saved when the barbarians were defeated, at least temporarily, in the early 1970s. We should be not only grateful for our slender victory but vigilant in securing it for posterity.

Such vigilance is impossible without understanding the foundations on which contemporary liberalism stands, and that in turn requires a second look at the 1960s — this time from the top down. For while the radicals in the streets were demanding more power, the progressives already in power were playing their parts as well.

It is understandable that the 1960s is viewed as an abrupt change or turning point in our history, because in many respects the changes were so sudden (and in some cases for the better). But there was also a profound continuity underlying the events of the decade. When Kennedy said that the torch had been passed to a new generation, he was referring in no small part to a new generation of progressives. These men (and a few women) were dedicated to continuing the projects of Wilson and Roosevelt. When the torch is passed, the runner changes, but the race remains the same.

In the chapter that follows, we will show that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson represented the continuation of the liberal quest begun by Woodrow Wilson and his fellow progressives — the quest to create an all-caring, all-powerful, all-encompassing state, a state that assumes responsibility for every desirable outcome and takes the blame for every setback on the road to utopia, a state that finally replaces God.

6

From Kennedy's Myth to Johnson's Dream: Liberal Fascism and the Cult of the State

FOR GENERATIONS, THE central fault line in American politics has involved the growth and power of the state. The conventional narrative has conservatives trying to shrink the size of government and liberals trying — successfully — to expand it. There's more than a little evidence to support this understanding. But much of it is circumstantial. Liberals often argue for restraining government in areas such as law enforcement (the Warren Court's Miranda ruling, for example), national security (opposition to the Patriot Act and domestic surveillance), and that vast but ill-defined realm that comes under the rubric of 'legislating morality.' While disagreements over specific policies proliferate, virtually all conservatives and most libertarians