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

compassionate conservatism has made inroads in the Republican Party). But while the God talk may have fallen by the wayside, the religious crusader's spirit that powered Progressivism remains as strong as ever. Rather than talk in explicitly religious terms, however, today's liberals use a secularized vocabulary of 'hope' and construct explicitly spiritual philosophies like Hillary Clinton's 'politics of meaning.'

Similarly, the nasty racism that infused the progressive eugenics of Margaret Sanger and others has largely melted away. But liberal fascists are still racist in their own nice way, believing in the inherent numinousness of blacks and the permanence of white sin, and therefore the eternal justification of white guilt. While I would argue that this is bad and undesirable, I would not dream of saying that today's liberals are genocidal or vicious in their racial attitudes the way Nazis were. Still, it should be noted that on the postmodern left, they do speak in terms Nazis could understand. Indeed, notions of 'white logic' and the 'permanence of race' were not only understood by Nazis but in some cases pioneered by them. The historian Anne Harrington observes that the 'key words of the vocabulary of postmodernism (deconstructionism, logocentrism) actually had their origins in antiscience tracts written by Nazi and protofascist writers like Ernst Krieck and Ludwig Klages.' The first appearance of the word Dekonstrucktion was in a Nazi psychiatry journal edited by Hermann Goring's cousin.¹⁵ Many on the left talk of destroying 'whiteness' in a way that is more than superficially reminiscent of the National Socialist effort to 'de-Judaize' German society. Indeed, it is telling that the man who oversaw the legal front of this project, Carl Schmitt, is hugely popular among leftist academics. Mainstream liberals don't necessarily agree with these intellectuals, but they do accord them a reverence and respect that often amount to a tacit endorsement.

A simple fact remains: Progressives did many things that we would today call objectively fascist, and fascists did many things we would today call objectively progressive. Teasing apart this seeming contradiction, and showing why it is not in fact a contradiction, are major aims of this book. But that does not mean I am calling liberals Nazis.

Let me put it this way: no serious person can deny that Marxist ideas had a profound impact on what we call liberalism. To point this out doesn't mean that one is calling, say, Barack Obama a Stalinist or a communist. One can go even further and note that many of the most prominent liberals and leftists of the twentieth century assiduously minimized the evils and dangers presented by Soviet Communism; but that doesn't necessarily mean it would be fair to accuse them of actually favoring Stalin's genocidal crimes. It's cruel to call someone a Nazi because it unfairly suggests sympathy with the Holocaust. But it is no less inaccurate to assume that fascism was simply the ideology of Jewish genocide. If you need a label for that, call it Hitlerism, for Hitler would not be Hitler without genocidal racism. And while Hitler was a fascist, fascism need not be synonymous with Hitlerism.

For example, it's illuminating to note that Jews were overrepresented in the Italian Fascist Party and remained so from the early 1920s until 1938. Fascist Italy had nothing like a death camp system. Not a single Jew of any national origin under Italian control anywhere in the world was handed over to Germany until 1943, when Italy was invaded by the Nazis. Jews in Italy survived the war at a higher rate than anywhere under Axis rule save Denmark, and Jews in Italian-controlled areas of Europe fared almost as well. Mussolini actually sent Italian troops into harm's way to save Jewish lives. Francisco Franco, allegedly a quintessential fascist dictator, also refused Hitler's demand to hand over Spanish Jews, saving tens of thousands of Jews from extermination. It was Franco who signed the document abrogating the 1492 Edict of Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Meanwhile, the supposedly 'liberal' French and Dutch eagerly cooperated with the Nazi deportation program.

At this point I need to make a few statements of a kind that should be obvious, but are necessary in order to prevent any possibility of being misunderstood or having my argument distorted by hostile critics. I love this country and have tremendous faith in its goodness and decency; under no circumstances can I imagine a fascist regime like that of the Nazis coming to power here, let alone an event like the Holocaust. This is because Americans, all Americans — liberals, conservatives, and independents, blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians — are shaped by a liberal, democratic, and egalitarian culture strong enough to resist any such totalitarian temptations. So, no, I do not think liberals are evil, villainous, or bigoted in the sense that typical Nazi comparisons suggest. The right-wing shtick of calling Hillary Clinton 'Hitlery' is no less sophomoric than the constant drumbeat of 'Bushitler' nonsense one finds on the left. The Americans who cheered for Mussolini in the 1920s cannot be held to account for what Hitler did nearly two decades later. And liberals today are not responsible for what their intellectual forefathers believed, though they should account for it.

But at the same time, Hitler's crimes do not erase the similarities between Progressivism — now called liberalism — and the ideologies and attitudes that brought Mussolini and Hitler to power.

For example, it has long been known that the Nazis were economic populists, heavily influenced by the same ideas that motivated American and British populists. And while too often downplayed by liberal historians, American populism had a strong anti-Semitic and conspiratorial streak. A typical cartoon in a populist publication depicted the world grasped in the tentacles of an octopus sitting atop the British Isles. The octopus was labeled 'Rothschild.' An Associated Press reporter noted of the 1896 Populist convention 'the extraordinary hatred of the Jewish race' on display.¹⁶ Father Charles Coughlin, 'the Radio Priest,' was a left-wing populist rabble-rouser and conspiracy theorist whose anti-Semitism was well-known among establishment liberals even when they defended the pro-Roosevelt demagogue as being 'on the side of the angels.'

Today, populist conspiracy theories run amok across the left (and are hardly unknown on the right). A full third of Americans believe it is 'very' or 'somewhat' likely that the government was behind (or allowed) the 9/11 attacks. A particular paranoia about the influence of the 'Jewish lobby' has infected significant swaths of the campus and European left — not to mention the poisonous and truly Hitlerian anti-Semitic populism of the Arab 'street' under regimes most would recognize as fascist. My point isn't that the left is embracing Hitlerite anti- Semitism. Rather, it is embracing populism and indulging anti-Semites to an extent that is alarming and dangerous. Moreover, it's worth recalling that the success of Nazism in Weimar Germany partially stemmed from the unwillingness of decent men to take it seriously.

There are other similarities between German and Italian Fascist ideas and modern American liberalism. For example, the corporatism at the heart of liberal economics today is seen as a bulwark against right-wing and vaguely fascistic corporate ruling classes. And yet the economic ideas of Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, and Robert Reich are deeply similar to the corporatist 'Third Way' ideologies that spawned fascist economics in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, contemporary liberalism's cargo cult over the New Deal is enough to place modern liberalism in the family tree of fascism.

Or consider the explosion of health and New Age crusades in recent years, from the war on smoking, to the obsession with animal rights, to the sanctification of organic foods. No one disputes that these fads are a product of the cultural and political left. But few are willing to grapple with the fact that we've seen this sort of thing before. Heinrich Himmler was a certified animal rights activist and an aggressive promoter of 'natural healing.' Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, championed homeopathy and herbal remedies. Hitler and his advisers dedicated hours of their time to discussions of the need to move the entire nation to vegetarianism as a response to the unhealthiness promoted by capitalism. Dachau hosted the world's largest alternative and organic medicine research lab and produced its own organic honey.

In profound ways, the Nazi antismoking and public health drives foreshadowed today's crusades against junk food, trans fats, and the like. A Hitler Youth manual proclaimed, 'Nutrition is not a private matter!' — a mantra substantially echoed by the public health establishment today. The Nazis' fixation on organic foods and personal health neatly fit their larger understanding of how the world works. Many Nazis were convinced that Christianity, which held that men were intended to conquer nature rather than live in harmony with it, and capitalism, which alienated men from their natural state, conspired to undermine German health. In a widely read book on nutrition, Hugo Kleine blamed 'capitalist special interests' (and 'masculinized Jewish half-women') for the decline in quality of German foods, which contributed in turn to the rise in cancer (another Nazi obsession). Organic food was inextricably linked to what the Nazis then described — as the left does today — as 'social justice' issues.¹⁷

Are you automatically a fascist if you care about health, nutrition, and the environment? Of course not. What is fascist is the notion that in an organic national community, the individual has no right not to be healthy; and the state therefore has the obligation to force us to be healthy for our own good. To the extent that these modern health movements seek to harness the power of the state to their