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

because Bismarck denied it a popular constituency. In its place was the statist liberalism of Dewey and DuBois, Wilson and FDR, a liberalism defined by economic entitlements and the alleviation of poverty.

Then there was the Kulturkampf — a subject to be discussed at greater length in a later chapter. The important point about the Kulturkampf, lost on so many contemporary commentators, is that it was a liberal phenomenon. German progressives declared war on backward Catholicism, believing that their blending of science and a form of nationalistic Social Gospel was the ideology of the future. It was a model the progressives adapted to American soil.

The godfathers of the liberal God-state were the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and the scientist Charles Darwin. Hegel had argued that history was an unfolding evolutionary process, and the engine driving that process was the state. The 'State is the actually existing, realized moral life...The divine idea as it exists on earth,' Hegel declared in The Philosophy of History. '[A]ll worth which the human being possesses — all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.'³⁰ The movement of the state through time was the 'march of God on earth.' Darwin's theory of evolution seemed to confirm that man was part of a larger organism, governed and directed by the state as the mind guides the body. For the 'modern' clergy this meant that politics was a religious calling; after all, politics is nothing less than the effort to define the mission of the state, and the state was the hand of God.

Virtually all of the leading progressive intellectuals shared this 'organic' and spiritual understanding of politics — perhaps none more than Richard Ely. 'God works through the State in carrying out His purposes more universally than through any other institution,' proclaimed the founder of the American Economic Association and the so-called Wisconsin School of progressivism. The state, he insisted, 'is religious in its essence,' and there is no corner of human existence beyond the scope of its authority. A mentor to Wilson and a great influence on Teddy Roosevelt, Ely was a postmillennialist Christian who defined the state as 'a mighty force in furthering God's kingdom and establishing righteous relations.'³¹ Many of Ely's famous colleagues at the University of Wisconsin saw their advocacy for economic reform, eugenics, war, socialism, Prohibition, and the rest of the progressive agenda as part of a united effort to bring about the 'New Jerusalem.'

It made little sense to talk about progressives as a group distinct from the theocratic zealots trying to create a new God-state. The American Economic Association, its mission statement dedicated to uniting church, state, and science to secure America's redemption, served as both the intellectual engine of progressive social policy and a de facto organ of the Social Gospel movement. More than sixty clergymen — roughly half the group's roster — counted themselves as members. Later, during World War I, Ely was the most rabid of jingoists, organizing loyalty oaths, hurling accusations of treason, and arguing that opponents of the war should be shot.

With Woodrow Wilson, it is impossible to separate the priest from the professor. From early essays with such titles as 'Christ's Army' and 'Christian Progress' to his later addresses as president, Wilson made it clear that he was a divine instrument, and the state the holy sword of God's crusade, while at the same time insisting that he represented the triumph of science and reason in politics. Speaking to the Young Men's Christian Association, he told the audience that public servants should be guided solely by the question: What would Christ do in your situation? He then proceeded to explain, 'There is a mighty task before us, and it welds us together. It is to make the United States a mighty Christian Nation, and to Christianize the world.'³²

The war only served to intensify these impulses. 'The Past and the Present are in deadly grapple,' he declared. His goal was the complete 'destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere...that can disturb the peace of the world' and the 'settlement of every question' facing mankind. Wilson advocated 'Force! Force to the utmost! Force without stint or limit! The righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.' America was 'an instrument in the hands of God,' he proclaimed, while his propaganda ministry called World War I a war 'to re-win the tomb of Christ.'³³

Wilson shared with other fascist leaders a firm conviction that his organic connection with 'the people' was absolute and transcended the mere mechanics of democracy. 'So sincerely do I believe these things that I am sure that I speak the mind and wish of the people of America.' Many Europeans recognized him as an avatar of the rising socialist World Spirit. In 1919 a young Italian socialist proclaimed, 'Wilson's empire has no borders because He [sic] does not govern territories. Rather He interprets the needs, the hopes, the faith of the human spirit, which has no spatial or temporal limits.'³⁴ The young man's name was Benito Mussolini.

That Wilson's government intruded deeply into the private sector in unprecedented ways is indisputable. It launched the effort, carried forward by FDR, of turning the economy into a 'cooperative' enterprise where labor, business, and government sat around a table and hashed things out on their own. Such a system — they called it syndicalism, corporatism, and fascism in Europe — sounds attractive on paper, but inevitably it serves to benefit the people inside the room and few others. When Wilson's dollar-a-year men weren't rewarding their respective industries, they were subjecting more of the private sector to government control. Wilson's planners set prices on almost every commodity, fixed wages, commandeered the private railroads, created a vast machinery for the policing of thought crimes, and even tried to dictate the menu of every family meal.³⁵

Wilson's war socialism was temporary, but its legacy was permanent. The War Industries Board and cartels closed shop after the war, but the precedent they set would prove too attractive for progressives to abandon.

While America was the victor in World War I, Wilson and the progressives lost their war at home. The government's deep penetration into civil society seemed forgivable during a war but was unacceptable during peace. Likewise, the artificial economic boom came to an end. Moreover, the Treaty of Versailles, which was supposed to justify every imposition and sacrifice, proved a disappointing riot of hypocrisies and false promises.

But the progressive faith endured. Liberal intellectuals and activists insisted during the 1920s that Wilson's war socialism had been a smashing success and its failures a result of insufficient zeal. 'We planned in war' became their slogan. Alas, they couldn't convince the yokels in the voting booths. As a result, they came more and more to admire the Bismarckian approach of top-down socialism. They also looked to Russia and Italy, where 'men of action' were creating utopias with the bulldozer and the slide rule. The Marxist emphasis on scientific socialism and social engineering infected American Progressivism. And since science isn't open to democratic debate, an arrogant literal-mindedness took over Progressivism.

It was also around this time that through a dexterous sleight of hand, Progressivism came to be renamed 'liberalism.' In the past, liberalism had referred to political and economic liberty as understood by Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith. For them, the ultimate desideratum was maximum individual freedom under the benign protection of a minimalist state. The progressives, led by Dewey, subtly changed the meaning of this term, importing the Prussian vision of liberalism as the alleviation of material and educational poverty, and liberation from old dogmas and old faiths. For progressives liberty no longer meant freedom from tyranny, but freedom from want, freedom to be a 'constructive' citizen, the Rousseauian and Hegelian 'freedom' of living in accord with the state and the general will. Classical liberals were now routinely called conservatives, while devotees of social control were dubbed liberals. Thus in 1935 John Dewey would write in Liberalism and Social Action that activist government in the name of the economically disadvantaged and social reconstruction had 'virtually come to define the meaning of liberal faith.'³⁶

Given this worldview, it shouldn't be surprising that so many liberals believed the Soviet Union was the freest place on earth. In a series of articles on the Soviet Union for the New Republic, Dewey hailed the grand 'experiment' as the 'liberation of a people to consciousness of themselves as a determining power in the shaping of their ultimate fate.' The Soviet revolution had brought 'a release of human powers on such an unprecedented scale that it is of incalculable significance not only for that country, but for the world.' Jane Addams also called the Soviets 'the greatest social experiment in history.'³⁷ Freed from the dogmas of the past, and adhering to evolutionary imperatives, Pragmatists believed that even states must 'learn by doing' — even if that meant, once again, that the new Jacobins had to unleash terror on those who would not comply with the general will.

For a generation progressives had complained that America lacked, in effect, a Volksgeist, a singular general will that could fuel this conception of a God-state. When the stock market crashed in 1929, they believed their shining moment had returned.

'[T]he United States in the 1920s,' writes William Leuchtenburg, 'had almost no institutional structure to