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

which Europeans would accord the term 'the State.'' Beyond the post office, most people had very little interaction with or dependence on 'the government in Washington.'³⁸ The New Deal changed all that. It represented the last stage in the transformation of American liberalism, whereby the U.S. government became a European 'state' and liberalism a political religion.

As economic policy, the New Deal was a failure. If anything, it likely prolonged the Depression. And yet we are constantly told that the New Deal remains the greatest domestic accomplishment of the United States in the twentieth century and a model liberals constantly wish to emulate, preserve, and restore. In 2007 Nancy Pelosi reportedly said that three words prove the Democrats aren't out of ideas: 'Franklin Delano Roosevelt.'³⁹ Why such devotion? The answer most often offered is that the New Deal gave Americans 'hope' and 'faith' in a 'cause larger than themselves.' Hope for what? Faith in what? What 'cause'? The answer: the liberal God-state or, if you prefer, the Great Society — which is merely that society governed by the God-state in accordance with the general will.

The New Deal amounted to a religious breakthrough for American liberalism. Not only had faith in the liberal ideal become thoroughly religious in nature — irrational, dogmatic, mythological — but many smart liberals recognized this fact and welcomed it. In 1934 Dewey had defined the battle for the liberal ideal as a 'religious quality' in and of itself. Thurman Arnold, one of the New Deal's most influential intellectuals, proposed that Americans be taught a new 'religion of government,' which would finally liberate the public from its superstitions about individualism and free markets.⁴⁰ It was as Robespierre insisted: the 'religious instinct' must be cultivated to protect the revolution.

The apotheosis of liberal aspirations under FDR took place not during the New Deal but during World War II. Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address proposed what he called a 'second Bill of Rights.' But this was really an argument for a new Bill of Rights, turning the original on its head. 'Necessitous men are not free men,' he declared. Therefore the state must provide a 'new basis of security and prosperity.' Among the new rights on offer were 'a useful and remunerative job,' 'a decent home,' 'adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,' 'adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment,' and 'a good education.' This second Bill of Rights remains the spiritual lodestar of liberal aspirations to this day.⁴¹

PURGING THE DEMONS WITHIN

The war against Hitler was as pristine an example of good versus evil as we've seen in the history of warfare. But that doesn't mean the war (and the New Deal mobilization) had only salutary effects. People grew accustomed to following the exhortations of elites — in the press, at leading institutions, and in government — without much reflection or skepticism. These elites told the American public that the war and state planning had 'saved' Western civilization and that it was now America's job to keep it safe.

The postwar environment saw the fusion of any number of progressive strains into a coherent agenda. Government was now truly run by experts. The public consensus was favorable to liberal ambitions. Classical liberalism seemed permanently discredited. Even the utopian dream of a new world order and, perhaps, a world government envisioned by Wilson, H. G. Wells, and many others was given new life by the creation of the United Nations. The problem for liberalism was that the new enemy on the horizon wasn't from the right but from the left. For liberals in the late 1920s and early 1930s the Soviet Union was like Bismarck's Prussia a generation earlier — a model to be emulated. During the 1930s the Soviets were on the front line fighting the fascist threat. In the 1940s the Soviets were our allies. But after the war it soon became clear that Soviet intentions weren't that honorable and that Soviet methods were embarrassingly difficult to distinguish from Nazi methods.

There is a modern notion that liberals didn't disapprove of or oppose anti-communism; they just opposed McCarthyite excesses. The problem is that communists and liberals have always made allowances for McCarthyite tactics when it is one of their enemies getting grilled. The House Un-American Activities Committee, after all, was founded by a progressive Democrat, Samuel Dickstein, to investigate German sympathizers. During the barely remembered 'Brown scare' of the 1940s, everyone from real Nazi supporters — the German-American Bund, for example — to misguided isolationists was targeted and harassed. Much like Wilson, FDR believed that any domestic dissent was treachery and insisted that his Department of Justice persecute his opponents. At the height of the madness, Walter Winchell read the names of isolationists on the radio, calling them 'Americans we can do without.'⁴² American communists in this period readily named names and compiled lists of 'German sympathizers.'

One might excuse such tactics as a necessary evil in the fight against Nazism. But the more poignant hypocrisy is that American communists did the same thing to other American communists. The Smith Act, which made it illegal to belong to an organization that advocated the overthrow of the United States, was a linchpin of American fascism, according to many leftists. But American communists themselves used the Smith Act to get American Trotskyites arrested during the war.

But that was a sideshow far from public eyes. After the war, liberals could not tolerate such tactics when aimed at their own ranks. Their denial that their own ideas and history had any link with totalitarianism was so total that anybody who suggested otherwise had to be destroyed. Whittaker Chambers demonstrated this when he accurately identified Alger Hiss, a scion of American liberalism, as a communist. The establishment rallied around Hiss while it demonized Chambers as a liar, a psychopath, a fascist.⁴³

Joseph McCarthy could not be so easily dismissed, largely because he was a U.S. senator. Despite his flaws and unforgivable excesses, he accurately called attention to the fact that much of the liberal establishment had been infested with communists and communist sympathizers. For that crime he, too, was dubbed a fascist.

Ask a liberal today why McCarthy was a fascist, and the answers you usually get are that he was a 'bully' and a 'liar.' Bullies and liars are bad, but there's nothing inherently right-wing about them. You will also hear that McCarthyism represents a grotesque distortion of patriotism, jingoism, and the like. This is a more complicated complaint, though it's worth remembering that many on the left think nearly any exhortation to patriotism is fascist. Still, it is true that McCarthyism represented a certain ugly nationalist strain in the American character. But far from being right-wing, this sentiment was in fact a throwback to traditional left-wing populist politics. Red baiting, witch hunts, censorship, and the like were a tradition in good standing among Wisconsin progressives and populists.

Today few remember that McCarthy's political roots lay firmly in the Progressive Era. McCarthy was, after all, a populist progressive from quite arguably the most progressive state in the Union, Richard Ely's and Robert La Follette's Wisconsin. Joe McCarthy was a product of Wisconsin and its traditions. Indeed, the primary reason he ran for the Senate as a Republican is that he'd learned in his first campaign for public office — when he ran as a Democrat — that Wisconsin under La Follette had essentially become a one-party Republican state. In his 1936 bid for district attorney of Shawano County, McCarthy railed against the Republican presidential candidate as a 'puppet' of right-wing business interests and fat cats like William Randolph Hearst. When he finally challenged La Follette for his Senate seat, he ran not as a bona fide right-winger but as a populist more in tune with the needs of Wisconsin.

There was much about McCarthy that was fascistic, including his conspiratorialism, his paranoid rhetoric, his bullying, and his opportunism; but those tendencies did not come from the conservative or classical liberal traditions. Rather, McCarthy and McCarthyism came out of the progressive and populist traditions. His followers were mostly middle-class, very often progressive or populist in their assumptions about the role of the state, and in many respects heirs to the Coughlinism of the early New Deal. The most effective such McCarthyite was the four- term Nevada Democratic senator Pat McCarran, author of the Internal Security Act, which required communist-front organizations to register with the attorney general, barred communists from working in defense-related industries, banned immigration of communists, and provided for the internment of communists in case of national emergency.

The point is not that McCarthy was simply a La Follette Progressive. Both La Follettes were honorable and serious men, in many ways among the most courageous politicians of the twentieth century. Nor am I saying that McCarthy was just another liberal, though he continued to use the word positively until as late as 1951. What I am saying is that what it meant to be a liberal was changing very rapidly after World War II. And once again, the losers in a liberal civil war — the right wing of the left — were demonized. Liberalism was in effect shedding its unrefined elements, throwing off the husk of the Social Gospel and all of that God talk. Had not the Holocaust proved that God was dead? The old liberals increasingly seemed like the William Jennings Bryan character in Inherit the Wind — superstitious, angry, backward. Through the benefit of