hindsight one can see how liberals would have invented the cool pragmatist JFK had he not existed. Then again, as we've seen, they largely did invent him.
At the dawn of the 1950s American liberals needed a unified field theory that not only sustained their unimpeachable status as Olympians but also took account of the Holocaust as well as the populist firebrands who'd dared to question the wisdom, authority, and patriotism of the liberal elite. The backward and unsatisfying language of religion increasingly cut off to them, their own legacy of eugenics discredited, and the orthodox Marxist narrative largely unpersuasive to the masses, liberals needed something that could unite and revive this trinity. They found the glue they needed in psychology.
A handful of immensely influential Marxist theorists, mostly Germans from the so-called Frankfurt School (transplanted to Columbia University beginning in the 1930s), married psychology and Marxism to provide a new vocabulary for liberalism. These theorists — led by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse — tried to explain why fascism had been more popular than communism in much of Europe. Borrowing from Freud and Jung, the Frankfurt School described Nazism and Fascism as forms of mass psychosis. That was plausible enough, but their analysis also held that since Marxism was objectively superior to its alternatives, the masses, the bourgeoisie, and anyone else who disagreed with them had to be, quite literally, mad.
Adorno was the lead author of
It's tempting to say these theorists merely threw a patina of pseudoscientific psychobabble over the propaganda leaflets of Stalin's Third International. But the tactic was more sophisticated than that. The essential argument was brilliant in its simplicity. The original Marxist explanation of fascism was that it was the capitalist ruling classes' reaction to the threat of the ascendancy of the working classes. The Frankfurt School deftly psychologized this argument. Instead of rich white men and middle-class dupes protecting their economic interests, fascism became a psychological defense mechanism against change generally. Men who cannot handle 'progress' respond violently because they have 'authoritarian personalities.' So, in effect, anyone who disagrees with the aims, scope, and methods of liberalism is suffering from a mental defect, commonly known as fascism.
The Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter was the Frankfurt School's most successful publicist. For Hofstadter, American history was a tale of liberals decapitating fascist Hydra heads in every chapter. His work dripped with the language of
It didn't take long for such psychological theorizing to break its banks and become an all-purpose solution to the 'social question,' as progressives used to put it. Indeed, modern psychology was a perfect substitute for the Social Gospel, militarism, Thurman Arnold's 'religion of government,' 'social control,' and even eugenics. Whereas progressives were once determined to weed out the biologically unfit, they now directed the same energies to the psychologically unfit. Some liberal psychiatrists even began describing a new 'religion of psychiatry' that would cure society of its 'extremist,' traditional, backward,
A wave of liberal theologians met the psychiatrists halfway, arguing that various neuroses were the product of social alienation and that traditional religion should reorient itself toward healing them. Psychiatry — and 'relevance' — became the new standards for clergy everywhere. For Paul Tillich, the source of salvation would be a redefining and recombining of the secular and the sacred, rendering politics, psychiatry, and religion all parts of the same seamless web.
Stripped of its jargon, this project was an almost perfect replay of the liberal pattern. Liberals love populism, when it comes from the left. But whenever the people's populist desires are at cross-purposes with the agenda of the left, suddenly 'reaction,' 'extremism,' and of course 'fascism' are loosed upon the land. Bill Clinton titled his 'blueprint' for America
THE GREAT SOCIETY: LBJ'S FASCIST UTOPIA
Much like the Nazi movement, liberal fascism had two faces: the street radicals and the establishment radicals. In Germany the two groups worked in tandem to weaken middle-class resistance to the Nazis' agenda. In the previous chapter we saw how the liberal fascists of the SDS and Black Panther movements rose up to terrorize the American middle class. In the remainder of this chapter — and the next — we will explain how the 'suit-and-tie radicals' of the 1960s, people like Hillary Clinton and her friends, used this terror to expand the power and scope of the state and above all to change the public attitude toward the state as the agent of social progress and universal caring and compassion.
Lyndon Johnson seems an odd choice for liberalism's deliverer. Then again, he was no one's
Amazingly, Johnson was the only full-fledged New Dealer to serve as president save FDR himself. Indeed, in many respects LBJ was the ultimate company man of the modern welfare state, the personification of everything the New Deal represented. Despite his large personality, he was in reality the personification of the system he helped to create.
From the beginning, FDR took a shine to LBJ. He told Harold Ickes that Johnson might well be the first southern president of the postwar generation. Johnson was a fanatically loyal FDR man. As a congressional aide, he threatened to resign more than once when his boss contemplated voting contrary to Roosevelt. In 1935 he was the head of the Texas branch of the National Youth Administration, winning the attention of the future Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and singling himself out as a star among the young New Dealers. In 1937, at the age of twenty-eight, he was elected to represent Texas's Tenth District. He caught FDR's attention while the president was in Texas, where they met and spent considerable time together. When FDR returned to Washington, he called his aide Thomas Corcoran and informed him, 'I've just met the most remarkable young man. Now I like this boy, and you're going to help him with anything you can.' FDR became Johnson's 'political Daddy,' in Johnson's own words, and more than any other elected official LBJ mastered the art of working the New Deal. Johnson brought a staggering amount of pork to his constituents in his first year alone. 'He got more projects, and more money for his district, than anybody else,' Corcoran recalled. He was 'the best Congressman for a district that ever was.'47
However, once elected, Johnson didn't brag about his support for the New Deal. He learned from the defeat of the Texas congressman Maury Maverick that getting praise from East Coast liberals didn't help you much in Texas. When he heard that the
