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

When he became president in his own right, he no longer had to keep his true feelings secret. He could finally and unabashedly come out of the closet as a liberal. JFK's death, meanwhile, was the perfect psychological crisis for liberalism's new phase. Woodrow Wilson used war to achieve his social ends. FDR used economic depression and war. JFK used the threat of war and Soviet domination. Johnson's crisis mechanism came in the form of spiritual anguish and alienation. And he exploited it to the hilt.

When Johnson picked up the fallen flag of liberalism, he did so with the succinct, almost biblical phrase 'let us continue.' But continue what? Surely not mere whiz-kid wonkery or touch football games at Hyannis Port. Johnson was tasked with building the church of liberalism on the rock of Kennedy's memory, only he needed to do so in the psychological buzz phrases of 'meaning' and 'healing.' He cast himself — or allowed himself to be cast — as the secular Saint Paul to the fallen liberal Messiah. LBJ's Great Society would be the church built upon the imagined 'word' of Camelot.

On May 22, 1964, Johnson offered his first description of the Great Society: 'The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning...The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.'⁴⁹

It was an ambitious project, to put it mildly. In the Great Society all wants would be fulfilled, all needs satisfied. No good thing would come at the cost of another good thing. The state would foster, nurture, and guarantee every legitimate happiness. Even leisure would be maximized so that every citizen would find 'meaning' in life.

Johnson conceded that such a subsidized nirvana couldn't materialize overnight. It would require the single- minded loyalty and effort of every American citizen and the talents of a new wave of experts. 'I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems,' he admitted. 'But I do promise this: We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America.'⁵⁰ Johnson established some fifteen committees to answer the question, what is the Great Society?

The renaissance in liberal ambition transpired even as America's intrinsic antistatist antibodies were reaching a critical mass. In 1955 National Review was born, giving an intellectual home to a heterodox collection of thinkers who would form modern conservatism. It's revealing that while William F. Buckley had always been a classical liberal and Catholic traditionalist, nearly all of the intellectual co-founders of National Review were former socialists and communists who'd soured on the god that failed.

In 1964 Senator Barry Goldwater was National Review's candidate of choice rather than of compromise. Goldwater was the first Republican presidential candidate since Coolidge to break with the core assumptions of Progressivism, including what Goldwater called 'me-too Republicanism.' As a result, Goldwater was demonized as the candidate of 'hate' and nascent fascism. LBJ accused him of 'preach[ing] hate' and consistently tried to tie him to terrorist 'hate groups' like the Klan (whose constituency was, of course, traditionally Democratic). In a speech before steelworkers in September 1964, Johnson denounced Goldwater's philosophy of the 'soup line' — as if free-market capitalism's ideal is to send men to the poorhouse — and scorned the 'prejudice and bigotry and hatred and division' represented by the affable Arizonan.⁵¹ Needless to say, this was a gross distortion. Goldwater was a champion of limited government who put his faith in the decency of the American people rather than in a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington. His one great mistake, which he later admitted and apologized for, was to vote against the Civil Rights Act.

Few liberals, then or now, would dispute that the Great Society was premised on love and unity. 'We will do all these things because we love people instead of hate them...because you know it takes a man who loves his country to build a house instead of a raving, ranting demagogue who wants to tear down one. Beware of those who fear and doubt and those who rave and rant about the dangers of progress,' Johnson railed. Meanwhile, the establishment worked overtime to insinuate that Goldwater was an architect of the 'climate of hate' that had claimed Kennedy's life. As befitted the newly psychologized zeitgeist, Goldwater was denounced as, quite literally, insane. An ad in the New York Times reported that 1,189 psychiatrists had diagnosed him as not 'psychologically fit' to be president. The charge was then recycled in excessive 'free media' coverage. Dan Rather's colleague Daniel Schorr (now a senior correspondent with National Public Radio) reported on the CBS Evening News, with no factual basis whatsoever, that candidate Goldwater's vacation to Germany was 'a move by Senator Goldwater to link up' with neo-Nazi elements.⁵²

Goldwater lost in a landslide. And given LBJ's monumental ego as well as the hubris of his intellectual coterie, it's no wonder that the election results were greeted as an overwhelming endorsement of the Great Society project.

Again, Johnson was in many ways a perfect incarnation of liberalism's passions and contradictions. His first job (tellingly enough) was as a schoolteacher during the rising tide of the Deweyan revolution in education. Indeed, as some observed during the debates over the Great Society, the roots of the phrase stretched back to Dewey himself. The phrase appears over and over in Dewey's 1927 The Public and Its Problems.⁵³ Ultimate credit, however, should properly go to the co-founder of Fabian socialism, Graham Wallas, who in 1914 published The Great Society, a book familiar to the two Johnson aides who claimed credit for coining Johnson's 'the Great Society.'

One of those aides was Richard Goodwin, a golden boy of the Kennedy administration (he graduated first in his class at Harvard Law) who came to JFK's attention for his work as a congressional investigator probing the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. LBJ inherited Goodwin as a speechwriter. In the summer of 1965 Goodwin offered what the New York Times called 'the most sophisticated and revealing commentary to date' on the question, what is the Great Society? His answer lay in the need for the state to give 'meaning' to individuals and 'make the world a more enjoyable and above all enriching place to live in.' 'The Great Society,' Goodwin explained, 'is concerned not with the quantity of our goods but the quality of our lives.' Though he didn't say so directly, it was clear that the Great Society would offer the opposite of the 'hate' that killed Kennedy: love.⁵⁴

But it was also to be a tough love. Goodwin made it clear that if the citizenry didn't want to find meaning through state action or measure the quality of their lives on a bureaucratic slide rule, such reluctance would be overcome. But not necessarily via persuasion. Rather, it was the government's task 'to spur them into action or the support of action.' Here again Dewey's ghost was hard at work. Goodwin declared that the Great Society must 'ensure our people the environment, the capacities, and the social structures which will give them a meaningful chance to pursue their individual happiness.' This differed very little from Dewey's version of state-directed democracy. Dewey held that '[n]atural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology' and that 'organized social control' via a 'socialized economy' was the only means to create 'free' individuals.⁵⁵

The religious character of modern liberalism was never far from the surface. Indeed, the 1960s should be seen as another in a series of 'great awakenings' in American history — a widespread yearning for new meaning that gave rise to a tumultuous social and political movement. The only difference was that this awakening largely left God behind. Paul Goodman, whose 1960 Growing Up Absurd helped launch the politics of hope in the first part of the decade, came to recognize in the second half how insufficient his original diagnosis had been: 'I...imagined that the world-wide student protest had to do with changing political and moral institutions, to which I was sympathetic, but I now saw [in 1969] that we had to do with a religious crisis of the magnitude of the Reformation in the fifteen hundreds, when not only all institutions but all learning had been corrupted by the Whore of Babylon.'⁵⁶

This view of the 1960s as essentially a religious phenomenon has gained a good deal of respectability in recent years, and scholars now debate the finer points of its trajectory. The deeply perceptive journalist John Judis, for example, argues that the 1960s revolt had two phases, a postmillennial politics of hope followed by a premillennial politics of despair, the latter ushered in by the escalation of the war, race riots at home, and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. 'Postmillennialism' and 'premillennialism' are theologically freighted terms for two related religious visions. Postmillennialists believe that man can create a kingdom of God on earth. The Social Gospellers were mostly postmillennialists in their aspirations; they believed the Hegelian God-state was the kingdom of heaven on earth. Premillennialists believe that the world is coming to an