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

end and can't get better before it gets worse.⁵⁷

Judis's chronological scheme has its merits, but ultimately it makes more sense to see these visions not as distinct phases of liberalism but as contending strains within liberalism itself. The left has always had an apocalyptic streak. Lenin argued 'the worse the better.' Georges Sorel's writings make no sense unless you understand that he saw politics as an essentially religious enterprise. The revolutionary vanguard has always demanded that destruction come before creation. The Futurists, anarchists, vorticists, Maoists, and various other modernist and left-wing avant-gardes believed that hammers were for smashing first, building second. Hitler was, of course, a great believer in the social benefits of destruction (though, as he often explained, he understood that real power came not from destroying but from corrupting institutions).

We should also note the apocalyptic logic of Progressivism generally. If the wheel of history, the state, is moving us forward to the kingdom of heaven, then anytime the 'enemy' takes over, we are moving in a metaphysically wrong direction. This is never more transparent than when the mainstream media describe socialistic reforms as a 'step forward' and free-market ones as 'going backward' or 'turning back the clock.' And when non-progressives are in charge too long, the demands from the left to 'tear the whole thing down' grow louder and louder.

In other words, the apocalyptic fervor Judis identifies in the late 1960s had its roots not just in the disillusion of the Kennedy assassination and the failures of Great Society liberalism but in the pent-up religious impulses inherent to Progressivism generally. The patient reformists had their chance; now it was time to 'burn, baby, burn!'

The 1960s wasn't all about 'fire in the streets,' though — just as the French Revolution wasn't all about the Terror. Complex bureaucracies designed to 'rationalize' the economy employed more Jacobins than the guillotine ever did. The born-again spirit of reform provided the drumbeat for the 'long march through the institutions.' Ralph Nader's consumerist crusade was launched in the 1960s, as was the modern environmental movement. Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique was published in 1963.⁵⁸ The Stonewall riots, which gave birth to the gay pride movement, took place in the summer of 1969. Once again, the line between formal religion and Progressive politics was blurred beyond recognition. Once again, religious leaders in the 'mainline' churches were seduced by radical politics.⁵⁹ The Methodist youth magazine motive — a major influence on the young Hillary Clinton — featured a birthday card to Ho Chi Minh in one issue and advice on how to dodge the draft in others. All of these political crusades were grounded in a moralizing fervor and a spiritual yearning for something more than bread alone. Most of the radicals of the New Left later explained that theirs was really a spiritual quest more than a political one. Indeed, that's why so many of them disappeared into the communes and EST seminars, searching for 'meaning,' 'authenticity,' 'community,' and, most of all, 'themselves.' For the 1960s generation 'self-actualization' became the new secular grace.⁶⁰

In 1965 Harvey Cox, an obscure Baptist minister and former Oberlin College chaplain, wrote The Secular City, which turned him into an overnight prophet. Selling more than one million copies, The Secular City argued for a kind of desacralization of Christianity in favor of a new transcendence found in the 'technopolis,' which was 'the place of human control, of rational planning, of bureaucratic organization.' Modern religion and spirituality required 'the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols.' Instead, we must spiritualize the material culture to perfect man and society through technology and social planning. In The Secular City 'politics replaces metaphysics as the language of theology.' Authentic worship was done not by kneeling in a church but by 'standing in a picket line.' The Secular City was an important intellectual hinge to the transition of the 1960s (though we should note that Cox recanted much of its argument twenty years later).⁶¹

Evidence of liberalism's divided nature can be found in the enduring love-hate relationship between 'hopeful' liberals and 'apocalyptic' leftists. Throughout the 1960s, centrist liberals made allowances and apologies for the radicals to their left. And when push came to shove — as it did at Cornell — they capitulated to the radicals. Even today, mainstream liberals are far more inclined to romanticize the 'revolutionaries' of the 1960s, in part because so many of them played that role in their youth. On college campuses today, administrators — often living fossils from the 1960s — applaud the Kabuki dance of left-wing protest as a central part of higher education. The only time they get worried is when the protest comes from the right.

But the most important legacy of the 1960s has to be liberal guilt. Guilt over their inability to create the Great Society. Guilt over leaving children, blacks, and the rest of the Coalition of the Oppressed 'behind.' Guilt is among the most religious of emotions and has a way of rapidly devolving into a narcissistic God complex. Liberals were proud of how guilty they felt. Why? Because it confirmed liberal omnipotence. Kennedy and Johnson represented the belief that an enlightened affluent society could solve every problem, redress every wrong. Normally you don't feel guilty when forces outside your control do evil. But when you have the power to control everything, you feel guilty about everything. Lyndon Johnson not only accelerated Kennedy's politics of expectation when he declared, 'We can do it all; we're the richest country in the world,' but rendered any shortcomings, anywhere, evidence of sagging commitment, racism, insensitivity, or just plain 'hate.' Feeling guilty was a sign of grace, for it proved your heart was in the right place.

Conservatives were caught in a trap. If you rejected the concept of the omnipotent state, it was proof that you hated those whom government sought to help. And the only way to prove you didn't hate them — whoever 'they' were — was to support government intervention (or 'affirmative action,' in Kennedy's phrase) on their behalf. The idea of a 'good conservative' was oxymoronic. Conservatism by definition 'holds us back' — leaves some 'behind' — when we all know that the solution to every problem lies just around the corner.

The result was a cleavage in the American political landscape. On one side were the radicals and rioters, who metaphorically — and sometimes literally — got away with murder. On the other were conservatives — hateful, sick, pre-fascist — who deserved no benefit of the doubt whatsoever. Liberals were caught in the middle, and most, when forced to choose, sided with the radicals ('they're too impatient, but at least they care!'). The fact that the radicals despised liberals for not going far enough fast enough only confirmed their moral status in the minds of guilt-ridden liberals.⁶²

In this climate, a liberal spending spree was inevitable. Like noblemen of yore purchasing indulgences from the Church, establishment liberals sought to expiate their guilt by providing the 'oppressed' with as much swag as possible. Fear, of course, played an important role as well. Pragmatic liberals — while understandably reluctant to admit it publicly — undoubtedly bought into the Bismarckian logic of placating the radicals with legislative reforms and government largesse. For others, the very real threat of radicalism provided precisely the sort of 'crisis mechanism' liberals are always in search of. The 'race crisis' panic sweeping through liberalism was often cited as a justification to dust off every statist scheme sitting on a progressive shelf.

From cash payments to the poor to building new bridges and community redevelopment, the payout was prodigious even by New Deal standards. The civil rights movement, which had captured the public's sympathies through King's message of equality and color blindness, quickly degenerated into a riot of racially loaded entitlements. George Wiley, the president of the National Welfare Rights Organization, insisted that welfare was 'a right, not a privilege.' Some even argued that welfare was a form of reparations for slavery. Meanwhile, any opposition to such programs was stigmatized as evidence of bigotry.

The War on Poverty, affirmative action, community redevelopment, and the vast panoply of subsidies that fall under the rubric of welfare — Aid to Families with Dependent Children, housing grants, Medicare, Women, Infants, and Children benefits, food stamps — were churned out by a massively increased administrative state on a scale undreamed of by FDR. But most on the left were not satisfied, in part because these programs proved remarkably ineffective at creating the Great Society or defeating poverty. While even FDR had recognized that the dole could be a 'narcotic...of the human spirit,' in the 1960s such concerns were widely dismissed as rubbish.⁶³ The New Republic argued that Johnson's antipoverty program was fine 'as a start' but insisted that there was 'no alternative to really large-scale, ameliorative federal social welfare action and payments.' Michael Harrington, whose The Other America laid the moral groundwork for the War on Poverty, led a group of thirty-two left-wing intellectuals, grandiosely dubbed the 'Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution,' which proclaimed that the state should provide 'every individual and every family with an adequate income as a matter of right.' The committee lamented that Americans were 'all too confused and frightened by a bogey we call the 'welfare state,' [a] term of pride in most parts of the world.'⁶⁴

Recipients weren't the only ones hooked on the narcotic of 'relief' the pushers were, too. Like a man