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

determined to pound a square peg into a round hole, establishment liberals kept insisting that just a little more money, a little more effort, would produce the social euphoria of the elusive Great Society. As Mickey Kaus argues in The End of Equality, the liberal response to every setback could be summarized in one word: 'more.'⁶⁵ When welfare seemed to cause fathers to abandon their families, liberals responded that payments should be extended to families where the father remains at home. But this in turn encouraged recipients to stay or become unemployed. The answer to that? Give money to employed poor fathers, too. But this in turn created an incentive for families to split up the moment the father moved out of poverty, so they wouldn't lose their benefits. Meanwhile, if you criticized any of this, you were a fascist.

The unintended but inevitable consequences of liberal utopianism spilled forth. From 1964 onward, crime in America grew at about 20 percent per year.⁶⁶ Liberal court rulings, particularly the Supreme Court's Miranda decision, caused clearance rates to plummet in major cities. Welfare had the tendency to encourage family breakdown, illegitimate births, and other pathologies it was designed to cure. The original civil rights revolution — which was largely based on a classically liberal conception of equality before the law — failed to produce the level of integration liberals had hoped for. In 1964 Hubert Humphrey — 'Mr. Liberal' — swore up and down in the well of the Senate that the Civil Rights Act could in no way lead to quotas and if anyone could prove otherwise, 'I will start eating the pages one after the other, because it is not there.' By 1972 the Democratic Party — under the guise of the 'McGovern rules' — embraced hard quotas (for blacks, women, and youth) as its defining organizational principle.⁶⁷ And it should be no surprise that a Democratic Party determined to do anything it could to make itself 'look like America' would in turn be committed to making America look like the Democratic Party. And if you criticized any of this, you also were a fascist.

Indeed, even as quintessentially fascist street violence erupted in American cities, white liberals responded by basking in guilt and blaming the right. The Watts riots in 1965 were the real turning point. Not only was the collective liberal intelligentsia determined to blame white America — 'the system' — for the violence, but the violence itself became morally admirable 'rebellion.' Johnson commented that such behavior was to be expected when 'people feel they don't get a fair shake.' Hubert Humphrey said that if he'd been born poor, he might have rioted also. An entire 'riot ideology' unfolded that, in the words of the urban historian Fred Siegel, became a new form of 'collective bargaining.' Destroy your neighborhood and the government will buy you a better one.⁶⁸

The extent of liberal denial was put on full display when Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an adviser to Richard Nixon, advocated a policy of 'benign neglect' on racial issues. The subject of race, Moynihan had told Nixon in confidence, 'has been too much talked about...We may need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades.'⁶⁹ To this end Moynihan urged the president to avoid confrontations with black extremists and instead invest his energies in an aggressive class-based approach to social policy. To this, liberal editorialists, activists, and academics responded in horror, calling the memo 'shameful,' 'outrageous,' and 'cruel' on its face. The reaction was instructive. Liberals had so thoroughly imbibed the assumptions of the God-state that to suggest the state could, never mind should, turn its back on the chosen people — for who could be more anointed than the poor black victims of slavery and segregation? — was tantamount to saying that God had ceased being God. When it comes to the state, neglect could not be benign, only malign. The state is love.

A more practical irony of the transformation of American liberalism is that it had fallen into the pre-fascist logic of the Bismarckian welfare state. Bismarck had pioneered the concept of liberalism without liberty. In exchange for lavish trinkets from an all-powerful state, Bismarck bought off the forces of democratic revolution. Reform without democracy empowered the bureaucratic state while keeping the public satisfied. Blacks in particular married their interests to the state and its righteous representatives, the Democratic Party. Blacks and the Democrats meet each other service for service, and so ingrained is this relationship that many liberal black intellectuals consider opposition to the Democratic Party to be, quite literally, a form of racism. Liberals also entered a Bismarckian bargain with the courts. Facing mounting disappointments in the democratic arena, liberals made peace with top-down liberalism from activist judges. Today liberalism depends almost entirely on 'enlightened' judges who use Wilson's living Constitution to defy popular will in the name of progress.

All of this is traceable back to the Kennedy assassination, in which a deranged communist martyred a progressive icon. In 1983, on the twentieth anniversary of the murder, Gary Hart told Esquire, 'If you rounded us [Democratic politicians] all up and asked, 'Why did you get into politics?' nine out of ten would say John Kennedy.'⁷⁰ In 1988 Michael Dukakis was convinced (absurdly enough) that he was the reincarnation of Kennedy, even tapping Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate to re-create the 'magic' of the Boston-Austin axis. In 1992 the high-water mark of the Clinton campaign was the Reifenstahlesque film of a teenage Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy. John Kerry affected a Kennedy accent in school, went by the initials JFK, and tried to model his political career on Kennedy's. In 2004 Howard Dean and John Edwards also claimed to be the true heirs of the Kennedy mantle. As did past candidates, including Bob Kerrey, Gary Hart, and, of course, Ted and Robert Kennedy. In 2007 Hillary Clinton said she was the JFK in the race.

A true indication of how thoroughly the Kennedy myth seeped into the grain of American life can be seen in how Americans greeted the death of his son John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1999. 'John-John,' as he was endearingly and condescendingly dubbed, was by all accounts a good and decent man. He was certainly very handsome. And he was the son of a beloved president. Yet beyond that, his career and contributions were lackluster at best. He took the New York Bar exam three times. He was an unremarkable prosecutor. He founded a childish magazine, George, which intentionally blurred the lines between the personal and the political, substance and celebrity, the trivial and the important. And yet when John Junior died in a tragic plane crash, his death was greeted in abjectly religious terms by a political class entirely convinced that the Son, like the Father, had been imbued with the Kennedy Holy Ghost. The historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in the New York Times that JFK Jr. was his generation's 'photogenic redeemer.' Wall-to-wall coverage portrayed the younger Kennedy as a lost 'national savior.' Bernard Kalb summarized the tenor of the coverage: JFK Jr. was being depicted as 'a kind of a secular messiah who would, had he lived, [have] rescued civilization from all its terrible problems.'⁷¹

Today, to deny JFK's status as the martyr to what might have been is to deny the hope of liberalism itself. For more than a generation, liberal politics in America has been premised on the politics of a ghost. The Jack Kennedy whom liberals remember never existed. But the Kennedy myth represents not a man but a moment — a moment when liberals hoped to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth. The times were not as propitious as liberals remember — after all it was only Kennedy's death, not his life, that truly rallied Americans around 'Kennedyism' in huge numbers. But that's not the point. What matters is that the people believe the myth and therefore pursue it. Liberals believed for a 'brief shining moment' that they could bring about their kingdom of heaven, their Camelot. Ever since, they have yearned to re-create that moment. Looked at from outside, the myth appears to be little more than power worship. But from within, it is gospel. Meanwhile, it's telling that Democrats wish to preserve the substance of the Great Society while maintaining the mythology of Camelot. Every Democrat says he wants to be JFK while insisting that he will do more or less what LBJ did. No Democrat would dream of saying he wanted to emulate Lyndon Johnson, because the myth is what matters most.

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Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine

THERE IS NO issue on which modern liberals consider themselves more thoroughly enlightened than that of race. And there is no contentious topic where they are quicker to insist that dissent from liberal orthodoxy is a sign of creeping fascism. In virtually every major racially charged debate over the last forty years, at least some self-righteous liberals have invoked the record of the Holocaust to warn, darkly, that if