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

civilized wage. Hence if you raised minimum wages to a civilized level, employers wouldn't hire such miscreants in preference to 'fitter' specimens, making them less likely to reproduce and, if necessary, easier targets for forced sterilization. Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist and adviser to Woodrow Wilson, explained: 'Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.'³¹ Arguments like these turn modern liberal rationales for welfare state wage supports completely on their head.

Few better epitomized the international nature of this progressive-socialist-nationalist consensus than the University of Wisconsin economist John R. Commons. Describing himself as 'a socialist, a single-taxer, a free- silverite, a greenbacker, a municipal-ownerist, a member of the Congressional Church,' Commons was a lion of the international labor movement and dubbed the 'American Sidney Webb.' His seminar room contained a giant chart that tracked the global success of progressive economics.³² Commons believed that many poor whites could be saved by government intervention and that they should receive the bounty of a lavishly generous welfare state. But he conceded that, by his estimate, nearly 6 percent of the population was 'defective' and 2 percent was irretrievably degenerate and in need of 'segregation.' These estimates didn't even include blacks and other 'inferior' races, whom he considered irredeemable, save perhaps through intermarriage with Aryans. Black inferiority was the main reason this champion of the labor movement felt slavery was justified.³³

Commons and colleagues at Wisconsin laid the foundation for most of the labor reforms we have today, many of them wholly defensible and worthwhile. Others, such as the Davis-Bacon Act, reflect the racial animus of the progressives. The act was passed in 1931 in order to prevent poor black laborers from 'taking' jobs from whites. Its authors were honest about it, and it was passed explicitly for that reason; the comparatively narrow issue of cheap black labor was set against the backdrop of the vestigial progressive effort to maintain white supremacy. By requiring that contractors on federal projects pay 'prevailing wages' and use union labor, the act would lock black workers out of federal jobs projects. Today the Davis-Bacon Act is as sacred to many labor movement liberals as Roe v. Wade is to feminists. Indeed, as Mickey Kaus has observed, devotion to Davis- Bacon is more intense today than it was thirty years ago, when self-described neoliberals considered it a hallmark of outdated interest-group liberalism.

To be fair, not all progressives supported the welfare state on eugenic grounds. Some were deeply skeptical of the welfare state — but also on eugenic grounds. The Yale economist Henry Farnam co-founded with Commons the American Association for Labor Legislation, the landmark progressive organization whose work laid the foundation for most social insurance and labor laws today. They argued that public assistance was dysgenic — that is, it increased the ranks of the 'unfit' — because it afforded the degenerate classes an opportunity to reproduce, whereas in a natural environment such rabble would die off. But Farnam, the protectionist economist Simon Patten, and others didn't therefore oppose the welfare state on those grounds. That would be tantamount to social Darwinism! Rather, they argued that the unintended consequences of the welfare state required a draconian eugenics scheme to 'weed out' the defective germ plasm bred by the state's largesse. Why should Aryans be denied the benefits of state socialism when you could simply sweep up the unavoidable mess with a eugenic broom?

Perhaps the only unifying political view held by virtually all eugenicists was that capitalism was dysgenic. 'Racial hygiene' was a subset of the larger 'social question,' and the one thing everyone knew was that laissez-faire was not the answer to the social question.

Until the Nazis came along, Germany generally lagged behind the United States and much of Europe when it came to eugenics. When Indiana passed the first sterilization law in 1907 — for 'confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists' — the West took notice. In the subsequent thirty years, twenty-nine other American states passed similar laws, as did Canada and most of Europe. Yes, the Germans admired America's 'fitter family' contests, in which good American Aryans were judged like prized cattle at county fairs, but some Scandinavian nations were years ahead of the Germans when it came to eugenic schemes, and many European countries — and Canadian provinces — remained committed to eugenics decades after the fall of the Third Reich.³⁴

Comparisons between the progressives' efforts to 'build a race' and the Nazis' efforts to hone or redeem their already homogeneous racial nation can easily become overly invidious because the checks on such programs in America were so much stronger. Thanks to American exceptionalism, progressives were forced to tinker surgically with scalpels — a point they lamented often — while thanks to German exceptionalism, National Socialists had a free hand to use axes, sledgehammers, and bulldozers. In a sense, Germany had been waiting for eugenics to arrive in order to give a scientific rationale to the deep Romantic yearnings in its culture.

Nietzsche himself had pointed the way. In 1880 he wrote, 'The tendency must be towards the rendering extinct of the wretched, the deformed, the degenerate.' Reproduction, Nietzsche argued, needed to be taken out of the hands of the masses so that 'race as a whole [no longer] suffers.' 'The extinction of many types of people is just as desirable as any form of reproduction.' Marriage itself, Nietzsche argued, must be more scrupulously regulated by the state. 'Go through the towns and ask yourselves whether these people should reproduce! Let them go to their whores!'³⁵

It's almost impossible to talk about the 'influence' of eugenic thought on Nazi public policy, since the Nazis conceived of eugenics as the goal of all public policy. One of the last things Hitler ever committed to paper was his wish that Germany stay loyal to its race laws. Everything — marriage, medicine, employment, wages — was informed by notions of race hygiene and the eugenic economics pioneered by British and American socialists and progressives. As in America, marriage licenses were a vital tool for eugenic screening. Marriages viewed as 'undesirable to the whole national community' were forbidden. Meanwhile, subsidies, travel allowances, bonuses, and the like were doled out to favored racial classes. Forced sterilizations became a standard tool of statecraft.³⁶

As we'll see, the Nazis co-opted independent religious and other charities under the auspices of the state. During their rise to power they constructed an alternative charitable infrastructure, offering social services the state couldn't provide. When the Nazis finally took over, they methodically replaced the traditional infrastructure of the state and churches with a Nazi monopoly on charity.

But the more relevant aspect of the Nazi welfare state was how it geared itself entirely toward building a racially defined national community. While it used the standard leftist rhetoric of guilt and obligation typically invoked to justify government aid for the needy and unfortunate, it excluded anyone who wasn't a 'national comrade.' This points to the unique evil of Nazism. Unlike Italian Fascism, which had less use for eugenics than America or Germany, Nazism was defined as racial socialism. Everything for the race, nothing for those outside it, was the central ethos of Nazism's mission and appeal.

One last point about the interplay of eugenics and the welfare state. In both Germany and America, eugenics gained currency because of the larger faith in 'public health.' World War I and the great influenza epidemic drafted the medical profession into the ranks of social planners as much as any other. For doctors promoted to the rank of physicians to the body politic, the Hippocratic oath lost influence. The American medical journal Military Surgeon stated matter-of-factly, 'The consideration of human life often becomes quite secondary...The medical officer has become more absorbed in the general than the particular, and the life and limb of the individual, while of great importance, are secondary to measures pro bono publico [for the public good].'³⁷

The Germans called this sort of thinking 'Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz,' the common good supersedes the private good. And it was under this banner that Germany took the logic of public health to totalitarian extremes. Prohibition was the premier illustration of how closely American progressives linked moral and physical health, and many Nazis looked favorably upon the American effort. The appreciation was mutual. In 1933 the American Scientific Temperance Journal celebrated the election of Hitler, a famous teetotaler. And while the racist undercurrent to Prohibition was always there — alcohol fueled the licentiousness of the mongrel races — in Germany the concern was more that alcohol and the even more despised cigarette would lead to the degeneracy of Germany's Aryan purity. Tobacco was credited with every evil imaginable, including fostering homosexuality.

The Nazis were particularly fixated on cancer — the Germans were the first to spot the link between smoking and the disease, and the word 'cancer' soon became an omnipresent metaphor. Nazi leaders routinely called Jews 'cancers' and 'tumors' on German society. But this was a practice formed from a broader and deeper habit. On both