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

sides of the Atlantic, it was commonplace to call 'defectives' and other groups who took more than they gave 'cancers on the body politic.' The American Eugenics Society was dubbed 'The Society for the Control of Social Cancer.' In Germany, before the Jews were rounded up, hundreds of thousands of disabled, elderly, and mentally ill 'pure' Germans were eliminated on the grounds that they were 'useless bread gobblers' or 'life unworthy of life' (lebensunwertes Leben), a term that first appeared in Germany in 1920. The application of these techniques and ideas to the 'Jewish problem' seemed like a rational continuation of eugenic theory in general.

But the Holocaust should not blind us to less significant but more directly relevant repercussions of Progressive Era ideas that have escaped the light of scrutiny. The architects of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society all inherited and built upon the progressive welfare state. And they did this in explicit terms, citing such prominent race builders as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as their inspirations. Obviously, the deliberate racist intent in many of these policies was not shared by subsequent generations of liberals. But that didn't erase the racial content of the policies themselves. The Davis-Bacon Act still hurts low-wage blacks, for example. FDR's labor and agricultural policies threw millions of blacks out of work and off their land. The great migration of African-Americans to northern cities was in no small part a result of the success of progressive policies. Black leaders didn't call the National Recovery Administration, or NRA, the 'Negro Run Around' for nothing.

In the previous chapter I noted that liberals cling to the myth of the New Deal out of religious devotion to the idea of the all-caring God-state. Something similar is at work in the liberal devotion to the Great Society. The rationales for the Great Society are almost always suffused with racial guilt and what could only be described as a religious faith in the state's redemptive power. In his book White Guilt, Shelby Steele tells of an encounter with a self-described 'architect' of the Great Society. 'Damn it, we saved this country!' the man barked. 'This country was about to blow up. There were riots everywhere. You can stand there now in hindsight and criticize, but we had to keep the country together, my friend.'³⁸ Moreover, added the LBJer, you should have seen how grateful blacks were when these programs were rolled out.

Well, the first claim is a falsehood, and the second is damning. While the civil rights acts were obviously great successes, liberals hardly stopped at equality before the law. The Great Society's racial meddling — often under various other guises — yielded one setback after another. Crime soared because of the Great Society and the attitudes of which it partook. In 1960 the total number of murders was lower than it had been in 1930, 1940, and 1950 despite a population explosion. In the decade after the Great Society, the murder rate effectively doubled. Black-on-black crime soared in particular. Riots exploded on LBJ's watch, often with the subtle encouragement of Great Society liberals who rewarded such behavior. Out-of-wedlock births among blacks skyrocketed. Economically, as Thomas Sowell has cataloged, the biggest drop in black poverty took place during the two decades before the Great Society.³⁹ In the 1970s, when the impact of Great Society programs was fully realized, the trend of black economic improvement stopped almost entirely.

One could go on like this for pages. But the facts are of secondary importance. Liberals have fallen in love with the idea behind the racial welfare state. They've absorbed the Marxist and fascist conception of 'the system' as racist and corrupt and therefore in constant need of state intervention. In particular, as Steele notes, they've convinced themselves that support for such programs is proof of their own moral worth. Blacks were 'grateful' to white liberals; therefore, white liberals aren't racist. We return once again to the use of politics to demonize those who fall outside the consensus — that is, conservatives — and to anoint those within it. Whites who oppose the racial spoils system are racists. Blacks who oppose it are self-hating race traitors.

Usually white liberals will simply opt to support black liberals who make such charges, rather than make them themselves. But occasionally they will step up and do so. Maureen Dowd, for example, writes that it is 'impossible not to be disgusted' with blacks such as Clarence Thomas. According to Dowd, the Supreme Court justice hates himself for 'his own great historic ingratitude' to white liberals or has been 'driven barking mad' by it. Take your pick. Steele summarizes the racism of this sort of thinking: '[W]e'll throw you a bone like affirmative action if you'll just let us reduce you to your race so we can take moral authority for 'helping' you. When they called you a nigger back in the days of segregation, at least they didn't ask you to be grateful.'⁴⁰

ABORTION

Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, was the founding mother of the birth control movement. She is today considered a liberal saint, a founder of modern feminism, and one of the leading lights of the progressive pantheon. Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood proclaims, 'I stand by Margaret Sanger's side,' leading 'the organization that carries on Sanger's legacy.' Planned Parenthood's first black president, Faye Wattleton — Ms. magazine's Woman of the Year in 1989 — said that she was 'proud' to be 'walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger.'⁴¹ Planned Parenthood gives out annual Maggie Awards to individuals and organizations who advance Sanger's cause. Recipients are a Who's Who of liberal icons, from the novelist John Irving to the producers of NBC's West Wing. What Sanger's liberal admirers are eager to downplay is that she was a thoroughgoing racist who subscribed completely to the views of E. A. Ross and other 'raceologists.' Indeed, she made many of them seem tame.

Sanger was born into a poor family of eleven children in Corning, New York, in 1879. In 1902 she received her degree as a registered nurse. In 1911 she moved to New York City, where she fell in with the transatlantic bohemian avant-garde of the burgeoning fascist moment. 'Our living-room,' she wrote in her autobiography, 'became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists and I.W.W.'s could meet.'⁴² A member of the Women's Committee of the New York Socialist Party, she participated in all the usual protests and demonstrations. In 1912 she started writing what amounted to a sex-advice column for the New York Call, dubbed 'What Every Girl Should Know.' The overriding theme of her columns was the importance of contraception.

A disciple of the anarchist Emma Goldman — another eugenicist — Sanger became the nation's first 'birth control martyr' when she was arrested for handing out condoms in 1917. In order to escape a subsequent arrest for violating obscenity laws, she went to England, where she fell under the thrall of Havelock Ellis, a sex theorist and ardent advocate of forced sterilization. She also had an affair with H. G. Wells, the self-avowed champion of 'liberal fascism.' Her marriage fell apart early, and one of her children — whom she admitted to neglecting — died of pneumonia at age four. Indeed, she always acknowledged that she wasn't right for family life, admitting she was not a 'fit person for love or home or children or anything which needs attention or consideration.'⁴³

Under the banner of 'reproductive freedom,' Sanger subscribed to nearly all of the eugenic views discussed above. She sought to ban reproduction of the unfit and regulate reproduction for everybody else. She scoffed at the soft approach of the 'positive' eugenicists, deriding it as mere 'cradle competition' between the fit and the unfit. 'More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control,' she frankly wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization. (The book featured an introduction by Wells, in which he proclaimed, 'We want fewer and better children...and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us.' Two civilizations were at war: that of progress and that which sought a world 'swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny.') ⁴⁴

A fair-minded person cannot read Sanger's books, articles, and pamphlets today without finding similarities not only to Nazi eugenics but to the dark dystopias of the feminist imagination found in such allegories as Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale.⁴⁵ As editor of the Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racism we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler. Indeed, after she resigned as editor, the Birth Control Review ran articles by people who worked for Goebbels and Himmler. For example, when the Nazi eugenics program was first getting wide attention, the Birth Control Review was quick to cast the Nazis in a positive light, giving over its pages for an article titled 'Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need,' by Ernst Rudin, Hitler's director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1926 Sanger proudly gave a speech to a KKK rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

One of Sanger's closest friends and influential colleagues was the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. In the book he offered his solution for the threat posed by the darker races: 'Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its