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

administration of the code they have framed.' We may believe that FDR fashioned the New Deal out of concern for the 'forgotten man.' But as one historian put it, 'The principle...seemed to be: to him that hath it shall be given.'¹⁶

Indeed, FDR's pragmatism and experimentalism, so cherished by liberals then and now, were of a deeply ideological sort: social planners should be given a free rein to do what they like until they get it right. Thurman Arnold, the theorist behind the new 'religion of government' and director of FDR's antitrust division, abandoned the standard liberal antipathy for cartels, monopolies, and trusts and instead emphasized consumption.

All this was done with the acquiescence of the liberal establishment, later called the 'new class' of managers, experts, and technocrats. The idea was that the smartest people should be immune to the rules of chaotic capitalism and vulgar politics. The 'best practices' of business and engineering should be applied to politics. These schemes went by any number of labels — syndicalism, Fordism, Taylorism, technocracy — but the underlying impulse was the same. Businessmen were part of this new conventional wisdom. Gerard Swope, the president of GE, provides a perfect illustration of the business elite's economic worldview. A year before FDR took office, he published his modestly titled The Swope Plan. His idea was that the government would agree to suspend antitrust laws so that industries could collude in order to adjust 'production to consumption.' Industry would 'no longer operate in independent units, but as a whole, according to rules laid out by a trade association...the whole supervised by some federal agency like the Federal Trade Commission.' Under Swopism, as many in and out of government called it, the state would remove the uncertainty for the big-business man so that he could 'go forward decisively instead of fearsomely.'¹⁷

As transparently fascistic as all this sounds today, it sounded even more fascistic back then. New Deal staffers studied Mussolini's corporatism closely. Fortune and the fairly liberal BusinessWeek both devoted considerable space to praising the Italian 'experiment.' 'The Corporate State is to Mussolini what the New Deal is to Roosevelt,' proclaimed Fortune. During both the Hoover and the early Roosevelt administrations, hosts of independent economists from across the ideological spectrum noted the similarities between Italian and Nazi economic policies and American ones. William Welk, a leading scholar of Italian Fascist economics, wrote in Foreign Affairs that the NRA codes seemed like imitations of their Italian counterparts, only the Italian Fascists had paid much more attention to social justice.¹⁸

The view from abroad was little different. 'We have not yet been informed whether, now that Rooseveltism has become openly and unmistakably Fascist, the British Trades Union Council means to withdraw its blessing and support from America's attempt to reform Capitalism,' wrote Fenner Brockway, the British pacifist, socialist, and journalist, in the New Leader. Giuseppe Bottai, the Fascist minister of corporations until 1932, wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs, 'Corporate State and the N.R.A.,' in which he suggested that while the similarities were real, the Italian system treated labor better.¹⁹

The Nazis saw the similarities as well. 'There is at least one official voice in Europe that expresses understanding of the methods and motives of President Roosevelt,' began a New York Times report in July 1933. 'This voice is that of Germany, as represented by Chancellor Adolf Hitler.' The German leader told the Times, 'I have sympathy with President Roosevelt because he marches straight toward his objective over Congress, over lobbies, over stubborn bureaucracies.'²⁰ In July 1934 the Nazi Party's newspaper, Der Volkische Beobachter, described Roosevelt as America's 'absolute lord and master,' a man of 'irreproachable, extremely responsible character and immovable will,' and a 'warmhearted leader of the people with a profound understanding of social needs.' Roosevelt's books Looking Forward (which, as mentioned earlier, had been favorably reviewed by Mussolini himself) and On Our Way were translated into German and received lavish attention. Reviewers were quick to note the similarities between Nazi and New Deal policies.

So what was the essence of this 'revolution from above'? In the economic sphere it was most often called 'corporatism,' a slippery word for dividing up industry into cooperative units, guilds, and associations that would work together under the rubric of 'national purpose.' Corporatism simply seemed like a more honest and straightforward attempt at what social planners and businessmen had been groping toward for decades. Other names proliferated as well, from 'syndicalism' to 'national planning' to, simply, the 'Third Way.' The new sense of national purpose, it was thought, would allow business and labor to put aside their class differences and hammer out what was best for everyone, in much the same way the war planners had in Germany, America, and throughout the West. The Third Way represented a widespread exhaustion with politics and a newfound faith in science and experts.

The image of the fasces conjures the spirit of the idea: strength in unity. Corporations or syndicates representing different sectors of the economy would, like the sticks around the fasces, bind tightly together for the 'public interest.'²¹ Fascists agreed with Marxists that class conflict was a central challenge of economic life; they merely differed — often only at a theoretical level — on how the conflict should be resolved. By making citizens see themselves as Germans or Italians rather than as workers or bosses, corporatists hoped to make Hitler's declaration 'There are no such thing as classes' a reality. Hitler in fact believed in classes — siding culturally and politically with the workers over the rich — but he, like most fascists, believed that class differences could be subordinated to the common good through nationalistic fervor. Under the Third Way, society would get all the benefits of capitalism with none of the drawbacks. The market would exist, but it would be constrained within 'healthy' and 'productive' borders. As the Italian Fascist procurator general Senator Silvio Longhi put it, 'The state recognizes and safeguards individual property rights so long as they are not being exercised in a way which contravenes the prevailing collective interest.'²²

'I believe,' proclaimed FDR in 1932, 'that the individual should have full liberty of action to make the most of himself; but I do not believe that in the name of that sacred word, a few powerful interests should be permitted to make industrial cannon fodder of the lives of half of the population of the United States.' Such Third Way rhetoric had a familiar echo in much Nazi propaganda as well. In a typical editorial, written on May 27, 1929, Goebbels explained that the party 'was not against capital but against its misuse...For us, too, property is holy. But that does not mean that we sing in the chorus of those who have turned the concept of property into a distorted monstrosity...A people of free and responsible owners: that is the goal of German socialism.'²³

THE NAZI GLEICHSCHALTUNG

Fascism is the cult of unity, within all spheres and between all spheres. Fascists are desperate to erode the 'artificial,' legal, or cultural boundaries between family and state, public and private, business and the 'public good.' Unlike communist Jacobinism (or Jacobin communism, if you prefer), which expropriated property and uprooted institutions in order to remake society from the ground up, fascism pragmatically sought to preserve what was good and authentic about society while bending it to the common good. Interests or institutions that stood in the way of progress could be nationalized, to be sure. But if they worked with the regime, if they 'did their part,' they could keep their little factories, banks, clubs, and department stores.

It's revealing that corporatism has many of its roots in Catholic doctrine. The 1891 papal encyclical Rerum novarum proposed corporatism or syndicalism in response to the dislocations of the Industrial Revolution. In 1931 an updated encyclical, Quadragesimo anno, reaffirmed the principles of Rerum novarum. The two documents formed the backbone of progressive Catholic social thought. The Church's interest in corporatism stemmed from its belief that this was the best way to revive medieval social arrangements that gave man a greater sense of meaning in his life.

In short, corporatism was in large measure a spiritual project. Both the cold impersonal forces of Marx's history and the unloving dogma of Adam Smith's invisible hand would be rejected in favor of a Third Way that let the 'forgotten man' feel like he had a place in the grand scheme of things.

The Nazis had a word for this process: Gleichschaltung. A political word borrowed — like so many others — from the realm of engineering, it meant 'coordination.' The idea was simple: all institutions needed to work together as if they were part of the same machine. Those that did so willingly were given wide latitude by the state. 'Islands of separateness' — be they businesses, churches, or people — were worn down over time. There could be no rocks in the river of progress. In effect, the entire society agreed to the fascist bargain, in which they bought economic, moral, and political security in exchange for absolute loyalty to the ideals of the Reich. Of course, this was a false security; the fascist bargain is a Faustian bargain. But that is what people thought they were getting.