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

Hammond.

The propagandistic nature of the film cannot be exaggerated. Hammond, a Hoover-like partisan hack of a president, has a car accident and is visited by the archangel Gabriel. When he recovers, he is reborn with a religious fervor to do good for America. He fires his entire cabinet — big-business lackeys all! Congress impeaches Hammond, and in response he appears before a joint session to proclaim, 'We need action — immediate and effective action.' After this he suspends Congress, assuming the 'temporary' power to make all laws. He orders the formation of a new 'Army of Construction' answerable only to him, spends billions on one New Deal-like program after another, and nationalizes the sale and manufacture of alcohol. When he meets with resistance from gangsters, presumably in league with his political enemies, he orders a military trial run by his aide-de-camp. Immediately after the trial, the gangsters are lined up against a wall behind the courthouse and executed. With that victory under his belt, Hammond goes on to bring about world peace by threatening to destroy any nation that disobeys him — or reneges on its debts to America. He dies of a heart attack at the end and is eulogized as 'one of the greatest presidents who ever lived.'

One of the project's uncredited script doctors was the Democratic presidential nominee, Franklin D. Roosevelt. He took time off from the campaign to read the script and suggested several important changes that Hearst incorporated into the film. 'I want to send you this line to tell you how pleased I am with the changes you made in 'Gabriel Over the White House,'' Roosevelt wrote a month into office. 'I think it is an intensely interesting picture and should do much to help.'³⁰

Ever since, Hollywood has been equally eager to help liberal causes and politicians. The movie Dave, starring Kevin Kline as a bighearted populist who is asked to impersonate a stricken (conservative) president and engineers a socially conscious coup d'etat, is merely an updating of the same premise.

THE LIBERAL FASCIST BARGAIN

Today we still live under the fundamentally fascistic economic system established by Wilson and FDR. We do live in an 'unconscious civilization' of fascism, albeit of a friendly sort infinitely more benign than that of Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, or FDR's America. This is the system I call liberal fascism.

Just because business thrives under capitalism doesn't mean businessmen are necessarily principled capitalists. Businessmen — at least those at the helm of very large corporations — do not like risk, and capitalism by definition requires risk. Capital must be put to work in a market where nothing is assured. But businessmen are, by nature and training, encouraged to beat back uncertainty and risk. Hence, as a group, they aren't principled capitalists but opportunists in the most literal sense.³¹

Most successful businessmen would prefer not to bother with politics. For years both Wal-Mart and Microsoft boasted that they had no interest in Washington. Microsoft's chief, Bill Gates, bragged that he was 'from the other Washington,' and he basically had one lonely lobbyist hanging around the nation's capital. Gates changed his mind when the government nearly destroyed his company. The Senate Judiciary Committee invited him to Washington, D.C., to atone for his success, and the senators, in the words of the New York Times, 'took a kind of giddy delight in making the wealthiest man in America squirm in his seat.'³² In response, Gates hired an army of consultants, lobbyists, and lawyers to fight off the government. In the 2000 presidential election, Wal-Mart ranked 771st in direct contributions to federal politicians. In the intervening years, unions and regulators began to drool over the enormous target the mega-retailer had become. In 2004 Wal-Mart ranked as the single largest corporate political action committee. In 2006 it launched an unprecedented 'voter education' drive.

There's a special irony to the example of Wal-Mart. One of the Nazis' most salient political issues was the rise of the department store. They even promised in their 1920 party platform to take over the Wal-Marts of their day. Plank 16 reads: 'We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great [department stores] and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality.' Once in power, the Nazis didn't completely make good on their promise, but they did ban department stores from entering a slew of businesses — much as today's critics would like to do with Wal-Mart. In America, too, fascist movements — such as Father Coughlin's National Union for Social Justice — targeted department stores as the engine of community breakdown and middle-class anxiety.³³

Wal-Mart provides an example, in microcosm, of how liberals use the word 'fascist' to describe anything outside the control of the state. For example, the New York Daily News columnist Neil Steinberg dubbed the company 'an enormous fascist beast rising to its feet and searching for new worlds to conquer.'³⁴ His solution to conquer the fascist beast? Invite it into bed with government, under the sheet of regulation, of course. It's also worth noting that both Wal-Mart and Microsoft found it necessary to protect themselves from Washington, not merely because government couldn't resist meddling, but because their competitors couldn't resist lobbying government to meddle.

This is one of the underappreciated consequences of the explosion in the size of government. So long as some firms are willing to prostitute themselves to Uncle Sam, every business feels the pressure to become a whore. If Acme can convince the government to pick on Ajax, Ajax has no choice but to pressure the government not to. In effect, politicians become akin to stockbrokers, taking a commission from clients who win and lose alike. Microsoft's competitors were eager to have the government tear it apart for their own benefit. This dynamic was rampant in Nazi Germany. Steel firms, increasingly reluctant to play the Nazis' game, pressed for more protections of their autonomy. As a result, chemical firms leaped up as loyal Nazis and took government contracts away from the steel industry.

Most businesses are like beehives. If government doesn't bother them, they don't bother government. If government meddles with business, the bees swarm Washington. Yet time and again, the liberal 'remedy' for the bee problem is to smack the hive with a bigger stick. There are hundreds of medical industry lobbies, for specific diseases, specialties, and forms of treatment, each of which spends a fortune in direct and indirect lobbying and advertising. Do you know which medical profession spends almost nothing? Veterinary care. Why? Because Congress spends almost no time regulating it.³⁵ Why do pharmaceutical industries spend so much money lobbying politicians and regulators? Because they are so heavily regulated that they cannot make major decisions without a by-your-leave from Washington.

As the size and scope of government have grown, so have the numbers of businesses petitioning the government. In 1956 the Encyclopedia of Associations listed forty-nine hundred groups. Today it lists over twenty-three thousand. Keep in mind that John Commons, a titan of liberal economics, believed that the proliferating influence of trade associations rendered us a fascist system nearly seventy years ago! Of course, not all of these groups are formal lobbying organizations, but they all work with — or on — government in some way. Meanwhile, the total number of registered lobbyists in the United States has tripled since 1996, and it has doubled in the last five years alone. As of this writing there were roughly thirty-five thousand registered lobbyists in Washington. From 1970 to 1980, when twenty new federal agencies were born, the number of lawyers in Washington roughly doubled to forty thousand.³⁶ These numbers don't come close to capturing the full scope of the situation. PR firms, law firms, advocacy groups, and think tanks have exploded across the nation's capital to do 'indirect' lobbying of the press, opinion makers, Congress, and others in order to create a more favorable 'issues environment.' When one of my lobbyist friends takes me out for a beer, he calls it 'third-party outreach.'

Corporations have long had Washington offices, but the tradition used to be that they were professional backwaters, the place you sent Ted when his drinking became too much of a problem or where you let Phil diddle around until he reached retirement age. Now they are enormous and very professional operations. Between 1961 and 1982 the number of corporate offices in Washington grew tenfold. Salaries for corporate lobbyists have been rising exponentially over the last decade.

In Nazi Germany businesses proved their loyalty to the state by being good 'corporate citizens,' just as they do today. The means of demonstrating this loyalty differed significantly, and the moral content of the different agendas was categorical. Indeed, for the sake of argument let us concede that what the Nazi regime expected of 'good German businesses' and what America expects of its corporate leaders differed enormously. This doesn't change some important fundamental similarities.

Consider, for example, the largely bipartisan and entirely well-intentioned Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, celebrated everywhere as a triumph of 'nice' government. The law mandated that businesses take a number