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

for a National Industrial Strategy. 'Businessmen,' Phillips warned, 'must set aside old concepts of laissez-faire...it is time for the U.S. to begin plotting its economic future' on a new Third Way course.⁴³ Amusingly, Phillips has also argued that George W. Bush's great-grandfather S. P. Bush was a war profiteer because he served on Woodrow Wilson's War Industries Board, the very model of the system Phillips advocates.

In 1992 Bill Clinton and Ross Perot both tapped into the widespread craving for a 'new alliance' between government and business (in 1991, 61 percent of Americans said they supported some such relationship). 'Without a national economic strategy, this country has been allowed to drift,' candidate Clinton declared in a typical speech. 'Meanwhile, our competitors have organized themselves around clear national goals to save, promote and enhance high-wage, high-growth jobs.' Clinton was ultimately foiled by Congress and the federal deficit in his hope to 'invest' hundreds of billions of dollars in his strategic plan for industry. But his administration did try very hard to 'target' specific industries for help, to very little effect — unless you count Al Gore's 'invention' of the Internet. Hillary Clinton's ill-fated health-care plan sought to dragoon the health-care industry into a web where it would be impossible to tell where government began and the private sector left off. Small businesses, like those poor dry cleaners and newspaper boys during the New Deal, simply had to take one for the team. When it was pointed out to her that small businesses would be devastated by her plan, Clinton dismissed the complaints, saying, 'I can't save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America.'⁴⁴

Democratic, and most Republican, health-care plans don't call for expropriating the private property of doctors and pharmaceutical companies or even for the cessation of employer-provided health care. Rather, they want to use corporations for government by proxy. There's a reason liberal economists joke that General Motors is a health-care provider that makes cars as an industrial by-product.

GM offers an ironic confirmation of Marxist logic. According to orthodox Marxism, the capitalist system becomes fascist as its internal contradictions get the better of it. As a theory of political economy, this analysis falls apart. But at the retail level, there's an undeniable truth to it. Industries that once had a proudly free-market stance suddenly sprout arguments in favor of protectionism, 'industrial policy,' and 'strategic competitiveness' once they find that they can't hack it in the market. The steel and textile industries, certain automobile companies — Chrysler in the 1980s, GM today — and vast swaths of agriculture claim that the state and business should be 'partners' at precisely the moment it's clear they can no longer compete. They quickly become captives of politicians seeking to protect jobs or donations or both. These 'last-gasp capitalists' do the country a great disservice by skewing the political climate toward a modified form of national socialism and corporatism. They're fleeing the rough-and-tumble of capitalist competition for the warm embrace of It Takes a Village economics, and Hillary Clinton calls it 'progress.'

Look, for example, at which agricultural sectors lobby the government most and which tend to leave it alone. Big sugar growers in the Midwest and Florida have spent millions to protect their industry from foreign — and domestic — competition precisely because they are so uncompetitive. And the return on their investment has been huge. In 1992 a handful of sugar refiners gave then-New York Senator Al D'Amato a mere $8,500 in campaign contributions. In return D'Amato successfully supported a tariff rebate to the sugar industry worth $365 million — a return of about 4 million percent. The sugar industry accounts for 17 percent of all agricultural lobbying in the United States. Meanwhile, apple growers — like most fruit and vegetable farmers — spend relatively little lobbying for subsidies because their industry is competitive. But they do have to lobby the government to keep it from subsidizing uncompetitive farmers who might try to move into the fruit and vegetable market.⁴⁵

There's no sector of the American economy more suffused with corporatism than agriculture. Indeed, both Democrats and Republicans are decidedly fascistic when it comes to the 'family farmer,' pretending that their policies are preserving some traditional volkisch lifestyle while in reality they're subsidizing enormous corporations.

But corporatism is only part of the story. Just as corporations were enmeshed in the larger Nazi Gleichschaltung, supposedly right-wing big business is central to the progressive coordination of contemporary society. If big business is so right-wing, why do huge banks fund liberal and left-wing charities, activists, and advocacy groups, then brag about it in commercials and publicity campaigns? How to explain that there's virtually no major issue in the culture wars — from abortion to gay marriage to affirmative action — where big business has played a major role on the American right while there are dozens of examples of corporations supporting the liberal side?

Indeed, the myth of the right-wing corporation allows the media to tighten liberalism's grip on both corporations and the culture. John McCain perfectly symbolizes this catch-22 of modern liberalism. McCain despises the corrupting effect of 'big money' in politics, but he is also a major advocate of increased government regulation of business. Apparently he cannot see that the more government regulates business, the more business is going to take an interest in 'regulating' government. Instead, he has concluded that he should try to regulate political speech, which is like decrying the size of the garbage dump and deciding the best thing to do is regulate the flies.

These speech regulations in turn give an unfair advantage to some very big businesses — media conglomerates, movie studios, and such — to express their political views in ways exempt from government censorship. It's no surprise that some of these outlets tend to celebrate McCain's genius and courage and use their megaphones to expand on the need for him to go even further and for other politicians to follow his lead. Of course, this dynamic is much larger than mere regulation. The New York Times is pro-choice and supports pro-choice candidates — openly on its editorial pages, more subtly in its news pages. Pro-life groups need to pay to get their views across, but such paid advertising is heavily regulated, thanks to McCain, at exactly the moment it might influence people — that is, near Election Day. One can replace abortion with gun control, gay marriage, environmentalism, affirmative action, immigration, and other issues, and the dynamic remains the same.

This is how the liberal Gleichschaltung works; contrary voices are regulated, barred, banned when possible, mocked and marginalized when not. Progressive voices are encouraged, lionized, amplified — in the name of 'diversity,' or 'liberation,' or 'unity,' and, most of all, 'progress.'

Go into a Starbucks sometime and pick up one of their brochures highlighting their Corporate Social Responsibility Report. The report covers all the progressive concerns — the environment, trade, sustainable development, and so on. It devotes a whole section to 'embracing diversity' in which the huge multinational boasts that it is 'striving to increase our diversity in our U.S. workforce.' Thirty-two percent of its vice presidents are women and 9 percent people of color. They spend $80 million a year with minority-and women-owned suppliers and provide 'extensive diversity training courses to address our partners' relevant business needs. Diversity content is also woven through our general training practices.' 'Partners,' by the way, is the Orwellian term they use for 'employees.'⁴⁶ In the new corporatism, we are all 'partners' after all.

Environmentalism in particular offers a number of eerie parallels to fascist practices, including as an overarching rationale for corporatist policies. According to generic fascism, an atmosphere of crisis must be maintained in order to circumvent conventional rules. Today, while Hollywood and the press relentlessly hype the threat of global warming, big business works assiduously to form alliances and partnerships with government as if the fight against global warming were the moral equivalent of war. Indeed, Al Gore — who makes much of such public-private partnerships — claims that global warming is equivalent to the Holocaust and anybody who denies it is the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier. Meanwhile, one oil company after another markets itself as a vital ally against global warming. British Petroleum runs creepily propagandistic ads in which it assures the viewer that it has enlisted in the environmental crusade and is moving 'beyond petroleum.' When the late libertarian crusader Julian Simon visited an oil installation in Alaska, he got so sick of hearing managers boast about the 'environmental benefits' of their work that he finally asked, 'What do you produce here? Oil or environmental benefits?'⁴⁷

GE, the birthplace of Swopism, today spends millions of dollars promoting its 'Ecomagination' program, through which it hopes to prove that GE is a progressive company. GE's CEO declared at the launch of his green initiative, 'It's no longer a zero-sum game — things that are good for the environment are also good for business.' The audience, eating organic hors d'oeuvres and drinking wine from a solar-powered winery, listened enthusiastically as the head of the biggest industrial manufacturer in America explained, 'Industry cannot solve the problems of the world alone. We need to work in concert with government.'⁴⁸ No surprise, then, that GE's launch party was held at its Washington office. Indeed, the agenda behind 'ecomagination' is to invest in