'clean' and 'green' technologies, and then lobby government to subsidize them through tax cuts or outright grants.
Corporations' power to 'switch on' their workers to larger political agendas is a vastly underappreciated aspect of modern American civilization. Diversity is a perfect case in point. Big corporations have a vested interest in supporting diversity for a host of legitimate reasons. No firm wants to appear hostile to potential customers, for example. Nor is it smart to turn away qualified applicants out of racial animus. Moreover, the legal regime
Such progressive leadership doesn't come without a heavy investment in reeducation. Almost all mid-level and senior executives in corporate America have been through 'diversity training' and/or 'sexual harassment training,' and often they're sent back for further reeducation — usually because the definition of 'tolerance' has been ratcheted up. Corporations have accepted the logic of diversity gurus who insist that if you aren't actively promoting diversity — with goals, timetables, and the like — you are actively opposing it. The totalitarian nature of this training has not gotten nearly the attention it deserves — partly because journalists themselves have been so thoroughly reprogrammed by the giant corporations they work for.
Ask yourself this: What would happen to the businessman who simply refused to employ the acceptable number of black — or, one day soon, gay — applicants? Let's assume that this businessman is an evil person, racist, mean, miserly. But there was once a notion that freedom involved the right to be bad. So let's say this businessman refuses to hire blacks, gays, Jews, or members of other 'oppressed' groups. What happens next? First he gets a letter from the government saying he has to have a workforce that looks like America. Then he'll get another letter. Perhaps he'll also get a letter from some disappointed job applicant threatening to sue. Eventually, he will be brought before a judge and told he must hire people he doesn't want to hire. If he still refuses, he may lose a lot of money in a civil suit. Or he might have his company taken away from him and put into receivership. If he persists in his stubborn independence, the state will, one way or another, take away his company. No doubt the Robert Reichs of the world will say that you have the right to employ the people you want, so long as your rights don't intrude on the 'common good.'
We might even agree with Reich because we think discrimination is evil. But is it really any less fascistic than telling a businessman that he must fire the Jews in his employ? Or if that's too dark a rumination, consider this: the restaurant chain Hooters came within a hairbreadth of being forced to hire men as 'Hooters girls.' It sounds funny, but just because something is done in the name of diversity doesn't make it un-fascist. It just makes it a nicer form of fascism.
9
Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism
LIBERALISM IS A culture and a dogma, much as conservatism is. Individual liberals may think they've reached their conclusions through careful deliberation — and no doubt many have — but there is no escaping the undertow of history and culture. Ideas and ideology are transmitted in more ways than we can count, and ignorance about where our ideas come from doesn't mean they don't come from somewhere.
Now, of course, this doesn't mean that the past has an iron grip on the present. For example, I am a strong supporter of states' rights. Racists once used support for states' rights as a cover for perpetuating Jim Crow. That does not mean that I am in favor of Jim Crow. But, as discussed earlier, conservatives have had to work very, very hard to explain why states' rights is no longer an argument about preserving Jim Crow. When someone asks me why my support for federalism won't lead to Jim Crow, I have answers at the ready. No such similar intellectual effort exists, or is required, on the left. Liberals are confident they've always been on the right side of history. George Clooney expresses a common sentiment among liberals when he says, 'Yes, I'm a liberal, and I'm sick of it being a bad word. I don't know at what time in history liberals have stood on the wrong side of social issues.'1
This is one of the main reasons I've written this book: to puncture the smug self-confidence that simply by virtue of being liberal one is also virtuous. At the same time, I need to repeat that I am not playing the movie backward. Today's liberals aren't the authors of past generations' mistakes any more than I'm responsible for the callousness of some conservative who championed states' rights for the wrong reason well before I was born. No, the problems with liberalism today reside in liberalism today. The relevance of the past is that unlike the conservative who has wrestled with his history to make sure he does not repeat it, liberals see no need to do anything of the sort. And so, armed with complete confidence in their own good intentions, they happily go marching past boundaries we should stay well clear of. They reinvent ideological constructs we've seen before in earlier times, unaware of their pitfalls, blithely confident that the good guys could never say or do anything 'fascist' because fascism is by definition anything not desirable. And liberalism is nothing if not the organized pursuit of the desirable.
Hillary Clinton is a fascinating person, not because of her dull and unremarkable personality, but because she is a looking glass through which we can see liberal continuity with the past and glimpse at least one possible direction of its future. She and her husband have been like Zeligs of the liberal left, appearing everywhere, interacting with everyone who has influenced liberalism over the decades. Because she is smart and ambitious, she has balanced idealism with cynicism, ideology with calculation. This, of course, is true of a great many politicians. But to the extent Hillary Clinton deserves the fame and attention, it is because observers believe she has the insight, advisers, and institutional power to pick the winning combinations.
If Waldo Frank and J. T. Flynn were right that American fascism would be distinct from its European counterparts by virtue of its gentility and respectability, then Hillary Clinton is the fulfillment of their prophecy. But more than that, she is a representative figure, the leading member of a generational cohort of elite liberals who (unconsciously of course) brought fascist themes into mainstream liberalism. Specifically, she and her cohort embody the maternal side of fascism — which is one reason why it is not more clearly recognized as such.
What follows, then, is a group portrait of Hillary and her friends — the leading proponents and exemplars of liberal fascism in our time.
THE POLITICS OF HUMAN RECONSTRUCTION
Hillary Clinton is conventionally viewed by her supporters as a liberal — or by conservative opponents as a radical leftist in liberal sheep's clothing; but it is more accurate to view her as an old-style progressive and a direct descendant of the Social Gospel movement of the 1920s and 1930s.
Nothing makes this clearer than the avowedly religious roots of her political vocation. Born to a Methodist family in Park Ridge, Illinois, she always had a special attachment to the Social Gospel. She was an active member in her church youth group as a teenager and the only one of the Rodham kids to regularly attend Sunday services. 'She's really a self-churched woman,' the Reverend Donald Jones, her former youth minister and mentor, told
Jones was being humble. The truth is that he was a major influence, the most important person in her life outside of her parents, according to many biographers. A disciple of the existential German emigre theologian Paul Tillich, Jones was a radical pastor who eventually lost his ministry for being too political. Hillary wrote to Jones regularly while in college. When she moved to Arkansas, Clinton taught Sunday school and often spoke as a lay preacher on the topic 'Why I Am a United Methodist' at Sunday services. Even today, Jones told
Jones bought Hillary a subscription to the Methodist magazine
