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

reasons no one but the editors probably ever cared about, motive in the late 1960s and early 1970s (when it folded) was an indisputably radical left-wing organ, as mentioned earlier.

Three decades later Clinton recalled for Newsweek that her thinking about the Vietnam War really changed when she read an essay in motive by Carl Oglesby. Newsweek chose to portray this as an endearing remembrance by a spiritual liberal, describing Oglesby as a 'Methodist theologian.' But this description is highly misleading.⁴ Oglesby, elected president of the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, in 1965, was a leading antiwar activist. His argument against Vietnam was theological only in the sense that liberal fascism is a political religion. Communist countries were good, according to Oglesby, because they were pragmatically trying to 'feed, clothe, house and cure their people' in the face of persecution by a 'virulent strain' of American imperialism and capitalism. Violence by oppressed peoples in the Third World or in the American ghetto was entirely rational and even commendable.⁵

Hillary Clinton saw such radical politics as cut from the same cloth as her religious mission. After all, she was reading this material in an official Methodist publication given to her by her minister. 'I still have every issue they sent me,' she told Newsweek.⁶

In 1969 Hillary was the first student in Wellesley's history to give a commencement address at her own graduation. Whether she began to see herself as a feminist leader at this time or whether the experience simply reinforced such aspirations is unknowable. But from that point on, Hillary increasingly draped herself in the rhetoric of the movement — the youth movement, the women's movement, the antiwar movement — and gravitated toward others who believed that both her generation and her gender had a rendezvous with destiny. The speech had such an impact that her photo made it into Life magazine, which picked her as one of the new generation's leaders (Ira Magaziner, a student at Brown University and Hillary's future health-care guru, was also highlighted by Life).

Trimmed of its New Age hokum, Hillary Clinton's Wellesley commencement address was an impassioned search for meaning, dripping with what by now should be familiar sentiments. 'We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for a more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.' She continued: 'We're not interested in social reconstruction; it's human reconstruction' they were interested in. College life, she explained, had briefly lifted the 'burden of inauthentic reality.' It gave the students an opportunity to search for authenticity. 'Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper, Founder's parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age.'⁷ A deep current of longing runs through her relatively short remarks: a longing for unity, for connectedness, for the resolution of 'inauthentic' feelings and institutions in a holistic marriage that 'transform[s] the future into the present' so that 'limitations no longer exist' and 'hollow men' are made whole.⁸ It's fitting that Wellesley's motto is 'Non ministrari sed ministrare' ('Not to be ministered unto but to minister').

THE TOTALITARIAN TEMPTATION

After graduation, Hillary was offered an internship by her hero Saul Alinsky — famed author of Rules for Radicals — about whom she wrote her thesis: 'There Is Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.' In an unprecedented move, Wellesley sequestered the thesis in 1992, even refusing to divulge the title until the Clintons left the White House.

Readers familiar with Alinsky and his times will understand what an enormous figure the 'Godfather' of community activism was on the left. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Alinsky got his start as a criminologist, but in 1936, fed up with the failures of social policy, he committed himself to attacking the supposed root causes of criminality. He eventually became a labor organizer in his native Chicago, working in the real-life neighborhood in which Upton Sinclair's Jungle was set. 'It was here,' writes P. David Finks, 'that Saul Alinsky would invent his famous 'method' of community organizing, borrowing tactics from the Catholic Church, Al Capone's mobsters, University of Chicago sociologists and John L. Lewis' union organizers.'⁹ His violent, confrontational rhetoric often sounded much like that heard from Horst Wessel or his Red Shirt adversaries in the streets of Berlin.

Alinsky joined forces with the churches and the CIO — then chockablock with Stalinists and other communists — learning how to organize in the streets. In 1940 he founded the Industrial Areas Foundation, which pioneered the community activism movement. He became the mentor to countless community activists — most famously Cesar Chavez — laying the foundation for both Naderism and the SDS. He believed in exploiting middle-class mores to achieve his agenda, not flouting them as the long-haired hippies did. Indeed, Alinsky believed that working through friendly or vulnerable institutions in order to smash enemy redoubts was the essence of political organization. And he was, by universal consensus, an 'organizational genius.' He worked closely with reformist and left-leaning clergy, who were for most of his career his chief patrons. Perhaps as a result, he mastered the art of unleashing preachers as the frontline activists in his mission of 'rubbing raw the sores of discontent.'¹⁰

In many respects, Alinsky's methods inspired the entire 1960s generation of New Left agitators (Barack Obama, for years a Chicago community organizer, was trained by Alinsky's disciples). It's worth noting, however, that Alinsky was no fan of the Great Society, calling it 'a prize piece of political pornography' because it was simultaneously too timid and too generous to the 'welfare industry.' Indeed, there was something deeply admirable about Alinsky's contempt for both the statism of elite liberals and the radically chic New Leftists, who spent their days 'spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport.'¹¹

Still, there's no disputing that vast swaths of his writings are indistinguishable from the fascist rhetoric of the 1920s and 1930s. His descriptions of the United States could have come from any street corner Brownshirt denouncing the corruption of the Weimar regime. His worldview is distinctly fascistic. Life is defined by war, contests of power, the imposition of will. Moreover, Alinsky shares with the fascists and pragmatists of yore a bedrock hostility to dogma. All he believes in are the desired ends of the movement, which he regards as the source of life's meaning. 'Change means movement. Movement means friction,' he writes. 'Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.' But what comes through most is his unbridled love of power. Power is a good in its own right for Alinsky. Ours 'is a world not of angels but of angles,' he proclaims in Rules for Radicals, 'where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles.'¹²

Hillary turned down Alinsky's offer in order to attend Yale Law School. He told her it was a huge mistake, but Hillary responded that only by marching through America's elite institutions could she achieve real power and change the system from within. This was a typical rationalization of many upper-class college students in the 1960s, who prized their radical credentials but also looked askance at the idea of sacrificing their social advantages. It's significant, however, that one of Hillary's chief criticisms of Alinsky in her thesis was that he failed to build a national movement based on his ideas. But Hillary, more than most, never gave up the faith. She remained true to her radical principles. Thus at Yale — where she eventually met Bill Clinton — she quickly fell in with the leftist fringe.

There is an almost literary synchronicity to the overlapping of narratives and ideas at Yale in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bill Clinton was taught constitutional law by Charles Reich, the 'Level III consciousness' guru. Reich, in turn, had served as a partner to the famed New Deal lawyer and intellectual Thurman Arnold — a disciple of the Crolyite liberals of the New Republic — who championed a new 'religion of government.' In the 1930s critics saw Arnold's work as one of the linchpins of American-style fascism. He went on to co-found the law firm Arnold, Fortas & Porter.¹³

Hillary helped edit the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, which at the time was a thoroughly radical organ supporting the Black Panthers and publishing articles implicitly endorsing the murder of police. One article, 'Jamestown Seventy,' suggested that radicals adopt a program of 'political migration to a single state for the purpose of gaining political control and establishing a living laboratory for experiment.'¹⁴ An infamous Review cover depicted police as pigs, one with his head chopped off. The Panthers had become an issue on campus because the 'chairman' of the Panthers, Bobby Seale, was put on trial in New Haven along with some fellow goons for the murder of one of their own. Hillary volunteered to help the