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

Panthers' legal team, even attending the trial to take notes to help with the defense. She did such a good job of organizing the student volunteers that she was offered a summer internship in the Berkeley, California, law offices of Robert Treuhaft, one of Seale's lawyers. Treuhaft was a lifelong member of the American Communist Party who had cut his teeth fighting for the Stalinist faction in the California labor movement.¹⁵

Hillary's attraction to radical groups and figures such as the Black Panthers, Alinsky, and — according to some biographers — Yasir Arafat is perfectly consistent with liberalism's historic weakness for men of action. Just as Herbert Croly could make allowances for Mussolini and countless others applauded Stalin's 'tough decisions,' the 1960s generation of liberals had an inherent weakness for men who 'transcended' bourgeois morality and democracy in the name of social justice. This love of hard men — Castro, Che, Arafat — is clearly tied to the left's obsession with the fascist values of authenticity and will.¹⁶

After law school, however, Hillary eschewed such radical authenticity in favor of pragmatism. She worked as a lawyer in Little Rock and as an activist within the confines of the liberal establishment, chairing the state-funded radical organ the Legal Services Corporation, as well as the nonprofit Children's Defense Fund. Before that she'd been a Democratic staffer for the House Judiciary Committee. Her marriage to Bill Clinton, arguably the most relentlessly dissected union in American history, need not occupy much of our time. Whatever their romantic feelings toward each other may have been or continue to be, reasonable people can agree that it was also a deeply political arrangement.

The most revealing aspect of Clinton's career prior to her arrival in Washington was her advocacy for children. Clinton wrote important articles, often denounced by critics as advocating the right of children to 'divorce' their parents. She never quite says as much, though it seems undeniable that she was pointing down that road. But the child-divorce debate was always a side issue. What is more important, Hillary Clinton's writings on children show a clear, unapologetic, and principled desire to insert the state deep into family life — a goal that is in perfect accord with similar efforts by totalitarians of the past.

This is hardly a view unique to myself or to the denizens of the American right. As the late Michael Kelly wrote in an influential profile of the then-new First Lady, she is the heir to 'the politics of do-goodism, flowing directly from a powerful and continual stream that runs through American history from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Jane Addams to Carry Nation to Dorothy Day...[T]he world she wishes to restore...[is] a place of security and community and clear moral values.'¹⁷

The late Christopher Lasch came to a similar conclusion. Lasch, one of the most perceptive students of American social policy in the twentieth century, and no partisan right-winger, reviewed all of Clinton's relevant writings for an article in the left-leaning journal Harper's in 1992. The result is a sober (and sobering) discussion of Clinton's worldview. Lasch dubs Clinton a modern 'child saver,' a term critical historians apply to progressives eager to insert the God-state into the sphere of the family. While Clinton cavils that she wants the state to intervene only in 'warranted cases,' her real aim, as she admits, is to set down a full and universal 'theory that adequately explains the state's appropriate role in child rearing.' To this end, she advocates the abolition of 'minority status' — that is, the legal codification of what distinguishes a child from an adult. This would be a great progressive leap forward in line with — Clinton's words — 'the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of married women.' Finally, 'children, like other persons,' would be presumed 'capable of exercising rights and assuming responsibilities until it is proven otherwise.'¹⁸

Tellingly, Clinton focuses on Wisconsin v. Yoder, a 1972 Supreme Court case that permitted three Amish families to keep their kids out of high school, defying mandatory attendance laws. Justice William O. Douglas dissented, noting that nobody ever asked the kids what they wanted. The 'children should be entitled to be heard,' he declared. Clinton takes Douglas's dissent and builds an argument claiming children should be 'masters of their own destiny.' Their voices should be weighted more heavily than the views of parents in the eyes of courts. Observing that in order to become 'a pianist or an astronaut or an oceanographer' a child must 'break from the Amish tradition,' she concludes that a child 'harnessed to the Amish way of life' would likely lead a 'stunted and deformed' life. Lasch offers a devastating conclusion: 'She condones the state's assumption of parental responsibilities...because she is opposed to the principle of parental authority in any form.' Clinton's writings 'leave the unmistakable impression that it is the family that holds children back, the state that sets them free.' In Clinton's eyes, Lasch concluded, 'the movement for children's rights...amounts to another stage in the long struggle against patriarchy.'¹⁹

Since Plato's Republic, politicians, intellectuals, and priests have been fascinated with the idea of 'capturing' children for social-engineering purposes. This is why Robespierre advocated that children be raised by the state. Hitler — who understood as well as any the importance of winning the hearts and minds of youth — once remarked, 'When an opponent says 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already...You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community.'' Woodrow Wilson candidly observed that the primary mission of the educator was to make children as unlike their parents as possible. Charlotte Perkins Gilman stated it more starkly. 'There is no more brilliant hope on earth to-day,' the feminist icon proclaimed, 'than this new thought about the child...the recognition of 'the child,' children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal [that is, parental] ownership — the unchecked tyranny...of the private home.'²⁰

Progressive education has two parents, Prussia and John Dewey. The kindergarten was transplanted into the United States from Prussia in the nineteenth century because American reformers were so enamored of the order and patriotic indoctrination young children received outside the home (the better to weed out the un-American traits of immigrants).²¹ One of the core tenets of the early kindergartens was the dogma that 'the government is the true parent of the children, the state is sovereign over the family.' The progressive followers of John Dewey expanded this program to make public schools incubators of a national religion. They discarded the militaristic rigidity of the Prussian model, but retained the aim of indoctrinating children. The methods were informal, couched in the sincere desire to make learning 'fun,' 'relevant,' and 'empowering.' The self-esteem obsession that saturates our schools today harks back to the Deweyan reforms from before World War II. But beneath the individualist rhetoric lies a mission for democratic social justice, a mission Dewey himself defined as a religion. For other progressives, capturing children in schools was part of the larger effort to break the backbone of the nuclear family, the institution most resistant to political indoctrination.

National Socialist educators had a similar mission in mind. And as odd as it might seem, they also discarded the Prussian discipline of the past and embraced self-esteem and empowerment in the name of social justice. In the early days of the Third Reich, grade-schoolers burned their multicolored caps in a protest against class distinctions. Parents complained, 'We no longer have rights over our children.' According to the historian Michael Burleigh, 'Their children became strangers, contemptuous of monarchy or religion, and perpetually barking and shouting like pint- sized Prussian sergeant-majors...Denunciation of parents by children was encouraged, not least by schoolteachers who set essays entitled 'What does your family talk about at home?''²²

Now, the liberal project Hillary Clinton represents is in no way a Nazi project. The last thing she would want is to promote ethnic nationalism, anti-Semitism, or aggressive wars of conquest. But it must be kept in mind that while these things were of enormous importance to Hitler and his ideologues, they were in an important sense secondary to the underlying mission and appeal of Nazism, which was to create a new politics and a new nation committed to social justice, radical egalitarianism (albeit for 'true Germans'), and the destruction of the traditions of the old order. So while there are light-years of distance between the programs of liberals and those of Nazis or Italian Fascists or even the nationalist progressives of yore, the underlying impulse, the totalitarian temptation, is present in both.

The Chinese Communists under Mao pursued the Chinese way, the Russians under Stalin followed their own version of communism in one state. But we are still comfortable observing that they were both communist nations. Hitler wanted to wipe out the Jews; Mussolini wanted no such thing. And yet we are comfortable calling them both fascists. Liberal fascists don't want to mimic generic fascists or communists in myriad ways, but they share a sweeping vision of social justice and community and the need for the state to realize that vision. In short, collectivists of all stripes share the same totalitarian temptation to create a politics of meaning; what differs between them — and this is the most crucial difference of all — is how they act upon that temptation.

THE FIRST LADY OF LIBERAL FASCISM

When Bill Clinton was elected president, his wife arrived in Washington as arguably the most powerful unelected — and un-appointed — social reformer since Eleanor Roosevelt. She admitted to the