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

in the press recognized a hustler when they saw one, he nonetheless got the attention he wanted. The New York Times hailed him as 'This Year's Prophet.' When it became clear, however, that the politics of meaning sounded too much like New Age hokum, the press and the Clintons turned a cold shoulder. In response, Lerner released his opus, The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism.

The book strikes one fascist chord after another. Lerner cites a long, familiar litany of progressive ideas and causes. He speaks about making the powerless more powerful, about throwing off the baggage of the past, about eschewing dogma and embracing national community, about rejecting the overly rational expertise of doctors and scientists. He waxes eloquent about the various crises — spiritual, ecological, moral, and social — afflicting Western bourgeois democracies that must be remedied through a politics of redemption. He also talks about creating new men and women — rejecting the false dichotomies between work and family, business and government, private and public. Above all, he insists that his new politics of meaning must saturate every nook and cranny of our lives by smashing the compartmentalism of American life. Morality, politics, economics, ethics: none of these things can be separated from anything else. We must have our metaphysics confirmed in every human interaction and encounter.

In this he unwittingly echoes Hitler's belief that 'economics is secondary' to the revolution of the spirit. Lerner writes, 'If there were a different ethical and spiritual connection between people, there would be a different economic reality...And that is why meaning cannot be given lower priority than economics.'²⁸ Needless to say, this is something of a departure from the Marxist materialism of his youth. Lerner's preferred agenda would, of course, echo many of the guarantees from the Nazi Party platform of 1920, including equal rights, guaranteed health care, excessive taxes on the undeserving wealthy, and clampdowns on big corporations. A few relevant items from a 1993 article in Tikkun:

The Department of Labor should mandate that...every workplace should provide paid leave for a worker to attend 12 two-hour sessions on stress...

The Department of Labor should sponsor 'Honor Labor' campaigns designed to highlight the honor due to people for their contributions to the common good...

The Department of Labor should create a program to train a corps of union personnel, worker representatives, and psychotherapists in the relevant skills to assist developing a new spirit of cooperation, mutual caring, and dedication to work.²⁹

This is precisely the sort of thing that Robert Ley's German Labor Front pioneered. The comparison is more than superficial. The National Socialist state, like the progressive and fascist ones, was based on the Hegelian idea that freedom could only be realized by living in harmony with the state, and it was the state's duty to ensure said harmony. There were no private individuals. (Ley famously said that the only private individual in the Nazi state is a person asleep.) Lerner argues in The Politics of Meaning that 'the workplace needs to be reconceptualized as a primary locus for human development.' In another book, Spirit Matters, he writes (in one gargantuan sentence) that under his new 'movement for Emancipatory Spirituality' the 'government needs to be reconceptualized as the public mechanism through which we all show that we care about everyone else, and government employees should be evaluated, rewarded, and promoted only to the extent that they are able to make the public come away from those interactions with a renewed sense of hope and a deepened conviction that other people really do care, and have shown that by creating such a sensitive and caring government.'

Lerner's ideal is the Israeli kibbutz, where even plucking chickens has transcendent meaning for the laborer. He pines for a way to re-create the sense of shared purpose people feel during a crisis like a flood or other natural disaster. Freedom, for Lerner, is reconceived in a Deweyan sense toward communal social 'construction.' Or, as the Nazis said more pithily, 'Work makes you free.'³⁰

Under the politics of meaning, all of society's institutions are wrapped around the state like sticks around the fascist blade. Every individual is responsible for maintaining not only his own ideological purity but that of his fellow man. Lerner is, in effect, the ideologist of the liberal Gleichschaltung, the Nazi idea of coordinating every institution in society. This becomes apparent when he shifts to a discussion of how these reforms are to be implemented. Lerner writes that all government agencies and private businesses should issue 'annual ethical-impact reports,' which would assess 'their effect on the ethical, spiritual, and psychological well- being of our society and on the people who work in and with these institutions.'³¹ His intent is arguably nicer, but is this really so different from the bureaucratization of ideological loyalty that required German businesses and institutions to constantly provide documentation showing their assertive loyalty to the spirit of the new era? Spiritual slackers in twenty-first-century America would no doubt find such scrutiny fascistic — albeit in a very caring and nurturing way.

Lerner believes it is the job of every profession — coordinating with the state, of course — to 'reflect' on its own contribution to the spiritual and psychic health of the national Volksgemeinschaft. 'Such reflection, for example, has led some lawyers associated with a politics-of-meaning perspective to envision a second stage of trials, in which the adversary system is suspended and the focus is shifted to healing the problems and pain that the initial trial has uncovered in the community.'³² That may sound a little silly to some ears, and it hardly seems to threaten a fascist coup. But if there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'

Oddly enough, Lerner vaguely comprehends his own ideology's relationship to fascism. In an ironic twist, he admits that he once 'could not understand why the European Left had been unable to stem the popularity of the fascists.' Fascist 'hatred of others was based on the degree to which they had come to believe (usually mistakenly) that the demeaned Others had actually caused the breakdown of their communities of shared meaning and purpose.' Lerner notes that many former liberals 'have now turned to the Right to find the sense of community and meaning that liberals, social democrats, and the Left always thought was irrelevant or necessarily reactionary.'³³ He writes that the 1990s are witnessing the rise of 'fascistic' right-wing movements and that they can only be countered by his politics of meaning.

Lerner's analysis breaks down in several parts, largely because of his thumbless grasp of the true nature of fascism.³⁴ But far more important, he largely concedes that the politics of meaning is in effect an attempt to provide an alternative to an imagined right-wing politics of meaning that he considers fascistic. He sees a fascistic straw man on the right and in response feels justified in creating an actual — nice — fascism of the left. He grounds all of it in vast departures into religious exhortation, arguing that his is a 'politics in the image of God,' a point he also hammers home relentlessly in his recent books The Left Hand of God and Spirit Matters.³⁵

Defenders of the politics of meaning, such as Cornel West, Jonathan Kozol, and even such mainstream historians as John Milton Cooper, reject or ignore the radical statism of Lerner's project. Still, they defend their political religion with a lot of classical Third Way verbiage about rejecting both free-market anarchy and statism in favor of a new synthesis balancing the community and the individual. 'To put it in crude terms,' writes Lerner, 'neither capitalism nor socialism in the forms that they have developed in the twentieth century seem particularly appealing to me.' Rather, what appeals to him are pragmatic approaches 'that differ from the typical Left/Right divisions, which must be transcended as we develop a politics for the twenty-first century.'³⁶ It's all so unoriginal. The French Fascist slogan was much catchier: Ni droite ni gauche!

As we've seen, ideologically fascist and progressive totalitarianism was never a mere doctrine of statism. Rather, it claimed that the state was the natural brain of the organic body politic. Statism was the route to collectivism. Government was merely the place where the spiritual will of the people would be translated into action (Marxists liked to use the word 'praxis' to describe this unity of theory and action). One consequence of this view is that institutions and individuals that stand apart from the state or the progressive tide are inherently suspect and labeled selfish, social Darwinist, conservative, or, most ironically, fascist. The state's role is not so much to make every decision as to be the metronome for the Gleichschaltung, ensuring that the decision makers are all in perfect agreement about the direction society needs to take. In a properly ordered progressive society, the state wouldn't take over Harvard or McDonald's, but it would certainly ensure that the Harvards and McDonald's had their priorities straight. The politics of meaning is ultimately a theocratic doctrine because it seeks to answer the fundamental questions about existence, argues that they can only be answered collectively, and