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

insists that the state put those answers into practice.

This liberal fascist thinking was nicely exposed in an exchange between the television producer Norman Lear and the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer in 1993. Krauthammer called Hillary Clinton's politics of meaning address a 'cross between Jimmy Carter's malaise speech and a term paper on Siddhartha' delivered with 'the knowing self-assurance, the superior air of a college student manifesto.'³⁷

Norman Lear leaped into the breach to defend Hillary. The creator of the television shows All in the Family, Maude, Sanford and Son, and Good Times, Lear was also the founder of People for the American Way, or PFAW, an organization with an ironically conservative sound to it. He launched PFAW in an effort to beat back the religious right, which was allegedly trying to destroy the fabled 'wall of separation' between church and state. But in the late 1980s Lear started to show a slight change of heart. In 1989, in an address to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Anaheim, California, he lamented 'the spiritual emptiness in our culture.' 'Among secularists,' he noted, 'the aversion toward discussing moral values, let alone religion, can reach absurd extremes.'³⁸

It's understandable that a left-wing civil libertarian like Lear would greet the arrival of a politics of meaning as nigh on providential. Lear wrote a bitter response in the Washington Post denouncing Krauthammer's cynicism in the face of Clinton's brilliant summation of America's spiritual crisis. 'The sophisticates of our politics, our culture and the media,' Lear opined, 'are embarrassed to talk seriously about the life of the spirit.' 'Our obsession with numbers, the quantifiable, the immediate, has cost us our connection with that place in each of us that honors the unquantifiable and eternal — our capacity for awe, wonder and mystery; that place where acts of faith in a process larger than ourselves, prove ultimately satisfying in the fullness of time.'³⁹

Lear's cri de coeur is an almost pitch-perfect restatement of the neo-Romantic objections to modern society that inspired fascist movements across Europe and the search for 'a cause larger than ourselves' of the American Progressives. He might receive an appreciative hearing from the early Paul de Man, Ezra Pound, and countless other fascist theorists and ideologues who denounced the Western — particularly Jewish — obsession with numbers and technical abstraction. But even more telling is the fact that Lear's People for the American Way is second perhaps only to the ACLU as an enforcer of the liberal Gleichschaltung. In lawsuits, campaign contributions, amicus briefs, advertising, and righteous news conferences, People for the American Way serves as a tireless mason in the construction of the wall between church and state, shrinking the public space for traditional religion and building the foundation of a secular counter-church of liberalism.

In other words, Lear is an adamant proponent of spiritualizing politics; but there's no room for traditional religion in his ideal political system, for it is the progressive priesthood — not churches or synagogues — that must sanctify the quest for meaning and spirituality. Independent sources of moral faith are 'divisive' and need to be undermined, walled off, excluded from our 'common project.' This means that liberal churches are fine because they are perceived — rightly or wrongly — to have subordinated religious doctrine to political doctrine. As John Dewey put it in his brief for a secular religion of the state: 'If our nominally religious institutions learn how to use their symbols and rites to express and enhance such a faith, they may become useful allies of a conception of life that is in harmony with knowledge and social needs.' Hitler was more succinct: 'Against a Church that identifies itself with the State...I have nothing to say.'⁴⁰

Conservatives are fond of scoring liberals for their cafeteria Christianity, picking those things they like from the religious menu and eschewing the hard stuff. But there's more than mere hypocrisy at work. What appears to be inconsistency is in fact the continued unfolding of the Social Gospel tapestry to reveal a religion without God. Cafeteria liberals aren't so much inconsistent Christians as consistent progressives.

EVERYTHING WITHIN THE VILLAGE...

No more thorough explication of the liberal fascist agenda can be found than in Hillary Clinton's best-selling book, It Takes a Village. All the hallmarks of the fascist enterprise reside within its pages. Again, the language isn't hostile, nationalistic, racist, or aggressive. To the contrary, it brims with expressions of love and democratic fellow feeling. But this only detracts from its fascist nature if fascism itself means nothing more than hostile or aggressive (or racist and nationalistic). The fascistic nature of It Takes a Village begins with the very title. It draws from a mythic and mythical communal past. 'It takes a village to raise a child' is supposedly an African proverb whose authorship is lost in the mists of time — from 'the ancient African kingdom of Hallmarkcardia,' according to P. J. O'Rourke.⁴¹ Clinton invokes this premodern image as a source of authority in order to reorganize modern society. It may not be as powerful as all that Teutonic imagery the National Socialists threw around. But is it any more rational? Any less Romantic? More important, the metaphor of the village is used in precisely the same way that the symbol of the fasces was. The difference is that the fasces were a symbol for a martial age; the village is a symbol for a maternal one.

In Mrs. Clinton's telling, villages are wonderful, supportive, nurturing places where everyone is looking out for one another: from 'everything in the State, nothing outside the State' to 'everything in the village, nothing outside the village.' The village, she writes, 'can no longer be defined as a place on a map, or a list of people or organizations, but its essence remains the same: it is the network of values and relationships that support and affect our lives.'⁴² In Hillary's village, the concept of civil society is grotesquely deformed. Traditionally, civil society is that free and open space occupied by what Burke called 'little platoons' — independent associations of citizens who pursue their own interests and ambitions free from state interference or coercion.

That is not Hillary's civil society. In a book festooned with encomiums to every imaginable social work interest group in America, Mrs. Clinton mentions 'civil society' just once. In a single paragraph she dispatches the concept as basically another way of describing the village. '[C]ivil society,' she writes, is just a 'term social scientists use to describe the way we work together for common purposes.'⁴³No, no, no. 'Civil society' is the term social scientists use to describe the way various groups, individuals, and families work for their own purposes, the result of which is to make the society healthily democratic. Civil society is the rich ecosystem of independent entities — churches, businesses, volunteer and neighborhood associations, labor unions, and such — that helps regulate life outside of state control. Bowling leagues, thanks to the Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam, are the archetypal institution of civil society. Bowling leagues are not mechanisms for working together for 'common purposes.' The late Seymour Martin Lipset even demonstrated that although many labor unions were corrupt and illiberal, so long as they remained independent of the state — and the state independent of them — they enriched democracy.

In Clinton's village, however, there is no public square where free men and women and their voluntary associations deal with each other on their own terms free from the mommying of the state. There are no private transactions, just a single 'spiritual community that links us to a higher purpose' managed by the state.⁴⁴ This is the Volksgemeinschaft reborn as a Social Gospel day-care center.

Think again of the image of a fasces, its many weak reeds or sticks bundled together to show strength in numbers. The first chapter of Mrs. Clinton's book begins with a quotation from the poet Verna Kelly: 'Snowflakes are one of nature's most fragile things, but just look what they can do when they stick together.'⁴⁵ It's a cute image, but is the message any different? Over and over again, Clinton uses a velvet hammer to beat it into the reader's head that togetherness, partnership, and unity are the only means of America's salvation.

The point where theory and practice most obviously merge is in the area of economic policy. Corporations were among the most important reeds in the fascist bundle. So it is in Hillary Clinton's village. 'Community-minded companies are already doing a number of things that citizens should applaud and government should encourage, when possible, with legislative changes to make them more attractive.' These include the usual wish list from 'no- layoff' policies to employer-provided day care. Again and again, Clinton beams sunshine wherever the lines between corporations, universities, churches, and government are already thin, hoping that the illumination of her gaze will cause even the shadows dividing them to disappear. Defense contractors are working with government to make peaceful products. Hooray. Automobile companies are working with the EPA to build green cars. Huzzah. Such '[s] ocially minded corporate philosophies are the avenue to future prosperity and social stability.'⁴⁶ Everyone will be secure and happy, nestled in the cozy confines of the village.

This all sounds peachy in the abstract. But when Clinton tried to impose precisely this sort of vision with her health-care plan, she had a harder edge. Recall Hillary's response when it was pointed out to her that her plan would destroy countless small businesses: 'I can't save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America.'⁴⁷ If they can't be part of the solution, who cares if they have problems?