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

advocates, organizations, associations, busybodies, bureaucrats, and meddlers who make up the army of 'qualified citizens' whose task it is to protect the village's interests in our children. 'I cannot say enough in support of home visits,' she gushes. '[The] village needs a town crier — and a town prodder.'⁶¹ Again, scrape the saccharine from the sentiment and look underneath. Imagine if, say, the former attorney general John Ashcroft had said, 'I cannot say enough in support of home visits.' The shrieks of 'fascism' would be deafening.

For Hillary Clinton, the most important front in the 'war' to protect children is the first three years of life. These precious moments are so critical that we cannot leave parents to cope with them on their own. Hence a vast array of programs are necessary to plug parents into a social network that alleviates their responsibilities. As Christopher Lasch noted well before she ever wrote It Takes a Village, Clinton 'puts her faith in 'programs.' The proliferation of children's programs — Head Start, day care, prenatal care, maternal care, baby clinics, programs for assessing standards in public schools, immunization programs, child-development programs — serves her as an infallible index of progress.'⁶²

The twentieth century gave us two visions of a dystopian future, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. For many years it was assumed that 1984 was the more prophetic tale. But no more. The totalitarianism of 1984 was a product of the age of Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini, the dictators of a continent with a grand tradition of political and religious absolutism. Brave New World was a dystopia based on an American future, where Henry Ford is remembered as a messiah (it's set in the year '632 A.F.,' after Ford) and the cult of youth that Huxley so despised defines society. Everything is easy under the World State. Everyone is happy. Indeed, the great dilemma for the reader of Brave New World is to answer the question, what's wrong with it?

There's a second important difference between the two dystopias: 1984 is a masculine vision of totalitarianism. Or rather, it is a vision of a masculine totalitarianism. Huxley's totalitarianism isn't a 'boot stamping on a human face — for ever,' as described in 1984. It's one of smiling, happy, bioengineered people chewing hormonal gum and blithely doing what they're told. Democracy is a forgotten fad because things are so much easier when the state makes all your decisions. In short, Huxley's totalitarianism is essentially feminine. Orwell's was a daddy-dystopia, where the state is abusive and bullying, maintaining its authority through a permanent climate of war and the manufacture of convenient enemies. Huxley's is a maternal misery, where man is smothered with care, not cruelty. But for all our talk these days about manliness, individualism, and even the 'nanny state,' we still don't have the vocabulary to fight off nice totalitarianism, liberal fascism.

With that distinction in mind, let us revisit It Takes a Village. On page after page, Clinton extols the idea that just about everything is a health issue. Divorce should be treated like a 'public health issue' because it creates stress in children. The very basics of parenting are health issues because 'how infants are held, touched, fed, spoken to, and gazed at' determines whether our brains can be 'hijacked' by our emotions, potentially making us murderously violent. Mrs. Clinton tells us that Janet Reno issued a report which found that gang violence and gun use are the products of people with badly imprinted brains who become 'emotionally hijacked' with little provocation. Quoting doctors, friendly activists, social workers, and random real Americans, in chapter after chapter she argues for interventions on behalf of children from literally the moment they are born. Children need '[g]entle, intimate, consistent contact' to reduce stress, which can 'create feelings of helplessness that lead to later developmental problems.' Even well-to-do parents need help because after all everyone feels stress, and 'we know that babies sense the stress.'⁶³

It's fair to say that a state empowered to eliminate parental stress is a state with a Huxleyan mandate. And a state with an extreme mandate must logically go to extremes. Hence Clinton argues for the diffusion of parental training into every nook and cranny of public life. Here's one such suggestion: 'Videos with scenes of common-sense baby care — how to burp an infant, what to do when soap gets in his eyes, how to make a baby with an earache comfortable — could be running continuously in doctors' offices, clinics, hospitals, motor vehicle offices, or any place where people gather and have to wait.'⁶⁴ Imagine if these sorts of ideas were fully implemented at the Department of Motor Vehicles, the passport office, and other places 'where people gather and have to wait.' Giant flat screens at the airport pumping breast-feeding advice? The JumboTron at football games? At what point would the Brave New World seem to be heading down the pike?

Then there are the home inspectors, the advisers, the teachers, the social workers. Clinton relies on her loyal army of experts to dispense advice about every jot and tittle of child rearing; no detail is too small, no nudge too condescending. 'The Child Care Action Campaign...advises that 'jigsaw puzzles and crayons may be fine for preschoolers but are inappropriate for infants.'' The Consumer Product Safety Commission, Clinton helpfully passes on, has concluded that 'baby showers with a safety theme are a great way to help new and expectant mothers childproof every room in their homes.'⁶⁵

Rousseau wanted to take children away from parents and raise them in state-owned boarding schools. Clinton doesn't go that far, but then again, she believes by the time kids are old enough to go to boarding school, it's too late. Hence her passion for day care. Of course, there is a second agenda here. Day care is also the holy grail for baby-boomer feminists who believe not that children should be liberated from the family but that mothers should be liberated from children.

In order to crack the spine of patriarchy, feminists have had to rely on Sorelian myths, noble lies, and crisis mechanisms to win their battles. For example, in 1998 President Clinton proposed a $22 billion federal day-care scheme to cure what Hillary was calling 'the silent crisis' of day care. Clinton also used the 'silent crisis' formulation in It Takes a Village to describe the plight of children generally. These crises were silent for the same reason unicorns are silent — they don't exist. Except, that is, in the hearts and minds of progressive 'reformers.' Even though eight out of ten children were cared for by family members, only 13 percent of parents polled said finding child care was a 'major problem.' Shortly before the White House held its crisis-mongering Conference on Child Care, which was intended to lay the groundwork for Hillary's plan, a mere 1 percent of Americans named child care one of the two or three most pressing problems government should fix. And surveys of women conducted since 1974 have shown that growing majorities of married women want to stay home with their children if they can.

Perhaps one reason women would prefer to raise their own children is that they intuitively understand that, all things being equal, day care is, in fact, not great for children. Dr. Benjamin Spock knew this as early as the 1950s, when he wrote that day-care centers were 'no good for infants.' But when he reissued his Baby and Child Care guide in the 1990s, he removed that advice, caving in to feminist pressures and concerns. 'It's a cowardly thing that I did,' he admits. 'I just tossed it in subsequent editions.' If, as liberals often suggest, the suppression of science for political ends is fascistic, then the campaign to cover up the dark side of child care certainly counts as fascism. For example, in 1991 Dr. Louise Silverstein wrote in American Psychologist that 'psychologists must refuse to undertake any more research that looks for the negative consequences of other-than-mother-care.' The traditional conception of motherhood is nothing more than an 'idealized myth' concocted by the patriarchy to 'glorify motherhood in an attempt to encourage white, middle class women to have more children.'⁶⁶

It's not that Clinton and others advocate policies they believe are bad for children. That would make them cartoon villains. Rather, they believe in good faith that society would be much improved if we all looked at everybody's children as our own. They sincerely hold, in the words of the feminist philosopher Linda Hirshman, that women cannot be 'fully realized human beings' if they don't make work a bigger priority than mothering. In a sense, Hirshman is a feminist version of Michael Lerner, who sees work as a 'locus' of meaning. Her contempt for women who don't completely dedicate themselves to work is palpable.⁶⁷ And as other feminists note, if women are made to feel 'judged' or shamed by their choice of day care, this negativity will be paid forward in the form of brain-warping stress.

Some couch their progressive utopianism in pragmatic language. Sandra Scarr is possibly the most quoted expert on 'other-than-mother' care in America and a past president of the American Psychological Society. 'However desirable or undesirable the ideal of fulltime maternal care may be,' she says, 'it is completely unrealistic in the world of the late 20th century.' That sounds defensible enough. But her larger agenda lurks beneath the surface. We need to create the 'new century's ideal children.' Uh-oh. Beware of social engineers who want to 'create' a new type of human being. These new children will need to learn how to love everybody like a