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

family member. 'Multiple attachments to others will become the ideal. Shyness and exclusive maternal attachment will seem dysfunctional. New treatments will be developed for children with exclusive maternal attachments.'⁶⁸ Can you see the Brave New World over the horizon yet?

Among these 'treatments' — another word for propaganda — are books that try to put distance between mothers and children, such as Mommy Go Away! and Why Are You So Mean to Me? In It Takes a Village, Clinton cites the Washington-Beech Community Preschool in Roslindale, Massachusetts, where 'director Ellen Wolpert has children play games like Go Fish and Concentration with a deck of cards adorned with images — men holding babies, women pounding nails, elderly men on ladders, gray-haired women on skateboards — that counter the predictable images.'⁶⁹ This sort of thing is carried into progressive grade schools where gender norms are often attacked, as documented in Christina Hoff Sommers's War Against Boys.

In short, day care is not bad for children. Rather, the traditional bourgeois standards by which we judge what is good for children are bad. This trick is a genteel replay of the Nazi effort to steal the young away from the hidebound traditions of their parents. The Nazis brilliantly replaced traditional stories and fairy tales with yarns of Aryan bravery, the divinity of Hitler, and the like. Math problems became mechanisms for subliminal indoctrination; kids would still learn math, but the word problems were now about artillery trajectories and the amount of food being wasted on defectives and other minorities. Christian morality was slowly purged from the schools, and teachers were instructed to base their moral teaching on 'secular' patriotic ideas. 'The idea of loyalty was very important to the Germanic Volk, as it is for us today,' teachers told their students. Indeed, loyalty to Hitler and the state was drilled into children, while loyalty to one's own parents was discouraged in myriad ways. The children were going to become new men and new women for the new age.

Obviously, the content of the saccharine liberalism children are indoctrinated into today is very different. But there are disturbing similarities, too. Good children will be those who are less attached to their parents and more attached to the 'community.' The fascist quest for the new man, living in a new, totalitarian society in which every individual feels the warm and loving embrace of the state, once again begins in the crib.

The last step toward the Huxleyan future for Hillary Clinton is philosophical, perhaps even metaphysical. Clinton's views of children are more universal than she seems to realize. Mrs. Clinton says, 'I have never met a stupid child,' and attests that 'some of the best theologians I have ever met were five-year-olds.'⁷⁰ Don't let the namby-pamby sentiment blind you to what is being said here. By defining the intellectual status of children up, she is simultaneously defining down the authority and autonomy of adults. In a world where children are indistinguishable from grown-ups, how distinct can grown- ups be from children?

The liberal cult of the child is instructive in its similarities to fascist thought. Children, like youth, are driven by passion, feelings, emotion, will. These are among the fascist virtues as well. Youth represents the glories of 'unreason.' These sentiments, in turn, are deeply tied to the narcissistic populism that celebrates the instincts of the masses. 'I want it now and I don't care if it's against the rules' is the quintessentially childlike populist passion. Fascism is a form of populism because the leader forges a parental bond with his 'children.' Without the emotional bond between the leader and 'the people,' Fuhrer and Volk, fascism is impossible. 'I'm on your side,' 'I'm one of you,' 'we're in this together,' 'I know what it's like to be you,' constitutes the sales pitch of every fascist and populist demagogue. Or as Willie Stark says to the nurturing crowd in All the King's Men: 'Your will is my strength. Your need is my justice.' Arguments, facts, reason: these are secondary. 'The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver,' proclaimed William Jennings Bryan, America's most beloved populist. 'I will look up the arguments later.'⁷¹

Bill Clinton campaigned relentlessly on his ability to 'feel our pain.' Countless observers marveled at his ability to 'feed' off the crowd, to draw energy from the masses. Journalists often called him an 'empath' for his ability to intuit what an audience wanted to hear. This is a great skill in a politician, but one should never forget that demagogues are first and foremost masterful politicians.

Of course, Clinton's demagoguery was of a decidedly feminine nature. He promised hugs, to feel your pain, and to protect you from those mean boys (Republicans and 'angry white males'). His watchword was 'security' — economic security, social security, security from globalization, crime, job losses, whatever. He was the 'first female president,' according to the feminist novelist Mary Gordon. When he was accused of failure or error, his reflexive response was that of an overwhelmed single mother: 'I've been working so hard,' as if that were an adequate substitute for being right or effective. His defenders essentially claimed that he was above the law because he was, as Stanford's Kathleen Sullivan put it, the only person who works for all of us twenty-four hours a day. In other words, he wasn't a person; he was the state in its maternal incarnation. Sure, many Americans liked his policies — or thought they did because the economy was doing well — but they liked him because of his oddly maternal concern. The political aesthetics here were nothing new. As Goebbels noted of his Fuhrer's popularity, 'The entire people loves him, because it feels safe in his hands like a child in the arms of its mother.'⁷²

Was Bill Clinton a fascist president? Well, he certainly believed in the primacy of emotion and the supremacy of his own intellect. He spun noble lies with reckless abandon. An admirer of Huey Long's, he shared the cornpone dictator's contempt for the rules and had the same knack for demagogic appeals. He was a committed Third Wayer if ever there was one, and he devoutly shared JFK's new politics. But I think if we are going to call him a fascist, it must be in the sense that he was a sponge for the ideas and emotions of liberalism. To say that he was a fascist himself is to credit him with more ideology and principle than justified. He was the sort of president liberal fascism could only produce during unexciting times. But most important, if he was fascist, it was because that's what we as Americans wanted. We craved empathy, because we felt we deserved someone who cared about Me.

Hillary Clinton learned that lesson well when she decided to run for office for the first time. Mrs. Clinton will never have her husband's raw political talent. She's too cold, too cerebral for his style of backslapping, lip-biting politics. Instead, she translated Bill Clinton's political instincts into an ideological appeal. In 2000, when she ran as a carpetbagger for Senate in New York, Mrs. Clinton's track record was a problem. She essentially had none — at least not as a New Yorker. So she crafted a brilliant campaign slogan and rationale: she was the candidate who was 'more concerned about the issues that concern New Yorkers.' Her discipline in sticking to this message awed veteran political observers. The issues weren't the issue, as they said in the 1960s. The issue of who was more concerned about the issues was the issue. 'I think that the real issue ought to be who cares about the children of New York City,' she said in a typical utterance.⁷³

One might ask, since when did 'concern' count as the greatest of qualifications? A plumber might well be more concerned about how to successfully remove your spleen than a surgeon would. Does that mean a sane man would prefer a plumber to a doctor? Do banks give loans to the applicants most concerned with running a successful business or to those most likely to pay back the loan? Should the student most concerned with getting good grades get straight As?

The response to all this is simple: concern is what children (and the rest of us) look for in parents. In the liberal fascist view, children are citizens and citizens are children (a chapter of Hillary's book is titled 'Children Are Citizens Too'), so it follows that leaders should behave like parents. 'I think my job is to lead,' Bill Clinton remarked while in office, 'and take care of the country. And I suppose the older I get, the more it becomes the role of a father figure instead of an older brother.'⁷⁴

Under this vision, even your own money is not yours. It's an allowance. When asked what his problem was with letting local school districts spend tax dollars the way they saw fit, Bill Clinton snapped back: 'Because it's not their money.' In 1997 he ridiculed Virginia voters who wanted tax cuts as 'selfish,' and then chided them like children: 'And think how you felt every time in your life you were tempted to do something that was selfish and you didn't do it, and the next day you felt wonderful.' In 1999, when the government was running a surplus, many taxpayers felt that getting back some of their money was a reasonable policy. When asked about this, President Clinton responded, 'We could give it all back to you and hope you spend it right.' Senator Clinton was more straightforward. Talking about George W. Bush's tax cuts, which did return that surplus to the people who created it, Mrs. Clinton — speaking in the classic argot of the Social Gospel — said that those cuts had to be done away with. 'We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.'⁷⁵

Hillary is no fuhrer, and her notion of the 'common good' doesn't involve racial purity or concentration camps.