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

animosity to modernity into a governing program.

The idea that environmentalism is itself a religion has been much discussed elsewhere. But it is telling how many of these New Age faiths define themselves as nature cults. As the National Public Radio correspondent (and committed witch) Margot Adler explains, 'This is a religion that says the world, the earth, is where holiness resides.' Joseph Sax, a giant in the field of environmental law and a pioneering activist, describes his fellow environmentalists as 'secular prophets, preaching a message of secular salvation.' Representative Ed Markey hailed Gore as a 'prophet' during his congressional testimony on climate change in early 2007.²³ An environmentally themed hotel in California has replaced the Bible in all its rooms with Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Anyone with kids certainly understands how the invocations to 'reduce, reuse, recycle' are taught like catechisms in schoolrooms across the country.

Ultimately, however, environmentalism is fascistic not because of its airy and obscure metaphysical assumptions about the existential plight of man. Rather, its most tangible fascistic ingredient is that it is an invaluable 'crisis mechanism.' Al Gore constantly insists that global warming is the defining crisis of our time. Skeptics are called traitors, Holocaust deniers, tools of the 'carbon interests.' Alternately, progressive environmentalists cast themselves in the role of nurturing caregivers. When Gore appeared before Congress in early 2007, he proclaimed that the world has a 'fever' and explained that when your baby has a fever, you 'take action.' You do whatever your doctor says. No time to debate, no room for argument. We must get 'beyond politics.' In practical terms this means we must surrender to the global nanny state and create the sort of 'economic dictatorship' progressives yearn for.

The beauty of global warming is that it touches everything we do — what we eat, what we wear, where we go. Our 'carbon footprint' is the measure of man. And it is environmentalism's ability to provide meaning that should interest us here. Almost all committed environmentalists subscribe to some variant of the Wrong Turn thesis. Gore is more eloquent than most in this regard. He rhapsodizes about the need for authenticity and meaning through collective action; he uses an endless series of violent metaphors in which people must be 'resistance fighters' against the putatively Nazi regime responsible for the new Holocaust of global warming (again, on the left, the enemy is always a Nazi). Gore alternately blames Plato, Descartes, and Francis Bacon as the white male serpents who tempted mankind to take the wrong turn out of an Edenic past. What is required is to reunite our intellects, our spiritual impulses, and our animalistic instincts into a new holistic balance. Nothing could be more fascistic.

Of course, the greener you get, the more the argument shifts from the white man to mankind in general as the source of the problem. A perverse and bizarre form of self-hatred has infected certain segments of the eco-left. The old critique of the Hebrew disease has metastasized into an indictment of what could be called the human disease. When Charles Wurster, the chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, was told that banning DDT would probably result in millions of deaths, he replied, 'This is as good a way to get rid of them as any.' The Finnish environmental guru Pentti Linkola argues that the earth is a sinking ship, and a chosen remnant must head to the lifeboats. 'Those who hate life try to pull more people on board and drown everybody. Those who love and respect life use axes to chop off the extra hands hanging on the gunwale.'²⁴

These nominally 'fringe' ideas have saturated the mainstream. 'Us Homo sapiens are turning out to be as destructive a force as any asteroid,' proclaimed the Today Show's Matt Lauer in a TV special. 'The stark reality is that there are simply too many of us. And we consume way too much...The solutions are not a secret: control population, recycle, reduce consumption.' Lauer's emphasis on population control should remind us that the progressive eugenic obsession with controlling the population has never disappeared and still lurks behind many environmental arguments.²⁵

One reason there is so much overlap between Nazi environmental thought and contemporary liberalism is that the environmental movement predates Nazism and was used to expand its base of support. The Nazis were among the first to make fighting air pollution, creating nature preserves, and pushing for sustainable forestry central planks in their platform. Ludwig Klages's Man and Earth was a manifesto for the idea that man had chosen the wrong path. Klages, a wild-eyed anti-Semite, decried the loss of species, the killing of whales, the clearing of forests, disappearing indigenous peoples, and other familiar concerns as symptoms of cultural rot. In 1980, to celebrate the founding of the German Green Party, the Greens reissued the essay.

Even though free-market conservatives have a great deal to offer when it comes to the environment, they are permanently on the defensive. Americans, like the rest of the Western world, have simply decided that the environment is an area where markets and even democracy should have little sway. To approach environmental questions as if they were economic questions — which they ultimately are — seems sacrilegious. Much as liberals have painted themselves as 'pro-child' and their opponents as 'anti-child,' to disagree with liberals on statist remedies to environmental issues makes you 'against' the environment and a craven lickspittle of robber barons and industrial fat cats.

Everyone cares about 'the environment,' just as everyone cares about 'the children.' For ideological environmentalists that means buying into a holistic vision of the earth and of humans as just another species. For conservatives, we are stewards of the earth, and that means making informed choices between competing goods. Many so-called environmentalists are in fact conservationists, using property rights and market mechanisms to conserve natural resources for posterity. Many on the left believe we must romanticize nature in order to create the political will to save it. But when such romanticism becomes a substitute religion and dissenters heretics, conservatives need to make it clear that environmental utopianism is as impossible as any other attempt to create a heaven on earth.

THE NAZI CULT OF THE ORGANIC

Unlike Marxism, which declared much of culture and humanity irrelevant to the revolution, National Socialism was holistic. Indeed, 'organic' and 'holistic' were the Nazi terms of art for totalitarianism. The Mussolinian vision of everything inside the state, nothing outside the state, was organicized by the Nazis. In this sense the Bavarian cabinet minister Hans Schemm was deadly serious when he said, 'National Socialism is applied biology.'²⁶

Nazi ideologues believed that the Aryans were the 'Native Americans' of Europe, colonized by Romans and Christians and hence deprived of their 'natural' symbiosis with the land. Hitler himself was a devoted fan of the novels of Karl May, who romanticized the Indians of the American West. The Nazi ideologue Richard Darre summarized much of Nazi Volk ideology when he said, 'To remove the German from the natural landscape is to kill him.' Ernst Lehmann, a leading Nazi biologist, sounded much like Mr. Gore: 'We recognise that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations.'²⁷

The Nazi cult of the organic was not some fringe view; it lay at the cutting edge of 'enlightened' thought. German historicism had pioneered the organic conception of society and state tied together. The state, wrote Johann Droysen, is 'the sum, the united organism, of all the moral partnerships, their common home and harbor, and so far their end.' Nor were these ideas uniquely German. Droysen was Herbert Baxter Adams's mentor, and Adams in turn was Woodrow Wilson's. Droysen's work is cited throughout Wilson's writings. The law that established our national park system was dubbed the 'Organic Act' of 1916.

Consider two spheres of concern that dominate vast swaths of our culture today: food and health. The Nazis took food very, very seriously. Hitler claimed to be a dedicated vegetarian. Indeed, he could talk for hours about the advantages of a meatless diet and the imperative to eat whole grains. Himmler, Rudolf Hess, Martin Bormann, and — maybe — Goebbels were vegetarians or health food fetishists of one kind or another. Nor was this mere sucking up to the boss (a real problem, one might imagine, in Nazi Germany). According to Robert Proctor, Hess would bring his own vegetarian concoctions to meetings at the Chancellery and heat them up like the office vegan with some macrobiotic couscous. This annoyed Hitler to no end. Hitler told Hess, 'I have an excellent dietician/cook here. If your doctor has prescribed something special for you, she could certainly prepare it. You cannot bring your own food in here.' Hess responded that his food had special biodynamic ingredients. Hitler suggested to Hess in return that maybe he might rather stay home for lunch from now on.²⁸

Hitler often claimed his vegetarianism was inspired by Richard Wagner, who, in an 1891 essay, argued that meat eating and race mixing were the twin causes of man's alienation from the natural world. Therefore he called for a 'true and hearty fellowship with the vegetarians, the protectors of animals, and the friends of temperance.' He would also wax eloquent on the vegetarian diets of Japanese sumo wrestlers, Roman legionnaires, Vikings, and African elephants. Hitler believed that man had mistakenly acquired the habit of eating meat out of desperation during the Ice Age and that vegetarianism was the more authentic human practice. Indeed, he often sounded like