You Wanted Change. You Now Have It! But At What Cost?

 

    If you search Lexis-Nexis for articles from just the last two years in which ³Bush² and ³fascist² are used in the same sentence, the results exceed 2,000.  Search for the years encompassing his entire term, and smoke will start to come out of your computer. 
     A stack of recent books have branded Bush, Cheney, Republicans, conservatives, the Christian Right, and, of course, ³neocons² as fascists, Nazis, or sympathizers with fascism and Nazism. Feminist author (and former Gore consultant) Naomi Wolf argues that America has already gone Nazi, equating the United States of today with the Germany of the early 1930s. The dyspeptic left-wing journalist Joe Conason warns that America is on the verge of fascism in It Can Happen Here. The Pulitzer Prize­winning former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges¹s book on the Christian Right gets straight to the point, beginning with its title: ³American Fascists.² 
     Today¹s F-bombers will tell you that conservatives have brought such charges on themselves by supporting George W. Bush and ³his² War on Terror. What passes for the Left¹s argument is by now so familiar that we need not dwell on it for long. Nazis cracked down on civil liberties; America is cracking down on civil liberties. Nazis used terror and, allegedly, so does the Bush administration. Nazis invaded countries; America invaded countries. Hitler lied; Bush lied. Nazis rounded up Jews after labeling them enemies of the state; Bush is rounding up Muslims and labeling them enemies of the state. Hitler was a bad guy; Bush is a bad guy. Auschwitz, Guantanamo: What¹s in a name? 
     But this is nothing new. In 2000, when Bush was still promising a ³humble² foreign policy, Jerrold Nadler denounced Republican efforts in the Florida recount as having ³the whiff of fascism.² Jesse Jackson lamented that, in the hanging-chad controversy, Holocaust survivors were being victimized ³again.² Earlier that year, Bill Clinton denounced the Texas GOP platform as a ³fascist tract.² 
     During the fight over the Contract with America, Rep. Charlie Rangel complained that ³Hitler wasn¹t even talking about doing these things.²   (This is technically accurate in that Hitler wasn¹t pushing term limits for committee chairmen and ³zero based² budgeting.) When Newt Gingrich invited black congressmen to Capitol Hill social events, Rep. Major Owens responded by declaring, ³These are people who are practicing genocide with a smile. They¹re worse than Hitler. . . . We¹re going to have cocktail-party genocide.² 
     Ronald Reagan was of course called a fascist by Communists from his earliest days fighting Reds in Hollywood. Before that, ³everyone knew² that Barry Goldwater was a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer. 
     Two generations of Hollywood scriptwriters, actors, and producers have been warning that the fascist peril lurks beneath the surface of the Right. Pleasantville, Falling Down, Fight Club, American Beauty, American History X, and countless other films advanced this idea. In the film adaptation of Tom Clancy¹s novel The Sum of All Fears, the all-too-real threat of Islamist terror is switched to a cabal of rich, white, conservative businessmen who just happen to be < you guessed it < Nazis. Even after 9/11, it seems liberals think the fascist Right is America¹s real, and only, existential threat. 
    This received wisdom is understandably vexing for conservatives, who have never had a kind word for fascists or Nazis. I¹ve gotten used to it. When speaking on college campuses, I¹ve been called a Nazi many times. The kids, accustomed to bullying their opponents with charges of intolerance that would be better aimed at themselves, rarely expect a response. 
     ³So, tell me,² I usually ask my accuser, ³except for the bigotry, murder, and genocide, what exactly is it about Nazism you don¹t like?² 
     Taking advantage of the ensuing pierced-tongue-tied silence, I explain: The Nazis were socialists. The Nazi ideologist Gregor Strasser put it succinctly: ³We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today¹s capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, its unfair wage system, its immoral way of judging the worth of human beings in terms of their wealth and their money.² The speech that first attracted a young Adolf Hitler to fascism was titled ³How and by What Means Is Capitalism to Be Eliminated?² The Nazi-party platform demanded guaranteed jobs, the ³abolition of incomes unearned by work,² the nationalization of all large corporations and trusts, profit-sharing in all major industries, expanded old-age insurance, a government takeover of big department stores (think Wal-Mart), the prohibition of child labor, and countless other ³progressive² reforms. 
    Then I explain that the Nazis < all in the name of ³progress² < sought to purge the authority of Church and tradition from society, and to replace them with the supremacy of the state and the dictates of political correctness. The Nazis partly grew out of and co-opted the first ³green,² youth, and health movements in the West. The proto-Nazi philosopher (and rabid anti-Semite) Ludwig Klages wrote one of the founding texts of modern environmentalism, Man and Earth, which presages most of the contemporary complaints from Al Gore and others on the environmental left. In 1980, the German Greens reissued his manifesto to celebrate the founding of their party. 
     The Nazi war on smoking would make Michael Bloomberg¹s heart leap. Nazis led the world in researching organic foods and alternative medicines (the concentration camp Dachau boasted the largest alternative- and organic-medicine research lab in the world). According to the medical historian Robert Proctor, the National Socialist ³campaign against tobacco and the ‘whole-grain bread operation¹ are, in some sense, as fascist as the yellow stars and the death camps.² 
     Nazism rejected open scientific inquiry in favor of research dictated by ³holistic² imperatives, and was tainted with a mysticism that exalted the ³natural order² above reason (such postmodern buzzwords as ³logocentrism² and ³deconstructionism² originate in the Nazi canon). Heinrich Himmler was an animal-rights activist and proponent of ³natural healing.² Hitler and his advisers endlessly discussed the need to move the entire nation to vegetarianism as a response to the unhealthiness promoted by capitalism. 
     And then there were the Italian Fascists. Benito Mussolini was raised on the mother¹s milk of revolutionary socialism. His father, an ardent socialist who was a member of the First International along with Marx and Engels, read Das Kapital to young Benito as a bedtime story. He first earned the title ³Il Duce² as leader of Italy¹s Socialist party. 
     Mussolini¹s Fascism was dubbed ³right-wing² by orthodox Communists as a way to discredit dissent from the Bolshevik party line. But Mussolini and the Italian Fascists remained committed to socialism. When he was kicked out of the Socialist party solely for supporting World War I < to ³save socialism,² in his words < he responded, ³Whatever happens, you won¹t lose me. Twelve years of my life in the party ought to be sufficient guarantee of my socialist faith. Socialism is in my blood.² 
     When you point to these and myriad other facts which support the conclusion that National Socialism, as well as Italian Fascism, was a phenomenon of the Left, liberals fall back on a very different argument. So maybe the National Socialists were socialists after all, they say. But that¹s incidental to the ³true nature² of Nazism and fascism. They only posed as socialists cynically, to attract more followers. In reality, Nazism and fascism are about war, racism, and mass murder. 
     Let¹s put aside for a moment the fact that this position is flatly untrue, and ask what it entails about conservatives. If all the manifestly leftist attributes of fascism are irrelevant but it¹s still fair to call conservatives Nazis and fascists, then conservatives must be Nazi-like because we too are murderous bigots. This is isn¹t an argument. It¹s slander. And it¹s high time we set the record straight. 
    On a warm July day in 1932, H. G. Wells visited Oxford University¹s summer school to deliver a major address to the Young Liberals, a group of progressive activists. Wells is remembered today primarily as a science-fiction writer, but this hardly does justice to the man. He was arguably the most influential English-speaking public intellectual during the first half of the 20th century. His writings were foundational to the linked progressive and social-gospel movements. He was a prominent member of the Fabian Society. His articles on religion and politics were read from the pulpit with electric excitement by American pastors. He was a frequent guest of Franklin Roosevelt in the Oval Office, and his meetings with the president were front-page news. 
     On that summer day at Oxford, Wells sought to summarize the unifying political idea of his life¹s work. That idea expressed itself in different forms over the years. He championed a ³world brain² that would unify mankind under the auspices of a collective intelligence overseen by special men < variously identified as scientists, priests, warriors, even airmen and ³samurai.² But always they would lead and rule from above, making the hard decisions about everything from war and peace to eugenics and economics. The ³will and the ideas of public-minded, masterful people² working through ³a militant organization² were necessary to forge a ³modernized state² that would ³release the human community from the entanglements of the past.² This idea, this urge, defined Wells¹s political vision. ³I have never been able to escape altogether from its relentless logic,² he declared. But until that day at Oxford he lacked a name for it. The name he came up with?  ³Liberal fascism.² 
     Wells¹s term was provocative, but not nearly as controversial as you might think. For it wasn¹t until the early 1930s that men of the Left were increasingly required to dissociate themselves from fascism (W. E. B. Du Bois lasted longer than most, praising Nazism as late as 1937). The Kremlin had declared at the Sixth Congress of the Third International that fascism was the last gasp of capitalism long prophesied by Marxist theology. While many useful idiots believed this, Stalin¹s intent was more strategic than ideological. National Socialism was proving to be a seductive alternative to his failing brand of international socialism. The workers of the world, it seemed, did not want to unite < but the workers of Germany, Italy, and other nations did. So Stalin issued his theory of ³social fascism,² which declared any socialist movement or organization that dissented from international socialism to be ³objectively fascist.² (Trotsky was anathematized as the leader of a ³fascist coup.²) 
     But before this hoax worked its way through the Western mind, fascism was still ³progressive.² Indeed, at the climax of the Progressive era, the Western world was in the throes of what I call a ³fascist moment.² 
     If the hallmark of classic fascism is the blending of war and politics, then the progressives were as fascistic as any devotee of Mussolini. They used the war in Europe as an excuse to launch a sweeping social ³experiment² that we are still paying for today. John Dewey, the most important American philosopher of the 20th century, supported the war because of the ³social benefits² it would provide at home. The New Republic editorialized that the war ³should bring with it a political and economic organization better able to redeem its obligations at home.² Another progressive put it more succinctly: ³Laissez-faire is dead. Long live social control.² 
     Under Woodrow Wilson, the first American president to embrace the new cult of pragmatism and power that had overtaken ³enlightened² thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic (and the first American president to openly disdain the U.S. Constitution), the progressives unleashed a crackdown on freedom that makes the supposed fascism of the McCarthy era and the Bush years seem like a teach-in at Smith College. Wilson established the American Protective League, a group of domestic fascisti charged with crushing dissent, beating ³slackers,² and intimidating average Americans. Wilson¹s Committee for Public Information was the first modern propaganda ministry. Indeed, according to the late sociologist and intellectual historian Robert Nisbet, the ³West¹s first real experience with totalitarianism < political absolutism extended into every possible area of culture and society, education, religion, industry, the arts, local community and family included, with a kind of terror always waiting in the wings < came with the American war state under Wilson.² 
     Exhilarated by their power during the war, progressives were crestfallen when America abandoned its war socialism after the armistice. ³We planned in war!² they cried, imploring that they be allowed to plan in peace as well. Whereas progressives once saw America as joining, in Jane Addams¹s words, a ³world-wide movement,² now America was turning its back on Progress and slouching toward the classical liberalism of the founders. So they looked abroad for inspiration. 
     Two great ³experiments² ignited their imaginations: Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy. The muckraker Lincoln Steffens returned from Russia to declare: ³I have been to the future < and it works!² Just a year earlier, Steffens had proclaimed that God ³formed Mussolini out of the rib of Italy.² Ida Tarbell, the muckraker who ³exposed² Standard Oil, took a similar view. She and other progressives referred to the ³Russian-Italian² method, recognizing the kindred spirit that animated both Fascism and Bolshevism. Charles Beard, the left-wing economic historian, wrote in The New Republic that Mussolini¹s Italy was, ³beyond question, an amazing experiment.² Herbert Croly, The New Republic¹s first editor, often defended Mussolini¹s crackdowns as necessary. Italian Fascism, he wrote, had ³substituted movement for stagnation, purposive behavior for drifting, and visions of great future for collective pettiness and discouragement.² 
     The New Deal did not try to copy Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, or Soviet Russia, as many on the old anti-Communist left and old right charged. Rather, it followed America¹s domestic fascist tradition, hoping to pick up where Wilson had left off. But the Brain Trusters did look at European Fascism and Bolshevism as proof that they were moving in the right direction. FDR tapped Hugh Johnson < the Army¹s representative to Wilson¹s War Industries Board < to run his National Recovery Administration, the cornerstone of the New Deal. There was no contradiction in the fact that Johnson openly admired Mussolini, hanging a portrait of the dictator on his office wall and handing out copies of the Italian Fascist text The Corporate State to members of the administration. Roosevelt himself privately acknowledged that ³what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we are doing them in an orderly way.² 
     Ah yes, the great defense against the charge of fascism: We¹re more orderly! 
    Today¹s liberals still worship the New Deal. But they look to another era for inspiration as well: the 1960s. Here too the parallels with classic fascism are too obvious to ignore. What are fascism¹s hallmarks? Among other things, the cult of action, the glorification of violence, the exaltation of youth, the perceived need to create ³new men,² the hatred of conventional morality and traditional authority, the adoration of ³the street² and ³people power,² the justification of crime as political rebellion, and the denigration of the rule of law as a form of oppression. All recognizable features of the ³youth movement² of the ¹60s. 
     ³Their goal,² historian John Toland writes of the German youth movement that became the feedstock of the Nazi party, ³was to establish a youth culture for fighting the bourgeois trinity of school, home and church.² Studies found that students generally outpaced any other group in their support for National Socialism because they wanted to belong to die Bewegung, the ³Movement.² The Nazis may have been striving for a utopian, thousand-year Reich, but their first instincts were radical: Destroy what exists. Tear it down. Eradicate das System < another term shared by the New Left and the fascists. Burn, baby, burn. 
     ³The future of our struggle is the future of crime in the streets,² declared Tom Hayden, a co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society. In June 1969 he declared the ³need to expand our struggle to include a total attack on the courts.² He dubbed the Black Panthers ³our Viet Cong.² Here was a street-based paramilitary group that sought the violent overthrow of the government in the name of racial separatism. Nothing fascistic here, folks. 
     During the guns-on-campus crisis at Cornell, then-professor Walter Berns fooled his students by reading them excerpts from Mussolini¹s speeches. The students cheered < until they learned the identity of the author. Peter Berger, a Jewish refugee from Austria and, at the time, a respected peace activist and left-wing sociologist, identified a long list of themes common to 1960s radicalism and European fascism. Irving Louis Horowitz, a revered leftist intellectual specializing in revolutionary thought, saw this fanaticism for what it was: ³Fascism returns to the United States not as a right-wing ideology, but almost as a quasi-leftist ideology.² 
    Some recognized that America would defend itself against the violent radicalism of the Weathermen and the Black Panthers. So there was a softer side to the fascistic awakening of the 1960s. These softer radicals were peaceful, process-oriented, and career-minded. But they remained no less dedicated to imposing ³a new social order,² and when pressed they defended the barbarians for having their ³hearts in the right place.² 
     It¹s worth remembering that it was Benito Mussolini who coined the word ³totalitarian.² Today that label has justifiably taken on the connotation of political evil. But that isn¹t how Mussolini meant it. He used it to convey ³all-encompassing² and ³holistic.² His totalitarian society was one in which everyone belonged, no one was left out, no child was left behind. The state was a spiritual institution, intended to supplant traditional religion and give ³meaning² to every individual. Mussolini defined Fascism in many ways, but his most enduring summation was ³Everything within the State, nothing outside the State.² Replace ³State² with ³Church and community,² and you get a sense of what he meant. Fascism was a ³politics of meaning² in which every citizen derived his personal worth from his relation to the state. 
     The 20th century¹s literature gave us two famous visions of a dystopian future: Huxley¹s Brave New World and Orwell¹s Nineteen Eighty-Four. For many years it was assumed that Nineteen Eighty-Four was the more prophetic tale. No longer. The totalitarianism of Nineteen Eighty-Four reflects the age of Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini, dictators on a continent with a grand tradition of political and religious absolutism. Brave New World is a dystopia based on a future in which the world has been Americanized and the cult of youth defines society. Everything is easy under Huxley¹s World State. Everyone is happy. Indeed, the great dilemma for the reader of Brave New World is to answer the question, ³What¹s wrong with it?² 
     Another important difference between the two dystopias: Nineteen Eighty-Four is a vision of a masculine totalitarianism. Huxley¹s totalitarianism, by contrast, isn¹t a ³boot stamping on a human face forever,² as in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It¹s one of smiling, happy, bioengineered people chewing hormone gum and blithely doing what they¹re told. Democracy is a forgotten fad because things are so much easier when the state makes all your decisions. In short, Huxley¹s totalitarianism is feminine. Orwell¹s is a daddy dystopia, where the bullying state maintains its authority through the manufacture of convenient enemies and useful crises in a climate of permanent war. Huxley¹s is a maternal misery, where man is smothered with care, not cruelty. But for all our talk about the ³nanny state,² political correctness, and the like, we still don¹t have the vocabulary to fight off nice totalitarianism, today¹s liberal fascism. 
     Which brings us to Hillary Clinton, the leading but by no means sole exemplar of liberal fascism in our time. Deeply influenced by the socially engaged, ³progressive² Methodism of her youth, Hillary was also a protégée of Saul Alinsky (and Barack Obama was trained by Alinsky¹s organization in Chicago), a man whose writings drip with fascist themes from the cult of action to the necessity of violent conflict to the dehumanization of the enemy as an abstract ³other.² While at Yale Law School, she volunteered to help the legal team of Black Panther Bobby Seale as he stood trial for murder. She also helped edit the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, a thoroughly radical organ that supported the Panthers and implicitly endorsed the murder of policemen. Despite Alinsky¹s urging, she declined to work with him full time, opting instead to pursue a legal career and change the system from within. 
     Clinton herself rejects the liberal label, preferring ³modern progressive,² and like the progressives < and the fascists < she subscribes to a fundamentally religious vision of politics. Her failed effort to launch a new ³politics of meaning² was essentially a spiritual enterprise aimed at ³redefining who we are as human beings in this postmodern age.² Writing in the Harvard Educational Review in 1973, she scorned the idea that ³families are private, nonpolitical units whose interests subsume those of children.² In 1996, she proclaimed to the United Methodist General Conference that Americans ³have to start thinking and believing that there isn¹t really any such thing as someone else¹s child.² 
     Mrs. Clinton¹s book It Takes a Village is a sweeping liberal-fascist manifesto. She asserts that children are born in a condition of ³crisis² that urgently requires state intervention. This strategy was pioneered by the Children¹s Defense Fund < where Clinton served as chairman < in order to safeguard ever-increasing welfare payments. But it has a long pedigree. Ever since Plato¹s Republic, politicians, intellectuals, and priests have been fascinated with the idea of ³capturing² children for social-engineering purposes. This is why Robespierre advocated that children be raised by the state, and why Hitler < who understood the importance of winning the hearts and minds of youth < once remarked, ³When an opponent declares, OI will not come over to your side,¹ I calmly say, Your child belongs to us already… In a short time they will know nothing but this new community.¹² Woodrow Wilson held that the primary mission of the educator was to make children as unlike their parents as possible. Feminist icon Charlotte Perkins Gilman denounced the ³unchecked tyranny of the home² and declared the importance of recognizing ³children . . . as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state.² 
     In Clinton¹s village, cadres of social workers, psychologists, teachers, and bureaucrats enforce the idea that there is no such thing as someone else¹s child. Government and business must collude at the most fundamental level to defend the ³holistic² idea that everything is inside the village and nothing outside it. In Clinton¹s village, the cult of youth is expanded almost to infancy: ³I have never met a stupid child,² she insists, and ³some of the best theologians I have ever met were five-year-olds.² 
     Don¹t let the namby-pamby sentiment blind you to what is actually being said here. By defining the intellectual status of children up, she is defining adulthood down. In her vision, children will not become citizens, but citizens will be treated like children. Her liberal forebear Walter Lippmann had a similar outlook, observing that most citizens are ³mentally children or barbarians² and must be forced to surrender their individuality to the new ³order.² 
     Mrs. Clinton has been working assiduously to redefine what it means to be Mrs. Clinton. But she hasn¹t been able to hide her true views. In Iowa, the weekend before the caucuses, she recalled her argument in It Takes a Village that every child needs a ³champion² and went on to say, ³I think the American people need a president who is their champion. And I¹ve been running to be that champion.² It didn¹t occur to her to note that the voters she¹s appealing to are not, in fact, children. Her village may have replaced the fasces with a hug, but an embrace from which you cannot escape is just a nicer form of tyranny. 
    In 1968, in a televised debate during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, when American fascists were taking to the streets outside the studio, Gore Vidal slandered William F. Buckley Jr. as a ³crypto-Nazi.² Vidal, a pagan, statist, and conspiracy theorist, had good reason to cast this charge as far from himself as possible. Buckley, a patriotic, pro-market, anti-totalitarian gentleman of impeccable manners, could take it no more and responded: ³Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I¹ll sock you in the goddamn face and you¹ll stay plastered.² 
     It was one of the few times in Buckley¹s long public life that he abandoned civility, and he instantly regretted it. Nonetheless, it¹s hard not to feel sympathy for him. For at some point it is necessary to throw down the gauntlet, to draw a line in the sand, to set a boundary, to cry at long last, ³Enough is enough.² To stand athwart ³progress² and yell, ³Stop!² That time is now. 
 
    JONAH GOLDBERG, National Review contributing editor, is the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, from which this essay is adapted.