A Half Century’s Slander - It isn’t conservatives who must answer for fascism

[110]

National Review
            January 28, 2008

            A Half Century’s Slander - It isn’t conservatives who must answer
            for fascism
            by JONAH GOLDBERG

            http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=ODhhMjc5NmM4ZDRlNjZlM2QxMTYzMTQwNTE5NjI3M2M=

            If you search Lexis-Nexis for articles from just the last two years
            in which “Bush” and “fascist” 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, “neocons” 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 Prize–winning former New York Times
            reporter Chris Hedges’s book on the Christian Right gets straight to
            the point, beginning with its title: “American Fascists.”

            Today’s F-bombers will tell you that conservatives have brought such
            charges on themselves by supporting George W. Bush and “his” War on
            Terror. What passes for the Left’s 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: What’s in a name?

            But this is nothing new. In 2000, when Bush was still promising a
            “humble” foreign policy, Jerrold Nadler denounced Republican efforts
            in the Florida recount as having “the whiff of fascism.” Jesse
            Jackson lamented that, in the hanging-chad controversy, Holocaust
            survivors were being victimized “again.” Earlier that year, Bill
            Clinton denounced the Texas GOP platform as a “fascist tract.”

            During the fight over the Contract with America, Rep. Charlie Rangel
            complained that “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these
            things.” (This is technically accurate in that Hitler wasn’t pushing
            term limits for committee chairmen and “zero based” budgeting.) When
            Newt Gingrich invited black congressmen to Capitol Hill social
            events, Rep. Major Owens responded by declaring, “These are people
            who are practicing genocide with a smile. They’re worse than Hitler.
            . . . We’re going to have cocktail-party genocide.”

            Ronald Reagan was of course called a fascist by Communists from his
            earliest days fighting Reds in Hollywood. Before that, “everyone
            knew” 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 Clancy’s 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 America’s real, and only, existential threat.
            * * *

            This received wisdom is understandably vexing for conservatives, who
            have never had a kind word for fascists or Nazis. I’ve gotten used
            to it. When speaking on college campuses, I’ve 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.

            “So, tell me,” I usually ask my accuser, “except for the bigotry,
            murder, and genocide, what exactly is it about Nazism you don’t
            like?”

            Taking advantage of the ensuing pierced-tongue-tied silence, I
            explain: The Nazis were socialists. The Nazi ideologist Gregor
            Strasser put it succinctly: “We are enemies, deadly enemies, of
            today’s 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.” The speech that first attracted a young Adolf Hitler to
            fascism was titled “How and by What Means Is Capitalism to Be
            Eliminated?” The Nazi-party platform demanded guaranteed jobs, the
            “abolition of incomes unearned by work,” 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 “progressive” reforms.
            Then I explain that the Nazis — all in the name of “progress” —
            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 “green,” 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 Bloomberg’s 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 “campaign against tobacco and the ‘whole-grain bread
            operation’ are, in some sense, as fascist as the yellow stars and
            the death camps.”

            Nazism rejected open scientific inquiry in favor of research
            dictated by “holistic” imperatives, and was tainted with a mysticism
            that exalted the “natural order” above reason (such postmodern
            buzzwords as “logocentrism” and “deconstructionism” originate in the
            Nazi canon). Heinrich Himmler was an animal-rights activist and
            proponent of “natural healing.” 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 mother’s 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 “Il Duce” as leader of
            Italy’s Socialist party.

            Mussolini’s Fascism was dubbed “right-wing” 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 “save socialism,” in his words — he responded,
            “Whatever happens, you won’t lose me. Twelve years of my life in the
            party ought to be sufficient guarantee of my socialist faith.
            Socialism is in my blood.”

            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 that’s incidental to the “true nature” 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.

            Let’s 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 it’s
            still fair to call conservatives Nazis and fascists, then
            conservatives must be Nazi-like because we too are murderous bigots.
            This is isn’t an argument. It’s slander. And it’s high time we set
            the record straight.
            * * *

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cont..

On a warm July day in 1932, H. G. Wells visited Oxford University’s
            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 life’s work. That idea expressed itself in
            different forms over the years. He championed a “world brain” that
            would unify mankind under the auspices of a collective intelligence
            overseen by special men — variously identified as scientists,
            priests, warriors, even airmen and “samurai.” But always they would
            lead and rule from above, making the hard decisions about everything
            from war and peace to eugenics and economics. The “will and the
            ideas of public-minded, masterful people” working through “a
            militant organization” were necessary to forge a “modernized state”
            that would “release the human community from the entanglements of
            the past.” This idea, this urge, defined Wells’s political vision.
            “I have never been able to escape altogether from its relentless
            logic,” he declared. But until that day at Oxford he lacked a name
            for it. The name he came up with?

            “Liberal fascism.”

            Wells’s term was provocative, but not nearly as controversial as you
            might think. For it wasn’t 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, Stalin’s 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 “social
            fascism,” which declared any socialist movement or organization that
            dissented from international socialism to be “objectively fascist.”
            (Trotsky was anathematized as the leader of a “fascist coup.”)

            But before this hoax worked its way through the Western mind,
            fascism was still “progressive.” Indeed, at the climax of the
            Progressive era, the Western world was in the throes of what I call
            a “fascist moment.”

            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 “experiment” that we are still paying for today.
            John Dewey, the most important American philosopher of the 20th
            century, supported the war because of the “social benefits” it would
            provide at home. The New Republic editorialized that the war “should
            bring with it a political and economic organization better able to
            redeem its obligations at home.” Another progressive put it more
            succinctly: “Laissez-faire is dead. Long live social control.”

            Under Woodrow Wilson, the first American president to embrace the
            new cult of pragmatism and power that had overtaken “enlightened”
            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
            “slackers,” and intimidating average Americans. Wilson’s Committee
            for Public Information was the first modern propaganda ministry.
            Indeed, according to the late sociologist and intellectual historian
            Robert Nisbet, the “West’s 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.”

            Exhilarated by their power during the war, progressives were
            crestfallen when America abandoned its war socialism after the
            armistice. “We planned in war!” they cried, imploring that they be
            allowed to plan in peace as well. Whereas progressives once saw
            America as joining, in Jane Addams’s words, a “world-wide movement,”
            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 “experiments” ignited their imaginations: Soviet Russia
            and Fascist Italy. The muckraker Lincoln Steffens returned from
            Russia to declare: “I have been to the future — and it works!” Just
            a year earlier, Steffens had proclaimed that God “formed Mussolini
            out of the rib of Italy.” Ida Tarbell, the muckraker who “exposed”
            Standard Oil, took a similar view. She and other progressives
            referred to the “Russian-Italian” method, recognizing the kindred
            spirit that animated both Fascism and Bolshevism. Charles Beard, the
            left-wing economic historian, wrote in The New Republic that
            Mussolini’s Italy was, “beyond question, an amazing experiment.”
            Herbert Croly, The New Republic’s first editor, often defended
            Mussolini’s crackdowns as necessary. Italian Fascism, he wrote, had
            “substituted movement for stagnation, purposive behavior for
            drifting, and visions of great future for collective pettiness and
            discouragement.”

            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 America’s 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 Army’s
            representative to Wilson’s 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 “what 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.”

            Ah yes, the great defense against the charge of fascism: We’re more
            orderly!
            * * *

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            Today’s 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
            fascism’s hallmarks? Among other things, the cult of action, the
            glorification of violence, the exaltation of youth, the perceived
            need to create “new men,” the hatred of conventional morality and
            traditional authority, the adoration of “the street” and “people
            power,” 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 “youth movement” of the ’60s.

            “Their goal,” historian John Toland writes of the German youth
            movement that became the feedstock of the Nazi party, “was to
            establish a youth culture for fighting the bourgeois trinity of
            school, home and church.” Studies found that students generally
            outpaced any other group in their support for National Socialism
            because they wanted to belong to die Bewegung, the “Movement.” 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.

            “The future of our struggle is the future of crime in the streets,”
            declared Tom Hayden, a co-founder of Students for a Democratic
            Society. In June 1969 he declared the “need to expand our struggle
            to include a total attack on the courts.” He dubbed the Black
            Panthers “our Viet Cong.” 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 Mussolini’s
            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: “Fascism returns to the United States
            not as a right-wing ideology, but almost as a quasi-leftist
            ideology.”
            * * *

            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 “a new social order,”
            and when pressed they defended the barbarians for having their
            “hearts in the right place.”

            It’s worth remembering that it was Benito Mussolini who coined the
            word “totalitarian.” Today that label has justifiably taken on the
            connotation of political evil. But that isn’t how Mussolini meant
            it. He used it to convey “all-encompassing” and “holistic.” 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
            “meaning” to every individual. Mussolini defined Fascism in many
            ways, but his most enduring summation was “Everything within the
            State, nothing outside the State.” Replace “State” with “Church and
            community,” and you get a sense of what he meant. Fascism was a
            “politics of meaning” in which every citizen derived his personal
            worth from his relation to the state.

            The 20th century’s literature gave us two famous visions of a
            dystopian future: Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 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 Huxley’s
            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?”

            Another important difference between the two dystopias: Nineteen
            Eighty-Four is a vision of a masculine totalitarianism. Huxley’s
            totalitarianism, by contrast, isn’t a “boot stamping on a human face
            forever,” as in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s one of smiling, happy,
            bioengineered people chewing hormone 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 feminine. Orwell’s 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. Huxley’s is a maternal misery, where man is smothered
            with care, not cruelty. But for all our talk about the “nanny
            state,” political correctness, and the like, we still don’t have the
            vocabulary to fight off nice totalitarianism, today’s 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, “progressive” Methodism of her youth, Hillary was
            also a protégée of Saul Alinsky (and Barack Obama was trained by
            Alinsky’s 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 “other.”
            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 Alinsky’s 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 “modern
            progressive,” and like the progressives — and the fascists — she
            subscribes to a fundamentally religious vision of politics. Her
            failed effort to launch a new “politics of meaning” was essentially
            a spiritual enterprise aimed at “redefining who we are as human
            beings in this postmodern age.” Writing in the Harvard Educational
            Review in 1973, she scorned the idea that “families are private,
            nonpolitical units whose interests subsume those of children.” In
            1996, she proclaimed to the United Methodist General Conference that
            Americans “have to start thinking and believing that there isn’t
            really any such thing as someone else’s child.”

            Mrs. Clinton’s book It Takes a Village is a sweeping liberal-fascist
            manifesto. She asserts that children are born in a condition of
            “crisis” that urgently requires state intervention. This strategy
            was pioneered by the Children’s Defense Fund — where Clinton served
            as chairman — in order to safeguard ever-increasing welfare
            payments. But it has a long pedigree. Ever since Plato’s Republic,
            politicians, intellectuals, and priests have been fascinated with
            the idea of “capturing” 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, “When an opponent
            declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your
            child belongs to us already. . . . In a short time they will know
            nothing but this new community.’” 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 “unchecked tyranny of the home” and declared the
            importance of recognizing “children . . . as citizens with rights to
            be guaranteed only by the state.”

            In Clinton’s village, cadres of social workers, psychologists,
            teachers, and bureaucrats enforce the idea that there is no such
            thing as someone else’s child. Government and business must collude
            at the most fundamental level to defend the “holistic” idea that
            everything is inside the village and nothing outside it. In
            Clinton’s village, the cult of youth is expanded almost to infancy:
            “I have never met a stupid child,” she insists, and “some of the
            best theologians I have ever met were five-year-olds.”

            Don’t 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 “mentally children or barbarians” and must be
            forced to surrender their individuality to the new “order.”

            Mrs. Clinton has been working assiduously to redefine what it means
            to be Mrs. Clinton. But she hasn’t 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 “champion” and went
            on to say, “I think the American people need a president who is
            their champion. And I’ve been running to be that champion.” It
            didn’t occur to her to note that the voters she’s 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 “crypto-Nazi.” 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: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or
            I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

            It was one of the few times in Buckley’s long public life that he
            abandoned civility, and he instantly regretted it. Nonetheless, it’s
            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, “Enough is enough.” To stand athwart
            “progress” and yell, “Stop!” That time is now.

            Mr. Goldberg, an NR 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.