LIBERAL FASCISM

by Jonah Goldberg

  The Kennedy operation endeavored mightily to send similar messages. Nary a newspaper article could be printed about the new president without references to his love of action, his youth, his vigor. Films of his manly exertions seemed to be everywhere. He could not be so obvious as Mussolini in his womanizing, but his cultivated status as a sex symbol was the product of decided political calculation. Kennedy ran explicitly as a war hero, and his political troops could usually be recognized by their PT-109 insignia pins. His campaign commercials, crammed with images of Kennedy the warrior, boasted that this was a “time for greatness.” Kennedy, like Mussolini, promised a national “restoration” and a “new politics” that would transcend old categories of left and right. He insisted that the forceful application of his own will and that of his technocratic aides would be more effective in solving the nation’s problems than traditional democratic means.

  Indeed, Kennedy was almost literally a superhero. It is a little-known but significant fact that no president has appeared more times in Superman comic books than JFK. He was even entrusted with Superman’s secret identity and once pretended to be Clark Kent so as to prevent it from being exposed. When Supergirl debuted as a character, she was formally presented to the Kennedys. (Not surprisingly, the president took an immediate liking to her.) In a special issue dedicated to getting American youth to become physically fit—just like the astronaut “Colonel Glenn”—Kennedy enlists Superman on a mission to close the “muscle gap.”

  Comic book writers weren’t alone in making this connection. In 1960 Norman Mailer wrote a ponderous piece for Esquire titled “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” Ostensibly a report from the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, the essay was more like a term paper for a Noam Chomsky seminar. But it does give you a sense of how even leading intellectuals like Mailer understood that they were being offered a myth—and were eager to accept it.

  The original Kennedy myth did not emphasize Kennedy’s progressive credentials. Ted Sorensen recalled that JFK “never identified himself as a liberal; it was only after his death that they began to claim him as one of theirs.” Indeed, the Kennedy family had serious trouble with many self-described progressives (who, after World War II, were essentially warmed-over communists) because of its close ties to that other prominent Irish-American politician, Joe McCarthy. After Roy Cohn. Bobby Kennedy was McCarthy’s most valued aide. Jack Kennedy never denounced his Senate colleague, who was also a dear friend of his father’s. But then, Kennedy was always more of a nationalist than a liberal. While a student at Harvard, he sent the isolationist America First Committee a one-hundred-dollar contribution with a note attached, telling them, “What you are doing is vital.”

  World War Il changed JFK’s perspective—as it did for most isolationists. It also amplified Kennedy’s fascination with “greatness,” He was awed by Churchill and would lip-synch Churchill’s oratory on the / Can Hear It Now albums narrated by Edward R. Murrow. In later years, staffers knew they could win Kennedy’s ear if they could make him think that greatness was in the offing. His entire political career was grounded in the hope and aspiration that he would follow FDR as a lion of the twentieth century.

  JFK famously inherited this ambition from his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, the pro-Nazi Democratic Party boss who was desperate to put a son in the White House. In 1946 Joe distributed a hundred thousand copies of John Hersey’s article on JFK’s PT-109 exploits. Soon an entire team of intellectuals was put to work, transforming JFK into the next great man of action. Kennedy’s first book, Why England Slept, an expanded version of his undergraduate thesis, was a dish concocted by many chefs. His second, Profiles in Courage, about great men who stick to their principles despite adversity, was essentially produced by a committee chaired by Ted Sorensen and only intermittently supervised by Kennedy himself. Of course, Kennedy accepted the Pulitzer alone.

  Kennedy was the first modern politician to recognize and exploit the new clout enjoyed by intellectuals in American society. The old Brain Trusters were economists and engineers, men concerned with shaping earth and iron. The new Brain Trusters were image men, historians, and writers—propagandists in the most benign sense—concerned with spinning words and pictures. Kennedy was no dunce, but he understood that in the modern age style tends to trump substance. (An indisputably handsome and charming man, he obviously benefited from the rise of television.) And the Kennedy machine represented nothing if not the triumph of style in American politics.

  Kennedy’s political fortune also stemmed from the fact that he seemed to be riding the waves of history. Once again, the forces of progressivism had been returned to power after a period of peace and prosperity. And despite the unprecedented wealth and leisure of the postwar years—indeed largely because of them—there was a palpable desire among the ambitious, the upwardly mobile, the intellectuals, and, above all. the activists of the progressive-liberal establishment to get “America moving again.” “More than anything else,” the conservative publisher Henry Luce wrote in 1960, “the people of America are asking for a clear sense of National Purpose.”

  This was the dawn of the third fascist moment in American life, which would unfurl throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, both in the streets and universities—as seen in the previous chapter—and in the halls of government. What ended as bloodshed in the streets began in many respects as a well-intentioned “revolution from above” by heirs to the Wilson-FDR legacy incapable of containing the demons they unleashed.

  Perhaps the best expression of this bipartisan-elite clamor for “social change” came in a series of essays on “the national purpose” co-published by the New York Times and Life magazine. Adlai Stevenson wrote that Americans needed to transcend the “mystique of privacy” and turn away from the “supermarket temple.” Charles R Darlington, a leading corporate executive and former State Department official, explained that America needed to recapture the collective spirit of national purpose it had enjoyed “during parts of the Administrations of Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts” (you can guess which parts). Above all, a reborn America needed to stop seeing itself as a nation of individuals. Once again, “collective action” was the cure. Darlington’s call for a “decreased emphasis on private enterprise” amounted to a revival of the corporatism and war socialism of the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations.

  On the eve of JFK’s inauguration in January 1960, a Look report, utilizing data from a special Gallup survey, found that Americans were actually feeling pretty good: “Most Americans today are relaxed, unadventurous, comfortably satisfied with their way of life and blandly optimistic about the future.” The trick, then, was to rip Americans’ attention away from their TV dinners and fan-tailed cars and get them to follow the siren song of the intellectuals. And that meant Kennedy needed a crisis to bind the public mind to a new Sorelian myth. “Great crises produce great men,” Kennedy proclaimed in Profiles in Courage, and his entire presidency would be dedicated to the creation of crises commensurate with the greatness he yearned to achieve.

  A vast retinue of brains and activists, nostalgic for the excitement of the New Deal and World War II, shared Kennedy’s desire to shake America out of its complacency. In the 1950s Arthur Schlesinger Jr. spoke for this entire circle of progressives, young and old. when he lamented the “absent discontents” of the American people.

  Kennedy, like FDR, believed he was a true democrat, and it would be unfair to label him a fascist. But his obsession with fostering crises in order to whip up popular sentiments in his favor demonstrates the perils of infatuation with fascist aesthetics in democratic politics, Ted Sorensen’s memoirs count sixteen crises in Kennedy’s first eight months in office. Kennedy created “crisis teams” that could short-circuit the traditional bureaucracy, the democratic process, and even the law. David Halberstam writes that Johnson inherited from Kennedy “crisis-mentality men, men who delighted in the great international crisis because it centered the action right there in the White
House—the meetings, the decisions, the tensions, the power, they were movers and activists, and this was what they had come to Washington for, to meet these challenges.” Garry Wills and Henry Fairlie—hardly right-wing critics—dubbed the Kennedy administration a “guerilla government” for its abuse of and contempt for the traditional governmental system. In an interview in 1963 Otto Strasser, the left-wing Nazi who helped found the movement, told the scholar David Schoenbaum that Kennedy’s abuse of authority and crisis-mongering certainly made him look like a fascist.

  Everything about Kennedy’s politics conveyed a sense of urgency. He ran on a “missile gap” that never existed and governed based on a heightened state of tension with the Soviets that he labored to create. He constantly spoke the language of “danger” and “sacrifice,” “courage” and “crusade.” He installed the first “situation room” in the White House. His first State of the Union address, delivered eleven days after his inaugural, was a “wartime speech without a war.” Kennedy warned that freedom itself was at its “hour of maximum danger.” “Before my term has ended we shall have to test again whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure. The outcome is by no means certain.”

  Kennedy’s adrenaline-soaked presidency was infectious, and deliberately so. His administration launched a massive campaign to encourage the construction of fallout shelters, with various agencies competing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the conversion of schools and hospitals into nuclear bunkers. We think of those duck-and-cover drills as icons of the 1950s, but it was under Kennedy that they reached the climate of extreme paranoia so often parodied today. The administration distributed fifty-five million wallet-sized cards with instructions on what to do when the nukes started raining from the sky. If, as the New Left so often claimed, the mobilization of “youth” in the 1960s was spurred by the anxiety of living under the shadow of “the bomb,” then they have JFK to thank for it.

  Even Kennedy’s nondefense policies were sold as the moral analogue of wan He justified more education spending—as Johnson would after him—on the explicit grounds that we needed to stay competitive with the Soviets. Kennedy’s tax cuts—aimed to counteract the worst stock market crash since the Depression—were implemented not in the spirit of supply-side economics (as some conservatives are wont to insinuate) but as a form of Keynesianism, justified in the language of Cold War competition. Indeed, Kennedy was the first president to explicitly claim that the White House had a mandate to ensure economic growth—because America couldn’t ignore Khrushchev’s boastful threat that the Soviet Union would soon “bury” the United States economically. His intimidation of the steel industry was a rip-off of Truman’s similar effort during the Korean War, itself a maneuver from the playbooks of FDR and Wilson. Likewise, the Peace Corps and its various domestic equivalents were throwbacks to FDR’s martial CCC. Even Kennedy’s most ambitious idea, putting a man on the moon, was sold to the public as a response to the fact that the Soviet Union was overtaking America in science.

  Particularly in response to Kennedy’s crackdown on the steel industry, some observers charged that he was making himself into a strongman. The Wall Street Journal and the Chamber of Commerce likened him to a dictator. Ayn Rand explicitly called him a fascist in a 1962 speech, “The Fascist New Frontier.”

  It is not a joyful thing to impugn an American hero and icon with the label fascist. And if by fascist you mean evil, cruel, and bigoted, then Kennedy was no fascist. But we must ask. what made his administration so popular? What made it so effective? What has given it its lasting appeal? On almost every front, the answers are those very elements that fit the fascist playbook: the creation of crises, nationalistic appeals to unity, the celebration of martial values, the blurring of lines between public and private sectors, the utilization of mass media to glamorize the state and its programs, invocations of a new “post-partisan” spirit that places the important decisions in the hands of experts and intellectual supermen, and a cult of personality for the national leaden Kennedy promised to transcend ideology in the name of what would later be described as cool pragmatism. Like the pragmatists who came before him, he eschewed labels, believing that he was beyond right and left. Instead, he shared Robert McNamara’s confidence that “every problem could be solved” by technocratic means. Once again the Third Way defined ideological sophistication. In his 1962 Yale commencement address, President Kennedy explained that “political labels and ideological approaches are irrelevant to the solution” of today’s challenges. “Most of the problems...that we now face, are technical problems, are administrative problems,” he insisted at a press conference in May 1962. These problems “deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men” and should therefore be left to the experts to settle without subjecting them to divisive democratic debate.

  Once again, Kennedy’s famous declaration “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” is seen today as a fine patriotic turn of phrase. Liberals in particular see it as an admirable call to service. And it is both of these things. But what is often missed is the historical context and motivation. Kennedy was trying to re-create the unity of World War Il in the same way FDR had tried to revive the unity of World War I. His declaration that we should put a man on the moon was not the result of Kennedy’s profound farsightedness, nor even of his desire to wallop the Russians. Rather, it was his best option for finding a moral equivalent of war.

  HE DIED FOR LIBERALISM

  All of this went down the memory hole after Kennedy’s murder. Kennedy the nationalistic Third Waver was replaced by Kennedy the fighting liberal. The JFK of Camelot eclipsed the one who tried to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro.

  Woodrow Wilson’s grandson Dean Francis Say re delivered a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral in homage to the fallen leader. “We have been present at a new crucifixion.” he told the assembled dignitaries. “All of us,” he explained, “have had a part in the slaying of our President. It was the good people who crucified our Lord, and not merely those who acted as executioners.” Chief Justice Earl Warren declared that the president had an organic and mystical bond with the people. He is “chosen to embody the ideals of our people, the faith we have in our institutions, and our belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.” Five days after Kennedy’s death, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, capped his address to a joint session of Congress by asking that Americans “put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence” and turn away from “the apostles of bitterness and bigotry.”

  Even after the nature of the assassination was more clear, the notion that “hate” and America’s collective sin killed Kennedy endured. Washington’s Methodist bishop, John Wesley Lord, declared that the nation needed to “atone” for Kennedy’s death. Rather than naming monuments after Kennedy, the nation could more appropriately “thank a martyr for his death and sacrifice” by redoubling its commitment to liberal politics.

  Most historians view Kennedy and Johnson as representing the last gasp of traditional progressive politics, ending the era that began with Wilson and ran through the New Deal and the Fair Deal to the New Frontier and the Great Society. Programmatically, that’s largely right (though it lets the very liberal Nixon off the hook). But the Kennedy presidency represented something more profound. It marked the final evolution of Progressivism into a full-blown religion and a national cult of the state.

  From the beginning, Kennedy’s presidency had tapped into a nationalistic and religious leitmotif increasingly central to American liberalism and consonant with the themes of both Progressivism and fascism. The Kennedy “action-intellectuals” yearned to be supermen, a Gnostic priesthood imbued with the special knowledge of how to fix society’s problems. JFK’s inaugural opened the decade with the proclamation that America was the agent of God and the possessor of godlike powers: “For man holds in his mortal hands th
e power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” The sociologist Robert Bellah found proof in this address that America already had a civil religion, defined by “the obligation, both collective and individual, to carry out God’s will on earth.” The New York Times’s C. L. Sulzberger wrote that the inaugural appealed to anybody who believed there was “still room on this earth for the kingdom of heaven.”

  John F. Kennedy represented the cult of personality tradition of American liberalism. He wanted to be a great man in the mold of Wilson and the Roosevelts. He was more concerned with guns than butter. Lyndon Baines Johnson, a southern populist ward heeler born and bred in the New Deal tradition, was, on the other hand, all about the butter. Johnson could neither be a warrior nor a priest. If he couldn’t be the liberal lion his predecessor wanted to be, he could embody the maternal aspect of Progressivism as the caring and protective shepherd overseeing his flock. He would transform the Kennedy personality cult into a cult of government. To this end, LBJ, a crafty and clever politician, made shameless use of JFK’s assassination, converting it into precisely the sort of transformative national crisis that had always eluded Kennedy himself. His legacy, the modern welfare state, represents the ultimate fruition of a progressive statist tradition going back to Woodrow Wilson.

  As we’ve seen, Wilson and the progressives laid the intellectual foundations for the divinized liberal state. The progressives, it should be remembered, did not argue for totalitarianism because the war demanded it; they argued for totalitarianism and were delighted that the war made it possible. But World War I also proved to be the undoing of the progressive dream of American collectivism. The total mobilization of the war—and the stupidity of the war in the first place—reawakened in its aftermath the traditional American resistance to such tyranny. In the 1920s the progressives sulked while Americans enjoyed remarkable prosperity and the Russians and Italians (in their view) had “all the fun of remaking a world.” The Great Depression came along just in time: it put the progressives back in the driver’s seat. As we have seen. FDR brought no new ideas to government; he merely dusted off the ideas he had absorbed as a member of the Wilson administration. But he left the state immeasurably strengthened and expanded. Indeed, it is worth recalling that the origins of the modern conservative movement stem from an instinctive desire to shrink the state back down to a manageable size after the war. But the Cold War changed that, forcing many conservatives to support a large national security state in order to defeat communism. This decision on the part of foreign policy hawks created a permanent schism on the American right. Nonetheless, even though Cold War conservatives believed in a limited government, their support for anti-communism prevented any conceivable attempt to actually get one.