LIBERAL FASCISM

by Jonah Goldberg

  Wilson’s status as the most racist president of the twentieth century is usually attributed to the fact that he was a southerner, indeed the first southern president since Reconstruction. And it is true that he harbored many Dixiecrat attitudes. His resegregation of the federal government, his support for antimiscegenation laws, his antagonism toward black civil rights leaders as well as antilynching laws, and his notorious fondness for D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation all testify to that. But in fact Wilson’s heritage was incidental to his racism. After all, he was in no way a traditional defender of the South. He embraced Lincoln as a great leader—hardly a typical southern attitude. Moreover, as a believer in consolidating federal power, Wilson, in his opinion on states’ rights, ran counter to those who complained about the “War of Northern Aggression.” No, Wilson’s racism was “modern” and consistent both with the Darwinism of the age and with the Hegelianism of his decidedly Germanic education. In The State and elsewhere, Wilson can sound downright Hitlerian. He informs us, for example, that some races are simply more advanced than others. These “progressive races” deserve progressive systems of government, while backward races or “stagnant nationalities,” lacking the necessary progressive “spirit,” may need an authoritarian form of government (a resurgence of this vision can be found among newly minted “realists” in the wake of the Iraq war). This is what offended him so mightily about the post-Civil War Reconstruction. He would never forgive the attempt to install an “inferior race” in a position superior to southern “Aryans.”

  Wilson was also a forthright defender of eugenics. As governor of New Jersey—a year before he was sworn in as President—he signed legislation that created, among other things, the Board of Examiners of Feebleminded, Epileptics, and Other Defectives. Under the law, the state could determine when “procreation is inadvisable” for criminals, prisoners, and children living in poorhouses. “Other Defectives” was a fairly open category. But Wilson was merely picking up where Teddy Roosevelt left off. The Bull Moose—recently rediscovered by liberal Republicans and “centrist” liberals—regularly decried “race suicide” and supported those “brave” souls who were battling to beat back the tide of mongrelization (although on a personal level Roosevelt was far less of a racist than Wilson).

  Roosevelt, like Wilson, was merely demonstrating the attitudes that made him so popular among “modern” progressive intellectuals. In The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly speculated that a “really regenerated state government” would take steps to prevent “crime and insanity” by regulating who could marry and procreate. Such an empowered state, he wrote archly, “might conceivably reach the conclusion that the enforced celibacy of hereditary criminals and incipient lunatics would make for individual and social improvement even more than would a maximum passenger fare on the railroads of two cents a mile.” The state, he insisted, must “interfere on behalf of the really fittest.”

  Still, these thoughts qualified Croly as something of a “dove” on the issue of eugenics. Charles Van Hise, Roosevelt’s close adviser, was more emphatic. “He who thinks not of himself primarily, but of his race, and of its future, is the new patriot,” explained Van Hise, a founder of the American conservation movement and president of the University of Wisconsin during its glory days as the premier training ground for American progressives. Van Hise summarized the American progressive attitude toward eugenics well when he explained: “We know enough about agriculture so that the agricultural production of the country could be doubled if the knowledge were applied; we know enough about disease so that if the knowledge were utilized, infectious and contagious diseases would be substantially destroyed in the United States within a score of years; we know enough about eugenics so that if the knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation.”

  The key divide among progressives was not between eugenicists and non-eugenicists or between racists and non-racists. It was between advocates of “positive eugenics” and advocates of “negative eugenics,” between those who called themselves humanists and those who subscribed to theories of race suicide, between environmentalists and genetic determinists. The positive eugenicists argued for merely encouraging, cajoling, and subsidizing the fit to breed more and the unfit to breed less. The negative eugenicists operated along a spectrum that went from forced sterilization to imprisonment (at least during the reproductive years). Environmentalists stressed that improving the material conditions of the degenerate classes would improve their plight (many progressives were really Lamarckians when it came to human evolution). Race suicide theorists believed that whole lines and classes of people were beyond salvation.

  For a variety of reasons, those we would today call conservatives often opposed eugenic schemes. The lone dissenter in Buck v. Bell, for example, wasn’t the liberal justice Louis Brandeis or Harlan Fiske Stone but the “archconservative” Pierce Butler. The Catholic conservative G. K. Chesterton was subjected to relentless ridicule and scorn for his opposition to eugenics. In various writings, most notably Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized Society, Chesterton opposed what was held to be the sophisticated position by nearly all “thinking people” in Britain and the United States. Indeed, the foremost institution combating eugenics around the world was the Catholic Church. It was the Catholic influence in Italy—along with the fact that Italians were a genetically polyglot bunch—that made Italian Fascism less obsessed with eugenics than either the American progressives or the Nazis (though Mussolini did believe that over time Fascist government would have a positive eugenic effect on the Italians).

  Nonetheless, progressives did come up with a term for conservative opponents of eugenics. They called them social Darwinists. Progressives invented the term “social Darwinism” to describe anyone who opposed Sidney Webb’s notion that the state must aggressively “interfere” in the reproductive order of society. In the hothouse logic of the left, those who opposed forced sterilization of the “unfit” and the poor were the villains for letting a “state of nature” rule among the lower classes.

  Herbert Spencer, the supposed founder of social Darwinism, was singled out as the poster boy for all that was wrong in classical liberalism. Spencer was indeed a Darwinist—he coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”—but his interpretation of evolutionary theory reinforced his view that people should be left alone. In almost every sense, Spencer was a good—albeit classical—liberal: he championed charity, women’s suffrage, and civil liberties. But he was the incarnation of all that was backward, reactionary, and wrong according to the progressive worldview. not because he supported Hitlerian schemes of forced race hygiene but because he adamantly opposed them. To this day it is de rigueur among liberal intellectuals and historians to take potshots at Spencer as the philosophical well spring of racism, right-wing “greed,” and even the Holocaust.

  Thanks to some deeply flawed scholarship by the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter, nearly all of the so-called robber barons of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were dubbed social Darwinists, too, even though subsequent historians have demonstrated that Gilded Age industrialists were barely influenced by Darwinism, if at all. Darwinism was a fixation of intellectuals and academics. The so-called robber barons generally lacked formal education. To the extent they grounded their worldview in anything, it was in Christian ethics and the writings of Adam Smith. Moreover, they believed that capitalism was good for the poor. Yet selective quotations and sweeping generalizations—usually infused with Marxist clichés—rendered the robber barons ersatz fascists.

  A few historians have dealt with these conundrums by labeling the progressives “reform Darwinists.” Reform Darwinists were the only real Darwinians as we understand the term today. Almost all the leading progressive intellectuals interpreted Darwinian theory as a writ to “interfere” with human natural selection. Even progressives with no ostensible ties to eugenics worked closely with champions of the caus
e. There was simply no significant stigma against racist eugenics in progressive circles.

  Before we continue, it is important to dispel a misperception that may be building in some readers’ minds. While progressive eugenicists were often repugnantly racist, eugenics as a field was not necessarily so. Obviously, intermarriage with blacks would be greeted with horror by people already terrified by “Aryans” marrying Slavs or Italians. But W. E. B. DuBois shared many of the eugenic views held by white progressives. His “Talented Tenth” was itself a eugenically weighted term. He defined members of the Talented Tenth as “exceptional men” and the “best of the race.” He complained that “the negro has not been breeding for an object” and that he must begin to “train and breed for brains, for efficiency, for beauty.” Over his long career he time and again returned to his concern that the worst blacks were overbreeding while the best were underbreeding. Indeed, he supported Margaret Sanger’s “Negro Project,” which sought to sharply curtail reproduction among “inferior” stocks of the black population.

  Perhaps an even better indication of how little modern popular conceptions jibe with the historical reality during this period is the Ku Klux Klan. For decades the Klan has stood as the most obvious candidate for an American brand of fascism. That makes quite a bit of sense. The right-wing label, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as clean a fit. The Klan of the Progressive Era was not the same Klan that arose after the Civil War. Rather, it was a collection of loosely independent organizations spread across the United States. What united them, besides their name and absurd getups, was that they were all inspired by the film The Birth of a Nation. They were, in fact, a “creepy fan subculture” of the film. Founded the week of the film’s release in 1915. the second Klan was certainly racist, but not much more than the society in general. Of course, this is less a defense of the Klan than an indictment of the society that produced it.

  For years the conventional view among scholars and laymen alike was that the Klan was rural and fundamentalist. The truth is it was often quite cosmopolitan and modern, thriving in cities like New York and Chicago. In many communities the Klan focused on the reform of local Government and on maintaining social values. It was often the principal extralegal enforcer of Prohibition, the consummate progressive “reform.” “These Klansmen,” writes Jesse Walker in an illuminating survey of the latest scholarship, “were more likely to flog you for bootlegging or breaking your marriage vows than for being black or Jewish.”

  When modern liberals try to explain away the Klan membership of prominent Democrats—most frequently West Virginia senator Robert Byrd—they cough up a few clichés about how good liberals “evolved” from their southern racial “conservatism.” But the Klan of the 1920s was often seen as reformist and modern, and it had a close relationship with some progressive elements in the Democratic Party. The young Harry Truman as well as the future Supreme Court justice Hugo Black were members. In 1924, at the famous “Klanbake” Democratic convention, the KKK rallied around the future senator William McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of the treasury (and son-in-law), a key architect of Wilson’s war socialism, and a staunch Prohibitionist.

  Moreover, if the Klan was less racist than we’ve been led to believe, academia was staggeringly more so. Indeed, the modern institution of academic tenure was largely carved out by progressive academia’s solidarity with E. A. Ross, the author of the “race suicide” thesis. Simultaneously one of America’s leading sociologists, economists, and “raceologists,” Ross was the quintessential reform Darwinist. He first became attracted to Progressivism when he saw that one of his conservative professors was horrified by Henry George’s Progress and Poverty—a tract that inspired American progressives, British socialists, and German national socialists. Ross studied in Germany and then returned to the United States, where he finished his studies among the Germanophiles of Johns Hopkins and under the tutelage of Woodrow Wilson and Richard Ely.

  A great bear of a man, Ross was an omnipresent public intellectual, writing for all the right magazines and giving lectures at all the right schools. He served as a tutor on immigration issues to Teddy Roosevelt, who was kind enough to write the introduction to Ross’s 5//? and Society. He shared with Ely, Wilson, and others a conviction that social progress had to take into account the innate differences between the races. Ross also shared Wilson’s view, expressed in The State, that various races were at different stages of evolution. Africans and South Americans were still close to savages. Other races—mostly Asians—might be more “advanced” but had slid into evolutionary degeneration. Ross believed that America faced similar degeneration through immigration, intermarriage, and the refusal of the state to impose sweeping eugenic reforms. In 1914 he wrote: “Observe immigrants not as they come travel-wan up the gangplank, nor as they issue toil-begrimed from pit’s mouth or mill-gate, but in their gatherings, washed, combed, and in their Sunday best...[They] are hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality...[C]learly they belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These ox-like men are descendants of those who always stayed behind.”

  Such views didn’t stop Ross from getting a prominent appointment at Stanford—Stanford’s conservative grande dame and benefactor, Jane Lanthrop Stanford, however, disliked not only his politics and his activism but also his increasingly loud and crude denunciations of Chinese “coolies” She forced the president of the school, David Starr Jordan—himself an avid eugenicist—to fire Ross.

  The faculty erupted in outrage. Professors resigned. Progressive academics and organizations, led by Richard Ely’s American Economic Association, rallied to his cause. The New York Times and other prominent newspapers editorialized on Ross’s behalf. These efforts came to naught, and Ross left for the University of Nebraska (where he helped Roscoe Pound formulate the doctrine of “sociological jurisprudence”—a bedrock of modern liberalism’s “living constitution”) and eventually found a home at the University of Wisconsin working alongside Ely under the “race patriot” Charles Van Hise,

  It is telling that while we constantly hear about America’s racist past and our need to redeem ourselves via racial quotas, slavery reparations, and other overtures toward “historically oppressed groups,” it is rare indeed that anyone mentions the founders of American liberalism. Again, when liberals are the historical villains, the crime is laid at the feet of America itself. The crime is considered proof of America’s conservative past. When conservatives sin. the sin is conservatism’s alone. But never is liberalism itself to blame.

  Consider the infamous Tuskegee experiments, where poor black-men were allegedly infected with syphilis without their knowledge and then monitored for years. In the common telling, the episode is an example of southern racism and American backwardness. In some versions, black men were even deliberately infected with syphilis as part of some kind of embryonic genocidal program. In fact, the Tuskegee experiments were approved and supported by well-meaning health professionals who saw nothing wrong or racist with playing God. As the University of Chicago’s Richard Shweder writes, the “study emerged out of a liberal progressive public health movement concerned about the health and wellbeing of the African-American population.” If racism played a part, as it undoubtedly did, it was the racism of liberals, not conservatives. But that’s not how the story is told,

  I’m not saying that people who once called themselves progressives were racist and therefore those who call themselves progressives today are racist, too. Rather, the point is that the edifice of contemporary liberalism stands on a foundation of assumptions and ideas integral to the larger fascist moment. Contemporary liberals, who may be the kindest and most racially tolerant people in the world, nonetheless choose to live in a house of distinctly fascist architecture. Liberal ignorance of this fact renders this fascist foundation neither intangible nor irrelevant. Rather, it underscores the success of these ideas, precisely because they go unquestioned.

  The greatest
asset liberalism has in arguments about racism, sexism, and the role of government generally is the implicit assumption that liberalism’s intentions are better and more high-minded than conservatism’s. Liberals think with their hearts, conservatives with their heads, goes the cliché. But if you take liberalism’s history into account, it’s clear this is an unfair advantage, an intellectual stolen base. Liberals may be right or wrong about a given policy, but the assumption that they are automatically arguing from the more virtuous position is rubbish.

  What is today called liberalism stands, domestically, on three legs: support for the welfare state, abortion, and identity politics. Obviously, this is a crude formulation. Abortion, for example, could be lumped into identity politics, as feminism is one of the creeds extolling the iron cage of identity. Or one could say that “sexual liberty” is a better term than abortion. But I don’t think any fair-minded reader would dispute that these three categories nearly cover the vast bulk of the liberal agenda—or at least describe the core of liberal passions—today.

  In the remainder of this chapter. I propose to look at each area, starting with the least obvious—and perhaps least important—to see how the progressive urge to reengineer society from the bottom up manifests itself in these three pillars of liberalism today.

  THE WELFARE STATE

  What is the welfare state? The plain meaning is fairly obvious: a social safety net, a system by which the government can address economic inequalities, presumably for the betterment of the whole society, with special emphasis on the least fortunate. The term, and to a significant degree the concept, begins with Bismarck’s Prussia, Bismarck’s Wohlfahrtssfaaf included everything from guaranteed pensions and other forms of “social insurance” to a whole constellation of labor reforms. This “’state socialism.” as we’ve seen, was an enormous inspiration to progressives, socialists, and social democrats in Britain and America, and. of course, in Germany.