LIBERAL FASCISM: The Secret History of the AMERICAN LEFT from MUSSOLINI to the POLITICS OF MEANING

by Jonah Goldberg

  The German and American New Deals may have been merely whatever Hitler and FDR felt they could get away with. But therein lies a common principle: the state should be allowed to get away with anything, so long as it is for “good reasons.” This is the common principle among fascism, Nazism, Progressivism, and what we today call liberalism. It represents the triumph of Pragmatism in politics in that it recognizes no dogmatic boundaries to the scope of government power. The leader and his anointed cadres are decision makers above and beyond political or democratic imperatives. They invoke with divine reverence “science” and the laws of economics the way temple priests once read the entrails of goats, but because they have blinded themselves to their own leaps of faith, they cannot see that morals and values cannot be derived from science. Morals and values are determined by the priests, whether they wear black robes or white lab smocks.

  AN “EXPERIMENTAL” AGE

  Ever since FDR’s presidency—when “liberalism” replaced “progressivism” as the preferred label for center-left political ideas and activism—liberals have had trouble articulating what liberalism is, beyond the conviction that the federal government should use its power to do nice things wherever and whenever it can. Herbert Croly said it well when he defended the New Republic against critics who said the magazine’s qualified support for Mussolini violated its liberal principles: “If there are any abstract liberal principles, we do not know how to formulate them. Nor if they are formulated by others do we recognize their authority. Liberalism, as we understand it, is an activity.” In other words, liberalism is what liberals do or decide is worth doing, period. Faith without deeds is dead, according to the Bible. Pragmatic liberals internalized this while protesting they have no faith. This was at the core of what the German historian Peter Vogt called the progressives’ “elective affinity” for fascism. Or as John Patrick Diggins says, “Fascism appealed, first of all. to the pragmatic ethos of experimentation.”

  As president, Roosevelt bragged that he was married to no preconceived notions. He measured an idea’s worth by the results it achieved. “Take a method and try it.” he famously declared at Oglethorpe University in May 1932. “If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” The only coherent policy Roosevelt subscribed to was “bold, persistent experimentation.” Conservatives were cast by FDR and his allies as opponents of all change, selfish slaves to the status quo. But stasis is not the American conservative position. Rather, conservatives believe that change for change’s sake is folly. What kind of change? At what cost? For the liberals and progressives, everything was expendable, from tradition to individualism to “outdated” conceptions of freedom. These were all tired dogmas to be burned on the altars of the new age.

  When FDR was elected president in 1932, three events were viewed as admirable experiments: the Bolshevik Revolution, the Fascist takeover in Italy, and the American “experiment” in war socialism under Wilson. By 1932 admiration for the Russian “social experiment” had become a definitive component of American liberalism—in much the same way that admiration for Prussian top-down socialism had been two decades earlier. Simply, the Soviet Union was the future, and “it worked.”

  Intermingled in these encomiums to what Lincoln Steffens called the “Russian-Italian method”—signifying that, as far as he was concerned, Bolshevism and Fascism were not opposites but kindred movements—were lusty expressions of nostalgia for the short-lived American “experiment” with war socialism under Woodrow Wilson. “We planned in war!” was the omnipresent refrain from progressives eager to re-create the kind of economic and social control they had under Wilson. The Italians and the Russians were beating America at its own game, by continuing their experiments in war socialism while America cut short its project, choosing instead to wallow in the selfish crapulence of the Roaring Twenties. In 1927 Stuart Chase said it would take five years to see if the “courageous and unprecedented experiment” in the Soviet Union was “destined to be a landmark for economic guidance” of the whole world. Half a decade later he concluded that the evidence was in: Russia was the new gold standard in economic and social policy. So “why,” he asked in his 1932 book, ,4 New Deal, “should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?”

  Chase’s comment is indicative of an important aspect of the progressive mind-set. Anybody who has ever met a student activist, a muckraking journalist, or a reformist politician will notice the important role that boredom and impatience play in the impulse to “remake the world.” One can easily see how boredom—sheer, unrelenting ennui with the status quo—served as the oxygen for the fire of progressivism because tedium is the tinder for the flames of mischievousness. In much the same way that Romanticism laid many of the intellectual predicates for Nazism, the impatience and disaffection of progressives during the 1920s drove them to see the world as clay to be sculpted by human will. Sickened by what they saw as the spiritual languor of the age, members of the avant-garde convinced themselves that the status quo could be easily ripped down like an aging curtain and just as easily replaced with a vibrant new tapestry’. This conviction often slid of its own logic into anarchism and radicalism, related world views which assumed that anything would be better than what we have now.

  A deep aversion to boredom and a consequent, indiscriminate love for novelty among the intellectual classes translated into a routinized iconoclasm and a thoroughgoing contempt for democracy, traditional morality, the masses, and the bourgeoisie, and a love for “action, action, action!” that still plagues the left today. (How much of the practiced radicalism of the contemporary left is driven by the childish pranksterism they call being subversive?) Many of George Bernard Shaw’s bons mots seem like shots in the dark against the monster of boredom—which could only be conquered by a Nietzschean superman. At one time or another Shaw idolized Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini as the world’s great “progressive” leaders because they “did things,” unlike the leaders of those “putrefying corpses” called parliamentary democracies. In like terms, Gertrude Stein praised Huey Long by declaring that he was “not boring.”

  Or consider H. G. Wells. More than any other figure, his literary escapism and faith in science as the salvation of man were seen as the preeminent antidotes to the disease of Western malaise. In the summer of 1932, Wells delivered a major speech at Oxford University to Britain’s Young Liberals organization, in which he called for a “ ‘Phoenix Rebirth’ of Liberalism” under the banner of “Liberal Fascism.” Fabian socialism had failed, he explained, because it hadn’t grasped the need for a truly “revolutionary” effort aimed at the total transformation of society. His fellow Socialists understood the need for socialism, but they were just too nice about it. Their advocacy of piecemeal “Gas, Water and School-Board socialization” was simply too boring. Conventional democratic governments, meanwhile, were decadent, feeble, and dull. If the liberals in the 1930s were going to succeed where the Fabians had failed—abolishing private property, achieving a fully planned economy, violently crushing the forces of reaction—they’d have to learn that lesson.

  Wells confessed that he’d spent some thirty years—since the dawn of the Progressive Era—reworking the idea of liberal fascism. “I have never been able to escape altogether from its relentless logic,” he explained. “We have seen the Fascist! in Italy and a number of clumsy imitations elsewhere, and we have seen the Russian Communist Party coming into existence to reinforce this idea.” And now he was done waiting. “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.”

  “And do not let me leave you in the slightest doubt as to the scope and ambition of what I am putting before you,” he continued:

  These new organizations are not merely organizations for the spread of defined opinions...the days of that sort of amateurism are over—they are organizations to replace the dilatory indecisiveness of [democracy]. The world is sick of parliamentary politics...The Fascist Party, to the best of its ability, is Italy now. The Commu
nist Party, to the best of its ability, is Russia. Obviously the Fascists of Liberalism must carry out a parallel ambition on a still vaster scale...They must begin as a disciplined sect, but they must end as the sustaining organization of a reconstituted mankind.

  Wells’s fiction was so thinly veiled in its praise for fascism that the attentive reader can only squirm. In The War in the Air; German airships liquidate New York City’s “black and sinister polyglot population.” In The Shape of Things to Come, veterans of a great world war—mostly airmen and technicians—in black shirts and uniforms fight to impose one-world government on the beaten and undisciplined masses. In Wells’s far-flung future, a historian looks back on the twentieth century and finds that the roots of the new, enlightened “Air Dictatorship” lay in Mussolini’s Fascism—a “bad good thing,” the historian calls it—as well as Nazism and Soviet Communism. In 1927 Wells couldn’t help but notice “the good there is in these Fascists. There is something brave and well-meaning about them.” By 1941 no less a figure than George Orwell couldn’t help but conclude, “Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany.”

  Wells was an enormous fan of FDR’s, and the two met often at the White House, particularly during 1934. Wells pronounced Roosevelt “the most effective transmitting instrument possible for the coming of the new world order.” In 1935 and 1936 he briefly switched to Huey Long’s and Father Coughlin’s more exciting brand of fascism.

  (He described the bayou dictator as “a Winston Churchill who has never been at Harrow”) By 1939, however, he was again firmly back in the Roosevelt camp, seeing FDR’s brand of “personal government” as indispensable.

  Wells’s vision neatly captures the sense of excitement that infused the Western left in the 1930s. It should be no surprise that an avant-garde of self-described supermen would welcome an age where supermen would run the world. To be sure, these were on the whole dark and pessimistic times. But the spirit of “the worse the better” served as a wind behind liberals eager to remake the world, to end the days of drift and inaugurate the era of progressive mastery.

  STEALING FASCIST THUNDER

  Herbert Hoover won the presidential contest of 1928 in no small part on the strength of the international craze for economic planning and collectivization. He was a self-made millionaire, but his chief appeal was his experience as an engineer. In the 1920s and 1930s it was widely believed that engineering was the highest calling, and it was hoped that engineers could clear political mountains the same way they moved real ones.

  Hoover failed to deliver as the Great Engineer, ironically because he gave the people too much of what they wanted. Indeed, many economic historians concede that the New Deal was, in significant respects, an accelerated continuation of Hoover’s policies rather than a sharp break from them. The lines are even blurrier when one notes that FDR went into office as a budget balancer who cut government pay. Of course, the New Deal was an even greater failure when it came to curing the Great Depression—but Roosevelt had something going for him that Hoover did not: an appreciation of the fascist moment.

  Just as progressivism constituted a definite international moment during the second decade of the twentieth century, so in the 1930s the Western world was riding through a storm of collectivist sentiments, ideas, and trends. In Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, and Finland, quasi-fascist parties received their highest share of the votes. Until 1934 it seemed possible that Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists (who, like Mussolini, always considered himself a man of the left), might occupy 10 Downing Street. Meanwhile, in the United States, national socialists or populist progressives such as Huey Long and Father Coughlin were hugely popular, and they, more than any other group, moved the political center of gravity in America to the left.

  This is as good a place as any to tackle the enduring myth that Long and Coughlin were conservatives. It is a bedrock dogma of all enlightened liberals that Father Charles Coughlin was an execrable right-winger (Long is a more complicated case, but whenever his legacy is portrayed negatively, he is characterized as right-wing; whenever he is a friend of the people, he’s a left-winger). Again and again, Coughlin is referred to as “the right-wing Radio Priest” whom supposedly insightful essayists describe as the ideological grandfather of Rush Limbaugh, Pal Buchanan, Ann Coulter, and other putative extremists. But Coughlin was in no meaningful way a conservative or even a right-winger. He was a man of the left in nearly all significant respects.

  Born in 1891 in Hamilton, Ontario, Coughlin was ordained as a priest in 1916. He taught at Catholic schools in Canada for seven years, and then moved to Michigan. He eventually found a spot as a parish priest in the town of Royal Oak, a suburb of Detroit. He named the church the Shrine of the Little Flower after Saint Therese. Coughlin’s first taste of publicity came when he battled the local Ku Klux Klan, which was at the time harassing Catholics, many of them immigrants. He talked a local radio station into permitting him to deliver sermons over the air. He was a success almost from the outset.

  From 1926 until 1929 Coughlin confined himself almost entirely to religious topics, denunciations of the Klan, sermons for children, and diatribes against Prohibition—all for an audience that didn’t extend very far outside the Detroit area. His big breakthrough came with the stock market collapse, when he took up populist economics. He shrewdly tapped into popular anxiety and economic discontent, and his broadcasts were picked up by more and more stations as a result. In 1930 he signed a deal with CBS to deliver six months of sermons on sixteen stations across the country on his Golden Hour of the Little Flower

  Almost instantly Coughlin became the most successful political commentator of the fledgling mass-media age. With over forty million listeners and a reported million letters a week, he became one of the most powerful voices in American politics.

  His first victim was that ostensible conservative, Herbert Hoover. In October 1931, in a fiery speech against laissez-faire economics, Coughlin declared that America’s problems couldn’t be solved “by waiting for things to adjust themselves and by eating the airy platitudes of those hundreds of so-called leaders who have been busy assuring us that the bottom has been reached and that prosperity and justice and charity are waiting ‘just around the corner.’ ” His favorite villains were “international bankers” and their ilk. Donations and letters poured in.

  In November, denouncing Hoover’s belief that economic relief was a local matter, Coughlin made an impassioned case for government activism at the national level. He railed against a federal government that could help the starving of Belgium and even pigs in Arkansas but wouldn’t feed Americans because of its antagonism to welfare. As the presidential election loomed, Coughlin threw all his weight behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The left-wing theocrat swore that the New Deal was “Christ’s Deal” and that the choice Americans faced was “Roosevelt or Ruin.” Meanwhile, he wrote the Democratic candidate, Roosevelt, grotesquely sycophantic letters explaining that he would change his own positions if that’s what the campaign needed.

  FDR didn’t like Coughlin much, but, true to form, he was glad to let the priest think he did. When FDR won, thanks in part to a successful strategy of going after urban Catholic voters, Coughlin concluded that he had been instrumental in getting him elected. When FDR invited the Radio Priest to attend the inauguration, Coughlin assumed that the president-elect saw things the same way. Over time, he became increasingly convinced that he was an official White House spokesman, often creating serious headaches for the White House even as he celebrated this “Protestant President who has more courage than 90 per cent of the Catholic priests in the country” “Capitalism is doomed and is not worth trying to save,” Coughlin pronounced. At other times he advocated “state capitalism”—a phrase rich in both fascist and Marxist associations.

  Indeed. Coughlirfs economic populism usefully illustrates how ideological categories from the 1930s have been systematically misapplied ever since. As me
ntioned before. Richard Pipes described Bolshevism and Fascism as twinned heresies of Marxism. Both sought to impose socialism of one sort or another, erase class differences, and repudiate the decadent democratic-capitalist systems of the West. In a sense, Pipes’s description doesn’t go far enough. While Fascism and Bolshevism were surely heresies of Marxism, virtually all collectivist visions at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries were heresies of Marxism in the sense that Marxism itself was heretical. All of these isms, as the philosopher Eric Voegelin argued, were premised on the idea that men could create Utopias through the rearrangement of economic forces and political will. Marxism, or really Leninism, was the most influential and powerful of these heresies and came to define the left. But just as Leninism was a kind of applied Marxism, so. too, was Fascism (as well as technocracy, Fabian socialism, corporatism, war socialism, German social democracy, and so on). Collectivism was the “wave of the future,” according to the title and argument of a book by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and it would be known by different names in different places. The fascist moment that gave birth to the “Russian-Italian method” was in reality a religious awakening in which Christianity was to be either sloughed off and replaced or “updated” by the new progressive faith in man’s ability to perfect the world.

  From the dawn of the Progressive Era through the 1930s, the intellectual and ideological landscape was fractured within this larger camp. The fight between left and right was for the most part between left-wing and right-wing socialists. But virtually all camps subscribed to some hybridized version of Marxism, some bastardization of the Rousseauian dream of a society governed by a general will. It was not until the late 1940s, with the revival of classical liberalism led by Friedrich Hayek, that collectivism of all stripes was once again fought from a right that did not share the core assumptions of the left. What is aggravating is that vestigial carbuncles like Coughlin are still counted as figures of the right—because of their anti-Semitism or opposition to FDR. or because they are simply too embarrassing to the left—even though on the fundamental philosophical and political questions Coughlinites were part of the liberal-progressive coalition.