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

by Jonah Goldberg

  THE TOTALITARIAN TEMPTATION

  After graduation, Hillary was offered an internship by her hero Saul Alinsky—famed author of Rules for Radicals—about whom she wrote her thesis: “There Is Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.” In an unprecedented move, Wellesley sequestered the thesis in 1992, even refusing to divulge the title until the Clintons left the White House.

  Readers familiar with Alinsky and his times will understand what an enormous figure the “Godfather” of community activism was on the left. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Alinsky got his start as a criminologist, but in 1936, fed up with the failures of social policy, he committed himself to attacking the supposed root causes of criminality. He eventually became a labor organizer in his native Chicago, working in the real-life neighborhood in which Upton Sinclair’s Jungle was set. “It was here,” writes P. David Finks, “that Saul Alinsky would invent his famous ‘method’ of community organizing, borrowing tactics from the Catholic Church, Al Capone’s mobsters, University of Chicago sociologists and John L. Lewis’ union organizers.” His violent, confrontational rhetoric often sounded much like that heard from Horst Wessel or his Red Shirt adversaries in the streets of Berlin.

  Alinsky joined forces with the churches and the CIO—then chockablock with Stalinists and other communists—learning how to organize in the streets. In 1940 he founded the Industrial Areas Foundation, which pioneered the community activism movement. He became the mentor to countless community activists—most famously Cesar Chavez—laying the foundation for both Naderism and the SDS. He believed in exploiting middle-class mores to achieve his agenda, not flouting them as the long-haired hippies did. Indeed, Alinsky believed that working through friendly or vulnerable institutions in order to smash enemy redoubts was the essence of political organization. And he was, by universal consensus, an “organizational genius.” He worked closely with reformist and left-leaning clergy, who were for most of his career his chief patrons. Perhaps as a result, he mastered the art of unleashing preachers as the frontline activists in his mission of “rubbing raw the sores of discontent.”

  In many respects, Alinsky’s methods inspired the entire 1960s generation of New Left agitators (Barack Obama. for years a Chicago community organizer, was trained by Alinsky’s disciples). It’s worth noting, however, that Alinsky was no fan of the Great Society, calling it “a prize piece of political pornography” because it was simultaneously too timid and too generous to the “welfare industry.” Indeed, there was something deeply admirable about Alinsky’s contempt for both the statism of elite liberals and the radically chic New Leftists, who spent their days “spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport.”

  Still, there’s no disputing that vast swaths of his writings are indistinguishable from the fascist rhetoric of the 1920s and 1930s. His descriptions of the United States could have come from any street corner Brownshirt denouncing the corruption of the Weimar regime. His worldview is distinctly fascistic. Life is defined by war, contests of power, the imposition of will. Moreover. Alinsky shares with the fascists and pragmatists of yore a bedrock hostility to dogma. All he believes in are the desired ends of the movement, which he regards as the source of life’s meaning. “Change means movement. Movement means friction,” he writes. “Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.” But what comes through most is his unbridled love of power. Power is a good in its own right for Alinsky. Ours “is a world not of angels but of angles,” he proclaims in Rules for Radicals, “where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles.”

  Hillary turned down Alinsky’s offer in order to attend Yale Law School. He told her it was a huge mistake, but Hillary responded that only by marching through America’s elite institutions could she achieve real power and change the system from within. This was a typical rationalization of many upper-class college students in the 1960s, who prized their radical credentials but also looked askance at the idea of sacrificing their social advantages. It’s significant, however, that one of Hillary’s chief criticisms of Alinsky in her thesis was that he failed to build a national movement based on his ideas. But Hillary, more than most, never gave up the faith. She remained true to her radical principles. Thus at Yale—where she eventually met Bill Clinton—she quickly fell in with the leftist fringe.

  There is an almost literary synchronicity to the overlapping of narratives and ideas at Yale in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bill Clinton was taught constitutional law by Charles Reich, the “Level III consciousness” guru. Reich, in turn, had served as a partner to the famed New Deal lawyer and intellectual Thurman Arnold—a disciple of the Crolyite liberals of the New Republic—who championed a new “religion of government.” In the 1930s critics saw Arnold’s work as one of the linchpins of American-style fascism. He went on to co-found the law firm Arnold. Fortas & Porter.

  Hillary helped edit the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, which at the time was a thoroughly radical organ supporting the Black Panthers and publishing articles implicitly endorsing the murder of police. One article, “Jamestown Seventy,” suggested that radicals adopt a program of “political migration to a single state for the purpose of gaining political control and establishing a living laboratory for experiment.” An infamous Review cover depicted police as pigs, one with his head chopped off. The Panthers had become an issue on campus because the “chairman” of the Panthers, Bobby Seale. was put on trial in New Haven along with some fellow goons for the murder of one of their own. Hillary volunteered to help the Panthers’ legal team, even attending the trial to take notes to help with the defense. She did such a good job of organizing the student volunteers that she was offered a summer internship in the Berkeley, California, law offices of Robeit Treuhaft, one of Seale’s lawyers. Treuhaft was a lifelong member of the American Communist Party who had cut his teeth fighting for the Stalinist faction in the California labor movement.

  Hillary’s attraction to radical groups and figures such as the Black Panthers, Alinsky, and—according to some biographers—Yasir Arafat is perfectly consistent with liberalism’s historic weakness for men of action. Just as Herbert Croly could make allowances for Mussolini and countless others applauded Stalin’s “tough decisions,” the 1960s generation of liberals had an inherent weakness for men who “transcended” bourgeois morality and democracy in the name of social justice. This love of hard men—Castro, Che, Arafat—is clearly tied to the left’s obsession with the fascist values of authenticity and will.

  After law school, however. Hillary eschewed such radical authenticity in favor of pragmatism. She worked as a lawyer in Little Rock and as an activist within the confines of the liberal establishment, chairing the state-funded radical organ the Legal Services Corporation, as well as the nonprofit Children’s Defense Fund. Before that she’d been a Democratic staffer for the House Judiciary Committee. Her marriage to Bill Clinton, arguably the most relentlessly dissected union in American history, need not occupy much of our time.. Whatever their romantic feelings toward each other may have been or continue to be, reasonable people can agree that it was also a deeply political arrangement.

  The most revealing aspect of Clinton’s career prior to her arrival in Washington was her advocacy for children. Clinton wrote important articles, often denounced by critics as advocating the right of children to “divorce” their parents. She never quite says as much, though it seems undeniable that she was pointing down that road. But the child-divorce debate was always a side issue. What is more important, Hillary Clinton’s writings on children show a clear, un-apologetic, and principled desire to insert the state deep into family life—a goal that is in perfect accord with similar efforts by totalitarians of the past.

  This is hardly a view unique to myself or to t
he denizens of the American right. As the late Michael Kelly wrote in an influential profile of the then-new First Lady, she is the heir to “the politics of do-goodism, flowing directly from a powerful and continual stream that runs through American history from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Jane Addams to Carry Nation to Dorothy Day...[T]he world she wishes to restore...[is] a place of security and community and clear moral values.”

  The late Christopher Lasch came to a similar conclusion. Lasch, one of the most perceptive students of American social policy in the twentieth century, and no partisan right-winger, reviewed all of Clinton’s relevant writings for an article in the left-leaning journal Harper’s in 1992. The result is a sober (and sobering) discussion of Clinton’s worldview. Lasch dubs Clinton a modern “child saver,” a term critical historians apply to progressives eager to insert the God-state into the sphere of the family. While Clinton cavils that she wants the state to intervene only in “warranted cases,” her real aim, as she admits, is to set down a full and universal “theory that adequately explains the state’s appropriate role in child rearing.” To this end, she advocates the abolition of “minority status”—that is, the legal codification of what distinguishes a child from an adult. This would be a great progressive leap forward in line with—Clinton’s words—”the abolition of slaver}’ and the emancipation of married women.” Finally, “children, like other persons.” would be presumed “capable of exercising rights and assuming responsibilities until it is proven otherwise.”

  Tellingly, Clinton focuses on Wisconsin v. Yoder, a 1972 Supreme Court case that permitted three Amish families to keep their kids out of high school, defying mandatory attendance laws. Justice William O. Douglas dissented, noting that nobody ever asked the kids what they wanted. The “children should be entitled to be heard.” he declared. Clinton takes Douglas’s dissent and builds an argument claiming children should be “masters of their own destiny.” Their voices should be weighted more heavily than the views of parents in the eyes of courts. Observing that in order to become “a pianist or an astronaut or an oceanographer” a child must “break from the Amish tradition,” she concludes that a child “harnessed to the Amish way of life” would likely lead a “stunted and deformed” life. Lasch offers a devastating conclusion: “She condones the state’s assumption of parental responsibilities...because she is opposed to the principle of parental authority in any form.” Clinton’s writings “leave the unmistakable impression that it is the family that holds children back, the state that sets them free.” In Clinton’s eyes, Lasch concluded, “the movement for children’s rights...amounts to another stage in the long struggle against patriarchy.”

  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. Hitler—who understood as well as any the importance of winning the hearts and minds of youth—once remarked, “When an opponent says ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already...You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community.’ ” Woodrow Wilson candidly observed that the primary mission of the educator was to make children as unlike their parents as possible. Charlotte Perkins Gilman stated it more starkly. “There is no more brilliant hope on earth to-day.” the feminist icon proclaimed, “than this new thought about the child...the recognition of ‘the child,’ children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal [that is, parental] ownership—the unchecked tyranny...of the private home.”

  Progressive education has two parents, Prussia and John Dewey. The kindergarten was transplanted into the United States from Prussia in the nineteenth century because American reformers were so enamored of the order and patriotic indoctrination young children received outside the home (the better to weed out the un-American traits of immigrants). One of the core tenets of the early kindergartens was the dogma that “the government is the true parent of the children, the state is sovereign over the family.” The progressive followers of John Dewey expanded this program to make public schools incubators of a national religion. They discarded the militaristic rigidity of the Prussian model, but retained the aim of indoctrinating children. The methods were informal, couched in the sincere desire to make learning “fun,” “relevant,” and “empowering.” The self-esteem obsession that saturates our schools today harks back to the Deweyan reforms from before World War II. But beneath the individualist rhetoric lies a mission for democratic social justice, a mission Dewey himself defined as a religion. For other progressives, capturing children in schools was part of the larger effort to break the backbone of the nuclear family, the institution most resistant to political indoctrination.

  National Socialist educators had a similar mission in mind. And as odd as it might seem, they also discarded the Prussian discipline of the past and embraced self-esteem and empowerment in the name of social justice. In the early days of the Third Reich, grade-schoolers burned their multicolored caps in a protest against class distinctions. Parents complained, “We no longer have rights over our children.” According to the historian Michael Burleish. “Their children became strangers, contemptuous of monarchy or religion, and perpetually barking and shouting like pint-sized Prussian sergeant-majors...Denunciation of parents by children was encouraged, not least by schoolteachers who set essays entitled ‘What does your family talk about at home?’ ”

  Now, the liberal project Hillary Clinton represents is in no way a Nazi project. The last thing she would want is to promote ethnic nationalism. anti-Semitism, or aggressive wars of conquest. But it must be kept in mind that while these things were of enormous importance to Hitler and his ideologues, they were in an important sense secondary to the underlying mission and appeal of Nazism, which was to create a new politics and a new nation committed to social justice, radical egalitarianism (albeit for “true Germans”), and the destruction of the traditions of the old order. So while there are light-years of distance between the programs of liberals and those of Nazis or Italian Fascists or even the nationalist progressives of yore, the underlying impulse, the totalitarian temptation, is present in both.

  The Chinese Communists under Mao pursued the Chinese way, the Russians under Stalin followed their own version of communism in one state. But we are still comfortable observing that they were both communist nations. Hitler wanted to wipe out the Jews; Mussolini wanted no such thing. And yet we are comfortable calling them both fascists. Liberal fascists don’t want to mimic generic fascists or communists in myriad ways, but they share a sweeping vision of social justice and community and the need for the state to realize that vision. In short, collectivists of all stripes share the same totalitarian temptation to create a politics of meaning; what differs between them—and this is the most crucial difference of all—is how they act upon that temptation.

  THE FIRST LADY OF LIBERAL FASCISM

  When Bill Clinton was elected president, his wife arrived in Washington as arguably the most powerful unelected—and un-appointed—social reformer since Eleanor Roosevelt. She admitted to the Washington Post that she’d always had a “burning desire” to “make the world...better for everybody.” She had had this desire ever since the days when Don Jones showed her that the poor and oppressed didn’t have it as good as she did. And for Hillary, healing this social discord required power. “My sense of Hillary is that she realizes absolutely the truth of the human condition, which is that you cannot depend on the basic nature of man to be good and you cannot depend entirely on moral suasion to make it good,” Jones told Michael Kelly. “You have to use power. And there is nothing wrong with wielding power in the pursuit of policies that will add to the human good. I think Hillary knows this. She is very much the sort of Christian who understands that the use of po
wer to achieve social good is legitimate.” The echoes of Alinsky are obvious. Less obvious are the questions of who determines what the social good should be and by what means it should be achieved.

  But Hillary didn’t frame her mission in overtly Christian terms save, perhaps, when speaking to avowedly Christian audiences. Instead, she fashioned the quintessential expression of liberal fascism in modern times: “the politics of meaning.”

  Now, when I say that the politics of meaning, and Hillary Clinton’s ideas in general, are fascist, I must again be clear that they are not evil. Nor do they sound fascist to modern ears—indeed, that is the whole point. Today we equate fascism with militaristic language and racism, but war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided a great many of the metaphors for political discourse and for everyday conversation in general. So many of these words and phrases are part of the vernacular today that we don’t even realize their roots in battle and blood (”entrenched positions,” “storm fronts,” “hot shot,” and so on). Liberal fascism isn’t militaristic, but the same passions that prompted progressives to talk in terms of “industrial armies” and “going over the top” for the Blue Eagle lurk beneath today’s liberal rhetoric. War was seen as a communal, unifying experience that focused the public’s mind on the common good and whose passions and discipline could be harnessed to socially “useful” ends. Today the modern left is in many ways openly antiwar and avowedly pacifist. But liberals still yearn nostalgically for the unifying experiences of the labor and civil rights movements. The language is obviously nicer, and the intent is objectively “nicer,” too. But at the most substantive level, the politics of meaning stands on Mussolini’s shoulders.