One way to see how FDR embraced Nazi policies is to consider the distinctive fascist approach to economic policy followed by Mussolini as well as Hitler. The fascists were socialists but not in the Marxist way. Their national socialism did not involve nationalization of industry or worker control of various industries. Rather, it involved government control of the major sectors of the private economy. Fascism is state-directed capitalism.
This became FDR’s approach, and subsequent generations of progressive Democrats have made it their own. As we will see, the New Deal’s signature initiative, the National Recovery Act, was explicitly modeled on fascism and administered by an FDR man who was a devotee of Mussolini. FDR’s closest advisers like Rexford Tugwell openly praised fascism, which they recognized as leftist and which they considered more progressive than the New Deal.
Fascism’s influence on the New Deal was recognized by contemporaries such as Herbert Hoover, who warned, “If we continue down this New Deal Road, ours can become some sort of Fascist government.”17 Reagan too, in the quotation that opens this chapter, knew from his youth the close nexus between fascism and American progressivism. Imagine what Hoover and Reagan would have said had they lived to see how much these fascist roots have blossomed among Democrats in our own time.
Case in point: Obamacare. Already I can envision the progressive eruption. “So what precisely is fascist about Obamacare?” Look at the way that Obama greatly increased government control not only over healthcare—every hospital, every doctor, every health insurance company—but also over the financial sector—every bank, every investment house—and increasingly over the energy, automobile and education sectors as well. Obama didn’t nationalize these industries in the typical socialist mode, nor did he give workers control over the means of production, as Marx advocated.
Rather, he extended government control over these major sectors of the economy, giving him the power in 2009 to fire Rick Wagoner, the CEO of General Motors, or to direct health insurance companies on whom to cover and on what terms. Obama blithely went down this road—it never occurred to him to go down any other road—and whether he knew it or not, he used the fascist model of state-directed capitalism that has come down to him and to the Democratic Party from FDR.
FDR got some other big things from the Nazis—the politics of class hatred and enforced cultural conformity—and I’ll get to them. But I also want to highlight that there is one big thing FDR did not share with Hitler and Mussolini. They were dictators, and he was not. Admittedly FDR had dictatorial instincts. Some leading progressives like Walter Lippmann in complete seriousness urged FDR to assume dictatorial powers. To his credit, FDR declined, but at times he moved in a dictatorial direction, as when he tried to stack the Supreme Court and thus subvert the institution of an independent judiciary.
But in general FDR remained the elected leader of a constitutional democracy. This meant that, unlike Mussolini and Hitler, FDR had to build a political coalition to get himself reelected. He had to build Democratic constituencies for his fascist agenda, which meant he had to invent a peculiarly American brand of fascism. He did this by abandoning the old Van Buren strategy of mobilizing urban plantations, each run by a big-city boss, and replacing this decentralized Tammany model with a new model of a single national plantation with the White House as the Big House and the president as Massa.
This FDR model has proven both politically successful and extremely attractive to progressive seekers of power. Here, after all, is a chance to be Massa, not of a single plantation, as in the days of old, but of an American plantation. Who said that exploitation can’t be fun? LBJ, Bill Clinton and Obama all adopted FDR’s model in enthusiastic succession. And how each of them has enjoyed being Massa, including Obama, the first African American inhabitant of the Democratic Big House.
FDR saw himself as a kind of fascist superhero, not in the Hitler mode but in the Mussolini mode. But even before the end of World War II, even prior to U.S. troops entering the concentration camps, FDR knew how Americans had come to view fascism and Nazism and that he had to bury his past associations with both. Fascism had become politically radioactive. So FDR himself began the project that progressives have continued ever since, one of burying and entombing their own idolization of the fascist project.
At the same time, progressives began to redefine fascism and Nazism in such a way that they could project these evils onto the right, so that future generations would be bamboozled into thinking that the Republicans, not the Democrats, the conservatives, not the progressives, were in bed with Mussolini and Hitler in the critical decades leading up to global war and Holocaust. The big lie about race thus expands to incorporate a big lie about fascism and Nazism.
HOW THE NAZIS VIEWED FDR
Very few people today, either on the left or on the right, seem to know precisely what fascism means. We can see this from the examples I cited earlier of how the progressive left routinely portrays Trump as a fascist and Republicans who support him as a kind of neo-Nazi party. Trump is said to be a fascist because he is an authoritarian, an ultra-nationalist and a racist who derides Mexicans and Muslims and seeks to keep them out of this country. Doesn’t Trump say he wants to “make America great again” in precisely the same tone that Hitler promised to make Germany great again?
Actually, no. As I showed in The Big Lie, fascists aren’t merely authoritarians. We’ve seen dictators around the world for more than a century, from Idi Amin to Ferdinand Marcos to Pol Pot; obviously these rulers were not all fascists. Moreover, Trump is not an authoritarian. If he were, would he permit himself to be flayed across all platforms in every form of media, from the daily news to the commentators to the late-night comedians? Mussolini and Hitler would have dispatched their goons and shut those people down overnight.
Trump’s alleged racism arises out of his views on immigration. I mentioned earlier how Trump’s distinguishing line is not a racial one; rather, it is between legal and illegal immigrants. Admittedly, Trump has said he wants to change immigration laws to restrict immigrants who come merely through “chain migration” via the so-called family unification provision. Trump wants to admit more productive immigrants, but he includes in this definition capable Indian engineers and software guys.
In any other country Trump’s proposal would be unremarkable. Most countries that take immigrants do so on the basis of national self-interest. If Canada and Australia need more doctors and nurses, they open their doors to more doctors and nurses. They understand that, even under the liberal theory of the social contract, there is no “right to immigrate”; immigration is a pact between those who want to move to another country and the people of that country who want to have them. Whatever you think of Trump’s view on immigration, it is not racist.
Trump’s nationalism is nothing more than traditional American patriotism, surrounded by the familiar symbols of the flag, the anthem and soldiers’ graves. It should be emphasized that nationalism is not a distinguishing feature of fascism or Nazism. To take a few examples, Gandhi was a nationalist, as was Mandela. Other anticolonial leaders were, to a man, nationalists. Winston Churchill was a nationalist, as was de Gaulle. The American founders were nationalists, and so was Lincoln. It makes no sense to call all these people fascist.
Moreover, Mussolini and Hitler were not nationalists in the traditional or Trumpian sense. Mussolini once reviled the Italian flag as a “rag” to be “planted on a dung hill.” Traditional patriotism, Mussolini wrote, was a scheme for the capitalist class—the bourgeoisie—to win the loyalty of the people and protect its class privileges.18 Mussolini resolved to “remake” Italy much as Obama in 2008 resolved to remake America. Mussolini’s allegiance was never to the nation in general but only to a fascist conception of the nation.
Hitler too emphasized he was not a patriot, because patriotism, as he understood it, involved affirming the ideas, institutions and rituals of an existing so
ciety. Like Mussolini, Hitler sought to overthrow that society and replace it with something entirely new. His loyalty was neither to traditional Wilhelmine Germany nor to Weimar Germany, both of which he viewed as decadent. Hitler’s dedication was only to his own futuristic ideal of what he termed the Volkish or fascist state.
Perhaps the strongest evidence for Trump’s fascism and neo-Nazism is that self-styled fascists or neo-Nazis today have been seen shouting Trump slogans and wearing Trump hats. I examine this phenomenon in a later chapter. But here I want to focus not on neo-Nazis but on real Nazis. A neo-Nazi, after all, is a Nazi wannabe. Hitler admirers circa 2018 are not the same as the people who actually served Hitler and administered the fascist state with all its attendant horrors. Whom did those people—including the fascist leaders Hitler and Mussolini themselves—support on this side of the Atlantic?
Mussolini, it turns out, was an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt. Historian Stanley Payne writes in A Short History of Fascism that initially Mussolini thought better of FDR than of Hitler. Mussolini condescended toward Hitler at their first meetings and only changed his view after Hitler’s successful conquests. But he was positively disposed to FDR from the outset “and the Duce and Roosevelt established personal contact even before Roosevelt was inaugurated.”19
Shortly after FDR unveiled the early programs of the New Deal, Mussolini reviewed his book Looking Forward in an Italian magazine. Mussolini concluded that FDR’s policies and outlook were “reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people.” Adopting a ponderous tone, Mussolini wrote, “The question is often asked in America and in Europe just how much Fascism the American president’s program contains.”
Mussolini’s answer: a lot. Fascism, Mussolini said, “is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.” Terming the New Deal “boldly interventionist,” Mussolini identified as its main goal replacing America’s free-market economy with an economy controlled and regulated by the centralized state. FDR, Mussolini concluded, was moving his country in the direction of national socialism, and “without question the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.”20
Around the same time, the official Nazi newspaper Volkischer Beobachter provided its views of America’s new president. “We too as German National Socialists are looking toward America.” FDR, the Nazi publication said, was replacing “the uninhibited frenzy of market speculation” of the 1920s with the “adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies.” Of his policies the paper concluded, “We fear only the possibility that they might fail.”
On another occasion, the Volkischer Beobachter examined FDR’s leadership style, which it found comparable to Hitler’s own dictatorial style or Fuhrerprinzip. Returning to FDR’s New Deal policies, the Nazi paper noted that “if not always in the same words,” FDR too “demands that collective good be put before individual self-interest. Many passages in his book could have been written by a National Socialist. In any case, one can assume he feels considerable affinity with the National Socialist Philosophy.”21
I get these quotations from historian John Patrick Diggins’ Mussolini and Fascism, published in 1972 and virtually unknown today, and also from the German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s equally obscure study Three New Deals. Not a single prominent FDR biography or progressive history of the period gives us the scoop on fascist and Nazi enthusiasm for FDR. Even Ira Katznelson’s admirable recent study Fear Itself—the most honest progressive treatment of the links between the New Deal and fascism—artfully leaves out the most incriminating quotations.
So the whole subject of fascism and Nazism is surrounded today by a thick vapor of vagueness and obfuscation. Young progressives go around screaming about fascism and Nazism even though they have no idea what fascists and Nazis actually believed. We cannot fault them; they cannot find this information in their standard textbooks or in the general media. This darkness—this mirror of concealment—is a product of design, necessary to advance the progressive lie that fascism and Nazism are phenomena of the right. Let us therefore turn on the light and look behind the mirror.
FASCISM AT ITS CORE
What is fascism? In his April 29, 1938, message to Congress, FDR warned that “unhappy events abroad” had taught Americans a simple truth. “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”22
We see here how FDR himself is one of the earliest inventors of the progressive big lie about fascism. Fascism is not about the growth of private power; it is about the unchecked growth of government power. Fascism is not about the private sector taking over the government; it is about the government taking over the private sector. FDR redefines fascism to make it look like he is saving American democracy from a fascist takeover by big business. He inverts the meaning of fascism to portray his Republican opponents as fascists while presenting himself as, well, the antifascist.
FDR’s lies live on in the present. In May 2017 the New York Times published an op-ed by Henry Scott Wallace—grandson of FDR’s second vice president, Henry Wallace—defining fascism as “a merger of state and corporate power.” Wallace portrayed his grandfather as a champion of the people against the rise of fascist tendencies in America, drawing a straight line from the fascist Republicans of the 1930s to Trump and the GOP today.23
Nowhere does Wallace point out that his grandfather was a socialist and that Hitler was the head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In line with contemporary progressives, Wallace is desperate to get the socialism out of national socialism. Leftists regularly tell me on social media, “Hitler wasn’t a socialist. The Nazis just said that to get elected. They didn’t enact any socialist policies. Don’t you know Hitler persecuted the socialists and fought against the Soviet Union in World War II?”
Yes, I know. I also know that fascism in its essence is the centralization of power in the national state. “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, and nothing against the state.” That was the fascist slogan, drafted by Giovanni Gentile, the leading philosopher of fascism, and echoed by Mussolini, who created the first fascist regime in the world. Gentile adds, “The authority of the state is not subject to negotiation. It is entirely unconditioned. Morality and religion must be subordinated to the laws of the state.”24
“For fascism,” the fascist theoretician Alfredo Rocco wrote, “society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.”25 As this quotation suggests, the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s described the state as a living organism, with each individual being a cell within the organism. Obviously the cell had no value or identity or rights outside the organism; its value was solely what it contributed to the larger whole.
The second distinguishing feature of fascism was its forward-looking or progressive element. Progressives routinely portray fascism as “reactionary” in order to make it seem right-wing. But even the progressive historian Roger Griffin rejects this as a mischaracterization. “Fascism is anti-conservative,” he writes. It had a “revolutionary, forward-looking thrust . . . It thus represents an alternative modernism rather than a rejection of it.”26
One of the groups that strongly supported and eventually merged with the fascists was the Italian Futurists. In Germany too, self-described progressives and futurists embraced the revolutionary promise of fascism. Historians like A. James Gregor point out that fascists and communists recruited from the same sorts of people, malcontents who hated their society and sought to create another one from the ground up. Fascists, like communists, sought to create a new man and a new society freed from the shackles of traditional mores, relig
ion and morality.
Now ask yourself: does this sound right-wing or left-wing? You don’t have to guess. In 2012, at the Democratic National Convention, Obama unveiled the slogan, “The government is the one thing we all belong to.” This fascist apotheosis to the centralized state is a sentiment that Gentile and Mussolini would surely have applauded. It couldn’t be more different from the American founders’ view, which is that we don’t belong to the government; the government belongs to us.
Mussolini was a Marxist—together with Antonio Gramsci, the most famous Marxist in Italy. Mussolini was “the strongman of the revolutionary Left” who, in the words of historian Zeev Sternhell, “never said a single word against socialism as a system of thought.”27 Together with a group of revolutionary socialists known as the Syndicalists, he created the first fascist party in the early 1900s and the first fascist state in 1922. Around the same time, fascist movements were started in England, in France, in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
All the founders and leaders of early fascism—there are no exceptions—were men of the left. The leading French fascists were Jean Allemane, the “grand old man” of French socialism; Marcel Déat, founder of the Parti Socialiste de France; and Jacques Doriot, a French communist. The Belgian fascists were rallied by the socialist theoretician Henri de Man. In England, Oswald Mosley broke with the Labour Party, which he considered insufficiently leftist, and founded the British Union of Fascists. In Italy, Mussolini’s fascists were all revolutionary socialists, and one of his regime’s closest advisers was Nicola Bombacci, a founder of the Italian Communist Party.
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