Hitler too was a man of the left. The leading Nazis were all committed socialists, as we can see from the Nazi twenty-five-point platform, released in the 1920s. The Nazis called for nationalization of large corporations and trusts, government control of banking and credit, the seizure of land without compensation for public use, the splitting of large landholdings into smaller units, confiscation of war profits, prosecution of bankers and other lenders for usury, abolition of incomes unearned by work, profit sharing for workers in large companies, a broader pension system paying higher benefits, and universal free healthcare and education.
Doesn’t exactly sound like Trump’s agenda, does it? It’s not, and yet much of it is creepily familiar. Sure, some of the language is dated. Try crossing out the word “usury” and replacing it with its modern equivalent: “interest.” Also cross out the word “Jew” and substitute “Wall Street greed.” Now the Nazi platform of 1920 reads like a progressive platform jointly drafted by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. If read aloud at a left-wing gathering on campus, I am sure it would provoke thunderous applause.
Mussolini and Hitler were national socialists not just in theory but also in practice. They established state control over all the major industries in their countries. Germany also created massive new state entities, such as the Hermann Göring Reichswerke, a state-run conglomerate charged with increasing industrial output in preparation for war. Hitler went much further than Mussolini, largely because he had more power. Mussolini’s regime included nonfascist elements, and he had to compromise with them.
Unhampered by such constraints, Hitler enforced what the Nazis termed Gleichschaltung, the subordination of all the institutions of the culture to the ideological priorities of Nazism. Mussolini’s regime had its own version of this—as Gentile put it, “For fascism, the state and the individual are one”28—but it was enforced in the Italian, which is to say lackadaisical, way. The Nazis, with German punctiliousness, implemented Gleichschaltung by forcing the media, the universities and the film industry into full conformity. They called it “working toward the fuhrer.” Even private citizens were supposed to work toward the fuhrer at all times.
This was the true meaning of draping the swastika on your balcony, or giving the “Heil Hitler” salute. It signaled your willingness to be a servant or even a slave of the Nazi state. Thus Gleichschaltung in its own way corresponded to the Democratic master’s dream on every slave plantation to have his slaves in full conformity with his dictates, one may say at all times “working toward the master.”
Does all of this sound alarmingly familiar? It should. Today on the American left, Gleichschaltung has a different name: political correctness. Political correctness reflects the left’s desire to impose voluntary ideological compulsion throughout the culture. No one is exempt, not even the poor Christian baker who simply wants to live by his conscience. He too must be browbeaten into submission and forced to serve the gay wedding couple whose lifestyle he finds objectionable and immoral. He too must in his own way give the Heil Hitler salute to contemporary leftist orthodoxy.
While Hitler’s national socialism paralleled Mussolini’s fascism in many respects, it differed in one big one. Hitler despised the Jews and Mussolini did not. (In fact, some prominent founders of Italian fascism such as Angiolo Olivetti were Jewish.) Hitler was much more of a rabid racist than Mussolini. Yet even this racism, the German historian Gotz Aly shows in two important recent books, served the cause of the left and thus bears comparison with Democratic racism on this side of the Atlantic.
Aly’s work stands out in the vast corpus of German scholarship on the Nazi regime because he asks questions others don’t. Aly’s first question is: why did Hitler hate the Jews? It is not sufficient to answer that Hitler was a racist. Aly wants to know why he selected the Jews as his political targets. Aly’s answer: Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in envy. Hitler hated the Jews not because they were failures but because they were successful.
Hitler’s own rhetoric concedes this. He fulminates against Jews for being unscrupulous selfish capitalists engaged in exploitation of the ordinary German citizen. Distinguishing between productive capitalism and finance capitalism, Hitler accuses Jews of engaging largely in finance capitalism, in other words of being greedy swindlers who make obscene profits for producing nothing. FDR, as we will see, also embraced this politics of envy and bequeathed it down to progressive Democrats of our own day.
Aly then poses a second question: why did the German people remain loyal to Hitler even through a protracted war that reduced their nation to rubble? They had barely voted Hitler into office in 1933; did they believe in him so much that they would stick with him to the bitter end? To answer these questions, Aly writes, “It is necessary to focus on the socialist aspect of National Socialism.” Aly concludes that German allegiance to Hitler was not out of pure conviction. They weren’t just suckers for Goebbels’ propaganda.
Rather, Aly shows in a recent book, Hitler’s Beneficiaries, that Hitler robbed from the Jews and other nations in order to fund Nazi socialist and redistributionist schemes. Once the Nazis had ousted the Jews from high positions in Germany, those positions went to other Germans. The Nazis confiscated Jewish property and art treasures. At the same time, Hitler pillaged other European countries of their wealth, and these resources were used by the state treasury to fund an expansion of the Volksstaat, or welfare state.
Aly reports that by using all this stolen money, “the Nazi leadership gave Germans their first taste of what it might be like to own an automobile. It introduced the previously almost unknown idea of vacations.” Moreover, “It insured farmers against the vagaries of the weather and the world market.” Nazis pioneered “the beginnings of environmental conservation.” The national socialists expanded the state pension system and passed rent-control laws, tenants’ rights laws and laws restricting the rights of creditors. Thanks to Nazi largesse with the booty of war, many German workers also had their first taste of French silks, Belgian lace and Dutch cheese.
No wonder, Aly concludes, that the Germans stuck with their man. They were Hitler’s “satisfied thieves.” Other socialists merely made extravagant promises, but the Nazi welfare state delivered the goods. Hierarchical though Nazism may have been in its organizational structure, it was also in this respect egalitarian.29 One may say that any government that robs Peter to pay Paul can usually rely on Paul’s support. Once again, there would be a valuable lesson for FDR in this Nazi principle of building popular loyalty by using the government for the purpose of confiscation and wealth redistribution.
THAT ADMIRABLE ITALIAN GENTLEMAN
Now let’s see how FDR viewed fascism and how he created a uniquely American brand of it, in the process permanently transforming the progressive plantation. In 1933, FDR responded to a journalist who asked him his view of Mussolini. “I don’t mind telling you that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman.” That same year FDR again gave his view of Mussolini to Breckinridge Long, U.S. ambassador to Rome. “There seems to be no question that he is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy.”30
FDR’s enthusiasm for Mussolini and Italian fascism was echoed by other progressives of his time. The left-wing historian Charles Beard wrote of Mussolini’s regime, “An amazing experiment is being made here . . . It would be a mistake to allow feelings aroused by contemplating the harsh deeds and extravagant assertions that have accompanied the Fascist process . . . to obscure the potentialities and lessons of the adventure.”
Herbert Croly, editor of the New Republic, insisted that fascism offered the potential for the spiritual reconstruction of society. Progressives in popular culture picked up the fascist tune. “You’re the top, you’re Mussolini,” crooned Cole Porter in an early thirties hit song whose Mussolini ref
erence was tactfully removed a few years later when the Italian fascists invaded Ethiopia.31
FDR dispatched members of his so-called brain trust to fascist Rome to study fascist policies. He sent a second administrative team to examine the fascist organizational structure for the government. FDR adviser Rexford Tugwell, upon returning from Rome, wrote of fascism, “It’s the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.”32
FDR regarded his National Recovery Act (NRA) as the most important of his New Deal programs. It was directly modeled on Italian fascism. The NRA empowered the federal government to establish coalitions of labor and management in every industry to set production targets, wages, prices and even maximum and minimum working hours. These agreements would be reviewed by a government-run Industrial Advisory Board answerable to FDR himself. According to Tugwell, the NRA was designed to “eliminate the anarchy of the competitive system.”33
FDR’s man to run the NRA, General Hugh Johnson, was an avowed admirer of fascism who loved to associate himself with what he termed the “shining name” of Mussolini. Johnson carried with him, and routinely quoted from, a fascist propaganda pamphlet, The Structure of the Corporate State, written by one of Mussolini’s aides. Under Johnson, the NRA issued its own brochure, Capitalism and Labor Under Fascism. It acknowledged that “the fascist principles are very similar to those which have been evolving in America.”34
We have seen how FDR was ideologically shaped by fascism; now let us explore how, like the Nazis, he made political use of racism. FDR wasn’t a racist, at least not of the extreme form that Hitler was, but he was not above making a Faustian pact with his party’s worst bigots in order to get his agenda passed. The conventional progressive wisdom is that FDR won political support for the New Deal by assembling an amazing coalition of big-city bosses, poor white Southerners, farmers, laborers, Catholics, Jews, other ethnics and blacks.
But as progressive historian Ira Katznelson points out, these groups were not equally important for FDR.35 Consider blacks. Most blacks in the South did not vote, courtesy of voter suppression by the Democratic Party. True, a great migration had begun in which blacks were moving from the rural South to northern cities. But FDR already had the cities. So he didn’t care about the black vote there.
What FDR needed was the votes of the racist Democrats from the South who sat on powerful committees that had the power to accelerate or block his New Deal programs. These racists were also progressives who were generally behind FDR’s programs, especially New Deal initiatives, like the Tennessee Valley Project, that benefited their region. Yet recognizing how indispensable they were to FDR, the Democratic racists made three demands.
First, they demanded that most New Deal programs, like Social Security, be designed in a way to exclude blacks. FDR agreed. Consequently, most New Deal programs excluded farm labor and domestic workers, recognizing that these were the two areas in which most blacks were employed. In Katznelson’s words, blacks were “excluded from the legislation that created modern unions, from laws that set minimum wages and regulated the hours of work, and from Social Security.”36 These exclusions continued through the Truman administration and were only ended by Republicans in the 1950s.
Second, the Democratic racists demanded that FDR protect segregation. FDR was on board. He refused to desegregate the armed forces, even though he had the power to do so. As Katznelson puts it, in World War II, “The United States in effect had two armies—one white, one black. Not entirely separate, they were utterly unequal.”37 Desegregation would have to wait until the Truman era. FDR and progressive Democrats also prevented congressional Republicans from attaching antidiscrimination provisions to social programs. Again, it took Republicans in the Eisenhower era to finally remove these racist restrictions.
Third—and most damning—the Democratic racists insisted that FDR block antilynching legislation. FDR was up for it. Despite a surge in lynching that provoked Congressional Republicans, and even some Democrats, to get behind antilynching legislation, that legislation had no chance to pass without FDR’s support. He withheld it, and the laws failed. Later Truman followed in FDR’s footsteps by refusing to make lynching a federal offense.
We might expect this from a former Klansman like Truman, but why FDR? FDR seems to have agreed with his fellow Democrat, James Byrnes of South Carolina, who warned that laws against lynching would “arouse ill-feeling between the sections” and “destroy the Democratic Party.”38 FDR in other words was less concerned about black lives than he was about getting programs through and maintaining the Democratic Party’s balance of support between the northern cities and the solid South.
We should not unilaterally fault FDR here; the northern Democrats were (as we have seen throughout this book) complicit in the underlying racism. When an antilynching bill came to the Senate floor in 1937, it was a progressive northern Democrat, William Borah of Idaho, who denounced it as ill-timed, ill-advised, and unconstitutional. Seeing their cause was hopeless, proponents of the bill retreated, and FDR made no objection.
Katznelson gives a second example of what happened when southern Democrats launched a procedural amendment to kill an anti-lynching bill. Northern Democrats, who might be expected to align with Republicans, did not. “What is striking about this,” Katznelson writes, “is not the overwhelming support of southern Democrats or the comparable degree of opposition by Republicans. It is, rather, the critical support for adjournment provided by non-Southern Democrats, almost half of whom voted to support the South’s procedural move.”39
Equally striking for me is that a progressive like Katznelson has blown the cover of FDR and the northern Democrats. Katznelson doesn’t just expose how the Democratic Party, North and South, accommodated racism; he even links Democratic racism to Nazi racism. And notice how he admits in passing that Republicans could be expected to oppose Democratic racism. Republicans, in other words, were the party of civil rights not just in the 1860s but right through the 1930s and 1940s. Katznelson’s work is remarkable because he is virtually the only honest historian who has lifted the lid on FDR, revealing aspects of the man that have been concealed by two generations of biographers.
Yet in the end, even Katznelson disappoints. Basically Katznelson argues that even though FDR made a Faustian pact with the worst racists in his party—which is to say, in the country—it was all worth it. Despite FDR’s “dirty hands”—a term that Katznelson defines as “taking wrong action in a right cause”—he got the New Deal passed. In the end, Katznelson contends, echoing progressive conventional wisdom on this subject, the same New Deal coalition evolved in a manner that made civil rights legislation possible.40 So: two cheers for FDR!
Had the New Deal ended the Depression, one could make an argument that it constituted harsh medicine that required all sorts of shortcuts and ugly compromises. But it didn’t, and, as we will see, its long-term effects have been mostly negative. Katznelson’s second point about the evolution of the Democratic Party will have to wait for the next chapter, but again we will discover that the truth is quite different from progressive conventional wisdom.
SHIFTING THE BLAME
Finally, let’s see how FDR reconstructed the Democratic coalition by taking a page, actually two pages, from the early record of the Nazis. First, FDR identified and demonized an internal enemy: rich Republicans. Starting with his inaugural address in 1933 and continuing with his 1936 Democratic Party Nomination Address, FDR castigated wealthy Republicans and conservatives in the same type of language that Hitler used against the Jews.
Calling Republican businessmen “money changers” and “economic royalists,” FDR accused them of “creating a new despotism,” an “economic tyranny.” The New Deal in FDR’s view had challenged these “privileged princes” who sought to oppress “political freedom” by imposing “economic slavery” on the American people. “They are
unanimous in their hate for me,” FDR thundered, “and I welcome their hatred.” Only by exposing and routing these greedy swindlers, FDR concluded, could he and his valiant New Dealers create “the largest progressive democracy in the world.”41
I am tempted to say that FDR invented the language of class warfare that was then taken up by subsequent generations of Democrats and has now become a staple of progressive politics. In his election campaign of 1948, Truman railed against “princes of privilege” and “bloodsuckers with offices in Wall Street.”42 And today we have the same language from Pelosi, Schumer, Hillary and Obama.
But in truth FDR didn’t invent that language; Hitler did. Sure, we find the same language in Marx and in socialist rhetoric, but let’s remember that Hitler too was a socialist. He was the first political leader to actually use such language. FDR was the second. Thus the class warfare rhetoric of today’s progressive Democrats doesn’t just go back to FDR; it goes back to the Nazis.
FDR recognized, as Hitler did, that envy is a very powerful human force. Its power derives not merely from its sheer wickedness—we detest others for the mere fact that they are more successful than we are—but also from its secrecy. We rarely confess envy to another, “Hey, my neighbor is doing better than I am and I can’t take it.” We are reluctant to admit it even to ourselves. Thus envy is the worst of the deadly sins, even more potent for operating covertly.
No politician can openly appeal to envy. Both Hitler and FDR knew they couldn’t publicly say, “We cannot stand those Jews and Republicans and entrepreneurs who are smarter and more hardworking than we are. Let’s go get them.” Consequently, envy has to be mobilized behind the banner of social justice. “Those guys have been stealing from us. It is right and proper that we seize their possessions and distribute them among ourselves.” This is the strategy that Hitler and then FDR seized upon.
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