Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

by Jonah Goldberg

  Later that same year, the White House received a letter from the Roe v. Wade co-counsel Ron Weddington, urging the new president-elect to rush RU-486--the morning-after pill--to the market as quickly as possible. Weddington's argument was refreshingly honest:

  [Y]ou can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country. No, I'm not advocating some sort of mass extinction of these unfortunate people. Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can't afford to have babies. There, I've said it. It's what we all know is true, but we only whisper it, because as liberals who believe in individual rights, we view any program which might treat the disadvantaged as discriminatory, mean-spirited and...well...so Republican.

  [G]overnment is also going to have to provide vasectomies, tubal ligations and abortions...There have been about 30 million abortions in this country since Roe v. Wade. Think of all the poverty, crime and misery...and then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario. We lost a lot of ground during the Reagan-Bush religious orgy. We don't have a lot of time left.54

  How, exactly, is this substantively different from Margaret Sanger's self-described "religion of birth control," which would, she wrote, "ease the financial load of caring for with public funds...children destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation"?55

  The issue here is not the explicit intent of liberals or the rationalizations they invoke to deceive themselves about the nature of abortion. Rather, it is to illustrate that even when motives and arguments change, the substance of the policy remains in its effects. After the Holocaust discredited eugenics per se, neither the eugenicists nor their ideas disappeared. Rather, they went to ground in fields like family planning and demography and in political movements such as feminism. Indeed, in a certain sense Planned Parenthood is today more eugenic than Sanger intended. Sanger, after all, despised abortion. She denounced it as "barbaric" and called abortionists "bloodsucking men with M.D. after their names." Abortion resulted in "an outrageous slaughter" and "the killing of babies," which even the degenerate offspring of the unfit did not deserve.56

  So forget about intent: look at results. Abortion ends more black lives than heart disease, cancer, accidents, AIDS, and violent crime combined. African-Americans constitute little more than 12 percent of the population but have more than a third (37 percent) of abortions. That rate has held relatively constant, though in some regions the numbers are much starker; in Mississippi, black women receive some 72 percent of all abortions, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Nationwide, 512 out of every 1,000 black pregnancies end in an abortion.57 Revealingly enough, roughly 80 percent of Planned Parenthood's abortion centers are in or near minority communities. Liberalism today condemns a Bill Bennett who speculates about the effects of killing unborn black children; but it also celebrates the actual killing of unborn black children, and condemns him for opposing it.

  Of course, orthodox eugenics also aimed at the "feebleminded" and "useless bread gobblers"--which included everyone from the mentally retarded to an uneducated and malnourished underclass to recidivist criminals. When it comes to today's "feebleminded," influential voices on the left now advocate the killing of "defectives" at the beginning of life and at the end of life. Chief among them is Peter Singer, widely hailed as the most important living philosopher and the world's leading ethicist. Professor Singer, who teaches at Princeton, argues that unwanted or disabled babies should be killed in the name of "compassion." He also argues that the elderly and other drags on society should be put down when their lives are no longer worth living.

  Singer doesn't hide behind code words and euphemisms in his belief that killing babies isn't always wrong, as one can deduce from his essay titled "Killing Babies Isn't Always Wrong" (nor is he a lone voice in the wilderness; his views are popular or respected in many academic circles).58 But that hasn't caused the left to ostracize him in the slightest (save in Germany, where people still have a visceral sense of where such logic takes you). Of course, not all or even most liberals agree with Singer's prescriptions, but nor do they condemn him as they do, say, a William Bennett. Perhaps they recognize in him a kindred spirit.

  IDENTITY POLITICS

  Today's liberals have no particular animus toward racial minorities (majorities are another issue). They may even be prejudiced in favor of racial minorities. They give them extra credit. Built into the core of liberal racial views is that it's something of an accomplishment just being black.

  For the last forty years or so, popular entertainment has glorified what the National Review editor Richard Brookhiser calls "the Numinous Negro." Given how blacks were depicted in the past, it's understandable that artists would overcompensate in the other direction. But this is a broader cultural trend, encompassing politics and policy as well. The Congressional Black Caucus, for the most part a motley collection of extreme left-wing politicians, dubs itself the "conscience of the Congress" for no discernible reason other than its members' racial identity. White liberals are perfectly happy to perpetrate this perception, partly out of guilt, partly out of somewhat cynical calculation that allows them to appear noble as the (self-appointed) defenders of black America. But most white liberals, and black ones, too, subscribe to a philosophical orientation which insists that blacks are in some significant way "better."

  Certainly this is objectively true among such quintessentially fascist black supremacists as Louis Farrakhan and the black "raceologist" Leonard Jeffries. Indeed, across the Afrocentric and Black Nationalist left, bizarre and ahistorical fantasies proliferate about the superiority of ancient African civilization, about white conspiracies to erase black history, and the like. The similarity to Nazi mythology about the mythic Aryan past is not superficial. One of the few places in America where you can be sure to find The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is Afrocentrist bookshops. And, again, both the Nation of Islam and the Back to Africa movement expressed some ideological affinity with Nazism and Italian Fascism, respectively.

  Even on the liberal left, where these poisonous notions are far more diluted, it's axiomatic that there is something inherently and distinctly good about blacks. How so? Well, it must be so. If you buy into the various doctrines of multiculturalism and identity politics you already believe that blackness is distinct, immutable, and unchanging. Once you accept this logic--and the left obviously does--you are then left with a fairly simple choice. If race is not neutral, if "race matters," as Cornel West says, then how does it matter? Given the choice between assigning a positive value or a negative value, liberals opt for the positive.

  Positive discrimination forms the backbone of our racial spoils system. Gone are the days when affirmative action was justified solely on the grounds put forward by Lyndon Johnson of helping blacks or redressing historical injustices.59 To be sure, these arguments still loom quite large for many liberals, and that is to their credit. But they have been subsumed into a larger creed of multiculturalism, and liberals fall back on the rhetoric of racial damage--that is, affirmative action is necessary to "fix" what's been done to blacks--only when affirmative action is under threat. This is the breakwater for a vast Coalition of the Oppressed that relies on the core logic of black entitlement to empower a sweeping cultural and political agenda under the rubric of diversity. So long as blacks are in need of special treatment, the coalition has the political leverage for us-too politics. In a racial spoils state, this sort of tragedy of the commons was inevitable. Feminists, following in the wake of blacks, also wanted special treatment. Hispanic leftists copied the same model. Now homosexuals argue they are in nearly every meaningful sense the moral equivalent of blacks. Eventually, the ranks of the oppressed swelled to the point where a new argument was needed: "multiculturalism."

  Here the similarities with German fascist thought become most apparent. Isaiah Berlin famously argued
that fascism was the progeny of the French reactionary Comte Joseph de Maistre. Berlin was clearly exaggerating de Maistre's influence (both Nazis and Italian Fascists explicitly rejected de Maistre), but his argument nonetheless helps us understand how fascism and identity politics overlap and interact.

  Inherent to the Enlightenment is the idea that all mankind can be reasoned with. The philosophes argued that men all over the world were each blessed with the faculty of reason. It was the European right which believed that mankind was broken up into groups, classes, sects, races, nationalities, and other gradations in the great chain of being. The reactionary de Maistre railed against the notion that there were any "universal rights of man." In his most famous statement on the subject he declared, "Now, there is no such thing as 'man' in this world. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I've never encountered him. If he exists, I don't know about it."60

  De Maistre meant that we are all prisoners of our racial and ethnic identities. (He didn't mention gender, but that likely went without saying.) Indeed, there is less difference between today's identity politics and the identity politics of the fascist past than anyone realizes. As one fascist sympathizer put it in the 1930s, "Our understanding struggles to go beyond the fatal error of believing in the equality of all human beings and tries to recognize the diversity of peoples and races."61 How many college campuses hear that kind of rhetoric every day?

  Today it is the left that says there is no such creature as "man." Instead, there are African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Left-wing academics speak of the "permanence of race," and a whole new field of "whiteness studies" has sprouted up at prominent universities and colleges, dedicated to beating back the threat of whiteness in America. The sociologist Andrew Hacker decries "white logic," and a host of other scholars argue that blacks and other minorities underperform academically because the subject matter in our schools represents white-supremacist thinking. Black children reject schoolwork because academic success amounts to "acting white." This welter of nonsense enshrines and empowers a host of collectivist notions that place the state at the center of managing the progress of groups; those who oppose this agenda get clubbed over the head with the charge of racism. For example, the Seattle public school system recently announced that "emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology" is a form of "cultural racism." Indeed, the case for Enlightenment principles of individualism and reason itself is deemed anti-minority. Richard Delgado, a founder of critical race theory, writes: "If you're black or Mexican, you should flee Enlightenment based democracies like mad, assuming you have any choice."62

  In the 1960s, when the civil rights movement still relied on the classically liberal formulation of judging people by the content of their character, enlightened liberals denounced the "one-drop" rule which said that if you had a single drop of "black" blood you were black, a standard transparently similar to National Socialist notions of who counted as a Jew. Now, according to the left, if you have one drop of black blood, you should be counted as black for the purposes of positive discrimination. So valuable are the privileges associated with blackness that some black intellectuals want to make "racial fraud" a crime.63 It's a strange racism problem when people are clamoring to join the ranks of the oppressed and lobbying for laws to make sure "oppressors" don't get to pass themselves off as "victims."

  The glorification of racial permanence has caused the left to abandon narrow rationales for affirmative action in favor of the doctrine of multiculturalism. The diversity argument--which, by the way, is only used to defend favored groups; Asians and Jews almost never count toward the goal of diversity--is an argument for the permanence of race and identity. In other words, if the left has its way, racial preferences will no longer have anything to do with redressing past wrongs (except when such preferences are under attack). Rather, the pursuit of diversity will become the permanent license for social-engineering bean counters to discriminate against whatever group they see fit in order to reach the desired "balance." For example, quotas unfairly kept Jews out of universities to help white Protestants. Now quotas unfairly keep Jews (and Asians) out of universities to help blacks and Hispanics. What's different is that now liberals are sure such policies are a sign of racial progress.

  Diversity depends on, and therefore ratifies, racial essentialism. Not only do rich (and, increasingly, foreign-born) blacks count as much as poor ones, but the argument now is that mere exposure to blacks is uplifting in and of itself. The policy is condescending and counterproductive because it assumes that blacks come to school not as Tom Smith or Joe Jones but as interchangeable Black-Perspective Student. Professors turn to black students for "the black point of view," and students who don't present the party line are counted as inauthentic by condescending white liberals (that is, most faculty and administrators) or by race-gaming blacks. I've been to dozens of campuses, and everywhere the story is the same: blacks eat, party, and live with other blacks. This self-segregation increasingly manifests itself in campus politics. Blacks become a student body within a student body, a microcosm of the nation within a nation. Ironically, the best way for a white kid to benefit from exposure to a black kid, and vice versa, would be for there to be fewer black students or at least no black dorms. That way blacks would be forced to integrate with the majority culture. But of course, integration is now derided as a racist doctrine.

  You might say it's outrageous to compare the current liberal program to help minorities with the poisonous ideology of fascism and Nazism. And I would agree if we were talking about things like the Holocaust or even Kristallnacht. But at the philosophical level, we are talking about categorical ways of thinking. To forgive something by saying "it's a black thing" is philosophically no different from saying "it's an Aryan thing." The moral context matters a great deal. But the excuse is identical. Similarly, rejecting the Enlightenment for "good" reasons is still a rejection of the Enlightenment. And any instrumental or pragmatic gains you get from rejecting the Enlightenment still amount to taking a sledgehammer to the soapbox you're standing on. Without the standards of the Enlightenment, we are in a Nietzschean world where power decides important questions rather than reason. This is exactly how the left appears to want it.

  One last point about diversity. Because liberals have what Thomas Sowell calls an "unconstrained vision," they assume everyone sees things through the same categorical prism. So once again, as with the left's invention of social Darwinism, liberals assume their ideological opposites take the "bad" view to their good. If liberals assume blacks--or women, or gays--are inherently good, conservatives must think these same groups are inherently bad.

  This is not to say that there are no racist conservatives. But at the philosophical level, liberalism is battling a straw man. This is why liberals must constantly assert that conservatives use code words--because there's nothing obviously racist about conservatism per se. Indeed, the constant manipulation of the language to keep conservatives--and other non-liberals--on the defensive is a necessary tactic for liberal politics. The Washington, D.C., bureaucrat who was fired for using the word "niggardly" correctly in a sentence is a case in point.64 The ground must be constantly shifted to maintain a climate of grievance. Fascists famously ruled by terror. Political correctness isn't literally terroristic, but it does govern through fear. No serious person can deny that the grievance politics of the American left keeps decent people in a constant state of fright--they are afraid to say the wrong word, utter the wrong thought, offend the wrong constituency.

  If we maintain our understanding of political conservatism as the heir of classical liberal individualism, it is almost impossible for a fair-minded person to call it racist. And yet, according to liberals, race neutrality is itself racist. It harkens back to the "social Darwinism" of the past, we are told, because it relegates minorities to a savage struggle for the survival of the f
ittest.

  There are only three basic positions. There is the racism of the left, which seeks to use the state to help favored minorities that it regards as morally superior. There is racial neutrality, which is, or has become, the conservative position. And then there is some form of "classical racism"--that is, seeing blacks as inferior in some way. According to the left, only one of these positions isn't racist. Race neutrality is racist. Racism is racist. So what's left? Nothing except liberalism. In other words, agree with liberals and you're not racist. Of course, if you adopt color blindness as a policy, many fair-minded liberals will tell you that while you're not personally racist, your views "perpetuate" racism. And some liberals will stand by the fascist motto: if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Either way, there are no safe harbors from liberal ideology. Hence, when it comes to race, liberalism has become a kind of soft totalitarianism and multiculturalism the mechanism for a liberal Gleichschaltung. If you fall outside the liberal consensus, you are either evil or an abettor of evil. This is the logic of the Volksgemeinschaft in politically correct jargon.

  Now, of course you're not going to get a visit from the Gestapo if you see the world differently; if you don't think the good kind of diversity is skin deep or that the only legitimate community is the one where "we're all in it together," you won't be dragged off to reeducation camp. But you very well may be sent off to counseling or sensitivity training.