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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Indeed, we are all Crolyites now. It was Croly's insight that if you aren't going to expropriate private businesses, but instead want to use business to implement your social agenda, then you should want businesses themselves to be as big as possible. What's easier, strapping five thousand cats to a wagon or a couple of giant oxen? Al Gore's rhetoric about the need to "tame Big Oil" and the like is apposite. He doesn't want to nationalize "Big Oil" he wants to yoke it to his own agenda. Likewise, Hillary Clinton's proposed health-care reforms, as well as most of the proposals put forward by leading Democrats (and a great many Republicans), involve the fusion of big government and big business. The economic ideas in Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village are breathlessly corporatist. "A number of our most powerful telecommunications and computer companies have joined forces with the government in a project to connect every classroom in America to the Internet," she gushes. "Socially minded corporate philosophies are the avenue to future prosperity and social stability."40 It doesn't take a Rosetta stone to decipher what liberals mean by "socially minded corporate philosophies."

  The granddaddy of all such "philosophies" is of course industrial policy, the ghost of corporatism made flesh in modern liberalism. In 1960 President Kennedy called for a "new partnership" with corporate America. In the 1970s Jimmy Carter called for "reindustrialization" under a new "social contract" to deal with the "crisis of competitiveness." A young aide in the Carter administration named Robert Reich launched his career as a buzz-phrase generator, spewing out such impressive-sounding nuggets as "target stimulants" and "indicative planning." Later, the "Atari Democrats" once again claimed that the "future" lay in "strategic partnerships" between the public and the private sectors.

  In the 1980s envy for corporatist "Japan Inc." reached delirious proportions. The intellectual descendants of those who worshipped Bismarck's Prussia and Mussolini's Ministry of Corporations now fell under the spell of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, which soon became the lodestar of enlightened economic policy. James Fallows led an all-star cast of liberal intellectuals--including Clyde Prestowitz, Pat Choate, Robert Kuttner, Ira Magaziner, Robert Reich, and Lester Thurow--in a quest for the holy grail of government-business "collaboration."

  Reich was one of the pioneers of the Third Way movement. Indeed, Mickey Kaus writes that Third Way rhetoric is Reich's "most annoying habit" and his "characteristic mode of argument."41 In 1983 Reich wrote The Next American Frontier, in which he championed "an extreme form of corporatism" (Kaus's words) where in exchange for "restructuring assistance" from the government, businesses would "agree to maintain their old work forces intact." Workers would become de facto citizens of their companies, in a relationship eerily similar to Krupp's General Regulations. And in an even more eerie echo of Italian Fascist corporatist thought, corporations would "largely replace geographic jurisdictions as conduits of government support for economic and human development." Social services--health care, day care, education, and so forth--would all be provided via your employer. This was all not only good but inevitable because "business enterprises," according to Reich, "are rapidly becoming the central mediating structures in American society, replacing geographic communities as the locus of social services and, indeed, social life."42

  Yet somehow it's the economic right that wants corporations to have more control over our lives.

  In 1984 the former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips wrote Staying on Top: The Business Case for a National Industrial Strategy. "Businessmen," Phillips warned, "must set aside old concepts of laissez-faire...it is time for the U.S. to begin plotting its economic future" on a new Third Way course.43 Amusingly, Phillips has also argued that George W. Bush's great-grandfather S. P. Bush was a war profiteer because he served on Woodrow Wilson's War Industries Board, the very model of the system Phillips advocates.

  In 1992 Bill Clinton and Ross Perot both tapped into the widespread craving for a "new alliance" between government and business (in 1991, 61 percent of Americans said they supported some such relationship). "Without a national economic strategy, this country has been allowed to drift," candidate Clinton declared in a typical speech. "Meanwhile, our competitors have organized themselves around clear national goals to save, promote and enhance high-wage, high-growth jobs." Clinton was ultimately foiled by Congress and the federal deficit in his hope to "invest" hundreds of billions of dollars in his strategic plan for industry. But his administration did try very hard to "target" specific industries for help, to very little effect--unless you count Al Gore's "invention" of the Internet. Hillary Clinton's ill-fated health-care plan sought to dragoon the health-care industry into a web where it would be impossible to tell where government began and the private sector left off. Small businesses, like those poor dry cleaners and newspaper boys during the New Deal, simply had to take one for the team. When it was pointed out to her that small businesses would be devastated by her plan, Clinton dismissed the complaints, saying, "I can't save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America."44

  Democratic, and most Republican, health-care plans don't call for expropriating the private property of doctors and pharmaceutical companies or even for the cessation of employer-provided health care. Rather, they want to use corporations for government by proxy. There's a reason liberal economists joke that General Motors is a health-care provider that makes cars as an industrial by-product.

  GM offers an ironic confirmation of Marxist logic. According to orthodox Marxism, the capitalist system becomes fascist as its internal contradictions get the better of it. As a theory of political economy, this analysis falls apart. But at the retail level, there's an undeniable truth to it. Industries that once had a proudly free-market stance suddenly sprout arguments in favor of protectionism, "industrial policy," and "strategic competitiveness" once they find that they can't hack it in the market. The steel and textile industries, certain automobile companies--Chrysler in the 1980s, GM today--and vast swaths of agriculture claim that the state and business should be "partners" at precisely the moment it's clear they can no longer compete. They quickly become captives of politicians seeking to protect jobs or donations or both. These "last-gasp capitalists" do the country a great disservice by skewing the political climate toward a modified form of national socialism and corporatism. They're fleeing the rough-and-tumble of capitalist competition for the warm embrace of It Takes a Village economics, and Hillary Clinton calls it "progress."

  Look, for example, at which agricultural sectors lobby the government most and which tend to leave it alone. Big sugar growers in the Midwest and Florida have spent millions to protect their industry from foreign--and domestic--competition precisely because they are so uncompetitive. And the return on their investment has been huge. In 1992 a handful of sugar refiners gave then-New York Senator Al D'Amato a mere $8,500 in campaign contributions. In return D'Amato successfully supported a tariff rebate to the sugar industry worth $365 million--a return of about 4 million percent. The sugar industry accounts for 17 percent of all agricultural lobbying in the United States. Meanwhile, apple growers--like most fruit and vegetable farmers--spend relatively little lobbying for subsidies because their industry is competitive. But they do have to lobby the government to keep it from subsidizing uncompetitive farmers who might try to move into the fruit and vegetable market.45

  There's no sector of the American economy more suffused with corporatism than agriculture. Indeed, both Democrats and Republicans are decidedly fascistic when it comes to the "family farmer," pretending that their policies are preserving some traditional volkisch lifestyle while in reality they're subsidizing enormous corporations.

  But corporatism is only part of the story. Just as corporations were enmeshed in the larger Nazi Gleichschaltung, supposedly right-wing big business is central to the progressive coordination of contemporary society. If big business is so right-wing, why do huge banks fund liberal and left-wing charities, activists, and advocacy groups, then brag about it in commercials and
publicity campaigns? How to explain that there's virtually no major issue in the culture wars--from abortion to gay marriage to affirmative action--where big business has played a major role on the American right while there are dozens of examples of corporations supporting the liberal side?

  Indeed, the myth of the right-wing corporation allows the media to tighten liberalism's grip on both corporations and the culture. John McCain perfectly symbolizes this catch-22 of modern liberalism. McCain despises the corrupting effect of "big money" in politics, but he is also a major advocate of increased government regulation of business. Apparently he cannot see that the more government regulates business, the more business is going to take an interest in "regulating" government. Instead, he has concluded that he should try to regulate political speech, which is like decrying the size of the garbage dump and deciding the best thing to do is regulate the flies.

  These speech regulations in turn give an unfair advantage to some very big businesses--media conglomerates, movie studios, and such--to express their political views in ways exempt from government censorship. It's no surprise that some of these outlets tend to celebrate McCain's genius and courage and use their megaphones to expand on the need for him to go even further and for other politicians to follow his lead. Of course, this dynamic is much larger than mere regulation. The New York Times is pro-choice and supports pro-choice candidates--openly on its editorial pages, more subtly in its news pages. Pro-life groups need to pay to get their views across, but such paid advertising is heavily regulated, thanks to McCain, at exactly the moment it might influence people--that is, near Election Day. One can replace abortion with gun control, gay marriage, environmentalism, affirmative action, immigration, and other issues, and the dynamic remains the same.

  This is how the liberal Gleichschaltung works; contrary voices are regulated, barred, banned when possible, mocked and marginalized when not. Progressive voices are encouraged, lionized, amplified--in the name of "diversity," or "liberation," or "unity," and, most of all, "progress."

  Go into a Starbucks sometime and pick up one of their brochures highlighting their Corporate Social Responsibility Report. The report covers all the progressive concerns--the environment, trade, sustainable development, and so on. It devotes a whole section to "embracing diversity" in which the huge multinational boasts that it is "striving to increase our diversity in our U.S. workforce." Thirty-two percent of its vice presidents are women and 9 percent people of color. They spend $80 million a year with minority-and women-owned suppliers and provide "extensive diversity training courses to address our partners' relevant business needs. Diversity content is also woven through our general training practices." "Partners," by the way, is the Orwellian term they use for "employees."46 In the new corporatism, we are all "partners" after all.

  Environmentalism in particular offers a number of eerie parallels to fascist practices, including as an overarching rationale for corporatist policies. According to generic fascism, an atmosphere of crisis must be maintained in order to circumvent conventional rules. Today, while Hollywood and the press relentlessly hype the threat of global warming, big business works assiduously to form alliances and partnerships with government as if the fight against global warming were the moral equivalent of war. Indeed, Al Gore--who makes much of such public-private partnerships--claims that global warming is equivalent to the Holocaust and anybody who denies it is the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier. Meanwhile, one oil company after another markets itself as a vital ally against global warming. British Petroleum runs creepily propagandistic ads in which it assures the viewer that it has enlisted in the environmental crusade and is moving "beyond petroleum." When the late libertarian crusader Julian Simon visited an oil installation in Alaska, he got so sick of hearing managers boast about the "environmental benefits" of their work that he finally asked, "What do you produce here? Oil or environmental benefits?"47

  GE, the birthplace of Swopism, today spends millions of dollars promoting its "Ecomagination" program, through which it hopes to prove that GE is a progressive company. GE's CEO declared at the launch of his green initiative, "It's no longer a zero-sum game--things that are good for the environment are also good for business." The audience, eating organic hors d'oeuvres and drinking wine from a solar-powered winery, listened enthusiastically as the head of the biggest industrial manufacturer in America explained, "Industry cannot solve the problems of the world alone. We need to work in concert with government."48 No surprise, then, that GE's launch party was held at its Washington office. Indeed, the agenda behind "ecomagination" is to invest in "clean" and "green" technologies, and then lobby government to subsidize them through tax cuts or outright grants.

  Corporations' power to "switch on" their workers to larger political agendas is a vastly underappreciated aspect of modern American civilization. Diversity is a perfect case in point. Big corporations have a vested interest in supporting diversity for a host of legitimate reasons. No firm wants to appear hostile to potential customers, for example. Nor is it smart to turn away qualified applicants out of racial animus. Moreover, the legal regime requires firms to be diverse whenever possible. And just as laws like the ADA help big businesses over small ones, affirmative action has the same effect. According to the Yale Law School professor Peter Schuck, affirmative action programs "also tend to advantage large companies by imposing onerous reporting, staffing, and other compliance costs on smaller competitors who cannot bear them as easily."49 Survey data confirm that CEOs of large firms are more likely to support mandatory affirmative action programs than the CEOs of small firms.

  Such progressive leadership doesn't come without a heavy investment in reeducation. Almost all mid-level and senior executives in corporate America have been through "diversity training" and/or "sexual harassment training," and often they're sent back for further reeducation--usually because the definition of "tolerance" has been ratcheted up. Corporations have accepted the logic of diversity gurus who insist that if you aren't actively promoting diversity--with goals, timetables, and the like--you are actively opposing it. The totalitarian nature of this training has not gotten nearly the attention it deserves--partly because journalists themselves have been so thoroughly reprogrammed by the giant corporations they work for.

  Ask yourself this: What would happen to the businessman who simply refused to employ the acceptable number of black--or, one day soon, gay--applicants? Let's assume that this businessman is an evil person, racist, mean, miserly. But there was once a notion that freedom involved the right to be bad. So let's say this businessman refuses to hire blacks, gays, Jews, or members of other "oppressed" groups. What happens next? First he gets a letter from the government saying he has to have a workforce that looks like America. Then he'll get another letter. Perhaps he'll also get a letter from some disappointed job applicant threatening to sue. Eventually, he will be brought before a judge and told he must hire people he doesn't want to hire. If he still refuses, he may lose a lot of money in a civil suit. Or he might have his company taken away from him and put into receivership. If he persists in his stubborn independence, the state will, one way or another, take away his company. No doubt the Robert Reichs of the world will say that you have the right to employ the people you want, so long as your rights don't intrude on the "common good."

  We might even agree with Reich because we think discrimination is evil. But is it really any less fascistic than telling a businessman that he must fire the Jews in his employ? Or if that's too dark a rumination, consider this: the restaurant chain Hooters came within a hairbreadth of being forced to hire men as "Hooters girls." It sounds funny, but just because something is done in the name of diversity doesn't make it un-fascist. It just makes it a nicer form of fascism.

  9

  Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism

  LIBERALISM IS A culture and a dogma, much as conservatism is. Individual liberals may think they've reached their conclusions through carefu
l deliberation--and no doubt many have--but there is no escaping the undertow of history and culture. Ideas and ideology are transmitted in more ways than we can count, and ignorance about where our ideas come from doesn't mean they don't come from somewhere.

  Now, of course, this doesn't mean that the past has an iron grip on the present. For example, I am a strong supporter of states' rights. Racists once used support for states' rights as a cover for perpetuating Jim Crow. That does not mean that I am in favor of Jim Crow. But, as discussed earlier, conservatives have had to work very, very hard to explain why states' rights is no longer an argument about preserving Jim Crow. When someone asks me why my support for federalism won't lead to Jim Crow, I have answers at the ready. No such similar intellectual effort exists, or is required, on the left. Liberals are confident they've always been on the right side of history. George Clooney expresses a common sentiment among liberals when he says, "Yes, I'm a liberal, and I'm sick of it being a bad word. I don't know at what time in history liberals have stood on the wrong side of social issues."1

  This is one of the main reasons I've written this book: to puncture the smug self-confidence that simply by virtue of being liberal one is also virtuous. At the same time, I need to repeat that I am not playing the movie backward. Today's liberals aren't the authors of past generations' mistakes any more than I'm responsible for the callousness of some conservative who championed states' rights for the wrong reason well before I was born. No, the problems with liberalism today reside in liberalism today. The relevance of the past is that unlike the conservative who has wrestled with his history to make sure he does not repeat it, liberals see no need to do anything of the sort. And so, armed with complete confidence in their own good intentions, they happily go marching past boundaries we should stay well clear of. They reinvent ideological constructs we've seen before in earlier times, unaware of their pitfalls, blithely confident that the good guys could never say or do anything "fascist" because fascism is by definition anything not desirable. And liberalism is nothing if not the organized pursuit of the desirable.