Mussolini’s Ghosts?

Liberal Fascism:
The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
by Jonah Goldberg
Doubleday. 487 pp. $27.95

People on the Left who have not yet been rhetorically housebroken, or who have simply forgotten their manners, have a habit of referring to conservatives as fascists. The insult is at once so over the top and yet so devoid of meaning that most of its targets tend to shrug it off as unworthy of notice. As long ago as 1946, George Orwell concluded that the epithet was an item of political juvenilia, with no substantive reference beyond “something not desirable.”

But to the columnist Jonah Goldberg, a contributing editor of National Review, the term deserves to be taken very seriously indeed. In this book he not only repudiates its identification with conservatism but, as his title indicates, enthusiastically turns the accusation back on those who make it. It is modern American liberalism, he argues, both in its early-20th-century origins and in its subsequent manifestations, that actually betrays close family resemblances to European fascism.

This is not to say that Goldberg believes liberals have an affinity for storm troopers, lebensraum nationalism, or murderous anti-Semitism. “Milder, more friendly, more ‘maternal’” than its Nazi or Italian predecessors, liberal fascism is less likely to grind people under an iron heel than to want to smother them in a nanny-state embrace.

Of course, even as modified, Goldberg’s thesis will strike most liberals as preposterous and oxymoronic, and even non-liberals may find it profoundly counterintuitive. Yet his argument is worth attending to. If nothing else, it forces one to think about both liberalism and fascism in unaccustomed, provocative, and sometimes illuminating ways.

Take, to begin with, Goldberg’s insistence that fascism is in essence a movement of the Left. He traces its origins ultimately to the French Revolution, and to the revolutionaries’ marriage of Rousseau’s concept of the general will and Robespierre’s terror. (Further trace elements are located by Goldberg in the ideas of, among others, Hegel, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Georges Sorel.) Coming closer to our time, he reminds us that Benito Mussolini, who formed Italy’s fascist party, first won his title of Il Duce as the leader of Italian socialism, and even after switching allegiances did not become an economic conservative. In actuality, his new party’s radical populism was far more akin to socialism than to capitalism.

So, too, with the Nazis. Theirs was, after all, the national-socialist party, and their platform, which Goldberg helpfully reprints in an appendix, amply reflected that fact. They also rightly considered themselves to be social revolutionaries, as scornful of the established conservative order as they were of Marxists.

Economics and anti-traditionalism are not everything, of course, and other elements of historical fascism—militarism, radical nationalism, the “leader principle,” disdain for political liberties and democratic governance—suggest why the Italian and German regimes are customarily located on the Right. But Goldberg’s arguments do remind us that in some sense the European fascists were as they claimed to be: beyond the customary categories of Right and Left.

Fascism’s contact point with American thought came in the early 1900’s, at a moment when, as in Europe, the political, economic, and social institutions of liberal democracy were being widely dismissed as inadequate to the needs of modern industrial society. Singling out for examination such Progressives as Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Croly, Goldberg points to a number of ideas and attitudes they broadly shared with their European counterparts: nationalism, anti-individualism, economic corporatism, an impatience with parliamentary democracy and a correlative taste for strong leadership, and a yearning for communal spiritual regeneration inspired, led, and coordinated by the state. In connection with this last element—religion transmuted into utopian politics—Goldberg places significant emphasis on the Social Gospel movement, at one point referring to progressivism itself as “a kind of Christian fascism.”

Given all this, it is hardly surprising to Goldberg that Progressives in the 1920’s were intrigued by, and often openly admiring of, Mussolini’s fascist experiment—or that, for his part, Mussolini declared himself an admirer of William James, whose pragmatic philosophy was favored by many Progressives. Still, as Goldberg concedes, progressivism and fascism, though common in inspiration, were not the same: cultural traditions made a difference, and the Progressives’ fascist tendencies were tempered by America’s “liberal, democratic, and egalitarian culture.”

At one point, though, progressivism did in Goldberg’s view take on the character of full-blown fascism. During World War I, he asserts, America became, “albeit temporarily,” a fascist state and Wood-row Wilson “the 20th century’s first fascist dictator.” The crushing of dissent during the war involved a trampling of civil liberties quite without parallel in American history, and it happened under putatively liberal auspices.

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If the Progressive era was, in Goldberg’s telling, America’s first fascist moment, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was the second. In fighting the Great Depression, FDR emphasized the same themes of economic planning and social control that had characterized Wilson’s mobilization for war, and, in an echo of European fascism, depicted his New Deal itself as an experimental “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism. Indeed, Goldberg notes, comparisons of New Deal policies with fascism, from both the Left and the Right, were common in the 30’s, and fascist motifs were readily visible in, for example, the paramilitary atmosphere of the Civilian Conservation Corps or the Nuremberg-style rallies to celebrate the National Recovery Administration.

In 1932, H. G. Wells, a Fabian socialist and a great fan of Roosevelt’s, first promulgated the concept of a “liberal fascism” that would enlist fascist discipline and intensity in pursuit of enlightened social purposes. And, according to Goldberg, FDR himself, in speaking on behalf of “the forgotten man,” showed how he shared with Hitler a vision of national community—embodied, even more in Germany than America, in a generous welfare state—that would, in Goldberg’s words, “restore via an all-powerful [government] a sense of belonging to those lost in modern society.” Although the differences among Germany, Italy, and America in the 1930’s were finally greater than their similarities, Goldberg insists that those observers at the time who stressed the commonalities among the “three New Deals” were not imagining things.

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In Goldberg’s reconstruction, America’s third fascist moment—in whose aftermath, he suggests, liberalism still dwells—occurred in the 1960’s. “Much like the Nazi movement,” he writes, the 60’s version of liberal fascism “had two faces: the street radicals and the establishment radicals.” Representatives of the former included the black-power movement (think Black Panthers) and the radical student protesters (think the Weathermen), among both of whom there existed, beneath much Marxist rhetoric, a species of brute thuggishness for which “fascist” seems an appropriate label.

Goldberg’s “establishment radicals”—he distinguishes only intermittently between the radical New Left and liberal “New Politics” types—were those who, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, put together Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program. This “fascist utopia,” in Goldberg’s view, marked the culmination of the Progressive/New Deal liberal vision:

the quest to create an all-caring, all-powerful, all-encompassing state that assumes responsibility for every desirable outcome and takes the blame for every setback on the road to utopia, a state that finally replaces God.

The pursuit of this fascist-inspired “God-state” is what, in Goldberg’s view, modern liberalism is still all about.
In the final chapters of Liberal Fascism, Goldberg brings his arguments up to date in a series of critiques of today’s liberal predilections and pieties. In a discussion of “liberal-fascist economics,” for example, he argues that behind their anti-business rhetoric, liberals typically favor a form of corporatism—i.e., collusion between government and big business—of the kind first established in the Progressive era. Similarly, he ties contemporary liberal views of the welfare state, abortion, and multiculturalism to the eugenics movement that flourished in the United States in the first third of the 20th century and in which that era’s liberals were deeply complicit. Skewering Hillary Rodham Clinton’s best-selling book It Takes a Village, Goldberg identifies its embrace of the “politics of meaning” as a form of soft totalitarianism. In Clinton’s feminized version of Mussolini’s slogan “everything within the state, nothing outside the state,” the mantra becomes “everything within the village”—in effect, a kind of fascism with a human face.

In his discussion of the nation’s culture wars, Goldberg finds the ghost of fascism lurking everywhere. No matter what the subject—Hollywood films, religion in public life, cultural studies, witchcraft and paganism, moral relativism, environmentalism, public health, animal rights—he conjures up fascist roots for today’s liberal inclinations. So pervasive, indeed, are fascist influences as finally to transcend ideology: conservatives cheer Death Wish and Dirty Harry as lustily as liberals cheer Dead Poets Society (a film that “a young Hitler would have given . . . a standing ovation”). In terms of popular culture, Goldberg suggests, “we’re all fascists now.”

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That last line may have been intended only as a throwaway, but it points to a deeper problem in Goldberg’s analysis. Once he is through exploring fascist influences, it is difficult to see who has not been affected by them. If liberal political figures in today’s America are suspect, so by extension are the governments and elites of all the Western democracies. Even George Bush is implicated: in an afterword on “the tempting of conservatism,” Goldberg refers knowingly to something he calls “compassionate fascism.” By the end, it seems that the only political disposition exempt from the fascist taint is the barely extant one of classical free-market liberalism, strictly construed.

The problem is obvious: if the fascist label applies to almost everything everywhere, how does it usefully apply to anything in particular? And that is not the only problem. Goldberg’s efforts to find fascist analogues for today’s liberal views are often severely strained. There is, for example, only the most tenuous relation between contemporary liberal support for abortion or multiculturalism and the fascist/Progressive preoccupation with eugenics.

Nor, without an improbable imaginative leap, can one identify liberal corporatism, even loosely, with the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung, or coordination, according to which corporations obtained security for their operations in exchange for loyalty to the regime.

In Goldberg’s uneasy blend of analysis and polemic, moreover, his ideological instincts too often intrude on his historical interpretations of specific movements and events. Anyone familiar with the history of progressivism and the New Deal will find his descriptions of them selective and overblown—in Woodrow Wilson’s “fascist state,” to take only one example, the legislative and judicial branches of government continued to operate unimpeded. Even those who share his distaste for the Great Society are likely to be given pause by his depiction of it as a form of God-state utopianism.

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It seems, in the end, that in associating liberalism with fascism Goldberg has taken the incidental and partial for the essential. Both forms of politics are manifestations of collectivism, but that common response to modern conditions does not make them political soulmates. Beneath their joint collectivist instincts, liberalism and fascism are fundamentally at odds. To miss this is not so much to insult liberalism as to trivialize fascism.

It is one thing to question aspects of democratic governance, as modern liberals sometimes did, and quite another to set out relentlessly and systematically, as an essential expression of what you are about, to destroy it root and branch. The point is not just that Woodrow Wilson was not a dictator; it is that he and his fellow Progressives—and those who came after them—were not fascists. Take away from fascism its authoritarian bloody-mindedness, and whatever it is you have left it isn’t fascism, liberal or otherwise.

Jonah Goldberg is entirely right to insist that American conservatism has nothing serious to do with fascism. But he does not take his American exceptionalism far enough. Liberals, too, are protected by its immunities.