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Liberal Fascism The secret history of the American left from Mussolini to the politics of meaning
Liberal Fascism The secret history of the American left from Mussolini to the politics of meaning. Jonah Goldberg Double Day 2007.
Fascism is when corporations become the government. Bill Maher.
Liberal fascism differs from classical fascism in many ways. Fascisms differ from each other because they grow out of different soil. What unites them are their emotional or instinctual impulses, such as the quest for community, the urge to get beyond politics, a faith in the perfectibility of man and the authority of experts, and an obsession with the aesthetics of youth, the cult of action, and the need for an all-powerful state to coordinate society at the national or global level. Most of all, they share the belief-- what I call the totalitarian temptation--that with the right amount of tinkering we can realize the utopian dream of “creating a better world”.
Liberal fascism shares with classic fascism, and indeed with Naziism, a concern about health, nutrition, and the environment. Does that automatically make you a fascist if you care about health, nutrition, and the environment? Of course not. What is fascist is the notion that in an organic national community, the individual has no right not to be healthy; and the state therefore has the obligation to force us to be healthy for our own good. To the extent that these modern health movements seek to harness the power of the state to their agenda, they flirt with classical fascism. Even culturally, environmentalism gives license to the sort of moral bullying and intrusion that, were it couched in terms of traditional morality, liberals would immediately denounce as fascist.
Italian fascism is often conflated with Nazism, but from the Fascist Party’s founding in 1919, until they were kicked out in 1938, Jews were overrepresented in the Fascist Party. Fascism held a degree of popularity in America clear up to its invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Indeed, in the late 20s American icons such as the New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Literary Digest promoted Mussolini as some ideal great man. The Saturday Evening Post gave him one of the biggest advances ever given by an American publisher when they published his autobiography. Western icons such as Winston Churchill, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein applauded his policies. Columbia University became Italian fascism’s “home in America”. Liberal intellectuals supported him then in the same way that they support Fidel Castro now.
Pg. 30. Given everything that we've been taught about the evils of fascism how is it possible that for more than a decade this country was in significant respects pro-Fascist? How is it possible, considering that most liberals and leftists believe that they were put on earth to oppose fascism, that many if not most of America's liberals either admired Mussolini and his project or simply didn't care about it one way or another? Fascism was possible because at that time the liberal left believed that the era of liberal democracy was ending. It was time for man to lay aside the anachronism of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism, and the like, and rise to the responsibility of remaking the world in its own image. Mussolini, a lifelong socialist intellectual, was a warrior in this crusade, and his fascism a doctrine created from the same intellectual material Lenin and Trotsky had built their movements with. It was a grand leap into the era of experimentation that would sweep aside old dogmas and usher in a new age.
Mussolini was a red diaper baby. His father a socialist anarchist who attended the Third International with Marx and Engles. Mussolini was a born rabble rouser. At the age of 10 he led a high school demonstration against bad food in the cafeteria. Later he became active in the fight against the Catholic Church. He was also, by today’s standards, a sexual predator, boasting 169 mistresses during his life. In 1902, approaching conscription age, he fled to Switzerland, then a Casablanca for socialists and radicals. He was a prolific reader, and was famous for his ability to speak on obscure subjects without notes and in great depth. Indeed, alone among the major leaders of Europe in the 1930s and 40s he could speak, read, and write intelligently in several languages. Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler were undoubtedly the better politicians and commanders in chief, largely because of their legendary instincts, but by the standards of liberal intellectuals apply today, Mussolini was the smartest of the three.
Mussolini was heavily influenced by Georges Sorel's syndicalism, a theory of governance that argued that the state should be governed by revolutionary trade unions. It argued that society should be divided by professional sectors of the economy, an idea that deeply influenced the New Deals of both FDR and Hitler. But Sorel's greatest contribution to the left was in his concept of myths, which he defined as “artificial combinations invented to give the appearance of reality to hopes that inspire men in their present activity.” For Sorel, the general strike was the guiding myth of the day. It didn't matter whether the general strike could have achieved the results it boasted. What mattered was mobilizing the masses to understand their power over the capitalist ruling classes. Mussolini said in an interview in 1932, “it is faith that moves mountains, not reason. Reason is a tool, but it can never be the motive force of the crowd.”
Pg. 38. Other of Mussolini's influencers were William James, who's pragmatic “will to believe”, and Nietzsche's “will to power” added together, informed the creation of myth so necessary to the revolutionizing of the masses. The French Revolution, which was probably the first fascist government, and Rousseau’s philosophy of living according to the general will, with its totalitarian tendencies, probably influenced him. According to Rousseau, individuals who live in accordance with the general will are free and virtuous, and those who defy it are criminals, fools, or heretics. These enemies of the common good must be forced to bend to the general will. Rousseau proposed a society in which religion and politics were perfectly combined. Loyalty to the state and loyalty to the divine must be seen as the same thing. The Vatican accused the fascists of “Statolotry” and of propagandizing the children into a Pagan worship of the state.
Both Mussolini and Lenin believe that World War One was the death of socialism, and they were right. Across Europe, and later, America, socialist and other left-leaning parties voted for war, turning their backs on doctrines of international solidarity and the dogma that this war was a war for capitalism and imperialism, largely because that is where the masses wanted to go.
Pg. 44. Nevertheless, World War One pushed the socialists who were out of power to declare Mussolini, and the other socialists in power, right wingers. If World War One had given rise to fascism, it had also given rise to anti- fascism. Mussolini accepted the designation of right wing, but he always insisted that in his heart he was a socialist. Mussolini realized that it was utterly foolish to believe that class consciousness could ever trump the call of nation and culture. What was then called socialism was just a kind of socialism, international socialism. Mussolini was interested in creating a new socialism, a socialism in one state, national socialism, which had the added benefit of being achievable.
Pg. 45. Mussolini had learned from Sorel that Marxism, while not literally true, was a series of useful myths which can be utilized to energize the proletariat to do things that mobilize and focus their efforts. Therefore, Mussolini recognized, why not save socialism by changing the impotence of international socialism into a more potent national socialism, something the proletariat could believe in and take to heart. Change is after all a constant of dialectical materialism. This is the key insight that later led Stalin, with his doctrine of socialism in one country, to defeat Trotsky, whose doctrine of permanent revolution came to be seen as useless and futile, leading to his exile and murder. Stalin was objectively correct in his assessment of psychology and history, leading to his absolute control of the Soviet state.
Pg. 46. On March 23rd, 1919, Mussolini and a handful of others started the Fascist Combat Party in Milan, Italy, aiming to form a Popular Front of pro-war leftists, from socialist veterans’ groups, to futurist, anarchist, nationalist, and syndicalist intellectuals. In November the newly named and explicitly left-wing fascists ran a slate of candidates in the national elections. They got trounced at the hands of the socialists. Most historians claim this is what taught Mussolini to move to the right. He realized that there was no space in Italian politics for a party that was both nationalist and left.
Pg. 47. The author (Jonah Goldberg) thinks this distorts the picture. Mussolini did not move Fascism from left to right; he moved it from socialist to populist. An unwieldy phenomenon, that populism had never been known as a conservative or right-wing orientation before is only because so many were determined to label fascism right wing that populism under Mussolini was redefined as such. After all, the notion that political power is and should be vested in the people was a classical liberal position. Populism was a more radical version of this position. It's still a “power to the people” ideology, but it is skeptical of the parliamentary machinery of conventional liberalism (e.g., checks and balances). In the United States the populists-- always a force on the left in the 19th and early 20th centuries-- pushed for such reforms as direct election of Senators and the nationalization of industry and banking. Direct democracy and nationalization were two of the main planks of the fascist agenda. Mussolini also stopped calling his newspaper a “socialist daily” in favor of a “producers’ daily”.
Mussolini made the distinction that all populists make, between those who create wealth with their own hands and those who, as William Jennings Bryan noted, were “idle holders of idle capital”. The populist sought to expand the scope of government to smash the “economic royalists” and help the little guy. This was Mussolini’s approach in a nutshell.
Pg. 48. From 1919 to 1922, when Mussolini led the march on Rome and became prime Minister, his first objective was power and combat. He led both secret police modeled after Lenin’s secret police, and gangs of rough thugs who were capable of cracking skulls and breaking legs. The fascists initiated a civil war in which around 2000 lives were lost, with 35% of the dead confirmed leftist and 15% fascist. It is worth keeping in mind that more Italians died during this period from traditional Italian Mafia wars. Many fascists were impressive, respectable men, who gained not only the cooperation of the police, but the sympathy of both judges and the common man. In a national contest Between the two broad factions, Italian people-- workers, peasants, small businessmen, and professionals, as well as the well to do and wealthy-- chose the fascist over the avowed international socialists and communists.
Pg. 49. Mussolini’s style was remarkably similar to Yasser Arafat’s. He played the political game of claiming to seek peaceful accords and alliances while straining to contain the more violent elements within his movement. When squads of fascist black shirts broke the bones of his opponents, he would claim that his hands were tied. Again, like Lenin and Arafat, Mussolini practiced a philosophy of the worse the better. He celebrated violence committed by socialists because it gave him the opportunity to commit more violence in retribution. In the end Mussolini’s violence was not the main issue in a nation torn by economic and social chaos as well as political bitterness in the wake of the Versailles treaty. Mussolini’s messages and tactics triumphed. Moreover, success had less to do with ideology and violence than with populist emotional appeals. Mussolini promised to restore two things in short supply: pride and order.
Mussolini's March on Rome took place after the king had already asked him to form a government. It was not a spontaneous, revolutionary event, but a staged bit of political theater designed to advance a Sorelian myth. The violence between the fascists and other left-wing parties reached a crescendo during the summer of 1922, when the communists and socialists called for a general strike to protest the government's refusal to clamp down on the Fascists. Mussolini declared that if the government didn't break the strike, his fascist would do it themselves. When the Reds launched their strike on July 31st Mussolini’s squads broke it within a day. They drove the streetcars, kept the traffic moving, and, most famously, got the trains running on time.
Pg. 50. Mussolini's tactics resonated with the Italian public, tired of and cynical about parliamentary democracy and liberal politics. Mussolini's military efficiency seemed to transcend partisan politics. With the public largely behind him, he planned to break a different sort of strike: the parliamentary deadlock that had paralyzed the government. He threatened that he and his black shirted goons would march on Rome. In this period the fascists used the revolutionary myth to force the government to make Mussolini Prime Minister. 1924 he held reasonably fair elections, and the fascists won by a landslide.
Pg. 51. Mussolini successfully cast himself as the leader of the future. Throughout the 1920s, even if he implemented some policies that western intellectuals disliked, anti-press laws for example, his method of government was regarded as quintessentially modern. At a time when many young intellectuals were rejecting the dogma of classical liberalism, Mussolini seemed a leader at the forefront of the movement to reject old ways of thinking. It is no coincidence that fascism was the first politically successful, self-styled modern youth movement, and was widely recognized as such. No leader in the world was associated more with the cult of technology than Mussolini in the 1920s. By the 1930s world leaders were trying to fit into Mussolini’s mold as a modern statesman.
Chapter 2. Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left.
The word fascist and fascism occurred in Mein Kampf twice, both in connection with the French and Russian revolutions: an idea could subject a whole nation to a process of complete renovation. The rest was grown in German soil. Mussolini did not like Hitler. He saw him as crude and a man of limited ideas. In 1934 Mussolini threatened a military confrontation with Hitler to save fascist Austria from a Nazi invasion. Mussolini, along with his Fascist Party, distanced themselves from Hitler's anti-Semitism. He realized that Hitler would say or do anything to achieve and hold power. Hitler's genius was in the realization that people wanted to rally to ideas and symbols. Thus, his success lay in the quintessential techniques, technology, and icons of the 20th century, marketing, advertising, radio, airplanes, TV, film, and most of all, oratory to massive, exquisitely staged rallies.
The conventional explanation for Hitler and Nazism’s rise to power was that they exploited popular resentment over Germanys defeat in World War One and the harsh peace settlement at Versailles. Colluding with capitalists and industrialist eager to defeat communism, the Nazi staged a reactionary coup by exploiting patriotic sentiment and mobilizing the conservative elements of German society. The left has cherry picked and highlighted these aspects of Nazism, while trivializing the very substantial leftist and socialist aspects of Nazism. The desired effect was to cast Nazism as the polar opposite of communism. In reality the national socialist left replaced the internationalist socialist left in the same way the American new left replaced the old left and the new right replaced the old right: by discarding ideas and policies that did not work and inserting new ideas and policies that were more attuned to the times.
Pg. 58. Nazism and fascism were both popular movements with support from every stratum of society. Meanwhile the contention that industrialist and other fat cats were pulling Hitler strings from behind the scenes has also been banished to the province of aging Marxist, nostalgic for paradigms lost. The notion, grounded in Marxist gospel, that fascism or Nazism was the fighting arm of capitalist reaction fell with the Berlin Wall. Indeed, the very notion that corporations are inherently right wing is itself an ideological vestige of earlier times.
In Germany the aristocracy and business elite were generally repulsed by Hitler and the Nazis. But when Hitler demonstrated that he wasn't going away, these same elites decided it would be wise to put down some insurance money on the upstarts. These decisions weren't driven by anything like an ideological alliance between capitalism and Nazism. Corporations in Germany, like their counterparts today, tended to be opportunistic, not ideological.
Pg. 59. Broadly speaking, the left is the party of change, the right the party of status quo. On this score, in no sense, way, shape, or form, was Hitler a man of right. There are few things he believed in more totally than that he was a revolutionary. Yet the left must deny this, because for them revolutions are always good.
Pg. 66. World War One shattered the old dogmas of religion, democracy, capitalism, and monarchy. The war fueled widespread hatred, suspicion, and paranoia towards elites and established institutions. For belligerence on both sides, economic planning lent political and intellectual credibility to state directed war socialism. And, of course, it led to the enthronement of revolutionaries throughout Europe: Lenin in Russia, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany.
Austrian Hitler contrived to join the German army. While fighting against Russia the antiwar agitators in Germany enraged him, leading to his further hatred of communism. The German Reds fed on the suffering of the German people, organizing strikes against the government and demanding peace with the Soviets and the establishments of German socialism. Hitler saw the antiwar mobilization as treason. It was not only as a betrayal of the troops at the front, but was also instigated at the behest of an enemy power.
Pg. 67. After the war Hitler, still in the army, was assigned to a post in Munich. His job was to “monitor” organizations promoting what the army considered to be dangerous ideas, pacifism, socialism, communism, etc. While listening to a populist speaker Hitler instantly recognized the potential of the ideas, which would appeal to the little guy in both cities and small towns. Hitler understood that, just as in America, the increasing power of big banks, corporations, and big box stores fostered a sense of powerlessness among blue collar workers, small farmers, and small business owners.
When at a meeting of the German Workers Party, Hitler picked up a pamphlet and reading it realized that there were people who thought just like him, and that there was a ready-made ideology available for him to adopt and exploit. Even if Hitler's nationalism, populism, anti-Semitism, and non-Marxist socialism took more time to germinate, the relevant point is that what came to be known as Hitlerism or Nazism was already a significant current in Germany and elsewhere in Central Europe. What Hitler realized was that the masses didn't need a new doctrine, what they needed was someone to who could pull them into action. Action was the watchword across the western world, action got things done. Hitler would become National Socialism's greatest salesman, not its creator.
In 1920 Hitler helped write the Nazi party's platform dedicated to the overarching principle that the common good must come before self-interest. The most striking thing about the platform was its concerted appeal to socialistic and populist economics, including providing a livelihood for citizens, the total confiscation of war profits, the nationalization of trusts, expanded old age pensions, and the outlawing of child labor. This was not a right-wing platform.
Pg. 69. What the Nazis pursued was a form of anti-capitalist, anti-conservative, communitarianism, encapsulated in the concept of” people's community.” The aim was to transcend class differences, but only within the confines of the community. “We have endeavored”, Hitler explained, “to depart from the external, the superficial, and endeavor to forget social, religion, class, profession, fortune, education, capital, and everything else that separates men in order to reach that which bonds them together”. Again and again, Nazi propaganda, law, and literature insisted that none of the conservative or bourgeois categories should hold any German back from fulfilling his potential in the new Reich. To Hitler, Marx's most offensive conviction was the idea that “the working men have no country”. In this context it is relatively easy to see why it was so easy for Hitler to recruit men from the left into his movement. He was recruiting men not from the left to the right, but from left wing socialism to right wing socialism. Marx’s class struggle, the primary guarantee of communism’s inevitability, was unceremoniously thrown into the trash can of history.
Chapter 3. Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism
Fascism, at its core, is the view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union towards the same goals, overseen by the state. Mussolini coined the word “totalitarian” to describe not a tyrannical society but a humane one in which everyone is taken care of and contributes equally. The militarization of society and politics was considered simply the best available means towards this end. Call it what you like--progressivism, fascism, communism, or totalitarianism--the first true enterprise of this kind was established not in Russia, Italy, or Germany, but in the United States, and Woodrow Wilson was the 20th century’s first fascist dictator.
Consider the evidence. More dissidents were arrested and jailed in a few years under Wilson than under Mussolini during the entire 1920s. Wilson arguably did as much if not more violence to civil liberties in his last three years in office than Mussolini did in his first 12. Wilson created a better and more effective propaganda ministry than Mussolini ever had. In the 1920s Mussolini's critics harangued--and rightly so—him for using his semiofficial Fascisti to bully the opposition and for his harassment of the press. Just a few years earlier, Wilson had unleashed literally hundreds of thousands of badge carrying goons on the American people and prosecuted a vicious campaign against the press that would have made me Mussolini envious.
Pg. 84. Wilson was infatuated with political power, and as is so common to intellectuals, he let his power worship infect his analysis. Lord Acton’s famous dictum that power corrupts could just as well be referring to the academicians who let the power of an individual bias their analysis. Historians tend to forgive the powerful for transgressions they would never condone by the weak. Wilson admired Abraham Lincoln not for his humanitarian instincts, but for his ability to impose his will on the entire country. He was a centralizer, a modernizer who used his power to forge a new united nation. Wilson admired Lincoln’s means; suspension of the habeas corpus, the draft, and the campaign of the radical Republicans after the war, far more than he liked his ends. Wilson loved, craved, and in a sense, glorified power. Few ideologies are more directly concerned with the glory of might, will, strength, and action, as is fascism. “Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion”, wrote George Orwell. The liberal intelligentsia of the 1930s had moved to the right.
Pg. 86. Wilson believed that the state was a natural, living thing, which could only grow or die. Unlike classical liberalism, which saw the government as a necessary evil, or simply a benign and voluntary social contract, for free men to enter willingly, the belief that the entire society was one organic whole left no room for those who didn't want to behave, let alone evolve. Your home, your private thoughts, everything was part of the organic body politic, which the state was charged with redeeming. The home could no longer be seen as an island, separate and sovereign from the rest of society. John Dewey helped create kindergartens in America to shape the apples before they fell from the tree, while at the other end of the educational process through reformers like Wilson ideal was not to help students adjust themselves to the world, but to make them as unlike their fathers as possible.
Pg. 88. Wilson's writings are full of demands that the artificial barriers established in our antiquated 18th century system of checks and balances be smashed. He mocked the “4th of July sentiments” of those who still invoked the founding fathers as a source of constitutional guidance. 1890 essay, “Leaders of Men”, Wilson explained that the true leader uses the masses like tools. He must not traffic in subtleties and nuance, as literary men do. Rather, he must speak to stir their passions, not their intellect. In short, he must be a skillful demagogue. Wilson considered himself an idealist, but in reality, he was a cynic.
Pg. 90. If Wilson represented the socialistic, academic, technocratic wing of the Progressive movement, Teddy Roosevelt can be seen as representing the more nationalistic, populist, get ‘er done wing. He was not as concerned with social reform, as was Wilson. He was more concerned with moving the American project ahead. While Wilson wanted a ruling elite of technocrats who could understand the root causes of social decay, Teddy wanted an elite drawn from a metaphorical “warrior class”, imbued with “manly vigor”, who could defeat the decadence of “soft living”. While Wilson looked for legal loopholes to introduce a socialistic measure, Teddy preferred to charge ahead and let the courts and legislature catch up later.
Pg. 91. The 1912 election boiled down to what kind of Progressivism America would get. Taft considered himself a progressive but was more conservative than his “insurgent” opponents within the Republican Party, who favored more government intervention in the economy, especially where the railroads were concerned. Taft lost more support when he signed a tariff reform bill that raised tariffs rather than lowered them as his constituents desired. In addition to losing control of the Republican Party in Congress, he lost the faith of Teddy Roosevelt, who split the Republican ticket by running as a third-party candidate. Woodrow Wilson won the election with ease.
Pg. 92. Teddy, who had run his Presidency as a “trust buster”, and failing in that ran his 1912 “Bull Moose Party” campaign on making corporations work for the people by incorporating government into them. “The New Nationalism,” Teddy proclaimed, “maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it”, raising cries of “despotism” and “Caesarism”. H.L. Mencken scored him for stressing “the duty of the citizen to the state, while soft pedaling the duty of the state to the citizen.” Wilson was seen as the more conservative candidate in the 1912 contest because he was closer to 19th century laissez-faire liberalism. But Wilson was talking out of both sides of his mouth: two weeks after proclaiming that “the history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government power”, he said that “America is not now and cannot in the future be the place of unrestricted individual enterprise”.
Pg. 94. American progressive liberals were heavily influenced by European, and especially German social thinkers. Many of the founders of American liberalism were among the 9,000 Americans who studied at German universities during the 19th century, learning there that experts could mold society like clay. Otto von Bismark was the European statesman most influential among American liberals. His top-down socialism promoted the world’s first welfare state, delivering an eight hour workday, health care, social insurance, old age pensions, and the right to work if healthy.
Page 96. Bismarck’s motive was to forestall demands for more democracy by giving people the sort of things they might ask for at the polls. His top-down socialism was a Machiavellian masterstroke because it made the middle-class dependent on the state. The middle-class took away from this the lesson that enlightened government was not the product of democracy, but an alternative to it. Such logic proved disastrous a little more than a generation later. But it was precisely this logic that appealed to the progressives. As Wilson put it, the essence of progressivism is that the individual “marry his interests to the state”.
Pg. 98. When reading about Herbert Croly one often finds phrases such as “Croly was no fascist, but…” Yet no effort has been made to explain why he was not a fascist. Most seem to think that it is simply self-evident that the founder of the New Republic could not have been a disciple of Mussolini's. In reality, however, almost every single item on the standard checklist of fascist characteristics can be found in The Promise of American Life. The need to mobilize society like an army? Check! Call for a spiritual rebirth? Check! For great revolutionary leaders? Check! Reliance on a manufactured, unifying, national myth? Check! Contempt for parliamentary democracy? Check! Non-Marxist socialism? Check! Nationalism? Check! A spiritual calling for military expansion? Check! The need to make politics into religion. Check! Hostility to individualism? Check!
Pg. 104. Wilson won the election in 1912 in an Electoral College landslide, but with only 42% of the popular vote. Immediately he set about to convert the Democratic Party into a Progressive Party and, in turn, to make it the engine for the transformation of America. Increasingly the core of the Progressive Party became almost entirely devoted to preparedness, shorthand for a big military buildup and imperial assertiveness.
Pg. 106. Wilson’s Fascist Police State
Pg. 108. Musicians, comedians, sculptors, ministers-- and of course the movie industry-- were all happily drafted to the cause, eager to wear the “invisible uniform of war.” Isadora Duncan, an avant-guard pioneer of what today would be called sexual liberation, became a toe tapper in patriotic pageants at the Metropolitan Opera House. The most enduring and iconic image of the time is the “I want you” poster of Uncle Sam pointing with shaming finger of the state made flesh at uncommitted citizens. The war revealed that a generation of young intellectuals, trained in pragmatic philosophy, were ill equipped to prevent means from becoming ends. The peculiar congeniality between the war and these men was simply baked into the cake. It is as if the war and they had been waiting for each other.
Pg. 109. More important than socializing industry was nationalizing the people for the war effort. “Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way,” Wilson threatened in June of 1917.
Pg. 114. The Justice Department created its own quasi-official fascisti, known as the American Protective League, or APL. They were given badges, many of which read “Secret Service”, and charged with keeping an eye on their neighbors, coworkers, and friends.
Pg. 116. Progressives were, for the most part, satisfied that the Great War was striking down individualism and building up collectivism, where the good of the individual is sacrificed for the good of the whole.
Pg. 118. Only in Italy were anti war socialist banished from the left. In Germany, Britain, and the US antiwar socialist remained left wing.
Pg. 119. War socialism under Wilson was an entirely progressive project, and long after the war it remained the liberal ideal.
Chapter 4. Franklin Roosevelt’s Fascist New Deal
The Russian Revolution had opened the eyes of the ruling elite of all countries, forcing a realization of the power of a collectivized society. Laborers were enchanted by the idea of workers’ control of the economy. Big businesses saw a captive market and captive labor, possibility of huge loans to cash starved nations, and the opportunities to develop industries virtually from the ground up.
The laisse faire capitalism of the Robber Baron era all but killed capitalism in the hearts and minds of the working class, and the rich, fearing expropriation without compensation, detested communism. The middle class saw no place for itself in either system. Benito Mussolini’s Italian fascism provided a third way, without the degradation of the worker under unbridled capitalism or the class hatreds of communism. State regulated capital and state regulated labor allowed a protected space for the middle class, fascism’s main support.
FDR political career started as a state legislator in New York. He moved on to the national stage when Wilson appointed him assistant secretary of the Navy. In 1921 he caught polio, which kept him out of the political spotlight during the roaring 20s when progressive politics were distinctly unwelcome. The early FDR was more of a follower than a leader. He kept out of the public eye while working on the political angles behind the scene. He read people well, and through extensive conversations with intellectuals, activists, politicians, and the like, he was able to absorb the zeitgeist of the times. Always ready to “split the difference”, chameleon like, his friends complained that they never really knew what he was thinking. He was ready to go whichever way the wind blew him. Unfortunately, the wind was blowing toward statism.
Politics is a problem-solving enterprise, a give and take: you give me this, I give you that. Problems are not solved by splitting the difference and neither does a pragmatic “whatever works” stance solve problems. They just kick the can down the road. The third way refuses to accept tradeoffs and is thus utopian. This leads inevitably to authoritarianism, and increasingly radical solutions, as the old solutions fail to solve the problem.
Pg. 131. FDR’s “middle way” was born of the Bismarckian attempt to forestall greater radicalism. The US elite, including business leaders, were for the most part reconciled to the fact that “socialism” of some kind was of going to be a permanent feature of the political economy. Middle way politics was carefully crafted to appeal to the middle classes’ entirely justifiable fear of the red menace. Hitler and Mussolini exploited this anxiety at every turn; indeed, it was probably the key to their success. This appeal was homegrown socialism, or orderly socialism, socialism with a German or Italian face, as opposed to nasty “foreign” socialism, in much the same way that 100% Americanism had been progressive America's counteroffer to Bolshevism.
German and American New Deals may have been merely whatever Hitler and FDR felt that they could get away with. But therein lies a common principle: the state should be allowed to get away with anything, so long as it is for “good reasons”. This Is the common principle among fascism, Nazism, progressivism, and liberalism. It represents the triumph of pragmatism in politics given that it recognizes no dogmatic boundaries to the scope of government power. The leader and his anointed cadres are decision makers, above and beyond political or democratic imperatives. Liberalism is what liberals do, Nazism is what Nazis do, and fascism is what fascists do.
Coupled with the liberal’s avoidance of doctrinaire solutions was the desire to go back to the war socialism of Woodrow Wilson. They saw the continuing experimentation of Italy and Russia as beating America at its own game and were revulsed by the individualism of the Roaring Twenties. Much of the liberal’s enthusiasm to remake the world was fueled by a simple boredom with the status quo. Change was going on around the world, and they weren’t getting in on it! This conviction often slid by its own logic into anarchism and radicalism, related worldviews which assume that anything would be better than what we have now.
George Bernard Shaw, Gertrude Stein, H.G. Wells, all icons of the era, sought to hurry socialism along. Fabian Socialism, they declared, was just too slow. The idea of taking over from the inside was boring. These liberal advocates of socialism, in their fiction, proposed what can only be called liberal fascist solutions to the world's problems. Wells was an enormous fan of FDRs, and the two met often at the White House, particularly during 1934. 1935 and 1936 Wells briefly switched to Huey Long’s and Father Coughlin's more exciting brand of fascism. By 1939 however, he was again firmly back in Roosevelt's camp, seeing FDR’s brand of personal government as indispensable.
Pg. 139. Stealing Fascist Thunder.
From the dawn of the Progressive Era through the 1930s, the intellectual and ideological landscape was fractured by the fight between left wing socialism and right wing socialism. All camps subscribed to some hybridized version of Marxism, some bastardization of a Rousseauian dream of a society governed by a general will. It was not until the late 1940s, with the revival of classical liberalism led by Frederick Hayek, that collectivism of all stripes was once again fought by a right that did not share the core assumptions of the left.
During the 1930s, however, FDR was forced to fight opponents on his left, within socialism, who pushed him to ever more aggressive reforms. Populist progressives such as Huey Long and Father Coughlin, the right-wing “Radio Priest”, were hugely popular, and they more than any other group, moved the political center of gravity in America to the left. Coughlin styled himself an economist and made fiery speeches against laissez- faire economics, and international bankers and their ilk. When the election came he threw himself behind FDR, who pretended to like him. FDR won, thanks in part to a successful strategy of going after urban Catholic voters. Coughlin concluded that he has been instrumental in getting FDR elected, and eventually created serious headaches for the White House. He declared that capitalism wasn’t worth saving, and at other times advocated “state capitalism”.
Senator Huey Long, the archetypical American fascist, is likewise often called a right winger by his detractors. Some liberals have ambivalent feelings towards him, attracted to his larger than life persona and economic populism, but disliking his unrefined demagoguery. Long’s dismissal of the Socialist Party was entirely cultural and pragmatic, not ideological. He derided them for their inability to win elections. One of his supporters stated he had been a lifelong socialist that long was telling people the things that we have been telling them for a generation. Listen to him while they thought we were fools. What makes long so recognizable as a fascist was he spoke free contempt for the rules of democracy he had an authentic organic connection with his constituents seemed to exceed anything America had seen before oddly enough, have allowed so many liberals and socialists to recognize the fascism and lip long politics was their own elitism and cosmopolitism. Long had no use for pointy head experts and elites.
Fascism’s success almost always depends on the cooperation of the ‘losers’ during a time of economic and technological change. The lower middle classes-- the people who have just enough to fear losing it-- are the electoral shock troops of fascism. Populist appeals to resentment of “fat cats”, international bankers, economic royalists, and so on, are the stock in trade of fascist demagogues. FDR and Hitler both cared about the little guy, but Hitler was the more successful and generous of the two, according to most basic indicators. Birth rate increased 50% from 1932 to 1936. Marriages increased until Germany led Europe in 1938. Suicide plummeted by 80% from 1932 to 1939.
Pg. 149. The core value of original fascism was the imposition of war values on society. The chief appeal of war or social planning isn't conquest or death, but mobilization. Free societies are disorganized; people do their own thing. War brings conformity and unity of purpose. The ordinary rules of behavior are mothballed. You can get things done. Many progressives probably would have preferred a different organizing principle, which is why William James spoke of the ‘moral equivalent’ of war. He wanted all the benefits—Dewey’s social possibilities of war-- without the costs. In more recent times, the left has looked to everything from environmentalism and global warming to public health and diversity as war equivalents to cajole the public into an expert-driven unity.
Very nearly- every program of the early New Deal was written in the politics of war, the economics of war, or the aesthetics of war emerging from World War One. The Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, the signature public works project of the New Deal, had it had its roots in a World War One power project. Many New Deal agencies were mostly continuations of various boards and committees set up 15 years earlier during the war. The National Recovery Administration was explicitly modeled on the War Industries Board of World War One. Public Works Administration paid for the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Enterprise, as well as four cruisers, many smaller warship, over 100 army planes. Perhaps the reason so many people believe the New Deal ended the depression is that the New Deal segway into a full-blown war economy was so seamless.
Pg. 152.
Perhaps no program better represented the new governmental martial outlook than the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC. Arguably the most popular plan of the New Deal, the CCC mobilized some 2.5 million young men into what could only be called paramilitary training. The speaker of the house boasted of the CCC's success: “They are also under military training and as they come out of it they come out improved in health and developmentally and physically and are more useful citizens, and if ever we should become involved in another war they would furnish a very valuable nucleus for army. Meanwhile, the Nazis were establishing similar camps for virtually identical reasons.
Far more shocking example of the militarization of American life came in the form of the National Recovery Administration, led by Hugh Johnson, Times Man of the Year, liaison to the War Industries Board, and director of the military draft during WW 1. Cooperation to the program gave stores the right to display a Blue Eagle on their doors, along with the motto “we do our part”. The program was monitored by an army of quasi-official informants, from the union members to Boy Scouts. Johnson’s totalitarian approach was unmistakable. “When every American housewife understands that the Blue Eagle on everything that she permits to come into her home is a symbol of its restoration to security, may God have mercy on the man or group of men who attempt to trifle with this bird.”
Because one of the central goals of the early New Deal was to create artificial scarcity in order to drive prices up, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration ordered that 6,000,000 pigs slaughtered. Crops were left to rot. Many farmers were paid not to plant.
Johnson's favorite means of promoting compliance were military parades and Nuremberg style rallies. On September 12, 1933, Johnson harangued an audience of 10,000 at Madison Square Garden vowing that 85% of America's workers were already under the authority of the Blue Eagle. The following day New York was nearly shut down by a Blue Eagle parade in honor of the “President's NRA Day”. This was the biggest parade in New York's history. The President's NRA Day parade hosted 50,000 garment workers, 30,000 city laborers, 17,000 retail workers, 6000 brewery hands, and a Radio City Music Hall troupe. Nearly a quarter million men and women marched for 10 hours past an audience of well over 1,000,000 people, with 49 military planes flying overhead. Similar spectacles were staged across the country.
An interlude:
I have been sidelined to secondary sources, to wit, The Structure of the Corporate State by Raffaello Viglione, a 50-page pamphlet commissioned by the British Empire Fascist Party to explain Italian Fascism to their members. Unable to find a download, I found this article examining the subject: On Corporatism, Fascism, and the First New Deal by James Q. Whitman published in The American Journal of Comparative Law. Vol. 39
Pg. 748. To supporters and critics alike, Johnson's NRA, a vast scheme for delegating governmental authority to private cartel, seemed akin to the “corporatism” of Italian fascism. Pg. 749. “Corporatism,” an ill-defined industrial policy involving official state sponsorship of industry cartels and labor unions… PG 752. As a general matter one can say that corporatism is the body of political theory that seeks to establish a modern Guild order, an order, that is somehow founded neither on state power nor on individual liberty, but on the autonomy of guild like intermediate bodies, such as unions and professional associations….they involve what are generally considered state powers to private organizations. Pg. 757. Corporatist propaganda usually emphasizes two points, the misery of class conflict and the farce of parliamentary democracy. An important propaganda tract the Italian fascist party “The structure of the Corporate State” it was a fable like explanation of the history of labor relations. In many ways it could be considered the fascist equivalent of the Communist Manifesto.
In the preindustrial age workers and owners cooperated in small businesses, depending upon each other, with a start-to-finish production in which the worker found satisfaction in his work and the owner felt a paternal responsibility to the worker. As a result of the industrial revolution these factors no longer held, businesses were immense, workers and owners were separated, there was no longer pride in the product of the work due to the necessities of mass production. Unions and parliamentary democracy were created to regulate these conflicts. At first, they worked well to satisfy the problems as they arose. Soon the temptations of power corrupted both the union leaders and the parliamentarians. The only bright spot in recent history was World War One which distracted men from social warfare. This suggested the model for a necessary new order. There was a need to remove both class warfare and to shield the union leaders from the temptation of politics. To end class warfare, the authors of the pamphlet, drawing on an established Catholic tradition, argued for “mixed syndicates,” in which workers and employers would be grouped together, according to their true common identity in a modern economy: their identity as producers. The basic authority for exercising social control should be removed from parliament and delegated to the mixed syndicates, which served as the fundamental governing organs of society under the supervision of a supreme state. Syndicates were empowered to send representatives to a fascist national advisory parliament, in which questions of interest politics could be considered under the watchful direction of the state.
Pg. 765. In April 1933, Roosevelt, under pressure from Congress, formed several teams to propose industrial policy. A draft, thoroughly corporatist, was delivered by General Johnson and Donald Richberg. Their bill called for suspension of the antitrust laws to allow government licensed cartels to set industry wide standards on wages, prices and competitive practices. The other two teams combined and produced a draft very similar to Johnson’s, with the addition of massive federal expenditures on public works. Roosevelt ordered the two teams to reconcile their papers, and the results were the National Industrial Recovery Act. Title 2 of the compromise statute called for massive federal expenditure on public works. As such it had nothing to do with corporatist delegationism. But title 1, which established the National Recovery Administration was the fulfillment of a decade of associationist yearnings and memories of the war economy. Roosevelt appointed Johnson as director of the NRA, and Johnson appointed Richberg his assistant. Both soon earned a reputation as right wingers, and later fascists, with their calls for a “Man of Action.”
Pg. 775. The greatest difference between American corporatism and European corporatism, according to this paper, was that the Europeans thought the biggest area of conflict was between labor and capital, and the risk of conflagration came because the conflict was being fought out in parliament where the conflict was inflamed and exacerbated for political gain. American corporatist ideology, by contrast, far from being ideology of political economy was simply an economic ideology. Congress, to Americans, was a place full of incompetents, not rogues. As a result, American corporatism contained no implicit theory of representative government, and it felt that the biggest arena of conflict was between capitalists and other capitalists. Too much competition, in other words. But the US had been through laissez-faire capitalism and had had its trust busters and written its anti-trust laws in reaction to it. American corporatism caught its breath during the “war socialism” of World War 1, and during the Depression era National Recovery Act, but the Supreme Court found that unconstitutional after a few years. So, this paper gives no clear answer to the question of why America escaped fascism, but it does point out that we nearly didn’t.
Back to our book.
Pg. 156. Economist and politicians familiar with fascist Italy found that FDR's National Recovery Administration had many similarities to Fascist Italy, and noted that the NRA could only be administered by a bureaucracy operating by fiat and that such a bureaucracy would be far more akin to the incipient fascist or Nazi state than to a liberal Republic, Despite both Wilson’s war economy of WW 1, and FDR’s New Deal measures being similar to socialism, if not identical, fascism is most often seen as a right wing phenomena. Oddly, the fascist tendencies of the New Deal were seen, and proclaimed, as such during the 1930s, yet became a taboo observation after WW 2. Most like this was because in the early days there was hope that new doctrines could alleviate the many problems that had accumulated, while Hitler’s policies, most saliently his Jewish policies, could only be seen as abominations, and fascism’s policies, though not racist, were tarred with that brush. As for fascism’s association with the right, well, if you repeat something often enough it becomes true.
Well, I've covered the first third of the book, and I've read the second 2/3 of the book, and I see that I'm going to have to cover the second part differently. The parts that I have covered deal with the era of fascism when the fascist parties existed and could be observed. The rest of the book is concerned with recent history, with the author looking for examples of fascism in recent history. I could cover it in the same manner as I have been, but that would bring the length of this paper to an unmanageable level, so I think it's better if I do some summarizing.
The 1950s and the 1960s we're two very different decades, With the fifty 50s representing an idealized vision of the American dream, with the father working, and the mother at home raising the children in a suburban home. Meanwhile the 60s are seen mostly through the lens of a movement of students who rebelled against their professors, “hippies” living a life that challenged established behaviors, against a background of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. On the other side of the coin were the “straight” people, still in charge, both defiant and bewildered, chasing a paycheck and not relevance or meaning.
Pg. 172. The New Left’s Fascist Moment.
The elevation of unity as the highest social value is a core tenant of fascism and all leftist ideologies. You can't forget that unity is, at best, morally neutral and often the source of irrationality and groupthink. Rampaging mobs are still united. Organized crime is unified. Marauding Barbarians bent on rape and pillage are unified. Civilized people have disagreements, and small D democrats have arguments. Classical liberalism is based on this fundamental insight, which is why fascism is always anti-liberal. Liberalism rejected the idea that unity is more valuable than individuality. For fascism, meaning and authenticity are found in collective enterprises-- of class, nation, or race--and the state is there to enforce that meaning on everyone without hindrance of debate.
To follow the author’s argument farther, I’m going to have to indulge in some speculation. Whose side is Jonah Goldberg on, and why is he writing this book? A self-described conservative, and described as such by notoriously leftist Wikipedia, yet a columnist for the very liberal New York Times and liberal Los Angeles Times, and an editor of the National Review, a conservative monthly, but of the “country club” Republicans variety, i.e. a RINO, Republican In Name Only. Yes, the National Review that ran an entire issue of Never Trump content, which, for me, shines a bright light on Goldberg’s motive in writing this book, a book that only a RINO could write.
I switched sides, from left to right, in 1989, after what was clearly an epiphany, when the workers abandoned the “Worker’s Paradise” in mass, in anything that would move, when the Iron Curtain fell. And they weren’t fleeing capitalism. What is wrong with this picture? And why did the socialists remain socialists after this? Quick answer: that wasn’t real socialism. Lol. Anyway, I did switch, and was soon asking myself—why does the right not refute this leftist claptrap? Sun Tzu: If the enemy is making a mistake, don’t interfere.
Goldberg published the book in 2007, in time for the 2008 Obama-McCaine Presidential contest. Coincidence? Was Obama an Islamofascist, as is alleged? He is certainly proud of his community organizing background. Was the Black Lives Matter “Summer of Love” an insurrection? There was certainly an element of myth making around George Floyd’s timely death. Is the book a “do’s and don’t’s manual? Speculation and rumor mongering from the right.
Pg. 175. It is at this point that Goldberg brings in some more recent philosophers in to aid his argument: primarily Nietzsche, but also Heidegger, Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Franz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, all tinged with the fascist tradition, Goldberg asserts, yet redeemed for the left by their Marxist affiliation, all postmodern critics of the European Enlightenment. Meanwhile all major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to Enlightenment thinkers—John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke—and none have any direct links to Nazism, Nietzsche, existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism.
Pg. 176. Deconstruction, existentialism, post modernism, pragmatism, relativism; all these ideas had the same purpose-- to erode the iron chains of tradition, dissolve the concrete foundations of truth, and firebomb the bunkers where the defenders of the ancient regime still fought and persevered. These were ideologies of the “movement”. Nietzsche and Heidegger with James and Dewey were all part of the same grand project.
Few were more adept at using the jargon of the movement than fascist and pre-fascist. Hitler used the phrase the “movement” over 200 times in Mein Kamph. A Nazi party journal was called ‘The Movement.” The word “movement” itself is instructive. “Movement”, unlike progress, doesn't imply fixed destination. Rather, it takes it as a given that any change is better. The Nazi’s first instinct was “Tear it down”. “Destroy what exists”. The desire to destroy is the natural outgrowth of the cult of action. Out of the libraries and into the streets. It is herethat Goldberg sees the nexus of fascism and the 60s radicals, who took their movement out of the libraries and into the streets. Revolutionaries didn’t need to know the reality of Marxism (or nationalism, or syndicalism, fascism, etc.); they needed to believe in the myth of Marxism etc. Passions, not facts, was the fuel of action. “It is faith that moves mountains, not reason”, according to Mussolini (and Wilson.)
Pg. 211. If by fascist you mean evil, cruel, and bigoted, then Kennedy was no fascist. But we must ask, what made his administration so popular? What made it so effective? What has given it its lasting appeal? On almost every front, the answers are those very elements that fit the fascist playbook: creation of crises, nationalistic appeals to unity, the celebration of martial values, the blurring of lines between public and private sectors, the utilization of mass media to glamorize the state and its programs, invocation of a new “post partisan” spirit that places the important decisions in the hands of experts and intellectual supermen, and a cult of personality for the national leader.
Kennedy promised to transcend ideology in the name of what later would be described as cool pragmatism. Like the pragmatist who came before him, he eschewed labels, believing that he was beyond right and left. Instead, he shared Robert McNamara's confidence that “every problem could be solved” by technocratic means. Once again, the Third Way defined ideological sophistication. In his 1962 Yale commencement address, President Kennedy explained that “political labels and ideological approaches are irrelevant to the solution” of today's challenges. “Most of the problems that we now face, are technical problems, are administrative problems,” he insisted at a press conference in May 1962. “These problems deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men” and should therefore be left to the experts to settle without subjecting them to divisive democratic debate.
John F Kennedy represented the cult of personality tradition of American liberalism. He was more concerned with guns than butter. Lyndon Baines Johnson, a southern populist ward healer born and bred in the New Deal tradition, was on the other hand, all about the butter. Johnson could neither be a warrior nor a priest. If he couldn't be the liberal lion his predecessor wanted to be, he could embody the material and maternal aspect of Progressivism as the caring and protective shepherd overseeing his flock. He would transform the Kennedy personality cult into a cult of government. His legacy, the modern welfare state, represents the ultimate fruition of a progressive statist tradition going back to Woodrow Wilson.
Lost in the fog. I shouldn’t stray from the task at hand. Only one paragraph. Not from Liberal Fascism. Written by me from who knows what source.
Roy Cohen is the link between Donald Trump and Joseph McCarthy. Cohen was McCarthy's lawyer and lead council when McCarthy made his charges that the government was infiltrated with communists at the highest level. He began making his charges in February of 1950 by the time he was silenced it was December 1954 he presented little evidence for his charges other than hearsay and innuendo. These were tense times. Richard Nixon was riding the anticommunist horse and had charged Alger Hiss, a prominent Washington lawyer of being a communist because he denied knowledge of Whittaker Chambers, a former communist who had turned into a republican cold warrior. McCarthy had shown disrespect for such leading figures as president Eisenhower, Secretary of State George Marshall, and Harry Truman. He was finally silenced on the Edward R Murrow show, the nation's premier newscaster, on live TV, when a lawyer for the US army questioned his integrity. Donald Trump contacted Roy Cohen in 1973, asking him to introduce him into the higher reaches of New York political and business society. Whether trump was interested in Cohen's knowledge of McCarthy's anti-communist crusade is unclear.
Back to Liberal Fascism.
Pg. 248. Scholarly exchanges between eugenicist, “raceologist”, racist hygienists, and birth controllers in Germany and the United states were unremarkable and regular occurrences. Hitler “studied” American eugenics while in prison, and sections of Mein Kamph certainly reflect that immersion. Indeed, some of his argument seemed to be lifted straight out of various progressive tracks on “race suicide”. Hitler wrote to the president of the American Eugenics Society to ask for a copy of his “Case for Sterilization”-- which called for the forcible sterilization of some 10 million Americans--- and later sent him another note thanking him for his work. Madison Grant’s “Passing of the Great Race” also made a great impression on Hitler, who called the work his “Bible”. In 1934, when the National Socialist government had sterilized over 50,000 “unfit” Germans, frustrated American eugenicist exclaimed “the Germans are beating us at our own game.”
Of course, American progressives are not culpable for the Holocaust. But it is a well-documented fact that eugenics lie at the heart of progressive enterprise. The eugenics crusade, writes the historian Edwin Black, “created in the publications and academic research rooms of the Carnegie institution, verified by the research grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, validated by leading scholars from the best Ivy League universities, and financed by the special efforts of the Harriman railroad fortune.” German race science stood on American shoulders.
Pg. 264. Consider the debate over the minimum wage. The controversy centered on what to do about what Sidney Webb called the “unemployable class”. It was Webbs belief, shared by many of the progressive economist affiliated with the American Economic Association, that establishing a minimum wage above the value of the unemployable’s worth would lock them out of the market, accelerating their elimination as a class. This is essentially the modern conservative argument against the minimum wage.
Pg. 267. But the more relevant aspect of the Nazi welfare state was how it geared itself entirely toward building a racially defined national community. While it used the standard leftist rhetoric of guilt and obligation typically involved to justify government aid for the needy and unfortunate, it excluded anyone who wasn't a “national comrade”. This points to the unique evil of Nazism. Unlike Italian fascism, which had less use for eugenics than America or Germany, Nazism was defined as racial socialism. Everything for the for the race, nothing outside it, was the central ethos of Nazisms mission and appeal.
Pg. 280. There is less difference between today's identity politics and the identity politics of the fascist past that 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 people and races. 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.
Pg. 283. 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 a “social Darwinism” of the past, we are told, because it relegates minorities to a savage struggle for the survival of the fittest.
Pg. 284. Chapter 8. Liberal Fascist Economics.
Pg. 285. If you define “right wing” or “conservative” in the American sense of supporting the rule of law and the free market, then the more right wing a business is, the less fascist it becomes.
Pg. 290. The fascist bargain goes something like this. The state says to the industrialists, “you may stay in business and own your factories. In the spirit of cooperation and unity, we will even guarantee you profits and a lack of serious competition. In exchange, we expect you to agree with and help implement our political agenda.” The moral and economic content of the agenda depends on the nature of the regime. The left looked at German businesses support for the Nazi war machine and concluded that business always supports war. They did the same thing with American business after World War One, arguing that because arms manufacturers benefited from war, the armaments industry was therefore responsible for it.
Pg. 291. Here the connection between government and big business is examined, with the focus on the meat packing industry, pertinent with today’s exorbitant meat prices, and limitation of competition. Regulation of meat packers, promoted as a health measure, is a means of keeping small businesses out of the market. Regulations which a large concern can absorb or pass along can strangle a small, local business, who perhaps has gained the trust of his customers after years of service. The “government inspected” stamp on a piece of meat is an advertisement paid for with your taxes.