"Liberal Fascism," by Jonah Goldberg. Doubleday, 2008, 496 pages.

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Half True

by Warren Gibson

In 1962 the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand delivered a talk entitled "The Fascist New Frontier" (reprinted in the recent collection "The Ayn Rand Column"), an analysis of President Kennedy's New Frontier social and economic programs. When she offered a written version of the talk as part of a projected volume of essays, her publisher, Bennett Cerf, "absolutely hit the roof." As he related in his memoir, "At Random," "I called her and said we were not going to publish any book that claimed Hitler and Jack Kennedy were alike." Rand refused to back down, and soon thereafter ended her association with Random House.

Cerf's reaction has to be understood in the context of the times. Only 17 years had passed since the great crusade against fascism had ended in victory. Kennedy, who enjoyed a reputation as a war hero, was taking the war victory a step further by proclaiming that not only had a bad ideology been defeated, but that the end of all ideology was at hand. "What is at stake in our economic decisions today," he declared in a 1962 speech, "is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies, but the practical management of the modern economy." The public, perhaps as weary of ideological conflict as it was of military conflict, warmed to Kennedy's message. It was ready for the cool technocrats with their butch cuts, white shirts, and narrow black ties to run the economy according to scientific management principles. To call Kennedy or his program "fascist" in those times was considered very bad taste, to put it mildly.

In fact the article shows us Rand at her nonfiction best. True to form, she defines her terms explicitly: fascism is "a governmental system with strong centralized power, permitting no opposition or criticism, controlling all affairs of the nation, emphasizing an aggressive nationalism"; and she emphasizes that under fascism, in contrast to socialism, "men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal." She presents several Kennedy sayings along with similar sayings by fascist leaders. For example, she pairs Kennedy's famous "ask not what your country will do for you — ask what you can do for your country" with this from Hitler: "If we then understand national solidarity aright, we cannot but see that it is based on the idea of sacrifice. In other words, if somebody objects that the continual giving involves too heavy a burden, then we must reply that . . . true national solidarity cannot find its sense in mere taking."

She concludes with this call to action: "If you wish to oppose [statism], you must challenge its basic premises. You must begin by realizing that there is no such thing as 'the public interest' except as the sum of the interests of rational men. And the basic, common interest of all men — all rational men — is freedom."

Rand's talk drew little notice, but Kennedy's New Frontier began to disintegrate even before his death. Then Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam war tore the country apart. His "war on poverty" left poverty unscathed while taxpayers bled. The 1970s brought simultaneous inflation and recession, which was impossible according to the Keynesian theory that Kennedy had taken as gospel. As a result of these and other events, a "grand warfare of rival ideologies" broke out after all, and in full force; it continues to this day. Classical liberal ideas, which could only simmer underground during Kennedy's time, burst onto the public stage under the directorship of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman; Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher carried the battle to the political arena.

By 1980, inflation was raging and Harry Browne was writing bestsellers about hoarding gold and stocking a hideout in the country. Rand's thesis might have gotten a more respectful hearing, had it appeared then. In fact, 1980 was the publication date of "The Ominous Parallels: the End of Freedom in America," by Rand's disciple Leonard Peikoff. The book had taken Peikoff 14 years to write, much of that time spent "reeling from the onslaught of [Rand's] literary criticisms and insistence on re-writes," according to Rand's biographer, Barbara Branden. We will probably never know how much of this book is due to Peikoff, and how much to Rand. In any event, it shows the persistence of the radical critique of American politics undertaken by libertarians and other followers of Rand.

The first half of "Ominous Parallels" attempts to trace the intellectual roots of the Nazi horror to the philosophy of Kant, Hegel, and their successors. For Kant, according to Peikoff, objective reality exists but is unknowable to man. Morality consists in absolute obedience to categorical imperatives, regardless of, or preferably in opposition to, one's personal desires. Hegel carried on where Kant left off, explicitly rejecting Aristotelian logic and proclaiming the State as the "Divine Idea as it exists on earth." The second half of Peikoff's book, "Practice," recounts the rise of the Nazis and how they strove to destroy not just the bodies but the souls of the concentration camp inmates. Finally, it identifies trends in American culture that parallel the early years of Nazi Germany.

The book was lucidly written, though flawed by shoddy scholarship. Like Rand, Peikoff is sometimes quick to dismiss some idea as "altruism" or "mysticism," and to blame it for distant political events, without showing that he knows what he is talking about. Two examples that I feel qualified to comment on are his dismissals of quantum uncertainty and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. He appears oblivious to the thorough experimental verification of quantum phenomena and to the rigorous logic by which Gödel proved his theorem. Peikoff gave no credit to any thinkers except Rand and Aristotle, so it is not surprising that his book got no attention outside of the tiny circle of her intellectual followers.

The scene shifts to January 2008, when Doubleday published Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism," subtitled "The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning." Goldberg is a writer for the Los Angeles Times, National Review, and other publications. The book spent seven weeks atop The New York Times Bestseller list, gaining him the audience that eluded Peikoff's book and Rand's essay.

The introduction, "Everything You Know about Fascism is Wrong," is a disappointment. (Is anyone else getting tired of being told that everything we know about this or that subject is wrong?) Goldberg had to force himself to offer a definition, and not a good one at that: "Finally, since we must have a working definition of fascism, here is mine: Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and wellbeing, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the 'problem' and is therefore defined as the enemy."

While these may be accurate descriptive phrases, applicable to many phenomena of modern liberalism and socialism, from political correctness to state healthcare schemes to idolatry of a dynamic government, they miss the specific, and crucial, similarities and differences among socialism, fascism, and modern liberalism. And it's mostly uphill from there.

Chapter 3 recounts the fascist aspects of the Woodrow Wilson administration. This is the chapter that prompted The New York Times to title its dismissive review "Heil, Woodrow!" The progressives of Wilson's time, admitted by all to be forerunners of today's liberals, "were convinced that the state could, through planning and pressure, create a pure race, a society of new men . . . Fascists and progressives shared the same intellectual heroes and quoted the same philosophers." Well, not entirely the same. But Wilson, like many other progressives, did worship power: "I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive," he once wrote. Taking dead aim at the Declaration of Independence, he said, "[A] lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle."

Wilsonian "fascism" had many faces. His Sedition Act banned "uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States government or the military." The Postmaster General was given the teeth to enforce this act and proceeded to ban at least 75 publications outright. Criticizing Samuel Gompers, suggesting that the war be paid for by taxes rather than loans, or reprinting Thomas Jefferson's view that Ireland should be a republic — all these were trespasses that triggered censorship. Needless to say, the effects of censorship spread far beyond the overt shutdowns of small publications, as "the threat of being put out of business focused the minds of other editors." Criticism of "Mr. Wilson's War" could get you fired if you were a professor at Columbia. On the cultural front, German authors were purged from libraries, sauerkraut became liberty cabbage, and performances of Beethoven disappeared from customary venues.

Goldberg ably summarizes the parallels between progressivism, the ideology of Wilson's time, and fascism: "Progressivism was largely a middle-class movement equally opposed to runaway capitalism above and Marxist radicalism below . . . [The Progressives'] chief desire was to impose a unifying, totalitarian moral order that regulated the individual inside his home and out. The Progressives also shared with the Nazis a burning desire to transcend class differences within the national community and create a new order."

Readers who were unaware of the fascistic nature of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal will be shocked by some incidents from that era recounted by Goldberg, particularly those involving Hugh Johnson, an outspoken admirer of Italian Fascism and czar of Roosevelt's "National Recovery Administration," known by its "Blue Eagle" emblem. The NRA was designed to organize all businesses into cartels and set wages, prices, and business practices for the entire country. At its peak, it managed to enlist businesses employing 85% of American workers (according to Johnson), before being declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. On Sept. 13, 1933, businesses in New York were ordered closed at noon for a Blue Eagle parade of a quarter million marchers, with military planes flying overhead. A British visitor was "horrified by such pageantry, saying it made him feel like he was in Nazi Germany." In another incident, a tailor served three months in jail for charging 35 cents to press a suit when the approved price was 40 cents.

But did the American brand of fascism include an essential characteristic of European fascism, namely racism? Not overtly, but in effect, yes. By granting special privileges to unions that were often "viscerally racist," FDR gave them the power to lock blacks out of the labor force. In the countryside, white farmers were paid to slaughter pigs and plow crops under, thus raising prices, which meant that black farm workers went hungry. Little wonder that some black newspapers spelled out NRA as "Negro Run Around" or "Negroes Robbed Again."

A chapter entitled "Fascism Takes to the Streets" moves forward to the 1960s, tagging the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, Abbie Hoffman, et. al., with the fascist label; the next chapter indicts Johnson's Great Society. Easy targets, all. Oddly, though, Goldberg skips over the Nixon era, seemingly a rich source of fascist analogies. Why? Goldberg asks himself that question and gives this unsatisfying answer: "I told the story I thought needed to be told." For Goldberg, Nixon was at worst a "caretaker of the welfare state." It's pretty clear that he goes easy on Nixon because he wasn't a Democrat, and Goldberg has a distinct dislike for Democrats.

More impressive is Goldberg's discussion of current "diversity" and sexual harassment training, as parts of modern fascist indoctrination. Readers who work for big companies or government agencies probably know all about such things. I didn't, but found out fast during the writing of this review. As a lecturer at Santa Clara University, I was required to endure an online training course regarding harassment and discrimination on the job. It was a hair-raising demonstration of modern liberal fascism in action. Politicians and bureaucrats at the federal level have inserted themselves into the workplace in a big way, dictating what may or may not be said and done about many things. Private institutions such as Santa Clara have fallen in line just as neatly as the universities and corporations fell in line with the Nazis in Germany or the Fascists in Italy. Of course, most of the proscribed behavior mentioned by my training course was the sort of thing that no sensible person would engage in. But it is very easy to see the next steps: suppression of dissent, glorification of the state, and ultimately totalitarianism.

Goldberg correctly identifies the fascism of contemporary ethnic and gender distinctions: "When you hear a campus radical denounce 'white logic' or 'male logic,' she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced 'Jewish logic' . . . The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism." He reports that "white studies" departments have sprung up in at least 30 colleges. These are not departments devoted to glorifying whiteness. "The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race," writes one "scholar" in the "field." Hip-hop culture has incorporated a shocking number of fascist themes: the glorification of violence, the romance of the street, racial solidarity, and misogynism. And we are all too familiar with the physical intimidation of dissident speakers that is allowed on many college campuses (but not at Santa Clara, I hasten to add).

Hillary Clinton gets a whole chapter as "the First Lady of Liberal Fascism." Goldberg recounts her political upbringing at the knee of Saul Alinsky, a radical organizer whose disciples also trained Barack Obama. Of Alinksy, Goldberg says, "His descriptions of the United States could have come from any street corner Brownshirt denouncing the corruption of the Weimar regime. His worldview is distinctly fascistic. Life is defined by war, contest of power, and the imposition of will." Donald Jones, Hillary's former youth minister, says of her, "You have to use power. And there is nothing wrong with wielding power in the pursuit of policies that will add to the human good . . . She is very much the sort of Christian who understands that the use of power to achieve social good is legitimate." Another mentor was Rabbi Michael Lerner, a colleague of the communist theorist Herbert Marcuse and an LSD fan. This man of the cloth "couldn't resist interrupting his sister's wedding with an impromptu speech denouncing the guests as 'murderers' with 'blood on your hands' for not doing more to stop the war in Vietnam."

But Hillary's specialty is children. She wants control of them in the early years so as to mold them into obedient little citizens of her new order. To this end, she needs to separate them from their mothers by means of a proliferation of programs: Head Start, day care, prenatal care, maternal care, child-development programs. "Multiple attachment to others will become the ideal . . . New treatments will be developed for children with exclusive maternal attachments," says Sandra Scarr, a Clinton ally. In like manner, says Goldberg, the Nazis "brilliantly replaced traditional stories and fairy tales with yarns of Aryan bravery and the divinity of Hitler . . . Loyalty to Hitler was drilled into children, while loyalty to one's own parents [was] discouraged in myriad ways."

Ratting on one's parents has been a staple of totalitarian states of all stripes, and one can see it coming in Hillary's Brave New World. On this front, resistance to Hillary is futile, or nearly so, according to Goldberg. It's not just that everybody experiences a good feeling about a smiling lady who projects concern for children's welfare. The real problem, he says, is that conservatives concede (and libertarians should concede) a role for the state in protecting children who, after all, are incapable of functioning as autonomous agents. This makes it difficult to draw the line where state involvement must cease.

Al Gore gets a good scolding under the heading "Green Fascism." Goldberg quotes a typically unctuous Gore-ism: "the froth and frenzy of industrial civilization mask our deep loneliness for that communion with the world that can lift our spirits and fill our senses with the richness and immediacy of life itself." This is pure 19th-century Romanticist pap, the stuff that led to Hitler's worship of "nature" and "vitality," both surrogates for the quest for total dominance of a total world. Gore has struck a gold mine with his global warming crusade because it means (quoting Goldberg) that "we must surrender to the global nanny state and create the sort of 'economic dictatorship' that progressives yearn for. The beauty of global warming is that it touches everything we do — what we eat, what we wear, where we go. Our 'carbon footprint' is the measure of man. . . . Gore alternately blames Plato, Descartes, and Francis Bacon as the white male serpents who tempted mankind to take the wrong turn out of an Edenic past." Peikoff and Rand located the demons of the past in the "mystical" philosophies of Hegel, Kant, and, yes, Plato too. Gore apparently locates them in the great analytic and scientific philosophers. Plato can obviously be construed in either way.

"Liberal Fascism" is an engrossing read and a rich source of comparisons between modern American political and social trends and those of other times and places. But these virtues make the flaws of the book more maddening. Time and again, having shown the fascist nature of some idea or policy, Goldberg pulls the rug out from under himself with an apology or backslide. "Now, when I say that the politics of meaning, and Hillary Clinton's ideas in general, are fascist, I must again be clear that they are not evil." Dammit, if Hillary's ideas are fascist, and they are threats to liberty, prosperity, and just about everything else we hold dear, then they're evil. I'd like to know what else they could be.

Unlike Rand's and Peikoff's efforts, "Liberal Fascism" lacks philosophical foundations, leaving Goldberg without a consistent set of concepts and principles that could have unified his arguments. Lacking Rand's understanding of the evil that is altruism, for example, Goldberg quotes someone who makes the virtually incredible statement, "Service is the rent we pay to be living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time" — and lets it pass without comment, as if he knew if was wrong but couldn't quite figure out why.

Goldberg describes himself as a conservative, but adds this interesting aside: "If libertarianism could account for children and foreign policy, it would be the ideal political philosophy." That libertarians haven't paid enough attention to the status of children is a fair criticism. That they have failed to sign on to the disastrous Bush mission to spread democracy around the world, which Goldberg explicitly supports, is no failure at all.

And a key question remains: was it a good idea to tag modern liberalism with the f-word: fascism? Goldberg surely knew that critics would give him hell for doing so, which may explain the numerous apologies and backtracks that so frustrated me. Given that nearly all meaning has been drained from the word in popular usage, leaving only a smear term, was it worth it? Should it have been "liberal totalitarianism" or "liberal statism" instead? This is a tactical question, not easily answered, but I think "fascism" is the right term, after all. I give Goldberg considerable credit for using it and using it courageously. I also credit him for using the term "classical liberal" many times. This is a phrase we libertarians should use more frequently to emphasize the perversion that is modern "liberalism."

All the protagonists in contemporary political battles line up on one side or the other of a great divide. Proponents of individual liberty, dignity, responsibility, peace, and prosperity face off against the forces of submission, helplessness, hatred, war, and destruction. The figures Goldberg criticizes all occupy various plots on the wrong side, and they all aid and abet one another, knowingly or not. This story cannot be told insistently enough. So — one and a half cheers for Jonah Goldberg, who has bravely tried to tell it and has gotten a hearing. No, make that two cheers. But let us hope that writers closer to Rand's caliber step forward to retell it.

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