This was precisely the social mission and appeal of fascism and Nazism. In speech after speech, Hitler made it clear that his goal was to have no dividing lines between rich and poor. "What a difference compared with a certain other country," he declared, referring to war-torn Spain. "There it is class against class, brother against brother. We have chosen the other route: rather than to wrench you apart, we have brought you together." Robert Ley, the head of the Nazis' German Labor Front, proclaimed flatly, "We are the first country in Europe to overcome the class struggle." Whether the rhetoric matched the reality is beside the point; the appeal of such a goal was profound and the intent sincere. A young and ambitious German lawyer who wanted to study abroad was persuaded by his friends to stay home so he wouldn't miss the excitement. "The [Nazi] party was intending to change the whole concept of labour relations, based on the principle of co-determination and shared responsibility between management and workers. I knew it was Utopian but I believed in it with all my heart...Hitler's promises of a caring but disciplined socialism fell on very receptive ears."74
Of course, such utopian dreams would have to come at the price of personal liberty. But progressives and fascists alike were glad to pay it. "Individualism," proclaimed Lyman Abbott, the editor of the Outlook, "is the characteristic of simple barbarism, not of republican civilization."75 The Wilsonian-Crolyite progressive conception of the individual's role in society would and should strike any fair-minded person of any true liberal sensibility today as at least disturbing and somewhat fascistic. Wilson, Croly, and the vast bulk of progressives would have no principled objection to the Nazi conception of the Volksgemeinschaft — "people's community," or national community — or to the Nazi slogan about placing "the common good before the private good." Progressives and fascists alike were explicitly indebted to Darwinism, Hegelianism, and Pragmatism to justify their worldviews. Indeed, perhaps the greatest irony is that according to most of the criteria we use to locate people and policies on the ideological spectrum in the American context — social bases, demographics, economic policies, social welfare provisions — Adolf Hitler was indisputably to Wilson's left.
This is the elephant in the corner that the American left has never been able to admit, explain, or comprehend. Their inability and/or refusal to deal squarely with this fact has distorted our understanding of our politics, our history, and ourselves. Liberals keep saying "it can't happen here" with a clever wink or an ironic smile to insinuate that the right is constantly plotting fascist schemes. Meanwhile, hiding in plain sight is this simple fact: it did happen here, and it might very well happen again. To see the threat, however, you must look over your left shoulder, not your right.
4
Franklin Roosevelt's Fascist New Deal
THE NATION WAS caught up in a war fever, fomented by the government, even though there was no war. Striking union members were provoked into a riot by government forces. Sixty-seven workers were killed, some shot in the back. A young correspondent reported, "I understood deep in my bones and blood what fascism was." A leading intellectual who'd signed on with the government declared in a lecture to students, "The ordeal of war brings out the magnificent resources of youth."1
The British ambassador cabled London to alert his superiors to the spreading hysteria fomented by the nation's new leader. The "starved loyalties and repressed hero-worship of the country have found in him an outlet and a symbol." Visiting the rural hinterlands, an aide reported back on the brewing cult of personality: "Every house I visited — mill worker or unemployed — had a picture of the President...He is at once God and their intimate friend; he knows them all by name, knows their little town and mill, their little lives and problems. And though everything else fails, he is there, and will not let them down."2
Though the crisis was economic in nature, the new national commander had promised to seek the "power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe...I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems."
Presumably some readers already know that the country I'm talking about is America, and the leader FDR. The labor riots took place in Chicago. The wide-eyed young reporter was Eric Sevareid, one of the titans of CBS news. The intellectual who harangued Dartmouth students about the virtues of war was Rexford Tugwell, one of the most prominent of the New Deal's Brain Trusters. And of course the last quotations were from Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself in his first inaugural address.
As liberalism in recent years has fallen into ideological and intellectual disarray, American liberals have crouched into a fetal position around Franklin D. Roosevelt's "legacy." Liberal legal theorists have made the New Deal into a second American founding. Leading journalists have descended into abject idolatry. Indeed, it sometimes seems that all one needs to know about the merits of a policy is whether Roosevelt himself would have favored it. It is a given that Republicans are wrong, even fascistic, whenever they want to "dismantle" FDR's policies.
One of the most poignant ironies here is that a modern-day Hitler or Mussolini would never dismantle the New Deal. To the contrary, he'd redouble the effort. This is not to say that the New Deal was evil or Hitlerian. But the New Deal was a product of the impulses and ideas of its era. And those ideas and impulses are impossible to separate from the fascist moment in Western civilization. According to Harold Ickes, FDR's interior secretary and one of the most important architects of the New Deal, Roosevelt himself privately acknowledged that "what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we were doing them in an orderly way." It's hard to see how orderliness absolves a policy from the charge of fascism or totalitarianism. Eventually, the similarities had become so transparent that Ickes had to warn Roosevelt that the public was increasingly inclined "to unconsciously group four names, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Roosevelt."3
The notion that FDR harbored fascist tendencies is vastly more controversial today than it was in the 1930s, primarily because fascism has come to mean Nazism and Nazism means simply evil. Saying, for example, that FDR had a Hitlerite fiscal policy just confuses people. But the fascist flavor of the New Deal was not only regularly discussed; it was often cited as evidence in Roosevelt's favor. There was an enormous bipartisan consensus that the Depression required dictatorial and fascistic policies to defeat it. Walter Lippmann, serving as an ambassador for America's liberal elite, told FDR in a private meeting at Warm Springs, "The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers."4 Eleanor Roosevelt, too, believed that a "benevolent dictator" might be the only answer for America. And it was hardly lost on the liberal intellectuals swirling around the Roosevelt administration that the enormously popular Benito Mussolini had used the same methods to whip the unruly Italians into shape. After all, the New Republic — the intellectual home of the New Deal — had covered the goings-on in Italy with fascination and, often, admiration.
Indeed, the New Deal was conceived at the climax of a worldwide fascist moment, a moment when socialists in many countries were increasingly becoming nationalists and nationalists could embrace nothing other than socialism. Franklin Roosevelt was no fascist, at least not in the sense that he thought of himself in this way. But many of his ideas and policies were indistinguishable from fascism. And today we live with the fruits of fascism, and we call them liberal. From economic policy, to populist politics, to a faith in the abiding power of brain trusts to chart our collective future — be they at Harvard or on the Supreme Court — fascistic assumptions about the role of the state have been encoded upon the American mind, often as a matter of bipartisan consensus.