A deep aversion to boredom and a consequent, indiscriminate love for novelty among the intellectual classes translated into a routinized iconoclasm and a thoroughgoing contempt for democracy, traditional morality, the masses, and the bourgeoisie, and a love for "action, action, action!" that still plagues the left today. (How much of the practiced radicalism of the contemporary left is driven by the childish pranksterism they call being subversive?) Many of George Bernard Shaw's bons mots seem like shots in the dark against the monster of boredom — which could only be conquered by a Nietzschean superman. At one time or another Shaw idolized Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini as the world's great "progressive" leaders because they "did things," unlike the leaders of those "putrefying corpses" called parliamentary democracies. In like terms, Gertrude Stein praised Huey Long by declaring that he was "not boring."18
Or consider H. G. Wells. More than any other figure, his literary escapism and faith in science as the salvation of man were seen as the preeminent antidotes to the disease of Western malaise. In the summer of 1932, Wells delivered a major speech at Oxford University to Britain's Young Liberals organization, in which he called for a "'Phoenix Rebirth' of Liberalism" under the banner of "Liberal Fascism."19 Fabian socialism had failed, he explained, because it hadn't grasped the need for a truly "revolutionary" effort aimed at the total transformation of society. His fellow Socialists understood the need for socialism, but they were just too nice about it. Their advocacy of piecemeal "Gas, Water and School-Board socialization" was simply too boring. Conventional democratic governments, meanwhile, were decadent, feeble, and dull. If the liberals in the 1930s were going to succeed where the Fabians had failed — abolishing private property, achieving a fully planned economy, violently crushing the forces of reaction — they'd have to learn that lesson.
Wells confessed that he'd spent some thirty years — since the dawn of the Progressive Era — reworking the idea of liberal fascism. "I have never been able to escape altogether from its relentless logic," he explained. "We have seen the Fascisti in Italy and a number of clumsy imitations elsewhere, and we have seen the Russian Communist Party coming into existence to reinforce this idea." And now he was done waiting. "I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis."
"And do not let me leave you in the slightest doubt as to the scope and ambition of what I am putting before you," he continued:
These new organizations are not merely organizations for the spread of defined opinions...the days of that sort of amateurism are over — they are organizations to replace the dilatory indecisiveness of [democracy]. The world is sick of parliamentary politics...The Fascist Party, to the best of its ability, is Italy now. The Communist Party, to the best of its ability, is Russia. Obviously the Fascists of Liberalism must carry out a parallel ambition on a still vaster scale...They must begin as a disciplined sect, but they must end as the sustaining organization of a reconstituted mankind.20
Wells's fiction was so thinly veiled in its praise for fascism that the attentive reader can only squirm. In The War in the Air, German airships liquidate New York City's "black and sinister polyglot population." In The Shape of Things to Come, veterans of a great world war — mostly airmen and technicians — in black shirts and uniforms fight to impose one-world government on the beaten and undisciplined masses. In Wells's far-flung future, a historian looks back on the twentieth century and finds that the roots of the new, enlightened "Air Dictatorship" lay in Mussolini's Fascism — a "bad good thing," the historian calls it — as well as Nazism and Soviet Communism. In 1927 Wells couldn't help but notice "the good there is in these Fascists. There is something brave and well-meaning about them." By 1941 no less a figure than George Orwell couldn't help but conclude, "Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany."21
Wells was an enormous fan of FDR's, and the two met often at the White House, particularly during 1934. Wells pronounced Roosevelt "the most effective transmitting instrument possible for the coming of the new world order." In 1935 and 1936 he briefly switched to Huey Long's and Father Coughlin's more exciting brand of fascism. (He described the bayou dictator as "a Winston Churchill who has never been at Harrow.")22 By 1939, however, he was again firmly back in the Roosevelt camp, seeing FDR's brand of "personal government" as indispensable.
Wells's vision neatly captures the sense of excitement that infused the Western left in the 1930s. It should be no surprise that an avant-garde of self-described supermen would welcome an age where supermen would run the world. To be sure, these were on the whole dark and pessimistic times. But the spirit of "the worse the better" served as a wind behind liberals eager to remake the world, to end the days of drift and inaugurate the era of progressive mastery.
STEALING FASCIST THUNDER
Herbert Hoover won the presidential contest of 1928 in no small part on the strength of the international craze for economic planning and collectivization. He was a self-made millionaire, but his chief appeal was his experience as an engineer. In the 1920s and 1930s it was widely believed that engineering was the highest calling, and it was hoped that engineers could clear political mountains the same way they moved real ones.23
Hoover failed to deliver as the Great Engineer, ironically because he gave the people too much of what they wanted. Indeed, many economic historians concede that the New Deal was, in significant respects, an accelerated continuation of Hoover's policies rather than a sharp break from them. The lines are even blurrier when one notes that FDR went into office as a budget balancer who cut government pay. Of course, the New Deal was an even greater failure when it came to curing the Great Depression — but Roosevelt had something going for him that Hoover did not: an appreciation of the fascist moment.
Just as progressivism constituted a definite international moment during the second decade of the twentieth century, so in the 1930s the Western world was riding through a storm of collectivist sentiments, ideas, and trends. In Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, and Finland, quasi-fascist parties received their highest share of the votes. Until 1934 it seemed possible that Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists (who, like Mussolini, always considered himself a man of the left), might occupy 10 Downing Street. Meanwhile, in the United States, national socialists or populist progressives such as Huey Long and Father Coughlin were hugely popular, and they, more than any other group, moved the political center of gravity in America to the left.
This is as good a place as any to tackle the enduring myth that Long and Coughlin were conservatives. It is a bedrock dogma of all enlightened liberals that Father Charles Coughlin was an execrable right-winger (Long is a more complicated case, but whenever his legacy is portrayed negatively, he is characterized as right-wing; whenever he is a friend of the people, he's a left-winger). Again and again, Coughlin is referred to as "the right-wing Radio Priest" whom supposedly insightful essayists describe as the ideological grandfather of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, and other putative extremists.24 But Coughlin was in no meaningful way a conservative or even a right-winger. He was a man of the left in nearly all significant respects.