Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

6

From Kennedy's Myth to Johnson's Dream: Liberal Fascism and the Cult of the State

FOR GENERATIONS, THE central fault line in American politics has involved the growth and power of the state. The conventional narrative has conservatives trying to shrink the size of government and liberals trying — successfully — to expand it. There's more than a little evidence to support this understanding. But much of it is circumstantial. Liberals often argue for restraining government in areas such as law enforcement (the Warren Court's Miranda ruling, for example), national security (opposition to the Patriot Act and domestic surveillance), and that vast but ill-defined realm that comes under the rubric of "legislating morality." While disagreements over specific policies proliferate, virtually all conservatives and most libertarians favor assertiveness in government's traditional role as the "night-watchman state." Many go further, seeing the government as a protector of decency and cultural norms.

In short, the argument about the size of government is often a stand-in for deeper arguments about the role of government. This chapter will attempt to show that for some liberals, the state is in fact a substitute for God and a form of political religion as imagined by Rousseau and Robespierre, the fathers of liberal fascism.

Historically, for many liberals the role of the state has been a matter less of size than of function. Progressivism shared with fascism a deep and abiding conviction that in a truly modern society, the state must take the place of religion. For some, this conviction was born of the belief that God was dead. As Eugen Weber writes, "The Fascist leader, now that God is dead, cannot conceive of himself as the elect of God. He believes he is elect, but does not quite know of what — presumably of history or obscure historical forces." This is the fascism that leads to the Fuhrerprinzip and cults of personality. But there is a second kind of fascism that sees the state not as the replacement of God but as God's agent or vehicle. In both cases, however, the state is the ultimate authority, the source and maintainer of values, and the guarantor of the new order.

We've already touched on statolatry as a progressive doctrine; later we will examine how this worldview manifests itself in what is commonly called the culture war. The hinge of that story is the 1960s, specifically the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

While not a modern liberal himself, JFK was turned after his death into a martyr to the religion of government. This was due partly to the manipulations of the Kennedy circle and partly to the (much more cynical) machinations of LBJ, who hijacked the Kennedy myth and harnessed it to his own purposes. Those purposes, consistent with the "nice" totalitarian impulse of the progressive movement in which Johnson had cut his political teeth, were nominally secular, but on a deeper, and perhaps unconscious, level fundamentally religious.

On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. As if on cue, Dallas was christened "the city of hate." A young TV reporter named Dan Rather heard a rumor that some Dallas schoolchildren had cheered when they heard the news of Kennedy's death. The rumor wasn't true, and the local Dallas CBS affiliate refused to run the story. Rather made an end run around the network and reported the story anyway.

Rather wasn't the only one eager to point fingers at the right. Within minutes Kennedy's aides blamed deranged and unnamed right-wingers. One headline proclaimed the assassination had taken place "deep in the hate of Texas." But when it became clear that a deranged Marxist had done the deed, Kennedy's defenders were dismayed. "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights," Jackie lamented to Bobby Kennedy when he told her the news. "It's — it had to be some silly little Communist."¹

Or maybe not, the Kennedy mythmakers calculated. They set about creating the fable that Kennedy died battling "hate" — established code, then and now, for the political right. The story became legend because liberals were desperate to imbue Kennedy's assassination with a more exalted and politically useful meaning. Over and over again, the entire liberal establishment, led by the New York Times — and even the pope! — denounced the "hate" that claimed Kennedy's life. The Supreme Court justice Earl Warren summed up the conventional wisdom — as he could always be counted upon to do — when he theorized that the "climate of hatred" in Dallas — code for heavy right-wing and Republican activity — moved Lee Harvey Oswald to kill the president.²

The fact that Oswald was a communist quickly changed from an inconvenience to proof of something even more sinister. How, liberals asked, could a card-carrying Marxist murder a liberal titan on the side of social progress? The fact that Kennedy was a raging anti-communist seemed not to register, perhaps because liberals had convinced themselves, in the wake of the McCarthy era, that the real threat to liberty must always come from the right. Oswald's Marxism sent liberals into even deeper denial, their only choice other than to abandon anti-anti-communism. And so, over the course of the 1960s, the conspiracy theories metastasized, and the Marxist gunman became a patsy. "Cui bono?" asked the Oliver Stones then and ever since. Answer: the military-industrial complex, allied with the dark forces of reaction and intolerance, of course. Never mind that Oswald had already tried to murder the former army major general and prominent right-wing spokesman Edwin Walker or that, as the Warren Commission would later report, Oswald "had an extreme dislike of the right-wing."³

Amid the fog of denial, remorse, and confusion over the Kennedy assassination, an informal strategic response developed that would serve the purposes of the burgeoning New Left as well as assuage the consciences of liberals generally: transform Kennedy into an all-purpose martyr for causes he didn't take up and for a politics he didn't subscribe to.

Indeed, over the course of the 1960s and beyond, a legend grew up around the idea that if only Kennedy had lived, we would never have gotten bogged down in Vietnam. It is a central conceit of Arthur Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and His Times. Theodore Sorensen, Tip O'Neill, and countless other liberals subscribed to this view. A popular play on Broadway, MacBird, suggested that Johnson had murdered JFK in order to seize power. But even Robert F. Kennedy conceded in an oral history interview that his brother never seriously considered withdrawal and was committed to total victory in Vietnam. Kennedy was an aggressive anti-communist and Cold War hawk. He campaigned on a fictitious "missile gap" with the Soviets in a largely successful effort to move to Richard Nixon's right on foreign policy, tried to topple Castro at the Bay of Pigs, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis, and got us deep into Vietnam. A mere three and a half hours before Kennedy died, he was boasting to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce that he had increased defense spending on a massive scale, including a 600 percent increase on counterinsurgency special forces in South Vietnam. The previous March, Kennedy had asked Congress to spend fifty cents of every federal dollar on defense.⁴

The Kennedy myth also veers sharply from reality when it comes to the issue of race. The flattering legend is that Kennedy was an unalloyed champion of civil rights. Supposedly, if he had lived, the racial turmoil of the 1960s could have been avoided. The truth is far more prosaic. Yes, Kennedy pushed for civil rights legislation, and he deserves credit for it. But he was hardly breaking with the past. In the supposedly reactionary 1950s, Republicans had carried most of the burden of fulfilling the American promise of equality to blacks. Eisenhower had pushed through two civil rights measures over strong opposition from southern Democrats, and in particular Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who fought hard to dilute the legislation. Again, Kennedy was on the right side of history, but his efforts were mostly reactive. "I did not lie awake worrying about the problems of Negroes," he confessed.⁵

There is considerable irony in the fact that in the first election to replace Kennedy, Barry Goldwater was roundly hailed as the "fascist" in the race. The bespectacled small-government conservative in funereal suits was about as far from a fascist as one can get in American politics. Meanwhile, the intellectuals denouncing Goldwater as a crypto-Nazi failed to grasp that it was John F. Kennedy who was advancing fascist themes and aesthetics in American politics. FDR had been the first president to use modern technology to construct a mythological narrative about himself, but it was Kennedy who transformed that technique into an art. "Camelot," a phrase never used to describe Kennedy's tenure when he was alive, has become a catchall for every gauzy memory and unfulfilled wish of the Kennedy presidency. In 1964 James Reston summarized the newly minted liberal nostalgia for America's Greek god of a president. "He was a story-book President, younger and more handsome than mortal politicians, remote even from his friends, graceful, almost elegant with poetry on his tongue and a radiant young woman at his side."⁶

Many elements of the Kennedy myth are as obvious now as they were then. He was the youngest man ever elected president (Teddy Roosevelt had been the youngest to serve). He was the first president born in the twentieth century. He was a man of action — a bona fide war hero. He was also an intellectual — the author of a best-selling book on political courage — who made liberalism cool and glamorous, but at the same time a pragmatist who would never let the pointy-headed Ivy Leaguers with whom he surrounded himself get in the way of the right course of action. He represented a national yearning for "renewal" and "rebirth," appealing to American idealism and calling for common sacrifice.

Recall the key themes to Mussolini's cult of personality: youth, action, expertise, vigor, glamour, military service. Mussolini cast himself as the leader of a youth movement, a new generation empowered through intellect and expertise to break with the old categories of left and right. JFK's stirring inaugural spoke of "a new generation of Americans — born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage." Mussolini's entire movement (like Hitler's) was built around the generation of Italians who'd been tempered in World War I and their resentment against the bitter peace of Versailles. The Italian Fascist government, billed as a "regime of youth," sold itself as a technocratic marvel in which Mussolini ran many of the ministries himself through force of will and indomitable vigor. Fascist propagandists saturated the media with pictures of Mussolini chopping wood, skiing, running, and standing bare-chested in the Alpine snow. Moreover, Mussolini's reputation as an intellectual and writer was in fact well deserved — unlike Kennedy's.

The Kennedy operation endeavored mightily to send similar messages. Nary a newspaper article could be printed about the new president without references to his love of action, his youth, his vigor. Films of his manly exertions seemed to be everywhere. He could not be so obvious as Mussolini in his womanizing, but his cultivated status as a sex symbol was the product of decided political calculation. Kennedy ran explicitly as a war hero, and his political troops could usually be recognized by their PT-109 insignia pins. His campaign commercials, crammed with images of Kennedy the warrior, boasted that this was a "time for greatness." Kennedy, like Mussolini, promised a national "restoration" and a "new politics" that would transcend old categories of left and right. He insisted that the forceful application of his own will and that of his technocratic aides would be more effective in solving the nation's problems than traditional democratic means.

Indeed, Kennedy was almost literally a superhero. It is a little-known but significant fact that no president has appeared more times in Superman comic books than JFK. He was even entrusted with Superman's secret identity and once pretended to be Clark Kent so as to prevent it from being exposed. When Supergirl debuted as a character, she was formally presented to the Kennedys. (Not surprisingly, the president took an immediate liking to her.) In a special issue dedicated to getting American youth to become physically fit — just like the astronaut "Colonel Glenn" — Kennedy enlists Superman on a mission to close the "muscle gap."⁷

Comic book writers weren't alone in making this connection. In 1960 Norman Mailer wrote a ponderous piece for Esquire titled "Superman Comes to the Supermarket." Ostensibly a report from the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, the essay was more like a term paper for a Noam Chomsky seminar. But it does give you a sense of how even leading intellectuals like Mailer understood that they were being offered a myth — and were eager to accept it.⁸

The original Kennedy myth did not emphasize Kennedy's progressive credentials. Ted Sorensen recalled that JFK "never identified himself as a liberal; it was only after his death that they began to claim him as one of theirs." Indeed, the Kennedy family had serious trouble with many self-described progressives (who, after World War II, were essentially warmed-over communists) because of its close ties to that other prominent Irish-American politician, Joe McCarthy. After Roy Cohn, Bobby Kennedy was McCarthy's most valued aide. Jack Kennedy never denounced his Senate colleague, who was also a dear friend of his father's. But then, Kennedy was always more of a nationalist than a liberal. While a student at Harvard, he sent the isolationist America First Committee a one-hundred-dollar contribution with a note attached, telling them, "What you are doing is vital."⁹

World War II changed JFK's perspective — as it did for most isolationists. It also amplified Kennedy's fascination with "greatness." He was awed by Churchill and would lip-synch Churchill's oratory on the I Can Hear It Now albums narrated by Edward R. Murrow.¹⁰ In later years, staffers knew they could win Kennedy's ear if they could make him think that greatness was in the offing. His entire political career was grounded in the hope and aspiration that he would follow FDR as a lion of the twentieth century.

JFK famously inherited this ambition from his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, the pro-Nazi Democratic Party boss who was desperate to put a son in the White House. In 1946 Joe distributed a hundred thousand copies of John Hersey's article on JFK's PT-109 exploits. Soon an entire team of intellectuals was put to work, transforming JFK into the next great man of action. Kennedy's first book, Why England Slept, an expanded version of his undergraduate thesis, was a dish concocted by many chefs. His second, Profiles in Courage, about great men who stick to their principles despite adversity, was essentially produced by a committee chaired by Ted Sorensen and only intermittently supervised by Kennedy himself. Of course, Kennedy accepted the Pulitzer alone.

Kennedy was the first modern politician to recognize and exploit the new clout enjoyed by intellectuals in American society. The old Brain Trusters were economists and engineers, men concerned with shaping earth and iron. The new Brain Trusters were image men, historians, and writers — propagandists in the most benign sense — concerned with spinning words and pictures. Kennedy was no dunce, but he understood that in the modern age style tends to trump substance. (An indisputably handsome and charming man, he obviously benefited from the rise of television.) And the Kennedy machine represented nothing if not the triumph of style in American politics.

Kennedy's political fortune also stemmed from the fact that he seemed to be riding the waves of history. Once again, the forces of progressivism had been returned to power after a period of peace and prosperity. And despite the unprecedented wealth and leisure of the postwar years — indeed largely because of them — there was a palpable desire among the ambitious, the upwardly mobile, the intellectuals, and, above all, the activists of the progressive-liberal establishment to get "America moving again." "More than anything else," the conservative publisher Henry Luce wrote in 1960, "the people of America are asking for a clear sense of National Purpose."¹¹

This was the dawn of the third fascist moment in American life, which would unfurl throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, both in the streets and universities — as seen in the previous chapter — and in the halls of government. What ended as bloodshed in the streets began in many respects as a well-intentioned "revolution from above" by heirs to the Wilson-FDR legacy incapable of containing the demons they unleashed.

Perhaps the best expression of this bipartisan-elite clamor for "social change" came in a series of essays on "the national purpose" co-published by the New York Times and Life magazine. Adlai Stevenson wrote that Americans needed to transcend the "mystique of privacy" and turn away from the "supermarket temple." Charles F. Darlington, a leading corporate executive and former State Department official, explained that America needed to recapture the collective spirit of national purpose it had enjoyed "during parts of the Administrations of Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts" (you can guess which parts). Above all, a reborn America needed to stop seeing itself as a nation of individuals. Once again, "collective action" was the cure. Darlington's call for a "decreased emphasis on private enterprise" amounted to a revival of the corporatism and war socialism of the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations.¹²

On the eve of JFK's inauguration in January 1960, a Look report, utilizing data from a special Gallup survey, found that Americans were actually feeling pretty good: "Most Americans today are relaxed, unadventurous, comfortably satisfied with their way of life and blandly optimistic about the future." The trick, then, was to rip Americans' attention away from their TV dinners and fan-tailed cars and get them to follow the siren song of the intellectuals. And that meant Kennedy needed a crisis to bind the public mind to a new Sorelian myth. "Great crises produce great men," Kennedy proclaimed in Profiles in Courage, and his entire presidency would be dedicated to the creation of crises commensurate with the greatness he yearned to achieve.¹³

A vast retinue of brains and activists, nostalgic for the excitement of the New Deal and World War II, shared Kennedy's desire to shake America out of its complacency. In the 1950s Arthur Schlesinger Jr. spoke for this entire circle of progressives, young and old, when he lamented the "absent discontents" of the American people.¹⁴

Kennedy, like FDR, believed he was a true democrat, and it would be unfair to label him a fascist. But his obsession with fostering crises in order to whip up popular sentiments in his favor demonstrates the perils of infatuation with fascist aesthetics in democratic politics. Ted Sorensen's memoirs count sixteen crises in Kennedy's first eight months in office. Kennedy created "crisis teams" that could short-circuit the traditional bureaucracy, the democratic process, and even the law. David Halberstam writes that Johnson inherited from Kennedy "crisis-mentality men, men who delighted in the great international crisis because it centered the action right there in the White House — the meetings, the decisions, the tensions, the power, they were movers and activists, and this was what they had come to Washington for, to meet these challenges." Garry Wills and Henry Fairlie — hardly right-wing critics — dubbed the Kennedy administration a "guerilla government" for its abuse of and contempt for the traditional governmental system. In an interview in 1963 Otto Strasser, the left-wing Nazi who helped found the movement, told the scholar David Schoenbaum that Kennedy's abuse of authority and crisis-mongering certainly made him look like a fascist.¹⁵

Everything about Kennedy's politics conveyed a sense of urgency. He ran on a "missile gap" that never existed and governed based on a heightened state of tension with the Soviets that he labored to create. He constantly spoke the language of "danger" and "sacrifice," "courage" and "crusade." He installed the first "situation room" in the White House. His first State of the Union address, delivered eleven days after his inaugural, was a "wartime speech without a war." Kennedy warned that freedom itself was at its "hour of maximum danger." "Before my term has ended we shall have to test again whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure. The outcome is by no means certain."¹⁶

Kennedy's adrenaline-soaked presidency was infectious, and deliberately so. His administration launched a massive campaign to encourage the construction of fallout shelters, with various agencies competing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the conversion of schools and hospitals into nuclear bunkers. We think of those duck-and-cover drills as icons of the 1950s, but it was under Kennedy that they reached the climate of extreme paranoia so often parodied today. The administration distributed fifty-five million wallet-sized cards with instructions on what to do when the nukes started raining from the sky. If, as the New Left so often claimed, the mobilization of "youth" in the 1960s was spurred by the anxiety of living under the shadow of "the bomb," then they have JFK to thank for it.

Even Kennedy's nondefense policies were sold as the moral analogue of war. He justified more education spending — as Johnson would after him — on the explicit grounds that we needed to stay competitive with the Soviets. Kennedy's tax cuts — aimed to counteract the worst stock market crash since the Depression — were implemented not in the spirit of supply-side economics (as some conservatives are wont to insinuate) but as a form of Keynesianism, justified in the language of Cold War competition. Indeed, Kennedy was the first president to explicitly claim that the White House had a mandate to ensure economic growth — because America couldn't ignore Khrushchev's boastful threat that the Soviet Union would soon "bury" the United States economically.¹⁷ His intimidation of the steel industry was a rip-off of Truman's similar effort during the Korean War, itself a maneuver from the playbooks of FDR and Wilson. Likewise, the Peace Corps and its various domestic equivalents were throwbacks to FDR's martial CCC. Even Kennedy's most ambitious idea, putting a man on the moon, was sold to the public as a response to the fact that the Soviet Union was overtaking America in science.

Particularly in response to Kennedy's crackdown on the steel industry, some observers charged that he was making himself into a strongman. The Wall Street Journal and the Chamber of Commerce likened him to a dictator. Ayn Rand explicitly called him a fascist in a 1962 speech, "The Fascist New Frontier."

It is not a joyful thing to impugn an American hero and icon with the label fascist. And 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: the 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, invocations 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 would later be described as cool pragmatism. Like the pragmatists 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.¹⁸

Once again, Kennedy's famous declaration "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country" is seen today as a fine patriotic turn of phrase. Liberals in particular see it as an admirable call to service. And it is both of these things. But what is often missed is the historical context and motivation. Kennedy was trying to re-create the unity of World War II in the same way FDR had tried to revive the unity of World War I. His declaration that we should put a man on the moon was not the result of Kennedy's profound farsightedness, nor even of his desire to wallop the Russians. Rather, it was his best option for finding a moral equivalent of war.

HE DIED FOR LIBERALISM

All of this went down the memory hole after Kennedy's murder. Kennedy the nationalistic Third Wayer was replaced by Kennedy the fighting liberal. The JFK of Camelot eclipsed the one who tried to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro.

Woodrow Wilson's grandson Dean Francis Sayre delivered a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral in homage to the fallen leader. "We have been present at a new crucifixion," he told the assembled dignitaries. "All of us," he explained, "have had a part in the slaying of our President. It was the good people who crucified our Lord, and not merely those who acted as executioners." Chief Justice Earl Warren declared that the president had an organic and mystical bond with the people. He is "chosen to embody the ideals of our people, the faith we have in our institutions, and our belief in the father-hood of God and the brotherhood of man." Five days after Kennedy's death, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, capped his address to a joint session of Congress by asking that Americans "put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence" and turn away from "the apostles of bitterness and bigotry."¹⁹

Even after the nature of the assassination was more clear, the notion that "hate" and America's collective sin killed Kennedy endured. Washington's Methodist bishop, John Wesley Lord, declared that the nation needed to "atone" for Kennedy's death. Rather than naming monuments after Kennedy, the nation could more appropriately "thank a martyr for his death and sacrifice" by redoubling its commitment to liberal politics.²⁰

Most historians view Kennedy and Johnson as representing the last gasp of traditional progressive politics, ending the era that began with Wilson and ran through the New Deal and the Fair Deal to the New Frontier and the Great Society. Programmatically, that's largely right (though it lets the very liberal Nixon off the hook). But the Kennedy presidency represented something more profound. It marked the final evolution of Progressivism into a full-blown religion and a national cult of the state.

From the beginning, Kennedy's presidency had tapped into a nationalistic and religious leitmotif increasingly central to American liberalism and consonant with the themes of both Progressivism and fascism. The Kennedy "action-intellectuals" yearned to be supermen, a Gnostic priesthood imbued with the special knowledge of how to fix society's problems. JFK's inaugural opened the decade with the proclamation that America was the agent of God and the possessor of godlike powers: "For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life." The sociologist Robert Bellah found proof in this address that America already had a civil religion, defined by "the obligation, both collective and individual, to carry out God's will on earth." The New York Times's C. L. Sulzberger wrote that the inaugural appealed to anybody who believed there was "still room on this earth for the kingdom of heaven."²¹

John F. Kennedy represented the cult of personality tradition of American liberalism. He wanted to be a great man in the mold of Wilson and the Roosevelts. He was more concerned with guns than butter. Lyndon Baines Johnson, a southern populist ward heeler 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 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. To this end, LBJ, a crafty and clever politician, made shameless use of JFK's assassination, converting it into precisely the sort of transformative national crisis that had always eluded Kennedy himself. His legacy, the modern welfare state, represents the ultimate fruition of a progressive statist tradition going back to Woodrow Wilson.

As we've seen, Wilson and the progressives laid the intellectual foundations for the divinized liberal state. The progressives, it should be remembered, did not argue for totalitarianism because the war demanded it; they argued for totalitarianism and were delighted that the war made it possible. But World War I also proved to be the undoing of the progressive dream of American collectivism. The total mobilization of the war — and the stupidity of the war in the first place — reawakened in its aftermath the traditional American resistance to such tyranny. In the 1920s the progressives sulked while Americans enjoyed remarkable prosperity and the Russians and Italians (in their view) had "all the fun of remaking a world." The Great Depression came along just in time: it put the progressives back in the driver's seat. As we have seen, FDR brought no new ideas to government; he merely dusted off the ideas he had absorbed as a member of the Wilson administration. But he left the state immeasurably strengthened and expanded. Indeed, it is worth recalling that the origins of the modern conservative movement stem from an instinctive desire to shrink the state back down to a manageable size after the war. But the Cold War changed that, forcing many conservatives to support a large national security state in order to defeat communism. This decision on the part of foreign policy hawks created a permanent schism on the American right. Nonetheless, even though Cold War conservatives believed in a limited government, their support for anti-communism prevented any conceivable attempt to actually get one.

Kennedy's contribution to the permanent welfare state was for the most part stylistic, as we've seen. But his "martyrdom" provided a profound psychological crisis that proved useful for the promotion of liberal goals and ideas. Johnson used it not just to hijack the national political agenda but to transform Progressivism itself into a full-blown mass political religion. For the first time, the progressive dream could be pursued without reservation during a time of prosperity and relative peace. No longer dependent on war or economic crisis, Progressivism finally got a clean shot at creating the sort of society it had long preached about. The psychological angst and anomie that progressives believed lay at the core of capitalist society could be healed by the ministrations of the state. The moment to create a politics of meaning on its own merits had finally arrived.

In his first speech as president, Johnson signaled his intention to build a new liberal church upon the rock of Kennedy's memory. That church, that sacralized community, would be called the Great Society.

THE BIRTH OF THE LIBERAL GOD-STATE

We have already discussed at some length the personalities driving American liberalism. It is now necessary to take what may seem like a sharp detour to address the cult of the state itself in American liberalism. Without this historical detour, it is difficult to see modern liberalism for what it is: a religion of state worship whose sacrificial Christ was JFK and whose Pauline architect was LBJ.

It's hard to fix a specific starting date for the progressive race for the Great Society, but a good guess might be 1888, the year Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward burst on the American scene. One of the most influential works of progressive propaganda ever conceived, the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was hailed as the biggest publishing sensation since Uncle Tom's Cabin. The narrator of the book, which is set in the faraway year 2000, lives in a utopian, militarized society. Workers belong to a unified "industrial army," and the economy is run by all-powerful central planners partly inspired by the successes of German military planning. Citizens are drafted into their occupations, for "every able-bodied citizen [is] bound to work for the nation, whether with mind or muscle." The story's preacher informs us that America has finally created the kingdom of heaven on earth. Indeed, everyone looks back on the "age of individualism" with bemused contempt.²²

The umbrella in particular is remembered as the symbol of the nineteenth century's disturbing obsession with individualism. In Bellamy's utopia, umbrellas have been replaced with retractable canopies so that everyone is protected from the rain equally. "[I]n the nineteenth century," explains a character, "when it rained, the people of Boston put up three hundred thousand umbrellas over as many heads, and in the twentieth century they put up one umbrella over all the heads."²³

Bellamy's vision of a militarized, nationalistic, socialist utopia captivated the imagination of young progressives everywhere. Overnight, Bellamite "Nationalist Clubs" appeared across the country dedicated to "the nationalization of industry and the promotion of the brotherhood of humanity." Nationalism in America, as in most of Europe, meant both nationalism and socialism. Thus Bellamy predicted that individual U.S. states would have to be abolished because "state governments would have interfered with the control and discipline of the industrial army."²⁴

Religion was the glue that held this American national socialism together. Bellamy believed that his brand of socialist nationalism was the true application of Jesus' teachings. His cousin Francis Bellamy, the author of the Pledge of Allegiance, was similarly devoted. A founding member of the First Nationalist Club of Boston and co-founder of the Society of Christian Socialists, Francis wrote a sermon, "Jesus, the Socialist," that electrified parishes across the country. In an expression of his "military socialism," the Pledge of Allegiance was accompanied by a fascist or "Roman" salute to the flag in American public schools. Indeed, some contend that the Nazis got the idea for their salute from America.²⁵

Everywhere one looked, "scientific" utopianism, nationalism, socialism, and Christianity blended into one another. Consider the 1912 Progressive Party convention. The New York Times described it as a "convention of fanatics," at which political speeches were punctuated by the singing of hymns and shouts of "Amen!" "It was not a convention at all. It was an assemblage of religious enthusiasts," the Times reported. "It was such a convention as Peter the Hermit held. It was a Methodist camp meeting done over into political terms." The "expression on every face" in the audience, including that of Jane Addams, who rose to nominate Teddy Roosevelt for his quixotic last bid for the presidency, was one "of fanatical and religious enthusiasm." The delegates, who "believed — obviously and certainly believed — that they were enlisted in a contest with the Powers of Darkness," sang "We Will Follow Jesus," but with the name "Roosevelt" replacing the now-outdated savior. Among them were representatives of every branch of Progressivism, including the Social Gospeller Washington Gladden, happily replacing the old Christian savior with the new "Americanist" one. Roosevelt told the rapturous audience, "Our cause is based on the eternal principles of righteousness...We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord."²⁶

The American Social Gospel and Christian sociology movements essentially sought to bend Christianity to the progressive social agenda. Senator Albert Beveridge, the progressive Republican from Indiana who chaired the 1912 convention, summed up the progressive attitude well when he declared, "God has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world."²⁷

Walter Rauschenbusch offers the best short explanation of the Social Gospel for our purposes. A professor at the Rochester Theological Seminary and a onetime preacher on the outskirts of New York's Hell's Kitchen, the slender clergyman with a thin goatee had become the informal leader of the movement when he published Christianity and the Social Crisis in 1907. "[U]nless the ideal social order can supply men with food, warmth and comfort more efficiently than our present economic order," he warned, "back we shall go to Capitalism...'The God that answereth by low food prices,'" he boomed, "'let him be God.'" Left-wing clergy like Rauschenbusch were convinced that the state was the instrument of God and that collectivism was the new order sanctioned by Jesus.²⁸

Progressive clergy like Rauschenbusch laid the philosophical and theological foundation for statism in ways that the new crop of social scientists never could. They argued from pulpits and political gatherings and in the intellectual press for a total and complete reconception of scripture in which redemption could only be achieved collectively. Conservative theologians argued that only the individual could be born again. The progressive Christians claimed that individuals no longer mattered and that only the state could serve as divine intercessor. The Baptist Social Gospel preacher argued that the state must become "the medium through which the people shall co-operate in their search for the kingdom of God and its righteousness."²⁹

Inspiration for such ideas came from an improbable source: Bismarck's Prussia. Bismarck inspired American progressives in myriad ways, some of which have been touched on already. First, he was a centralizer, a uniter, a European Lincoln who brought disparate regions and factions under the yoke of the state, heedless of dissent. Second, he was the innovator of top-down socialism, which pioneered many of the welfare state programs the progressives yearned for: pensions, health insurance, worker safety measures, eight-hour workdays, and so on. Bismarck's efficiency at delivering programs without the messiness of "excessive" democracy set the precedent for the idea that "great men," modernizers, and "men of action" could do what the leaders of decadent and decaying democracies could not.

Moreover, Bismarck's socialism from above gelded classical liberalism in Germany and helped to hobble it around the globe. This was precisely his purpose. Bismarck wanted to forestall greater socialist or democratic radicalism by giving the people what they wanted without having them vote for it. To this end he bought off the left-leaning reformers who didn't particularly care about limited government or liberal constitutionalism. At the same time, he methodically marginalized, and in many cases crushed, the classical or limited-state liberals (a similar dynamic transpired in the United States during World War I). Hence, in Germany, both left and right became in effect statist ideologies, and the two sides fought over who would get to impose its vision on society. Liberalism, defined as an ideology of individual freedom and democratic government, slowly atrophied and died in Germany because Bismarck denied it a popular constituency. In its place was the statist liberalism of Dewey and DuBois, Wilson and FDR, a liberalism defined by economic entitlements and the alleviation of poverty.

Then there was the Kulturkampf — a subject to be discussed at greater length in a later chapter. The important point about the Kulturkampf, lost on so many contemporary commentators, is that it was a liberal phenomenon. German progressives declared war on backward Catholicism, believing that their blending of science and a form of nationalistic Social Gospel was the ideology of the future. It was a model the progressives adapted to American soil.

The godfathers of the liberal God-state were the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and the scientist Charles Darwin. Hegel had argued that history was an unfolding evolutionary process, and the engine driving that process was the state. The "State is the actually existing, realized moral life...The divine idea as it exists on earth," Hegel declared in The Philosophy of History. "[A]ll worth which the human being possesses — all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State."³⁰ The movement of the state through time was the "march of God on earth." Darwin's theory of evolution seemed to confirm that man was part of a larger organism, governed and directed by the state as the mind guides the body. For the "modern" clergy this meant that politics was a religious calling; after all, politics is nothing less than the effort to define the mission of the state, and the state was the hand of God.

Virtually all of the leading progressive intellectuals shared this "organic" and spiritual understanding of politics — perhaps none more than Richard Ely. "God works through the State in carrying out His purposes more universally than through any other institution," proclaimed the founder of the American Economic Association and the so-called Wisconsin School of progressivism. The state, he insisted, "is religious in its essence," and there is no corner of human existence beyond the scope of its authority. A mentor to Wilson and a great influence on Teddy Roosevelt, Ely was a postmillennialist Christian who defined the state as "a mighty force in furthering God's kingdom and establishing righteous relations."³¹ Many of Ely's famous colleagues at the University of Wisconsin saw their advocacy for economic reform, eugenics, war, socialism, Prohibition, and the rest of the progressive agenda as part of a united effort to bring about the "New Jerusalem."

It made little sense to talk about progressives as a group distinct from the theocratic zealots trying to create a new God-state. The American Economic Association, its mission statement dedicated to uniting church, state, and science to secure America's redemption, served as both the intellectual engine of progressive social policy and a de facto organ of the Social Gospel movement. More than sixty clergymen — roughly half the group's roster — counted themselves as members. Later, during World War I, Ely was the most rabid of jingoists, organizing loyalty oaths, hurling accusations of treason, and arguing that opponents of the war should be shot.

With Woodrow Wilson, it is impossible to separate the priest from the professor. From early essays with such titles as "Christ's Army" and "Christian Progress" to his later addresses as president, Wilson made it clear that he was a divine instrument, and the state the holy sword of God's crusade, while at the same time insisting that he represented the triumph of science and reason in politics. Speaking to the Young Men's Christian Association, he told the audience that public servants should be guided solely by the question: What would Christ do in your situation? He then proceeded to explain, "There is a mighty task before us, and it welds us together. It is to make the United States a mighty Christian Nation, and to Christianize the world."³²

The war only served to intensify these impulses. "The Past and the Present are in deadly grapple," he declared. His goal was the complete "destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere...that can disturb the peace of the world" and the "settlement of every question" facing mankind. Wilson advocated "Force! Force to the utmost! Force without stint or limit! The righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust." America was "an instrument in the hands of God," he proclaimed, while his propaganda ministry called World War I a war "to re-win the tomb of Christ."³³

Wilson shared with other fascist leaders a firm conviction that his organic connection with "the people" was absolute and transcended the mere mechanics of democracy. "So sincerely do I believe these things that I am sure that I speak the mind and wish of the people of America." Many Europeans recognized him as an avatar of the rising socialist World Spirit. In 1919 a young Italian socialist proclaimed, "Wilson's empire has no borders because He [sic] does not govern territories. Rather He interprets the needs, the hopes, the faith of the human spirit, which has no spatial or temporal limits."³⁴ The young man's name was Benito Mussolini.

That Wilson's government intruded deeply into the private sector in unprecedented ways is indisputable. It launched the effort, carried forward by FDR, of turning the economy into a "cooperative" enterprise where labor, business, and government sat around a table and hashed things out on their own. Such a system — they called it syndicalism, corporatism, and fascism in Europe — sounds attractive on paper, but inevitably it serves to benefit the people inside the room and few others. When Wilson's dollar-a-year men weren't rewarding their respective industries, they were subjecting more of the private sector to government control. Wilson's planners set prices on almost every commodity, fixed wages, commandeered the private railroads, created a vast machinery for the policing of thought crimes, and even tried to dictate the menu of every family meal.³⁵

Wilson's war socialism was temporary, but its legacy was permanent. The War Industries Board and cartels closed shop after the war, but the precedent they set would prove too attractive for progressives to abandon.

While America was the victor in World War I, Wilson and the progressives lost their war at home. The government's deep penetration into civil society seemed forgivable during a war but was unacceptable during peace. Likewise, the artificial economic boom came to an end. Moreover, the Treaty of Versailles, which was supposed to justify every imposition and sacrifice, proved a disappointing riot of hypocrisies and false promises.

But the progressive faith endured. Liberal intellectuals and activists insisted during the 1920s that Wilson's war socialism had been a smashing success and its failures a result of insufficient zeal. "We planned in war" became their slogan. Alas, they couldn't convince the yokels in the voting booths. As a result, they came more and more to admire the Bismarckian approach of top-down socialism. They also looked to Russia and Italy, where "men of action" were creating utopias with the bulldozer and the slide rule. The Marxist emphasis on scientific socialism and social engineering infected American Progressivism. And since science isn't open to democratic debate, an arrogant literal-mindedness took over Progressivism.

It was also around this time that through a dexterous sleight of hand, Progressivism came to be renamed "liberalism." In the past, liberalism had referred to political and economic liberty as understood by Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith. For them, the ultimate desideratum was maximum individual freedom under the benign protection of a minimalist state. The progressives, led by Dewey, subtly changed the meaning of this term, importing the Prussian vision of liberalism as the alleviation of material and educational poverty, and liberation from old dogmas and old faiths. For progressives liberty no longer meant freedom from tyranny, but freedom from want, freedom to be a "constructive" citizen, the Rousseauian and Hegelian "freedom" of living in accord with the state and the general will. Classical liberals were now routinely called conservatives, while devotees of social control were dubbed liberals. Thus in 1935 John Dewey would write in Liberalism and Social Action that activist government in the name of the economically disadvantaged and social reconstruction had "virtually come to define the meaning of liberal faith."³⁶

Given this worldview, it shouldn't be surprising that so many liberals believed the Soviet Union was the freest place on earth. In a series of articles on the Soviet Union for the New Republic, Dewey hailed the grand "experiment" as the "liberation of a people to consciousness of themselves as a determining power in the shaping of their ultimate fate." The Soviet revolution had brought "a release of human powers on such an unprecedented scale that it is of incalculable significance not only for that country, but for the world." Jane Addams also called the Soviets "the greatest social experiment in history."³⁷ Freed from the dogmas of the past, and adhering to evolutionary imperatives, Pragmatists believed that even states must "learn by doing" — even if that meant, once again, that the new Jacobins had to unleash terror on those who would not comply with the general will.

For a generation progressives had complained that America lacked, in effect, a Volksgeist, a singular general will that could fuel this conception of a God-state. When the stock market crashed in 1929, they believed their shining moment had returned.

"[T]he United States in the 1920s," writes William Leuchtenburg, "had almost no institutional structure to which Europeans would accord the term 'the State.'" Beyond the post office, most people had very little interaction with or dependence on "the government in Washington."³⁸ The New Deal changed all that. It represented the last stage in the transformation of American liberalism, whereby the U.S. government became a European "state" and liberalism a political religion.

As economic policy, the New Deal was a failure. If anything, it likely prolonged the Depression. And yet we are constantly told that the New Deal remains the greatest domestic accomplishment of the United States in the twentieth century and a model liberals constantly wish to emulate, preserve, and restore. In 2007 Nancy Pelosi reportedly said that three words prove the Democrats aren't out of ideas: "Franklin Delano Roosevelt."³⁹ Why such devotion? The answer most often offered is that the New Deal gave Americans "hope" and "faith" in a "cause larger than themselves." Hope for what? Faith in what? What "cause"? The answer: the liberal God-state or, if you prefer, the Great Society — which is merely that society governed by the God-state in accordance with the general will.

The New Deal amounted to a religious breakthrough for American liberalism. Not only had faith in the liberal ideal become thoroughly religious in nature — irrational, dogmatic, mythological — but many smart liberals recognized this fact and welcomed it. In 1934 Dewey had defined the battle for the liberal ideal as a "religious quality" in and of itself. Thurman Arnold, one of the New Deal's most influential intellectuals, proposed that Americans be taught a new "religion of government," which would finally liberate the public from its superstitions about individualism and free markets.⁴⁰ It was as Robespierre insisted: the "religious instinct" must be cultivated to protect the revolution.

The apotheosis of liberal aspirations under FDR took place not during the New Deal but during World War II. Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address proposed what he called a "second Bill of Rights." But this was really an argument for a new Bill of Rights, turning the original on its head. "Necessitous men are not free men," he declared. Therefore the state must provide a "new basis of security and prosperity." Among the new rights on offer were "a useful and remunerative job," "a decent home," "adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health," "adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment," and "a good education." This second Bill of Rights remains the spiritual lodestar of liberal aspirations to this day.⁴¹

PURGING THE DEMONS WITHIN

The war against Hitler was as pristine an example of good versus evil as we've seen in the history of warfare. But that doesn't mean the war (and the New Deal mobilization) had only salutary effects. People grew accustomed to following the exhortations of elites — in the press, at leading institutions, and in government — without much reflection or skepticism. These elites told the American public that the war and state planning had "saved" Western civilization and that it was now America's job to keep it safe.

The postwar environment saw the fusion of any number of progressive strains into a coherent agenda. Government was now truly run by experts. The public consensus was favorable to liberal ambitions. Classical liberalism seemed permanently discredited. Even the utopian dream of a new world order and, perhaps, a world government envisioned by Wilson, H. G. Wells, and many others was given new life by the creation of the United Nations. The problem for liberalism was that the new enemy on the horizon wasn't from the right but from the left. For liberals in the late 1920s and early 1930s the Soviet Union was like Bismarck's Prussia a generation earlier — a model to be emulated. During the 1930s the Soviets were on the front line fighting the fascist threat. In the 1940s the Soviets were our allies. But after the war it soon became clear that Soviet intentions weren't that honorable and that Soviet methods were embarrassingly difficult to distinguish from Nazi methods.

There is a modern notion that liberals didn't disapprove of or oppose anti-communism; they just opposed McCarthyite excesses. The problem is that communists and liberals have always made allowances for McCarthyite tactics when it is one of their enemies getting grilled. The House Un-American Activities Committee, after all, was founded by a progressive Democrat, Samuel Dickstein, to investigate German sympathizers. During the barely remembered "Brown scare" of the 1940s, everyone from real Nazi supporters — the German-American Bund, for example — to misguided isolationists was targeted and harassed. Much like Wilson, FDR believed that any domestic dissent was treachery and insisted that his Department of Justice persecute his opponents. At the height of the madness, Walter Winchell read the names of isolationists on the radio, calling them "Americans we can do without."⁴² American communists in this period readily named names and compiled lists of "German sympathizers."

One might excuse such tactics as a necessary evil in the fight against Nazism. But the more poignant hypocrisy is that American communists did the same thing to other American communists. The Smith Act, which made it illegal to belong to an organization that advocated the overthrow of the United States, was a linchpin of American fascism, according to many leftists. But American communists themselves used the Smith Act to get American Trotskyites arrested during the war.

But that was a sideshow far from public eyes. After the war, liberals could not tolerate such tactics when aimed at their own ranks. Their denial that their own ideas and history had any link with totalitarianism was so total that anybody who suggested otherwise had to be destroyed. Whittaker Chambers demonstrated this when he accurately identified Alger Hiss, a scion of American liberalism, as a communist. The establishment rallied around Hiss while it demonized Chambers as a liar, a psychopath, a fascist.⁴³

Joseph McCarthy could not be so easily dismissed, largely because he was a U.S. senator. Despite his flaws and unforgivable excesses, he accurately called attention to the fact that much of the liberal establishment had been infested with communists and communist sympathizers. For that crime he, too, was dubbed a fascist.

Ask a liberal today why McCarthy was a fascist, and the answers you usually get are that he was a "bully" and a "liar." Bullies and liars are bad, but there's nothing inherently right-wing about them. You will also hear that McCarthyism represents a grotesque distortion of patriotism, jingoism, and the like. This is a more complicated complaint, though it's worth remembering that many on the left think nearly any exhortation to patriotism is fascist. Still, it is true that McCarthyism represented a certain ugly nationalist strain in the American character. But far from being right-wing, this sentiment was in fact a throwback to traditional left-wing populist politics. Red baiting, witch hunts, censorship, and the like were a tradition in good standing among Wisconsin progressives and populists.

Today few remember that McCarthy's political roots lay firmly in the Progressive Era. McCarthy was, after all, a populist progressive from quite arguably the most progressive state in the Union, Richard Ely's and Robert La Follette's Wisconsin. Joe McCarthy was a product of Wisconsin and its traditions. Indeed, the primary reason he ran for the Senate as a Republican is that he'd learned in his first campaign for public office — when he ran as a Democrat — that Wisconsin under La Follette had essentially become a one-party Republican state. In his 1936 bid for district attorney of Shawano County, McCarthy railed against the Republican presidential candidate as a "puppet" of right-wing business interests and fat cats like William Randolph Hearst. When he finally challenged La Follette for his Senate seat, he ran not as a bona fide right-winger but as a populist more in tune with the needs of Wisconsin.

There was much about McCarthy that was fascistic, including his conspiratorialism, his paranoid rhetoric, his bullying, and his opportunism; but those tendencies did not come from the conservative or classical liberal traditions. Rather, McCarthy and McCarthyism came out of the progressive and populist traditions. His followers were mostly middle-class, very often progressive or populist in their assumptions about the role of the state, and in many respects heirs to the Coughlinism of the early New Deal. The most effective such McCarthyite was the four-term Nevada Democratic senator Pat McCarran, author of the Internal Security Act, which required communist-front organizations to register with the attorney general, barred communists from working in defense-related industries, banned immigration of communists, and provided for the internment of communists in case of national emergency.

The point is not that McCarthy was simply a La Follette Progressive. Both La Follettes were honorable and serious men, in many ways among the most courageous politicians of the twentieth century. Nor am I saying that McCarthy was just another liberal, though he continued to use the word positively until as late as 1951. What I am saying is that what it meant to be a liberal was changing very rapidly after World War II. And once again, the losers in a liberal civil war — the right wing of the left — were demonized. Liberalism was in effect shedding its unrefined elements, throwing off the husk of the Social Gospel and all of that God talk. Had not the Holocaust proved that God was dead? The old liberals increasingly seemed like the William Jennings Bryan character in Inherit the Wind — superstitious, angry, backward. Through the benefit of hindsight one can see how liberals would have invented the cool pragmatist JFK had he not existed. Then again, as we've seen, they largely did invent him.

At the dawn of the 1950s American liberals needed a unified field theory that not only sustained their unimpeachable status as Olympians but also took account of the Holocaust as well as the populist firebrands who'd dared to question the wisdom, authority, and patriotism of the liberal elite. The backward and unsatisfying language of religion increasingly cut off to them, their own legacy of eugenics discredited, and the orthodox Marxist narrative largely unpersuasive to the masses, liberals needed something that could unite and revive this trinity. They found the glue they needed in psychology.

A handful of immensely influential Marxist theorists, mostly Germans from the so-called Frankfurt School (transplanted to Columbia University beginning in the 1930s), married psychology and Marxism to provide a new vocabulary for liberalism. These theorists — led by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse — tried to explain why fascism had been more popular than communism in much of Europe. Borrowing from Freud and Jung, the Frankfurt School described Nazism and Fascism as forms of mass psychosis. That was plausible enough, but their analysis also held that since Marxism was objectively superior to its alternatives, the masses, the bourgeoisie, and anyone else who disagreed with them had to be, quite literally, mad.

Adorno was the lead author of The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950. The book presented evidence that people holding "conservative" views scored higher on the so-called F-Scale (F for "Fascism") and were hence in dire need of therapy. The political scientist Herbert McClosky likewise diagnosed conservatives as a pre-fascist "personality type" comprising mostly "the uninformed, the poorly educated, and...the less intelligent." (Lionel Trilling famously reduced conservatism to a series of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.")⁴⁴ For McClosky, Adorno, and establishment liberals generally, conservatism was at best the human face of the madness of Nazi-style fascism.

It's tempting to say these theorists merely threw a patina of pseudoscientific psychobabble over the propaganda leaflets of Stalin's Third International. But the tactic was more sophisticated than that. The essential argument was brilliant in its simplicity. The original Marxist explanation of fascism was that it was the capitalist ruling classes' reaction to the threat of the ascendancy of the working classes. The Frankfurt School deftly psychologized this argument. Instead of rich white men and middle-class dupes protecting their economic interests, fascism became a psychological defense mechanism against change generally. Men who cannot handle "progress" respond violently because they have "authoritarian personalities." So, in effect, anyone who disagrees with the aims, scope, and methods of liberalism is suffering from a mental defect, commonly known as fascism.

The Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter was the Frankfurt School's most successful publicist. For Hofstadter, American history was a tale of liberals decapitating fascist Hydra heads in every chapter. His work dripped with the language of The Authoritarian Personality. In "Pseudo-Conservative Revolt" — which later became part of The Paranoid Style in American Politics — Hofstadter used psychological scare words to describe the crypto-fascist menace within: "clinical," "disorder," "complexes," "thematic apperception." As Christopher Lasch writes, "The Authoritarian Personality had a tremendous impact on Hofstadter and other liberal intellectuals, because it showed them how to conduct political criticism in psychiatric categories, to make those categories bear the weight of political criticism. This procedure excused them from the difficult work of judgment and argumentation. Instead of arguing with opponents, they simply dismissed them on psychiatric grounds."⁴⁵

It didn't take long for such psychological theorizing to break its banks and become an all-purpose solution to the "social question," as progressives used to put it. Indeed, modern psychology was a perfect substitute for the Social Gospel, militarism, Thurman Arnold's "religion of government," "social control," and even eugenics. Whereas progressives were once determined to weed out the biologically unfit, they now directed the same energies to the psychologically unfit. Some liberal psychiatrists even began describing a new "religion of psychiatry" that would cure society of its "extremist," traditional, backward, conservative elements. Adorno and his colleagues had laid the groundwork for this transition by identifying the "authoritarian family" as the locus of evil in the modern world.

A wave of liberal theologians met the psychiatrists halfway, arguing that various neuroses were the product of social alienation and that traditional religion should reorient itself toward healing them. Psychiatry — and "relevance" — became the new standards for clergy everywhere. For Paul Tillich, the source of salvation would be a redefining and recombining of the secular and the sacred, rendering politics, psychiatry, and religion all parts of the same seamless web.

Stripped of its jargon, this project was an almost perfect replay of the liberal pattern. Liberals love populism, when it comes from the left. But whenever the people's populist desires are at cross-purposes with the agenda of the left, suddenly "reaction," "extremism," and of course "fascism" are loosed upon the land. Bill Clinton titled his "blueprint" for America Putting People First, but when the people rejected his agenda, we were informed that "angry white men" (read white "authoritarian personalities") were a threat to the Republic. Similarly, when the people supported New Deal social planners, one could barely find an inch of daylight between Progressivism and populism. But when the same people had become fed up with socialism from above, they became "paranoid" and dangerous, susceptible to diseases of the mind and fascistic manipulation. Hence, liberal social planners were all the more justified in their efforts to "fix" the people, to reorient their dysfunctional inner lives, to give them "meaning." It was all reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht's famous quip: "Would it not be easier...for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?"⁴⁶

THE GREAT SOCIETY: LBJ'S FASCIST UTOPIA

Much like the Nazi movement, liberal fascism had two faces: the street radicals and the establishment radicals. In Germany the two groups worked in tandem to weaken middle-class resistance to the Nazis' agenda. In the previous chapter we saw how the liberal fascists of the SDS and Black Panther movements rose up to terrorize the American middle class. In the remainder of this chapter — and the next — we will explain how the "suit-and-tie radicals" of the 1960s, people like Hillary Clinton and her friends, used this terror to expand the power and scope of the state and above all to change the public attitude toward the state as the agent of social progress and universal caring and compassion.

Lyndon Johnson seems an odd choice for liberalism's deliverer. Then again, he was no one's choice. An assassin's bullet anointed him to the job. Still, it's not as if he hadn't prepared for it.

Amazingly, Johnson was the only full-fledged New Dealer to serve as president save FDR himself. Indeed, in many respects LBJ was the ultimate company man of the modern welfare state, the personification of everything the New Deal represented. Despite his large personality, he was in reality the personification of the system he helped to create.

From the beginning, FDR took a shine to LBJ. He told Harold Ickes that Johnson might well be the first southern president of the postwar generation. Johnson was a fanatically loyal FDR man. As a congressional aide, he threatened to resign more than once when his boss contemplated voting contrary to Roosevelt. In 1935 he was the head of the Texas branch of the National Youth Administration, winning the attention of the future Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and singling himself out as a star among the young New Dealers. In 1937, at the age of twenty-eight, he was elected to represent Texas's Tenth District. He caught FDR's attention while the president was in Texas, where they met and spent considerable time together. When FDR returned to Washington, he called his aide Thomas Corcoran and informed him, "I've just met the most remarkable young man. Now I like this boy, and you're going to help him with anything you can." FDR became Johnson's "political Daddy," in Johnson's own words, and more than any other elected official LBJ mastered the art of working the New Deal. Johnson brought a staggering amount of pork to his constituents in his first year alone. "He got more projects, and more money for his district, than anybody else," Corcoran recalled. He was "the best Congressman for a district that ever was."⁴⁷

However, once elected, Johnson didn't brag about his support for the New Deal. He learned from the defeat of the Texas congressman Maury Maverick that getting praise from East Coast liberals didn't help you much in Texas. When he heard that the New Republic was going to profile him along with other influential New Deal congressmen, LBJ panicked. He called a friend at the International Labor Organization and implored her: "You must have some friend in the labor movement. Can't you call him and have him denounce me? [If] they put out that...I'm a liberal hero up here, I'll get killed. You've got to find somebody to denounce me!"⁴⁸

When he became president in his own right, he no longer had to keep his true feelings secret. He could finally and unabashedly come out of the closet as a liberal. JFK's death, meanwhile, was the perfect psychological crisis for liberalism's new phase. Woodrow Wilson used war to achieve his social ends. FDR used economic depression and war. JFK used the threat of war and Soviet domination. Johnson's crisis mechanism came in the form of spiritual anguish and alienation. And he exploited it to the hilt.

When Johnson picked up the fallen flag of liberalism, he did so with the succinct, almost biblical phrase "let us continue." But continue what? Surely not mere whiz-kid wonkery or touch football games at Hyannis Port. Johnson was tasked with building the church of liberalism on the rock of Kennedy's memory, only he needed to do so in the psychological buzz phrases of "meaning" and "healing." He cast himself — or allowed himself to be cast — as the secular Saint Paul to the fallen liberal Messiah. LBJ's Great Society would be the church built upon the imagined "word" of Camelot.

On May 22, 1964, Johnson offered his first description of the Great Society: "The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning...The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community."⁴⁹

It was an ambitious project, to put it mildly. In the Great Society all wants would be fulfilled, all needs satisfied. No good thing would come at the cost of another good thing. The state would foster, nurture, and guarantee every legitimate happiness. Even leisure would be maximized so that every citizen would find "meaning" in life.

Johnson conceded that such a subsidized nirvana couldn't materialize overnight. It would require the single-minded loyalty and effort of every American citizen and the talents of a new wave of experts. "I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems," he admitted. "But I do promise this: We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America."⁵⁰ Johnson established some fifteen committees to answer the question, what is the Great Society?

The renaissance in liberal ambition transpired even as America's intrinsic antistatist antibodies were reaching a critical mass. In 1955 National Review was born, giving an intellectual home to a heterodox collection of thinkers who would form modern conservatism. It's revealing that while William F. Buckley had always been a classical liberal and Catholic traditionalist, nearly all of the intellectual co-founders of National Review were former socialists and communists who'd soured on the god that failed.

In 1964 Senator Barry Goldwater was National Review's candidate of choice rather than of compromise. Goldwater was the first Republican presidential candidate since Coolidge to break with the core assumptions of Progressivism, including what Goldwater called "me-too Republicanism." As a result, Goldwater was demonized as the candidate of "hate" and nascent fascism. LBJ accused him of "preach[ing] hate" and consistently tried to tie him to terrorist "hate groups" like the Klan (whose constituency was, of course, traditionally Democratic). In a speech before steelworkers in September 1964, Johnson denounced Goldwater's philosophy of the "soup line" — as if free-market capitalism's ideal is to send men to the poorhouse — and scorned the "prejudice and bigotry and hatred and division" represented by the affable Arizonan.⁵¹ Needless to say, this was a gross distortion. Goldwater was a champion of limited government who put his faith in the decency of the American people rather than in a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington. His one great mistake, which he later admitted and apologized for, was to vote against the Civil Rights Act.

Few liberals, then or now, would dispute that the Great Society was premised on love and unity. "We will do all these things because we love people instead of hate them...because you know it takes a man who loves his country to build a house instead of a raving, ranting demagogue who wants to tear down one. Beware of those who fear and doubt and those who rave and rant about the dangers of progress," Johnson railed. Meanwhile, the establishment worked overtime to insinuate that Goldwater was an architect of the "climate of hate" that had claimed Kennedy's life. As befitted the newly psychologized zeitgeist, Goldwater was denounced as, quite literally, insane. An ad in the New York Times reported that 1,189 psychiatrists had diagnosed him as not "psychologically fit" to be president. The charge was then recycled in excessive "free media" coverage. Dan Rather's colleague Daniel Schorr (now a senior correspondent with National Public Radio) reported on the CBS Evening News, with no factual basis whatsoever, that candidate Goldwater's vacation to Germany was "a move by Senator Goldwater to link up" with neo-Nazi elements.⁵²

Goldwater lost in a landslide. And given LBJ's monumental ego as well as the hubris of his intellectual coterie, it's no wonder that the election results were greeted as an overwhelming endorsement of the Great Society project.

Again, Johnson was in many ways a perfect incarnation of liberalism's passions and contradictions. His first job (tellingly enough) was as a schoolteacher during the rising tide of the Deweyan revolution in education. Indeed, as some observed during the debates over the Great Society, the roots of the phrase stretched back to Dewey himself. The phrase appears over and over in Dewey's 1927 The Public and Its Problems.⁵³ Ultimate credit, however, should properly go to the co-founder of Fabian socialism, Graham Wallas, who in 1914 published The Great Society, a book familiar to the two Johnson aides who claimed credit for coining Johnson's "the Great Society."

One of those aides was Richard Goodwin, a golden boy of the Kennedy administration (he graduated first in his class at Harvard Law) who came to JFK's attention for his work as a congressional investigator probing the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. LBJ inherited Goodwin as a speechwriter. In the summer of 1965 Goodwin offered what the New York Times called "the most sophisticated and revealing commentary to date" on the question, what is the Great Society? His answer lay in the need for the state to give "meaning" to individuals and "make the world a more enjoyable and above all enriching place to live in." "The Great Society," Goodwin explained, "is concerned not with the quantity of our goods but the quality of our lives." Though he didn't say so directly, it was clear that the Great Society would offer the opposite of the "hate" that killed Kennedy: love.⁵⁴

But it was also to be a tough love. Goodwin made it clear that if the citizenry didn't want to find meaning through state action or measure the quality of their lives on a bureaucratic slide rule, such reluctance would be overcome. But not necessarily via persuasion. Rather, it was the government's task "to spur them into action or the support of action." Here again Dewey's ghost was hard at work. Goodwin declared that the Great Society must "ensure our people the environment, the capacities, and the social structures which will give them a meaningful chance to pursue their individual happiness." This differed very little from Dewey's version of state-directed democracy. Dewey held that "[n]atural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology" and that "organized social control" via a "socialized economy" was the only means to create "free" individuals.⁵⁵

The religious character of modern liberalism was never far from the surface. Indeed, the 1960s should be seen as another in a series of "great awakenings" in American history — a widespread yearning for new meaning that gave rise to a tumultuous social and political movement. The only difference was that this awakening largely left God behind. Paul Goodman, whose 1960 Growing Up Absurd helped launch the politics of hope in the first part of the decade, came to recognize in the second half how insufficient his original diagnosis had been: "I...imagined that the world-wide student protest had to do with changing political and moral institutions, to which I was sympathetic, but I now saw [in 1969] that we had to do with a religious crisis of the magnitude of the Reformation in the fifteen hundreds, when not only all institutions but all learning had been corrupted by the Whore of Babylon."⁵⁶

This view of the 1960s as essentially a religious phenomenon has gained a good deal of respectability in recent years, and scholars now debate the finer points of its trajectory. The deeply perceptive journalist John Judis, for example, argues that the 1960s revolt had two phases, a postmillennial politics of hope followed by a premillennial politics of despair, the latter ushered in by the escalation of the war, race riots at home, and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. "Postmillennialism" and "premillennialism" are theologically freighted terms for two related religious visions. Postmillennialists believe that man can create a kingdom of God on earth. The Social Gospellers were mostly postmillennialists in their aspirations; they believed the Hegelian God-state was the kingdom of heaven on earth. Premillennialists believe that the world is coming to an end and can't get better before it gets worse.⁵⁷

Judis's chronological scheme has its merits, but ultimately it makes more sense to see these visions not as distinct phases of liberalism but as contending strains within liberalism itself. The left has always had an apocalyptic streak. Lenin argued "the worse the better." Georges Sorel's writings make no sense unless you understand that he saw politics as an essentially religious enterprise. The revolutionary vanguard has always demanded that destruction come before creation. The Futurists, anarchists, vorticists, Maoists, and various other modernist and left-wing avant-gardes believed that hammers were for smashing first, building second. Hitler was, of course, a great believer in the social benefits of destruction (though, as he often explained, he understood that real power came not from destroying but from corrupting institutions).

We should also note the apocalyptic logic of Progressivism generally. If the wheel of history, the state, is moving us forward to the kingdom of heaven, then anytime the "enemy" takes over, we are moving in a metaphysically wrong direction. This is never more transparent than when the mainstream media describe socialistic reforms as a "step forward" and free-market ones as "going backward" or "turning back the clock." And when non-progressives are in charge too long, the demands from the left to "tear the whole thing down" grow louder and louder.

In other words, the apocalyptic fervor Judis identifies in the late 1960s had its roots not just in the disillusion of the Kennedy assassination and the failures of Great Society liberalism but in the pent-up religious impulses inherent to Progressivism generally. The patient reformists had their chance; now it was time to "burn, baby, burn!"

The 1960s wasn't all about "fire in the streets," though — just as the French Revolution wasn't all about the Terror. Complex bureaucracies designed to "rationalize" the economy employed more Jacobins than the guillotine ever did. The born-again spirit of reform provided the drumbeat for the "long march through the institutions." Ralph Nader's consumerist crusade was launched in the 1960s, as was the modern environmental movement. Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique was published in 1963.⁵⁸ The Stonewall riots, which gave birth to the gay pride movement, took place in the summer of 1969. Once again, the line between formal religion and Progressive politics was blurred beyond recognition. Once again, religious leaders in the "mainline" churches were seduced by radical politics.⁵⁹ The Methodist youth magazine motive — a major influence on the young Hillary Clinton — featured a birthday card to Ho Chi Minh in one issue and advice on how to dodge the draft in others. All of these political crusades were grounded in a moralizing fervor and a spiritual yearning for something more than bread alone. Most of the radicals of the New Left later explained that theirs was really a spiritual quest more than a political one. Indeed, that's why so many of them disappeared into the communes and EST seminars, searching for "meaning," "authenticity," "community," and, most of all, "themselves." For the 1960s generation "self-actualization" became the new secular grace.⁶⁰

In 1965 Harvey Cox, an obscure Baptist minister and former Oberlin College chaplain, wrote The Secular City, which turned him into an overnight prophet. Selling more than one million copies, The Secular City argued for a kind of desacralization of Christianity in favor of a new transcendence found in the "technopolis," which was "the place of human control, of rational planning, of bureaucratic organization." Modern religion and spirituality required "the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols." Instead, we must spiritualize the material culture to perfect man and society through technology and social planning. In The Secular City "politics replaces metaphysics as the language of theology." Authentic worship was done not by kneeling in a church but by "standing in a picket line." The Secular City was an important intellectual hinge to the transition of the 1960s (though we should note that Cox recanted much of its argument twenty years later).⁶¹

Evidence of liberalism's divided nature can be found in the enduring love-hate relationship between "hopeful" liberals and "apocalyptic" leftists. Throughout the 1960s, centrist liberals made allowances and apologies for the radicals to their left. And when push came to shove — as it did at Cornell — they capitulated to the radicals. Even today, mainstream liberals are far more inclined to romanticize the "revolutionaries" of the 1960s, in part because so many of them played that role in their youth. On college campuses today, administrators — often living fossils from the 1960s — applaud the Kabuki dance of left-wing protest as a central part of higher education. The only time they get worried is when the protest comes from the right.

But the most important legacy of the 1960s has to be liberal guilt. Guilt over their inability to create the Great Society. Guilt over leaving children, blacks, and the rest of the Coalition of the Oppressed "behind." Guilt is among the most religious of emotions and has a way of rapidly devolving into a narcissistic God complex. Liberals were proud of how guilty they felt. Why? Because it confirmed liberal omnipotence. Kennedy and Johnson represented the belief that an enlightened affluent society could solve every problem, redress every wrong. Normally you don't feel guilty when forces outside your control do evil. But when you have the power to control everything, you feel guilty about everything. Lyndon Johnson not only accelerated Kennedy's politics of expectation when he declared, "We can do it all; we're the richest country in the world," but rendered any shortcomings, anywhere, evidence of sagging commitment, racism, insensitivity, or just plain "hate." Feeling guilty was a sign of grace, for it proved your heart was in the right place.

Conservatives were caught in a trap. If you rejected the concept of the omnipotent state, it was proof that you hated those whom government sought to help. And the only way to prove you didn't hate them — whoever "they" were — was to support government intervention (or "affirmative action," in Kennedy's phrase) on their behalf. The idea of a "good conservative" was oxymoronic. Conservatism by definition "holds us back" — leaves some "behind" — when we all know that the solution to every problem lies just around the corner.

The result was a cleavage in the American political landscape. On one side were the radicals and rioters, who metaphorically — and sometimes literally — got away with murder. On the other were conservatives — hateful, sick, pre-fascist — who deserved no benefit of the doubt whatsoever. Liberals were caught in the middle, and most, when forced to choose, sided with the radicals ("they're too impatient, but at least they care!"). The fact that the radicals despised liberals for not going far enough fast enough only confirmed their moral status in the minds of guilt-ridden liberals.⁶²

In this climate, a liberal spending spree was inevitable. Like noblemen of yore purchasing indulgences from the Church, establishment liberals sought to expiate their guilt by providing the "oppressed" with as much swag as possible. Fear, of course, played an important role as well. Pragmatic liberals — while understandably reluctant to admit it publicly — undoubtedly bought into the Bismarckian logic of placating the radicals with legislative reforms and government largesse. For others, the very real threat of radicalism provided precisely the sort of "crisis mechanism" liberals are always in search of. The "race crisis" panic sweeping through liberalism was often cited as a justification to dust off every statist scheme sitting on a progressive shelf.

From cash payments to the poor to building new bridges and community redevelopment, the payout was prodigious even by New Deal standards. The civil rights movement, which had captured the public's sympathies through King's message of equality and color blindness, quickly degenerated into a riot of racially loaded entitlements. George Wiley, the president of the National Welfare Rights Organization, insisted that welfare was "a right, not a privilege." Some even argued that welfare was a form of reparations for slavery. Meanwhile, any opposition to such programs was stigmatized as evidence of bigotry.

The War on Poverty, affirmative action, community redevelopment, and the vast panoply of subsidies that fall under the rubric of welfare — Aid to Families with Dependent Children, housing grants, Medicare, Women, Infants, and Children benefits, food stamps — were churned out by a massively increased administrative state on a scale undreamed of by FDR. But most on the left were not satisfied, in part because these programs proved remarkably ineffective at creating the Great Society or defeating poverty. While even FDR had recognized that the dole could be a "narcotic...of the human spirit," in the 1960s such concerns were widely dismissed as rubbish.⁶³ The New Republic argued that Johnson's antipoverty program was fine "as a start" but insisted that there was "no alternative to really large-scale, ameliorative federal social welfare action and payments." Michael Harrington, whose The Other America laid the moral groundwork for the War on Poverty, led a group of thirty-two left-wing intellectuals, grandiosely dubbed the "Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution," which proclaimed that the state should provide "every individual and every family with an adequate income as a matter of right." The committee lamented that Americans were "all too confused and frightened by a bogey we call the 'welfare state,' [a] term of pride in most parts of the world."⁶⁴

Recipients weren't the only ones hooked on the narcotic of "relief" the pushers were, too. Like a man determined to pound a square peg into a round hole, establishment liberals kept insisting that just a little more money, a little more effort, would produce the social euphoria of the elusive Great Society. As Mickey Kaus argues in The End of Equality, the liberal response to every setback could be summarized in one word: "more."⁶⁵ When welfare seemed to cause fathers to abandon their families, liberals responded that payments should be extended to families where the father remains at home. But this in turn encouraged recipients to stay or become unemployed. The answer to that? Give money to employed poor fathers, too. But this in turn created an incentive for families to split up the moment the father moved out of poverty, so they wouldn't lose their benefits. Meanwhile, if you criticized any of this, you were a fascist.

The unintended but inevitable consequences of liberal utopianism spilled forth. From 1964 onward, crime in America grew at about 20 percent per year.⁶⁶ Liberal court rulings, particularly the Supreme Court's Miranda decision, caused clearance rates to plummet in major cities. Welfare had the tendency to encourage family breakdown, illegitimate births, and other pathologies it was designed to cure. The original civil rights revolution — which was largely based on a classically liberal conception of equality before the law — failed to produce the level of integration liberals had hoped for. In 1964 Hubert Humphrey — "Mr. Liberal" — swore up and down in the well of the Senate that the Civil Rights Act could in no way lead to quotas and if anyone could prove otherwise, "I will start eating the pages one after the other, because it is not there." By 1972 the Democratic Party — under the guise of the "McGovern rules" — embraced hard quotas (for blacks, women, and youth) as its defining organizational principle.⁶⁷ And it should be no surprise that a Democratic Party determined to do anything it could to make itself "look like America" would in turn be committed to making America look like the Democratic Party. And if you criticized any of this, you also were a fascist.

Indeed, even as quintessentially fascist street violence erupted in American cities, white liberals responded by basking in guilt and blaming the right. The Watts riots in 1965 were the real turning point. Not only was the collective liberal intelligentsia determined to blame white America — "the system" — for the violence, but the violence itself became morally admirable "rebellion." Johnson commented that such behavior was to be expected when "people feel they don't get a fair shake." Hubert Humphrey said that if he'd been born poor, he might have rioted also. An entire "riot ideology" unfolded that, in the words of the urban historian Fred Siegel, became a new form of "collective bargaining." Destroy your neighborhood and the government will buy you a better one.⁶⁸

The extent of liberal denial was put on full display when Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an adviser to Richard Nixon, advocated a policy of "benign neglect" on racial issues. The subject of race, Moynihan had told Nixon in confidence, "has been too much talked about...We may need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades."⁶⁹ To this end Moynihan urged the president to avoid confrontations with black extremists and instead invest his energies in an aggressive class-based approach to social policy. To this, liberal editorialists, activists, and academics responded in horror, calling the memo "shameful," "outrageous," and "cruel" on its face. The reaction was instructive. Liberals had so thoroughly imbibed the assumptions of the God-state that to suggest the state could, never mind should, turn its back on the chosen people — for who could be more anointed than the poor black victims of slavery and segregation? — was tantamount to saying that God had ceased being God. When it comes to the state, neglect could not be benign, only malign. The state is love.

A more practical irony of the transformation of American liberalism is that it had fallen into the pre-fascist logic of the Bismarckian welfare state. Bismarck had pioneered the concept of liberalism without liberty. In exchange for lavish trinkets from an all-powerful state, Bismarck bought off the forces of democratic revolution. Reform without democracy empowered the bureaucratic state while keeping the public satisfied. Blacks in particular married their interests to the state and its righteous representatives, the Democratic Party. Blacks and the Democrats meet each other service for service, and so ingrained is this relationship that many liberal black intellectuals consider opposition to the Democratic Party to be, quite literally, a form of racism. Liberals also entered a Bismarckian bargain with the courts. Facing mounting disappointments in the democratic arena, liberals made peace with top-down liberalism from activist judges. Today liberalism depends almost entirely on "enlightened" judges who use Wilson's living Constitution to defy popular will in the name of progress.

All of this is traceable back to the Kennedy assassination, in which a deranged communist martyred a progressive icon. In 1983, on the twentieth anniversary of the murder, Gary Hart told Esquire, "If you rounded us [Democratic politicians] all up and asked, 'Why did you get into politics?' nine out of ten would say John Kennedy."⁷⁰ In 1988 Michael Dukakis was convinced (absurdly enough) that he was the reincarnation of Kennedy, even tapping Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate to re-create the "magic" of the Boston-Austin axis. In 1992 the high-water mark of the Clinton campaign was the Reifenstahlesque film of a teenage Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy. John Kerry affected a Kennedy accent in school, went by the initials JFK, and tried to model his political career on Kennedy's. In 2004 Howard Dean and John Edwards also claimed to be the true heirs of the Kennedy mantle. As did past candidates, including Bob Kerrey, Gary Hart, and, of course, Ted and Robert Kennedy. In 2007 Hillary Clinton said she was the JFK in the race.

A true indication of how thoroughly the Kennedy myth seeped into the grain of American life can be seen in how Americans greeted the death of his son John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1999. "John-John," as he was endearingly and condescendingly dubbed, was by all accounts a good and decent man. He was certainly very handsome. And he was the son of a beloved president. Yet beyond that, his career and contributions were lackluster at best. He took the New York Bar exam three times. He was an unremarkable prosecutor. He founded a childish magazine, George, which intentionally blurred the lines between the personal and the political, substance and celebrity, the trivial and the important. And yet when John Junior died in a tragic plane crash, his death was greeted in abjectly religious terms by a political class entirely convinced that the Son, like the Father, had been imbued with the Kennedy Holy Ghost. The historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in the New York Times that JFK Jr. was his generation's "photogenic redeemer." Wall-to-wall coverage portrayed the younger Kennedy as a lost "national savior." Bernard Kalb summarized the tenor of the coverage: JFK Jr. was being depicted as "a kind of a secular messiah who would, had he lived, [have] rescued civilization from all its terrible problems."⁷¹

Today, to deny JFK's status as the martyr to what might have been is to deny the hope of liberalism itself. For more than a generation, liberal politics in America has been premised on the politics of a ghost. The Jack Kennedy whom liberals remember never existed. But the Kennedy myth represents not a man but a moment — a moment when liberals hoped to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth. The times were not as propitious as liberals remember — after all it was only Kennedy's death, not his life, that truly rallied Americans around "Kennedyism" in huge numbers. But that's not the point. What matters is that the people believe the myth and therefore pursue it. Liberals believed for a "brief shining moment" that they could bring about their kingdom of heaven, their Camelot. Ever since, they have yearned to re-create that moment. Looked at from outside, the myth appears to be little more than power worship. But from within, it is gospel. Meanwhile, it's telling that Democrats wish to preserve the substance of the Great Society while maintaining the mythology of Camelot. Every Democrat says he wants to be JFK while insisting that he will do more or less what LBJ did. No Democrat would dream of saying he wanted to emulate Lyndon Johnson, because the myth is what matters most.