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

7

Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine

THERE IS NO issue on which modern liberals consider themselves more thoroughly enlightened than that of race. And there is no contentious topic where they are quicker to insist that dissent from liberal orthodoxy is a sign of creeping fascism. In virtually every major racially charged debate over the last forty years, at least some self-righteous liberals have invoked the record of the Holocaust to warn, darkly, that if opponents of racial preferences of one kind or another get their way, we just may find ourselves on the slippery slope to Nazi Germany.

White liberals learned this trick from black liberals. Black civil rights figures love playing the Nazi card. When Newt Gingrich tried to reach out to liberal Democrats by inviting them to social functions, New York representative Major Owens was outraged. "These are people who are practicing genocide with a smile; they're worse than Hitler," Owen said. "Gingrich smiles...[and] says they're going to be our friend. We're going to have cocktail-party genocide." The NAACP chairman Julian Bond is supposed to be a moderate in racial politics, but he, too, has a weakness for Nazi analogies. "Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side by side," he recently declared. Harry Belafonte smeared conservative blacks — Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and others — in the Bush administration by snorting that Hitler also "had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich" (this is untrue, by the way). Jesse Jackson has never met a reductio ad Hitlerum he didn't like. Over the course of his career he has compared Republicans to genocidal Nazis countless times, from decrying the Hitlerian roots of the religious right to denouncing George W. Bush's "Nazi tactics."¹

The American right is constantly required to own the darkest chapters in the country's history: the accommodation of segregationists, McCarthyite excesses, isolationism prior to World War II, and so on. Rarely mentioned is the liberal side of these stories, in which the Democratic Party was the home to Jim Crow for a century; in which American liberalism was at least as isolationist as American conservatism; in which the progressive Red Scare made McCarthyism look like an Oxford Union debate; in which successive Democratic presidents ordered such things as the detention of Japanese-Americans, sweeping domestic surveillance of political enemies, and the (justified) use of horrific weapons on Japan; and in which Moscow-loyal communists "named names" of heretical Trotskyites.²

Perhaps most damning of all is the liberal infatuation with eugenics, which has simply been whitewashed out of existence. Like the editors of the old Soviet encyclopedias who would send out updates to instruct which pages should be torn out, American liberalism has repeatedly censored and rewritten its own history so that the "bad guys" were always conservatives and the good guys always liberals. This revisionism plays a role in our bioethical debates today: liberals still have a soft spot for certain types of eugenics, but they are as blind to their current attraction as they are to their historical one.

In fact, they have blind spots on blind spots. Ignorant of their own history and only vaguely aware of the nature of Nazi eugenics, they work on the assumption that eugenics is something bad that only bad people want to pursue. Like the "liberal" who wants to ban negative political ads and campus hate speech but believes he is a fierce opponent of censorship, the modern liberal retains an attraction for eugenic ideas, but it never dawns on him that what he wants to do might be called by that name.

Meanwhile, in current debates it is typically assumed that conservatives don't mean what they say. Conservative opposition to racial preferences may be defended with high-flying rhetoric about color-blind equality, but beneath the surface, liberals assert, the lofty rhetoric amounts to "coded" appeals to the racism of southern whites and a desire to "turn back the clock" on racial progress.

The controversy over Charles Murray's Bell Curve is the most notorious example of this phenomenon in the last twenty years. Upon its release virtually every progressive voice in the country denounced Murray as a "social Darwinist" bent on promoting every reactionary measure from rounding up racial defectives to forced sterilization. America's largest Jewish organization proclaimed, "To take Charles Murray seriously is to endanger more than sixty years of progress towards racial justice by adopting the long disproved and discredited theories of social Darwinism and eugenics." The black scholar Adolph Reed called Murray and his co-author, Richard J. Herrnstein, "intellectual brownshirts" and declared that endorsements of Nazi-like "extermination, mass sterilization and selective breeding" were implicit in the work.³ But whatever the merits or demerits of The Bell Curve may be, the simple fact is that Murray and Herrnstein were making a deeply libertarian case for state nonintervention. Yes, they focused on issues of classic concern to eugenicists — the heritability of intelligence and its distribution among races — but their argument was 180 degrees opposite from real eugenics, which means using state power to improve the racial, genetic, or biological health of the community.

Liberals constantly expect conservatives to atone for the racism, real and alleged, of various dead conservatives. Meanwhile, in large part because liberals were right about the moral imperative of desegregation, they see no need to explore their own intellectual history. They're the good guys, and that's all they need to know. Left unasked is why Progressivism — not conservatism — was so favorably inclined to eugenics. Is there something inherent to a "pragmatic" ideology of do-goodery that makes it susceptible to eugenic ideas? Or is liberalism's ignorance of its own history to blame? I'm not claiming that the editors at the New Republic today sympathize with eugenicists simply because previous editors did. But modern liberalism does provide a hospitable, nurturing environment for all sorts of "nice" eugenic and racist notions precisely because liberals haven't taken the sort of intellectual and historical inventory conservatives have. It's high time someone did.

When reading the literature on the subjects of eugenics and race, one commonly finds academics blaming eugenics on "conservative" tendencies within the scientific, economic, or larger progressive communities. Why? Because according to liberals, racism is objectively conservative. Anti-Semitism is conservative. Hostility to the poor (that is, social Darwinism) is conservative. Therefore, whenever a liberal is racist or fond of eugenics, he is magically transformed into a conservative. In short, liberalism is never morally wrong, and so when liberals are morally flawed, it's because they're really conservatives!

In an otherwise thoughtful essay in the New Republic, the Yale historian and professor of surgery Sherwin Nuland writes:

Eugenics was a creed that appealed to social conservatives, who were pleased to blame poverty and crime on heredity. Liberals — or progressives, as they were then usually called — were among its most vigorous opponents, considering the inequities of society to be due to circumstantial factors amenable to social and economic reform. And yet some progressive thinkers agreed with the eugenicists that the lot of every citizen would be improved by actions that benefited the entire group. Thus were the intellectual battle lines drawn.⁴

Alan Wolfe, also in the New Republic, writes: "Racial conservatism has its roots in biological and eugenicist thought. Liberal theories of racial damage, by contrast, grew out of a twentieth-century concern with the impact of social environments on individuals."⁵

How convenient. Alas, this is simply untrue. In order to see how this conventional wisdom is built upon a series of useful liberal myths, and therefore understand the real lineage of American liberalism, we need to unlearn a lot of false history and categories we take on faith. In particular, we need to understand that American Progressivism shares important roots with European fascism. No clearer or more sinister proof of this exists than the passion with which American and European progressives greeted eugenics — widely seen as the answer to the "social question."

Let's review our story so far. The fascist moment at the beginning of the twentieth century was a transatlantic phenomenon. Intellectuals across the West embraced the idea that nations were organic entities in need of direction by an avant-garde of scientific experts and social planners. Contemptuous of nineteenth-century dogma, this self-anointed progressive elite understood what needed to be done in order to bring humanity to the sunny uplands of utopia. War, nationalism, the quest for state-directed community, economic planning, exaltation of the public, derogation of the private: these are what defined all of the various and competing new isms of the West.

Eugenics fit snugly within this new worldview, for if nations are like bodies, their problems are in some sense akin to diseases, and politics becomes in effect a branch of medicine: the science of maintaining social health. By lending scientific credibility to the Hegelian and Romantic view of nations as organic beings, Darwinism bequeathed to scientists a license to treat social problems like biological puzzles. All the ills of modern mass society — urban crowding, a rising population among the lower classes, poor public hygiene, even the dumbing down of mainstream bourgeois culture — now seemed curable through conscientious application of biological principles.

Indeed, the population explosion, and in particular the explosion of the "wrong" populations, were of a piece with Darwinian thought from the outset. Darwin himself admitted that his ideas were merely an extension of Malthusianism to the natural world. (Thomas Malthus was the economic philosopher who predicted that a natural human tendency to overbreed, coupled with finite natural resources, would yield persistent misery.) Intellectuals feared that modern technology had removed the natural constraints on population growth among the "unfit," raising the possibility that the "higher elements" would be "swamped" by the black and brown hordes below.

Not only was America no exception to this widespread panic among the intellectual and aristocratic classes; it often led the way. American progressives were obsessed with the "racial health" of the nation, supposedly endangered by mounting waves of immigration as well as overpopulation by native-born Americans. Many of the outstanding progressive projects, from Prohibition to the birth control movement, were grounded in this quest to tame the demographic beast. Leading progressive intellectuals saw eugenics as an important, and often indispensable, tool in the quest for the holy grail of "social control."

Scholarly exchanges between eugenicists, "raceologists," race hygienists, and birth controllers in Germany and the United States were unremarkable and regular occurrences. Hitler "studied" American eugenics while in prison, and sections of Mein Kampf certainly reflect that immersion. Indeed, some of his arguments seem to be lifted straight out of various progressive tracts on "race suicide." Hitler wrote to the president of the American Eugenics Society to ask for a copy of his Case for Sterilization — which called for the forcible sterilization of some ten million Americans — and later sent him another note thanking him for his work. Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race also made a huge impression on Hitler, who called the book his "bible." In 1934, when the National Socialist government had sterilized over fifty thousand "unfit" Germans, a frustrated American eugenicist exclaimed, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."⁶

Of course American progressives are not culpable for the Holocaust. But it is a well-documented fact that eugenics lay at the heart of the progressive enterprise. The eugenic crusade, writes the historian Edwin Black, was "created in the publications and academic research rooms of the Carnegie Institution, verified by the research grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, validated by leading scholars from the best Ivy League universities, and financed by the special efforts of the Harriman railroad fortune."⁷ German race science stood on American shoulders.

It would be nice to say that liberals' efforts to airbrush eugenics from their own history and fob it off on conservatives are unacceptable. But of course they have been accepted. Most intellectuals, never mind liberal journalists and commentators, don't know much about either conservatism or the history of eugenics, but they take it on faith that the two are deeply entwined. One can only hope that this wrong can be made right with a dose of the truth. A brief review of the progressive pantheon — the intellectual heroes of the left, then and now — reveals how deeply imbued the early socialists were with eugenic thinking.

Just as socialist economics was a specialization within the larger progressive avocation, eugenics was a closely related specialty. Eugenic arguments and economic arguments tracked each other, complemented each other, and, at times, melted into each other. Sidney Webb, the father of Fabian socialism and still among the most revered British intellectuals, laid it out fairly clearly. "No consistent eugenicist," he explained, "can be a 'Laissez Faire' individualist [that is, a conservative] unless he throws up the game in despair. He must interfere, interfere, interfere!" The fact that the "wrong" people were outbreeding the "right" ones would put Britain on the path of "national deterioration" or, "as an alternative," result "in this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews."⁸

Indeed, British socialism, the intellectual lodestar of American Progressivism, was saturated with eugenics. The Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, and H. G. Wells were devoted to the cause. John Maynard Keynes, Karl Pearson, Havelock Ellis, Julian and Aldous Huxley, Eden Paul, and such progressive publications as the New Statesman (founded by Webb) and the Manchester Guardian were also supporters of eugenics to one extent or another.

As discussed earlier, Wells was probably the most influential literary figure among pre-World War II American progressives. Despite his calls for a new "liberal fascism" and an "enlightened Nazism," Wells more than anyone else lent romance to the progressive vision of the future. He was also a keen eugenicist and particularly supportive of the extermination of unfit and darker races. He explained that if his "New Republic" was to be achieved, "swarms of black and brown, and dirty-white and yellow people" would "have to go." "It is in the sterilisation of failures," he added, "and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies." In The New Machiavelli, he asserts that eugenics must be the central tenet of any true and successful socialism: "Every improvement is provisional except the improvement of the race." While Wells could be squeamish about how far the state should go in translating this conclusion into policy, he remained a forceful advocate for the state to defend aggressively its interest in discouraging parasitic classes.⁹

George Bernard Shaw — no doubt because of his pacifist opposition to World War I — has acquired the reputation of an outspoken individualist and freethinker suspicious of state power and its abuses. Nothing could be further from the truth. Shaw was not only an ardent socialist but totally committed to eugenics as an integral part of the socialist project. "The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man," he declared. Shaw advocated the abolition of traditional marriage in favor of more eugenically acceptable polygamy under the auspices of a State Department of Evolution and a new "eugenic religion." He particularly lamented the chaotic nature of a laissez-faire approach to mate selection in which people "select their wives and husbands less carefully than they select their cashiers and cooks." Besides, he explained, a smart woman would be more content with a 10 percent share in a man of good genetic stock than a 100 percent share in a man of undesirable lineage. What was therefore required was a "human stud farm" in order to "eliminate the Yahoo whose vote will wreck the commonwealth." According to Shaw, the state should be firm in its policy toward criminal and genetically undesirable elements. "[W]ith many apologies and expressions of sympathy, and some generosity in complying with their last wishes," he wrote with ghoulish glee, we "should place them in the lethal chamber and get rid of them."¹⁰

Other liberal heroes shared Shaw's enthusiasm. John Maynard Keynes, the founding father of liberal economics, served on the British Eugenics Society's board of directors in 1945 — at a time when the popularity of eugenics was rapidly imploding thanks to the revelation of Nazi concentration camp experiments. Nonetheless, Keynes declared eugenics "the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists." Julian Huxley, the founder of the World Wildlife Fund, first director of UNESCO, and revered science popularizer, co-wrote The Science of Life with Wells and Wells's son. Huxley, too, was a sincere believer in eugenics. Havelock Ellis, the pioneering sex theorist and early architect of the birth control movement, spoke for many when he proposed a eugenic registry of all citizens, so as to provide "a real guide as to those persons who are most fit, or most unfit to carry on the race." Ellis did not oppose Nazi sterilization programs, believing that good science "need not become mixed up in the Nordic and anti-Semitic aspects of Nazi aspiration." J. B. S. Haldane, the British geneticist, wrote in the Daily Worker, "The dogma of human equality is no part of Communism...the formula of Communism: 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,' would be nonsense, if abilities were equal."¹¹

Harold Laski, to some the most respected British political scientist of the twentieth century (he was Joseph Kennedy Jr.'s tutor and JFK's professor), echoed the panic over "race suicide" (an American term): "The different rates of fertility in the sound and pathological stocks point to a future swamping of the better by the worse." Indeed, eugenics was Laski's first great intellectual passion. His first published article, "The Scope of Eugenics," written while he was still a teenager, impressed Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. At Oxford, Laski studied under the eugenicist Karl Pearson, who wrote, "Socialists have to inculcate that spirit which would give offenders against the State short shrift and the nearest lamp-post."¹²

Laski, of course, had an enormous impact on American liberalism. He was a regular contributor to the New Republic — which in its early years published scores of leading British intellectuals, including Wells.¹³ He also taught at Harvard and became friends with Felix Frankfurter, an adviser to FDR and, later, Supreme Court justice. Frankfurter introduced Laski to FDR, and he became one of Roosevelt's most ardent British supporters, despite his strong communist ties. More famously, he became one of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's closest friends, despite an age difference of more than five decades. The two maintained a storied correspondence that lasted nearly twenty years.

EUGENICS, AMERICAN-STYLE

American progressives, who took their lead in many ways from their British cousins, shared a similar ardor for racial hygiene. Take Justice Holmes, the most admired jurist of the progressive period and one of the most revered liberal icons in American legal history. It seems that no praise of Holmes can go too far. Felix Frankfurter called him "truly the impersonal voice of the Constitution." "No Justice thought more deeply about the nature of a free society or was more zealous to safeguard its conditions by the most abundant regard for civil liberty than Mr. Justice Holmes." Another observer commented, "Like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, he is the summit of hundreds of years of civilization, the inspiration of ages yet to come." Others have declared that "for the American lawyer he is the beau ideal, and the lawyer quotes his aphorisms as the literate layman quotes Hamlet."¹⁴

What explains Holmes's popularity with liberals? It's a complicated question. Holmes was hailed by many civil libertarians for his support of free speech during the war. Progressives loved him for holding that their nation-building social welfare programs were constitutional. "If my fellow citizens want to go to hell, I will help them. It's my job," Holmes famously declared. This has caused some conservatives to admire his "judicial restraint." But the truth is he practiced "restraint" mostly because he agreed with the direction the progressives were taking.

In 1927 Holmes wrote a letter to Harold Laski in which he proudly told his friend, "I...delivered an opinion upholding the constitutionality of a state law for sterilizing imbeciles the other day — and felt that I was getting near the first principle of real reform." He went on to tell Laski how amused he was when his colleagues took exception to his "rather brutal words...that made them mad."¹⁵

Holmes was referring to his decision in the notorious case of Buckv. Bell, in which progressive lawyers on both sides hoped to get the Supreme Court to write eugenics into the Constitution. Holmes was eager to oblige. The state of Virginia deemed a young woman, Carrie Buck, "unfit" to reproduce (though she was not, as it turned out, retarded, as the state had contended). She was consigned to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, where she was cajoled into consenting to a salpingectomy, a form of tubal ligation. The case depended in part on a report by America's leading eugenicist, Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York — the RAND Corporation of eugenics research, funded by various leading progressive philanthropists. Without having ever met Buck, Laughlin credited the assessment of a nurse who observed of the Buck family, "These people belong to the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South." Hence, Laughlin concluded that eugenic sterilization would be "a force for the mitigation of race degeneracy."

Writing for the majority, Holmes issued a terse opinion barely over a single page long. The decision now ranks as one of the most vilified and criticized examples of legal reasoning in American history. Yet of all his many opinions, it is perhaps the most revealing. Citing only one precedent, a Massachusetts law mandating vaccinations for public school children, Holmes wrote that "the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes...It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind." He concluded by declaring, famously: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." As we will see, this reasoning endures in the often unspoken rationale for abortion.

The opinion tied together many of the major strains in progressive thought at the time. Holmes, a bloody-minded veteran of the Civil War, saw war as a source of moral values in a world without meaning. Given the sacrifice of so many noble characters on the battlefield, requiring degenerates like Carrie Buck to sacrifice their ability to breed — or even their lives — for the greater good seemed entirely reasonable and fair. By citing a public health measure as an adequate precedent, Holmes further underscored how the health of the organic body politic trumped individual liberty. Whether through the prism of mobilization or public health, the project was the same. As Holmes put it in a 1915 Illinois Law Review article, his "starting point for an ideal for the law" would be the "co-ordinated human effort...to build a race."¹⁶

Given such rhetoric, it is impossible not to see Progressivism as a fascistic endeavor — at least by the standards we use today.

There's a general consensus among liberal historians that Progressivism defies easy definition. Perhaps that's because to identify Progressivism properly would be too inconvenient to liberalism, for doing so would expose the eugenic project at its core. The most obvious reply — that progressives were merely representing the age they lived in — fails on several levels. For one thing, the progressive eugenicists had non-progressive, anti-eugenic adversaries — premature conservatives, radical libertarians, and orthodox Catholics — whom the progressives considered to be backward and reactionary. For another, arguing that progressives were a product of their time simply reinforces my larger argument: Progressivism was born of the fascist moment and has never faced up to its inheritance. Today's liberals have inherited progressive prejudice wholesale, believing that traditionalists and religious conservatives are dangerous threats to progress. But this assumption means that liberals are blind to fascistic threats from their own ranks.

Meanwhile, conservative religious and political dogma — under relentless attack from the left — may be the single greatest bulwark against eugenic schemes. Who rejects cloning most forcefully? Who is most troubled by euthanasia, abortion, and playing God in the laboratory? Good dogma is the most powerful inhibiting influence against bad ideas and the only guarantor that men will act on good ones. A conservative nation that seriously wondered if destroying a blastocyst is murder would not wonder at all whether it is murder to kill an eight-and-a-half-month-old fetus, let alone a "defective" infant.

Mainstream liberalism is joined at the hip with racial and sexual-identity groups of one kind or another. A basic premise shared by all these groups is that their members should be rewarded simply by virtue of their racial, gender, or sexual status. In short, the state should pick winners and losers based upon the accidents of birth. Liberals champion this perspective in the name of antiracism. Unlike conservatives who advocate a color-blind state, liberals still believe that the state should organize society on racial lines. We are accustomed to talking about this sort of social engineering as a product of the post-civil-rights era. But the color-blind doctrine championed by progressives in the 1960s was a very brief parenthesis in a very long progressive tradition. In short, there is more continuity between early Progressivism and today's multiculturalism than we think.

Here again, Woodrow Wilson was the pioneer. Wilson's vision of "self-determination" has been retroactively gussied up as a purely democratic vision. It wasn't. It was in important respects an organic, Darwinian-Hegelian vision of the need for peoples to organize themselves into collective spiritual and biological units — that is, identity politics. Wilson was a progressive both at home and abroad. He believed in building up nations, peoples, races into single entities. His racial vision was distinct from Hitler's — and obviously less destructive — but just as inseparable from his worldview.

Wilson's status as the most racist president of the twentieth century is usually attributed to the fact that he was a southerner, indeed the first southern president since Reconstruction. And it is true that he harbored many Dixiecrat attitudes. His resegregation of the federal government, his support for antimiscegenation laws, his antagonism toward black civil rights leaders as well as antilynching laws, and his notorious fondness for D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation all testify to that. But in fact Wilson's heritage was incidental to his racism. After all, he was in no way a traditional defender of the South. He embraced Lincoln as a great leader — hardly a typical southern attitude. Moreover, as a believer in consolidating federal power, Wilson, in his opinion on states' rights, ran counter to those who complained about the "War of Northern Aggression." No, Wilson's racism was "modern" and consistent both with the Darwinism of the age and with the Hegelianism of his decidedly Germanic education. In The State and elsewhere, Wilson can sound downright Hitlerian. He informs us, for example, that some races are simply more advanced than others. These "progressive races" deserve progressive systems of government, while backward races or "stagnant nationalities," lacking the necessary progressive "spirit," may need an authoritarian form of government (a resurgence of this vision can be found among newly minted "realists" in the wake of the Iraq war). This is what offended him so mightily about the post-Civil War Reconstruction. He would never forgive the attempt to install an "inferior race" in a position superior to southern "Aryans."

Wilson was also a forthright defender of eugenics. As governor of New Jersey — a year before he was sworn in as President — he signed legislation that created, among other things, the Board of Examiners of Feebleminded, Epileptics, and Other Defectives. Under the law, the state could determine when "procreation is inadvisable" for criminals, prisoners, and children living in poorhouses. "Other Defectives" was a fairly open category.¹⁷ But Wilson was merely picking up where Teddy Roosevelt left off. The Bull Moose — recently rediscovered by liberal Republicans and "centrist" liberals — regularly decried "race suicide" and supported those "brave" souls who were battling to beat back the tide of mongrelization (although on a personal level Roosevelt was far less of a racist than Wilson).

Roosevelt, like Wilson, was merely demonstrating the attitudes that made him so popular among "modern" progressive intellectuals. In The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly speculated that a "really regenerated state government" would take steps to prevent "crime and insanity" by regulating who could marry and procreate. Such an empowered state, he wrote archly, "might conceivably reach the conclusion that the enforced celibacy of hereditary criminals and incipient lunatics would make for individual and social improvement even more than would a maximum passenger fare on the railroads of two cents a mile." The state, he insisted, must "interfere on behalf of the really fittest."¹⁸

Still, these thoughts qualified Croly as something of a "dove" on the issue of eugenics. Charles Van Hise, Roosevelt's close adviser, was more emphatic. "He who thinks not of himself primarily, but of his race, and of its future, is the new patriot," explained Van Hise, a founder of the American conservation movement and president of the University of Wisconsin during its glory days as the premier training ground for American progressives.¹⁹ Van Hise summarized the American progressive attitude toward eugenics well when he explained: "We know enough about agriculture so that the agricultural production of the country could be doubled if the knowledge were applied; we know enough about disease so that if the knowledge were utilized, infectious and contagious diseases would be substantially destroyed in the United States within a score of years; we know enough about eugenics so that if the knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation."²⁰

The key divide among progressives was not between eugenicists and non-eugenicists or between racists and non-racists. It was between advocates of "positive eugenics" and advocates of "negative eugenics," between those who called themselves humanists and those who subscribed to theories of race suicide, between environmentalists and genetic determinists. The positive eugenicists argued for merely encouraging, cajoling, and subsidizing the fit to breed more and the unfit to breed less. The negative eugenicists operated along a spectrum that went from forced sterilization to imprisonment (at least during the reproductive years). Environmentalists stressed that improving the material conditions of the degenerate classes would improve their plight (many progressives were really Lamarckians when it came to human evolution). Race suicide theorists believed that whole lines and classes of people were beyond salvation.

For a variety of reasons, those we would today call conservatives often opposed eugenic schemes. The lone dissenter in Buck v. Bell, for example, wasn't the liberal justice Louis Brandeis or Harlan Fiske Stone but the "archconservative" Pierce Butler.²¹ The Catholic conservative G. K. Chesterton was subjected to relentless ridicule and scorn for his opposition to eugenics. In various writings, most notably Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized Society, Chesterton opposed what was held to be the sophisticated position by nearly all "thinking people" in Britain and the United States. Indeed, the foremost institution combating eugenics around the world was the Catholic Church. It was the Catholic influence in Italy — along with the fact that Italians were a genetically polyglot bunch — that made Italian Fascism less obsessed with eugenics than either the American progressives or the Nazis (though Mussolini did believe that over time Fascist government would have a positive eugenic effect on the Italians).

Nonetheless, progressives did come up with a term for conservative opponents of eugenics. They called them social Darwinists. Progressives invented the term "social Darwinism" to describe anyone who opposed Sidney Webb's notion that the state must aggressively "interfere" in the reproductive order of society. In the hothouse logic of the left, those who opposed forced sterilization of the "unfit" and the poor were the villains for letting a "state of nature" rule among the lower classes.

Herbert Spencer, the supposed founder of social Darwinism, was singled out as the poster boy for all that was wrong in classical liberalism. Spencer was indeed a Darwinist — he coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" — but his interpretation of evolutionary theory reinforced his view that people should be left alone. In almost every sense, Spencer was a good — albeit classical — liberal: he championed charity, women's suffrage, and civil liberties. But he was the incarnation of all that was backward, reactionary, and wrong according to the progressive worldview, not because he supported Hitlerian schemes of forced race hygiene but because he adamantly opposed them. To this day it is de rigueur among liberal intellectuals and historians to take potshots at Spencer as the philosophical wellspring of racism, right-wing "greed," and even the Holocaust.²²

Thanks to some deeply flawed scholarship by the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter, nearly all of the so-called robber barons of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were dubbed social Darwinists, too, even though subsequent historians have demonstrated that Gilded Age industrialists were barely influenced by Darwinism, if at all. Darwinism was a fixation of intellectuals and academics. The so-called robber barons generally lacked formal education. To the extent they grounded their worldview in anything, it was in Christian ethics and the writings of Adam Smith. Moreover, they believed that capitalism was good for the poor. Yet selective quotations and sweeping generalizations — usually infused with Marxist cliches — rendered the robber barons ersatz fascists.²³

A few historians have dealt with these conundrums by labeling the progressives "reform Darwinists." Reform Darwinists were the only real Darwinians as we understand the term today. Almost all the leading progressive intellectuals interpreted Darwinian theory as a writ to "interfere" with human natural selection. Even progressives with no ostensible ties to eugenics worked closely with champions of the cause. There was simply no significant stigma against racist eugenics in progressive circles.²⁴

Before we continue, it is important to dispel a misperception that may be building in some readers' minds. While progressive eugenicists were often repugnantly racist, eugenics as a field was not necessarily so. Obviously, intermarriage with blacks would be greeted with horror by people already terrified by "Aryans" marrying Slavs or Italians. But W. E. B. DuBois shared many of the eugenic views held by white progressives. His "Talented Tenth" was itself a eugenically weighted term. He defined members of the Talented Tenth as "exceptional men" and the "best of the race." He complained that "the negro has not been breeding for an object" and that he must begin to "train and breed for brains, for efficiency, for beauty." Over his long career he time and again returned to his concern that the worst blacks were overbreeding while the best were underbreeding. Indeed, he supported Margaret Sanger's "Negro Project," which sought to sharply curtail reproduction among "inferior" stocks of the black population.²⁵

Perhaps an even better indication of how little modern popular conceptions jibe with the historical reality during this period is the Ku Klux Klan. For decades the Klan has stood as the most obvious candidate for an American brand of fascism. That makes quite a bit of sense. The right-wing label, on the other hand, isn't nearly as clean a fit. The Klan of the Progressive Era was not the same Klan that arose after the Civil War. Rather, it was a collection of loosely independent organizations spread across the United States. What united them, besides their name and absurd getups, was that they were all inspired by the film The Birth of a Nation. They were, in fact, a "creepy fan subculture" of the film. Founded the week of the film's release in 1915, the second Klan was certainly racist, but not much more than the society in general. Of course, this is less a defense of the Klan than an indictment of the society that produced it.

For years the conventional view among scholars and laymen alike was that the Klan was rural and fundamentalist. The truth is it was often quite cosmopolitan and modern, thriving in cities like New York and Chicago. In many communities the Klan focused on the reform of local government and on maintaining social values. It was often the principal extralegal enforcer of Prohibition, the consummate progressive "reform." "These Klansmen," writes Jesse Walker in an illuminating survey of the latest scholarship, "were more likely to flog you for bootlegging or breaking your marriage vows than for being black or Jewish."²⁶

When modern liberals try to explain away the Klan membership of prominent Democrats — most frequently West Virginia senator Robert Byrd — they cough up a few cliches about how good liberals "evolved" from their southern racial "conservatism." But the Klan of the 1920s was often seen as reformist and modern, and it had a close relationship with some progressive elements in the Democratic Party. The young Harry Truman as well as the future Supreme Court justice Hugo Black were members. In 1924, at the famous "Klanbake" Democratic convention, the KKK rallied around the future senator William McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson's secretary of the treasury (and son-in-law), a key architect of Wilson's war socialism, and a staunch Prohibitionist.

Moreover, if the Klan was less racist than we've been led to believe, academia was staggeringly more so. Indeed, the modern institution of academic tenure was largely carved out by progressive academia's solidarity with E. A. Ross, the author of the "race suicide" thesis.²⁷ Simultaneously one of America's leading sociologists, economists, and "raceologists," Ross was the quintessential reform Darwinist. He first became attracted to Progressivism when he saw that one of his conservative professors was horrified by Henry George's Progress and Poverty — a tract that inspired American progressives, British socialists, and German national socialists. Ross studied in Germany and then returned to the United States, where he finished his studies among the Germanophiles of Johns Hopkins and under the tutelage of Woodrow Wilson and Richard Ely.

A great bear of a man, Ross was an omnipresent public intellectual, writing for all the right magazines and giving lectures at all the right schools. He served as a tutor on immigration issues to Teddy Roosevelt, who was kind enough to write the introduction to Ross's Sin and Society. He shared with Ely, Wilson, and others a conviction that social progress had to take into account the innate differences between the races. Ross also shared Wilson's view, expressed in The State, that various races were at different stages of evolution. Africans and South Americans were still close to savages. Other races — mostly Asians — might be more "advanced" but had slid into evolutionary degeneration. Ross believed that America faced similar degeneration through immigration, intermarriage, and the refusal of the state to impose sweeping eugenic reforms. In 1914 he wrote: "Observe immigrants not as they come travel-wan up the gangplank, nor as they issue toil-begrimed from pit's mouth or mill-gate, but in their gatherings, washed, combed, and in their Sunday best...[They] are hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality...[C]learly they belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These ox-like men are descendants of those who always stayed behind."²⁸

Such views didn't stop Ross from getting a prominent appointment at Stanford. Stanford's conservative grande dame and benefactor, Jane Lanthrop Stanford, however, disliked not only his politics and his activism but also his increasingly loud and crude denunciations of Chinese "coolies." She forced the president of the school, David Starr Jordan — himself an avid eugenicist — to fire Ross.

The faculty erupted in outrage. Professors resigned. Progressive academics and organizations, led by Richard Ely's American Economic Association, rallied to his cause. The New York Times and other prominent newspapers editorialized on Ross's behalf. These efforts came to naught, and Ross left for the University of Nebraska (where he helped Roscoe Pound formulate the doctrine of "sociological jurisprudence" — a bedrock of modern liberalism's "living constitution") and eventually found a home at the University of Wisconsin working alongside Ely under the "race patriot" Charles Van Hise.

It is telling that while we constantly hear about America's racist past and our need to redeem ourselves via racial quotas, slavery reparations, and other overtures toward "historically oppressed groups," it is rare indeed that anyone mentions the founders of American liberalism. Again, when liberals are the historical villains, the crime is laid at the feet of America itself. The crime is considered proof of America's conservative past. When conservatives sin, the sin is conservatism's alone. But never is liberalism itself to blame.

Consider the infamous Tuskegee experiments, where poor black men were allegedly infected with syphilis without their knowledge and then monitored for years. In the common telling, the episode is an example of southern racism and American backwardness. In some versions, black men were even deliberately infected with syphilis as part of some kind of embryonic genocidal program. In fact, the Tuskegee experiments were approved and supported by well-meaning health professionals who saw nothing wrong or racist with playing God. As the University of Chicago's Richard Shweder writes, the "study emerged out of a liberal progressive public health movement concerned about the health and wellbeing of the African-American population." If racism played a part, as it undoubtedly did, it was the racism of liberals, not conservatives. But that's not how the story is told.

I'm not saying that people who once called themselves progressives were racist and therefore those who call themselves progressives today are racist, too. Rather, the point is that the edifice of contemporary liberalism stands on a foundation of assumptions and ideas integral to the larger fascist moment. Contemporary liberals, who may be the kindest and most racially tolerant people in the world, nonetheless choose to live in a house of distinctly fascist architecture. Liberal ignorance of this fact renders this fascist foundation neither intangible nor irrelevant. Rather, it underscores the success of these ideas, precisely because they go unquestioned.

The greatest asset liberalism has in arguments about racism, sexism, and the role of government generally is the implicit assumption that liberalism's intentions are better and more high-minded than conservatism's. Liberals think with their hearts, conservatives with their heads, goes the cliche. But if you take liberalism's history into account, it's clear this is an unfair advantage, an intellectual stolen base. Liberals may be right or wrong about a given policy, but the assumption that they are automatically arguing from the more virtuous position is rubbish.

What is today called liberalism stands, domestically, on three legs: support for the welfare state, abortion, and identity politics. Obviously, this is a crude formulation. Abortion, for example, could be lumped into identity politics, as feminism is one of the creeds extolling the iron cage of identity. Or one could say that "sexual liberty" is a better term than abortion. But I don't think any fair-minded reader would dispute that these three categories nearly cover the vast bulk of the liberal agenda — or at least describe the core of liberal passions — today.

In the remainder of this chapter, I propose to look at each area, starting with the least obvious — and perhaps least important — to see how the progressive urge to reengineer society from the bottom up manifests itself in these three pillars of liberalism today.

THE WELFARE STATE

What is the welfare state? The plain meaning is fairly obvious: a social safety net, a system by which the government can address economic inequalities, presumably for the betterment of the whole society, with special emphasis on the least fortunate. The term, and to a significant degree the concept, begins with Bismarck's Prussia. Bismarck's Wohlfahrtsstaat included everything from guaranteed pensions and other forms of "social insurance" to a whole constellation of labor reforms. This "state socialism," as we've seen, was an enormous inspiration to progressives, socialists, and social democrats in Britain and America, and, of course, in Germany.

But there were at least two important differences between America and Prussia. First, America was a democratic republic with a firm constitution designed to protect minorities (albeit imperfectly) against the tyranny of the majority. Second, Germans already constituted a "racial nation." American progressives were frustrated by the first point because they were envious of the second. The progressives believed that, in the words of Justice Holmes, the aim of law and social policy was to "build a race." Our democracy, with its inconvenient checks and balances, including a diverse population, made such a project difficult. Nonetheless, progressive social policy — the granite foundation of today's welfare state — was from the outset dedicated to solving this "problem."

The American welfare state, in other words, was in important respects a eugenic racial project from the outset. The progressive authors of welfare state socialism were interested not in protecting the weak from the ravages of capitalism, as modern liberals would have it, but in weeding out the weak and unfit, and thereby preserving and strengthening the Anglo-Saxon character of the American racial community.

"Raceologists" like E. A. Ross dedicated their careers to this effort. At the macro level, Ross described the program as one of "social control." This meant mining the society for its purest elements and forging those elements into a "superior race." For white Anglo Protestants, this would amount to a national "restoration" (the watchword of all fascist movements). For the rest, it meant pruning the American garden of racial "weeds," "defective germ plasm," and other euphemisms for non-Aryan strains. Education, in the broadest sense, required getting the entire society to see the wisdom in this policy. Perhaps in a perfect world, the state wouldn't have to get involved: "The breeding function of the family would be better discharged if public opinion and religion conspired...to crush the aspirations of woman for a life of her own."²⁹ But it was too late for such measures, so the state had to interfere.

Ross was a showman, but his ideas fit squarely within the worldview of progressive economics, on both sides of the Atlantic. Consider the debate over the minimum wage. The controversy centered on what to do about what Sidney Webb called the "unemployable class." It was Webb's belief, shared by many of the progressive economists affiliated with the American Economic Association, that establishing a minimum wage above the value of the unemployables' worth would lock them out of the market, accelerating their elimination as a class. This is essentially the modern conservative argument against the minimum wage, and even today, when conservatives make it, they are accused of — you guessed it — social Darwinism. But for the progressives at the dawn of the fascist moment, this was an argument for it. "Of all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites," Webb observed, "the most ruinous to the community is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as wage earners."³⁰

Ross put it succinctly: "The Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him." Since the inferior races were content to live closer to a filthy state of nature than the Nordic man, the savages did not require a civilized wage. Hence if you raised minimum wages to a civilized level, employers wouldn't hire such miscreants in preference to "fitter" specimens, making them less likely to reproduce and, if necessary, easier targets for forced sterilization. Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist and adviser to Woodrow Wilson, explained: "Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind."³¹ Arguments like these turn modern liberal rationales for welfare state wage supports completely on their head.

Few better epitomized the international nature of this progressive-socialist-nationalist consensus than the University of Wisconsin economist John R. Commons. Describing himself as "a socialist, a single-taxer, a free-silverite, a greenbacker, a municipal-ownerist, a member of the Congressional Church," Commons was a lion of the international labor movement and dubbed the "American Sidney Webb." His seminar room contained a giant chart that tracked the global success of progressive economics.³² Commons believed that many poor whites could be saved by government intervention and that they should receive the bounty of a lavishly generous welfare state. But he conceded that, by his estimate, nearly 6 percent of the population was "defective" and 2 percent was irretrievably degenerate and in need of "segregation." These estimates didn't even include blacks and other "inferior" races, whom he considered irredeemable, save perhaps through intermarriage with Aryans. Black inferiority was the main reason this champion of the labor movement felt slavery was justified.³³

Commons and colleagues at Wisconsin laid the foundation for most of the labor reforms we have today, many of them wholly defensible and worthwhile. Others, such as the Davis-Bacon Act, reflect the racial animus of the progressives. The act was passed in 1931 in order to prevent poor black laborers from "taking" jobs from whites. Its authors were honest about it, and it was passed explicitly for that reason; the comparatively narrow issue of cheap black labor was set against the backdrop of the vestigial progressive effort to maintain white supremacy. By requiring that contractors on federal projects pay "prevailing wages" and use union labor, the act would lock black workers out of federal jobs projects. Today the Davis-Bacon Act is as sacred to many labor movement liberals as Roe v. Wade is to feminists. Indeed, as Mickey Kaus has observed, devotion to Davis-Bacon is more intense today than it was thirty years ago, when self-described neoliberals considered it a hallmark of outdated interest-group liberalism.

To be fair, not all progressives supported the welfare state on eugenic grounds. Some were deeply skeptical of the welfare state — but also on eugenic grounds. The Yale economist Henry Farnam co-founded with Commons the American Association for Labor Legislation, the landmark progressive organization whose work laid the foundation for most social insurance and labor laws today. They argued that public assistance was dysgenic — that is, it increased the ranks of the "unfit" — because it afforded the degenerate classes an opportunity to reproduce, whereas in a natural environment such rabble would die off. But Farnam, the protectionist economist Simon Patten, and others didn't therefore oppose the welfare state on those grounds. That would be tantamount to social Darwinism! Rather, they argued that the unintended consequences of the welfare state required a draconian eugenics scheme to "weed out" the defective germ plasm bred by the state's largesse. Why should Aryans be denied the benefits of state socialism when you could simply sweep up the unavoidable mess with a eugenic broom?

Perhaps the only unifying political view held by virtually all eugenicists was that capitalism was dysgenic. "Racial hygiene" was a subset of the larger "social question," and the one thing everyone knew was that laissez-faire was not the answer to the social question.

Until the Nazis came along, Germany generally lagged behind the United States and much of Europe when it came to eugenics. When Indiana passed the first sterilization law in 1907 — for "confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists" — the West took notice. In the subsequent thirty years, twenty-nine other American states passed similar laws, as did Canada and most of Europe. Yes, the Germans admired America's "fitter family" contests, in which good American Aryans were judged like prized cattle at county fairs, but some Scandinavian nations were years ahead of the Germans when it came to eugenic schemes, and many European countries — and Canadian provinces — remained committed to eugenics decades after the fall of the Third Reich.³⁴

Comparisons between the progressives' efforts to "build a race" and the Nazis' efforts to hone or redeem their already homogeneous racial nation can easily become overly invidious because the checks on such programs in America were so much stronger. Thanks to American exceptionalism, progressives were forced to tinker surgically with scalpels — a point they lamented often — while thanks to German exceptionalism, National Socialists had a free hand to use axes, sledgehammers, and bulldozers. In a sense, Germany had been waiting for eugenics to arrive in order to give a scientific rationale to the deep Romantic yearnings in its culture.

Nietzsche himself had pointed the way. In 1880 he wrote, "The tendency must be towards the rendering extinct of the wretched, the deformed, the degenerate." Reproduction, Nietzsche argued, needed to be taken out of the hands of the masses so that "race as a whole [no longer] suffers." "The extinction of many types of people is just as desirable as any form of reproduction." Marriage itself, Nietzsche argued, must be more scrupulously regulated by the state. "Go through the towns and ask yourselves whether these people should reproduce! Let them go to their whores!"³⁵

It's almost impossible to talk about the "influence" of eugenic thought on Nazi public policy, since the Nazis conceived of eugenics as the goal of all public policy. One of the last things Hitler ever committed to paper was his wish that Germany stay loyal to its race laws. Everything — marriage, medicine, employment, wages — was informed by notions of race hygiene and the eugenic economics pioneered by British and American socialists and progressives. As in America, marriage licenses were a vital tool for eugenic screening. Marriages viewed as "undesirable to the whole national community" were forbidden. Meanwhile, subsidies, travel allowances, bonuses, and the like were doled out to favored racial classes. Forced sterilizations became a standard tool of statecraft.³⁶

As we'll see, the Nazis co-opted independent religious and other charities under the auspices of the state. During their rise to power they constructed an alternative charitable infrastructure, offering social services the state couldn't provide. When the Nazis finally took over, they methodically replaced the traditional infrastructure of the state and churches with a Nazi monopoly on charity.

But the more relevant aspect of the Nazi welfare state was how it geared itself entirely toward building a racially defined national community. While it used the standard leftist rhetoric of guilt and obligation typically invoked to justify government aid for the needy and unfortunate, it excluded anyone who wasn't a "national comrade." This points to the unique evil of Nazism. Unlike Italian Fascism, which had less use for eugenics than America or Germany, Nazism was defined as racial socialism. Everything for the race, nothing for those outside it, was the central ethos of Nazism's mission and appeal.

One last point about the interplay of eugenics and the welfare state. In both Germany and America, eugenics gained currency because of the larger faith in "public health." World War I and the great influenza epidemic drafted the medical profession into the ranks of social planners as much as any other. For doctors promoted to the rank of physicians to the body politic, the Hippocratic oath lost influence. The American medical journal Military Surgeon stated matter-of-factly, "The consideration of human life often becomes quite secondary...The medical officer has become more absorbed in the general than the particular, and the life and limb of the individual, while of great importance, are secondary to measures pro bono publico [for the public good]."³⁷

The Germans called this sort of thinking "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz," the common good supersedes the private good. And it was under this banner that Germany took the logic of public health to totalitarian extremes. Prohibition was the premier illustration of how closely American progressives linked moral and physical health, and many Nazis looked favorably upon the American effort. The appreciation was mutual. In 1933 the American Scientific Temperance Journal celebrated the election of Hitler, a famous teetotaler. And while the racist undercurrent to Prohibition was always there — alcohol fueled the licentiousness of the mongrel races — in Germany the concern was more that alcohol and the even more despised cigarette would lead to the degeneracy of Germany's Aryan purity. Tobacco was credited with every evil imaginable, including fostering homosexuality.

The Nazis were particularly fixated on cancer — the Germans were the first to spot the link between smoking and the disease, and the word "cancer" soon became an omnipresent metaphor. Nazi leaders routinely called Jews "cancers" and "tumors" on German society. But this was a practice formed from a broader and deeper habit. On both sides of the Atlantic, it was commonplace to call "defectives" and other groups who took more than they gave "cancers on the body politic." The American Eugenics Society was dubbed "The Society for the Control of Social Cancer." In Germany, before the Jews were rounded up, hundreds of thousands of disabled, elderly, and mentally ill "pure" Germans were eliminated on the grounds that they were "useless bread gobblers" or "life unworthy of life" (lebensunwertes Leben), a term that first appeared in Germany in 1920. The application of these techniques and ideas to the "Jewish problem" seemed like a rational continuation of eugenic theory in general.

But the Holocaust should not blind us to less significant but more directly relevant repercussions of Progressive Era ideas that have escaped the light of scrutiny. The architects of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society all inherited and built upon the progressive welfare state. And they did this in explicit terms, citing such prominent race builders as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as their inspirations. Obviously, the deliberate racist intent in many of these policies was not shared by subsequent generations of liberals. But that didn't erase the racial content of the policies themselves. The Davis-Bacon Act still hurts low-wage blacks, for example. FDR's labor and agricultural policies threw millions of blacks out of work and off their land. The great migration of African-Americans to northern cities was in no small part a result of the success of progressive policies. Black leaders didn't call the National Recovery Administration, or NRA, the "Negro Run Around" for nothing.

In the previous chapter I noted that liberals cling to the myth of the New Deal out of religious devotion to the idea of the all-caring God-state. Something similar is at work in the liberal devotion to the Great Society. The rationales for the Great Society are almost always suffused with racial guilt and what could only be described as a religious faith in the state's redemptive power. In his book White Guilt, Shelby Steele tells of an encounter with a self-described "architect" of the Great Society. "Damn it, we saved this country!" the man barked. "This country was about to blow up. There were riots everywhere. You can stand there now in hindsight and criticize, but we had to keep the country together, my friend."³⁸ Moreover, added the LBJer, you should have seen how grateful blacks were when these programs were rolled out.

Well, the first claim is a falsehood, and the second is damning. While the civil rights acts were obviously great successes, liberals hardly stopped at equality before the law. The Great Society's racial meddling — often under various other guises — yielded one setback after another. Crime soared because of the Great Society and the attitudes of which it partook. In 1960 the total number of murders was lower than it had been in 1930, 1940, and 1950 despite a population explosion. In the decade after the Great Society, the murder rate effectively doubled. Black-on-black crime soared in particular. Riots exploded on LBJ's watch, often with the subtle encouragement of Great Society liberals who rewarded such behavior. Out-of-wedlock births among blacks skyrocketed. Economically, as Thomas Sowell has cataloged, the biggest drop in black poverty took place during the two decades before the Great Society.³⁹ In the 1970s, when the impact of Great Society programs was fully realized, the trend of black economic improvement stopped almost entirely.

One could go on like this for pages. But the facts are of secondary importance. Liberals have fallen in love with the idea behind the racial welfare state. They've absorbed the Marxist and fascist conception of "the system" as racist and corrupt and therefore in constant need of state intervention. In particular, as Steele notes, they've convinced themselves that support for such programs is proof of their own moral worth. Blacks were "grateful" to white liberals; therefore, white liberals aren't racist. We return once again to the use of politics to demonize those who fall outside the consensus — that is, conservatives — and to anoint those within it. Whites who oppose the racial spoils system are racists. Blacks who oppose it are self-hating race traitors.

Usually white liberals will simply opt to support black liberals who make such charges, rather than make them themselves. But occasionally they will step up and do so. Maureen Dowd, for example, writes that it is "impossible not to be disgusted" with blacks such as Clarence Thomas. According to Dowd, the Supreme Court justice hates himself for "his own great historic ingratitude" to white liberals or has been "driven barking mad" by it. Take your pick. Steele summarizes the racism of this sort of thinking: "[W]e'll throw you a bone like affirmative action if you'll just let us reduce you to your race so we can take moral authority for 'helping' you. When they called you a nigger back in the days of segregation, at least they didn't ask you to be grateful."⁴⁰

ABORTION

Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, was the founding mother of the birth control movement. She is today considered a liberal saint, a founder of modern feminism, and one of the leading lights of the progressive pantheon. Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood proclaims, "I stand by Margaret Sanger's side," leading "the organization that carries on Sanger's legacy." Planned Parenthood's first black president, Faye Wattleton — Ms. magazine's Woman of the Year in 1989 — said that she was "proud" to be "walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger."⁴¹ Planned Parenthood gives out annual Maggie Awards to individuals and organizations who advance Sanger's cause. Recipients are a Who's Who of liberal icons, from the novelist John Irving to the producers of NBC's West Wing. What Sanger's liberal admirers are eager to downplay is that she was a thoroughgoing racist who subscribed completely to the views of E. A. Ross and other "raceologists." Indeed, she made many of them seem tame.

Sanger was born into a poor family of eleven children in Corning, New York, in 1879. In 1902 she received her degree as a registered nurse. In 1911 she moved to New York City, where she fell in with the transatlantic bohemian avant-garde of the burgeoning fascist moment. "Our living-room," she wrote in her autobiography, "became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists and I.W.W.'s could meet."⁴² A member of the Women's Committee of the New York Socialist Party, she participated in all the usual protests and demonstrations. In 1912 she started writing what amounted to a sex-advice column for the New York Call, dubbed "What Every Girl Should Know." The overriding theme of her columns was the importance of contraception.

A disciple of the anarchist Emma Goldman — another eugenicist — Sanger became the nation's first "birth control martyr" when she was arrested for handing out condoms in 1917. In order to escape a subsequent arrest for violating obscenity laws, she went to England, where she fell under the thrall of Havelock Ellis, a sex theorist and ardent advocate of forced sterilization. She also had an affair with H. G. Wells, the self-avowed champion of "liberal fascism." Her marriage fell apart early, and one of her children — whom she admitted to neglecting — died of pneumonia at age four. Indeed, she always acknowledged that she wasn't right for family life, admitting she was not a "fit person for love or home or children or anything which needs attention or consideration."⁴³

Under the banner of "reproductive freedom," Sanger subscribed to nearly all of the eugenic views discussed above. She sought to ban reproduction of the unfit and regulate reproduction for everybody else. She scoffed at the soft approach of the "positive" eugenicists, deriding it as mere "cradle competition" between the fit and the unfit. "More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control," she frankly wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization. (The book featured an introduction by Wells, in which he proclaimed, "We want fewer and better children...and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us." Two civilizations were at war: that of progress and that which sought a world "swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny.")⁴⁴

A fair-minded person cannot read Sanger's books, articles, and pamphlets today without finding similarities not only to Nazi eugenics but to the dark dystopias of the feminist imagination found in such allegories as Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale.⁴⁵ As editor of the Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racism we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler. Indeed, after she resigned as editor, the Birth Control Review ran articles by people who worked for Goebbels and Himmler. For example, when the Nazi eugenics program was first getting wide attention, the Birth Control Review was quick to cast the Nazis in a positive light, giving over its pages for an article titled "Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need," by Ernst Rudin, Hitler's director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1926 Sanger proudly gave a speech to a KKK rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

One of Sanger's closest friends and influential colleagues was the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. In the book he offered his solution for the threat posed by the darker races: "Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat."⁴⁶ When the book came out, Sanger was sufficiently impressed to invite him to join the board of directors of the American Birth Control League.

Sanger's genius was to advance Ross's campaign for social control by hitching the racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and female liberation. In her "Code to Stop Overproduction of Children," published in 1934, she decreed that "no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit...no permit shall be valid for more than one child."⁴⁷ But Sanger couched this fascistic agenda in the argument that "liberated" women wouldn't mind such measures because they don't really want large families in the first place. In a trope that would be echoed by later feminists such as Betty Friedan, she argued that motherhood itself was a socially imposed constraint on the liberty of women. It was a form of what Marxists called false consciousness to want a large family.

Sanger believed — prophetically enough — that if women conceived of sex as first and foremost a pleasurable experience rather than a procreative act, they would embrace birth control as a necessary tool for their own personal gratification. She brilliantly used the language of liberation to convince women they weren't going along with a collectivist scheme but were in fact "speaking truth to power," as it were.⁴⁸ This was the identical trick the Nazis pulled off. They took a radical Nietzschean doctrine of individual will and made it into a trendy dogma of middle-class conformity. This trick remains the core of much faddish "individualism" among rebellious conformists on the American cultural left today. Nonetheless, Sanger's analysis was surely correct, and led directly to the widespread feminist association of sex with political rebellion. Sanger in effect "bought off" women (and grateful men) by offering tolerance for promiscuity in return for compliance with her eugenic schemes.

In 1939 Sanger created the previously mentioned "Negro Project," which aimed to get blacks to adopt birth control. Through the Birth Control Federation, she hired black ministers (including the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.), doctors, and other leaders to help pare down the supposedly surplus black population. The project's racist intent is beyond doubt. "The mass of significant Negroes," read the project's report, "still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes...is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit." Sanger's intent is shocking today, but she recognized its extreme radicalism even then. "We do not want word to go out," she wrote to a colleague, "that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."⁴⁹

It is possible that Sanger didn't really want to "exterminate" the Negro population so much as merely limit its growth. Still, many in the black community saw it that way and remained rightly suspicious of the progressives' motives. It wasn't difficult to see that middle-class whites who consistently spoke of "race suicide" at the hands of dark, subhuman savages might not have the best interests of blacks in mind. This skepticism persisted within the black community for decades. Someone who saw the relationship between, for example, abortion and race from a less trusting perspective telegrammed Congress in 1977 to tell them that abortion amounted to "genocide against the black race." And he added, in block letters, "AS A MATTER OF CONSCIENCE I MUST OPPOSE THE USE OF FEDERAL FUNDS FOR A POLICY OF KILLING INFANTS."⁵⁰ This was Jesse Jackson, who changed his position when he decided to seek the Democratic nomination.

Just a few years ago, the racial eugenic "bonus" of abortion rights was something one could only admit among those fully committed to the cause, and even then in politically correct whispers. No more. Increasingly, this argument is acceptable on the left, as are arguments in favor of eugenics generally.

In 2005 the acclaimed University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt broke the taboo with his critical and commercial hit Freakonomics (co-written with Stephen Dubner). The most sensational chapter in the book updated a paper Levitt had written in 1999 which argued that abortion cuts crime. "Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime."⁵¹Freakonomics excised all references to race and never connected the facts that because the aborted fetuses were disproportionately black and blacks disproportionately contribute to the crime rate, reducing the size of the black population reduces crime. Yet the press coverage acknowledged this reality and didn't seem to mind.

In 2005 William Bennett, a committed pro-lifer, invoked the Levitt argument in order to denounce eugenic thinking. "I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down." What seemed to offend liberals most was that Bennett had accidentally borrowed some conventional liberal logic to make a conservative point, and, as with the social Darwinists of yore, that makes liberals quite cross. According to the New York Times's Bob Herbert, Bennett believed "exterminating blacks would be a most effective crime-fighting tool." Various liberal spokesmen, including Terry McAuliffe, the former head of the Democratic National Committee, said Bennett wanted to exterminate "black babies." Juan Williams proclaimed that Bennett's remarks speak "to a deeply racist mindset."⁵²

In one sense, this is a pretty amazing turnaround. After all, when liberals advocate them, we are usually told that abortions do not kill "babies." Rather, they remove mere agglomerations of cells and tissue or "uterine contents." If hypothetical abortions committed for allegedly conservative ends are infanticide, how can actual abortions performed for liberal ends not be?

Some liberals are honest about this. In 1992 Nicholas Von Hoffman argued in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Free cheap abortion is a policy of social defense. To save ourselves from being murdered in our beds and raped on the streets, we should do everything possible to encourage pregnant women who don't want the baby and will not take care of it to get rid of the thing before it turns into a monster...At their demonstration, the anti-abortionists parade around with pictures of dead and dismembered fetuses. The pro-abortionists should meet these displays with some of their own: pictures of the victims of the unaborted — murder victims, rape victims, mutilation victims — pictures to remind us that the fight for abortion is but part of the larger struggle for safe homes and safe streets.⁵³

Later that same year, the White House received a letter from the Roe v. Wade co-counsel Ron Weddington, urging the new president-elect to rush RU-486 — the morning-after pill — to the market as quickly as possible. Weddington's argument was refreshingly honest:

[Y]ou can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country. No, I'm not advocating some sort of mass extinction of these unfortunate people. Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can't afford to have babies. There, I've said it. It's what we all know is true, but we only whisper it, because as liberals who believe in individual rights, we view any program which might treat the disadvantaged as discriminatory, mean-spirited and...well...so Republican.

[G]overnment is also going to have to provide vasectomies, tubal ligations and abortions...There have been about 30 million abortions in this country since Roe v. Wade. Think of all the poverty, crime and misery...and then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario. We lost a lot of ground during the Reagan-Bush religious orgy. We don't have a lot of time left.⁵⁴

How, exactly, is this substantively different from Margaret Sanger's self-described "religion of birth control," which would, she wrote, "ease the financial load of caring for with public funds...children destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation"?⁵⁵

The issue here is not the explicit intent of liberals or the rationalizations they invoke to deceive themselves about the nature of abortion. Rather, it is to illustrate that even when motives and arguments change, the substance of the policy remains in its effects. After the Holocaust discredited eugenics per se, neither the eugenicists nor their ideas disappeared. Rather, they went to ground in fields like family planning and demography and in political movements such as feminism. Indeed, in a certain sense Planned Parenthood is today more eugenic than Sanger intended. Sanger, after all, despised abortion. She denounced it as "barbaric" and called abortionists "bloodsucking men with M.D. after their names." Abortion resulted in "an outrageous slaughter" and "the killing of babies," which even the degenerate offspring of the unfit did not deserve.⁵⁶

So forget about intent: look at results. Abortion ends more black lives than heart disease, cancer, accidents, AIDS, and violent crime combined. African-Americans constitute little more than 12 percent of the population but have more than a third (37 percent) of abortions. That rate has held relatively constant, though in some regions the numbers are much starker; in Mississippi, black women receive some 72 percent of all abortions, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Nationwide, 512 out of every 1,000 black pregnancies end in an abortion.⁵⁷ Revealingly enough, roughly 80 percent of Planned Parenthood's abortion centers are in or near minority communities. Liberalism today condemns a Bill Bennett who speculates about the effects of killing unborn black children; but it also celebrates the actual killing of unborn black children, and condemns him for opposing it.

Of course, orthodox eugenics also aimed at the "feebleminded" and "useless bread gobblers" — which included everyone from the mentally retarded to an uneducated and malnourished underclass to recidivist criminals. When it comes to today's "feebleminded," influential voices on the left now advocate the killing of "defectives" at the beginning of life and at the end of life. Chief among them is Peter Singer, widely hailed as the most important living philosopher and the world's leading ethicist. Professor Singer, who teaches at Princeton, argues that unwanted or disabled babies should be killed in the name of "compassion." He also argues that the elderly and other drags on society should be put down when their lives are no longer worth living.

Singer doesn't hide behind code words and euphemisms in his belief that killing babies isn't always wrong, as one can deduce from his essay titled "Killing Babies Isn't Always Wrong" (nor is he a lone voice in the wilderness; his views are popular or respected in many academic circles).⁵⁸ But that hasn't caused the left to ostracize him in the slightest (save in Germany, where people still have a visceral sense of where such logic takes you). Of course, not all or even most liberals agree with Singer's prescriptions, but nor do they condemn him as they do, say, a William Bennett. Perhaps they recognize in him a kindred spirit.

IDENTITY POLITICS

Today's liberals have no particular animus toward racial minorities (majorities are another issue). They may even be prejudiced in favor of racial minorities. They give them extra credit. Built into the core of liberal racial views is that it's something of an accomplishment just being black.

For the last forty years or so, popular entertainment has glorified what the National Review editor Richard Brookhiser calls "the Numinous Negro." Given how blacks were depicted in the past, it's understandable that artists would overcompensate in the other direction. But this is a broader cultural trend, encompassing politics and policy as well. The Congressional Black Caucus, for the most part a motley collection of extreme left-wing politicians, dubs itself the "conscience of the Congress" for no discernible reason other than its members' racial identity. White liberals are perfectly happy to perpetrate this perception, partly out of guilt, partly out of somewhat cynical calculation that allows them to appear noble as the (self-appointed) defenders of black America. But most white liberals, and black ones, too, subscribe to a philosophical orientation which insists that blacks are in some significant way "better."

Certainly this is objectively true among such quintessentially fascist black supremacists as Louis Farrakhan and the black "raceologist" Leonard Jeffries. Indeed, across the Afrocentric and Black Nationalist left, bizarre and ahistorical fantasies proliferate about the superiority of ancient African civilization, about white conspiracies to erase black history, and the like. The similarity to Nazi mythology about the mythic Aryan past is not superficial. One of the few places in America where you can be sure to find The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is Afrocentrist bookshops. And, again, both the Nation of Islam and the Back to Africa movement expressed some ideological affinity with Nazism and Italian Fascism, respectively.

Even on the liberal left, where these poisonous notions are far more diluted, it's axiomatic that there is something inherently and distinctly good about blacks. How so? Well, it must be so. If you buy into the various doctrines of multiculturalism and identity politics you already believe that blackness is distinct, immutable, and unchanging. Once you accept this logic — and the left obviously does — you are then left with a fairly simple choice. If race is not neutral, if "race matters," as Cornel West says, then how does it matter? Given the choice between assigning a positive value or a negative value, liberals opt for the positive.

Positive discrimination forms the backbone of our racial spoils system. Gone are the days when affirmative action was justified solely on the grounds put forward by Lyndon Johnson of helping blacks or redressing historical injustices.⁵⁹ To be sure, these arguments still loom quite large for many liberals, and that is to their credit. But they have been subsumed into a larger creed of multiculturalism, and liberals fall back on the rhetoric of racial damage — that is, affirmative action is necessary to "fix" what's been done to blacks — only when affirmative action is under threat. This is the breakwater for a vast Coalition of the Oppressed that relies on the core logic of black entitlement to empower a sweeping cultural and political agenda under the rubric of diversity. So long as blacks are in need of special treatment, the coalition has the political leverage for us-too politics. In a racial spoils state, this sort of tragedy of the commons was inevitable. Feminists, following in the wake of blacks, also wanted special treatment. Hispanic leftists copied the same model. Now homosexuals argue they are in nearly every meaningful sense the moral equivalent of blacks. Eventually, the ranks of the oppressed swelled to the point where a new argument was needed: "multiculturalism."

Here the similarities with German fascist thought become most apparent. Isaiah Berlin famously argued that fascism was the progeny of the French reactionary Comte Joseph de Maistre. Berlin was clearly exaggerating de Maistre's influence (both Nazis and Italian Fascists explicitly rejected de Maistre), but his argument nonetheless helps us understand how fascism and identity politics overlap and interact.

Inherent to the Enlightenment is the idea that all mankind can be reasoned with. The philosophes argued that men all over the world were each blessed with the faculty of reason. It was the European right which believed that mankind was broken up into groups, classes, sects, races, nationalities, and other gradations in the great chain of being. The reactionary de Maistre railed against the notion that there were any "universal rights of man." In his most famous statement on the subject he declared, "Now, there is no such thing as 'man' in this world. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I've never encountered him. If he exists, I don't know about it."⁶⁰

De Maistre meant that we are all prisoners of our racial and ethnic identities. (He didn't mention gender, but that likely went without saying.) Indeed, there is less difference between today's identity politics and the identity politics of the fascist past than anyone realizes. As one fascist sympathizer put it in the 1930s, "Our understanding struggles to go beyond the fatal error of believing in the equality of all human beings and tries to recognize the diversity of peoples and races."⁶¹ How many college campuses hear that kind of rhetoric every day?

Today it is the left that says there is no such creature as "man." Instead, there are African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Left-wing academics speak of the "permanence of race," and a whole new field of "whiteness studies" has sprouted up at prominent universities and colleges, dedicated to beating back the threat of whiteness in America. The sociologist Andrew Hacker decries "white logic," and a host of other scholars argue that blacks and other minorities underperform academically because the subject matter in our schools represents white-supremacist thinking. Black children reject schoolwork because academic success amounts to "acting white." This welter of nonsense enshrines and empowers a host of collectivist notions that place the state at the center of managing the progress of groups; those who oppose this agenda get clubbed over the head with the charge of racism. For example, the Seattle public school system recently announced that "emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology" is a form of "cultural racism." Indeed, the case for Enlightenment principles of individualism and reason itself is deemed anti-minority. Richard Delgado, a founder of critical race theory, writes: "If you're black or Mexican, you should flee Enlightenment based democracies like mad, assuming you have any choice."⁶²

In the 1960s, when the civil rights movement still relied on the classically liberal formulation of judging people by the content of their character, enlightened liberals denounced the "one-drop" rule which said that if you had a single drop of "black" blood you were black, a standard transparently similar to National Socialist notions of who counted as a Jew. Now, according to the left, if you have one drop of black blood, you should be counted as black for the purposes of positive discrimination. So valuable are the privileges associated with blackness that some black intellectuals want to make "racial fraud" a crime.⁶³ It's a strange racism problem when people are clamoring to join the ranks of the oppressed and lobbying for laws to make sure "oppressors" don't get to pass themselves off as "victims."

The glorification of racial permanence has caused the left to abandon narrow rationales for affirmative action in favor of the doctrine of multiculturalism. The diversity argument — which, by the way, is only used to defend favored groups; Asians and Jews almost never count toward the goal of diversity — is an argument for the permanence of race and identity. In other words, if the left has its way, racial preferences will no longer have anything to do with redressing past wrongs (except when such preferences are under attack). Rather, the pursuit of diversity will become the permanent license for social-engineering bean counters to discriminate against whatever group they see fit in order to reach the desired "balance." For example, quotas unfairly kept Jews out of universities to help white Protestants. Now quotas unfairly keep Jews (and Asians) out of universities to help blacks and Hispanics. What's different is that now liberals are sure such policies are a sign of racial progress.

Diversity depends on, and therefore ratifies, racial essentialism. Not only do rich (and, increasingly, foreign-born) blacks count as much as poor ones, but the argument now is that mere exposure to blacks is uplifting in and of itself. The policy is condescending and counterproductive because it assumes that blacks come to school not as Tom Smith or Joe Jones but as interchangeable Black-Perspective Student. Professors turn to black students for "the black point of view," and students who don't present the party line are counted as inauthentic by condescending white liberals (that is, most faculty and administrators) or by race-gaming blacks. I've been to dozens of campuses, and everywhere the story is the same: blacks eat, party, and live with other blacks. This self-segregation increasingly manifests itself in campus politics. Blacks become a student body within a student body, a microcosm of the nation within a nation. Ironically, the best way for a white kid to benefit from exposure to a black kid, and vice versa, would be for there to be fewer black students or at least no black dorms. That way blacks would be forced to integrate with the majority culture. But of course, integration is now derided as a racist doctrine.

You might say it's outrageous to compare the current liberal program to help minorities with the poisonous ideology of fascism and Nazism. And I would agree if we were talking about things like the Holocaust or even Kristallnacht. But at the philosophical level, we are talking about categorical ways of thinking. To forgive something by saying "it's a black thing" is philosophically no different from saying "it's an Aryan thing." The moral context matters a great deal. But the excuse is identical. Similarly, rejecting the Enlightenment for "good" reasons is still a rejection of the Enlightenment. And any instrumental or pragmatic gains you get from rejecting the Enlightenment still amount to taking a sledgehammer to the soapbox you're standing on. Without the standards of the Enlightenment, we are in a Nietzschean world where power decides important questions rather than reason. This is exactly how the left appears to want it.

One last point about diversity. Because liberals have what Thomas Sowell calls an "unconstrained vision," they assume everyone sees things through the same categorical prism. So once again, as with the left's invention of social Darwinism, liberals assume their ideological opposites take the "bad" view to their good. If liberals assume blacks — or women, or gays — are inherently good, conservatives must think these same groups are inherently bad.

This is not to say that there are no racist conservatives. But at the philosophical level, liberalism is battling a straw man. This is why liberals must constantly assert that conservatives use code words — because there's nothing obviously racist about conservatism per se. Indeed, the constant manipulation of the language to keep conservatives — and other non-liberals — on the defensive is a necessary tactic for liberal politics. The Washington, D.C., bureaucrat who was fired for using the word "niggardly" correctly in a sentence is a case in point.⁶⁴ The ground must be constantly shifted to maintain a climate of grievance. Fascists famously ruled by terror. Political correctness isn't literally terroristic, but it does govern through fear. No serious person can deny that the grievance politics of the American left keeps decent people in a constant state of fright — they are afraid to say the wrong word, utter the wrong thought, offend the wrong constituency.

If we maintain our understanding of political conservatism as the heir of classical liberal individualism, it is almost impossible for a fair-minded person to call it racist. And yet, according to liberals, race neutrality is itself racist. It harkens back to the "social Darwinism" of the past, we are told, because it relegates minorities to a savage struggle for the survival of the fittest.

There are only three basic positions. There is the racism of the left, which seeks to use the state to help favored minorities that it regards as morally superior. There is racial neutrality, which is, or has become, the conservative position. And then there is some form of "classical racism" — that is, seeing blacks as inferior in some way. According to the left, only one of these positions isn't racist. Race neutrality is racist. Racism is racist. So what's left? Nothing except liberalism. In other words, agree with liberals and you're not racist. Of course, if you adopt color blindness as a policy, many fair-minded liberals will tell you that while you're not personally racist, your views "perpetuate" racism. And some liberals will stand by the fascist motto: if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Either way, there are no safe harbors from liberal ideology. Hence, when it comes to race, liberalism has become a kind of soft totalitarianism and multiculturalism the mechanism for a liberal Gleichschaltung. If you fall outside the liberal consensus, you are either evil or an abettor of evil. This is the logic of the Volksgemeinschaft in politically correct jargon.

Now, of course you're not going to get a visit from the Gestapo if you see the world differently; if you don't think the good kind of diversity is skin deep or that the only legitimate community is the one where "we're all in it together," you won't be dragged off to reeducation camp. But you very well may be sent off to counseling or sensitivity training.