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

9

Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism

LIBERALISM IS A culture and a dogma, much as conservatism is. Individual liberals may think they've reached their conclusions through careful deliberation — and no doubt many have — but there is no escaping the undertow of history and culture. Ideas and ideology are transmitted in more ways than we can count, and ignorance about where our ideas come from doesn't mean they don't come from somewhere.

Now, of course, this doesn't mean that the past has an iron grip on the present. For example, I am a strong supporter of states' rights. Racists once used support for states' rights as a cover for perpetuating Jim Crow. That does not mean that I am in favor of Jim Crow. But, as discussed earlier, conservatives have had to work very, very hard to explain why states' rights is no longer an argument about preserving Jim Crow. When someone asks me why my support for federalism won't lead to Jim Crow, I have answers at the ready. No such similar intellectual effort exists, or is required, on the left. Liberals are confident they've always been on the right side of history. George Clooney expresses a common sentiment among liberals when he says, "Yes, I'm a liberal, and I'm sick of it being a bad word. I don't know at what time in history liberals have stood on the wrong side of social issues."¹

This is one of the main reasons I've written this book: to puncture the smug self-confidence that simply by virtue of being liberal one is also virtuous. At the same time, I need to repeat that I am not playing the movie backward. Today's liberals aren't the authors of past generations' mistakes any more than I'm responsible for the callousness of some conservative who championed states' rights for the wrong reason well before I was born. No, the problems with liberalism today reside in liberalism today. The relevance of the past is that unlike the conservative who has wrestled with his history to make sure he does not repeat it, liberals see no need to do anything of the sort. And so, armed with complete confidence in their own good intentions, they happily go marching past boundaries we should stay well clear of. They reinvent ideological constructs we've seen before in earlier times, unaware of their pitfalls, blithely confident that the good guys could never say or do anything "fascist" because fascism is by definition anything not desirable. And liberalism is nothing if not the organized pursuit of the desirable.

Hillary Clinton is a fascinating person, not because of her dull and unremarkable personality, but because she is a looking glass through which we can see liberal continuity with the past and glimpse at least one possible direction of its future. She and her husband have been like Zeligs of the liberal left, appearing everywhere, interacting with everyone who has influenced liberalism over the decades. Because she is smart and ambitious, she has balanced idealism with cynicism, ideology with calculation. This, of course, is true of a great many politicians. But to the extent Hillary Clinton deserves the fame and attention, it is because observers believe she has the insight, advisers, and institutional power to pick the winning combinations.

If Waldo Frank and J. T. Flynn were right that American fascism would be distinct from its European counterparts by virtue of its gentility and respectability, then Hillary Clinton is the fulfillment of their prophecy. But more than that, she is a representative figure, the leading member of a generational cohort of elite liberals who (unconsciously of course) brought fascist themes into mainstream liberalism. Specifically, she and her cohort embody the maternal side of fascism — which is one reason why it is not more clearly recognized as such.

What follows, then, is a group portrait of Hillary and her friends — the leading proponents and exemplars of liberal fascism in our time.

THE POLITICS OF HUMAN RECONSTRUCTION

Hillary Clinton is conventionally viewed by her supporters as a liberal — or by conservative opponents as a radical leftist in liberal sheep's clothing; but it is more accurate to view her as an old-style progressive and a direct descendant of the Social Gospel movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

Nothing makes this clearer than the avowedly religious roots of her political vocation. Born to a Methodist family in Park Ridge, Illinois, she always had a special attachment to the Social Gospel. She was an active member in her church youth group as a teenager and the only one of the Rodham kids to regularly attend Sunday services. "She's really a self-churched woman," the Reverend Donald Jones, her former youth minister and mentor, told Newsweek.²

Jones was being humble. The truth is that he was a major influence, the most important person in her life outside of her parents, according to many biographers. A disciple of the existential German emigre theologian Paul Tillich, Jones was a radical pastor who eventually lost his ministry for being too political. Hillary wrote to Jones regularly while in college. When she moved to Arkansas, Clinton taught Sunday school and often spoke as a lay preacher on the topic "Why I Am a United Methodist" at Sunday services. Even today, Jones told Newsweek, "when Hillary talks it sounds like it comes out of a Methodist Sunday-school lesson."³

Jones bought Hillary a subscription to the Methodist magazine motive as a graduation present just before she went off to Wellesley. Spelled with a lowercase m for reasons no one but the editors probably ever cared about, motive in the late 1960s and early 1970s (when it folded) was an indisputably radical left-wing organ, as mentioned earlier.

Three decades later Clinton recalled for Newsweek that her thinking about the Vietnam War really changed when she read an essay in motive by Carl Oglesby. Newsweek chose to portray this as an endearing remembrance by a spiritual liberal, describing Oglesby as a "Methodist theologian." But this description is highly misleading.⁴ Oglesby, elected president of the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, in 1965, was a leading antiwar activist. His argument against Vietnam was theological only in the sense that liberal fascism is a political religion. Communist countries were good, according to Oglesby, because they were pragmatically trying to "feed, clothe, house and cure their people" in the face of persecution by a "virulent strain" of American imperialism and capitalism. Violence by oppressed peoples in the Third World or in the American ghetto was entirely rational and even commendable.⁵

Hillary Clinton saw such radical politics as cut from the same cloth as her religious mission. After all, she was reading this material in an official Methodist publication given to her by her minister. "I still have every issue they sent me," she told Newsweek.⁶

In 1969 Hillary was the first student in Wellesley's history to give a commencement address at her own graduation. Whether she began to see herself as a feminist leader at this time or whether the experience simply reinforced such aspirations is unknowable. But from that point on, Hillary increasingly draped herself in the rhetoric of the movement — the youth movement, the women's movement, the antiwar movement — and gravitated toward others who believed that both her generation and her gender had a rendezvous with destiny. The speech had such an impact that her photo made it into Life magazine, which picked her as one of the new generation's leaders (Ira Magaziner, a student at Brown University and Hillary's future health-care guru, was also highlighted by Life).

Trimmed of its New Age hokum, Hillary Clinton's Wellesley commencement address was an impassioned search for meaning, dripping with what by now should be familiar sentiments. "We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for a more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living." She continued: "We're not interested in social reconstruction; it's human reconstruction" they were interested in. College life, she explained, had briefly lifted the "burden of inauthentic reality." It gave the students an opportunity to search for authenticity. "Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper, Founder's parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age."⁷ A deep current of longing runs through her relatively short remarks: a longing for unity, for connectedness, for the resolution of "inauthentic" feelings and institutions in a holistic marriage that "transform[s] the future into the present" so that "limitations no longer exist" and "hollow men" are made whole.⁸ It's fitting that Wellesley's motto is "Non ministrari sed ministrare" ("Not to be ministered unto but to minister").

THE TOTALITARIAN TEMPTATION

After graduation, Hillary was offered an internship by her hero Saul Alinsky — famed author of Rules for Radicals — about whom she wrote her thesis: "There Is Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model." In an unprecedented move, Wellesley sequestered the thesis in 1992, even refusing to divulge the title until the Clintons left the White House.

Readers familiar with Alinsky and his times will understand what an enormous figure the "Godfather" of community activism was on the left. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Alinsky got his start as a criminologist, but in 1936, fed up with the failures of social policy, he committed himself to attacking the supposed root causes of criminality. He eventually became a labor organizer in his native Chicago, working in the real-life neighborhood in which Upton Sinclair's Jungle was set. "It was here," writes P. David Finks, "that Saul Alinsky would invent his famous 'method' of community organizing, borrowing tactics from the Catholic Church, Al Capone's mobsters, University of Chicago sociologists and John L. Lewis' union organizers."⁹ His violent, confrontational rhetoric often sounded much like that heard from Horst Wessel or his Red Shirt adversaries in the streets of Berlin.

Alinsky joined forces with the churches and the CIO — then chockablock with Stalinists and other communists — learning how to organize in the streets. In 1940 he founded the Industrial Areas Foundation, which pioneered the community activism movement. He became the mentor to countless community activists — most famously Cesar Chavez — laying the foundation for both Naderism and the SDS. He believed in exploiting middle-class mores to achieve his agenda, not flouting them as the long-haired hippies did. Indeed, Alinsky believed that working through friendly or vulnerable institutions in order to smash enemy redoubts was the essence of political organization. And he was, by universal consensus, an "organizational genius." He worked closely with reformist and left-leaning clergy, who were for most of his career his chief patrons. Perhaps as a result, he mastered the art of unleashing preachers as the frontline activists in his mission of "rubbing raw the sores of discontent."¹⁰

In many respects, Alinsky's methods inspired the entire 1960s generation of New Left agitators (Barack Obama, for years a Chicago community organizer, was trained by Alinsky's disciples). It's worth noting, however, that Alinsky was no fan of the Great Society, calling it "a prize piece of political pornography" because it was simultaneously too timid and too generous to the "welfare industry." Indeed, there was something deeply admirable about Alinsky's contempt for both the statism of elite liberals and the radically chic New Leftists, who spent their days "spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport."¹¹

Still, there's no disputing that vast swaths of his writings are indistinguishable from the fascist rhetoric of the 1920s and 1930s. His descriptions of the United States could have come from any street corner Brownshirt denouncing the corruption of the Weimar regime. His worldview is distinctly fascistic. Life is defined by war, contests of power, the imposition of will. Moreover, Alinsky shares with the fascists and pragmatists of yore a bedrock hostility to dogma. All he believes in are the desired ends of the movement, which he regards as the source of life's meaning. "Change means movement. Movement means friction," he writes. "Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict." But what comes through most is his unbridled love of power. Power is a good in its own right for Alinsky. Ours "is a world not of angels but of angles," he proclaims in Rules for Radicals, "where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles."¹²

Hillary turned down Alinsky's offer in order to attend Yale Law School. He told her it was a huge mistake, but Hillary responded that only by marching through America's elite institutions could she achieve real power and change the system from within. This was a typical rationalization of many upper-class college students in the 1960s, who prized their radical credentials but also looked askance at the idea of sacrificing their social advantages. It's significant, however, that one of Hillary's chief criticisms of Alinsky in her thesis was that he failed to build a national movement based on his ideas. But Hillary, more than most, never gave up the faith. She remained true to her radical principles. Thus at Yale — where she eventually met Bill Clinton — she quickly fell in with the leftist fringe.

There is an almost literary synchronicity to the overlapping of narratives and ideas at Yale in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bill Clinton was taught constitutional law by Charles Reich, the "Level III consciousness" guru. Reich, in turn, had served as a partner to the famed New Deal lawyer and intellectual Thurman Arnold — a disciple of the Crolyite liberals of the New Republic — who championed a new "religion of government." In the 1930s critics saw Arnold's work as one of the linchpins of American-style fascism. He went on to co-found the law firm Arnold, Fortas & Porter.¹³

Hillary helped edit the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, which at the time was a thoroughly radical organ supporting the Black Panthers and publishing articles implicitly endorsing the murder of police. One article, "Jamestown Seventy," suggested that radicals adopt a program of "political migration to a single state for the purpose of gaining political control and establishing a living laboratory for experiment."¹⁴ An infamous Review cover depicted police as pigs, one with his head chopped off. The Panthers had become an issue on campus because the "chairman" of the Panthers, Bobby Seale, was put on trial in New Haven along with some fellow goons for the murder of one of their own. Hillary volunteered to help the Panthers' legal team, even attending the trial to take notes to help with the defense. She did such a good job of organizing the student volunteers that she was offered a summer internship in the Berkeley, California, law offices of Robert Treuhaft, one of Seale's lawyers. Treuhaft was a lifelong member of the American Communist Party who had cut his teeth fighting for the Stalinist faction in the California labor movement.¹⁵

Hillary's attraction to radical groups and figures such as the Black Panthers, Alinsky, and — according to some biographers — Yasir Arafat is perfectly consistent with liberalism's historic weakness for men of action. Just as Herbert Croly could make allowances for Mussolini and countless others applauded Stalin's "tough decisions," the 1960s generation of liberals had an inherent weakness for men who "transcended" bourgeois morality and democracy in the name of social justice. This love of hard men — Castro, Che, Arafat — is clearly tied to the left's obsession with the fascist values of authenticity and will.¹⁶

After law school, however, Hillary eschewed such radical authenticity in favor of pragmatism. She worked as a lawyer in Little Rock and as an activist within the confines of the liberal establishment, chairing the state-funded radical organ the Legal Services Corporation, as well as the nonprofit Children's Defense Fund. Before that she'd been a Democratic staffer for the House Judiciary Committee. Her marriage to Bill Clinton, arguably the most relentlessly dissected union in American history, need not occupy much of our time. Whatever their romantic feelings toward each other may have been or continue to be, reasonable people can agree that it was also a deeply political arrangement.

The most revealing aspect of Clinton's career prior to her arrival in Washington was her advocacy for children. Clinton wrote important articles, often denounced by critics as advocating the right of children to "divorce" their parents. She never quite says as much, though it seems undeniable that she was pointing down that road. But the child-divorce debate was always a side issue. What is more important, Hillary Clinton's writings on children show a clear, unapologetic, and principled desire to insert the state deep into family life — a goal that is in perfect accord with similar efforts by totalitarians of the past.

This is hardly a view unique to myself or to the denizens of the American right. As the late Michael Kelly wrote in an influential profile of the then-new First Lady, she is the heir to "the politics of do-goodism, flowing directly from a powerful and continual stream that runs through American history from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Jane Addams to Carry Nation to Dorothy Day...[T]he world she wishes to restore...[is] a place of security and community and clear moral values."¹⁷

The late Christopher Lasch came to a similar conclusion. Lasch, one of the most perceptive students of American social policy in the twentieth century, and no partisan right-winger, reviewed all of Clinton's relevant writings for an article in the left-leaning journal Harper's in 1992. The result is a sober (and sobering) discussion of Clinton's worldview. Lasch dubs Clinton a modern "child saver," a term critical historians apply to progressives eager to insert the God-state into the sphere of the family. While Clinton cavils that she wants the state to intervene only in "warranted cases," her real aim, as she admits, is to set down a full and universal "theory that adequately explains the state's appropriate role in child rearing." To this end, she advocates the abolition of "minority status" — that is, the legal codification of what distinguishes a child from an adult. This would be a great progressive leap forward in line with — Clinton's words — "the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of married women." Finally, "children, like other persons," would be presumed "capable of exercising rights and assuming responsibilities until it is proven otherwise."¹⁸

Tellingly, Clinton focuses on Wisconsin v. Yoder, a 1972 Supreme Court case that permitted three Amish families to keep their kids out of high school, defying mandatory attendance laws. Justice William O. Douglas dissented, noting that nobody ever asked the kids what they wanted. The "children should be entitled to be heard," he declared. Clinton takes Douglas's dissent and builds an argument claiming children should be "masters of their own destiny." Their voices should be weighted more heavily than the views of parents in the eyes of courts. Observing that in order to become "a pianist or an astronaut or an oceanographer" a child must "break from the Amish tradition," she concludes that a child "harnessed to the Amish way of life" would likely lead a "stunted and deformed" life. Lasch offers a devastating conclusion: "She condones the state's assumption of parental responsibilities...because she is opposed to the principle of parental authority in any form." Clinton's writings "leave the unmistakable impression that it is the family that holds children back, the state that sets them free." In Clinton's eyes, Lasch concluded, "the movement for children's rights...amounts to another stage in the long struggle against patriarchy."¹⁹

Since Plato's Republic, politicians, intellectuals, and priests have been fascinated with the idea of "capturing" children for social-engineering purposes. This is why Robespierre advocated that children be raised by the state. Hitler — who understood as well as any the importance of winning the hearts and minds of youth — once remarked, "When an opponent says 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already...You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community.'" Woodrow Wilson candidly observed that the primary mission of the educator was to make children as unlike their parents as possible. Charlotte Perkins Gilman stated it more starkly. "There is no more brilliant hope on earth to-day," the feminist icon proclaimed, "than this new thought about the child...the recognition of 'the child,' children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal [that is, parental] ownership — the unchecked tyranny...of the private home."²⁰

Progressive education has two parents, Prussia and John Dewey. The kindergarten was transplanted into the United States from Prussia in the nineteenth century because American reformers were so enamored of the order and patriotic indoctrination young children received outside the home (the better to weed out the un-American traits of immigrants).²¹ One of the core tenets of the early kindergartens was the dogma that "the government is the true parent of the children, the state is sovereign over the family." The progressive followers of John Dewey expanded this program to make public schools incubators of a national religion. They discarded the militaristic rigidity of the Prussian model, but retained the aim of indoctrinating children. The methods were informal, couched in the sincere desire to make learning "fun," "relevant," and "empowering." The self-esteem obsession that saturates our schools today harks back to the Deweyan reforms from before World War II. But beneath the individualist rhetoric lies a mission for democratic social justice, a mission Dewey himself defined as a religion. For other progressives, capturing children in schools was part of the larger effort to break the backbone of the nuclear family, the institution most resistant to political indoctrination.

National Socialist educators had a similar mission in mind. And as odd as it might seem, they also discarded the Prussian discipline of the past and embraced self-esteem and empowerment in the name of social justice. In the early days of the Third Reich, grade-schoolers burned their multicolored caps in a protest against class distinctions. Parents complained, "We no longer have rights over our children." According to the historian Michael Burleigh, "Their children became strangers, contemptuous of monarchy or religion, and perpetually barking and shouting like pint-sized Prussian sergeant-majors...Denunciation of parents by children was encouraged, not least by schoolteachers who set essays entitled 'What does your family talk about at home?'"²²

Now, the liberal project Hillary Clinton represents is in no way a Nazi project. The last thing she would want is to promote ethnic nationalism, anti-Semitism, or aggressive wars of conquest. But it must be kept in mind that while these things were of enormous importance to Hitler and his ideologues, they were in an important sense secondary to the underlying mission and appeal of Nazism, which was to create a new politics and a new nation committed to social justice, radical egalitarianism (albeit for "true Germans"), and the destruction of the traditions of the old order. So while there are light-years of distance between the programs of liberals and those of Nazis or Italian Fascists or even the nationalist progressives of yore, the underlying impulse, the totalitarian temptation, is present in both.

The Chinese Communists under Mao pursued the Chinese way, the Russians under Stalin followed their own version of communism in one state. But we are still comfortable observing that they were both communist nations. Hitler wanted to wipe out the Jews; Mussolini wanted no such thing. And yet we are comfortable calling them both fascists. Liberal fascists don't want to mimic generic fascists or communists in myriad ways, but they share a sweeping vision of social justice and community and the need for the state to realize that vision. In short, collectivists of all stripes share the same totalitarian temptation to create a politics of meaning; what differs between them — and this is the most crucial difference of all — is how they act upon that temptation.

THE FIRST LADY OF LIBERAL FASCISM

When Bill Clinton was elected president, his wife arrived in Washington as arguably the most powerful unelected — and un-appointed — social reformer since Eleanor Roosevelt. She admitted to the Washington Post that she'd always had a "burning desire" to "make the world...better for everybody." She had had this desire ever since the days when Don Jones showed her that the poor and oppressed didn't have it as good as she did. And for Hillary, healing this social discord required power. "My sense of Hillary is that she realizes absolutely the truth of the human condition, which is that you cannot depend on the basic nature of man to be good and you cannot depend entirely on moral suasion to make it good," Jones told Michael Kelly. "You have to use power. And there is nothing wrong with wielding power in the pursuit of policies that will add to the human good. I think Hillary knows this. She is very much the sort of Christian who understands that the use of power to achieve social good is legitimate."²³ The echoes of Alinsky are obvious. Less obvious are the questions of who determines what the social good should be and by what means it should be achieved.

But Hillary didn't frame her mission in overtly Christian terms save, perhaps, when speaking to avowedly Christian audiences. Instead, she fashioned the quintessential expression of liberal fascism in modern times: "the politics of meaning."

Now, when I say that the politics of meaning, and Hillary Clinton's ideas in general, are fascist, I must again be clear that they are not evil. Nor do they sound fascist to modern ears — indeed, that is the whole point. Today we equate fascism with militaristic language and racism, but war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided a great many of the metaphors for political discourse and for everyday conversation in general. So many of these words and phrases are part of the vernacular today that we don't even realize their roots in battle and blood ("entrenched positions," "storm fronts," "hot shot," and so on). Liberal fascism isn't militaristic, but the same passions that prompted progressives to talk in terms of "industrial armies" and "going over the top" for the Blue Eagle lurk beneath today's liberal rhetoric. War was seen as a communal, unifying experience that focused the public's mind on the common good and whose passions and discipline could be harnessed to socially "useful" ends. Today the modern left is in many ways openly antiwar and avowedly pacifist. But liberals still yearn nostalgically for the unifying experiences of the labor and civil rights movements. The language is obviously nicer, and the intent is objectively "nicer," too. But at the most substantive level, the politics of meaning stands on Mussolini's shoulders.

As for racism, there is a great deal of racism, or perhaps a more fair word would be "racialism," in liberalism today. The state counts "people of color" in different ways from how it counts white people. Further to the left, racial essentialism lies at the core of countless ideological projects. Anti-Semitism, too, is more prominent on the left today than at any time in recent memory. Obviously, this is not the same kind of racism or anti-Semitism that Nazis subscribed to. But again, Nazi racism does not define fascism. Moreover, Nazi racism — quite in sync with progressive racism, let us remember — was an expression of a deeper impulse to define the individual by his relationship to the collective.

Let me anticipate one last criticism. Some will say that Hillary Clinton's politics of meaning is old hat. Clinton hasn't mentioned the phrase in years, swept under the rug by political expediency like the memory of her disastrous health-care plan. This would be a more salient critique if my aim was to offer anti-Clinton talking points for the 2008 presidential campaign. But that's not my concern. What I find interesting about Clinton is her ability to illuminate the continuity of liberal thought. If what liberals thought and did in the 1920s is relevant today — as I believe it is — then surely what liberals thought and did in the 1990s is relevant as well. Moreover, there is no evidence that she's been chastened ideologically. In her 1996 book, It Takes a Village, Clinton hardly backed off her radical views on children, even though those views were a political liability in 1992. She did, however, repackage her message in more palatable ways, thanks to the help of a ghostwriter.

Lastly, Clinton's politics of meaning was arguably the most interesting and serious expression of liberalism in the 1990s, delivered at the apex of liberal optimism. Since Bush's election and the 9/11 attacks, liberalism has been largely reactive, defined by its anti-Bush passions more than anything else. Hence, it seems worthwhile to investigate what liberals were saying when they were dancing to their own tune.

In April 1993 Clinton delivered a commencement address to the University of Texas at Austin in which she declared, "We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves."²⁴

The phrase "fills us up again" is particularly telling — in 1969 she had talked of how we needed a politics to make "hollow men" whole. She seems to be suggesting that without a social cause or mission to "fill" her, Hillary's life (and ours) is empty and purposeless. Hillary has seemingly put pragmatic concerns ahead of everything else her whole life, but whenever she's given a chance to express herself honestly, the same urges come to the fore: meaning, authenticity, action, transformation.

The politics of meaning is in many respects the most thoroughly totalitarian conception of politics offered by a leading American political figure in the last half century. Hillary's views have more in common with the totalizing Christian ideologies of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell than they do with the "secular atheism" such Christian conservatives ascribe to her. But they have even more in common with the God-state Progressivism of John Dewey, Richard Ely, Herbert Croly, and Woodrow Wilson and other left-wing Hegelians. Hillary's vision holds that America suffers from a profound "spiritual crisis" requiring the construction of a new man as part of a society-wide restoration and reconstruction effort leading to a new national community that will provide meaning and authenticity to every individual. Hers is a Third Way approach that promises to be neither left nor right, but a synthesis of both, under which the state and big business will work hand in hand. It is a fundamentally religious vision hiding in the Trojan horse of social justice that seeks to imbue social policy with spiritual imperatives.

To better understand the politics of meaning, we should consider the career of Clinton's self-anointed guru, the progressive activist and rabbi Michael Lerner. Lerner was born to nonobservant Jews in New Jersey — his mother was the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party. A graduate of Columbia University in 1964, he received his Ph.D. from Berkeley, where he served as a teaching assistant to Herbert Marcuse and led the SDS. A fan of LSD, a "progressive drug," he believed that taking the hallucinogen was the only way to truly understand socialism (the irony clearly escaped him). When his sister married a successful attorney, a number of prominent politicians attended the wedding. Lerner could not let such an opportunity slip by. He interrupted the festivities with a speech denouncing the guests as "murderers" with "blood on your hands" for not doing more to stop the war in Vietnam.²⁵

When Cupid aimed his arrow at him, he told his paramour, "If you want to be my girlfriend, you'll have to organize a guerrilla foco first." (A foco is a form of paramilitary cadre pioneered by Che Guevara — much cherished in Marxist-Leninist theory — designed for lightning-fast insurrectionary strikes.) When the two were married in Berkeley, they exchanged rings extracted from the fuselage of an American aircraft downed over Vietnam. The wedding cake was inscribed with the Weathermen motto "Smash Monogamy." (The marriage lasted less than a year.) Lerner claims to have been a leader in the nonviolent wing of the New Left. While a professor at the University of Washington, he founded the Seattle Liberation Front, which he later claimed was a nonviolent alternative to the Weathermen. Nonetheless, he was arrested on charges of incitement to riot as one of the members of the "Seattle Seven." The charges were eventually dropped, but not before J. Edgar Hoover dubbed him — no doubt hyperbolically — "one of the most dangerous criminals in America."²⁶

In 1973 Lerner wrote The New Socialist Revolution, a cliched ode to the glories of the coming socialist takeover. The rhetoric was quintessentially Mussolinian: "The first task of the revolutionary movement...is to destroy bourgeois hegemony and develop a radical consciousness among each of the potential constituencies for revolutionary action."²⁷

Over the years, Lerner's thinking evolved. First, he became deeply interested in mass psychology (he's a licensed psychotherapist), imbibing all the Frankfurt School nonsense about fascist personalities (conservatism is a treatable illness in Lerner's view). Second, he became a rabbi. And while his commitment to progressive politics never waned, he increasingly became obsessed with the "spiritual" aspect of politics. Finally, he cast aside dialectical materialism in favor of attacking consumer materialism and the psychic pain it causes. In 1986 he launched Tikkun, an odd magazine dedicated in large part to creating a new Social Gospel with heavily Jewish and ecumenical biases.

After Hillary Clinton's politics of meaning speech, which was partly inspired by Lerner (who'd ingratiated himself with then-Governor Clinton), the radical rabbi psychotherapist went into overdrive, promoting himself as the house seer of the Clinton administration. He was to be the Herbert Croly of the new Progressive Era. Though many in the press recognized a hustler when they saw one, he nonetheless got the attention he wanted. The New York Times hailed him as "This Year's Prophet." When it became clear, however, that the politics of meaning sounded too much like New Age hokum, the press and the Clintons turned a cold shoulder. In response, Lerner released his opus, The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism.

The book strikes one fascist chord after another. Lerner cites a long, familiar litany of progressive ideas and causes. He speaks about making the powerless more powerful, about throwing off the baggage of the past, about eschewing dogma and embracing national community, about rejecting the overly rational expertise of doctors and scientists. He waxes eloquent about the various crises — spiritual, ecological, moral, and social — afflicting Western bourgeois democracies that must be remedied through a politics of redemption. He also talks about creating new men and women — rejecting the false dichotomies between work and family, business and government, private and public. Above all, he insists that his new politics of meaning must saturate every nook and cranny of our lives by smashing the compartmentalism of American life. Morality, politics, economics, ethics: none of these things can be separated from anything else. We must have our metaphysics confirmed in every human interaction and encounter.

In this he unwittingly echoes Hitler's belief that "economics is secondary" to the revolution of the spirit. Lerner writes, "If there were a different ethical and spiritual connection between people, there would be a different economic reality...And that is why meaning cannot be given lower priority than economics."²⁸ Needless to say, this is something of a departure from the Marxist materialism of his youth. Lerner's preferred agenda would, of course, echo many of the guarantees from the Nazi Party platform of 1920, including equal rights, guaranteed health care, excessive taxes on the undeserving wealthy, and clampdowns on big corporations. A few relevant items from a 1993 article in Tikkun:

The Department of Labor should mandate that...every workplace should provide paid leave for a worker to attend 12 two-hour sessions on stress...

The Department of Labor should sponsor "Honor Labor" campaigns designed to highlight the honor due to people for their contributions to the common good...

The Department of Labor should create a program to train a corps of union personnel, worker representatives, and psychotherapists in the relevant skills to assist developing a new spirit of cooperation, mutual caring, and dedication to work.²⁹

This is precisely the sort of thing that Robert Ley's German Labor Front pioneered. The comparison is more than superficial. The National Socialist state, like the progressive and fascist ones, was based on the Hegelian idea that freedom could only be realized by living in harmony with the state, and it was the state's duty to ensure said harmony. There were no private individuals. (Ley famously said that the only private individual in the Nazi state is a person asleep.) Lerner argues in The Politics of Meaning that "the workplace needs to be reconceptualized as a primary locus for human development." In another book, Spirit Matters, he writes (in one gargantuan sentence) that under his new "movement for Emancipatory Spirituality" the "government needs to be reconceptualized as the public mechanism through which we all show that we care about everyone else, and government employees should be evaluated, rewarded, and promoted only to the extent that they are able to make the public come away from those interactions with a renewed sense of hope and a deepened conviction that other people really do care, and have shown that by creating such a sensitive and caring government."

Lerner's ideal is the Israeli kibbutz, where even plucking chickens has transcendent meaning for the laborer. He pines for a way to re-create the sense of shared purpose people feel during a crisis like a flood or other natural disaster. Freedom, for Lerner, is reconceived in a Deweyan sense toward communal social "construction." Or, as the Nazis said more pithily, "Work makes you free."³⁰

Under the politics of meaning, all of society's institutions are wrapped around the state like sticks around the fascist blade. Every individual is responsible for maintaining not only his own ideological purity but that of his fellow man. Lerner is, in effect, the ideologist of the liberal Gleichschaltung, the Nazi idea of coordinating every institution in society. This becomes apparent when he shifts to a discussion of how these reforms are to be implemented. Lerner writes that all government agencies and private businesses should issue "annual ethical-impact reports," which would assess "their effect on the ethical, spiritual, and psychological well-being of our society and on the people who work in and with these institutions."³¹ His intent is arguably nicer, but is this really so different from the bureaucratization of ideological loyalty that required German businesses and institutions to constantly provide documentation showing their assertive loyalty to the spirit of the new era? Spiritual slackers in twenty-first-century America would no doubt find such scrutiny fascistic — albeit in a very caring and nurturing way.

Lerner believes it is the job of every profession — coordinating with the state, of course — to "reflect" on its own contribution to the spiritual and psychic health of the national Volksgemeinschaft. "Such reflection, for example, has led some lawyers associated with a politics-of-meaning perspective to envision a second stage of trials, in which the adversary system is suspended and the focus is shifted to healing the problems and pain that the initial trial has uncovered in the community."³² That may sound a little silly to some ears, and it hardly seems to threaten a fascist coup. But if there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Oddly enough, Lerner vaguely comprehends his own ideology's relationship to fascism. In an ironic twist, he admits that he once "could not understand why the European Left had been unable to stem the popularity of the fascists." Fascist "hatred of others was based on the degree to which they had come to believe (usually mistakenly) that the demeaned Others had actually caused the breakdown of their communities of shared meaning and purpose." Lerner notes that many former liberals "have now turned to the Right to find the sense of community and meaning that liberals, social democrats, and the Left always thought was irrelevant or necessarily reactionary."³³ He writes that the 1990s are witnessing the rise of "fascistic" right-wing movements and that they can only be countered by his politics of meaning.

Lerner's analysis breaks down in several parts, largely because of his thumbless grasp of the true nature of fascism.³⁴ But far more important, he largely concedes that the politics of meaning is in effect an attempt to provide an alternative to an imagined right-wing politics of meaning that he considers fascistic. He sees a fascistic straw man on the right and in response feels justified in creating an actual — nice — fascism of the left. He grounds all of it in vast departures into religious exhortation, arguing that his is a "politics in the image of God," a point he also hammers home relentlessly in his recent books The Left Hand of God and Spirit Matters.³⁵

Defenders of the politics of meaning, such as Cornel West, Jonathan Kozol, and even such mainstream historians as John Milton Cooper, reject or ignore the radical statism of Lerner's project. Still, they defend their political religion with a lot of classical Third Way verbiage about rejecting both free-market anarchy and statism in favor of a new synthesis balancing the community and the individual. "To put it in crude terms," writes Lerner, "neither capitalism nor socialism in the forms that they have developed in the twentieth century seem particularly appealing to me." Rather, what appeals to him are pragmatic approaches "that differ from the typical Left/Right divisions, which must be transcended as we develop a politics for the twenty-first century."³⁶ It's all so unoriginal. The French Fascist slogan was much catchier: Ni droite ni gauche!

As we've seen, ideologically fascist and progressive totalitarianism was never a mere doctrine of statism. Rather, it claimed that the state was the natural brain of the organic body politic. Statism was the route to collectivism. Government was merely the place where the spiritual will of the people would be translated into action (Marxists liked to use the word "praxis" to describe this unity of theory and action). One consequence of this view is that institutions and individuals that stand apart from the state or the progressive tide are inherently suspect and labeled selfish, social Darwinist, conservative, or, most ironically, fascist. The state's role is not so much to make every decision as to be the metronome for the Gleichschaltung, ensuring that the decision makers are all in perfect agreement about the direction society needs to take. In a properly ordered progressive society, the state wouldn't take over Harvard or McDonald's, but it would certainly ensure that the Harvards and McDonald's had their priorities straight. The politics of meaning is ultimately a theocratic doctrine because it seeks to answer the fundamental questions about existence, argues that they can only be answered collectively, and insists that the state put those answers into practice.

This liberal fascist thinking was nicely exposed in an exchange between the television producer Norman Lear and the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer in 1993. Krauthammer called Hillary Clinton's politics of meaning address a "cross between Jimmy Carter's malaise speech and a term paper on Siddhartha" delivered with "the knowing self-assurance, the superior air of a college student manifesto."³⁷

Norman Lear leaped into the breach to defend Hillary. The creator of the television shows All in the Family, Maude, Sanford and Son, and Good Times, Lear was also the founder of People for the American Way, or PFAW, an organization with an ironically conservative sound to it. He launched PFAW in an effort to beat back the religious right, which was allegedly trying to destroy the fabled "wall of separation" between church and state. But in the late 1980s Lear started to show a slight change of heart. In 1989, in an address to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Anaheim, California, he lamented "the spiritual emptiness in our culture." "Among secularists," he noted, "the aversion toward discussing moral values, let alone religion, can reach absurd extremes."³⁸

It's understandable that a left-wing civil libertarian like Lear would greet the arrival of a politics of meaning as nigh on providential. Lear wrote a bitter response in the Washington Post denouncing Krauthammer's cynicism in the face of Clinton's brilliant summation of America's spiritual crisis. "The sophisticates of our politics, our culture and the media," Lear opined, "are embarrassed to talk seriously about the life of the spirit." "Our obsession with numbers, the quantifiable, the immediate, has cost us our connection with that place in each of us that honors the unquantifiable and eternal — our capacity for awe, wonder and mystery; that place where acts of faith in a process larger than ourselves, prove ultimately satisfying in the fullness of time."³⁹

Lear's cri de coeur is an almost pitch-perfect restatement of the neo-Romantic objections to modern society that inspired fascist movements across Europe and the search for "a cause larger than ourselves" of the American Progressives. He might receive an appreciative hearing from the early Paul de Man, Ezra Pound, and countless other fascist theorists and ideologues who denounced the Western — particularly Jewish — obsession with numbers and technical abstraction. But even more telling is the fact that Lear's People for the American Way is second perhaps only to the ACLU as an enforcer of the liberal Gleichschaltung. In lawsuits, campaign contributions, amicus briefs, advertising, and righteous news conferences, People for the American Way serves as a tireless mason in the construction of the wall between church and state, shrinking the public space for traditional religion and building the foundation of a secular counter-church of liberalism.

In other words, Lear is an adamant proponent of spiritualizing politics; but there's no room for traditional religion in his ideal political system, for it is the progressive priesthood — not churches or synagogues — that must sanctify the quest for meaning and spirituality. Independent sources of moral faith are "divisive" and need to be undermined, walled off, excluded from our "common project." This means that liberal churches are fine because they are perceived — rightly or wrongly — to have subordinated religious doctrine to political doctrine. As John Dewey put it in his brief for a secular religion of the state: "If our nominally religious institutions learn how to use their symbols and rites to express and enhance such a faith, they may become useful allies of a conception of life that is in harmony with knowledge and social needs." Hitler was more succinct: "Against a Church that identifies itself with the State...I have nothing to say."⁴⁰

Conservatives are fond of scoring liberals for their cafeteria Christianity, picking those things they like from the religious menu and eschewing the hard stuff. But there's more than mere hypocrisy at work. What appears to be inconsistency is in fact the continued unfolding of the Social Gospel tapestry to reveal a religion without God. Cafeteria liberals aren't so much inconsistent Christians as consistent progressives.

EVERYTHING WITHIN THE VILLAGE...

No more thorough explication of the liberal fascist agenda can be found than in Hillary Clinton's best-selling book, It Takes a Village. All the hallmarks of the fascist enterprise reside within its pages. Again, the language isn't hostile, nationalistic, racist, or aggressive. To the contrary, it brims with expressions of love and democratic fellow feeling. But this only detracts from its fascist nature if fascism itself means nothing more than hostile or aggressive (or racist and nationalistic). The fascistic nature of It Takes a Village begins with the very title. It draws from a mythic and mythical communal past. "It takes a village to raise a child" is supposedly an African proverb whose authorship is lost in the mists of time — from "the ancient African kingdom of Hallmarkcardia," according to P. J. O'Rourke.⁴¹ Clinton invokes this premodern image as a source of authority in order to reorganize modern society. It may not be as powerful as all that Teutonic imagery the National Socialists threw around. But is it any more rational? Any less Romantic? More important, the metaphor of the village is used in precisely the same way that the symbol of the fasces was. The difference is that the fasces were a symbol for a martial age; the village is a symbol for a maternal one.

In Mrs. Clinton's telling, villages are wonderful, supportive, nurturing places where everyone is looking out for one another: from "everything in the State, nothing outside the State" to "everything in the village, nothing outside the village." The village, she writes, "can no longer be defined as a place on a map, or a list of people or organizations, but its essence remains the same: it is the network of values and relationships that support and affect our lives."⁴² In Hillary's village, the concept of civil society is grotesquely deformed. Traditionally, civil society is that free and open space occupied by what Burke called "little platoons" — independent associations of citizens who pursue their own interests and ambitions free from state interference or coercion.

That is not Hillary's civil society. In a book festooned with encomiums to every imaginable social work interest group in America, Mrs. Clinton mentions "civil society" just once. In a single paragraph she dispatches the concept as basically another way of describing the village. "[C]ivil society," she writes, is just a "term social scientists use to describe the way we work together for common purposes."⁴³No, no, no. "Civil society" is the term social scientists use to describe the way various groups, individuals, and families work for their own purposes, the result of which is to make the society healthily democratic. Civil society is the rich ecosystem of independent entities — churches, businesses, volunteer and neighborhood associations, labor unions, and such — that helps regulate life outside of state control. Bowling leagues, thanks to the Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam, are the archetypal institution of civil society. Bowling leagues are not mechanisms for working together for "common purposes." The late Seymour Martin Lipset even demonstrated that although many labor unions were corrupt and illiberal, so long as they remained independent of the state — and the state independent of them — they enriched democracy.

In Clinton's village, however, there is no public square where free men and women and their voluntary associations deal with each other on their own terms free from the mommying of the state. There are no private transactions, just a single "spiritual community that links us to a higher purpose" managed by the state.⁴⁴ This is the Volksgemeinschaft reborn as a Social Gospel day-care center.

Think again of the image of a fasces, its many weak reeds or sticks bundled together to show strength in numbers. The first chapter of Mrs. Clinton's book begins with a quotation from the poet Verna Kelly: "Snowflakes are one of nature's most fragile things, but just look what they can do when they stick together."⁴⁵ It's a cute image, but is the message any different? Over and over again, Clinton uses a velvet hammer to beat it into the reader's head that togetherness, partnership, and unity are the only means of America's salvation.

The point where theory and practice most obviously merge is in the area of economic policy. Corporations were among the most important reeds in the fascist bundle. So it is in Hillary Clinton's village. "Community-minded companies are already doing a number of things that citizens should applaud and government should encourage, when possible, with legislative changes to make them more attractive." These include the usual wish list from "no-layoff" policies to employer-provided day care. Again and again, Clinton beams sunshine wherever the lines between corporations, universities, churches, and government are already thin, hoping that the illumination of her gaze will cause even the shadows dividing them to disappear. Defense contractors are working with government to make peaceful products. Hooray. Automobile companies are working with the EPA to build green cars. Huzzah. Such "[s]ocially minded corporate philosophies are the avenue to future prosperity and social stability."⁴⁶ Everyone will be secure and happy, nestled in the cozy confines of the village.

This all sounds peachy in the abstract. But when Clinton tried to impose precisely this sort of vision with her health-care plan, she had a harder edge. Recall Hillary's response when it was pointed out to her that her plan would destroy countless small businesses: "I can't save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America."⁴⁷ If they can't be part of the solution, who cares if they have problems?

ETERNAL CORPORATISM

I suppose one cannot talk about Hillary Clinton without mentioning her health-care plan. So much ink has been spilled in that cause it hardly seems worth wading into the details of Clinton's effort to control one-seventh of the U.S. economy. What may be more worthwhile is to see how her health-care plan was the inevitable consequence of liberal empowerment. There was an Aesopian nature to the Clintonites. For example, once Hillary tapped her old friend — and Bill's Rhodes scholar pal — Ira Magaziner to head up her Health Reform Task Force, it was inevitable that a large, government-run, corporatist product would come out of the sausage maker. Why? Because that's what Magaziner does. The scorpion must sting the frog, and Magaziner must propose sweeping new public-private partnerships where experts make all the big decisions.

Magaziner, Hillary's co-leader in Life magazine in 1969, was a true phenomenon at Brown University (his senior thesis, he told Newsweek, was nothing less than a Comtian "search for a new metaphysics, a new answer to the question, 'Why be good?'"). As a junior, he took it upon himself to study the school's curriculum and propose an alternative that was more "relevant" and pragmatic, leaving it up to the young to design their own educations. He created his own major, "Human Studies," and he produced a nearly five-hundred-page report. The shocking part is that he succeeded in getting his Deweyan curriculum (few grades, lots of self-discovery) accepted. For traditionalists, the curriculum has made Brown the joke of the Ivy League ever since; for progressives, it has made the school its crown jewel.⁴⁸

At Oxford, Magaziner led anti-Vietnam protests and allied himself with a smitten Vanessa Redgrave. James Fallows, a fellow Rhodes scholar and future Carter speechwriter and industrial planning publicist, explained that the main difference between Clinton and Magaziner was "the difference between somebody who planned to run for office and somebody who didn't." When Magaziner moved to Boston, he launched an Alinsky-Hayden-style community organization effort in Brockton, Massachusetts. Later, he went to work for the Boston Consulting Group, or BCG, where he acquired a knack for telling companies how to invest in the technologies of the future. Soon he was taking jobs from foreign governments to give them the same advice. In 1977 he got a gig consulting to Sweden. The final result of his efforts was dubbed "A Framework for Swedish Industrial Policy," in which he called for Sweden to redesign its economy from the top down, discarding old industries and investing heavily in the winners of tomorrow. Even the Swedes (!) rejected it as naive and heavy-handed. The Boston Consulting Group was so embarrassed it tried to make the report disappear.⁴⁹

Told by a red-faced BCG he shouldn't do any more governmental planning, Magaziner decided to start his own firm. In 1979 he founded Telesis, which means "intelligently planned progress" — a nice summation of an attitude described throughout this book. In 1980 Magaziner wrote a book titled Japanese Industrial Policy. In 1982 he co-wrote a book on industrial policy with Robert Reich — a Yale Law School classmate of the Clintons as well as a fellow Rhodes scholar. In 1984, at the age of thirty-six, he penned a giant plan for the state of Rhode Island, the most ambitious state-level industrial planning effort in memory. Dubbed the Greenhouse Compact, the plan envisioned the state as a "greenhouse" for the right technologies — that is, technologies the government was smart enough to pick even though the market wasn't. The voters of Rhode Island rejected the measure handily. One could go on, but you get the point.

Now, does it seem likely that the Clintons, who'd known Magaziner for twenty years, expected that he'd come up with anything other than a corporatist strategy for American health care the moment they picked him? All of the studying, the meetings, the towers of briefing books, and the forests of file folders: these were all props in a Kabuki dance that had been scripted and blocked out well in advance.

Or consider fellow Yalie Robert Reich. We've already touched on his views on industrial policy and the Third Way. But it's worth looking at Reich as a true acolyte of the religion of government. I have been openly disdainful of psychological theorizing in earlier chapters, but how can we see Robert Reich as anything but a walking Sorelian myth, a one-man band belting out noble lies for the cause?

In his Clinton administration memoirs, Locked in the Cabinet, Reich describes a Thomas Nast cartoon world where he is in constant battle with greedy fat cats, Social Darwinists, and Mr. Monopoly. In one scene he recounts how he told some hard truths to the National Association of Manufacturers, describing a room as billowing with cigar smoke and filled with hostile men whose boos and hisses were punctuated with curses. Jonathan Rauch, one of Washington's best journalists and thinkers, checked the videotape. The audience was polite, even warm. They didn't smoke at all. Plus, the room was one-third female. In another episode Reich reported that a congressman jumped up and down shouting, "Evidence! Evidence!" at Reich during a hostile hearing. Rauch again checked the tape. Instead of an inquisition, it was a typically "dull, earnestly wonkish hearing," and most of the statements Reich attributed to his tormentor were simply "fabricated" by him. Indeed, vast swaths of the book are pure fantasy — but in a very familiar sort of way. At every turn people say things that confirm Reich's cartoon version of reality. Representative Robert Michel, the former House Republican leader, supposedly tells Reich that Newt Gingrich and company "talk as if they're interested in ideas, in what's good for America. But don't be fooled. They're out to destroy. They'll try to destroy anything that gets in their way, using whatever tactics are available." Michel never said any such thing.⁵⁰

When Slate asked him about the controversy, Reich said, "Look, the book is a memoir. It's not investigative journalism." When Rauch asked him about his tall tales, "Did you just make them up?" Reich responded, "They're in my journal." Finally, Reich simply fell back on pure relativism. "I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions."⁵¹ In other words, his defense is that this is really the way he sees the world. So again, if Reich is capable of bending reality to fit his political-morality tale, if he is programmed to see the world as a series of vital lies and useful myths, how exactly could the Clintons have expected him to do anything but stay true to form? It's not like the Clintons didn't know what their two old friends believed. Bill Clinton's policy manifesto, Putting People First, was essentially a Magaziner-Reich Festschrift.

What seems to motivate people like Reich is an abiding conviction that they are on the right side of history. Their aim is to help the people, and therefore they are not required to play by the rules. Moreover, just as they claim to be secularists, they also claim to be pragmatists, unconstrained by dogma, unlike those hidebound conservatives. Circumstances change, so, too, must our ideas. Or as Jonathan Chait of the New Republic puts it, "[I]ncoherence is simply the natural byproduct of a philosophy rooted in experimentation and the rejection of ideological certainty." This is a bit reminiscent of a line from Mussolini, quoted in the same magazine by Charles Beard. "The fascisti," Il Duce announced, "are the gypsies of Italian politics; not being tied down to any fixed principles, they proceed unceasingly toward one goal, the future well-being of the Italian people."⁵²

THINK OF THE CHILDREN

Such self-confidence cannot operate in a vacuum. It needs a mechanism to convince or force others to surrender their interests to the greater good. The New Republic's former editor George Soule, the author of A Planned Society (which popularized the phrase "we planned in war"), explained it well. The greatest of "the lessons from our war planning" was that "we must have an objective which can arouse general loyalty and enthusiasm." In It Takes a Village, Clinton cheers the way crises erase the wall between business and government but laments that the social benefits of natural disasters and wars are temporary. "Why does it take a crisis to open our eyes and hearts to our common humanity?"⁵³ In response to this problem, liberals have manufactured one "crisis" after another in their quest to find a new moral equivalent to war, from the war on cancer, to global warming, to countless alleged economic crises. Indeed, a brief perusal of the last hundred years of economic journalism from the left would have you believe that the most prosperous century in human history was one long, extended economic crisis.

But we should return to Hillary Clinton's crisis of choice: the children. The very concept of "the children" was designed to circumvent traditional political processes. The giveaway is the prefatory article, which denotes an entire category of human beings for whom all violations of the principle of limited government may be justified.

Constitutionally ordered liberal societies tend to view citizens as adults who are responsible for their own actions. But children are the Achilles' heel of every society (if libertarianism could account for children and foreign policy, it would be the ideal political philosophy). We make allowances for children. We have different rules for them — as well we should — and tend not to hold them accountable for their decisions. The "child savers" of the Progressive Era were brilliant at exploiting this weakness. In the modern era it was Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children's Defense Fund, or CDF, and Hillary Clinton's longtime friend and mentor, who relaunched this tradition.

Edelman is perhaps America's leading liberal scold. Harper's Bazaar named her "America's universal mother." Her CV is festooned with honorifics and awards like a Christmas tree bending from the weight of too many ornaments — the presidential Medal of Freedom, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, a Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award, and so on. Her organization is showered with contributions from enormous corporations eager to buy grace on the cheap. Edelman got her start working for the NAACP and eventually found her way to Yale Law School and to Washington, D.C., as the policy-entrepreneur founder of the CDF. She is undoubtedly a kind and selfless woman, deeply religious and steeped in the traditions of the Social Gospel. Inspiring quotations from Edelman are so omnipresent in the welfare, civil rights, and feminist industries — "industries" being the best word for these self-esteem-building, logrolling, black-tie fund-raiser networks — that they could be combined into a liberal Maoist Little Red Book for earnest social crusaders. "Service is the rent we pay to be living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time," she proclaims. "Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?" she asks. "No person has the right to rain on your dreams," she avers.

While few would question the rectitude of her campaigns for black equality and desegregation, Edelman's greatest influence has been in welfare policy, and there her ideas about how to organize society and American politics have proven to be spectacularly wrong. In many respects Edelman was a basic welfare state liberal, believing no entitlement or transfer payment was too big. Her great innovation was to defend the welfare system from empirical criticism — that is, it doesn't work — by hiding behind the image of poor children. "When you talked about poor people or black people you faced a shrinking audience," she has said. "I got the idea that children might be a very effective way to broaden the base for change." Indeed, Edelman more than anyone else can be blamed for the saccharine omnipresence of "the children" in American political rhetoric.⁵⁴

The problem is that while this tactic was brilliant strategically, the net effect was to make responsible reform impossible. After all, the reason the "audience" was "shrinking" for exhortations to expand the welfare state was that it was becoming increasingly obvious that the welfare state was causing dependency among black women and alienation among black men. As a result, defenders of the status quo became ever more shrill in their attacks on opponents. Hence the use and abuse of "the children."

Traditional objections to welfare as a violation of constitutional principles and a corrupter of civic virtue — which only gained respectability in the late 1970s — were suddenly beside the point. Edelman, Clinton, and others transformed the debate to one about children. Who cares if — as FDR also believed — "relief" was ultimately detrimental to adults, sapping their initiative? The effects on adults were irrelevant. Children were the beneficiaries of aid checks, not their parents (even though their parents still cashed them). Indeed, one tragic consequence of this strategy was that the government used child poverty to crush individualism and pride among inner-city blacks. James Bovard notes that when Congress mandated food stamps, welfare "recruiters" — a hundred thousand of them created by the War on Poverty — went into the cities to convince poor people to enroll. An Agriculture Department magazine reported that food stamp workers could often overcome people's pride by telling parents, "This is for your children." It continued: thanks to "intensive outreach efforts, resistance of the 'too prouds' is bending."⁵⁵

Perhaps just as important, this provided vital propaganda value for liberals. Ronald Reagan got traction for attacking "welfare queens." But no one would dare attack the unfortunate offspring of these women. Suddenly to criticize welfare policy made you "anti-child," thus spawning all of those liberal talking points about balancing the budget on the "backs of the children." This fed nicely into the psychological propaganda that conservatives are just bad people and that any break with the welfare state is motivated by "hate." Even Bill Clinton wasn't immune. When he signed the welfare reform bill, Peter Edelman resigned as assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, and Marian Edelman called Clinton's action a "moment of shame." "Never let us confuse what is legal with what is right," she proclaimed, pointedly adding, "Everything Hitler did in Nazi Germany was legal, but it was not right." The CDF denounced the move as an act of "national child abandonment," while Ted Kennedy called it "legislative child abuse." The New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen dubbed it "the politics of meanness."⁵⁶

But the CDF and other remoras of the Great Society practiced the true politics of meanness, because at the end of the day their welfare state — based though it may have been on love, concern, and niceness — resulted in more damage to the black family and specifically to black children than much that can be laid at the feet of racist neglect. Today black children are less likely to be raised by two parents than they were during the era of slavery.

While Hillary Clinton may have learned from Edelman how to use children as propaganda tools for her ideological agenda, she far surpassed her teacher in the scope of her ambition. For Clinton, welfare policy was simply one front in a wider war. The crisis facing children wasn't merely an issue for poor denizens of the inner city. For Hillary, childhood is a crisis, and the government must come to the rescue. On this she has remained remarkably consistent. In her 1973 article "Children Under the Law" in Harvard Educational Review, she criticized the "pretense" that "children's issues are somehow beyond politics" and scorned the idea that "families are private, non-political units whose interests subsume those of children." Fast-forward twenty-three years, to her April 24, 1996, address to the United Methodist General Conference: "As adults we have to start thinking and believing that there isn't really any such thing as someone else's child... For that reason, we cannot permit discussions of children and families to be subverted by political or ideological debate."⁵⁷

These two quotations sound at odds, but the intent is exactly the same. It's just that Hillary Clinton in 1996 is a politician, whereas in 1973 she's a radical lawyer. What Clinton means when she says we cannot permit ideologues to "subvert" the discussion on children is that there can be no debate about what to do about children. And what must be done is to break the unchecked tyranny of the private home, as the progressive icon Charlotte Perkins Gilman put it.

This "brilliant hope" — as Gilman described it — is only realizable if children are cast as a class in perpetual crisis. Much as the proletariat were portrayed by Marxists as being in a constant state of war, with the nation under deadly siege by classical fascists, Hillary's children are in unimaginable existential peril. Thus she approvingly quotes the Cornell psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner: "The present state of children and families in the United States represents the greatest domestic problem our nation has faced since the founding of the Republic. It is sapping our very roots." She concludes, "At a time when the well-being of children is under unprecedented threat, the balance of power is weighted heavily against them." The government must do everything it can to "reverse the crisis affecting our children," she declares. "Children, after all, are citizens too."⁵⁸

Here at last is a "moral equivalent of war" that modern liberals can rally around, a "crisis mechanism" no one would identify as fascistic because when you say "the children" the last thing you think of are storm troopers. Nobody wants to be seen as anti-child. The "child crisis" needed no definition because it had no boundaries. Even people without children should care about other people's children. Fast foods were targeted because they make children fat — and nutritional decisions can't be left to the parent. "More than the much-reviled products of Big Tobacco, big helpings and Big Food constitute the number-one threat to America's children," the Nation warned. The Clinton administration and affiliated activists justified its gun control policies based on the threat to children. "No longer will we be silent as the gun lobby refuses to put our children's health and safety first," Hillary Clinton barked in a senatorial debate in 2000.⁵⁹

It's forgotten now, but the early Clinton administration was saturated with such thinking. Janet Reno, appointed the nation's top law enforcement official as part of a gender quota, defined her primary mission as a protector of children. "I would like to use the law of this land to do everything I possibly can," she declared when nominated, "to give to each of them the opportunity to grow to be strong, healthy and self-sufficient citizens of this country." Reno, it may be forgotten, had come to national attention as a crusading prosecutor who won a number of convictions in a series of high-profile child sex-abuse cases. Many of them, it was later revealed, were fraudulent, and Reno's zealous tactics do not look admirable in hindsight. When she came to Washington, the first woman in one of the big four cabinet positions, she was determined to cast herself as primarily a children's advocate, launching her "national children's agenda." "The children of America, 20 percent of whom live in poverty, have no one to advocate for them," Reno said.⁶⁰ Reno's zeal as a protector of children no doubt played a role in her disastrous handling of the Branch Davidian raid in Waco, Texas.

But Janet Reno was precisely the sort of attorney general that, at least in theory, the author of It Takes a Village would want. Clinton describes an enormous network of activists, advocates, organizations, associations, busybodies, bureaucrats, and meddlers who make up the army of "qualified citizens" whose task it is to protect the village's interests in our children. "I cannot say enough in support of home visits," she gushes. "[The] village needs a town crier — and a town prodder."⁶¹ Again, scrape the saccharine from the sentiment and look underneath. Imagine if, say, the former attorney general John Ashcroft had said, "I cannot say enough in support of home visits." The shrieks of "fascism" would be deafening.

For Hillary Clinton, the most important front in the "war" to protect children is the first three years of life. These precious moments are so critical that we cannot leave parents to cope with them on their own. Hence a vast array of programs are necessary to plug parents into a social network that alleviates their responsibilities. As Christopher Lasch noted well before she ever wrote It Takes a Village, Clinton "puts her faith in 'programs.' The proliferation of children's programs — Head Start, day care, prenatal care, maternal care, baby clinics, programs for assessing standards in public schools, immunization programs, child-development programs — serves her as an infallible index of progress."⁶²

The twentieth century gave us two visions of a dystopian future, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. For many years it was assumed that 1984 was the more prophetic tale. But no more. The totalitarianism of 1984 was a product of the age of Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini, the dictators of a continent with a grand tradition of political and religious absolutism. Brave New World was a dystopia based on an American future, where Henry Ford is remembered as a messiah (it's set in the year "632 A.F.," after Ford) and the cult of youth that Huxley so despised defines society. Everything is easy under the World State. Everyone is happy. Indeed, the great dilemma for the reader of Brave New World is to answer the question, what's wrong with it?

There's a second important difference between the two dystopias: 1984 is a masculine vision of totalitarianism. Or rather, it is a vision of a masculine totalitarianism. Huxley's totalitarianism isn't a "boot stamping on a human face — for ever," as described in 1984. It's one of smiling, happy, bioengineered people chewing hormonal gum and blithely doing what they're told. Democracy is a forgotten fad because things are so much easier when the state makes all your decisions. In short, Huxley's totalitarianism is essentially feminine. Orwell's was a daddy-dystopia, where the state is abusive and bullying, maintaining its authority through a permanent climate of war and the manufacture of convenient enemies. Huxley's is a maternal misery, where man is smothered with care, not cruelty. But for all our talk these days about manliness, individualism, and even the "nanny state," we still don't have the vocabulary to fight off nice totalitarianism, liberal fascism.

With that distinction in mind, let us revisit It Takes a Village. On page after page, Clinton extols the idea that just about everything is a health issue. Divorce should be treated like a "public health issue" because it creates stress in children. The very basics of parenting are health issues because "how infants are held, touched, fed, spoken to, and gazed at" determines whether our brains can be "hijacked" by our emotions, potentially making us murderously violent. Mrs. Clinton tells us that Janet Reno issued a report which found that gang violence and gun use are the products of people with badly imprinted brains who become "emotionally hijacked" with little provocation. Quoting doctors, friendly activists, social workers, and random real Americans, in chapter after chapter she argues for interventions on behalf of children from literally the moment they are born. Children need "[g]entle, intimate, consistent contact" to reduce stress, which can "create feelings of helplessness that lead to later developmental problems." Even well-to-do parents need help because after all everyone feels stress, and "we know that babies sense the stress."⁶³

It's fair to say that a state empowered to eliminate parental stress is a state with a Huxleyan mandate. And a state with an extreme mandate must logically go to extremes. Hence Clinton argues for the diffusion of parental training into every nook and cranny of public life. Here's one such suggestion: "Videos with scenes of common-sense baby care — how to burp an infant, what to do when soap gets in his eyes, how to make a baby with an earache comfortable — could be running continuously in doctors' offices, clinics, hospitals, motor vehicle offices, or any place where people gather and have to wait."⁶⁴ Imagine if these sorts of ideas were fully implemented at the Department of Motor Vehicles, the passport office, and other places "where people gather and have to wait." Giant flat screens at the airport pumping breast-feeding advice? The JumboTron at football games? At what point would the Brave New World seem to be heading down the pike?

Then there are the home inspectors, the advisers, the teachers, the social workers. Clinton relies on her loyal army of experts to dispense advice about every jot and tittle of child rearing; no detail is too small, no nudge too condescending. "The Child Care Action Campaign...advises that 'jigsaw puzzles and crayons may be fine for preschoolers but are inappropriate for infants.'" The Consumer Product Safety Commission, Clinton helpfully passes on, has concluded that "baby showers with a safety theme are a great way to help new and expectant mothers childproof every room in their homes."⁶⁵

Rousseau wanted to take children away from parents and raise them in state-owned boarding schools. Clinton doesn't go that far, but then again, she believes by the time kids are old enough to go to boarding school, it's too late. Hence her passion for day care. Of course, there is a second agenda here. Day care is also the holy grail for baby-boomer feminists who believe not that children should be liberated from the family but that mothers should be liberated from children.

In order to crack the spine of patriarchy, feminists have had to rely on Sorelian myths, noble lies, and crisis mechanisms to win their battles. For example, in 1998 President Clinton proposed a $22 billion federal day-care scheme to cure what Hillary was calling "the silent crisis" of day care. Clinton also used the "silent crisis" formulation in It Takes a Village to describe the plight of children generally. These crises were silent for the same reason unicorns are silent — they don't exist. Except, that is, in the hearts and minds of progressive "reformers." Even though eight out of ten children were cared for by family members, only 13 percent of parents polled said finding child care was a "major problem." Shortly before the White House held its crisis-mongering Conference on Child Care, which was intended to lay the groundwork for Hillary's plan, a mere 1 percent of Americans named child care one of the two or three most pressing problems government should fix. And surveys of women conducted since 1974 have shown that growing majorities of married women want to stay home with their children if they can.

Perhaps one reason women would prefer to raise their own children is that they intuitively understand that, all things being equal, day care is, in fact, not great for children. Dr. Benjamin Spock knew this as early as the 1950s, when he wrote that day-care centers were "no good for infants." But when he reissued his Baby and Child Care guide in the 1990s, he removed that advice, caving in to feminist pressures and concerns. "It's a cowardly thing that I did," he admits. "I just tossed it in subsequent editions." If, as liberals often suggest, the suppression of science for political ends is fascistic, then the campaign to cover up the dark side of child care certainly counts as fascism. For example, in 1991 Dr. Louise Silverstein wrote in American Psychologist that "psychologists must refuse to undertake any more research that looks for the negative consequences of other-than-mother-care." The traditional conception of motherhood is nothing more than an "idealized myth" concocted by the patriarchy to "glorify motherhood in an attempt to encourage white, middle class women to have more children."⁶⁶

It's not that Clinton and others advocate policies they believe are bad for children. That would make them cartoon villains. Rather, they believe in good faith that society would be much improved if we all looked at everybody's children as our own. They sincerely hold, in the words of the feminist philosopher Linda Hirshman, that women cannot be "fully realized human beings" if they don't make work a bigger priority than mothering. In a sense, Hirshman is a feminist version of Michael Lerner, who sees work as a "locus" of meaning. Her contempt for women who don't completely dedicate themselves to work is palpable.⁶⁷ And as other feminists note, if women are made to feel "judged" or shamed by their choice of day care, this negativity will be paid forward in the form of brain-warping stress.

Some couch their progressive utopianism in pragmatic language. Sandra Scarr is possibly the most quoted expert on "other-than-mother" care in America and a past president of the American Psychological Society. "However desirable or undesirable the ideal of fulltime maternal care may be," she says, "it is completely unrealistic in the world of the late 20th century." That sounds defensible enough. But her larger agenda lurks beneath the surface. We need to create the "new century's ideal children." Uh-oh. Beware of social engineers who want to "create" a new type of human being. These new children will need to learn how to love everybody like a family member. "Multiple attachments to others will become the ideal. Shyness and exclusive maternal attachment will seem dysfunctional. New treatments will be developed for children with exclusive maternal attachments."⁶⁸ Can you see the Brave New World over the horizon yet?

Among these "treatments" — another word for propaganda — are books that try to put distance between mothers and children, such as Mommy Go Away! and Why Are You So Mean to Me? In It Takes a Village, Clinton cites the Washington-Beech Community Preschool in Roslindale, Massachusetts, where "director Ellen Wolpert has children play games like Go Fish and Concentration with a deck of cards adorned with images — men holding babies, women pounding nails, elderly men on ladders, gray-haired women on skateboards — that counter the predictable images."⁶⁹ This sort of thing is carried into progressive grade schools where gender norms are often attacked, as documented in Christina Hoff Sommers's War Against Boys.

In short, day care is not bad for children. Rather, the traditional bourgeois standards by which we judge what is good for children are bad. This trick is a genteel replay of the Nazi effort to steal the young away from the hidebound traditions of their parents. The Nazis brilliantly replaced traditional stories and fairy tales with yarns of Aryan bravery, the divinity of Hitler, and the like. Math problems became mechanisms for subliminal indoctrination; kids would still learn math, but the word problems were now about artillery trajectories and the amount of food being wasted on defectives and other minorities. Christian morality was slowly purged from the schools, and teachers were instructed to base their moral teaching on "secular" patriotic ideas. "The idea of loyalty was very important to the Germanic Volk, as it is for us today," teachers told their students. Indeed, loyalty to Hitler and the state was drilled into children, while loyalty to one's own parents was discouraged in myriad ways. The children were going to become new men and new women for the new age.

Obviously, the content of the saccharine liberalism children are indoctrinated into today is very different. But there are disturbing similarities, too. Good children will be those who are less attached to their parents and more attached to the "community." The fascist quest for the new man, living in a new, totalitarian society in which every individual feels the warm and loving embrace of the state, once again begins in the crib.

The last step toward the Huxleyan future for Hillary Clinton is philosophical, perhaps even metaphysical. Clinton's views of children are more universal than she seems to realize. Mrs. Clinton says, "I have never met a stupid child," and attests that "some of the best theologians I have ever met were five-year-olds."⁷⁰ Don't let the namby-pamby sentiment blind you to what is being said here. By defining the intellectual status of children up, she is simultaneously defining down the authority and autonomy of adults. In a world where children are indistinguishable from grown-ups, how distinct can grown-ups be from children?

The liberal cult of the child is instructive in its similarities to fascist thought. Children, like youth, are driven by passion, feelings, emotion, will. These are among the fascist virtues as well. Youth represents the glories of "unreason." These sentiments, in turn, are deeply tied to the narcissistic populism that celebrates the instincts of the masses. "I want it now and I don't care if it's against the rules" is the quintessentially childlike populist passion. Fascism is a form of populism because the leader forges a parental bond with his "children." Without the emotional bond between the leader and "the people," Fuhrer and Volk, fascism is impossible. "I'm on your side," "I'm one of you," "we're in this together," "I know what it's like to be you," constitutes the sales pitch of every fascist and populist demagogue. Or as Willie Stark says to the nurturing crowd in All the King's Men: "Your will is my strength. Your need is my justice." Arguments, facts, reason: these are secondary. "The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver," proclaimed William Jennings Bryan, America's most beloved populist. "I will look up the arguments later."⁷¹

Bill Clinton campaigned relentlessly on his ability to "feel our pain." Countless observers marveled at his ability to "feed" off the crowd, to draw energy from the masses. Journalists often called him an "empath" for his ability to intuit what an audience wanted to hear. This is a great skill in a politician, but one should never forget that demagogues are first and foremost masterful politicians.

Of course, Clinton's demagoguery was of a decidedly feminine nature. He promised hugs, to feel your pain, and to protect you from those mean boys (Republicans and "angry white males"). His watchword was "security" — economic security, social security, security from globalization, crime, job losses, whatever. He was the "first female president," according to the feminist novelist Mary Gordon. When he was accused of failure or error, his reflexive response was that of an overwhelmed single mother: "I've been working so hard," as if that were an adequate substitute for being right or effective. His defenders essentially claimed that he was above the law because he was, as Stanford's Kathleen Sullivan put it, the only person who works for all of us twenty-four hours a day. In other words, he wasn't a person; he was the state in its maternal incarnation. Sure, many Americans liked his policies — or thought they did because the economy was doing well — but they liked him because of his oddly maternal concern. The political aesthetics here were nothing new. As Goebbels noted of his Fuhrer's popularity, "The entire people loves him, because it feels safe in his hands like a child in the arms of its mother."⁷²

Was Bill Clinton a fascist president? Well, he certainly believed in the primacy of emotion and the supremacy of his own intellect. He spun noble lies with reckless abandon. An admirer of Huey Long's, he shared the cornpone dictator's contempt for the rules and had the same knack for demagogic appeals. He was a committed Third Wayer if ever there was one, and he devoutly shared JFK's new politics. But I think if we are going to call him a fascist, it must be in the sense that he was a sponge for the ideas and emotions of liberalism. To say that he was a fascist himself is to credit him with more ideology and principle than justified. He was the sort of president liberal fascism could only produce during unexciting times. But most important, if he was fascist, it was because that's what we as Americans wanted. We craved empathy, because we felt we deserved someone who cared about Me.

Hillary Clinton learned that lesson well when she decided to run for office for the first time. Mrs. Clinton will never have her husband's raw political talent. She's too cold, too cerebral for his style of backslapping, lip-biting politics. Instead, she translated Bill Clinton's political instincts into an ideological appeal. In 2000, when she ran as a carpetbagger for Senate in New York, Mrs. Clinton's track record was a problem. She essentially had none — at least not as a New Yorker. So she crafted a brilliant campaign slogan and rationale: she was the candidate who was "more concerned about the issues that concern New Yorkers." Her discipline in sticking to this message awed veteran political observers. The issues weren't the issue, as they said in the 1960s. The issue of who was more concerned about the issues was the issue. "I think that the real issue ought to be who cares about the children of New York City," she said in a typical utterance.⁷³

One might ask, since when did "concern" count as the greatest of qualifications? A plumber might well be more concerned about how to successfully remove your spleen than a surgeon would. Does that mean a sane man would prefer a plumber to a doctor? Do banks give loans to the applicants most concerned with running a successful business or to those most likely to pay back the loan? Should the student most concerned with getting good grades get straight As?

The response to all this is simple: concern is what children (and the rest of us) look for in parents. In the liberal fascist view, children are citizens and citizens are children (a chapter of Hillary's book is titled "Children Are Citizens Too"), so it follows that leaders should behave like parents. "I think my job is to lead," Bill Clinton remarked while in office, "and take care of the country. And I suppose the older I get, the more it becomes the role of a father figure instead of an older brother."⁷⁴

Under this vision, even your own money is not yours. It's an allowance. When asked what his problem was with letting local school districts spend tax dollars the way they saw fit, Bill Clinton snapped back: "Because it's not their money." In 1997 he ridiculed Virginia voters who wanted tax cuts as "selfish," and then chided them like children: "And think how you felt every time in your life you were tempted to do something that was selfish and you didn't do it, and the next day you felt wonderful." In 1999, when the government was running a surplus, many taxpayers felt that getting back some of their money was a reasonable policy. When asked about this, President Clinton responded, "We could give it all back to you and hope you spend it right." Senator Clinton was more straightforward. Talking about George W. Bush's tax cuts, which did return that surplus to the people who created it, Mrs. Clinton — speaking in the classic argot of the Social Gospel — said that those cuts had to be done away with. "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."⁷⁵

Hillary is no fuhrer, and her notion of the "common good" doesn't involve racial purity or concentration camps. But she indisputably draws her vision from the same eternal instinct to impose order on society, to create an all-encompassing community, to get past endless squabbles and ensconce each individual in the security blanket of the state. Hers is a political religion, an updated Social Gospel — light on the Gospel, heavy on the Social — spoken in soothing tones and conjuring a reassuring vision of cooperation and community. But it remains a singular vision, and there's no room in it for those still suffering from the "stupidity of habit-bound minds," to borrow Dewey's phrase. The village may have replaced "the state," and it in turn may have replaced the fist with the hug, but an unwanted embrace from which you cannot escape is just a nicer form of tyranny.