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

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT FASCISM IS WRONG

1. Real Time with Bill Maher, HBO, Sept. 9, 2005.

2. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St. Martin's, 1991), p. 26; Roger Eatwell, "On Defining the 'Fascist Minimum': The Centrality of Ideology," Journal of Political Ideologies 1, no. 3 (1996), p. 313; Gentile is quoted in Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 5 n. 6.

3. Griffin, Nature of Fascism, p. 1, quoting R. A. H. Robinson, Fascism in Europe (London: Historical Association, 1981), p. 1; the dictionary definition is quoted in Richard Griffiths, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Fascism (London: Duckworth, 2000), p. 4; Payne, History of Fascism, p. 3; Gilbert Allardyce, "What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept," American Historical Review 84, no. 2 (April 1979), p. 367.

4. George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," Horizon, April 1946, in Essays (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 959.

5. Michele Parente, "Rangel Ties GOP Agenda to Hitler," Newsday, Feb. 19, 1995, p. A38; Bill Clinton, Remarks to the Association of State Democratic Chairs in Los Angeles, June 24, 2000, Public Papers of the Presidents, 36 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 1491; for a typical Times article, see Alexander Stille, "The Latest Obscenity Has Seven Letters," New York Times, Sept. 13, 2003.

6. Rick Perlstein, "Christian Empire," New York Times, Jan. 7, 2007, sec. 7, p. 15; Jesse Jackson, interview, "Expediency Was Winner Over Right," Chicago Sun-Times, Dec. 3, 1994, p. 18.

7. In America "social Darwinism" means "survival of the fittest" in an anarchic free-for-all of capitalist predation. This is the tradition of Herbert Spencer, a radical freethinker and individualist. By that definition, Nazism is the opposite of social Darwinism. As we shall see, the Nazis were Darwinists, but they were reform Darwinists, believing that the state should actively pick winners and losers and lavish the winners with social benefits, welfare, and other forms of government largesse — exactly the opposite position of those we call social Darwinists.

8. John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 215.

9. One correspondent for the New York Times was an enthusiastic supporter of Italian Fascism for many years, writing that fascism was both good for Italy and good for the Abyssinians Mussolini tried to conquer. That reporter, Herbert Matthews, later recanted his support for fascism when it came into conflict with his support for the communists in the Spanish civil war. But years later he found another revolutionary "man of action" he could support with gusto: Fidel Castro.

10. DuBois eventually condemned Nazi anti-Semitism, but often through clenched teeth as he was more than a little resentful of the special attention the plight of Jews was receiving in America. In September 1933 he editorialized in Crisis: "Nothing has filled us with such unholy glee as Hitler and the Nordics. When the only 'inferior' peoples were 'niggers,' it was hard to get the attention of the New York Times for little matters of race, lynchings and mobs. But now that the damned include the owner of the Times, moral indignation is perking up." Harold David Brackman, "'Calamity Almost Beyond Comprehension': Nazi Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in the Thought of W. E. B. DuBois," American Jewish History 88, no. 1 (March 2000), citing W. E. B. DuBois, "As the Crow Flies," Crisis 40 (Sept. 1933), p. 97.

11. See John Garraty, James Q. Wilson, David Schoenbaum, Alonzo Hamby, Niall Ferguson, and, most powerfully, the German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch.

12. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), pp. 32, 29.

13. Ironically, the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter made a similar, if dramatically more understated, argument about the progressives and populists in The Age of Reform and elsewhere. But he intimated that progressives and populists were essentially right-wing forces, an argument I don't believe can be sustained.

14. The national leaders would be "pure and sensitive souls," according to Robespierre, imbued with the ability to do what destiny demanded in "the people's name" and blessed with the "enlightenment" to determine which "enemies within" required execution. See J. M. Thompson, Robespierre (New York: Appleton-Century, 1936), p. 247. As Robespierre put it, "The people is sublime, but individuals are weak" or expendable. Gertrude Himmelfarb, "The Idea of Compassion: The British vs. the French Enlightenment," Public Interest, no. 145 (Fall 2001), p. 20. See also Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 836; John Kekes, "Why Robespierre Chose Terror," City Journal (Spring 2006). Robespierre explained the need for terror: "If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs."

15. Thomas R. DeGregori, "Muck and Magic or Change and Progress: Vitalism Versus Hamiltonian Matter-of-Fact Knowledge," Journal of Economic Issues 37, no. 1 (March 2003), pp. 17-33.

16. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 95, citing New York Sun, July 23, 1896, p. 2, as reported in Edward Flower, "Anti-Semitism in the Free Silver and Populist Movements and the Election of 1896" (master's thesis, Columbia University, 1952), pp. 27-28.

17. As Robert Proctor writes, "Public health initiatives were pursued not just in spite of fascism, but also in consequence of fascism." The National Socialist "campaign against tobacco and the 'whole-grain bread operation' are, in some sense, as fascist as the yellow stars and the death camps." Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 124, 249, 278.

18. Here is a list of the things the New York City Council tried to ban — not all successfully — in 2006 alone: pit bulls; trans fats; aluminum baseball bats; the purchase of tobacco by eighteen-to twenty-year-olds; foie gras; pedicabs in parks; new fast-food restaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods); lobbyists from the floor of council chambers; lobbying city agencies after working at the same agency; vehicles in Central and Prospect parks; cell phones in upscale restaurants; the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, because of a unionization dispute; mail-order pharmaceutical plans; candy-flavored cigarettes; gas-station operators adjusting prices more than once daily; Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus; Wal-Mart. "Whatever It Is, They're Against It," New York Post, Dec. 29, 2006, p. 36.

19. Greenpeace International, "Getting It On for the Good of the Planet: The Greenpeace Guide to Environmentally-Friendly Sex," Sept. 10, 2002, www.greenpeace.org/international/news/eco-sex-guide (accessed March 15, 2007).

20. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Knopf, 1994), vol. 2, p. 320.

21. Philip Coupland, "H. G. Wells's 'Liberal Fascism,'" Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 4 (Oct. 2000), p. 549.

22. Wells's theology was, to put it mildly, heretical. He argued that God was not all-powerful but rather an ally of man "struggling and taking a part against evil." H. G. Wells, God, the Invisible King (New York: Macmillan, 1917), p. xiv. His was also a God of imperialism and conquest.

1. MUSSOLINI: THE FATHER OF FASCISM

1. Many authors have referenced these lyrics to demonstrate Mussolini's widespread popularity, but it is a common mistake to ascribe these lyrics to Cole Porter, the original author of the musical Anything Goes. Porter almost certainly did not write these lyrics. Rather, they were probably added by P. G. Wodehouse when he helped adapt the musical for the British stage. It also appears that there were multiple versions of the song with the Mussolini lyric, which hopscotched back and forth across the Atlantic.

2. Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1998) won Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor and was nominated for Best Director. The title of the film, ironically enough, derives from Leon Trotsky. According to Benigni, shortly before the exiled Bolshevik was to be assassinated in Mexico, he supposedly looked at his wife in their garden and said, "Life is beautiful anyway."

3. John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 245; Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), p. 295.

4. "Calls Mussolini Latin Roosevelt," New York Times, Oct. 7, 1923, p. E10.

5. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, p. 206; Norman Hapgood, Professional Patriots (New York: Boni, 1927), p. 62.

6. "Hughes a Humorist, Will Rogers Says," New York Times, Sept. 28, 1926, p. 29; Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, p. 27, citing Will Rogers, "Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President," Saturday Evening Post, July 31, 1926, pp. 8-9, 82-84.

7. Toscanini's relationship with the Mussolini regime was turbulent. For reasons probably more artistic than political, he refused to perform the fascist national anthem, "Giovinezza."

8. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, Volume II: Muckraking/Revolution/ Seeing America at Last (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1931), p. 799; McClure's view can be found in Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, pp. 28-29.

9. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, pp. 255, 257.

10. Those numbers evened out a bit as Americans became increasingly interested in the Soviets' five-year plan. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 51.

11. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, p. 244.

12. La Follette's son, Philip, the famously progressive governor of Wisconsin, kept a picture of Mussolini in his office as late as 1938. Ibid., pp. 220-21.

13. Benito Mussolini, My Rise and Fall (New York: Da Capo, 1998), p. 3.

14. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: Perennial, 1991), p. 96. Here's how Mussolini describes one incident in his autobiography: "I caught her on the stairs, throwing her into a corner behind a door, and made her mine. When she got up weeping and humiliated she insulted me by saying that I had robbed her of her honor and it is not impossible that she spoke the truth. But I ask you, what kind of honor could she have meant?"

15. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 43.

16. Found in ibid., p. 224, n. 61.

17. The historian Hugh Gallagher writes of Roosevelt, he "was no Thomas Jefferson, and neither a scholar nor an intellectual in the usual sense of the word. He had a magpie mind, and many interests, but he was not deep." William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 27, quoting Hugh Gregory Gallagher, FDR's Splendid Deception: The Moving Story of Roosevelt's Massive Disability — and the Intense Efforts to Conceal It from the Public (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985), p. 160.

18. Ivone Kirkpatrick, Mussolini (London: Odhams, 1964), p. 47.

19. Ibid., p. 49.

20. Mussolini wrote in a review of Sorel's Reflections on Violence, "That which I am...I owe to Sorel...He is an accomplished Master who, with his sharp theories on revolutionary formations, contributed to the molding of the discipline, the collective energy, the power of the masses, of the Fascist cohorts." A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free Press, 1969), p. 116. In 1913 Sorel said, "Mussolini is no ordinary Socialist. One day you will see him at the head of a consecrated battalion, greeting the Italian banner with his dagger. He is an Italian of the 15th century, a condottiere. You do not know it yet. But he is the one energetic man who has the capacity to correct the weaknesses of the government." Kirkpatrick, Mussolini, p. 159.

21. Joshua Muravchik, Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), p. 146; Joseph Husslein, The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912, p. 386; Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 11.

22. If all the workers were already dedicated socialists, there would be no need for a general strike because the society would have already made the transition to socialism. Neil McInnes, Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1973). For the Mussolini interview, see Kirkpatrick, Mussolini, p. 159. For the quotation from Sharpton, see John Cassidy, "Racial Tension Boils Over as Rape Case Is Branded a Hoax," Times (London), June 19, 1988.

23. Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 56.

24. Gregor, Ideology of Fascism, p. 116.

25. Gertrude Himmelfarb, "The Idea of Compassion: The British vs. the French Enlightenment," Public Interest, no. 145 (Fall 2001).

26. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (New York: Dutton, 1950), p. 297.

27. For example, in 1924 the Italian Fascist theorist Giuseppe Bottai declared in a lecture, "Fascism as Intellectual Revolution": "If by democracy one understands the possibility granted all citizens of actively participating in the life of the state, then nobody will deny democracy's immortality. The French Revolution rendered this possibility historically and ethically concrete, so much so that an ineradicable right was born that exercises a tenacious hold on individual consciousness, independent of abstract invocations of immortal principles or developments in modern philosophy." Reprinted in: Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ed., A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p. 82.

28. See George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich (New York: Fertig, 2001); George L. Mosse, "Fascism and the French Revolution," Journal of Contemporary History 24, no. 1 (Jan. 1989), pp. 5-26.

29. The observation that Rousseau's state is the most "powerful to be found anywhere in political philosophy" is Robert Nisbet's. Robert Nisbert, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 52.

30. Fascism, according to the fascist theorist Giuseppe Bottai, "was, for my comrades or myself, nothing more than a way of continuing the war, of transforming its values into a civic religion." "Fascism as Intellectual Revolution," p. 20. Augusto Turati, a party secretary and self-proclaimed "new apostle of the Fatherland's religion," explained to massive rallies of Italian Youth that the new "fascist religion" demanded "the need to believe absolutely; to believe in Fascism, in the Duce, in the Revolution. Just as one believes in God...we accept the Revolution with pride, just as we accept these principles — even if we realize they are mistaken, and we accept them without discussion."

31. "Pope in Encyclical Denounces Fascisti and Defends Clubs," New York Times, July 4, 1931; "Everything Is Promised," Time, July 13, 1931. See also Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 95.

32. David Nicholls, God and Government in an "Age of Reason" (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 80.

33. The law was passed by the Convention but was never fully implemented. Himmelfarb, "Idea of Compassion." The Tocqueville quotation is from The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York: Anchor, 1955), p. 156, found in ibid.

34. Robespierre, speech of Feb. 5, 1794, in Modern History Sourcebook, www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/robespierre-terror.html.

35. Marisa Linton, "Robespierre and the Terror," History Today, Aug. 1, 2006.

36. R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998), p. 104.

37. David Ramsay Steele, "The Mystery of Fascism," Liberty, www.laarticles.org.uk/fascism.htm (accessed March 13, 2007).

38. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, p. 148, citing Margherita G. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, trans. Frederic Whyte (New York: Stokes, 1925), p. 263.

39. Mussolini, My Rise and Fall, p. 36.

40. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, p. 149, citing Jasper Ridley, Mussolini: A Biography (New York: St. Martin's, 1997), p. 71.

41. Jeffrey T. Schnapp, pp. 3-6; Charles F. Delzell, Mediterranean Fascism, 1919-1945 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 12-13.

42. Robert O. Paxton, "The Five Stages of Fascism," Journal of Modern History 70, no. 1 (March 1998), p. 15.

43. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2004), p. 17; Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship, p. 39. According to Hannah Arendt, Mussolini "was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone." Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1966), p. 325 n. 39.

44. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 72.

45. Arnaldo Cortesi, "Mussolini, on Radio, Gives Peace Pledge," New York Times, Jan. 2, 1931; W. Y. Elliott, "Mussolini, Prophet of the Pragmatic Era in Politics," Political Science Quarterly 41, no. 2 (June 1926), pp. 161-92.

46. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, pp. 170, 171.

2. ADOLF HITLER: MAN OF THE LEFT

1. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 533.

2. According to Robert O. Paxton, the first example of "national socialism" as an ideological label and political precursor to fascism was the Cercle Proudhon in France in 1911, a club of intellectuals who aimed to "unite nationalists and left-wing anti-democrats" to mount an attack on "Jewish capitalism." Its founder, Georges Valois, worked tirelessly to convert the working class away from Marxist internationalism to a nation-based socialism. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2004), p. 48.

3. Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 185; Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 232; Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: Perennial, 1991), p. 319; Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival (repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), p. 30.

4. Joachim Fest, Hitler (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 205.

5. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 18.

6. This might be a little unfair to Chamberlain in that his appeasement was based in no small part on realpolitik while Western pacifists were often Hitler's useful idiots.

7. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Touchstone, 1990), p. 205.

8. John Lukacs, The Hitler of History (New York: Vintage, 1997), p. 84.

9. David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 19; Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), p. 245.

10. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 406.

11. Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (New York: Random House, 1998), p. xii; Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New York: Da Capo, 1993), p. 20; Eugene H. Methvin, "20th Century Superkillers," National Review, May 31, 1985, pp. 22-29.

12. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 195.

13. Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution, p. 62.

14. Roger Griffin, ed., Fascism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 123.

15. Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 484, 496-97.

16. Ibid., p. 484.

17. Burleigh, Third Reich, pp. 132-33.

18. Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution, p. 59; Burleigh, Third Reich, p. 105.

19. Theodore Abel, Why Hitler Came Into Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), pp. 135-39; Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism: Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth Century (Malabar, Fla.: Kriegler, 1982), p. 55, quoting Abel, Why Hitler Came Into Power, pp. 203-301.

20. Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924 (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 253.

21. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1974), p. 136; Burleigh, Third Reich, p. 55.

22. John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 217 n. 19.

23. Ibid., p. 215.

24. Sidney Hook, "The Fallacy of the Theory of Social Fascism," in American Anxieties: A Collective Portrait of the 1930s, ed. Louis Filler (Somerset, N.J.: Transaction, 1993), p. 320.

3. WOODROW WILSON AND THE BIRTH OF LIBERAL FASCISM

1. Fred Siegel, "'It Can't Happen Here,'" Weekly Standard, Aug. 14, 2006, p. 40. Amusingly, one of the most devastating critics of the book was in fact Lewis himself. At a left-wing event held to honor the book and its author, Lewis said, "Boys, I love you all. And a writer loves to have his latest book praised. But let me tell you, it isn't a very good book."

2. Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here (New York: New American Library, 2005), p. 46.

3. Ibid., pp. 16, 17.

4. Woodrow Wilson, "The Ideals of America," The Atlantic Monthly, December 1902. See also Tony Smith, America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 63; Jan Willem, Woodrow Wilson: A Life for World Peace, trans. Herbert H. Rowen (Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press 1991), p. 37.

5. Walter McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 128.

6. George Orwell, "Review of Power: A New Social Analysis," Adelphi, Jan. 1939, in Essays (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 107.

7. Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908, 1961).

8. Ronald J. Pestritto, "Why Progressivism Is Not, and Never Was, a Source of Conservative Values," Claremont Review of Books, Aug. 25, 2005, www.claremont.org/publications/pubid.439/pub_detail.asp (accessed March 14, 2007). Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1913).

9. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), pp. 66, 59.

10. Ibid., p. 111.

11. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, p. 127.

12. John G. West, Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest (Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2006), p. 61.

13. Woodrow Wilson, Leaders of Men, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952), pp. 20, 25-26.

14. Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), p. 165.

15. John Milton Cooper Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 150-51.

16. Beveridge boasted that the Meat Inspection Act constituted "THE MOST PRONOUNCED EXTENSION OF FEDERAL POWER IN EVERY DI RECTION EVER ENACTED." McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 163. For the quotation, see William E. Leuchtenburg, "Progressivism and Imperialism: The Progressive Movement and American Foreign Policy, 1898-1916," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39, no. 3 (Dec. 1952), p. 484.

17. Walter McDougall's Promised Land, Crusader State is invaluable for understanding this point. McDougall writes:

Historians stress the dynamic crosscurrents in turn-of-the-century American society. Foster Rhea Dulles thought the era "marked by many contradictions." Richard Hofstadter identified "two different moods" one tending toward protest and reform, the other toward national expansion. Frederick Merk wrote of Manifest Destiny contesting with mission, and Ernest May of "cascades of imperialistic and moralistic oratory." But the contradictions are only a product of our wish to cleanse the Progressive movement of its taint of imperialism abroad. For at bottom, the belief that American power, guided by a secular and religious spirit of service, could remake foreign societies came as easily to the Progressives as trust-busting, prohibition of child labor, and regulation of interstate commerce, meatpacking, and drugs. Leading imperialists like Roosevelt, Beveridge, and Willard Straight were all Progressives; leading Progressives like Jacob Riis, Gifford Pinchot, and Robert La Follette all supported the Spanish war and the insular acquisitions. (p. 120)

And in a famous 1952 essay, the historian William Leuchtenburg wrote that "imperialism and progressivism flourished together because they were both expressions of the same philosophy of government, a tendency to judge any action not by the means employed but by the results achieved, a worship of definitive action for action's sake, as John Dewey has pointed out, and an almost religious faith in the democratic mission of America." Leuchtenburg, "Progressivism and Imperialism," p. 500.

18. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 209; Arthur A. Ekrich Jr., The Decline of American Liberalism (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. 193.

19. Long also said that it would come to America as "anti-Fascism," a fairly prophetic analysis since the left has long considered itself the fighting wedge of "anti-Fascism." For the Mencken quotations, see H. L. Mencken, "Roosevelt: An Autopsy," in Prejudices: Second Series (New York: Knopf, 1920), pp. 112, 114.

20. Ronald J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), p. 255. Emphasis mine.

21. Progressives didn't start widely using the word "progressive" to describe themselves until 1909. In England progressives might be called "Tory democrats," "Labour imperialists," "new liberals," "Fabians," or "collectivists." In America progressives might go by "reformer" or even "radical" and, of course, Republican or Democrat (the widespread use of the word "liberal" to describe progressives didn't fully catch on until the 1920s). In France and Germany many of these labels were in play, too, as were such monikers as interventionnistes. Some cited Nietzsche, others Marx, others William James. Many — as Mussolini and Georges Sorel would — claimed all three as influences. Indeed, there's little doubt that some Italian socialist bands called fascios in Italy at the time fell squarely in the "progressive" camp. And we know that the nationalist intellectuals who laid the groundwork for fascism in Italy were heavily influenced by William James's pragmatism, just as James was influenced by them.

22. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 57, 74.

23. Joseph Jacobs, "Works of Friedrich Nietzsche," New York Times, May 7, 1910; Mencken, "Roosevelt: An Autopsy," p. 111. Indeed, Richard Hofstadter, the iconic liberal historian, saw Teddy Roosevelt as a thinly veiled fascist. In the words of David Brown, Hofstadter's biographer, Roosevelt's defining characteristic was a "Mussolini lite" and his politics, marked by a "stern dedication to nationalism, martial values, and a common spirit of racial identity and destiny" were "a slight variation of the fascist politics that poisoned Europe following Roosevelt's death." David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. xvi, 60.

24. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, pp. 86-87.

25. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 102; Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson, The Development of Modern Europe: An Introduction to the Study of Current History, vol. 2 (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1907), p. 141; Frederic C. Howe, Socialized Germany (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1915), p. 166; Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 66.

26. Murray N. Rothbard, "World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals," Journal of Libertarian Studies 9, no. 1 (Winter 1989), p. 103.

27. Woodrow Wilson, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 1 (New York: Harper, 1927), pp. 6-10.

28. James Bovard, Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), p. 8.

29. Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era, 1900-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 124-25.

30. Wilfred M. McClay, "Croly's Progressive America," Public Interest, no. 137 (Fall 1999).

31. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 192.

32. Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism, p. 15; Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 191.

33. Bovard, Freedom in Chains, p. 8.

34. Leuchtenburg, "Progressivism and Imperialism," p. 490.

35. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), p. 14.

36. Herbert Croly, "Regeneration," New Republic (June 9, 1920), pp. 40-44; originally found in Sydney Kaplan, "Social Engineers as Saviors: Effects of World War I on Some American Liberals," Journal of the History of Ideas (June 1956), pp. 347-69.

37. John Patrick Diggins, "Flirtation with Fascism: American Pragmatic Liberals and Mussolini's Italy," American Historical Review 71, no. 2 (Jan. 1966), p. 494.

38. "No doubt there were single hours in the world war," Ross wrote in The Russian Soviet Republic, "when more Russian lives were consumed than the Red Terror ever took...it accomplished its purpose in that the bourgeoisie suddenly ceased to plot." Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, "The Early American Observers of the Russian Revolution, 1917-1921," Russian Review 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1943), p. 67. Razstrellyat misspelled in original.

39. Ibid., p. 69.

40. Lewis S. Feuer, "American Travelers to the Soviet Union, 1917-32: The Formation of a Component of New Deal Ideology," American Quarterly 14, no. 2, pt. 1 (Summer 1962), p. 125; Stuart Chase, Robert Dunn, and Rexford Guy Tugwell, eds., Soviet Russia in the Second Decade (New York: John Day, 1928), pp. 49-50, 54.

41. Feuer, "American Travelers to the Soviet Union," pp. 102, 128, 126, 119-49.

42. Ibid., p. 132.

43. The March 2, 1927, issue of the New Republic informed readers that "the more liberal attitude is to regard Fascism in Italy, like Communism in Russia, as a political and social experiment which has a function in Italian political development and which cannot be understood and appraised from the formulas either of its friends or enemies."

44. Diggins, "Flirtation with Fascism," p. 494, citing Charles A. Beard, "Making the Fascist State," New Republic, Jan. 23, 1929, pp. 277-78.

45. West, Darwin's Conservatives, p. 60.

46. It was around this time that the New Republic became akin to an intellectual PR firm for the Wilson administration. Teddy Roosevelt was so frustrated that his former cheering section had switched loyalties he proclaimed the New Republic a "negligible sheet run by two anemic Gentiles and two uncircumcised Jews." Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 194.

47. Woodrow Wilson, Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Trusts and Monopolies, Jan. 20, 1914, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=65374 (accessed March 14, 2007).

48. Wilson's conviction that he was the messianic incarnation of world-historical forces was total. Time and again he argued that he was the instrument of God or history or both. He concluded a famous speech to the League to Enforce Peace:

But I did not come here, let me repeat, to discuss a program. I came only to avow a creed and give expression to the confidence I feel that the world is even now upon the eve of a great consummation, when some common force will be brought into existence which shall safeguard right as the first and most fundamental interest of all peoples and all governments, when coercion shall be summoned not to the service of political ambition or selfish hostility, but to the service of a common order, a common justice, and a common peace. God grant that the dawn of that day of frank dealing and of settled peace, concord, and cooperation may be near at hand!

Full text can be found at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=65391. Woodrow Wilson, The Messages and Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 1, ed. Albert Shaw (New York: Review of Reviews Corporation, 1924), p. 275. See also "Text of the President's Speech Discussing Peace and Our Part in a Future League to Prevent War," New York Times, May 28, 1916, p. 1.

49. William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 39.

50. For the Dewey quotation, see www.fff.org/freedom/fd0203c.asp; for the Blatch, see McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 282, and John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 127; for the Ely, see Murray N. Rothbard, "Richard T. Ely: Paladin of the Welfare-Warfare State," Independent Review 6, no. 4 (Spring 2002), p. 587; for the Wilson, see "Gov. Wilson Stirs Spanish Veterans," New York Times, Sept. 11, 1912, p. 3; for the Hitler, see The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943, ed. Louis P. Lochner (New York: Doubleday, 1948), p. 314.

51. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 282.

52. For the Croly quotations, see "The End of American Isolation," editorial, New Republic, Nov. 7, 1914, quoted in John B. Judis, "Homeward Bound," New Republic, March 3, 2003, p. 16; and Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, p. 202. For the Lippmann quotations, see Ronald Steel, "The Missionary," New York Review of Books, Nov. 20, 2003; and Heinz Eulau, "From Public Opinion to Public Philosophy: Walter Lippmann's Classic Reexamined," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 15, no. 4 (July 1956), p. 441.

53. Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, p. 39; David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 52.

54. Grosvenor Clarkson, Industrial America in the World War: The Strategy Behind the Line, 1917-1918 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), p. 292.

55. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 289; Woodrow Wilson, A Proclamation by the President of the United States, as printed in New York Times, May 19, 1917, p. 1.

56. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922).

57. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 288; Barry, Great Influenza, p. 127.

58. For the Bernays quotation, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 70. For the CPI posters, see Barry, Great Influenza, p. 127.

59. Barry, Great Influenza, p. 126.

60. "Charges Traitors in America Are Disrupting Russia," New York Times, Sept. 16, 1917, p. 3; Stephen Vaughn, "First Amendment Liberties and the Committee on Public Information," American Journal of Legal History 23, no. 2 (April 1979), p. 116.

61. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 293.

62. Ibid., pp. 293, 294.

63. H. W. Brands, The Strange Death of American Liberalism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 40. In all of the cases of Burleson's clamping down on the press, there are only two instances when Wilson disagreed with his postmaster enough to redress the situation. In all the others Wilson steadfastly supported the government's largely unlimited right to censor the press — including one instance when Burleson used his powers to harass a local Texas journal that criticized his decision to evict sharecroppers from his property. In a letter to one congressman, Wilson declared that censorship is "absolutely necessary to the public safety." John Sayer, "Art and Politics, Dissent and Repression: The Masses Magazine Versus the Government, 1917-1918," American Journal of Legal History 32, no. 1 (Jan. 1988), p. 46.

64. Sayer, "Art and Politics, Dissent and Repression," p. 64 n. 99; Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, pp. 216-17.

65. Carl Brent Swisher, "Civil Liberties in War Time," Political Science Quarterly 55, no. 3 (Sept. 1940), p. 335.

66. See Howard Zinn, The Twentieth Century: A People's History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 89-92.

67. Norman Hapgood, Professional Patriots (New York: Boni, 1927), p. 62. See also John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 206. About a decade later, a legion representative from Texas pinned a legion button on Mussolini's lapel, making him an honorary member. In return, Mussolini posed for a photograph wearing a Texas cowboy hat with the legion colonel.

68. "Congress Cheers as Wilson Urges Curb on Plotters," New York Times, Dec. 8, 1915, p. 1; Charles Seymour, Woodrow Wilson and the World War: A Chronicle of Our Own Times (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1921), p. 79; "Suggests Canada Might Vote with US," New York Times, Sept. 26, 1919, p. 3.

69. "President Greets Fliers," Washington Post, Sept. 10, 1924; Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, p. 217; Barry, Great Influenza, p. 125.

70. For Butler, see Ellen Nore, Charles A. Beard: An Intellectual Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), p. 80; and Kennedy, Over Here, p. 74. To his eternal credit, the historian Charles Beard resigned his teaching position in protest. Few of his colleagues followed his example. For Ely, see Rothbard, "Richard T. Ely," p. 588, citing Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), p. 207.

71. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 299; "Stamping Out Treason," editorial, Washington Post, April 12, 1918.

72. Kazin, Populist Persuasion, p. 69; John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 102.

73. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 290.

74. David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 63; Michael Mann, Fascists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 146.

75. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 59.

4. FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT'S FASCIST NEW DEAL

1. Michael A. Bernstein, The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 273; William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 50.

2. Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, pp. 10-11.

3. Lewis S. Feuer, "American Travelers to the Soviet Union, 1917-32: The Formation of a Component of New Deal Ideology," American Quarterly 14, no. 2, pt. 1 (Summer 1962), p. 148, citing Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes: The First Thousand Days (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), p. 104; Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 22; Ickes, Secret Diary, vol. 2, pp. 325-26.

4. The best single treatment of FDR's policies as dictatorial and fascistic can be found in William E. Leuchtenburg's essay "The New Deal as the Moral Analogue of War," in FDR Years, pp. 35-75. On Lippmann, see Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 5; Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 300.

5. Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 17.

6. Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, p. 27, citing Hugh Gregory Gallagher, FDR's Splendid Deception: The Moving Story of Roosevelt's Massive Disability — and the Intense Efforts to Conceal It from the Public (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985), p. 160.

7. Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933-1937 (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 223.

8. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, 1882-1940 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1984), p. 50.

9. Ibid., pp. 52, 61.

10. However, this attitude didn't extend to his own interests. He told his mother she should not go overboard by following the government mantra that one should buy Liberty Bonds "until it hurts." The man who would later decry "economic royalists" told the woman controlling his purse strings not to sell off any of the family's more valuable assets in order to buy more patriotic — but less lucrative — securities. Davis, FDR, pp. 512-13.

11. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 412; Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, p. 2.

12. Burns, Roosevelt, p. 144.

13. Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents, pp. 18, 37; Alvin H. Hansen, "Toward Full Employment," speech at the University of Cincinnati, March 15, 1949, quoted in Brinkley, End of Reform, p. 5.

14. "Liberalism vs. Fascism," editorial, New Republic, March 2, 1927, p. 35. It is impossible not to detect the fascist obsession with unity and action in Croly's defense of Mussolini. In another editorial he declared, "Whatever the dangers of Fascism, it has at any rate substituted movement for stagnation, purposive behavior for drifting, and visions of great future for collective pettiness and discouragement." Brinkley, End of Reform, p. 155; John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 204.

15. John Patrick Diggins, "Flirtation with Fascism: American Pragmatic Liberals and Mussolini's Italy," American Historical Review 71, no. 2 (Jan. 1966), p. 495.

16. Stuart Chase, A New Deal (New York: Macmillan, 1932), p. 252.

17. The Marquis de Sade considered himself a great revolutionary and philosophe. But in reality he was a bored pervert who came up with elaborate rationales to poke and scratch people for the fun of it. Lenin was bored to nausea by anything but constant agitation for revolution. Martin Heidegger taught an entire course on boredom, calling it the "insidious creature [that] maintains its monstrous essence in our [Being]." It's been speculated that Heidegger signed up with the Nazis at least in part to cure himself of boredom.

18. James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), p. 416.

19. "We who are over sixty," Sinclair Lewis observed on the occasion of Wells's death in 1946, "have remembered all that he meant to us...For here was a man who, more than any other of this century, suggested to our young minds the gaudy fancy (which conceivably might also be fact) that mankind can, by taking thought," refuse "to make our lives miserable and guilty just to please some institution that for a century has been a walking and talking corpse." Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), p. 178. I did not get the title of this book from Wells's speech, but I was delighted to discover the phrase has such a rich intellectual history. See Philip Coupland, "H. G. Wells's 'Liberal Fascism,'" Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 4 (Oct. 2000), pp. 541-58.

20. Coupland, "H. G. Wells's 'Liberal Fascism,'" p. 543.

21. H. G. Wells, The War in the Air (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), p. 128. When the film version opened in theaters, a letter appeared in the British Union of Fascists party newspaper, Action, asking, "Is Mr. Wells a Secret Fascist?" The correspondent noted, "The supermen all wore the black shirt and broad shiny belt of Fascism! The uniforms were identical, and their wearers moved and bore themselves in the semi-military manner of fascists." Coupland, "H. G. Wells's 'Liberal Fascism,'" p. 541. H. G. Wells, "What Is Fascism — and Why?" New York Times Magazine, Feb. 6, 1927, p. 2; George Orwell, "Wells, Hitler, and the World State," Horizon, Aug. 1941, in Essays (New York: Knopf, 2002), p. 371.

22. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain Since 1866 (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 682; William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 93.

23. In the 1920s and 1930s various fascist-like intellectual cults popped up based on the idea that engineers should rule, the most famous of which was Thorstein Veblen's "technocracy" fad.

24. As a writer for the Village Voice puts it, Coughlin was the leader of a "group of right-wing Christian political losers." James Ridgeway, "Mondo Washington," Village Voice, March 14, 2000, p. 41. A writer for the New York Times simply declared Pat Buchanan the "Father Coughlin of 1996." Samuel G. Freedman, "The Father Coughlin of 1996," New York Times, Feb. 25, 1996. The historian Michael Kazin told BusinessWeek, "Buchanan hearkens back to Father Coughlin's 1930s isolationist-conservatism." Lee Walczak, "The New Populism," BusinessWeek, March 13, 1995, p. 72. A professor writing for Foreign Policy expresses shock that "the contemporary Christian Right have been staunch supporters of Israel," which he says should be a "surprise to observers familiar with the anti-Semitic virulence of such pre-World War II Christian conservatives as radio commentator Father Charles." William Martin, "The Christian Right and American Foreign Policy," Foreign Policy, no. 114 (Spring 1999), p. 72. Newsweek counts Father Coughlin and Ronald Reagan as two "conservatives" who really got radio. Howard Fineman, "The Power of Talk," Newsweek, Feb. 8, 1993, p. 24. And on and on.

25. Marshall William Fishwick, Great Awakenings: Popular Religion and Popular Culture (Binghamton, N.Y.: Haworth, 1995), p. 128.

26. "Lays Banks' Crash to Hoover Policies," New York Times, Aug. 24, 1933, p. 7; "State Capitalism Urged by Coughlin," New York Times, Feb. 19, 1934, p. 17.

27. A wide range of observers understood that communism was a new religion. John Maynard Keynes began his brilliant 1925 essay "A Short View of Russia" by declaring, "Leninism is a combination of two things which Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartments of the soul — religion and business. We are shocked because the religion is new, and contemptuous because the business, being subordinated to the religion instead of the other way round, is highly inefficient."

28. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 122.

29. "'Roosevelt or Ruin,' Asserts Radio Priest at Hearing," Washington Post, Jan. 17, 1934, pp. 1-2; Brinkley, Voices of Protest, p. 126. See also Father Coughlin, Address, National Union for Social Justice, Nov. 11, 1934, www.ssa.gov/history/fcspeech.html (accessed Feb. 20, 2007).

30. Principles of the National Union for Social Justice, quoted in Brinkley, Voices of Protest, pp. 287-88.

31. Coughlin went on: "We maintain the principle that there can be no lasting prosperity if free competition exists in any industry. Therefore, it is the business of government not only to legislate for a minimum annual wage and maximum working schedule to be observed by industry, but also to curtail individualism that, if necessary, factories shall be licensed and their output shall be limited." Charles A. Beard and George H. E. Smith, eds., Current Problems of Public Policy: A Collection of Materials (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1936), p. 54.

32. Brinkley, Voices of Protest, p. 239.

33. Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1998, p. 240); Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval: 1935-1936, vol. 3 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), p. 66.

34. Sinclair was the muckraking journalist who most famously wrote The Jungle, the story of an exploited immigrant in the Chicago meatpacking industry who ultimately finds salvation through socialism. Sinclair himself was formally a member of the Socialist Party until World War I, when he broke with it in favor of intervention (which would have made him a Fascist in Italy). Sinclair remained an ideological socialist (and food faddist) for the rest of his days. Dr. Townsend is an even odder duck. In September 1933 he wrote a letter to his local California newspaper claiming that America's economic problems could be solved if only the federal government gave two hundred dollars to all people over the age of sixty, so long as they promised to spend the money within thirty days. This alone would jump-start the economy and pull the elderly out of poverty. Within three months of that letter to the editor, there were three thousand Townsend clubs across the country, as well as a weekly national newspaper. By the summer of 2005, there were an estimated 2.25 million members across the country. The Townsend movement, which Today dubbed "easily the outstanding political sensation of 1935," ended up winning numerous seats in state legislatures and even two governorships. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 180.

35. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), p. 73.

36. Gotz Aly, Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Holt, 2007). A discerning reader might ask, "Why was Hitler's Germany so much more successful than America if the Third Reich was more socialist?" It's an excellent question and one that I've asked several economists. The short answer is "real wages." See Jody K. Biehl, "How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer," Spiegel Online, March 22, 2005, http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html (accessed June 26, 2007).

37. Anne O'Hare McCormick, "Hitler Seeks Jobs for All Germans," New York Times, July 10, 1933, p. 6.

38. John A. Garraty, "The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression," American Historical Review 78, no. 4 (Oct. 1973), pp. 933-34; Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, pp. 19-20.

39. Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, pp. 23, 24, 19.

40. Benito Mussolini, "The Birth of a New Civilization," in Fascism, ed. Roger Griffin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 73; Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, p. 31.

41. Alonzo L. Hamby, For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 146.

42. Interestingly, James engages the German philosopher S. R. Steinmetz in his essay. And while he disagrees with Steinmetz on several substantial points, it's worth noting that he says Steinmetz is "a conscientious thinker" and "moral" militarist. Steinmetz, now widely forgotten, was a very prominent German social Darwinist and eugenicist. William James, Memories and Studies (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1934), p. 281.

43. Alter, Defining Moment, p. 4.

44. Ibid., p. 5.

45. Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, p. 63.

46. Ibid., pp. 55, 56.

47. Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution, p. 63. Konstantin Hierl, the head of the Labor Service, explained that there was no better way to overcome class differences than to dress "the son of the director and the young worker, the university student and the farmhand, in the same uniform, to set them the same table in common service to Volk and Vaterland." Comparing Germany to Spain, Hitler proclaimed in 1936, "What a difference compared with a certain other country. There it is class against class, brother against brother. We have chosen the other route: rather than to wrench you apart, we have brought you together."

48. Hugh S. Johnson, The Blue Eagle, from Egg to Earth (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1935), p. 264.

49. Colloquially, this is "All for one, one for all," but its closer translation would be "The community over self-interest."

50. Otto Friedrich, "F.D.R.'s Disputed Legacy," Time, Feb. 1, 1982.

51. Hamby, For the Survival of Democracy, p. 164.

52. "Not Since the Armistice," Time, Sept. 25, 1933, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,882190,00.html (accessed February 7, 2007); T. H. Watkins, "The Bird Did Its Part," Smithsonian, vol. 30, no. 2, May 1999.

53. "Red Rally Dimmed by Harlem Fervor," New York Times, Aug. 5, 1934, p. N3.

54. Lee Lescaze, "Reagan Still Sure Some in New Deal Espoused Fascism," Washington Post, Dec. 24, 1981, p. A7. Reagan was even more straightforward the previous August: "Anyone who wants to look at the writings of the Brain Trust of the New Deal will find that President Roosevelt's advisers admired the fascist system...They thought that private ownership with government management and control a la the Italian system was the way to go, and that has been evident in all their writings." See Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980 (Roseville, Calif.: Prima, 2001), p. 681; Robert G. Kaiser, "Those Old Reaganisms," Washington Post, Sept. 2, 1980, p. A2.

55. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Annual Message to U.S. Congress, Jan. 3, 1936, quoted in James Bovard, Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), p. 17.

56. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 340.

57. William A. Schambra, "The Quest for Community, and the Quest for a New Public Philosophy," paper presented at the American Enterprise Institute's Public Policy Week, Washington, D.C., Dec. 5-8, 1983, quoted in Robert Nisbet, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), p. 51; text of President Roosevelt's Speech to His Neighbors, New York Times, Aug. 27, 1933, p. 28.

58. Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, p. 186.

59. Ibid., p. 37. Emphasis mine.

5. THE 1960s: FASCISM TAKES TO THE STREETS

1. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 315.

2. Donald Alexander Downs, Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 172. I am aware that responsibility for the Reichstag fire is a subject of considerable debate among historians. But the Nazis did not care who was actually responsible for the fire. Rather, they exploited the fire for their own purposes. Some of the Black Nationalists at Cornell surely believed the cross was burned by white racists, but the leadership knew this was not the case and seized on the opportunity.

3. Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866-1945 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), p. 478.

4. John Toland, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), p. 75.

5. Ibid.

6. Miriam Beard, "The Tune Hitlerism Beats for Germany," New York Times, June 7, 1931.

7. Richard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 (New York: Da Capo, 1995), p. 306.

8. Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 200.

9. Walter Schultze, "The Nature of Academic Freedom," in Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich, ed. George L. Mosse (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), p. 316.

10. Downs, Cornell '69, p. 9; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, "'New Order' at Cornell and the Academic Future," Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1969, p. C11.

11. Walter Berns, "The Assault on the Universities: Then and Now," in Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 158-59.

12. Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 339.

13. Paul Farhi, "Dean Tries to Summon Spirit of the 1960s," Washington Post, Dec. 28, 2003, p. A05.

14. Kerry denies attending the session when the issue was debated. Some claim he was there but voted against the idea. Nobody credibly alleges that he supported such a policy.

15. Farhi, "Dean Tries to Summon Spirit of the 1960s," p. A05.

16. Richard J. Ellis, "Romancing the Oppressed: The New Left and the Left Out," Review of Politics 58, no. 1 (Winter 1996), pp. 109-10; James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 30-31; Tom Hayden, "Letter to the New (Young) Left," in The New Student Left: An Anthology, ed. Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, rev. and expanded ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1967), pp. 5-6. The article originally appeared in the Activist (Winter 1961).

17. Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), p. 159.

18. Peggy Kamuf, an American translator of many of Derrida's books, recalls that reading his work in 1970, while a graduate student at Yale, offered a way of finding solidarity with radicals in the streets. Deconstruction, she said, offered a way to do academic work while maintaining "that urgency of response to the abuses of power" that fed political engagement. In short, it let radical academics keep their jobs while turning the universities into incubators for radicalism. Quoted in Scott McLemee, "Derrida, a Pioneer of Literary Theory, Dies," Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 22, 2004, p. A1, chronicle.com/free/v51/i09/09a00101.htm (accessed Jan. 4, 2007).

19. Downs, Cornell '69, p. 232. See also "The Agony of Cornell," Time, May 2, 1969; Homer Bigart, "Cornell Faculty Reverses Itself on Negroes," New York Times, April 24, 1969. The trauma over the climate of betrayal and bitterness Rossiter both endured and fostered — academic, professional, and personal — doubtless contributed to his tragic decision to kill himself the following year. Caleb Rossiter, Clinton's son, discounts this view in two vivid chapters in his autobiography. However, it is difficult to read his account without concluding that the stress of these events — particularly the extreme radicalism of his own sons — played some role.

20. Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House, 1990), p. 6.

21. Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 6-7.

22. The relationship between Pragmatism and conservatism is a bit more complicated. William James was a great American philosopher, and there is much in his work that conservatives admire. And if by Pragmatism you simply mean realism or practicality, then there are a great many conservative pragmatists. But if by Pragmatism one means the constellation of theories swirling among the progressives or the work of John Dewey, then conservatives have been at the forefront of a century-long critique of Pragmatism. However, it should be said that both James and Dewey are thoroughly American philosophers whose influence in a wide range of matters defies neat categorization along the left-right axis.

23. Wolin, Seduction of Unreason, p. 60.

24. Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, p. 311.

25. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2004), pp. 16, 17; R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998), p. 39.

26. Wolin, Seduction of Unreason, p. 61; Beard, "The Tune Hitlerism Beats for Germany."

27. See Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, p. 169. The SDS itself started as an offshoot of the League for Industrial Democracy, an anti-communist socialist organization briefly headed by John Dewey. Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 232.

28. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 337.

29. Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 56.

30. Gitlin, Sixties, p. 283.

31. The Port Huron Statement, in Takin' It to the Streets: A Sixties Reader, ed. Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 61; Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution (New York: Avalon, 2005), pp. 97, 52; Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents, pp. 229, 233.

32. Gitlin, Sixties, p. 101; Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 173, 174. See also W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 8; Tom Wells, The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam (New York: Holt, 1994), pp. 117-18, 427; Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987), pp. 196-97.

33. Gitlin, Sixties, p. 107; Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, p. 291.

34. Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents, p. 235. See also Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 300-5.

35. Walter Laqueur, "Reflections on Youth Movements," Commentary, June 1969.

36. Jay W. Baird, "Goebbels, Horst Wessel, and the Myth of Resurrection and Return," Journal of Contemporary History 17, no. 4 (Oct. 1982), p. 636.

37. Ibid., pp. 642-43.

38. Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, p. 102.

39. Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 359-60; Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Collier, 1989), p. 247; Henry Raymont, "Violence as a Weapon of Dissent Is Debated at Forum in 'Village' Moderation Criticized," New York Times, Dec. 17, 1967, p. 16; Tom Hayden, "Two, Three, Many Columbias," Ramparts, June 15, 1968, p. 40, in America in the Sixties — Right, Left, and Center: A Documentary History, ed. Peter B. Levy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998), pp. 231-33. See also Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, p. 292.

40. Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, p. 310; Jeff Lyon, "The World Is Still Watching after the 1968 Democratic Convention, Nothing in Chicago Was Quite the Same Again," Chicago Tribune Magazine, July 24, 1988. See also James W. Ely Jr., "The Chicago Conspiracy Case," in American Political Trials, ed. Michael R. Belknap (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994), p. 248; Tom Hayden, Rebellion and Repression (New York: World, 1969), p. 15. For the recollections of the defendants and defense attorneys, see "Lessons of the '60s," American Bar Association Journal 73 (May 1987), pp. 32-38.

41. Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 243.

42. Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 399, 401.

43. Ibid., pp. 399, 400. This account, as well as many of the accounts in this chapter, is derived from ibid. as well as Miller's Democracy Is in the Streets.

44. Gitlin, Sixties, p. 399. Dohrn spent a decade in hiding after her involvement in the "Days of Rage" assault on Chicago, where she now works as the director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University. In 1993 she told the New York Times, "I was shocked at the anger toward me." She blamed part of the reaction to sexism — because she refused to behave like a "good girl." Susan Chira, "At Home With: Bernardine Dohrn; Same Passion, New Tactics," New York Times, Nov. 18, 1993, sec. C, p. 1.

45. The Nazis were pranksters of a sort as well. When All Quiet on the Western Front opened in Germany, Goebbels bought up huge numbers of tickets, ordering his storm troopers to heckle the movie and then release hundreds of white mice into the theater.

46. Abbie Hoffman, The Best of Abbie Hoffman (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990), p. 62; Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, pp. 285-86; Gitlin, Sixties, p. 324.

47. Richard Jensen, "Futurism and Fascism," History Today 45, no. 11 (Nov. 1995), pp. 35-41.

48. Wolin, Seduction of Unreason, p. 62.

49. Gold believed that an "agency of the people" would have to take over the United States once imperialism had been dismantled. When someone said his idea sounded like a John Bircher's worst dream, Gold replied, "Well, if it will take fascism, we'll have to have fascism." Gitlin, Sixties, p. 399.

50. I vote for the Democratic Party

They want the UN to be strong

I attend all the Pete Seeger concerts,

He sure gets me singing those songs.

And I'll send all the money you ask for

But don't ask me to come along.

So love me, love me, love me —

I'm a liberal.

(Gitlin, Sixties, p. 183.)

51. Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1972), pp. 120-21.

52. Ibid., p. 21.

53. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, p. 17.

54. Jay Nordlinger, "Che Chic," National Review, Dec. 31, 2004, p. 28.

55. Paul Berman, "The Cult of Che," Slate, Sept. 24, 2004, www.slate.com/id/2107100/ (accessed March 15, 2007); Nordlinger, "Che Chic," p. 28.

56. Lumumba, contrary to what I was taught in school, was assassinated not by the CIA but by opposing Congolese forces in a nasty civil war (though the CIA did have a plan in the works to get rid of him). He was handed over to his enemies by his former handpicked chief of staff Mobutu Sese Seko, who eventually took over the country and became a fascistic dictator whose ruthlessness didn't dissaude the American left, particularly the black left, from making him into a Pan-African hero.

57. Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), p. 22; Gitlin, Sixties, p. 344.

58. When the black fascisti took over Straight Hall, one desperate parent called campus security. The first question the security dispatcher asked the man was whether the perpetrators were white or black. When the father responded they were black, "I was told that there was nothing that could be done for us." Regarding black students and SAT scores, Thomas Sowell writes: "Most of the black students admitted to Cornell had SAT scores above the national average — but far below the averages of other Cornell students. They were in trouble because they were at Cornell — and, later, Cornell would also be in trouble because they were there...[S]ome academically able black applicants for admission were known to have been turned away, while those who fit the stereotype being sought were admitted with lower qualifications." See Thomas Sowell, "The Day Cornell Died," Weekly Standard, May 3, 1999, p. 31. Also see Berns, "Assault on the Universities."

59. Michael T. Kaufman, "Stokely Carmichael, Rights Leader Who Coined 'Black Power,' Dies at 57," New York Times, Nov. 16, 1998.

60. D'Souza, End of Racism, pp. 398-99. See also W. E. B. DuBois, "Back to Africa," Century, Feb. 1923, cited by John Henrik Clarke, ed., Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 101, 117, 134; John Hope Franklin and August Meier, eds., Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 132-34. Today, much like in the 1960s, Black Nationalist groups, journals, and "intellectuals" frequently find common cause with white supremacists. The Third World Press, run by the Black Nationalist Haki Madhubuti, typically bars white authors but makes allowances for such anti-Semitic scribblers as Michael Bradley, whose theories about the Jews are perfectly consistent with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

61. For the Forman quotation, see Nina J. Easton, "America the Enemy," Los Angeles Times Magazine, June 18, 1995, p. 8. Chavis was released after the governor of North Carolina caved to international pressure — including from the Soviet Union — alleging an unfair trial.

62. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, p. 7.

63. Morris L. Fried, "The Struggle Is the Message: The Organization and Ideology of the Anti-war Movement, by Irving Louis Horowitz," Contemporary Sociology 1, no. 2 (March 1972), pp. 122-23, citing Irving Louis Horowitz, The Struggle Is the Message: The Organization and Ideology of the Anti-war Movement (Berkeley, Calif.: Glendessary, 1970), pp. 122-23.

64. Seymour Martin Lipset, Rebellion in the University (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), p. 115; Robert Soucy, "French Fascist Intellectuals in the 1930s: An Old New Left?" French Historical Studies (Spring 1974).

6. FROM KENNEDY'S MYTH TO JOHNSON'S DREAM: LIBERAL FASCISM AND THE CULT OF THE STATE

1. Max Holland, "After Thirty Years: Making Sense of the Assassination," Reviews in American History 22, no. 2 (June 1994), pp. 192-93; "Chapter II — or Finis?" Time, Dec. 30, 1966; Philip Chalk, "Wrong from the Beginning," Weekly Standard, March 14, 2005; Mimi Swartz, "Them's Fightin' Words," Texas Monthly, July 2004.

2. "Pope Paul Warns That Hate and Evil Imperil Civil Order," New York Times, Nov. 25, 1963, p. 1; Wayne King, "Dallas Still Wondering: Did It Help Pull the Trigger?" New York Times, Nov. 22, 1983, p. A24. The "city of hate" designation remains one of the more bizarre episodes in American mass psychology. It seemed to be pegged largely to the rough treatment LBJ got in his home state from some protesting Republican women during the 1960 election, as well as an anti-UN protest in 1963 that resulted in Adlai Stevenson — then the U.S. ambassador to the UN — getting bonked on the head with an anti-UN placard.

3. Warren Commission, The Warren Commission Report: Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (New York: St. Martin's, 1992), p. 416.

4. On MacBird, see Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (New York: Free Press, 2000), p. 13. Kennedy requested $52.3 billion in military spending plus an additional $1.2 billion for the space program — which he indisputably saw as a defense-related investment — out of a total budget of $106.8 billion. Derek Leebaert, The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Shapes Our World (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), p. 267; Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America's Anti-statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 140.

5. Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980 (Roseville, Calif.: Prima, 2001), p. 23; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993), pp. 136-37. Kennedy's reaction to the Freedom Rides in the spring of 1961 was hardly unequivocal. He did the right thing by offering federal resources to stem the violence, but he was privately furious with the Congress of Racial Equality for creating strife while he was trying to focus on the Vienna summit with Khrushchev. "Can't you get your friends off those goddamned buses?" he implored Harris Wofford, his civil rights adviser. "Stop them," he pleaded. He and Bobby also fought hard to prevent Martin Luther King's March on Washington. When they failed, they worked closely with civil rights leaders to spin the message of the famous rally in the administration's favor. What became the 1964 Civil Rights Act was hopelessly bogged down in Congress when Kennedy was murdered, and it's unlikely that he would have pressed for its passage in his reelection campaign.

6. The Camelot appellation hangs on some fairly fragile hooks. Jackie Kennedy recalled that her husband liked the soundtrack to the popular Broadway musical Camelot, which had opened a month after Kennedy's election. Theodore White, a Kennedy chronicler, convinced Life magazine to run with the idea. The musical's tagline, "for that brief shining moment," became an overnight cliche to describe Kennedy's "thousand days," itself a clever bit of wordplay designed to make the Kennedy moment seem all the more precious and fleeting. See also James Reston, "What Was Killed Was Not Only the President but the Promise," New York Times Magazine, Nov. 15, 1964, p. SM24.

7. It's widely believed that the character of Superman was inspired by Nietzsche's doctrine of the Ubermensch, which can be translated as both "overman" and "superman." But it's worth noting that the actual character was an inversion of the Nietzschean idea — and the Nazified concept. Nietzsche's superman owes no loyalty to conventional morality and legalisms because he is above such petty concerns. The comic Superman bound himself to such customs even more than normal men. There is a certain nationalistic conceit to the character in that he was born in the American heartland and imbibed all that was good of Americanism. But this manifested itself in benign or beneficial patriotism more than anything else.

At the end of the issue on physical fitness, Superman and Supergirl lead a parade of Americans waving flags and holding signs supporting the president. One marcher carries a placard that reads, "OBSERVE THE PRESIDENT'S PHYSICAL FITNESS PROGRAM AND THE 'WEAKLING' AMERICANS WILL BE THE STRONG AMERICANS!" The comic was supposed to appear in early 1964, but the assassination postponed it. LBJ eventually asked DC Comics to run the issue as a tribute. Kennedy remained a recurring character after his death. In one comic Jimmy Olsen travels to the future and identifies alien villains because they are the only people who didn't observe a moment of silence for the slain president. See http://www.dialbforblog.com/archives/166/ for images from the comic and commentary (accessed July 10, 2007).

8. The election would decide, Mailer wrote, "if the desire of America was for drama or stability, for adventure or monotony." Mailer hoped Americans would choose Kennedy "for his mystery, for his promise that the country would grow or disintegrate by the unwilling charge he gave to the intensity of the myth." Norman Mailer, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," Esquire, Nov. 1960, in Pols: Great Writers on American Politicians from Bryan to Reagan, ed. Jack Beatty (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), p. 292.

9. Herbert S. Parmet, "The Kennedy Myth and American Politics," History Teacher 24, no. 1 (Nov. 1990), p. 32, citing "What JFK Meant to Us," Newsweek, Nov. 28, 1983, p. 72; Jonah Goldberg, "'Isolationism!' They Cried," National Review, April 10, 2006, p. 35; Alan McConnaughey, "America First: Attitude Emerged Before World War II," Washington Times, Dec. 12, 1991, p. A3.

10. Louis Menand, "Ask Not, Tell Not: Anatomy of an Inaugural" New Yorker, Nov. 8, 2004, p. 110.

11. John W. Jeffries, "The 'Quest for National Purpose' of 1960," American Quarterly 30, no. 4 (Autumn 1978), p. 451, citing John K. Jessup et al., The National Purpose (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. v. Newsweek had noted the previous year that "thoughtful men" were worried America had lost its "boldness and imagination, the sense of mission and dedication." Chief among these was Walter Lippmann, an elder statesman of liberalism who had led the march to war in 1917 in the hope that it would bring about a "transvaluation of values." Once again, Lippmann hoped Americans would embrace a collective mission, this time in the face of the Soviet challenge. Jeffries, "'Quest for National Purpose' of 1960," p. 454, citing "An Unwitting Paul Revere?" Newsweek, Sept. 28, 1959, pp. 33-34.

12. Adlai E. Stevenson, "National Purpose: Stevenson's View," New York Times, May 26, 1960, p. 30; Charles F. Darlington, "Not the Goal, Only the Means," New York Times, July 3, 1960, p. 25; Charles F. Darlington, letter, New York Times, May 27, 1960, p. 30.

13. Jeffries, "'Quest for National Purpose' of 1960," p. 462, citing William Attwood, "How America Feels as We Enter the Soaring Sixties," Look, Jan. 5, 1960, pp. 11-15; Leebaert, Fifty-Year Wound, p. 261.

14. William F. Buckley, "Mr. Goodwin's Great Society," National Review (September 7, 1965), p. 760.

15. Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), pp. 170, 171; David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Norton, 1980), p. xv n. 4.

16. Leebaert, Fifty-Year Wound, p. 263; Wills, Kennedy Imprisonment, p. 171.

17. H. W. Brands, The Strange Death of American Liberalism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 87-88.

18. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Norton, 1995), p. 218 n. 55, citing David Eakins, "Policy-Planning for the Establishment," in A New History of Leviathan, ed. Ronald Radosh and Murray Rothbard (New York: Dutton, 1972), p. 198.

19. James Reston, "A Portion of Guilt for All," New York Times, Nov. 25, 1963; Tom Wicker, "Johnson Bids Congress Enact Civil Rights Bill with Speed; Asks End of Hate and Violence," New York Times, Nov. 28, 1963.

20. "When JFK's Ideals Are Realized, Expiation of Death Begins, Bishop Says," Washington Post, Dec. 9, 1963, p. B7.

21. Robert N. Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967), pp. 1-21; C. L. Sulzberger, "A New Frontier and an Old Dream," New York Times, Jan. 23, 1961, p. 22.

22. Bill Kauffman, "The Bellamy Boys Pledge Allegiance," American Enterprise 13, no. 7 (Oct./Nov. 2002), p. 50.

23. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (New York: New American Library, 1960), p. 111.

24. Nicholas P. Gilman, "'Nationalism' in the United States," Quarterly Journal of Economics 4, no. 1 (Oct. 1889), pp. 50-76; Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 143.

25. The story of the Pledge of Allegiance and its National Socialist roots is a fascinating one. Rex Curry, a passionate libertarian, has made the issue his white whale. See rexcurry.net/pledgesalute.html.

26. "Hail New Party in Fervent Song," New York Times, Aug. 6, 1912, p. 1.

27. Senator Albert Beveridge, Congressional Record, Senate, Jan. 9, 1900, pp. 704-11, quoted in The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance, ed. Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom (Boston: South End Press, 1987), p. 23.

28. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1912), p. 330. The Social Gospel journal Dawn, founded in 1890, was intended "to show that the aim of socialism is embraced in the aims of Christianity and to awaken members of Christian churches to the fact that the teachings of Jesus Christ lead directly to some specific form or forms of socialism." William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 175.

29. Charles Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865-1915 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1940), p. 253.

30. James Bovard, Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), p. 4, quoting G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Collier & Son, 1902), p. 87.

31. Murray N. Rothbard, "Richard T. Ely: Paladin of the Welfare-Warfare State," Independent Review 6, no. 4 (Spring 2002), p. 586, citing Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865-1901 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), pp. 180-81; John R. Commons, "The Christian Minister and Sociology" (1892), in John R. Commons: Selected Essays, ed. Malcolm Rutherford and Warren J. Samuels (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 20; Eldon J. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), p. 60 n. 21.

32. John Lukacs, Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2005), p. 305.

33. Woodrow Wilson, "Force to the Utmost," speech at the opening of the Third Liberty Loan Campaign, delivered in the Fifth Regiment Armory, Baltimore, April 6, 1918, in The Messages and Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Albert Shaw (New York: Review of Reviews Corporation, 1924), vol. 1, p. 484; Woodrow Wilson, Address to Confederate Veterans, Washington, D.C., June 5, 1917, in ibid., p. 410; Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 10.

34. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 97.

35. An ad in a newspaper at the time gives a sense of how far the government intruded.

Here is your schedule for eating for the next 4 weeks which must be rigidly observed, says F. C. Findley, County Food Commissioner:

Monday: Wheatless every meal.

Tuesday: Meatless every meal.

Wednesday: Wheatless every meal.

Thursday: Breakfast, meatless; supper wheatless.

Friday: Breakfast, meatless; supper wheatless.

Saturday: Porkless every meal, meatless breakfast.

Sunday: Meatless breakfast; wheatless supper.

Sugar must be used very sparingly at all times. Do not put sugar in your coffee unless this is a long habit, and in that case use only one spoonful. (Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], p. 137)

36. John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2000), p. 30. See also Alex Viskovatoff, "A Deweyan Economic Methodology," in Dewey, Pragmatism, and Economic Methodology, ed. Elias L. Khalil (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 293; Virgil Michel, "Liberalism Yesterday and Tomorrow," Ethics 49, no. 4 (July 1939), pp. 417-34; Jonah Goldberg, "The New-Time Religion: Liberalism and Its Problems," National Review, May 23, 2005.

37. Lewis S. Feuer, "American Travelers to the Soviet Union, 1917-32: The Formation of a Component of New Deal Ideology," American Quarterly 14, no. 2, pt. 1 (Summer 1962), pp. 122, 126.

38. William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 284. A. J. P. Taylor made a similar observation about people's interaction with the federal government:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman...He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter a foreigner could spend his life in the country without permit and without informing the police...All this was changed by the impact of the Great War...The state established a hold over its citizens which though relaxed in peace time, was never to be removed and which the Second World War was again to increase. The history of the English people and the English State merged for the first time. (A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1965], p. 1)

39. Quoted in Scott Yenor, "A New Deal for Roosevelt," Claremont Review of Books (Winter 2006).

40. Thurman Arnold, The Folklore of Capitalism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937), p. 389.

41. Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, p. 20.

42. Walter Winchell, "Americans We Can Do Without," Liberty, Aug. 1, 1942, p. 10.

43. See Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997), pp. 179, 561.

44. Herbert McClosky, "Conservatism and Personality," American Political Science Review 52, no. 1 (March 1958), p. 35; Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking, 1950), p. ix.

45. David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 90; Casey Blake and Christopher Phelps, "History as Social Criticism: Conversations with Christopher Lasch," Journal of American History 80, no. 4 (March 1994), pp. 1310-32.

46. Bertolt Brecht, "The Solution," in Poems, 1913-1956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (New York: Routledge, 1987), p. 440.

47. Robert Dallek, Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 29; Jordan A. Schwarz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 276.

48. Schwarz, The New Dealers, p. 267.

49. Lyndon B. Johnson, "Commencement Address — the Great Society," University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, May 22, 1964, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963-64 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1965), pp. 704-7; America in the Sixties — Right, Left, and Center: A Documentary History, ed. Peter B. Levy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998), pp. 106-7. See also Hayward, Age of Reagan, p. 21.

50. Johnson, "Commencement Address — the Great Society," p. 108.

51. Charles Mohr, "Johnson, in South, Decries 'Radical' Goldwater Ideas," New York Times, Oct. 27, 1964; Cabell Phillips, "Johnson Decries Terrorist Foes of Negro Rights," New York Times, July 19, 1964; "Transcript of President's News Conference on Foreign and Domestic Affairs," New York Times, July 19, 1964.

52. Charles Mohr, "Johnson Exhorts Voters to Reject Demagogic Pleas," New York Times, Sept. 23, 1964; advertisement, New York Times, Sept. 12, 1964, p. 26; Ralph D. Barney and John C. Merrill, eds., Ethics and the Press: Readings in Mass Media Morality (New York: Hastings House, 1975), p. 229. See also Jack Shafer, "The Varieties of Media Bias, Part 1," Slate, Feb. 5, 2003, www.slate.com/id/2078200/ (accessed March 19, 2007); Jonah Goldberg, "Hold the Self-Congratulation," National Review, Oct. 24, 2005; Jeffrey Lord, "From God to Godless: The Real Liberal Terror," American Spectator, June 12, 2006, www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=9943 (accessed Jan. 16, 2007).

53. However, in this work Dewey called the existing society the Great Society. He hoped that the state could transform the Great Society into what he called the "Great Community." But Dewey's Great Community sounds much closer to what Johnson had in mind with his Great Society.

54. Robert R. Semple Jr., "Nation Seeks Way to Better Society," New York Times, July 25, 1965.

55. Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, pp. 15, 76. The lineage of the War on Poverty was similarly transparent. Just as the New Deal was sold in the language of war, the War on Poverty was another chapter in the Progressive effort to invoke the "moral equivalent of war." Indeed, most of the Great Society programs were merely greatly expanded versions of New Deal programs, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which started as an insurance plan for the widows of coal miners. Those programs, in turn, were born out of a desire to re-create the "successes" of Wilson's war socialism. See also the chapter on John Dewey by Robert Horwitz, in The History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

56. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, p. 207.

57. John B. Judis, "The Spirit of '68: What Really Caused the Sixties," New Republic, Aug. 31, 1998.

58. The Feminine Mystique is an excellent example of how powerfully the Holocaust had distorted the liberal mind. A longtime communist journalist and activist, Friedan cast herself in The Feminine Mystique as a conventional housewife completely ignorant of politics. In a disturbing extended metaphor she argued that housewives were victims of Nazi-like oppression. The "women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps," she wrote. The home, Friedan wrote in direct echoes of Horkheimer, was a "comfortable concentration camp." The analogy is sufficiently grotesque, intellectually and morally, to merit further dissection.

59. This in turn led to another front of the great awakening: a fight to religious orthodoxy among Christian conservatives and others who rejected the politicization of their faiths.

60. For many, drugs became the new sacrament. After the New Left imploded, Tom Hayden went into hiding "among the psychedelic daredevils of the counterculture," believing that drugs were a way of "deepening self awareness" and helping him to find spiritual meaning and authenticity. Even the most ardent exponents of the drug culture grounded their defense of drugs in explicitly religious terms. Self-proclaimed gurus such as Timothy Leary, a Harvard professor who became a "spiritual guide" with tabs of acid as his Communion wafers, spoke incessantly about how drugs lead to a "religious experience." William Braden, a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God, one of countless books and tracts that tried to update the new counterculture with the "New Theology," as it was called.

61. William Braden, "The Seduction of the Spirit," Washington Post, Sept. 9, 1973, pp. BW1, BW13.

62. The Reverend Martin Marty, an academic theologian and editor at the Christian Century, proclaimed in a series of speeches in 1965 that the radicals were "moral agents" and described writers such as James Baldwin as "charismatic prophets." Marty made these remarks at a speech at Columbia University. In response, a student radical challenged him: "What you say is meaningless because the Great Society is basically immoral and rotten." Marty responded that such comments were typical of those who chose to be "morally pure" instead of politically relevant. In other words, moral purity lay at the radicals' end of the political spectrum. "Radicals Called 'Moral Agents,'" New York Times, July 26, 1965, p. 19.

63. The famous passage is from FDR's 1935 State of the Union address: "The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of a sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America. Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers."

64. Hayward, Age of Reagan, p. 20, citing "T.R.B. from Washington," New Republic, March 14, 1964, p. 3, and citing Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), p. 48.

65. Mickey Kaus, The End of Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

66. Hayward, Age of Reagan, p. 124. A demographic surge in male baby boomers is partly to blame for the rise in crime, but the cultural, legal, and political climate was undoubtedly the chief culprit. In the 1960s policy intellectuals believed that "the system" itself caused crime, and virtually all of the legal reforms of the day pushed in the direction of giving criminals more rights and making the job of police more difficult. Culturally, a wide array of activists and intellectuals had proclaimed that crime — especially black crime — was morally warranted political "rebellion."

67. Ibid., p. 26, citing Richard Epstein, Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 186-88; Penn Kemble and Josh Muravchik, "The New Politics & the Democrats" Commentary, Dec. 1972, pp. 78-84. McGovern later joked that his rules opened the doors to the Democratic Party and "twenty million people walked out."

68. Hayward, Age of Reagan, pp. 90-92.

69. "Text of the Moynihan Memorandum on the Status of Negroes," New York Times, March 1, 1970. See also Peter Kihss, "'Benign Neglect' on Race Is Proposed by Moynihan," New York Times, March 1, 1970, p. 1.

70. Parmet, "Kennedy Myth and American Politics," p. 35, citing Randall Rothenberg, "The Neoliberal Club," Esquire, Feb. 1982, p. 42.

71. Douglas Brinkley, "Farewell to a Friend," New York Times, July 19, 1999, p. A17; Reliable Sources, CNN, July 24, 1999. See also Tim Cuprisin, "Few Shows, Cost Blurring Appeal of Digital TV," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 27, 1999, p. 8.

7. LIBERAL RACISM: THE EUGENIC GHOST IN THE FASCIST MACHINE

1. Michele Parente, "Rangel Ties GOP Agenda to Hitler," Newsday, Feb. 19, 1995, p. A38; Bond is quoted in "Washington Whispers," U.S. News & World Report, July 28, 2003, p. 12; Marc Morano, "Harry Belafonte Calls Black Republicans 'Tyrants,'" Cybercast News Service, Aug. 8, 2005; Steve Dunleavy, "There's Nothing Fascist About a Final Verdict," New York Post, Dec. 13, 2000, p. 6.

2. And to the extent these various dark chapters of liberalism are ever mentioned, they are mentioned by hard-left critics of America itself. The net effect is that whenever conservatives commit an alleged evil, it is the result of conservatism. Whenever liberals commit an alleged evil, it is the result either of liberals' insufficiently severe liberalism or of America itself. In short, liberalism is never to blame and conservatives always are.

3. Adolph Reed Jr., "Intellectual Brownshirts," Progressive, Dec. 1994.

4. Sherwin B. Nuland, "The Death of Hippocrates," New Republic, Sept. 13, 2004, p. 31.

5. Alan Wolfe, "Hidden Injuries," New Republic, July 7, 1997.

6. A former adviser to Teddy Roosevelt, and an extremist even by the standards of many eugenicists, Grant wrote, "Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race." Quoted in Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 10. See also Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 24; Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), p. 291.

7. Black, War Against the Weak, p. xviii.

8. Charles Murray, "Deeper into the Brain," National Review, Jan. 24, 2000, p. 49; Thomas C. Leonard, "'More Merciful and Not Less Effective': Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era," History of Political Economy 35, no. 4 (Winter 2003), p. 707.

9. Diane Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," Journal of the History of Ideas 45, no. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1984), p. 586 n. 56, citing H. G. Wells, Sociological Papers (London, 1905), p. 60; William J. Hyde, "The Socialism of H. G. Wells in the Early Twentieth Century," Journal of the History of Ideas 17, no. 2 (April 1956), p. 220; H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli (New York: Duffield, 1910), p. 379. In A Modern Utopia (1905), Wells wrote:

The State is justified in saying, before you may add children to the community for the community to educate and in part to support, you must be above a certain minimum of personal efficiency...and a certain minimum of physical development, and free of any transmissible disease...Failing these simple qualifications, if you and some person conspire [note the use of the criminal "conspire"] and add to the population of the State, we will, for the sake of humanity, take over the innocent victim of your passions, but we shall insist that you are under a debt to the State of a peculiarly urgent sort, and one you will certainly pay, even if it is necessary to use restraint to get the payment out of you. (H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia [London, 1905], pp. 183-84, quoted in Michael Freeden, "Eugenics and Progressive Thought: A Study in Ideological Affinity," Historical Journal 22, no. 3 [Sept. 1979], p. 656)

10. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, 1903), p. 43; Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," p. 568, citing George Bernard Shaw, Sociological Papers (London, 1905), pp. 74-75; Shaw, Man and Superman, pp. 45, 43; George Bernard Shaw, preface to Major Barbara (New York: Penguin, 1917), p. 47.

11. Freeden, "Eugenics and Progressive Thought," p. 671; Chris Nottingham, The Pursuit of Serenity: Havelock Ellis and the New Politics (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), pp. 185, 213; Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," p. 567, citing J. B. S. Haldane, "Darwin on Slavery," Daily Worker (London), Nov. 14, 1949.

12. Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," pp. 568, 573.

13. In its first year of publication, a full quarter of the magazine's contributions came from the British Isles. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 276.

14. For more of such encomiums, see Yosal Rogat, "Mr. Justice Holmes: A Dissenting Opinion," Stanford Law Review 15, no. 1 (Dec. 1962), pp. 3-44.

15. William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 19. Emphasis mine.

16. Robert J. Cynkar, "Buck v. Bell: 'Felt Necessities' v. Fundamental Values?" Columbia Law Review 81, no. 7 (Nov. 1981), p. 1451.

17. In 1911 Wilson asked Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen, the state's leading eugenicist and an expert on epilepsy, to draft the law. A Polish Catholic of Jewish extraction and American citizenship, Katzen-Ellenbogen has a story too lengthy to recount here. But it is worth noting that this profoundly evil man later found himself a doctor to the SS in France and ultimately a "prisoner" who ended up working with the butchers of Buchenwald. He personally murdered thousands — often in the name of eugenic theories he developed in American psychiatric hospitals — and tortured countless more. The "science" he learned in America was quite warmly received by the SS. In a grotesque miscarriage of justice, he escaped execution at Nuremberg. See Edwin Black, "Buchenwald's American-Trained Nazi," Jerusalem Report, Sept. 22, 2003.

18. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 345, 191.

19. Charles Richard Van Hise, The Conservation of Natural Resources in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1910), p. 378.

20. Scott Gordon, The History and Philosophy of Social Science (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 521; Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 68.

21. Justice Butler did not offer a written opinion, but there are two (compatible) possible explanations for his dissent. One, Butler was a social Darwinist in the sense that he didn't believe the state should "interfere, interfere, interfere!" as Sidney Webb had put it. Two, he was the Court's only Catholic at the time, and the Church was resolute in its teachings against anything that smacked of eugenics.

22. Edward Pearce, writing in the British Guardian, calls Spencer "a downright evil man...whose passion for eugenics and elimination made him the daydreamer of things to come." Edward Pearce, "Nietzsche Is Radically Unsound," Guardian, July 8, 1992, p. 20. Edwin Black, author of War Against the Weak, claims that eugenics was born of Spencer's ideas and that Spencer "completely denounced charity" in Social Statics. Black clearly has not read the book; neither of these things is true. See Roderick T. Long, "Herbert Spencer: The Defamation Continues," Aug. 28, 2003, www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/long3.html (accessed March 13, 2007).

23. Part of the problem is that Hofstadter simply got much of the history wrong (a point even the left-wing historian Eric Foner is forced to concede in his introduction to the 1992 edition of Social Darwinism in American Thought). Fifteen years after the publication of Hofstadter's book, Irvin Wyllie of the University of Wisconsin demonstrated that almost none of the Gilded Age industrialists expressed themselves in Darwinian terms or took much notice of the Darwin fad among the intellectual classes. Even the phrase "social Darwinism" was almost unknown during the so-called age of the robber barons. In one egregious example, Hofstadter erroneously attributed a statement about the "survival of the fittest" to John D. Rockefeller. Rather, it was Rockefeller's college-educated son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., who offered the throwaway line in 1902 in an address at Brown University. Irvin G. Wyllie, "Social Darwinism and the Businessman," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Oct. 15, 1959, p. 632, citing Raymond B. Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait (New York: Harper, 1956), pp. 130-31.

24. The progressive Jane Addams worked closely with the Chicago judge Harry Olson, the founder of the American Eugenics Society and onetime president of the Eugenics Research Association. As a pioneer of juvenile courts in America, Olson was dedicated to weeding out "the cheaper races." He advocated sterilization when necessary, but his preferred remedy was to set up a psychiatric gulag where the unfit could live out their lives segregated from the better human stocks. In 1916 the New Republic demonstrated the spirit of compromise among progressives in an editorial (almost surely written by Croly):

Laissez-faire as a policy of population leads straight to perdition ...Imbecility breeds imbecility as certainly as white hens breed white chickens; and under laissez-faire imbecility is given full chance to breed, and does so in fact at a rate far superior to that of able stocks... We may suggest that a socialized policy of population cannot be built upon a laissez-faire economic policy. So long as the state neglects its good blood, it will let its bad blood alone...When the state assumes the duty of giving a fair opportunity for development to every child, it will find unanimous support for a policy of extinction of stocks incapable of profiting from their privileges. (New Republic, March 18, 1916; emphasis mine)

Translation: Cast the social safety net as far and as wide as possible, and all good progressives will agree that whoever's left out of the net will be a candidate for "extinction."

25. Daylanne English, "W. E. B. DuBois's Family Crisis," American Literature 72, no. 2 (June 2000), pp. 297, 293; Charles Valenza, "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?" Family Planning Perspectives 17, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1985), pp. 44-46.

26. Jesse Walker, "Hooded Progressivism," Reason, Dec. 2, 2005.

27. Rexford Tugwell, FDR's Brain Truster, claims, to the contrary, that it was his mentor Simon Patten who deserves the honor of coining the phrase. Leonard, "'More Merciful and Not Less Effective,'" pp. 693-94, 696 n. 13.

28. David M. Kennedy, "Can We Still Afford to Be a Nation of Immigrants?" Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1996, pp. 52-68.

29. Edward Alsworth Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (New York: Macmillan, 1901), p. 418.

30. Sidney Webb, "The Economic Theory of a Legal Minimum Wage," Journal of Political Economy 20, no. 10 (Dec. 1912), p. 992, quoted in Leonard, "'More Merciful and Not Less Effective,'" p. 703.

31. Edward Alsworth Ross, Seventy Years of It (New York: Appleton-Century, 1936), p. 70, quoted in Leonard, "'More Merciful and Not Less Effective,'" p. 699; Royal Meeker, "Review of Cours d'economie politique," Political Science Quarterly 25, no. 3 (1910), p. 544, quoted in Leonard, "'More Merciful and Not Less Effective,'" p. 703.

32. Commons is rightly a member of the "Labor Hall of Fame." For a glowing summary of his accomplishments, see Jack Barbash, "John R. Commons: Pioneer of Labor Economics," Monthly Labor Review 112, no. 5 (May 1989), pp. 44-49, available at

www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1989/05/art4full.pdf (accessed March 16, 2007). The historian Joseph Dorfman writes, "More than any other economist [Commons] was responsible for the conversion into public policy of reform proposals designed to alleviate defects in the industrial system." Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in America, 1918-1933 (New York: Viking, 1959), vols. 4-5, p. 377, quoted in Barbash, "John R. Commons," p. 44.

A onetime president of the American Economic Association, Commons complained in his influential Races and Immigrants in America that "competition has no respect for superior races," which was why "the race with lowest necessities displaces others." Hence, "the Jewish sweat-shop is the tragic penalty paid by that ambitious race." John R. Commons, Races and Immigrants in America (New York: Macmillan, 1907), pp. 151, 148.

33. "The negro could not possibly have found a place in American industry had he come as a free man...[I]f such races are to adopt that industrious life which is a second nature to races of the temperate zones, it is only through some form of compulsion." Leonard, "'More Merciful and Not Less Effective,'" p. 701.

34. Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 47. The Swedes — long the model of humane Third Way economics — had passed eugenics laws around the same time as the Nazis. Even more disturbing, the Swedes continued the practice well into the mid-1970s. Over sixty thousand Swedes were forcibly sterilized. Or, to be more fair, some were given the option of being locked up until their child-bearing years were over instead of going under the knife. Among those who received "treatment" were children of racially mixed parents, Swedes with "gypsy features," unwed mothers with "too many" children, habitual criminals, and even a boy deemed "sexually precocious." The Danes passed similar eugenics laws in 1929, even before the Nazis. They sterilized eleven thousand and kept their laws on the books until the late 1960s. In Finland eleven thousand people were sterilized, and four thousand involuntary abortions were performed between 1945 and 1970. Similar revelations came from Norway, France, Belgium, and other quarters of enlightened Europe. A year earlier, Alberta, Canada, went through a similar controversy when it was revealed that nearly three thousand people were sterilized for all the usual reasons. Some were told they were being admitted for appendectomies and left the hospital barren. Adrian Wooldridge, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Sept. 15, 1997.

35. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 34, 35.

36. As Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann note, after 1935 Nazi "social policy was indivisible from the 'selection' of 'alien' races and those of 'lesser racial value.'" Ibid., p. 48

37. John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 144.

38. Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 124.

39. Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? (New York: William Morrow, 1984), p. 84.

40. Maureen Dowd, "Could Thomas Be Right?" New York Times, June 25, 2003, p. A25; Steele, White Guilt, p. 174.

41. David Tell, "Planned Un-parenthood: Roe v. Wade at Thirty," Weekly Standard, Jan. 27, 2003, pp. 35-41; Gloria Feldt, Behind Every Choice Is a Story (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2002), pp. xix, xvi; Faye Wattleton, "Humanist of the Year Acceptance Speech," Humanist, July-Aug. 1986.

42. Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (New York: Norton, 1938), p. 70.

43. Daniel J. Kevles, "Sex Without Fear," New York Times, June 28, 1992.

44. Valenza, "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?" p. 45, citing David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 115; H. G. Wells, introduction to The Pivot of Civilization, by Margaret Sanger (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2003), p. 42.

45. While Sanger cast herself as a champion of female liberation, her arguments nonetheless elevated the private realm of procreation to the public agenda. In Sanger's vision women would be "freed" from the reproductive tyranny of the family, but in order for this to happen, women — particularly certain women — would be subjected to a new tyranny of the eugenic planner. Marie Stopes, the British Margaret Sanger (that is, the mother of the British birth control movement), was of similar temperament. "Utopia," she explained, "could be reached in my life time had I the power to issue inviolable edicts." Quoted in Mukti Jain Campion, Who's Fit to Be a Parent? (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 131.

46. Quoted in Black, War Against the Weak, p. 133. Also quoted in Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, p. 216.

47. Steven W. Mosher, "The Repackaging of Margaret Sanger," Wall Street Journal, May 5, 1997, p. A18.

48. "Birth control is no negative philosophy concerned solely with the number of children brought into this world," she writes. "It is not merely a question of population. Primarily it is the instrument of liberation and of human development." Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, p. 224.

49. Valenza, "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?" p. 45, citing Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right (New York: Grossman, 1976), p. 332; Margaret Sanger to C. J. Gamble, Dec. 10, 1939, quoted in Valenza, "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?" p. 46.

50. Colman McCarthy, "Jackson's Reversal on Abortion," Washington Post, May 21, 1988, p. A27.

51. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 139.

52. Bill Bennett, Morning in America, Sept. 28, 2005; for transcript, see mediamatters.org/items/200509280006 (accessed March 16, 2007); see also Brian Faler, "Bennett Under Fire for Remark on Crime and Black Abortions," Washington Post, Sept. 30, 2005, p. A05. Bob Herbert, "Impossible, Ridiculous, Repugnant," New York Times, Oct. 6, 2005, p. A37; The Big Story with John Gibson, Fox News Channel, Sept. 30, 2005; see also Jonah Goldberg, "'Ridiculous,'" National Review Online, Oct. 7, 2005; Fox News Sunday, Fox News Channel, Oct. 2, 2005; "Talk-Back Live," editorial, Washington Times, Oct. 5, 2005, p. A16.

53. Ramesh Ponnuru, The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2006), p. 65.

54. "The Clinton RU-486 Files: The Clinton Administration's Radical Drive to Force an Abortion Drug on America," Judicial Watch Special Report, 2006, available at www.judicialwatch.org/archive/2006/jw-ru486-report.pdf (accessed March 16, 2007).

55. Steven W. Mosher, "The Repackaging of Margaret Sanger," Wall Street Journal, May 5, 1997.

56. Tell, "Planned Un-parenthood," p. 40.

57. Sheryl Blunt, "Saving Black Babies," Christianity Today, Feb. 1, 2003.

58. Peter Singer, "Killing Babies Isn't Always Wrong," Spectator, Sept. 16, 1995, pp. 20-22.

59. Lyndon Johnson laid out the rationale in his 1965 speech introducing affirmative action when he proclaimed, "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." Rhetorically, this was very Wilsonian in that it translated an entire people into a single collective "person." Lyndon B. Johnson, "To Fulfill These Rights," remarks at the Howard University commencement, June 4, 1965. For full text, see www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/650604.asp (accessed May 8, 2007).

60. Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. xxiii.

61. Gene Edward Veith Jr., Modern Fascism: The Threat to the Judeo-Christian Worldview (St. Louis: Concordia, 1993), p. 134.

62. Andrew J. Coulson, "Planning Ahead Is Considered Racist?" Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 1, 2006; Debera Carlton Harrell, "School District Pulls Web Site After Examples of Racism Spark Controversy," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 2, 2006. The guideline was withdrawn in response to protests. But one can be sure the attitudes that spawned it are intact. Richard Delgado, "Rodrigo's Seventh Chronicle: Race, Democracy, and the State," 41 UCLA Law Review 720, 734 (1994), cited in Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry, Beyond All Reason: The Radical Assault on Truth in American Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 29.

63. The law professor Luther Wright Jr. suggests that America adopt more rigid racial classifications for all of its citizens and that racial impostors be subjected to "fines and immediate job or benefit termination." Luther Wright Jr., "Who's Black, Who's White, and Who Cares: Reconceptualizing the United States's Definition of Race and Racial Classifications," Vanderbilt Law Review, March 1995, p. 513. A similar phenomenon is at work with American Indians. The Native American population in the United States has been growing enormously over the last two decades, far in excess of what is mathematically possible given their fertility rate and death rates. And since, by definition, it's impossible for Native Americans to immigrate to America, the only possible explanation is that more people find it advantageous to call themselves Indians, thanks to our spoils system.

64. Yolanda Woodlee, "Williams Aide Resigns in Language Dispute," Washington Post, Jan. 27, 1999, p. B1.

8. LIBERAL FASCIST ECONOMICS

1. Kevin Phillips, a former aide to Richard Nixon, has turned himself into a cottage industry as the voice of "real" conservatism and the "real" Republican Party. He is in fact the voice of the old socially meddling Progressivism that used to mark the bipartisan consensus between the Democrats and the Republicans. As for the charge that George W. Bush's grandfather was a Nazi collaborator of some sort, put forward in Phillips's book American Dynasty, Peter Schweizer demonstrates why this is such a bad-faith slander:

One of Phillips's most attention-grabbing chapters posits the theory that the Bushes were involved in the rise of Adolf Hitler. While he correctly notes that Brown Brothers Harriman, an investment-banking firm employing Prescott Bush and George H. Walker (George W.'s great-grandfather), invested in Nazi-era German companies, Phillips fails to note that it was Averell Harriman, later FDR's ambassador to Moscow and Truman's commerce secretary, who initiated these investments (and some in Soviet Russia) before either of the Bushes joined the firm. Prescott Bush did not oversee these investments; the reality is that he was involved almost exclusively in managing the firm's domestic portfolio. It was Harriman who largely managed the foreign investments and, accordingly, it was he who met German and Soviet leaders. (Peter Schweizer, "Kevin Phillips's Politics of Deceit," National Review Online, March 30, 2004, www.nationalreview.com/comment/schweizer200403300907.asp [accessed Jan. 23, 2007])

2. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., "Crimes Against Nature," Rolling Stone, Dec. 11, 2003; Rebecca Shoval, "Al Franken Airs Show at Ithaca College," Cornell Daily Sun, April 26, 2006, www.cornellsun.com/node/17563 (accessed Jan. 23, 2007); John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), p. 120.

3. Jeffrey T. Schnapp writes, "The notion that fascism represented a 'third way' with respect to capitalist and communist development was a key feature of the movement's self-definition. In contrast to the democratic leveling and standardization of life attributed to capitalism, and to the collectivism and materialism attributed to bolshevism, fascism claimed to be able to provide all of the advantages of accelerated modernization, without the disadvantages such as the loss of individuality and nationality, or of higher values such as the pursuit of heroism, art, tradition, and spiritual transcendence." Jeffrey T. Schnapp, "Fascinating Fascism," in "The Aesthetics of Fascism," special issue, Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (April 1996), p. 240.

4. Over and over again, in popular articles about fascism, serious authors routinely assert that fascism constitutes "the rejection of both liberalism and socialism," as Alexander Stille wrote in the New York Times. Now, it is true that fascists opposed both socialism and liberalism. But these words had specific connotations during the era of classical fascism. Socialism in this context means Bolshevism, an internationalist ideology that called for the complete abrogation of private property and decried other socialist ideologies as "fascist." Liberalism in the 1920s and 1930s was defined as free-market laissez-faire. Translated into contemporary categories, fascism was a rejection of both free-market capitalism and totalitarian communism. That means something slightly different from "the rejection of both liberalism and socialism." Alexander Stille, "The Latest Obscenity Has Seven Letters," New York Times, Sept. 13, 2003, sec. B, p. 9.

5. A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free Press, 1969), p. 12; Robert S. Wistrich, "Leon Trotsky's Theory of Fascism," in "Theories of Fascism," special issue, Journal of Contemporary History 11, no. 4 (Oct. 1976), p. 161, citing Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (New York: Pathfinder, 1972), p. 5.

6. Peter Davies and Derek Lynch, eds., The Routledge Companion to Fascism and the Far Right (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 52; Palmiro Togliatti, Lectures on Fascism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), pp. 1-10; Martin Kitchen, Fascism (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 46; Henry Ashby Turner Jr., ed., Reappraisals of Fascism (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), p. xi.

7. Henry Ashby Turner Jr., German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 75.

8. Ibid., p. 347.

9. In the European tradition, one could quite easily make the case that these arrangements are right-wing, historically speaking, though that is not an open-and-shut case, since even in Europe today free-market economics is described as an ideology of the right. In mid-century Germany, things get even more confusing because, thanks to Bismarck, classical liberalism was extinguished in the 1870s, and what was called liberalism there was in fact statism. In other words, both left and right were left-wing as we understand the terms in America.

10. "Packers Face Report Music," Washington Post, June 7, 1906, p. 4; Timothy P. Carney, The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley & Sons, 2006), pp. 37-38. See also Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963), pp. 103, 107.

11. Carney, Big Ripoff, p. 40; Kolko, Triumph of Conservatism, pp. 39, 174.

12. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 202, 359.

13. Carney, Big Ripoff, p. 42, citing Murray Rothbard, "War Collectivism in World War I," in A New History of Leviathan, ed. Ronald Radosh and Murray Rothbard (New York: Dutton, 1972), p. 70; Paul A. C. Kostinen, "The 'Industrial-Military Complex' in Historical Perspective: World War I," Business History Review (Winter 1967), p. 381.

14. Grosvenor Clarkson, Industrial America in the World War: The Strategy Behind the Line, 1917-1918 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), p. 63; Robert Higgs, "Crisis and Quasi-Corporatist Policy-Making: The U.S. Case in Historical Perspective," The World & I, Nov. 1988, reprinted by the Independent Institute, www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=312 (accessed Jan. 24, 2007).

15. While in the 1920s, particularly under Calvin Coolidge, the state unraveled some — but by no means all — of the corporatist excess of Wilson's war socialism, many in the government continued to advance the cause. One of them was the secretary of commerce from 1921 to 1928, Herbert Hoover. Contrary to the absurd propaganda that Hoover was some starry-eyed free marketeer, the director of the Food Administration in Woodrow Wilson's cabinet was committed to "organizing" American business to cooperate with government hand in hand. Most economic historians see more continuity than "revolution" in FDR's 1932 economic policies. It was FDR's politics that constituted the real break with the past. He militarized corporatism — just as his overseas counterparts had done — making the New Deal the "moral equivalent of war." The segue to real war was nearly as seamless for Americans as it was for Germans, though the economy was permanently transformed, much to the liking of liberals and business, even before the war began. William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 41.

16. Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), pp. 347, 348, 349; William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 87.

17. Carney, Big Ripoff, p. 46; Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 37.

18. John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 164; William G. Welk, "Fascist Economic Policy and the N.R.A.," Foreign Affairs, Oct. 1933, pp. 98-109. I have refrained from recounting the literally numberless similar comments from communists and hard socialists in the United States because the view that New Dealism was fascist was so widespread. Also, thanks to the Stalinist doctrine of social fascism, it was official policy among Reds and other socialists in America to say it was so, even if they didn't think it was. But suffice it to say everyone from Norman Thomas on down repeatedly and cavalierly referred to Hoover and FDR as fascists at one point or another.

19. When Brockway visited the United States, he became even more convinced that Rooseveltism was fascism. He was particularly horrified by the Civilian Conservation Corps work camps, which "remind one immediately of the Labour Service Camps in Fascist Germany. One has an uneasy feeling that the American camps, no less than the German, would be transferred from civilian to military purposes immediately war or a social uprising threatened, and that behind the mind of the military authorities in charge of them their potential military value is dominant." Barbara C. Malament, "British Labour and Roosevelt's New Deal: The Response of the Left and the Unions," Journal of British Studies 17, no. 2 (Spring 1978), pp. 137, 144. See also Giuseppe Bottai, "Corporate State and the N.R.A.," Foreign Affairs, July 1935, pp. 612-24.

20. Anne O'Hare McCormick, "Hitler Seeks Jobs for All Germans," New York Times, July 10, 1933, pp. 1, 6.

21. In his 1929 "state of the nation" address, Mussolini boasted of his success in implementing the corporate state:

The employed are integrated within the institutions of the regime: syndicalism and corporatism enable the whole nation to be organized. The system is based on the legal recognition of professional unions, on collective contracts, on the prohibition of strikes and lock-outs...[This approach] has already borne fruit. Labour and capital have ceased to consider their antagonism an inexorable fact of history: the conflicts which inevitably arise are solved peacefully thanks to an increasing degree of conscious class collaboration. The social legislation of Italy is the most advanced in the world: it ranges from the law on the eight-hour day to compulsory insurance against tuberculosis. (Benito Mussolini, "The Achievements of the Fascist Revolution," in Fascism, ed. Roger Griffin [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], pp. 63-64)

22. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 311.

23. Frank Kingdon, That Man in the White House: You and Your President (New York: Arco, 1944), p. 120; Helen M. Burns, The American Banking Community and New Deal Banking Reforms, 1933-1935 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1974), p. 100; David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Norton, 1980), pp. 25-26.

24. William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty That Armed Germany at War (New York: Back Bay Books, 2003), p. 152.

25. Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 38.

26. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 73.

27. Jay W. Baird, "From Berlin to Neubabelsberg: Nazi Film Propaganda and Hitler Youth Quex," in "Historians and Movies: The State of the Art: Part 1," special issue, Journal of Contemporary History 18, no. 3 (July 1983), p. 495; Peter Goddard, "The Subtle Side of Nazi Propaganda Machine," Toronto Star, Jan. 19, 1996, p. D4.

28. Proctor, Nazi War on Cancer, p. 138.

29. Stuart Chase, The Economy of Abundance (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 313. The progressive economist John Commons said that the new system of pressure groups and trade associations created by the New Deal amounted to "an occupational parliament of the American people, more truly representative than the Congress elected by territorial divisions. They are the informal American counterparts of Mussolini's 'corporate state,' the Italian occupational state." Abram L. Harris, "John R. Commons and the Welfare State," Southern Economic Journal 19, no. 2 (Oct. 1952), pp. 222-33; Higgs, "Crisis and Quasi-Corporatist Policy-Making."

30. Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 185.

31. When it was still unclear whether the Nazis would attain power in Germany, Gustav Krupp, the patron of the enormous and infamous arms manufacturer, gave specific instructions to his chauffeur. When leaving meetings with various political leaders, he explained, he told his driver to pay careful attention to which hand he carried his gloves in. If Krupp emerged with his gloves in his right hand, the driver was to give him the traditional Prussian greeting (clicked heels and a tap of the hat). If Krupp had his gloves in his left hand, the chauffeur was instructed to give him the full "Heil Hitler" salute, which Gustav would return with equal gusto. Krupp, like most of Germany's leading businessmen and industrialists, did not like Hitler or the Nazis. Indeed, Krupp — who was rightly tried for war crimes at Nuremberg — had joined other business leaders in trying to prevent Hitler's appointment to the chancellorship. But when it was clear that history was on the side of Nazism, German business started to fall in line.

32. Lizette Alvarez, "An 'Icon of Technology' Encounters Some Rude Political Realities," New York Times, March 4, 1998, p. D4.

33. For the Nazi Party platform, see www.hitler.org/writings/programme. Alan Brinkley's Voices of Protest has an outstanding discussion of the sources of anti-department-store rage. The chief problem was that the big chains put local general stores out of business. These stores were important cultural and financial institutions in rural America, providing, among other things, credit to farmers during bad seasons. See Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 198.

34. Neil Steinberg, New York Daily News, Feb. 13, 2005.

35. Roughly 40 percent (or slightly over forty million) of American households own at least one dog, and roughly 35 percent of households contain a cat (and half of them have more than one). The vast majority of pet owners pay for veterinary services in cash with almost no paperwork and no long waits and with a high quality of service. Competition to get into veterinary school is tougher than it is to get into medical school. Why? Because Congress stays out of it (and because they haven't allowed the trial lawyers to get into it). And because government leaves the vets alone, the vets leave government alone.

36. As state governments get involved in more regulatory issues, the numbers of lobbyists at the state level have exploded as well. New York State, for example, has nearly four thousand registered lobbyists.

37. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "A Tale of Tobacco, Pleasure, Profits and Death," New York Times, April 15, 1996.

38. Christine Hall, "Unholy Alliance," National Review Online, April 12, 2006.

39. The New York Times reported, "Business leaders applauded yesterday, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the sweeping proposals announced by President Nixon Sunday night." Robert D. Hershey Jr., "Psychological Lift Seen," New York Times, Aug. 17, 1971, p. 1.

40. Hillary Rodham Clinton, It Takes a Village (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 301.

41. Kaus (who once worked for Reich at the Federal Trade Commission — charged with figuring out how to rule that closing a factory was an "unfair trade practice") offers a few examples from Reich's writings. "But must we choose between zero-sum nationalism and impassive cosmopolitanism?" Reich asks. No! There is "a third, superior position: a positive economic nationalism." "American political rhetoric often frames the decision in the dramatic terms of myth: either we leave the market free, or the government controls it," Reich complains. "There is a third alternative, however." "Two fictions confound discussions of economic change in America. The first is the fiction of automatic adjustment," where layoffs have little negative impact. The "other, opposite fiction," according to Reich, is that people "never adjust to change but simply suffer." Reich claims for himself a "middle, messier ground" in which "[t]here are many options" for pragmatic, expert-driven control of the economy, using capitalism and socialism together. Mickey Kaus, "The Policy Hustler," New Republic, Dec. 7, 1992, pp. 16-23.

42. Ibid., p. 20.

43. When Reagan left office, President George H. W. Bush was ill equipped philosophically to deal with the rising clamor for a more planned economy, particularly when the recession hit (which the media exaggerated to great political effect). Once again, advocates of industrial policy dusted off arguments for a planned prosperity grounded in the moral equivalents of war. "Our principal rivals today are no longer military," George Fisher, the chairman of the Council on Competitiveness under Bush, offered in a widespread refrain. "They are those who pursue economic, technology, and industrial policies designed to expand their shares of global markets. This is the way it is. U.S. policy must reflect this reality if we are to remain a world leader and a role model." The former defense secretary Harold Brown called for "a new alliance between government and industry" to develop new technologies. See Kevin Phillips, "U.S. Industrial Policy: Inevitable and Ineffective," Harvard Business Review, July/August 1992.

44. Hobart Rowan, "Clinton's Approach to Industrial Policy," Washington Post, Oct. 11, 1992, p. H1; Paul A. Gigot, "How the Clintons Hope to Snare the Middle Class," Wall Street Journal, Sept. 24, 1993, p. A10.

45. This sort of interference has a cascading effect throughout the economy, creating even more perverse incentives for government and business to get in bed together. Because American companies are required to pay twice the global market price for sugar, most big sugar consumers — Coca-Cola, for example — use corn sweeteners in their soft drinks instead of sugar. Archer Daniels Midland makes a lot of corn sweetener, which is why it gives a lot of money to politicians who support sugar subsidies.

46. Obviously, much of this is marketing. Starbucks customers, according to a survey by Zogby International, are more likely to be liberal (and female) by a margin of roughly two to one (Republicans and men prefer Dunkin' Donuts). But one shouldn't overlook the point that if "liberals" prefer Starbucks, it is in Starbucks' interest that more people become liberal, which is why it spends so much money on what amounts to public education. Zogby Consumer Profile Finding, "Starbucks Brews Up Trouble for Dunkin' Donuts: Seattle Chain's Coffee Preferred by 34% to 30%; 'Starbucks Divide' Evident in Age, Politics of Coffee's Drinkers," August 8, 2005, http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1016 (accessed June 26, 2007).

47. Conversation with Ronald Bailey, science correspondent, Reason magazine.

48. Ned Sullivan and Rich Schiafo, "Talking Green, Acting Dirty," New York Times, June 12, 2005, p. 23; "The Profiteer: Jeff Immelt," Rolling Stone, www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/8742315/the_profiteer/ (accessed March 18, 2007).

49. See www.ceousa.org/pdfs/eeoctestimony5=06.pdf (accessed May 8, 2007).

9. BRAVE NEW VILLAGE: HILLARY CLINTON AND THE MEANING OF LIBERAL FASCISM

1. Interview on Fresh Air, National Public Radio, Oct. 18, 2005.

2. Kenneth L. Woodward, "Soulful Matters," Newsweek, Oct. 31, 1994, p. 22.

3. Ibid. Jones has stayed involved in her life. During the Lewinsky scandal he reacquainted Clinton with a sermon of Tillich's — "Faith in Action" — and served as a spiritual adviser during her 2000 Senate campaign.

4. I can find no reference to Oglesby being a theologian of any kind. The title of his article, according to Newsweek, was "Change or Containment." But it was actually "World Revolution and American Containment" and came from the SDS pamphlet by the same name. Oglesby co-wrote a book with an expert in liberation theology, Richard Shaull, called Containment and Change, which may be a source of the confusion. Clinton told Newsweek, "It was the first thing I had ever read that challenged the Vietnam War." This seems unlikely since even if she'd been reading motive and nothing else, Oglesby's article was hardly the first anti-Vietnam piece to appear in that magazine (it became known for advising young people on how to escape to Sweden to avoid the draft). In time Oglesby became something of a New Left libertarian, believing that the New Left and the Old Right were kindred spirits — or at least should be.

5. "I can no more condemn the Andean tribesmen who assassinate tax collectors than I can condemn the rioters in Watts or Harlem or the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Their violence is reactive and provoked, and it remains culturally beyond guilt at the very same moment that its victims' personal innocence is most appallingly present in our imaginations." It was Oglesby's idea for the SDS to send "Brigades" to Cuba in solidarity with the regime. David Brock, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 18.

6. Woodward, "Soulful Matters," p. 22.

7. Hillary D. Rodham, 1969 Student Commencement Speech, Wellesley College, May 31, 1969, www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/Commencement/1969/053169hillary.html (accessed March 19, 2007).

8. These last comments came from a poem written by a fellow student:

My entrance into the world of so-called "social problems"

Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.

The hollow men of anger and bitterness

The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation

All must be left to a bygone age.

And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle

For all those myths and oddments

Which oddly we have acquired

And from which we would become unburdened

To create a newer world

To transform the future into the present.

See www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/Commencement/1969/053169 hillary.html.

9. P. David Finks, "Organization Man," Chicago Tribune Magazine, May 26, 1985, p. 21.

10. "Strength Through Misery," Time, March 18, 1966.

11. Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1972), p. xxi.

12. Ibid., pp. 4, 21, 13.

13. A precocious legal theorist, Reich became a professor at Yale Law School at the impressive age of thirty-two, where he taught Hillary and Bill Clinton, among others, constitutional law. Approaching his fortieth birthday, he accepted a student's invitation to spend a summer at Berkeley in 1967, which just happened to be the Summer of Love. He returned to Yale a long-haired, bell-bottom-wearing guru who wouldn't be caught dead without a string of beads around his neck. He gave up all the tradition-directed dogmas, including academic rigor. The students called one of his courses Kindergarten II because you could read or do anything you wanted. His 1970 book, The Greening of America, was not an environmental work, as the title might imply, but a quasi-religious tract on the need for American society to evolve to "Level III consciousness." Greening considered political change to be the end stage of the Level III consciousness "revolution." Change had to occur within the culture before politics could change, and within the individual before the culture could. For Reich himself, individual transformation required dropping out of the Yale faculty and wandering around as a self-described "Sorcerer" in search of meaning and authenticity amid the sketchier backwaters of the California counterculture. Much of the New Left followed in his footsteps.

14. It continued: "Now a new frontier must be found to foster further experimentation, an environment relatively unpolluted by conventional patterns of social and political organization. Experimentation with drugs, sex, individual lifestyles or radical rhetoric and action within the larger society is an insufficient alternative. Total experimentation is necessary. New ideas and values must be taken out of heads and transformed into reality." Daniel Wattenberg, "The Lady Macbeth of Little Rock," American Spectator 25, no. 8 (Aug. 1992).

15. Treuhaft's wife, Jessica Mitford, was a muckraking communist journalist most famous for writing The American Way of Death, an expose of the American funeral industry. Born to an aristocratic British family, she was a classic girl of privilege who fell in with rebellious radicalism. Several of her sisters were equally radical. Unity Mitford was a famous friend of Hitler's, and Diana Mitford married Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists. Unity Mitford had to leave the country, incensed that Britain would fight such a progressive leader as Hitler. Diana and Oswald were jailed for the duration of the war. Oswald, of course, always considered himself a man of the left: "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right," Mosley proclaimed in 1968. "My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics." Jessica Mitford, meanwhile, remained committed to Stalinism her entire life. When Hungarian freedom fighters were mowed down by Soviet tanks, she argued that the "fascist traitors" got what they deserved.

16. As Allan Bloom wrote, "I have seen young people, and older people too, who are good democratic liberals, lovers of peace and gentleness, struck dumb with admiration for individuals threatening or using the most terrible violence for the slightest and tawdriest of reasons." He continued: "They have a sneaking suspicion that they are face to face with men of real commitment, which they themselves lack. And commitment, not truth, is believed to be what counts." Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 221.

17. Michael Kelly, Things Worth Fighting For: Collected Writings (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 170. This profile, "Saint Hillary," first appeared in the May 23, 1993, New York Times Magazine. For reasons that may strike some as suspicious, it is impossible to find in the Lexis-Nexis database, in professional academic databases, or on the New York Times Web site. Fortunately, it appears in Kelly's posthumous Things Worth Fighting For. Sadly, and oddly, the New York Times does not consider this historic essay to be something worth saving.

18. Christopher Lasch, "Hillary Clinton, Child Saver," Harper's, Oct. 1992.

19. Ibid.

20. Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), p. 235; Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Norton, 1995), p. 14. While she summarized the environmental position well, it's worth noting that Gilman herself was an unreconstructed racist eugenicist.

21. John Taylor Gatto writes:

A small number of very passionate American ideological leaders including Horace Mann of Massachusetts, Calvin Stowe of Ohio, Barnas Sears of Connecticut, and others visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century, fell in love with the order, obedience, and efficiency they saw there, attributed the well-regulated, machine-like society to its educational system, and campaigned relentlessly upon returning home to bring the Prussian vision to these shores...So at the behest of Horace Mann and other leading citizens, without any national debate or discussion, we adopted Prussian schooling or rather, most had it imposed upon them...The one-and two-room schoolhouses, highly efficient as academic transmitters, breeders of self-reliance and independence, intimately related to their communities, almost exclusively female-led, and largely un-administered, had to be put to death. (Charlotte A. Twight, Dependent on D.C.: The Rise of Federal Control over the Lives of Ordinary Americans [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002], p. 138.)

22. Burleigh, Third Reich, p. 236.

23. Martha Sherrill, "Hillary Clinton's Inner Politics," Washington Post, May 6, 1993, p. D1; Kelly, Things Worth Fighting For, p. 172.

24. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Remarks at University of Texas, Austin, April 7, 1993, clinton4.nara.gov/WH/EOP/First_Lady/html/generalspeeches/1993/19930407.html (accessed March 18, 2007).

25. David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 175.

26. Tom Gottlieb, "Book Tour Includes a Political Lesson," Roll Call, May 16, 2006.

27. Lee Siegel, "All Politics Is Cosmic," Atlantic Monthly, June 1996, pp. 120-25.

28. Michael Lerner, The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1997), pp. 13-14.

29. Tikkun, May-June 1993.

30. Lerner, Politics of Meaning, p. 226; Michael Lerner, Spirit Matters (Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads, 2000), p. 325.

31. Lerner, Politics of Meaning, p. 58.

32. Ibid., p. 59.

33. Ibid., pp. 88, 91.

34. Among the points he fails to grasp is the fact that the left has always been about constructing communities; that the right-wing movements he identifies are not necessarily fascistic; or that he is employing the classic liberal tactic of calling the "other" "fascist." Indeed Lerner writes, "The delegitimization of the notion of a possible 'we,' who could act from shared high moral purpose and could achieve morally valuable results, is the number-one goal of the conservative forces in America's elites of wealth and power." Ibid., p. 318.

35. In the former he offers an interesting interpretation of liberal history in order to persuade liberals to reconnect with the old Progressive Social Gospel mission. "With the rise of fascism," he writes, "the American religious Left abandoned the Social Gospel of its pre-World War II past, with its cheery hope of steady progress toward the Kingdom of God." He identifies the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as the culprit behind this move because he convinced liberals to take seriously the threat of Nazism. "For Niebuhr and the Christian realists who rallied around his writings, sinfulness required recognizing the limitations of any politics aimed at fundamental social change, accommodating the inequities of their own capitalist societies and championing the Cold War. The Christian 'realists' helped reinforce individualism when they focused religious energy away from social movements." Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 164.

36. Lerner, Politics of Meaning, pp. 219, 283.

37. Charles Krauthammer, "Home Alone 3: The White House," Washington Post, May 14, 1993, p. A31.

38. "By the Dawn's Early Light," National Review, Jan. 22, 1990, p. 17.

39. Norman Lear, "A Call for Spiritual Renewal," Washington Post, May 30, 1993, p. C7.

40. John Dewey, "What I Believe," Forum 83, no. 3 (March 1930), pp. 176-82, in Pragmatism and American Culture, ed. Gail Kennedy (Boston: Heath, 1950), p. 28; Adolf Hitler, Hitler's Table Talk, trans. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens, introduction and preface by Hugh Trevor Roper (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), p. 143.

41. Indeed, O'Rourke argued that It Takes a Village is a fascist tract in 1996. He wrote:

If a name must be put to these stupid politics, we can consult the Columbia Encyclopedia under the heading of that enormous stupidity, fascism: "totalitarian philosophy of government that glorifies state and nation and assigns to the state control over every aspect of national life." Admittedly, the fascism in It Takes a Village is of a namby-pamby, eat-your-vegetables kind that doesn't so much glorify the state and nation as pester the dickens out of them. Ethnic groups do not suffer persecution except insofar as a positive self-image is required among women and minorities at all times. And there will be no uniforms other than comfortable, durable clothes on girls. And no concentration camps either, just lots and lots of day care. (P. J. O'Rourke, "Mrs. Clinton's Very, Very Bad Book," Weekly Standard, Feb. 19, 1996, p. 24)

42. Hillary Rodham Clinton, It Takes a Village (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 13.

43. Ibid., p. 14.

44. Lear, "Call for Spiritual Renewal," p. C7.

45. Clinton, It Takes a Village, p. 20.

46. Ibid., pp. 299, 301.

47. Paul A. Gigot, "How the Clintons Hope to Snare the Middle Class," Wall Street Journal, Sept. 24, 1993, p. A10.

48. Howard Fineman, "Clinton's Brain Trusters," Newsweek, April 19, 1993, p. 26.

49. Jacob Weisberg, "Dies Ira: A Short History of Ira Magaziner," New Republic, Jan. 24, 1994, p. 18. Even the Swedish embassy couldn't get a copy when it asked for one on behalf of Fortune magazine.

50. Jonathan Rauch, "Robert Reich, Quote Doctor," Slate, May 30, 1997, www.slate.com/?id=2447 (accessed Jan. 19, 2007). See also Robert Scheer, "What's Rotten in Politics: An Insider's View," Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1997.

51. Rauch, "Robert Reich, Quote Doctor." See also Robert Reich, "Robert Reich Replies," Washington Post, June 5, 1997, p. A21; Thomas W. Hazlett, "Planet Reich: Thanks for the Memoirs," Reason, Oct. 1997, p. 74.

52. Jonathan Chait, "Fact Finders: The Anti-dogma Dogma," New Republic, Feb. 28, 2005; Herbert W. Schneider, Making the Fascist State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 67.

53. Walter Lippmann, The Good Society (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2004), p. 92; Clinton, It Takes a Village, p. 200.

54. Mickey Kaus, "The Godmother," New Republic, Feb. 15, 1993, p. 21; Kay S. Hymowitz, "The Children's Defense Fund: Not Part of the Solution," City Journal 10, no. 3 (Summer 2000), pp. 32-41.

55. James Bovard, Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), p. 68, citing U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition, Feb. 1972.

56. Hymowitz, "Children's Defense Fund," pp. 32-41.

57. Lasch, "Hillary Clinton, Child Saver" Hillary Rodham Clinton, Address to the General Conference, April 24, 1996, www.gcah.org/GC96/hilltext.html (accessed Feb. 6, 2007).

58. Clinton, It Takes a Village, pp. 314, 315. Emphasis mine.

59. Ian Williams, "Big Food's Real Appetites," Nation, May 6, 2002; Tim Russert, CNBC, June 10, 2000.

60. Nomination of Janet Reno, White House, Feb. 11, 1993, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=47044&st=&st1 (accessed Feb. 6, 2007); Janet Reno, Remarks to Justice Department Employees, Washington, D.C., April 6, 1993.

61. Clinton, It Takes a Village, pp. 82, 113.

62. Lasch, "Hillary Clinton, Child Saver."

63. Clinton, It Takes a Village, pp. 45, 63, 88-89.

64. Ibid., p. 83.

65. Ibid., pp. 233, 132.

66. Kate O'Beirne, "The Kids Aren't Alright," National Review, Sept. 1, 2003; Kate O'Beirne, Women Who Make the World Worse: And How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports (New York: Penguin, 2006), pp. 36-38.

67. Gretchen Ritter, director of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Texas, likewise writes that mothers who stay home to take care of their children are the equivalent of slackers who refuse "to contribute as professionals and community activists." Gretchen Ritter, "The Messages We Send When Moms Stay Home," Austin American-Statesman, July 6, 2004, p. A9.

68. O'Beirne, Women Who Make the World Worse, p. 40.

69. Clinton, It Takes a Village, p. 189.

70. Ibid., pp. 239, 169.

71. William Jennings Bryan, Omaha World-Herald, Sept. 23, 1892, quoted in Paolo E. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan: Volume 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 75; H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877-1896 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1969), p. 496.

72. Ian Kershaw, The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 73.

73. Elizabeth Kolbert, "Running on Empathy," New Yorker, Feb. 7, 2000, p. 36.

74. Bovard, Freedom in Chains, p. 19.

75. "The Real Hillary Just Stood Up," New York Post, June 30, 2004, p. 30; Amy Fagan, Inside Politics, Washington Times, June 30, 2004, p. A07.

10. THE NEW AGE: WE'RE ALL FASCISTS NOW

1. "Reality-based community" became a slogan for left and liberal bloggers starting in 2004. The phrase is generally used as a form of derision for President George W. Bush and his policies. It comes from an October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality"..."That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Hitler's speech is quoted in Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 257.

2. John J. Miller, "Banning Legos," National Review Online, March 27, 2007.

3. It's interesting to note that during the height of the Kulturkampf, America's president, Ulysses S. Grant, lobbied for a constitutional amendment banning the teaching of "sectarian tenets" in any school receiving any amount of public assistance — and mandating that "all church property" be subject to taxation. See Jeremy Rabkin, "The Supreme Court in the Culture Wars," Public Interest (Fall 1996), pp. 3-26.

It's important to understand how Protestantism in Germany became corrupted by both nationalist and socialist agendas, in much the same way it had been in America by the progressives. Surveys in 1898 and 1912 revealed that a majority of German workers did not believe in God, but nearly all of them believed that Jesus was a "true workers' friend." If Jesus were alive today, surmised one worker, "he would certainly be a social Democrat, maybe even a leader and a Reichstag deputy." (Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War [New York: HarperCollins, 2005], p. 268.) For non-Marxists, the emphasis was less on class and more on the nation as the subject of religious ardor. Adolf Stoecker, the court preacher to Wilhelm II, helped lead the charge and was a direct influence on Hitler and National Socialism. Stoecker denounced capitalism — in part because of its alleged inherent "Jewishness." He advocated workers' communes and a lavish welfare state. He also demanded racial quotas for universities and other professions and went on to found one of the first anti-Semitic parties in Germany, the Christian Socialist Workers' Party. The process of turning Germanism into a religion became symbolically complete when another party came along and changed the word "Christian" to "National" — the Nazis.

4. Hitler's Table Talk, p. 59.

5. Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction (New York: Putnam, 1940), p. 50.

6. Other official holy days included Heroes' Memorial Day, Reich Party Day, the Fuhrer's Birthday (of course), and the National Festival of the German People. Winter solstice, brimming with volkisch tributes to Germanic superiority, replaced Christmas. Commemoration of the movement's fallen replaced the old Remembrance Day and was drenched with pagan rituals.

7. William E. Drake, "God-State Idea in Modern Education," History of Education Quarterly 3, no. 2 (June 1963), p. 90.

8. J. S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-45 (New York: Basic Books, 1968), pp. 76-77; Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin's, 1987), p. 230.

9. The song continues:

Singing we follow Hitler's banners;

Only then are we worthy of our ancestors.

I am no Christian and no Catholic.

I go with the SA through thick and thin.

The Church can be stolen from me for all I care.

The swastika makes me happy here on earth.

Him will I follow in marching step;

Baldur von Schirach take me along.

(Gene Edward Veith Jr., Modern Fascism: The Threat to the Judeo-Christian Worldview [St. Louis: Concordia, 1993], p. 67)

10. Ibid., pp. 94, 102.

11. Ibid., p. 138.

12. Joyce Howard Price, "Harvard Professor Argues for 'Abolishing' White Race," Washington Times, Sept. 4, 2002, p. A05.

13. Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century. See http://web.archive.org/web/20020603084225/www.ety.com/HRP/books online/mythos/mythosb1chap03.htm (accessed July 10, 2007). Timothy W. Ryback, "Hitler's Forgotten Library," Atlantic Monthly, May 2003; Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 454.

14. Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 133; see also David Rieff, "Designer Gods," Transition, no. 59 (1993), pp. 20-31.

15. Adam LeBor and Roger Boyes, Seduced by Hitler (Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2001), p. 119.

16. E. F. Kaelin, Heidegger's "Being and Time": A Reading for Readers (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1988), p. 58; Veith, Modern Fascism, pp. 119, 124.

17. Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 28.

18. Quoted in Richard Harrington, "The Good, the Bad, and the Bee-Bop," Washington Post, Oct. 17, 1988, p. B1.

19. Hitler's Table Talk, p. 353.

20. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 348; Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party (Keizer, Ore.: Founders, 1995), p. vii.

21. Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up (New York: Picador, 2000), p. 140.

22. Albert Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 336, 220-21.

23. See Michael Crichton's Commonwealth Club speech in 2003: www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote05.html. Also see Steven Landsburg's Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life (New York: Free Press, 1993); Eric Goldscheider, "Witches, Druids, and Other Pagans Make Merry Again," New York Times, May 28, 2005, p. B7; Robert H. Nelson, "Tom Hayden, Meet Adam Smith and Thomas Aquinas," Forbes, Oct. 29, 1990; Dana Milbank, "Some Heated Words for Mr. Global Warming," Washington Post, March 22, 2007, p. A02.

24. William Rees-Mogg, "And Yet the Band Plays On," Times (London), May 26, 1994.

25. Matt Lauer, Countdown to Doomsday, Sci-Fi Channel, June 14, 2006.

26. See Peter Staudenmaier, "Fascist Ecology: The 'Green Wing' of the Nazi Party and Its Historical Antecedents," www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html (accessed May 8, 2007).

27. Ibid.

28. Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 139.

29. Prominent raw foodists (or members of the living food movement) include Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson, Edward Norton, and Angela Bassett; Hitler's Table Talk, p. 443.

30. See, for example, www.peta.org/about/whyanimalrights.asp and Charles Oliver, "Don't Put Animal Rights Above Humans," USA Today, June 11, 1990, p. 10A.

31. See Jacob Sullum, "What the Doctor Orders," Reason, Jan. 1996; Jacob Sullum, "An Epidemic of Meddling," Reason, May 2007.

32. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer, p. 120; Jacob Sullum, "To Your Health!" National Review, Sept. 13, 1999.

33. Jon Gertner, "The Virtue in $6 Heirloom Tomatoes," New York Times Magazine, June 6, 2004; Jonah Goldberg, "Gaiam Somebody!" National Review, March 19, 2001.

AFTERWORD: THE TEMPTING OF CONSERVATISM

1. The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz writes:

At heart, Buchanan is a man of the old Catholic right — echoing the anti-New Deal catechism popularized by the "radio priest," Father Charles Coughlin, and the muscular, pietistic, corporatist anti-communism that found a hero in Generalissimo Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War...He detests the welfare state, which he sees as an intrusive secularist force. He regards the world beyond our shores as a tempest of savage tribalism, and he would like, on that account, both to halt immigration and to pull the United States out of the United Nations. He has a penchant for conspiratorial thinking, illustrated by his remarks about the devilish "foreign policy elites" and the pro-Israel "amen corner" that supposedly control our policies abroad and corrupt our politics at home. ("Third Out," New Republic, Nov. 22, 1999)

There's much truth here, but what Wilentz gets flatly wrong is that Buchanan does not, in fact, "detest" the welfare state and never has. This is not an insignificant distortion.

2. Molly Ivins, "Notes from Another Country," Nation, Sept. 14, 1992.

3. These and other quotations are from Ramesh Ponnuru's "A Conservative No More," National Review, Oct. 11, 1999. I'm indebted to Ponnuru in general and to this article in particular for many insights into Buchanan.

4. For Buchanan on Zhirinovsky, see The Death of the West (New York: St. Martin's, 2002), p. 18. On Euro-Americans, see "The Disposition of Christian Americans," Nov. 27, 1998, www.buchanan.org/pa-98-1127.html; and "Un-American Ivy League," New York Post, Jan. 2, 1999.

5. See Ponnuru, "A Conservative No More."

6. See David Brooks, "Politics and Patriotism: From Teddy Roosevelt to John McCain," Weekly Standard, April 26, 1999; Richard Lowry, "TR and His Fan," National Review, Feb. 7, 2000; David Brooks, "A Return to National Greatness: A Manifesto for a Lost Creed," Weekly Standard, March 3, 1997; John B. Judis, "Are We All Progressives Now?" American Prospect, May 8, 2000.

7. Ramesh Ponnuru, "Swallowed by Leviathan: Conservatism Versus an Oxymoron: 'Big-Government Conservatism,'" National Review, Sept. 29, 2003.

8. Fred Barnes, Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006); see also interview with Tim Russert, CNBC, Jan. 28, 2006.

9. See Samuel Huntington, "Conservatism as an Ideology," American Political Science Review 51 (June 1957); and Friedrich Hayek, "Why I Am Not a Conservative," in The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

10. See: Jonah Goldberg, "A Lib-Lib Romance," National Review, Dec. 31, 2006.