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

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Franklin Roosevelt's Fascist New Deal

THE NATION WAS caught up in a war fever, fomented by the government, even though there was no war. Striking union members were provoked into a riot by government forces. Sixty-seven workers were killed, some shot in the back. A young correspondent reported, "I understood deep in my bones and blood what fascism was." A leading intellectual who'd signed on with the government declared in a lecture to students, "The ordeal of war brings out the magnificent resources of youth."¹

The British ambassador cabled London to alert his superiors to the spreading hysteria fomented by the nation's new leader. The "starved loyalties and repressed hero-worship of the country have found in him an outlet and a symbol." Visiting the rural hinterlands, an aide reported back on the brewing cult of personality: "Every house I visited — mill worker or unemployed — had a picture of the President...He is at once God and their intimate friend; he knows them all by name, knows their little town and mill, their little lives and problems. And though everything else fails, he is there, and will not let them down."²

Though the crisis was economic in nature, the new national commander had promised to seek the "power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe...I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems."

Presumably some readers already know that the country I'm talking about is America, and the leader FDR. The labor riots took place in Chicago. The wide-eyed young reporter was Eric Sevareid, one of the titans of CBS news. The intellectual who harangued Dartmouth students about the virtues of war was Rexford Tugwell, one of the most prominent of the New Deal's Brain Trusters. And of course the last quotations were from Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself in his first inaugural address.

As liberalism in recent years has fallen into ideological and intellectual disarray, American liberals have crouched into a fetal position around Franklin D. Roosevelt's "legacy." Liberal legal theorists have made the New Deal into a second American founding. Leading journalists have descended into abject idolatry. Indeed, it sometimes seems that all one needs to know about the merits of a policy is whether Roosevelt himself would have favored it. It is a given that Republicans are wrong, even fascistic, whenever they want to "dismantle" FDR's policies.

One of the most poignant ironies here is that a modern-day Hitler or Mussolini would never dismantle the New Deal. To the contrary, he'd redouble the effort. This is not to say that the New Deal was evil or Hitlerian. But the New Deal was a product of the impulses and ideas of its era. And those ideas and impulses are impossible to separate from the fascist moment in Western civilization. According to Harold Ickes, FDR's interior secretary and one of the most important architects of the New Deal, Roosevelt himself privately acknowledged that "what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we were doing them in an orderly way." It's hard to see how orderliness absolves a policy from the charge of fascism or totalitarianism. Eventually, the similarities had become so transparent that Ickes had to warn Roosevelt that the public was increasingly inclined "to unconsciously group four names, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Roosevelt."³

The notion that FDR harbored fascist tendencies is vastly more controversial today than it was in the 1930s, primarily because fascism has come to mean Nazism and Nazism means simply evil. Saying, for example, that FDR had a Hitlerite fiscal policy just confuses people. But the fascist flavor of the New Deal was not only regularly discussed; it was often cited as evidence in Roosevelt's favor. There was an enormous bipartisan consensus that the Depression required dictatorial and fascistic policies to defeat it. Walter Lippmann, serving as an ambassador for America's liberal elite, told FDR in a private meeting at Warm Springs, "The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers."⁴ Eleanor Roosevelt, too, believed that a "benevolent dictator" might be the only answer for America. And it was hardly lost on the liberal intellectuals swirling around the Roosevelt administration that the enormously popular Benito Mussolini had used the same methods to whip the unruly Italians into shape. After all, the New Republic — the intellectual home of the New Deal — had covered the goings-on in Italy with fascination and, often, admiration.

Indeed, the New Deal was conceived at the climax of a worldwide fascist moment, a moment when socialists in many countries were increasingly becoming nationalists and nationalists could embrace nothing other than socialism. Franklin Roosevelt was no fascist, at least not in the sense that he thought of himself in this way. But many of his ideas and policies were indistinguishable from fascism. And today we live with the fruits of fascism, and we call them liberal. From economic policy, to populist politics, to a faith in the abiding power of brain trusts to chart our collective future — be they at Harvard or on the Supreme Court — fascistic assumptions about the role of the state have been encoded upon the American mind, often as a matter of bipartisan consensus.

This was not FDR's "vision," for he had none. He was the product of an age where collectivism, patriotic exhortations, and a pragmatic rejection of overreliance on principle simply seemed to be the "way of the future." He imbibed these attitudes and ideas from his experience during the Progressive Era and from his advisers who did likewise. If Wilson was an intentional totalitarian, Roosevelt became one by default — largely because he didn't have any better ideas.

PROGRESSIVE FROM THE BEGINNING

Born in 1882, a year before Mussolini, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was hardly raised to be a great man. Indeed, he wasn't raised to be much of anything. A sweet and gentle boy, he was sheltered from anything like what we would today call a normal childhood. Almost smothered with attention from his parents, James Roosevelt and the former Sara Delano, he was expected to emulate their lifestyle as aristocrats. Young FDR had few friends his own age. An only child, he was educated mostly by Swiss tutors at home (recall that Wilson, too, had been homeschooled). In 1891, while his parents visited a spa in Bismarck's Germany, young Franklin — "Franz" to his classmates — attended a local Volksschule, where he studied map reading and military topography. He claimed to remember the experience fondly, particularly his study of German military maps.

Roosevelt's youth laid the foundations of his adult personality. When Franklin was only eight, his father suffered the first of several heart attacks. Franklin responded by resolving to conceal his sorrow and anxiety from his father. This is apparently where FDR first began the practice of masking his real feelings behind a permanently cheery demeanor. For the rest of his life, and particularly when he was president, his friends and enemies alike would complain that they could never trust that Roosevelt was telling them what he really thought. This was a polite way of saying that they could never be sure whether Roosevelt was lying to their face. "When I talk to him, he says 'Fine! Fine! Fine!'" Huey Long lamented. "But Joe Robinson [a political enemy of Long's] goes to see him the next day and again he says 'Fine! Fine! Fine!' Maybe he says 'fine' to everybody."⁵

FDR left his parental cocoon in 1896 to attend Groton. The transition was difficult. Raised speaking German with his German-speaking governess and French with his French-language tutors, and to speak English haughtily in all other circumstances, Roosevelt grated on the other students. Eventually, though, his determination to fit in — almost an obsession with conformity — paid off, and he rose in social status. He was not a particularly gifted student. His highest scores were in punctuality and neatness. Indeed, the consensus is that FDR verged on being an intellectual lightweight. He rarely read books, and those he did read were far from weighty. The historian Hugh Gallagher writes, "He had a magpie mind, and many interests, but he was not deep."⁶

FDR suffered painfully from envy for his cousin Teddy Roosevelt. When Franklin enrolled at Harvard in 1904, he took to mimicking the Bull Moose's mannerisms — in much the same way many baby-boomer liberals, like Bill Clinton and John Kerry, emulated John F. Kennedy in their youth. Young Franklin would over-pronounce "deee-lighted," shout "bully!" and wear knockoffs of his cousin Teddy's iconic pince-nez glasses.

It was also during college that Roosevelt secretly courted his distant cousin Eleanor. The match seemed odd to many but proved to be a powerful political symbiosis. Franklin, smooth and insubstantial, seemed to want a partner who provided attributes he did not have. Eleanor offered conviction, steadfastness, earnestness — and extremely valuable connections. She was ballast for her husband's airiness. Franklin's mother, who retained a tight rein on her son (in part by keeping him on a strict allowance) until she died in 1941, opposed the marriage. But she acquiesced in the face of Franklin's determination, and in 1905 the two were married. Eleanor's uncle Teddy gave her away.

By this time FDR was attending law school at Columbia University. He never received his degree but passed the bar and became a fairly unremarkable lawyer. In 1910 he was invited to run for the New York State Senate from Dutchess County, largely because of his wealth, name, and connections. The county Democratic chairman, Edward E. Perkins, consented to have what he considered to be a young fop on the ticket largely because he expected Roosevelt to contribute to the party treasury and to pay for his own campaign. When FDR met with Perkins and other party bosses, he arrived dressed in his riding clothes. Perkins disliked the young aristocrat but acquiesced, saying, "You'll have to take off those yellow shoes" and "put on some regular pants."⁷ FDR eagerly accepted and won the race. Much as at Groton and Harvard, however, he didn't make many friends in the state legislature and was considered a second-rate intelligence. His colleagues often made fun of him, using his initials to call him "Feather Duster" Roosevelt.

Still, Roosevelt performed serviceably as a progressive state senator and won reelection fairly easily in 1912 thanks to his relationship with Louis Howe, a brilliant political fixer who taught him how to appeal to otherwise hostile constituencies. But he never finished his second term. Instead, he was tapped by Woodrow Wilson to serve as assistant secretary of the navy. Franklin was ecstatic about taking the same job "Uncle Teddy" (by marriage) had used to jump-start his own political prospects fifteen years earlier.

Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in on March 17, 1913, his eighth wedding anniversary, at the age of thirty-one. And he immediately dedicated himself to emulating Teddy. His immediate boss, patron, and mentor was the famed progressive newspaperman Josephus Daniels. As both secretary of the navy and a journalist, Daniels represented all of the bizarre contradictions — from today's perspective — of the progressive movement. He was a thoroughgoing racist whose North Carolina newspapers regularly published horrendously offensive cartoons and editorials about blacks. But he was also deeply committed to a host of progressive reforms, from public education to public health to women's suffrage. A longtime political ally of William Jennings Bryan, Daniels could sound both pacifist and belligerent notes, though once ensconced in the Wilson administration, he was a dutiful advocate for "preparedness," expansion of the navy, and, ultimately, war.

Daniels was constantly outflanked by his young assistant secretary's belligerence. FDR proved to be a very capable and astoundingly political assistant secretary. "I get my fingers into everything," he liked to say, "and there's no law against it."⁸ He particularly relished the fact that when his boss was away, he was the acting secretary. He loved the martial pomp, gushing with pride over the seventeen-gun salutes he received in his honor and taking an enormous amount of interest in designing a military flag for his office. Indeed from day one FDR was one of the "Big Navy Boys" — and he was constantly frustrated with what he perceived to be his boss's slow-footedness when it came to rearmament.

From his first days as assistant secretary, FDR formed a powerful alliance with constituencies deeply invested in the development of a large naval war machine, particularly the Navy League, which was seen by many as little more than a mouthpiece for steel and financial interests. Just a month after his appointment, FDR gave a pro-big-navy speech at the league's annual convention. He even hosted a league planning meeting in his own office. During the months when the United States was officially neutral, FDR opened a channel with Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and other Republican hawks critical of the Wilson administration. He even leaked naval intelligence to the Republicans so they could attack the administration, and Daniels in particular, for "unpreparedness."⁹ Today he might be called part of the neocon cabal inside the Wilson administration.

FDR witnessed, approved, and, on occasion, participated in all of the excesses of World War I. There's no record anywhere that he disapproved of George Creel's propaganda ministry or that he had any larger misgivings about the war abroad or at home. He watched as Creel's acolytes actively promoted what they dubbed "the Wilson cult." He approved of the oppression of dissidents and heartily celebrated the passage of the Sedition and Espionage acts. He sent a letter congratulating a U.S. district attorney who'd successfully won a case against four socialists who'd distributed antiwar publications. In speeches he inveighed against slackers who failed to buy Liberty Bonds or fully support the war.¹⁰

After the Great War, the country slowly regained its sanity. But many liberals remained enamored of war socialism, believing that a peacetime militarization of the society was still necessary. Daniels — partly out of a desire to scare the country into ratifying the Treaty of Versailles — warned that America might need to "become a super-Prussia." The administration — with Daniels and Roosevelt at the forefront — pushed aggressively but unsuccessfully for a peacetime draft. The administration also failed to pass a new peacetime sedition law like the one it imposed on the nation during the war (in 1919-20, Congress considered some seventy such bills). And once Wilson was out of office, the government released its political prisoners, including Eugene V. Debs, who was pardoned by Wilson's Republican successor, Warren Harding. Nonetheless, the nation emerged from "the war to make the world safe for democracy" less free at home and less safe in the world. No wonder Harding's campaign slogan had been "A Return to Normalcy."

In 1920 FDR's backers tried to orchestrate a Democratic presidential ticket with the revered progressive Herbert Hoover at the top and FDR as vice president. Hoover was open to the idea, but the plan fell apart when he threw his hat in with the Republicans. Roosevelt successfully maneuvered himself onto the Democratic ticket nonetheless as the running mate of James M. Cox of Ohio. FDR ran as a loyal Wilsonian, even if Wilson himself — now bitter and twisted, physically and psychologically — was less than gracious in his support.

Other Wilsonians, however, were ecstatic. Now back at the New Republic, Walter Lippmann, who had worked with Roosevelt on the Wage Scale Committee in 1917, sent him a congratulatory note calling his nomination "the best news in many a long day." But the campaign was doomed from the outset due to the deep resentment many Americans felt toward the Wilson administration and Progressives in general.

After a crushing defeat at the polls, FDR went into business. Then, in 1921, he contracted polio. He spent much of the next decade struggling to overcome his disability and planning a political comeback.

Indeed, FDR faced two existential crises that were really one: how to fight the disease and stay politically viable. He bravely fought his condition, most famously at the spa he purchased for that effort at Warm Springs. This kept him out of the limelight most of the time. But he did attend the ill-fated 1924 Democratic National Convention, where he painstakingly walked on crutches to center stage to nominate Al Smith for president. He didn't make another public appearance until 1928, when he gave another convention speech for Smith. In a perverse sense, Roosevelt was lucky. By keeping out of the public eye while working the political angles behind the scenes, he managed to stay untainted, biding his time, during a moment when the services of a progressive party were blessedly unwelcome.

While no intellectual, FDR possessed a certain genius for gauging the political temper of the times. He read people very well and picked up tidbits of information through extensive conversations with a vast range of intellectuals, activists, politicians, and the like. He was a sponge, biographers tell us, absorbing the zeitgeist while almost never concerning himself with larger philosophical conclusions. He was, in the words of the historian Richard Hofstadter, "content in large measure to follow public opinion." In many ways Roosevelt saw himself as a popularizer of intellectual currents. He spoke in generalities that everyone found agreeable at first and meaningless upon reflection. He could be — or at least sound — Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian, internationalist and isolationist, this and that as well as the other thing. He was like a "chameleon on plaid," groused Herbert Hoover.¹¹

Roosevelt's slipperiness stemmed from more than people pleasing. Until late in his presidency, his overriding imperative was to split differences, to claim the "middle way." "I think that you will agree," he wrote a friend about one speech, "that it is sufficiently far to the left to prevent any further suggestion that I am leaning to the right."¹² Once, when he was given two completely opposing policy proposals, he simply ordered his aide and postmaster general, James Farley, to reconcile them. His favorite form of management was to pit two individuals or departments against each other with the same task.

The problem with this sort of triangulation is that you end up moving to whatever you believe is the epicenter between two ever-shifting and hard-to-define horizons. Worse still, Roosevelt translated this approach into a de facto Third Way governing philosophy. This in effect meant that nothing was fixed. No question about the role of government or its powers was truly settled. And it is for this reason that both conservatives and radicals have always harbored feelings ranging from frustration to contempt for FDR. For the radicals FDR wasn't principled enough to commit to lasting change, while for conservatives he wasn't principled enough to stand his ground. He planted his flag atop a buoy at sea, permanently bobbing with the currents. Unfortunately, the currents tended to push him in only one direction: statism, for that was the intellectual tide of the time.

Today many liberals subscribe to the myth that the New Deal was a coherent, enlightened, unified endeavor encapsulated in the largely meaningless phrase "the Roosevelt legacy." This is poppycock. "To look upon these programs as the result of a unified plan," wrote Raymond Moley, FDR's right-hand man during much of the New Deal, "was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter's tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy's bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator." When Alvin Hansen, an influential economic adviser to the president, was asked — in 1940! — whether "the basic principle of the New Deal" was "economically sound," he responded, "I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is."¹³

This raises the first of many common features among New Deal liberalism, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialism, all of which shared many of the same historical and intellectual forebears. Fascist and Nazi intellectuals constantly touted a "middle" or "Third Way" between capitalism and socialism. Mussolini zigzagged every which way, from free trade and low taxes to a totalitarian state apparatus. Even before he attained power, his stock response when asked to outline his program was to say he had none. "Our program is to govern," the Fascists liked to say.

Hitler showed even less interest in political or economic theory, fascist or otherwise. He never read Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century or many of the other "classic" fascist texts. And the inability of numerous Nazis and fascists to plow through the Nazi bible Mein Kampf is legendary.

The "middle way" sounds moderate and un-radical. Its appeal is that it sounds unideological and freethinking. But philosophically the Third Way is not mere difference splitting; it is utopian and authoritarian. Its utopian aspect becomes manifest in its antagonism to the idea that politics is about trade-offs. The Third Wayer says that there are no false choices — "I refuse to accept that X should come at the expense of Y." The Third Way holds that we can have capitalism and socialism, individual liberty and absolute unity. Fascist movements are implicitly utopian because they — like communist and heretical Christian movements — assume that with just the right arrangement of policies, all contradictions can be rectified. This is a political siren song; life can never be made perfect, because man is imperfect. This is why the Third Way is also authoritarian. It assumes that the right man — or, in the case of Leninists, the right party — can resolve all of these contradictions through sheer will. The populist demagogue takes on the role of the parent telling the childlike masses that he can make everything "all better" if they just trust him.

FDR's "middle way" had a very specific resonance, seemingly contradictory to its philosophical assumptions. As many communists were keen to note, it was born of a Bismarckian attempt to forestall greater radicalism. The elites, including business leaders, were for the most part reconciled to the fact that "socialism" of some kind was going to be a permanent feature of the political economy. Middle-way politics was a carefully crafted appeal to the middle class's entirely justifiable fear of the Red menace. Hitler and Mussolini exploited this anxiety at every turn; indeed it was probably the key to their success. The fascist appeal was homegrown socialism, orderly socialism, socialism with a German or Italian face as opposed to nasty "foreign" socialism in much the same way that 100 percent Americanism had been progressive America's counteroffer to Bolshevism.

Time and again, FDR's New Dealers made the very same threat — that if the New Deal failed, what would come next would be far more radical. As we'll see, a great many of FDR's Old Right opponents were actually former progressives convinced that the New Deal was moving toward the wrong kind of socialism. That the Third Way could be cast as an appeal to both utopians and anti-utopians may sound implausible, but political agendas need not be logically coherent, merely popularly seductive. And seductiveness has always been the Third Way's defining characteristic.

The German and American New Deals may have been merely whatever Hitler and FDR felt they could get away with. But therein lies a common principle: the state should be allowed to get away with anything, so long as it is for "good reasons." This is the common principle among fascism, Nazism, Progressivism, and what we today call liberalism. It represents the triumph of Pragmatism in politics in that it recognizes no dogmatic boundaries to the scope of government power. The leader and his anointed cadres are decision makers above and beyond political or democratic imperatives. They invoke with divine reverence "science" and the laws of economics the way temple priests once read the entrails of goats, but because they have blinded themselves to their own leaps of faith, they cannot see that morals and values cannot be derived from science. Morals and values are determined by the priests, whether they wear black robes or white lab smocks.

AN "EXPERIMENTAL" AGE

Ever since FDR's presidency — when "liberalism" replaced "progressivism" as the preferred label for center-left political ideas and activism — liberals have had trouble articulating what liberalism is, beyond the conviction that the federal government should use its power to do nice things wherever and whenever it can. Herbert Croly said it well when he defended the New Republic against critics who said the magazine's qualified support for Mussolini violated its liberal principles: "If there are any abstract liberal principles, we do not know how to formulate them. Nor if they are formulated by others do we recognize their authority. Liberalism, as we understand it, is an activity."¹⁴ In other words, liberalism is what liberals do or decide is worth doing, period. Faith without deeds is dead, according to the Bible. Pragmatic liberals internalized this while protesting they have no faith. This was at the core of what the German historian Peter Vogt called the progressives' "elective affinity" for fascism. Or as John Patrick Diggins says, "Fascism appealed, first of all, to the pragmatic ethos of experimentation."¹⁵

As president, Roosevelt bragged that he was married to no preconceived notions. He measured an idea's worth by the results it achieved. "Take a method and try it," he famously declared at Oglethorpe University in May 1932. "If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." The only coherent policy Roosevelt subscribed to was "bold, persistent experimentation." Conservatives were cast by FDR and his allies as opponents of all change, selfish slaves to the status quo. But stasis is not the American conservative position. Rather, conservatives believe that change for change's sake is folly. What kind of change? At what cost? For the liberals and progressives, everything was expendable, from tradition to individualism to "outdated" conceptions of freedom. These were all tired dogmas to be burned on the altars of the new age.

When FDR was elected president in 1932, three events were viewed as admirable experiments: the Bolshevik Revolution, the Fascist takeover in Italy, and the American "experiment" in war socialism under Wilson. By 1932 admiration for the Russian "social experiment" had become a definitive component of American liberalism — in much the same way that admiration for Prussian top-down socialism had been two decades earlier. Simply, the Soviet Union was the future, and "it worked."

Intermingled in these encomiums to what Lincoln Steffens called the "Russian-Italian method" — signifying that, as far as he was concerned, Bolshevism and Fascism were not opposites but kindred movements — were lusty expressions of nostalgia for the short-lived American "experiment" with war socialism under Woodrow Wilson. "We planned in war!" was the omnipresent refrain from progressives eager to re-create the kind of economic and social control they had under Wilson. The Italians and the Russians were beating America at its own game, by continuing their experiments in war socialism while America cut short its project, choosing instead to wallow in the selfish crapulence of the Roaring Twenties. In 1927 Stuart Chase said it would take five years to see if the "courageous and unprecedented experiment" in the Soviet Union was "destined to be a landmark for economic guidance" of the whole world. Half a decade later he concluded that the evidence was in: Russia was the new gold standard in economic and social policy. So "why," he asked in his 1932 book, A New Deal, "should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?"¹⁶

Chase's comment is indicative of an important aspect of the progressive mind-set. Anybody who has ever met a student activist, a muckraking journalist, or a reformist politician will notice the important role that boredom and impatience play in the impulse to "remake the world." One can easily see how boredom — sheer, unrelenting ennui with the status quo — served as the oxygen for the fire of progressivism because tedium is the tinder for the flames of mischievousness.¹⁷ In much the same way that Romanticism laid many of the intellectual predicates for Nazism, the impatience and disaffection of progressives during the 1920s drove them to see the world as clay to be sculpted by human will. Sickened by what they saw as the spiritual languor of the age, members of the avant-garde convinced themselves that the status quo could be easily ripped down like an aging curtain and just as easily replaced with a vibrant new tapestry. This conviction often slid of its own logic into anarchism and radicalism, related worldviews which assumed that anything would be better than what we have now.

A deep aversion to boredom and a consequent, indiscriminate love for novelty among the intellectual classes translated into a routinized iconoclasm and a thoroughgoing contempt for democracy, traditional morality, the masses, and the bourgeoisie, and a love for "action, action, action!" that still plagues the left today. (How much of the practiced radicalism of the contemporary left is driven by the childish pranksterism they call being subversive?) Many of George Bernard Shaw's bons mots seem like shots in the dark against the monster of boredom — which could only be conquered by a Nietzschean superman. At one time or another Shaw idolized Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini as the world's great "progressive" leaders because they "did things," unlike the leaders of those "putrefying corpses" called parliamentary democracies. In like terms, Gertrude Stein praised Huey Long by declaring that he was "not boring."¹⁸

Or consider H. G. Wells. More than any other figure, his literary escapism and faith in science as the salvation of man were seen as the preeminent antidotes to the disease of Western malaise. In the summer of 1932, Wells delivered a major speech at Oxford University to Britain's Young Liberals organization, in which he called for a "'Phoenix Rebirth' of Liberalism" under the banner of "Liberal Fascism."¹⁹ Fabian socialism had failed, he explained, because it hadn't grasped the need for a truly "revolutionary" effort aimed at the total transformation of society. His fellow Socialists understood the need for socialism, but they were just too nice about it. Their advocacy of piecemeal "Gas, Water and School-Board socialization" was simply too boring. Conventional democratic governments, meanwhile, were decadent, feeble, and dull. If the liberals in the 1930s were going to succeed where the Fabians had failed — abolishing private property, achieving a fully planned economy, violently crushing the forces of reaction — they'd have to learn that lesson.

Wells confessed that he'd spent some thirty years — since the dawn of the Progressive Era — reworking the idea of liberal fascism. "I have never been able to escape altogether from its relentless logic," he explained. "We have seen the Fascisti in Italy and a number of clumsy imitations elsewhere, and we have seen the Russian Communist Party coming into existence to reinforce this idea." And now he was done waiting. "I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis."

"And do not let me leave you in the slightest doubt as to the scope and ambition of what I am putting before you," he continued:

These new organizations are not merely organizations for the spread of defined opinions...the days of that sort of amateurism are over — they are organizations to replace the dilatory indecisiveness of [democracy]. The world is sick of parliamentary politics...The Fascist Party, to the best of its ability, is Italy now. The Communist Party, to the best of its ability, is Russia. Obviously the Fascists of Liberalism must carry out a parallel ambition on a still vaster scale...They must begin as a disciplined sect, but they must end as the sustaining organization of a reconstituted mankind.²⁰

Wells's fiction was so thinly veiled in its praise for fascism that the attentive reader can only squirm. In The War in the Air, German airships liquidate New York City's "black and sinister polyglot population." In The Shape of Things to Come, veterans of a great world war — mostly airmen and technicians — in black shirts and uniforms fight to impose one-world government on the beaten and undisciplined masses. In Wells's far-flung future, a historian looks back on the twentieth century and finds that the roots of the new, enlightened "Air Dictatorship" lay in Mussolini's Fascism — a "bad good thing," the historian calls it — as well as Nazism and Soviet Communism. In 1927 Wells couldn't help but notice "the good there is in these Fascists. There is something brave and well-meaning about them." By 1941 no less a figure than George Orwell couldn't help but conclude, "Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany."²¹

Wells was an enormous fan of FDR's, and the two met often at the White House, particularly during 1934. Wells pronounced Roosevelt "the most effective transmitting instrument possible for the coming of the new world order." In 1935 and 1936 he briefly switched to Huey Long's and Father Coughlin's more exciting brand of fascism. (He described the bayou dictator as "a Winston Churchill who has never been at Harrow.")²² By 1939, however, he was again firmly back in the Roosevelt camp, seeing FDR's brand of "personal government" as indispensable.

Wells's vision neatly captures the sense of excitement that infused the Western left in the 1930s. It should be no surprise that an avant-garde of self-described supermen would welcome an age where supermen would run the world. To be sure, these were on the whole dark and pessimistic times. But the spirit of "the worse the better" served as a wind behind liberals eager to remake the world, to end the days of drift and inaugurate the era of progressive mastery.

STEALING FASCIST THUNDER

Herbert Hoover won the presidential contest of 1928 in no small part on the strength of the international craze for economic planning and collectivization. He was a self-made millionaire, but his chief appeal was his experience as an engineer. In the 1920s and 1930s it was widely believed that engineering was the highest calling, and it was hoped that engineers could clear political mountains the same way they moved real ones.²³

Hoover failed to deliver as the Great Engineer, ironically because he gave the people too much of what they wanted. Indeed, many economic historians concede that the New Deal was, in significant respects, an accelerated continuation of Hoover's policies rather than a sharp break from them. The lines are even blurrier when one notes that FDR went into office as a budget balancer who cut government pay. Of course, the New Deal was an even greater failure when it came to curing the Great Depression — but Roosevelt had something going for him that Hoover did not: an appreciation of the fascist moment.

Just as progressivism constituted a definite international moment during the second decade of the twentieth century, so in the 1930s the Western world was riding through a storm of collectivist sentiments, ideas, and trends. In Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, and Finland, quasi-fascist parties received their highest share of the votes. Until 1934 it seemed possible that Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists (who, like Mussolini, always considered himself a man of the left), might occupy 10 Downing Street. Meanwhile, in the United States, national socialists or populist progressives such as Huey Long and Father Coughlin were hugely popular, and they, more than any other group, moved the political center of gravity in America to the left.

This is as good a place as any to tackle the enduring myth that Long and Coughlin were conservatives. It is a bedrock dogma of all enlightened liberals that Father Charles Coughlin was an execrable right-winger (Long is a more complicated case, but whenever his legacy is portrayed negatively, he is characterized as right-wing; whenever he is a friend of the people, he's a left-winger). Again and again, Coughlin is referred to as "the right-wing Radio Priest" whom supposedly insightful essayists describe as the ideological grandfather of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, and other putative extremists.²⁴ But Coughlin was in no meaningful way a conservative or even a right-winger. He was a man of the left in nearly all significant respects.

Born in 1891 in Hamilton, Ontario, Coughlin was ordained as a priest in 1916. He taught at Catholic schools in Canada for seven years, and then moved to Michigan. He eventually found a spot as a parish priest in the town of Royal Oak, a suburb of Detroit. He named the church the Shrine of the Little Flower after Saint Therese. Coughlin's first taste of publicity came when he battled the local Ku Klux Klan, which was at the time harassing Catholics, many of them immigrants. He talked a local radio station into permitting him to deliver sermons over the air. He was a success almost from the outset.

From 1926 until 1929 Coughlin confined himself almost entirely to religious topics, denunciations of the Klan, sermons for children, and diatribes against Prohibition — all for an audience that didn't extend very far outside the Detroit area. His big breakthrough came with the stock market collapse, when he took up populist economics. He shrewdly tapped into popular anxiety and economic discontent, and his broadcasts were picked up by more and more stations as a result. In 1930 he signed a deal with CBS to deliver six months of sermons on sixteen stations across the country on his Golden Hour of the Little Flower.

Almost instantly Coughlin became the most successful political commentator of the fledgling mass-media age. With over forty million listeners and a reported million letters a week, he became one of the most powerful voices in American politics.

His first victim was that ostensible conservative, Herbert Hoover. In October 1931, in a fiery speech against laissez-faire economics, Coughlin declared that America's problems couldn't be solved "by waiting for things to adjust themselves and by eating the airy platitudes of those hundreds of so-called leaders who have been busy assuring us that the bottom has been reached and that prosperity and justice and charity are waiting 'just around the corner.'"²⁵ His favorite villains were "international bankers" and their ilk. Donations and letters poured in.

In November, denouncing Hoover's belief that economic relief was a local matter, Coughlin made an impassioned case for government activism at the national level. He railed against a federal government that could help the starving of Belgium and even pigs in Arkansas but wouldn't feed Americans because of its antagonism to welfare. As the presidential election loomed, Coughlin threw all his weight behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The left-wing theocrat swore that the New Deal was "Christ's Deal" and that the choice Americans faced was "Roosevelt or Ruin." Meanwhile, he wrote the Democratic candidate, Roosevelt, grotesquely sycophantic letters explaining that he would change his own positions if that's what the campaign needed.

FDR didn't like Coughlin much, but, true to form, he was glad to let the priest think he did. When FDR won, thanks in part to a successful strategy of going after urban Catholic voters, Coughlin concluded that he had been instrumental in getting him elected. When FDR invited the Radio Priest to attend the inauguration, Coughlin assumed that the president-elect saw things the same way. Over time, he became increasingly convinced that he was an official White House spokesman, often creating serious headaches for the White House even as he celebrated this "Protestant President who has more courage than 90 per cent of the Catholic priests in the country." "Capitalism is doomed and is not worth trying to save," Coughlin pronounced. At other times he advocated "state capitalism" — a phrase rich in both fascist and Marxist associations.²⁶

Indeed, Coughlin's economic populism usefully illustrates how ideological categories from the 1930s have been systematically misapplied ever since. As mentioned before, Richard Pipes described Bolshevism and Fascism as twinned heresies of Marxism. Both sought to impose socialism of one sort or another, erase class differences, and repudiate the decadent democratic-capitalist systems of the West. In a sense, Pipes's description doesn't go far enough. While Fascism and Bolshevism were surely heresies of Marxism, virtually all collectivist visions at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries were heresies of Marxism in the sense that Marxism itself was heretical. All of these isms, as the philosopher Eric Voegelin argued, were premised on the idea that men could create utopias through the rearrangement of economic forces and political will. Marxism, or really Leninism, was the most influential and powerful of these heresies and came to define the left. But just as Leninism was a kind of applied Marxism, so, too, was Fascism (as well as technocracy, Fabian socialism, corporatism, war socialism, German social democracy, and so on). Collectivism was the "wave of the future," according to the title and argument of a book by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and it would be known by different names in different places. The fascist moment that gave birth to the "Russian-Italian method" was in reality a religious awakening in which Christianity was to be either sloughed off and replaced or "updated" by the new progressive faith in man's ability to perfect the world.²⁷

From the dawn of the Progressive Era through the 1930s, the intellectual and ideological landscape was fractured within this larger camp. The fight between left and right was for the most part between left-wing and right-wing socialists. But virtually all camps subscribed to some hybridized version of Marxism, some bastardization of the Rousseauian dream of a society governed by a general will. It was not until the late 1940s, with the revival of classical liberalism led by Friedrich Hayek, that collectivism of all stripes was once again fought from a right that did not share the core assumptions of the left. What is aggravating is that vestigial carbuncles like Coughlin are still counted as figures of the right — because of their anti-Semitism or opposition to FDR, or because they are simply too embarrassing to the left — even though on the fundamental philosophical and political questions Coughlinites were part of the liberal-progressive coalition.

Coughlin himself was a darling among Capitol Hill Democrats, particularly the progressive bloc — the liberals to the left of FDR who pushed him for ever more aggressive reforms. In 1933 the administration was under considerable pressure to include Coughlin in the U.S. delegation to a major economic conference in London. Ten senators and seventy-five congressmen sent a petition declaring that Coughlin had "the confidence of millions of Americans." The vast majority of the signatories were Democrats. There was even a groundswell among progressives for FDR to appoint Coughlin treasury secretary.

This was no joke. Indeed, Coughlin was perhaps the foremost American advocate of what had become an international push toward economic nationalism. An heir to the Free Silver movement, he was a classic left-wing populist. The more "dignified" forces of liberalism embraced him in much the same way today's Democratic Party embraces Michael Moore. Raymond Moley ran an article on inflation by Coughlin in the journal he edited. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace collaborated with Coughlin in an effort to sway the administration's monetary policy further to the left. Recall that Wallace (who was Alger Hiss's boss at Agriculture) went on to become Roosevelt's penultimate vice president, the leading Soviet "useful idiot" in the United States, the editor of the New Republic, and the Progressive Party's 1948 presidential nominee. In 1933 the League for Independent Political Action, a far-left group of intellectuals chaired by John Dewey, invited Coughlin to participate in its summer institute. When William Aberhart, the "radical premier" of Alberta, Canada, visited Coughlin in Detroit in 1935 to discuss his own left-wing economic program, Aberhart explained he wanted to get "the most expert advice on the continent."²⁸

Coughlin was more than willing to roll up his sleeves for the role of attack dog for the Democratic Party. The centrist Democrat Al Smith, the first Catholic to win a major party's presidential nomination, had become an increasingly bitter foe of the New Deal and FDR. This was all the provocation Coughlin needed. After tipping off FDR in a telegram, Coughlin took to the air to flay his fellow Catholic as a bought-and-paid-for tool of Wall Street.

Liberals often debated among themselves whether Coughlin's contribution was worth the price of his unflinching demagoguery. Until late in 1934 the answer was invariably yes. Chief among his defenders was Monsignor John Ryan, the most respected liberal Catholic intellectual and theologian in America at the time. When Coughlin unfairly and cruelly ripped Al Smith to shreds, many wondered whether it was time to distance themselves from the Radio Priest. Ryan intervened and declared the rabble-rouser was "on the side of the angels." This was the standard liberal defense of the supposedly right-wing Coughlin. He was fighting the good fight, so who cared about his excesses?

At a congressional hearing on FDR's monetary policy, Coughlin offered a two-hour peroration that held the committee transfixed. "If Congress fails to back up the President in his monetary program," he blustered, "I predict a revolution in this country which will make the French Revolution look silly!" "I know the pulse of the Nation," he further declared. "And I know Congress will do nothing but say: 'Mr. Roosevelt, we follow.'" "God is directing President Roosevelt," he added. "He is the answer to our prayers." In his sermons the leader of America's religious left sounded like he'd borrowed Mussolini's talking points: "Our Government still upholds one of the worst evils of decadent capitalism, namely, that production must be only at the profit for the owners, for the capitalist, and not for the laborer."²⁹

So how did Coughlin suddenly become a right-winger? When did he become persona non grata in the eyes of liberal intellectuals? On this the historical record is abundantly clear: liberals started to call Coughlin a right-winger when he moved further to the left.

This isn't nearly as contradictory as it sounds. Coughlin became a villain in late 1934 almost solely because he had decided that FDR wasn't radical enough. FDR's less than fully national-socialist policies sapped Coughlin's patience — as did his reluctance to make the priest his personal Rasputin. Still, Coughlin managed for most of the year to qualify his support, saying things like "More than ever, I am in favor of a New Deal." Finally, on November 11, 1934, he announced he was forming a new "lobby of the people," the National Union for Social Justice, or NUSJ. He issued sixteen principles of social justice as the platform for the new super-lobby. Among its articles of faith:

* that every citizen willing to work and capable of working shall receive a just and living annual wage which will enable him to maintain and educate his family...

* I believe in nationalizing those public necessities which by their very nature are too important to be held in the control of private individuals.

* I believe in upholding the right of private property yet of controlling it for the public good.

* I believe not only in the right of the laboring man to organize in unions but also in the duty of the Government which that laboring man supports to protect these organizations against the vested interests of wealth and of intellect.

* I believe in the event of a war and for the defense of our nation and its liberties, if there shall be a conscription of men let there be a conscription of wealth.

* I believe in preferring the sanctity of human rights to the sanctity of property rights. I believe that the chief concern of government shall be for the poor, because, as is witnessed, the rich have ample means of their own to care for themselves.³⁰

The following month Coughlin issued another seven principles, to elaborate exactly how the NUSJ would combat the horrors of capitalism and modern commerce. These were even more explicitly anticapitalist. Thus it was the government's "duty" to limit the "profits acquired by any industry." All workers must be guaranteed what we would today call a living wage. The government must guarantee the production of "food, wearing apparel, homes, drugs, books and all modern conveniences." "This principle," Coughlin rightly explained, "is contrary to the theory of capitalism."³¹

The program was largely derived from the prevailing views of the liberal wing of the Catholic Church, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor and Wisconsin Progressive labor parties, and Coughlin's own well-worn themes. That his economic doctrine should be influenced from the disparate branches of American populism shouldn't be a surprise. From the outset, Coughlin's ideological roots intermingled with those of many New Dealers and progressives and populists. At no time was he ever associated with classical liberalism or with the economic forces we normally connect with the right.

This returns us to one of the most infuriating distortions of American political debate. In the 1930s, what defined a "right-winger" was almost exclusively opposition to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The muckraking journalist J. T. Flynn, for example, is often labeled a leading light of the Old Right for no other reason than that he was a relentless FDR critic and a member of America First (indeed, he was one of the most articulate voices decrying the incipient fascism of the New Deal). But Flynn was no classical liberal. He had been a left-leaning columnist for the New Republic for much of the 1930s, and he denounced Roosevelt for moving in what he considered a rightward direction. As for his isolationism, he considered himself a fellow traveler with Norman Thomas, head of the American Socialist Party, Charles Beard, and John Dewey.

Senator Huey Long, the archetypal American fascist, is likewise often called a right-winger by his detractors — though his place in the liberal imagination is more complicated. Many Democrats, including Bill Clinton, still admire Long and invoke him very selectively. Long inspired Sinclair's It Can't Happen Here as well as the far superior All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, and his larger-than-life persona elicits an ambivalent reaction from liberals who admire his economic populism but dislike his unrefined demagoguery. But leaving all that aside, what cannot be denied is that Long attacked the New Deal from the left. His Share the Wealth plan was pure booboisie socialism. His well-documented opposition to the actual Socialist Party was entirely cultural and pragmatic, not ideological. "Will you please tell me what sense there is in running on a socialist ticket in America today?" Long quizzed a reporter from the Nation. "What's the use of being right only to be defeated?" Meanwhile, Norman Thomas was regularly beseeched by his rank and file to show more sympathy to Coughlin and Long. "Now I am a socialist," an Alabama man wrote Thomas in 1935, "have been for thirty five years...[Long] is telling the people the things we have been telling them for a generation. They listen to him...while they thought we were fools."³²

What makes Long so recognizable as a fascist was his folksy contempt for the rules of democracy — "the time has come for all good men to rise above principle" — and his absolute faith that he was the authentic voice of the people. His rule over Louisiana certainly transcended that of a mere political boss. He had an authentic organic connection with his constituents that seemed to exceed anything Americans had seen before. "There is no dictatorship in Louisiana. There is a perfect democracy there, and when you have a perfect democracy it is pretty hard to tell it from a dictatorship."³³ Oddly enough, what may have allowed so many liberals and socialists to recognize the fascism in Long's politics was their own elitism and cosmopolitanism. Long had no use for pointy-headed experts and elites. His was an undiluted populism of the sort that throws aside dogma and celebrates the wisdom of the mob above all else. He appealed to the narcissism of the masses, proclaiming that through his own will to power he could make "every man a king." He had a relationship with his folk more akin to Hitler's relationship to the Volk than FDR could ever manage. As such, many liberals saw it as threatening, and rightly so.

Within the White House, Long and Coughlin were seen, along with other populist and radical movements and leaders — including Upton Sinclair's 1934 campaign for the governorship of California and Dr. Francis Townsend's bizarre pension movement, which swept the country in the 1930s — as dangerous threats to the control and rule of New Deal planners.³⁴ But only the most sloppy and circular thinking — the sort that says right-wing equals bad, and bad equals right-wing — would label such radicals and collectivists as anything but creatures of the left.

In 1935 Roosevelt was sufficiently worried about these various threats from the left that he ordered a secret poll to be conducted. The results scared the dickens out of many of his strategists, who concluded that Long could cost FDR the election if he ran on a third-party ticket. Indeed, Roosevelt confessed to aides that he hoped to "steal Long's thunder" by adopting at least some of his issues.

How did FDR hope to steal the thunder of incipient fascist and collectivist movements in the United States? Social Security, for starters. Although the extent of its influence is hotly debated, few dispute that the national-socialist push from below — represented by Long, Coughlin, and Townsend — contributed to the leftward tilt of Roosevelt's "Second Hundred Days." FDR the Third Wayer aped the Bismarckian tactic of splitting the difference with the radicals in order to maintain power. Indeed, just when Long's popularity was spiking, Roosevelt unexpectedly inserted a "soak the rich" bill into his list of "must pass" legislative proposals. How things would have played out over time is unknowable because Long was assassinated in September 1935. As for Coughlin, his problems accelerated as he became ever more of an economic radical and ever more sympathetic to the actual, name-brand, foreign fascism of Mussolini and Hitler. His anti-Semitism — evident even when Roosevelt and New Deal liberals welcomed his support — likewise became ever more pronounced. During the war FDR ordered his Justice Department to spy on Coughlin with the aim of silencing him.

How much electoral support Long, the Coughlinites, and the rest would have garnered had Long survived to challenge Roosevelt at the polls remains a matter of academic speculation, but it is somewhat irrelevant to the larger point. These populist leftists framed the public debate. That Coughlin garnered 40 million listeners in a nation of only 127 million and that his audience was largest when he was calling the New Deal "Christ's Deal" should tell us something about the nature of FDR's appeal, and Coughlin's. Even those New Dealers who despised Long and Coughlin believed that if they didn't steal their thunder, "Huey Long and Father Coughlin might take over." What's more, there was precious little daylight between the substantive ideas and motivations of "street" or "country" fascists like Long and Coughlin and those of the more rarefied intellectuals who staffed the Roosevelt administration.

REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN MAN

One can easily make too much of the parallel chronology of Hitler's and Roosevelt's tenures. But it is not a complete coincidence that they both came to power in 1933. Though obviously very different men, they understood many of the same things about politics in the mass age. Both owed their elections to the perceived exhaustion of traditional liberal politics, and they were the two world leaders who most successfully exploited new political technologies. Roosevelt most famously utilized the radio — and the Nazis quickly aped the practice. FDR broke with all tradition to fly to the Democratic National Convention to accept his party's nomination. The imagery of him flying — a man of action! — rather than sitting on the porch and waiting for the news was electrifying, as was Hitler's brilliant use of planes, most famously in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Take away the text of New Deal, Soviet, and Nazi propaganda posters and other artwork, and it's almost impossible to tell whether the bulging-biceps laborers are the New Soviet Man, the New Nazi Man, or the New Deal Man. Max Lerner observed in 1934, "The most damning blow that the dictatorships have struck at democracy has been the compliment they have paid us in taking over (and perfecting) our most prized devices of persuasion and our underlying contempt for the credulity of the masses."³⁵

Where FDR and Hitler overlapped most was in their fawning over "the forgotten man." Fascism's success almost always depends on the cooperation of the "losers" during a time of economic and technological change. The lower-middle classes — the people who have just enough to fear losing it — are the electoral shock troops of fascism (Richard Hofstadter identified this "status anxiety" as the source of Progressivism's quasi-fascist nature). Populist appeals to resentment against "fat cats," "international bankers," "economic royalists," and so on are the stock-in-trade of fascist demagogues. Hitler and Mussolini were surely more demagogic than FDR, but Roosevelt fully understood the "magic" of such appeals. He saw nothing wrong with ascribing evil motives to those who didn't support him, and he certainly relished his role as the wellborn tribune of the little guy.

Obviously, this wasn't all a cynical act. FDR did care about the little guy, the worker, and the like. But so did Hitler. Indeed, there is a mounting body of scholarship showing that "Hitler's New Deal" (David Schoenbaum's phrase) was not only similar to FDR's but in fact more generous and more successful. Germany prospered under Hitler according to the most basic indicators. The birthrate increased 50 percent from 1932 to 1936; marriages increased until Germany led Europe in 1938-39. Suicide plummeted by 80 percent from 1932 to 1939. A recent book by the German historian Gotz Aly calls Hitler the "feel good dictator" because he was so successful in restoring German confidence.³⁶

When Hitler became chancellor he focused like a laser on the economy, ending unemployment far faster than FDR. When asked by the New York Times if his first priority was jobs, Hitler boisterously responded, "Wholly! I am thinking first of those in Germany who are in despair and who have been in despair for three years...What does anything else matter?" Hitler said he was a great admirer of Henry Ford, though he didn't mention Ford's virulent anti-Semitism. What appealed to Hitler about Ford was that he "produces for the masses. That little car of his had done more than anything else to destroy class differences."³⁷

Mussolini and Hitler also felt that they were doing things along similar lines to FDR. Indeed, they celebrated the New Deal as a kindred effort. The German press was particularly lavish in its praise for FDR. In 1934 the Volkischer Beobachter — the Nazi Party's official newspaper — described Roosevelt as a man of "irreproachable, extremely responsible character and immovable will" and a "warmhearted leader of the people with a profound understanding of social needs." The paper emphasized that Roosevelt, through his New Deal, had eliminated "the uninhibited frenzy of market speculation" of the previous decade by adopting "National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies." After his first year in office, Hitler sent FDR a private letter congratulating "his heroic efforts in the interests of the American people. The President's successful battle against economic distress is being followed by the entire German people with interest and admiration." And he told the American ambassador, William Dodd, that he was "in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan 'The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual.'"³⁸

Mussolini was even more assiduous in claiming the New Deal as an incipient fascist phenomenon. He reviewed FDR's book Looking Forward, saying, in effect, "This guy's one of us": "The appeal to the decisiveness and masculine sobriety of the nation's youth, with which Roosevelt here calls his readers to battle, is reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people." Mussolini wrote that FDR understood that the economy could not "be left to its own devices" and saw the fascistic nature of how the American president put this understanding into practice. "Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism," he wrote. (He later reviewed a book by Henry Wallace, proclaiming, "Where is America headed? This book leaves no doubt that it is on the road to corporatism, the economic system of the current century.") The Volkischer Beobachter also noted that "many passages in his book Looking Forward could have been written by a National Socialist. In any case, one can assume that he feels considerable affinity with the National Socialist philosophy."³⁹

In a famous interview with Emil Ludwig, Mussolini reiterated his view that "America has a dictator" in FDR. In an essay written for American audiences, he marveled at how the forces of "spiritual renewal" were destroying the outdated notion that democracy and liberalism were "immortal principles." "America itself is abandoning them. Roosevelt is moving, acting, giving orders independently of the decisions or wishes of the Senate or Congress. There are no longer intermediaries between him and the nation. There is no longer a parliament but an 'etat majeur.' There are no longer parties, but a single party. A sole will silences dissenting voices. This has nothing to do with any demo-liberal conception of things." In 1933 members of Mussolini's press office recognized that these statements were starting to hurt their putative comrade-in-arms. They issued an order: "It is not to be emphasized that Roosevelt's policy is fascist because these comments are immediately cabled to the United States and are used by his foes to attack him." Still, the admiration remained mutual for several years. FDR sent his ambassador to Italy, Breckinridge Long, a letter regarding "that admirable Italian gentleman," saying that Mussolini "is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished."⁴⁰

Perhaps Norman Thomas, America's leading socialist, put the question best: "To what extent may we expect to have the economics of fascism without its politics?"⁴¹

But the most glaring similarity between Nazi Germany, New Deal America, and Fascist Italy wasn't their economic policies. It was their common glorification of war.

THE FASCIST NEW DEALS

The core value of original fascism, in the eyes of most observers, was its imposition of war values on society. (This perception — or misperception, depending on how it is articulated — is so fundamental to the popular understanding of fascism that I must return to it several times in this book.) The chief appeal of war to social planners isn't conquest or death but mobilization. Free societies are disorganized. People do their own thing, more or less, and that can be downright inconvenient if you're trying to plan the entire economy from a boardroom somewhere. War brings conformity and unity of purpose. The ordinary rules of behavior are mothballed. You can get things done: build roads, hospitals, houses. Domestic populations and institutions were required to "do their part."

Many progressives probably would have preferred a different organizing principle, which is why William James spoke of the moral equivalent of war. He wanted all the benefits — Dewey's "social possibilities" of war — without the costs. Hence, in more recent times, the left has looked to everything from environmentalism and global warming to public health and "diversity" as war equivalents to cajole the public into expert-driven unity. But at the time the progressives just couldn't think of anything else that did the trick. "Martial virtues," James famously wrote, "must be the enduring cement" of American society: "intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built."⁴²

In Italy many of the first Fascists were veterans who donned paramilitary garb. The fascist artistic movement Futurism glorified war in prose, poetry, and paint. Mussolini was a true voluptuary of battle, rhetorically and literally. "War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it," he declared in a Jamesian spirit in the Enciclopedia italiana's entry on Fascism. Meanwhile, from the movement's origin as the German Fighting League Against Interest Slavery, the Nazis were always a paramilitary organization, determined to recapture the esprit de corps of the Great War, the socialism of the trenches.

Still, not every Fascist pounding the table about war actually wanted one. Mussolini didn't launch a war until a full sixteen years into his reign. Even his Ethiopian adventure was motivated by a desire to revitalize Fascism's flagging domestic fortunes. Hitler did not commence his military buildup at once, either. Indeed, while solidifying power, he cultivated an image as a peacemaker (an image many Western pacifists were willing to indulge in good faith). But few dispute that he saw war as a means as much as an end.

With the election of Franklin Roosevelt, the progressives who'd sought to remake America through war socialism were back in power. While they professed to eschew dogma, they couldn't be more dogmatically convinced that World War I had been a successful "experiment." Had not the experiences of the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy in the 1920s proved that America had dropped the ball by relinquishing war socialism?

During the campaign FDR promised to use his experience as an architect of the Great War to tackle the Depression. Even before he was nominated, he ordered aides to prepare a brief on presidential war powers. He asked Rexford Tugwell to find out if he could use the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act to unilaterally embargo gold exports and extracted an assurance from his intended attorney general that no matter what the arguments to the contrary, the Department of Justice would find that Roosevelt had the authority to do whatever he felt necessary in this regard. Roosevelt's inaugural address was famously drenched with martial metaphors: "I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to the disciplined attack upon our common problems."

According to a document unearthed by the Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter, FDR's staff prepared a radio address to the American Legion, the first to be delivered after his inaugural, in which FDR was to instruct the veterans that they should become his own "extra-constitutional" "private army" (Alter's words). "A new commander-in-chief under the oath to which you are still bound," Roosevelt's prepared text read, "I reserve to myself the right to command you in any phase of the situation which now confronts us."⁴³

While Alter concedes this was "dictator talk — an explicit power grab" and showed that FDR or his minions contemplated forming "a makeshift force of veterans to enforce some kind of martial law," he minimizes the importance of his own discovery.⁴⁴ He leaves out the legacy of the American Protective League, which FDR no doubt endorsed. He fails to mention that the American Legion saw itself as an "American Fascisti" for a time. And he leaves out that FDR — who showed no reluctance when it came to using the FBI and other agencies to spy on domestic critics — oversaw the use of the American Legion as a quasi-official branch of the FBI to monitor American citizens.

Almost every program of the early New Deal was rooted in the politics of war, the economics of war, or the aesthetics of war emerging from World War I. The Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, the signature public works project of the New Deal, had its roots in a World War I power project. (As FDR explained when he formally asked Congress to create the thing, "This power development of war days leads logically to national planning.") The Supreme Court defended the constitutionality of the TVA in part by citing the president's war powers.

Many New Deal agencies, the famous "alphabet soup," were mostly continuations of various boards and committees set up fifteen years earlier during the war. The National Recovery Administration was explicitly modeled on the War Industries Board of World War I. The Securities and Exchange Commission was an extension of the Capital Issues Committee of the Federal Reserve Board. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was an updated version of the War Finance Corporation. FDR's public housing initiative was run by the architect of World War I-era housing policies. During the war, public housing had been a necessity for war laborers. Under FDR, everyone became in effect a war laborer.

Presumably it is not necessary to recount how similar all of this was to developments in Nazi Germany. But it is worth noting that for the first two years of the American and German New Deals, it was America that pursued militarism and rearmament at a breakneck pace while Germany spent relatively little on arms (though Hitler faced severe constraints on rearmament). The Public Works Administration paid for the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Enterprise as well as four cruisers, many smaller warships, and over one hundred army planes parked at fifty military airports. Perhaps one reason so many people believed the New Deal ended the Depression is that the New Deal's segue into a full-blown war economy was so seamless.

Old Wilson hands infested every level of the Roosevelt bureaucracy. This makes sense in that Roosevelt's was the first Democratic administration since Wilson. Even so, the New Dealers weren't looking for mere retreads; they wanted war veterans. When Holger Cahill at first declined the invitation to head the Federal Art Project, a colleague explained, "An invitation from the Government to a job like that is tantamount to an order. It's like being drafted."⁴⁵

Not only did government agencies organize themselves along military lines, but the staffers spoke in military jargon. Field work was work "in the trenches." Junior staffers were called "noncoms." New federal programs went "over the top." And so on.

Perhaps no program better represented the new governmental martial outlook than the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC. Arguably the most popular program of the New Deal, the CCC mobilized some 2.5 million young men into what could only be called paramilitary training. CCCers mostly worked as a "forestry army," clearing dead wood and the like. Enlistees met at army recruiting stations; wore World War I uniforms; were transported around the country by troop trains; answered to army sergeants; were required to stand at attention, march in formation, employ military lingo — including the duty of calling superiors "sir" — read a CCC newspaper modeled on Stars and Stripes; went to bed in army tents listening to taps; and woke to reveille.

After the CCC was approved by Congress, FDR reported, "It is a pretty good record, one which I think can be compared with the mobilization carried on in 1917." The Speaker of the House boasted of the CCC's success: "They are also under military training and as they come out of it they come out improved in health and developed mentally and physically and are more useful citizens and if ever we should become involved in another war they would furnish a very valuable nucleus for our army."⁴⁶ Meanwhile, the Nazis were establishing similar camps for virtually identical reasons.

The chief motive among social planners was to get young men out of the mainstream workforce. The public arguments tended to emphasize the need to beef up the physical and moral fiber of an embryonic new army. FDR said the camps were ideal for getting youth "off the city street corners." Hitler promised his camps would keep youth from "rotting helplessly in the streets." Mussolini's various "battles" — the "Battle of the Grains" and such — were defended on similar grounds.

A second rationale was to transcend class barriers, an aspect of the program that still appeals to liberals today. The argument, then as now, is that there are no common institutions that foster a sense of true collective obligation. There's merit to this point. But it's interesting that the Nazis were far more convinced of this rationale than the New Dealers, and it informed not only their Labor Service program but their entire domestic agenda.⁴⁷

A far more shocking example of the militarization of American life came in the form of the National Recovery Administration, led by Hugh "Iron Pants" Johnson, Time's Man of the Year for 1933. General Johnson was a pugnacious brawler who threatened that Americans who didn't cooperate with the New Deal would get a "sock in the nose." The military liaison to the War Industries Board and director of America's first military draft during the Great War — which he later called the "great schooling" for the New Deal — Johnson was convinced that what America needed was another injection of wartime fervor and fear. Few public figures — Joseph McCarthy included — were more prone to question the patriotism of their opponents. At every opportunity, Johnson claimed the war on the Depression was indistinguishable from battle. "This is war — lethal and more menacing than any other crisis in our history," he wrote. No sphere of life was out of bounds for the new service. "It is women in homes — and not soldiers in uniform — who will this time save our country," he announced. "They will go over the top to as great a victory as the Argonne. It is zero hour for housewives. Their battle cry is 'Buy now under the Blue Eagle!'"⁴⁸

The Blue Eagle was the patriotic symbol of compliance that all companies were expected to hang from their doors, along with the motto "We do our part," a phrase used by the administration the way the Germans used "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz."⁴⁹ Now largely airbrushed from popular awareness, the stylized Indian eagle clutching a band of lightning bolts in one claw and an industrial cogwheel in the other was often compared to the swastika or the German Reich eagle in both American and German newspapers. Johnson demanded that compliance with the Blue Eagle program be monitored by an army of quasi-official informants, from union members to Boy Scouts. His totalitarian approach was unmistakable. "When every American housewife understands that the Blue Eagle on everything that she permits to come into her home is a symbol of its restoration to security, may God have mercy on the man or group of men who attempt to trifle with this bird."⁵⁰

It's difficult to exaggerate the propagandistic importance FDR invested in the Blue Eagle. "In war, in the gloom of night attack, soldiers wear a bright badge on their shoulders to be sure their comrades do not fire on comrades," the president explained. "On that principle those who cooperate in this program must know each other at a glance." In a fireside chat in 1933, Roosevelt called for a great Mussolini-style "summer offensive against unemployment." Hollywood did its part. In the 1933 Warner Brothers musical Footlight Parade, starring James Cagney, a chorus line uses flash cards to flip up a portrait of Roosevelt, and then forms a giant Blue Eagle. Will Rogers led a Who's Who roster of stars in Blue Eagle and NRA radio broadcasts.

Johnson's favorite means of promoting compliance with the Blue Eagle were military parades and Nuremberg-style rallies. On September 12, 1933, Johnson harangued an audience of ten thousand at Madison Square Garden, vowing that 85 percent of America's workers were already under the authority of the Blue Eagle. The following day New York was nearly shut down by a Blue Eagle parade in honor of "The President's NRA Day." All Blue Eagle-compliant stores were ordered shut at 1:00 p.m., and the governor declared a half-day holiday for everyone else as well. Under the direction of a U.S. Army major general, the Blue Eagle parade marched from Washington Square up Fifth Avenue to the New York Public Library, where it passed a reviewing stand upon which stood Johnson, the governors from the tristate area, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

This was the biggest parade in New York's history, eclipsing even the ticker-tape parade to celebrate Charles Lindbergh's crossing of the Atlantic. In true corporatist fashion, labor and management alike were expected to participate. The President's NRA Day Parade boasted fifty thousand garment workers, thirty thousand city laborers, seventeen thousand retail workers, six thousand brewery hands, and a Radio City Music Hall troupe. Nearly a quarter-million men and women marched for ten hours past an audience of well over a million people, with forty-nine military planes flying overhead. Because of events like this, writes Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Johnson and Roosevelt achieved their goal of "transforming a government agency into a religious experience."⁵¹ A member of the British Independent Labour Party was horrified by such pageantry, saying it made him feel like he was in Nazi Germany.

The New York parade was no isolated incident. Similar spectacles were held in cities across the country, where marchers typically wore the uniforms of their respective occupations. The Philadelphia Eagles football team was named in honor of the Blue Eagle. A hundred thousand schoolkids were marched onto the Boston Common and forced to swear an oath, administered by the mayor: "I promise as a good American citizen to do my part for the NRA. I will buy only where the Blue Eagle flies."⁵² In Atlantic City, beauty pageant contestants had the Blue Eagle stamped on their thighs. In San Francisco, eight thousand schoolchildren were orchestrated to form an enormous Blue Eagle. In Memphis, fifty thousand citizens marched in the city's Christmas parade, which ended with Santa Claus riding a giant Blue Eagle.

Not surprisingly, victims of the Blue Eagle received little sympathy in the press and even less quarter from the government. Perhaps the most famous case was Jacob Maged, the forty-nine-year-old immigrant dry cleaner who spent three months in jail in 1934 for charging thirty-five cents to press a suit, when the NRA had insisted that all loyal Americans must charge at least forty cents. Because one of the central goals of the early New Deal was to create artificial scarcity in order to drive prices up, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration ordered that six million pigs be slaughtered. Bountiful crops were left to rot. Many white farmers were paid not to work their land (which meant that many black tenant farmers went hungry). All of these policies were enforced by a militarized government.

In urban centers the plight of blacks was little better. By granting new collective bargaining powers to unions, FDR also gave them the power to lock blacks out of the labor force. And the unions — often viscerally racist — did precisely that. Hence some in the black press said the NRA really stood for the "Negro Run Around," the "Negro Removal Act," and "Negroes Robbed Again." At a rally in Harlem a protester drew a picture of the Blue Eagle and wrote underneath: "That Bird Stole My Pop's Job."⁵³ Meanwhile, under Johnson's watchful eye, policemen would break down doors with axes to make sure tailors weren't working at night and — literally — yank newsboys from the street because they didn't work for big corporations.

It should not be surprising to learn that General Johnson was an ardent disciple of Fascism. As head of the NRA, he distributed copies of The Corporate State by Raffaello Viglione — an unapologetic Fascist tract by one of Mussolini's favorite economists. He even gave one to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, imploring her to hand out copies to the cabinet.

By 1934 Johnson's fascist methods and, more important, his unstable personality had led to his downfall. And while he was undoubtedly the most unrelentingly fascistic and pro-Fascist member of the Roosevelt administration, his ideas and methods were not at all out of the mainstream. When Alexander Sachs, a respected economist who'd grown up in Europe, was invited to consult on the formation of the NRA, he warned that it could only be administered "by a bureaucracy operating by fiat and such bureaucracy would be far more akin to the incipient Fascist or Nazi state than to a liberal republic." No one followed his advice, and he joined the administration anyway. In late 1934 Rexford Tugwell visited Italy and found the Fascist project familiar. "I find Italy doing many of the things which seem to me necessary...Mussolini certainly has the same people opposed to him as FDR has. But he has the press controlled so that they cannot scream lies at him daily." The Research and Planning Division of the NRA commissioned a study, Capitalism and Labor Under Fascism, which concluded, "The fascist principles are very similar to those which have been evolving in America and so are of particular interest at this time."

It's ironic that in the 1930s it was far from out-of-bounds to call the New Deal or FDR fascist. Yet for the two generations after World War II it was simply unacceptable to associate the New Deal with fascism in any way. This cultural and political taboo has skewed American politics in profound ways. In order to assert that the New Deal was the opposite of fascism — rather than a kindred phenomenon — liberal intellectuals had to create an enormous straw man out of the modern conservative movement. This was surprisingly easy. Since "right-wing" was already defined as anti-Roosevelt, it did not take much effort to conflate the American right with Nazism and fascism. Thus, for example, liberals portray American "isolationism" as a distinctly conservative tradition, even though most of the leading isolationists associated with America First and similar causes in the 1930s and 1940s were in fact liberals and progressives, including Joe Kennedy, John Dewey, Amos Pinchot, Charles Beard, J. T. Flynn, and Norman Thomas.

The myth of right-wing fascism only began to unravel decades later thanks to an unlikely figure: Ronald Wilson Reagan, a former Roosevelt Democrat. In both 1976 and 1980 Reagan refused to retract his opinion that the early New Dealers looked favorably on the policies of Fascist Italy. In 1981 the controversy was renewed when then-President Reagan stuck to his guns. "Reagan Still Sure Some in New Deal Espoused Fascism," read the headline of a Washington Post article.⁵⁴ Reagan's refusal to back off this claim was a watershed moment, though the taboo remains largely intact.

But why was the taboo there in the first place? One answer is both obvious and entirely understandable: the Holocaust. As one of the signature evils of human history, the extermination of European Jewry colors everything it touches. But this is terribly inaccurate, in that various other fascist regimes don't deserve to be blamed for the Holocaust, including Fascist Italy. Nowhere here do I suggest that New Dealism was akin to Hitlerism if we are to define Hitlerism solely in terms of the Holocaust. But fascism was already fascism before the Holocaust. The Holocaust chronologically and to a certain extent philosophically was the death rattle of fascism in Germany. To use the last chapter of German fascism to explain away the earlier fascisms of Italy, America, and elsewhere is akin to reading the wrong book backward. And to say that the New Deal had nothing in common with fascism because the later New Dealers stood opposed to the Holocaust is to say that there is nothing distinct or significant to fascism save the Holocaust — a position no serious person holds.

Indeed, it seems impossible to deny that the New Deal was objectively fascistic. Under the New Deal, governmental goons smashed down doors to impose domestic policies. G-Men were treated like demigods, even as they spied on dissidents. Captains of industry wrote the rules by which they were governed. FDR secretly taped his conversations, used the postal service to punish his enemies, lied repeatedly to maneuver the United States into war, and undermined Congress's war-making powers at several turns. When warned by Frances Perkins in 1932 that many provisions of the New Deal were unconstitutional, he in effect shrugged and said that they'd deal with that later (his intended solution: pack the Supreme Court with cronies). In 1942 he flatly told Congress that if it didn't do what he wanted, he'd do it anyway. He questioned the patriotism of anybody who opposed his economic programs, never mind the war itself. He created the military-industrial complex so many on the left decry as fascist today.

In 1936 Roosevelt told Congress, "We have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people's government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people."⁵⁵ As Al Smith noted, the upshot of this statement is that Roosevelt didn't mind an authoritarian government, so long as representatives of "the people" — that is, liberals — ran the government. But if anybody "we" dislike gets control of the government, it would constitute tyranny.

This kind of skewed rationale gets to the heart of liberal fascism. Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don't matter. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of "good things" under the direction of "our people" is always and everywhere justified. Dissent by the right people is the highest form of patriotism. Dissent by the wrong people is troubling evidence of incipient fascism. The anti-dogmatism that progressives and fascists alike inherited from Pragmatism made the motives of the activist the only criteria for judging the legitimacy of action. "I want to assure you," FDR's aide Harry Hopkins told an audience of New Deal activists in New York, "that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal."⁵⁶

Today, particularly under Bush, it is precisely this attitude that liberals call fascist. But that yardstick is too short to get the full measure of what made the New Deal fascistic. We render fascism and Nazism into cartoons when we simply say that they were evil. The seduction of Nazism was its appeal to community, its attempt to restore via an all-powerful state a sense of belonging to those lost in modern society. Modernization, industrialization, and secularization sowed doubt and alienation among the masses. The Nazis promised to make people feel they belonged to something larger than themselves. The spirit of "all for one, one for all" suffused every Nazi pageant and parade.

This was the fundamental public philosophy shared by all of FDR's Brain Trust, and they inherited it wholesale from Herbert Croly and his comrades. "At the heart of the New Deal," writes William Schambra, "was the resurrection of the national idea, the renewal of the vision of national community. Roosevelt sought to pull America together in the face of its divisions by an appeal to national duty, discipline, and brotherhood; he aimed to restore the sense of local community, at the national level." Roosevelt himself observed that "we have been extending to our national life the old principle of the local community" in response to the "drastic changes" working their way through American life.⁵⁷ Militarism in America, as in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, was a means to this end, not the end itself.

This has been the liberal enterprise ever since: to transform a democratic republic into an enormous tribal community, to give every member of society from Key West, Florida, to Fairbanks, Alaska, that same sense of belonging — "we're all in it together!" — that we allegedly feel in a close-knit community. The yearning for community is deep and human and decent. But these yearnings are often misplaced when channeled through the federal government and imposed across a diverse nation with a republican constitution. This was the debate at the heart of the Constitutional Convention and one that the progressives sought to settle permanently in their favor. The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good. And yet ever since the New Deal, liberals have been unable to shake this fundamental dogma that the state can be the instrument for a politics of meaning that transforms the entire nation into a village.

We should close this discussion by once again reiterating that whatever the similarities between the three New Deals, the differences between America, Germany, and Italy are more important. FDR's sins were nowhere near those of Hitler or Mussolini. Some of this has to do with the man. FDR believed in America and the American way of life — or at least he firmly believed that he believed in them. He still stood for election, though he did violate the tradition that presidents only serve two terms. He respected the system, though he did try to castrate the Supreme Court. He was not a tyrant, though he did put over a hundred thousand citizens into camps on the theory that their race could not be trusted. There are good arguments to be had on all sides of these and other events. But one thing is clear: the American people could never be expected to countenance tyranny for too long. During wartime this country has historically done whatever it takes to see things through. But in peacetime the American character is not inclined to look to the state for meaning and direction. Liberals have responded to this by constantly searching for new crises, new moral equivalents of war.

The former New Republic journalist J. T. Flynn was perhaps the most famous anti-Roosevelt muckraker of the 1930s. He loathed Roosevelt and was convinced that the New Deal was a fascist enterprise. He predicted that proponents of the New Deal and its successors would become addicted to crises to maintain power and implement their agendas. He wrote of the New Deal: "It is born in crisis, lives on crises, and cannot survive the era of crisis. By the very law of its nature it must create for itself, if it is to continue, fresh crises from year to year. Mussolini came to power in the postwar crisis and became himself a crisis in Italian life...Hitler's story is the same. And our future is charted out upon the same turbulent road of a permanent crisis."⁵⁸

But Flynn understood that while America might go down a similar road, it needn't be as bumpy a ride. He predicted that American fascism might manifest itself as "a very genteel and dainty and pleasant form of fascism which cannot be called fascism at all because it will be so virtuous and polite." Waldo Frank made a similar observation in 1934:

The NRA is the beginning of American Fascism. But unlike Italy and Germany, democratic parliamentarianism has for generations been strong in the Anglo-Saxon world; it is a tribal institution. Therefore, a Fascism that disposes of it, rather than sharpens and exploits it, is not to be expected in North America or Britain. Fascism may be so gradual in the United States that most voters will not be aware of its existence. The true Fascist leaders will not be present imitators of German Fuhrer and Italian condottieri, prancing in silver shirts. They will be judicious, black-frocked gentlemen; graduates of the best universities; disciples of Nicholas Murray Butler and Walter Lippmann.⁵⁹

I think it is clear that to the extent there's any validity to my argument at all — that fascism, shorn of the word, endures in the liberal mind — this analysis is true. We have been on the road to serfdom, we may still be on that road, but it doesn't feel that way.

The question is why. Why "nice" fascism here and not the nastier variety? My own answer is: American exceptionalism. This is what Frank is referring to when he says democracy in America is a "tribal institution." American culture supersedes our legal and constitutional framework. It is our greatest bulwark against fascism.

Werner Sombart famously asked: "Why is there no socialism in the United States?" The answer for historians and political theorists has always been: because America has no feudal past, no class problems of the European sort. This, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues, is also largely the answer to the question: "Why is there no Fascism in the United States?" But this is the case only if we mean the oppression, cruelty, and tyranny of classical fascism. Nationalism and fascism can only bring out traits that are already in a society's genetic code. In Germany the blackest parts of the German soul were unleashed, in Italy the insecurities of a faded star of Western civilization. In America, fascism hit at the beginning of the American century, which meant, among other things, that it was not nearly so dark a vision. We had no bitter resentments to vindicate, no grievances to avenge. Instead, fascism in America was a more hopeful affair (though let us recall that fascism succeeded at first in Italy and Germany because it offered hope as well).

That doesn't mean we didn't have bleak moments. But these moments could not be sustained. The progressives and liberals had two shots at maintaining real fascistic war crises — during World War I and again during the New Deal and World War II. They couldn't keep it going, because the American system, the American character, and the American experience made such "experiments" unsustainable. As for the genteel fascism Flynn referred to, that's a different story — one that begins in the chapters that follow.

While the cultural left has long seen the outlines of fascism in the alleged conformity of the 1950s, the third fascist moment in the United States actually began in the 1960s. It differed dramatically from the first two fascist moments — those that followed the Progressive Era and the New Deal — largely by virtue of the fact it came after the hard collectivist era in Western civilization. But as with the previous eras, the 1960s represented an international movement. Students launched radical uprisings around the world, in France, Indonesia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Senegal, South Korea, Mexico, and the United States. Meanwhile, working from within the establishment, a new cohort of liberal activists sought to re-create the social and political dynamics of their parents' generation, to further the legacies and fulfill the promises of the Progressive Era. This two-pronged assault, from above and below, ultimately succeeded in seizing the commanding heights of the government and the culture. The next two chapters will consider each in turn.