What confused the left then and now about American conservatism is that love and support for one’s country do not necessarily put one on the road to fascism. Patriotism is not the same thing as extreme nationalism or fascism. The Nazis killed a great many German patriots whose love of their homeland was deep and profound. In a sense, one of the Jews’ greatest offenses was that they were patriotic Germans. It was in the 1960s that the left convinced itself that there is something fascistic about patriotism and something perversely “patriotic” about running down America. Anti-Americanism—a stand-in for hatred of Western civilization—became the stuff of sophisticates and intellectuals as never before. Flag burners became the truest “patriots” because dissent—not just from partisan politics, but from the American project itself—became the highest virtue. In 2003 the professor at Columbia who hoped America would face “a million Mogadishus” is a patriot in the eyes of the left. But Americans eager to maintain limited government—of all things!—are somehow creeping fascists.
Witnessing how the brutality and wanton destruction of the Nazis had swept Hitler to power, the novelist Thomas Mann wrote in his diary that this was a new kind of revolution, “without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice “ The “common scum” had won the day, “accompanied by vast rejoicing on the part of the masses.” Liberals in the 1960s who lived through a similar degradation of decency by the same intellectual rot began to rebel. Confronted with an ideology that always assumed America was the problem and never the solution, they chose to mount a counter assault. These patriots in both parties became in large part that band of intellectuals known as neo-conservatives. They were given that name by leftists who thought the prefix “neo” would conjure associations with neo-Nazis.
But since the testimony of neoconservatives counts for nothing in most corners of liberal thought, it’s worth noting that even some titans of the left still had the clarity of vision to understand what they were dealing with. Irving Louis Horowitz, a revered leftist intellectual (he was the literary executor of C. Wright Mills) specializing in revolutionary thought, saw in 1960s radicalism a “fanatic attempt to impose a new social order upon the world, rather than await the verdict of consensus-building formulas among disparate individuals as well as the historical muses “ And he saw this fanaticism for what it was: “Fascism returns to the United States not as a right-wing ideology, but almost as a quasi-leftist ideology”
Peter Berger, a Jewish refugee from Austria and a respected peace activist and left-wing sociologist (he helped popularize the phrase “social construction of reality”), saw much the same thing. When “observing the [American] radicals in action, I was repeatedly reminded of the storm troopers that marched through my childhood in Europe.” He explored a long list of themes common to 1960s radicalism and European fascism and concluded they formed a “constellation that strikingly resembles the common core of Italian and German fascism.” In 1974 A. James Gregor wrote The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics, which synthesized and cataloged these trends with sweeping detail and intellectual rigor. “In the recent past,” he observed, “student radicals and the ‘new left’ have legitimized a political style calculated to be maximally serviceable to an American variant of fascism.”
Even some in the SDS recognized that the more extreme members were degenerating into fascism. An editorial in the Campaigner (published by the New York and Philadelphia Regional Labor Committee of the Students for a Democratic Society) observed of the SDS faction that spawned the Weathermen, “There is a near identity between the arguments of anarchists (around the Columbia strike movement, e.g.) and Mussolini’s polemics for action against theory, against program.”
The “youth movement” theorizing sparked by Charles Reich’s Greening of America, the indictment of reason, the populist appeals to defeating “the system,” the table thumping for a new Volk-centric community that would replace capitalism with a more organic and totalitarian approach, was too much for some leftists with a clear understanding of the historical roots of fascism. The fascistic “overtones,” Stewart Alsop wrote of The Greening of America, “are obvious to anyone who has seen those forests of arms raised in unison by the revolutionary young, or heard their mindless shouted chants. Professor Reich is certainly a good and kindly man, without a fascist bone in his body,” Alsop continued, “and most of the ‘liberated’ young he worships are good and kindly too. But surely anyone with a sense of the political realities can smell the danger that these silly, kind, irrational people, in their cushioned isolation from reality, are bringing upon us all. The danger starts with the universities, but it does not end there. That is what makes the mush so scary.” No less a socialist icon than Michael Harrington declared Reich’s sweeping indictment of modernity—he called it “elite existentialism”—to have much in common with the Romantic roots of Nazism.
Today the liberal left’s version of the 1960s makes about as much sense as it does to remember Hitler as the “man of peace” described by Neville Chamberlain. In its passions and pursuits, the New Left was little more than an Americanized updating of what we’ve come to call the European Old Right. From Easy Rider to JFK, Hollywood has been telling us that if only the forces of reaction hadn’t killed their Horst Wessels, we would today be living in a better, more just, and more open-minded country. And if only we could rekindle the hope and ambition of those early radicals, “what might have been” will turn into “what could still be.” This is the vital lie of the left. Western civilization was saved when the barbarians were defeated, at least temporarily, in the early 1970s. We should be not only grateful for our slender victory but vigilant in securing it for posterity.
Such vigilance is impossible without understanding the foundations on which contemporary liberalism stands, and that in turn requires a second look at the 1960s—this time from the top down. For while the radicals in the streets were demanding more power, the progressives already in power were playing their parts as well.
It is understandable that the 1960s is viewed as an abrupt change or turning point in our history, because in many respects the changes were so sudden (and in some cases for the better). But there was also a profound continuity underlying the events of the decade. When Kennedy said that the torch had been passed to a new generation, he was referring in no small part to a new generation of progressives.
These men (and a few women) were dedicated to continuing the projects of Wilson and Roosevelt. When the torch is passed, the runner changes, but the race remains the same.
In the chapter that follows, we will show that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson represented the continuation of the liberal quest begun by Woodrow Wilson and his fellow progressives—the quest to create an all-caring, all-powerful, all-encompassing state, a state that assumes responsibility for every desirable outcome and takes the blame for every setback on the road to Utopia, a state that finally replaces God.
6
From Kennedy’s Myth to Johnson’s Dream: Liberal Fascism and the Cult of the State
FOR GENERATIONS, THE central fault line in American politics has involved the growth and power of the state. The conventional narrative has conservatives trying to shrink the size of government and liberals trying—successfully—to expand it. There’s more than a little evidence to support this understanding. But much of it is circumstantial. Liberals often argue for restraining government in areas such as law enforcement (the Warren Court’s Miranda ruling, for example), national security (opposition to the Patriot Act and domestic surveillance), and that vast but ill-defined realm that comes under the rubric of “legislating morality.” While disagreements over specific policies proliferate, virtually all conservatives and most libertarians favor assertiveness in government’s traditional role as the “night-watchman state.” Many go further, seeing the government as a protector of decency and cultural norms.
In short, the argument about the size of governme
nt is often a stand-in for deeper arguments about the role of government. This chapter will attempt to show that for some liberals, the state is in fact a substitute for God and a form of political religion as imagined by Rousseau and Robespierre, the fathers of liberal fascism.
Historically, for many liberals the role of the state has been a matter less of size than of function. Progressivism shared with fascism a deep and abiding conviction that in a truly modern society, the state must take the place of religion. For some, this conviction was born of the belief that God was dead. As Eugen Weber writes, “The Fascist leader, now that God is dead, cannot conceive of himself as the elect of God. He believes he is elect, but does not quite know of what—presumably of history or obscure historical forces.” This is the fascism that leads to the Fuhrerprinzip and cults of personality. But there is a second kind of fascism that sees the state not as the replacement of God but as God’s agent or vehicle. In both cases, however, the state is the ultimate authority, the source and maintainer of values, and the guarantor of the new order.
We’ve already touched on statolatry as a progressive doctrine; later we will examine how this worldview manifests itself in what is commonly called the culture war. The hinge of that story is the 1960s, specifically the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
While not a modern liberal himself, JFK was turned after his death into a martyr to the religion of government. This was due partly to the manipulations of the Kennedy circle and partly to the (much more cynical) machinations of LBJ, who hijacked the Kennedy myth and harnessed it to his own purposes. Those purposes, consistent with the “nice” totalitarian impulse of the progressive movement in which Johnson had cut his political teeth, were nominally secular, but on a deeper, and perhaps unconscious, level fundamentally religious.
* * *
On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. As if on cue, Dallas was christened “the city of hate.” A young TV reporter named Dan Rather heard a rumor that some Dallas schoolchildren had cheered when they heard the news of Kennedy’s death. The rumor wasn’t true, and the local Dallas CBS affiliate refused to run the story. Rather made an end run around the network and reported the story anyway.
Rather wasn’t the only one eager to point fingers at the right. Within minutes Kennedy’s aides blamed deranged and unnamed right-wingers. One headline proclaimed the assassination had taken place “deep in the hate of Texas.” But when it became clear that a deranged Marxist had done the deed, Kennedy’s defenders were dismayed. “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights,” Jackie lamented to Bobby Kennedy when he told her the news. “It’s—it had to be some silly little Communist”
Or maybe not, the Kennedy mythmakers calculated. They set about creating the fable that Kennedy died battling “hate”—established code, then and now, for the political right. The story became legend because liberals were desperate to imbue Kennedy’s assassination with a more exalted and politically useful meaning. Over and over again, the entire liberal establishment, led by the New York Times—and even the pope!—denounced the “hate” that claimed Kennedy’s life. The Supreme Court justice Earl Warren summed up the conventional wisdom—as he could always be counted upon to do—when he theorized that the “climate of hatred” in Dallas—code for heavy right-wing and Republican activity—moved Lee Harvey Oswald to kill the president.
The fact that Oswald was a communist quickly changed from an inconvenience to proof of something even more sinister. How, liberals asked, could a card-carrying Marxist murder a liberal titan on the side of social progress? The fact that Kennedy was a raging anti-communist seemed not to register, perhaps because liberals had convinced themselves, in the wake of the McCarthy era, that the real threat to liberty must always come from the right. Oswald’s Marxism sent liberals into even deeper denial, their only choice other than to abandon anti-anti-communism. And so, over the course of the 1960s, the conspiracy theories metastasized, and the Marxist gunman became a patsy. “Cui bono?” asked the Oliver Stones then and ever since. Answer: the military-industrial complex, allied with the dark forces of reaction and intolerance, of course. Never mind that Oswald had already tried to murder the former army major general and prominent right-wing spokesman Edwin Walker or that, as the Warren Commission would later report, Oswald “had an extreme dislike of the rightwing.”
Amid the fog of denial, remorse, and confusion over the Kennedy assassination, an informal strategic response developed that would serve the purposes of the burgeoning New Left as well as assuage the consciences of liberals generally: transform Kennedy into an all-purpose martyr for causes he didn’t take up and for a politics he didn’t subscribe to.
Indeed, over the course of the 1960s and beyond, a legend grew up around the idea that if only Kennedy had lived, we would never have gotten bogged down in Vietnam. It is a central conceit of Arthur Schlesingers Robert Kennedy and His Times. Theodore Sorensen, Tip O’Neill, and countless other liberals subscribed to this view. A popular play on Broadway, MacBird, suggested that Johnson had murdered JFK in order to seize power. But even Robert F. Kennedy conceded in an oral history interview that his brother never seriously considered withdrawal and was committed to total victory in Vietnam. Kennedy was an aggressive anti-communist and Cold War hawk. He campaigned on a fictitious “missile gap” with the Soviets in a largely successful effort to move to Richard Nixon’s right on foreign policy, tried to topple Castro at the Bay of Pigs, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis, and got us deep into Vietnam. A mere three and a half hours before Kennedy died, he was boasting to the Foil Worth Chamber of Commerce that he had increased defense spending on a massive scale, including a 600 percent increase on counterinsurgency special forces in South Vietnam. The previous March, Kennedy had asked Congress to spend fifty cents of every federal dollar on defense.
The Kennedy myth also veers sharply from reality when it comes to the issue of race. The flattering legend is that Kennedy was an unalloyed champion of civil rights. Supposedly, if he had lived, the racial turmoil of the 1960s could have been avoided. The truth is far more prosaic. Yes, Kennedy pushed for civil rights legislation, and he deserves credit for it. But he was hardly breaking with the past. In the supposedly reactionary 1950s, Republicans had carried most of the burden of fulfilling the American promise of equality to blacks. Eisenhower had pushed through two civil rights measures over strong opposition from southern Democrats, and in particular Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who fought hard to dilute the legislation. Again, Kennedy was on the right side of history, but his efforts were mostly reactive. “I did not lie awake worrying about the problems of Negroes,” he confessed.
There is considerable irony in the fact that in the first election to replace Kennedy, Barry Goldwater was roundly hailed as the “fascist” in the race. The bespectacled small-government conservative in funereal suits was about as far from a fascist as one can get in American politics. Meanwhile, the intellectuals denouncing Goldwater as a crypto-Nazi failed to grasp that it was John F. Kennedy who was advancing fascist themes and aesthetics in American politics. FDR had been the first president to use modern technology to construct a mythological narrative about himself, but it was Kennedy who transformed that technique into an art. “Camelot,” a phrase never used to describe Kennedy’s tenure when he was alive, has become a catchall for every gauzy memory and unfulfilled wish of the Kennedy presidency. In 1964 James Reston summarized the newly minted liberal nostalgia for America’s Greek god of a president. “He was a story-book President, younger and more handsome than mortal politicians, remote even from his friends, graceful, almost elegant with poetry on his tongue and a radiant young woman at his side.”
Many elements of the Kennedy myth are as obvious now as they were then. He was the youngest man ever elected president (Teddy Roosevelt had been the youngest to serve). He was the first president born in the twentieth century. He
was a man of action—a bona fide war hero. He was also an intellectual—the author of a best-selling book on political courage—who made liberalism cool and glamorous, but at the same time a pragmatist who would never let the pointy-headed Ivy Leaguers with whom he surrounded himself get in the way of the right course of action. He represented a national yearning for “renewal” and “rebirth,” appealing to American idealism and calling for common sacrifice.
Recall the key themes to Mussolini’s cult of personality: youth, action, expertise, vigor, glamour, military service. Mussolini cast himself as the leader of a youth movement, a new generation empowered through intellect and expertise to break with the old categories of left and right. JFK’s stirring inaugural spoke of “a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.” Mussolini’s entire movement (like Hitler’s) was built around the generation of Italians who’d been tempered in World War I and their resentment against the bitter peace of Versailles. The Italian Fascist government, billed as a “regime of youth,” sold itself as a technocratic marvel in which Mussolini ran many of the ministries himself through force of will and indomitable vigor. Fascist propagandists saturated the media with pictures of Mussolini chopping wood, skiing, running, and standing bare-chested in the Alpine snow. Moreover. Mussolini’s reputation as an intellectual and writer was in fact well deserved—unlike Kennedy’s.