For a generation progressives had complained that America lacked, in effect, a Volksgeist, a singular general will that could fuel this conception of a God-state. When the stock market crashed in 1929, they believed their shining moment had returned.
“[T]he United States in the 1920s,” writes William Leuchtenburg, “had almost no institutional structure to which Europeans would accord the term ‘the State.’ ” Beyond the post office, most people had very little interaction with or dependence on “the government in Washington.” The New Deal changed all that. It represented the last stage in the transformation of American liberalism, whereby the U.S. government became a European “state” and liberalism a political religion.
As economic policy, the New Deal was a failure. If anything, it likely prolonged the Depression. And yet we are constantly told that the New Deal remains the greatest domestic accomplishment of the United States in the twentieth century and a model liberals constantly wish to emulate, preserve, and restore. In 2007 Nancy Pelosi reportedly said that three words prove the Democrats aren’t out of ideas: “Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” Why such devotion? The answer most often offered is that the New Deal gave Americans “hope” and “faith” in a “cause larger than themselves.” Hope for what? Faith in what? What “cause”? The answer: the liberal God-state or, if you prefer, the Great Society—which is merely that society governed by the God-state in accordance with the general will.
The New Deal amounted to a religious breakthrough for American liberalism. Not only had faith in the liberal ideal become thoroughly religious in nature—irrational dogmatic, mythological—but many smart liberals recognized this fact and welcomed it. In 1934 Dewey had defined the battle for the liberal ideal as a “religious quality” in and of itself. Thurman Arnold, one of the New Deal’s most influential intellectuals, proposed that Americans be taught a new “religion of government,” which would finally liberate the public from its superstitions about individualism and free markets. It was as Robespierre insisted: the “religious instinct” must be cultivated to protect the revolution.
The apotheosis of liberal aspirations under FDR took place not during the New Deal but during World War II. Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address proposed what he called a “second Bill of Rights.” But this was really an argument for a new Bill of Rights, turning the original on its head. “Necessitous men are not free men.” he declared. Therefore the state must provide a “new basis of security and prosperity.” Among the new rights on offer were “a useful and remunerative job,” “a decent home,” “adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” “adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment,” and “a good education.” This second Bill of Rights remains the spiritual lodestar of liberal aspirations to this day.
PURGING THE DEMONS WITHIN
The war against Hitler was as pristine an example of good versus evil as we’ve seen in the history of warfare. But that doesn’t mean the war (and the New Deal mobilization) had only salutary effects. People grew accustomed to following the exhortations of elites—in the press, at leading institutions, and in government—without much reflection or skepticism. These elites told the American public that the war and state planning had “saved” Western civilization and that it was now America’s job to keep it safe.
The postwar environment saw the fusion of any number of progressive strains into a coherent agenda. Government was now truly run by experts. The public consensus was favorable to liberal ambitions. Classical liberalism seemed permanently discredited. Even the Utopian dream of a new world order and, perhaps, a world government envisioned by Wilson, H. G. Wells, and many others was given new life by the creation of the United Nations. The problem for liberalism was that the new enemy on the horizon wasn’t from the right but from the left. For liberals in the late 1920s and early 1930s the Soviet Union was like Bismarck’s Prussia a generation earlier—a model to be emulated. During the 1930s the Soviets were on the front line fighting the fascist threat. In the 1940s the Soviets were our allies. But after the war it soon became clear that Soviet intentions weren’t that honorable and that Soviet methods were embarrassingly difficult to distinguish from Nazi methods.
There is a modern notion that liberals didn’t disapprove of or oppose anti-communism; they just opposed McCarthyite excesses. The problem is that communists and liberals have always made allowances for McCarthyite tactics when it is one of their enemies getting grilled. The House Un-American Activities Committee, after all, was founded by a progressive Democrat, Samuel Dickstein, to investigate German sympathizers. During the barely remembered “Brown scare” of the 1940s, everyone from real Nazi supporters—the German-American Bund, for example—to misguided isolationists was targeted and harassed. Much like Wilson, FDR believed that any domestic dissent was treachery and insisted that his Department of Justice persecute his opponents. At the height of the madness, Walter Winchell read the names of isolationists on the radio, calling them “Americans we can do without.” American communists in this period readily named names and compiled lists of “German sympathizers.”
One might excuse such tactics as a necessary evil in the fight against Nazism. But the more poignant hypocrisy is that American communists did the same thing to other American communists. The Smith Act, which made it illegal to belong to an organization that advocated the overthrow of the United States, was a linchpin of American fascism, according to many leftists. But American communists themselves used the Smith Act to get American Trotskyites arrested during the war.
But that was a sideshow far from public eyes. After the war, liberals could not tolerate such tactics when aimed at their own ranks. Their denial that their own ideas and history had any link with totalitarianism was so total that anybody who suggested otherwise had to be destroyed. Whittaker Chambers demonstrated this when he accurately identified Alger Hiss, a scion of American liberalism, as a communist. The establishment rallied around Hiss while it demonized Chambers as a liar, a psychopath, a fascist.
Joseph McCarthy could not be so easily dismissed, largely because he was a U.S. senator. Despite his flaws and unforgivable excesses, he accurately called attention to the fact that much of the liberal establishment had been infested with communists and communist sympathizers. For that crime he, too, was dubbed a fascist.
Ask a liberal today why McCarthy was a fascist, and the answers you usually get are that he was a “bully” and a “liar.” Bullies and liars are bad, but there’s nothing inherently right-wing about them. You will also hear that McCarthyism represents a grotesque distortion of patriotism, jingoism, and the like. This is a more complicated complaint, though it’s worth remembering that many on the left think nearly any exhortation to patriotism is fascist. Still, it is true that McCarthyism represented a certain ugly nationalist strain in the American character. But far from being right-wing, this sentiment was in fact a throwback to traditional left-wing populist politics. Red baiting, witch hunts, censorship, and the like were a tradition in good standing among Wisconsin progressives and populists.
Today few remember that McCarthy’s political roots lay firmly in the Progressive Era. McCarthy was, after all, a populist progressive from quite arguably the most progressive state in the Union, Richard Ely’s and Robert La Follette’s Wisconsin. Joe McCarthy was a product of Wisconsin and its traditions. Indeed, the primary reason he ran for the Senate as a Republican is that he’d learned in his first campaign for public office—when he ran as a Democrat—that Wisconsin under La Follette had essentially become a one-party Republican state. In his 1936 bid for district attorney of Shawano County, McCarthy railed against the Republican presidential candidate as a “puppet” of right-wing business interests and fat cats like William Randolph Hearst. When he finally challenged La Follette for his Senate seat, he ran not as a bona fide right-winger but as a populist more in tune with the needs of Wisconsin.
There was much about McCarth
y that was fascistic, including his conspiratorialism, his paranoid rhetoric, his bullying, and his opportunism; but those tendencies did not come from the conservative or classical liberal traditions. Rather, McCarthy and McCarthyism came out of the progressive and populist traditions. His followers were mostly middle-class, very often progressive or populist in their assumptions about the role of the state, and in many respects heirs to the Coughlinism of the early New Deal. The most effective such McCarthyite was the four-term Nevada Democratic senator Pat McCarran, author of the Internal Security Act, which required communist-front organizations to register with the attorney general, barred communists from working in defense-related industries, banned immigration of communists, and provided for the internment of communists in case of national emergency.
The point is not that McCarthy was simply a La Follette Progressive. Both La Follettes were honorable and serious men, in many ways among the most courageous politicians of the twentieth century. Nor am I saying that McCarthy was just another liberal, though he continued to use the word positively until as late as 1951, What I am saying is that what it meant to be a liberal was changing very rapidly after World War II. And once again, the losers in a liberal civil war—the right wing of the left—were demonized. Liberalism was in effect shedding its unrefined elements, throwing off the husk of the Social Gospel and all of that God talk. Had not the Holocaust proved that God was dead? The old liberals increasingly seemed like the William Jennings Bryan character in Inherit the Wind—superstitious, angry, backward. Through the benefit of hindsight one can see how liberals would have invented the cool pragmatist JFK had he not existed. Then again, as we’ve seen, they largely did invent him.
At the dawn of the 1950s American liberals needed a unified field theory that not only sustained their unimpeachable status as Olympians but also took account of the Holocaust as well as the populist firebrands who’d dared to question the wisdom, authority, and patriotism of the liberal elite. The backward and unsatisfying language of religion increasingly cut off to them, their own legacy of eugenics discredited, and the orthodox Marxist narrative largely un-persuasive to the masses, liberals needed something that could unite and revive this trinity. They found the glue they needed in psychology.
A handful of immensely influential Marxist theorists, mostly Germans from the so-called Frankfurt School (transplanted to Columbia University beginning in the 1930s), married psychology and Marxism to provide a new vocabulary for liberalism. These theorists—led by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse—tried to explain why fascism had been more popular than communism in much of Europe. Borrowing from Freud and June—the Frankfurt School described Nazism and Fascism as forms of mass psychosis. That was plausible enough, but their analysis also held that since Marxism was objectively superior to its alternatives, the masses, the bourgeoisie, and anyone else who disagreed with them had to be, quite literally, mad.
Adorno was the lead author of The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950. The book presented evidence that people holding “conservative” views scored higher on the so-called F-Scale (F for “Fascism”) and were hence in dire need of therapy. The political scientist Herbert McClosky likewise diagnosed conservatives as a pre-fascist “personality type” comprising mostly “the uninformed, the poorly educated, and...the less intelligent.” (Lionel Trilling famously reduced conservatism to a series of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”) For McClosky, Adorno. and establishment liberals generally, conservatism was at best the human face of the madness of Nazi-style fascism.
It’s tempting to say these theorists merely threw a patina of pseudoscientilie psychobabble over the propaganda leaflets of Stalin’s Third International. But the tactic was more sophisticated than that. The essential argument was brilliant in its simplicity. The original Marxist explanation of fascism was that it was the capitalist ruling classes’ reaction to the threat of the ascendancy of the working classes. The Frankfurt School deftly psychologized this argument. Instead of rich white men and middle-class dupes protecting their economic interests, fascism became a psychological defense mechanism against change generally. Men who cannot handle “progress” respond violently because they have “authoritarian personalities.”
So, in effect, anyone who disagrees with the aims, scope, and methods of liberalism is suffering from a mental defect, commonly known as fascism.
The Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter was the Frankfurt School’s most successful publicist. For Hofstadter, American history was a tale of liberals decapitating fascist Hydra heads in every chapter. His work dripped with the language of The Authoritarian Personality. In “Pseudo-Conservative Revolt”—which later became part of The Paranoid Style in American Politics—Hofstadter used psychological scare words to describe the crypto-fascist menace within: “clinical,” “disorder,” “complexes,” “thematic apperception” As Christopher Lasch writes. “The Authoritarian Personality had a tremendous impact on Hofstadter and other liberal intellectuals, because it showed them how to conduct political criticism in psychiatric categories, to make those categories bear the weight of political criticism. This procedure excused them from the difficult work of judgment and argumentation. Instead of arguing with opponents, they simply dismissed them on psychiatric grounds.”
It didn’t take long for such psychological theorizing to break its banks and become an all-purpose solution to the “social question,” as progressives used to put it. Indeed, modern psychology was a perfect substitute for the Social Gospel, militarism, Thurman Arnold’s “religion of government,” “social control.” and even eugenics. Whereas progressives were once determined to weed out the biologically unfit, they now directed the same energies to the psychologically unfit. Some liberal psychiatrists even began describing a new “religion of psychiatry” that would cure society of its “extremist,” traditional, backward, conservative elements, Adorno and his colleagues had laid the groundwork for this transition by identifying the “authoritarian family” as the locus of evil in the modern world.
A wave of liberal theologians met the psychiatrists halfway, arguing that various neuroses were the product of social alienation and that traditional religion should reorient itself toward healing them. Psychiatry—and “relevance”—became the new standards for clergy everywhere. For Paul Tillich. the source of salvation would be a redefining and recombining of the secular and the sacred, rendering politics, psychiatry, and religion all parts of the same seamless web.
Stripped of its jargon, this project was an almost perfect replay of the liberal pattern. Liberals love populism, when it comes from the left. But whenever the people’s populist desires are at cross-purposes with the agenda of the left, suddenly “reaction,” “extremism,” and of course “fascism” are loosed upon the land. Bill Clinton titled his “blueprint” for America Putting People First, but when the people rejected his agenda, we were informed that “angry white men” (read white “authoritarian personalities”) were a threat to the Republic. Similarly, when the people supported New Deal social planners, one could barely find an inch of daylight between Progressivism and populism. But when the same people had become fed up with socialism from above, they became “paranoid” and dangerous, susceptible to diseases of the mind and fascistic manipulation. Hence, liberal social planners were all the more justified in their efforts to “fix” the people, to reorient their dysfunctional inner lives, to give them “meaning,” It was all reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht’s famous quip: “Would it not be easier...for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?”
THE GREAT SOCIETY: LBJ’S FASCIST UTOPIA
Much like the Nazi movement, liberal fascism had two faces: the street radicals and the establishment radicals. In Germany the two groups worked in tandem to weaken middle-class resistance to the Nazis’ agenda. In the previous chapter we saw how the liberal fascists of the SDS and Black Panther movements rose up to terrorize the American mid
dle class. In the remainder of this chapter—and the next—we will explain how the “suit-and-tie radicals” of the 1960s, people like Hillary Clinton and her friends, used this terror to expand the power and scope of the state and above all to change the public attitude toward the state as the agent of social progress and universal caring and compassion.
Lyndon Johnson seems an odd choice for liberalism’s deliverer. Then again. he was no one’s choice. An assassin’s bullet anointed him to the job. Still, it’s not as if he hadn’t prepared for it.
Amazingly. Johnson was the only full-fledged New Dealer to serve as president save FDR himself. Indeed, in many respects LBJ was the ultimate company man of the modern welfare state, the personification of everything the New Deal represented. Despite his large personality, he was in reality the personification of the system he helped to create.
From the beginning, FDR took a shine to LBJ. He told Harold Ickes that Johnson might well be the first southern president of the postwar generation. Johnson was a fanatically loyal FDR man. As a congressional aide, he threatened to resign more than once when his boss contemplated voting contrary to Roosevelt, In 1935 he was the head of the Texas branch of the National Youth Administration, winning the attention of the future Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and singling himself out as a star among the young New Dealers, In 1937, at the age of twenty-eight, he was elected to represent Texas’s Tenth District, He caught FDR’s attention while the president was in Texas, where they met and spent considerable time together. When FDR returned to Washington, he called his aide Thomas Corcoran and informed him, “I’ve just met the most remarkable young man. Now I like this boy, and you’re going to help him with anything you can.” FDR became Johnson’s “political Daddy,” in Johnson’s own words, and more than any other elected official LBJ mastered the art of working the New Deal, Johnson brought a staggering amount of pork to his constituents in his first year alone. “He got more projects, and more money for his district, than anybody else,” Corcoran recalled. He was “the best Congressman for a district that ever was,”