Smiley-Face Fascism ethics

Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is an eye-opener. We’ve been taught that fascism is a foreign-born ideology that spawned the political aspirations of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. In reality, fascism has had a long history in America. The political philosophies of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson are textbook examples of fascism. Do you find this hard to take? Here’s what Goldberg says on the subject:

Wilson revered [Otto von] Bismarck as much as Teddy Roosevelt or any of the other progressives did. . . . Bismarck’s motive was to forestall demands for more democracy by giving people the sort of thing they might ask for at the polls. His top-down socialism was a Machiavellian masterstroke because it made the middle class dependent upon the state. The middle class took away from this the lesson that enlightened government was not the product of democracy but an alternative. . . . As Wilson put it, the essence of progressivism was that the individual “marry his interests to the state.”

The type of fascism that was being promoted by these early American “Progressives” is what we might call today “smiley-face-fascism” in that there are no jack-booted troops marching through the streets or calls for the suspension of habeas corpus. Bismarck’s social policies are very much like our own and those of anther fascist.

William L. Shirer, in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, writes that Bismarck’s policies gradually made the German people “value security over political freedom and caused them to see in the State, however conservative, a benefactor and a protector.”

Between 1883 and 1889 Bismark put through a program for social security far beyond anything known in other countries at the time. It included compulsory insurance for workers against old age, sickness, accident and incapacity, and though it was organized by the State it was financed by employers and employees. Sound familiar?

Hitler took full advantage of the German state of mind and Bismarck’s early progress in turning the nation into a model of socialist reform. Hitler remarks in Mein Kampf, “I studied Bismarck’s socialist legislation in its intention, struggle and success.”

It was Hitler’s social security policies and promises that got him elected to office.

Hitler was not alone in his admiration of Bismarck and what he was able to accomplish. FDR borrowed Bismarck’s socialist agenda and created what is now known as the Social Security System. Bismarck said that “the State must take the matter in hand, since the State can most easily supply the requisite funds. It must provide them not as alms but in fulfillment of the workers’ right to look to the State where their own good will can achieve nothing more.”

Roosevelt and his admirers agreed. P. J. O’Brien, writing in Forward with Roosevelt, links Bismarck’s social policies with those of Roosevelt: “[The quotation by Bismarck] might have been lifted out of a speech by President Roosevelt in 1936, but the Iron Chancellor uttered it in 1871.”

Some people understood the implications of what Roosevelt was attempting to do. “Roosevelt was branded as an agent of the Reds [Communists] for voicing similar opinions.”

The State became the savior of the people, and the social policies of the New Deal became holy writ:

There’s a massive confusion at the core of our politics. Against all evidence, everyone expects government to guarantee economic growth and higher living standards. It can’t. Even the New Deal failed to pull the nation out of the Depression. World War II did that by boosting factory production. But the expectation of government as economic miracle worker is deeply entrenched, and politicians pander to it. For the past three decades, presidents have used the language of economics to rationalize deficits and, in the process, reward their supporters.

Wars, of course, are anomalies and should not be used as standards for economic policy. World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the war in Iraq have done much to hide the negative effects of government spending on the overall economy. Coupled with military spending, government social programs expanded beyond anything FDR could have imagined. Our nation, contrary to liberal social spenders, is not reaping the excesses of the ReaganBush years. We are reaping the whirlwind of the massive interventionism of New Deal liberalism that even Conservatives are afraid to criticize for fear of being thrown out of office

In Edward Bellamy’s widely read socialist fantasy novel Looking Backward, 2000–1887, a Rip Van Winkle character goes to sleep in the year 1887 and awakens in the year 2000 to discover a changed world. His twentyfirst century companions explain to him how the utopia that astonishes him emerged in the 1930s from the hell of the 1880s. “That utopia involved the promise of security ‘from cradle to grave’—the first use of the that phrase we have come across—as well as detailed government planning, including compulsory national service by all persons over an extended period.”

Bellamy’s fiction became much of the world’s reality in twentiethcentury socialism. Bellamy believed that “human nature is naturally good and people are ‘godlike in aspirations . . . with divinest impulses of tenderness and selfsacrifice.’ Therefore, once external conditions are made acceptable, the Ten Commandments become ‘wellnigh obsolete,’ bringing us a ‘second birth of the human race.’”

Bellamy managed to mix the perversions of socialism, secularism, and New Age philosophy into one impossible world.

Goldberg’s book is a real eye-opener. It’s depressing to read, but it’s a needed antidote to politicians—on the left and right—who are appealing to the State to save us. He warns us not to fall for the religionists who are nothing more than Bismarck with a clerical collar.

This article was posted: December 16th, 2008
Footnotes:
[1] Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (New York: Random House, 2007), 96.
[2] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 96, note.
[3] Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 96, note.
[4] Quoted in P. J. O'Brien, Forward with Roosevelt (Chicago: John C. Winston Co., 1936), 84.
[5] O'Brien, Forward with Roosevelt, 85.
[6] O’Brien, Forward with Roosevelt, 85.
[7] Robert J. Samuelson, “Rhetoric Over Reality,” Newsweek (March 1, 1993), 31.
[8] Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 93.
[9] Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Washington, DC: Regnery/Gateway, [1983] 1989), 190.