Fascism is a phenomenon of the Left, not the Right.

Ask the average, reasonably educated person what comes to mind when he or she hears the word "fascism" and the immediate responses are "dictatorship," "genocide," "anti-Semitism," "racism," and of course, "right-wing." Delve a bit deeper, and move a bit further to the left, and you'll hear a lot about "eugenics," "social Darwinism," "state capitalism," or the sinister rule of big business. War, militarism, and nationalism come up a lot as well. Some of these attributes were indisputably central to what we might call "classical" fascism, the fascism of Mussolini, and the Nazism of Hitler. Others, like the widely misunderstood term "social Darwinism," have little to do with fascism. But very few of these things are unique to fascism, and almost none of them are right-wing or conservative, at least in the American sense. Consider militarism. Militarism was central to fascism in many countries. For some thinkers in Germany and the U.S., war was truly the source of important moral values. This was militarism as a social philosophy pure and simple. But for far more people, militarism was a pragmatic expedient: the highest, best means for organizing society in productive ways. Militarism seemed to provide a workable and sensible model for achieving desirable ends. Mussolini used this logic. Such ideas had an immense following in the U.S., with many leading progressives championing the use of "industrial armies" to create the ideal workers' democracy. FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps, as militaristic a social program as one can imagine, borrowed from these ideas, as did JFK's Peace Corps. This trope has hardly been purged from modern liberalism. We always hear about the "war on cancer," the "war on drugs," the "War on Poverty," and exhortations to make this or that social challenge the "moral equivalent of war." From health care to gun control to global warming, liberals insist that we need to get beyond politics and put ideological differences behind us in order to do the people's business. The experts and scientists know what to do, we are told, therefore the time for debate is over. This, albeit in a nicer and more benign form, is the logic of fascism, and it was on ample display in the administrations of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and JFK. Fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. It is one of the left. Even more telling, FDR's defenders openly admitted their admiration of fascism. The New Deal did emulate fascism; but Italy and Germany were secondary models, post hoc confirmations that liberals were on the right track. A simple fact remains: progressives did many things that we would today call fascist, and fascists did many things we would today call progressive. Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy. Modern liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism. For more than 60 years, liberals have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream of the political right. The ranks of the left-wing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition. Yet, all it takes is the word "Marxist" to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents. Under the politics of meaning, all of society's institutions are wrapped around the state like sticks around the fascist blade. Every individual is responsible for maintaining not only his own ideological purity but that of his fellow man. Michael Lerner, Hillary Clinton's self-anointed guru and progressive activist, is, in effect, the ideologist of the liberal Gleichschaltung, the Nazi idea of coordinating every institution in society. This becomes apparent when he shifts to a discussion of how these reforms are to be implemented. Lerner writes that all government agencies and private businesses should issue "annual ethical-impact reports," which would assess "their effect on the ethical, spiritual, and psychological well-being of our society and on the people who work in and with these institutions." His intent is arguably nicer, but is this really so different from the bureaucratization of ideological loyalty that required German businesses and institutions to constantly provide documentation showing their assertive loyalty to the spirit of the new era? Spiritual slackers in twenty-first century America would no doubt find such scrutiny fascistic, albeit in a very caring and nurturing way. Lerner believes it is the job of every profession, coordinating with the state, of course, to "reflect" on its own contribution to the spiritual and psychic health of the national Volksgemeinschaft. "Such reflection, for example, has led some lawyers associated with a politics-of-meaning perspective to envision a second state of trials, in which the adversary system is suspended and the focus is shifted to healing the problems and pain that the initial trial has uncovered in the community." That may sound a little silly to some ears, and it hardly seems to threaten a fascist coup. But if there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors, but with lawyers and social workers saying, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." As we've seen, ideologically fascist and progressive totalitarianism was never a mere doctrine of statism. Rather, it claimed that the state was the natural brain of the organic body politic. Statism was the route to collectivism. Government was merely the place where the spiritual will of the people would be translated into action (Marxists liked to use the word "praxis" to describe this unity of theory and action). One consequence of this view is that institutions and individuals that stand apart from the state or the progrssive tide are inherently suspect and labeled selfish, social Darwinist, conservative, or, most ironically, fascist. The state's role is not so much to make every decision as to be the metronome for the Gleichschaltung, ensuring that the decision makers are all in perfect agreement about the direction society needs to take. In a properly ordered progressive society, the state wouldn't take over Harvard or McDonald's, but it would certainly ensure that the Harvards and McDonald's had their priorities straight. The politics of meaning is ultimately a theocratic doctrine because it seeks to answer the fundamental questions about existence, argues that they can only be answered collectively, and insists that the state put those answers into practice. Today's liberalism doesn't seek to conquer the world by force of arms. It is not a nationalist and genocidal project. To the contrary, it is an ideology of good intentions. But we all know where even the best of intentions can take us. Even the best of us are susceptible to the totalitarian temptation. Liberals agree with Hillary Clinton's intentions; they just assert that anyone who finds them oppressive is a fascist.