by Anthony Gregory
Five years ago, antiwar liberals calling the Bush administration fascist were labeled as kooks, marginalized by their own party leadership, accused by conservatives of treasonous thoughts worthy of federal punishment, even deportation. A few years pass, the policies hardly change, and the political dynamic turns upside down: Tea Party conservatives accusing the Obama regime of fascist impulses are compared to terrorists, accused of being racists, told that their hyperbole is a real threat to the country’s security.
The establishment derides both groups for their fringe outlook on America, convinced that the United States is anything but a fascist country. After all, isn’t America the nation that defeated fascism in the 1940s? Sensible conservatives and liberals agree with that.
The unappreciated reality is that when the patriot right and radical left refer to the U.S. system as fascistic, they have part of the truth but not the whole analysis. This is due to the blinders both sides wear as it concerns state power. Moreover, the criticisms sometimes fail to take account of America’s very unique strain of fascism. This political program is distinct in every nation, always taking a different form but with some general themes in common. U.S. fascism is a most insidious mixture of the key ingredients while maintaining the necessary nuance to snooker the masses, the media, and the respectable folks across the spectrum.
The FDR-Bush Program of Economic Corporatism
First, and this is key, we must look at the economic system. The liberals are proud to have had a role in creating its socially democratic elements. The conservatives are proud of America’s towering financial and military institutions. Republicans and Democrats all pretend America has a free enterprise system, attacking greedy profiteers while crediting themselves for the benefits of capitalism, blaming laissez faire for all our problems while dissonantly congratulating themselves for having supplanted it with sensible regulation and safety nets once and for all.
The dirty little secret is that there has been a bipartisan project of corporatism, the economic underpinning of fascism, for almost a century. The regulatory bureaus, the banking establishment, agricultural policy, telecommunications planning, even the welfare state all enrich corporate interests, but at the ultimate direction of the state. One could say this arrangement was foreshadowed in Lincoln or even Hamilton. But it was during the World Wars and New Deal that the nation embarked upon something decisively fascistic.
Hitler, Mussolini, and the other fascists all employed a general approach of co-opting the market through huge governmental takeovers of industry while maintaining the pretense of private property. Along with this came interventions that would be considered socialistic in other contexts. Lew Rockwell very nicely summed up the economic programs of Hitler, which mirror the great prides of Progressive politics of the 20th century:
He suspended the gold standard, embarked on huge public works programs like Autobahns, protected industry from foreign competition, expanded credit, instituted jobs programs, bullied the private sector on prices and production decisions, vastly expanded the military, enforced capital controls, instituted family planning, penalized smoking, brought about national health care and unemployment insurance, imposed education standards, and eventually ran huge deficits. The Nazi interventionist program was essential to the regime's rejection of the market economy and its embrace of socialism in one country.
Much of this agenda was adopted in the United States during World War I, and then brought back to life in the New Deal. John T. Flynn, a leftist who initially supported Franklin Roosevelt then became disenchanted with the president’s program of central planning, described the 1930s atmosphere of political ideology in his seminal work, The Roosevelt Myth:
There was indeed a good deal of tolerance for the idea of planning our capitalist system even in the most conservative circles. And a man could support publicly and with vehemence this system of the Planned Economy without incurring the odium of being too much of a radical for polite and practical society.
There was only one trouble with it. This was what Mussolini had adopted – the Planned Capitalist State. And he gave it a name – fascism. Then came Hitler and adopted the same idea. His party was called the Nazi party, which was derived from the initials of its true name, but it was dedicated to fascism. . . .
Whatever it was, it was the direct opposite of liberalism. It was an attempt, somewhere between Communism and capitalism, to organize a stable society and to do it by setting up a State equipped with massive powers over the lives and fortunes of the citizens. . . . Yet this curiously un-American doctrine was being peddled in America as the bright flower of the liberals. Of course they did not call it fascism, because that had a bad name. . . . They called in the Planned economy. But it was and is fascism by whatever name it is known.
In specific, FDR’s National Recovery Administration was fashioned after the industrial policy of Mussolini. Flynn explains:
[Mussolini] organized each trade or industrial group or professional group into a state-supervised trade association. He called it a corporative. These corporatives operated under state supervision and could plan production, quality, prices, distribution, labor standards, etc. The NRA provided that in America each industry should be organized into a federally supervised trade association. It was not called a corporative. It was called a Code Authority. But it was essentially the same thing. These code authorities could regulate production, quantities, qualities, prices, distribution methods, etc., under the supervision of the NRA. This was fascism.
Such an analysis of the New Deal as fascism is not only found in the Old Right or their libertarian successors. Historian Thaddeus Russell’s great chapter "Behold a Dictator: Fascism and the New Deal" in his new book A Renegade History of the United States comes from a leftist perspective and arrives at much the same conclusions. Many of the greatest progressive intellectuals and business elites of Roosevelt’s time were especially enamored of Mussolini’s regime. "The men who made the New Deal were driven by dreams of a machinelike society, in which all members, from the leaders of government to the lowliest workers, would be parts designed, built, and employed entirely for their function within the whole apparatus. But to their dismay, these men found that most Americans rejected such dreams, except during times of crisis. The First World War was the first such crisis. . . . But then came the peace and prosperity of the 1920s, a long time of waiting for another national emergency that could make their fantasies of social order come true."
This mirrors Robert Higgs’s ratchet effect thesis and the insights found in his books Crisis and Leviathan and Depression, War, and Cold War, in regard both to the general expansion of state power during crises and the particular ways World War I and the New Deal solidified a state that Higgs has, with a nod to Charlotte Twight, referred to as "participatory fascism."
What makes FDR’s role in American fascism so insidious is that as the greatest 20th century liberal president who led America to war with the Nazis, he is often characterized as the prototypical U.S. anti-fascist. The great Smedley Butler, a brilliant critic of America’s merchants of death, was very concerned that reactionary forces along with the military came close to dethroning FDR and creating a fascist regime. But one must ask, could anyone tell the difference? What would the anti-FDR fascists do – wage total war? Nationalize the economy? Put American citizens into concentration camps based on race? Create a permanent military-corporate establishment? To discuss a possible fascist coup in the years of Franklin Roosevelt is to ignore that it in fact happened – a "revolution within the form," as Garet Garrett described it.
Also insidious is the great respect most Republicans have for FDR, whether it’s acknowledged or not. Reagan was a devout New Dealer who never abandoned this orientation when he became governor or president. George W. Bush’s entire economic program was also thoroughly Rooseveltian – expanding Medicare to the benefit of the pharmaceutical companies, an Ownership Society (how fascist does that sound!?) intended to shore up the real estate and finance sectors, an attempt to corporatize Social Security (thereby saving FDR’s domestic triumph, itself a copy from a Prussian program of the 19th century), the bipartisan bailouts of financial institutions, steel tariffs, further nationalization of education, and all the rest.
The Democrats, for their part, continue with the fascist economics they adopted four generations ago, and it leads to a good deal of confusion as they are the "liberal" party. Yet when Obama plans to force individuals to buy private health insurance, picks corporate giants to head up regulatory offices, schemes to create a phony market in carbon credits, and widens the revolving door between Wall Street and the Oval Office, he along with his party is only continuing down the road of their Mussolinian predecessors.
One of the most horrifying parts of fascist economics, autarky, has even been mimicked by all presidents since Nixon in their crazed calls for "energy independence." We also see it in the hysteria about jobs being oursourced. Today it often has an environmental spin, and there is not the beating on the podium and screaming of Lebensraum, but the protectionism and codependency between favored American businesses and the omnipotent state, all with a nationalist focus, are nevertheless there for anyone to see.
It could be countered that many other nations have corporate states as well. Perhaps they too have fascist tendencies. Yet there are a few corporatist features singular to the United States. As the holder of the world’s reserve currency, and given that money is half of most economic transactions, the United States boasts one of the most significant corporatist arrangements in the world in its alliance between the Federal Reserve and the big banks. The U.S. government, in absolute terms, claims the largest of all regressive welfare programs in the form of Social Security. It is likely the global leader in intellectual property enforcement, both in domestic and international terms, with most nations trailing considerably behind in this increasingly draconian form of corporate privilege. As the grandest leviathan preying over the world’s richest nation, the U.S. corporate state is in its own class.
Flynn’s insight that the economic structure of America’s planned economy is fascist whatever label we affix to it is echoed in a much more recent and popular authority. In an episode of South Park, Kyle the idiosyncratically precocious kid has this great exchange with his father:
Kyle’s dad: "You see Kyle, we live in a liberal-democratic society, and democrats make sexual harassment laws, these laws tell us what we can and can't say in the work place, and what we can and can't do in the work place."
Kyle: "Isn't that Fascism?"
Kyle’s dad: "No, because we don't call it Fascism."
Up and down the economy, at all levels of government, bureaucrats and planners dictate details in nearly all areas of economic behavior, with the principle that some sectors should simply be free of government intrusion having been totally discarded. If we have large swaths of economic liberty in America, and we do, this is by accident, or merely due to the state’s institutional limits in being able to run everything. The ideological thrust of U.S. economic policy is that we may live our commercial lives freer than in many places, but all upon the good graces of the state, its cartels, licensing boards, and regulatory apparatuses. Even our homes are private property only insofar as it serves the interest of the state, which claims the right to seize anything we own if it bolsters the tax receipts garnered through the state-business nexus. The business environment adheres to a rapidly expanding litany of commercial codes, many of them designed not even by legislature but by executive or judicial fiat. Taken together, this is the essence of economic fascism.
Warmongering Nationalism
A major feature of the fascist powers in the 1930s and 1940s was their belligerence. Without the militarism and war making, these regimes may have never drawn the ire of the U.S. and its allies, we are often told, and it’s probably true. It is thus bizarre to hear conservatives voice concern about America’s slide toward fascism without acknowledging this central aspect. The United States is the most militarily belligerent nation since World War II, with a very competitive résumé from decades before that. The U.S. appears to have been at war with more nations than any other. The U.S. has dominated the world in bombings, with no other nation coming close, certainly not in the last six decades. Taking the estimates of civilians killed due to U.S. wars of aggression, strategic bombings, and sanctions on food and medicine, the death toll easily surpasses ten million.
The U.S. spends more on national offense than the rest of the world combined. There are now five wars raging – in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya – and it is treated as normal, not an extraordinary state of affairs at all. And it isn’t one. About every generation the U.S. has had a major war – 1812, Mexico, Lincoln’s War, Spanish-American, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War and war on terrorism.
In the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations we can find U.S. bases. Virtually no state is treated neutrally; all are favored and bribed, bullied and manipulated, or invaded with the goal of conquest. Many of the most bloody regimes and insurgent forces in the world have been allied to the U.S. government, from Stalin’s Russia to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, from the proto-Taliban in Afghanistan to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The U.S. has trained dozens of states and armies in the arts of torture and terror. One year the U.S. will opportunistically side with a ruthless dictator, only to backstab him often at the very moment he is least menacing to the rest of the world. These foreign activities are all characteristic of a fascist power.
At home, American culture is saturated by militarism, and it is not a modern anomaly. The flag, national anthem, presidency, Constitution, relationship between the federal government and the states, the major welfare programs, prohibition, police policies, weaponry and conduct, the very territory that defines U.S. boundaries – it can all be clearly traced to war. America is not the only state infected by this militarist taint, but it is the most prominent such nation today with pretensions of peace-loving to have an undisturbed history of war making, virtually none of which the current national culture looks upon with shame.
Although the U.S. has long had a militaristic fever, we have seen it reach absurd proportions in recent years. Robert Higgs, in his recent interview with Jeff Tucker, put it very well:
One hears lately, unfortunately, at sporting events, at baseball games, at football games, certain interludes of worship for the Armed Forces. I find it disgusting myself because I like baseball and I don’t want my baseball to be spoiled by intrusions of nationalistic fervor and worship of the Armed Forces. To me baseball is glorious for being a peaceful activity. We don’t have to kill people to find excitement in life.
It is the same way in the churches, in the media, in the business sector. The Armed Forces are honored and privileged, enjoying a very high official status, even as the injured who return from war are typically mistreated by the very institutions on whose behalf they risked their lives. A returning soldier is a higher form of life than a common citizen. But in the midst of the state’s institutions, he is still just a used-up cog, the repair of which is often not worth it to the machine.
Militarism is not as nakedly on display as in Germany at the height of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, yet we must also consider the continuity. The U.S. has been steadily militaristic for most of the last century, and much of the previous one. It is unapologetically so, even when there is some subtlety to it. Although the cultural right is much more militaristic, the left is also dominated by love of the Armed Forces. Franklin Roosevelt, hero to most of the left, was father of the modern military industrial complex as well as nuclear weaponry. Liberals love claiming the legacy of America’s most beloved war, and they love the myths that surround that state undertaking for having unified the culture and brought America out of the Depression. World War II supposedly demonstrates the efficacy of central planning, as well as the necessity to kill untold numbers of innocent people, on occasion, which is why both statist wings of the American political class love it so dearly.
It is almost impossible to get very high in the national culture with a radically antiwar outlook, to say nothing of an anti-military one. There is much that is taboo to say in American life, but principled critiques of war making, based on the common-sense morality concerning questions about the taking of innocent life, are probably at the top of the list.
Economically, the so-called defense industry stands as a giant. Major defense contractors have infrastructure in nearly every state, and their hands in virtually every sector of government – from TSA and the Department of Agriculture to the IRS and Homeland Security, from NASA and the Food and Drug Administration down to the New York police department. Very few critics of this regime get very far in the mainstream.
The Leader Principle with a Twist
In the United States, any natural-born citizen can grow up to be the president, we are often reminded, demonstrating once more, as if any more evidence were needed, that America is the greatest nation in history, its people the chosen people to lead the world. America is proud to advertise itself as the king of democracies. There is no religious test to be president. There is no familial restriction. Every four or eight years, we see the peaceful transfer of power – unprecedented, demonic power – and Americans can thus say with pride that more than any other nation in the world, "the people here really are the government – the greatest government there ever was."
Yet when that American citizen is in office, he (or she, as I’m sure we’ll see soon enough) is basically god on Earth. Is there a minor or major problem with America’s economy, or the world’s? The president shall respond. Is school violence or sex on television becoming a problem? The president will send one of his officials to fix it. Is injustice transpiring overseas? The president shall see to it immediately. Health care, energy, immigration, social peace, crime, marriage, international trade – nothing is to be tackled without the consultation or active involvement of the president.
One would think the president works a 75-hour day, given his supposed capacity to heal the sick, fix the market, bring democracy to Afghanistan, stamp out drugs in Mexico, secure the auto industry, stand as a role model, unify the nation, end racism, teach all children – not a one left behind – to read, decide when to launch nuclear weapons and which other nations are worthy of having them, save Americans from natural disasters, fix the weather, and get everyone into homes with ever increasing sale values at ever declining costs.
This is such an important, holy office, that the president never travels anywhere without a vast legion of bodyguards, medical personnel, executive officials, and dozens if not hundreds of others. No one else in the world has ever had such a personal army. Wherever the president travels, the local population must surrender its petty business and witness entire neighborhoods overtaken by the head of state’s coterie of pampering assistants and armed guardians.
Americans are enamored of the flawed, everyday persona of the president. They loved Reagan for losing his temper. They adored Clinton for his foibles. They liked it that Bush was a guy with whom you could have a beer, that Obama listens to the same music that they do. They love the idea that, unlike in other fascist regimes, the president can be anybody. And that person can then opt to torture and kill anyone on Earth, or destroy any Third World nation on his (or her – it must be emphasized) say so.
When it comes to power – the actual control the president has over resources and his capacity to destroy human life – no other fascist leader has ever approached what is at the president’s fingertips. No other political office has lasted so long with so much Caesarian prerogative. No other political position was ever credibly believed by so many to have the power to do so much good. In America, the president is a deity – which, paradoxically, is why so many political opponents take it so personally when someone they dislike has the office. Some Americans don’t want to see the greatness of their country tarnished by a perjurer like Clinton or a doofus like Bush. They might even question the officeholder’s legitimacy, as with Obama. But this is because the office is so revered. The presidency itself is upheld as the commanding office of the nation, the secular savior of the world. It is the godhead of America’s democratic omnipotence. It is a sacred position. The fact it is an elected office occupied by imperfect souls only bolsters its unparalleled grandeur. To say the Leader Principle isn’t alive and well in this country is to define the concept too narrowly.
Read more:
http://lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory239.html
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