JONATHAN CHAIT APRIL 13, 2010
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
When Michael Lind is good, he's really, really good. Here he is dissecting the intellectual roots of the current Republican hysteria about the evils of progressivism, embraced by Jonah Goldberg, Glenn Beck, and many others. Lind's whole essay is worthwhile, but here's the nub:
The problem arises when these scholars, and their popularizers like Beck and Goldberg, treat all American liberalism and leftism from World War I until the 21st century as the continuation of early 20th century progressivism, the better to denounce today's liberalism as "historicist" and "relativist" and lump it with the Confederate and Nazi ideology. This ignores the profound differences between the Progressive movement and subsequent movements on the American center-left.
New Deal liberalism broke with progressivism in many if not most respects. Progressives wanted technocratic economic planning. By the 1940s, New Dealers dropped planning for Keynesianism. Most progressives were nativists who supported immigration restriction on ethnic or cultural grounds. New Deal liberals celebrated the melting pot and liberalized American immigration laws in the 1960s.
Wilson resegegrated Washington. Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security and Johnson created Medicare. Wilson opposed national health insurance.
It is even harder to find any traces of Wilsonian progressive DNA in the New Left of the 1960s and '70s or the neoliberalism of the 1970s and '80s. Wilsonian progressives idolized the impartial expert administrator. The New Left denounced bureaucracy and academic hierarchy. Wilsonian progressives wanted a state-directed economy. Neoliberals like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers celebrated deregulation and free markets.
For Straussian scholars and popularizers like Beck and Goldberg to denounce modern progressives because long-forgotten WASP political scientists in the early 1900s favored eugenics or economic planning is absurd. It is as though today's liberals denounced today's conservatives on the grounds that in the late 19th century the McKinley Republicans favored excessively high tariffs.
3 comments
The difference between liberal fascism and conservative fascism is that today's liberals have happily jettisoned a lot of ugly ideas held by "progressives" in the past (while clinging tight to old ideas that have stood the test of time, like treating workers decently and fighting discrimination against various out-groups). Conservative fascists, however, revere their fascist past - as we're seeing today with Southern governors hauling out the stars and bars to (metaphorically) bludgeon the citizens of their states who wrongly feel that they, and America and the South, are better off than they would be if the slavers had prevailed. The right-wing fascists are projecting. Since their ideas haven't evolved since 1920 (or 1860), they can't imagine that liberals' ideas have. Also, since most of their leading lightweights are reactionary demagogue provocateurs and provocateuses whose primary function is to outrage opponents, conservatives view their heroes through an "all or nothing" lens. Rush (the fat one, not the musical one) and Sarah (plain and annoying, not plain and tall) thrive as much for the criticism they receive as the criticism they dish out, which would not work nearly as well if they were criticized by their own side as well as by godless elites. Finally, conservatives like to deify their heroes ("I Hate George Bush" reminds us of some of the W hagiography rampant in his presidency). This not only provides a stark contrast between their heroes and godless, compromised elites, it also wishes away anything that does not comport with the tactical demands of day-to-day reactionary politics - for example, St. Ronnie's tax increases, arms negotiations and social security reforms.
- Geoff G
April 13, 2010 at 1:36pm
Lind's essay is good as far as it goes, but fails to identify the real source of the conservative complaint. It is not simply that liberals are historicists or relativists; it is that liberals (in the conservative view) do not acknowledge or accept any authority that places absolute constraints on their desires or ambitions. For Strauss that authority is platonic; for the religious conservative, it is revelation. In either case, it is an appeal to a moral (and by extension political) anchor for values that is somehow beyond the power of the human imagination or human reason to alter. Hence the complaints about Occam and nominalism, or Rousseau and his placement of the social contract within the general will (replacing God), or Dewey, and so on. There are various types of response to this. One is to reject the conservative premise right at the start. Another is to accept it (as I do) but point out just how many liberal ends are perfectly compatible with it, indeed called for even after accepting an external moral, philosophical or religious authority: national healthcare; an equitable system of labor; etc. It's also worth pointing out that the concept of ordered liberty, or the tension between individual desires and societal constraints, is no more resolved by appeal to external authority than it is by reliance on Rawlsian ideas of justice. Both come up short. There might indeed be such a thing as liberal fascism; but it is no more in evidence today (except in the fevered imagination of the right) than actual, plain jane fascism is to be found on the right, and there is no reason to suppose that the liberal agenda is dragging us any faster to some form or left authoritarianism than we would be pulled to right authoritarianism under the rule of the Family Research Council.
- timteeter
April 13, 2010 at 3:55pm
Jonah Goldberg does not link liberalism with the "Confederate" ideology. The Confederacy is not mentioned in his popular, "Liberal Fascism." He does link Progressivism with the Nazism, Fascism and other forms of Statism. "Most progressives were nativists who supported immigration restriction on ethnic or cultural grounds." Some Progressives opposed immigration on racialist grounds. Eastern European Jews, Sicilians and other southern Europeans were viewed as racially or genetically inferior to the WASP majority. Ethnic and cultural discrimination is only a polite way of saying that they believed these immigrants were genertically inferior and would weaken the WASP race. The dark underside of the WASP culture was the Eugenitcs movement. Wilson may have opposed national health care, yet the centralizing tendency of the war economy was hailed by liberals, at the time, as a highly positive developement. We know that various writers of the New Republic expressed great enthusiasm for the Wilson administration's domestic war time economic policies (i.e., Walter Lippman). Some found the economic centralization and planning the war economy created odious, such as Randolph Broune. It is far-fetched to see in the same sentence "Straussian scholars and popularizers like Beck and Goldberg." Goldberg is a middle-brow historian with a wildly distorted theory and Beck is the electronic media domagogue-entertainer. "Straussian scholars" have many faults but linking Nazism with Liberalism does not appear high on their agenda, as I recall. Goldberg's book, "Liberal Fascism" is simple and clever enough to become a manual or guidebook for Beck, Fox, the tea party and numerous conspiracy enthusiasts. A penetrating reply to Goldberg , etc. is required from the center-left. I'm not sure Lind is the writer for this job.
- LawrenceGulotta
April 13, 2010 at 3:58pm