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How to Argue with a (Guilty) Liberal
Like a demanding and ill-mannered child, liberals
are used to getting their way. Whenever they lapse
into the losing side of an argument, they
reflexively resort to name-calling and
mud-slinging. Epithets like “neo-Nazi,”
“crypto-fascist,” and “imperialist
stooge” buzz like mosquitoes hovering over a
Potomac swamp.
But how many conservatives who are targets of
such slurs know these liberals are indulging in one
of the greatest intellectual ruses in history? How
many realize it’s a matter of the red-faced
pot calling the kettle black?
Esteemed reader, you are about to learn the
truth of the long-standing love affair between
American progressivism and European fascism.
As Jonah Goldberg reveals in his bestseller
Liberal Fascism, that romance can be traced back to
the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. The Democrat was
both a progressive and racist who famously wrote,
“The white men were roused by a mere instinct
of self-preservation…until at last there had
sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a
veritable empire of the South, to protect the
Southern country.”
Shortly after America entered World War I in
1917, Wilson signed an Executive Order establishing
the Committee on Public Information, a propaganda
apparatus designed to whip Americans into a
patriotic fervor. The following year Wilson pushed
for the Sedition Act which banned the use of any
“disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive
language” about the government. That sweeping
language served to squelch all forms of political
dissent.
The notorious Sedition Act occasioned the arrest
of an estimated 175,000 Americans accused of
essentially failing to be sufficiently patriotic
– leading Goldberg to dub the Wilson
presidency a “fascist police state.”
For those who wonder whether the phrase
“liberal fascist” is a little over the
top, in fact it was coined by science fiction
novelist H.G. Wells. In 1932 the progressivist
Wells delivered a speech that called for a
revitalization of the fading liberal movement:
“the Fascists of Liberalism must…begin as
a disciplined sect, but they must end as the
sustaining organization of a reconstituted
mankind.”
Wells was also a friend and confidante of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Struggling to rescue
America from the dregs of the Great Depression, FDR
was fully aware of what was transpiring in Europe
and sought to emulate its accomplishments.
Roosevelt once bragged, “what we are doing in
this country were some of things that were being
done in Russia and even some of the things that
were being done under Hitler in Germany.”
European fascists returned the presidential
compliment. In 1934 the Nazi Party’s official
newspaper sang the praises of FDR, describing him
as a “warm-hearted leader of the people with a
profound understanding of social needs.” And
the Fuhrer himself sent Roosevelt a private letter
applauding his “heroic efforts in the
interests of the American people.”
Mussolini was even more enthralled with the
American commander. Upon reading Roosevelt’s
Looking Forward, Mussolini fawned, “The appeal
to the decisiveness and masculine sobriety of the
nation’s youth, with which Roosevelt here
calls his readers to battle, is reminiscent of the
ways and means by which Fascism awakened the
Italian people.”
Il Duce was of course referring to the sweeping
New Deal policies that established massive job
programs, centralized power in vast government
bureaucracies, and imposed rigid price controls on
the economy.
But the ugliest chapter in the
progressive-fascist alliance centered on eugenics,
the pseudo-science of racial purification. Three
prominent persons, all of the liberal persuasion,
were prominent flag-wavers in this execrable
episode of American history.
Woodrow Wilson was one of the first American
politicians to promote eugenic policies. As
governor of New Jersey, Wilson approved a law in
1912 that created the Board of Examiners of
Feebleminded, Epileptics, and Other Defectives.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was another
progressive icon of the era. Holmes wrote the
flawed Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell that put
the legal stamp of approval on compulsory
sterilization. “Three generations of imbeciles
are enough,” Holmes infamously wrote.
A few years later in 1934 the American Eugenics
Society published the Case for Sterilization, a
book that piqued the interest of the Fuhrer
himself. One leading member of the American
Eugenics Society was Margaret Sanger. The
birth-control crusader was the moving force behind
the Negro Project, which enlisted ministers such as
Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. in the crusade to restrict
reproduction among “inferior” stocks of
Blacks.
So fellow conservatives, arise! The next time
you are slandered as a proto-Nazi or angry White
male (which in the liberal mind are one and the
same), drag out the fascist skeletons rattling in
the progressive closet. Mention Woodrow
Wilson’s infatuation with racial cleansing,
the FDR-Hitler mutual admiration society, Justice
Holmes’ authorship of Buck v. Bell, and
Margaret Sanger’s Negro Project.
If that doesn’t stop the guilty-minded
liberal in his tracks, mention how
progressive-inspired eugenics policies were the
prime moving force behind the forced sterilization
of 400,000 undesirables in Nazi Germany.
That inconvenient truth is certain to focus the
discussion.
* * *
Carey
Roberts probes and lampoons political correctness.
His work has been published frequently in the
Washington Times, Townhall.com, LewRockwell.com,
ifeminists.net, Intellectual Conservative, and
elsewhere. He is a staff reporter for the New Media
Network. You can contact him at E-Mail
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