An old reblog, via (hilker) (complicatedshoes) (sds)

It’s ironic that in the 1930s it was far from out-of-bounds to call the New Deal or FDR fascist. Yet for the two generations after World War II it was simply unacceptable to associate the New Deal with fascism in any way. This cultural and political taboo has skewed American politics in profound ways. In order to assert that the New Deal was the opposite of fascism—rather than a kindred phenomenon—liberal intellectuals had to create an enormous straw man out of the modern conservative movement. This was surprisingly easy. Since “right-wing” was already defined as anti-Roosevelt, it did not take much effort to conflate the American right with Nazism and fascism….

The myth of right-wing fascism only began to unravel decades later thanks to an unlikely figure: Ronald Wilson Reagan, a former Roosevelt Democrat. In both 1976 and 1980 Regan refused to retract his opinion that the early New Dealers looked favorably on the policies of Fascist Italy. […] Reagan’s refusal to back off his claim was a watershed moment, though the taboo remains largely intact. But why was the taboo there in the first place? One answer is both obvious and entirely understandable: the Holocaust. As one of the signature evils of human history, the extermination of European Jewry colors everything it touches. But this is terribly inaccurate, in that various other fascist regimes don’t deserve to be blamed for the Holocaust, including Fascist Italy. Nowhere here do I suggest that New Dealism was akin to Hitlerism if we are to define Hitlerism solely in terms of the Holocaust. But fascism was already fascism before the Holocaust. The Holocaust chronologically and to a certain extent philosophically was the death rattle of fascism in Germany. To use the last chapter of German fascism to explain away the earlier fascisms of Italy, America, and elsewhere is akin to reading the wrong book backward. And to say that the New Deal had nothing in common with fascism because the later New Dealers stood opposed to the Holocaust is to say that there is nothing distinct or significant to fascism save the Holocaust—a position that no serious person holds.

Indeed, it seems almost impossible to deny that the New Deal was objectively fascistic. Under the New Deal, governmental goons smashed down doors to impose domestic policies. G-Men were treated like demigods, even as they spied on dissidents. Captains of industry wrote the rules by which they were governed. FDR secretly taped his conversations, used the postal service to punish his enemies, lied repeatedly to maneuver the United States into war, and undermined Congress’ war-making powers at several turns. When warned by Frances Perkins in 1932 that many provisions of the New Deal were unconstitutional, he in effect shrugged and said that they’d deal with that later (his intended solution: pack the Supreme Court with cronies). In 1942 he flatly told Congress that if it didn’t do what he wanted, he’d do it anyway. He questioned the patriotism of anybody who opposed his economic programs, never mind the war itself. He created the military-industrial complex so many on the left decry as fascist today.

In 1936 Roosevelt told Congress, “We have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people’s government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people.” As Al Smith noted, the upshot of this statement is that Roosevelt didn’t mind an authoritarian government, so long as representatives of “the people”—that is, liberals—ran the government. But if anybody “we” dislike gets control of the government, it would constitute tyranny.

This kind of skewed rationale gets to the heart of liberal fascism. Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don’t matter. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of “good things” under the direction of “our people” is always and everywhere justified. Dissent by the people is troubling evidence of incipient fascism. The anti-dogmatism that progressives and fascists alike inherited from Pragmatism made the motives of the activist the only criteria for judging the legitimacy of action. “I want to assure you,” FDR’s aide Harry Hopkins told an audience of New Deal activists in New York, “that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal.”

Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.