Nazis were Liberal Progressives

5 Reasons We Know Nazis Were Liberal Progressives

American Progressives of the 1930s Embraced Fascism

None other than H. G. Wells, one of the most influential progressives of the 20th century, said in 1932 that American progressives must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis.” He had this to say about fascist totalitarianism, “I have never been able to escape altogether from its relentless logic.”

When he wrote of the need for a “‘Phoenix Rebirth’ of Liberalism” under the umbrella of “Liberal Fascism,” he said: “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.” Amazing stuff for an renown American author.

And there were many others of that era that enthusiastically sang the praises of Mussolini’s socialism and Hitler’s Nazi government. The poet Wallace Stevens described himself as “pro-Mussolini personally.”

The American historian Charles Beard, writing of Mussolini’s programs, said that, “Beyond question, an amazing experiment is being made [in Italy], an experiment in reconciling individualism and socialism.”

W. E. B. DuBois, co-founder of the NAACP, saw Hitler’s National Socialism as a worthy model for economic organization. The establishment of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany, he wrote, had been “absolutely necessary to get the state in order.” In 1937 DuBois stated: “there is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.”

Playwright George Bernard Shaw held up Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini as the world’s great “progressive” leaders because they “did things,” unlike the leaders of those “putrefying corpses” he referred to as parliamentary democracies.

Just like today, leading journalists of the day overwhelmingly admired Mussolini.

Lincoln Steffens said that Italian fascism made Western democracy look like a system run by “petty persons with petty purposes.” Mussolini, Steffens proclaimed admiringly, had been “formed” by God “out of the rib of Italy.”

McClure’s Magazine founder Samuel McClure described Italian fascism as “a great step forward and the first new ideal in government since the founding of the American Republic.”

After visiting Italy and interviewing Benito Mussolini in 1926, the American humorist Will Rogers, said of the fascist dictator: “I’m pretty high on that bird.” “Dictator form of government is the greatest form of government,” Rogers wrote, “that is, if you have the right dictator.” This from the man who was nicknamed “Ambassador-at-Large of the United States” by the National Press Club.

FDR’s Progressive Administration Emulated the Fascists of Europe

Another parallel between fascism and progressivism was their shared faith in the process of experimental trial and error, modeled on the scientific method, as a means of developing better forms of societal organization. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose politics were heavily influenced by progressive ideas, boasted that he was not wedded to any preconceived notions concerning social policy, but rather that he measured an idea’s worth by the results it achieved.

“Take a method and try it,” he said in 1932. “If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” His primary guiding principle was “bold, persistent experimentation.” The result, unfortunately, is the modern American welfare state.

New Republic co-founder Herbert Croly put it this way: “If there are any abstract liberal principles, we do not know how to formulate them. Nor if they are formulated by others do we recognize their authority. Liberalism, as we understand it, is an activity.” The Italian Fascists put it still more succinctly: “Our policy is to govern.”

Unlike Germany and Italy, however, American fascism was shaped by many special factors including our geographical size, ethnic diversity, Jeffersonian individualism, and a strong liberal tradition. As a result, American fascism was milder, more friendly, more ‘maternal’ than its foreign counterparts. Author Jonah Goldberg described it is ‘liberal fascism’” – a phenomenon characterized by “nannying, not bullying.”

In the early decades of the 20th century, it was called progressivism. FDR adviser Rexford Guy Tugwell said of Italian fascism: “It’s the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.” New Republic editor George Soule, who avidly supported FDR, noted approvingly that the Roosevelt administration was “trying out the economics of fascism.”

Consistent with the totalitarian roots of fascism and progressivism alike, was the progressives’ dismissal of America’s traditional system of constitutional checks and balances as an anachronistic impediment to social progress. Progressives reasoned that such restraints on power would only slow the process by which the governing elite could implement their programs to refashion society in accordance with their own progressive vision.

European Fascism and American Progressivism Were Both Militaristic

In the late 1800s and 1900s, many German intellectuals propagated the idea that war could be an effective means of unifying a population and, as a result, overcoming class distinctions. The fact is that these same intellectuals had an enormous influence on the American mind.

As a result, progressives in the United States favored America’s entry into World War I because they believed it would help to collectivize society and make it properly obedient to the powerful federal government.

And President Woodrow Wilson stated, “I am an advocate of peace, but there are some splendid things that come to a nation through the discipline of war.”

John Dewey, the famous education reformer and socialist, spoke of the “social possibilities of war” and the “immense impetus to reorganization” he believed it brought. He added that the war might force Americans “to give up much of [their] economic freedom”; to abandon their “individualistic tradition” and “march in step”; and to recognize “the supremacy of public need over private possessions.”

Grosvenor Clarkson, Chairman of the Federal Interdepartmental Defense Board, said the war effort “is a story of the conversion of a hundred million combatively individualistic people into a vast cooperative effort in which the good of the unit was sacrificed to the good of the whole.”

The progressive financier George Perkins said the “great European war … is striking down individualism and building up collectivism.”

The social worker Felix Adler said the central control imposed on society by the war effort was helping America create the “perfect man…a fairer and more beautiful and more righteous type than any…that has yet existed.”

In the meantime, Benito Mussolini was making virtually the same pro-war arguments on his side of the Atlantic.

Most American progressives did not disavow fascism until the horrific deeds of the Nazi Holocaust became public during World War II. After the war, those progressives who had praised Mussolini and Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s had to distance and dissociate themselves from fascism.

“Accordingly,” wrote Jonah Goldberg, “leftist intellectuals redefined fascism as ‘right-wing’ and projected their own sins onto conservatives, even as they continued to borrow heavily from fascist and pre-fascist thought.”

The Fascists of Europe and American Progressives Both Favored Eugenics

The Progressive movement swept America from roughly the early 1890s through the early 1920s, producing a broadly-held belief that government should be the primary agent of social change. To accomplish this change, legions of idealistic young crusaders, operating at the local, state, and federal levels, seized and wielded sweeping new powers.

They enacted vast amounts of new legislation, including minimum wage and maximum hour laws, antitrust statutes, restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol, appropriations for hundreds of miles of roads and highways, assistance to new immigrants and the poor, women’s suffrage, and electoral reform, and on and on.

Apparently many on the liberal left would like to revive that movement and its sense of social justice. Journalist Bill Moyers, speaking at a conference sponsored by the left-wing Campaign for America’s Future, described Progressivism as “one of the country’s great traditions.”

Progressives, he told the crowd, “exalted and extended the original American Revolution. They spelled out new terms of partnership between the people and their rulers. And they kindled a flame that lit some of the most prosperous decades in modern history.”

Not really, according a book review by Damon Root at Reason.com, the authors of The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900–1917, reveal the racist roots manifest in early American progressivism:…the Progressive Era was also a time of vicious, state-sponsored racism. In fact, from the standpoint of African-American history, the Progressive Era qualifies as arguably the single worst period since Emancipation. The wholesale disfranchisement of Southern black voters occurred during these years, as did the rise and triumph of Jim Crow. Furthermore, as the Westminster College historian David W. Southern notes… the very worst of it-disfranchisement, segregation, race baiting, lynching “went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism.” Racism was the norm, not the exception, among the very crusaders romanticized by today’s activist left.

At the heart of Southern’s flawed but useful study is a deceptively simple question: How did reformers infused with lofty ideals embrace such abominable bigotry? His answer begins with the race-based pseudoscience that dominated educated opinion at the turn of the 20th century. “At college,” Southern notes, “budding progressives not only read exposes of capitalistic barons and attacks on laissez-faire economics by muckraking journalists, they also read racist tracts that drew on the latest anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, eugenics, and medical science.”

As for the European Progressives – the Fascists? Almost six million Jews, along with hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally and physically handicapped, and Christians and political rivals were murdered in the name of eugenics and racial purity.

The Shared Ideological Tenets of Nazis and Liberals

Adolf Hitler and Anton Drexler composed a series of points for the organization that became the foundation of the NAZI party. . They were publically presented on 24 February 1920. Hitler translated his ideology into a plan of action which would prove its popularity with the German people throughout the coming years.

For many at the time, its abrupt departure from the tradition of politics as practiced in the western world was as much of a shock as was its liberal nature and foresight of the emerging problems of western democracy.

The points were prefaced with a comforting – and familiar to American ears – disclaimer: “The Programme of the German Workers’ Party is designed to be of limited duration. The leaders have no intention, once the aims announced in it have been achieved, of establishing fresh ones, merely in order to increase, artificially, the discontent of the masses and so ensure the continued existence of the Party.”

Here are some of the points laid out in Hitler’s progressive vision:

• We demand that the State shall make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens.

• The activities of the individual must not clash with the general interest, but must proceed within the framework of the community and be for the general good.

• We demand the nationalization of all businesses which have been formed into corporations (trusts).

• We demand profit-sharing in large industrial enterprises.

• We demand the extensive development of insurance for old age.

• We demand a land reform suitable to our national requirements, the passing of a law for the expropriation of land for communal purposes without compensation; the abolition of ground rent, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.

• The State must consider a thorough reconstruction of our national system of education… at the expense of the State.

• We demand the abolition of the mercenary army and the foundation of a people’s army.

• The publishing of papers which are not conducive to the national welfare must be forbidden.

• We demand freedom for all religious denominations in the State, provided they do not threaten its existence not offend the moral feelings of the German race…

• To put the whole of this programme into effect, we demand the creation of a strong central state power for the Reich.

Sound familiar? Who knew?

http://conservativeamerica-online.com/5-reasons-we-know-nazis-were-liberal-progressives/