The Main Event
In his seventh chapter, D’Souza finally gets to brass tacks. He sets out to draw a straight line between the fascist and National Socialist experiments in Italy and Germany, respectively, and the American left. Notably, he will not be able to triangulate this connection with one to racism, which explains why D’Souza already spilled so much ink belaboring the points about Italian fascist racism. The goal now is to tie Franklin Roosevelt to Hitler.
Fascism, D’Souza tells us, is actually what the attempts of the Democratic Party to maintain or increase financial and environmental regulations or to introduce some standard of managed care beyond Medicare. Gentile and Mussolini, he tells us, “were not in favor of state ownership; [they] knew their fellow socialists had no idea how to run industries. Instead they advocated state-run capitalism, putting the industrial might of the private sector at the behest of the state.”[1]
The problem with this statement isn’t that it’s false – it’s actually largely true. Rather, the problem is that what he’s describing isn’t socialism. It’s corporatism, which I hope I’ve shown in previous installments isn’t the same thing. “Strictly speaking,” he explains, “socialism involves workers owning the means of production.”[2] No, that’s syndicalism. Socialism is the state owning the means of production. That’s an important distinction, whether D’Souza likes it or not.
After briefly returning to early Soviet history to offer another embarrassing error (Leninists fighting Trotskyists in the early 20th century[3]), D’Souza goes on to say that socialism, fascism, and progressivism are all forms of leftism. All three are united in their opposition to capitalism. This brings us back to a problem addressed in the first installment of this series, i.e., what exactly does it mean to be “left wing”?
Like manna from heaven, current events have intervened to offer us a decent cheat sheet. This past week, a young software engineer at Google was fired for circulating a sort of white paper opposing certain measures adopted at Google to foster greater gender and racial diversity. Although the paper’s author has a level of rigor in his scholarship akin to a guy who spent half an hour reading mises.org, he does offer a decent list of left-right distinctions. Quoting the memo directly, he breaks down the biases of left and right thus:
Left Biases
• Compassion for the weak
• Disparities are due to injustices
• Humans are inherently cooperative
• Change is good (unstable)
• Open
• Idealist
Right Biases
• Respect for the strong/authority
• Disparities are natural and just
• Humans are inherently competitive
• Change is dangerous (stable)
• Closed
• Pragmatic[4]
His points can be disputed, certainly, but he hits at two key aspects of the left/right divide: on the left, equality and change are favored, while on the right, freedom and stability are favored.
Notice that the above bullet points don’t mention anything about economics or social policy – that’s important too since economic and social policies are largely outgrowths of these biases, the former more than the latter. Socialists want equality of opportunity, if not of outcome. State control of capital, in theory, helps in redistributing wealth and promoting social welfare. Capitalists believe in innate inequalities and the way the market determines things being best.
Would D’Souza disagree with this breakdown? It’s hard to say; as far as I’m aware, he hasn’t yet. It’s hard to think he’d dispute the notion that capitalism and socialism would apply to the right and left biases, respectively, from the Google memo. What about the repressive vs. permissive axis I talked about in my first post in this series? Remember that we did not classic these qualities as either right or left. All we did was chart social and economic policies along two axes.
Granted, the model from either myself or from the Google memo isn’t perfect. The Google memo charts change as a bias of the left, but there’s no question, as established, that fascists intended to change things. It’s also true that fascists had a utopian veneer about them. But undoubtedly, fascists tick off more bullets on the right than on the left.
So when D’Souza or anyone else tries to tag fascist and National Socialism as inherently leftist, they are truly trying to pull a fast one. Fascism undoubtedly favored the strong, believe in natural disparities, and believed in a closed society.
Some of D’Souza’s more preposterous claims, as already established, he doesn’t bother to source, making it especially difficult to dispute them. For instance, D’Souza acknowledges that the leadership principle (Fuehrerprinzip) was a core value in fascism but just as quickly goes on to say that FDR himself believed that he played this role – that he embodies the U.S. in the same way that Mussolini did Italy or Hitler did Germany. Then, to “prove” his point, he cites not any evidence from FDR himself but rather the observations of people who admired both fascism and FDR.
We should not put too much stock into the fact that people could admire both FDR and Mussolini or even Hitler. If one admires strength in a leader, then one is likely to find something to admire in these men, particularly before World War II and the true extent of what evil people could do was exposed. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was distasteful to many Americans but not because they loved Jews; indeed, “country club” anti-Semitism was common here until after the war.
We should therefore not exist that the anti-Semitism of the Nazis would be a deal-breaker for many Americans. After all, as D’Souza himself points out, we treated African Americans in the south just as badly, perhaps even worse, at least until Reichskristallnacht.
To drive home the idea that we should not be surprised that there was mutual admiration among leaders of countries and should not conclude that admiration was equivalent to sympathies with politics, Churchill was among the world leaders who expressed admiration of Mussolini, particularly for his economic policies. But D’Souza also admires Churchill. Does this mean that Churchill was a fascist and, by extension, D’Souza himself?
Hey Mister Wilson!
To wrap up the progressive-fascist connection in a bow while lacking any indication of racism on Roosevelt’s part, it’s necessary for D’Souza to go back to Woodrow Wilson for the racist content of the progressive ideology. Remarkably, D’Souza doesn’t mention anywhere in his analysis that Wilson was a Southerner – a native of Virginia. Thus his support for segregation, although this fact certainly doesn’t excuse it.
The treatment of Wilson offers one of the most remarkable statements in D’Souza’s book. Remarking on Wilson’s likely significant role in making The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith’s infamous Civil War and Reconstruction drama that lionizes the KKK, a popular film in the U.S., D’Souza recounts an anecdote of Griffith saying that Wilson found the film “terribly true” and “like writing history with lightning.”
Noting that there is independent corroboration of these statements, D’Souza says, “[B]ut there is no reason to doubt Griffith’s veracity on this point.”[5] Really? The man was an inveterate racist, but lying would be out of the question? This seems to be an assessment by D’Souza of Griffith’s truthfulness pulled wholly from his posterior.
Subsequently, D’Souza spends a lot of time listing purported leftists who admired Mussolini and/or Hitler. He does eventually return to FDR, first pointing out that Mussolini and Hitler both admired him – at least at first. He then sets out to show that FDR had designs for authoritarian seizure of power. Here, D’Souza focuses on FDR’s New Deal economic reforms, including the National Recovery Administration. Besides D’Souza’s failure to distinguish the NRA from the act that created it, the National Industrial Recovery Act, D’Souza again relies on third party assessments to conclude it was “fascist” and continues to conflate socialism and corporatism.
The New Deal, D’Souza says, was fascist because it permanently destroyed economic liberty in the U.S. Assuming for a moment that this statement about lost liberty is true, that still doesn’t make it fascist. Expansion of the welfare state by the New Deal, D’Souza says, is both fascist and progressive because the idea of the welfare state was introduced by Bismarck, who practiced “moderate, conservative progressivism.”[6]
At this point, it’s gotten so that terms has essentially lost their meaning. Progressives are socialists, we have been told by D’Souza repeatedly, or at least in favor of government control of the means of production (or was that workers’ control?). Now, Bismarck, the man who introduced a welfare state to push back the rising power of German socialists is a progressive?
To be continued
[1] Dinesh D’Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (Washington: Regnery, 2017), Loc. 2854.
[2] Ibid, Loc. 2838.
[3] Ibid, Loc. 2902.
[4] “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320
[5] D’Souza, ibid, Loc. 3046.
[6] Ibid, Loc. 3236.
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