http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2010/04/05/glenn_beck_s_historians
Monday, Apr 5, 2010 Salon.com
Glenn Beck's partisan historians The academics behind the progressivism-as-fascism meme
By Michael Lind
"Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their
frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back," John Maynard
Keynes observed in 1936. And not only madmen in authority; lightweights
in mass media, too.
Behind Glenn Beck's televised crusade against progressivism and Jonah
Goldberg's bestselling tract "Liberal Fascism" is more than the usual
attempt to smear political opponents by shouting, "So you agree with
Hitler!" Beck and Goldberg are peddling dumbed-down versions of the
history of the American center-left that originated with serious
scholars on the American right. As Beck says of his frequent guest
professor R.J. Pestritto's book "Woodrow Wilson and American
Progressivism, "That book will make your head hurt but you will read
things that you'd never knew [sic] in history."
So much nonsense has been written about the influence of the
German-American political theorist Leo Strauss on the American right
that one hesitates even to raise the subject. But the origins of the
"progressivism-is-fascism" meme are to be found in the work of scholars
influenced by Strauss, including Harry Jaffa, Pestritto, Thomas G. West
and Charles Kesler. They are associated with a few conservative liberal
arts colleges: Hillsdale College, Claremont McKenna College and the
University of Dallas.
In their version of Straussianism, the American Founders established
universal human rights as the only legitimate foundation for
government. The enemies of natural rights liberalism are historicists
and relativists who argue that there are no absolute values and that
good and evil vary in different times and places. In the 19th century,
Abraham Lincoln defended the idea of universal values against
historicist, relativist Southern slaveowners who dismissed the
Declaration of Independence because it claimed "all men are created
equal." In the 20th century, neoconservative hero Winston Churchill
defended universal values against Nazi amoralism.
How does this make President Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry
Reid into fascists? Patience, dear reader, patience.
In the early 1900s, Woodrow Wilson and many members of the progressive
movement, influenced by the German scholarship of the time, dismissed
Enlightenment notions of natural rights, arguing that government was
the product of historical evolution, not Lockean social contracts. Many
progressives also disliked the checks and balances of America's 18th
century Constitution and argued that a benign, technocratic
administrative elite should be empowered to carry out economic planning
and social engineering, including eugenics (a horrible fad that
attracted many Fabian socialists, communists, feminists and
conventional conservatives as well as fascists, before Nazi Germany
discredited the idea).
The Straussian conservatives are correct when they point out that many
progressive intellectuals like Wilson rejected the 18th century ideas
of natural rights and checks and balances as outmoded. 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.
The claim that modern American liberalism rejects the founding
tradition of universal natural rights is particularly preposterous.
What, if not the idea of universal, inalienable human rights, has been
the basis of center-left campaigns for feminism, gay rights,
reproductive choice, civil liberties and international human rights?
None of these movements has appealed to historical traditions or moral
or cultural relativism. The historicists and relativists are to be
found on the right, where, for example, same-sex marriage is denounced
because it goes against "six thousand years" of tradition (historicism)
or because it represents the imposition of the values of a liberal
subculture on conservative subcultures with different values (cultural
relativism).
But if conservatives were interested in consistency or historical
accuracy, Jonah Goldberg would have titled his book "Liberal
Historicism and Relativism" instead of "Liberal Fascism" and his net
worth would be much lower.
The Straussian-inspired denunciation of progressives as amoral
historicists and relativists who have more in common with Jefferson
Davis and Adolf Hitler than with Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill
is simply the latest in a series of smear campaigns against the
center-left launched by American conservatives with the help of the
highbrow right. From generation to generation, the details of American
conservative historical mythmaking change, but the underlying pattern
remains the same.
Once upon a time, we are supposed to believe, there was a golden age in
which everyone shared orthodox conservative beliefs. Then a wicked
intellectual introduced heretical ideas, and the world went to hell in
a handbasket.
For the conservative thinker Richard Weaver in "Ideas Have
Consequences" (1948), the decline of Western civilization began with
the triumph of William of Occam and the nominalist school of Catholic
theology in the 14th century. For Irving Babbitt, who influenced T.S.
Eliot and Russell Kirk, world history's greatest villain was
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who spawned romanticism, which is responsible
for all of the ills of the modern world.
Today's Straussian conservatives attribute the Fall to the influence of
German Hegelianism on early 20th century American progressive
intellectuals. The narrative of the expulsion from Eden is always the
same, no matter when it is supposed to have occurred or what thinker is
assigned the role of the snake.
All of these conservative interpretations of history share one thing in
common: They ignore any material factors -- industrial revolutions,
population growth, urbanization, geopolitics -- and treat American and
world history as a Manichaean struggle of abstract philosophies.
But most political debates are not about the "first principles" beloved
by the Lincoln-and-Churchill school of Straussianism. They are about
practical subjects: how to provide healthcare, what kind of
infrastructure we need. The Democratic healthcare plan can be
criticized, but not because it is Hegelian state-worship that betrays
the principles of the Declaration of Independence. There is nothing
relativist or historicist about the hydropower dams of the New Dealers
like Roosevelt and Johnson.
One can learn from reading Leo Strauss, a thinker far more subtle and
interesting than his disciples. It is a pity that the epigones of
Strauss lend their scholarly credentials to the oldest trick of
right-wing populist demagogues: denouncing liberals as amoral,
state-worshiping libertines.