Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (19 page)

Now the GOP presidential candidate in 1964, Barry Goldwater, did vote against the Civil Rights Act. But Goldwater was no racist. In fact, he had been a founding member of the Arizona NAACP. He was active in integrating the Phoenix public schools. He had voted for the 1957 Civil Rights Act.

Goldwater opposed the 1964 act because it outlawed private as well as public discrimination, and Goldwater believed the federal government did not have legitimate authority to restrict the private sector in that way. I happen to agree with him on this—a position I argued in
The End of Racism
. Even so, Goldwater’s position was not shared by a majority of his fellow Republicans.

It was Governor Orval Faubus, Democrat of Arkansas, who ordered the Arkansas National Guard to stop black students from enrolling in Little Rock Central High School—until Republican President Dwight Eisenhower sent troops from the 101st Airborne to enforce desegregation. In retaliation, Faubus shut down all the public high schools in Little Rock for the 1958–59 school year.

It was Governor George Wallace, Democrat of Alabama, who attempted to prevent four black students from enrolling in elementary schools in Huntsville, Alabama, until a federal court in Birmingham intervened. Bull Connor, the infamous southern sheriff who unleashed dogs and hoses on civil rights protesters, was a Democrat.

Progressives who cannot refute this history—facts are stubborn things—nevertheless create the fantasy of a Nixon “Southern strategy” that supposedly explains how Republicans cynically appealed to racism in order to convert southern Democrats into Republicans. In reality Nixon had no such strategy—as we have seen, it was Lyndon Johnson who had a southern strategy to keep blacks from defecting to the Republican Party. Johnson, not Nixon, was the true racist, a fact that progressive historiography has gone to great lengths to disguise.

Nixon’s political strategy in the 1968 campaign is laid out in Kevin Phillips’s classic work
The Emerging Republican Majority
. Phillips writes that the Nixon campaign knew it could never win the presidency through any kind of racist appeal. Such an appeal, even if it won some converts in some parts of the Lower South, would completely ruin Nixon’s prospects in the rest of the country. Nixon’s best bet was to appeal to the rising middle classes of the Upper South on the basis of prosperity and economic opportunity.
²²
This is exactly what Nixon did.

There are no statements by Nixon that even remotely suggest he appealed to racism in the 1968 or 1972 campaigns. Nixon never displayed the hateful, condescending view of blacks that Johnson did. The racist vote in 1968 didn’t go to Nixon; it went to George Wallace. A longtime Democratic segregationist, Wallace campaigned that year on an independent ticket. Nixon won the election but Wallace carried the Deep South states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

Nixon supported expanded civil rights for blacks throughout his career while Johnson was—for the cynical reasons given above—a late convert to the cause. Nixon went far beyond Johnson in this area; in fact, Nixon implemented America’s first affirmative action program which involved the government forcing racist unions in Philadelphia to hire blacks.

To sum up, starting in the 1930s and continuing to the present, progressive Democrats developed a new solution to the problem of what they saw as useless people. In the antebellum era, useless people from the Democratic point of view were mainly employed as slaves. In the postbellum period, southern Democrats repressed, segregated, and subjugated useless people, seeking to prevent them from challenging white supremacy or voting Republican. Meanwhile, northern progressives like Margaret Sanger sought to prevent useless people from being born. Today’s progressives, building on the legacy of Wilson, FDR, and Johnson, have figured out what to do with useless people: turn them into Democratic voters.

CHAPTER 6

PROGRESSIVISM
ÜBER ALLES

THE SECRET PACT BETWEEN PROGRESSIVISM AND FASCISM

I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished. I don’t mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman
.
¹

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt on Mussolini

H
illary Clinton has a big idea that she intends to be the centerpiece of her 2016 campaign. She wants to turn college education into a new entitlement, like health care. To this end, she has an ambitious proposal to help cover the costs of higher education. “Under my plan,” she says, “tuition would be affordable for every family. Students should never have to take out a loan to pay for tuition at their state’s public university.”
²

Hillary’s proposal is not “free college” but rather “debt-free college.” For “free college”—or at least free public university education—we have to turn to Bernie Sanders. Hillary is offering the discount program while Bernie comes closest to offering the free program. Bernie’s plan offers no tuition and no fees at public universities. While Hillary’s plan is estimated to cost $350 billion over ten years, Bernie’s plan would cost $70 billion a year.

Under Hillary’s proposal, students and their parents would still pay according to their ability. The federal government would dispatch money
to the states to subsidize public universities, which would be pressured to lower costs. So students at state-run universities would presumably get a debt-free education. A fully free education would only be available to some students: low-income students and students who enrolled in government programs like Americorps.
³

Critics of Hillary’s program, such as Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum call these plans “Obamacare for higher education.” Obama I think would approve of this label. A couple of years ago, Obama himself offered a $60 billion proposal to make community college free. Even though Obama’s plan languished in the Republican-dominated Congress, Bernie and Hillary build on it, even though they intend to take it much further over the next several years.

Both Hillary and Bernie’s plans appeal to a lot of young people. College debt is a serious problem—it totals $1.3 trillion at last count—so debt-free sounds good. Even more attractive is the idea of not paying for college at all. Young people have historically responded well to offers of “free food” and “free drinks.” Why then should they not respond equally well to the idea of a free college education?

Of course it would never occur to these same young people to work for free when they graduate. And, they would surely realize if they thought about it, college isn’t actually free. Obviously there are buildings to construct and maintain, facilities to operate, faculty to pay, and innumerable other costs to bear. Someone has to foot the bills for all this.

If students and their families are not the ones who are paying, who is? Hillary and Bernie both answer: the taxpayer. The government will pay. College isn’t free, but it’s free to you. Your entitlement comes at someone else’s expense.

The government will pay, but the government, it turns out, doesn’t have the money. Over and above existing allocations for Pell Grants and other federal subsidies, there are no discretionary funds lying about that can be used to fund young people’s college education.

Hillary and Bernie both want to get the money for their college subsidy programs from Wall Street. That means Congress would have to approve higher taxes. If Congress doesn’t do this, there is only one
other way to pay: the government would have to borrow the money. The United States government is $19 trillion in debt and counting. So under Hillary’s plan, $350 billion would be added to the national debt over the next decade. Bernie’s plan would add even more.

What happens to that debt? Ultimately it has to be paid. If this generation isn’t going to pay it, then it is going to be passed down to the next generation. It goes, in other words, to young people. They inherit the debt and the accumulated interest from their profligate predecessors. In the end, the national debt is a claim upon the future earnings of the younger generation.

What Hillary’s proposal amounts to, objectively considered, is a transfer of income from the future to the present. She is reaching into the back pockets of young people, taking out their own future earnings, and using those earnings to pay for young people’s education today. This isn’t robbing Peter to pay Paul; it’s robbing Paul to pay Paul. This entitlement isn’t free at all.

The genius of Hillary’s idea is that she gives young people the false impression that she is providing free education when, as we just saw, young people end up paying their own freight plus interest. With some innovative financing, they could have themselves arranged to borrow against their future earnings. Hillary is not “giving” them anything.

But she is counting on suckers to believe that she is. The real beneficiary in this whole deal is Hillary herself. If she pulls it off, she is viewed as the person who made higher education free, in the same way that Obama is viewed as the person who provided health care for all Americans. Isn’t it wonderful to gain a reputation for such magnanimity without putting out a penny? This is the basic scam of progressive politics.

Hillary’s real objective isn’t to help students; it is to establish government control—which is to say progressive control—over higher education. The progressives already dominate elementary and secondary education, because public schools are an arm of the state. If Hillary succeeds, she will have brought another major arm of the private sector into the federal orbit that will turn out Democratic voters for decades to come.

COLONIZING THE PRIVATE SECTOR

This continues a trend under Obama in which major industries have, one by one, been colonized by the federal government. The process began in 2009 with banks and investment houses being taken over in the aftermath of the 2008 market crash. Next, the government established control over the automobile sector through bailouts, paying the unions, and stiffing the bondholders.

Next came health care. Through Obamacare, the federal government became the boss of every insurance company, every hospital—that amounts to one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Next stop is the energy sector. Through EPA regulations, the government can control what type of energy Americans are allowed to use and how much can be used per day. Higher education would be the next prize in this ongoing usurpation of the private sector, further tightening federal control which is already exercised through regulations and grants.

Three features of his progressive expansion of power stand out. The first is entitlements: progressives advance by declaring that people are entitled to something without having to work for it or earn it. Second, there is typically an element of fear. Progressive control over banking and investment firms came about in the aftermath of the 2008 panic. Obamacare played on fears that people who got sick would not have access to hospitals and doctors. Third, the progressive move is not to actually take over and manage the private sector but to direct and regulate it from the outside; in other words, state-run capitalism.

Where do these ideas come from? We are accustomed to linking progressivism with socialism but none of the three features of modern progressivism come from socialism per se. Socialism doesn’t involve “entitlements.” Marx never appealed to fear. He did predict that class conflicts would generate a socialist revolution in which the workers overthrow the capitalists, but that prophecy has long been discredited.

Finally, state-run capitalism is not socialism. Socialism is not about the state relying on private industry to create resources and then staking its claim to steer and direct those resources. Rather, socialism is about nationalization, which means the government actually takes over an
industry like oil drilling or health care and manages it. We have seen nationalization in Russia, China, India, Venezuela, Cuba, and other socialist regimes.

Obama and Hillary are not socialists in that sense. In fact, they are too lazy to be socialists. They have no interest in actually running companies or factories. They don’t intend to build automobiles or computers or figure out how to extract oil from the ground. Neither do the vast majority of American progressives. They don’t know how to do any of this, nor do they want to. Rather, they want the private sector to produce resources, and then they want to direct the use of those resources. This isn’t socialism; it’s something else.

Perhaps Hillary and Obama’s approach can be understood in terms of another version of socialism—socialism in the classic sense. Socialism in the classic sense means that workers control the means of production. An automobile company, for instance, would be owned and controlled by its workers. Apple would be owned and governed not by shareholders or management but by the people who work at Apple. Clearly classic socialism is not what Obama and Hillary are about. They haven’t even
proposed
that workers in American companies own or run those companies. Again, socialism per se isn’t going on here.

So what’s going on? In the previous chapter I showed the association of progressivism with racism. But people who know history may feel that I am leaving something out. How can you say, they might protest, that progressivism derived all its central themes from racism? Here the critics are right. I never meant to suggest that modern progressivism was solely based on racism. As I intend to show, it also drew its inspiration from another important twentieth-century movement: fascism.

LEARNING FROM FASCISM

Most people today have no idea what fascism means. They think it means the Holocaust. Actually, that’s not correct. Fascism preceded the Holocaust. While the German fascists hated Jews and perpetrated the Holocaust, fascists in Italy and other countries did not do this and
opposed it. As Jonah Goldberg reminds us, fascism by itself has nothing to do with anti-Semitism or gas chambers.
⁴

Fascism actually means putting the resources of the individual and of industry at the service of the state. This means that the state defines what individual aspirations are about, and the state controls the resources of private industry. Fascism also confers entitlements on citizens and uses these to justify state power and state control. Finally, fascism draws on an atmosphere of perpetual fear—sometimes accompanied by perpetual conflict—to keep citizens apprehensive and make them look to the state for protection and care.

This is how fascism is defined and this is how fascism has been implemented in the countries that have implemented it. The actual definition is not obscure, notwithstanding postwar progressive efforts to obscure it. So given what fascism means and how it is actually put into practice, who can deny that Obama and Hillary’s vision for the federal government most closely resembles fascism? It is, I suggest, a new fascism for the twenty-first century.

If this is so, however, it’s hardly a new departure for the Democratic Party. The progressive Democrats have shown an affinity for fascism—both of the German and Italian type—since at least the early 1930s. Moreover, Italian and German fascists drew on the ideas of American progressives going back to the 1910s and 1920s. European fascism and American progressivism are old friends, even if progressive intellectuals have worked hard to disavow the association.

At this point I can almost hear progressives erupt with outrage. Fascism! Nazism! The Holocaust! How dare you associate our movement and our party and our iconic leaders with thuggery and mass murder?

Well, let’s see. John F. Kennedy is an icon of the Democratic Party. He was a progressive but a relatively moderate one; even some conservatives today admire JFK. In 1937 as a young man, JFK toured Germany in the early years of Adolf Hitler. What he saw greatly impressed him. “Fascism?” JFK wrote in his diary. “The right thing for Nazi Germany.”

JFK visited Hitler’s Bavarian holiday home as well as a teahouse that Hitler had constructed on a mountaintop. “Who has visited these
two places,” JFK observed, “can easily imagine how Hitler in a few years will emerge from the hatred currently surrounding him as one of the most important personalities that ever lived.” In a later journal entry, JFK continued in the same mode, remarking that Hitler “had something mysterious about him. He was the stuff of legends.”

Touring the Rhineland, JFK echoed Nazi propaganda at the time. “The Nordic races certainly seem to be superior to the Romans.” Hostility to Nazi Germany, JFK added, stems largely from jealousy and fear of German superiority. “The Germans really are too good—therefore people have ganged up on them to protect themselves.”
⁵

JFK went on to serve as a Navy Lieutenant in World War II. He had no illusions about Hitler after the war. Even so, JFK’s pre-war fascination with Hitler is revealing because he was not alone. Other noted progressives at the time admired Hitler and the Nazis. The feeling was reciprocal; Hitler and the Nazis admired them.

In 1933, for example, the main Nazi paper
Volkischer Beobachter
confessed that the Nazi movement had a lot to learn from the New Deal. “We National Socialists are looking toward America.” The publication found FDR’s policies “thoroughly inflected by a strong national socialism” and noted that “many passages in his book
Looking Forward
could have been written by a National Socialist.”
⁶

Many more progressives admired fascism—not so much Nazi-style fascism as the fascism of Italian strongman Benito Mussolini. New Deal progressives lionized Mussolini, and left-leaning journals like
The New Republic
praised his policies. As the quotation at the beginning of this chapter suggests, FDR was quite a fan of Mussolini. Mussolini, for his part, was also a fan of FDR.

A SECRET PACT

The secret pact between American progressivism and European fascism is perhaps the most closely guarded secret in politics today. Fascism showed progressives how to use “entitlements” to create dependent classes not just of blacks but of Americans of all colors. Fascism also
provided a model for how to organize the progressive state: basically as a quarterback directing the wealth and resources of private industry. How, then, have progressives gotten away with hiding their deep connection with the twentieth century’s most odious political movement?