from Liberal Fascism
Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism
The irony, of course, is that it did happen here, and Lewis virtually admits as much. In the same scene
Jessup unleashes a gassy tirade about how America is ripe for a fascist takeover. His argument hinges on what
happened in America during and immediately after World War I:
Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical - yes, or more obsequious! - than America...Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut "Liberty cabbage" and somebody actually proposed calling German measles "Liberty measles"? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia!...Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares...Prohibition - shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor - no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!
Lewis undersold his case. The period of liberty cabbage, wartime censorship, and propaganda wasn't an example of how America might someday be ripe for fascism. It was an example of how America had actually endured a fascistic dictatorship. If the events that transpired during and immediately after World War I occurred today in any Western nation, few educated people would fail to recognize it for what it was. Indeed, a great many educated people have convinced themselves that America under George W. Bush has nearly become "a thinly veiled military dictatorship," in the words of the writer Andrew Sullivan. The liberty cabbage, the state-sanctioned brutality, the stifling of dissent, the loyalty oaths and enemies lists - all of these things not only happened in America but happened at the hands of liberals. Self-described progressives - as well as the majority of American socialists - were at the forefront of the push for a truly totalitarian state. They applauded every crackdown and questioned the patriotism, intelligence, and decency of every pacifist and classically liberal dissenter.
Fascism, at its core, is the view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union toward the same goals overseen by the state. "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State," is how Mussolini defined it. Mussolini coined the word "totalitarian" to describe not a tyrannical society but a humane one in which everyone is taken care of and contributes equally. It was an organic concept where every class, every individual, was part of the larger whole. The militarization of society and politics was considered simply the best available means toward this end. Call it what you like - progressivism, fascism, communism, or totalitarianism - -the first true enterprise of this kind was established not in Russia or Italy or Germany but in the United States, and Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century's first fascist dictator.
This claim may sound outrageous on its face, but consider the evidence. More dissidents were arrested or jailed in a few years under Wilson than under Mussolini during the entire 1920s. Wilson arguably did as much if not more violence to civil liberties in his last three years in office than Mussolini did in his first twelve. Wilson created a better and more effective propaganda ministry than Mussolini ever had. In the 1920s Mussolini's critics harangued him - rightly - for using his semiofficial Fascisti to bully the opposition and for his harassment of the press. Just a few years earlier, Wilson had unleashed literally hundreds of thousands of badge-carrying goons on the American people and prosecuted a vicious campaign against the press that would have made Mussolini envious.
