The View From 1776

When liberal still meant support for personal freedom from arbitrary interference by the political state, John Flynn recognized that progressivism, now called liberalism, was more akin to fascism than to political liberty.

Wikipedia tells us:

Although Flynn graduated from Georgetown Law School, he chose a career in journalism. He started at the New Haven Register, but eventually moved to New York; there he was financial editor of the New York Globe. During the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote articles for such leading publications as The New Republic, Harper’s Magazine, and Collier’s Weekly. He became one of the best-known political commentators in the United States. Like Oswald Garrison Villard, another key figure in the Old Right, Flynn was a leftist with populist inclinations during this period. He supported Franklin D. Roosevelt for president but criticized the New Deal.

The following excerpts present a picture of conditions about which Flynn wrote regularly as they occurred.

Principles First
by John F. McManus
(The New American, January 31, 2000)

Old-school “liberal” John T. Flynn fought for limited government and noninterventionism against the rising tides of socialism and militarism.

Quote:

It’s hardly a bombshell to report that labels can be misleading. But trying to pin one on John T. Flynn must have been a daunting exercise. Flynn considered himself a “liberal” throughout his entire life. Yet, when his fellow liberals cast aside the principles of limited government and a noninterventionist foreign policy in favor of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s socialistic New Deal and America’s entry into World War II, Flynn refused to go along with the pack. He used his influential pen as a “liberal” journalist to warn against the totalitarian implications of both the Welfare State and the Warfare State, and for this he became anathema to America’s power elite. FDR so feared Flynn’s powerful pen that he personally tried to blacklist him and drive him into obscurity…

In her 1976 study, An American First: John T. Flynn and the America First Committee, Flynn’s daughter, Michele Flynn Stenehjem, offered a definition of what her father’s brand of liberalism entailed:

John Flynn and other America Firsters believed that government should regulate business by preventing monopolies and cartels from controlling large sectors of the economy. However, Flynn and his colleagues did not think that government itself should become a large economic power. This condition would restrict individual freedom, which was the essence of their definition of liberalism.... Flynn and his colleagues rejected Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brand of liberalism, in which government entered the economic community as a large employer and customer...

While never ceasing his criticism of unrestrained big business, Flynn soon began criticizing big government as well. In 1932, he eagerly supported the candidacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Like many others, he was lured to do so by a belief that the candidate would adhere to the promises in the Democratic Party’s Platform, which called for: an end to the extravagant spending of the Republicans under Herbert Hoover; a balanced budget; and the elimination of an array of federal bureaus, agencies, and commissions. He was also impressed by Roosevelt’s campaign oratory against welfare and his demands for across-the-board cuts in federal spending.

After he took office in March 1933, FDR quickly abandoned his campaign promises in favor of greater spending, a huge boost in the federal deficit, and far more bureaus, agencies and commissions than before. More courageous than others, Flynn spoke out against this betrayal…

[This, of course, is a direct parallel to the disconnect between Barack Obama’s campaign rhetoric and his rush in office to implement indigestible portions of liberal-progressive-socialistic doctrine.]

In a September 1937 Collier’s article, Flynn targeted the government’s fraudulent practice of lending money it had created out of thin air. In a bow to the Constitution’s separation of powers, he pointed out that various government bureaus were “supplying one another with money as part of this new system of eliminating Congress from its historic role of controlling the purse strings.”

After several years of watching government programs shovel freshly created money at farmers and home owners, Flynn noted that “the government today holds twice as many home mortgages as all the commercial banks in the country put together, more than all life insurance companies or more than all the savings banks, and more, even, than the 8,000 building and loan associations combined.” He targeted the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) as “the biggest and most sensational of all the government lending plants.” But he also made the point that the RFC had been created during the Hoover administration, adding the telling point that it was “roundly criticized by Candidate Roosevelt, and then adopted and enlarged by him” after taking office…

Perhaps the greatest example of his foresight during this period was his concern that the American people were being led to believe that, no matter what problem they faced, the answer was government intervention. He wrote: “Thus the young and the old, the manufacturer, the farmer, the laborer, the little merchant and the big merchant, all swell the chorus of demand for order, law, regulation, rule — control.” He warned against subjecting the capitalist system to “extensive controls,” and he pointed out that those controls could be made to succeed “only when backed up by a grim and ruthless authoritarian government which enforces compliance with an iron hand.”

America, he contended, was headed in the direction of fascism...he summarized: “We seem to be a long way off from the kind of Fascism which we behold in Italy today, but we are not so far from the kind of Fascism which Mussolini preached in Italy before he assumed power, and we are slowly approaching the conditions which made Fascism there possible…

He wanted the docile American people to realize that our nation was being undermined from within to accept a despotic ideology. Taking aim at the “self-appointed” intellectuals on whom he blamed the transformation, he wrote: “They think that to be a Fascist you must have some sort of shirt uniform, must drill and goose-step, must have a demonstrative salute, must hate the Jews, and believe in dictatorship. Fascism is not the result of dictatorship. Fascism is the consequence of economic jam and dictatorship is the product of Fascism, for Fascism cannot be managed save by a dictator.”

...Flynn’s concern that wartime indebtedness and the shift of power to Washington were leading the nation toward fascism led to his 1944 book As We Go Marching . Therein he warned that “Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans” who have been working “to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing billions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshalling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our nation’s greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination, all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers, with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society.”

...By 1948, however, Flynn’s thoroughly detailed survey of the Roosevelt Presidency entitled The Roosevelt Myth found a publisher in Devin Garrity and his small Devin-Adair Publishing Company. Not a biography of the President, Flynn limited his work to a critical analysis of the 1932-1945 New Deal — with great emphasis paid to the Communist penetration of the U.S. government. More than passively aware of the propaganda informing the American people that Roosevelt had astutely rescued them from the Great Depression and led our forces to victory in the war, he wrote The Roosevelt Myth to disclose what the President had actually done to America.

Although Flynn was an ardent anti-Communist, he recognized that America’s gravest internal danger was not a sudden Communist takeover but creeping collectivism. As he put it in his 1949 book The Road Ahead: America’s Creeping Revolution : “Most people in this country believe that the American Communist Party and its dupes are the chief internal enemy of our economic system and our form of government. This is a serious mistake. The Communists are a traitorous bloc in our midst, but if every Communist in America were rounded up and liquidated, the greatest menace to our form of social organization would still be among us. This most dangerous enemy is the American counterpart of the British Fabian Socialist, who denies that he is a Socialist and operates behind a mask which he calls National Planning.... Unless they are recognized for what they are, and are stopped, they will destroy this country.” The Road Ahead enjoyed remarkable sales and was helped to prominence when Reader’s Digest issued it in condensed form.

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Highlighting another aspect of New Deal socialism, I wrote in an earlier post:

Labor Unions: American Nazis

Democrat/Socialists support labor union extortion for two reasons.  First, unions are, along with the class-action tort litigation bar, the largest source of campaign funds and free get-out-the-vote labor for Democrat/Socialists.  Second, labor unions are quintessential exemplars of socialism in action, Marx’s proletariat working to overthrow capitalism.

This political and economic poison was first administered to the nation by President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s New Deal (which President Obama apparently aims to repeat).   John T. Flynn, a liberal economist and syndicated columnist at the time, described it this way in The Roosevelt Myth:

There were men around the President at this time who saw the tremendous possibilities of organizing labor as a political force.  They knew the history of the labor movement in England, which had grown so great that it completely wiped out the old Liberal party as a political force.  They believed that something like that could be done in America and they wanted the President to use his vast powers and great funds to encourage the formation of labor into a great political force.  To do this it was necessary to enlarge the field of labor organization.

Those socialistic ideological intentions were implemented by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, popularly known as the Wagner Act. 

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What Is Fascism?
This article is excerpted from As We Go Marching, part 1, chapter 10.

Quote:

At this point we can say that fascism is (1) a capitalist type of economic organization, (2) in which the government accepts responsibility to make the economic system work at full energy, (3) using the device of state-created purchasing power effected by means of government borrowing and spending, and (4) which organizes the economic life of the people into industrial and professional groups to subject the system to control under the supervision of the state.

[This summation can be applied directly to the so-called living-Constitution doctrine employed by presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama.]

...There is a third weapon the dictatorship uses with deadly effect. This is the weapon of modern propaganda, which is quite different from that mild and old-fashioned thing which in America was once known as “publicity.” Complete control of the press is of course a vital element of this along with suppression of all critical elements. But this modern propaganda is something more than the negative force inherent in suppression. It is a positive assault upon the mind of the people. I have said that these modern dictatorships are popular or demagogic. I do not mean that they are popular in the sense of commanding the love of the people. But for reasons associated with the structure of modern societies, these dictatorships must have their roots running deep into the populations as the final source of power. They rise to power by running with all the streams of thought in the population. They are committed more or less to do those things that the powerful minorities among the people wish. But when they face the necessity of doing these things, immediately powerful countercurrents press against them. Thus spending involves taxes and borrowing, which in turn involves more taxes, which sets up powerful resistance from all quarters.

Corporative control means regimentation of business which, when attempted, involves stern compliance measures that also provoke another powerful group of irritations and enmities. In the end, the dictator must do things that the population does not like. Hence he must have power — power to subdue criticism and resistance. And this necessity for power grows by what it feeds on until nothing less than absolutism will do. And so the popular mind must be subjected to intense conditioning, and this calls for the positive and aggressive forms of propaganda with which we are becoming familiar in this country. The chief instruments of this are the radio and the movies. In the hands of a dictator or a dictatorial government or a government bent on power the results that can be achieved are terrifying. Along with this, of course, goes the attack upon the mind of youth. The mind is taken young and molded in the desired forms. It is at this point the dictatorships develop their attitude toward religious organizations, which cannot be permitted to continue their influence over young minds…

The commonly accepted theory that Fascism originated in the conspiracy of the great industrialists to capture the state will not hold. It originated on the Left. Primarily it gets its first impulses in the decadent or corrupt forms of socialism — from among those erstwhile socialists who, wearying of that struggle, have turned first to syndicalism and then to becoming saviors of capitalism by adapting the devices of socialism and syndicalism to the capitalist state…

Mussolini — the same Mussolini whose career of violence and aggression and tyranny had been widely advertised — has testimonials from many Americans. Mr. Myron C. Taylor, until recently envoy to the Vatican, said in 1936 that all the world has been forced to admire the success of Premier Mussolini “in disciplining the nation.” He did not use the word Ethiopia, but he told a dinner audience that “today a new Italian Empire faces the future and takes up its responsibilities as the guardian and administrator of an alien backward nation of 10,000,000 souls.”

When Mussolini wrote his autobiography he did so at the instance and prodding of one of his most devoted admirers, the United States ambassador to Italy, the late Richard Washburn Child, who had been in Italy during a considerable part of the whole Fascist episode and knew it at first hand. When the book appeared, it contained a fulsome preface by the ambassador, just as another book by Count Volpi, Mussolini’s finance minister, on the glories of Italian Fascist finance, carried a complimentary preface by Mr. Thomas W. Lamont.

Mr. Sol Bloom, now chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the House of Representatives, said on the floor of the House January 14, 1926,

He [Mussolini] is something new and vital in the sluggish old veins of European politics. It will be a great thing not only for Italy but for all of us if he succeeds.

It is his inspiration, his determination, his constant toil that has literally rejuvenated Italy and given her a second, a modern, Renaissance.

He has taken nothing for himself, neither titles, money, palaces, nor social position for his family. His salary is only … about $1,000 in American money.

...Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler [president of Columbia University, one of the Ivy League promoters of socialism] said “that it was safe to predict that just as Cromwell made modern England, so Mussolini could make modern Italy.” He boasted of his friendship for Mussolini, who covered him with decorations, and he described “fascism as a form of government of the very first order of excellence,” and insisted that “we should look to Italy to show us what its experience and insight have to teach in the crisis confronting the twentieth century.”

Democrat/Socialist Party leaders since then have assiduously followed Dr. Butler’s advice.

Dinesh D’Sousa identified President Obama’s anti-traditional otherness with his father’s anti-western-colonialism. Mr. Steele notes the president’s identification with the anti-American radicalism of left-wing students in the 1960s and 1970s.

A Referendum on the Redeemer
Barack Obama put the Democrats in the position of forever redeeming a fallen nation rather than leading a great one.

By SHELBY STEELE
Whether or not the Republicans win big next week, it is already clear that the “transformative” aspirations of the Obama presidency—the special promise of this first black president to “change” us into a better society—are much less likely to materialize. There will be enough Republican gains to make the “no” in the “party of no” even more formidable, if not definitive.

But apart from this politics of numbers, there is also now a deepening disenchantment with Barack Obama himself. (He has a meager 37% approval rating by the latest Harris poll.) His embarrassed supporters console themselves that their intentions were good; their vote helped make history. But for Mr. Obama himself there is no road back to the charisma and political capital he enjoyed on his inauguration day.

How is it that Barack Obama could step into the presidency with an air of inevitability and then, in less than two years, find himself unwelcome at the campaign rallies of many of his fellow Democrats?

The first answer is well-known: His policymaking has been grandiose, thoughtless and bullying. His health-care bill was ambitious to the point of destructiveness and, finally, so chaotic that today no citizen knows where they stand in relation to it. His financial-reform bill seems little more than a short-sighted scapegoating of Wall Street. In foreign policy he has failed to articulate a role for America in the world. We don’t know why we do what we do in foreign affairs. George W. Bush at least made a valiant stab at an American rationale—democratization—but with Mr. Obama there is nothing.

All this would be enough to explain the disillusionment with this president—and with the Democratic Party that he leads. But there is also a deeper disjunction. There is an “otherness” about Mr. Obama, the sense that he is somehow not truly American. “Birthers” doubt that he was born on American soil. Others believe that he is secretly a Muslim, or in quiet simpatico with his old friends, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, now icons of American radicalism.

But Barack Obama is not an “other” so much as he is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new “counterculture” American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America. So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency. He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture American identity. When he bows to foreign leaders, he is not displaying “otherness” but the counterculture Americanism of honorable self-effacement in which America acknowledges its own capacity for evil as prelude to engagement.

Bad faith in America became virtuous in the ‘60s when America finally acknowledged so many of its flagrant hypocrisies: the segregation of blacks, the suppression of women, the exploitation of other minorities, the “imperialism” of the Vietnam War, the indifference to the environment, the hypocrisy of puritanical sexual mores and so on. The compounding of all these hypocrisies added up to the crowning idea of the ‘60s: that America was characterologically evil. Thus the only way back to decency and moral authority was through bad faith in America and its institutions, through the presumption that evil was America’s natural default position.

Among today’s liberal elite, bad faith in America is a sophistication, a kind of hipness. More importantly, it is the perfect formula for political and governmental power. It rationalizes power in the name of intervening against evil—I will use the government to intervene against the evil tendencies of American life (economic inequality, structural racism and sexism, corporate greed, neglect of the environment and so on), so I need your vote.

“Hope and Change” positioned Mr. Obama as a conduit between an old America worn down by its evil inclinations and a new America redeemed of those inclinations. There was no vision of the future in “Hope and Change.” It is an expression of bad faith in America, but its great ingenuity was to turn that bad faith into political motivation, into votes.

But there is a limit to bad faith as power, and Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party may have now reached that limit. The great weakness of bad faith is that it disallows American exceptionalism as a rationale for power. It puts Mr. Obama and the Democrats in the position of forever redeeming a fallen nation, rather than leading a great nation. They bet on America’s characterological evil and not on her sense of fairness, generosity or ingenuity.

When bad faith is your framework (Michelle Obama never being proud of her country until it supported her husband), then you become more a national scold than a real leader. You lead out of a feeling that your opposition is really only the latest incarnation of that old characterological evil that you always knew was there. Thus the tea party—despite all the evidence to the contrary—is seen as racist and bigoted.

But isn’t the tea party, on some level, a reaction to a president who seems not to fully trust the fundamental decency of the American people? Doesn’t the tea party fill a void left open by Mr. Obama’s ethos of bad faith? Aren’t tea partiers, and their many fellow travelers, simply saying that American exceptionalism isn’t racism? And if the mainstream media see tea partiers as bumpkins and racists, isn’t this just more bad faith—characterizing people as ignorant or evil so as to dismiss them?

Our great presidents have been stewards, men who broadly identified with the whole of America. Stewardship meant responsibility even for those segments of America where one might be reviled. Surely Mr. Obama would claim such stewardship. But he has functioned more as a redeemer than a steward, a leader who sees a badness in us from which we must be redeemed. Many Americans are afraid of this because a mandate as grandiose as redemption justifies a vast expansion of government. A redeemer can’t just tweak and guide a faltering economy; he will need a trillion- dollar stimulus package. He can’t take on health care a step at a time; he must do it all at once, finally mandating that every citizen buy in.

Next week’s election is, among other things, a referendum on the idea of president-as- redeemer. We have a president so determined to transform and redeem us from what we are that, by his own words, he is willing to risk being a one-term president. People now wonder if Barack Obama can pivot back to the center like Bill Clinton did after his set-back in ‘94. But Mr. Clinton was already a steward, a policy wonk, a man of the center. Mr. Obama has to change archetypes.

Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Read QE2 — The Fed’s Plan for Job Growth Could Backfire.

Key quote:

“QE2 will work through several channels,” says Morgan Stanley economist Richard Berner. “It will lower financing costs, boost risky asset prices and household wealth, and continue to weaken the dollar.” The program hasn’t even begun, and already it has started to work, as market expectations work their way into asset prices...Stock prices are generally up about 10 percent, fully reversing their second quarter drop, and the trade-weighted dollar has fallen more than 5 percent.

Readers can judge for themselves the likelihood of economic recovery anticipated by liberal-progressive Keynesians.  We’ve seen, during the past two years, the greatest increase in our history of Federal Reserve expansion of the money supply and the lowest interest rates ever.  Results have been negative, just as they were throughout the 1930s Depression under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal socialism.

The Fed has been, since its formation in 1913, a servant to the United States Treasury, repeatedly expanding the money supply out of thin air to finance World War I, New Deal welfare statism, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, on and on.  Overall inflation has increased more than 1,000% during that period.

The Federal government’s state-planning role and that of the Federal Reserve system as implementer of Keynesian socialistic economic policy were officially articulated by the Employment Act of 1946.  Speaking of that act, President Harry Truman said, in his annual Economic Report on January 14, 1953:

The Employment Act of 1946 is one of the most fundamental compacts in domestic affairs which the people through their Government have made during my tenures as President…

It is the purpose of the the Employment Act - the one most widely recognized at the time of its passage - to prevent depressions...

Judge for yourself whether that purpose has been fulfilled in the ensuing 64 years.

In short, QE2 proposed by the Fed is not a rational economic policy.  Arbitrary expansion of the money supply has never worked as other than a stimulus to further inflation, with all the distortions of economic activity arising from inflation, such as the dot.com boom-and-bust and our recent housing bubble. 

In our current economic crisis, Keynesian spending by the government and by the Fed were, not a depression preventive, but the source of funding for the disastrous housing bubble and creation of securitized subprime mortgage loans. 

QE2 will do no more than pile logs on the already flickering inflation fire and continue to inflate the stock market speculative bubble that began last year.

Many factors are implicated in California’s rush to the edge of financial oblivion.  Seldom noted is the underlying push from liberal-progressivism, beginning early in the 20th century.

The “good government” mind-set of Progressives, who later merged with the Socialist Party, fostered a modern version of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s faith in the beneficence of primitive society before the advent of private property.  Restructuring political society to control or eliminate private property rights, Progressives thought, would create a limitless cornucopia of welfare-state benefits for the state’s growing population.

Our first activist, big-government presidents were Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. 

Roosevelt, as did his cousin Franklin twenty years later, advocated a Bismarckian, overweening presidency in which he decided what should be done, no matter what the Constitution prescribes. 

Teddy and cousin Franklin Roosevelt, prominent members of the Eastern liberal establishment, were products of Harvard University, where socialistic concepts prevailing in German universities in the 19th century attained early ascendancy in this country.

Wilson was a product of Johns Hopkins, the first American university modeled directly on the great German, and thoroughly socialistic, universities.  His was a Marxian-style historicist belief that our Constitution had been outmoded by the inevitable progress of history toward socialism.