"Underlying Contempt for the Credulity of the Masses"

(More thoughts inspired from reading Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism

FDR and Hitler both came to power in 1933. Max Lerner observed in 1934, "The most damning blow that the dictatorships have struck at democracy has been the compliment they have paid us in taking over (and perfecting) our most prized devices of persuasion and our underlying contempt for the credulity of the masses." Today, with the exception of Fox News, the television media and majority of the print media is clearly an organ of persuasion for the left. The "underlying contempt for the credulity of the masses" was on full display in the coverage of the tea parties that took place across America this week.

Both FDR and Hitler appealed to resentment against "fat cats," a tactic that also proved effective for Obama last October and November. Hitler restored German confidence, ending unemployment faster than FDR. Hitler was a great admirer of Henry Ford (and visa versa). The official newspaper of the Nazi Party praised FDR in 1934 for adopting "National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies." Both Hitler and Mussolini thought of FDR as "one of us." Likewise, FDR was an admirer of Mussolini, saying that he was "deeply impressed by what he has accomplished."

All three glorified war. The chief appeal of war to them was mobilization. Goldberg explains, "Free societies are disorganized. People do their own thing, more or less, and that can be downright inconvenient if you're trying to plan the entire economy from a boardroom somewhere. War brings conformity and unity of purpose. In more recent times the left has looked to environmentalism as a war equivalent to cajole the public into expert-driven unity."

Nevertheless, "Hitler at first cultivated an image as peacemaker (an image many Western pacifists were willing to indulge in good faith)."

With the election of FDR, the progressives who had sought to remake America through war socialism were back in power. Almost every program of the early New Deal was rooted in the politics of war, the economics of war, or the aesthetics of war emerging from World War I. FDR mobilized 2.5 million men into paramilitary training in the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC. Hitler did the same in Germany. "The chief motive among social planners was to get young men out of the mainstream workforce."

All American companies were required to hang from their door a "blue eagle," which was the patriotic symbol of compliance with New Deal programs. It was a "stylized Indian eagle clutching a band of lightning bolts in one claw and an industrial cogwheel in the other." On NRA DAy, Sept. 13, 1933 (not National Rifle Association) the National Recovery Administration organized the biggest parade in New York history. Nearly a quarter-million men and women marched for ten hours past an audience of well over a million people, with 49 military planes flying overhead. The leader of the NRA was General Hugh "Iron Pants" Johnson, "the most unrelentingly fascistic and Pro-Fasict member of the Roosevelt administration."