From Marx to Biden: The U.S. Democratic Party and the Fabianization of America – December 25, 2023
America’s political landscape has a curious history in which each of the two main parties has come to exchange its position on key issues for that of its ideological rival.
It may come as a surprise to some to learn that the Democrats were the original conservative party. Yet this has close parallels with Europe where states with an agrarian economy controlled by a landed aristocracy had a more conservative society, whereas states controlled by a merchant class were more liberal or “progressive” republics.
The Democratic Party founded in 1828 represented the interests of the Southern states whose economy was based on land-ownership and agriculture, especially cotton plantations. These states favored more traditional or conservative policies, being opposed to high tariffs and taxes, and the establishment of a national bank.
In contrast, the Democrats’ Republican rival was a liberal party founded in 1854 to represent the Northern states where an industry-based economy was the norm. The political views dominant in these states ranged from classical to radical liberalism, with a marked interest in economic and social reform, especially the abolition of slavery. In opposition to the Democrats’ adherence to free banking, the Republicans also favored a national banking system.
The divergent views on banking highlight the growing importance of banks in America’s expanding economy, which was driven by a fast-growing population that increased from about five million in 1800 to seventy-six million in 1900. In addition to providing loans to both government and public, banks played a crucial role in the trade with Europe. As a result, both parties soon came under the influence of financiers with links to powerful European banking houses.
Originally from Germany, the Rothschild family founded banks in Paris and London in the early 1800s. Being also active in textile trading which formed a large share of Anglo-American trade relations, they established close links to the cotton-producing Southern states represented by the Democrats. Their agent Aaron Schönberg, whose Anglicized name was August Belmont, had made a name for himself among Wall Street bankers in the late 1830s and was appointed chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), a position he held from 1860 to 1872.
The Civil War of 1861-1865 presented an ideal opportunity for bankers and their business associates to expand their operations and influence. Also from Germany, the Seligman brothers arrived in America at the same time as Belmont. After setting up a dry goods firm in New York, they supplied uniforms to the Union Army and sold government bonds to finance the war effort against the South. This enabled them to found their own banking firm with branches in Paris, London, and other major cities in Europe and America. After the war, the Seligmans expanded their extensive business connections to the leading bankers and industrialists of the time, such as shipping and railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, and Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. In 1879, the Seligmans formed a syndicate with N. M. Rothschild & Sons of London and their various New York & London agents, including A. Belmont & Co and J. S. Morgan & Co., to refund the government’s Civil War debt. In short, bankers like the Seligmans were extremely well-connected not only to the political establishment but also to the leaders of business and finance.
In terms of political views, like the merchant classes from which they emerged, the bankers’ preferred political system had always been liberalism, which provided them with the freedom to engage in economic activities without government interference. Bankers from ethnic or religious minorities, especially those who had recently immigrated to America as the Seligmans, were particularly interested in progressive movements advocating social and economic reform.
Ironically, it was none other than Republican President Abraham Lincoln who created the national banking system, laying the foundations for the subsequent centralization of financial and political power that served to strengthen the position of already powerful and influential bankers and their business associates. The combined influence of financial corporations and liberal Republican policies meant that liberalism was becoming the dominant political system in which more radical tendencies such as socialism and communism were able to thrive.
The influential Roosevelt clan was especially close to the Republicans’ radical liberal faction. Clinton Roosevelt, a relative of President Theodore Roosevelt, openly advocated a communist-style economic system based on government control and planning (The Science of Government, 1841). Incredible though this may sound to twenty-first century readers, the Republicans’ widely-read New-York Daily Tribune employed Marx, Engels, and other members of the London-based Communist League as European correspondents and regularly published their articles for a period of a decade from 1851 to 1861, right up to the outbreak of the Civil War.
This exposes the undemocratic, “revolution-from-above” nature of liberalism. Had liberalism been a truly popular, grassroots movement as often falsely claimed, the world would have been liberal by now and there would have been no need to deploy an army of bankers, industrialists, academics, politicians, media operatives, and activists to promote it.
The reality is that although some social and economic reforms were regarded as desirable, the American public’s general political orientation remained conservative. However, true to liberalism’s character of a movement whose aim and direction are decided by socioeconomic elites, the following decades saw the rise of a gradual or progressive form of socialism backed by leading bankers and industrialists. As with other forms of liberalism, its main ideological proponents were a small intellectual elite. In 1884 a group of British intellectuals and civil servants founded the Fabian Society of London and its leaders soon began to spread the new ideology to America and other parts of the world.
One of the first joint projects of the London Fabians and their American associates provides an instructive insight into the modus operandi employed by Fabianism and by socialism in general, most socialism today being of the Fabian type. This was a socialist group based on the Marxist-inspired, utopian science fiction writings of Edward Bellamy. It was discreetly organized in 1888 in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of W. D. P. Bliss, a Christian Socialist disciple of the Fabian leadership who is generally regarded as the founder of Fabian Socialism in the United States; Cyrus Field Willard and Sylvester Baxter, Boston journalists and devotees of the Fabian and Theosophist Annie Besant; and one or two members of the Fabian Society, and launched under the euphemistic designation of “Nationalist Club.” Willard’s relative Frances Willard, a member of the Fabian Society, was instrumental in publicizing Bellamy’s writings, who was himself recruited into the Fabian movement. Though seemingly appealing to American citizens’ patriotism, the new movement advocated the nationalization of private property while avoiding any mention of socialism. A few years later there were hundreds of “Nationalist Clubs” throughout the country.
Having injected socialist ideas into the American psyche under the guise of “nationalism,” the Fabians in the early 1900s moved on to more openly socialist enterprises ranging from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (renamed League for Industrial Democracy when socialism became unpopular owing to the Russian revolution) to the Rand School of Social Science and the Public Ownership League. Although the ISS is often regarded as the brainchild of the socialist novelist Upton Sinclair, the fact is that almost all signatories of the original call for its formation were members of the American Fabian League, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Clarence Darrow, who had been involved in the earlier Nationalist Clubs, and millionaire financier J. G. Phelps Stokes, known as “the millionaire socialist,” who became the society’s president.
These organizations were affiliates of the British Fabian Society and promoted Fabian Socialist policies such as state ownership (euphemistically called “public ownership”) and, in particular, government planning and control. However, in the same way the earlier clubs had avoided using the term “socialist,” the new organizations were careful to not publicly disclose their Fabian connections, this being in line with Fabianism’s characteristic strategy of propagating Fabian ideas and implementing Fabian policies without calling them Fabian, a strategy they referred to as “permeation.”
Avoiding the name “Fabian” was particularly expedient in America where it was regarded as alien, which is why it was gradually abandoned. This has led some historians to erroneously assume that American Fabianism “disappeared.” In fact, it successfully became the main form of “democracy” represented in particular by the Democratic Party, in the same way in Continental Europe it became “social democracy.” In Britain itself it became “labor” while the Fabian Society has remained the movement’s undisputed ideological leader. In addition, through key ideologists from Graham Wallas to Maynard Keynes and others, the London Fabians also continued to exert influence across the Atlantic in America’s intellectual and academic circles, shaping much of what became standard liberal ideology and inspiring reformist Democratic programs like New Deal, New Frontier, Great Society, and in particular, Third Way.
Like their British counterparts, American Fabians believed in the “inevitability of socialism” and described themselves as “democratic in politics, socialist in economics.” This enabled them to advance their agenda under various political guises ranging from democrats to socialists and communists. With the characteristic efficiency and thoroughness that had become their trade mark, they systematically infiltrated universities, teachers’ and labor unions, cultural and religious organizations, and press associations. The far-reaching effects of Fabian activism soon became visible in the Progressive Era of 1896-1917. Under sustained Fabian influence, the Democratic Party underwent a dramatic conversion, gradually becoming the radical liberal party with which we are only too familiar today.
A central plank in the Fabian agenda was to change the American Constitution. Already in 1895, The American Fabian, the organ of the American Fabian Society of Boston founded that year by W. D. P. Bliss, announced its plan for the gradual socialization of America in the following statement:
“England’s (unwritten) Constitution readily admits of constant though gradual modification. Our American Constitution does not readily admit of such change. England can thus move into Socialism almost imperceptibly. Our Constitution being largely individualistic must be changed to admit of Socialism, and each change necessitates a political crisis. This means the raising of great new issues …” (The American Fabian, Feb. 1895).
Founder and leader of the London Fabians, George Bernard Shaw himself, wrote that the American Constitution is “an exasperating obstruction to the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of the American nation” (“Illusions of Socialism,” p. 152). Accordingly, the Fabian strategy was (and is) to use or create crises or “great new issues” to implement policies that would undermine both the letter and spirit of the Constitution and push the American Republic in an increasingly socialist direction.
Among the key figures that facilitated the advancement of Fabianism in American politics were John Pierpont Morgan, head of the powerful private investment bank J. P. Morgan & Co. (formerly J. S. Morgan & Co.), which represented Rothschild interests, and his friend and collaborator Woodrow Wilson. Wilson had been a council member of the American Economic Association (AEA), an organization founded in 1885 in Saratoga Springs, New York, by the economist Edwin Seligman, son of Joseph Seligman of J. & W. Seligman & Co.
With socialism on the rise in their homeland, the Seligmans had brought with themselves not only their business practices but also their progressive tendencies. E. Seligman, who served as treasurer and later president of AEA, and his associates were followers of the German historical school, a progressive current dubbed “armchair socialism” by the more radical elements, advocating social reform. Though the association’s stated purpose was to “encourage economic research,” its true objective was to discreetly promote the kind of political economy advocated by Fabians and their financial backers. It had close links to the Fabians’ British Economic Association (later renamed Royal Economic Society) and it published essays on socialism by Fabian Society founder Sydney Webb who was becoming a leading socialist ideologue with followers from all over Europe, including Germany.
Another influential German-American ideologue active in this period was Felix Adler, who was from the same German town of Alzey as August Belmont. Adler was the founder of the Ethical Culture movement that aimed to make social activism a form of universal moral religion “without ritual or creed” and to establish a “parliament of parliaments” as a form of world government. In 1877 he founded the New York Ethical Society with funding from Joseph Seligman who also served as the society’s first president.
Adler’s society and its offshoots along with other like-minded organizations were taken over by leading British Fabians such as Percival Chubb, a cofounder of the London Fabians who had moved to America to propagate Fabianism and joined the Ethical Society in 1886, later becoming its leader. In this way, the various liberal currents of the day – social, economic, political, and ethical – were amalgamated under an ever-expanding Fabian umbrella with the support of liberal financial backers. In addition, the Fabians also became the lead element in the London-based Socialist International, the body that directed and coordinated the worldwide socialist movement.
In the meantime, E. Seligman became an influential figure in the academic community thanks to his appointment as professor of political economy at Columbia (he was later instrumental in the formation of the American Association of University Professors) as well as to his extensive connections to banking and business. With Seligman’s encouragement and generous financial support from the Morgan, Kuhn Loeb, and Rockefeller firms, Wilson entered politics to win the 1912 presidential election.
Wilson shared many political and economic beliefs with the Fabians and before becoming president of Princeton University in 1902, had gathered around himself a circle of academics called Philadelphia University Extension through which he propagated the Fabian ideas adopted by Seligman’s AEA. A key feature of Wilson’s political theory which he shared with the Fabians was that the Constitution was “defective” and that public policy should be determined not so much by the popular vote as by “administrative experts.”
As President, Wilson surrounded himself with precisely the type of “experts” prescribed by Fabian doctrine such as Walter Lippmann (who had studied under Fabian professors at Harvard and was a member of the Fabian Society and the New York Socialist Party), and immediately proceeded to pursue Fabian policies, appointing the first Secretary of Labor in the Department of Labor (promoted by Fabian leader W. D. P. Bliss while serving as Bureau of Labor investigator), signing income tax into law, and laying the foundations of a future world government by helping to create the League of Nations, a British-controlled project that served the interests of International Fabianism as much as the interests of the British Empire.
While the Democratic Party of the Wilson era was far from being the liberal organization it is today, it was at this point that Fabian influence firmly set it on the increasingly leftward trajectory it has followed ever since. Also under Fabian influence, former Republican President and Wilson rival in the 1912 campaign, Theodore Roosevelt, founded the Progressive Party (1912-1920) with George W. Perkins, senior partner of J. P. Morgan & Co. Perkins was a leading member of the efficiency movement advocated by Fabian ideologists and whose adherents included Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
It was only after Roosevelt’s failed Progressive experiment that the Republican Party underwent an ideological shift to the right and gradually moved in the conservative direction followed today. However, some key Republicans such as the Rockefeller family carried on the original liberal course and became the RINO (Republicans in name only) faction of later GOP politics.
The Rockefellers’ power and influence increased dramatically in the next decades after the decline of the Morgan banking group in the 1930s. Following in the footsteps of the Rothschilds and their representatives and associates, the Rockefellers used their foundations, endowments, and political donations to become lead sponsors of Fabianism in America and Europe under various “social science” guises such as political science, political economy, political psychology, sociology, and social research, and having as objective the mass indoctrination of young people in liberal thinking.
A typical product of Rockefeller-Fabian institutions was Harold Lasswell. Lasswell studied philosophy and economics in the 1920s at the University of Chicago – founded in 1890 by John D. Rockefeller – where he became an influential professor of political science, while also teaching at the New School of Social Research of New York, and at Columbia and Yale. Heavily influenced by the writings of Marx and Havelock Ellis (an early member of the London Fabian Society), Lasswell was of a distinctly left-leaning political persuasion, which he disseminated through his own prolific writings and teachings. Like a true Fabian, he developed a keen interest in social communication and propaganda, asserting that propaganda, which he defined as a means of psychological manipulation, is an indispensable part of democracy.
Later Rockefeller generations were not only generous benefactors of Fabian projects. They readily embraced Fabianism, especially the doctrine of governance by ideologically indoctrinated technocratic “experts.” David Rockefeller personally attended the Fabians’ London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and chose Fabianism as the subject of his senior thesis at Harvard where he also served as editor of the Fabianized The Crimson. As their subsequent activities show, all Rockefeller enterprises from banks to foundations were virtually converted into Fabian institutions. The Rockefellers themselves were particularly influential on government policy in a Fabian sense through strategically placed presidential advisers beginning with the Democratic administrations of F. D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
Two Rockefeller think tanks were particularly instrumental in establishing the practice of public policy-making by corporate-associated “experts”: the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission. The CFR was founded in 1921 based on internationalist ideas developed during the Wilson era and expanded its influence especially under Democratic administrations from Truman (when it was incorporated into the State Department) to Lyndon Johnson. The Trilateral Commission was founded by David Rockefeller in 1973 and became particularly influential under Democratic President Jimmy Carter.
Carter had been an original member of the Trilateral, where he was indoctrinated in the Rockefellers’ Fabian foreign relations and economic ideology based on globalist economic policies dictated by the interests of multinational corporations. Upon assuming office, he surrounded himself with a large number of Trilateral members, whom he appointed in key positions as foreign and economic policy advisers. In a revealing policy paper, Carter adviser Samuel P. Huntington who had been a professor of government at Columbia University, wrote that an elected president’s (corporate-dominated) government coalition needs to have little relation to the (popular) electoral coalition that brought him to power.
Carter’s Trilateral Connection | News | The Harvard Crimson (thecrimson.com)
The next major influence on the Democratic Party after the Rockefellers was George Soros. Originally from Hungary, Soros was indoctrinated in Fabian thought at the Fabians’ LSE, after which he became an employee and later associate of the European Rothschilds. In this capacity, he used his great wealth and extensive contacts to become one of the most influential behind-the-scenes figures in American liberal politics, especially as sponsor of Democratic leaders Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, but also through a wide network of organizations promoting liberal causes.
While at the beginning of Clinton’s presidency the Democratic Party’s conservative and moderate factions constituted the majority of its ranks, under the leadership of Barak Obama and Joe Biden the party’s liberal faction came to exceed its moderate and conservative components. At the same time, the electorate as a whole moved farther to the left, in a clear evidence of the success of the Fabian strategy whose central concern is to push the whole of society farther and farther to the left, until the voters themselves no longer have reason to oppose a socialist state.
In the words of Fabian leader G. B. Shaw,
“Socialism will come by installments of public regulation and public administration enacted by parliaments, vestries, municipalities, parish councils, school boards, and the like” (“Illusions of Socialism,” p. 161)
Commenting on Fabian activism in America, the historian Rose Martin observed:
“From the very beginning, all these organizations were penetrated at the core by a Fabian Socialist conspiracy to capture the mind of America and eventually the machinery of government, in the interests of a revolutionary future wholly alien to the American tradition” (Fabian Freeway p. 128)
The growing influence of foreign financial interests and political ideologies is reflected in the progressive internationalization of American politics purportedly fighting “isolationism,” while in fact aiming to establish intergovernmental organizations as instruments of world government beginning with Wilson’s League of Nations and followed by the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, NATO, and many other similar bodies founded by the Democratic administrations of Roosevelt and Truman, and expanded under their successors from Clinton to Biden.
(Even before starting his presidency, in addition to founding the Biden Institute at Delaware University to develop public policy on the usual liberal themes such as civil rights and the environment, Mr. Biden in 2018 also founded the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, all of which illustrates the Democratic leadership’s faithful adherence to the twofold focus of Fabian doctrine: (1) the gradual transformation of society and culture into instruments of socialism and (2) the incorporation of America into a global system of governance. In true Fabian fashion, these policies are not submitted to the popular vote, but are promoted through corporate-sponsored think tanks and pressure groups that are not accountable to the electorate and do not take account of public opinion except to manipulate it by various means as advocated by Laswell and others. This also demonstrates that Democratic policies are taking the Republic from rule by the people to rule by corporations and their political collaborators, which is Fabianism’s prescribed road to socialism.)
In all these instances (and many others) the Democratic leadership’s true agenda stands exposed by its collaboration with its British counterparts, the Fabian Socialist Labour Party – and the Fabian Society that founded it. It cannot be mere coincidence that Democratic-dominated America chose Fabian Socialist Britain as its closest ally and military partner. As the saying goes, birds of a feather flock together.
For centuries, British governments had acquired a not undeserved reputation of duplicitous and treacherous behavior, winning the accolade of “perfidious” from their European rivals. This description is particularly fitting for the British Fabians’ modus operandi that in addition to gradualism, also employed stealth and deception, especially the systematic application of language for the purpose of psychological manipulation. We have seen that by “nationalism” Fabians meant nationalization; by “public ownership” they meant state ownership; by “progressive” they meant progressive or gradual Marxism; and by “democracy” they meant social democracy or socialism. It is not by accident that some of the most undemocratic regimes have called themselves “democratic” – Communist Germany and North Korea, for example.
In light of the facts, when President Wilson in 1917 asked Congress to go to war with Germany because “the world must be made safe for democracy,” he could only have meant social democracy, that is, the Fabian Socialism that was on the rise in both America and Britain. In the same vein, when Democratic President Roosevelt in 1941 signed the declaration of war on Germany, he was defending the same Fabian Socialism he was imposing on the unsuspecting American people.
Democratic-dominated America is now fighting a proxy war with Russia, and another Democratic President, Mr. Biden himself, keeps demanding that Congress provide cash and arms for Ukraine. Can there be any doubt that the only threat Russia poses is to the Fabian Socialist plans for America and the world? It cannot be claimed that America is defending democracy in Ukraine for the simple reason that Ukraine is not a democratic country, being dominated by oligarchs and their political collaborators who cannot be challenged by voters because President Zelensky has conveniently imposed martial law, making elections illegal, and has banned all political opposition for being “pro-Russia.”
The Democrats’ war on Christian Russia is not a fight for democracy, but a fight for liberalism. It is not a fight for Christianity and traditional American values, but a fight for the liberal values of the European Union and NATO, two liberal organizations founded by liberals to advance a liberal agenda that militates against Christianity and tradition. President Biden himself has spoken in defense of the liberal new world order in his address to the Business Roundtable’s CEO Quarterly Meeting in March.
Equally disastrous is the Democrats’ performance on the home front. Having started his presidency by using the pandemic to place the country under a Stalinist-style regime and civil rights movements to stoke racial tension, Mr. Biden and his supporters have engaged in what amounts to suppression and persecution of political opponents, while the party has been allowed to wage an unprecedented cultural, demographic, and economic war on the American people. In typical Fabian fashion, language is used deceptively to mislead the public: “equality” and “inclusion” is used to promote inequality and exclusion; “secure borders” is used to describe borders open to drug cartels and human trafficking; and “economic growth” is used to cover up falling household incomes and rising prices and inflation.
The Democrats’ handling of the border crisis clearly shows that they have no regard for the electorate. In Fabian ideology it is not the voters but the unelected “experts” running the country that decide. In the Democrats’ dystopia-come-true the Nanny State knows best and the citizens must do as they are told, come what may.
In the meantime, the Republicans find themselves in an unenviable position. To turn America around from the brink of disaster they must fight both the official “Democratic” opposition and the unofficial fifth-column elements ensconced among Republican ranks. This is becoming an epic battle that will take more than voting to win. A step in the right direction is to raise public awareness of the Democrats’ increasingly anti-American agenda and organize determined resistance, not only for the sake of America’s future but for the future of the entire free world.
Thomas P. Jenkin, “The American Fabian Movement,” The Western Political Quarterly Vol. 1, No. 2 (Jun., 1948), pp. 113-123
G. B. Shaw, “Illusions of Socialism,” 1896, in Edward Carpenter (ed.), Forecasts of the Coming Century by a decade of writers, 1897, pp. 141-177.
Rose Martin, Fabian Freeway: High Road to Socialism in the U.S.A 1884-1966, 1966.
Ioan Ratiu, The Milner-Fabian Conspiracy: How an international elite is taking over and destroying Europe, America and the World, 2012.
Fabian Freeway: High Road to Socialism in the U.S.A | Mises Institute PDF
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