World Famous Comics: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
By: Jonah Goldberg Publisher: Doubleday Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Doubleday Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 496 Publication Date: January 08, 2008 Release Date: January 08, 2008
“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers”—such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?
Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.
Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.
Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.
Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.
These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.
This essential book should be required reading in every college Comparative Government, American History and World History course. It crucially sets the record straight on one of the Left's most successful, enduring and harmful feats of taxonomical "disinformation" in the history of modern political science.
To the abiding embarrassment and discomfiture of the Left, Goldberg highlights the common philosophical ancestry that the various strands of leftism share with fascism. (At the calumnious expense of conservatives and the political "right"). Not surprisingly, the truth hurts those it unmasks, and this book has American (and British) liberals all tied up in an indignant spluttering snit. Well, good.
A minor and incidental reflection of the truth of Goldberg's thesis is that both Goebbels and Lenin have been credited with the same quote that "A lie told often enough becomes the truth." Well, with this book, Jonah Goldberg renders a huge service in debunking many of those lies.
The fact that it is also engagingly and wittily written is just a bonus, but a no less welcome one for that.
Accurate history Liberal Fascism should be required reading for every high school or political science student. Mr. Goldberg relates political history in the US as well as abroad in an easy to read manner. More importantly, his facts for the first half of the 20th century are as I remember being taught 60 or so years ago when schools still taught history as it was. The last half of the 20th century, I knew from living it, and he's correct there too.
When a former National Review writer gets panned by the National Review...hmmm. How to write a goofy book that sells:
Do some research about how fascists were vegetarians, and other interesting although irrelevant points. Provide anecdotal evidence of campus brainwashing by citing 20 or so lunkheads who make uninformed lunkheaded remarks at some college political events (the serious students are in the library studying Rousseau, Mill, and Emerson); find a nifty title that will attract fearful, disenchanted Americans because it will have their biases confirmed; and have a built-in audience garnered from readers of your column as Jimmy Buffet, best selling mystery writer, had when 10% of his fans bought his fiction. However, that did not make him the new Agatha Christie.
The National Review itself gave this book an extremely negative critique, and rightfully so. None of it adds up. It would be the 'liberal' equivalent of using John McCain's reference to remaining in Iraq for a hundred years as 'proof' he is a warmonger.
At one time, when discerning people understood the nature of propaganda, and the use of rhetorical devices, this book would be categorized as using 'strawman' technique. Apparently the Age of Enlightenment, that great era in history, with its brilliant minds who gave us concepts such as reason, empiricism, rhetorical analysis, the scientific method, and the great theories of government, has been long forgotten.
To graduate from college in those days--as many of our 'founding fathers' had done--required that one translate Greek to Latin and vice-versa. I suspect the true motive behind books of this ilk is that so-called Conservatives don't get a chance to guest host Saturday Night Live, and this is their revenge.
Anyone who takes this drivel seriously does not understand fascism or American liberalism! My title should explain it all. Goldberg is nothing more than a childish right-wing ideologue, who understand neither fascism, nor American liberalism, nor constructive political discourse. Anyone, who takes this book or its author seriously, understands neither fascism, nor American liberalism. The book is pure garbage.
A Truly Instructive Read for the Open-Minded Jonah Goldberg's book is a tour de force of history and political philosophy that should remain relevant well after other contemporary political tomes have lost their punch.
Many "official" reviewers have focused on the historical analysis, and the revelation (to the common reader) of the leftist characters of Hitler and Mussolini. One point that Goldberg makes, but (apparently) needs re-emphasizing over and over again, is that these men and their fascist or Nazi cohorts were never, ever right wing in the American sense of the term. Given that America's electorate has never really had a strong, popular, explicitly socialist component, the socialist mindset of the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis would absolutely have belonged on the historical left in this country. Indeed, Goldberg goes to great lengths to bring out the mutual admiration that the Fascists, in particular, and the American progressives shared. The initial chapters of the book, from Mussolini and Hitler through Wilson's "War Socialism" and FDR's revanchist progressives, are very enlightening and have generally been well-received.
Where many reviewers, especially (though not exclusively) on the left, have tried to split the baby is in the later chapters, where Goldberg traces the fascist influence of the Progressive movement through modern liberalism. The natural progression of the argument is that if modern liberalism owes much to FDR (as many claim), and FDR's group were largely trying to recreate Wilson's progressive nirvana of a controlled war economy in peacetime, the fascist nature of the Progressive movement must have survived in some form to the present day. Indeed, he demonstrates this quite well, though far too many reviewers tendentiously ignore this logic.
Far too many readers have incorrectly latched on to the discussion of certain lifestyles or (vegetarianism, for example), to mischaracterize the argument. Goldberg does NOT say that because Hitler was a vegetarian, vegetarians are a whisper away from being Nazis. He rather makes the point that much of what you'll find in the progressive, Nazi or fascist agendas had little to do with evil schemes to dominate or exterminate other people, and much more to do with attempts by the state to control or regulate personal or economic behavior in a way intended to make people better off. The craze for restricting trans fats in certain jurisdictions, for instance, makes more sense in a historical context when you realize that totalitarian regimes of the past really did believe in a holistic approach to the state's involvement in citizens' welfare. The cultish, coercive elements of the Nazi's social welfare views, therefore, are the focus of his argument, and many who would rather ignore these points feel the need to create straw men rather than engage the argument.
The arguments put forth in this book are elegant and persuasive, even if you may find areas to disagree with here and there. However, if you're really interested in engaging with the philosophical skeletons in the closet of the American left in a serious and thought-provoking way, read this book.
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