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 Goldberg, Jonah. Publication date 2007. Topics Fascism, Liberalism, World politics. Publisher New York: Doubleday. Internet Archive Books. Delaware County District Library (Ohio) American Libraries. Liberal Fascism and millions of other books are available for instant access. —New York Post“Jonah Goldberg is the first historian to detail the havoc this spin of all. Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
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Liberal Fascism Quotes Showing 1-30 of 59
“If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” ―
“America's political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now More and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.” ―
“The Nazis played the same games against Jews that today’s left plays against 'Eurocentrism,' 'whiteness,' and 'logocentrism.' When you hear a campus radical denounce 'white logic' or 'male logic,' she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced 'Jewish logic' and the 'Hebrew disease'...The white man is the Jew of liberal fascism.” ―
“We tend to forget that unity is, at best, morally neutral and often a source of irrationality and groupthink. Rampaging mobs are unified. The Mafia is unified. Marauding barbarians bent on rape and pillage are unified. Meanwhile, civilized people have disagreements, and small-d democrats have arguments. Classical liberalism is based on this fundamental insight, which is why fascism was always antiliberal. Liberalism rejected the idea that unity is more valuable than individuality. For fascists and other leftists, meaning and authenticity are found in collective enterprises—of class, nation, or race—and the state is there to enforce that meaning on everyone without the hindrance of debate.” ―
“Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency. Across the West, this was the most glorious boon of World War I.” ―
“Unlike classical liberalism, which saw the government as a necessary evil, or simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, the belief that the entire society was one organic whole left no room for those who didn’t want to behave, let alone “evolve.” ―
“There is no word in the English language that gets thrown around more freely by people who don’t know what it means than “fascism.” Indeed, the more someone uses the word “fascist” in everyday conversation, the less likely it is that he knows what he’s talking about.” ―
“Every Democrat says he wants to be JFK while insisting that he will do more or less what LBJ did. No Democrat would dream of saying he wanted to emulate Lyndon Johnson, because the myth is what matters most.” ―
“In short, “fascist” is a modern word for “heretic,” branding an individual worthy of excommunication from the body politic. The left uses other words—“racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe,” “christianist”—for similar purposes, but these words have less elastic meanings. Fascism, however, is the gift that keeps on giving. George Orwell noted this tendency as early as 1946 in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language”: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.” ―
“American Progressivism—the moralistic social crusade from which modern liberals proudly claim descent—is in some respects the major source of the fascist ideas applied in Europe by Mussolini and Hitler.” ―
“Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency.” ―
“So, we are supposed to see a party in favor of universal education, guaranteed employment, increased entitlements for the aged, the expropriation of land without compensation, the nationalization of industry, the abolition of market-based lending—a.k.a. “interest slavery”—the expansion of health services, and the abolition of child labor as objectively and obviously right-wing. What the Nazis pursued was a form of anticapitalist, antiliberal, and anti-conservative communitarianism” ―
“Given the benefit of hindsight, it’s difficult to understand why anyone doubts the fascist nature of the French Revolution. Few dispute that it was totalitarian, terrorist, nationalist, conspiratorial, and populist. It produced the first modern dictators, Robespierre and Napoleon, and worked on the premise that the nation had to be ruled by an enlightened avant-garde who would serve as the authentic, organic voice of the “general will.” The paranoid Jacobin mentality made the revolutionaries more savage and cruel than the king they replaced. Some fifty thousand people ultimately died in the Terror, many in political show trials that Simon Schama describes as the “founding charter of totalitarian justice.” Robespierre summed up the totalitarian logic of the Revolution: “There are only two parties in France: the people and its enemies. We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against the rights of man…[W]e must exterminate all our enemies.” ―
“These two visions—Darwinian organicism and Christian messianism—seem contradictory today because they reside on different sides of the culture war. But in the Progressive Era, these visions complemented each other perfectly. And Wilson embodied this synthesis. The totalitarian flavor of such a worldview should be obvious. Unlike classical liberalism, which saw the government as a necessary evil, or simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, the belief that the entire society was one organic whole left no room for those who didn’t want to behave, let alone “evolve.” Your home, your private thoughts, everything was part of the organic body politic, which the state was charged with redeeming.” ―
“Under the New Deal, governmental goons smashed down doors to impose domestic policies. G-Men were treated like demigods, even as they spied on dissidents. Captains of industry wrote the rules by which they were governed. FDR secretly taped his conversations, used the postal service to punish his enemies, lied repeatedly to maneuver the United States into war, and undermined Congress’s war-making powers at several turns. When warned by Frances Perkins in 1932 that many provisions of the New Deal were unconstitutional, he in effect shrugged and said that they’d deal with that later (his intended solution: pack the Supreme Court with cronies). In 1942 he flatly told Congress that if it didn’t do what he wanted, he’d do it anyway.” ―
“Fascism’s success almost always depends on the cooperation of the “losers” during a time of economic and technological change. The lower-middle classes—the people who have just enough to fear losing it—are the electoral shock troops of fascism (Richard Hofstadter identified this “status anxiety” as the source of Progressivism’s quasi-fascist nature). Populist appeals to resentment against “fat cats,” “international bankers,” “economic royalists,” and so on are the stock-in-trade of fascist demagogues.” ―
“Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don’t matter. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of “good things” under the direction of “our people” is always and everywhere justified.” ―
“This is why the Third Way is also authoritarian. It assumes that the right man—or, in the case of Leninists, the right party—can resolve all of these contradictions through sheer will. The populist demagogue takes on the role of the parent telling the childlike masses that he can make everything “all better” if they just trust him.” ―
“[T]he United States in the 1920s,” writes William Leuchtenburg, “had almost no institutional structure to which Europeans would accord the term ‘the State.’” Beyond the post office, most people had very little interaction with or dependence on “the government in Washington.”38 The New Deal changed all that. It represented the last stage in the transformation of American liberalism, whereby the U.S. government became a European “state” and liberalism a political religion.” ―
“only because so many were determined to label fascism right-wing that populism under Mussolini was redefined as such. After all, the notion that political power is and should be vested in the people was a classical liberal position. Populism was a more radical version of this position. It’s still a “power to the people” ideology,” ―
“fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact—an inconvenient truth if there ever was one—is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate and control the same social space.” ―
“The particular content of the idea was decidedly secondary. The ultimate utility of ideas is not their intrinsic truth but the extent to which they make a desired action possible—in Hitler’s case the destruction of your enemies, the attainment of glory, and the triumph of your race. This is important to keep in mind because Hitler’s ideological coherence left a great deal to be desired. His opportunism, pragmatism, and megalomania often overpowered any desire on his part to formulate a fixed ideological approach.” ―
“Debates about economics these days generally enjoy a climate of bipartisan asininity. Democrats want to “rein in” corporations, while Republicans claim to be “pro-business.” The problem is that being “pro-business” is hardly the same thing as being pro–free market, while “reining in” corporations breeds precisely the climate liberals decry as fascistic.” ―
“In his unintentionally chilling 1890 essay, Leaders of Men, Wilson explained that the “true leader” uses the masses like “tools.” He must not traffic in subtleties and nuance, as literary men do. Rather, he must speak to stir their passions, not their intellects. In short, he must be a skillful demagogue.” ―
“There is at least one official voice in Europe that expresses understanding of the methods and motives of President Roosevelt,” began a New York Times report in July 1933. “This voice is that of Germany, as represented by Chancellor Adolf Hitler.” The German leader told the Times, “I have sympathy with President Roosevelt because he marches straight toward his objective over Congress, over lobbies, over stubborn bureaucracies.” ―
“It is a little-known but significant fact that no president has appeared more times in Superman comic books than JFK. He was even entrusted with Superman's secret identity and once pretended to be Clark Kent so as to prevent it from being exposed. When Supergirl debuted as a character, she was formally presented to the Kennedys. (Not surprisingly, the president took an immediate liking to her.) In a special issue dedicated to getting American youth to become physically fit — just like the astronaut 'Colonel Glenn' — Kennedy enlists Superman on a mission to close 'the muscle gap'.” ―
“In a famous interview with Emil Ludwig, Mussolini reiterated his view that “America has a dictator” in FDR. In an essay written for American audiences, he marveled at how the forces of “spiritual renewal” were destroying the outdated notion that democracy and liberalism were “immortal principles.” “America itself is abandoning them. Roosevelt is moving, acting, giving orders independently of the decisions or wishes of the Senate or Congress. There are no longer intermediaries between him and the nation.” ―
“ideologically fascist and progressive totalitarianism was never a mere doctrine of statism. Rather, it claimed that the state was the natural brain of the organic body politic.” ―
“The village may have replaced “the state,” and it in turn may have replaced the fist with the hug, but an unwanted embrace from which you cannot escape is just a nicer form of tyranny.” ―
“in America, as Friedrich Hayek and others have noted, a conservative is one who protects and defends what are considered liberal institutions in Europe but largely conservative ones in America: private property, free markets, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and the rights of communities to determine for themselves how they will live within these guidelines.9” ―
All Quotes Quotes By Jonah Goldberg
Such is Britain's cultural deference to American values that any incendiary political volume that tops the New York Times bestseller list will, despite its irrelevance to our political culture, appear here with hoopla. Hence the LA Times columnist Jonah Goldberg's invective against American liberalism being published by Penguin.
Oscar Wilde's notion that Britain and the US are divided by a common language is especially true of the use of the term 'liberal'. Stateside, Goldberg's title is provocative oxymoron; here it's flat-out contradiction. There, 'liberal' is regularly used by conservatives to abuse anyone left of Paul Wolfowitz. In Britain, it has no such force: here, liberalism is underscored by Mill's principle of liberty, whereby the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. There are problems with the principle, but it can offer a bulwark against just those forms of totalitarianism Goldberg indicts and which he suggests were foundational for modern American liberalism.
Mussolini and Hitler didn't dig Mill. And yet, for Goldberg's thesis to make sense in Britain, they would have to. His book, as published here, is a triumph of the terminological will whereby words mean just what the author means them to. It was actually a Briton, HG Wells, who coined the term 'liberal fascism'. In 1932, Wells told Young Liberals in Oxford that piecemeal Fabian socialism and parliamentary democracy had failed to deliver, so should be scrapped. 'I am asking for liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis,' he said. What can we say about this other than that it was a then-deluded, now-forgotten speech, and that Wells would have done better to read more Mill? And yet Goldberg takes it as a key text for his own now-deluded, soon-to-be-forgotten thesis.
Goldberg is a Kantian conservative sceptical of leftwing ideas of human perfectibility. Indeed, he argues that all totalitarianisms - Hitlerism, fascism, communism, Hillary Clintonism - proceed from the same lie: that tyrannical leaders can realise the utopian dream of 'creating a better world' (Goldberg's scare quotes), and that when US liberals abuse conservatives as fascists for the usual things (opposing abortion and stem cell research, defending marriage and intelligent design), they don't know their history.
He insists we must recognise the 'inconvenient truth' that communism and fascism were once bedfellows (forget that Hitler and Mussolini denounced and killed communists). In the 20s, US lefties detected no foul odour from Mussolini or Hitler, Goldberg argues. Fair enough, but I have a 1939 photograph of Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain flanking Mussolini at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma - it wasn't just lefties who cosied up to fascists. He adds: 'The horror of the Holocaust completely changed our view of fascism as uniquely evil.' Fascism became a term of abuse, hung by liberals on conservatives like Goldberg. Goldberg's chief motivation is that this must stop.
Fascism, Goldberg contends, first appeared in government before Mussolini, thanks to the Democrat president Woodrow Wilson (whose first world war administration insisted that sauerkraut was renamed 'liberty cabbage' in its cafeterias to reflect anti-German sentiment). Anyone who believes in collective action through the state to improve people's lives is fascist or operating with unconscious fascistic impulses, Goldman argues. Our 1944 Education Act and the NHS, then, rest on the same foundational principles as Kristallnacht and al-Qaida. Eugenics, cloning, Keynesianism, state-regulated abortion, the Führer (one chapter is called 'Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left') all bear the same imprimatur.
Jonah Goldberg Liberal Fascism
Goldberg defines fascism as 'a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people.' But this is hopeless: I long for Gordon Brown to be attuned to the will of the people, but I don't get religious about it. That there is in modern leftwing politics a religion of the state untempered by scepticism comes from Goldberg's nightmares rather than convincing political analysis.
Liberal Fascism
'The promise of American life,' Goldberg concludes, 'will be frittered away for a bag of magic beans called security.' There is nothing intrinsically wrong with security, except that, as Freud recognised, and as was demonstrated at Guantánamo, it's readily traded off for freedom.
Liberal Fascism Book
What has this to do with the 44th US president? Goldberg notes that Barack Obama was trained by followers of the community organiser Saul Alinsky, whose 'violent, non-confrontational rhetoric often sounded much like that heard from Horst Wessel or his Red Shirt adversaries in the streets of Berlin'. It's a long journey from Horst Wessel to Obama, but Goldberg makes it histrionically short. Obama, surely, offers promise. It was his conservative predecessor, in the wake of 9/11, who frittered away the goodwill of the world.
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