Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning [Paperback]

This is a terrific book that I almost missed. Frankly, I was going to pass on it because I had viewed Jonah Goldberg as a bit of a wise acre and didn't realize he had a book like this in him. And the title and the cover art, while attention getting, contribute to the idea that this is going to be a lightweight attack piece. I guess the title and cover art got a lot of attention and helped the book sell well, but I only read it because a friend told me I shouldn't miss it. I am glad my friend brought it to my attention because it is a valuable book and will provide great information to anyone who is willing to actually read it rather than surmise what it says one way or the other.

If you have doubts or objections to what you think the book might be saying, I encourage you to start with the Afterword in which he anticipates many of the likely criticisms of the book and also shows where he believes conservatism can run off the rails. This is not the one sided or wild-eyed attack piece some have claimed it to be. Goldberg shows us what an imprecise and slippery epithet fascism has become. He then takes us back to the father of fascism, Mussolini, and shows how it grew out of the Progressive movements alive in American and Europe and uses the writings of intellectuals of that movement to show the linkage and their praise of Pre-Hitler Mussolini.

Goldberg then demonstrates how Hitler was a man of the Left and how the accusations of his being "right wing" have to be understood as accusations against a nationalist socialist movement from the USSR's internationalist (read Moscow dominated) communist-socialist movement. The author is CLEAR and says many times that he is not saying that the left wing in general and especially that the left of today is NOT guilty of the holocaust nor is he saying that their policies would lead to such a monstrous outcome.

We next move to Woodrow Wilson through to Franklin Roosevelt and the ways in which they introduced fascist policies within America and in our foreign policy. The kind of public suppression of individual liberty and thought under Wilson is swept under the rug today and I hope the events Goldberg describes in this book get brought back into popular awareness. We would be horrified at someone being shot for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance, but in that time it was seen as a justifiable and heroic act!

Franklin Roosevelt's true history is getting broader play today and the all but universal praise he received in my youth is justly being reconsidered. This book does a fine job in setting those policies in a clear context of the worldwide progressive and fascist movements. Remember, you cannot use your present suppositions about what fascism means to judge this use of the term. It was a term that was used with praise prior to World War II and the holocaust.

Chapter 5 takes us through the 1960s and the cultural revolution that revived many of the fascist notions and spread them into the radical youth who are now striving for power in our political (and economic) institutions today. Chapters 7 reviews how eugenics was originally stated and how its echoes remain in present left-progressive policies (without their advocating the kind of eugenics policies that seemed so useful to intellectual advocating social and racial hygiene a century ago). Chapter 8 tours the economic bargains the participants in various progressive economies were willing to strike with fascism. Goldberg shows clearly why big companies are no longer capitalist and why they work for state protection from competition, for tax breaks and subsidies, and end up supporting progressive-left state policies.

Chapter 9 is a useful and clear headed analysis of the kinds of policies Hillary Clinton and her progressive compatriots advocate and how they have changed the techniques of persuasion in order to sell the old progressive nostrums in the name of "the children". We see clearly our own acceptance of these old fascist notions and how the old-time religion of individual liberty and limited government is weakening under the administrations of BOTH the Democrats and Republicans, especially George W. Bush.

This is a very useful book and I hope it is widely read and discussed seriously. We don't need any shouting down, spitting, or claims about what the books says or proves that it doesn't say for itself. In any case, Goldberg has my sincerest praise for his accomplishment. Superbly done. Thanks, Jonah.

In the intro, Goldberg discusses the confusion surrounding the term 'fascism' with reference to Roger Griffin, Emilio Gentile, Gilbert Allardyce, Ernst Nolte, Stanley Payne, Roger Eatwell et al. The phenomenon has many variants & names whilst the manner of its expression is influenced by the national culture. Nowadays the term is loosely applied to 'anything not desirable.' The author investigates the characteristics of the movement, its roots in American Progressivism of the late 19th and early 20th century, manifestation during the New Deal and similarities with the agenda of what is today called Liberalism in the USA.

First he examines Mussolini, a favorite of the New York Times, New Republic, Hollywood and many intellectuals until his invasion of Ethiopia in 1934. This chapter includes sections on Jacobin Fascism with observations on the French Revolution, JJ Rousseau, Georges Sorel and Napoleon, and War, which deals with populism and pragmatism as forms of relativism. National Socialism predated Hitler, competed with communism for the same support base, used identity politics and was not identical with Italian Fascism as Goldberg points out in the 2nd chapter. Further information on the similarities, differences and the danse macabre of shifting alliances in 1930s Europe is available in Sinisterism by Bruce Walker.

There's selective amnesia as regards Woodrow Wilson during whose 'progressive' presidency censorship, economic regulation, militarism, propaganda & corporatism dominated the USA. Unimaginable crackdowns on the media, restrictions of civil liberties & other outrages took place. During Roosevelt's New Deal the term Liberalism replaced Progressivism; it was the leftist author HG Well's who first advocated 'liberal fascism.' Goldberg shows how closely the programmes of Roosevelt, Mussolini & Hitler resembled one another. Fortunately, democratic parliamentarianism is an Anglo-Saxon tribal institution so the global trend didn't gain totalitarian power in the UK or USA.

The third fascist movement exploded in the 1960s with the student riots, assassinations and terrorism of groups like the Weather Underground & Black Panthers. This tumult flowed from the writings of European academics like Paul de Man, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt and Derrida whose 'deconstruction' was a direct offshoot of Heidegger's variety of existentialism. The Reckless Mind by Mark Lilla takes a closer look at these intellectuals and what they promoted. They in turn influenced Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin & Hillary's mentor Saul Alinsky. A wide chasm separates the aforementioned from the classical liberal, conservative or libertarian thinkers like Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke, Locke and Hayek. Classical Liberalism focused on the individual whilst its collectivist opponents favored the group, whether based on race, gender or whatever. In other words, Multiculturalism.

The author traces the seeds of the 'god-state' idea from Hegel, Darwin and Bismarck's Prussia through the Frankfurt School and the marriage of psychology & Marxism by Adorno, Marcuse & Fromm. Its chief propagandist was Richard Hofstadter. The Kennedy Myth underpinned Lyndon B Johnson's idea of the 'Great Society.' In truth, the 1960s tumult was a spiritual phenomenon that transpired simultaneously on campus and in government with its vast spending sprees that resulted in family breakdown, the escalation of crime and street violence. The notion of 'unity', neutral in itself, is easily hijacked for the purpose of irrational groupthink.

Earlier in the 20th century, Eugenics was promoted by progressives like the Fabians, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells & Maynard Keynes and opposed by traditionalists like GK Chesterton. The author quotes Nietzsche on eugenics and investigates Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood & the birth control movement. In the economic sphere, the Italian & German collectivist states enforced corporatism (co-ordination) and the New Deal was the same. Government meddling, regulating and corporate lobbying limit competition, are detrimental to small businesses and consumers, and resemble the corporatism of Mussolini's Italy, Nazi Germany and Bismarck's Prussia. Hillary's 'politics of meaning' is a theocratic concept since it claims that the collective can solve all problems via the state, leaving no room for voluntary associations. Polanyi's Science, Faith And Society provides valuable insights on this matter.

Today's culture wars echo Bismarck's Kulturkampf, with liberals as the aggressors. Then as now, the enemy is traditional religion and the battlefields are identity, morality, the family and nature, including environmentalism and the cult of the organic. By undermining truth, tradition and reason, ideologies like deconstruction, existentialism, postmodernism, pragmatism and relativism pave the way toward dystopia as Stephen Hicks argues so eloquently in Explaining Postmodernism. Liberalism in the USA is really Leftism, a secular salvationist ideology. No matter how 'nice' it appears on the surface, it has been subverting Enlightenment standards for many decades. And without those standards, society decays into the Nietzchean abyss where brute force supplants reason.

In the Afterword, Goldberg looks at the tempting of American conservatism which is a blend of cultural conservatism & classical political liberalism. He examines the writings of Patrick Buchanan, the most notorious champion of tribalism on the Right and looks at 'compassionate conservatism,' a well-meaning policy that nevertheless extended state powers. Finally, Goldberg observes that transforming the USA into a European welfare state is not the end of the world (although there's plenty of evidence that the real thing is unsustainable, nearing implosion and civilizational collapse). He warns against what might come after a welfarist America. The Western European utopias so beloved of American liberals will show the way in the next two decades. Claire Berlinski's Menace in Europe and Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept offer intriguing glimpses into the continent's current condition & possible future. The causes and effects are highlighted by the philosopher Chantal Delsol in her illuminating books Icarus Fallen and The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century.

This well-researched and brilliantly argued book concludes with an appendix (The Nazi Party Platform), 54pp of bibliographical notes and an index. For further reading, I recommend United in Hate by Jamie Glazov, A Conservative History of the American Left by Daniel Flynn, Unholy Alliance by David Horowitz, The Road to Serfdom by FA Hayek and Leftism Revisited by by Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn.

There are a few things that we've learned as kids and have since taken for granted: the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, the birds fly south in the Winter, and north in the Summer, there are four seasons, seven days in week, etc. One of these truisms that almost no one questions is that communism is a left/liberal ideology while fascism is a right/conservative one. And while communism to this day has maintained a certain level of respectability and even moral high ground in some circles, labeling someone a fascist is the lowest form of insult, and something that many conservative thinkers are constantly subjected to. Therefore it came as a bit of a surprise to me to discover that fascism is in fact, when looked at objectively and without the baggage that it has assumed in popular perception, a quintessential left-of-center ideology. Granted, "Nazi" is in fact a shorthand for "National-socialist," but for the better part of last seventy years hardly anyone thought to emphasize the "socialist" part of the label, only the nationalism by which it was widely known. In the light of that Jonah Goldberg's book comes as a revelation that has profound effect on one's perception of the world. It is equivalent to discovering that the sun rises AND sets in the East. I was at first rather skeptical of the premise of this book, but the exhaustive, detailed and persuasive historical evidence that was presented in the book put all my misgivings aside. It documented many of the fascist tendencies and full-blown policies of some of the darlings of American left: Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It shows that aside from the extermination of Jews, there are hardly any policies of German National-socialists that differ substantially from any other socialist movement of the time, or even today. And herein, according to this book, lies the greatest danger for the modern western democracies. By demonizing fascism as a phenomenon of the right, it leaves open the unimpeded encroachment to many fascist policies under the guise of socialist and other liberal movements. These movements don't necessarily want the full-blown fascist dictatorships installed, but they are certainly progressing in that direction. That's why they are referred to as "liberal" fascists - fascists with a smiley face.
Jonah Goldberg does a remarkable job of presenting his ideas and impressions to the modern reader - always backed by facts, never overdoing the rhetoric. The book covers somewhat the similar ground as the legendary "The Road to Serfdom" by F. A. Hayek. This latter book was written in the middle of WWII, and had some of the same perceptions as "Liberal Fascism." Its thesis was to warn the Western democracies against implementing many of the social programs that led to the rise of fascism and communism in Europe at the time. It is sobering to see that many of those warnings are still relevant today, maybe even more so than in 1940s. We live in the world where both fascism and communism are rapidly recede in people's memory, and it is easy to think that what led to them could not possibly happen again. "Liberal Fascism" is a sobering reminder that the road to fascism is indeed sometimes paved with the best intentions.
One final note: many of the current-events books out there don't age well, and their relevance diminishes almost as fast as that of many periodicals. This is certainly not the case with "Liberal Fascism." The style of writing and the comprehensive historical references and examples will keep this book relevant for many years to come.