Posted on 02/26/2008 7:10:25 AM PST by SJackson
| Liberal Fascism |
Liberal Fascism That "thwack" you hear from coast to coast is conservative book-writing pundits smacking themselves on the forehead and exclaiming, "Why didn't I think of that?" The reason is National Review editor Jonah Goldberg's new book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, as it racks up huge sales and dominates best-seller lists. It's a natural — even obvious — idea whose time has come. The packaging is simple but brilliant, with a provocative title and one of the all-time classic dust jackets. The book is at once "high-concept" (a subject that can be defined simply and compellingly), yet unlike much of what passes as political publishing these days, Goldberg provides enough substance and complexity to justify his book's length and price. In fact, most readers who pick up Liberal Fascism would wonder why hasn't anyone given us this great resource before now. Not only is the topic is ubiquitous -- it's nearly impossible to engage in any form of conservative activism, from advocating tax cuts to protesting abortion without some ignorant leftie throwing the word "fascist" in your direction — but it's also been going on for more than 60 years. As George Orwell wrote in 1946, "The word Fascism has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies 'something not desirable.'" Of course, PC institutions like the mainstream media or academe have another synonym for everything not desirable: conservative. Those of us who have been on the receiving end of the fascist epithet generally have a stock answer depending on the topic. If the argument is economic, it's common to point out that national socialism (fascism) is hardly the polar opposite of international socialism (communism), but free markets are the opposite of both. And nearly every pro-life activist knows that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a rabid eugenicist who was more interested in selective breeding than "choice" -- and she provided Nazis a platform in her publications. Goldberg covers this ground as well in a most enlightening way. How many conservatives, for example, know the stated end goal of the early 20th century Progressive movement was the engineering of a superior race by statist means? When most people hear "fascist," they think "Nazi" or "blackshirt," and associate the phrase "right wing" with both. Goldberg dismisses that with this pithy paragraph: "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 right wing." There is a political party that has two presidential candidates vying for their nomination who, to one degree or another, agrees with all these platforms of the German Nazi Party of the 1930s. Hint: It's not the Republican Party. Much of the historical content in Liberal Fascism is far from a new take on events. Any discussion of fascism on the Frontpage message boards brings up the main points of Goldberg's theses. (On the day I started Liberal Fascism, in fact, I was called a fascist by a pacifist wingnut for writing positively about the value system US military, and several readers jumped to my defense). There have always been excellent historical sources available for conservatives to counter the fascist slur. Charles Bracelin Floods excellent Hitler: The Path to Power, gives a detailed picture of Hitler's appropriation of Communist tactics and ideas, Thomas Fleming's popular The Illusion of Victory is a thorough expose of Woodrow Wilson's fascist tactics, which included jailing of dissidents, using propaganda, adopting openly racist policies and thirsting for war. And Amity Shlaes's recent The Forgotten Man reminds us that FDR not only declared war on big business, but his goons also tried to retroactively imprison those businesses that were contrary to the goals of the National Recovery Act. But no matter how informative these and other resources are, no other single book I know of has been devoted to this topic in particular. Liberal Fascism is the rare tool that has the potential to change the vernacular — or at least give powerful backup to those engaged in the war of words.. Goldberg's focus is is perfectly timed. After generations of misappropriating the word "liberal" and thoroughly discrediting a word that classically applies better to George Washington than to George McGovern, the American Left has reclaimed its roots by attempting to resurrect the euphemism of "progressive" to describe itself. This would seem a good public relations move. Everyone is for "progress," and all anyone remembers about the Progressives from high school history class is that they were for food safety standards, banning child labor, breaking up predatory monopolies and reforming slumlords. But as Goldberg points out, America's turn-of-the-century progressives were the direct intellectual forebears of 1930s fascism, and many of those who lived that long actively supported both the Italian and German "experiments." The Progressives and fascists both admired Bismarck's welfare state, though the collapse of Christianity in Europe was replaced by a religion of the state, while the Social Gospel -- the means for perfecting the masses -- became dominant in America. The Progressives' variety, Goldberg writes, was "nice and for your own good … a sort of Christian fascism. … But liberals often forget that the Progressives were also imperialists, at home and abroad. They were the authors of Prohibition, the Palmer Raids, eugenics, loyalty oaths, and, in its modern incarnation, what many would call 'state capitalism.'" As Goldberg points out, both fascists like Italy's Benito Mussolini and progressives like Woodrow Wilson claimed the same intellectual forebears, and it is utterly specious to posit that modern conservatives and fascists have any intellectual roots in common. Conservatives simply draw no inspiration from Hegel, Nietzsche or Rousseau; fascists and progressives do — and Wilson and Mussolini expressly did. One of the great ironies — and strokes of genius — of Goldberg's approach is the book's title. Media commentators who have not read the book have brushed it off as "Ann Coulter-like" merely because they are offended by the title. But the phrase was coined by one of early Progressivism's brightest and most enduring stars -- science fiction writer and socialist H. G. Wells, who is still a literary hero of the Left. Wells coined the phrase "liberal fascism," while opining that the world had "tired of parliamentary government" and was ready for just such a phenomenon. Lefties often admire Wells, a Fabian Socialist, for his utopian vision, but they conveniently overlook his fondness for even forcible eugenic experiments. Similarly whitewashed is Wilson, who gets "credit" for visualizing world peace through the League of Nations even though his vision cost 100,000 American lives and ended in abject failure. But Wilson was the also epitome of a Progressive president in deed and word. Goldberg points out that Leftists are always on the guard for a future fascist dictatorship just waiting to pounce from the shadows of the conservative movement (a la Sinclair Lewis's ironically titled novel, It Can't Happen Here). But Goldberg notes Lewis was late. America had already experienced fascist dictatorship under Wilson. Consider the following: By the 1930s, it could have been proclaimed, "We are all fascists now." Goldberg, like Shlaes, points out that Herbert Hoover was hardly a free market fan, but his tinkering with the economy was nothing compared to the massive control that Franklin Roosevelt asserted during the Great Depression. The New Deal revolutions were far too vast to be dealt with in one chapter, but Goldberg's recounting of the National Recovery Act's program and its bullying tactics -- combined with a suspiciously Germanic "Blue Eagle" trademark -- makes one wonder what modern liberals flyspecking for the slightest whiff of fascist tendencies in conservatism would make of it — if they had any real historical memory. But while pointing out these similarities and following the intellectual and political threads through Democratic politics to the present day, Goldberg effectively turns "Bush is a Nazi" rhetoric on its head-- but repeatedly says, "liberals are not Nazis." Goldberg makes the point that American fascism is warm and fuzzy fascism of the we-will-take-care-of-you variety — or, as George Carlin put it (though he undoubtedly meant something else), "smiley face fascism." But even smiley fascists need an enemy for motivation, a rallying point for their anger. Though modern liberal fascists may not be genocidal, they do have a target. "The white male," Goldberg writes, "is the Jew of liberal fascism." The first two-thirds of Liberal Fascism is the most valuable. It exposes the attitudes, philosophies and actions of the early heroes of the leftist pantheon as being firmly and unapologetically in the fascist camp. Goldberg kills the argument that liberty-based conservatism has fascist ancestry, then drags the corpse around the block and stomps on it several times for good measure. Among the common threads of Progressivism, fascism and modern liberalism that Goldberg explores are: It's when Goldberg gets to the modern day that things get a little dicey-- though no less entertaining or interesting. Even those who agree with Goldberg's thesis will find much worth arguing over in the later chapters. And they'll have a ball doing so. While Goldberg's tracing of fascist intellectual genealogy through to its current "liberal" offspring is persuasive, his discussion of fascist style is pretty subjective. For one thing, Goldberg tends to describe any outward trait manifested by fascists as "fascistic." But fascists were influenced by history and culture too, and are, after all, human. Not everything fascists did — even as a group — in unique to fascism. In his section on the New Left, Goldberg recounts the radical student takeover of Cornell's administration building in 1969 and takes great delight comparing it to similar pro-fascist student uprisings in Germany in the 1930s. (And I eagerly anticipate someday being able to make use of those comparisons in a face-to-face argument.) But Goldberg later admits the forcible methods of ideological "confessions" and students bullying professors into recanting their beliefs more directly hearkens to Mao's Cultural Revolution of a few years earlier. But, he inserts, "Who more classically fits the definition of fascist than Mao?" While this is an interesting example that shows that Communism and fascism are nearly interchangeable on many levels, to conflate completely the two is to be terribly imprecise. If you can't call Mao a Communist, the word has no meaning. While admitting to be a fan of the Dirty Harry films, Goldberg later writes that liberals "were not wrong" to detect "fascist themes" in the movies. Harry, in effect, was a revolutionary taking the law into his own hands as a Nietzsche-esque superman, Goldberg contends. But he misses the point: Detective Harry Callahan was rebelling against liberal fascists in Dirty Harry by fighting to preserve the old order of justice, whose primary concern was protection of the innocent. His opponents were the revolutionaries who had rewritten the Constitution by judicial fiat. Dirty Harry was more Samuel Adams than Horst Wessell; his rebellion was in defense of liberty and, thus, was a conservative. At times, it seems a more precise — but less cool -- title for this book would have been Democrat Fascism. President Theodore Roosevelt makes several cameo appearances s in Liberal Fascism, but he does not get the full treatment despite his post-presidential prominence in Progressive circles. And while it took until the turn of the century for American Progressives to bloom into full-fledged fascists, the Radical Republicans of Lincoln's time should get some mention as a historical influence. What better example of a warlike religion of the state could there be than Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic and its reveling in the imagery of Confederate blood as being stomped in a divine winepress by the Union armies of God? Goldberg sees the "fascist temptation" in "compassionate conservatism," including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's stated admiration for early progressives and a boomlet of TR admiration among the GOP intelligentsia in the late 1990s. Still, he shies away from using the f-word directly on Republicans. Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain, however, does rate this pointed paragraph in the chapter "Liberal Fascist Economics:": "John McCain perfectly symbolizes the Catch-22 of modern liberalism. McCain despises the corrupting effect of 'big money' in politics, but he is also a major advocate of increase government regulation of business. Apparently, he cannot see that the more government regulates business, the more business will take an interest in regulating government. Instead, he has concluded that he should try to regulate political speech, which is like decrying the size of the garbage dump and deciding the best thing to do is regulate the flies. American politicians spend so much time extolling past American icons that we tend to treat it like background noise. Perhaps we should grant that McCain really means it when he calls Teddy Roosevelt his role model. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, however, rates a whole chapter called "Brave New Village," which is a good antidote to all the "moderate" and "pragmatic" talk around the former first lady. "Liberal Fascism" is a rich motherlode of facts, ideas, philosophy, polemic and brilliant bull session. I've only scratched the surface with this column. This is a book that belongs on your shelf and consulted often if you regularly argue about such things with lefties. Besides, it's a lot of fun just to carry around. Just walk into a Starbucks or a Borders café and plop it on your table. It has a similar repelling effect as crosses in one of Jonah Goldberg's favorite TV shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The expressions you engender alone are worth the 28 bucks. Trust me on this.
The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
By Jonah Goldberg
Doubleday, $27.95, 487 pp.
Review by David Forsmark
I often wonder about what will become of all the minorities, gays and lesbians, when the dems don’t need them anymore.
-—good post—good book—
Libs get all up in arms when you point out where they are blatantly fascists.
INVARIABLY, they point to some conservative position that puts limits on behavior, 99% of the time, it’s a sex-related issue.
There’s not many, if any, issues outside of the right to stick your genitals wherever you feel like it at this moment, without consequences,
where the left is actually pro-freedom.
Hitler and Stalin murdered over 50,000,000 Capitalist’s!
Added to my “to buy”-”must read” list.
Objectively, sexual license is actually anti-freedom, because it’s chief social effect is to weaken the family, thereby tilting the balance of social control from parents to the state.
This is why sex is the one area in which the modern American fascists ostensibly support freedom.
I’m sick of ‘left’ and ‘right’: the seating arrangment in the French National Assembly is irrelevant, and the actual usage since about 1920 has been ‘left’ = ‘supports international socialism’ (whether of the sort with the Comintern at its head, or of the ‘let the UN decide, let’s make the world a copy of Sweden’ sort), and ‘right’ = ‘opposes international socialism’. A usage whose ambiguity (Nazis are ‘right’ since they oppose the international aspect, free-traders are ‘right’ since they oppose the socialist aspect) only serves the interests of the left (which does seem to have a precise meaning).
Essentially, fascism is a nationalistic version of socialism, but it’s still socialism.
Fascism was born out of the post WWI experience but heavily borrowed on the largely popular communist/socialist movements in Europe starting in the mid 1860s. Hitler’s Germany was a socialist state, where the first gun laws were passed, Kindergeld came about……….
The socialist today attempts to paint fascism as a concept that is politically right, but in fact the right is in it’s traditional American values about privatization, decentralization, individual rights, personal responsibility, God, etc is about as far removed from fascism or socialism as you can get. Post WWII this “perception” of the right being fascist was groomed by the left, in fact the left likes to see themselves as the opposition, as the oppressed, and as victims of the fascists, who were in reality just another form of socialists competing for power in the 1920s – 30s. The fascist socialists saw the communist socialists as competition and a threat, and once in power eliminated them. Essentially, the differences between a Hitler and Stalin are about semantics. What is true however is that socialism has serious political and societal ramifications since it places extreme power into the hands of state systems, centralizes power, sees collective rights as superseding those of the individual, is essentially Godless may that be the Nazi regime or Soviets etc etc etc.
The American right, is the antithesis of socialism; which is about centralization, collective and secular thought, state managed nanny states etc. That’s also one of the reasons why European socialist so despise us American conservatives.
I agree that the promotion of sexual indiscriminateness (it’s not “freedom”)
has the goal of destroying the family. The further goal is to destroy the traditional society and culture.
The ASSes (authoritarian secular socialists) want to impose THEIR version of a society on everyone, but they know that if the people are given the choice between the proven success of traditional values vs the demonstrable failures of secular socialism, they’ll never choose the latter. Only if there is no choice, if the other choice is destroyed, will the people choose secular socialism.
The other two are Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy by M. Stanton Evans and The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness by Lyle H. Rossiter Jr., MD.
Try going to your bookstore and asking for these books. I asked for Liberal Fascism at my bookstore and I was told that they didn't have it in and "we won't be ordering it." (IOW, we're good libs, so you're not allowed to rad that -- thus proving Jonah Goldberg's point.)
After reading these three, I plan to go back and re-read Michael Savage's Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder and Ann Coulter's Treason. (Hey, ask your bookstore for those, too.) :)
They'll get stomped on, just like The Party of Compassion does to everyone else. The only people they ever really cared about or wanted to support were themselves.
Here is another one that sounds interesting:
THE ENEMIES WITHIN: OPINIONS I HAVE GATHERED ACROSS THE INTERNET. Why Liberals Hate Themselves The Secret to the Suicidal Liberal Mind. By Jack Wheeler, Freedom Research Foundation
“Applying the language of war to domestic problems.”
Mrs. Bill Clinton, fascist, speaks of Bush’s “War Against Science” because he doesn’t support “stem cell” (human embryo) research.
http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-us&brand=msnbc&fg=copy&vid=f21ff4fe-d84a-4234-8228-431f7a07fb1a&from=00
Chilling.
Theodore Roosevelt was a true proto-fascist, and it is my personal opinion that had he lived to see Mussolini's movement he would have been the first American Fascist with a capital "f." His youth, his crusading nature, his dramatic speaking style, his lauding of "the strenuous life," his jingoism, his militarism, and his domestic interventionism in the economy all point in this direction.
There was a "progressive" element to the temperance/prohibition movement (especially in the early years), but by the Twenties the Fundamentalist Protestant element had become just as important, if not more so. The "wet" states and populations were in the areas we now recognize as liberal, while the Bible Belt was solidly "dry." Also, I notice that Prohibition gets lambasted by the liberal media quite often (because it "didn't work"), yet that same media wants to apply the same logic to guns. Furthermore, conservatives' arch-villain FDR made the repeal of Prohibition one of his major issues.
I believe the author makes an error when he identifies Woodrow Wilson's "goon squad" as "the American Legion." The American Legion was not organized until 1919, and it was made up of the American Expeditionary Forces. I believe I've read about the organization the author truly has in mind, and it isn't The American Legion.
Lay off of Julia Ward Howe! The Battle Hymn of the Republic is one of the most inspirational patriotic songs of all time! And if the Union's confidence in the rightness of its cause is "fascist," isn't every government at war for what it feels is a "just cause" similarly "fascist" (including the Confederacy, which fired the first shot)? Seems to me this is one of those universal human attitudes shared by fascists rather than a specifically fascist attitude. (Pinging wideawake for the Julia Ward Howe thing.)
I think the notable distinction between the ideals of a non-fascist society and the ideals of a fascist society are - as Mussolini emphasized and as Carl Schmitt analyzed - that the fascist society is built on a mythic goal.
And by "mythic" neither Mussolini or Schmitt meant "imaginary" but that the goal was invented by the fascist movement, invested with religious significance and raised to a transformative event.
To the Nazis, the elimination of Jews from the world was a way to save Aryan man from destruction and to usher in a glorious new age of Aryan world ascendancy.
The Holocaust was not imaginary, but its ideology and its contemplated results were mythic.
The Battle Hymn Of The Republic is not really in that mold.
It basically says, in florid language, that slavery is a blemish on a land that considers itself a land of freedom and that fighting to end slavery is moral and that God is happy with and supports those who fight to free their fellow man from oppression.
This is not the creation of heretofore unknown myth, but a repetition of common Scriptural tropes: that God is on the side of the just, that oppression of the poor and weak is something God hates, and that those who fight to accomplish God's justice will be rewarded. Her imagery is that of the Second Coming, in which a glorious Christ will judge the nations - and the message is that if the USA fights to end the oppression of slaves, then it can feel confident of that judgment when it comes.
If The Battle Hymn Of The Republic was about killing every last Confederate without mercy and said that the ending of slavery would create an earthly paradise in which the USA would conquer and rule the whole world, then it might be characterized as fascist.
But it doesn't really fit the mold.
ping
Margaret Sanger—
“Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan...In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.” (Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, P.366)
“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” Margaret Sanger’s December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 255 Adams Street, Milton, Massachusetts. Original source: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, North Hampton, Massachusetts. Also described in Linda Gordon’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976.
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