Jonah Goldberg on Liberal Fascism (And how Barack Obama fits in)

Hugh Hewitt Show ^ | 2/21/2008 | Jonah Goldberg

[GVnana]

"The idea that government can love you is the central myth that conservatives are always going to have to fight."

[fkabuckeyesrule]

Last night I was reading National Review’s review of this book. I want to read this along with the book about Joeseph McCarthy.

[spanalot]

“Barack, as Oprah said, is one of the most brilliant men you will meet in our lifetime.”

Great!

What has he accomplished then? This should be an easy request to fulfill given he is one of the most brilliant.

[GVnana]

They’re all the misapplication of religious principles to politics. And you know, Obama has said on the stump that we can create a kingdom of Heaven on Earth

The key themes in this election which the MSM won't touch.

[Piquaboy]

He is the “Elmer Gantry” of 2008.

[sageb1]

“fool’s gold”

Good analogy. Looks pretty. Isn’t worth a thing.

[JaneNC]

Yep fool’s gold.

[o_zarkman44]

Jonah Goldberg has also been featured on the Glenn Beck Radio Show, and was also on glenn Beck’s TV show on CNN last night. We are going to try to buy his book today.

This political process has been unfolding for decades, right under our noses. No wonder the urgency of the revision of history has stepped up in our schools.
Shame on us for allowing this to happen.

[spanalot]

BTW - this is a great book and every FREEPER should read it.
It answers a lot of questions about the last century.

http://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0385511841/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203785903&sr=8-1

[cowboyway]

Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

And if I refuse will I be sent to the 'Gulag' for 'reeducation'?

[GVnana]

This political process has been unfolding for decades, right under our noses. No wonder the urgency of the revision of history has stepped up in our schools. Shame on us for allowing this to happen.

Yep. We've been lucky, and now we're going to have the fight of our lives.

[GOPJ]

...it reminds me a bit of the 1912 Progressive Party convention. They changed the words of We Will Follow Jesus to We Will Follow Roosevelt. And it also, too, was like a religious revival. This has, you know, when you listen to Obama, when he talks about we are the change we have been waiting for, there is this incredible messianic feel to it. And he may be a decent and honorable man, I think he almost certainly is, but I don’t think he has any conception of the kind of emotional and political passions that he’s toying with when he tries to promise people that simply by rallying around a national leader who expresses their national will and their spirit and all the rest, that he can deliver us to someplace outside of history, to this new sunny upland, you know, utopia. That is dangerous stuff, and when you unleash that in politics, it almost never ends well.

Goldberg knows totalitarian horrors can live in Pandora's box - something Obama doesn't know - yet...

[Emperor Palpatine]

No, Not Gantry, (that's Huckabee, anyways...), more like Ellsworth Monckton Toohey from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead".



"What am I after? I daresay know one knows but me.....power perhaps?"

[o_zarkman44]

Incremental socialsim has bought off the passive. Fighting will be difficult because the people on the public tit will see a fight as a threat to their well being.

These coming times are going to be extremely difficult and many good people are going to be sent to the gulag.

[Yardstick]

It's a really good book. In fact, this Obama phenomenon is making it look like the book for the times. It's good for decoding him (and the modern left generally). Not because Obama is a fascist, but because fascism and Obamaism (and other noxious movements) share the same root, which is the desire for salvation and community and meaning through the state.

[Sans-Culotte]

Bump to read later.

[depressed in 06]

MO: Don’t get sick in this country, not here. Americans are in debt not because they live frivolously, but because someone got sick. And even with insurance, the deductibles and premiums are so high that people are still putting medication treatments on credit cards. And they can’t get out from under.

When the government takes over, don't get sick in America, we will let you die. It is for the greater good. Your illness is too expensive and there will be no incentive to work on a cure.

[Blind Eye Jones]

Rousseauian vision, it is a natural human desire to want to recreate that sort of religious, spiritual tribal feeling.

Rousseau is about the noble savage, the emphasis on the beginnings, on “feeling” as a corrective for humans coming out of the state of nature to form civil society. Communism capitalized on these feelings as a corrective and counterpoise to bourgeois rational society. Communism was the secular religion that promised heaven on earth through the efforts of man. Oddly enough, communism was considered a science by Marx and was very much part of the enlightenment as well as opposing the self-interested rationalism of enlightenment.

[Bluebird Singing]

“And things have gotten progressively worse throughout my lifetime, through Democratic and Republican administrations.” - Michelle Obama

Our life expectancy is longer than any time in history while our medical technology has developed beyond imagination. These statements of hers show that they believe we are a nation of idiots. If Obama is elected, she’s right.

She also has said that she fears the children of today and the future will never have the opportunities she had. Huh? I thought we were a racist nation that never let blacks get ahead. I guess this ideal time in history that she’s talking about, came and went in a flash. Odd double speak coming from a black, millionaire woman.